In the middle of things

This is Patrick, helping to put up a Maypole for Mayday- it's nice to be helping out with stuff at the playground.  I think I have settled down a bit since my last supervision.  Moving away from an immersion in Affect and Event and issues that are essentially ontological and deeply philosophical, I have been reading and thinking about ethnography and how I am to approach it as a method within my research.  I have covered some basic stuff but also visual and sensory approaches mostly by reading through Sarah Pink. I've also been doing some reading about play and its relation to arts practice.  I have a book called The Philosophy of Play, it's analytical rather than European philosophy and that seems to suit me at the moment; it covers  minor stuff around the magic circle, sphere of play and rules but it's useful in relation to my last supervision and my work with Abi Hacket in Rotherham.

Both these areas are fairly new to me as is reading  analytical approaches to writing philosophy, it was never part of my casual reading or a specific interest.  Essentially, the reading is much easier to understand from the perspective of what makes sense, so you can actually take a few notes and in a very pseudo-analytical and concrete way at least feel you are getting somewhere, even if its probably not where you want to be.

I've also been working and thinking with Abi about our Rotherham project and doing bits and bobs at the adventure playground. All in all it's been a happy time since I got back from Toronto.  There is a flow to the work, a moving through and in and out that I'm enjoying in an intelligent way.  A few years ago I think I would have described this interplay as dialectical but now, perhaps with some of the thinking I've being doing, we could feel it as Event, a small event.

The problem that underpins all this work and thinking is their duality, the two states of things - research and making or doing and thinking as Heidegger mentions in an earlier post.  If we take each as part of dwelling perhaps dwelling is the aim, to dwell within this space of the PhD, to bide a while. This is the point I suppose of doing it at all, to learn to dwell, the process though does not make this easy, the process is difficult to fit to dwelling.  Building the space is important as there is a need to feel in control.  Space has always drawn me in firstly in the sense of Soja's notion of space as part of a trilectic of existence, his Third Space Theory, or Massey in her work, For Space sees space as something total. Place and space feel like they should be mapped and there is a certain type of mapping that is about power and ownership.  The importance here is to work out how to be both multiple and singular, to find a personal path and a singular way through a shared terrain.  I think that this explains my lighter mood it explains the reading that has an emphasis on doing. I'm working through some stuff I don't know and will need and to be honest, it feels good to put some of the more complicated stuff to one side for a while.

Tim, my friend says I need to just start writing and get down fifty thousand words or so of thoughts and fragments of where and what I'm thinking.  I told him about additive and reductive artistic processes, how we take away material such as carving or where you add material such as collage and how with some materials like clay you can do a bit of both.  That is how I feel I can make things work for me, its like a giant block of clay that getting bigger and bigger that I will knock about into a rough shape before I carve in the detail.  I am using a method that is a bit like when you make a giant snowball by rolling it around on the lawn. As it gets bigger it leaves tracks of green grass but also picks up bits of sticks and if you are unlucky, dog shit.  You then take a number of balls and build a snowman or an igloo out of them, at the moment I'm rolling the snowballs that will become a building material to be assembled at a future point, before they melt.

The problem here is one of form, everything comes back to form and the academic form is often old, lazy and redundant.  That is a very hard statement to write and seems a bit mean but at my level of entry into the system there seems to be a structure that prevents much good work happening.  It feels like a field dominated by internal logic and strange systems that evolve without being really questioned as to what they are for.  I am now embedded within this system and I am not prepared to invest my last life efforts into raging against it so I shall make a snowball out of its bits. I do not think it will give me a head or a body, it may form part of a small dog at the snow man's feet next to the mouse of artistic research methods.  This presents a problem for content and where it will live, if it does not sit within the forms of the academy then I am not sure where it could dwell.  Perhaps this is the work? Building my own route to unifying building and thinking, doing and knowing, being present and absent whether through events, trilectics, dialectics or going on about singularities.

If I am successful I think this will be the work - the addition to the giant basket of knowledge and also a small challenge to it.  When I woke up this morning Melvin Brag was doing a radio program about Henry Bergson.  I have quoted him a few times in relation to the event and Deleuze and Whitehead and James. I know what he stands for but haven't read him in the original.  There was a glorious bit where Melvyn really wasn't getting any of the arguments.  He was really struggling not to see Bergsons' ideas on time as just referencing that people experience time differently depending on what they are doing.  As a way to pull back the three philosophers who were really trying to be accessible but not really being able to talk about Bergson's notions of time in an accessible way - a way that didn't require a shift in the basic notions of common sense experiences of time.  Melvin said,

'Human beings do not experience time in the same way a clock does'.

The three presenters laughed and one said,

'Ah, so this is where we are then - back to basics.  No, humans certainly don't experience time in the same way a clock does'.

I know why this is funny and I know that to think of time like Delueze or Bergson you need to do a thing in your brain that allows you to think in a way that allows you to think in a way that allows you to move towards an understanding.  And this is the trick and the joy of much of this work, however the question remains, 'What difference does it make to think of time in this way as opposed to another way or indeed to think of time at all?'.  Perhaps we can experience it just as a clock does.