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.