That was fun but I'm not sure how serious people took it.

Last week was great, I had a good session at playgroup with Abi followed by a useful meeting with Rotherham museum where I think we put everyone at ease in terms of our exhibition in September. I took some nice pictures and thought a lot about the sensory and also the potential to co-produce with our young research partners.  I then made a colander to wear on my head with a fiber optic array from a special schools sensory room that I found in a skip.  I tried to dance in it but it was a bit heavy to go out in but looked pretty cool and will come in handy.

Although I don't have ethical approval for my research with Abi she does for her study so in a way I've started working within the frame of research even if it isn't my own study. I think its helping or rather in a very generous way Abi is helping me to understand the difference between doing and researching.  It's not the field notes or the structure or method it's more the approach to an informed doing that gives space for thinking. It is a slow and gentle way of easing into finding out and it stops me rushing.  Abi and I seem to like working together and this feels nice, its good not to feel out on your own, I left the studio 30 years ago to bide-a-while with people.  I remember calling the projects I worked on by myself bootstrap projects- this meant the only way to make them work was to pull yourself up by your own bootstraps,  like Baron Munchausen  defying the laws of gravity and pulling himself up by own hair. Bootstrap projects are very isolating so its nice to have this joint project. I have recognised that the relationship to doing and thinking in research needs to shift and this is a significant piece of learning that I'm aware of but secretly have not actually accepted.

I wanted to write an analogy about studying a wave here.  It was long and complex and referenced surfing, catching a wave of knowledge and riding it into shore.  I wanted to say I felt pressured into taking a sample of the sea water and studying it under a microscope.  It was a clever analogy that held my resistance to what I was seeing as a narrowing of  myself into the tiny focus that gets called called 'a contribution to new knowledge'.  I wanted to rage to point out that I would  miss the point of a wave.  I think though instead of making a clever point my analogy was trying to resist the inevitable defining of territory for effective research.  If you want to study a wave it's a problem if you can't describe what a wave is and any study of a wave may require at some point a focus on a cup of water.  Understanding some sort of area of study and set of events as the location of thoughts and actions that I will  be described as my PhD is just practical and essential to stop me writing shit about waves and surfing to avoid actually grasping the nettle of what I'm engaged in.  But also there is a contradiction and a binary at play, a desire to not reduce knowledge down to a set of component parts,  against a recognition that that what most academic or knowledge production does, is a reductive process to a set of categories or parts of things.  Richard Feynman says that 'All science is either physics or stamp collecting.'   I feel a bit like this with any of the reading I'm doing apart from continental philosophy, it isn't that it is not reductive,  more that if you want to understand something in a non reductive way you can't start off by carving up into pieces with a scalpel.

I was talking to an artist this morning who was struggling with the idea of a rhizome from 1000 plateaus, he is very clever but said he didn't find it very appealing as an idea. The flatness of the ontologies layering within a singular plane.  I told him that it was not something you could dip into and reject or adopt bits of and it was like moving from a position of not having faith or belief in a god to moving to a position of true faith, an epiphany and clarity in faith that meant that the structures that all your knowledge were built on were changing and would no longer work in the world in the way they did.  I wasn't saying that Capitalism and Schizophrenia presented pseudo spiritual texts that required a faith structure to read  I was more making the point that they are foundational-ontological concepts that cannot be understood from the position  where you now stand.  I can go to mosque tonight and break fast with my friends and I will experience an aspect of Islam but as I prayer I will not be part of Islam as I will experience it from my point of difference not my point of belonging. 

Today has being hard, I have struggled with two difficult things and they relate to the edges of things again. The first is the process of applying for ethical approval for my fieldwork. The process made me think of the wave.  It feels like the process of working out what will get ethical approval is narrowing the possible scope of study.  From most perspectives this is probably a good thing as the PhD process seems to involve a narrowing of the field of study, partly out of practicalities and partly because as you start reading you realise most of the field of study is written about better somewhere else.   The hard thing goes back to the work with Abi and the realisation that my research will not actual include much doing, partly because as Abi pointed out if you do to much there remains no time or capacity to think about it. Perhaps put  simply this is one of the definitions of research, it's not just doing.   I worry though and it makes me slightly sad that the area of doing will be formed and marked out by what it is possible to effectively explain within an application for ethical approval.  The system feels slightly screwed up by its potential to do harm and profit from others and a history of research that has done harm to people and communities.  The process has made me have to consider some very real implications of the fact I'm now involved in doing research and not making art and although not mutually exclusive doing research is not as simple as dancing around with a colander on your head.

The other strange thing that happened this week was in conversation with a curator about the subject of my PhD I explained it as focusing on artists working within informal education.  I came up with this as a way to avoid working directly with schools as I just could not see how I was going to work in schools as they made me so sad inside.  He asked if I was exploring the pedagogic turn and it struck me that I hadn't really thought about artistic education or the pedagogic turn at all.  Even after going to Toronto and thinking about FLUXUS and Roy Ascot the fact I'm in an education department and everything that actually means that art as education is a central concept behind any thinking I've done. Even in my reading list Dewey and Ruskin and Colin Ward but maybe less the more contemporary writing leans towards a unpicking of arts role in pedagogy.  In some ways this is useful as its a good chapter and some new reading and some positioning of my research.  Its also good as it cuts across fields but is pulled into clear focus by my PhD so I should be excited.  I feel a bit thick though for not really thinking about it. I wonder if I got distracted by Toronto. Whitehead the plane of absolute immanence  and pointers towards new reading from Sutton around play and also trying to get a feel for ethnography.  The wave has rolled me under and come crashing down on me and revealed my inadequacies and its maybe time to get out of the water for a bit and have a breather before trying to catch the next wave or collecting some water in a jam jar.