User:Ssstephen/Reading/The Practice of Everyday Life
'ordinary man' [usual apologies for the gendered terminology], who existed before texts and any attempt to represent him or his activities, especially in the form of numbers. Everyday practices are to be foregrounded and articulated. This is not an analysis of individuals, since social relations are always involved: indeed, the 'individual' is but a plurality of these relations.
how individual sentences are constructed on the basis of shared vocabulary and syntax
Systems/networks exist to be used just like all other technology. But they also restrict and confine, just like all other technology.
which networks and resources help people resist and evade the discipline offered by institutions?
Can the same networks not afford resistance and evasion, the institutions are emergent properties of the network rather than controllers of the other actors in it? The people navigate the network and so do the institutions, although with different amounts of power and influence.
erratic 'trajectories', 'unforeseeable sentences, partly unreadable paths'. These cannot be described by formal analysis, including statistics. They feature bricolage and discursivenss, and lack the homogeneity required by analysis.
Again this applies to non-human actors in the network too, including the institutions it is implied these tactics are used against. Oh the whole next paragraph disagrees with what I am saying, lovely. Strategies are tactics, they are the same.
Reading, for example, looks passive, but it is an activity, a 'silent production', involving improvisation, the use of memory to connect elements from other texts, or activities such as skipping. The world of the author is really only 'rented' by readers (xxi). Reading is as mobile as conversation.
Is conversation mobile? Does consciousness emerge only through dialogue? Can you know something without talking about it, or reading about it? Can you know something by cooking it for someone else? Can you know something through dance? By her clothes? By his smell? By looking at each other? Is there ever a time when another human isn't involved?
Science also offers combinations of formal discourses and 'ancient tricks', masquerading as methods -- these are tactical too.
Fuck you, science.
The Man Without Qualities, Robert Musil
there is always a network of writings, and influences are not easily accessed
And these influences aren't always the same ones the reader notices, like did the author want me to think of Earle Brown now? And David Arden? And the cast of Brooklyn 99? Where does discourse stop and the real world of everything that is happening begin? Zora sent me a link to a Stormzy song. Irmak said something in Turkish. The discourse, if it is part of everyday life, is part of a network.
In sociology, habitus (/ˈhæbɪtəs/) is the way that people perceive and respond to the social world they inhabit, by way of their personal habits, skills, and disposition of character.
Van wikipedia.
Bourdieu manages to deny both sociological determinism and the idea of a calculating subject, so he has to revert to mechanisms in the sociology of education to explain how structures actually work -- through knowledge acquisition, the interiorisation of structures, and then the exteriorisation of the results of learning in the habitus.
How is this not sociological determinism? I dont get teh difference between structure and habitus.
Tactics proliferate and resist classification. They are singular and unconscious.
I dunno. Just because it's complex doesn't mean its unknowable. Just because it's vague doesnt mean it hasnt happened before. Also there is a practical reason to acknowledge tactics as classifiable, to allow unified resistance.
Marx never visited a factory
Ha! Wanker. Is this true? Dr. Evert Gummesson and Paul Johnson are the people who claim this, but a quick search online gives mixed opinions about it. Engels was a capitalist, in the textile industry. Did Hegel ever have an actual conversation with anyone? Definitely the overall point that philosophers and theorists are toolbags seems true.
The key technique to manage and domesticate is narrative, which once led to the dominance of literary knowledge as the key to understanding.
How to escape this though? Even that question is just part of a narrative?
aesthetics has slowly become isolated and codified, and the discipline gradually becomes a matter of relating theory to practice... the last stage is to try and develop a theory of practice
Isn't all theory "of practice"? Theories only exist to attempt to explain the world? Sometimes this feels uselessly looped up to me.
Narrations therefore are never just descriptive, but involve the creation of 'fictional space', which helps people escape from, and 'balance with' the present.
Of course, nothing should be "taken literally", the map is not the territory. A narrative can attempt to be descriptive, but it is only creating a fictional space. Sometimes this space's relationship with (a percieved) reality can make it useful to the writer/reader. And how does this apply to less obviously discursive practices? A cookbook is full of errors. Maybe the glance was just a glance.
Reading Guide to: Lyotard, J - F (1986) The Post - Modern Condition: A Report on Knowledge
memory can alter space, and destabilize equilibrium. Memory can disestablish order, since it is invisible and thus escapes power.
Can, but also it can be used for the exact opposite purposes as well of course, it can be used to maintain stable equilibrium, and to establish and sustain order. It doesnt escape power but rather is a tool of power which can counteract dominant narratives as much as support them.
story tellers can gain authority even though they have no power
No, to have someone listening to your stories is a form of power, and if they believe them the storyteller clearly has even more power.
Tactical moves of this kind display:... alteration, singularity, mobility
What are we really talking about?
The pedestrians on the streets down below read the city as a text, but, crucially they also write it.
Its a good job this sentence says "down below" or else I would almost believe it. It actually makes this whole section hard to read, the flaneur vibe feels gross. Although I also have to admit to relating to these "readings" of the city. Two days ago I was playing the game where I work out the polyrhythm of the length pf my steps to the length of the slabs in the path; 5:2 this time. A major tenth. I heard a song with the same interval and thought I would like to make something similar. Then I forgot about both things until now. Are these thoughts "natural" or even "everyday"? For me they feel like both but how do you generalise this sort of stuff. I remember talking to Steve Ryan about the steps thing and even he thought it was weird.
This sort of self centred and often unconscious process of significations can be displaced and condensed, as in dreams.
Is the point of putting this at the end a kind of defeatism, or acceptance of intangibility?
Walking is a kind of 'story', composed of 'debris... leftovers... fragments of scattered semantic places... combined with things extra and other'
Ok all activity, all stories, on this level are the same they are messy and the mess is inescapable I can live with that (sometimes).
These interrupt the accepted framework and order, which 'leaks... meaning: it is a sieve order'