So I ran into a friend today. It was nice, and also novel, because I do relatively little social interaction these days and seem to avoid it more than I ever did (case in point: I had seen another friend earlier in the day and I walked past quickly in a panic that she might see me and I might have to talk to her and I was scared I wouldn’t know how to do it without (a) offering to buy her a drink/clean her house/carry her children by way of pre-meditated over-compensation for my social ineptitude or (b) using the word ’subaltern’). Anyway, I was so overwhelmed by the niceness and novelty of seeing this friend that I leaned in to give said friend a hug and a kiss, then realised he hadn’t assumed the hug and the kiss, so I pulled back, by which point he realised I was going for the hug and the kiss, so he leaned in and had to stretch twice as far to deliver an awkward kiss as I gigglingly hugged him.
CHRIST SIMON.
I have become socially illiterate. HELP.
Today’s (recurring) crisis is the discomfiting sense that I have lost my creative voice,that sociology has trained me out of it. In such moments it has helped somewhat to recall sociology’s interpretative, ethnological and narrative tradition, as highlighted by Zygmunt Bauman, Scott Lash and Fuyuki Kurosawa; also its early intention to provide accounts of social life richer and more inflected than those provided by coldhardscience(tm). Reading lectures from The College of Sociology has given me further confirmation of this intention, even C. Wright Mills has reminded me that imagination is allowed, if a bit dangerous. “Science … tends to reduce sensibility to a minimum” said Georges Bataille at a Saturday COS lecture on February 5 1938. “The phenomena I attempt to descibe are lived by us…I am obviously distancing myself from what I gladly refer to as science’s deep slumber…”.
Still, I am currently stalking-with-a-view-to-seducing a supervisor in cultural studies, and today I joined the Centre for New Writing.
Now excuse me while I actually go and do some work on my PhD.
“Aesthetic production today has become integrated into commodity production generally: the frantic economic urgency of producing fresh waves of ever more novel-seeming goods (from clothing to airplanes), at ever greater rates of turnover, now assigns an increasingly essential structural function and position to aesthetic innovation and experimentation. Such economic necessities then find recognition in the varied kinds of institutional support available for the newer art, from foundations and grants to museums and other forms of patronage (…)
I must remind the reader of the obvious; namely that this whole global; yet American, postmodern culture is the internal and superstructural expression of a whole new wave of American military and economic domination throughout the world: in this sense, as throughout class history, the underside of culture is blood, torture, death, and terror.”
Jameson, Postmodernism Or, The Cultural Logic of Late Capitalism
1991: 4-5