The phd turns out to be a game of doubles. It is a mannerist oscillating of opposites, shimmering and cycling back and forth in a ‘poetics of inoperativity’ (Agamben).

The work cycles through language, etymologies, through image histories, signs inscriptions, playing upon shifting associations, and through this play in play, this ‘mannerism’ the work reflects upon language, reflects upon image, revealing its own makings, its leanings in the formation of perception. It cannot be measured by the rules and scales of the epistemic table. It is revealed only through the encounter with the mind/body, whose openness, sensibility, have been effected/affected by the epsiteme (Foucault)…and whose response is in relation to the peculiar way in which this mind/body has been signed, stamped by the dispositif, the inscriber (the CVLTVS)*…

We could say that the work of this phd, inhabits a realm of ‘inoperativity’ (which we might later call ironic irony), where the artwork exists in a field of metaphor (rather than the ‘objective’ field designated by the episteme), and it is this mannerist poetics, made of doubles and refractions, which may be considered the ‘method’ through which the artwork aims to reveal the workings of the dispositif…. through which it aims to reveal us to ourselves, (whilst avoiding being caught up in the gramma (glamour, magic) of the moment, without merely repeating the inscriptions of the current episteme/ re- projecting (mirroring) the IMAGO of the contemporary dispositif)

Writing reveals the workings of the world/work, the corpus being created and uncreated, through graph, inscription. The instruments of writing, drawing, are simultaneously the tools of surgery, the instruments of torture, the the implements of butchery, for the preparation of the feast, the sacrifice, for the creation of fire, that which keeps the world turning.

The contemporary is revealed as an unfolding historical category, whereby a world view is constructed, deconstructed, and reconstructed, and shifting surface forms conceal a relation to sacrifice which persists.

For the sake of the artist phd, the writing the ‘thesis’ is obliged to follow the being of the artwork into its territory, thus the writing becomes less ‘thesis’/thysia, (sacrifice tied to the doctoral stake), moving into the domain of aesthesis/aísthomai , of feeling, perception, and thus whose ‘knowledge’ remains nebulous, inconclusive, and paradoxically this is to be it’s contribution, its offering.

The writing cannot escape (reveals itself as unable to escape) the metaphor, in order to establish its claims, and herein the paradoxical nature of its argument is revealed, demonstrating the fundamental quarrel, which produces the relation : art/episteme.

It is thus not an attempt to efface ‘the table’ (of knowledge), but to reveal it, to see through to its concealed structures, and so belongs with it; art praxis, becomes necessary counterpart to epsitemic axes.

It is from this place that it may be able to offer a unique vision; and any critique becomes possible for the very reason that it remains other to epsiteme. The work maintains a distance, and yet simultaneously acknowledges its own lack of innocence. (It cannot help but participate- also feeding from and reliant upon the table- and thus must reveal that what it says is not ‘true’, and this is its honesty, part of its revelation).

Critique occurs within the work, through the work, reflecting back on the work itself, as that which participates within the schema it critiques. (it ‘enjoys’ the horrors it reveals, though for the purpose of exorcism) Its function is not simply to observe, critique from without, without acknowledging its own culpability, its own participation in the sacrifice: it sacrifices all and nothing.

(It EATS no one and everyone; it makes and unmakes itself.)

*(a body which has been signed, is a body which is made to sign….taught to see, to name, to frame, to relate.

Through its own marks, tones, play of form and subject, the work aims to disturb this inscription, to get under the skin- it bypasses, plays into, and out of, the problem of writing (Plato) to offer critique without final judgement, (since the judgement is an aspect of that which is critiqued)

To make the work without unmaking it, would be to perform yet another inscription, another wound to the mind/body, another sacrifice.