I have spent all day sorting out the files on my computer. I have been very keen not to lose some of my writing. I have sometimes copied stuff onto this blog just to keep it in a timeline. I have found lots of bits of writing I had forgotten I had done. A nice piece about a post-ontologies camping trip and a dairy piece from a couple of weeks before the first lock down. I sometimes find it difficult to read my notes as they always seem a bit the same and I often sound like I'm moaning when I really only stuck. Its interesting to read these notes as its clear that the process of doing the RD2 review knocked me sideways and I haven't really recovered my stature. At the point of writing I was helping Alice realise one of the ideas from her cancelled degree show. It is a projected image of me drowning in a bucket. Make of that what you will. I'm so lazy today I'm just going to stick in some chunks of this text - its from a year ago and I am not sure if I have moved on much, this is fine.
thoughts on a literature review 24th Feb
I realized that my description of fixing the toilets at the adventure playground in the context of event had not hit home like the well-aimed practice oriented arrow I had hopefully launched. I also checked the fact that my close reading of Manning and Massumi early in the PhD process would not get me very far given the context that it was not enough to be interested in why other people are interested in something and I had to at least find a glimmer of my own interest. I honestly said that the idea of the assemblage was the thing that had held my attention. The reason I like the idea of the assemblage from Delueze and Guattari especially within the nomadic plateau is that it feels like life and it feels like art. The always more than simply putting things together- the beyond the sum of the parts of this togetherness. How the idea relates to arts practice and the encounter with the world of the material. It quite simply has helped me to think differently in a way that does not seem performative. Although you can stack up the theory – Assemblage is a concept that sits on the plane of philosophy established by D and G which is essentially after Oedipus so different to Lacan in that it does not foreground the essential ‘I’ or individual subjective. Although in no way is the idea strictly materialist it does hold some of the useful aspects of a new materialist approach that does not put the human subjective and perhaps body ( without organs) at the middle of everything. In many ways this feeling about the vibrant connectivity and togetherness of things that allows for at least the concept that there may be no territory can open up all sorts of ways to feel the world. These ways of feeling the world are probably- if I scrape off the layers of irony and doubt what I feel art can do or is about...
The idea I’m massaging then and the new issue that has come up within the field work and flown inevitably into other aspects of my work. The ideas behind loose parts play and sculpture although on the surface similar and I will describe as;
‘A free arrangements of different materials with many potentials for their own sake – the sake of the action rather than a specific pre determined outcome.’
This phrase could be applied to both things and could underpin both activities and produce near identical material outcomes yet there seems to be a critical disjuncture at an ideological level.
For me this revolves around the subjective, the flow of practice and the need for unnatural levels of investment in a thing that cannot be pinned down. The role of artist is often for me the idea of paying attention to the personal the identifiers. In its simplest form this could be a motif yet as this attention is layered into materials or images we pay attention to affects that are unmediated by the systems of language. We accept there is no lexicon or interpretation; we accept this as the limitation of the gestalt or form we work within – art in this sense is not a language it is affect.
The reason that Deleuze draws on Bergson is the pure connection between subjectivity and time. Bergson says that the subjective is time rather than existing through it. This concept is one of those reductions that I wonder if people actually pay attention to. It is a way marker in a movement towards a different understanding of the self, of identity and of an individuated ontology. There are the people who understand what this statement points towards and the people who just say well Doh. When I talk to most people about this, well the few people who are polite enough to pause I can feel the held back Doh – the “ that is just a statement of the obvious” yet at the back of my mind I have a feeling that I have done a lot of work to get to the point of understanding why Deleuze turns to Bergson to wrestle time back for living.
It is naïve yet more importantly pointless to think of the PhD as a set of relational assemblages with points of connection, tempting as it is to explore this as a rhizomatic set of relations I do not think that I can leap into this level of connectivity across territory within a single plane. To do this is not easy though at some point may be necessary yet I feel it would defuse the potency – make the specific general subsume everything within a singularity when the search at the moment is for difference held in the same place – Barad’s Agential Cut .
Alongside this pragmatic application of theory is the notion that Art with a capitol A sits upon a different plane. It does not nestle into D and G’s plane like one of their philosophical concepts and they really don’t want it to.
In What is Philosophy D and G say that the purpose of Philosophy is to establish concepts upon a plane of immanence. They suggest that only a very few philosophers have ever established a new plane Kant is one as is Nietche and of course themselves. They place science and art on different planes of understanding. Cleverly they say science has limits – the speed of light and absolute zero as two examples - a science that thinks faster than the speed of light will need a new plane of immanence – it will not emerge within the current plane. Their plane defies territory and boundaries it allows for everything that can be real and imagined to emerge within it and become a concept – its limits are not charted it is consistently unfolding within chaos – it resist chaos yet not at a division or a cut it is part of it and does not order chaos into anything it merely resists it.
The limits of art are not specified but like the other planes it also resists chaos. I think Art here is probably part of a validated cannon, Brecht, Kafka. Joyce, Fransis Bacon perhaps Godard, Proper Art. I am not sure that it is an art I recognize. Yet it is interesting as a proposition to place it within a different plane, perhaps the thing that is outside the plane is the point of difference that at least gives some sense of orientation.
In the conversation with Tim I tried to talk through how this idea presents a problem with the thinking about assemblage as residency. The art of the residency can be moved onto a separate plane of immanence and emerge differently. I can accept I am not Francis Bacon and the art that I produce does not transcend the assemblage, I am happy to an extent with this. Arts as everyday -culture as ordinary – give up on expertise or the notion of training yourself to see – artist as Shaman or savant sensitized to the field they choose to operate within, a little bit special.
However if I unpick my journey and my agency through the various research projects I work within and my resistance to the form of a PhD then an acceptance that I desire to sit upon a different plane to what is considered research is clear. The problems with Practice as Research as a mode of validating art within the academies becomes clear as it locates it upon the plane of research. Also as I tried to explain to Tim the moments I switch into a making art mode, driven by all the old desires to keep chaos at bay the more uncomfortable I feel. perhaps rather than a line of flight from the assemblage I’m trying to imagine I’m working on a different plane. Nobody will ever care but me and that is me as a subjective Eye yet the fact I care so much I’m sure that must be the point.
I enjoyed reading this again after a year of Covid I had forgotten I had written it - there are bits in it that stand up well - that have not been broken by Covid lock-down and the drift of the past year. I think this will be a good place to reread them as I go through this blog in a few months time - when it finishes and goes through a Mary Douglas transition from function to meaning
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