many ways to skin a cat

i hate that expression. it has always conjured thoughts of dead cats, the sound of ripping and the separation of cat skin from cat flesh. flogging a dead horse is a similar idiom that i try to avoid. why all the dead animals? but this idiom (the cat one) is in my thoughts tonight, because here I am, writing a thesis without having an institution which may sanction it and award me with a qualification one day. i am homeless in the land of academia. well, officially so, although i continue to work at a university, and thus i continue to be a paid researcher who presents at conferences, talks about his research, and tinkers away on weekends and spare hours. in re-reading and re-thinking lyotard's concept of 'narrative knowledge', i'm pitching an argument for the inclusion of this text, but not the entire text, just the part about competence and know-how as pivotal to contemporary ways of knowing. i'm poaching, as certeau might say, like a thief in the night. or better still, i'm engaging in bricolage. i'm taking up 'narrative knowledge' as a theoretical approach from the toolbox of western philosophy. this is how foucault would like to see people use his work, and this is what i try to do - not just with his work, but lyotard's too. and certeau, latour, haraway, kuhn and others. because in poaching their work i get to engage with it, and this is what i'm here for. i want to read and consider and play with ways of knowing, writing, and narrating. such an approach is demonstrative of the politics i point to within my thesis - that of young people's sex practices. here too, is an array of tools and discourses in which young people engage to create particular sexual knowledges and realities. knowledge and learning is generated here through practice. just like my thesis, where it is only in the practice of writing, reading, and re-writing, over and over, that i come to know what i know. there is no actual guide to writing a thesis. and (despite what supervisors have told me) there's more than one way to write a thesis. when i told previous supervisors that i needed more time to read and think, or spoke of the ways i need to approach this so as to manage and maintain my interest, they didn't listen. they rolled their eyes and told me to write a thesis in the way that everyone must write a thesis, otherwise it's not a thesis. they wanted me to tailor it to fictional (as yet unconsidered) markers who would give the stamp of approval. they didn't believe that i knew what was best. they didn't accept that my experiences of making and writing other things (including an honours thesis) gave me a sense of knowing my capabilities and preferences, and how best to manage my learning. and thus, i was a bad student, evicted from the academy. but still, after falling off this near dead horse several times, i have a sense that i was right, that i did know what i needed; that is, when i needed to keep reading, when i needed to not-yet write, and when i needed to play with concepts and data in ways that might seem risky, yet were the only ways to sustain my interest in a project that often overwhelms me, stretching itself well beyond my periphery. and now i guess i have time to play. and maybe the game will end in a thesis.

experiencing space beyond place

last week i decided to forfeit the chapter on 'space', leaving me with only 2 chapters to draft. the next one is 'experience'. but yesterday i returned to certeau's the practice of everyday life, and plans changed again. 'experience' will now be about space. young people's experience of sex/health will be the starting point - that which is problematised at angles of too much experience (without knowledge) or lack of experience - both of which constitute risk. yet, how are experiences discursively produced? i suspect that sex often features across the data as a uniform practice. sex is sex - its function and actors are the same, transportable to any given sexual occasion. yet interview data suggest otherwise. sex experiences always differ, which relates to the various spaces in which they unfold.

as certeau highlights, the map is different from the itinerary. the bearings of a sexual encounter rarely differ in the discourse - the map is a diagram of bodies sexually connected. yet the itinerary, the ways in which this sexual 'place' is experienced alter, elaborate, or stray from the map.

this is about moving from place (lieu) to space (espace). the place is the proper law of a location, the space involves the mechanics of practice. the space is unstable, and scripted through the experience had. therefore, the guide/map of sex outlined in a website cannot be the same as the sex had, which is spacially constructed through its enactment. sex had in a bedroom, in a relationship, in a park, in a one-night-stand, in a bout of depression, in a group of friends etc, are different elaborations of sex. these spaces are not pre-determined by the map. and hence, the map that plots points of safety does not translate to the journey had.

and so i still get to write about space. which is nice.

Jinny's dance

i'm in the bath reading the intro to lefebvre's rhythmanalysis. i'm feeling a bit enthralled, yet guilty - i probably shouldn't be reading this. it's extracurricular. or something. but it seems like i need to. it arrived in today's mail. it demands to be used.

then i put the book down and lay quietly; slowly adrift. i contemplate the tired state of my body, the hour, and the tingle of hot water. i hear noises and then i don't. i want to read more, but i won't. instead i pick up virgina woolf's the waves.

and i read until i get to this passage. which makes me stop to read it again.

We go in and out of this hesitating music. Rocks break the current of the dance; it jars, it shivers. In and out, we are swept now into this large figure; it holds us together; we cannot step outside its sinuous, its hesitating, its abrupt, its perfectly encircling walls. Our bodies, his hard, mine flowing, are pressed together within its body; it holds us together; and then lengthening out, in smooth, in sinuous folds, rolls us between it, on and on. Suddenly the music breaks. My blood runs on but my body stands still. The room reels past my eyes. It stops.

Grosz is absent, not dead

This week i've gone back to Elizabeth Grosz (volatile bodies & space, time & perversion). Feels like stepping back in time, but not, because I'm entering these texts from a different angle now. My approach is different from that of my honours thesis, when I last engaged with Grosz. Though I find myself being seduced back into the fold of the body, into a central focus on bodies as material sites of knowing, being, practicing our selves. And it leads me back to the question of difference, from which I've strayed.

In attempting to solidify or capture a central argument, I find myself returning to my introduction. When I read things like the following, I want it to be my starting point, my opening.

It would be good to dynamize thinking, to think of a text, whether book, paper, film, painting, or building, as a thief in the night. Furtive, clandestine, and always complex, it steals ideas from all around, from its own milieu and history, and, better still, from its outside, and disseminates them elsewhere. A conduit not only for the circulation of ideas, as knowledges or truths, but also passage or point of transition from one (social) stratum or space to another (Grosz 1995, ST&P, 125).

I find comfort in considering my thesis as a text in this sense. A thief in the night. Stealing from the likes of Grosz and others, stealing from the mouths and minds of young people, health promoters, theorists. Taking and shaping and making something else that is not necessary new, but a new assemblage of current ideas and words. Text as collage. Text born from an author, but inhabiting its own pulsing body, transcending its birth.

In chatting to Jessie about 'the academic', I realised that I wish to sever authors from texts. I want to engage with the thoughts (text) rather than the thinker (author). Likewise, I want my words to travel and resonate within the text I give birth to. I don't want to be forever accountable to my text. Once released, I don't need to explain its actions or motives. Cut from my hands, it will have its own llife.

I want to read without a desire to know the author, the maker, the mother behind the text. The work must speak to me, unsupervised. The mother is absent, not dead. She is just away, somewhere else, gestating another thieving text.

trapped by my own politics?

I had a good meeting with temporary and departing supervisor. Her leaving-ness made it easier to be really frank today, and well, we got down to the core of things. She suggested that I 'out' my politics within this project. She talked about how other people at the centre are committed to engaging with public health, and are motivated, politically, to improve health. She suggested that maybe for me it's less about this (correct) and that my politics lie elsewhere (correct again).

I guess I've held my cards to my chest on this one. It's not really appropriate, here, at my centre, to say that health is a fallacy, that health promotion is redundant, that people are going to engage in 'risk' practices no matter what. I find myself trapped in an impasse, wedged between post-structural and health promotion discourses. Straddling the two, but perhaps committed to neither on account of their incompatibility.

Health promotion believes in fairness, justice, equality, and correcting situations where these ideals do not occur, doing so through intrusion into people's lives, values, and bodily practices. I do not. But I don't begrudge others who believe in these things, particularly if these beliefs achieve some sense of social justice, or more so, a greater desire for social justice. In my view, such a thing is impossible, but worth striving for. Yet, convinced of its impossibility, I can't be the one striving for it. I want to, but cannot.

What I feel more impassioned about is the (unproductive?) destruction that seems to be formed by health surveillance, education, promotion and monitoring. I worry what this does to our experiences of bodies, generating an implicit understanding that bodies are some sort of productive systems through which the nation, the state, the community is served, regenerated, fixed. Bodies as mechanisms in a force that serves (and regenerates) the function of a capitalist regime. Oh my. I typically shy away from the c word - what's happening to me? It's strange, but I guess I have to go there (for now, perhaps I'll recoil tomorrow) to say it, simmer it, see where it takes me in my desire to articulate my political position.

But I realise that this outburst (the c word!) puts me at another impasse. Am I suggesting a need to return to a place where bodies were more... 'real'? I don't think so. Bodies aren't real, in the sense that nothing is. Bodies are always fragmentary, slipping in and out of consciousness. To argue for bodies as materially purposeful seems flawed, in this respect. I guess that bodies as fragmentary is the one thing I can say and believe. Bodies as fragmentary, incoherent, sensual, and affective. So maybe this is my starting point?

I guess it comes back to the experiment that I've always envisioned my project to be. I'm saying "I'm not so sure about this and this. What happens if we consider it in these terms?" An experimental gesture that hopefully engages with an ever-rolling discourse around health and bodies. But I fear it may be a self-fulfilling prophecy (isn't it always?) in which my political beliefs win out in the end. Well, the final chapter was probably drafted before I started, otherwise I may not have started. Because such a project (I believe) is unsustainable without some element of knowing what you want to say, how you want to say it, and how it feels (ie. self-validating) to say it.

Because isn't all writing, work, and adventure about self-production - inscribing ourselves into this world? And if I think this is what I'm doing (I pretty much do) then why here, now, in the form of a PhD? What the fuck was I thinking?

truth, power, and research on the bus

Oh Lyotard. Lately as I've been reading you on the bus I've been drifting off the page. I've been feeling stupid by your words. I've been getting distracted by the sounds of other travelers. I wonder about how useful you really are to my project. Well, in parts you are. There are pages marked over with grey pencil. But lately just a line here or there and no asterix. Until this morning, when you said:

The production of proof, which is in principle only part of an argumentation process designed to win agreement from the addressees of scientific messages, thus falls under the control of another language game, in which the goal is no longer truth, but performativity - that is, the best possible input/output equation. The State and/or company must abandon the idealist and humanist narratives of legitimation in order to justify the new goal: in the discourse of today's financial backers of research, the only credible goal is power. Scientists, technicians, and instruments are purchased not to find truth, but to augment power.

now being a social scientist

i got a lift in to uni with N. he asked about my research topic, then said it was nice to hear of a topic with a practical element. i don't often consider my work as practical. i guess i've been floating in the realm of philosophy/cultural studies for much of this journey. but now, as i swim in a sea of health research papers, i'm starting to be won over by the potential practical effects of this 'kind' of research. i'm starting to realise that to be cross-disciplinary it doesn't really pay to be anti a particular discipline. especially if that's the discipline that pays me my way. and the one i'm likely to get work in, further down the track.

thanks to bruno latour and his actor-network theory friends i'm now okay about calling myself a social scientist. it only took 2 years, maybe longer, to realise that social science research can combine the creative, the criticial, and the philosophical. it now seems really basic that to challenge something (ie. a discourse of social health practice and research), you have to speak its language. so yes, now i'm traipsing about calling myself a social scientist. whatever that means. and i even feel a bit seduced by the things that i once riled against. which i think is a good thing. no use dismissing something outright. no use ignoring the good things in order to set up an easy argument via some sort of binary.

reading over government strategy documents today i started to realise how dodgy i've been. of course health is important. i don't wish to shout down this kind of thing. i wish to read it, think about it, and see how things might be different. with the same goal, perhaps, of promoting health. though maybe that's a different version of health. health might also mean a self determination or self production or something that might look and sound like autonomy. though i hate that word, and don't really see the merit in bandying it about. who in the world is autonomous or wants to be?

so maybe this is the next hump i need to get over. what is it i'm arguing for. seems easier to know what i'm arguing against.