ABSTRACT
To be confused by culture is to know culture. To study culture is not to understand it, but to maintain that confusion. The cultural object is not only the object (thing) under analysis but also the object (aim) of analysis: it is both the reason for enquiry and the reason for not concluding the enquiry. To conclude the enquiry is then to present the findings, to close the text and shut the case. When this is done, all simultaneity and immediacy evaporate in a discourse that presents evidence to state that there were things not evident in the ‘original’ object; that there was little to be discovered in the immediate and simultaneous experience of the object’s material effects. The evidence is intended to prove a point of view-when it should be proving the object.
