It is Monday and it is raining outside. It is raining in a way that reminds me of summer holidays camping in Cornwall with the children where playing cards can only last ten minutes and needs to be looked forward too in advance. With the kids bouncing off the sides of the tent shedding scabs from impetigo covered faces, sand in the sleeping bags and scrotal sacks, with wet towels not drying on the car seats, steaming everything up even with the engine running.
I can't go and do any work at the playground and this is a good thing as it gives me an opportunity start writing a literature review. Everyone including me thinks this is a good idea so I don't drowned under the task of doing some proper PhD writing when the end gets in sight. But its 12.18 and no writing has taken place. The good intention was there when I woke up and looked out at the wind and rain yet as I once said the only difference between a fake and a copy is an intention and there is little point in faking anything. As I write this my RD2 document sits on my desktop behind this window, I have not read it since it was approved and it felt like a good place to start this morning at 8.30, I will read it next- I promise myself.
I have been thinking about realising being bean a real artist again this morning perhaps this is a signal of an inner insecurity - a need to perform something, a worry that there is an essential performative aspect to where I am at the moment, where I often find myself.
The rational way of thinking about what I'm doing at the moment is to consider the effort it took to read 1000 Plateaus and then to authentically assert that although new materialism owes Deleuze a debt it is not good to read him with this in mind - you are drawn into a perspective that slices rather than immerses and immersion is the best way to read him. Like jumping in an ice pool after a sauna the body and the mind consumed or perhaps the Body without organs as a none duelist shock to the system. I've read that book now I've tired myself out digging and building like Professor Challenger from the day the earth screamed I have pricked my world and heard it scream. Both endeavors have been life affirming and reminded me of my mortality yet neither produced any writing that could be considered a PhD.
My supervision on Friday reminded me of this and somewhere in my mind the bit of my brain that occasional resolves not to drink so much and in a strange way believes itself decided I would give over two days a week to writing my PhD even if i didn't get anywhere I would stick at it. The horse would be flogged to within inches of its death; whether dead or alive or both, like a cat shut in a box of ambiguous potentials.
Why do I forget what new materialism even is? When I quickly remind myself the shorthand for it, origins and definitions it doesn't seem that difficult but then I forget what it is and what it does. I wonder here if its because with a commitment to materials and process and a very personal aesthetic sensibility if I have felt a new materialist most of my life, an embodied state of relation to the world that can remain unspoken. If I have been enacting or perhaps enunciating a materialism through making and thinking that aligns with new materialism as it comes or becomes into the world then it is my natural habitus there is little to set it against. Perhaps it does not change the fundamental relationship to knowing as much of what I have valued or feel inclined to work with what emerges from a close relationship to the properties of materials that extends from the stuff and lines of flight into a world of relations. Materialism in its mechanical origin is not to say that everything is material it is more the imagining the material accepting the impossibility that there is anything that could transcend this material world. Materialism perhaps denies the possibility of the transcendental and the meta-physical world - new materialism in its denial of any duality opens up a different set of possibilities. You can find this difference in Deleuze but when you come back to earth and lay it into a pre-structured and lived ontology then it becomes a flash of difference an alternative rather than the thing in itself. To hold onto the thing itself I needed to take a break from the world and be in making and be in the book to let both things shape a life. perhaps this is a true return to practice. Not so much a diffraction but a living that will never actually make it to a literature review. Perhaps I have conflated distraction with diffraction.
I am not sure what to do now as I am not keen on becoming a performance again just yet. To demonstrate that I have read something and taken something from it that others can understand as a thing. However sensible it is to distribute the thinking I have lived within into a form of writing that will work towards a PhD the difficulty of capture of the current assemblage of this moment makes me want to push it to the back burner however reckless an act I know this to be.
I will do my two days this week and next week and the week after and something will come to show from it and it will become something else -
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