Found items, Saturday noon, arranged thusly.
Further indication of a rather polite evening’s activities. Broken bottle, top half. Not smashed. Or smashed into something. But, placed carefully. Arranged things.
Further arrangements. My friend Tod called this one “Larry, Curly and Moe.” Get it?
More purposeful arrangements. Capacitors, large ones to handle the switching effects of 12 volt solenoids, placed in a recently assembled circuit board.
Burnishing brushes for a Dremel, arranged in their holding bin.
Why do I blog this? Observations that caught my eye. Things arranged with purpose. Thoughtful acts. Practices and constraints in which things assume their “proper” place. Remnants of reviewing old grad school reading lists, especially Sorting Things Out: Classification and Its Consequences
by Geoffrey Bowker and Susan Leigh Starr. It’s a wonderful treatment on the ways in which categories function as embodied social practice. The purpose and utility of boundaries between things, disciplines, people, actions, specifically around organizing, disciplining, classifying, cataloging. All that good taxonomic stuff that we social beings tend to do to order ourselves and our knowledge. If there’s a lesson for me in that book its about unclassification and undisciplining, especially when the boundaries become so accepted that they discipline even in their absence. New things, new futures, innovation mean pushing away from older orders of knowledge and practice.
Anyway.
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