Just talked to Steve and realised how all of us are theorising what surrounds the objects, the resonances and echoes, whether they are with or without provenance. Their aura is what we are looking at. Perhaps we should make this the focus for our proposal for the Boston event?
here are some quotes to get you thinking:
…
I could mention the chapter of 'Mimesis' entitled, “The Brown Stocking” in which Eric Auerbach (1953) evokes a passage of Virginia Woolf's To the Lighthouse, and the representations or, better, the repercussions that a minor external event triggers in Mrs Ramsay's consciousness. This event, trying on a stocking, is but a point of departure which, though it is not wholly fortuitous, takes value only through the indirect reactions it sets off. One sees well, in this case, that knowledge of stimuli does not enable us to understand much of the resonances and echoes they elicit unless one has some of the idea of the habitus that selects and amplifies them with the whole history with which it is itself pregnant.’
(Bourdieu and Wacquant 1992: 124)
Basically what this means is that we need to understand the way of being and doing in the world, the habitus, in order to understand the object and its reactions.
Habitus is a set of structuring structures, it is the way you live your life in a house. Objects and their meanings are all subject to the logic of the habitus.
I read the concept of habitus as a heuristic, as a point of departure and reflection. In
The Practice of Everyday Life de Certeau’s argued that habitus is a metaphoric chimera, a dwelling pace (like Kate's dwelling) which nevertheless, is generative of research (de Certeau 1984).
Anyway, what do you think?
here is the draft proposal as it stands:
How do objects get transformed by narratives and how do they become divested of narratives? This presentation will interrogate what we call ‘the systems around the object’ drawing on a year-long research project, funded by the Arts Council UK, involving 2 artists and 2 researchers, and a collection of artefacts for schools in Leeds. It aims to develop theory around how objects can sit within systems, stories and places. Drawing on auto-ethnographic discussion about the relationship between artefacts and their context, this paper seeks to uncover and unsettle this relationship. In particular it will ask the following questions:
How do objects move in meaning, or move from function to meaning?
Does it matter if an object has no provenance?
What happens if there is a narrative and no object (the case of the disappearing object)
Are objects merely taking their menaing from their form and function or do they acquire new identities as new resonsances and echoes take hold of them?What does everyone think?