Words leaking from objects: thinking with absent photographs
Journal Title: Journal of Comparative Research in Anthropology and Sociology - Year 2012, Vol 3, Issue 1
Abstract
The possibilities within notions of the object constitute a special area of interest in my research. As I have come to see it, the object is bounded by - and yet comes to alter- views of representation/re-presentation; it contributes towards academic thinking through its capacity for democratizing and bridging itself towards others - yet it has a history of failing in the exchange of everyday gestures with places seemingly remote from the academia. Although accused of resolution and impermeability, I admittedly cannot part with the word ‘object’. And this creates a tension in my work with photography, where I attempt to articulate a personal view of the photograph as something ultimately unfixed. In this view, writing and photography extend continuously and reciprocally into the virtual and the physical from gestures before the photograph and before the word. This text reflects on these tensions, drawing on notions of affect, potentiality and on ethics to discover traces of the other suggested in the physical, but also the imaginary surface of an object. Following Sherry Turkle’s notion of ‘object’ as evocative, in this text ‘the things I think with’ form narratives that reflect the absence of other(s), and the escaping capacity of absent objects in and out of words.
Authors and Affiliations
Ana Luisa Cruz
Keywords
Related Articles
- EP ID EP40959
- DOI -
- Views 229
- Downloads 0
Schumpeter, Joseph Alois, 1939, Business Cycles: A Theoretical, Historical, and Statistical Analysis of the Capitalist Process, New York and London, McGraw – Hill Book Company Inc
Joseph Schumpeter’s economic thought is indissolubly linked to the study of entrepreneurship and innovation. In Business Cycles, the book planned to be ‘the crown of his work’, Schumpeter carefully crafted a theoretica...
Motive, desire, drive: the discourse of force
A review of the original paper on motive by Blum and McHugh (1971) is used as an occasion to make transparent an approach to social theory as it has developed over the years in their work. This method, in treating moti...
From land to sea: unsettling subjectivities
In this paper I trace an important conceptual shift which emerged during my fieldwork with fishermen in the South West of Ireland. I begin by describing how my role as a social researcher was interpreted as a valuable...
The organization of Romanian social memory after the December 1989 events
The social memory phenomenon causes debates nowadays, puts in opposition methodological schools, generates a series of incompatible theoretical positions. Proof that the concept of “social memory” “lived” its first age...
A rough guide to musical anthropology
This paper has set out to be an introductory approach to socio-anthropological studies of music and all human behavior and narratives (as lore) associated to it. The path chosen for this was the somewhat convenient and...