Money belt
Sleeping bag
Insect repellent
Pillowcase
Chicken wire
Photo of husband
More than one copy of passport details
Alarm clock
Smaller rucksack
Writing equipment
Camera
Razors
Tampax
Pack of cards
Sealable plastic bags
Envelopes
Cagoule
Warm top
Cotton top
Little radio
Address for the embassies

Went out this morning, walked past the station and down a long road to find myself on Preston Road, past a car sales point with flying flags of blue and red, colours flapping in the rain, passed by and up towards Riley Road. Checked emails, spoke on the phone, and then left the house to Kemptown to visit a friend who gave me coffee. She made me feel good.

The tree opposite, with green spiked leaves erect and upright sits in collaboration with the building in the background. Jutting out at one corner is a quarter wheel set against the leaves. It brings an aesthetic tinge of shapes, an image caught in space.

A Californian pink building against the blue sky and the leaves of a palm tree, alongside some boulevard somewhere, white wooden shutters closed. A yellow crane gives a straight horizontal line. A structure. Mass collaboration of structures, open-ended exploration, always onwards, existing, moving, breathing, questionable.

There was no party to begin the academic year with, nor was there a celebration to mark its end. There was no money for that kind of thing anymore, not in this place, a strange department….demurely set within a neo-classical, neo-fascistic building and housing the most diverse assortment of academics, so diverse that any point of commonality between them was quashed immediately in the name of a kind of vulgar essentialism. This department prided itself on hostilities, on living out a kind of antagonistic practice of everyday life, a kind of impersonal fellowship that survived on exacerbating frustration and anger between colleagues. But, at the end of a semester, and with the dawning realisation in most academics minds, that the onslaught of the summer months ahead held some promise, there was a lapse in the barriers of defence, and when the time came to gather in the seminar room for the upgrade papers, the academics seemed more relaxed. Having spent the year frittering between departmental meeting after departmental meeting, delivering lectures written hastily the night before, hating each other and their students because of the workload, the idealisation of the summer and the prospect of ‘getting down’ to writing revealed itself as a symptom, a way of coping with the pressures of academic life, and feelings of well being towards the book chapters that could now be written or articles finally edited for publication. The promise of writing allowed a kind of nostalgia to be generated between colleagues about their efforts that year. Academics may work hard, but they also grumble hard too.
Upgrade papers were rituals, an opportunity to present the shimmer of a research project, the glimpse of a much bigger thing. Members of staff were in attendance. Some would come along for the whole two days, others would sneak in and out of the seminar room intermittently, occasionally raising an eyebrow in recognition of those colleagues that stood as firm allies, showing to each other who was with who, and what it meant to proclaim allegiance to a disciplinary camp. Those who stayed for the duration paid attention, concentrated, phrased their questions carefully and tactfully. They were invested. In those moments, one could catch onto the vibe (often lost in the muddle of bureaucracy, of form filling and protocol) that some academics felt committed to their apprentices. But emotions run high in these spaces, and more often than not, each kindly response was met with a counter-attack by someone else, and not just by qualified academics.
It was the worst department on campus. Financial difficulties, hostilities between disciplinary camps, self-seeking academics in the guise of managers allowed to run freely between budget after budget, filtering and pillaging numbers. It wasn’t so easy to lay the blame for the circumstances were more complicated than that. But this didn’t stop the act of blaming playing itself out, from hour to hour, year to year; the desire for someone to be held accountable, responsible for each downfall, each minor glitch.

'The written word opens up a space of random appropriation, establishes a principle of untamed difference that is altogether unlike the universal exchangeability of commodities. To put it very crudely, you cannot lay your hands on capital like you can lay your hands on the written word. The play of language without hierarchy that violates an order based on the hierarchy of language is something completely different than the simple fact that a euro is worth a euro and that two commodities that are worth a euro are equivalent to one another. It is a matter of knowing if absolutely anyone can take over and redirect the power invested in language. This presupposes a modification in the relationship between the circulation of language and the social distribution of bodies, which is not at all at play in simple monetary exchange' (Ranciere, 2004, p.55).

Ranciere, J (2004), trans. Gabriel Rockhill, The Politics of Aesthetics. London: Continuum

List to close read:

worn path and concrete steps - juxtapositions
Lamp post - what is the sound of a lamp post bulb blowing?
the constructed path through the woods - framing Heidegger's 'clearing'
folders
shelves
paper clip

Response II - Differing modes of analysis, de Certeau...or how to begin?

How might thinking through this exchange, be a mode of making, a poeisis; a productive activity connected to, but distinctly critical of, ways of using (modes of consumption)?

Michel de Certeau would suggest that a 'tactics of everyday life' brings 'clandestine' formations to life; it is the creativity of groups/individuals responding within the net of 'discipline'. A form of thinking; a mode of making, shaping, forming, responding.

But, is a philosophy of the everyday/'lived experience', really a subversive form of thinking? Are there instances/examples/utterances of experience in everyday life that provide critiques of the everyday (the everyday that binds us to an order, such as labouring activity)? Are there examples that tell us something about our sensations of shock, delight and disgust with the everyday? (I guess would signpost Jean-Paul Sartre's Nausea as one significant example of this...perhaps?).

How might we find these intense experiences of the everyday in books, images, formed material objects, processes/techniques/practices of making? Are these 'modes' of making and their effects, the critical formation of differing social spaces; a social commentary on the existing social/economic ordering of the world?

How might reading an image such as yours, also be the formation of a critical social space?

How is a 'critique of the everyday' a compulsion or drive to connect with 'subaltern' experiences so as to transform social life.

For example, Michel de Certeau in his introduction to The Practice of Everyday Life, writes the following:

'Many, often remarkable, works have sought to study the representations of a society, on the one hand, and its modes of behavior on the other. Building on our knowledge of these social phenomena, it seems both possible and necessary to determine the use to which they are put by groups or individuals. For example, the analysis of the images broadcast by television (representation) and of the time spent watching television (behavior) should be complemented by a study of what the cultural consumer "makes" or "does" during this time and with these images. The same goes for the use of urban space, the products purchased in the supermarket, the stories and legends distributed by the newspapers, and so on.

The "making" in question is a production, a poeisis - but a hidden one, because it is scattered over areas defined and occupied by systems of "production" (television, urban development, commerce, etc), nad because the steadily increasing expansion of these systems no longer leaves "consumers" any place in which they can indicate what they make or do with the products of these systems. To a rationalized, expansionist and at the same time centralized, clamorous, and spectacular production corresponds another production, called "consumption". The latter is devious, it is dispersed, but it insinuates itself everywhere, silently and almost invisibly, because it does not manifest itself through its own products, but rather through its ways of using the products imposed by a dominant economic order'.

Michel de Certeau, The Practice of Everyday Life, trans. Steven Rendall (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1984), pp.xii-xiii

1. How am I not consuming in this exchange between photographic image and response?

• My resistance has already begun....perhaps I should begin by saying what I want to resist writing about?

2. How might I respond to this context (through that of de Certeau's)?

3. How might you respond to this context (through that of de Certeau's)?

4. I have already started the process of framing, of imposing a particular kind of social order onto your image.

THE MATERIAL LIFE OF OBJECTS?
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2SvdWk8zRrI

THINKING OBJECTS SCULTPURALLY - derive, detournement, unitary urbanism, psychogeography?

• An everyday object?
• What is an object?
• How is an object different from a thing?
• An opening?
• A spacing of the everyday?
• Narratives of this spacing?
• A cupboard inaccessible - a storage facility for what?
• What construction are we situating?
• Image production - the accumulation of spectacle?
• Cultural materialism - culture is a productive process?
• Gaston Bachelard, The Poetics of SpaceDomestic spaces - the interior (psychological) life of these objects - hybrid objects - quality of intimacy
• The imagination and the cupboard
• Stationary cupboard
• Michel de Certeau, The Practice of Everyday LifeThe Psychogeography of objects

http://www.courtauld.ac.uk/researchforum/projects/documents/MLOT-callforapplications_000.pdf

more to follow