Fooling around with Form

My RD2 or R2D2 as I've been calling it is nearly ready to go in.  I am pleased with where I got, although I'm trying to have a much needed relaxation of my brain.  I think for the first time on the PhD project I've moved into a space between the Form of art and the Form of academic writing.  My RD2 doesn't know what it is and I like this as I am intending to move in this direction.

I have adopted a new way of writing that feels more like arts practise than when I have written before.  Rather than constructing a text from the bottom up I massaged all sorts of ideas together until I felt I was getting somewhere then produced a false confidence that this was where I wanted to be.  I then wrote in bursts of around 2000 words and gradually worked back into these chunks of text. I lost quite a bit in this cutting back and pruning to try and meet the criteria and guidelines of the RD2 requirements but I did maintain the essence of my idea and my writing style, the style I'm trying to mature. The process has taken about 6 weeks and has included a lot of revisiting notes and deep reflecting on what I have read.  This made the reading process feel worthwhile as at times in the year I hadn't really known where I was going.  The biggest thought is how the writing has helped the thinking move on and how the writing has become about making something new.  It holds the struggle of the year.

I am reading What is Philosophy,  D and G's last book together - I think the first chapter is about the void staring back at you- Johan Siebers introduced me to this idea and it gave me the eebee jeebies.  D and G talk a lot about making new concepts and explain what they mean by the concept - its a good book because it says a lot of what I tried to say in my RD2 - that philosophy is total and you can't cherry pick bits of it to fit into a social science paradigm without changing social science to become  its new image.  I think this is why I have got so stuck - the logos or logic of what lots of educational researchers seem to be doing struggles as they layer what gets referred to as theory which is really philosophy, the construction of new concepts onto social research rather than the world. 

Art is not a philosophy or a  concept in the true sense neither is it a method or a methodology and it is something that wriggles away from capture.  The RD2 feels like a moving back to art but not in a defensive way as if I have been threatened but more in a loving way as if my old friend has come to walk with me for a while, out of friendship rather than duty or loneliness. 





 

Question For Ted

Doing what it said on the tin

I'm still trying to write my RD2.  I want to write a front end as a list but I don't think it will go down well so I will do it here.  The process of trying to write has brought me to a set of conclusions most of which if unpicked are positive and lay some groundwork.

1. There is an aesthetic turn within social science research.  This is at a practical and theoretical level.

2. Aesthetic thinking is slippery and often gets conflated with other types of thinking- it nests with phenomenology yet also refutes it.

3. The coin has many sides but the two that really count are the idea that aesthetics exist externally to human experience (within the object sometimes called Kantian aesthetics) or that they are constructed by things outside it ( often human actors thoughts , networks or event).  One road leads to relativism the other awakens all types of gods and her functions. 

4. Artists are involved because they historically have the reputation of living closer to an aesthetic world as Ruskin says they learn to see what is really there. If we flip the coin they help construct all that can possibly be constructed.

5. ESRI is known for cutting edge social research that embraces the turn towards speculation and questions the value of any existing methods.

6.  The only real point in progressing this PhD is to be able to work from within the idea of what artists can bring to research and invest in the relations that construct this network.

7. Theory of this sort can sit next to practise yet when we work it through practise or as I suggest worldize it,  it is not  helpful to split the two. ( hence the pull of totalising ontologies- Dialectics - phenomenology new and old materialism the Event and the move towards flatness)

8. The systems at the university are not set up to enable the kind of artistic approaches to research that people are keen to explore.

9.  There is a lot of cherry picking of thoughts and ideas from different fields and an attempt to work with them out of context.  This can find low hanging fruit but becomes problematic when it turns to fundamentally different ontologies and world views - you can't just sit where you like.

10. I am doing real work and getting somewhere with a complex set of thoughts but it is fragile- the temptation to go through the motions is difficult as going through the motions in the past had a rational that I understood or felt in terms of a wider practice.  Going through the motions now has no point and more importantly would disenchant my world.