When I took this photo of the old markets as they were demolished I thought of the Paul Nash painting. I first encountered sea ice in York art gallery it is the painting that first drew me to art. The image fits my memory of a lonely younger childhood and the fact I was always in the gallery on my own reminds me of this isolation. Both images remind me of the first world war and the melancholic beauty of isolation, feeling a long way away from the rest of the world and other people.
I'm writing to avoid reading. I'm grinding through a thousand Plateaus and really enjoying the densely packed text. I have done a close reading of the Nomadic war machine plateau and I am much the wiser though not in a conventional this is what it says way. I am struck by the connections to Ruskin; the ideas of the Gothic and the idea of a "life force" seem very close to a Ruskinian way of thinking about the world. I have found some writing about this but it's marginal, few of the writers actually bother to "get' Ruskin, to feel his orietation. I suppose scholars are worlds apart in terms of areas of interest and nobody really sees the political critique in Ruskin unless you read him as a friend that needs forgiving.
In the bath this morning I had a thought about the ideas I was working with before Christmas and how this related to residency. When Kate actually realised that the residency I kept speaking of was within ESRI she referred to it as Russian dolls, I liked this. However as one doll opens you need to open a another this unveiling requires a new layer of smoke and mirror. A layer of the secret plan is exposed and somehow I needed to take the flow underground again. The secret plan only really works in terms of giving a direction of flow when it is submerged; on the surface it is to easy to know. This is how clever scholars like Massumi use Deleuze they ingest him and then puke and shit him all over the world. As Massumi quotes Becket - Habit chains the dog to his own vomit.
The interesting thing is that I was chained to my habits of residency at the start of the PhD process and I was trundling along fine in the bubble of my own world. I thought that residency was a way that artists learnt to be present in new spaces, to understand them from a different perspective but to learn to dwell or bide a while in their own way. This way of working requires a settling in and a location of positions to map yourself into. Reading about nomadology this week I have decided that this is the true nature of the residency, not the settling but the moving differently through space. I think that the issue is that this moving often requires a strong subjective and to an extent fixed to a person to provide a sense of what is moving. In simple terms this could be artistic expertise or institutional validation of a practice. Because we are moving then we need to know where our edges are so we can move them along with us.
What thinking the residency through the nomad can do is recognise the state of movement which is not related to fixed points. Mostly when we think of movement we think about a journey that takes us from one place to another through a space which is mapped or mappable ( Striated). The Nomad does not offer a different way of moving it affords a different perception of space. Here space is open we can only travel through and between and there are no fixed locations, the desert and the steppe are unmapable ( smooth). I think that this can make a new sense of residency and change the focus. It requires a break with traditions and ideas of mastery expertise and training. It asks questions of different types of knowing, a knowing that is to do with movement and not dwelling. The contribution of nomadology is to suggest that the sets of relations or the assemblages are within a different space. However much we strive for an alternative methods to understand the world the Universities construction of knowledge paradigms are exemplars of Striated rather than smooth space. The Nomad is a nice way to think of myself and to explain away my lightness and inability to attach myself to territory. The interesting thought from new materialism is what happens if the boundary of ourselves is less defined, if we think of flows and life forces rather than mastery and intentions. I was thinking this through Dewey and the idea of art as always in process with no concept of finished object. Perhaps this is what needs to be explained in a felt way, moved towards through a practice that is not located within a person. These thoughts are hard and useful. In the Russian doll of my residency at ESRI I don't really find or feel this kind of thinking. When I encounter thought at the university it happens on the surface of things, what is thought to be underneath is not really changed.
I started writing this as a return to thinking about the post -qualitative and why it was important. I have tried to explain this to people outside of universities and it seems really pointless. For most people and for me when I was outside the university the really good thing that it could offer was a structured approach and structured thought. For example a discourse analysis can point to how a text reinforces patriarchy. An ethnographic study can draw attention to important parts of culture that are normally obscure. This system at its edges looks to nomadology to crack some of its striations, to frack the system to let out something useful, the rhizome replaces the Arbor because the tree can only produce a certain type of fruit. The university however remains an orchard cultivating the same apples and pears. When I started this work I was a vagabond, journeyman, itinerant, diddycoy I have been taken in but the shelter I've been offered is not really a good fit. I enjoy been on the outside of the glass house so I can through stones.
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