The Blog Ate My Homework

September 27th, 2007 Fred McVittie Posted in Blog, Knowledge, Lem, Stanislaw, Metaphor |

The original purpose of this writing was to support my PhD research by acting as a repository for the various wayward ideas, both relevant and irrelevant, that occurred to me during this time. Because of my admiration for the work of the Polish author Stanislaw Lem I chose initially to frame these random thoughts within the conceit of a fictional conference, a space which offers the unusual literary form of the conference abstract.

Abstracts for conferences, from my experience, are often far more engaging than the full papers to which they refer. A well-articulated abstract does not only outline a set of findings or lay out the terms of a new piece of analysis, it also achieves something of the status of an artwork, compressing extensive polyphonal expressions into a single, dense piece of prose. There is something engagingly aleatory about such writing, it shows us the swings and roundabouts of conceptualisation and invites us to play on these for a while, before the more formal fencing off of that area that will take place during the full exposition of the paper. Metaphorical images and performances flow and strut across the paragraphs with an unfettered air of poetic freedom that is often suppressed in the more extensive discursions.

Although I abandoned this conceit quite early on in the process of this writing, the status of the conference abstract is nevertheless relevant to how the rest of this writing is working, for me at least. The conference abstract, like the abstract in art or of some poetry, is poised between two different poles of knowing and being. On the one hand is the apparently transparent revealing of the full paper, representational and photographic in its claim for truth, realism, and authenticity. Here is knowledge in the public domain, fully visible, fully referenced, and solid as a rock or a book. This is the direction in which the abstract leans and toward which it directs our gaze. On the other hand is the performance, the experiment, the experience, and the moment of coming-into-being which precedes the abstract. It is ephemeral, artistic, and phenomenal and is upstream from all writing; we are carried swiftly on, the illumination casts shadows on the page, the video of the performance misses the moment when the dancer’s foot is at just this angle. It is ultimately irrecoverable.

The writings in this blog traverse this odd liminal space of the conference abstract, sometimes reaching forward into the objective space ahead and touching the material of facts and shared knowledge, sometimes falling toward the point of origin and the moment of performance.