My barber doesn’t bother at all: “Hair -he told me last week – will always grow on people’s head!”. The phantasmagorical numbers of the capitalist crisis do not mean anything at all to him (do they mean anything to most of us, by the way?). He carries on as he can, as he has almost always done, a coffee and a cigarette here and there, a joke quite often.
He made me think that everyday’s life is a challenging terrain for social scientists, more complex and fluid that we – social scientists – are usually inclined to think: it engages simultaneously with the real, the symbolic and the imaginary, and ‘how and what it is experienced as experience is itself variable’ (N. Thrift, Non Representational Theory, 2008).
Thrift on malice and misanthropy
3 responses so far ↓
kiyallsmith // December 9, 2008 at 6:18 pm
I think it is interesting that you chose to include a photograph with this post. Do you think that symbolic interactionists would point out that the photograph demonstrates performance and not non-representational interaction? All three men are looking at the camera, two of them smiling and the other one gesturing. It appears to me that this is not a candid shot.
kiyallsmith
pacard // December 9, 2008 at 9:41 pm
You are definitely right: this is not a candid shot, never meant to be. I am a social scientist, not a spy (or paparazzo) with a candid camera or a CCTV. It is a bit like having an interview and being honest with your informant on the scopes of your research, either than keeping the voice recorder open without them being aware of that. There is some kind of ethics, I suppose, in taking pictures, for the simple reason that photography is so powerful and, as such, it is a favourite instrument of power. Regards, Paolo
Capitalism’s meltdown and the Body (II) | kiddingthecity [dot] org // December 14, 2008 at 9:48 pm
[...] comment on my post ‘Capitalism’s meltdown and the Body’ allows me to expand further on these issues. The commentator remarks that the shot is not candid, [...]
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