Sheesh. I’ve moved paragraphs around, rewritten things, deleted duplications and added a bunch of new queries. I know it’ll be better, but because I didn’t actually advance at all today (build in any of the other new material I have or read any further into Derrida’s Politics of Friendship) I feel like it’s stalled. It feels messier than it was before.
I’m sure qamar could help me in trying to describe this. There’s a way of thinking about information when I’m working on a text this large. I think it probably happens to novellists too. With Honours, I had a clear sense of “up” and “down” when I was thinking about my concepts. I don’t have the same clarity with this one, partly due to the matrix concepts I’m working with i think, but I still have a mental concept of the physical space the text occupies which is different from just the pages in the document. When I shift a section from one area to another, I have to adjust that mental map. Last time I overhauled so seriously, I did it physically, with scissors. This time I’ve just done it electronically and I feel lost in my own thesis. I have the beginnings of a hand-drawn napkin map but I’m trying to match it to the landscape I’m looking at and it doesn’t fit. Or more accurately, I have a hand-drawn architectural plan and I’m halfway through renovating. I will be able to sculpt it to fit but it hurts.
Meanwhile, I sent my supervisor a paragraph to describe the ‘central research question’ as requested:
I intend to trace these processes [the ways communities split and reform] and the resulting discursive strategies “edge identities” employ to negotiate multiple partial subjectivities in the interstices of multiple marginalised communities.
I will engage with a number of televisual, electronic and cultural texts, elaborating the ways in which “edge identities” are re/presented and fixed and the possibilities for resistive readings of such representations.
He sent back a one line e‑mail: I like it.
Obfuscation R Us.
I’m LJing too much, but I need to debrief. Actually, right now, I need to watch CSI and eat gelato. Bye.