Capture the Axiomatic and new windows

I had to look up axiomatic before writing this - the definition is - an obvious or unquestionable truth.  I think I knew this but when I was reading a Thousand Plateaus this morning I couldn't really make sense of how they were using the word.  They say it is not a metaphor or being used metaphorically,  I wonder if its not a word that works well in translation, perhaps its not quite right for what they are trying to say. It certainly does not seem to point to an self evident truth that is emerging from the text, or if it does I'm missing something.  A combination of having our windows done and exhausting myself digging and cutting and volunteering at the playground has meant that I have lost a bit of momentum in my morning reading and thinking hours.

I started off with the Nomad and the war machine and I think I took a lot from this that I felt I could work with although its all gone a bit fudgey now in my brain mess.  In the capture chapter the true nature of how capitalism is a mechanism of capture is- worried about, talking through territory we move away from the refrain and the assemblage and place capitalism as something else - perhaps not in a metaphysical sense but at the heart of its essential subjectifications the knots of self that are constituted only by capital, that cannot exist before it.   I think that this chapter more than others requires a carrying of what has gone before that brings us to this point.  Perhaps this is why we are introduced to the axiomatic - by this point a certain set of thoughts and feelings should be self evident. I am not sure I have got far enough, although I have got somewhere and to a certain extent I think I am becoming a Deleuzian;  perhaps as none of the texts or writing that comes after really seems to give you what you need they leave a gaping void in a construction of a worldview.  I said in my RD2 proposal that social science uses the concepts to retrofit modes of thinking that are unable to work with the new technologies of thought, pointless acts of tilting at windmills. When asked what I did in lock-down I can say I read a thousand plateaus from cover to cover and we had new windows put in the house.

Alongside paying attention to my Onto -epistemology I have been volunteering at the adventure playground.  As I am unable to conduct face to face research this work is not part of my PhD.  It's very interesting as the notion of territory is in some ways very straightforward. What is and isn't research is what is agreed within my ethical procedure and at this period my ethics and instruction from my research institute creates a clear line of territory, at least in relation to what can be considered research, which includes collecting data and evidence. I have also finished my arts council project which was concerned with the idea of assemblage and sculpture.  This presented another territory that was externally legitimized. For now I am officially working as volunteer though the process is very similar on the inside the external structures or mechanisms that help to build and hold the assemblage that enunciates a territory that can be traversed is structured differently - the inside subjective has to rise to the surface as there is no longer an external scaffold to structure parameters.

Physical work then and violence against male bodies, the violence and the self flagellation of work. I had thought and written about this as a search for redemption from  my collective unknown sin,  I looked for redemption in work - Work makes you free - the sign from the gates of Auschwitz.  I think now in this limbo land where the external lines of flight that take me out of the playground and position the work within an expanded field of an unfolding assemblage that I am aspiring to reach a state of grace. This lofty notion seems a little extreme as I am really just building a bit of decking with a shed on it however I realise that the closest I ever come to grace is in the sweaty awkward and violent moments of building something on uneven ground.  This is the Axiomatic of diffracting a reading of a thousand plateaus through the body to try and find some kind of freedom.

All I have to offer you is blood sweat and tears

I am onto page 475 of A Thousand Plateaus and I'm reading a bit about capture.  In some ways I have lost my way and the reading is a little performative.  For a while it felt like a giant version of Kerplunk where cogs were turning and things were falling into place - maybe that wasn't Kerplunk? that was the game where you pulled out the cocktail sticks and everything fell to pieces - I was thinking of Downfall - similar but much more structured.  All life can be compared to kids games from the 1970s.

I think I am going through a fuzzy phase.  I bought the New Scientist idiots guide to the nature of reality and it gave me very little material world to grasp onto.  It seems that in science as in philosophy the nature of the real is under constant de-terrotilisation.  The idea that we live in a giant simulation and that every moment that could possibly exist does exist in a constant and ever expanding multiverse and that counter to new materialist thinking human consciousness really does influence the nature of reality - it is not external to us at a quantum level  or a macro level.  Plus the fact that space and time really may not be what we imagine them to be even if this imaging is part of bringing them into whatever version of reality we want to accept as just about enough to keep us sane.   It seems like Alfred North Whiteheads speculations are aligning well with both the new Physics and the new philosophy if in fact either are new at all.  

 I have just been reading about the state and the town and over-coding and the alcoholic only ever been able to have the penultimate drink rather than the final drink.  In simple terms if there are any this concept brings us to a threshold - the edge of the assemblage before it becomes something else.  We get a long description of an exchange system of axes for seeds and the point where the exchange breaks down into something else. The alcoholic is better as it makes more sense for if it is a last drink then after this threshold you become something else -from functioning to none functioning, from alive to dead from alcoholic to recoverist.   I like this concept of the one before last.

I am like the alcoholic artist giving up everything that makes you an artist, the art object, the codes attempts at communication, the deep long term relationship to a tradition and the bastardizing through instrumentalism of all those traditions.  This is the denying art 3 times in the garden before the cock crows.  The dissolving of the subjective position into an over expanded field.  The denial of gallery or critical discourse of other artists.   The taking on the mantle of researcher, of ethnographer, of PhD student, of community worker of play worker, of activist, of avatar.  This is a liturgy of deterrotilsation  of assaults and over-coding.  The point is to come to a threshold so that a territory is visible; to come to the brink of something different, the last glass of Rum before death or oblivion and then to make sure that what is left is not located in the false notion of an independent internalized subjective self but is laid bare and opened up, a body without organs with its Back to the machinic machine its life in proximity to the void, two holes for eyes and a chasm of a mouth.

And then a re-coding within a written text, a writing of a new territory that is supposed to make sense of things.  My future self already looking back on this writing in the thickness of the now can see a rights of passage and a getting to the end of the book - the last book or the penultimate book.  Was it lock down or was it a mini episode? what was I up to?  thinking when I got obsessed with the sweat from my back making the face of a bull on the kitchen floor.  The artist asserting a territory that is unassailable or the threshold of something else. The last or the penultimate Bull print?

The Refrain

I have finished the Refrain Plateau this morning.  I worked hard on it but got slightly lost in the middle.  It is very hard to write about as it weaves between music, repetition, painting  and territory.  I am not sure if it is my frame of mind or the slightly masochistic dogma I have imposed on myself but it felt this morning like the words were not really printed on the page in the right order - they felt like someone had eaten a bag of magnetic poetry letters and then puked them onto the pages.

This didn't really put me in a bad mood but it did make me question the usefulness of my  thousand Plateaus challenge.  I literally can't write a single paragraph about what I can take from the idea of the refrain after struggling for about 6 hours with it.   The other problem is when I read the writing of others that is after Deleuze or some of the guides to a thousand Plateaus  I often find myself disagreeing with what they say.  So even after admitting I don't really understand any of it I can still disagree with the people who clearly are seen to understand it pretty well.

I had a fairly good supervision last week , I need to start writing and I think it probably needs to start to be around territory secrets and the opaque.  That is perhaps 3 chapters.  I also feel like I could do with a few days off thinking.  It will be good to finish the book - I have about 100 pages left and then take a breath. It is so strange to spend so much time not feeling you are getting very far, I am waiting for the great leap forward.

My Monday blog writing is hard today its taken until 2 to sit down and wrench some words out, this isn't really like me so I'm going to leave it here and cut the grass and the hedges as they look a mess.

Taking note

Of course the picture is not accidental  the hammer is placed, the break in the wood I had just made is positioned so it lines up with the edge of the bench.   The newer wood on the right hand side is not placed - it is accidental but I like it creeping into shot - as with my ripped work jeans.  The rhetoric of this image is constructed - it is one of about twenty I took with this blog post in mind.  An image and some writing, an image and some writing - I've been blogging since 2005,   it is my legacy to myself as nobody else ever reads it.

I wanted to just make a note of how in the becoming plateau D and G write about 15 pages about secrets - secret societies but also the nature of secrets.  This chapter is very long it has taken about 8 days and  I worry a bit about the becoming-woman section.  There are some origins of the post-human thinking that may emerge from this writing.  The idea that the white European man is never a becoming as he is molar fixed and finished and stands with Jesus at the center of everything to become anything at all he needs to become- woman.  It is a difficult chapter and dances around a lot - exploring music and introducing the refrain walking us through Henry James who is consistently becoming woman.  It again has the trap sentences the apology for saying one word when they mean another 20 pages later,   just to remind you to stay awake.

So there are no notes to take but a sense of synergy in the fact I talk about art and arts practice as a secret plan.  I explain this secret to Abi and then regret it.  I explain to Kate that my residency is actually within ESRI she talks of Russian dolls - I think I need a secret plan within this secret plan that is opaque - a becoming plan - a process plan a flow from the middle.

It would be nice to take the idea of the opaque from Glissant and the secret fro D and G and have these two threads as the theory of my PhD - I think this would be enough and it would certainly sound cool when I have to speak to academics about it.

Whats your PhD about Steve?

"I am working through the notion of the secret drawing on D and G by way of the Body without organs to explore the opacity of the subjective within artistic residency.  The residency that only becomes within the subjective of time  in opposition to a point of location.  I am thinking with Glissant about opacity within fields of practice and the molecular nature of nomadic  moment within   smooth space. "

The images rhetoric is louder when it remain opaque.

Week 12 of lockdown

I'm slightly stir crazy at the moment.  It feels like my attempts at self structuring some kind of structure are beginning to fray at the edges.  I keep wondering if I should give myself a week off but really want to finish A Thousand Plateaus before I try and switch off.  I've become a bit saturated in it and started reading passages again without much comprehension.  I also keep calling it A Thousand Platters and imagining it as a buffet.  This is more in a dream-time than a real time.  It feels like Deleuze keeps writing a stream of un/consciousness and then Guattari keeps calling the things he writes by different names; like Donald Trump trying to mask one terrible story by releasing or causing a bigger story.  Things like the abstract machine, the plane of consistency, and the body without organs are meticulously explained and differentiated only to be conflated as the same thing or part of the same thing later in the chapter or in a different chapter.  The book turns consistency on its head and I suppose this is its point.  It's also a bit like reading Philip K Dick novels where everything is already constituted as a thing from the start - so ideas are mentioned without any explanation until much much later in the book; you fall into concepts and trip over them.  It really is a journey through form and content but some days I just struggle to pick it up and the 10-15 pages I seem to manage is probably enough for a day's work.

The answers to these feelings are like dealing with a mild depression instead of trying to tackle it head-on; the best way forward is to just ignore it or deny it until it goes away.  These are not normal times and although something will return from before, it will not, nor should it be, normality.  So I will struggle on and not take notes and try to write and also think about been/bean/being a real artist on the project and the idea of keeping things opaque and the secret plan - I have the start of something that will emerge into a PhD at some point. But not for a while, I fear.

On my weekly trip to Marks and Spencers to buy chocolate eclairs, I bought a New Scientist special edition about the nature of reality.

I think I was having an onto-auto-epistemological crisis and thought some clear scientific facts would ground me back into my original faith.  The Karen Barad reading had not really done this for me as I was always thinking that the forces had not been unified.  Einstein's general relativity and quantum mechanics had not been joined in a Euclidean or any other circle.  In a section about the nature of mathematics and the possibility that the most basic unit of reality could be mathematical we are treated to a diagram showing sets of empty bags as an explanation that something could come from nothing.  It felt like Jesuits arguing about how many angels can fit on the end of a pin.  All I could think was that the bags were filled with bags rather than being empty bags.  I have a box under the alcove in the kitchen where I keep my supermarket re-usable bags - it is a box full of bags not a box full of the nothing within the empty bags.  Scientists striving to describe a reality which is beyond human perception, a physical universe without God, nature or the sublime feels like a search to collect empty bags just as much as philosophy's quest to find concepts to explain what emerges within a life. There is little comfort in the empty bag of science, but the chocolate eclairs were really nice.

We make the road by walking it

I wanted to draw the type of maps you would give to someone when you were decribing how to get to a local country pub, a map that was only useful before GPS.  This map is from the writing in the home and the street project- looking back I think this is where I cut my teeth as an artist/researcher.  Richard was a good teacher,  he knows how to riff off ideas and walk with a flow.

Monday mornings are coming around faster and faster.  I've just read my last post - I enjoyed its manic energy and wondered if I was actually alright.  I think I was going a bit deleuzonal last week my back against the wall of the abstract machine the immersion in the writing of Glissant and the Deleuze were perhaps to much.

A weekend sort of 'off' and the government giving me another 3 grand and chatting to Kate and Becci have brought me back to earth a bit.  I've also enjoyed a couple of email exchanges with Sarah Truman who I think is very clever.  I think reading a thousand Plateaus is like Conrad's journey into the Heart of Darkness to find colonel Kurtze or Marlon Brando. The point is to loose your mind along the way.  I'm also loosing a bit of momentum with it at the moment and have for the first time dropped some of my attention today.  I'm reading about the molecular and the molar and its just one step into this-being-that but different and the-same-as-that- but different at the same time - it has done my head in as the kids would say.

I went to the allotments to feed the chickens with Tim yesterday.   In the greenhouse he asked me to explain the Body without Organs, then we talked about Shamans and his sisters funeral and finding a bronze age flint flake in the soil from the grave.  I explained Karen Barads meeting the universe halfway and we both decided that although we are hard wired to find a flow of meaning in things for the true Shaman this is not linguistic - it is a flow that does not require a signifier or a signified. The Shamanic journey is never circular. We gave the chickens noodles and stole their eggs.  It was good to see Tim as he made me feel less mad partly because he is clearly  more unhinged than me and partly because he is probably the only sane person I know.  Tim says its like the dog that only barks at you when he is sure you are not aware of him - a dog  chained to his vomit by habit.

Glissant and Deleuze are shadows

"She ended up knowing so much that she could no longer interpret anything . There are no longer shadows to help her see more clearly, only glare. ( Henry James in Delueze and Guattari)

I feel like I am coming to the end of something. I am a becoming chrysalis, not a butterfly but the genetic soup that  can still twitch the cocoon on the outside,  like the flex of a liquid muscle. Reading Glissant and Delueze and Guattari on a morning and flopping around in the afternoon, writing fragments - six sentences at a time, like getting blood out of a stone.  Playing games of online poker with mental excuses running through my mind like the telecast of a news presenter. The weeks are all rolling together, the grass needs cutting, something different needs to happen.

The biggest thoughts of the week-

What it is for something to be opaque,

Why does Deleuze think it  so important to prick the life of the world with a pointed drill.

How smooth and striated space function to hold back chaos.  ( the thinking of them together and holding this)

How the encounter with art; when it is new (for the academic with plexi glass and colored oils  or ink and white paper) is something different to those of us who spend a life submerged in the flow of it, for good or bad.

I thought again of intermediality,  Fluxus raises its ugly head  working with unfixed forms or forms that are matter out of place in contexts like research or school.

The art world is striated space - culture is capitol and relative there is base and superstructure.

Glissant writes of the opaque and Deleuze and Guattarri write of facialisation.  They say to become a body without organs is dangerous and we should move gently into the valley.  They tell us the tool needed is a file not a hammer but ask us to stitch up all our holes, our mouths and anuses and cut new ones, the cutting is extreme the Body without Organs is a set of Punctions and ruptures.

Artaud coins the phrase but he is mad - he owns a walking stick that belongs to st Patrick to Jesus and the Devil and goes to Ireland to Galway to return  it to all three - this detour was a reminder of the stories that carry us away - I lost my great grandads walking stick because I had two many I was supposed to be looking after it as it connected to his hand as an extension of his body perhaps the lost walking stick of my grandad is a body without organs? I have no nowhere to return it to that is now and here.

I 'm lost in music caught in a trap there is no turning back.  Vaguely as I read on and find my organs receding   I am wondering if I am less afraid of dieing as I am dismantled in my oneness. I  hope this is the point of the effort, to be less frightened of my own death would be a result in terms of the difficulty of the journey.

I'm also working through an idea that the reason I couldn't make any work in my workshop was that it is separate from the world I work in - removed from the actual sites of practice, it is not a bad thing but currently makes no sense or is a (new)sense the term I'm coining along with other words I'm coining.

After word - The idea of performing artist is on my mind Judith Butler says that you perform who you are within the subjectivity of time rather than been an artists you are being been an artist  (or not).   So I'm performing been an artist by making art and referencing art - I'm turning an inflatable aubergine into a bean.  I am referencing a piece of work called the negative meaning wears the trousers - I am been both silly and clever I am bean a bean and performing being been an artist at the same time, it is and is not my masterpiece. It is one of the silliest things I have bothered investing my time in- it is how I feel - the work is too clever for its own good and too silly to be taken seriously.  Why is language full of homophones  if its intention is to make sense and not a (new)sense of itself.