Christmas Beyond Good and Evil

 Grass has started growing on the ramp up to the loose parts platform.  One of my last jobs was to scatter grass seed and I'm surprised to see it germinated so well in the winter.   It was nice to pop into the playground and wish everyone a happy Christmas. Patrick's mum died last week and he is grieving but also going into work and doing his job which makes sense of things for him.  I did the projections in Rotherham and now I have run out of steam.  I want to finish my chunk of writing I have been working on so I can forward it to Kate and Laura before the Christmas break.  I'm a bit frightened to look at it in case it turns out to be a bit shit.  I also need to get it just as good as I can as I think it is probably the start of my PhD proper.  

I have put Anti Oedipus to one side and I'm reading John Berger.  He is nice to read and I think cleverly balances his writing in a way I can draw on.  This will be my job of work I think to balance the world with my writing and to write for artists.  Perhaps I will be like Spinoza and I will be discovered in some future epoch.  

Part of me is worried that I have got lazy another part tells me I need a bit of a break.  To be honest with myself  I haven't been very motivated for the last two weeks and now all the kids are home and I feel like I need to rest my brain for a few weeks even if I don't really deserve it.

I never did actually write any notes on a Minor Gesture apart from the first two chapters although it feels like these are the most relevant. 

I feel a bit all at sea again but this state is the modern condition. 

gratitude

 It's very nearly time to take a Christmas break.  I'm supposed to be writing today but couldn't face it, I was not in the mood.  I have been for a walk and chopped our old sofa up with the axe I got for my birthday which felt a little manic.  I am just about to set off and project stained glass onto Rotherham Minster and my brain just didn't feel restful enough to sit and write for a day.

 I havn't got on very well with reading anti-Oedipus  but it's not that easy.  I think that within it and the excision of the ego there is a way to understanding how Manning takes the 'I 'out of both art and team.  There is no I in team but there is a Mr T in the A team is an overused joke that holds more than its content.

I almost feel like I am going through the motions here as I am performing my blog.  Two things to mention that are currently not keeping me awake at night but enter my woken brain.

 

It is not the prefix that goes before discipline that is a problem, not intra inter trans or cross the problem is with the term discipline.  We are not interested in the things that provide edges makes up rules and constrains thought. 

The other is that the point of my PhD is to come up with research that is not about asking a question or set of sub questions.  Not that questions are bad just that it seems much harder than it should be to move away from asking a question.  The question can only really be asked about something already present.  perhaps that is why we look to the 'what if ' the 'not yet' and the proposition.  What is the proposition of this research is a what if question.  I shall not mark it with punctuation.  

Finding Hope Bento's Sketchbook

 I sent an Arts Council proposal off on Sunday, its the culmination of a lot of messing about.  I am in two minds about it as it is a symbol of my two selves the artist and the scholar. I need to wait 6 weeks and see if it gets funded. I am hoping it does as it will affirm to me that I am the kind of artist that the Art Council wants to fund.  It will also affirm I am good at writing applications to the Arts Council. When I sent it off I had to change it to be less about Covid19 focused.  We still seem to be in the middle of it but when I think of this time next year I have a strong feeling of the possibility of the end of it. I need to keep relevant. 

Last week was a finishing of things off week.  I realized that when I go to the playground there isn't actually anything for me to do.  The platforms finished and I don't really want to get caught up in doing any maintenance unless I am asked to as its cold and I get  aches in my fingers - perhaps the start of arthritis? Anyway it feels like there are other things I should be doing, there are jobs at home that will make more sense in the short term if writing and reading get too much.

 I finished the Minor Gesture and found it useful. I think I did understand it better this time around.  It is very specific and it is a problem to generalise or apply some of the thinking that falls from it.  It is like Deleuze and Guattari without the jokes but it tries not to oversimplify their thinking. I think it is very much a book for artist scholars which I am now in a process of becoming. I need to take notes this week before I forget what I read, it is not so good that it defies note-taking, this will have to be my reluctant job for tomorrow.

My next book is Anti-Oedipus.  I started it this morning with the slight feeling of familiar excitement that goes with reading a new challenging book.  The forward by Foucault is a joy - he has spotted the trap streets that catch you in the cul da sacs of texts - it was nice to find Foucault saying something I've been saying for a while.  I am not sure what happened then as when I read the first chapter about the desiring machine and the body without organs I felt all at sea again.  My mum told me a story once about a boy in her reception class who had been at school for a few months.  At the end of the day she would get the kids to do Yoga relaxation, they would lay on their backs and feel the energy flows of their bodies.  My mum invented this in the 80's along with Shake and Vac for carpets, but that truly is another story.  The boy was on the verge of sleep and staring at the ceiling said loudly "What is this strange place".  It was an acknowledgement that school was indeed strange but the real point to the story is that it had taken a moments pause for him  to pay attention to this strangeness. That is what it felt like this morning trying to get over Oedipus, to be reminded of having to stitch up all my openings including my eyelids and my anus and suck on the tit of the desiring machine which is not my mother.  The process of reading is uncomfortable and is something that cannot be enjoyed in the moment.  The pages make you wonder what you are doing in such a strange place.

Last week Niche's overman which I think must be his uberman or superman cropped up between good and evil and Spinoza was somehow important.  These were the two rabbit holes that I tripped over, I need to ask the question however. Is the problem with starting with someone like Manning that she starts where she is and not where you are?  You can't pick up a book like the Minor Gestures and read whats on the page. Well you can but you don't get very far. 

I also sent my 7000 words of writing about research creation to Kate.  This is actually a very clever piece of writing and it is performing a different thing to my other writing.  I believe it is my style, like it or lump it it will be the shape of what I submit next year. maybe with lots of projections to do and 2 weeks until Christmas I need a pause. 

On the desk next to me is John Bergers' Bentos Sketchbook - I named this post after him but I haven't mentioned it as I am never sure where to fit John Berger in - in simple terms he writes things that make sense to artists - in the end I hope this is what I can do and then I can retire.

Monday afternoon - a day in the midlife of my PhD

I'm not that sure where I am today as for the first time in a long time I'm struggling to work out exactly what to do with myself.  I had a supervision this morning with Kate where I explained why I thought a years extension to my PhD would be helpful.  I then went to see Patrick and drop some chairs off at the playground and then walked around the cemetery and missed my dog and thought seriously about retiring.  It was a practical thinking rather than a melancholy one though it did leave me feeling slightly melancholy. 

The end of an era is something I say a lot, my retirement will be the end of an era but we are not quite there yet. There is still much to do and much to be taken from the doing of it.  The grim weather and the dark evenings and the lock-down sometimes hold my mood at a point of waiting to step into a lighter place, a waiting for the switch to switch and something else to happen.

Today I got up and read some Erin Manning, did my Joe Wick PE session, had a bath then listened to Utube about Spinoza.  Then I had my supervision which went well, though after it I felt like I needed a break. I popped to the playground and had a chat with Pete and Patrick, we told some jokes and said it was too cold too work. At 3.30 I decided I would blog mainly because I don't want to start anything else.  This all sounds a bit glum and I know I should make myself a cup of tea and snap out of whatever I seem to have snapped into.  Manning was writing about Guattaris' depressions and his oinking like a pig, she seems to want to find some positivity between the spark and petrification of depression.  I am finding the last few chapters slightly irritating. I thought this morning that she is trying to be like Zizeck and not really write a series of books but to write one long single book.  Anyway I only read about eight pages and it was enough. 

I'm waiting for a second wind or a Christmas break or something different.  I told Kate I would do some loose parts play stuff with kids in spring on the platform. I also told Patrick this and it makes some sort of sense of things.  I quite like my writing about research creation but I can't actually look at it in case it's shit.  I am trying to keep positive- John Berger says we need to clench hope between our teeth - today in the cold, it feels like a day to bite hard on hope as both a distraction and something to eat.  I wondered why more people haven't connected Ruskin to Spinoza  it feels like his understanding of Nature and God are similar I am going to cook a chilly and have an early day as I feel if I don't I may end up oinking like a pig.

Sorting out my Library

These are my PhD books I have sorted them out and given them their own shelf.  I am already not sure about the new materialist section.  I'm tempted to move these books up a shelf with the Isaak Walton and the Sartre.  The slightly out of reach PhD section for the not quite making the bottom shelf books.  I think I have probably read most of these books now and I am not sure if this is something I'm proud of.  I was always impressed by people who could do card tricks but also carried a slight worry that they may have spent a lot of their lives practicing something that in the final analysis is quite light and a little naff.  My reading of some of these texts feels a bit like this, in some ways impressive in others pathetic.

The books are organized in a taxonomy  that is very definitely not the Dewey decimal system or alphabetical this is an attempt to order things.  I start off with Deleuze and then Deleuze and his mate Guattari.  I did not put my broken copy of 1000 Plateaus here because of the weight of it has broken its spine and could mess up the neatnes of things. We then have Manning and Massumi and a copy of Thought in the Act which I originally ironically thought was called caught in the act.  However uncomfortable these texts feel in there throbbing difficulty it has to be said that the more time passe, the more these texts become a fluid molten core of my work. The books then slip into the books about and the stuff that comes after; Massumi's guide and another guide to Capitalism and Schizophrenia both of which let you down or lead you wrong.  There are a few books about assemblage theory that I've struggled with leading into the philosophy of play a rather dead end bit.  On the shelf below I have Engels and Dewey and a few Ruskin books John Humes Speculations and a chunk of Colin Ward plus all my Whitechapel art gallery readers guides, which are nice to read. A chunk about play and adventure play that I never know what to do with, the horrid Hicky-sticky Moody new materialist bit and then a final section filling the shelf up which are some of my older art theory books. Kesters Conversation Pieces, Bourriauds, Relational Aesthetics and Clare Bishops, Artificial Hells.  I am not sure if these need to go upstairs or not but they can live here a while. 

The book that is out next to me today is Erin Mannings a Minor Gesture.  I keep wondering if this is the most important book in my PhD.  It is hard to read I've just started chapter 4 which is about autism and movement it is crazy dense in places.  I keep saying its like Deleuze and Guattari without the jokes.  This is true there are not many jokes in it.  I don't think Manning is a new materialist although she does try and theorise the  the more -than human of the world.  Perhaps this is why I keep getting pulled back into research-creation as an idea.  Put simply Manning draws on Bergson and Whitehead to argue for the forward unfolding creative moments that constitute the world that are not reliant on a singular bounded human mind/body.  At the end of this line of thinking you can end up sharing lots of thoughts from a new materialist orientation but you end up more with a Deluezian configuration of a life which I am afraid cannot live without its italics here. 

And then we have the playground and then we have the playing and the people and then we have the building and the making and then we have the me and the others and all these things are in excess and more-than.  I am going to stop writing this bitty blog now and go back to reading Manning and taking notes.  Writing on my blog now feels less necessary though perhaps it is more important.  I may come back and tidy this post up or I may leave it. For now it finishes here.

Tuesday tea time

Just had a power walk in  the Cemetery  I have been making power bowls for dinner which is just salad in  a bowl really.  I am feeling like a need to keep fit and healthy and power on.   The playground is  now closed to the public and I'm not sure I can carry on working there during the current lock down period.  Its probably a good idea to have a bit of a break as the platform is finished and we can't commission it so I would end up doing odd jobs which is not really a good idea. 

I sanded the dining room floor today and have moved upstairs I have sorted out all my PhD books and have a plastic crate filled with the most important ones.  In a way I have gone full circle as I am back reading Erin Manning's a minor gesture . In the first chapter she gives a pretty good description of what research creation means to her and  its pretty useful for me.  I think that this is the key to the work  of writing as I am getting closer to thinking that what is missing is a way to write about art making that is more entwined with making.  Perhaps this is worldizing, I prefer this to diffraction as it lets things hold their difference within a totality in a way I feel is more in tune with making and doing in the world. 

I am struggling top get through the Manning .I thought I might of gone more clever over the last two years but I'm not sure I have really as I annotated my copy and it seems to be annotated in all the best places. The problem we have is she slides into Bergson and pulls a big chunk out of Whitehead and before this sent me into a spiral worm hold of speculation that didn't really get me anywhere - this time I need to be more strategic in where I end up.

I don't have much to say today - I am just checking in with myself as I said i would every week - when I read this back I hope i will see it as the start of a turning point - a minor gesture perhaps?

Thurdays writing

I struggled on my writing day  - in the end I went out with Tim and his new puppy for a walk.  I did write for about an hour and a half - I read it this morning and couldn't think where to file it or to put it so I'm locating it here in time and in my thoughts.

My alternative RD2 a year on from the actual Event.

It's the 5th of November last year on this day I was preparing for a public event with the school of architectures Urban Room at Moor foot in Sheffield.  I didn’t realize it at the time but this ended up been the end event of my assembling the bits arts council project as by the time I got to the real end of the project Covid 19 had stopped most face to face activity.  The rest of November would be spent preparing for my year two progression.  I remember this as 2 months of writing mainly hung up on not knowing what a literature review was supposed to look like.  In retrospect the 1^st draft of my RD2 that I submitted was a really honest piece of writing on where I was and it contained my worries and my hopes. What I realize now is that it wasn’t what was required for my progression or transgression, which I keep calling it.  The reality I think is I wasn’t really at the point of progression I was still really working things out.  I was also balancing lots of things that I saw as other things, keeping the spinning plates in the air.  I like this metaphor as when I say it I can see a family on the generation game in 1978 desperately gyrating the cane sticks to actually keep plates spinning and running between them  Brucey would intervene and knock them off to move the show on a bit faste .  The arts council project, finding funding from the South Yorkshire trusts to buy materials, finding money from the festival of social science to run an event – thinking about how things work at the playground  are all part of what I am considering as residency but they were not part of the writing about residency – residency is mess and its residual.

So I wrote about everything I was reading and I was reading to try and find something that made sense of art in relation to life.  Ideas that did not separate life from everything else or as Manning would say parse.  The kernel of this probably started forming when I read Pure Immanence a life on the train to London.  The book is a strange anthology and I think the bit of it on immanence was just an essay or a musing and the book was put together as a book made from scraps of things.  It is at least quite short and to the point.  Delueze’s notion of a life extracted from the idea of a human life and scaffolded by a thousand concepts and a lifetimes writing.  In my reading I was following the lines of different singularities that although very different all seemed to say the same thing.  There is no inside and no outside there is no beyond, everything is singular.  In all this reading and following of lines the singularities stand out as different names for the same thing.  All of them share a collective aim to undermine the concept of the singular autonomous bounded human.  All of them however are not considered post- or after or more than the human.  

I suppose I started with old school dialectical materialism and I’m not sure why this doesn’t actually work other than been massively tainted by Stalin who posthumously discredited by his actions Lenin.  Perhaps without the prospect of immanent revolution Dialectical Materialism loses something.   I then toyed with actor network theory and new materialism and Object Oriented Ontologies via Whitheads speculative realism.   Then dabbled in Vibrant matter and Bennets essential vitalism through to Barads Pseudo-science and agential realism. Then wanting to be taken a little more seriously I immersed myself in both Deleuze and Guattari and lockdown.   So there is a lot of stuff here and it’s all about the singular nature of reality – the impossibility of an inside or an outside and therefore the study and the object of study.  I wonder if there is someone who can just plump for the theory that works for them in a given situation.  I know that for many researchers theory isn’t that important, it's a necessary distraction for scaffolding what you are trying to say but lots of research just emerges from itself and the work does not necessarily ask fundamental ontological questions about the nature of realities.  

But this is the problem of working with Deleuze and Guattari as their mission is to create a new plane of immanence on which concepts can emerge.  I got this through reading What is Philosophy and after this realistion of what they were attempting within their work I got to better understand how it all worked and why it often didn’t work for researchers.

I feel like I need to cross the fourth wall here and talk to camera.  The reason that D and G don’t work for most researchers is that they can not be retrofitted into existing thought technologies.  Assemblage which lives in the middle or milieu of their work is made up of everything else.  It’s meaning is not a case of translation it is the thing that grows or is enunciated as you read.  For it to work in continuity they have to keep adding concepts.  Some of which seem to work others that seem not to fit only to emerge and fit later, theirs is an improvised philosophy.  

So what do I need to do next?  it feels like again I have no writing. What I thought was going to be a chapter on Methodology is apparently a literature review so I still don’t actually know what a literature review is. There is a need to have something that is less per formative but it feels like the edges of the genre of academic writing are not very permeable.  The writing stops been academic and becomes something else.

It feels like I am back at the beginning – I have gone full circle and to an extent need to start again – not from the start though perhaps from the middle.   Today in trying to write it feels like I need to settle down with a bit more book work – firstly to go back to some key texts and secondly to get a bit of detail and overview .  That's what’s needed – so I’m going to stop this writing which isn’t going anywhere as I don’t know enough yet -  here is my list of things.

 

Read manning a minor gesture

Think through residency as assemblage

Work out how this core of thinking relates to work in the field and how it could be written.

Think about the relationship between writing and making more this is actually the methodology or perhaps the lit review.

 

Waiting for the results

 We are in lock-down and waiting for the results of the American election - this is very distracting and I am strangely much more concerned about it than I thought I would be.  It is Thursday and it is writing day, I have just had a nice chat with people in the writing group and said I am going to do some free writing today.  River mentioned using a program called Mendeley this is a good thing to get me organised - it feels like it is time to jump in to being more organised. 

My supervision was a bit strange this week.  I had sent a piece of writing that was an attempt to do something that read a bit more like a PhD at least one within an education department.  I am not sure I succeeded however the writing did help to work some things out and also some things that are now irrelevant.  The big thing is to drop new materialism and work with agencement or assemblage from Deleuze.  So Gertz and Manning are important, a chapter that brings it into educational research so I suppose Maggie and Hicky Moody and perhaps Rachael and Springay and Trueman. 

It feels like the R D process was a real problem for me as I grasped at the wrong straw.  I can't blame anyone for this and it happened coincidentally as I was reading Jane Bennet at the time - I would of grasped at anything I was reading to be honest as I was sent into panic mode. It would of been good to have realised this at the time and then perhaps I could have refocused myself in a direction that would of felt more constructive and more in an area I was excited by or in tune with. By the time I had to do the rewrite of the proposal I was in a pragmatic mode of jumping through the hoop- when I landed on the other side however I couldn't seem to shake off the shackles of what I had said I was going to do.

I don't really want to return to the piece of writing I have spent so long on as I know in my heart it is to general and it jumps all over the place.  Perhaps there are some things I need to pull from it and extend, the writing is performative yet I'm not that sure what it is performing.  I should be writing now so I will stop this writing and start a different writing.  Perhaps it should be a really honest RD2 proposal that maps out the next stage of the PhD from where I am today.  As Trump keeps saying it may be time to stop counting and announce a decision.

On the edge of lock down

 Monday morning again and a new lock down starts on Thursday. I had a strangely unproductive week looking back on it.  Monday  and spent the afternoon at Pitsmoor with Tom.  We worked really slowly and I tried to show him how to use a few tools and cut wood.  He was sad and I carried a bit of this weight with me- it slowed us down a bit. Tuesday I went to Highfields playground and looked at the potential new build for them.  It is interesting as I can't make this part of my PhD study it is a trajectory but not a useful one. We worked at the playground in the afternoon in the rain and it was a bit miserable in the damp. Wednesday I worked the morning with Bryn we were basically fitting some rope sides to the ramp  I had been reading Tim Ingolds book about Dewey in the morning and can't work out if its useful or a distraction or a useful distraction. Afternoon was the PGR drop in I felt like an old lag but also a little like a con artist that would be found out

Wednesday afternoon was mainly online  stuff with Kate  and then the PgR drop in.  Thursday was writing group and Nigel came back - this is the best bit of the week as it feels like something me and River have taken on and I think it is a really good thing for everyone trying to write.  each time I try and explain the complexity of what I'm writing about I feel a bit silly. I did a proper days writing on my methods sections and sent it to Kate and Laura.  I was relatively pleased with it especially the bit about Custard and sauce anglais, I felt a little stupid by writing the wrong source  - original pirate material - my dyslexic mistakes are sometimes the origins of interesting world play.  Exegesis a word I've struggled to get near enough for spell check to find came up as Exit Jesus on my transcription software which has both helped me to remember the word and made me chuckle.  I know I have a certain talent for a certain type of writing and am adaptable yet the lack of grasp of some of the basics is a raw window of vulnerability within academic writing - I do not know or understand the sauce  of my problem but its not saucy or to make an academic joke a problem with Saussure.

Friday and Saturday I showed films at the playground - I talked to Zac and Bryn about the nature of time and remembered I wanted to read the 1930s exchange between Bergson and Einstein which was big news at the time I think this is another distraction. 

On Friday I was given a bottle of Rum for projecting the films  today I have bought Bryn an impact driver for all his help - I could write about Gifts - I may do in my field notes but what is interesting to say here is that the gifts should not become representations in text.   This is a thought that is bubbling under the surface this week - like the best art that can never be captured within documentation because the fact is you have to experience it first hand.  There is something in the way I'm thinking that is to hold things within their semblance and not move to resemblance or representation. It is this I think that research creation can offer foundationaly and it is within this difficulty I may be able to say something original, at least to me. 

No New World -Another rainey tuesday

 I have been away again and it was nice to have a break.  I have properly enrolled for my final year and nearly officially have an extra six months to complete my PhD before I submit.  I am not that sure how I feel as we enter tier 3 lock down rules.  A mixture of quite enjoying the elongated extension, the pause in the state of things, coupled with feeling frustrated with the sense of waiting for something to happen and the rain.

 Tom's home and we are nearly about to set off to the playground to probably touch base and have a chat about where we are.  The platform is very nearly finished. This is good as it has taken long enough.  I think it is at the center of things - it is a new affordance, in that it holds potential.  It is a thing that is new and material and made by mainly my hands. It is unquestionably present within the project.  I think that perhaps on the advice of Beth St Pierre I need to drop research as a term and play with enquiry/inquiry as a process of finding out.

I have lost the affirmed certainty of reading a Thousand Plateaus, diffracted through building a large platform with a tree in the middle of it at the playground.   I felt like a real scholar/artist for an instant, my mental and physical blood, sweat and tears smeared on the door handles of our house by half sanatised hands.  These were perhaps the good old days when I developed a new relationship both to making and to death.   The finishing off bits, the handrail and exposed bolt heads in the mud, in the rain are not really doing the same thing for me.  The carefully mapped diffraction patterns of the two waves of making and thinking erode into the slight ripples of entropy on the beach of acceptance.

And this is happening because I've started to try and write something that looks like a PhD and it is a bit shit but has consumed an enormous amount of time .  I thought by this point I would be 2 years into an elephant like gestation period ready to give birth to a baby elephant that I would nurture with elephant milk and grow into something a spectacular spectacular in the vernacular. As chairman Mao said even a PhD of 90 thousand words starts with a single word.  As Paulo Freire so aptly commentated we make the road by walking it - yet these optimistic quotes are always best heard in the retrospect. When the long march is well underway and the road is partially made through it's walking.  They are nostalgic psychological props that are not really that much help at the real beginning of a journey. 

The plan then is to contain the writing and to try and start some chunks and share them with Kate and Laura.  Thursday writing group is going well although it clearly is nowhere near enough time to spend writing.  I think I will need more structure than this and I will need it very soon.  But first to properly finish the platform and then to let its edges bleed. 

On another note I'm reading Tim Ingolds latest book - its strange as his main influences seem to be Manning, Massumi, Dewey, Rancierre and a bit of not that well represented Deleuze and Guattari.  It is all my key thinkers that have underpinned my thinking from the start.  The most applicable bunch and I think I could work with some of  his ideas- lets see where it goes with his lines and categorizes and demarcations. 

 

A Rainey Tuesday

Bryn who helped me work at the Venture yesterday may have Covid so I'm limiting my contacts and its raining so I can't work at the playground anyway.  I miss my dog today as he would make me go for a walk and I would feel better for it.

I always start my blog post by reading and editing the last post. It's like the bit at the start of box sets that quickly fill you in on the last episode. This is good because I tend to sleep through more and more telly unless its Money Heist which has kept me completely gripped. 

I have clearly had a bit of a Deleuzian phase as my writing is filled with a strange and dislocating passion that even the odd well placed self deprecatory joke does little to counter.  I must admit when reading back in the clear light of distance chunks of the writing don't sound like me which is because there is a development.  

Yesterday Bryn asked me about my PhD and Patrick was listening and I tried to explain the artists residence and new materialism and the idea of a life  from Deleuze that was in the world, or the plane of absolute immanance.  He asked me if this was phenomenology and I explained that although I find a lot in Heidegger and his Phenomenology that seems to fit  there is in this thinking something human (often a white man) at the center of experiencing the world.  I tried to explain about flat ontologies but then heard Maggie's voice from my transition Viva saying that all I did was keep saying flat ontology.  I diverted the conversation with a joke about the wide mouth frog that eats only nuts and flies.  There is a connection but its a long joke I may tell it in my field notes.  The punchline paraphrased could come from my Viva

Steve - Hello I'm a new materialist and I eat flat ontologies

Maggie - I am clever and I  eat naive new materialist for breakfast. 

Steve - Ohhh you don't see many of those about nowadays do you ?   

In a way though things are moving and it has to be in some sort of line for me.  I have had to build something that is of significance that has taken time and is real as essentially this is my artists way to build and make something that is real and functions on many levels.  As I actually step across the threshold into my final year there is a real progression towards finding out where I am and where I sit in the mesh-work of relations between world - thing- thought .  In using this language of separation I recognise that the problems we tackle are contained within the language we use and that is why the things/stuff/materilities/objects/events/ in and of themselves beyond text are rising to the challenge.

A week of work

I tried to enrol for my last years of funded PhD on Monday but I jumped the gun as I can't actually do this until October.  Looking back to last Thursday when I started the writing group and splurged a couple of thousand words onto the page its difficult to put a mental finger on what I've actually done.  My writing ended up been about methodology,  I am trying to justify why auto-ethnography.  I have also been thinking about making or wroughting as I've started calling it.  

This came about as I took a step back from where I was and thought:

1. There are things I have made.

2. There is writing. 

Although this is simple and obvious it it an almost certain truth.  What the things are and what the writing constitutes is open for debate but they are clearly things and writing.  Material outcomes in the world.  I then tried to think analytically and to an extent within a framing of vibrant assemblages (agensement) .  The trick with thinking assemblage is that the foundation or multiplicity of the concept is built on something that should not be named, that re/places the unknown constructed sense of self that was there before.  The short language that often gets used to move towards thinking through assemblages  never really works- I may as well say the Chicken without Giblets.  Neither can we describe assemblages through doing as the new way of feeling the world requires a positioning that need views that feels immanence - the what is to come rather than the what has gone.  It is hard not to present a closed set of things that unfold in complex relation as an assemblage yet without the vibrancy of a lifes potential immanent becoming this is merely a collection of things.  The neck kidneys and liver placed in a polythene bag and stuffed back up the opening in the carcass that I think may at one point of been a chickens arse though I am never sure I think the parson knows. 

1. There are things I have made.

2. There is writing.

The purpose of the ~PhD from a post perspective is to move towards framing this writing and making into a conceptual framework that adds up to something new.  I think I can do this and I'm well situated to build a vibrant assemblage of parts that will be probably if we are talking in singularities be best described as a difficulty.

 'The only way to find a larger vision is to be somewhere in particular' writes Donna Harrawy in her 1998 article situated knowledge.   I've also done this, am doing this when I've finished this blog I am going to spend a day at the playground, still in residency, still in limbo.  All I have properly learned is what I knew already in that there are no real boundaries between things - everything flows.

After-life - the transubstantiation of my PhD

 Just before I left the house to go on holiday I had a worry that my computer and my laptop and my hard-drives would all be stolen and I would lose all the work I have done on my PhD.  I quickly backed up the folders on a pen drive and decided to hide it somewhere safe.  I  had found a plaster head of Jesus in a skip outside St James playgroup  20 years ago, as a fragment it feels much more desirable than its fully torsoed original.  I hid the USB drive inside the head of Christ for both pragmatic and poetic reasons.  I have just retrieved it as I needed to transfer some files to my laptop.  For a few moments I speculated on the possibility that a thousand dancing angels, forsaking the head of a needle, may have descended into the bits of my drive. That perhaps like monkeys typing the complete works of Shakespeare they fiddled with the binary code and transformed the acres of fragmented musing into a fully finished PhD thesis.  All I would need to do was smugly sit on it until the date of my final submission arrived.  Wine would become blood and bread would be a body without organs. Alas as I formatted the drive it contained the same shite it did when I put it there.  No elves had repaired the shoes, Santa had not popped down the chimney and done a copy edit.  There is still the hard work to do- speculative realism my arse. 

I had a great holiday. I managed to not even sneak anything that could be considered a PhD book into my bag and as much as is possible, within these times of worry, managed to switch off.  It's 2 hours until I have a supervision so I've spent the last 2 days trying to switch on again. To pick up where I left off without feeling quite so stressed about it.  I've done this by making an attempt to write my literature review plan and reading the rest of Pat Thomson's book about helping PhD students to write. Both these activities have switched me back on again. The writing was hard and dissatisfying though it did feel like a start. It made writing feel possible again after a long period of reading and doing.

After this preamble it feels like I should not revert to bullet points but as this blog is linear and I know that ideas will be fixed in time and context I have some things to note that I'm hoping to take into my supervision meeting. 

1. Pat talks a lot of writing work and identity work.  I have found this very helpful as I have decided I need to do identity work, specifically on constructing and performing myself as an artist/scholar.  I am not very good at feeling secure in my skin and the artist/scholar is a difficult identity to either make or write.  However it is a gap and a space that could do with filling with something other than the arts school artist/scholars.  This is a club or as Pat would call it a community of practice to which I will never find a legitimate front door entrance.  The gap in writing exist in the relationship to thinking and making, there are established and recognised  diagrams or apparatus of the relations yet none of them fit what I'm doing very well.

To put it in very clear terms the work I do as an artist is easily written off as low level community arts or the instrumental use of arts many technics or habits.  Until this or roundabout this moment I have been able to aline with this. It felt fine as my practice, the underground river flowing through the mess that is a life, could remain happily opaque.  It would emerge occasional from the chalk meadow fields and look pretty. The fact I am aware it is there yet know little about it has always been very sustaining, even on the dark days. The artist/scholar identity work I'm embarking on has to take into account this opacity with an intention not to obscure anything deliberately. 

This movement towards singing a duet as the artist and as the scholar within my PhD has suddenly become more attractive as a proposition.  I am moving from been an artist doing a PhD to writing my identity as an artist/scholar.  

2. Pat says that a PhD has to follow a line of an argument it has to make some sort of sense and it has to be something an examiner can read. I have taken this bit really seriously as when I decided I would be a 'becoming artist scholar' the idea of writing something banal felt like a betrayal.

3. I have decided that I want to centralise the writing of Deleuze.  I like the fact that Foucault said the 20th century was essentially Deleuzian.  In all my reading his texts hold the most generative potential. I think that essentially there is something in his writing from Bergson about the relationship of life to time. At the moment there is an element of floundering around within this thought but of any community of practice I could perhaps fit into I get the feeling I could dwell here.  I'm not sure if this is a good idea but it fits with the identity work of becoming an artist scholar - who the fuck else could you choose ?

4. The things are the thing.  I have always intended to have a series of encounters with material things, the horn of a unicorn, the platform for loose parts play, the digging of holes the rusting of nails the fixing of toilets, the death of a rat, the chicken without giblets.  These are points of encounter with the material of the world.  The interesting question to take from Deleuze and how his thinking weaves through new materialist interpretations and what it brings to the material encountering? its certainly not just a mind, thought or human being.  This is the point where things do not come together - the need for thinking through totalities and what that means for edges and boundaries.  There is a level of complexity here that will emerge in stories and narratives about things.  Perhaps in building the identity of an artist scholar, at least for the moments of finishing my PhD writing I will somehow bring some of these thoughts to heal.

5. When I started this process I decided I would try and enjoy it and not get bogged down or negative.  I am doing pretty well in this but I have noticed that when things start to feel difficult its because I'm trying to hold too much of it in my head at one go.  I have written about my amazement at not been able to make films and take stills at the same time.  I wonder if some people can do this, I know lots of people try yet for me its two modes of being in the world.  Film it temporal a photograph is still, they are two different mediums even though in my case I use a single camera.  I think it takes me around 15 minutes to switch mode. If I don't pay attention to the switch I take crap footage and crap stills.  A similar thing happens in the making and doing phase of my PhD.  I can have a breather and write field notes and I can write a regular blog but I can't switch from working on my residencies as visual artist to writing as scholar.  This is complex if I am trying to be a becoming artist/scholar with a backs/lash.  Perhaps I need to think of the Janus with two faces, the Roman god of transitions and develop the ability to look both ways at once - perhaps I may need to learn to be a little two faced.

Bits and Bots

 It has taken me a while to sit down and blog this week.  We got back from Glasgow and then I had a days experimenting with the projector at the picture house.  Interestingly this is the only work I have done for about 4 months that isn't directly connected to my PhD.  It is good to remind myself of this as it means that I am on task even though I often worry I'm not achieving very much. 

It has been very rainy so I've spent more time reading and more time trying to write.  I feel like I am about to turn a corner as I have a document called literature review which is getting longer.  I need to really thank Pat Thomson for this as her book has really helped. Firstly it has given me some practical tips on academic writing. Secondly it has introduced the idea that we write ourselves as scholars through the process of creating texts. Finally it has pointed to the work at hand which is to maintain my identity as an artist through writing and not to set  two identities, scholar and artist in opposition.  I tried to do a bit of this type of writing just then - tried to do it in a way that had a little gravitas and potentially opened a door into a community of practice.  I worry about artist scholars though as they have never really squared the circle ( alchemist reference) with art and text and the various levels of what is and isn't representation.  In terms of reading I have bought a handbook of arts based research and read some stuff about new materialism.  This is an inching towards a clearer vision of an area of potential study - I cannot say focus as this is not the point. 

I also worried about not been able to finish the steps on the platform at the playground - it was partly rain but also the fact I'm working pretty much on my own now and its a two person job; or at least it is much easier with two people.  One of the reason this blog post is delayed is the fact that I've spent 2 big days down there and really pushed myself to get it done.   I paid Giz to work with me on Wednesday and nearly killed myself yesterday.  I've used all the wood all the nails and all the screws I'm like the DIY tiger monster who came for tea.

I did a projection on Abbyfield house on Saturday as a favor  - we took Shaun and Mary to the beach on Friday so I have put a couple of pictures in as a reminder.  We are going away to Greece for two weeks and I intend to try and switch off as my brain is a little addled and as I start my final year in a month I think it is time for a moment of transition. 

I recon its as good a place as any to leave things for a while.

Monday Again

 

 Last week we had a meeting at the playground with some people from architecture department. Carolyne was worried about some wool on a tree trunk - it was growing into the bark a so I sliced it off with my universal buzzy saw,  the tree has all sorts of cords growing into its bark. Trees have a hard time at the playground. I've done quite a lot of pruning to create a better view over the past few weeks. I do it guiltily and always in  small bits at a time hoping nobody will realize my brutality. It is the manipulation of nature to fit my evil plans of dominating the world of things the shaping it to an image from my minds eye. I at least released the tree from its decorative bondage. 

 I have just got back from the allotments with Tim after a dull start the sun has come out.  It is Monday the day I promise myself I will write a blog post so I have a record of where I am.  It is a snapshot, Tim talked a lot about feeling slightly removed from reality, a standing slightly outside of himself. I told him about Alfred North Whitehead and the origins of his speculative-realism where Christ is reborn and Angels dance on the heads of pins. He ordered Pizza from the most unlikely Italian restaurant anywhere outside Italy.  He asked me when I was starting the work on the platform and I mumbled a bit and tried to explain that I was interested in finding out how to embed loose parts play into the playground and that was what I was starting so my work was more holistic.  I also said that one of the things I was thinking about was how it may be important to not make loose parts play and building separate from everything else, or to establish them as ideals to work towards - that it was part of the whole thing.  I tried to extend this into the way that the playground builds community out of the loose parts of things- things that include people.  I want to make Tim part of a Socratic dialogue where I bring the reader along with me to a point of understanding, they follow with Tim a line of thought, their own thought along with a slightly re-imagined Tim that offers some sort of enlightenment.  

We were going to feed the Chickens which always seems like a euphemism but although it usually involves a lot of talking we do feed the chickens.  As they scuttle around the allotment I wonder how the giblets actually work to power them along. When I came up with the idea of the chicken without giblets as my own interpretation of the body without organs I didn't really think about a live chicken  with feathers and a face. Confronted by six today I wondered what the giblets actually did. I'm not naive enough to think of them stuffed inside the body cavity in a polythene bag but my chicken biology is also not good enough to imagine them doing work inside a clucking scratching hen.  I wonder if there is any mileage in the chicken without giblets or CWG taken seriously or as a joke the concept doesn't really add very much.  Things that are alive and things that are dead are very different though and if we are truly to embrace an ontology that  flattens the living with the none living we need to come to terms with the car crash of a carcass verses pecking hopping feathery chicken.

After a weekend in Glasgow I started the day off reading Pat Thompsons book on writing and PhD's.  I think it was good to read her talk about writing up negatively and to position writing at the heart of scholarship.   She says writing blogs and field notes is writing and the main thing to remember is it is the place where we work out ideas.  I do that in my blog and my field notes and my more esoteric meanderings. It was good to know that even though I am not doing all the writing I will surely need to do I am writing.  I am producing text and actively working through ideas. I have never really agreed with the separation that the idea of writing up holds and its good to know that it doesn't have to work like that.

At the playground and in the work in Rotherham I am part of trying to make something happen and part of trying to research something happening and I do not declare either as a specific territory or treat them as such.  The thing I'm trying to make happen is not a dead chicken with or without giblets its a live clucking and pecky thing scratching up set potatoes on a day when the weather doesn't know what to do with itself, a Rhode Island Red digging up a Charlotte to be precise .

I am now going to write some field notes from last week because I'm sure something happened that will be constituted or at least thought through in writing.   I have Tim to thank for this discipline, this is practical rather than Socratic and real not speculated Tim. 

Ambiguity

 

I had a long conversation with Richard Steadman-Jones yesterday where I worked through some thoughts that have been hovering for a while about ambiguity.  One of the things I have noticed in conversations at ESRI and in some of the papers I read are striving for clarity within texts.   I don't think this is about trying to be straightforward but I do wonder if it comes from the Anglo-American  analytical tradition within philosophy.  This is surprising as much of the writing seems to draw heavily from  the continental tradition. This can ends up leaving a sense of chalk and cheese, an attempt to pull definitions or applications from texts which were trying to make a new-sense of themselves on different terms.  I am sure that all the clever people are very aware of what from the outside can feel like a contradiction; it is in many ways necessary if this feral french thinking is to be brought to heal and put to work  within social science.

What struck me and surprised me in the conversation with Richard was the way ambiguity works if you give it space.  There is a tendency to try and pin words to definitions that creates the building blocks of knowledge, some kind of common sense system of exchange.  What I've taken from my slow reading of 1000 Plateaus is that it is within the vastness of the whole books layered ambiguity that its real use lives.  Everything that comes after  that tries to say what the pair of thinkers actually mean by concepts such as Assemblage try to lesson the ambiguity move towards sense.  Because art is generally not literal and not tied into a regime of signs in the same way as language it offers an opportunity to break from trying to explain things or more specifically translate them into spoken or written language.  Although research creation probably makes this proposition and brings the process of art into art and into the idea of process philosophy there is still a strange disjuncture that happens when art has to become encoded or perhaps over-coded so we can recognize it as art.  

Rusty nails marking a table can be seen as art because it doesn't really serve any other purpose, what the hell else could it be other than incidental? There is clearly something intentional about their arrangement and then the waiting for the rain. 

 

Most people would probably not see the marks that the nails left on the table as serious art or art at all but that doesn't really matter as I can call them an art work with a level of clarity and certainty.  Making the giant territorial platform for loose parts play to take place on is much more ambiguous. For most people it is clear what it is, an area, a summer house, shade, shelter, storage, a frame, a ground, a surface, the thing that comes before art, the stretching of a canvas at best.   

So it is not its failure to be art or its queering of arts definitions or anything fuzzy that is important it is a deliberate striving for ambiguity neither one thing or another and importantly not in a process of becoming one or the other.  

Literature review and Richard Wentworth

 

In conversation with the critic Stuart Morgan, Richard Wentworth said: 'I find cigarette packets folded up under table legs more monumental than a Henry Moore. Five reasons. Firstly the scale. Secondly, the fingertip manipulation. Thirdly, modesty of both gesture and material. Fourth, its absurdity and fifth, the fact that it works.'

I took the photograph above as a homage to the Richard Wentworth quote probably for another blog about 4 years ago.  I dug it out to is today as I think my current obsession with it has something to do with how I feel about writing.  I would like to try and write keeping in mind these five reasons,  a type of writing like an artwork that is  for-itself and not for purpose. This is the kind of writing that they find difficult to teach in school as it does not sit neatly in an established genre.  Obviously I can't write a PhD that is just for-itself but I can probably develop an aspect of writing that takes into account scale, the manipulation of words on the tips of my tongue, modesty of both gesture and material, absurdity and of course the possibility that it may work. 

I am a few pages off finishing Art and Objects by Graham Harman.   I had got a bit distracted by reading his overly enthusiastic version of Object Orientated Ontology late last year. It introduced another set of ideas  pulling me in a different direction that trickled into my writing. After the great performative identity deconstruction and necessary rites of passage I had to go back into my RD2 document and strip mine this line of thought.  Luckily I didn't really  like it that much it seemed very elitist and to be honest preachy like the kid in whistle down the wind who goes around shouting "I know something you don't know" at everyone he meets.  The reason I keep coming back to Harman is he actually tries to deal with aesthetics and although he has his very own take on this he sees art in its philosophical conception and more formal history as one of the most important companions to philosophy.  To paraphrase him in a way he would surely have issue with he suggests that through metaphor art and aesthetic knowing has the best chance of reaching towards what is unknowable within an object which is it's essential object-hood.  What is attractive about this way of thinking is it gives us within a western philosophical tradition an alternative to relativism and post -structuralism; It is an aspect of speculative realism that turns away from the linguistic post structural constructions of the real and offers a flat ontology that allows space for something more-than yet not beyond. To paraphrase Orwell within a flat ontology everything is equal yet within Object Oriented Ontology some things are more equal than others.

In my last supervision I mentioned Michael Taussig   as I had read about him in the Elizebeth Groz about art and territory book I was dabbling with last week. My friend Becci has been reading him over lock down and I was wondering whether he was writing  speculative ethnography and might be a bit like my hero John Berger.  Laura was very good  and just said Taussig is interesting but a phenomenolgist and that doesn't seem to be a direction that you are traveling in.   We also had a similar conversation about educational theory and where this would lead me in terms of what I would need to take into account. It is clear that within PhD writing there is little brushing up against ideas everything needs to be taken seriously.  Simon Nicholson and loose parts theory coming from architecture opens a small can of worms that can just about be managed however this does not mean I should open the large catering tins of worms like tins of artists shit stacked on the shelves of the gallery walls and cafe. One of the tings I know i have learned is that I only now really understand now what Laura is talking about. There comes a point where you pay your money and you take your choice and that choice has to have limitations.  I am probably past that moment now I've paid my money in the academic vending machine and all I can do now is type in my number and watch the spiral wind and the Kit-Kat sized manageable snack of knowledge drop into the dispenser draw. 

This morning though I decided that in all my reading I hadn't really come across much that actually expanded what art can be from the perspective of an artists trying to enact art into the world.  The closest I have come to feeling any real insight into how it feels is Glissants writing on the opaque. Even though this wasn't about art it resonated with me in that it presents what is there but cannot be known.  This is what art feel like for me, an unknowable surplus. Harman in  his exploration of Kant and the idea of the thing-in-itself also touches on this feeling about the impossibility of knowing yet the certainty that there is something there.   I don't know how to write about this without it coming out pompous, bigger than its supposed to be  however  I do feel-it or as I bring things forth into the world however functional and mundane they may appear at their surface.  Interestingly I never think of anything as art or not art it is not a category I find useful beyond funding applications.  Definitions  and categories are what Harman calls undermining and although assumed to be the way we organize knowledge they do not work well for Art with either a capitol or small a.

In my other writing about how art works in research I suggest that its OK to make art in what ever image you want, a golden calf to worships or everyday acts like brewing a cup of tea.  I know its not my position to say this or to give anyone permission to do anything. I go on to say that you will probably be able to get from art what you need if you take it seriously in all its relations  This is perhaps one thing you can say about good artists, even if we don't make good art we do take art seriously on its own terms. 

In all my reading and most of my conversations within the world of post- Cartesian social inquiry I haven't come across many approaches that expand art in a way that feels familiar or how I have experienced it as useful in the quest to better understand living knowledge.   In the writing of John Dewey, Harman, Rancierre, Deleuze and Guattari and Ernst Block I have found a thread that links to Bergson's conception of time. Through Dewey's notions of experience that extends art properly into process.  I think this is what I have always experienced art as, a process that relates us to the material world, ties us into the assemblage  of what Deleuze would call a life.  

Last week as I struggled to start my literature review I ordered Pat Thompsons book about how to encourage PhD students to write.  It was a moment of slight desperation. I like Pat and in a way it is a bit of a quid quo pro as Pat does a lot of academic work within my old art world.  I always smugly wondered what it felt to write about all this stuff but to be always kept at arms length, just in case you got a glimpse of the king in his altogether. It feels like the other way around now and Pat may be able to help me as a local guide who knows the territory.

Whitehead is another writer I've spent a little time with, he is complex and historically very attractive having a serious finger in the pie of principa mathmatica, quantum physics and later a rather idiosyncratic metaphysics.  Sadly he is often reduced like many great thinkers to set of basic principles for which his name is often presented as an inadequate shorthand.   One of these is the idea of the lure of the groove and the problem with getting stuck in it.  To easily extrapolated from metaphysics the grove gets used to mean stuck in one academic discipline so you can't see anything else - a problem of specialization. The groove for me though is much more about process and how you move forward, the stuckness is in process not in time. The answer in relation to the relations of doing a PhD is not to be frightened of the groove but as much as possible to plough your own furrow.  

At this point my thread through the field of the literature I've engaged with is how art is imagined and in turn what affects this has on how we think about knowing the world.  The groove that I seem to be stuck in is what this means in the context of new -materialism or rather Post Cartesian research  that mostly starts from a position of flatness.  How and in what ways can the process of art-making or to follow Dewey art as experience be part of thinking about how we experience and expand the fields of art and living knowledge.  Research creation and the origins of practice as research approaches complicated by a search for external academic validation and the search for research funding follows a parallel furrow or groove rich and full of potential but it is a furrow Whitehead may recognize as a groove.  On occasion well mostly at the moment the stylus is not staying on the record so I can only speak off it.

 

Plywood

Plywood is striated space it's made of layers stuck together, the grain of the wood alternating in different directions.  I've seen a film of them making it from giant trees from the rain forest; they mount the trunks on giant lathes and then peel them like apples - the lungs of the earth rolled out like a giant sheet of toilet paper.  I am reading Harmans book about art and aesthetics,  he thinks the only way we can describe an object ( which can be basically anything that has a form) is through metaphor that draws us towards a partial experience of of its Noumenon the thing in-itself or the bit about it that is real but can never be known according to Kant.  Harmen is quite useful in  how he describes the things and people he disagrees with and also the odd bits of other peoples thinking that he agrees with. In this book he talks through Greenberg and Fried and a bit of Kraus and the emerging history of modernity within art criticism.  He just expects you are with him on all the object oriented ontology guff and to be honest its a lot to swallow.  When he describes the American civil war as an object or a banana or the Hudson bay company you begin to wonder what could not be encountered as an object.

What Harmen does give us though is some ideas within the Western tradition that oppose relativism and shake up dualism and if you take the bait line and sinker can hook you in to the possibility of a different way of thinking if you were inclined to think in a way in the first place.

From an OOO perspective then what can the metaphor of plywood bring you closer too ? This was my question for today for trying to work with theory as I go backwards and forwards to the playground reading dense text and trying to work out how to build a slide from my platform, develop loose parts play and still maintain some identity that resembles  what I carried with me before working on a PhD necessarily deconstructed me.  All my images of plywood are in a process of laminating the weather has crept into its edges and dissolved the glue which was obviously under specification.  We have interior ply, exterior ply, Far-Eastern ply, Birch ply and Marine ply - you should always use marine ply at an adventure playground but we never do as its too expensive.  They all look the same when they are new.  As I look at the stamp that says its from managed forests I wonder if this is true, I suspect its not, I have always felt guilty building stuff from the rain forest.  We have the material plywood and the implication for the planet and for  my lungs as I inhale its dust and we have the flatness of surface but the real strength of plywood as a metaphor is when it laminates and spreads itself across the playground, it becomes beautiful within its decomposition.

Plywood in the images above is an active metaphor that holds the object of entropy, things however strongly adhered together, whatever adhesive we use, at some point will begin to laminate. Striated space lets smooth space in, it begins to flow and structural strength is lost. As the age of usefulness passes there is perhaps a moment where aesthetics take over to be noticed sideways and at the edges of perception. This is not so much captured in a photograph but aspects of it are remembered and pointed towards in an image.  And here Harmen is useful as the metaphor is not a simile or a literal comparison,  it is not like the surface of something else it just draws us closer to the thing in itself that can never be known.  This laminated plywood is a metaphor for the object of my PhD writing, PhD as Plywood makes sense and Plywood as PhD doesn't. Its past its best, laminated and becoming soft.  Its no longer useful to build anything practical but as it decays and goes back to the soil it holds a staggering new potential to become something quite different.  

Soil

keeping positive

I am conscious that I moan a lot on my blog.  I tend not to do that in my field notes where I leave little messages to my future self that will cheer me up when I read them.  On my blog I tend to vent a bit and even though I can see that nobody is reading them I have a misguided idea that at some point posterity will choose to discover them and unlike in my field-notes I want to be wearing metaphorically clean underwear.  I also choose to write here when I have nowhere else to write, when I can't quite think of my writing as field notes or academic discussion -this somewhere between writing is helpful. Somewhere between a diary and an auto-ethnography and personal notes and a story; somewhere between fact and fiction and right and wrong, heaven and hell the playground and home.  This is not too dangerously claim it's from any middle -  the writing is between unhinged and bolted down it is not really for anyone even the future me.

The rightness of the previous three weeks of early morning Joe Wicks exercise plan followed by close reading of a Thousand Plateaus followed by some esoteric writing on this blog followed by practical building at the playground has necessarily started to fade.  It started to slip away when the chinks and gaps in the territory I had been beavering away within began to get pried apart by the bogie man of writing for a PhD.

I'm reading the Plague by Camus it's great and there is a character in it who is always writing and complaining how hard it is to say what he wants in words. The doctor who is at the moment the main protagonist goes to visit him as he wants to share where he has got too after months of dedication focus.  He has written a single sentence it is something like. 

"The woman rides by on a chestnut horse and her hair blows in the wind."

It reminded me of the poet played by Steve Buscemski in the film Big Fish.  He spends a lifetime trying to craft a poem about the toxic yet perfect small American town of Splendor where people get stuck because of the sheer impossibility of moving anywhere better. The poem he writes is perhaps a pastiche of the New York poets cut back style but Buscemski delivers its perfection in three words " Splendor is good' .  It is perhaps the lifetime of struggle that takes us to these three words or more likely its a joke at the expense of poets in either case it sticks in my head. 

'The adventure playground is good.' there is a truth in this and perhaps it is more than a truism but it is not a poem or a PhD.

I am trying to keep positive but my struggle to start writing proper PhD stuff and not blogs or very short true poems is weighing heavily on me. This is mainly because I am sitting doing this blog to displace the looking at the literature review document I started yesterday.  The normal thing I would do, actually the thing I am doing is just to give myself time where there is nothing else to do but start writing. This works because if I don't start to write it I have literally wasted my time.  I am not good at wasting time as luckily  my time is generally my own and I tend to cherish it.

The last time I tried to write a literature review I wrote a few thousands words on why I wasn't ready to write a literature review. I can't do that again so will need a positive approach.  I've been trying to get started for a week now and although yesterday I did get started I dare not really look at what I wrote today in case it's not really a start  " The literature review is good." I did however find a quote from Lukac that I copied and pasted and it ended up pasting a bit like a concrete poem as it was from a PDF . it reminded me of an important thought I had had and then forgotten.

At this point I realized that I am an old school materialist and find speculative and neo materialism Bourgeois , a word I will always struggle to spell - its the same with plateaus - just write the first bit then all the vowels you know in any order twice.

A

spider

conducts

operations

which

resemble

those

of

the

weaver,

and

a

bee

would

put

many

a

human

architect

to

shame

by

the

construction

of

its

honey‐comb

cells.

But

what

distinguishes

the

worst

architect

from

the

best

of

bees

is

that

the

architect

builds

the

cell

in

his

mind

before

he

constructs

it

in

wax.

At

the

labour

process,

a

result

emerges

which

had

already

been

conceived

by

the

worker

at

the

beginning,

hence

already

existed

ideally.

Man

not

only

effects

a

change

of

form

in

the

materials

of

nature;

he

also

realizes

his

own

purpose

in

those

materials.

And

this

is

a

purpose

he

is

conscious

of,

it

determines

the

mode

of

his

activity

with

the

rigidity

of

a

law,

and

he

must

subordinate

his

will

to

it.

(pp.

283-°©‐284;

quoted

in

Lukács

1980,

p.

3)