work in progress
A window on a mindmap of where I am and where I’m going. Edited in the cloud and on the phone.
Mindmeister allows me to give editing rights to people so if you can help me in any way, contact me and I’ll let you through the window.
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Turning back on myself
Bourdieu says:
“If the sociology I propose differs in any significant way from the other sociologies of the past and of the present, it is above all in that it continually turns back onto itself the scientific weapons it produces.” 1
Leaving aside the problematic word ’scientific’, this claim is also of course a challenge to the community or may be even ‘field’. It certainly goes to the heart of the problem of ’practice-based’ research.
If this Project is to be critical and also avoid the trap of a simple partnership of practice and thesis, then the weapons of ‘dialectical images’ and ’scopic regime’ must run through the critique of the images and imag(in)ing practices. But they must also run therough the App I build and the process of building it.
I may be a collector of rags ‘n refuse, the scopic fragments that construct and position ‘2012′ but I am also a visualiser and my App and its forerunner (this site) are part of that regime and should be open to dialectical critique.
My weapons are far from scientific in a Bourdieu or an Althusserian sense but they are focused out towards the mobile web/edge of London under investigation. And it is on that web and at the edge that my practice (photographic and academic) is located. I cannot avoid their eye.
- Waquant, L. D (1989) p47 ↩
Posted 4 months, 2 weeks ago. Add a comment
why a website..?
This site is both a workspace and the Project in process. Its fragments and images are the rags ‘n refuse that Benjamin talks about and collected in his analog envelopes. But why use a website and more specifically a Blog?
Clearly one reason is to embrace but also explore the rhetoric of ‘open source’ and networked, distributed content. By putting my fragments of work and drafts of ‘chapters’ on the Networks and allowing comments, subscriptions and embedding, I am exploring the wisdom of crowds – the vision of group writing being ’smarter’ than any one monkey with a typewriter.
But by building this Project in a Blog rather than on a wiki, by allowing commenting within structures I have determined, I retain a form of authorship – a vision maybe – and build the windows through which the Olympic Arcades can be seen.
A second reason for working through this site/space is that by doing so I am admitting my own position within the network relations under analysis. I am not outside the Net, the Net discourse nor its power relations. Even if I was not developing the Project online I would still be part of those relations but by deliberately working in space built through XML, HTTP and TCPIP I am foregrounding my relationship to those protocols 1.
A third reason for developing this ‘practice-based PhD’ here (wherever that is) is so I can explore and even discover what that ‘practice’ is as I collect fragments and images. The mindmaps that form some of the fragments, the screengrabs filed in multiple miscellaneous categories 2 and the audio and Kodachrome explorations are fragments not just of content or reportage but of practice. By allowing them to be ‘filed’ as they are found means they can exist as practice as well as text and so allow me to unpick my own practice, the practice part of Birkbeck’s brief and the wider issue of networked media practice.
