Reading Diary
Ronell. Avital On writing a dissertation. 2013 European Graduate School Lecture https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zanetT7b5Ko
My thoughts as generated by watching this video:
Much of what Avital Ronell has to say about writing in general and writing a dissertation in particular I have heard before, but it is always good to hear again. The self discipline that writing - any creative practice - requires is the same. Unless you get your butt in the studio, sit down with whatever tools you use to write, pick up the brush, the camera, the journal that you sketch out your thoughts in, you will get nowhere. There is the saying “you can’t win if you don’t play the game” but, I ask, how can you play the game if nobody has told you the rules? The first rule appears to be: commit yourself to it, start it, do it, and go from there. Something will happen.
Although the primary focus of my practice is making paintings, and usually I’d rather make painting than make writings, I do write, too. Just as I am at times driven to say something in paint I am also driven to say something - usually related to what I am or have been saying in paint - in words. Getting the words onto the screen - I tend to write more on a computer rather than long hand but still occasionally grab pen and paper to leave my scratchings on the page - tends to not be the problem for me. I can blather on and on and on … as you can tell if you’ve had the (mis)fortune of reading this or other postings on my Research website. In fact, I find in typing words they flow much more fluidly than if I were looking at another person across the table and trying to speak them.
What I find tedious is the editing process.
Well, I find it tedious while I am doing it, but then I fall into it and suddenly cutting words, reformulating sentences, eliminating the superfluous ramblings becomes almost enjoyable. In terms of writing the dissertation I anticipate that I will spend the better part of 12 months just editing and I am planning for this. Like Rontell I don’t like to be pressured by the deadline, I tend to generate enough pressure on my own by giving myself a deadline in advance of ‘the deadline’. I know this about myself and I know I need to find a way to balance for the sake of my health, physical and mental, and for the sake of those with whom I interact (live) on a regular (daily) basis.
My greatest concern with writing the dissertation is, and has been all along, the radical disjuncture between the ways I tend to write and ‘academic’ writing in general. It is not that I feel I am not up to the task, it is just I have so rarely encountered this type of writing that I personally enjoyed reading. I wouldn’t let a work of art I make out of my studio that I personally would not find some pleasure in looking at again and again so why would I write something that I wouldn’t find pleasure in reading even once? In writing the dissertation it is not that I want to do something new or different - I agree with Rontell if one tries to do something that has never been done before it would end up completely detached from the discourse and incomprehensible - rather I my aim is to write something that is clearly integrated into my practice-led research which for me means my voice is maintained in the dissertation as it is in the paintings.
Finally, a word to Rontell’s schizophrenic (her term, not mine) approach to writing. I would not call it ‘schizophrenic’ to dissociate oneself in the way she suggests, to create different roles for the various tasks that are required of the writer to write. In fact, I would call it using personas as tools in one’s creative practice!
Gibbs, Anna (2015): Writing as Method: Attunement, Resonance, and rhythm. In: Affective Methodologies. Developing Cultural research strategies for the Study of Affect. Eds. Britta Timm Knudsen and Carsten Stage. Palgrave Macmillan 2015, 222-236.
“... writing as a critical form of resistance to important aspects of the present, including the injunction to communicate in ways codified by the academy.”
I hope to use writing in this way which is in part why I have committed myself to this undertaking.
“... writing as research …” is as important to me as painting as research therefore finding the way so that both carry equal weight within the written dissertation (and within the exhibition) is important to me. This is what will be my personal deciding factor if what I produce is ‘successful’. There should be an obvious connection for the reader of the written dissertation to the paintings and vice versa; and if this is to be the case then it means the writing could be read and understood by non-academics as well as academics and the same could be said for the paintings. My challenge, at least as I see it at this point, is to bring theoretical weight to my voice while still maintaining an accessible tone.
Engaging with affect. How is affect presented in my painting, in my writing? How can I increase/decrease its application in both of these parts of my practice?
“... affect theory has never represented simply one more tool in the bag, but rather requires us to rethink what it is we do when we use any of our tools. It emphasises the relationality of empirical research, especially with human subjects, and it directs or attention to the ethics and the politics of the incorporation of the voices of those subjects in our writing (Certeau, 1984).”
In my research I am one of the subjects, the spectators (readers) are subjects. It is a question if I view (or still view) the personas as subjects?
Self-reflection is an important part of my practice and my project’s methodology. I have been recently encountering the present (and the past and the future contained within the present) quite often.
Writing as an affective methodology.
Make it contagious, make it vital, then it will flow and find form.
“If affective attunement is the first task of writing, the second is affective resonance, achieved when writing finds the particular form adequate to what it describes.”
“Rhythm, I think is a critical key to thinking writing as an affective methodology.”
“..., the stability of print as a platform and the linearity of text in the codex form both enable backscanning and the extension of speech beyond the body of the writer, producing the effect of an inner voice and with a psychodynamics of interiority. Here knowledge becomes characterised as the product of reflection and ideation and is thought in terms of absorption and contemplation rather than as the product of one’s active relationship and interaction with an exterior environment (Angel and Gibbs, 2011). From this perspective, the writing body must rehearse and recall, or re-enact, its active relations with the world in abstract and attenuated form.”
What are the rhythms of my daily life, my studio practice, my painting, my writing, my personas? How do these various rhythms link to each other? What rhythm results from their linkage?
Visualizing the data to recognize the patterns forming the whole.
Call me a luddite, but I don’t like the thought of writing machines …
“Flusser addressed his book to those ‘who write despite knowing that it makes no sense’ (161). If this would seem to usher in a new era of writing as at best a melancholy and at worst a nostalgic practice, would argue that the work of textual and translation theorist, Henri Meschonnic offers us compelling reasons to continue to engage in writing as a mode of resistance to the present.”
And painting?
Perhaps taking a cue from Meschonnic I should look to the rhythm of painting.
“Moreover the relationship between rhythm and subjectivity is reciprocal: subjectivity produces rhythm, but rhythm in turn acts on subjectivity.”
Is painting to visual image making what poetry is to writing? Can it be?
“..., for Meschonnic (and here he follows Benveniste) rhythm is not flow nor fegularity, nor recurrence, but rather a movement which produces form without stable consistency, like a piece of clothing which can be crumpled, stretched, rearranged on the body and kept in perpetual motion about it, yet remains recognizable as a garment across all these movements that change its form.”
“... a writing that refuse to position itself at a safe point of critical distance, ...”
I like the idea of that kind of writing!