Do you ever wonder how we account for our abilities in remembering? What is the place of rememberings in our dis-assembling of the social?
One of Latour’s core principles is his emphasis on objects and on unravelling “things” more completely so that we make fewer shortcuts into meaning without properly addressing the origins of these meanings – as they are present and mediated in objects primarily. I am thinking now about memories, and about how rememberings or memories become objects in my current sociality.
I am now very attached to small round café tables – I associate these tables with intimate interpersonal events of meeting, talking, getting to know friends and closer friends – I find such small round tables with their cast iron legs and laminate tops and matching wrought-iron chairs everywhere. I see them even when I don’t see them. – I transpose and transform similar tables and chairs at my neighbourhood fair trade coffee bars – into these cast-iron tables. I hear conversations that have occurred, I remember jokes and stories, I see hands gesturing, cigarettes waving, and waiters and waitresses delivering the props for these dramas. I remember being transformed from one way of thinking to another, from one language to another. I can trace lines of connection between my earliest experiences as an actor (and woman, always a woman ;-) at such a table and my present-day search for a suitable representative table that can be installed in my new office. I want to create movement in my world as a new teacher through this relationship. What’s in a table you ask? Nothing really. But from this Latourian perspective, a small round table that is explicitly reminiscent of a European (really a French) café is replete with memory and meanings that conjure my social self, and that confer a certain affective structure. I can speak and act differently if I am able to conjure this memory of this table set up an outdoor café.
What’s in a memory that contributes to my sociality? Do memories fit the Latourian definition of matters of fact or matters of concern? Are memories absorbed into my personal theories of action? And of course, is a memory really a veritable object in this way, or is it something else?
I know that tomorrow I will go looking for that particular place, and space and even if I don’t find it, I will find its representation in another place and space and I will remember and I will be transformed again. Such is the power of associations.
One of Latour’s core principles is his emphasis on objects and on unravelling “things” more completely so that we make fewer shortcuts into meaning without properly addressing the origins of these meanings – as they are present and mediated in objects primarily. I am thinking now about memories, and about how rememberings or memories become objects in my current sociality.
I am now very attached to small round café tables – I associate these tables with intimate interpersonal events of meeting, talking, getting to know friends and closer friends – I find such small round tables with their cast iron legs and laminate tops and matching wrought-iron chairs everywhere. I see them even when I don’t see them. – I transpose and transform similar tables and chairs at my neighbourhood fair trade coffee bars – into these cast-iron tables. I hear conversations that have occurred, I remember jokes and stories, I see hands gesturing, cigarettes waving, and waiters and waitresses delivering the props for these dramas. I remember being transformed from one way of thinking to another, from one language to another. I can trace lines of connection between my earliest experiences as an actor (and woman, always a woman ;-) at such a table and my present-day search for a suitable representative table that can be installed in my new office. I want to create movement in my world as a new teacher through this relationship. What’s in a table you ask? Nothing really. But from this Latourian perspective, a small round table that is explicitly reminiscent of a European (really a French) café is replete with memory and meanings that conjure my social self, and that confer a certain affective structure. I can speak and act differently if I am able to conjure this memory of this table set up an outdoor café.
What’s in a memory that contributes to my sociality? Do memories fit the Latourian definition of matters of fact or matters of concern? Are memories absorbed into my personal theories of action? And of course, is a memory really a veritable object in this way, or is it something else?
I know that tomorrow I will go looking for that particular place, and space and even if I don’t find it, I will find its representation in another place and space and I will remember and I will be transformed again. Such is the power of associations.
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