By asking you to produce a DOCUMENT in writing, rather than for instance, a description, or a report, I am intending to produce the question, “but how is this possible?!”
You are right, it is impossible, if the interpretation of the word “document” is to be solely DENOTATIVE. That is, to exist only as the direct or literal meaning. Semioticians such as Roland Barthes (later in his work) pretty much agree there is no meaning without some connotative (or associative, figurative, social) meaning. What is a written document–perhaps only a cash register receipt, a marriage licence, your library record? OK, take these as your inspiration, why is it that we can accept these (right or wrong) as documents? Because they REGISTER a RELATIONSHIP, a TRANSACTION, but appear to do very little more. How hard it is to do very little in writing.
OK, so the point of the exercise is to describe an event, in words, but to try think less about “description” and more about “documentation”. Whatever that might mean.
A good conversation would be: Why doesn’t the same crisis occur when one is told to document something with a camera. What is it about the (scientific? pseudo objective) nature of the camera that lets us sidestep these questions. In fact they would be good questions to ask of both writing and photography. With writing we are very aware of our own subjectivity as the recording apparatus, we feel our decisions, we process them. Compare your writing and your photo document. Ask these questions (translate them creatively across the media of words and photography). What lens am I using? (wide, medium, telephoto, objective, subjective, closeup, official, personal), how am I framing (what to keep in, what to cut out, what to cut in half at the edge of the frame), where am I what is my vantage, my perspective, how am I getting “in the way of” the scene, how am I (the writer the camera) implicated in the scene, where is the focus, can I shift the focus in the middle of the document, have I used gaps, connections, series, repetition, can I reorder events, should I? What kind of recording device am I exactly?
And of course with words, one can bring in registers (sound, touch, taste) that the camera can’t record.
So please produce a short document in WORDS.
You could look at (even though they both involve words and pictures, not just words)
Sophie Calle, L’Hotel, 1981, or Detective, 1980
Martha Rosler, The Bowery in Two Inadequate Descriptive Systems, 1974-1975
Ed Ruscha,
excerpt from The Financial District by poet Jenna Osman