Part IV of ‘When in Doubt’ autoethnographic companion to the walk ‘A Speculative Muddle’ (Richmond-Upon-Thames).
I have worked at it: finding a path that allows for integrity to the work and knowledge and movement towards institutional support. I turn to the history, context and supporting sources – I turn to my companions. My method has always been to appeal to good nature, a desire to activate the personal-political and support Folx who have been demonstrably marginalised all the while remaining the Other-subject. We are trying to help, just tell us how. We are all in this together.
A path can be what unfolds through action: a path as what you have to do in order to get somewhere. A path can also be a path through an organisation.
Sara Ahmed, Complaint!, 2021.
I have found the pockets in life where I can work with what I got, where I am at – aware there are potential partnerships, however in or out of reach. I/we/you can move towards something, but it may not stay in place. I have this (a) fundamental belief that each space, while it does have a name, its agency is a matter of debate and perspective – which means there are people involved. I enter with my companions, the artists, neurodivergent, FLINTA, and folx who move differently (literally and metaphorically), and I enter a tiny part of this debate. Is it a debate? Let us name the conversation to raise the stakes – but I will not declare a winner from the onset. I will only make my position as clear as possible. This can be summarised in one statement: sometimes you will see me, sometimes you will have to look, and sometimes you will not – I will appear lost. Or Stuck. Trust me, I may have lost something, but I am not lost.
In working to transform institutions, we generate knowledge about them. Concepts are at work in how we work, whatever it is that we do. We need to work out, sometimes, what these concepts are (what we are thinking when we are doing, or what doing is thinking) because concepts can be murky as background assumptions. But that working out is precisely not bringing a concept in from the outside (or from above): concepts are in the worlds we are in.
ibid., 13.
Let me explain: I am asking about spaces and their agency to produce knowledge of and about folx who are instrumentalising and going beyond words. You need to look up and see the space to see the space. Right now, you are looking at a screen. Or perhaps you are using a read-aloud feature, or perhaps you are reading this printed. I value the design enough to present on the web – aware of this format’s backend limits (it is ultimately still binary, even with all its hexes and shortcodes). Here we are in this space. Now please put aside what you are looking at and look around. Also, think about what is behind it.
Whatever you see before, you have a history. A nuanced history.
The palimpsest feeds into a story.
The relationship between perception, action, and direction … work closely with phenomenological texts in order to develop an approach to the concept of orientations, which I then explore with reference to more concrete examples in the following chapters … orientation of phenomenology toward the writing table might depend upon forms of labor, which are relegated to the background … spatial orientations (relations of proximity and distance) are shaped by other social orientations, such as gender and class, that affect “what” comes into view … queer phenomenology might offer an approach to sexual orientation by rethinking the place of the object in sexual desire.
Sara Ahmed, Queer Phenomenology: Orientations, Objects, Others, 20061Ahmed, Sara. Queer Phenomenology: Orientations, Objects, Others. Durham: Duke University Press, 2006. pp. 23
I find the repeated use of the table-as-metaphor to launch a conversation about consciousness and knowledge production productive. Ahmed has done her homework (as well as others), asking about the table and the labour that has gone unseen (such as the housework and childcare that go on around the table or in the background while someone does the work of writing and reading at the table). However, I/we/you are on a walk, and I ask I/we/you to get up and leave the table. There is work to be done, but the work is not still (I am not explaining).
You see, I see the chair as ‘still’. This has value and is a generative space: I am using it now. I sit in a pub in Barnes, and I choose to be here because I can look up and the palimpsest of back there, the chair at the desk at home where watercolours of Anzaldúian inspired monsters sit behind me and ahead are overgrown houseplants and the books I keep at home that inform the research: Starhawks The Spiral Dance. A copy of the Shabbat and Festival Prayer Book, and the precious first editions, such as Virginia Woolf’s Night and Day. I am reminded that at home, there is a private view. These Jewish lesbian tzatchkes share a bit about my path with Others, but I must protect my knowledge and my way of being. No one will critique if my personal practice involves spiritual inspiration – but leave it at home, leave it behind.
Here is the institutional divide: no one questions my right to be inspired by canonical lesbian spiritual tombs. But there is a question about whether it is generative institutional knowledge, a debate to be entered into as we grow into a new form of HE humanities/arts research. So I/we/you protect this knowledge of home and our/Selves at home.
I/we/you am/are cautious about whose hands may touch something valuable through its aura affect(s). Something might get lost.
I have just entered a debate. However, marginal. I have staked my claim.
It’s Personal.
I’m not blind, though, to its imperfections-indeed it is more an experiment than an achievement. Is your art as chaotic as ours? I feel that for us writers the only chance now is to go out into the desert and peer about, like devoted scapegoats, for some sign of a path. I expect you got through your discoveries sometime earlier. All this, however, we will chatter about endlessly when we meet.
Letter from Virgina Woolf to Jacques Ravernat, 1922 2Virginia Woolf, ‘1330: To Jacques Raverat’, in The Letters of Virginia Woolf Volume Two: 1912-1922, ed. Nigel Nicolson and Joanne Trautmann (Hogarth House, Paradise Road, Richmond, Surrey, 1922; New York: Harvest/HBJ Books, 1978), 591.It is chaotic – I am peering about, aware of the terminology, deserts, scapegoating, lost, lesbians, spiritual, wandering, darkness. Lost. Wander. Tables. Orientation. Paths.
There needs to be a meeting.
When in Doubt Series
Footnotes
- 1Ahmed, Sara. Queer Phenomenology: Orientations, Objects, Others. Durham: Duke University Press, 2006. pp. 23
- 2Virginia Woolf, ‘1330: To Jacques Raverat’, in The Letters of Virginia Woolf Volume Two: 1912-1922, ed. Nigel Nicolson and Joanne Trautmann (Hogarth House, Paradise Road, Richmond, Surrey, 1922; New York: Harvest/HBJ Books, 1978), 591.
