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{ Tag Archives } agency

On Materiality and Space

What is a materialist approach in social analysis?

Lets try to go beyond the discursive, and focus on the practice, on what effectively happens or what people do. Without re-claiming truth, we can pinpoint to a lived space and the interrelation between people and objects, as well as between people of course, and the objects as stand-alone categories:

‘Objects exceed the classificatory systems in which they originate and have an existence, a ‘thingness’, of their own. Object have agency, they are cultural agency objectified, compressed performativity. Things of everyday life are a part of who we are and how we operate in the world at large’ ((Caroline Knowles, Race and Social Analysis, 2003: 9)) .

Objects have memories, in the sense that both belong to and make the spatial dimension of memories, the geometry and the kinaesthetic of our thoughts. They are, as we are, in space.

Talking about race making, for instance, Knowles insists on a framework which involves a shifting lens in order to catch up with the minutiae of everyday life, the level of details or grain of one’s own biography and unpredictable behaviour:

‘Racial orders are in fact composed of myriad and ordinary everyday social processes and mechanisms with which people interface in no predictable way…Race making centrally involves people and their decisions and their actions: their way of being in the world in which they live. And race making involves a myriad rather ordinary social processes and activities’ (cited: 25)’.

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2009 01 28 pa_card Blogging the City
Remembering the City Comments (0)

Trans-photography

A very interesting lecture indeed by photographer and activist Sara Davidmann, PhD and Researcher at LCC London, who showed us ((MA in Photography and Urban Culture at Goldsmiths)) many photos from her collection of visual ethnography with transgender and transsexual people. Her fairly recent paper, Border Trouble: photography, strategies, and transsexual identities, offers a good background to the discussion and gives an idea of the very important issues at stake. Last, but not least, ethical issues around visual representation, power relationships in portraiture photography, the potential for photography to constitute a critical/technological intervention, and performativity in public and private (e. g. studio) spheres.

But, I want to highlight two other things that particularly struck me: the issue of in/visibility and the conundrum of language vs. practise. The former opens on a consideration of symbolic representation and ownership of own image in the visual public sphere. Transgender people are willing to become invisible, Davidmann maintains, in order to be accepted in the social norm, which wants a strict binary distinction between genders.  The issue of safety in public space here, I guess, is crucial – hence the urge to comply with the visual stereotype of the male or of the female. As it is the issue of ‘medicalization’, that is, the tendency of western culture to push deviance to the safe border of psy-disciplines as well as towards surgery: the idea being of ‘fixing’ the wrong bodies. The paradox is completed when, looking at the incredible series of pictures taken over years by Davidmann, the private sphere is then perceived safe enough to let the proper self be as it wants to be.  Which one is the social performance for transsexual people, the public ‘norm’ or the ‘passing’? Thus, unsettling dramatically notion of performance.trans-ition

The other issue I found particularly poignant is the insistence on the inadequacy of our language categories (most notably written texts) to describe and hence make acceptable – so at least it would sound – situations at the border, in-between binary constructions. Yes, it is true we need to equip ourselves of a new language, and to go beyond the binary distinction of gender, as well as of sex, but I think this is not enough. I borrow an expression from Thrift (2008), according to whom: ‘Practices are property of the practises themselves, not of the actors’. Let’s look at the problem of the public toilets, the embarrassment or difficulty of going to the loo in a gendered world: two signs on the door of the cinema or the pub, no other chance. The  action, which any of us has to perform at least a few times a day, and to which most of us do not pay attention as it is taken for granted, might become a big issue for some people.

Pace Judith Butler, the social construction of gender is a practical experience lived day by day, and involves all sort of conflicts, misunderstanding, resistance, defences, and so on. Davidmann’s critical and militant photography seems to me to do more and better.

Very interesting stuff, provocative and problematic, but full of insights…

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2009 01 22 pa_card Framing the City
Imaging the City
Playing the City Comments (1)

More notes on the quotidian

‘Structural forces only reveal themselves in the lived reality of social relations’ ((L. McNay, Agency and Experience, in ‘Feminism After Bourdieu’, Blackwell, 2004)) e.g. the idea of “class” will remain as such, because ‘people are never actually assembled in classes, and this cannot be easly expressed without reference to something like a common experience, a lived experience of the conflicts and struggles inherent in relations of exploitation’ (E. M. Wood, 1995 in McNay, cited).

The five axes of oppression (structural forces): exploitation, marginalization, powerlessness, cultural emperialism and violence (I. M. Young, 1997, in McNay, cited). The individuals move around multiple axis of oppression in the social action, e.g. between gender, ethic or racial belongings, which are also set in time and in place. ‘If the idea of agency refers, in some sense, to the individual’s capacity for self-reflection and self-evaluation then it needs to be examined from some kind of hermeneutic perspective: [that is] analysis of experience is central to the understanding of agency (McNay, cited).

But what do we mean by “experience”? The subjective realm, often associated with emotions and affect, taken as a given, the personal, personality. However, there is a risk of empiricism (‘which doesn’t scrutinize the conditions that determine how experience relates to knowledge’) and might establish ‘an arguably tendentious unity between women’ (McNay, cited). We need then to equip ourselves with a notion of social experience that is set in context:

‘This contexualization involves tracing the links between the phenomenal immediacy of experience and abstract system of power that operate at one remove from every day activity. At the same time, the way in which actors negotiate these power relations cannot be derived from an abstract analytics of power. To explain agency, it is not possible to bypass an analysis of experience. It is through the uncovering of immanent structures contained in the contingent that the singular complexity of actions and interactions can be understood’ (ibidem).

Drawing and developing on Bourdieu’s phenomenology, McNay proposes to see gender as lived relation that involves negotiation of social conflict and tension. A form of social interaction is posited by the analysis of the emotions: they are ‘both shaped by latent social structures and  also the vehicle through which  invisible power dynamics  are made present within immediate everyday  experience’.

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2009 01 21 pa_card Framing the City Comments (0)

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