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.
No comments:
Post a Comment