I guess it feels a lot like christmas

 Stuff comes from stuff.  I think this is my favorite statement from the polytechnic manifesto. I wonder if its almost a concept. It is banal as a statement but more than most slogans its animated when it is applied.  I often hear myself saying it inside my head when something emerges from something else.  I have it spinning around like an ear worm, a catchy Christmas tune when I'm feeling unproductive or blocked.  It is the best piece of advice you can offer an artist who is struggling to come up with an idea to make new work - do something and stuff will come from it.

Writing is different but the same.  In writing we create texts and new texts can emerge from getting stuck in. Yet writing reproduces it makes representation.  Stuff like the event or the object can be expanded as a concept to include just about everything in the world. As a reluctant  materialist I recognize that this is probably all there is.  Stuff then like other words that aspire to represent the singularity of everything become of little use as a category.  It would be simpler to just say 'everything' and if anyone suggests anything else to answer - 'yes that as well.'  The simple use of language requires words and sentences to describe something as opposed to something else whether in difference or in similarity.

The stuff that comes from making something like a work of art or in my case a tree house or pirate ship sediments into the world and becomes a feature an edifice.  The stuff that comes from writing, at least for me always seems more fleeting.  I have just read Fridays blog and although I liked what I wrote and still feel it carries some weight there is a lack of momentum in the idea.  It is stuck rather than fecund.

If this idea had somehow become part of practice then the stuff of it would be bubbling away and creating so much stuff and  so many thoughts and trajectories that I would quickly and gloriously lose my way in it.  There would be no need to think or log where something came from, no need to return to something to make sense of it or wonder what I was doing at the time. All there should be is flow, nothing else is needed, all references are superficial.

writing is not like that, stuff does come from writing. I think it is more writing rather than more stuff.

black finger nails

 My black nail is growing out - it marks PhD slow time.  I have worked on my literature review for the best part of 5 days now.  I am up to nearly 10,000 words and it feels like it needs splitting into two chapters, like a dividing single cell organism an agentile cut.

 I have threaded through some of my own thoughts and my own experience.  These bits feel edgy, there is an anger in  them, but also a confidence that was missing before.  I have proposed that to work with the philosophy of Deleuze and Guattari  it is necessary to at least aspire to come up with new concepts.  The concept for them belongs to philosophy an element of research-creation belongs to philosophy so concepts are important.   Therefore I propose in ignorance and sublime bliss that the best way to put any of these thoughts to work is to try and come up with new concepts.  These emerge from the situated event of research upon a plane of pure immanence or consistency whichever concept fits best as a platform or ground. 

I like this step in thought as it is serious but slightly ironic and after a week of struggling to work out why all the social science writing that uses D and G is a bit crap I think I have worked it out.  The point is to hit the ground running and continue the job of back filling with concepts to prop up the castles in the sky.  The job is not to apply theory or to lay it onto the world , the job is about opening the next franchise of concepts to keep the balls in the air.  I'm sure other people know this and try this but lots of people also try to live in the edifice rather than doing the work to keep it propped up.

This takes us to the concept of a raveling.  It is built as assemblage on the same plane but by thinking of raveling the concept of assemblage can flow into a project and think something differently, shed a little baggage.  This may be a small thing like building a platform with a tree in it that the kids have started calling the tree house.  It could even be as small as lining rusty nails up on a bench, catching a rat and fixing an asbestos flush tank.  I'm drawn to raveling as it holds its opposite the more frequently used unraveling.  This happens to all of us at points in our lives we begin to unravel. 

This idea of developing a new concept needs to be given some kind of structure and context but today at least I think that my writing and thinking has taken me somewhere. Better to spend some time coming up with some creative if crap new concepts to help move thought forward than to regurgitate the ideas of others and chain ourselves to a big pile of sick.  

 

 

 

Synonyms & Near Synonyms for raveling

• disentangling,
• unraveling,
• unsnarling,
• untangling,
• unwinding

• unbraiding,
• unlacing

• loosening,
• loosing

• unbinding,
• undoing,
• unfastening,
• unlashing,
• untying
• (or untieing)

Antonyms & Near Antonyms for raveling

• binding,
• fastening,
• knotting,
• lashing,
• tying
• (or tieing)

• braiding,
• interlacing,
• interweaving,
• lacing,
• winding

• entangling,
• snarling,
• tangling

feeling and looking guilty

 

It was supposed to be a writing day. I was going to start to write something about residency.  It started off quite well, I did some reading and I filled in my RD9 which is an online form that records my supervision meeting. In the form I said I was about to start writing about residency.  Then I went for a walk with the dog.  When I came back I chopped some logs with my new axe and returned to digging up the tree stump in our new garden. If I was writing in mental jumps which I have begun to enjoy I would now shout "Shane come back - come back Shane"  I would expect everyone to know that the removal of a tree stump figures centrally in the Alan Ladd cowboy Shane. On many levels I think it is rude not to know this indeed I waited until lunch when my muscles would be warm and ready before hefting my axe.  How can I write for people who don't know about the tree stump scene in Shane,. If they haven't been infected by it ?  Perhaps this is why I couldn't write about residency.  

 

'Sir I was unable to complete the assignment when I realized that only me my brother and a mate I grew with with in Selby would have a clue what I am talking about - come back Shane come back.' We all know that the film is really about getting that stubborn stump out of the ground. 

So at five I cannot start to write a new Phd chunk and my booster vaccine in combination with stump and rubble removal have combined to make me feel a little woosey.  I did have a thought though and this blog has evolved into a place to log thoughts, it is like Bentos sketchbook something that can become anything once it's lost. 

I read an interesting paper about residency by Karen Wall and Michel Lithgow.  They talk and define what they identify as embedded residencies and they frame it in some Deleuzian concepts.  I think they brought to text what I am thinking. The idea of nomadic thought and smooth and striated space and lines of flight basically residency as assemblage.  As I said in the blog before I can't see in simple terms a residency as anything else but an assemblage of parts that become an event.  Their writing was actually rather good which may be another reason why I had to go and attack my tree stump with my new axe.  This was not in any way because I felt they had done what I was aiming to do better. It was more that in attempting to write this position well they proved how impossible it is to lay these thoughts onto something like the actual assemblage of a residency with words on paper and it not really saying anything, it always misses the point.

There are some simple errors in language - I am not keen on the idea of suggesting residencies are embedded as although this suggests deep connections it does also produce two different things one within the other with potential edges.  It is useful when opposed to a residency that is superficial but not at all useful if we are to consider a residency as an assemblage or event, at the very least present it as singular and flat.   This brings us back to removing the tree-stump which is stuck in the middle of our garden and half way through the film Shane.  The tree-stump is embedded in  the lawn and it can be cut out.  The micillium of the Oyster mushrooms currently fruiting is now integral to the wood itself.  We could say that it has embedded itself into the rotting wood but the reality is it has become one with the wood and changed it into something else, rotting but still useful. 

The Deleuzian view of the artists residency in the paper is I think what Beth St Pierre would call the rush to application.  It takes some concepts and applies them to the artists residency and this gets us to thiunk about things in a certain way. However that way is still a thinking of things in parts with edges.  Art must holds its nomadic status and move through strited space and generate productive friction we are back to the grit in the oyster but this is not where I am.  At least not today.  All this said the problem is that to write in a languge of description about how concepts work within projects is the problem.  The problem is not to attempt to do this better rather its about attempting to do something different. 

The residency then operate as rhizome and assemblage and it can only enunciate itself within the singular event. The writing or diagramming  needs to be from the middle.  That's why I popped out to attack my immovable tree-stump.  I don't really know how to write from the inside of something, not even my own skin. 

Recuring themes- the eternal return

 I have always been really interested in walls and windows that have been bricked up or blocked.  It is a recurring theme in my work and I collect them with my eyes in my daily life.  I always stop and carefully think about the reasons for permanently blocking an opening, is it the window tax, the view, security?  I like how they look and this is usually enough. I know in a symbolic way they mean something, there is a sadness about most of them. This symbolism is not what I'm interested in, the things I like about blocked up windows sits behind the symbolism. 

I gave a lecture in Bristol to some MA students and I said I was interested in meaning but meaning that sits behind spoken or text  based language.  One of the students asked me for an example of this so I gave him the finger.  I was in some ways referencing Wittgenstein's later work around private language but also pointing out that I couldn't really talk or write about meaning that was beyond spoken or written language  without creating a circular paradox. I think the students liked my arrogance but also were frustrated I couldn't be of more use to them. The picture above says something that I could never put into language, it represents a moment and a space and a noticing.  It isn't something that requires autonomy or a transformation into something else but for me at least it does act as a reminder of how a practice flows in and out of a life.  If I was still reading Whitehead it would be a prehension but I've forgotten what this means in all its complexities. 

I am about to start to read about artists residencies. I have done a little of this but it was never an avenue of research that held me for long.  In writing my literature review I am trying as much as possible to adopt the writing style of analytical philosophy. I'm not really sure what this is but I will define it here as getting as close in language to explaining an idea as is possible and to write for an audience who may not have a grounding in any of the ideas or philosophies I am trying to write about and with. I have just finished reading a book called Radical Hope by Jonathan Lear, this book is written in this way. It tells stories and builds arguments and keeps bringing you back to the central flow of an idea. This is the type of writing I aspire to for my first chapter although through necessity it will require a smaller area of focus.

The sky was red this morning and a storm is coming, for the third day I got soaking wet walking the dog. The arthritis in my little fingers reminded me of how our bodies don't ignore the seasons even if we try our best to push on as normal. I met Tim at the top path just by the grave of Disney Tummy, Tim represent the Jungian wise man of this blog. He is constructed here in my minds eye from the  best bits of himself. The sounding board of the cemetery where only Tim and the dead seem to pay attention to my mumbling.    Today I made the proposition  of artists residency as assemblage.  This is to take from Delueze/Guattari the concept of agencement and think residency through it.  Like our walk the conversation went around in a large circle skirting the periphery and the main issue which is of course death.  My question to Tim put as simply as I can is.- If we conceive as the artists in residence as a manifestation or rather a becoming of a more than human assemblage that pays attention to its singular nature what the fuck difference does it make?

As it stands an artist in residence is an assemblage of artist, place, practice, traditions, materials, art works, people, time, process, politics, the law, religion, history, language and and and.  The residency becomes, there is an enunciation across time and space, something comes to matter.  This is what a residency 'is' and although some of these words are not words I would of previously used I would have felt the meaning behind them and lived them as ethos, tradition and position while in residence.  I think most artists would look at this recipe of reduced parts and recognise the singularity of a residency and all the expectations that go with this. My question to Tim was not about seeing the existing state of things as an assemblage, putting a name to something that was already there or seeing something in a new way. My question was about the potentials of a residency becoming assemblage within a new conceptual framework.  Initially I thought this was about de-materializing the art object and reorientation to pure process referencing John Dewey and Lucy Lipard yet this feels like retrofitting the abstract machine of capture that constituted the idea of residency before it became a body without organs. The proposition for residency held as assemblage where the ideas, practice and individual romanticized vision of the artists sublimate is the place I think residency as assemblage could pass through. Deleuze liked Lewis Carol as he felt the writing took you through and across surfaces, down rabbit holes inside skins at different scales, he liked Artaud because of his body without organs and his drug fueled chaotic journeys.  Tim had to go home to try and catch up with an assemblage of paperwork and forgotten jobs that really needed doing. We avoided some rabbit holes and I think agreed that most people live life as assemblages and singularities without questioning or refuting this position. So we were both unclear what fucking difference thinking through Deleuzian assemblage made to anything outside a very narrow world of the academy.

The long day closes

 "Perhaps in new empirical work, we might think concept as method and begin with concepts like assemblage and haecceity in the middle of the mixture of words and things, in the folding of the outside that makes the new, the new we will create" (Beth St Pierre)

I woke up with good intentions. I had not enjoyed yesterday because I felt too distant from the text I was writing. I was adding references ,I had a strong feeling that the words missed the point.  I got all my blood tests back this morning and they were in a folder that said- no further action. My lethargy must be a touch of the long Covid or the tail end of the house move taking its toll.

I read this- Deleuze and Guattari’s language for new empirical inquiry by Elizabeth Adams St. Pierre this morning. As soon as I started reading it I remembered I had read it before, in fact I can trace back some of my thinking to listening to Beth on a webcast and reading this article.  She basically says what I'm trying to say in my literature review put simply -you can't retrofit old humanist social  science into post philosophies, they both emerge from distinct ontological positions that do not align.   She also explains that the concepts held within the work of Deleuze and Guatari are all interdependent and do not work as monads they are fragile and fleeting interactions, not singular reducible bodies. 

The paper gets difficult in the middle when it starts to work through written language and takes us on a complex little trip.  As D and G state in the opening chapter of What is Philosophy there is no apologies for writing something complicated as the issues and ideas at hand are complicated.  I have decided that reading this paper then going out for lunch today was a good thing. I think this because I believe I have followed Beth's advice and my literature review is an attempts to share this process.  Of course it is difficult as the thing I'm trying to do is difficult.

In staying with the trouble as Donna Haraway would say I am at all points resisting the easy option. Partly as I have no real idea what the easy option is. Partly to quote Massumi after Deleuze I can only have my penultimate work of arts practice, not a final work because at the end of the final work I would stop actually being an artist. This thought is illustrated  by a story about an alcoholic never been able to have a final drink as at the moment they finish their final drink they are no longer an alcoholic.  This transition from been an artist to been something else is problematic. My scholar/artist identity is more fragile as it is for very good reasons more exposed. 

What Beth says in her article is that D and G offer us a way to move away from the humanist idea of the conscious individual subject at the center of things.  Other ontologies do this, Derrida and Foucault do this with a focus on the nature of language D and G do it through constructing a flowing assemblage of concepts that collectively de-center ideas of life and self, they literally enunciate a new order of things.   I think the sad truth is to really enter into their space of thought you need to be already on the road to Damascus, in need of an epiphany, only interested in taking the blue pill, or is it the pink pill.   You read and then there is a rights of passage from one side to the other. As Wittgenstied says you have to pull the old ways of thinking up from the root, discard the clothes of the old ways of thinking so they don't make any sense anymore. 

Beths article chastises social science for it's inability to shed the old ways of thinking, to transcend the hold of scientific method and humanistic ontologies.  It is at this point where I remind myself that I am not a social scientist and that my rites of passage in reading a Thousand Plateaus is essentially very different. The problem at the heart of the conflicting ontologies of art and social science is the same and it returns to the same theme I started with 3 years ago, arts practice is incredibly individualistic - the personal vision the artists way, the whole history of aesthetics and value yet these issues are manifested empirically in completely different ways.  This is the struggle with been as Kate calls me matter out of place. I have gone on the essential the journey that is necessary to enter into the world of DeleuzeGuattarian concepts, by hook or by crook I have made the leap, yet my journey starts off and ends up in a very different place to a social scientists journey, I am kicking against a different wall. 

This is my literature review, the fist 10,000 words that will be followed by a series of stories that will if read with care open some of this journey to experience.   I am hoping that anybody will be able to read the next 70,000 and get somewhere the first 10 will make it into a PhD the rest will be a journey where the reader will have to decide where they want to go.

Writing Day

 

I have had two weeks off, it was an accidental break brought on by moving house and a recognition I had a post Covid brain fog.  I would not say I have been unwell but I haven't felt myself and I feel better for giving it a name and not using it as an excuse.  We have just been away for a few days to Northumberland and sold our old house and I have sat down today with a clear dairy until Christmas opened my literature review document and made a start.  I know I am more serious when I actually start to put references in rather than just writing the word (reference) in brackets for filling in at some future point. 

I have a supervision booked in for next week so feel I should send this work off to Laura and Kate by the end of today.  I know it will not be ready but it will be something.  I think that this blog holds something really important in  terms of my journey of the last 3 years and I wonder if it is here where I need to start to pull something together.  I have managed to maintain it and although at points it feels like a moan fest it is by far the best writing and thinking I've done.  I am when I read it back both surprised and relieved that it holds so many thoughts and ideas. 

The literature review I'm reworking now however is not very good. Its actually surprisinly bad which is a little depressing.  At the final meeting of our Odd project I suggested we did some work at the intersection between writing, thinking, doing which is very research-creation .  I have actually explored this area reasonably well and I am sure that there is a gap.  There is a lot of art theory and a lot of critical discourse and a lot of curator speak, faux philosophy in writing about art.  There is a gap however where practice, my type of arts practice comes to writing.  As I said on a blog many many moons ago writing is not my first language and visual art has its own vocabulary that doesn't directly translate.  This means that when art comes to written texts we have to practice the art of looking sideways and write in the periphery, texts can illuminate something but only at the edges.  

I am going to walk the dog and then do a few hours more work.  The dead bird on the beach is sad and sublime, this is the feeling for the day.