Gitelman, Paper Knowledge, Chapter 1
Initial Questions...
1.
How might we describe Gitelman’s specific
interest in the blanks of present? How does she relate this study of job
printing to contemporary concerns?
2.
To what extent should we consider the purposeful
production of medical forms as form of authorship?
3.
Format as authorship?
4.
Design as authorship? Poetry, blanks?
5.
Blanks are printed and use, not authored or
read. Point holds in the present, but forms today can be read.
6.
Distinction between users and readers (30). On
31 – is the bureaucratic self best thought of as created as people fill in
forms? Or is best thought of as being created by others filling out forms about
them?
7.
On 30 – How do we relate her concept of the everyday
relate to her objects of analysis? How are these things the everyday? Methodologically,
how do we draw connections between these kinds of objects and an argument we
want to make? How do we turn blanks into an argument especially when a form
itself doesn’t make an argument?
Discussion of the Reading
Are the forms supposed to be evidence for a
claim about an overarching system or logic? How do they structure knowledge?
On page 49 – her interest in the everyday
is underpinned by an ambivalence toward the distinction between public and private.
The liberal subject did not just emerge from reading but from a triangulation
of the subject through job printing. This is one part of an argument throughout
the chapter that blank forms offer a window into private uses of paper, but simultaneously
offer a window into a larger bureaucratic world and structures of social differentiation
or economies.
What has to be true of a technology in general
or printed blanks specifically for them to actually do the kinds of things that
she claims they are doing in a nontrivial way? The objection would go was that
it doesn’t matter if there was printed blanks, they were going to use what was
available.
How do we know blanks are creating
subjectivities or selves and not something else?
Whatever printed blanks do is it novel or
are they an evolution of a technology that existed before?
Maybe its not about the object but about
bureaucracy and circulation (see page 30). If we look at these documents then
we see a continuity between institutions that we wouldn’t see if we didn’t look
at the document. Is it the case that the objects aren’t here interest but the
places, people, things….?
Is there a relationship here between the
exchange element and the transversal relationship between things?
LG is interested in these blanks and how
the function in various institutional sites and more generically, assemblages?
She is interested in function. So why these documents?
How is it that words are doing things for
her amidst these larger assemblies? Maybe the function of these forms is not as
self-explanatory as other media like newspapers, where you read for content. She
is not interested in the semantics of the words, but the pragmatics and perhaps
this why she is not interested in authors and readers, but users. This then
becomes a non-representational account of subjectivity.
Concluding Idea...
Draw on Visman, Gitelman, and Foucault to
draw our approach to medical records together.
How do people conceive of themselves in
relation to forms? Design of forms/person filling out forms? Different variants
of the bureaucratic self? Depends on different kinds of forms. Some you feel out,
some are lists that you write on, some are things you want multiple copies of. Some
are binded, some are just a combination of sheets. For example, the medical record
is not binded.
Documentation now precedes the affective
care of health, whereas once it happened alongside it.
