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Timothy Ingold writes that “movement [is] truly generative of the object rather than merely revelatory of an object that is already present” (2000:346). He suggests considering the notion of weaving in order to more adequately register objects as the embodiment of process or movement. Contrasting this with the limitations of “making” as the central verb throughout dominant discourse on the generation of things, he writes:

The notion of making, of course, defines an activity purely in terms of its capacity to yield a certain object, whereas weaving focuses on the character of the process by which that object comes into existence. [Ingold 2000:346]

By “movement”, Ingold explicitly references the subtle, rhythmic, adaptive, cooperative movement of weaving, through which objects come into existence. But he extends this notion of generative movement well beyond the realm of everyday physical objects by invoking, for example, Heidegger’s thinking (1971) on building versus dwelling. Ingold writes: “Dwelling in the world, in short, is tantamount to the ongoing, temporal interweaving of our lives with one another and with the manifold constituents of our environment” (2000:348).

For me, Ingold’s emphasis on generative movement functions well alongside Jane Bennett’s discussion of the assemblage, with particularly evocative parallels with her discussion of the assemblage’s “vibratory shi”:

Shi names the dynamic force emanating form a spatiotemporal configuration rather than from any particular element within it…[T]he shi of an assemblage is vibratory; it is the mood or style of an open whole where both the membership changes over time and the members themselves undergo internal alteration. [2005:461]

For Bennett the idea of the assemblage (drawn from Deleuze) provides a valuable starting place for exploring notions of agency which might extend beyond traditional models of human-centered agency. Bennett employs the “assemblage” to describe a collective of both human and nonhuman actants and to “focus attention on the distributive and composite nature of agency” (2005:446):

While individual entities and singular forces each exercise agentic capacities, isn’t there also an agency proper to the groupings they form? This is the agency of assemblages: the distinctive efficacy of a working whole made up, variously, of somatic, technological, cultural, and atmospheric elements. [2005:447]

My own interest in thing theory rests somewhere near the intersection of Ingold and Bennett—the generative movement that brings things (like pencils, or assemblages) into existence, and the collective agency distributed throughout the assembled range of actants.

During my earlier project for this class I spoke and wrote about the way video games are localized before they are distributed throughout different regions around the world. When I first began studying video game production, distribution, and reception, this practice of localization stood out to me as a site where ideologies of national, regional, and cultural identity were actively engaged, negotiated, and even evaluated. For a period of time I was able to focus on the history and ongoing practice of video game localization. I wanted to know how localization practices implicated games and game players in the broader politics of national and regional identity, international economics, and globalization. I wanted to know who were making these localization decisions, and how they were making them—who decided what images might alienate U.S. consumers, what character-designs would be more appealing for a Japanese audience, or what plot devices or linguistic markers might be too region-specific?

The Japanese video game industry sustains a number of independent organizations who specialize in providing streamlined localization services for both larger game publishers and smaller-scale developers, while similar service-providers are not as common in the U.S. When I started writing and talking with these localization vendors, I was immediately surprised by the disproportionate number of young, U.S.-born writers, artists, and programmers employed as localization professionals in Japan, facilitating the movement of games, manga, anime, and films between Japan and the United States. The fact that so many U.S. citizens are employed by such a small, specialized service industry in Japan only prompted more questions, so I started to inquire about what initially drew them to this work, as well as to working in Japan, so far from home.

Many of them describe a very similar sequence of events. At around the age of twelve or fourteen they were interested in something—maybe a video game like Super Mario Brothers (1985) or an animated film like Akira (1988), for example—and they eventually discovered that the product they were interested in was originally produced in Japan. After a bit of poking around, exploring, their interest in a particular article expanded to embrace a broader genre or sub-genre of Japanese media—for example, from “I loved Super Mario Brothers” to “I realized how much I liked two-dimensional Japanese platforming games”; or from “Akira was the most interesting film I had ever seen” to “I discovered this whole world of apocalyptic anime”. This interest then expanded even further to a familiarity with and interest in other genres of Japanese media, and eventually to an interest in Japan more generally—language, history, people, politics, culture. Several of the localization professionals I know were studying Japanese language while they were in high school, usually not through standard curriculum but through some extracurricular language program. Also of interest is the fact that most of them studied journalism, creative writing, or art/design as undergraduates, hoping to eventually write for gaming magazines or games themselves, or to design for games, animation, or comics. Some took the opportunity to study abroad as undergraduates and some applied after graduation to teach English in Japan through organizations like the JET program. For all of them, after they reached Japan, the localization industry provided an opportunity to stay.

Localization vendors provide specialized services for a wide range of media, including things like manga, games, and anime—exactly the forms that brought so many of their employees to Japan in the first place. Altogether, then, these life histories resulted in a number of U.S. citizens who ended up in the right place, with the right skill sets and interests, to take advantage of the needs of a quickly developing sector of media production and international distribution. As I mentioned earlier, someone who works as a localization specialist in Japan may have been introduced to Japan through Super Mario Brothers. Now, that same specialist is making decisions about what qualities in Nintendo’s next Mario Brothers game might be too unfamiliar to sell well in the U.S.—how the game should be modified to better appeal to a Western audience. Often, this includes the additional task of identifying what markers of Japan are themselves appealing overseas—what features are popular because they are cosmopolitan indicators of the exotic.

I am interested in this cycle, this movement of people and products, the international circulation and translation of media forms like video games—the way a U.S. consumer can become a producer in Japan and then contribute to the way Japan is subsequently imagined by the next U.S. consumer, for example. I have been studying localization, then, as one especially compelling node along this wider circulating network. But I wanted to start even earlier—to look at what was happening well before traveling overseas. I wanted to understand what was happening between people and these things—whether they were toys or television shows—what was happening that was shaping these sorts of decisions and life histories.

So about a year ago I started to work through a Japanese language program in Philadelphia. The school offers Japanese language curriculum on Saturdays, catering to a wide range of age groups and skill levels (age groups from pre-school to adult, and skill levels from beginners through native speakers). Through this program I met and began interviewing a small number of high school students who had enrolled in the language program as a result of previous interests in Japanese games, anime, and manga—much like the localizers I had been speaking with before. Each of the language school students expressed a desire to someday live and work, at least temporarily, in Japan—again, a lot like the localizers. I thought: “This is a great group to begin a longer-term research project alongside.” I have been collecting interviews, participant-observation through the language school, and I have started on a larger-scale life history project with one of the students. I am interested in incorporating some sort of research method that more adequately emphasizes the role played by things—things like games or anime. In addressing the agency of an assemblage, Bennett describes “the power to make a difference, to generate changes that call for responses” (2005:457). She is careful to note that intentionality is only one small potential attribute of the agency articulated through the assemblage, and that, understood via a distributive notion of agency, “an intention becomes like a pebble thrown into a pond…it vibrates” (2005:457). If I take as my assemblage these people and things circulating between the U.S. and Japan around mass culture commodities like games or anime, the range of actants is extensive, from international ratings boards, region-specific software lock-out, and import/export economics through high school language curriculum and the Cartoon Network. In terms of the power to generate changes, overseas employment is only an extreme example.

Through this “Thing Theory” course I wanted to try to put together a research method that would help me work more carefully and effectively somewhere within this assemblage of people and things. I decided to experiment with an adaptation of photo-elicitation. I work as the media coordinator for a youth organization in Philadelphia. I teach video production for a program in which youth are provided the instruction and resources to plan and conduct community-based research projects. In this program we have used photo-elicitation interviews in various forms in order to coordinate brainstorming around community topics. Photo-elicitation interviews involve structuring interviews around photographic images—these can be archival, they can be generated by the interviewee, or the interviewer, under appropriate circumstances they can even be something like magazine advertisements. While a number of social scientists have reviewed the applications, advantages, and drawbacks of this method (see for example Collier and Collier 1986; Harper 2002), I am not so much interested in assessing the values of photo-elicitation as I am in adapting the method towards alternative ends with my own project.

One of the qualities that interests me most about photo-elicitation has not, to my knowledge, been written about at all—that is about the very organic way in which the photograph participates in the interview process. Sociologists have written that images “trigger” responses in interview subjects, but in my experience the interaction is much more dynamic. The interviewee might argue with the image, might negotiate and eventually settle uncomfortably with, or even dispute the photograph. The interviewee and photograph are in conversation—the photograph a very active participant. These are the qualities that made photo-elicitation jump out at me as a research method that might help me begin to treat my problem with “things”. Of course my things are not photographs so much as mass culture commodities like toys, video games, or animated films.

So I decided to try something of an exploratory exercise. For many reasons, including time constraints and the experimental nature of this exercise, I chose to interview close acquaintances of mine, Hal and Michelle. In addition, I chose movie rentals for my “thing-elicitation” interview exercise because we had easy access to a database of rentals over the past year, and I thought movie renting activities provided a valuable approximation of the assemblage in which I am primarily interested—fans, media, distribution channels, translation in so many forms, an emphasis on mobility, circulation, generative movement.

Hal and Michelle requested a print-out of their account activity detailing their video rentals from October 2006 to present. The list ends abruptly on February 16 because that was the day they joined Netflix and closed their account with the more local rental establishment.

from hal and michelle’s rental activity between october 2006 and april 2007:

10/01/06 Squid and the Whale

10/02/06 Duck Season

10/04/06 Fargo

10/06/06 Matador

10/07/06 It’s the Great Pumpkin, Charlie Brown

10/08/06 South Park, Season 8 Disc 1

10/09/06 South Park, Season 7 Disc

10/11/06 Girlfight, South Park, Season 8 Disc 3

10/13/06 Monk, Season 4 Disc 1, 2, & 3

10/15/06 Tick, Season 1 Disc 2

10/17/06 American Dreamz, E.T.

10/21/06 Cat’s Eye

10/22/06 Alien Apocalypse

10/25/06 Monk, Season 4 Disc 4, The Breakup

10/30/06 Delicatessen, Cheerleader Camp

10/31/06 Ghostbusters

11/04/06 Dark Crystal, Walking Tall

11/05/06 Slither, Down in the Valley

11/10/06 Indiana Jones: Raiders of the Lost Ark, Prairie Home Companion

11/22/06 Lake House, Omen

11/24/06 O Brother, Where Art Thou?, My Name is Earl, Season 1 Disc 1

11/27/06 Scoop

11/28/06 Life and Debt

12/01/06 Night Watch, John Tucker Must Die

12/02/06 My Name is Earl, Season 1 Disc 2

12/02/06 Thank You For Smoking

12/04/06 My Name is Earl, Season 1 Disc 3 & 4

12/10/06 Sopranos, 6^th/Part 1, #1, Maniac Cop

12/11/06 Sopranos, 6^th/Part 1, #2 & #3

12/15/06 Sopranos, 6^th/Part 1, #4, Oh in Ohio

12/17/06 Swimming Pool, Mysterious Skin

12/19/06 Art School Confidential, Pizza

12/27/06 Young Guns

01/08/07 Covenant, Monster House

01/09/07 Little Miss Sunshine, Superman II: Richard Donner Cut

01/10/07 The Descent

01/15/07 Idiocracy, Alias, Season 5 Disc 1

01/20/07 Barnyard

01/23/07 Alias, Season 5 Disc 2, 3 & 4

01/24/07 Hotel Rwanda

01/27/07 Alias, Season 5 Disc 4, Bikini Girls on Dinosaur Planet

01/28/07 Employee of the Month, Strangers with Candy: The Movie

01/30/07 Crank, Stay Alive

02/04/07 The Devil Wears Prada, Pushing Tin

02/06/07 The Science of Sleep, Last Kiss, How to Eat Fried Worms

02/11/07 Body Heat

02/15/07 City of God

02/16/07 City of God

After we obtained this list, I converted portions into a more visually accessible calendar form (see sample months at the end of this essay), and we sat down and used the details to structure an interview, similar to the way photo-elicitation functions. At first, I asked specific questions about rental titles—why they chose a film, what they remembered about watching it. Hal mentioned that “Young Guns” may have been the low point of his holiday break, and that they did not rent much else during this period because they were watching a number of movies they had received as gifts. The discussion moved beyond the more specific realm of video rentals to broader life-history details. For example, Michelle described October as a “tough month”. She was still teaching undergraduate courses part-time as an adjunct instructor when she began a full-time administrative position. She told me “I couldn’t watch anything too dramatic then. I was exhausted. Comedy, action, and horror close to Halloween, but nothing that really took a lot of energy.”

I also asked Hal and Michelle to look through the list and discuss details that stood out to them, or describe their overall rental tendencies in order to try a more auto-driving interview strategy. Here they spent some time drawing connections between films and filling in gaps, but I thought it was most interesting that they were drawn to what might appear as anomalies in the rental record. When a video did not fit well, for Hal and Michelle, alongside the rest of their rental history, they spent a considerable portion of time explaining the choice. For example, they focused heavily on The Breakup, Mysterious Skin, and Bikini Girls on Dinosaur Planet. For one reason or another, each of these films deviated from their notions of an idealized rental history, and Hal and Michelle wanted to preemptively correct any potential misinterpretations.

Then we moved to the rental shop, to give the videos themselves some presence in the conversation. At the rental shop, where we could handle the videos, or at least their packaging, Hal and Michelle traveled much more quickly through the library, moving from one film to another, describing the connections between them. Sometimes films were connected simply via proximity on the shelf, other times the connections were much more personal. In particular I was interested in the ways Hal and Michelle decided what to rent when the title they had come for was unavailable. Of course marketing strategies structure particular elements of the interface between customer and product—newly released videos are the most easily accessible and highly advertised, for example. But at the same time objects themselves engage with the individual consumer in highly personal and unpredictable ways.

While a lot of research methods involve prompting subjects through objects that they may see or use in their everyday lives, I am interested in moving beyond the use of things simply as prompts or triggers, towards an attempt to understand things as more active participants—cooperative actants equally imbued with the distributed agency embodied and activated throughout the assemblage. I am not sure how successful I was in this exercise. I could have taken the method even further by watching some of the films with Hal and Michelle. And a rental history definitely offers some explicit temporal structure that would likely be unavailable in most research contexts. However, by imagining a form of photo-elicitation in which the image acts more as a participant and less as a prompt or a trigger, and by substituting any range of things for the eponymous photograph, I believe I am moving towards a method that will benefit my overall research project with an improved emphasis on “thing theory” . The application of Ingold’s generative movement and Bennett’s agency of assemblages provides a provocative framework for thinking through a collective of human and nonhuman actants circulating through Japan and the U.S.

works cited

Bennett, Jane. 2005. The Agency of Assemblages and the North American Blackout. Public Culture 17(3): 445-65.

Collier, John & Malcolm Collier. 1986. Visual Anthropology: Photography as a Research Method. Albuquerque: University of New Mexico Press.

Harper, Douglas. 2002. Talking About Pictures: A Case for Photo Elicitation. Visual Studies 17:13-2.

Heidegger, Martin. 1971. Poetry, language, thought. Albert Hofstadter, Trans. Harper & Row: New York.

Ingold, Timothy. 2000. The Perception of the Environment: Essays in Livelihood. Routledge, London.


	thing-elicitation interview an excercise with research methods and	home
	thing theory
	jon corliss
T H I N G
	Timothy Ingold writes that “movement [is] truly generative of the object rather than merely revelatory of an object that is already present” (2000:346). He suggests considering the notion of weaving in order to more adequately register objects as the embodiment of process or movement. Contrasting this with the limitations of “making” as the central verb throughout dominant discourse on the generation of things, he writes: The notion of making, of course, defines an activity purely in terms of its capacity to yield a certain object, whereas weaving focuses on the character of the process by which that object comes into existence. [Ingold 2000:346] By “movement”, Ingold explicitly references the subtle, rhythmic, adaptive, cooperative movement of weaving, through which objects come into existence. But he extends this notion of generative movement well beyond the realm of everyday physical objects by invoking, for example, Heidegger’s thinking (1971) on building versus dwelling. Ingold writes: “Dwelling in the world, in short, is tantamount to the ongoing, temporal interweaving of our lives with one another and with the manifold constituents of our environment” (2000:348). For me, Ingold’s emphasis on generative movement functions well alongside Jane Bennett’s discussion of the assemblage, with particularly evocative parallels with her discussion of the assemblage’s “vibratory shi”: Shi names the dynamic force emanating form a spatiotemporal configuration rather than from any particular element within it…[T]he shi of an assemblage is vibratory; it is the mood or style of an open whole where both the membership changes over time and the members themselves undergo internal alteration. [2005:461] For Bennett the idea of the assemblage (drawn from Deleuze) provides a valuable starting place for exploring notions of agency which might extend beyond traditional models of human-centered agency. Bennett employs the “assemblage” to describe a collective of both human and nonhuman actants and to “focus attention on the distributive and composite nature of agency” (2005:446): While individual entities and singular forces each exercise agentic capacities, isn’t there also an agency proper to the groupings they form? This is the agency of assemblages: the distinctive efficacy of a working whole made up, variously, of somatic, technological, cultural, and atmospheric elements. [2005:447] My own interest in thing theory rests somewhere near the intersection of Ingold and Bennett—the generative movement that brings things (like pencils, or assemblages) into existence, and the collective agency distributed throughout the assembled range of actants. During my earlier project for this class I spoke and wrote about the way video games are localized before they are distributed throughout different regions around the world. When I first began studying video game production, distribution, and reception, this practice of localization stood out to me as a site where ideologies of national, regional, and cultural identity were actively engaged, negotiated, and even evaluated. For a period of time I was able to focus on the history and ongoing practice of video game localization. I wanted to know how localization practices implicated games and game players in the broader politics of national and regional identity, international economics, and globalization. I wanted to know who were making these localization decisions, and how they were making them—who decided what images might alienate U.S. consumers, what character-designs would be more appealing for a Japanese audience, or what plot devices or linguistic markers might be too region-specific? The Japanese video game industry sustains a number of independent organizations who specialize in providing streamlined localization services for both larger game publishers and smaller-scale developers, while similar service-providers are not as common in the U.S. When I started writing and talking with these localization vendors, I was immediately surprised by the disproportionate number of young, U.S.-born writers, artists, and programmers employed as localization professionals in Japan, facilitating the movement of games, manga, anime, and films between Japan and the United States. The fact that so many U.S. citizens are employed by such a small, specialized service industry in Japan only prompted more questions, so I started to inquire about what initially drew them to this work, as well as to working in Japan, so far from home. Many of them describe a very similar sequence of events. At around the age of twelve or fourteen they were interested in something—maybe a video game like Super Mario Brothers (1985) or an animated film like Akira (1988), for example—and they eventually discovered that the product they were interested in was originally produced in Japan. After a bit of poking around, exploring, their interest in a particular article expanded to embrace a broader genre or sub-genre of Japanese media—for example, from “I loved Super Mario Brothers” to “I realized how much I liked two-dimensional Japanese platforming games”; or from “Akira was the most interesting film I had ever seen” to “I discovered this whole world of apocalyptic anime”. This interest then expanded even further to a familiarity with and interest in other genres of Japanese media, and eventually to an interest in Japan more generally—language, history, people, politics, culture. Several of the localization professionals I know were studying Japanese language while they were in high school, usually not through standard curriculum but through some extracurricular language program. Also of interest is the fact that most of them studied journalism, creative writing, or art/design as undergraduates, hoping to eventually write for gaming magazines or games themselves, or to design for games, animation, or comics. Some took the opportunity to study abroad as undergraduates and some applied after graduation to teach English in Japan through organizations like the JET program. For all of them, after they reached Japan, the localization industry provided an opportunity to stay. Localization vendors provide specialized services for a wide range of media, including things like manga, games, and anime—exactly the forms that brought so many of their employees to Japan in the first place. Altogether, then, these life histories resulted in a number of U.S. citizens who ended up in the right place, with the right skill sets and interests, to take advantage of the needs of a quickly developing sector of media production and international distribution. As I mentioned earlier, someone who works as a localization specialist in Japan may have been introduced to Japan through Super Mario Brothers. Now, that same specialist is making decisions about what qualities in Nintendo’s next Mario Brothers game might be too unfamiliar to sell well in the U.S.—how the game should be modified to better appeal to a Western audience. Often, this includes the additional task of identifying what markers of Japan are themselves appealing overseas—what features are popular because they are cosmopolitan indicators of the exotic. I am interested in this cycle, this movement of people and products, the international circulation and translation of media forms like video games—the way a U.S. consumer can become a producer in Japan and then contribute to the way Japan is subsequently imagined by the next U.S. consumer, for example. I have been studying localization, then, as one especially compelling node along this wider circulating network. But I wanted to start even earlier—to look at what was happening well before traveling overseas. I wanted to understand what was happening between people and these things—whether they were toys or television shows—what was happening that was shaping these sorts of decisions and life histories. So about a year ago I started to work through a Japanese language program in Philadelphia. The school offers Japanese language curriculum on Saturdays, catering to a wide range of age groups and skill levels (age groups from pre-school to adult, and skill levels from beginners through native speakers). Through this program I met and began interviewing a small number of high school students who had enrolled in the language program as a result of previous interests in Japanese games, anime, and manga—much like the localizers I had been speaking with before. Each of the language school students expressed a desire to someday live and work, at least temporarily, in Japan—again, a lot like the localizers. I thought: “This is a great group to begin a longer-term research project alongside.” I have been collecting interviews, participant-observation through the language school, and I have started on a larger-scale life history project with one of the students. I am interested in incorporating some sort of research method that more adequately emphasizes the role played by things—things like games or anime. In addressing the agency of an assemblage, Bennett describes “the power to make a difference, to generate changes that call for responses” (2005:457). She is careful to note that intentionality is only one small potential attribute of the agency articulated through the assemblage, and that, understood via a distributive notion of agency, “an intention becomes like a pebble thrown into a pond…it vibrates” (2005:457). If I take as my assemblage these people and things circulating between the U.S. and Japan around mass culture commodities like games or anime, the range of actants is extensive, from international ratings boards, region-specific software lock-out, and import/export economics through high school language curriculum and the Cartoon Network. In terms of the power to generate changes, overseas employment is only an extreme example. Through this “Thing Theory” course I wanted to try to put together a research method that would help me work more carefully and effectively somewhere within this assemblage of people and things. I decided to experiment with an adaptation of photo-elicitation. I work as the media coordinator for a youth organization in Philadelphia. I teach video production for a program in which youth are provided the instruction and resources to plan and conduct community-based research projects. In this program we have used photo-elicitation interviews in various forms in order to coordinate brainstorming around community topics. Photo-elicitation interviews involve structuring interviews around photographic images—these can be archival, they can be generated by the interviewee, or the interviewer, under appropriate circumstances they can even be something like magazine advertisements. While a number of social scientists have reviewed the applications, advantages, and drawbacks of this method (see for example Collier and Collier 1986; Harper 2002), I am not so much interested in assessing the values of photo-elicitation as I am in adapting the method towards alternative ends with my own project. One of the qualities that interests me most about photo-elicitation has not, to my knowledge, been written about at all—that is about the very organic way in which the photograph participates in the interview process. Sociologists have written that images “trigger” responses in interview subjects, but in my experience the interaction is much more dynamic. The interviewee might argue with the image, might negotiate and eventually settle uncomfortably with, or even dispute the photograph. The interviewee and photograph are in conversation—the photograph a very active participant. These are the qualities that made photo-elicitation jump out at me as a research method that might help me begin to treat my problem with “things”. Of course my things are not photographs so much as mass culture commodities like toys, video games, or animated films. So I decided to try something of an exploratory exercise. For many reasons, including time constraints and the experimental nature of this exercise, I chose to interview close acquaintances of mine, Hal and Michelle. In addition, I chose movie rentals for my “thing-elicitation” interview exercise because we had easy access to a database of rentals over the past year, and I thought movie renting activities provided a valuable approximation of the assemblage in which I am primarily interested—fans, media, distribution channels, translation in so many forms, an emphasis on mobility, circulation, generative movement. Hal and Michelle requested a print-out of their account activity detailing their video rentals from October 2006 to present. The list ends abruptly on February 16 because that was the day they joined Netflix and closed their account with the more local rental establishment. from hal and michelle’s rental activity between october 2006 and april 2007: 10/01/06 Squid and the Whale 10/02/06 Duck Season 10/04/06 Fargo 10/06/06 Matador 10/07/06 It’s the Great Pumpkin, Charlie Brown 10/08/06 South Park, Season 8 Disc 1 10/09/06 South Park, Season 7 Disc 10/11/06 Girlfight, South Park, Season 8 Disc 3 10/13/06 Monk, Season 4 Disc 1, 2, & 3 10/15/06 Tick, Season 1 Disc 2 10/17/06 American Dreamz, E.T. 10/21/06 Cat’s Eye 10/22/06 Alien Apocalypse 10/25/06 Monk, Season 4 Disc 4, The Breakup 10/30/06 Delicatessen, Cheerleader Camp 10/31/06 Ghostbusters 11/04/06 Dark Crystal, Walking Tall 11/05/06 Slither, Down in the Valley 11/10/06 Indiana Jones: Raiders of the Lost Ark, Prairie Home Companion 11/22/06 Lake House, Omen 11/24/06 O Brother, Where Art Thou?, My Name is Earl, Season 1 Disc 1 11/27/06 Scoop 11/28/06 Life and Debt 12/01/06 Night Watch, John Tucker Must Die 12/02/06 My Name is Earl, Season 1 Disc 2 12/02/06 Thank You For Smoking 12/04/06 My Name is Earl, Season 1 Disc 3 & 4 12/10/06 Sopranos, 6^th/Part 1, #1, Maniac Cop 12/11/06 Sopranos, 6^th/Part 1, #2 & #3 12/15/06 Sopranos, 6^th/Part 1, #4, Oh in Ohio 12/17/06 Swimming Pool, Mysterious Skin 12/19/06 Art School Confidential, Pizza 12/27/06 Young Guns 01/08/07 Covenant, Monster House 01/09/07 Little Miss Sunshine, Superman II: Richard Donner Cut 01/10/07 The Descent 01/15/07 Idiocracy, Alias, Season 5 Disc 1 01/20/07 Barnyard 01/23/07 Alias, Season 5 Disc 2, 3 & 4 01/24/07 Hotel Rwanda 01/27/07 Alias, Season 5 Disc 4, Bikini Girls on Dinosaur Planet 01/28/07 Employee of the Month, Strangers with Candy: The Movie 01/30/07 Crank, Stay Alive 02/04/07 The Devil Wears Prada, Pushing Tin 02/06/07 The Science of Sleep, Last Kiss, How to Eat Fried Worms 02/11/07 Body Heat 02/15/07 City of God 02/16/07 City of God After we obtained this list, I converted portions into a more visually accessible calendar form (see sample months at the end of this essay), and we sat down and used the details to structure an interview, similar to the way photo-elicitation functions. At first, I asked specific questions about rental titles—why they chose a film, what they remembered about watching it. Hal mentioned that “Young Guns” may have been the low point of his holiday break, and that they did not rent much else during this period because they were watching a number of movies they had received as gifts. The discussion moved beyond the more specific realm of video rentals to broader life-history details. For example, Michelle described October as a “tough month”. She was still teaching undergraduate courses part-time as an adjunct instructor when she began a full-time administrative position. She told me “I couldn’t watch anything too dramatic then. I was exhausted. Comedy, action, and horror close to Halloween, but nothing that really took a lot of energy.” I also asked Hal and Michelle to look through the list and discuss details that stood out to them, or describe their overall rental tendencies in order to try a more auto-driving interview strategy. Here they spent some time drawing connections between films and filling in gaps, but I thought it was most interesting that they were drawn to what might appear as anomalies in the rental record. When a video did not fit well, for Hal and Michelle, alongside the rest of their rental history, they spent a considerable portion of time explaining the choice. For example, they focused heavily on The Breakup, Mysterious Skin, and Bikini Girls on Dinosaur Planet. For one reason or another, each of these films deviated from their notions of an idealized rental history, and Hal and Michelle wanted to preemptively correct any potential misinterpretations. Then we moved to the rental shop, to give the videos themselves some presence in the conversation. At the rental shop, where we could handle the videos, or at least their packaging, Hal and Michelle traveled much more quickly through the library, moving from one film to another, describing the connections between them. Sometimes films were connected simply via proximity on the shelf, other times the connections were much more personal. In particular I was interested in the ways Hal and Michelle decided what to rent when the title they had come for was unavailable. Of course marketing strategies structure particular elements of the interface between customer and product—newly released videos are the most easily accessible and highly advertised, for example. But at the same time objects themselves engage with the individual consumer in highly personal and unpredictable ways. While a lot of research methods involve prompting subjects through objects that they may see or use in their everyday lives, I am interested in moving beyond the use of things simply as prompts or triggers, towards an attempt to understand things as more active participants—cooperative actants equally imbued with the distributed agency embodied and activated throughout the assemblage. I am not sure how successful I was in this exercise. I could have taken the method even further by watching some of the films with Hal and Michelle. And a rental history definitely offers some explicit temporal structure that would likely be unavailable in most research contexts. However, by imagining a form of photo-elicitation in which the image acts more as a participant and less as a prompt or a trigger, and by substituting any range of things for the eponymous photograph, I believe I am moving towards a method that will benefit my overall research project with an improved emphasis on “thing theory” . The application of Ingold’s generative movement and Bennett’s agency of assemblages provides a provocative framework for thinking through a collective of human and nonhuman actants circulating through Japan and the U.S. works cited Bennett, Jane. 2005. The Agency of Assemblages and the North American Blackout. Public Culture 17(3): 445-65. Collier, John & Malcolm Collier. 1986. Visual Anthropology: Photography as a Research Method. Albuquerque: University of New Mexico Press. Harper, Douglas. 2002. Talking About Pictures: A Case for Photo Elicitation. Visual Studies 17:13-2. Heidegger, Martin. 1971. Poetry, language, thought. Albert Hofstadter, Trans. Harper & Row: New York. Ingold, Timothy. 2000. The Perception of the Environment: Essays in Livelihood. Routledge, London.
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