I have worked out my PhD - again

I have actually worked out my PhD this morning.  I was grumpy yesterday as I listened to Zizeck too much and thought I had wasted a day but then I talked to Kate about old projects and felt a bit better. 

I am not sure why I felt better.  I remembered been in a Sheffield station. I was recruiting an academic to our Studio legacy project, all full of hope and the energy. This is required to get you through filling out the extensive case for support and its appendixes.  To try and shine a light on our aspiration  I told a story. I explained how at a conference an artist and an archeologist had delivered a project about Quaker sheep farmers in the North York Moors now and used the dairies of Quakers in the same area at the turn of the century.  They made a sensitive film of the working landscape juxtaposed with the modern day farmers reading about the hardships at the turn of the century - a nice and gentle  piece of work - It did not try or assume to be more than it was.   When the floor opened to questions instead of talking about what the film was doing or paying attention to the academics made suggestions of how to make it better.  Things like 

" I was confused because they were reading about winter but on the film it was a sunny day and someone was mending a tractor?"

The consensus in the room was that the film was confusing. My point was that despite all the clever people in the room there seemed to be an inability to actually be an audience for a piece of art.  The academics were disabled by a knee jerk reaction to turn things into textual or at least semiotic meaning.  I also have a story I made up about Erin Manning and Brian Massumi talking dirty to each other in the bedroom, that would make a similar  messy point but that's another story.

The academic I was chatting to took a different meaning from the intended and asked me why I had an axe to grind.  I had being thinking that I want to do a project that makes this better - finds ways for people from different disciplines to work with art in ways more akin to normal people help them live better with their disability; access to art for the text constipated over thinkers. I wanted this as I perform myself as someone who tries to do a good job - to find a cause and do the best I can.  This was not supposed to be a single story with axes to be ground it was a trace that led to more deep seated barriers to a way of working, a call to work not arms.

From this point things started to go astray in all our projects on connected communities.  Territory entered into all our fields and the age old battles began to rage in our backyard.  It wasn't that we had been unaware of the battle it was more we felt  removed from it within a bubble of friendships.  The art school the art market, the art literature, were present but we were the peasants in the farms that only saw the soldiers passing through and had no allegiance and less interest.  The studio project inadvertently dropped us into a battlefield and I had not ground my axe or remembered where I had put it.

I am sat infront of the Skype screen and you are recording and I am wondering what you want from me and then I sleep on it and I work it out. I work it out properly then lay it onto Deleuze and Guattari - this is the right way around for theory - most academics do it the wrong way around or perhaps their right way is my wrong way. The thing  that I do is act as a nomad in residence - not settled in any one place and not carrying a bag of tricks or identifiable set of skills.  As Holly says

" Dad anybody could do what you do but nobody ever would."

This is what I do -  what everyone could do but what nobody ever would - which leads me to thinking about territory.  After yesterday I thought about my RD2 interview and the idea of not giving away my practice the complete and only sense of keeping it secret. From this comes the notion of arts practice as the secret plan, the plan that is, that has to remain, a secret even to me.   This is the point as as it becomes public it claims territory when it is private it allows me to proceed or perhaps the project to proceed in smooth rather than striated space.  As the art object or thing that is preferal or ignored it sits outside of everything it is neither minor or major or molar or molecular it is nomadic.  If it is unseen it does not become part of the meaning making where it is mounted to a board put in a frame or put on a wall - it is able to become what it can become, it has a potential for emergence.  In putting it forward it is fixed. Its potential which was never great is rung out like a dirty tea cloth.  It was never what the project was about anyway it was merely a node in the nomadic war machine of residency.


A bit more theory - Here goes then.

The line from new -materialism is infact the the flat ontology but rather than going from a Barad or a Bennet perspective I approach the flatness through a Guattari and Deleuze notion of smooth space and therefore presenting art as part of  a nomadic war machine and the artist working as journeyman nomad that does not take their territory with them or settle.  Kate used to say I should be a  train always passing through and not stopping.  The notion of residency is then not associated with dwelling but linked to moving through smooth rather than striated space. This position is counter to a tradition where artist with expertise explores space through established method with the intention of finding and communicating new meaning.  The points in projects such as the unicorn horn or Carlos are territorilisations and deterrotirilsations but as they are minor they do not divide space they merely allow for what Whitehead would call a flight of the speculative imagination.  A dropping down below the clouds to find a position, a 'where you are' at that moment rather than trying to map an area or terrain. 

I take this little nit ( this was a typo but I quite like it) of theory and worldize it play it alongside the residency and then record both together so neither takes control neither is allowed to striate the space. This I think is what I have done with the idea of residency and art since the start of working in place across different fields of knowledge.  Hold the idea of the nomad and nomad thought.  I'm sure there is a lot written about this but if I look at my problems on this little journey into writing then they are all linked to space been closed down and structured.  How ludicrous it seems to be doing any sort of research where the territory is fully marked out with ethical procedures where power enacts itself in very simple ways.  How riddled and structured the academic space and approaches to knowledge.  The desire is not for transgression nit (again another typo - this nit is god sent)  is for nomad thought and many many artists can bring an element of this without having to think too hard about it.

Amazingly in my nomadic mind I have found a section in the nomadic war machine  chapter in 1000 plateaus that talks of the Gothic in a very similar way to Ruskin. I mused in the bath about wether the Gothic tribes were actually our indigenous people. In tune with this northern climate in our austerity and love of the changing elements.   Offcourse I am not the first to notice this and I am biased but I think that both Ruskin and D and G find elements of the same thing in the Gothic architecture and process of building cathedrals.  This would be an interesting connection for a literature review (nit).

I wonder if this idea of the residency as nomadic drawing on the flatness or the desire for flatness  that emerges in new materialism has any legs. The legs seem to drop off things really quickly at the moment.  My dad told me this joke when I was younger it is rude but I think as it has a mirror in it then I could probably say in the current climate of poor schlarship that it references Lacan.

A man buys a magic mirror from a car boot sale and brings it home not knowing it can grant wishes.

His wife looks in the mirror, at her sagging aging breast and says 'Mirror mirror on the wall make my breast look like they did before.'  Ping a flash of light and her breast return to how they had looked when she was 19.

Her husband enters the room and realizes the potential power of the mirror, its gaze, his smallness and his desire (nit Lacan) the inadequacy of his Object petit  a (nit)  "Mirror mirror on the wall make my penis touch the floor" and the punch line as it hits you in the face - HIS LEGS DROP OFF.


When I talk of mending the toilets at the adventure playground as part of the residency the problem with people making sense of this is they cannot see the actions as flat. Mending the toilets or building a sculpture from discarded wood or talking by the fire in relation to a residency are flat activities in that they are in the same category of activity.

 I am not that sure if Barads approach to new materialism really sets out a theory of flatness in the same way.  Agential realism proposes a different relationship in fact it is not really flat its just that human consciousness does not sit above anything could I take some aspects of this thinking and flatten them? 

This way of thinking raises all sorts of issues around research creation and creative methods and PaR if I choose to draw from any of them as they are not nomadic  war machines or assemblages - they originate in actions of territorilisation - it is their ontology the why of them.  Nomadology and residency sound oxymoronic yet the nomad has to move through places just like the settler and the dweller and it is this moving through which is the ontology of residency.

propositions.

Nomadic artist in residence the artist is always moving through.
 
The nomadic residency is always within smooth space.

Art is not a nomadic war machine if it aims form a territory or to settle.

I like this idea waking up and reading everyday and thinking. It feels like I have attached a pull along string to the end of the last RD2 I did that was actually going somewhere. I have pulled the thing through all the shit in between like a unicorn on a string.  The flatness of things is what I take from new materialism the position not as master either crafts-person or puppeteer.   The hypothetical positioning behind, below or in the middle yet the recognition that the human or the nomad performs a  position within the smooth space of a residency and the nomad subjective is not located in a singular bounded human body yet it is something that requires attention.

When it was in my head and just about to come out it felt clearer than this but I had to get it down in some shape or form - so in simple terms this emerges through the work with Abi and is expanded into the work at the playground - it was always going to be a hard PhD to write or to mark. 

The day after the supervision before.

These are the very small cigarettes that Mark Wallenger fashioned at Cabanas in Sheffield when I tried to blag a fag from him.  At art school we used to call these prison rollys - when we tried to role the dust from the bottom of a number of packets of Golden Virginia found deep in draws and pockets.  I wrote about meeting Wallenger in the first proper piece of writing for my PhD. The first bit I thought was getting somewhere.  The somewhere it got was to land in the middle of practice and research and hold a space for a glimpse, I say this rather than a moment as it fits in sideways better.

Sharing was difficult, critique was easy.  Is this a lesson that when something is put forward for critique there needs to be a level of investment that allows for water to flow from a ducks back? people who live in ponds should not throw stones at ducks. The mixing of metaphors is always a problem and often useful as they stir up meaning and juxtaposepose thoughts and don't make a sense.

I think I had been having a good period of reading and thinking and writing.  Today I watched Zizeck give one of his post Hegelian tyraids .  I wondered why he had to be so difficult, clearly he is clever enough not to be so offensive to so many people with a valid position on what in civil society is acceptable behavior.  Then I wondered if it was a test, is he saying to hear what I am saying you have to get past what I have said.  I can only tell you this thing that is hard if you listen to a story about a fat young woman on the bus who would always lack the perfect body even if she had it, and then detailed description of images of his colon.  I snapped back into listening to him when he said that true disgust is when what is on the inside comes to the outside- the inner body, the contents of the stomach - the unconscious and the subconscious on the pavement.  This made sense of his objectionable behavior- not the showing of what is inside his filthy stories that he tells repeatedly but what is in the potential of knowing what disgusts us and where it lives in discussion.

The writing that I mention is in many ways disgusting - bringing the inside to the outside. It is more like a puking than a confession and holds a key problem.  The problem is a wrenching up of a partially digested meal that nobody really wants to see;  even if it does always contain carrots. Perhaps though this is the actual thing that needs to come up in the text acknowledging a as Zizeck says that making what is on the inside appear on the outside is disgusting.

My writing was an attempt to try and think about the idea of the artist within the  research projects I have worked on.  Not generally artists working in the myriad of ways artists work but me myself in the projects I work on. The disgusting bit is that a number of truths I have inplicitly being aware of are put on the outside. In the text they are guilded like the ghetto with a layer of gold  but as a great man said you cannot polish a turd yet you can sprinkle a bit of glitter on it.  The writing then in simple terms says -

Academics you have your research but you have your terrible legacies that you cannot bare to speak of.  You have a disgusting need on the inside past down through your disciplines to not infect the places you work with your evil. You kill your fathers and rape your mothers and put out your eyes yet still you feel no relief.  You cannot redeem yourselves yet there is still a compulsion to know.  I suppose in a veiled way I was writing about artists doing the academics dirty work, bringing in a subjective and personal attentive affect - an apparatus of the event clearly desired but never spoken of  - the discreet object petit a that always speaks to lack.  The stitched on bollocks and ball sack as performative ritual after the castration.  That is what Zizeck might say and then sniff and apologies.  Educational research is a place where monkeys perform yet art is a place where they masturbate it is an inconvenient truth and personal joke with myself.

I am angry for no reason today.  I am angry because I am stupid and thought that within the philosophy there is a quest  for finding the meaning of everything "why are we here?" .  But actually I am not reading or supposed to be reading to find the meaning of life or how to live without god or the nature of a speculative or material or constructed reality.  I'm also not reading to disgust people with my insides I am reading for altogether more pragmatic reasons that I don't care about.   This is a truth - perhaps not the truth.

I will cheer up but it is good to write something down - not cathartic but good to get something disgusting out.

Its all too much

The screen prints were made as part of a project called we are not an island.  Its all too much was about spending time in Venice and the exhaustion of the eye and mind.  But nothing lasts forever and there is an inevitable flow even if it lacks direction in this period of enforced contemplation.

This week I have mostly been reading and making art with Alice in the garden.  I have enjoyed helping her realise her degree show, not her real degree show but a nice piece of work, a piece that breaths and this is all you can ask for really of a piece of work.

I have read about research creation with Kate Pahl, we have done notes together and pushed through our combined cynicism.  We connect on cultural materialism. My gut feeling is that there is something in Raymond Williams essay Base and Superstructure that is really important but I can never get the important bit out of it however many times I try to read it.

I started the week reading Massumi and Manning thought in the act.  First two chapters were a bit wonkey donkey but I quite enjoyed the way they made a proposition.  Then the middle bit that actually had propositions and worked them through some lived experiences was like an overfilled club sandwich .  The joy of Manning writing something that was grounded in a practice- that is understandable from where I stand made the fact there is a lot of guff to wade through just about bearable.

In a way I think they actually present research creation as the nomadic war machine or try to; they do this in style rather than substance.  When I finished What is Philosophy I decided that Deleuze and Guattari had put some traps in the text.    A trap street is a road that doesn't exist in the world that people who own maps use as a way to protect their copyright - if sombody copies it rather than does their own mapping then they can sue.   There are also trap words in some dictionaries, made up words so you can check if somebody copies your lists.  The end of What is Philosophy is like trap philosophy- they try and say something that your brain thinks is a solution but it is in fact a trap that if you have read the book properly lets you understand that actually it is not that simple - thought cannot be held in the act.  To think so is to fall into the trap and become a copycat rather than stretch into new modes of thinking and doing.  this is philosophy - the making of new concepts. 

I then read Natalie Lovelaces manifesto for research creation and really enjoyed it but when I came to make notes on it I couldn't think what to write.  There was a terrible chapter about Lacan and the gaze and it was hard to get past it.  Earlier on there were some really interesting nuts and bolts that included research creations history and theory.  I enjoyed the description of the boundary object and the introduction of Matter out of place from Mary Douglas. The book seemed really honest and located research creation within the academy as a type of hybrid activist research.  This all flowed quite well although for someone who still feels outside the academy on the inside I did wonder why they didn't just move on.  Was it the need for tenure and pedagogic drive to teach or was it holding the university up as something it never really was, aspired to be, or could become. 

On a philosophical level it seems that people by this I mean researchers encounter much of this work from a methodological perspective - a what you do -rather than why you do it.  So my two books this week are about research creation in Canada.  Both take a thing they are unsure about ethically and aesthetically and reimagine it in all its potentials. Both involve working through and across disiplinary bounderies and both produce a diffused unfixed flow of what we have to call knowledge but only as its the closest word we have to what we are trying to say.

One takes as its ontological source Lacan and the other although not explicit, Deluezian.  In the complexity of this post modern, post 68 imagining of ideas of how the world falls together there are fundamental contradictions Delueze is against Lacan this was written large in the publication of after Oedipus.  Does this impact on people trying to do research creation? not really if you choose to ignore it but the confusion and lack of coherence means you are trying to critique research creation which is established from two very different positions.  This is ok for Lacan with his petit object a and Big other.  Its ok for Deleuze with his assemblage and rhizome and lack of a located subjective focal point .  But it must be difficult for practitioners who want to dip into research creation as a methodology without grasping the 'why' question - why do we need it? what is it against ? and what does it do?

I tried to come to both text from a new materialist perspective.  On the back of Barad as I had met her halfway and read her book and a peppering of Jane Bennett who's essential vitalism I struggle to see as anything else.   But Deleurze and Lacan are not materialists, cultural ,new or dialectical.  So there is not really a thread to follow.  Massumi and Manning talk of flow and interference patterns  and Loveless talks of rhymes and flows but they do not align with a material world that is more than human and constitutes an entangled world in the way Barad does with her science (royal) and Bennet does with her spiritual (psudo)

I finished the week by trying to go back to 1000 plateus - I found it much easier to read like I had past a threshold.  I thinks its been a very constructive PhD week but its a slow process and I put a lot in and get only a little bit out the other side. I have found the section about the Gothic which is pure Ruskin- I wonder how many people have made this connection.  I am not sure where I'm getting but its good to be held within an expanded field.

One and three chairs

Corona 19 isolation enters its fourth week.  In terms of doing a PhD the enforced isolation which felt very cerebral for most of last year gets its real life realisation. I'm doing lots of systematic reading and balancing this with a plethora of odd jobs such as mending the garden chairs.

I had a thought this morning in my notes on how to make art at the end of the world by Natalie Loveless. Here goes -  although research creation is in many ways seductive the art it talks about is very much located within the academy or art school. I do not come from a research institution that validates works of art in this context even though I see it as part of my tradition.  I think I said in my notes that 'the spectator was not fully emancipated by an unfair distribution of the sensible.'  To reference Rancierre  to myself obliquely in my notes shows how far I've come but how little I have really traveled.

My thought for today which is tentative and emerging from the miasmas  of thinking and reading is that the research creation in action as presented by Loveless is not particularly new materialist in its ontology.   Loveless talks of Boundary Objects and matter out of place  and trandisciplinary research.  I like all these ideas but the feminism or feminist edge of this writing although drawing on Harraway finds itself in ideas of Eros and Care rather than universal ontological entanglements that emerge from Barad.  Basically the discipline of art is working within an expanded field and part of this field enfolds research.  She describes multiple outcomes in different forms and places well. The boundary object is good here - it makes sense of lots of things I do. 

She also gets around the problem of Shart or shit art by saying the art is not really art - its something between art and research so shouldn't be seen within the same category of art proper.  This doesn't feel like an excuse just an explanation of what is happening.  So for example if the research creation object/subject of study  is a way of communicating more fully with neuro divergent young people then it is within this frame of influence or audience that this thing/object/work should be considered - not a gallery or an art mag but within the expanded field of Art/research.  I liked this approach and it made sense of things.

The thing I thought of next was who is working within Research Creation from a clear and acknowledged new materialist perspective.  I have been suspicious from the start that much contemporary art/ art school practice does not align with some of the central ontologies of the New materialism especially those drawing on Barads agential realist ontology.  We slip in a bit of love and desire and we locate this in the human body where it is most often located.

I am not sure if Manning and Massumi are new materialists at all. They are essentially Deleuzian who was I think in some ways a vitalist, at the very least a philosopher of life and becoming - he presents a life force not located within an individual .  The distinction between the Deleuzian assemblage and Barads Phenomena is that one has the potential of an outside in a very complex entanglement with the immanent becoming where the other denies the ontological possibility of an outside or an - external to.  Barad is harder to draw into the artistic creative tradition - or method.

My literature review and method could be drawn together by taking a new materialist approach to research creation that begins within the expanded field of Sculpture - I'm going to google that now as I've not read much about this ontological issue yet.

Corona Virus in the Onions

Nearly 3 weeks into lockdown and I think things are going OK. Its really good to be able to read for my PhD it feels like I'm accomplishing something I wasn't doing before.  Well I did for a couple of months, in the stress of the RD2 rights of passage but since then I was a bit dipping in and out and bouncing about.

I've got to the last chapter of Barads Meeting the Universe Halfway the last one was a real slog.  I'm pleased I've nearly read it but wonder if it was the best use of my time.  I have just under 12000 words of notes - like the book they repeat themselves. I have been working with Kate on D and G What is Philosophy that she deliberately calls  something else.  I found this book revelatory as it shows a pathway through their cannon it also more importantly seems helpful to identify when people use it in the wrong way.  I think if you read What is Philosophy carefully- which ever way you look at it there is a wrong way to work with their concepts. Its not salt and pepper, its the whole meal including the plate, knife, fork, tablecloth and anti Vera's note of apology that got lost and was defined in the space through its absence. 

Barad talks a lot about reading texts through each other she suggests that this creates superposition where both text exist in the same moment of space time and create interference patterns. I do this but mainly by reading two books at once and getting them muddled up - they become the same thing out of confusion rather than entanglement.  The cat and the isotropic particles conditions are entangled and an episode of killing Eve and the strange info graphic of Covid 19 all come to me in my dreams like waves crashing onto a beech.

I am reading Thought in the Act with Kate now.  I have two frogs that were squashed together by a car Tyre when they we having sex - we call it caught in the act.  As Manning and Massumi are a couple I wonder if they use this title ironically- they seem too serious for this- they are serious people but I would not like to hang out with them for long - they would be intense and bring out the worst in me.

This week I've made a film for the ODD project with Alice it is clearly art and it intervenes its way into my PhD blog.  It is a node that stands for the outside place of art in research.  The outside place that is defined by Delueze and  Guattari as a different plane of immanence is something that is holding my attention.  Research creation and Practise as Research, the everyday, the mundane and then other category that suggest a flat ontology  makes it difficult to position art separate to life or anything else.  This positioning outside seems important for art to perform (Judith Butler) itself within its apparatus(Foucault) if we want to work through a materialist perspective either new or dialectical the otherness (Not worldly) nature of art presents an element of the meta physical or transcendental.  The only real source of a vital materialism within this literature something that can speak of the possibility of transcendence without locating it within god or the world of spirits or life force is Deleuze and Guattari they manage the difficulty by creating a materiality that can collapse and hold an inside and an outside and a line of flight.  They do this by never settling, by always throwing a new concept at the thing that will not fit into the old concept - extending the plane beyond its given parameters which are always unfolding.

And that's the difference between Barad's  Agentile intra-active cut within phenomena - the absolute and total impossibility of an outside.  And D and G's notion of assemblage which although potentially contradictory does allow for a line of flight - the assemblage unlike the apparatus is not totalising. Art does not work well with totalising ontologies it just isn't in or outside its nature.