#construction
From a project handout (Bazalgette 2012):
Given the following context
“John is trapped in a room made of cheese on top of a mountain, and can signal for help only by eating the walls of the room such that a message is formed that can be seen from afar.”
What do you think of the following sentence?
“John ate that he needed help.”
I thought Swidler’s argument about the usage of culture was really interesting. While her writing was a bit dense and the analysis a bit… longwinded… her understanding and investigation of our usage of culture and the role it plays in an individual’s life was really enlightening. Until reading the book, I had more or less described myself as “anti-pop-culture” or “culturally illiterate” but in reality it’s not that I didn’t know any culture, but that the aspects of culture which were popular among my contemporaries were often the parts of culture which I actively rejected or which constituted mydistanced culture. For myself, I had set up a dichotomous story of me against culture, though in reality, I was simply choosing the culture of my parents more often over the culture of my peers. Yet to my mind, I was entirely logical and cohesive.
But it’s always easiest to notice hypocrisy in others, and I felt challenged about my own appropriation and selection of culture in reading the complicated views and reasoning her respondents voiced. Having those responses to her questions was really helpful (even if, honestly, I struggle to understand her analysis sometimes), because they offered concrete examples of real people that I might otherwise not have believed existed - or considered to be in the vast minority. Particularly, Nora amazed me because I’ve always assumed that women thought a lot and were very articulate about love (which Swidler would probably say is a result of my personal obsession for over-analysing and talking about issues of love, etc.) My instinctual reaction was a, “is this woman for real?! does she really never think about these things?”
It was fascinating to consider that the differing approaches was actual a result of settled/unsettled lives, and the proactiveness with which someone was shaping their own life/experience. I always assumed that it was “better” for everyone to be thoughtful and proactive about their lives. But after reading Privilege last term I feel like it is actually a culturing of the elite class. It is a message directed to those who want to be leaders and have the time to consider these facets of their life. It is a very middle-class and upper-class mentality: that we can and should be proactively pursuing our own happiness, that we should be thriving, not just surviving. It’s just fascinating because people with unsettled lives often seem (at least in this survey) to be more unhappy, and to be going through struggle. At a fundamental level, most of us would agree that this is undesirable. Yet using culture is also often a product of a diverse community and the idea of a cultivated identity, which is the ideal, open-minded upperclass elite lifestyle.
But the other people who have unsettled lives are members of minority groups who do not want to remain within given stereotypes and have to select from multiple cultures between race, class, etc. in order to form their strategies of action. At least for myself, Swidler’s examination of the usage of culture to me highlights why I often feel a struggle against society, because although there’s a lot in my cultural toolkit, coming from two different cultures with different ideals about love, etc. there’s also a lot of conflicting emotions about what aspects of culture I can and should use because the two often “contradict” or oppose each other. The dilemma is intensified by the fact that I don’t associate myself particularly with either of the prodominant streams of the two cultures, that is to say, there is nothing that readily fits. So I have assembled a very ecclectic blend of multiple cultures to form an ideology that very few people around me agree with. Which in many ways is not a particularly pleasant place to be, though I actively back myself up with cultural arguments that make me feel justified, as Swidler might have predicted.