What is a “ball”? Does a ball exist when there is nobody around to see it? Over the past couple of months I have been exposed to the thought of Bruno Latour. Latour tries to thread the needle between seeing all of reality as a social or rhetorical construction and a strictly realist or objective approach. For Latour, a ball is a “quasi-object.” In the sense that it is a sphere made of some material and has a certain set of physical properties, it is an object. But it is only in its interaction with humans that this sphere becomes a “ball.” At the same time, as soon as a person interacts with such an object they are themselves transformed into a condition of “play.” The relationship between person and object (or by extension, place or activity) is a reciprocal and interconnected one. (I have much more to learn about Latour, and the example of the ball is not really his, but for a summary see here.) Latour first came up for me this summer while I was attending a conference entitled “Shared Ritual Practices and Divided Historiography: Media, Phenomena, Topoi” sponsored by the Dynamics of Jewish Ritual Practices […]
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