An Awkward Post

Since moving to Cambridge and leaving behind my job working for a 'media company' I've survived on some freelance writing work and also working in a framing shop. I don't actually make picture frames, that's taken care of in workshop - I'm at the retail end. One aspect of the job that's strangely gratifying is that I can very easily describe to someone what it is I do to someone of any age, background etc. I wouldn't go so far as to start talking about 'honest toil' or anything like that, it's simply that I recall numerous situations where I would, quite apologetically, give long and tortuous explanations of my job and the function of the company. And there's also that lack of any real commitment to the company and the job, going hand in hand with the company's lack of real commitment to you, particularly when an American CEO takes up the reins. Many people I knew at the company were also: freelance journalists, stand-up comedians, playwrights, bloggers, musicians etc. The office was our 'day job'. So Adam Kotsko's 'Awkardness' hit home on that point, in its tackling of the office (and The Office). I was in that classic job about which people would ask 'So what is it that you do exactly?'. My sister told me on many occasions that she still didn't really understand what it was I did. (Let's say I, and others like me in the company, provided a range of services to TV companies.) I'm also conscious that I was largely guilty of using the irony tactic of dissociating myself from a role I ended up in, that of a Team Leader. Highly symptomatic behaviour would be that in an appraisal situation with one of team where I'd basically be going through the old 'you and I know this is bullshit, but we've got to go through the motions together' routine. It's worth mentioning, though, that in retail - so, not necessarily in an office environment - I've encountered numerous people who have gone the other route, overidentification. That's a shop manager's speciality.

That aside, what I wanted to look at was Kotsko's assertion that 'radical awkwardness' is what ensues when people from two radically different cultures meet. But perhaps there's a more fundamental, radical awkwardness than that, which is the awkwardness of subjectivity. I see that the social context is still key - an individual doesn't exist in isolation first and then enter society; I'm thinking more that subjectivity engenders the situation not just of trying to identify with a managerial role when there's nothing there you could wholly identify with, but of trying to identify with yourself - where, equally, there's nothing to identify with. That's where society (including family, government, media, the whole apparatus) is, giving you explicit cues and implicit clues as to the person you're supposed to be but can never fully inhabit. That's in part because those cues and clues are contradictory (double binds), but also because there is no authentic self. I'm going with Metzinger here: we are no-one. That's my (rough) idea of radical awkwardness, and I see it as leading to the same coping mechanisms of over-identification or that technically un-ironic irony.

I'm surely not the only person to feel this kind of awkwardness quite deeply to have used the latter mechanism as shelter, largely from people who seemed to be more of the first persuasion, the kinds of people most likely to pierce a fragile carapace and witness your fundamental inadaptedness and lack of sympathy with yourself as something shameful.

The ironic stance can clearly be a dead-end, but it can also be a phase that is moved through (as our culture has, according to Kotsko, started to move through it), perhaps more easily than the over-identification setting, although the overcoming of the latter, if it can/could occur, would be more dramatic, revolutionary.

Either way, on the other side, Kotsko suggests, is the potential for a solidarity based on 'awkwardness'. I'm now at the point of dropping that word 'awkwardess' and opting for: a solidarity based on an awareness of the problems of subjectivity, of being systems with Phenomenal Self Models.

That's the beginning of where, lately, I think I've accidentally started grasping some of the political implications of Speculative Realism, without having had any direct contact with work by the relevant philosophers, but more by stitching together threads of reading/viewing from last year - Metzinger, John Berger, K-Punk, the Kotsko book, Frantz Fanon maybe. So coming soon, where 'Ways of Seeing' meets 'Being No One'.