Chicken Soup for the Subject

[lapsedmodernist]

What the hell is everyone's obsession with De Certeau? I got into an argument about him tonight, and also, like everyone in my department is fixated on him. It annoys me. De Certeau seems like a radical alternative to people like Bourdieu and especially Foucault by rethinking the Order of things and re-imbuing subjects of the Panopticum and the habitus of Distinction with agency. His specific critique of Foucault pivots around differentiating between strategy and tactics, and it sounds really appealing, but I think that its lure is an illusion. The pomo trend is to return agency to subjects in the form of fractured, fluid praxis, but that kind of agency that everyone has all the time, while perhaps a potent tool of preservation of sanity if living in a totalitarian regime (like Aesopian doublespeak, or ketman-game), is not very useful for the kinds of arguments that someone like Foucault is making. The trade-off for constructing agency is making it devoid of any real power except in the most subjective sense--some would say that is a lot; I would not. according to him life is a battle against social overdetermination, but the faith in the ordinary man's capacity to transcent it by practicing agency via actualizing his subjective narration of reality is a) in a weird way touchingly Modernist, and b) not particularly new--a similar viewpoint can be (and has been) derived from Jakobson's theory of speech acts. To be fair, like Adorno in "Negative Dialectics" De Certeau tries to practice what he preaches, and tries to use the practice of his writing to somehow escape the language discourse of what he is writing about, but I am not convinced that it worked for him. His poetic style can be read as self-indulgent as much as it can as radical, and while the ideas are EXTREMELY appealing, and even applicable in a descriptive way, I don't know what comprehensive methodology could be derived from his approach, so I see him as vying for Baudrillard's spot as the eccentric mad-poet-prophet-sociologist of the French poststructuralist vanguard, but not much beyond that.

Additionally, I think people who pick him as their mascot philosopher are weak. Yep, I said it. Weak. You know what I mean. Like, people who are all, like, "Nietzsche is my boy" are usually pretty specific personality types, and people who reify Foucault are often self-righteous and annoying (except constintina) and people who are into Gramsci are reductionists and people who are into Lucacs are assholes who think they are stoic, and people who like Benjamin like to think of themselves as nostalgically transgressive (different from Foucauldian transgressive). And Appadurai lovers are "cosmopolitan." And De Certeauans are whiners. And weak. Because De Certeau is the self-help/"chicken soup for the subject" equivalent of theoretical writing.

Comments

[meekgirl.livejournal.com]

that last paragraph is funny. who is your theorist if you have one?

[lapsedmodernist.livejournal.com]

overall i am really into benjamin.

lately: old--Simmel/new--Agamben

ooof!

[cthrogglazx.livejournal.com]

further evidence that over-education can indeed have adverse side effects.
Aside from chromosone damage and genetic mutation, it seems it can also mutate your ability to be human.

not counting anthrochica . . .

[tomorrow-devil.livejournal.com]

my favorite theorists, in no set order, are:
Bill Hicks (People Who Hate People Party HQ), devil_panda, thecapm, Nietzsche (is my boyeeeee), nuncstans, and Grant Morrison (Barbelith - The Bomb)