Rather a Long Pause

I am in the middle of things and it keeps raining.  Venice is now flooded as is Doncaster and I've been working with the playground and the School of Architecture and Abi and the playground. The dog has died and I've just been away for five days.  While I was away I bought a book about Palmistry - it goes with my book on Phrenology and my flat earth book.  They are special books as they use science to prove the absurd and they are all very convincing if you are in a position to be convinced.

Why indeed should we all have different marks on our different shaped hands unless they are there to tell us something?  This got me thinking about speculative realism and the world of metaphysical possibility.  I read a bit more of the Diffractive ethnography and delved into its pseudo science.  The books were very similar- a strange broken metaphor a wish to tell us that things are not what they seem.

The doing and the thinking have either become merged or I'm a bit over tired - I don't think that any of the ontological turn as Guillion calls it offers us much hope in a Blokian sense.  Not much hope for ethnography or for social science or for a languge that can better explain anything.

The rational goes like this.  We thought the world worked one way and it was wrong it actually works another way and the two ways we think it works are incompatible. We have an old social science that is based on traditional science and it doesn't work at certain levels of inquiry so we can learn from the Quantum world of entanglement to use a different approach to understand what life is.  This may not be human life or even animal or plant life it is the life within the assembled entanglement of the material world which is all that exists in any possible sense.

There is no mention of Einstein and his relativity which transforms Newtonian physics and gives us the Nuclear bomb. I'm not sure Max Plank with his black box gave us nuclear fission but I don't know enough about it.  What seems to be an omission probably not in the Barad who I haven't read yet but definitely in the bits I've read of diffractive ethnogrphy is the fact that quantum science still abides to the basic philosophy of science.  It relies on hypothesis, experimentation and the fact it can be verified and repeated, its also underpinned by some crazy mathematical shit that none of us understand. And that is the problem with diffractive ethnography it may allow for sloppy ethnographic practice that in trying to escape its own floored tradition chucks the baby out with the bathwater and ends up saying - we can't know anything because everything is far to complicated.   I feel myself saying well just go and do stuff then rejoice in the complications of living and experiencing the world,  if we always come back to writing - 'its all very complicated' then do a painting, write a novel, build a giant spaceship and fly it to the planets.  Tales of palmists and Phrenologists are fascinating and convincing and of a time and I wonder if the speculation on the reality we are living through has an element of escapism and rabbit holes.