Foggy morning, would have loved the time to have been able to make a short film about the fog. Where I live it was thick and around the street lights were glowing halos.
We are moving toward what we call sense making in the specific context of the studio. We are doing this by noticing. This noticing involved a listing of what we think we have learned, then a listing and noticing of what we would like to learn, and today we are making notes about what might need to happen – to be done – for this to happen. This writing is to be published into your blog.
We then changed material practice and registers (materiality matters and different materials have different agencies, they let different actors do things) by drawing draw what we think the studio is as an actor–network. What things are in it, what are their parts, what is it that moves between these things?
What are the differences between the writing and the drawing? What different knowledges do these different but very simple practices allow, provide for, conceal?
Agency
Things act, all by themselves with and without our bidding. This is most of the world (the bits of the world that are completely subject to our bidding are either tiny, or non existent, not sure which it is). So if things act, and this is partly why a thing matters and what makes a thing a thing (if it doesn’t act then it isn’t a thing), what actions are they undertaking?
Materiality
What things are made from matters. They are what let things do the things that they do. For people water wets (though not for fish?) and for fire it (sometimes) smothers. It is materiality that helps let things have agency, and we often mistake the agency of something as what we control. For example we choose to use paper to write on, as if we imperially gave paper the qualities that make paper paper and a suitable surface for writing.
Relationality
Things and their materials come to matter to each other because of the relations they form. Relations are the ways that connections happen between things. Their agency is realised as relations between. Different relations make different things. (A father is a different thing to a child. The tree in my garden is a different thing to me than to the musk lorikeets there on the weekend.)
This is my drawing of the studio as an actor–network. Every named thing is an actor. Blue lines suggest flows-that-matter that are asymmetrical, they flow mainly in one direction. Green lines suggests flows-that-matter that are symmetrical, something is happening both ways.
We are a university by an act of parliament and is this legal document that bestows this title. That’s it. There are laws (state, federal) that matter, and these come from ‘outside’ the university. Then we have our own regulations, that in some cases have to respond to or reflect state and federal law, what we are as a university, and some other ‘soft’ standards.
A teacher is a teacher because they are employed as such by a thing called a university. They do this by being responsible for a course (which may or may not have a classroom and a time). This one does. It does this for reasons of industrial history and ‘efficiency’, as well as because we have them available. A teacher is also a teacher because they are responsible for a course. (Well, responsible for ‘delivering’ a course, which is a very ambiguous description.)
It is a classroom because it has particular sorts of furnishings, arranged in particular sorts of ways, that require you to sit, face, and conduct your bodies in particular sorts of ways. Other infrastructure is present such as wifi with an authentication system, libraries, toilets, elevators, lighting, heating, air conditioning, each subject to surprisingly stringent rules and regulations. There are readings (with a related set of legal rules and obligations, and pedagogical protocols attached) that ‘make’ a student a student. Such readings have particular qualities (that vary amongst courses) but generally are assumed to be about things-not-yet-known-or-understood. These, in concert with teacher, classroom, furniture, time, scheduling and students, produce their own arguments, ideas, propositions, questions, eddies if you like. These are things (actions) because they become blog posts, discussions, asides, conversations, essays, arguments, realised through writing, making films, talking, and more reading. In their wake there are different media trails, all of them quite ephemeral. Teachers notes (in the blog, between other teachers, in meetings and reports), films, logs in Google, whiteboard drawings and words, sketches, photographs, conversations.
Constellations of courses make a degree which the univeristy confers if particular measures are achieved. Each point here matters in its own way. For a teacher the course might matter more than the degree. For a student the degree might matter more than the course. At times the air conditioning might matter more than an idea. Other times the reverse.
