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 1st 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.
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