In preparing for a supervision

"I have observed that all students enter this space of becoming-other for emergence to happen but the intensity of the liminal varies and does not continue evenly throughout the research. It is about entering a particular space of creation. There are times of transformation and times of stability in the research, as in life." ( Post modern emergence Somerville 2007)

Its hard coming back having been away.  Today I woke up and wondered if I was heading in the best direction. As Somerville points out there are times of stability and times of transformation. When I got back from Venice airport her post modern emergence article was open on my desktop.  I have read it before and remembered this only as she talks of being "in country" as it had triggered an early memory of watching Nicholas Roeg's brilliant film walkabout as a teenager.   The film seems to revolve around cultural difference and abandonment of both responsibility and self in the harshness of the Australian outback.  I jump to an image of the global weather forecast on sky TV and the realisation I had that Alice Springs is bang in the middle of the country and just under 40 degrees C which was the temperature of the Finnish Sauna I spent most evenings in last week.  I jump again to Neville Shutes book A Town like Alice I glimpse the film in the corner of my minds eye. To  the Australian  mechanics punishment beating at the hands of the Japanese guards. Then the thing I always think about when I remember Neville Shute and my grandma's friend who died on the maiden voyage of the R101 airship to America.  Shute had helped to design this when he was balancing a career as a writer and as an aviation engineer. This is all going on in my head as I bounce around in an attempt to settle on what I am going to say tomorrow at my supervision meeting.

Today I have transcribed my final meeting with Abi about our work together.  I have an idea I want to write a chapter about this project which is almost standalone with the title "What I learnt from working with Abi' It is an interesting transcription but hard to pull any headline ideas from.  I say a lot of 'and and and I think think think' I struggle to find words to explain what I'm thinking.  There is an acceptance that at the start of the work I was making assumptions about how doing a PhD would be different to normal and a real struggle for this, difference to normal, not been about 'becoming other' which is probably where the Sommerville article materilised from on my desktop.  We both come across as thoughtful and a little bit resolved to the partial failure of our shared exhibition.  There is a long discussion of whether we could of done things differently and if we could of approached the exhibition much more as a co-production process with the children and parents from the playgroup.  There is an interesting bit about agency and roles.  I say that I think or thought my role is to intervene in what is happening - if it wasn't why would I be there?  Abi seems to recognise a deep commitment to what is happening in the site that is not part of us being there, perhaps an ethnographic eye if not an ethnographic distance.   It is not a good interview in many ways, I talk too much but then it is also a shared reflective space and the three interviews together hold some interesting ideas and points to launch off from. I am not sure if I did a good job of this project, it feels like a clash of the old and the new, it feels complicated, it feels impossible to draw research from it that could fit into a form of writing that I could perform for my PhD thesis.  It is messy and tied into all sorts of things that are bigger than my research project.   It has an edge now, on paper at least it is finished, perhaps this edge will be useful and I can learn about edges. Territory is a real problem at the moment - it is the at the heart of what it is to know.  Archimedes is supposed to have said that given a lever long enough and a place to stand he would move the earth. I think it is the place to stand that is the difficult thing to find especially when it seems necessary to always be in the middle of things.

My other thing today is reading Bellacasa's  Matters of Care. I bought it as I imagined it would be useful to see how a new materialist approach could be brought to a subject- in this case care.  Its pretty good but also a shock to the system after having a lovely week off in Italy. I'm half way through the second chapter.  She writes of assembling- neglected- things  and does reference Heidegger which seems to be important when we talk of things rather than objects. I feel a bit like I need to settle down a bit and work out what new materialism is doing here, its reasonably theoretical and is doing well to build without being methodical.  I keep forgetting why I'm reading it though and wonder if I need to use it as a way to think through new materialism and play. But this feels like it is too linear for me at the moment. What I felt I had suggested in my revisions on the RD2 perhaps but not really where I can see useful stuff happening.

I really want to enter a time of stability as I want to get past the feelings of not quite knowing what I'm doing.  If I had my confident head on I would say the stability would come from working in the field.  My work with Abi and my work at the playground is thoughtful and helping me grow.  There is a disjuncture between the philosophy or perhaps theory and the actions- I was hoping this might be some sort of useful agentile cut  and Barad was helping me with this.  I'm overwhelmed today - I have tried to start off to quickly and need to stop bouncing around through air ships and walkabouts and crises of confidence - I may now go watch a Tchaikovsky film I recorded last night so I can take a breath.  Sometimes the first thing you need to do is recognise you are lost before you can find where you are.

In the Darkness

It feels like a busy week.  I have not really thought about Blogging this week but I've just written my field notes from a day at the playground on Monday and thought it might be good to drop in a sample here .  It is a bit stream of consciousness but it is a marker of where I am and holds an aspect of flow that felt absent to actually doing the work.

This day was a point of slippage – a getting down to something physical and manual that felt like real work and a catching up with the real outputs from my ACE proposal- the making of art or at least testing out for an experience and the idea that I was in residence- to make something that felt like art.  The line of the PhD study and the line of practice seems to diverge since Christmas.

At the back of this was a feeling I had moved on somewhere in understanding Bergson and time – he says that subjectivity is made of time rather than existing within it.  This made me think about how music only exist in time as it can’t exist in a moment – I had never really applied this way of thinking to subjectivity but it felt like I had moved somewhere into a life more examined.   I made a film ages ago as part of my blog I suggested theory playing in the background – inspired from a Laural and Hardy way out west a  film  a projection  I was to dance in front of. Now I feel that an ontological approach doesn’t work like that – theory is not located in a territory it is the plane of consistency.  I have what is philosophy -chapter 7 and I have assemblage – I also have an understanding of what the Nomadic War machine is  and I think that perhaps this is where the PhD sits if I can work these three concepts from D and G into the work at the playground – with a nod to lines of flight I will have a textual plane for something interesting to emerge – I may need to wrap it all up in something else but I can’t be doing with to much vitalism or new materialism that feels pseudo-spiritual – it is starting to do my head in.

What a lot of stuff to carry into the playground – as we start to dig out concrete and remove old equipment.  The just getting started feels like a really good move – there is something about just changing a space that opens up all sorts of potentials.  The area for loose parts has moved under the trees at the back of the building.  Stuff is gathering there we are testing stuff out – the building of a container and a platform down the other end is feeling less likely.  Peter said the kids don’t really go down there we thought about building an iconic swing.  Also Giz had the idea it would be good for a water slide – the potential opens up as we clear the space.

 There was lots of banter – it felt male and familiar.  Digging out the old equipment was a nightmare it had been fixed with mechanical machinery and was around 1 meter deep it took most of our time to remove one piece of it but somehow this felt fine – it was a mission. We talked about past missions of digging out tree stumps.  Patrick told us about how Peter had gone into an old coffin when he was a gravedigger and it had traumatized him and he had had to have time off work, we all laughed.  The time of the day folded and we were a bit cold.  I moved a large pipe and we turned it into a tunnel, I worried about my back and my wrists – work like this is almost like an addiction – like smoking- you really fancy a fag but it never quite does what you want or expect it to do. It does something else. 

 This work is really part of been in residence at the playground, it is not about building relationships for the future or earning respect it is more about been present and connected.  The three points of my brain are all conflicted. The doing the work that I enjoy and would do as a volunteer, the trying to be an artists to produce or shape what art can be and what art does and now on top of that the artist philosopher social scientist looking for what Erin Manning would call “A Way’ within research.  The complex sets of flows going on are the same as go on all the time although I used to be less aware  of them.  Digging and building are parts of dwelling and residency is a form of dwelling. My thinking is bitty and fragmented but I don’t think a new materialist approach will do – the assemblage is the only thing that can hold most of this together.  We talked about a lot of stuff over the day – going to Eastborne to the national play conference – I think Giz and Patrick talked about their  mums.   Art had nothing to do with the work – we were not making or doing art so the quick switch as I noticed the failing light was strange.

I went from helping to remove the giant post that was well stuck in the ground to thinking about making something that looked like art.  On my own I put a screen up then I flew Aiw Wai Wai Flag for refugees – I had forgotten that bit.  Me Giz and Patrick erected the screen to look a bit like a sail on the pirate ship.  It was all a bit of a rush.  I remember in the moment of setting this up for a projection I felt stupid as somehow the thoughts and things that would legitimate the effort felt out of reach.  In the 7 years I’ve had the projector I think it was the first time I had tried something out for my “own” work and even this was to get a photograph for a n article in Now Then magazine – projecting the past onto the present which is very Bergson in a literal way.  This moment of conflicting drivers which is actually obviously a fulcrum of the work was really underpinned by feeling a bit stupid – A lot of effort to achieve .......I’m not sure what? Its almost like in the realization of something that is my idea – old photos on the site – captain flint from Blacksails – meeting my ACE audience figures – helping Anton feel useful – there is a collision and perhaps this is a word that needs drawing in more centrally to the notion of assemblage.  Even assengerment with its primal energy that vibrates feels more organized than the collision of the assemblage  of what takes place.  The idea that the nomadic war machine is the thing that holds this plane together seems so removed from anything I could explain to anybody except Tim means that it has to be thought of as what is in and what is out – the line of flight from the assemblage – and this is perhaps the trick to understand the notion of Deleuzian territory.  Anyway we set up I projected old photos of the playground – took a picture for Now Then article then projected the scene of captain Flint from Blacksails the whole series moved to this point for me – the lesson that we are kept in our place because we fear to enter the darkness – we are frightened by the potential of an alternative way of been in the world.  It is a Marxist reference to revolution and fits the thread of my work about the fear of things been different – I am slightly embarrassed that I am doing this work – everyone liked it and it is part of my arts council work and I am been paid to do it and the behavior is what is expected of me.  What I think though is that to do this kind of work requires a closeness to the chaos just before the crest of a wave the build up to the crash and collapse and that there is a problem with linear knowing that means the sea is always calm.  The intersection between practice and research is an intersected – it is like a cross fade or a transition where things blend together that extends in both directions and the point where it is neither one nor the other is the interesting phase of the transition.  I feel under pressure to be either one thing or the other because it makes things easier – it steers us away from the darkness.

 A set of messy random thoughts from a messy random day - it feels good to be doing work that feels like work again