Saturday, December 26, 2009

Introduction

Course Description:

Modernity erupted into the social as a disruption of custom/tradition/ habit. In its place, it suggested new habits (more rationally conceived, more efficient), new attitudes towards what life is TRULY about, new modes of “finding one’s way in the world.” The activities comprised by this “finding” presume a new kind of subject: for starters, someone who can distinguish between work and pleasure, thought and emotion, private and public, and so forth until we realize that these categorical distinctions mask other, more perverse and complex binaries ---the line that separates nature from culture, for example; or the distance and tension between social order and social change. All these negotiations (between boredom and excitement, compulsion and innovation, etc.) play out in the terrain of something intellectual from the 19th c. through the early 21st c. call “everyday life.”

But in calling out this object of study, intellectual traditions have evoked a lot more than simply a description of repeated or recurrent activities (brushing your teeth, taking the bus, listening to your iPod, sitting at a desk in a uniquely decorated office cubicle, eating a Lean Cuisine micro waved lasagna for lunch, texting your girlfriend, etc.).

According to Ben Highmore, author of The Everyday Reader (Routledge 2002), everyday life can be mapped (as an object of study) according to a certain number of polarities / dualities, tendencies or orientations.

One possible sketch of these tendencies might look something like this:

Particular / General
Agency / Structure
Experience / Institutions
Feelings / Protocols
Resistance / Power
Micro / Macro

Implied in the study of everyday life is also the study of “everydayness” –what it illuminates, or obscures, how it can be a “good” thing, or a drag, how it is a refuge from stuff that really hurts or irritates, or it is the thing itself that provokes that irritation.

On the other side of the fence….always, seductively rearing its head, the possibility of “something” that crashes the ordinary and sends us to the extra-ordinary (like the Aretha Franklin song, something or someone, that just “sends me’).

In this seminar we will tackle:


1) the raw material of everyday life itself (as stuff, plot, and trope: i.e. the ontology of the thing itself)
2) the intellectual traditions that have claimed “the study” of this object (i.e. the epistemologies)
3) the mechanics of “striking a pose” as students/readers of 1 and 2 above (i.e. the metacommentary generated by exercises of reflexivity; a philosophical bracket to grant ourselves permission to play with the dialectics of being, and so forth........)

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