A hodgepodge of thoughts for the week

This week's reading list was an interesting mix. Having read some of these pieces in prior classes, I was at least not unfamiliar with a number of the authors. What I found interesting about some of these writers is the slightly different way in which they each engage with the everyday.

Bourdeiu makes the case that much of knowledge is a construct--in other words, it doesn't 'just happen.' He then states that:

Objectivism constitutes the social world as a spectacle offered to an observer who takes up a 'point of view' on the action and who, putting into the object the principles of his relation to the object, proceeds as if it were intended solely for knowledge and as if all the interactions within it were purely symbolic exchanges. (52)

He goes on to posit that it is entirely possible to step down from these "high positions" (52) in order to find a workable medium between simple subjective recording of what surrounds us and a purely objective, looking down (as if at ants, for example)approach to observing and analyzing what takes place around us. He is not, however, arguing that one should interfere in or influence the things that are being observed. This central argument of the range of differences between passive observation and full interaction is a core sticking point in many fields, including anthropology and cultural studies.

In contrast, Stuart Hall takes a look at how the things we call 'popular culture' can be understood not so much as firm categories of 'here is what a thing is,' than as something more along the lines of 'here is what this thing has developed into and here's a possible trajectory for where it will next go to/change to/etc.' He argues that 'popular culture' is a thing which is created through social consensus and that commercial popular culture is often a product of "manipulative aspect[s]" (Cultural Resistance Reader 186). In this sense, one could argue that the "everyday" is both constructed as a social contract and simultaneously working as a process of power structures and social manipulation. In other words, in Hall's analysis, you could argue that the everyday is in a certain sense always a construct and inherently artificial and a self-conscious reflection of some section of the social structure as a whole (the masses) or some cross-section of it (for example, advertisers).

Interesting stuff!

Connie Bracewell