Well I wouldn't start here.

 It is a snowy morning I have just been for a walk and a think.  I was wondering why I was ending up getting so theoretical and musing about the nature of the world and nature in the world.  I decided that perhaps it's because it's difficult to do anything else at the moment.  It is too cold too build anything and to be honest I have built enough without the kids at the playground being more involved.  Not to say I have built enough generally but I have built enough in relation to my PhD study.  If I do anymore building without the kids playing making and shaping then it will steer the PhD to be about me building stuff on my own.  

There is an element of this moment which means that the world has receded slightly moved more inside.  I think this has dropped me into theory and it is something to do I suppose.  I'm watching some philosophy lectures on You Tube in the early morning  as I need to get up to look after the new dog.  Today's was about John Dewey I enjoyed it, my new word is teleology which means towards a purpose.  Dewey doesn't really have a purpose at least in the teleological sense his philosophy is one of pragmatism rather than idealism, he likes it to address a problem and be involved in some kind of change.

At eleven o'clock I went for a walk in the cold. I took a couple of pictures of the playground as a punctuation mark. I thought about The Game of Thrones and said to myself that winter was coming.  I texted Kate and told her that we hadn't met up for a whole year and then tried to explain why our book chapter about theory had nothing to do with Deleuze or post-philosophies or research-creation. I said it was about co-producing  knowledge with young people that paid attention to lived experience.   I was pleased I managed to articulate this simply as there is no room for slippage in this thinking.  I was probably inspired by Dewey to think in this way - his take on the instrumentation of thought.  'An interesting idea  but what does it do ?' line of inquiry.  It felt important to say this as in our last paper together we introduced research-creation and this is straying into new territory which certainly is not what we have been actively engaged with for the last 12 years.  I don't think we can revisit the research projects we have done and look for research-creation we would find things to write about but what we were really engaged with was a rough pragmatism that responded to people and places.  Flexible pragmatism that set itself against the tyranny of method within educational research. 

I told Kate that she couldn't come down my current specific Deleuzian rabbit hole with me, she has no time to dance with Whiteheads angels or enter the Baroque fold or even to grunt like a pig with Guattari.  I had to pause for a moment in the cold while checking to see if there were any new oyster mushrooms to consider why on earth I was putting myself through such a trial. Elsewhere I'm writing the story of theory from my personal perspective so it is at the front of my mind at the moment even though the front of my mind feels hazy. I did however through texting Kate articulate this and felt I should write something down for posterity on this blog.

The philosophy I'm looking towards develops an ontology that counters traditional approaches to social science.  This is specifically around the nature of all things and the possibility of knowing anything concrete about them.  These philosophies seem to be things people get too when other scaffolds of thought begin to collapse.  Some people try and grab a bit of them to patch up an existing way of thinking about thing,s others swallow the bait hook line and sinker. The philosophies of immanence or post- philosophies however are often used to critique alternative ontologies of existence so they can be clumsily used to critique a rational positivist position or a mechanical materialist position.  They can work parallel to Hegelian dialectics in some ways doing the same work differently. When you read 1000  Plateaus a change happens and it as difficult to come back from the brink but invariably to do anything practical there is a need to take a step back from the edge.  

I wasn't intending to write the paragraph above I was keeping things a bit more chatty but that is the way this reading takes you.  Deleuze would say that the writing is difficult as what it discusses is difficult but the question more pertinent to the situation is is it necessary?   This was the question I was trying to think through as I walked around the cemetery this morning. 

The idea I have I suppose is to write a PhD study that counters the Practice as Research approach in that it does not separate the practice from the writing. Although I'm sure that most people adopting a PaR approach don't see themselves as doing this separation for me there is a structural gap between the writing and the practice in that for many practitioners writing is encountered as primarily a representational medium where practice especially for us fine artists can be imagined as a thing within itself.   Put simply I need to understand this theory to enable me to hold a practice within writing - for it to be the work and not about the work. This is simply to break away from any binary between text and the process orientation of practice.  Actually research-creation embedded withing process philosophy can help with this.  So this is the 'method' that is singular and not removed from epistemology or ontology  which I was trying to get too in my original proposal to consider the artists residency as method.

We take residency which is traditionally locating an artist in a site and getting them to respond through their line of practice and create something new which is most often an autonomous art object to be exhibited either at the site of the residency or to be shown elsewhere, in gallery, cinema, website.  We expand this into process and see the residency as a set of vibrant relationships where the artists or person who we nominally put at the center is only one actor in a set of relations and we remove the goal , the teleological purpose of producing art and open the residency to process.  By this I mean open, never complete, not bounded, without inside or outside yet containing both a Baroque unfolding where the notion of an edge is dissolved into pure immanence- And there I go again.  

Flat flat flat ontology where I am no more important than a pen, a hen, a number 10, a frozen fen, or our uncle Ben. All these thoughts and things are part of the making-thinking -doing there is no wonder that everything looks a bit brown,  like just after the snow has melted. next weeks blog post when the beast from the east has been overcome by a test from the west.

The coldest day of the millenium

 We turned the party light on this Sunday it cheered us all up although it didn't feel like a party, everything is on hold.  The current lock-down is in its 5th week. This blog is feeling a bit like the secret dairy of Anne Frank hidden somewhere on the cloud for a 1000 years it will be read with nostalgia by my great great great great grandchildren.  As everything is actually fine and we are all safe well fed and relatively happy I feel slightly guilty mentioning Anne.  However there is something about been locked away and the lack of connections to the outside world that diminishes who we are and the way that regular writing can to an extent pay some sort of testament to this. We have a new puppy, we turned the party light on, it was minus 15 in some place on the boarders, it has been the coldest day of the Millennium.  This coldness is due to the erratic weather brought on by man-made climate change.  It feels counter intuitive but also a mini ice age would seem like the least of our worries as a species.  Everything is held in stasis, every night we watch the numbers on the TV. This many infected, this many vaccinated, this many dead, this many still in hospital.  71 percent more effective on people over 50 with preexisting medical conditions which include having special educational needs and probably black skin.  Did I say we have a new puppy and I turned the party light on? 

I annoted the annoted version of my Ghost and Unicorn writing and sent it back for further comment.  I'm wondering if this was a little too specific and I should of just had a go at tightening up the text but it did give me an opportunity too leave it a bit longer.

This week I have mostly been reading some of the texts Laura suggested for me - some Alfred North Whitehead some Deleuze and some Liz St Pierre.  I have also read some Truman and Springay.  The point of this reading I think is to situate my writing better within the field of educational research - to construct a place for it to sit more comfortably.  Its probably about getting an acceptable level of discomfort so it can sit within this field and not just float off somewhere else.   St Pierre is interesting as she basically says what I said in my first chucked out RD2 that you can't retrofit qualitative research to accommodate Deleuze and Guattaris  alternative ontology.  Specifically the relationship to representation and the individual human subjective person, woman, self bloke.  So Deleuze never was a phenomenologist. In fact I nearly decided that the ontological problem with post-qualitative research was not with phenomenology as much as with the dominance of the analytical approach in American and British philosophy.   This is ironic as the two positions could almost be personified in the organic and speculative approach of Whitehead and the more logos orientated analytical approach of his early collaborator Bertrand Russel.  I've also watched a lot of you tube videos about Alfred North Whitehead I like the way he believed in God but everyone has forgotten this as it is an inconvenient truth.

It feels like this whole journey into philosophy is a distraction I spend most days in deep contemplation of the nature of reality watching bald philosophy professors from the 1990's give seminal lectures on the nature of reality or theology or ontology.  It is something to do I suppose and it does keep me very busy and out of trouble.  I wonder if this is just a phase and as lock-down finishes I will come out the other side of it and be able to write a PhD which reads like a PhD and get passed the block of this year.  I am hoping this happens like I am filling the cereable petrol tank with theory juice then I will be able to take a long road trip out into the world and do and say something that has some sort of value. 

I am writing the story of my encounter with theory at the moment - I am just writing it for posterity and probably for Kate to read so I explain myself a little better to her.  All this theory is probably part of my residency at ESRI its probably part of a secret plan and the practice of knowing slightly more than  I should - doing things slightly better than expected.  The secret plan is flowing very close to the surface at the moment I am uncomfortable with its proximity.

Begging for attention

 I have had a bit of a blog slippage, Clyde our new puppy is a cause for this but probably not a reason.  I also have a screen print I need to dig out which says " What Were You Expecting To Get from This?.  My words feel more appropriate in screen print than Neon, the cheap reproduction, rather than modernist singularity. 

I am blogging for the sake of it today and also out of a sense of duty to the practice of writing this blog .  It is important to make sure you write about not having anything to say when there isn't anything to say.  This is not ironic or the negation of negation it is merely a statement about the current state of things.

It's a week since my last supervision, I said a few Hail Mary's and downloaded a couple of articles to read but have not yet found redemption.  I quite like what I wrote about ghost and unicorns and the minor gesture.  There is a chunk in the middle of it where I give away too much but as I'm writing it mainly with artists in mind this is a good giving away. There is some technical writing that I'm probably going to have be much more explicit about within a holding text.  This may mean I need  to feed the good bits into a larger text without it becoming captured by the banality of academic writing. Perhaps if we are to think in a metaphor then there are jewels which need to be mounted within a piece of jewellery.  The mount needs not to detract from the stone yet it has to be secure and made from the correct alloy, white gold, platinum or silver. High Carat gold although pure is too soft too do the work of holding gems in place. 

I bought a copy of process and reality by Whitehead its surprisingly easy to read - reminds me of Bertrand Russel's History of Western Philosophy.  I've struggled with  anti-Oedipus its always going on about the anus and I'm not sure I'm in the mood for that.  Although I recon its a necessary foundation for reading 1000 Plateaus, opening up ideas such as the Body without Organs  to its origins. There is a strong psycho analytical historical perspective that I've not really got time to find a way to work with.  I've read enough to get more of a handle on schizo analysis and how it rattles Lacan's Freudian cage.  

This is the question I suppose, the one I'm finding hard to navigate.  I'm expecting constructive and serious critique, I'm expecting to be pushed and to push myself into places where I feel uncomfortable.  I'm not expecting to be nurtured or dammed by faint praise.  I'm expecting and was promised nothing but blood sweat, toil and tears.  I probably didn't expect my identity, my aspirations or my visual arts practice to be as challenged as they have been. I had made a strong attempt to ring-fence these I'm not precious about them really I just keep them away from view.  This week though they have felt a little vulnerable and exposed, in some ways they are receding as the nerve gradually dies back in an angry tooth recently crowned.