Lost at Sea

We had a yard sale on Sunday to get ready for moving house - I sold a lot of stuff that was at one point going to be made into sculptures; it was a sale of prehensions or at the very least lost potentials. 

 I'm listening to a song called 'Lost At Sea' so I stole it for my blog title.  When Tom was in a band he had a song called " War in the Pacific ".  It was written on his school history homework which was a cartoon he had drawn about the war in the pacific.  The song had nothing to do with this, it was about nearly asking a girl out but loosing confidence - A line went -

 "I thought I would end up going out with you, but somebody else will do."

The title really added to the song especially if you didn't realise its accidental nature and tried to build connections.  I do today however feel a bit lost at sea.

Doing a PhD as a 53 year old is complicated,   especially as a dyslexic with a few personal issues with writing and reading that bubble under the surface of my over confident smug interior.  I don't have imposter syndrome I have been working in the academy on and off for 20 years.  I do have some insight into what I'm good at and why I continue to live and work at the edges of academic projects.  I always knew that the PhD would locate me within a system that I have previously managed to navigate as a knowing outsider.  As I move toward the end of my funding and consider what to do next it seems more critical than ever to reconnect with the distance that gives me a certain desirable agency within research projects it makes me a commodity.  I was never intending to become an academic, rather I was intending to understand what it may mean to be a 'becoming academic'. 

But now it's a real thing it feels like there is no going through the motions of performing a PhD as when I finish and indeed as I progress an element of clarity and self knowledge in this moment seems essential.  

I did a keynote with Kate last week with no notes only stories and charisma.  It is clear that this presentation of a thinking differently is what I have to offer the strange interior world of academic thought. Perhaps its more about systems and structures, hierarchies and habits.  within this scaffold there is a need for thinking difference and thinking differently and this to a greater or lesser extent is my currency.

PhD study is what Deleuze and Guattari would call an apparatus of capture, a war machine, perhaps that over-codes the territory of thought creating striated space.   This is not bad in itself, when you read A Thousand Plateaus D and G keep reminding us that striated space is necessary that it is not bad, yet you are secretly drawn to their ideas of the nomad and smooth space and the royal or state science and the associated war machines feel at the very least a little invasive.  I want to be a sorcerer, alchemist, artist, body without organs or at least present myself as something that it not sediment in a fixed structure.  I am of course all of these things and I do want to start and finish the process of writing up a PhD and surprise myself.  I am working out how to do this without becoming something else.  It is an interesting process, a trick of the eye, a deflection of attention and then it will be done.  Not to be read of course, but also not to jump through a hoop.  I am not sure if a becoming academic looks like me, I am certainly different to when I started and I am enjoying 95 % of the process. Yet occasionally I notice I am not laughing as much as I used too and I am not actually thinking thoughts that flow or just feel like the right kind of thoughts.  On these days I remember why I called this blog MYPHD and wait for the clouds to shift.