Greetings colleagues,
Please post your responses to the list(s). This is a bit long-winded.
No surprise to those of you who know me. I encourage similar excess on
your parts.
How do we recover what Bourdieu refers to as the lost sense of original
possibles? Or to speak more practically, how do we begin to acclimatize
students (or anyone for that matter) to the realization that cultural
information does not travel well? That what is lost over time likely
exceeds what is transfered? That their paltry attempts at research
(using Google Scholar, Wikipedia, BHA, ABM -- does it matter?) are
likely doomed to mere academicism. From Bourdieu's The
Field of Cultural
Production (1993), speaking of fields of cultural production as
spaces composed of institutions, memberships, etc.:
“One of the major
difficulties of the social history of philosophy, art, or literature is
that is
has to reconstruct these spaces of original possibles which, because
they were
part of the self-evident givens of the situation, remain unremarked and
are
therefore unlikely to be mentioned in contemporary accounts, chronicles
or
memoirs. It is difficult to conceive of the vast amount of information
which is
linked to membership of a field and which all contemporaries
immediately invest
in their reading of works: information about institutions – e.g.
academies,
journals, magazines, galleries, publishers, etc. – and about persons,
their relationships,
liaisons and quarrels, information about
the ideas and problems which are ‘in the air’ and circulate
orally in
gossip and rumor. . . Ignorance of everything which goes to make up the
‘mood
of the age’ produces a derealization of works: stripped of everything
which
attached them to the most concrete debates of their time ..., they are
transformed in the direction of intellectualism or an empty humanism.”
(33)
I work with a number of photography classes here at Stanford: history
of photography, view camera, photobook making, etc. The primary means
by which I try to suggest to students what photographers and those who
looked at photographs might have been thinking is by examining
the photobook and photo magazine productions of that era, treating
these artifacts as the cultural detritus of a bygone era. This often
involves using items that in other collections would be treated merely
as secondary sources, but for such an investigation are now primary
materials. Of course, if the publications are lacking dust jackets,
trimmed and bound in buckram, they lose that fragile linkage to their
moment of origin. As culturally expressive materials they are
flattened, steam rolled. We face a similar problem with the digitizing
of books. Another cultural flattening occurs. I suspect many of us
would argue that this flattening is ideally pierced by a return to the
original. If one follows Bourdieu's argument and appreciates the value
of conjectural cultural analysis, there are profound implications for
collection development, processing, storage, preservation, and
instruction.
**My question has, for the moment, a specific and more practical
trajectory. Who among you also uses library materials in a similar
fashion, as the mute archaeological fragments of a bygone culture? How
do foreground your intercessions between the student and the piece?
What sort of responses do you get from students and faculty? What
collections do you use? Anyone who has followed the marked increase in
books about photobooks knows of the shift in scholarly focus towards
the photobook. The same can be said for the ephemeral materials of
contemporary art practice from the 1960s on. Probably also 19th century
materials such as Harper's, or trade catalogs. I'm especially
interested not just in what collections you use, but the how and why.
Best to all,
Peter Blank
-----------------------------
Peter P. Blank
Head Librarian
Art & Architecture Library
102 Cummings Art Bldg.
Stanford University
Stanford, CA 94305-2018
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Voice (650) 725-1038
FAX (650) 725-0140