‘I Saw You’: Searching for Lost Love via Practices of Reading, Writingand Responding

How do emotions move and how do emotions move us? How are feelings andrecognitions distributed socio-materially? Based on a multi-site ethnographicstudy of a ëromanticí correspondance system, this article explores the themes oflove, privacy, identity and public displays. Informed by ethnomethodology andactor- network theory its investigations into these ëinformalí affairs aresomewhat unusual in that much of the research carried out by those bodies ofwork concentrates on ëinstitutionalí settings such as laboratories, offices andcourtrooms. In common with ethnomethodology it attempts to re-specify sometopics of interest in the social sciences and humanities; in this case,documents and practices of writing and reading those documents. A key element ofthe approach taken is restoring to reading and writing their situated nature asobservable, knowable, distributed community practices. Re- specifying topics forthe social sciences involves the detailed description of several situated waysin which the ëromanticí correspondence system is used. Detailing thetranslations, transformations and transportations of documents as ‘quasi-objects’ through several orderings, the article suggests that documents have noessential meaning and that making them meaningful is part of the work of thosesettings.