21 june 2009.

On one hand, she says “cultural” outside of the ‘China vs. the World’ binaries that are so well-preserved in these parts, but on another she’s hand, let’s focus upon the “exchange” part of that phrasing rather than the “cultural”.

Okay, so naïvely, let’s broaden our minor understandings of culture:

From the Department of Social Relations, (why people act as they do)… 1. the “behavioral system” of biological needs… 2. the “personality system” of an individual’s characteristics affecting their functioning in the social world… 3. the “social system” of patterns of units of social interaction, especially social status and role… 4. the “cultural system” of norms and values that regulate social action symbolically.

If we can focus upon such exchanges with less quantitative referent to their final outcomes——e.g., commodity, your value for the money, the art product——we try to focus instead upon the cycles, flows and transmissions thereof, observation and documentation as an active process and deconstruction. I don’t know how much it is possible to tear down what we want to see. I don’t know how much it is possible to open oneself to the context, how that refers to the organisational motions toward content. What content can be put forth without specific agendas, can means without ends really be a geopolitical question (the living organisation of the city), or is it just too banal (the routine), too asocial (acommunicative)? what about adding another word to the question of context as content? “Continuity.” The minor displacements over time in Reich-ian fashion, repetition conjoined with all our failures in memory as an open-ended form of exchange. Growing up.

(small note for sportsbabel: wondering if my hesitation about ‘the gift’ has to do with that isolated ending, if “gift-ing” as a theoretical practice renders something different?)