After a funny week of angst I restarted Thursday writing day. River has handed his PhD in so the writing group isn't happening. This is sad but it never really picked up momentum and I'm not inclined to keep the stone rolling. It needs to gather moss. I went for a walk to Parkwood Springs as the day was glorious, on my return I've tried to watch Manning and Massumi on You Tube talking about Whitehead but after 7 minutes I switched off after 12 minutes I switched it off.
I did start my literature review again with a focus on research-creation. I read Manning Against Method chapter 4 of A Minor Gesture. She tricks you by starting normal and then going off the scale in terms of references and complicated rabbit holes of thought. I was really hoping it would make more sense this time around but by the middle I was very confused. It reads like it should be more like analytical philosophy in that it works towards or builds to as simple an explanation as is possible of a complicated issue but it just looses me in the middle, that's probably the point but I don't care enougth.
At about 2 I came up with this idea about research-creation and ethnographic field notes.
So the proposition is
Research creation affords the potential to write fiieldnotes from the speculative middle with no distance or withdrawal from the field and no transcendental aspiration - yet they still have to be field notes as a heuristic as something that becomes enfolded into the practice.
I liked this sentence because it pulled together my field notes and the idea of immanence in that I was not doing ethnography or trying to become an ethnographer. I was merely drawing on the writing of ethnographic field notes into the milieu of a research creation project. They emerged as boundary objects in the field, they were not performative or a representation of field notes. Yet because they came form the middle and emerged in the practice, not planned for or applied they were enfolded. As such they count as research creation and this concept freed them or at least changed their relationship to a tradition. The art making tipped them out of the groove as Whitehead would say.
If I was asked why am I doing field-notes and critiqued for turning to an ethnographic humanist tradition that necessarily bifurcates the known from the subjective 'I' that knows I am starting to formulate a response. I can scaffold this in relation to research creation and I can say I don't give a flying fuck what Denzin has to say about it.
When I was walking the dog I started to think about the actual location of my residency and its complex set of relations. I always secretly felt that my actual residency was within the university and within the idea of research and arts/artists position or location. The power of the university to separate itself from the world continues to fascinate me. This again is to an extent tackled by research-creation with its concern for making- thinking- doing, it can't just work with a fragment it is hungry for an expanse with no edges only folds.
So we come to the real work of the Phd and the only really consistent work I've done in terms of thinking and writing lives within this blog. It is here where I write the struggle and descend into madness and come back again only to end up in a stasis of frustration. it is here and only here where I do the writing that I can do, that I'm proud of and that works. It is here where I am able to talk about the actual residency that sits in the speculative middle between the becoming of the virtual and the actual in the only real that counts as anything in relation to the event of my PhD journey.