Meeting the universe halfway

I have just had a bath; it's Sunday morning and I'm trying to have a day off from work to make the weekend feel different to the rest of the week.  I got out of the bath a bit wet and lay on my daughter's bed and had a little bit of a revelation about reading the Barad book that I've been trawling through.  I am about 200 pages in at the start of chapter 5.  It's interesting as Gullion's Defractive Ethnography tries to make the same point, but I didn't really get this when I read it.  The feelings about the concepts fall apart when they are enacted within descriptions or perhaps representations of projects.

This is it then written on the blog as I know I will not lose it and may be able to find it again as a reminder.  It is complicated in some ways but will read rather straightforwardly.  It is the essence of Barad's point which she constructs in a strange metaphysical ontological scientism.

The nature of reality is not separate and is not given; agential realism is a real that is created within its enactment - Bloc's 'not yet' - the idea that there are only becomings and not things.  Barad locates this within quantum physics and suggests that a critical misconception of this comes from a lay reading of uncertainty principle.  She suggests that Heisenberg proposes that we cannot know the momentum and position of a molecule as the measuring of one impacts on the other and this impact is never knowable so it cannot be accounted for in any calculation.  The apparatus to measure one interferes with any attempt to measure the other. Niels Bohr, her hero, suggests that counter to Heisenberg's idea that a molecule has position and dimension as a separate "thing" distinct within spacetime, the agentile qualities of the thing are constituted by the apparatus used to measure the apparent affects 9 On bodies) usually a photon and a sensitive surface as we use the quantum double slit experiment as the main exampler. 

Barad insists that this foundational principle works at all scales not just the very tiny - this is how she gets around ideas of allegory or representation; she suggests and robustly defends the notion that this is the way a real world operates.

If we unpick this from a structuraist perspective we can say 'the real' is a social construction that depends on the difference of the 'unreal' for its signification so we have a linguistic problem here.  Yet Barad, as well as refusing representation, refuses language as one of its modes.  The real is not the real of language; the term 'real' points towards it but the unbroken and consistent plane of agential realism does not have an inside or an outside; a cut does not seperate or divide or create a fixed boundary, rather it constitutes the real in the action of the cutting. This is why we are presented with an onto-epistomology rather than one or the other.  A system of organising knowledge and moving towards a knowing of its nature - the cut does not divide one from the other which is why a hyphen does not quite cut the mustard.

What does this mean for ethnography or fieldwork?  Firstly, we need to take into account that the research is the object of study and the tool for studying, it is part of what constitutes its reality.  Simply put - what happens as part of the research would not happen if the research was not taking place.

On the surface this could be seen as reflexive sociology.  We know we carry a massively complex epistomological conscious and unconscious.  We know and, as ethnographers we are fully aware, that we will influence any sitution or place we enter.  Barad is keen to point out that we cannot effectively account for our influence on a situation as we are not only part of that situation, the situation would not exist without our presence.  I am not sure this distinction is particularly revelationary; it challenges positivist assumtions and scientific notions of objectiviy but is in line with lots of post qualitative methodologies.

What could be useful for me in thinking of methods is the expanded notion of the 'apparatus' which she lays out.  She moves on from Bohr's philosophy of science which as an anthrocentric view of the "observer' or scientist who records the results of the apparatus passively and from outside, to a post human notion of the apparatus.  This is a suggestion of something beyond the singular embodied idea of a human subject.

The thread here that is emerging in my research in relation to arts practice is what I have called either 'my practice', 'the mechanism', or more recently in conversation with Abi, 'the artist's secret plan' which is secret even to themselves.  If this broad notion of actions or as Barad would say 'intra actions; is viewed as 'apparatus' from the concept outlined in Barad's Meeting the Universe Halfway what does this give us ? 

It may allow us to consider an artist's practise that is fully part of and immersed within the real world.

It may allow us to accept that any intervention will have an agential affect on the 'things' it interacts with.

It will ask some complex questions about what marks on bodies this work leaves and what, in a discourse beyond representation, can be said about them.

It may allow for a different type of attention to be paid to certain things and an acceptance of others to take place.

I still prefer assemblage though as a thought tool - I didn't really need all that quantum drivel to work out these things. 

Covad 19

At least two weeks since I last posted and really no excuse other than the end of the world.  I'm not sure what to say really other than we are locked down and in the house for at least 3 weeks.  I had managed to avoid thinking about it for a week as I kept busy at the playground doing odd jobs and fixing stuff with Peter and chatting to Patrick.

On Thursday I got told my field work could not continue if its face to face.  All this made me think was how strange it was that my voluntary work only became research when I sat and wrote field notes about it - this was the only thing that made it research, the turning it into text.   But now its all finished put on hold for probably longer than we all think.

We are all moving apart and coming together. We- that is my generation have never known anything like this so we can't be of that much help.

I am, if I'm honest finding it hard to focus and feeling frustrated I can't seem to get more done - its like a missed opportunity to knuckle down - but we feel how we feel and we think how we think.

I am setting myself a task to

1. Read Karen Barad meeting the universe half way - to brush up on my new materialism and I find her easy to read. I like the fact I have a set of notes on books it reminds me I have actually read them.

2. I am writing and thinking with Kate - this feels like a nice connection we are helping each other have a professional life - I am trying to get her to read what is philosophy - she won't though.

3. I am going to have a practical day tomorrow i have a list of practical jobs to do.  I started the week saying i would do two days on my PhD study - I have done this but the achievements are small - I hope they are incremental.

4. Note to self - don't beat myself up its strange and stressful and the main thing is to look after everyone.

This post feels like the video recording that the captain of the star ship leaves and is found on the empty ship by the group of new arrivals that have know idea what happened to the crew.Then the aliens come.

Where is the work? its actually about art.

 Monday Blog post time.  I've had two weeks with little else to do but think about my PhD.  I have moved passed the RD2 crises and vaguely forgotten about new materialism.  I have written 5000 words which is really a stream of consciousness that in trying not to repeat itself, repeats itself.  I have just read it and in some ways within the drivel it maps out an area of theory that tries to think about what art means within what I'm going to call my study.  I seem to have avoided reading any critical literature from a contemporary art perspective. I'm pretty happy with this as it's what I need at the moment- to take back a little bit of the territory of art for myself - this is also what I notice I do on my projects.

I had a very short phone supervision with Kate on Friday as MMU would not let me in due to Covad 19 virus.  I told Kate that I felt I was getting distracted by the history and theory of Adventure play including loose parts approaches and that this had never been the focus of the PhD.  I said I needed to pull back to the idea of residency and foreground art.

There is obviously a problem here in that if I'm suggesting that residency is a mode of enquirer or knowledge production then it may need to have an area of inquiry other than itself. Of course I now know that this establishes a binary or duality that may not be useful but it still feels that without an area of exploration that sits outside the exploration of what it means to be in residence then everything gets circular and inward looking- its not a method its just a residency.

Regardless of this concern I need to be clear that my PhD is not about adventure play or early literacy - it just happens to be located in two residencies within these spaces of enquirey.  The settings are part of a broader assemblage they are not the objects of study.

Can a new materialist approach or lens afford a way to explore  the artists residency in a way that will add to understanding and create new knowledge? So practically am I working through some stuff that could free up the fixed definitions of what residency is and what art can do within research and within the world.  This desire feels like a worthwhile and consistent trace through my practice, It is one of the threads that the PhD has put under tension.  In some way preventing me taking for granted some of the givens that allow the practice to continue as  a practice.  What I tried to explain to Abi as the artists 'secret plan' that even they don't really know about, only that it exists and it determines actions.  Its interesting getting a little distance with the work with Abi as I can see the tiny parts of art falling out of the project.  Some of the bits of art make me feel like a fool, they seem pointless, some feel like a joke, like I'm not being serious or been taken seriously but mostly in retrospect they feel  OK.

I think this will happen with the adventure playground work - at the moment it doesn't feel much like art or much like a residency - its not located and the theory aspect of my life drops me into a bit of a muddle- I feel like I'm playing some sort of serious game of catch up - mainly with myself.

Is their a crux here? something that revolves around the nature of art and what it means - a really practical question about whether we need it and if it does anything.  Is art transcendental in its nature? its essence?  is any attempt to locate it materially a case of defusing its potency or agentive qualities.  If so then is the best solution to trundle on in constructed oxymoronic  ignorance.  I can see the points of art and practice as they emmerge - I can identify them as I look back and I can see where the things I'm doing do not conform to the secret plan or emerge as art.  This then must be some sort of progress - not really to share with anyone but at least to give myself a bit of a handhold for taking a breath.  

Camera Lucida

 

I've just read Roland Barthes Camera Lucida.   it reminded me of a type of writing that I like - a type of writing that takes you somewhere.  He is really unpicking his personal relationship to photographs as opposed to photography. On page 51 he says -

I am a primitive child- or a maniac; I dismiss all knowledge, all culture, I refuse to inherit anything from another eye than my own. 

It was nice to pick a book up at the weekend that wasn't from a new materialist perspective and wasn't directly linked to what I felt I should be reading for my PhD, to not feel swamped or stuck in a circle that wasn't yielding much or spinning much out.

Barthes writes very complex texts sometimes - death of the author- is hard.  He writes Mythologies for the interested accidental person and then writes a treatise on Myth which although readable is academically dense.  What works in this type of writing for me are the short numbered sections each holding something that can be held onto.  The text is broken down into sets of ideas each leaping off into the world, a moment, a story, a thing. The text holds something in a way that for me many of the texts I read at the moment don't quite hold - the chunks are too big to bite off- the ideas about the material not located in anything I can feel as material.

I have an idea to write my PhD in a form of bite size chunks each chunk focusing on a material encounter.  I had this idea last week because I got to a point while in semi isolation due to the Corona virus outbreak. In this time  I managed to go through the things that were stopping me doing what I wanted to do and decided I should just have a go.  As I have been working and writing I have noticed that having an idea can sometimes be a problem as it feels good in your head but can be difficult to get down on paper, to craft.

I haven't really read many PhD's and I don't think many of them would look like what I'm thinking.  Ordinary Affect by Kathleen Stuart sort of does it . Her  the 100's  seemed to try and do this caused a bit of a stir and much mimicry had a go.  I am not sure the Dogma of a 100 words and the very loose roundabout referencing worked but the effort was noted. 

Punctum and Scars.

As I am writing this Monday Blog post ,before going out into the first day of spring I sit in a pre-troussard state and my finger in inadvertently follows the line of a scar on my leg.  It is one of very few permenant marks on my body, the scar on my back where my lump was removed, the scar on my face where I was cut by the Libyan barber, the funny second toe on my left foot I smashed on a marble floor in Greece in the late 1970's. My scars are minor but permanent.  The one on my leg I would call a cut rather than a wound but as I feel it with my finger tip I remember it was deep and I didn't look after it properly and it became infected.  I was working on the set of a play about age, Demetria and the people who used to stick back together the shredded documents of the Stasi.  It was hot sweaty work in an old office, a good place for wounds to fester.  The cut was a more wholesome experience, a trip to get some winter Kale from our long gone allotment. With my new personally engraved Sheffield made penknife. The combination of a Kale stem, harder than expected and knife sharper than anticipated resulted in an accident that happened in the blink of an eye.  The surprise of these moments always reminds me that it is impossible to go a few seconds back in time and erase something.  The cut feels temporary, the wound and the scar perhaps because they leave a mark are more temporal, they journey with us.

Barthes looks at photographs for their wounds, the thing that can never be intentional, the thing that stands out but not for reasons of meaning. He calls this the punctum of the image and likens it to a wound.  Barthes recognizes the limitations of the cut.  This cut that appears as intervention or break or position, the parting of the perceived from the lived feels more real when imagined as a wound.  A wound that includes the moment of the act of breaking the skin, the infection the healing and the scar.  The cut is something that happens, the thing that feels like it should be reversible yet it is the scar that holds the moment as it persists upon skin.  A bit like a photograph and a bit like the childs drawing that survives.  A bit, if we listen to Barthes like a death.