For some reason, even though the semester’s been done and over for me for a week, I’m as busy as ever with various administrative and departmental chores. The College shuts down tomorrow and I feel under the gun to get things signed, sealed, and mailed away – on things that aren’t even academically related.
Hence, precious little time or energy to blog of late, though I’ve been thinking about the taste-versus-preferences question a bit more, and added a couple of comments to the original thread over at J Lena’s What is the what. There’s something interesting in the distinction between the taste/preferences distinction that points to how we divide up our social world and observe its contingencies, fluctuations, and changes (as well as its consistencies and stabilities – but I find contingency and change more fruitful as the baseline assumption). Perhaps another, more considered, post on this topic later.
Speaking of contingency, fluctuation, and change, here’s a little bonus clip of Harrison White being videoblogged at the recent Luhmann conference at the University of Lucerne. He seems unfamiliar with and skeptical about the very idea of blogging, but gets into the discussion quickly enough. After attempting to explain his view of social reality as turbulent, he turns and asks his interviewer, ‘Don’t you have a mother-in-law?’ or something to that effect. Courtesy of the Web Journal of Dirk Baecker.
The videoblog with Harrison White is hilarious. But what the heck is Harrison getting at in asking the interviewer, “Do you have a mother-in-law?” I think he was perplexed that the videoblogger was indifferent to who the audience of the blog might be, because most of his communications (the books he’s writing instead of blogging) are intended for particular audiences. Maybe he was trying to force the videoblogger into thinking about a more concrete audience.
I did find it funny that the first minute or two of the video was spent coaxing White in front of the camera. Re: mothers-in-law, I think your interpretation is charitable. I thought he was using the figure of the mother-in-law as a stock example of a kind of micro-level turbulence over which larger institutions are superimposed.