No New World -Another rainey tuesday

 I have been away again and it was nice to have a break.  I have properly enrolled for my final year and nearly officially have an extra six months to complete my PhD before I submit.  I am not that sure how I feel as we enter tier 3 lock down rules.  A mixture of quite enjoying the elongated extension, the pause in the state of things, coupled with feeling frustrated with the sense of waiting for something to happen and the rain.

 Tom's home and we are nearly about to set off to the playground to probably touch base and have a chat about where we are.  The platform is very nearly finished. This is good as it has taken long enough.  I think it is at the center of things - it is a new affordance, in that it holds potential.  It is a thing that is new and material and made by mainly my hands. It is unquestionably present within the project.  I think that perhaps on the advice of Beth St Pierre I need to drop research as a term and play with enquiry/inquiry as a process of finding out.

I have lost the affirmed certainty of reading a Thousand Plateaus, diffracted through building a large platform with a tree in the middle of it at the playground.   I felt like a real scholar/artist for an instant, my mental and physical blood, sweat and tears smeared on the door handles of our house by half sanatised hands.  These were perhaps the good old days when I developed a new relationship both to making and to death.   The finishing off bits, the handrail and exposed bolt heads in the mud, in the rain are not really doing the same thing for me.  The carefully mapped diffraction patterns of the two waves of making and thinking erode into the slight ripples of entropy on the beach of acceptance.

And this is happening because I've started to try and write something that looks like a PhD and it is a bit shit but has consumed an enormous amount of time .  I thought by this point I would be 2 years into an elephant like gestation period ready to give birth to a baby elephant that I would nurture with elephant milk and grow into something a spectacular spectacular in the vernacular. As chairman Mao said even a PhD of 90 thousand words starts with a single word.  As Paulo Freire so aptly commentated we make the road by walking it - yet these optimistic quotes are always best heard in the retrospect. When the long march is well underway and the road is partially made through it's walking.  They are nostalgic psychological props that are not really that much help at the real beginning of a journey. 

The plan then is to contain the writing and to try and start some chunks and share them with Kate and Laura.  Thursday writing group is going well although it clearly is nowhere near enough time to spend writing.  I think I will need more structure than this and I will need it very soon.  But first to properly finish the platform and then to let its edges bleed. 

On another note I'm reading Tim Ingolds latest book - its strange as his main influences seem to be Manning, Massumi, Dewey, Rancierre and a bit of not that well represented Deleuze and Guattari.  It is all my key thinkers that have underpinned my thinking from the start.  The most applicable bunch and I think I could work with some of  his ideas- lets see where it goes with his lines and categorizes and demarcations. 

 

A Rainey Tuesday

Bryn who helped me work at the Venture yesterday may have Covid so I'm limiting my contacts and its raining so I can't work at the playground anyway.  I miss my dog today as he would make me go for a walk and I would feel better for it.

I always start my blog post by reading and editing the last post. It's like the bit at the start of box sets that quickly fill you in on the last episode. This is good because I tend to sleep through more and more telly unless its Money Heist which has kept me completely gripped. 

I have clearly had a bit of a Deleuzian phase as my writing is filled with a strange and dislocating passion that even the odd well placed self deprecatory joke does little to counter.  I must admit when reading back in the clear light of distance chunks of the writing don't sound like me which is because there is a development.  

Yesterday Bryn asked me about my PhD and Patrick was listening and I tried to explain the artists residence and new materialism and the idea of a life  from Deleuze that was in the world, or the plane of absolute immanance.  He asked me if this was phenomenology and I explained that although I find a lot in Heidegger and his Phenomenology that seems to fit  there is in this thinking something human (often a white man) at the center of experiencing the world.  I tried to explain about flat ontologies but then heard Maggie's voice from my transition Viva saying that all I did was keep saying flat ontology.  I diverted the conversation with a joke about the wide mouth frog that eats only nuts and flies.  There is a connection but its a long joke I may tell it in my field notes.  The punchline paraphrased could come from my Viva

Steve - Hello I'm a new materialist and I eat flat ontologies

Maggie - I am clever and I  eat naive new materialist for breakfast. 

Steve - Ohhh you don't see many of those about nowadays do you ?   

In a way though things are moving and it has to be in some sort of line for me.  I have had to build something that is of significance that has taken time and is real as essentially this is my artists way to build and make something that is real and functions on many levels.  As I actually step across the threshold into my final year there is a real progression towards finding out where I am and where I sit in the mesh-work of relations between world - thing- thought .  In using this language of separation I recognise that the problems we tackle are contained within the language we use and that is why the things/stuff/materilities/objects/events/ in and of themselves beyond text are rising to the challenge.

A week of work

I tried to enrol for my last years of funded PhD on Monday but I jumped the gun as I can't actually do this until October.  Looking back to last Thursday when I started the writing group and splurged a couple of thousand words onto the page its difficult to put a mental finger on what I've actually done.  My writing ended up been about methodology,  I am trying to justify why auto-ethnography.  I have also been thinking about making or wroughting as I've started calling it.  

This came about as I took a step back from where I was and thought:

1. There are things I have made.

2. There is writing. 

Although this is simple and obvious it it an almost certain truth.  What the things are and what the writing constitutes is open for debate but they are clearly things and writing.  Material outcomes in the world.  I then tried to think analytically and to an extent within a framing of vibrant assemblages (agensement) .  The trick with thinking assemblage is that the foundation or multiplicity of the concept is built on something that should not be named, that re/places the unknown constructed sense of self that was there before.  The short language that often gets used to move towards thinking through assemblages  never really works- I may as well say the Chicken without Giblets.  Neither can we describe assemblages through doing as the new way of feeling the world requires a positioning that need views that feels immanence - the what is to come rather than the what has gone.  It is hard not to present a closed set of things that unfold in complex relation as an assemblage yet without the vibrancy of a lifes potential immanent becoming this is merely a collection of things.  The neck kidneys and liver placed in a polythene bag and stuffed back up the opening in the carcass that I think may at one point of been a chickens arse though I am never sure I think the parson knows. 

1. There are things I have made.

2. There is writing.

The purpose of the ~PhD from a post perspective is to move towards framing this writing and making into a conceptual framework that adds up to something new.  I think I can do this and I'm well situated to build a vibrant assemblage of parts that will be probably if we are talking in singularities be best described as a difficulty.

 'The only way to find a larger vision is to be somewhere in particular' writes Donna Harrawy in her 1998 article situated knowledge.   I've also done this, am doing this when I've finished this blog I am going to spend a day at the playground, still in residency, still in limbo.  All I have properly learned is what I knew already in that there are no real boundaries between things - everything flows.