10 reasons i’ve got to finish my phd thesis.
1. because I started it.
2. because I want to move on in life.
3. because it bores me (and thus will develop my patience-perseverance).
4. because it has good stuff in it that some people will be interested in reading.
5. because I want a job.
6. because/so I know I can do it. (I rock!)
7. because it is about time.
8. because people around me will get to know a nicer me.
9. because I need to in order to properly consider my next steps.
10. just like that 
from the shoelace (c bukowski)
it’s not the large things that
send a man to the madhouse
no it’s the continuing series of small tragedies
that send a man to the madhouse
not the death of his love
but a shoelace that snaps
with no time left…
day 478?
it was one of those days. it could have been day 478 with the masters/phd.
right now, i am feverish and bored out of my mind with whatever even very remotely evokes anthropology, academia, explanation, argument. as dani used to say ‘where’s the bucket!!’ today, i definitely do not want to be in the pinning-down corner of language, but in the expansive corner of poetry. even better: silence.
but i will be better in the morning. and write better anthropology, too.
bees…
are, for example, very communicative creatures. The dance choreography they perform in the hive provides precise information as to where food sourcs can be found. The intricacy and complexity of the communication system… demonstrates a truly amzing capacity for bees to encode and communicate information in an abstract, symbolic way that would put to shame many a communications of GIS specialist let alone any architect (Von Frisch, 1965, took 40 years to map the dances). The code to the dance patterns was broken, almost by accident, by a mathematician who happened to be the daughter of a bee researcher. She recognised the patterns when projecting the properties of a six-dimensional flag manifold – a rare and obscure kind of mathematics – onto a two-dimensional space (Frank 1997). The entire repertory of bee dances with all of its innumerable parts and variations falls within a mathematical schema unknown to any architect. The only other known physical process to which such a mathematics applies concerns the quarks of quantum theory. This raises the speculative possibility that ‘the bees are somehow sensitive to what’s going on in the quantum world of quarks, that quantum mechanics is as important to their perception of the world as sight, sound and smell’.
[David Harvey 2000 Spaces of Hope, p. 201]
This is by far the most impressive thing I have read this week [well, considering it is Tuesday, and all...]. The following conclusions could be drawn, among others, of course:
1. superiority of humans my a***; 2. note that this woman Frank spent a lifetime deciphering the bees’ movements – that is dedication… chapeau! 3. the limits of my perception are the limits of my world; 4. what does that make of the question – what knowledge is appropriate for what analysis; 5. how to go from the idea to the realisation, from the potential to the actual, from the hope to the fulfillment without pain, without mild delusion, without growth and moments of weakness that jeopardise all…
work ain’t all in life, that much is sure, but somehow it manages to be at the centre of the themes covered in my thesis, along with (haalt iech fest…) temporality, possibility, closure, regulation, food, and placing.
menschlich, ach so menschlich. an ode to human fallibility and limits. or rather: a toast, for it is late!
memory-dream-sea.
Having handed in a chapter and having turned my desk in an absolute mess while tidying my papers, retrospective mood kicked in. As you may know, I like this mode, even though it can be not-conducive to future-oriented action. It is, however, strangely soothing.
Be that as it may…
I have become a lot quieter in my heart from since I got back.
I have been learning about acceptance.
I have been dealing with the consequences of fieldwork.
I am willing to pay the price for the phd, for now.
I am not dancing enough and working too much.
… which is fine, most days.
Today as the sun was out in the morning, it was a much happier start to the day than yesterday. It was awful yesterday. The rain was constant, giving the town a strange sense of unreality. It felt as if the atmosphere was not just broken up by the rain, but as if the rain had taken over entirely. Walking back from the cinema felt like swimming in a light water and I arrived home drenched. The rain drops were so small that they were carried by the wind, whirling and disobeying the laws of gravity.
I think a lot about being unsettled. Aberdeen is alternating fleeting encounters in rapid succession with farewells.
Would I, entirely theoretically speaking, be ready for accepting the constancy and (partial) loss of flexibility and sense of excitement (purely based on novelty) that comes with settling?
I have known the answer for such a long time.
sans issue?
I know, some of you are not going to believe this, but I had not thought of Foucault for a long, long time. seriously.
James Ferguson reminded me of him…
As Foucault once observed, the right has spent the last few decades devising genuinely new arts of government (for better or—mostly— worse), while the left
seems able to offer only a reactive (and losing) rear-guard defense of the Keynesian
welfare state or unrealistic fantasies of revolutionary ‘multitudes’.
i know i know, i keep boomeranging away from and towards politics again.
what can i do about it?
Radical Doubt.
Es ist nicht die Zeit für Ich-Geschichten. Und doch vollzieht sich das menschliche Leben oder verfehlt sich am einzelnen Ich, nirgends sonst. – Max Frisch
When I first studied Romanian, I did not like it. I found it contained illogical, structural elements that duplicated meaning unnecessarily. I refused it for a moment. It was a silly thing to do, of course, and reflected my own reticence to dive and accept what I was getting myself into rather than some inherent property of the language itself.
I find something similar going on at this point of the PhD. I can very well approach it on a daily basis as studying more things, reading around, playing with the data, taking notes on chapter three, and being homesick, fieldsick, postfieldsick. I spend hours looking for literature that will constitute the vital improvement on my style. I then spend hours reading it in the wrong way. I write poems. I want to learn to knit. I dream. I seem to be creating something. I am happy when I can talk to other people about their research, and mostly, not about their research.
Importantly, though, I am very touchy about being pinned down on the thesis. I refuse anything that gets to close. It might just destroy my being. I have a form of radical doubt (of the kind that knocks you off your legs and makes you faint) towards the quality of the research I have completed in the field. I am unsure of my position on many things. I seem to be too uncritical or too critical. I find seminars difficult to handle because I do not find my work fitting in there, and interventions seem to be positioned, bridging, interested. I do not get them, which makes me feel inadequate. I am more restrained than I remember myself being. My name is Inhibition Taciturnity. I do not particularly like this in my being, but it is hard to let go of it at the moment.
The question imposes itself: what am I afraid of?
I feel it has to do with the situation’s many entanglements and how they affect my own personal social relations with people. And it seems to be about so much more than the thesis text.
- having to cut up an experience into a form that is not doing it any justice
- this experience being so intimately caught up with one’s own [recent] sense of self makes it very hard to separate from the person that one is despite the use of distancing rhetoric
- having the feeling that the most important things cannot be written about
- having to put that represented half-life experience out there for scrutiny by standards that are not clear-cut, and knowing that most people will disagree with most or part of it, and possibly not enjoy it for this or other reasons
So I have all these questions bouncing off my stomach walls about how to do it so it makes sense. It is painful, and it constantly runs off ahead of itself and beyond itself. It is about my life as well as about the thesis. A pars pro toto pain. A kind of stomach-migraine-metonymy.
How to write it down so people can taste and feel what it was like, even to some extent. How to marry that desire to concreteness and feeling with a propensity existing within me to go to the other extreme and overtheorise. How to make it work so that it is not just a thesis. How to write it so it is relevant to this world. How to.
How to begin to explain to people what it felt like. How to be with people now and not just reduce current experience to the past, and drawing the past out in the form of a text. How to separate work from life when this seems, at times, the healthiest thing to do, and at other times it is not advisable, and fraught with conflict.
How to go for walks to the beach in all this worrying and who to trust. How to make my personal life other than just fleeting glances at beauty. How to make it meaningful beyond getting this degree.
I will take a journey today, see and learn some new things. Hopefully it will make me better. I put all the interrogation marks into my suitcase and will gently nudge them, during the train journey, to make them jump out of the window, and make themselves useful elsewhere.
Homework: Read ‘The Thought-Fox’ by Ted Hughes. That’s what I want to do with my thesis, somehow…
Upset.
“distinterested anthropology”… “positive intervention”… “ontologies”… etc.
I have reached the conclusion that a lot of anthropological specialised language is unsuitable for the kind of ‘intellectual’ (forgive because said in a country/discipline where it can be an insult) and ‘political’ (I am not going to apologise for that one too) projects I have in mind for my life, professional or otherwise, for in writing they are connected.
How do I get out of this situation? How much am I willing to compromise? Can I really write a PhD like that?
Light Parody.
My office space looked so awfully bare, bar a funny Marjane Satrapi comic on how terrible life is for this green cat she draws ‘une pina colada, s’il vous plait’, and a story by Tahar Ben Jelloun called ‘Le dernier emigre’. Part of inhabiting a place involves making it your own, so I was looking through some pictures from Romania, to print them out and put them up.
I got a really big knot in my stomach and really did not want to continue with my day.
I suddenly understood why, on the weekend, among anthropologists and lots of talk about ‘truth’, ‘outreach’ and ’social effing constructionism’, I could not take anything seriously and was making fun out of everything, first and foremost my own research. Hello everyone, I’m researching cheese and power… to the general amusement of the group.
It seems, despite all the displayed mirth and felt happiness, I have not dealt with leaving the people there. Within the space of a month, my life has changed so much that I am not able to take in the consequences. This is why I laugh them off, with a hint of sarcasm observing everything that happens around me.
It is my way of grieving.
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