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.