(Return to) Return to the Far Side, Virtual
Or: what The Wire’s 2011 End of Year list can tell us about how values emerge from a culture that produces itself in its own imaginary web of self-reference
This is a re-post with an archival value to me.
Context: In 2017 I wrote a reflection about work I had conducted in 2013 – about a list-making imbroglio that happened around The Wire’s End of Year lists, in 2011.
…so: a very intricate frame-within-frame regress of temporalities, much as is implied by Ferraro’s cover, copy copy copied in the above screen shot.
I’m hoping a few readers might ‘stumble across’ this and find something of still fresh value in it, given we’re back in ‘end of year list’ season.
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Opening paragraph, written in 2017:
“In this document (long read!) I revisit an exploration of End of Year (EoY) listmaking dynamics. This piece began life in September 2013 as a research note developed while working as a research assistant, alongside my other responsibilities… The 2013 context of the research note is crucial to note. First of all, at that time the note was intended as a way of bringing my earlier experience as a blogger and music critic to bear on questions of distinction making and the accumulation of social and cultural capital. As composed — very quickly, over a few feverishly caffeinated hours — it was a way of explaining Bourdieu via a practice I was familiar with from one corner of electronic music culture. It was offered as an example to aid in understanding the circulation and attribution of value in street art economies, based on the striking commonalities I observed between the two fields after a week’s work transcribing interviews… In both fields, actants engage in mediated processes of evaluation, through which distinctions are produced and different forms of capital are accumulated and circulated. Although the cultural objects are quite different, the mechanisms were strikingly familiar. At heart, what I was trying to explain is how values emerge from a culture that produces itself in its own imaginary web of self-reference”.