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There are times in life when the question of knowing if one can think differently than one thinks, and perceive differently than one sees, is absolutely necessary if one is to go on looking and reflecting at all. – Michel Foucault.
Another week ends without submitting a single thing to Supervisor A, and I don’t immediately recognise that I’ve made any progress at all. If only productivity was quantified not by the number of words written but by the number of insights made, or by my progress towards unravelling and appreciating the myriad tiny ways that my privilege will effect my research, which might not seem outwardly productive now but it will be essential to grasp before I get to Derby.
Before I leave Melbourne, however, I need to face the Monash human rights ethics committee and pass my confirmation milestone (which is basically a cross between a research pitch and a thesis defence). For this I must exude a pretence of preparedness. Which is to say, I have to pretend to know what I’m doing before I really figure out what I’m doing. I have to search and synthesise and present the relevant literature, only to discard most of it before leaving for Derby so as to avoid being prescriptive in my interviews. Even if I find the literature useful, there is only so much preparation that I can do this way, because the tools that I really need I will pick up in the act of doing fieldwork. Yet again, the thesis-writing process proves to be what Kafka describes as a kind of “wriggling through by subtle manoeuvres” and based in either my unacknowledged biases or my lofty ideas about the power of music to heal all ills.
And then, when I finally arrive, I have to deal with the fact that so much of human experience is tucked away behind words and gestures, and the task of interpretation is made doubly hard when you don’t recognise those words and gestures. I’m becoming more acutely aware of the hermeneutic distance between minds, even those closest. So much of who we are and why we do what we do is rooted, ineffable, in our subconscious. Trying to articulate these things for another to interpret is in itself a task of interpreting our beliefs and desires. There seems to be so much room for error. How can I truly appreciate the complexity of another’s lived experience when I often struggle to make sense of my own reality? To what extent am I capable of seeing as another sees?
The visible is set in the invisible; and in the end what is unseen decides what happens in the seen; the tangible rests precariously upon the untouched and ungrasped. – John Dewey.
b. c. s. 