geez, such a dense and nebulous article. I mean look at that:
"Photography as such has no identity. Its status as a technology varies with the power relations which invest it. Its nature as a practice depends on the institutions and agents which define it and set it to work. Its function as a mode of cultural production is tied to definite conditions of existence, and its products are meaningful and legible only within the particular currencies they have. Its history has no unity. It is a flickering across a field of institutional spaces. It is this field we must study, not photography as such."
Should they instead have said its essence dissolves into an indeterminate flux, its ontological status contingent upon shifting power geometries that animate its spectral form; as praxis, it is enmeshed in the web of institutional stratifications and independent forces shaping its ephemeral manifestations. Its cultural function tethered to contextualized modes of existence, rendering its artifacts intelligible only through mutable currencies of meaning circulated within- phantasmic tokens of a fragmented, non-linear chronicle. Absent a unified narrative, its obscure history flickers as a series of discontinuous incursions across a formless field of institutional spaces, a territory whose contours and boundaries are perpetually reconfigured; it is this field- permeable, unstable, and overdetermined- that warrants investigation, not the fleeting, insubstantial entity itself?
geez, such a dense and nebulous article. I mean look at that:
"Photography as such has no identity. Its status as a technology varies with the power relations which invest it. Its nature as a practice depends on the institutions and agents which define it and set it to work. Its function as a mode of cultural production is tied to definite conditions of existence, and its products are meaningful and legible only within the particular currencies they have. Its history has no unity. It is a flickering across a field of institutional spaces. It is this field we must study, not photography as such."
It's, as expected, a little bit of jargon. Nothing more.
Should they instead have said its essence dissolves into an indeterminate flux, its ontological status contingent upon shifting power geometries that animate its spectral form; as praxis, it is enmeshed in the web of institutional stratifications and independent forces shaping its ephemeral manifestations. Its cultural function tethered to contextualized modes of existence, rendering its artifacts intelligible only through mutable currencies of meaning circulated within- phantasmic tokens of a fragmented, non-linear chronicle. Absent a unified narrative, its obscure history flickers as a series of discontinuous incursions across a formless field of institutional spaces, a territory whose contours and boundaries are perpetually reconfigured; it is this field- permeable, unstable, and overdetermined- that warrants investigation, not the fleeting, insubstantial entity itself?