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 ↩
