Communication Matters

Chapter 11

The documentality of Mme Briet’s antelope

Bernd Frohmann

 

This chapter proposes a concept of documentality as a contribution to an emerging field of study about documents, what they are and what they do, and about the processes or events of documentation, how they function, and how they happen.¹ By resisting reductions of documents to vehicles transporting consciousness, intentional substance, or human speech from person to person, it helps materialize documentation.² It is developed here, not through familiar kinds of documents, but through Suzanne Briet’s idea of an antelope as a document.

The chapter builds upon the author’s previous work exploring how thinking about documentation in terms of “arrangements” directs attention ...