“Why not suppose that thinking is not in alignment with the world and not upright in character, that it can be contrary toward things outside of itself and can be playful and ill-mannered as well as upright? Under this set of contestable assumptions, thinking becomes a conglomeration of intentions, leaps, intensities, trace elements, and accidents, out of which emerge the surprises that temporarily jar humans out of the stupor of their duly sequential representing and recognizing.”
Bennett, Jane. ‘The Enchantment of Modern Life: Attachments, Crossings, and Ethics’. New Jersey: Princeton University Press, 2001. p52-53
My thinking behind The Promise of a Scattered Methodology began in 2016, when looking to mirror the disjuncture that I faced within my practice.
After re-reading a research method report that I wrote at the start of 2016, I had not realised at the time of writing it that I had removed the ‘I’ from the report, writing it with a predominant analytical perspective. On reflection, I think this report was impacted by watching Ingmar Bergman’s 1966 film Persona, in 2015.
To witness Persona is to observe a form of technological reflexivity, wherein, the film maker implies that the film may have a sense of self-awareness, with the capacity to exercise influence over the narrative, the characters and the viewer, by subjecting its subjects to the mercy of the film, as a medium. Though this was not the first film I had encountered montage being used as a cinematic strategy to juxtapose and intertwine a collision of thoughts and feelings, it was my first encounter where the materiality of the medium had been used as a method to interrupt the narrative content.
Since witnessing Bergman’s method of using the materiality of film as a reflective voice, I began appropriating still and moving scenes from ‘Persona’ to present my practice-based research in the form of an essay film. What culminated was a psychologically tense zone which requires deliberation when jumping between silence and sound, and material manifestations that collapse between still and moving scenes (available to view here).
While looking for ways to reintroduce the ‘I’ back into my research, by exploring strategies to decentre any one viewpoint and present a multitude of voices, I then discovered Hunter Vaughan’s text Where Film meets Philosophy, 2013, in which he explores cinematic strategies that look beyond an individuals frame of reference [1] as a method for challenging habituated thought processes. From this point, I began to retune my voice and what evolved was a cacophony of voices; academic, personal, and poetic. And while reading Vaughan’s theories alongside Deleuze and Guattari’s rhizomatic thinking in A Thousand Plateaus: Capitalism and Schizophrenia, from 1987, I then began to figure my multiplicity of viewpoints into circular menu’s, wherein, more circular menus could be accessed.
Making a connection between a rhizomes entangled roots that branch off in all different directions, akin to a dynamic, digital network, I published The Promise of a Scattered Methodology online, in 2017, as a means to embed hyperlinks within a series of web pages using circular menus that enabled me to disrupt the linear format of reading and reflect the fragmentary nature of thinking around things.
Wondering about the multifarious connections which persons of wide knowledge (polymaths) draw upon when communicating their breadth of vision between disciplines with interdependencies, The Promise of a Scattered Methodology is an an evolving environment that is embed with pop-up messages which serve as loose ends rather than endings, where formations of thought patterns accumulate.
[1] Frame of Reference: a set of ideas or facts that a person accepts and that influences the person’s behaviour, opinions or decisions. Online Source: FRAME OF REFERENCE | meaning in the Cambridge English Dictionary, Cited: 13th March 2017