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.
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