I had to look up axiomatic before writing this - the definition is - an obvious or unquestionable truth. I think I knew this but when I was reading a Thousand Plateaus this morning I couldn't really make sense of how they were using the word. They say it is not a metaphor or being used metaphorically, I wonder if its not a word that works well in translation, perhaps its not quite right for what they are trying to say. It certainly does not seem to point to an self evident truth that is emerging from the text, or if it does I'm missing something. A combination of having our windows done and exhausting myself digging and cutting and volunteering at the playground has meant that I have lost a bit of momentum in my morning reading and thinking hours.
I started off with the Nomad and the war machine and I think I took a lot from this that I felt I could work with although its all gone a bit fudgey now in my brain mess. In the capture chapter the true nature of how capitalism is a mechanism of capture is- worried about, talking through territory we move away from the refrain and the assemblage and place capitalism as something else - perhaps not in a metaphysical sense but at the heart of its essential subjectifications the knots of self that are constituted only by capital, that cannot exist before it. I think that this chapter more than others requires a carrying of what has gone before that brings us to this point. Perhaps this is why we are introduced to the axiomatic - by this point a certain set of thoughts and feelings should be self evident. I am not sure I have got far enough, although I have got somewhere and to a certain extent I think I am becoming a Deleuzian; perhaps as none of the texts or writing that comes after really seems to give you what you need they leave a gaping void in a construction of a worldview. I said in my RD2 proposal that social science uses the concepts to retrofit modes of thinking that are unable to work with the new technologies of thought, pointless acts of tilting at windmills. When asked what I did in lock-down I can say I read a thousand plateaus from cover to cover and we had new windows put in the house.
Alongside paying attention to my Onto -epistemology I have been volunteering at the adventure playground. As I am unable to conduct face to face research this work is not part of my PhD. It's very interesting as the notion of territory is in some ways very straightforward. What is and isn't research is what is agreed within my ethical procedure and at this period my ethics and instruction from my research institute creates a clear line of territory, at least in relation to what can be considered research, which includes collecting data and evidence. I have also finished my arts council project which was concerned with the idea of assemblage and sculpture. This presented another territory that was externally legitimized. For now I am officially working as volunteer though the process is very similar on the inside the external structures or mechanisms that help to build and hold the assemblage that enunciates a territory that can be traversed is structured differently - the inside subjective has to rise to the surface as there is no longer an external scaffold to structure parameters.
Physical work then and violence against male bodies, the violence and the self flagellation of work. I had thought and written about this as a search for redemption from my collective unknown sin, I looked for redemption in work - Work makes you free - the sign from the gates of Auschwitz. I think now in this limbo land where the external lines of flight that take me out of the playground and position the work within an expanded field of an unfolding assemblage that I am aspiring to reach a state of grace. This lofty notion seems a little extreme as I am really just building a bit of decking with a shed on it however I realise that the closest I ever come to grace is in the sweaty awkward and violent moments of building something on uneven ground. This is the Axiomatic of diffracting a reading of a thousand plateaus through the body to try and find some kind of freedom.
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