yes, i don't think the relations of knowledge to artefact are often embodied, though granted sometimes they are. there are discourses that surround and never touch the object itself, but give it meaning and thus it is a relationship of a sort of possession, in the sort of possession that one might imagine a vase is possessed by a poltergeist.... it isn't... but the meaning of the poltergeist as interpretted by the culture influences our understanding of the vase. it is a relationship that is hard to define. there are many relations that exist around artifacts, but... embodiment is only one of them, most of the relationships around them that are knowable/known/knowledge are not embodied. the broad system of knowledges that form the system of relations/meanings of an object also 'possess' the object within its culture or so i'd argue. Possess in that sense is a sort of complicity embeddedness of the object within the cultural circumstances and its relations. Here i'm thinking more of the network relations of an actor-network account then anything else.
On Nov 23, 2010, at 5:42 PM, teena clerke wrote:
> To explicate Jeremy's statement,
>
> <A cell phone is an artifact, an artifact possesses every kind of knowledge that the culture it is embedded in applies to it.>
>
> a fine example of how artefacts/objects are transformed from material to symbol in which knowledge is embodied (my choice of word over 'possesses'), I again recommend:
>
> Jurgen Streeck, 1996, 'How to do things with Things', Human Studies, 19: 365-384
>
> teena
Jeremy Hunsinger
Center for Digital Discourse and Culture
Virginia Tech
Live without dead time.
-graffitti Paris 1968
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