Monday afternoon - a day in the midlife of my PhD

I'm not that sure where I am today as for the first time in a long time I'm struggling to work out exactly what to do with myself.  I had a supervision this morning with Kate where I explained why I thought a years extension to my PhD would be helpful.  I then went to see Patrick and drop some chairs off at the playground and then walked around the cemetery and missed my dog and thought seriously about retiring.  It was a practical thinking rather than a melancholy one though it did leave me feeling slightly melancholy. 

The end of an era is something I say a lot, my retirement will be the end of an era but we are not quite there yet. There is still much to do and much to be taken from the doing of it.  The grim weather and the dark evenings and the lock-down sometimes hold my mood at a point of waiting to step into a lighter place, a waiting for the switch to switch and something else to happen.

Today I got up and read some Erin Manning, did my Joe Wick PE session, had a bath then listened to Utube about Spinoza.  Then I had my supervision which went well, though after it I felt like I needed a break. I popped to the playground and had a chat with Pete and Patrick, we told some jokes and said it was too cold too work. At 3.30 I decided I would blog mainly because I don't want to start anything else.  This all sounds a bit glum and I know I should make myself a cup of tea and snap out of whatever I seem to have snapped into.  Manning was writing about Guattaris' depressions and his oinking like a pig, she seems to want to find some positivity between the spark and petrification of depression.  I am finding the last few chapters slightly irritating. I thought this morning that she is trying to be like Zizeck and not really write a series of books but to write one long single book.  Anyway I only read about eight pages and it was enough. 

I'm waiting for a second wind or a Christmas break or something different.  I told Kate I would do some loose parts play stuff with kids in spring on the platform. I also told Patrick this and it makes some sort of sense of things.  I quite like my writing about research creation but I can't actually look at it in case it's shit.  I am trying to keep positive- John Berger says we need to clench hope between our teeth - today in the cold, it feels like a day to bite hard on hope as both a distraction and something to eat.  I wondered why more people haven't connected Ruskin to Spinoza  it feels like his understanding of Nature and God are similar I am going to cook a chilly and have an early day as I feel if I don't I may end up oinking like a pig.

Sorting out my Library

These are my PhD books I have sorted them out and given them their own shelf.  I am already not sure about the new materialist section.  I'm tempted to move these books up a shelf with the Isaak Walton and the Sartre.  The slightly out of reach PhD section for the not quite making the bottom shelf books.  I think I have probably read most of these books now and I am not sure if this is something I'm proud of.  I was always impressed by people who could do card tricks but also carried a slight worry that they may have spent a lot of their lives practicing something that in the final analysis is quite light and a little naff.  My reading of some of these texts feels a bit like this, in some ways impressive in others pathetic.

The books are organized in a taxonomy  that is very definitely not the Dewey decimal system or alphabetical this is an attempt to order things.  I start off with Deleuze and then Deleuze and his mate Guattari.  I did not put my broken copy of 1000 Plateaus here because of the weight of it has broken its spine and could mess up the neatnes of things. We then have Manning and Massumi and a copy of Thought in the Act which I originally ironically thought was called caught in the act.  However uncomfortable these texts feel in there throbbing difficulty it has to be said that the more time passe, the more these texts become a fluid molten core of my work. The books then slip into the books about and the stuff that comes after; Massumi's guide and another guide to Capitalism and Schizophrenia both of which let you down or lead you wrong.  There are a few books about assemblage theory that I've struggled with leading into the philosophy of play a rather dead end bit.  On the shelf below I have Engels and Dewey and a few Ruskin books John Humes Speculations and a chunk of Colin Ward plus all my Whitechapel art gallery readers guides, which are nice to read. A chunk about play and adventure play that I never know what to do with, the horrid Hicky-sticky Moody new materialist bit and then a final section filling the shelf up which are some of my older art theory books. Kesters Conversation Pieces, Bourriauds, Relational Aesthetics and Clare Bishops, Artificial Hells.  I am not sure if these need to go upstairs or not but they can live here a while. 

The book that is out next to me today is Erin Mannings a Minor Gesture.  I keep wondering if this is the most important book in my PhD.  It is hard to read I've just started chapter 4 which is about autism and movement it is crazy dense in places.  I keep saying its like Deleuze and Guattari without the jokes.  This is true there are not many jokes in it.  I don't think Manning is a new materialist although she does try and theorise the  the more -than human of the world.  Perhaps this is why I keep getting pulled back into research-creation as an idea.  Put simply Manning draws on Bergson and Whitehead to argue for the forward unfolding creative moments that constitute the world that are not reliant on a singular bounded human mind/body.  At the end of this line of thinking you can end up sharing lots of thoughts from a new materialist orientation but you end up more with a Deluezian configuration of a life which I am afraid cannot live without its italics here. 

And then we have the playground and then we have the playing and the people and then we have the building and the making and then we have the me and the others and all these things are in excess and more-than.  I am going to stop writing this bitty blog now and go back to reading Manning and taking notes.  Writing on my blog now feels less necessary though perhaps it is more important.  I may come back and tidy this post up or I may leave it. For now it finishes here.

Tuesday tea time

Just had a power walk in  the Cemetery  I have been making power bowls for dinner which is just salad in  a bowl really.  I am feeling like a need to keep fit and healthy and power on.   The playground is  now closed to the public and I'm not sure I can carry on working there during the current lock down period.  Its probably a good idea to have a bit of a break as the platform is finished and we can't commission it so I would end up doing odd jobs which is not really a good idea. 

I sanded the dining room floor today and have moved upstairs I have sorted out all my PhD books and have a plastic crate filled with the most important ones.  In a way I have gone full circle as I am back reading Erin Manning's a minor gesture . In the first chapter she gives a pretty good description of what research creation means to her and  its pretty useful for me.  I think that this is the key to the work  of writing as I am getting closer to thinking that what is missing is a way to write about art making that is more entwined with making.  Perhaps this is worldizing, I prefer this to diffraction as it lets things hold their difference within a totality in a way I feel is more in tune with making and doing in the world. 

I am struggling top get through the Manning .I thought I might of gone more clever over the last two years but I'm not sure I have really as I annotated my copy and it seems to be annotated in all the best places. The problem we have is she slides into Bergson and pulls a big chunk out of Whitehead and before this sent me into a spiral worm hold of speculation that didn't really get me anywhere - this time I need to be more strategic in where I end up.

I don't have much to say today - I am just checking in with myself as I said i would every week - when I read this back I hope i will see it as the start of a turning point - a minor gesture perhaps?

Thurdays writing

I struggled on my writing day  - in the end I went out with Tim and his new puppy for a walk.  I did write for about an hour and a half - I read it this morning and couldn't think where to file it or to put it so I'm locating it here in time and in my thoughts.

My alternative RD2 a year on from the actual Event.

It's the 5th of November last year on this day I was preparing for a public event with the school of architectures Urban Room at Moor foot in Sheffield.  I didn’t realize it at the time but this ended up been the end event of my assembling the bits arts council project as by the time I got to the real end of the project Covid 19 had stopped most face to face activity.  The rest of November would be spent preparing for my year two progression.  I remember this as 2 months of writing mainly hung up on not knowing what a literature review was supposed to look like.  In retrospect the 1^st draft of my RD2 that I submitted was a really honest piece of writing on where I was and it contained my worries and my hopes. What I realize now is that it wasn’t what was required for my progression or transgression, which I keep calling it.  The reality I think is I wasn’t really at the point of progression I was still really working things out.  I was also balancing lots of things that I saw as other things, keeping the spinning plates in the air.  I like this metaphor as when I say it I can see a family on the generation game in 1978 desperately gyrating the cane sticks to actually keep plates spinning and running between them  Brucey would intervene and knock them off to move the show on a bit faste .  The arts council project, finding funding from the South Yorkshire trusts to buy materials, finding money from the festival of social science to run an event – thinking about how things work at the playground  are all part of what I am considering as residency but they were not part of the writing about residency – residency is mess and its residual.

So I wrote about everything I was reading and I was reading to try and find something that made sense of art in relation to life.  Ideas that did not separate life from everything else or as Manning would say parse.  The kernel of this probably started forming when I read Pure Immanence a life on the train to London.  The book is a strange anthology and I think the bit of it on immanence was just an essay or a musing and the book was put together as a book made from scraps of things.  It is at least quite short and to the point.  Delueze’s notion of a life extracted from the idea of a human life and scaffolded by a thousand concepts and a lifetimes writing.  In my reading I was following the lines of different singularities that although very different all seemed to say the same thing.  There is no inside and no outside there is no beyond, everything is singular.  In all this reading and following of lines the singularities stand out as different names for the same thing.  All of them share a collective aim to undermine the concept of the singular autonomous bounded human.  All of them however are not considered post- or after or more than the human.  

I suppose I started with old school dialectical materialism and I’m not sure why this doesn’t actually work other than been massively tainted by Stalin who posthumously discredited by his actions Lenin.  Perhaps without the prospect of immanent revolution Dialectical Materialism loses something.   I then toyed with actor network theory and new materialism and Object Oriented Ontologies via Whitheads speculative realism.   Then dabbled in Vibrant matter and Bennets essential vitalism through to Barads Pseudo-science and agential realism. Then wanting to be taken a little more seriously I immersed myself in both Deleuze and Guattari and lockdown.   So there is a lot of stuff here and it’s all about the singular nature of reality – the impossibility of an inside or an outside and therefore the study and the object of study.  I wonder if there is someone who can just plump for the theory that works for them in a given situation.  I know that for many researchers theory isn’t that important, it's a necessary distraction for scaffolding what you are trying to say but lots of research just emerges from itself and the work does not necessarily ask fundamental ontological questions about the nature of realities.  

But this is the problem of working with Deleuze and Guattari as their mission is to create a new plane of immanence on which concepts can emerge.  I got this through reading What is Philosophy and after this realistion of what they were attempting within their work I got to better understand how it all worked and why it often didn’t work for researchers.

I feel like I need to cross the fourth wall here and talk to camera.  The reason that D and G don’t work for most researchers is that they can not be retrofitted into existing thought technologies.  Assemblage which lives in the middle or milieu of their work is made up of everything else.  It’s meaning is not a case of translation it is the thing that grows or is enunciated as you read.  For it to work in continuity they have to keep adding concepts.  Some of which seem to work others that seem not to fit only to emerge and fit later, theirs is an improvised philosophy.  

So what do I need to do next?  it feels like again I have no writing. What I thought was going to be a chapter on Methodology is apparently a literature review so I still don’t actually know what a literature review is. There is a need to have something that is less per formative but it feels like the edges of the genre of academic writing are not very permeable.  The writing stops been academic and becomes something else.

It feels like I am back at the beginning – I have gone full circle and to an extent need to start again – not from the start though perhaps from the middle.   Today in trying to write it feels like I need to settle down with a bit more book work – firstly to go back to some key texts and secondly to get a bit of detail and overview .  That's what’s needed – so I’m going to stop this writing which isn’t going anywhere as I don’t know enough yet -  here is my list of things.

 

Read manning a minor gesture

Think through residency as assemblage

Work out how this core of thinking relates to work in the field and how it could be written.

Think about the relationship between writing and making more this is actually the methodology or perhaps the lit review.

 

Waiting for the results

 We are in lock-down and waiting for the results of the American election - this is very distracting and I am strangely much more concerned about it than I thought I would be.  It is Thursday and it is writing day, I have just had a nice chat with people in the writing group and said I am going to do some free writing today.  River mentioned using a program called Mendeley this is a good thing to get me organised - it feels like it is time to jump in to being more organised. 

My supervision was a bit strange this week.  I had sent a piece of writing that was an attempt to do something that read a bit more like a PhD at least one within an education department.  I am not sure I succeeded however the writing did help to work some things out and also some things that are now irrelevant.  The big thing is to drop new materialism and work with agencement or assemblage from Deleuze.  So Gertz and Manning are important, a chapter that brings it into educational research so I suppose Maggie and Hicky Moody and perhaps Rachael and Springay and Trueman. 

It feels like the R D process was a real problem for me as I grasped at the wrong straw.  I can't blame anyone for this and it happened coincidentally as I was reading Jane Bennet at the time - I would of grasped at anything I was reading to be honest as I was sent into panic mode. It would of been good to have realised this at the time and then perhaps I could have refocused myself in a direction that would of felt more constructive and more in an area I was excited by or in tune with. By the time I had to do the rewrite of the proposal I was in a pragmatic mode of jumping through the hoop- when I landed on the other side however I couldn't seem to shake off the shackles of what I had said I was going to do.

I don't really want to return to the piece of writing I have spent so long on as I know in my heart it is to general and it jumps all over the place.  Perhaps there are some things I need to pull from it and extend, the writing is performative yet I'm not that sure what it is performing.  I should be writing now so I will stop this writing and start a different writing.  Perhaps it should be a really honest RD2 proposal that maps out the next stage of the PhD from where I am today.  As Trump keeps saying it may be time to stop counting and announce a decision.

On the edge of lock down

 Monday morning again and a new lock down starts on Thursday. I had a strangely unproductive week looking back on it.  Monday  and spent the afternoon at Pitsmoor with Tom.  We worked really slowly and I tried to show him how to use a few tools and cut wood.  He was sad and I carried a bit of this weight with me- it slowed us down a bit. Tuesday I went to Highfields playground and looked at the potential new build for them.  It is interesting as I can't make this part of my PhD study it is a trajectory but not a useful one. We worked at the playground in the afternoon in the rain and it was a bit miserable in the damp. Wednesday I worked the morning with Bryn we were basically fitting some rope sides to the ramp  I had been reading Tim Ingolds book about Dewey in the morning and can't work out if its useful or a distraction or a useful distraction. Afternoon was the PGR drop in I felt like an old lag but also a little like a con artist that would be found out

Wednesday afternoon was mainly online  stuff with Kate  and then the PgR drop in.  Thursday was writing group and Nigel came back - this is the best bit of the week as it feels like something me and River have taken on and I think it is a really good thing for everyone trying to write.  each time I try and explain the complexity of what I'm writing about I feel a bit silly. I did a proper days writing on my methods sections and sent it to Kate and Laura.  I was relatively pleased with it especially the bit about Custard and sauce anglais, I felt a little stupid by writing the wrong source  - original pirate material - my dyslexic mistakes are sometimes the origins of interesting world play.  Exegesis a word I've struggled to get near enough for spell check to find came up as Exit Jesus on my transcription software which has both helped me to remember the word and made me chuckle.  I know I have a certain talent for a certain type of writing and am adaptable yet the lack of grasp of some of the basics is a raw window of vulnerability within academic writing - I do not know or understand the sauce  of my problem but its not saucy or to make an academic joke a problem with Saussure.

Friday and Saturday I showed films at the playground - I talked to Zac and Bryn about the nature of time and remembered I wanted to read the 1930s exchange between Bergson and Einstein which was big news at the time I think this is another distraction. 

On Friday I was given a bottle of Rum for projecting the films  today I have bought Bryn an impact driver for all his help - I could write about Gifts - I may do in my field notes but what is interesting to say here is that the gifts should not become representations in text.   This is a thought that is bubbling under the surface this week - like the best art that can never be captured within documentation because the fact is you have to experience it first hand.  There is something in the way I'm thinking that is to hold things within their semblance and not move to resemblance or representation. It is this I think that research creation can offer foundationaly and it is within this difficulty I may be able to say something original, at least to me.