today I am mostly thinking theory

My head is hurting this morning.  I'm reading Harman's idiot guide to Object Oriented Ontologies - the book is very like Stephen Hawkins a brief history of time in that someone deeply embedded in a field writes an explanation for normal people.  It is still on the edge of what it is possible for me to understand yet clear enough for me to work out where and why I disagree with lots of the thinking.  It also in its reductive flight through a selected history of western philosophy reminds me of a lot of things and gives good insights into phenomenology and Actor Network Theory.

I don't want to review the book or go into the detail of OOO as I've not finished yet but I do want to say - nice diagrams- and it is good to see Heidegger making another comeback and actually get a reference that doesn't just remind us he was a Nazi sympathiser.

I met with Richard Steadman Jones yesterday and probably went on a bit - we probably both went on a bit in our own specific ways and it was probably good for both of us.  Richard said I seemed to be going a bit theory heavy. This surprised me as I wasn't thinking of the theory in itself.  I  think I am thinking of a way to navigate my RD 2 so I can write a PhD that does not feel banal to me - this is my secret fear.  The trick with theory is to have a take on it that allows you to think through the world in new ways and that is my quest to come up with something obscure and robust enough to ride the storm of necessary critque .

I tried to explain this to Richard by giving a potted history of the Post - qualt turn in social science. I am not sure if it was just a mumbled ramble as it slopped out of my mouth. It felt like among the big stories and new theories of everything there are small trajectories that are been enacted in the world of educational research and among with other things these threads of relations make sense of me being at Esri as a philosopher artists trying to write a PhD.  As Boudoir so clearly points out the glass in the window does not break because the stone hits it it breaks because glass is breakable.  Along with all sorts of other things that look like luck the fabric and thoughts of social science at its edges are flaky and breakable. I am not really a stone though more like a clod of soft mud, well shit I suppose so I may smear the windows of social science with brown streaks and that may be enough as it is cold in houses with no windows.

People in glass houses should not throw stones

For ages people thought that scientific method was a good way to understand the world and that the natural sciences and the study of society needed to adopt scientific method based on an enlightenment notion that the world could be known fully.  This is realist and materialist and positivist approaches but they are fundamentally based on the idea of a fully knowable world even if this is not called the real the true or the quantum world.  Anthropology trundles on in the background in the south pacific it doesn't fully buy into scientific method but cracks on with writing about culture and holding opinions deeply embed in enlightenment thinking. Post 68 but obviously before, the post structuralists break down the possibility of truly knowing anything and social research splits and expand and reconstructs.  Qualitative research builds a stronger profile and this is underpinned by the ideas that we cannot ever really understand and have true knowledge of the world of emotion of the social of the human and more than human. We need methods that give us archeologies of knowledge to reference Foucault.

Post- qualt or what sometimes gets called the new theory emerges from falling deeper into the trap of thinking that nothing is truly knowable it  responsed to and resists  post structuralism and its challenge to the idea of knowledge is only ever enacted as power.  My encounter with post-qualt at ESRI brings into play a plethora of fantastically dense ideas and philosophies.  They are alternative theory, a bit like alternative medicine the homeopathy or Rieka of the social sciences.  They have massive appeal to those of us who struggle with the dominance of scientific rational reductionist ways of encountering the world and the trail of thought carnage this can leave in moving feeling aesthetic bodies.

I tried to explain this to Tim while we were picking mushrooms he thinks actor network theory and OOO are potential wormholes that spiral forever.  I wondered about the term wormhole - in science its a theoretical connection between dimensions - I also thought of Felix down the rabbit hole which is of course a reference to Alice in Wonderland and in that moment of thinking I logged in my head a paragraph that is not banal about the theoretically possible wormhole that has never been seen beyond mathematics and Lewis Carols creation for Alice to enter a speculative dimension.  I thought a paragraph that could explore the two through ideas of speculative realism with a focus on function metaphorical and scientific could hold something interesting but its not really for now.

For now I wanted to try and put a marker down about why I'm not getting heavily into theory and it was Tim that came up with it as I was giving him my basic steps to Object Orientated Ontologies and it was this.  Firstly he asked me if I believed in magic? then he asked if I thought it was about a new enchantment.? I think I had been building to this point but Tim catalysed it in his questions and I saw that my PhD was not about theory in the broad sense of all the guff I had been reading but was about a re-enchantment of the world through aesthetic experience. and perhaps this 'is' what people are looking for and within this lies a kernel of hope.

I started my RD 2 and wrote this  -

‘People are constantly putting up an umbrella that shelters them and on the underside of which they draw a firmament and write their conventions and opinions. But poets, artists, make a slit in the umbrella, they tear open the firmament itself, to let in a bit of free and windy chaos and to frame in a sudden light a vision that appears through the rent— WP- D and G)203-204’

Working within a frame of residency as method requires a location of the individual subjective artists that takes account of philosophies that present flat ontologies in order to problematise the human as privileged actor within the social space.  In order to work within a more-than-human research field the re-enchantment of the world, its objects, subjects, spaces, feelings, thoughts and emotions need to activate and become visible through creative events that bring the potential of newness into the world.

he wrote yes but it needs an edit.

I wrote this:-

edit it !  - I’ve got to write 6000 words and I’ve only done 9 

I wanted to sends it as I’m nicking your idea of re-enchantment - I think that is perhaps what it is - an opening up of possibilities that science closes down and we look to art to hold it but all the artists are saying - that is to much to ask for us - you need to banish us Like Plato did the poets and we can go and be Hermits and be happy.

If ~I go down this avenue then I’m the person or one of them that is required to re- enchant and persuade people they need re- enchanting but art now refers to itself - its like the coalfields it has been mined out and what is left isn’t worth digging out - its just the pit props and the bits they left underground to stop the land subsiding.

I’m just going to write 6000 words and then start to edit - to hard to construct well as you go along - better to get it all down and then work it up -  Basically its jumping through a flaming hoop and not burning yourself.

mushrooms were nice - scoffed em all - the big ones sort of melted into worms over night XX

and now its clear that the process of doing the PhD in all its relations may need me to fall in love or recognise my love of the aesthetic world in all its sensuous affect and it is essential within the objects of artists to love the world and seek to know it. This is a task worth setting a mind to.  In the end all theory of any value leads to the felt beating heart of the living body in the world of relations.  The new theory is important but to return to Heidegger through the thoughts of OOO it only really becomes visible when it stops functioning as a tool. 

What is Philosophy

: people are constantly putting up an umbrella that shelters them and on the underside of which they draw a firmament and write their conventions and opinions. But poets, artists, make a slit in the umbrella, they tear open the firmament itself, to let in a bit of free and windy chaos and to frame in a sudden light a vision that appears through the rent—Wordsworth’s spring or Cézanne’s apple, the silhouettes of Macbeth or Ahab. Then come the crowd of imitators who repair the umbrella with something vaguely resembling the vision, and the crowd of commentators who patch over the rent with opinions: communication. Other artists are always needed to make other slits, to carry out necessary and perhaps ever-greater destructions, thereby restoring to their predecessors the incommunicable novelty that we could no longer see. This is to say that artists struggle less against chaos (that, in a certain manner, all their wishes summon forth) than against the “clichés” of opinion. (WP- D and G)203-204

I was starting to write an invoice and I found this quote in the wrong folder on my computer.  It came at a good point as I was thinking about my encounter with a rat and working out how it would slot itself into the world of research.  The rat is a slit in the umbrella a tear in the firmament.  The loss of this fragment is significant as it must be important and it popping up as I looked for a folder to copy an invoice is testament to my messy note keeping.  This makes me think about slippage and the points that are becoming interesting are these slippages.  Not as art but as moments that transcend the present - become a memory in the act of their becoming. There is a physicality and a reality and although we have some arty stuff in the quote the tear in the umbrella seems to go beyond art.

I have just ordered  What is Philosophy - I hope its not really hard biut it could be useful for my PhD - not a bedrock but a shifting sand to drive in the concrete foundations that will be washed away in the storm - never buy a house in a hole or build on unsure foundations.
Here are my fieldnots about the rat and a reminder and a tear.

I talked myself out of doing a den building competition or having a den building afternoon as a way of getting more kids actively involved as it felt like a workshop and I wasn’t really that interested in workshops.  I felt like I was relaxing into being at the playground without doing an all singing all dancing role and started fiddling with the 360 camera and wondering what it would be able to capture – its playing in the background as I write these field notes and its strange – I don’t know where it will go but I will talk it through with people and work it out – it feels strangely ethnographic and not invasive like police surveillance – perhaps this is because I’m carrying it about everywhere.  It definitely felt like I was hanging out at the playground and this is what I had planned to do but it also felt like I needed to be deprogrammed from trying to be useful.

This became more noticeable as the sinks in the kitchen got blocked.  Both sinks were full of washing up which is unusual as, even if the drain is blocked, water tends to leak out the top of the drain outside rather than sit in the sink.  I genuinely felt a small lift inside, a little flutter as I cleared the cupboards to strip down the waste pipe and find the fat burger.  A strange Lacanian primeval desire to be useful coupled with the unsettling feeling that I was just very deliberately hanging about like what my dad would call a loose part.  The playground has a collapsed drain so I got Sinbad to run the sinks in the kid’s toilets to check there wasn’t a big blockage further down.  I suppose if my brain had been working better I would of realized that it was unlikely that both sinks had got blocked simultaneously but experience teaches you that you come across unpredictable phenomena and double faults in plumbing.  I had once used back-pressure to clear a blockage in my friends Saskia’s shower system – the water ran bright blue for ten minutes afterwards with no practical or scientific explanation. 

Working backwards down the three and a quarter inch tubing I found the T joint where the pipes joined. It was complicated to get to them and I had to pull away protective covers.  Patrick emptied the sinks and I let it run onto the grass. I stuffed my fingers into the pipe to try and find the blockage.  Remembering the blue sludge and life’s unpredictability my fingers grasped what felt like a balloon, tough and rubbery I imagine children pushing them down the sink with a wooden spoon but as I loosened it from the congealed fat and its surface began to pull away I realized it was a rat’s tale. It was attached to a body that was very stuck.  I screamed in a non-gender=specific way and asked Patrick to bring me some gloves.  Not wanting to let go of the rat as like Schrödinger’s cat I was unsure if it was both alive and dead simultaneously.

Patrick seemed a bit irritated at first I thought it was because he didn’t realize what was happening – later he would admit that he didn’t want to get accidentally slapped in the face by a dead rat if it were to fly out all in one go.  Julius came over and Fran legged it saying she needed to get ready for her holiday.  The feeling of usefulness was beginning to fade as I began to gag in that horrible way when you want to be sick but have run out of puke.   I pulled really hard and wiggled and considered moshing the bastard up a bit with a screwdriver.

  

 I asked Patrick and Julius if they remembered the story of the Giant Turnip. I thought it was in Winnie the Poo where they all had to grab hold of each other to pull it out of the ground.  I think it may be a folk tale we all knew it from our various histories - it made me laugh although I was also a bit disgusted.  It was only a baby rat in the end, my Granddad hated rats and along with his good temperament I inherited a probably quite rational dislike for them – he used to say that they “Would be bad buggers if they were as big as donkeys.’   Sinks mended, water flowing, a slight feeling of satisfaction at doing something useful with an overwhelming inner disgust.  I washed my hands like Lady Macbeth and avoided eating food with my fingers. 

Matter Out Of Place

Monday morning and about to start writing my RD2.  I've started my fieldwork at the adventure playground and I'm working with Abi in Rotherham.  I laid in the bath this morning and started to mull things over in my head. I do this about four times a day - not the bath but the mulling over.  When you think about making an artwork this is what you do, turn things over and stir them around until they fall into a place that feels about right.  Before you get properly practiced at this or mature as an artist you can get stuck at this point of falling and not enact anything.  I think this could be related to lines of flight (as a feeling) and flow (as a relationship to time)  perhaps what John Dewey would call 'the rhythms of the world'.

As I'm writing a PhD and not making an artwork, the flow doesn't make the same kind of sense - it keeps flowing out of sight into texts.  The idea of residency as method is about sense making - a slant telling of the truth or more correctly a truth.  The truth that came to me in the bath this morning before embarking on squeezing the round peg of my brain into the square hole of the RD2 writing  process was the absence of critical aesthetic thinking within the art orientated educational research  papers I have read.  Aesthetics are also a little absent in some of the spacial thinking from Soja to Massey and although Sara Pink writes a whole book from an aesthetical perspective in doing sensory ethnography, she doesn't really name it as such.  Culture and socially constructed norms are present yet there is little critical aesthetic theory from a current or historical perspective.  I can't say this with confidence as I haven't read that widely, there may well be a whole massive body of literature just concerned with aesthetic theory within educational post -qualt research. If so, I haven't encountered it yet so it's okay to say that some of the papers I have read lack a position or a perspective on aesthetics whilst explicitly situating a practice within the aesthetic realm.  Perhaps this is due to some of this work positioning aesthetics within the relational/diaolgical/everyday in some ways denying it a ontological category for itself and to an extent historical context. 

I was reminded in bed last night as I closed my eyes to go to sleep of my favorite quote from Brecht "Something is missing".  The quote is so great because the thing that is missing isn't a thing or a thought, it is the space that is opened up by the feeling that something is absent.  Aesthetics are absent in this way from the papers, not the aesthetics we can describe, the historical chain of thought from Plato banishing the poets to to the aesthetics of the everyday, they hover in the background. For me the lack is more aligned to Dewey and his sense of rhythm within art and experience, a lived and felt aesthetics of bodies moving in space in time. I feel a sense of a disjuncture, an absence of understanding, perhaps a fault line where the uncomfortable feeling of things not being quite right locates itself.

In her Blog on the Odd project Becky Shaw describes me as an 'education artist'.  I must admit, like the other prefix people put in front of my title such as local or community, I would much rather just be an artist.  This is important for my generation of artists as it allows the necessary amount of flexibility in role for us to remain unfinished.  It affords me my nomadic status and legitimizes my choices.  At a time when artists are not that bothered about what they get called and become producers or activists or community development workers there is a need to ask questions about what we lose and what we gain from thinking ourselves different.

I took a break, wrote some field notes and then read Geoff Bright's excellent position paper on auto ethnography from his PhD.  It's really interesting as he clearly explains why the method lacks traction within educational research.  It made me a little sad to read it as Geoff's struggle felt a little like mine.  He says that within auto ethnography he could find a real contribution to knowledge production as he could work with his 45 years experience as youth worker and activist in an honest way, a way where this knowledge could be drawn into the field pulled in by the great attractor, the gap, the void, the undefined thing that we all feel is missing at the heart of arty-farty-research.

I also felt quite liberated.  Geoff wanted to make a mark in the world of educational ethnographic research and every time he wanted to do something really interesting something hobbled him.  Like the scene in Misery where Kathy Bates smashes James Caan's ankles so he can't run away, when Geoff finds something that works he has to hold it to one side as nobody will publish anything that smells of auto-ethnography.  It is contamination - it is dust - it is self obsessed and self promoting, it is not knowledge.  I would love to read Geoff's proper auto-ethnography and I think this is why we both find ourselves returning to John Berger's writing, especially 'A Fortunate Man' which is the best ethnography I've come across.   Geoff's writing is a cautionary tale and a reminder that I have and never have had any intention of becoming an ethnographer of education and to an extent this is liberating. 

I hope there is no Kathy Bates character waiting to chain me to a bed and hobble my ankles and if there is that I can work out strategies to navigate them that are not too demoralising.  In adopting the life of a professional nomad in the post-structuralist sense of leaving behind the singularity of my consciousness, the gift or the payback is a freedom from the restraints of intellectual belonging, the rules of being accepted within any school of thought place of worship or field.  This position has its drawbacks but also its advantages. Geoff could not turn to auto-ethnography as he would not be taken seriously by the world of educational research, the world he wanted to step into and at the very least find some level of intellectual validation.  I don't share this desire, my validation lies elsewhere.  As I am just about to set fingers to typing my RD2 I wonder how much of my desire to hold onto my identity as an artist I will make visible, how much of this process needs to be treated as a game and how much of it is a genuine place for growth.

I am Icarus making wings of feathers and wax, I am not sure they will get me off the ground so at the moment have no worries of flying too close to the sun.  I have 6000 words to write and I am reluctant to start as they will pin down my thoughts in a way that chains the aesthetic mind of touch, sense and emotion and breaks with the rhymes and rhythms of my day to day.  This is what I am taking on - this is my new nomadic home.