to me it feels like disguised, more than controlled, falling most of the time

And, thanks Danny. Especially for your gentle reminder about the ‘participation *for what ends*’ question

Not true Walking is only ever ‘controlled falling,’ and that doesn’t include when I wipe out on the ice!

Bingo! And I think that question leads inexorably to the need for a theory of the subject that has the possibility of becoming a “node” in any “network”. From my POV “participation” is valuable as empirical data, but doesn’t give you much to work on in terms of how to act. I mean, pentecostal churches are big on participation in creative production, doesn’t mean I want to help it happen (I can say that now I don’t teach lol). Nice post.

As for the rest of your comment - I’ll just say first of all that when Glen Fuller longhand meets Jean Burgess shorthand, well, we could write one hell of a confusing textbook together!

But in regard to the question, “what is animating your content creators/contributors to creative cultural production, not in terms of individual subjectiviist accounts of motivation, but as animations within broader cultural events?”

Good question - can I get back to you when i’ve finished my fieldwork? Cop-out, yes But there is a certain problem of translatability across our theoretical frameworks, I reckon - I’m not as comfortable with the time-and-action-oriented (events, animations) reference points as you are. Or maybe mine are just different ways of describing cultural temporalities (history, memory) and actions/movements (accretion, sedimentation, touch, flow) And I won’t let go of social identity (ok, identification) or the way i use it so easily either…that doesn’t answer the question, I know! But it helps me understand why I have trouble answering your questions, sometimes.

And the other point about answering you after I do my fieldwork, is that I need to know how my research participants theorise their own participation, first, and that probably won’t have much to do with ‘events’ and ‘animations’. Based on what I have already heard and experienced in my fieldwork, it will more likely have to do with families, social connection, stories, memories, curiosity, learning, and the desire to show off, and things of that nature.

But, yes, outcomes of the ‘motivation’ to participate are not pretedermined - that’s how the principle of emergence works, yeah?

And most of my work with participants involves people who are *not* particularly ‘animated’ to participate…

re the question of motivation, thought instead of what can be ‘read’ (identity), but in terms of what domain such acts of motivation can belong. I think there is a productive tension between subjectivist accounts of motivation (author of identity) vs systemic (or perhaps more properly ‘machinic’) accounts of *animation*. Animation here has mutliple meanings. Sure there is the puppet being-animated-by-top-down-power sort of control that I think does exist, at least, it exists in concert with other forms of determination. However, there is also ‘animation’ in the sense of ‘becoming animated’ during a coversation where one becomes excited and the register and intensity of engagement or participation may shift. However, the exact outcome of such animation is determined beforehand, only the probability of intensity is. Here it is not so much macro-scale social structures determining micro-social individual behaviour, but the individual becoming whipped up by and within the event that has been orchestrated by such macro-social forces. Event here has multiple meanings, too!! lol! the happening of the conversation may be the event of becoming-together of two or more parties in a dialogic movement. But there also may be larger scale events that involve low-level, long-term processes of animated individuation. Here I am thinking of political commitments and what I would call ‘enthusiasms’. These can be whipped up at various points through the affective modulation of populations when needed for macro-social purposes, but for the main they remain like background noise being filtered out of everyday life.

So the question I would ask then, is what is animating your content creators/contributors to creative cultural production, not in terms of individual subjectiviist accounts of motivation, but as animations within broader cultural events?