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.