yes, I see your point, and suggest this is a question of how these
relations are theorised. I frame my comments through my understanding
of Foucauldian power-knowledge discourses, and feminist theorisations
of embodied knowledge. The problem for me as a designer was how to
think of the objects designers use/make within these framings.
Streeck's article was useful because it introduced me to the idea of
a process by which objects come to embody knowledge in particular
discourses and through pedagogic interactions with people. He
explores how individuals come to understand (learn) the (symbolic)
meaning of particular artefacts from experts. He analyses the
pedagogic process by which an expert explains to a novice (through
his embodied interaction with the objects via speech, gesture, sound,
observation, taste) how to evaluate the quality of biscuits and their
packaging - in this process, these objects are transformed from
meaningless material object (outside the practice discourse of
biscuit expert) to a material symbol in which knowledge is embodied
and can be understood much later, long after the lesson has finished
(within this discourse).
cheers, teena
>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.
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