Back from Europe and the edge

The students in Venice made me cry -  I'm not sure why, it was a letting go of something we were never really allowed to have - us British say we are European but I'm not that sure that many of us who have lived lives on our island  genuinely feel it.  Venice was a pause for lots of reasons, it came on the end of writing my RD2,  its the last piece of scheduled Poly-Technic work with Kate and it was for 2 weeks.  Venice is  one of the most amazing cities in the world my spiritual home an old soul in an old city.  Its left me feeling a bit warn out to be honest, like the pause is leaking into my everyday life but then of course there is always other stuff going on.

I'm reading Gullion's Diffractive ethnography today and doing some writing.  I'm actually doing three types of writing.  I'm catching up on field notes'  I'm writing notes on the book I'm reading and I'm writing a blog post.  They are all very similar as they are personal and although this is public few people will read it.  I don't swear on the blog though I do swear in all my other texts (fuck).

The blog is a roughly weekly affair where I attempt to put a marker down on where I am. I do try to be clever probably for posterity and my archive it is very much about how I feel about things.  I also try and skim some of the deeper bits of my thought to have a shorthand that clarifies a few things.  Today I'm recognising a conflict between doing and thinking.   It feels like there isn't enough time in a life to get to wrapped up in one or the other and the trick isn't finding a balance.

At the moment I am in a doing phase or on the brink of a doing phase and its hanging a little heavy with me as it does feel like a balance - the draw of the text, the reading and the writing are a distraction from the doing.  The reading and the writing are an essential- vibrant matter - is not something that fits well with words but without words it would not be shaping my thoughts.  I'm also finding myself drawn to aesthetics and emotion and affect but know that these terms are very much  appropriated,  in different realms they mean different things the songs are not on the same hymn sheet

I'm not finding Diffractive ethnography very helpful at the moment it seems like a methods book about Qualt verses quant and the problems with positivism wrapped up in new materialism - its as if it is giving us as much as ethnography can cope with.  I'm enjoying writing field notes and saying I'm doing ethnography and reading a bit about it. I acknowledge its a construction and I know where I think it fits in terms of my relationship to the world but I'd like to have it as a useful tool to work with so that my doing is not just doing. Ethnography cannot elevate the doing into something else but it does make the doing different.  I'm having different here back from Derrida and using it just to mean different to what I've always done which is mainly is about doing.

When people encounter something new like art or ethnogrphy it has the potency of the newness to them, for them.  I've had many encounters in my life of love, of the imagination of pain and fear, we all have.  Every new encounter sits within this trajectory of previous encounters - it is a skill to be able to encounter something as new, to grasp it tightly and to change through and with it.

That is one of the problems with the mundane and the everyday and methodologies that are completely embedded, methodologies can work with difference they can shape the encounter between actors - sometimes methodologies need an interjection of newness to make them work for us to give us momentum.  Because people spend a lifetime in  research and can get lazy or as Whitehead would say in a groove methods and methodologies need renewal.  The thing that can sometimes be forgotten is what is old and tired for some is completely new for others and as we know since the end to history has already taken place no position is more progressive or advanced than any other.

In the playground and personally I probably need my newness of old school ethnography to give me epistemological distance in a very traditional way - A distance that just doing denies me.  In terms of ESRI for most people things have moved past this.  I'm pretending  my residency is at the playground but perhaps my real work is at ESRI.  I know this as I haven't got ethical consent so the boundaries are not set by systems.  So which will it be heavens or hells, truths or speculation, old school or new materialism - my ontologies are not flat they stick out at and angle. "Is that a flat ontology or are you not pleased to see me?"

Igloos and upcycling

I am back from Venice and today I installed two igloos that are being taken out of artic world at Weston park Museum at the playground.  After two months of working on the exhibition in Rotherham and writing my RD2 its one of the first times I've felt useful in this kind of way for a while.  By useful II mean handy but also doing something physical, making a change in the structure of the world - a change of space.  I didn't make them but along with others I'm instrumental in them getting here.

I keep telling people that Venice was like -walkabout - a songline and a travel away from the everyday of my life. I am pleased to be back and pleased my brain feels a little easier for the break but I'm also missing the intensity of thinking I managed in the middle of my RD2.  Some of that complexity has now become a short hand and I've relaised that the shorthand does not contain enough of the original.  I wonder what the walkabout means for me, if I will actually get somewhere when I come back to earth. At the moment I feel more like I have lost an important thread.  I read a lot of Dewey when I was away and I think this messed my thoughts up a little.   There is clearly something within art and experience that is very useful.  It links to Williams and culture as ordinary in that it prevents us creating categories of art or culture.  The thinking also stops us talking about art as process and art as product and these two aspects of art being set against each other. In Dewey art can only be experience and this is very useful as both process and product only exist as experience so they are not strictly speaking in opposition or in fact different.   Perhaps this is the obvious thread I bring back from my walkabout plus the dense  melancholy aesthetic massage that Venice inevitably gives me.

I set out with the newly found focus on the aesthetic and saw this as a line in all my work and came back feeling raw and exposed to the aesthetic world of feeling and seeing.  This connection is always to much and though I turn from it ironically it is always on the brink of consuming me, indulging me and taking me deeply into myself.  Its strange how I thought this was happening intellectually in the world of ideas and as Whitehead says the grooves we slip into but to be honest it has always been the aesthetic I hold at bay and am dragged relentlessly towards.

I need to focus on fieldwork for a while and be immersed in place and making in all its complexity  academic thought is just a massive distraction no wonder the field is so conflicted. 

I will write some field notes tomorrow about my work at the playground and meeting the architecture students .  They seemed a little lost I told them I hated CNC routers plywood and laser cutters and it was as if I had taken away all their toys. 

Fooling around with Form

My RD2 or R2D2 as I've been calling it is nearly ready to go in.  I am pleased with where I got, although I'm trying to have a much needed relaxation of my brain.  I think for the first time on the PhD project I've moved into a space between the Form of art and the Form of academic writing.  My RD2 doesn't know what it is and I like this as I am intending to move in this direction.

I have adopted a new way of writing that feels more like arts practise than when I have written before.  Rather than constructing a text from the bottom up I massaged all sorts of ideas together until I felt I was getting somewhere then produced a false confidence that this was where I wanted to be.  I then wrote in bursts of around 2000 words and gradually worked back into these chunks of text. I lost quite a bit in this cutting back and pruning to try and meet the criteria and guidelines of the RD2 requirements but I did maintain the essence of my idea and my writing style, the style I'm trying to mature. The process has taken about 6 weeks and has included a lot of revisiting notes and deep reflecting on what I have read.  This made the reading process feel worthwhile as at times in the year I hadn't really known where I was going.  The biggest thought is how the writing has helped the thinking move on and how the writing has become about making something new.  It holds the struggle of the year.

I am reading What is Philosophy,  D and G's last book together - I think the first chapter is about the void staring back at you- Johan Siebers introduced me to this idea and it gave me the eebee jeebies.  D and G talk a lot about making new concepts and explain what they mean by the concept - its a good book because it says a lot of what I tried to say in my RD2 - that philosophy is total and you can't cherry pick bits of it to fit into a social science paradigm without changing social science to become  its new image.  I think this is why I have got so stuck - the logos or logic of what lots of educational researchers seem to be doing struggles as they layer what gets referred to as theory which is really philosophy, the construction of new concepts onto social research rather than the world. 

Art is not a philosophy or a  concept in the true sense neither is it a method or a methodology and it is something that wriggles away from capture.  The RD2 feels like a moving back to art but not in a defensive way as if I have been threatened but more in a loving way as if my old friend has come to walk with me for a while, out of friendship rather than duty or loneliness. 





 

Question For Ted

Doing what it said on the tin

I'm still trying to write my RD2.  I want to write a front end as a list but I don't think it will go down well so I will do it here.  The process of trying to write has brought me to a set of conclusions most of which if unpicked are positive and lay some groundwork.

1. There is an aesthetic turn within social science research.  This is at a practical and theoretical level.

2. Aesthetic thinking is slippery and often gets conflated with other types of thinking- it nests with phenomenology yet also refutes it.

3. The coin has many sides but the two that really count are the idea that aesthetics exist externally to human experience (within the object sometimes called Kantian aesthetics) or that they are constructed by things outside it ( often human actors thoughts , networks or event).  One road leads to relativism the other awakens all types of gods and her functions. 

4. Artists are involved because they historically have the reputation of living closer to an aesthetic world as Ruskin says they learn to see what is really there. If we flip the coin they help construct all that can possibly be constructed.

5. ESRI is known for cutting edge social research that embraces the turn towards speculation and questions the value of any existing methods.

6.  The only real point in progressing this PhD is to be able to work from within the idea of what artists can bring to research and invest in the relations that construct this network.

7. Theory of this sort can sit next to practise yet when we work it through practise or as I suggest worldize it,  it is not  helpful to split the two. ( hence the pull of totalising ontologies- Dialectics - phenomenology new and old materialism the Event and the move towards flatness)

8. The systems at the university are not set up to enable the kind of artistic approaches to research that people are keen to explore.

9.  There is a lot of cherry picking of thoughts and ideas from different fields and an attempt to work with them out of context.  This can find low hanging fruit but becomes problematic when it turns to fundamentally different ontologies and world views - you can't just sit where you like.

10. I am doing real work and getting somewhere with a complex set of thoughts but it is fragile- the temptation to go through the motions is difficult as going through the motions in the past had a rational that I understood or felt in terms of a wider practice.  Going through the motions now has no point and more importantly would disenchant my world.

today I am mostly thinking theory

My head is hurting this morning.  I'm reading Harman's idiot guide to Object Oriented Ontologies - the book is very like Stephen Hawkins a brief history of time in that someone deeply embedded in a field writes an explanation for normal people.  It is still on the edge of what it is possible for me to understand yet clear enough for me to work out where and why I disagree with lots of the thinking.  It also in its reductive flight through a selected history of western philosophy reminds me of a lot of things and gives good insights into phenomenology and Actor Network Theory.

I don't want to review the book or go into the detail of OOO as I've not finished yet but I do want to say - nice diagrams- and it is good to see Heidegger making another comeback and actually get a reference that doesn't just remind us he was a Nazi sympathiser.

I met with Richard Steadman Jones yesterday and probably went on a bit - we probably both went on a bit in our own specific ways and it was probably good for both of us.  Richard said I seemed to be going a bit theory heavy. This surprised me as I wasn't thinking of the theory in itself.  I  think I am thinking of a way to navigate my RD 2 so I can write a PhD that does not feel banal to me - this is my secret fear.  The trick with theory is to have a take on it that allows you to think through the world in new ways and that is my quest to come up with something obscure and robust enough to ride the storm of necessary critque .

I tried to explain this to Richard by giving a potted history of the Post - qualt turn in social science. I am not sure if it was just a mumbled ramble as it slopped out of my mouth. It felt like among the big stories and new theories of everything there are small trajectories that are been enacted in the world of educational research and among with other things these threads of relations make sense of me being at Esri as a philosopher artists trying to write a PhD.  As Boudoir so clearly points out the glass in the window does not break because the stone hits it it breaks because glass is breakable.  Along with all sorts of other things that look like luck the fabric and thoughts of social science at its edges are flaky and breakable. I am not really a stone though more like a clod of soft mud, well shit I suppose so I may smear the windows of social science with brown streaks and that may be enough as it is cold in houses with no windows.

People in glass houses should not throw stones

For ages people thought that scientific method was a good way to understand the world and that the natural sciences and the study of society needed to adopt scientific method based on an enlightenment notion that the world could be known fully.  This is realist and materialist and positivist approaches but they are fundamentally based on the idea of a fully knowable world even if this is not called the real the true or the quantum world.  Anthropology trundles on in the background in the south pacific it doesn't fully buy into scientific method but cracks on with writing about culture and holding opinions deeply embed in enlightenment thinking. Post 68 but obviously before, the post structuralists break down the possibility of truly knowing anything and social research splits and expand and reconstructs.  Qualitative research builds a stronger profile and this is underpinned by the ideas that we cannot ever really understand and have true knowledge of the world of emotion of the social of the human and more than human. We need methods that give us archeologies of knowledge to reference Foucault.

Post- qualt or what sometimes gets called the new theory emerges from falling deeper into the trap of thinking that nothing is truly knowable it  responsed to and resists  post structuralism and its challenge to the idea of knowledge is only ever enacted as power.  My encounter with post-qualt at ESRI brings into play a plethora of fantastically dense ideas and philosophies.  They are alternative theory, a bit like alternative medicine the homeopathy or Rieka of the social sciences.  They have massive appeal to those of us who struggle with the dominance of scientific rational reductionist ways of encountering the world and the trail of thought carnage this can leave in moving feeling aesthetic bodies.

I tried to explain this to Tim while we were picking mushrooms he thinks actor network theory and OOO are potential wormholes that spiral forever.  I wondered about the term wormhole - in science its a theoretical connection between dimensions - I also thought of Felix down the rabbit hole which is of course a reference to Alice in Wonderland and in that moment of thinking I logged in my head a paragraph that is not banal about the theoretically possible wormhole that has never been seen beyond mathematics and Lewis Carols creation for Alice to enter a speculative dimension.  I thought a paragraph that could explore the two through ideas of speculative realism with a focus on function metaphorical and scientific could hold something interesting but its not really for now.

For now I wanted to try and put a marker down about why I'm not getting heavily into theory and it was Tim that came up with it as I was giving him my basic steps to Object Orientated Ontologies and it was this.  Firstly he asked me if I believed in magic? then he asked if I thought it was about a new enchantment.? I think I had been building to this point but Tim catalysed it in his questions and I saw that my PhD was not about theory in the broad sense of all the guff I had been reading but was about a re-enchantment of the world through aesthetic experience. and perhaps this 'is' what people are looking for and within this lies a kernel of hope.

I started my RD 2 and wrote this  -

‘People are constantly putting up an umbrella that shelters them and on the underside of which they draw a firmament and write their conventions and opinions. But poets, artists, make a slit in the umbrella, they tear open the firmament itself, to let in a bit of free and windy chaos and to frame in a sudden light a vision that appears through the rent— WP- D and G)203-204’

Working within a frame of residency as method requires a location of the individual subjective artists that takes account of philosophies that present flat ontologies in order to problematise the human as privileged actor within the social space.  In order to work within a more-than-human research field the re-enchantment of the world, its objects, subjects, spaces, feelings, thoughts and emotions need to activate and become visible through creative events that bring the potential of newness into the world.

he wrote yes but it needs an edit.

I wrote this:-

edit it !  - I’ve got to write 6000 words and I’ve only done 9 

I wanted to sends it as I’m nicking your idea of re-enchantment - I think that is perhaps what it is - an opening up of possibilities that science closes down and we look to art to hold it but all the artists are saying - that is to much to ask for us - you need to banish us Like Plato did the poets and we can go and be Hermits and be happy.

If ~I go down this avenue then I’m the person or one of them that is required to re- enchant and persuade people they need re- enchanting but art now refers to itself - its like the coalfields it has been mined out and what is left isn’t worth digging out - its just the pit props and the bits they left underground to stop the land subsiding.

I’m just going to write 6000 words and then start to edit - to hard to construct well as you go along - better to get it all down and then work it up -  Basically its jumping through a flaming hoop and not burning yourself.

mushrooms were nice - scoffed em all - the big ones sort of melted into worms over night XX

and now its clear that the process of doing the PhD in all its relations may need me to fall in love or recognise my love of the aesthetic world in all its sensuous affect and it is essential within the objects of artists to love the world and seek to know it. This is a task worth setting a mind to.  In the end all theory of any value leads to the felt beating heart of the living body in the world of relations.  The new theory is important but to return to Heidegger through the thoughts of OOO it only really becomes visible when it stops functioning as a tool. 

What is Philosophy

: people are constantly putting up an umbrella that shelters them and on the underside of which they draw a firmament and write their conventions and opinions. But poets, artists, make a slit in the umbrella, they tear open the firmament itself, to let in a bit of free and windy chaos and to frame in a sudden light a vision that appears through the rent—Wordsworth’s spring or Cézanne’s apple, the silhouettes of Macbeth or Ahab. Then come the crowd of imitators who repair the umbrella with something vaguely resembling the vision, and the crowd of commentators who patch over the rent with opinions: communication. Other artists are always needed to make other slits, to carry out necessary and perhaps ever-greater destructions, thereby restoring to their predecessors the incommunicable novelty that we could no longer see. This is to say that artists struggle less against chaos (that, in a certain manner, all their wishes summon forth) than against the “clichés” of opinion. (WP- D and G)203-204

I was starting to write an invoice and I found this quote in the wrong folder on my computer.  It came at a good point as I was thinking about my encounter with a rat and working out how it would slot itself into the world of research.  The rat is a slit in the umbrella a tear in the firmament.  The loss of this fragment is significant as it must be important and it popping up as I looked for a folder to copy an invoice is testament to my messy note keeping.  This makes me think about slippage and the points that are becoming interesting are these slippages.  Not as art but as moments that transcend the present - become a memory in the act of their becoming. There is a physicality and a reality and although we have some arty stuff in the quote the tear in the umbrella seems to go beyond art.

I have just ordered  What is Philosophy - I hope its not really hard biut it could be useful for my PhD - not a bedrock but a shifting sand to drive in the concrete foundations that will be washed away in the storm - never buy a house in a hole or build on unsure foundations.
Here are my fieldnots about the rat and a reminder and a tear.

I talked myself out of doing a den building competition or having a den building afternoon as a way of getting more kids actively involved as it felt like a workshop and I wasn’t really that interested in workshops.  I felt like I was relaxing into being at the playground without doing an all singing all dancing role and started fiddling with the 360 camera and wondering what it would be able to capture – its playing in the background as I write these field notes and its strange – I don’t know where it will go but I will talk it through with people and work it out – it feels strangely ethnographic and not invasive like police surveillance – perhaps this is because I’m carrying it about everywhere.  It definitely felt like I was hanging out at the playground and this is what I had planned to do but it also felt like I needed to be deprogrammed from trying to be useful.

This became more noticeable as the sinks in the kitchen got blocked.  Both sinks were full of washing up which is unusual as, even if the drain is blocked, water tends to leak out the top of the drain outside rather than sit in the sink.  I genuinely felt a small lift inside, a little flutter as I cleared the cupboards to strip down the waste pipe and find the fat burger.  A strange Lacanian primeval desire to be useful coupled with the unsettling feeling that I was just very deliberately hanging about like what my dad would call a loose part.  The playground has a collapsed drain so I got Sinbad to run the sinks in the kid’s toilets to check there wasn’t a big blockage further down.  I suppose if my brain had been working better I would of realized that it was unlikely that both sinks had got blocked simultaneously but experience teaches you that you come across unpredictable phenomena and double faults in plumbing.  I had once used back-pressure to clear a blockage in my friends Saskia’s shower system – the water ran bright blue for ten minutes afterwards with no practical or scientific explanation. 

Working backwards down the three and a quarter inch tubing I found the T joint where the pipes joined. It was complicated to get to them and I had to pull away protective covers.  Patrick emptied the sinks and I let it run onto the grass. I stuffed my fingers into the pipe to try and find the blockage.  Remembering the blue sludge and life’s unpredictability my fingers grasped what felt like a balloon, tough and rubbery I imagine children pushing them down the sink with a wooden spoon but as I loosened it from the congealed fat and its surface began to pull away I realized it was a rat’s tale. It was attached to a body that was very stuck.  I screamed in a non-gender=specific way and asked Patrick to bring me some gloves.  Not wanting to let go of the rat as like Schrödinger’s cat I was unsure if it was both alive and dead simultaneously.

Patrick seemed a bit irritated at first I thought it was because he didn’t realize what was happening – later he would admit that he didn’t want to get accidentally slapped in the face by a dead rat if it were to fly out all in one go.  Julius came over and Fran legged it saying she needed to get ready for her holiday.  The feeling of usefulness was beginning to fade as I began to gag in that horrible way when you want to be sick but have run out of puke.   I pulled really hard and wiggled and considered moshing the bastard up a bit with a screwdriver.

  

 I asked Patrick and Julius if they remembered the story of the Giant Turnip. I thought it was in Winnie the Poo where they all had to grab hold of each other to pull it out of the ground.  I think it may be a folk tale we all knew it from our various histories - it made me laugh although I was also a bit disgusted.  It was only a baby rat in the end, my Granddad hated rats and along with his good temperament I inherited a probably quite rational dislike for them – he used to say that they “Would be bad buggers if they were as big as donkeys.’   Sinks mended, water flowing, a slight feeling of satisfaction at doing something useful with an overwhelming inner disgust.  I washed my hands like Lady Macbeth and avoided eating food with my fingers.