Easing Myself Back In...

So, after a month of almost completely ignoring my thesis and giving my time over to tiling the bathroom and doing up the kitchen, it's time to continue. I must say it has been useful to have this site to revisit and remember where I was all that time ago. My next steps are:

1) To tighten up my theory a bit (though I should leave room for iteration);
2) To plan the next stage of research in the light of that - this is likely to be a closer investigation of the more directly political science and historical texts about parties and political organisation. After that, and assessing its implications for my theoretical work so far, I suspect that I will want to investigate more of the detail whether through memoirs, interviews, archive research etc. or perhaps some combination of all three.

Really, do I know what I am doing? I feel like I am making this up as I go along. Although, perhaps this is the point. A thesis like this (of any kind?) is a creative act. Certainly it is not entirely free. I am bound by rules and discipline myself. I am restrained by practice, supervision, method and assessment. But in not being 'free' (what does this word really mean anyway?), I have room to be creative. How can I say what I want to say within the boundaries that are set me? How can I use the structures built around me to push outside and beyond them, just a little? Structure is useful because it gives us something to work with or against, to reinforce or to pull down. In any case, there is little choice in the matter because a) we cannot escape from forms of order or structure or power [and would we in any sense want to? what would we be without it?]; b) I want to get a PhD; c) I am being unnecessarily pretentious and really ought to get on with some work rather than speculate like a sixth form philosophy student. Just easing myself back in...