Any old Tuesday

Dear Void,

I don’t know who came up with the phrase ‘new knowledge’ to describe the goal of academic research. Surely, it’s important to reflect on old, morally good (not colonial &c) knowledge and other already-known things (i.e from other cultures)—I think it’s possible to do both at once. And the methods I’m using to read and subsume the material of my research, I hope, go some way to achieving this. Come to me, newness. Come to me, oldness!

Of course, I understand the position that sees the individual mind as a participant in the rigorous formation of knowledge but we never start with nothing. People of the past have left us breadcrumb trails already. Perhaps there’s too much? Can’t see the trails for the breadcrumbs?

Michael Taussig has recently offered that we are in an age of mimetic excess; an excess of representation and imitation of the real world in art and literature, in non-sensuous correspondence. We mimic the phenomena in the real world in order to exploit it. One of Taussig’s examples of mimesis is Sergei Eisenstein’s 'Cream Separator' sequence from 'The General Line (The Old and the New)', 1929. I’d never seen it before and so I watched it today, blessing the internet and this remarkable age we live in. Enjoy:

It is exactly it, isn’t it? The expression of ecstasy in a seemingly asexual public space is something like making art and explicating it in an exegesis in this conservative, collective space (the university). Oh, I’m not complaining, I’m just saying it’s a fine line we have to tread. It feels like we get cream all over our faces and then have to put the cream and our faces into context. Something like that anyway.

Writing these ‘letters’ to you, Void, is now part of my method. You are a subset of my methodology, if you will. Most of it is reading though, let’s be honest. And looking for material on the internet. And, oh this is something I have to get back to--in May last year I was working in the Rare Books reading room of Fisher Library (very unglamorous, not like , say, the Reading Room of the London Library with its ‘high sunny window, through which you could see the high green leaves of St James’s Square,’ where the fictional Roland Mitchell was introduced to the fictional Randolph Henry Ash’s copy of Vico’s Principj di Scienza Nuova in AS Byatt’s Possession). It was after the first 2020 lockdown and I was in a hurry to make up for lost time; it was before the 2021 lockdown, so just a brief window of normalcy when I could visit the manuscript in person. I’d also requested to see ‘Proposed Australian universities' bibliography: correspondence / Henry Mackenzie Green,’ but it was [da-da-da-daaah] missing. I’m looking for evidence of how the manuscript came to be here at Fisher and thought there may have been some correspondence with, well, I don’t know who.

I’m trying to pluck up the courage to ask Lady Mary’s descendants but bc I don’t know what I’m looking for exactly I don’t want to waste the moment with wisps of ‘can you help me with my degree please?’ which amounts to: 'can you do my homework for me?' What I want to ask is: 'did your grandfather give the Martin Woods your ancestor's commonplace book'. And: 'why?'

It's 4:30pm and these are the tabs I have open on the pdf reader: a chapter from Taussig's Mastery of non-Mastery; David Bohm's On Dialogue; and some notes I made from a paper on 'Blogging as art'.

The kid goes back to high school tomorrow. Neither of us know how we feel about that.

Stay ecstatic, Void.

J.