Last friday we had a lecture by Annette Balkema discussing a text from ‘Negotiations  1972 – 1990’, the chapter about ‘a thousand plateau’s’ by Gilles Deleuze

I had a go at the text the days before the lecture. Funny thing was – I understood most of the words, those I did not I looked up, really paid attention, but did not understand what this was all about. Try this for size: “We attempt, for instance, to construct a concept of war machines, they involve, above all, a certain type of space, a conjunction of very specific sorts of men with other technological and affective components (like arms, jewels …).”

Fortunately Annette gave us some clues:

• these people are philosophers discussing philosophy
• they talk about an influential book named ‘a thousand plateau’s  that is like a cookery book with receipes for doing research
• if you don’t know Deleuze’s work it is kind of hard to understand a text where he discusses his work and the concepts he created (‘war machine’ is an example).

Main question discussed in the lecture was ‘how to think, how to do research, how to state the processes of your mind’.

That was real interesting, especially the encouragement she gave us to invent our own concepts, mint our own words. This inspired me to make a list of  the new words that I found recently (see page New words on top of this blog), which in its turn led to a number of new research questions that I posted this morning under the category ‘to research’.  It is just questions at this time, but I find having them all down blog-style very reassuring.  Now when I post this blog I will no longer be running behind a whole herd of new ideas, I feel like I am running in the middle of them. Which is – Annette says – a great way of doing research: Nomad style.