On thesis and its true location

Dear Void

Today was a day of fits and starts. It’s 5pm and I’m staying on a bit to make up for having lunch in the middle of the day with my kid and ending up visiting the Chau Chak Wing Museum. It’s still school holidays and we have to take advantage of being so close to such a great resource right here on campus.

I’m well into JLAustin’s first lecture in How to Do Things with Words (1955/1962). If you like your information conveyed quantitatively, then please know that I have 27.62% (fact) of radical rewording to go. This is my method of going deep into associative investigation of the text. A deeply pleasurable enterprise. (More pleasurable if the writing is good. Barthes’ text is my favourite for this. Many contemporary academic papers, not so pleasurable). It allows me the time and space to contemplate distinctions being made by the text that I would normally skim over, and not really retain much for use in my own writing practice. This way, as I scrutinise the sentences, I can pick up on, say, the double sense of the word ‘state’ as Austin plays on it in one particular part of his lecture. As a noun, to mean a particular condition at a particular time, and as a verb ‘to express something definitely or clearly in speech or writing.’ The verb sense dates from the mid C17th. The noun, with its longer history, is partly a shortening of estate with its sense of property and position and partly from the Latin status ‘state, condition’ and from stare ‘to stand.’

There’s something bodily in this. As I’m beginning to understand it, the body is the true location of a thesis. Let’s not, here, have a discussion about the binary of quantitative and qualitative research paradigms and variabilities and invariabilities. And those ‘struggles’ that artist/researchers have over locating their thesis or question. I am of the third way: performative research. I live in/for variables. I am an imitative, interpretive, improvising, compromising instrument. And I aim to misbehave. Wait, that last bit was from Serenity. I’m also a plagiarising instrument. Captain Mal makes this declarative statement just before taking a final push to get to Mr Universe with the evidence that the people on the mysterious planet of Miranda died bc of a failed drug experiment that also (*says in loud whisper for spoiler-y reasons*) created the Reavers Sssshhhh.

So this doubleness of the word ‘state’, and the way these senses operate on the word ‘statement’ has, for me, resonances with words like stead, in stead, instead, which of course bring me to position, to place (verb) which is the etymological foundation of thesis.

Ok. I can give no more time today to JL Austin and the measures of utterance. So that final 27.62% of the text will have to wait till tomorrow to be scrutinised!

A sign from the museum today :)

Thank you to my friends who’ve given me the thumbs up for the blog. I’m happy to get comments here below if you feel the urge to converse about research-y stuff. Remembering that my focus is on performative research, practice-led research and how I’m going about mine. But I'd love to hear about other people's approaches to arts research (in academia or out of it). And I hope, too, that these missives will be a sort of trail of breadcrumbs for those starting this kind of research in the future.

Stay standing, void.

J.