Having exited the field, knowing how we exited the field (Ausgangshaltung), a pause of gathering resources before setting out toward the problems of anthropology seemed appropriate. In this studio work we tested this intuition and we are now clear that it is appropriate.During the period after the heat of exiting we found ourselves engaging and welcoming a period of calmer observation of the state of affairs. Working in the studio, we decided to call this stage “gathering”. Gathering brings together an active process of bringing into proximity a variety of things. These include people, objects, media, equipment, experiences, observations and affects.In recuperation, the task is to take up the objects of inquiry to work on them, to dis-articulate them from the direct experience of fieldwork and its previous affect.
For instance, the topic of discordancy has appeared continuously in our work and inquiry. This continuity underscores the fact that the ethics of discordancy is central to our work. However, upon closer inspection and during this period of recuperation it became clearer to us that this term contained a series of referents and furthermore was meant to function differently at different points in the inquiry.
In this light, we decided we had to work through dis-aggregating discordancy and Haltung. This separation affirmed the essential function of Haltung in the Ausgang, but not its mandatory presence in all inquiries into discordancy.
The work on the self was to disengage the haltung from the knowledge and the insights produced during the fieldwork and the Ausgang and we did this working-through (durcharbeiten) studios 1-9.
The recuperation activity consists in at a minimum, equipment, which helps us pick out and order the objects we want to work on, including Haltung. We note that the activity of identifying equipment (paraskeue) in the ancient world took place during a recuperative pause after turbulent events or at the end of the day. It frequently took the form of a narration and might well be shared with friends. Recuperation is purposeful.We pick them out relative to where we are trying to go.
The recuperative work on these objects was enabled by a reminder of the topics which were posited conceptually in the diagnostic stage of our inquiry. The topics were ethics, governance and truth-knowledge. These topics were equally central in both orienting our fieldwork and aided us in parameterizing the observations and experiences in the field. By the Ausgang from the fieldwork these topics remained central to articulating the concepts and problems that had been resolved and those that needed a different mode of action to successfully through.
What’s the function of the topics in the recuperative moment? We had the equipment, we turned to the studio and what were we working on? We were working on trying to sort out excesses and deficiencies, serious speech acts and speech acts, capabilities and incapacities. These functioned as the more specific parameters within the equipment for sorting out how we would fashion our observations such that the discordancy could be dis-aggregated into its elements (Haltung, the work of having exited, the objects that have been fashioned in the fieldwork, enduring problems and their transformations) thereby making it possible to re-aggregate these elements as objects relevant to another mode of action — curation.
Studio equipment enabled the turning of Haltung into an object, and hence we could work on it by objectifying it. Haltung as our reactive embodiment came first, and then we worked on it. How did we work on it? Through the studio equipment, which did what? Made it into an object and hence provided analytically determinations. For example, we identified the double binds that characterized the fieldwork engagement. Working in the studios provided a space in which posing questions to ourselves was a normal part of the exercise required such that the answers aided us in our exit.
Given that we have identified that this work was about displacing Haltung, we did it by turning the conditions for which Haltung was the solution themselves into objects and assemblages (next step, curation). Through this displacement and dis-aggregation we were able to recuperate the knowledge, the affect and the objects of inquiry that we brought with us from the field and the Ausgang.