The Personal is Political. The Political is Personal.

 
gaze upon my b'dum b'dum, ye





(pointless) update to this:


            tho note, if everybody always is creeping everybody else out,

then everybody always is paranoid vis-a-vis everybody else, and

everybody is always looking at everybody else -- & must look, & be looked at.



Hence one of the most haunting sentences that TiR stumbled onto in the past month:

If Lionel Trilling was right, if the property that grounded the self, in Romanticism, was sincerity, and in modernism it was authenticity, then in postmodernism it is visibility.

from William Deresiewicz's "The End of Solitude," here, as excerpted in the current Wilson Quarterly.



Deresiewicz then launches into a fine contribution to TiR's ever beloved field of Boredom Studies, e.g., that

SOLITUDE    :    LONELINESS    :  :    idleness    :    boredom,


etc.



Can one shudder, flee, pursue, look over one's shoulder, spy out of one eye, and yawn, all at once?

[update 8/27/09:

the Context of the Creepy: Henry Giroux draws upon Habermas on public space, & others, here:

[F]ear and violence become the only modalities through which to grasp the meaning of the self and larger social relations. . . .

As the public collapses into highly charged narratives of personal anger . . . irrational mob rule becomes "the only politics there is, the only politics with a tangible referent or emotional valence."

(quoting Jean & John Comaroff, here)

The title of the piece is "Town Hall Democracy or Mob Hysteria? Rethinking the Importance of the Public Sphere."]

posted by TiR at 7:01 AM