"What is a piece of ‘research’? To find out we would need to have some idea of what a ‘result’ is. What is it that one finds? What is it that one wants to find? What is missing? In what axiomatic field will the fact isolated, the meaning brought out, the statistical discovery placed?
No doubt it depends each time on the particular science approached, but from the moment a piece of research concerns the text (and the text extends very much further than the literary work) the research itself becomes text, production: to it, any ‘result’ is literally im-pertinent.
Research is then the name which prudently, under the constraint of certain social conditions, we give to the activity of writing: research here moves on the side of writing, is an adventure of the signifier."
- Barthes 1977, 197-198.
Yes - the question is both urgent and valid - but from where, writes Walker, will the Barthesian mythologists who will examine this question come?
I come from architecture, but as this type of mythologist I must be vigilant with respect to my own motives and those of the institution that sustained my work.
No doubt it depends each time on the particular science approached, but from the moment a piece of research concerns the text (and the text extends very much further than the literary work) the research itself becomes text, production: to it, any ‘result’ is literally im-pertinent.
Research is then the name which prudently, under the constraint of certain social conditions, we give to the activity of writing: research here moves on the side of writing, is an adventure of the signifier."
- Barthes 1977, 197-198.
Yes - the question is both urgent and valid - but from where, writes Walker, will the Barthesian mythologists who will examine this question come?
I come from architecture, but as this type of mythologist I must be vigilant with respect to my own motives and those of the institution that sustained my work.
No comments :
Post a Comment