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.
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