Should they instead have said its essence dissolves into an indeterminate flux, its ontological status contingent upon shifting power geometries that animate its spectral form; as praxis, it is enmeshed in the web of institutional stratifications and independent forces shaping its ephemeral manifestations. Its cultural function tethered to contextualized modes of existence, rendering its artifacts intelligible only through mutable currencies of meaning circulated within- phantasmic tokens of a fragmented, non-linear chronicle. Absent a unified narrative, its obscure history flickers as a series of discontinuous incursions across a formless field of institutional spaces, a territory whose contours and boundaries are perpetually reconfigured; it is this field- permeable, unstable, and overdetermined- that warrants investigation, not the fleeting, insubstantial entity itself?
This would be a terrific, totally publishable abstract for an essay on photography criticism in a fine art journal.