From bricoleur to carver – A methodological provocation from video ethnographic inquiry

Abstract

This article discusses video ethnographic inquiry and its methodological implications. Equipped with only a video camera and amateurism, the author dives into a unique judo practice. By illustrating the failures and regrets from the attempts in the field, the article highlights the methodological significance of using audio-visual recording in comparison to writing. By drawing on Henri Bergson’s criticism of spatialised time, the article develops the possibility of the method of subtraction, arguing that while text-based practice is open for additions, video recording, rather, is a subtractive attempt. The metaphor of the carver is proposed, along with discussion of Lévi-Strauss’ bricoleur and engineer, to illuminate how the practice of subtraction aims to achieve duration, missing from dominant studies today.

Introduction

He isn’t making eyebrows and noses with his chisel. What he’s really doing is excavating with the help of mallet and chisel those nose and eyebrow shapes that lie buried in the wood. He can’t go wrong. It’s just like digging stones up from the soil. (Natsume 1974, 48)

With technological enhancements and flooding visual and audio messages, scholars today may have different possibilities than ever before to expand their academic terrains (Pink 2021). Including sound and movement as well as moving images, for instance, can offer ‘a sensory method’ (Bates 2015a, 1) for scholars to elaborate nuances and senses that may have escaped from solely descriptive, text-based approaches (Lorimer 2010; Brown and Banks 2015; Garrett and Hawkins 2014; Pink 2021).

Although using a video camera as a tool for field research is often regarded as supplemental to descriptive formats, video cameras enable researchers in the field to record their experiences as they go along. Well-crafted outcomes can become enlivened, rather than just presented (Garrett 2010; Bates 2015a; Vannini 2017), thereby ‘transcending the limits of representation’ (Vannini 2017, 161). Academic products from video recording turn out to be not just a simple representation of recorded data, but rather a way to evoke a different modality of academic representation. Vannini points out such uses of video recording for academic production as ‘the most intense more-than-representational activities’ (Vannini 2017, 160).

However, as Vannini (2015) reminded us, simply bringing high-end video cameras and editing software alone would not directly produce high quality end products. Rather, in the case of video ethnographic production for instance, a high degree of professional video recording skill is needed, along with the right technology to produce something of aesthetic and academic value (see also Lorimer 2010). Otherwise, there is a risk of producing unsophisticated, boring end-products, along with ‘the embarrassing amateurism’ (Vannini 2015, 234) which can negatively affect the methodological field.

It makes sense that an amateur filmmaker using advanced technologies does not necessarily result in the production of a good quality product. Simply patchworking documented images and sounds, movements and voices is not likely to evoke academic insights. To some degree, however, accessibility to audio-visual equipment, or simply, high-tech-normalised cell phones these days, lowers the hurdle for scholars to video record, edit, and share footage. Embarrassing amateurism. After coming back from a video ethnographic attempt in the field, this word kept haunting me.

Below, how I conducted fieldwork using a video camera is introduced. By illustrating the context behind the footage shared below, which reflects failures and regrets from the attempts, I highlight the methodological significance of audio-visual recording in comparison to writing. I further extend the discussion by examining Henri Bergson’s work, particularly on the concept of time and space, and elucidate the methodological possibility that ethnographic video inquiry provokes.

To begin, I share what might appear as one embarrassing failure within the ‘(r)aw fieldwork footage’ (Garrett and Hawkins 2014, 522) I gathered, which can be viewed at the following link, upon entering the password ‘carver’:

https://vimeo.com/536231816.

Failures from Tokyo

The footage is from my fieldwork in Tokyo, Japan. I was walking with a man, Kawasora, who participated in the periodical training camp of the national visually impaired judo team of Japan, held at the Kodokan dojo (gym), the headquarters of the Kodokan Judo Association. It was morning and we were on our way to the training site from the accommodation where all the trainees and staff members stayed. It was only the second day since having met Kawasora in person. Although we had exchanged nearly 50 e-mails until that time, I knew very little about him– not by the way of descriptive information, but as a human being who walks, eats, and speaks, with his scarce eyesight and silenced ears. Somehow, after joining the camp as a researcher focusing on Kawasora’s judo practice, I ended up being assigned by the camp organising committee to stay in the same room with him and ‘help him if needed’. Until then I had no idea how much involvement would be required during my fieldwork with Kawasora, and the way things were set up last minute, was intriguing. Someone around him told me he could see lights and vague shapes of objects in front of him, but it was hard for me to tell how much, and how he may have seen these things differently to myself. The relatively unprepared and unstructured decision was something that I needed to adjust to.

By spending a night in shared accommodation with him and three other judoka (judo athletes) participating in the national competition the following day, I started to better understand the degree to which he could do things by himself. He spoke orally with some accents and a somewhat limited vocabulary, but not a critical obstacle to understand what he was saying. He communicated with tactile signing or finger braille. He also used his cell phone by connecting it to an accessory electronic notetaker (Braille Sense) that he carried almost always with him.

One day Prior

Some amount of time had passed, probably around forty minutes since we came into the room after our first meeting, when Kawasora suddenly spoke to me (Bates 2015b):

He looks at me and asks to guide him to the bathroom. I tap his back twice with my open hand, the way I had started telling him that I was here. We leave the room. A thought flashes through my mind whether I should grab a video camera, and I decline. Not the priority now, I need to take him to the toilet. Outside the bedroom Kawasora finds his slippers in the hallway without a problem. The old ryokan (classic Japanese style accommodation) is tight and narrow. The wooden hallway leads us to small aisles on the left and right, and our footsteps across the wooden floor make the floorboards creak. Kawasora is carefully touching the wall on his right side with his right hand, and with his left hand holding my right shoulder in front of him. We keep going straight. There are three stairs going down just before the washroom sign. I shrug my shoulder down, indicating that there are stairs. His stride becomes shorter, and touching the wall carefully, he goes down the stairs. We arrive at the washroom. I touch his right hand and let him touch the doorknob. He opens the door. There are other sets of slippers waiting there for bathroom use only, but I do not know how to tell him. Kawasora keeps going inside, and I pull his arm toward the toilet. I touch his back when he gets in front of the toilet. He starts. I step back through the door and wait for him. (Field notes, 21 November 2015)

With the help of a translator, Kawasora and I exchanged a good amount of communication that night. We also exchanged short e-mails back and forth in the quiet room. In both cases, there was always a time lag in our communication, which I had never experienced until then.

The day of

After finishing breakfast in the morning, we took off to Kodokan, located in the middle of a classic neighbourhood where small houses stood tightly among tall apartment buildings bound by narrow roads. Why was I guiding him? I did not know. At this point, it seemed that people involved in the tournament expected me to be with Kawasora. The sidewalk was not so busy on a Saturday morning, yet there were people on foot or bicycle heading somewhere, and the street had a steady stream of cars coming and going. The trainees and staff members had taken off from the shared accommodation together, but the crowd had soon spread out, almost reflecting the degree of sightedness of each judoka. Simply, those who could see more were walking faster. We walked at the very end of the group. Kawasora was holding my right shoulder with his left hand, while pulling his suitcase with his right hand. I decided to take this opportunity to record, at the time not knowing that walking was increasingly being considered an academic method, such as Vannini and Vannini’s (2017) ‘go along’ or Pink’s ‘walking with video’ (Pink 2007, 243), which could bring ‘the possibilities for conducting research on the move along the way’ (Bates and Rhys-Taylor 2017, 2). My motivation was simply based on recording as much footage as possible, from various ranges, angles, sceneries, and contexts, which I had hoped would turn out to be a provocative piece later. In retrospect, however, in the very least the recording was a ‘mode of participation’ (Pink 2015, 125) where I had a very specific way of ‘being with, and doing things with’ (Pink 2011, 270) the surrounding environment and situation; with Kawasora and the video camera in my hand.

I started holding my video camera with my left hand, pointing the lens towards Kawasora’s upper body. The video recording itself was not easy at all, as I was paying attention to Kawasora’s safety, as well as making sure that the lens of the video camera was pointed in the intended direction. Since I was not able to look into the monitor, I was not fully sure how accurately the lens was directed, or whether objects in Kawasora’s periphery, such as my face, would be captured, and or be distracting. I just kept recording. I did not know how horrible the exposure would turn out. This attempt at video recording would probably be infuriating from a non-amateur maker’s perspective, and it ended with Kawasora almost falling. In the footage, Kawasora’s face seemed unchanged for a while, but then we saw him showing a confused, wry expression. While recording, I could not see his face in that moment.

I wonder what you, the viewer perceived from the footage. Confusion? Would it have been helpful, then, if the footage went on for a longer period? Or would it have been more concise if I had included descriptions of what was going on, as subtitles? If viewers were simply assuming that Kawasora had lost his balance, what was actually going on in the moment would not be perceived accurately enough. He tripped, because I suddenly stopped walking and asked someone for directions, as I could not see the other groups of judoka walking ahead of us. My sudden halt made Kawasora lose his balance, in combination with the steep downhill slope we were walking on. I was busy just keeping the video camera on. I did not think enough about the possibility that the exceedingly heavy, stuffed backpack he was carrying had been affecting his balance while walking. I can also assume here that my nervousness about guiding the man who I had only just met the day before, who I did not really know how to guide on a longer walk, with his heavy baggage, in the morning rush, had all affected the footage as well.

Engagement in the field

In retrospect, I regret I made Kawasora experience such a dangerous moment. I should have been aware of the surrounding environment while video recording. Meanwhile, I also realised my novice recording skills, lack of technological control and lack of ‘visual literacy’ (Garrett and Hawkins 2014, 152) affected the video recording and aesthetic and filled it with countless failures. Footage ‘has a life of its own and a relationship with its viewers’ (Bates 2015a, 16) – as my footage’s first viewer, I hold the feelings of regret still today.

I believe how I conducted the video recording and how it turned out could have been avoided with better technical skill. Better, in this case, not only refers to those technological dimensions such as sound and image qualities, but also to the control of video recording through foresight of what could happen in the next moment and the skill to adjust the video recording accordingly. Simply put, the footage reflects my immatureness to witness video recording ‘as a complex process of learning to be affected both by the camera and by those you are filming (with)’ (Lorimer 2010, 244).

The key point to discuss here is that the video camera captured the very moment before the incident was named or meanings were gleaned. The footage at least did not eliminate the web of linkages surrounding the camera. For instance, while it was me who turned the lens toward the specific objects to record, deciding when to turn on the video camera, at which angle, from which position, and how to keep the stability of the camera, all needed to be adjusted to whatever was going on around me. While recording, for example, I tried not to record the faces of random people passing near us to adjust to ethics concerns. Even those who I had received consent from, I was still hesitant to video record them at that point in my field engagement, which limited the scope of the camera more than the actual technical possibilities of the lens.

The footage also directly reflected how I was walking along with Kawasora in the very moment. I adjusted my walking speed to the rhythm of his walk, or so I thought. I focused on my right shoulder where I could feel his grip tense when our walking speed was not synchronised well. I also paid attention to his footsteps, not only visually, but also to their sound, as I had found that soon after the rhythm of his steps became irregular, he would get off balance. The pavement of the narrow street was relatively helpful in this regard, as it made our steps rather audible. If I had been wearing sound control headphones, for example, to focus more on the quality of sound recorded, I would not have been able to rely on those sounds around me. At least there was my ‘sensory embodied experience as a basis from which to empathise with others’ (Pink 2007, 243) behind the captured footage.

From products to production

Isn’t the audio-visual method sensorial and nuanced? Yes, maybe in some degree. Yes, when it is done with care and skill. While many studies are keen about how their end products will appear, text-based or audio-visual, scholastic works may be, as April Vannini expressed, ‘preoccupied with producing an outcome’ (Vannini and Vannini 2017, 192). I wonder how often we could encounter an ‘embarrassing’ quality of academic works in the eventual publication, or in the footages not used. Nearly any format of academic works today, is well polished and neatly decorated, at least in appearance. It is rare to find something like ‘shaky footage’ (Author 2017) that leaves scholars’ struggles and failures from the field in the final articles or video products.

Now, by focusing on the footage which may be untidy, unskilled, and full of regrets from the field, the modality of my engagement in the field is shared in the way a descriptive approach will not allow. The footage showcased the ‘present-congruent nature of filming’ (Washiya 2017, 162) ‘beyond being simply something that is statically situated in the past and from which we might garner our authority as ethnographers’ (Pink 2021, 180). This means that video recording in the field enables future viewers to encounter not only the outcome of the engagement as footages, but also to envision how the video-based engagement was conducted, the very modality in situ where:

What is captured on camera during an ethnographic shoot is more likely to be a mediation of experience rather than a reflection on experience. When we are recording fieldwork activity, it is not usually reflection we are looking for in the moment … (Garett 2011, 531)

Video recording as subtraction

Video ethnographic inquiry is an attempt to document the ongoing moment directly and represent what the video camera sees and hears. During this process what ends up being captured by the camera is eventually limited: Present action (video recording) is restricted within the future result (footages) from which we need to subtract to get to the end product. This limitation drives those of us researching using audio-visual tools to strive for recording quality images and sound on site. No matter how poor the footage turns out, we still need to use it as the source for the end products. The selection of footages thus becomes subtractive, rather than additional. Video recording then, can be characterised as what I deem to be the practice of subtraction.

Indeed, a subtractive practice is found throughout video ethnographic attempts. For instance, pointing the lens towards specific objects is enabled by subtracting those not to be included in the view. Unlike audio recording, which can collect sounds 360 degrees around a microphone, a video camera can only collect images within the width of the lens. This limitation, the subtractive nature of a video camera, guides the recording to focus on its object. By this way, the material nature of a video camera first and foremost, initiates a subtractive video ethnographic practice even to the extent that myself, the videographer, becomes subtracted – the closer I come to the video camera, the more that the line between my viewpoint and that of the camera lens is lessened. Through the effort of improvising within the entity, I myself am increasingly subtracted.

Description as addition

Thinking of video ethnographic inquiry as a subtractive approach contrasts sharply with the other, major direction – addition. This meta-methodological tendency studies strive to achieve is well depicted by the famous term ‘thick description’ (Geertz 1973, 6).¹ There are recent studies using the metaphor to convey certain qualities of research, such as ‘thick participation’ (Samudra 2008) or ‘thick sensory description’ (Taylor and Hansen 2005, 1225). Here, it is intriguing to note that a richer and more nuanced understanding relates to thickness, a geometric metaphor.

This article foregrounds the meta-methodology of addition as the undercurrent of academic works and are based on descriptive approaches. The point is that addition is open-ended – it allows descriptions to keep being added, almost with no limit, unlike audio-visual products composed by images and sound that are limited to the moment they took place. For example, by adding descriptions about the above footage from Tokyo, the background context of the tripping incident could be further illustrated. Describing Kawasora here as being deaf and blind would successfully locate him within the categories we are familiar with, and in a way help the audience and readers come to envision what was going on in that moment more decisively.

However, the way I describe the footage is essentially different, qualitatively, from what was actually taking place, due to the nature of description (Emerson, Fretz, and Shaw 2011). Because of the static unchanging nature of description, researchers can add further explanations to write up, afterwards. We can delete descriptions and rewrite them. The atemporality of descriptions enables us to pursue the approach of addition, like an attempt of stacking bricks.

Spatialisation of time

Henri Bergson’s thoughts provide an insightful scope to examine this additional methodology and the issue of atemporality. For example, Bergson argued that scientific thoughts are dealing with lines that are already drawn and spatialised as the trajectories of movement, but not the movements themselves. We can divide such lines into parts and that is how scientific examinations and analysis are executed. Bergson argued that time is spatialised by such an approach. To explain his argument, among other cases, he called on Zeno’s Paradox of the tortoise and Achilles:

When Achilles pursues the tortoise, each of his steps must be treated as indivisible, and so must each step of the tortoise. After a certain number of steps, Achilles will have overtaken the tortoise … Zeno’s device is to reconstruct the movement of Achilles according to a law arbitrarily chosen. Achilles with a first step is supposed to arrive at the point where the tortoise was, with a second step at the point which it has moved to while he was making the first, and so on. In this case, Achilles would always have a new step to take. But obviously, to overtake the tortoise, he goes about it in quite another way. The movement considered by Zeno would only be the equivalent of the movement of Achilles if we could treat the movement as we treat the interval passed through, decomposable and recomposable at will. (Bergson 1911a, 311)

By transferring movement into pieces of immobile moments separated from each other, time is spread into space. This is how scholars examine the fluidity of the world, scientifically. Movements, colour, time, and such lose continuity of their own, and thus we can discuss and analyse them, as static objects. Our intellectual and scientific practices take geometry for granted, assuming its presence even prior to scientific observation, or as Bergson put it, ‘[I]t is a latent geometry, immanent in our idea of space, which is the main spring of our intellect and the cause of its working’ (1911a, 211).

It is our scientific, intellectual effort that translates the quality of time, into a spatialised time of quantity (Kerszberg 1997). Objects to observe external to ourselves are spatially constructed by our minds. In this way, ‘we are now standing before our own shadow’ (Bergson 2013, 133). While we assume we are examining objects we perceived, we have already replaced the experienced time itself by static states of descriptions. As Kreps (2015) explained, descriptions, including language, cannot be separated from objects that they refer to. Even further, those objects and objective reality are from our own perception, which indeed we are also part of, and we fix by a descriptive approach. To perceive a line drawn as a line, we need to achieve an external point of view.

Such criticism against the spatialisation of time goes even further and provokes that those visual images used for non-descriptive methods also spatialise time. Bergson characterised it as ‘cinematographical habits of intellect’ (1911a, 312) and criticised its discontinuity of the original flow. Indeed, video recorded footage is constructed from a certain number of static images per second (Hadjioannou 2012) and in this sense, as Vannini and Vannini noted, ‘video is an illusion, not a copy, of movement and rhythm’ (2017, 183). We can add descriptions for each image, in any language. The attempt would be open-ended, as technically speaking, we can insert more still images in between each of them.

While studies adopting a video camera or visual medium tend to aim to capture the qualitative dimensions of reality over the quantitative, logos-centric understandings, the point provoked by Bergson’s works, illuminated that visual images or text-based descriptions are both mostly located in the realm of spatialisation. They cannot be simply taken for granted as the binary of qualitative and quantitative anymore. Bergson argued that once we set our intellectual approach toward matters in the world, the methodological approach is guided toward such spatialisation where ‘to perceive means to immobilize’ (1911b, 275).

It is precisely through this spatialisation of time that transition is lost, where ‘(w)e have only the imaginary stops “child” and “man,” and we are very near to saying that one of these stops is the other’ (Bergson 1911a, 312–313). The point emerges that transition is lost in our hands, by creating static stops where our ‘habits of language’ or ‘the cinematographical mechanism of thought’ (Bergson 1911a, 313) are almost destined to spatialise the reality we experience, shaping it into extension and quantity (Kleinherenbrink 2014).

Duration instead of spatialisation

While spatialised time is seen as the major scientific approach, if we are to understand the objects of movement itself, Bergson advocated to get out from spatialisation, and set movement as being there prior to space (Linstead and Mullarkey 2003). This is how Bergson came to underscore the difference from clock-time (time spatialised) and the time of continuity without transition. Bergson called such time, duration:

In a word, pure duration might well be nothing but a succession of qualitative changes, which melt into and permeate one another, without precise outlines, without any tendency to externalize themselves in relation to one another, without any affiliation with number: it would be pure heterogeneity. (Bergson 2013, 104)

It must be emphasised that we ought not to understand duration as a geometric way; even the metaphor of the ‘line’ I have been using in this paper, for instance, is by itself already spatialised. Lines are extensity, homogeneous and cannot include heterogeneity or diversity within the lines themselves (Winkler 2006). Duration is not experienced as divisible pieces, such as that of ‘an “instant” of duration’ (Kreps 2015, 164). Each element of duration interpenetrates one another, as the present is penetrated by the past where ‘(w)ithout that survival of the past into the present there would be no duration but only instantaneity’ (Bergson 1946, 211). Thus, drawing a line between ‘the now-point (impression) and what has just run off (retentions)’ (Winkler 2006, 104) is not accurate.

The methodology of addition is thus highlighted here as a de-temporalised, spatialised practice. Because each of the moments, or pieces of duration, are moments not mutually interpenetrated but rather segmented, we can add to it, like bricks: Each one homogeneous, and cannot be heterogenous, each image, a stack of bricks.

Under spatialisation, heterogeneity is replaced by homogeneity. Here, the paradox of Achilles and the tortoise introduced above can be paraphrased in this way: The paradox emerges, because the nature of descriptions allows readers to understand Achilles and the tortoise as movement (simultaneity), yet allowing readers to accept Achilles to move separately, after the tortoise gets to a specific geometric point. In other words, through the spatialisation of time the ‘future appears to co-exist with the present and succession is converted into juxtaposition’ (Čapek 1987, 135). Or maybe in a sense, what we call paradox is, then, something that we find as the gap between homogeneity and heterogeneity, or juxtaposition and succession.

From bricoleur to carver

Here, I propose the Lévi-Strauss’s famous metaphor of ‘bricolage’ (1966, 16) to investigate the methodological implications from audio-visual research methods. When a bricoleur uses whatever resources available, they can reach within a confined set of materials, collected during their prior excavations, in a sense resembling video ethnographic inquiry which collects resources, or footages, from which editing is done. The editing process as well, includes similarities with what a bricoleur may do, assembling videos from a limited source of footages ‘collected or retained on the principle that “they may always come in handy”’ (18).

On the other hand, however, video recording could resemble more a practice of what Lévi-Strauss calls ‘engineer’ (1966, 17) in contrast to bricolage. While the latter highlights a dispositional attitude without being constrained by ‘the availability of raw materials and tools conceived and procured for the purpose of the project’ (16), being an engineer reflects being in the enclosed circle of tools and materials with predetermined purposes – in other words, an engineer’s means are already ‘defined in terms of a project’ (16).²

Although audio-visual recording could be considered as the process of bricolage or engineering, I propose that it is also a vivid example of the practice of subtraction, as recording and editing are destined to delete and reduce from whatever was collected for a given project. Here, I characterise the metaphor of the carver, as the person practicing subtraction. Like a carver selecting a specific material to sculpt from many possible choices, a researcher pursuing video ethnographic inquiry chooses where to point their lens, exclusively in a specific direction at every moment. Like a carver placing a chisel onto a specific point on the object in their hands to carve out, video ethnographic inquiry keeps cutting off from whatever they have already recorded. Like carvers that need to throw away those materials they separated from the sculpture, what is not recorded, and footages subtracted from later edits are cast aside. Carvers need to subtract from what is in front of them, which is in strike contrast to the methodology of addition.

The metaphor of the carver also elucidates absence as a key concept. In general, to sense and perceive the world around us, we need to subtract from all the possible senses, to omit that which is not regarded as useful by our ‘vital functions’ (Mullarkey 1995, 250). Not limited to a person’s immediate senses, memory as well ‘becomes engaged during the act of perception, the subject purposively selects from the entire stock of recollections’ (Shapiro 2013, 143).

On academic carving

By newly demonstrating subtraction as a methodological approach, contrasting studies using the methodology of addition that have long been taken for granted become objectivised. The metaphor of the carver at least foregrounds the ultimate limitation of our intellectual attempts: being part of an entire duration without having an external viewpoint. When we try to add (descriptions), the same effort takes us further away from what we are eager to capture. The point is, then, whether, and how, we deal with such ultimate limitation.

Simply pursuing the spatialisation of time cannot avoid the pitfall. Quality is spatialised: Consider for example duration as experienced by one’s body – it is measured by clock time with numbers, which does not allow one another to be penetrated. Present and past would not inter-penetrate each other if we were to follow clock time. Pursuing logical arguments is thus regulated by the rules that our intellectual functions created and adapted, including the systems of numbers and language.

By this way, experienced physical movement become the object to ‘reconstruct’ as if the experience was ontologically constructed, built up, and re-presented. Physical movement is preformed in this manner when we are descriptive. To attain the movement itself, instead of pre-drawn lines spatialising movements, we need to go against the current of spatialisation. Achieving it may require massive effort. Bergson considered the effort akin to a kind of violence toward our mind, to ‘reverse the direction of the operation by which it habitually thinks, has perpetually to revise, or rather to recast, all its categories’ (1912, 69). Further still he noted:

Certainly, concepts are necessary to it, for all the other sciences work as a rule with concepts, and metaphysics cannot dispense with the other science. But it is only truly itself when it goes beyond the concept, or at least when it frees itself from rigid and ready-made concepts in order to create a kind very different from those which we habitually use; I mean supple, mobile, and almost fluid representations, always ready to mould themselves on the fleeting forms of intuition. (21)

Bergson suggested intuition in this context, as the driving force to seek succession, ‘a growth from within’ (1946, 35), ‘to get back the movement and rhythm’ (102). While analytical thoughts are based on immobility, ‘intuition places itself in mobility’ (1912, 47).

After Bergson’s death, his concepts and approach to understand movement which once heavily influenced the world, receded. Recent studies however, started re-highlighting his insights (Ansell-Pearson 2005). One of the hurdles that Bergson’s argument contained was that intuition, for instance, itself is quite conceptual and far from indicating a practical approach, even though the concept encourages parting from a conceptual understanding of movement. Bergson (1946) also noted that intuition gets mistaken as instinct or feeling. Similarly, intuition has been highlighted by scholars often merely as an approach to sympathise with and understand people in the field without keeping their viewpoint as external to the field (Charmaz and Mitchell 2001, 163) which is mistaking the essential point of the concept. Bergson’s intuition was not a mere sympathy directed against isolated individuals to go beyond internal and external divisions. ‘[T]o think intuitively is to think in duration’ (1946, 38), but not simply to think in someone else’s shoes, as once we set the others’ viewpoint, it is spatialised.

Furthermore, intuitive effort is always done with the fundamental restriction that intuition is a concept usually to be communicated to others by way of descriptions, such as numbers and languages that are spatialised (Bergson 1911a; Bergson 1946). When intuition is set as the practice ‘without any expression, translation, or symbolic representation’ (Bergson 1912, 9) we are destined to describe, as I am doing now. Academic arguments, including what Bergson proposed, are thus essentially taking place within a spatialised realm from which duration cannot be understood as it is: ‘[W]e believe that we can form a faithful representation of duration by setting in line the concepts of unity, multiplicity, continuity, finite or infinite divisibility, etc. There precisely is the illusion’ (1912, 18).

Artistic making

Against this illusion of our habitual thoughts and understanding, Bergson’s approach provoked artists and related activities as a channel for intuitive effort to be expressed (Grosz 2005). Take for example:

What is the aim of art if not to show us, in nature and in the mind, outside of us and within us, things which did not explicitly strike our senses and our consciousness? The poet and the novelist who express a mood certainly do not create it out of nothing; they would not be understood by us if we did not observe within ourselves, up to a certain point, what they say about others. As they speak, shades of emotion and thought appear to us which might long since have been brought out in us but which remained invisible; just like the photographic image which has not yet been plunged into the bath where it will be revealed. The poet is this revealing agent. (Bergson 1946, 159)

Here, artistic practice is to be considered as a channel to rethink academic inquiry. Then, imagine carvers at work, subtracting from the material they face: The reality in hand loses its own lines gradually. The carver keeps deleting the line that separates the inside from the outside, the lines that we take for granted are constantly challenged and changed. Here, we should not assume that the material is a single, immobile, and unchanging object. Quite contrary, the material to face is a wholistic entity in which the carvers are embedded. The material is continuingly changing its texture, the way it reflects light, its appearance in the carvers’ eyes, and so on. Carvers as well, are continuingly changing; their body positions, their pulse, their (dis)satisfaction with how the material appears, and countless others. The carvers are simply doing subtraction. By doing so, they can even subtract aesthetics or sensibilities to be expressed from the moment and leave it to the matter of future becoming. Much in the same way that Lévi-Strauss located painters, carvers could be ‘mid-way’ (1966, 16)

between design and anecdote, and his genius consists in uniting internal and external knowledge, a ‘being’ and a ‘becoming’, in producing with his brush an object which does not exist as such and which he is nevertheless able to create on his canvas. (25)

Consider for instance, Matisse’s, thoughts on carving a statue:

By removing oneself from the literal representation of movement one attains greater beauty and grandeur … a man hurling a discus will be caught at the moment in which he gathers his strength, or at least, if he is shown in the most strained and precarious position implied by his action, the sculptor will have epitomized and condensed it so that equilibrium is re-established, thereby suggesting the idea of duration. (1995, 40)

For carvers, they not only subtract the material by carving, but also subtract the desire of achieving the entire movement with a single moment. By doing so, duration comes to be suggested, by absence.

The meta-method of subtraction

For carvers, they are within the whole, their viewpoint internal of the entity. Unlike the methodology of addition which aims to find the whole by building it up from whatever materials they have as the end product, subtraction, rather, is the attempt to dig into the whole in which we are embedded. Subtraction is based on this ontological setting as its default, in sharp contrast with the methodology of addition, based on having less to start with and heading towards increasing its ‘possessions’ in the end. Bergson claimed, ‘We go from absence to presence, from the void to the full, in virtue of the fundamental illusion of our understanding’ (1911a, 274–275).

The video ethnographic inquiry from Tokyo is re-situated here: It is the pursuit of audio-visual making, which is a process of subtractive engagement in multiple dimensions. The subtraction includes, for instance, a ‘desire to endow duration with the same attributes as extensity, to interpret a succession by a simultaneity, and to express the idea of freedom in a language into which it is obviously untranslatable’ (Bergson 2013, 221). Indeed, invention of film itself originated from the keen interest to seek succession, where sequences are ‘by no means constituted by ideas, but rather by images’ (Laplantine 2015, 63). Similarly, Bergson noted:

No image can replace the intuition of duration, but many diverse images, borrowed from very different orders of things, may, by the convergence of their action, direct consciousness to the precise point where there is a certain intuition to be seized. By choosing images as dissimilar as possible, we shall prevent any one of them from usurping the place of the intuition it is intended to call up, since it would then be driven away at once by its rivals. (1912, 16)

Here, the succession to seek is not residing in the film products themselves but is coproduced with the viewers (see Prendeville 2013). Unlike written words or photographic image(s) to be shown simultaneously, film requires an audience to wait for the next moment to come. Movement of film, in this case, is duration to be experienced by viewers who can follow the changes, instead of consuming each moment of each image as individual pieces and thus satisfied in each moment. In other words, viewers need to be able to wait and the waiting creates dissatisfaction, desire, and imagination of the forthcoming moments. Video ethnographic products are a typical example, which can illuminate well the interdependency of each image, or durational inter-penetration. Entity is imagined in absence as the form of dissatisfaction. Prolongation is strictly a matter of duration, retardation that is brought by hindering everything to be given at the same time (Bergson 1946). An absence of knowing is also an attempt afforded by subtraction.

Bergson urged intuition as the driving force to achieve capturing human movement as it is. From the metaphor of the carver, along with the meta-methodology of subtraction then, I propose action to ignite intuition: Instead of encouraging scholars to simply use intuition, a noun, that is too vague in practice, subtraction, a verb, directly suggests first and foremost, a specific modality of action to take. Here, you might wonder, subtraction of what? This is exactly the point that subtraction provokes. The object comes after the action of subtraction, after which spatialisation and scientific examination can be pursued. The object is not residing as de facto, nor to be found in the spaces between static subjects, but to be found, captured, and objectivised by the action of subtraction. In this way, we can foreground the process of capturing an object-to-be, before letting our habitual thoughts spatialise a research object. We need to capture our world, our physical movements, before understanding them within a descriptive framework, but not the other way around. If we do not capture well, or in a limited way, our understanding would be limited accordingly. In considering the homogenisations of ‘science’ in academia, not only limited by positivism, but also all the scientific preformation in examining physical movements, how we capture such movements as they are, is a critical issue to be addressed.

By examining my attempt of using a video camera in the field, this article comes to highlight the analogies of addition and subtraction, the bricoleur, engineer, and carver. The metaphor of the carver, and the meta-method of subtraction illuminate a new possibility for studies here. Although the approach does not articulate effective ways to overcome spatialisation, it can at least demonstrate the direction to pursue, in aiming to achieve duration. The attempt of subtractive engagement naturally foregrounds the process of production rather than the modality of products. Video ethnographic inquiry opens a new channel for studies to experiment with the subtractive approach, in its nature present congruent. Even embarrassing amateurism can be a strong driving force for cultivating new inquiries.

ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

This work was supported by the Yamaha Motor Foundation Sport Research grants and the Japan Society for the Promotion of Science Grant-in-Aid for Young Scientists under Grant [number 18K17807].

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Additional information

Funding

This work was supported by Japan Society for the Promotion of Science [grant number 18K17807]; Yamaha Motor Foundation [Sport Research grants].

Notes on contributors

Yosuke Washiya

Yosuke's research focuses on qualitative methods. In particular, how bodily movements become techniques and are passed between people within the intersecting dimensions of the physical, cultural, social, and corporeal in our everyday lives. Research interests include audio and visual methods, ethnography, bodily techniques, embodiment, time, nature/ human dichotomy, and Henri Bergson.

Notes

1 Waquant criticised the concept as ‘the philosophic naïveté of Chicago-style empiricism, and the glamours seductions of postmodern storytelling’ (Waquant 2015, 4).

2 By bringing the concept of bricolage, for example, Gibson (2016, 393) argued the importance of taking ‘the artisanal, craft component of interpretive perspectives’ so that scholastic works can transcend the preformed paradigmatic boundaries, methodologically.