Monday, December 14, 2009

How can the wind be borrowed? Finding oneself (and losing oneself) in a new (old) aesthetic

How can the wind be borrowed? How can it be made to have a bearing on corn and bread? How can its force be translated so that, whatever it does or does not do, the corn is reliably ground? Yes, may use the words translation and interest as well, because it is no more and no less difficult to interest a group in the fabrication of vaccine than to interest the wind in the fabrication of bread. Complicated negotiations have to go on continuously in both cases so that the provisional alliances do not break off.
(Latour, 1987, Science in action)

And so it is also for fund raising for a charity, will the sun shine on Christmas in the park, will the donations suffice for another year of service...

And for a phd student...
How to bend the wind...how to represent that which takes shape in one context, squeeze it through pages and have any evocation of what one sort to represent.

Tyler, cited by Strathern (1991) on what ethnography does:
"the point of discourse is not how to make a better representation, but how to avoid representation"...Ethnography works by evoking in the reader responses that cannot be commensurate with the writer's
- there is no 'object' that they both grasp....rather s/he provides a reader with a connection to it. Ethnography makes available what can be conceived but not presented."

The image loses its power the moment it becomes a subject of discussion as a shift to rhetoric alters the form.
A juxtoposition then of image following image where sediments of previous evocation might connect the one with the other in the reader's mind.

1 comment:

  1. Am back to having readers verify a word because of messages like this one.

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