In defence of R2 D2

I have finished most of my work and after a week of restless nights and a grinding of teeth I have started to feel better about the RD2 process.

Strangely this feeling better has come from the same kind of thinking too deeply that put me here in the first place.  Deeply here does not mean productively as I have being flitting around in the realm of theory like a fly on scatological shit.  Or perhaps more poetically some sort of insect pollinator traversing a meadow of wild flowers.  Although I think I have been producing tins of artists shit  rather than the Bill Woodrows bee keeper honey.  I thought it may be good to reference artists work here as it is another strand of the useful process of defending my RD2.  Art has it's traditions and its foundations and interestingly in creating hyperlinks the mind and the clicking tends to stop at the specific work; they are points on a map. The flight of the speculative imagination is held in the image, they stand in for more than what they are, without representing what they are,  at least that is for us artists.

I have ended up at a cross roads and feel like I need to quote Ruskin - he is in my PhD for this reason as he was a great thinker who to an extent understood the artists of his day.  Better I think than Deleuze or Lacan as they created art and the artist in the image of their own desire or drive, the artists of the gap and the void.  Ruskin gives us the artists in full flight, in the lofty mountains of the alps or the cold Gothic beauty of a Northern cathedral .

‘And nothing is ever taken seriously or as it is meant but always, if it may be, turned the wrong way, and misunderstood; and while this is so, there is not, nor cannot be, any hope of achievement of high things; men dare not open their hearts to us, if we are to broil them on a thorn-fire.’

John Ruskin Modern Painters, Volume 2

 This indeed is the point of him and I have had my heart broiled on a thorn fire.  The  fears the fast rampaging flames crackling all around, yet my heart slowly cooking in a pan of congealing ontological stew.  Ruskin is in my RD2 because of his difficulty; I am told that we need to stay with the difficulty.  My problem is one of capitulation, I am aware of what it is thought I should do with my work, I am aware of its logic and its neatness, it course of least resistance. Yet I am at a point of refusal and I am not sure where to locate the stoppage.  As Ruskin tells us nothing is ever taken seriously or how it is meant but always turned the wrong way.

I haven't reread my RD2 yet because I remember writing it and I remember all its faults, naive and under researched, it is an honest deep dive into an ontological soup, a short treading of water, a little broiling a re-emergence and an attempt to swim to the side of the pan where the liquid is cooler and there is potential to bide a while.  I wrote it at the wrong time and I was ill prepared for the critique. Deleuze and Guattari in What is Philosophy? tell us that philosophy is the development of new concepts, they say this quite plainly.  This is the endeavor and the reworking of old concepts is not philosophy yet as you read on there is a realistion that the new concepts sit on a plain of Immanence which unfolds towards an event horizon that contains its limits yet not its territory.  At least within my RD2 I didn't aspire to create my own plain of immanence limiting my self creation to new concept and methodology.

 I met with Kate and Laura who did an emergency supervision as I probably come across as needed help.  It feels like it was decided that I could look at a New Materialist reading of informal areas of learning and narrow my field of view.  Instead of wondering why social science in its late stages of the post Qualitative turn needs a flat ontology that de-centers the subjective I should just adopt the parts of the thinking we can all cope with and apply it to the area of study.  

This is a shame really as I was in the middle of thinking that my problem was somewhere between Deleuze and Lacan.  Both after and before Oedipus  on the road between drive and desire.  I was making some progress in the unpicking of thought and was taking myself probably too seriously.  I wondered whether the dissolution of the subjective and the absence of organs, the human as organic machines and the collapse of the ego super ego and the id did not leave a constitutive gap. The fact that Hegal personified has become a dialectic utterly active in any argument both for and against this  despite Deluezes protestations, an active and constituted gap within Delueze through his enforced absense , his body without organs.  I can find lots of interest within a turn to New Materialism and I'm enjoying reading the texts that emerge from an encounter with the world through this thought path.  I think though that it should be necessary to put this desire for a different way to think through the world in a broader context of it emergence, the need for it - what it is against. 

If I were my supervisor I would encourage an active defense of a deep dive into an ontology that requires more than passive reading it requires a visceral and active change in the way we/I /they comprehend the world and this struggle is valiant and salient it is a struggle that we/I/they would always need to come back from and it is both productive and counter productive yet for the sake of the gap that used to be god in the context of my journey it should at least be recognised as necessary.  

here endeth the rant. 

I found this image in a sketchbook from 1984 - it is part of the artists way - it is what we bring in all our difficulties and it does not flatten well.