Story about fragments
From: Frank Schaap
To: cyberculture mailinglist
Date: Sun, 15 Oct 2000 03:17:11 +0200
Subject: [CC] Early experiences in hypertext
A short welcome story for the new listserver It was back in 1992 I think and I was in my second year of Anthropology at the university of Amsterdam. I was enrolled in a rather theoretical course on linguistics and anthropological theory, all of that somehow tied up with a good shot of Bourdieu. Our final assignment was to analyze a particular social phenomenon (and to write a paper about it of course) by applying the five analytical categories that we had been taught to use. I forgot what those categories were exactly, probably something or the other to do with Bourdieu.
I decided to write my paper on jazz, or more specifically, on a jazz workshop held in a local bar. Jazz and jazz musicians are notoriously individualistic and seem to resist categorizations as if it's their second nature. I took pictures. I did interviews. I tried and tried, but jazz resisted fitting in those five categories. I might have known then, but as I later learned this happens not only with jazz, but with reality in general as you try hard enough to fit it into some sort of category. Some realities however seem to be somewhat better categorizable than others, but when you get down to the last details, pieces, portions and fragments flaunt themselves elsewhere, anywhere, in the face of categories.
I ended up with loose ends, fragments, scraps of theory, snatches of songs, pretty pictures that didn't tell the whole story, beginnings and endings of tales but no middles. Improvise! Make it up as you go along, it's what jazz musicians do... Surely a new form had to be created, I had to play with the elements that were there, I should jam along and then take it to the bridge and I'd be home free. Right. But this was science, or was it?
One thing was clear and that was that the categories didn't work in this case. None of my observations, experiences, interviews or photographs would fit into any one category. They'd fit everywhere if you'd think long enough about it and therefore they'd fit nowhere. Could it be then that those categories were purely abritrary? If they couldn't be credibly applied here, could they be anywhere? Thinking critically is usually appreciated, so why not question the theory itself through this particular case?
After a lot of thinking I decided that I should let the material I collected do its work, have _it_ question theory, simply, or maybe not so simply, by displaying it and showing it would fit anywhere and nowhere at the same time. The way the material was to be presented should underscore this and so I decided to also experiment with the form of the paper and not to write a paper (being at times somewhat recalcitrant, I of course delighted in that). I gathered my material and made a big 25 piece puzzle, consisting of short theoretical excursions, pieces of interview, photographs, and everything that I figured would fit. This was some time before I became acquainted with hypertext, but I figured the different elements would allow for the reader's interaction, showing links as the reader would reason her way through the fragments, trying to make sense of them.
The idea was that you could fill any of the five 'required' categories with any of the 25 pieces of the puzzle, you could even create five categories each consisting of five pieces of the puzzle. I thought this would convincingly display (and just to be sure, I wrote a little theoretical piece on it that was part of the puzzle) that categorization is always arbitrary, that it depends on the point of view you take, your own personal interpretations of what you want a photograph to mean, etc.
My teacher appreciated the experiment and invited me to come over to discuss the piece. She was (and is I recon) a very thorough person, very serious about science... a modernist you could say, I guess, rooted in the belief that there is a Truth out there that Science can uncover. The discussion about my 'paper' turned out to be a little test for me. She had me discuss five sets of five puzzle pieces she had selected and put them in a particular order, asking me to explain them. I tried, or rather, I told her what the particular constellation of fragments conveyed to me. It was obvious she was somewhat disappointed and growing impatient at that as well.
After 15 minutes or so, she eventually took charge of the discussion and pointed out to me that putting these five different pieces in this particular order really could not be interpreted other than that they belonged to this particular category that we had been taught in class. Slowly it dawned upon me... Of course you could argue that these elements constituted this particular category, I tried to argue, but you can put in other elements and argue just the same. She stared incredulously at me, so caught up in her five categories for analysis, that it took her a long time to at least acknowledge that that was what I had intended to convey with the piece. Somehow, the larger point of categorization being inherently arbitrary wasn't even discussed at all. I guess it would have complicated the discussion quite a bit.
Eventually I left her room, with my paper, a good grade, but rather unsatisfied. I had tried to create an option with maximum freedom, a piece creating maximum freedom for its reader and that freedom, I felt, was used and turned against me. My freedom of association, my individual/individualistic point of view had been co-opted and compromised. Freedom I had so carefully tried to maintain had been cast aside in favor of the self imposed restrictions of categorization.
