Dave, the new blog looks great. I’ll keep an eye on it. I’ve really got to read more Stephenson. Something seems especially creepy about your line, “hope that our academic colleagues will suddenly become ex nihilo creative geniuses.” I think of Tom C sarcastically talking about how everyone thinks philosophers just “make stuff up.” Definitively since Weber, the name of the game in academia has been information about things. At the very least, whatever your organizing theories are, a scholar should know about a bunch of things and be able to teach them to students. A category like wisdom doesn’t count. Weber says, find it elsewhere. What, anyway, would a museum be like with only theories and no things?

Molly! No, I don’t know Gell, but I’ll keep an eye out for it. I found a little summary for beginners here:

Art and Agency offers a new departure to study such responses because it singles out precisely that aspect of the interaction between works of art and their viewers that makes them similar to living beings: their agency, the power to influence their viewers, to make them act as if they are engaging not with dead matter, but with living persons. Because Gell’s is an anthropological theory of art, the stress is on the art nexus, the network of social relations in which art works are embedded; that is, on agency. It considers objects of art not in terms of their formal or aesthetic value or appreciation within the culture that produced them. Neither does it consider them as signs, visual codes to be deciphered or symbolic communications. Instead, Gell defined art objects in performative terms as systems of actions, intended to change the world rather than encode symbolic propositions about it. Art works thus considered are the equivalents of persons, more particularly social agents.

I love the idea of works of art as persons.

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In this respect, I urge you to consider the situation created in Neil Stephenson’s Diamond Age. Certain static images “crash” the brain, hijacking its code and reprogramming it. The solution is not increased creativity–and therefore somehow escaping the terror of the past–but inoculation from a deadly virus. To use Sam Gill’s concept of storytracking, this means we must inoculate ourselves against viruses by tracking the genealogy of our narrative and noticing its false starts, spurs, and forks. If we want to save these objects from the ways that feminists have used them (to establish a more stable basis for interpretation) then our job should not be to hope that our academic colleagues will suddenly become ex nihilo creative geniuses. Instead we should ask how the objects have been used by these folks. This question doesn’t negate the power of the objects, as you rightly crib from Richard Davis’ The Lives of Indian Images, but situates it in ways that allow us to productively extend the “incorrect” or unsatisfying older models.

Sry I haven’t been keeping up with your work. You’ve been a busy (and wonderfully successful) person. I’m trying to restart my blogging. Go on and help me out as I try to get into the swing of things during my comprehensive reading exam time….