Techne

 

Length: 1:02

 

A black-and-white video of Jonathan and Jackie sitting next to each other on a couch. Jackie examines a book, and Jonathan looks at his smartphone. As a voice-over, Jackie reads the following passage from page 116 of On Multimodality.

 

Techne has no precise equivalent in English; it has been variously translated as “art” (or craft), “technical knowledge,” “skill,” etc. Here we use techne as a sort of praxis middle ground, more than the “clever, bold strokes” of phronesis (Lyotard and Thebaud) or the knowledge-making systematicity of episteme. We pose the techne of queer sexuality as a sort of generative lived knowledge; it is a view of techne that points less to the prescriptive how-to sense of the term and more to the ethical, civic dimension. This techne has two broad parameters (1) the acknowledgment and even embrace of the idea of spectacle, the alienating distance between bodily self and representation as a productive space for critique; and (2) the importance of lived experiences to the formation of an ethical stance. The life of the body is not to be ignored.

 

As the voice-over continues, the video shows Jackie passing the book to Jonathan and then looking at her own smartphone. The video ends with Jackie and Jonathan holding up their smartphones toward each other, taking pictures of each other's face.