Just before I left the house to go on holiday I had a worry that my computer and my laptop and my hard-drives would all be stolen and I would lose all the work I have done on my PhD. I quickly backed up the folders on a pen drive and decided to hide it somewhere safe. I had found a plaster head of Jesus in a skip outside St James playgroup 20 years ago, as a fragment it feels much more desirable than its fully torsoed original. I hid the USB drive inside the head of Christ for both pragmatic and poetic reasons. I have just retrieved it as I needed to transfer some files to my laptop. For a few moments I speculated on the possibility that a thousand dancing angels, forsaking the head of a needle, may have descended into the bits of my drive. That perhaps like monkeys typing the complete works of Shakespeare they fiddled with the binary code and transformed the acres of fragmented musing into a fully finished PhD thesis. All I would need to do was smugly sit on it until the date of my final submission arrived. Wine would become blood and bread would be a body without organs. Alas as I formatted the drive it contained the same shite it did when I put it there. No elves had repaired the shoes, Santa had not popped down the chimney and done a copy edit. There is still the hard work to do- speculative realism my arse.
I had a great holiday. I managed to not even sneak anything that could be considered a PhD book into my bag and as much as is possible, within these times of worry, managed to switch off. It's 2 hours until I have a supervision so I've spent the last 2 days trying to switch on again. To pick up where I left off without feeling quite so stressed about it. I've done this by making an attempt to write my literature review plan and reading the rest of Pat Thomson's book about helping PhD students to write. Both these activities have switched me back on again. The writing was hard and dissatisfying though it did feel like a start. It made writing feel possible again after a long period of reading and doing.
After this preamble it feels like I should not revert to bullet points but as this blog is linear and I know that ideas will be fixed in time and context I have some things to note that I'm hoping to take into my supervision meeting.
1. Pat talks a lot of writing work and identity work. I have found this very helpful as I have decided I need to do identity work, specifically on constructing and performing myself as an artist/scholar. I am not very good at feeling secure in my skin and the artist/scholar is a difficult identity to either make or write. However it is a gap and a space that could do with filling with something other than the arts school artist/scholars. This is a club or as Pat would call it a community of practice to which I will never find a legitimate front door entrance. The gap in writing exist in the relationship to thinking and making, there are established and recognised diagrams or apparatus of the relations yet none of them fit what I'm doing very well.
To put it in very clear terms the work I do as an artist is easily written off as low level community arts or the instrumental use of arts many technics or habits. Until this or roundabout this moment I have been able to aline with this. It felt fine as my practice, the underground river flowing through the mess that is a life, could remain happily opaque. It would emerge occasional from the chalk meadow fields and look pretty. The fact I am aware it is there yet know little about it has always been very sustaining, even on the dark days. The artist/scholar identity work I'm embarking on has to take into account this opacity with an intention not to obscure anything deliberately.
This movement towards singing a duet as the artist and as the scholar within my PhD has suddenly become more attractive as a proposition. I am moving from been an artist doing a PhD to writing my identity as an artist/scholar.
2. Pat says that a PhD has to follow a line of an argument it has to make some sort of sense and it has to be something an examiner can read. I have taken this bit really seriously as when I decided I would be a 'becoming artist scholar' the idea of writing something banal felt like a betrayal.
3. I have decided that I want to centralise the writing of Deleuze. I like the fact that Foucault said the 20th century was essentially Deleuzian. In all my reading his texts hold the most generative potential. I think that essentially there is something in his writing from Bergson about the relationship of life to time. At the moment there is an element of floundering around within this thought but of any community of practice I could perhaps fit into I get the feeling I could dwell here. I'm not sure if this is a good idea but it fits with the identity work of becoming an artist scholar - who the fuck else could you choose ?
4. The things are the thing. I have always intended to have a series of encounters with material things, the horn of a unicorn, the platform for loose parts play, the digging of holes the rusting of nails the fixing of toilets, the death of a rat, the chicken without giblets. These are points of encounter with the material of the world. The interesting question to take from Deleuze and how his thinking weaves through new materialist interpretations and what it brings to the material encountering? its certainly not just a mind, thought or human being. This is the point where things do not come together - the need for thinking through totalities and what that means for edges and boundaries. There is a level of complexity here that will emerge in stories and narratives about things. Perhaps in building the identity of an artist scholar, at least for the moments of finishing my PhD writing I will somehow bring some of these thoughts to heal.
5. When I started this process I decided I would try and enjoy it and not get bogged down or negative. I am doing pretty well in this but I have noticed that when things start to feel difficult its because I'm trying to hold too much of it in my head at one go. I have written about my amazement at not been able to make films and take stills at the same time. I wonder if some people can do this, I know lots of people try yet for me its two modes of being in the world. Film it temporal a photograph is still, they are two different mediums even though in my case I use a single camera. I think it takes me around 15 minutes to switch mode. If I don't pay attention to the switch I take crap footage and crap stills. A similar thing happens in the making and doing phase of my PhD. I can have a breather and write field notes and I can write a regular blog but I can't switch from working on my residencies as visual artist to writing as scholar. This is complex if I am trying to be a becoming artist/scholar with a backs/lash. Perhaps I need to think of the Janus with two faces, the Roman god of transitions and develop the ability to look both ways at once - perhaps I may need to learn to be a little two faced.
