The encroachment of the real

This image is taken from the exhibition in Rotherham - I am going to use it to talk to Abi about the real.  It is interesting as first of all it is a digital image that is its material reality a collection of binary code - not as I think new materialism may like to see it quantum code but a series of naughts and ones that may rely on electrons and may exists on the cloud in torrents, widely displayed but do not rely on uncertainty principle to do their appointed jobs - they are machines in a very traditional mechanical way and should not be confused with Turin's thinking machines.  Then we have the real of the exhibition the codes and practices that structure the collection, archiving and  representational nature of the artefacts.  Each object stands in  for itself it is not the real doll it is an object of meaning that presents us with doll, it is not the real dog on wheels it is the dog that represents the dog on wheels.  This is the ony way a museum can work to present the real and authentic as a stand in for the actual real. Then there is the actual toy dog that presents the image of the real that makes us realise that all the objects are in fact a reflection in the door of the case.  In a sense the fact that the image of the toy dog on the right is more real than the reflection is the only thing that lets us know that the binary code presents us with a reflection of the real that stands in for the real that was never a real baby or a real dog. An images rhetoric is changed by the change in the medium and the object can never be the same.

I've just realised my blog title references the procession of the simulacra an accident that I think I was aware of making. At this moment I feel like the fatted calf  rather than the golden boy.  I'm returning from Leeds and giving a talk about artists and research, not home ground but as close to it as I have felt for a while.

I used the negative meaning wears the trousers and an old school art prof tells me a story about Kieth Arnot as his lecturer making them all read loads of theory and I thought I bet he was a bit of a bastard that Kieth- but what a time.   During conceptualism we artists saw ourselves as quick philosophers and many of us were treated as such.  But it was a reminder that my self constructed real place of art is still there and though it accepts no one it holds Ernst Blocks warm winds of Hiemat.

I am not sure where to go from here other than to say I have worked out that I have been going backwards to try and find where a certain type of thinking emerges from - to ask the question before the question I thought I needed to ask - this will always be ontological.  I have found in D and G what is philosophy a kind of answer that I will keep to myself as it is unpopular and will be full of holes but it is enough to move forward with understanding if not clarity. In the words of both Lacan and Mick Jagger - you can't always get what you want, but you can get what you need.

here is my email to Kate as a reminder and a note to self ;-

essentially the problem I have is that the split in the theory is Hegelian in relation to the individual subjective - so research creation or anything post after Oedipus and Deleuzian defuses the subjective but what I think I'm saying is art especially as it is co-opted and put to work in research follows a Hegelian logos or indeed a plane of immanence where its horizon is firmly moving within the realm of the subjective , infact its agency and from a Lacanian perspective  we can claim back human individuated agency. It's not that Deleuze denies the possibility of the individual more the denial of any kind of phenomenology.this gives art to the collective the hive yet steels it from the id as the id no longer exists.  Within artistic research apart from perhaps Mannings' notion of the defused desire of research creation we operate in what could be called either denial or an active dualism - neither of which suit my PhD 

The concepts that fall out of a plain of immanence can't be picked up piecemeal as the singularity of the event horizon established by Deleurs does not allow for a personal logus or episto-ontilogy   That's my term it's how you organise your Ontologies.  

The reason we turn to ego within artists studio project is that the drivers for art are Freudian and art as it is imagined and practiced is built on this foundation - it is what in a simple way it offers to research and it's why everything after Deleuze has been such a struggle in terms of my PHD

If you think about it social science has spent most of its history trying to erase the Id and the individual from its research - yes in the hope for an impossible scientific objectivism but the process of withdrawal is the same it is a moving away from the world and a denial of self - an old habit that chains the dog to its vomit - though this was never Deleuze intention as I believe he was always driven by desire .