Tim Morton: Interiority, Western vs Eastern

So I was thinking about this problem of interiority as it relates to process, and remembered this post of Tim Morton, where he touches on contemplation, modernity and orientalism. There's definitely a bit to unpack there, although as his analysis suggests, one need not to go through Object philosophy to get there.

I may as well hold myself to account then, and confess that I am going trough Tim mortons process of how to do a phd and its pretty similar to how I want to conceptualise my practice. Especially how he talks about work being a transitional object that produces expertise and knowledge.

I feel that in the last year I've been guilty of a lot of this methodological/ meta-thinking of which he is critical. (Lazy!). The result of this is that a lot of my ideas have been contingent ones in the sense that they are good methods opportunistically applied. In this sense they are conceptualist, because they present as theses not hypotheses, and hence the works feel redundant and so I am not inclined to want to actualise them. Further this scattergun approach is not the way to create an a parallel symbolic system / entire world. 

As he points out, rather you need an archive and hypotheses that are tested through research and making. This can be an existing archive, that is, the world itself, or ethnographic research. I am having trouble articulating my concerns as questions. Morton says the best way to overcome this problem is to pick a formal archive first. This is about letting the forms lead you, an analogue to recoding existing forms, which in theory i do prefer. 

He does say though that at the end of the day the archive is what sustains you, it is ultimately driven by your own joy and desire. In many ways it is through the choice of questions and archives that you put yourself in your work. This can be as simple as choosing your precursors. 

So actually right now I have to answer the most personal and simple and complicated question which is what do I really like and is important. Maybe this is why interior forms, like poetry, address this problem for me at the moment, before turning outward toward the intersubjectivity of performative, relational, decentered work.