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.
No comments:
Post a Comment