Sunday, July 12, 2009

writing 'slices of practice'

John Law's Aircraft Stories attempts a text 'writing in slices'.
The cover says it 'works to upset the binary of modernism where knowledge, subjects and objects as having centred and concrete essences and the postmodern notion that all is fragmented and centreless.' His writing in slices aims for 'fractional coherence'.

I am entertaining this as a thesis writing style.
Law has a tendency to write using metaphor (and to my mind a few too many at a time).
He refers to a mirror, shattered. But i dont think this 'reflects' the idea fully enough.
Putting it back together creates a fractured reflection of a reality, as if there were but one. Leaving it in shards doesn't work either.
He has chosen to present the object-aircraft by writing a text in slices. For me it invokes a 3D image, slicing through planes, where intersectional slices impact one on another, and where the topology is never fully understood from any one plane, nor from the surface.


The risk is writing in slices might just come across as a series of essays on a theme.
...pictures at an exhibition...or a succession of fairy tales in a chapter book.
What I am wanting to create is instead techno-social-political stories of both fact and fiction, where performances intersect...
Using the text as Donna Haraway suggests as a heuristic or topos for generating and then illustrating points. In this instance pointing to changes in a network being contingent and precarious, planned as well as unplanned, shaped and shaping, that performances in the network require coordination to establish any semblance of stability, and that at least in part each node is subject to an incredible choreography of making and shaping. And if i can pull it off, to demonstrate that performances as well as objects and subjects, are multiple.

Feels ambitious.

No comments:

Post a Comment