I had a nice if brief conversation with M yesterday. M is doing a PhD. I won't give the title here as I think there's a way to go on that as yet, and I suspect changes are on the way.
In one of his peices of writing he stated
"landcsape is sick"
This is led to a conversation about how one of his supervisors considered this to be 'overly polemical', as M described it. Be that as it may, its a nice line, and it rings true in some respects.
Later in his text M quotes Baudrillard from 'between Difference and Singularity' where Baudrillard states,
'we can oppose this paradigm of the totality of globalisation, where all differences must be intergrated, but as differences, not singularites..you must create your own underground, because now there's no more underground, no more avant-garde, no more marginality. You can create your personal undergound, your own black hole, your own singularity'
Once again I find myself thinking, with a sense of anxiety and near panic, about the 'closures' which necessiate the 'opening' of the Instituion. If a subject/voice is seen as aberrant in the institution of knowledge, if it is in some way an eruption, then it is necessarily singular.
If M cannot write the words 'landsape is sick', or if the words 'landsccpe is sick' cannot ( should not ) exist within the framework of research and knowlege production, then I must assume that knowledge, as understood by the Academy, is global, universal even and by definition cannot live with eruptions of singularities.
This brings me to remind myself to dig my own black holes and that hopefully if I dig enough of them I'll create an underground which might just join up with someone else's.
