barren 25.11.13
between here and there
So, here in Aberdeen, there are long stretches of beach either side, much granite and it is easy to romanticise the wanderer. It is harder to imagine the types of challenges of wandering when we have Wi-Fi at our disposal, together with romanticising ‘getting away from it all’. These remain personal and intricately woven in the journey we take. Journey equally romanticises and assumes a linear path carving and shaping our future, again equally linear. The phrase’ what is next for you?’ or ‘what are you doing now?’, supposes a linearity of a to b and does not necessarily assume a quantity of ‘x’s. For many of us ‘what’s next’ indicates a sense of becoming, and a burden of ‘what should I be doing?’, something else forwards and after our current selves. We tend to think of shedding the past and continuing on in a renewed self. But Proust countered wandering with the reality of voluntary memory that pervades every footstep and establishes how our past, present and future are already with us.
When faced with personal challenges we reach to shed and move on, drawing lines between us and what was. We make new decisions on seemingly new information and knowledge of ourselves. Which brings us to this term becoming, hinted at through Heidegger’s Being and Time as ‘Being in the world’ (1962) and surmised as, in constant pursuit or process of authenticity. This being alludes somewhat to a completed project of the self as truly authentic. becoming is established with Deleuze’s work and his collaboration with Guattari ; It’s point towards future and creating something new indicates that we become; I am not convinced we become. Nor do I consider the linearity of coming to an end of a life as a complete work. This is romantic and tiresome. We usually depart our lives with much incomplete, including the knowledge of ourselves.
Therefore my understanding of becoming has shifted to an understanding of courses, interwoven elocutions of our currency and presence towards. Becoming takes on a nuance of becoming a part of oneself for a time but continually towards, again unsatisfactorily, it is linear. Rather this towards could be suggested as myriads – Periods, seasons and episodes that sit side by side like hexagonal pieces where there is no finish. Rhiannon Williams stitches in ‘The Time I’m Taking’ (2011) Proust’s (1927) writings and episodes into neat hexagonal pieces as part of a series of patchwork quilts perhaps begins to explore this becoming point. Sliding off into new ethers of ourselves; in discovering the ethers and the varieties of oneself we then appoint a series of facades as Erving Goffman ( 1959), American Sociologist would announce, playing useful chapter titles in counting the episodes in life which Deleuze establishes as the difference to becoming and as history which is linear in its accounts.
I think of the horizontal not as a line but as a plane, a surface over which we skid, fall, lose and gain the vastness of our interiors in a world marked and objectified as exteriors. We move toward a constant shifting horizon that begins from beneath our own feet, our own position and our own stance and our point of view. The space within us is far more extensive and bewildering and our relationship with and in the world. So becoming can possibly be a sense of horizontal plane as surface and therefore becoming is simply exploring the diversity of self and being in the world rather than marking it in climbed contours. This is rather liberating and deals with becoming as processing rather than process. Process assumes an end and finish to an object; continuing with processing allows for ‘by product’ and continued engagement. It lifts the weight of being something and doing something that somehow needs titling.
This processing was exemplified in a workshop at Leeds College of art (Robinson.D, arts.brighton.ac.uk;25.11.13) using a variety of technologies as extended tools to drawing, writing, casting and in fact the outcomes were completely unknown. We just engaged with the processing and encountered turns. The exhibition that followed did not mark a territory of finished objects but a territory of possibility and before we romanticise that, it is perhaps wise to note that everything that appears possible does not become but becoming a supply of possibilities is being and becoming on a wandering basis.
