HE’S EATING PEOPLE!!! literally for a statement to become part of the narrative that jon is constructing, the statement-maker regurgitate it and relinquish control over it, must go from person with agency living in the world to inert statement preserved in the archive… the narrative requires constant sacrifice in order to proceed, the plot is powered by the routine violence of extracting statements… when you take someone’s story for your own you do them a great harm…. archive as site of preservation only after thorough digestion, archive as tomb….
literally being dragged out of your life into your statement… from person moving on from trauma to character in a story that you can’t stop reliving…
update may never stop thinking about the violence and consumption inherent in qualitative research… the fact that you have to extract something from a subject in order to create an artifact or record, that you have to erase, leave out, edit down in order to create a coherent historical narrative… foucault voice knowledge is not made for understanding, it is made for cutting… and the making of knowledge requires cutting as well… the archivist’s whole thing is that they’re supposedly capable of extracting a ‘complete statement’ or whatever but a statement as an object can never be complete because a statement IS an object and not an experience… qualitative research, no matter how detailed or supernaturally augmented, requires the inherently violent reduction of complex lived experience into data via consumption by a voyeur, someone who did not live through the experience but merely appropriates it afterwards for their own gain…
the irreducible TENSION between the archivist and the people whose lives he is feeding on in order to build his archive… delicious <3
