artifacts/practices

From: Mike Cole (mcole@weber.ucsd.edu)
Date: Sun Jan 30 2000 - 10:54:14 PST


Your commentary on Gordon's note was helpful to me, Phil. Your wrote in
part:

Without descending to a narrow economism, can we say the difference is that
when we look at these processes as artefacts, we are looking at *what* is
produced within a given field; that when we look through the lens of social
practice, we are looking at the *processes* of production, at *how* these
are produced; and when we look at the forms in which the genre becomes
manifest, we are looking at the processes of _re_production, the
structuring structures of production and reproduction, which includes the
"rules" of exchange (which are usually nothing other than tradition and
reactions thereto)?........

I recognize the usefulness of such parsing, but it makes me nervous.
In particular, I see a really incestuoys hybridity involving artifacts
and practices, so some way of talking about this nexus that treats
the different "moments" as "perspectives" or "figure/ground" establishing
analytic tools might be useful. I think both you and gordon were pointing
in the same direction, but here is a case where our discourse, i am
afraid, runs the risk of "murdering in order to dissect."

mike



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