I'm slightly stir crazy at the moment. It feels like my attempts at self structuring some kind of structure are beginning to fray at the edges. I keep wondering if I should give myself a week off but really want to finish A Thousand Plateaus before I try and switch off. I've become a bit saturated in it and started reading passages again without much comprehension. I also keep calling it A Thousand Platters and imagining it as a buffet. This is more in a dream-time than a real time. It feels like Deleuze keeps writing a stream of un/consciousness and then Guattari keeps calling the things he writes by different names; like Donald Trump trying to mask one terrible story by releasing or causing a bigger story. Things like the abstract machine, the plane of consistency, and the body without organs are meticulously explained and differentiated only to be conflated as the same thing or part of the same thing later in the chapter or in a different chapter. The book turns consistency on its head and I suppose this is its point. It's also a bit like reading Philip K Dick novels where everything is already constituted as a thing from the start - so ideas are mentioned without any explanation until much much later in the book; you fall into concepts and trip over them. It really is a journey through form and content but some days I just struggle to pick it up and the 10-15 pages I seem to manage is probably enough for a day's work.
The answers to these feelings are like dealing with a mild depression instead of trying to tackle it head-on; the best way forward is to just ignore it or deny it until it goes away. These are not normal times and although something will return from before, it will not, nor should it be, normality. So I will struggle on and not take notes and try to write and also think about been/bean/being a real artist on the project and the idea of keeping things opaque and the secret plan - I have the start of something that will emerge into a PhD at some point. But not for a while, I fear.
On my weekly trip to Marks and Spencers to buy chocolate eclairs, I bought a New Scientist special edition about the nature of reality.
I think I was having an onto-auto-epistemological crisis and thought some clear scientific facts would ground me back into my original faith. The Karen Barad reading had not really done this for me as I was always thinking that the forces had not been unified. Einstein's general relativity and quantum mechanics had not been joined in a Euclidean or any other circle. In a section about the nature of mathematics and the possibility that the most basic unit of reality could be mathematical we are treated to a diagram showing sets of empty bags as an explanation that something could come from nothing. It felt like Jesuits arguing about how many angels can fit on the end of a pin. All I could think was that the bags were filled with bags rather than being empty bags. I have a box under the alcove in the kitchen where I keep my supermarket re-usable bags - it is a box full of bags not a box full of the nothing within the empty bags. Scientists striving to describe a reality which is beyond human perception, a physical universe without God, nature or the sublime feels like a search to collect empty bags just as much as philosophy's quest to find concepts to explain what emerges within a life. There is little comfort in the empty bag of science, but the chocolate eclairs were really nice.
No comments:
Post a Comment