Social constructs

One often hears people declare something to be “just a social construct” as a way of dismissing its reality or relevance. In reality, the fact that something is a social construct makes it infinitely more powerful and difficult to escape than if it were, for instance, a biological brute fact. We get around biological brute facts all the time. Social forces regulate our eating, drinking, defecation, urination, sexual pairings, etc., etc. Social forces can drive us to suicide — meaning they have overcome the most fundamental biological drive of survival. Biology isn’t infinitely pliable, of course, but it is hardly destiny.

What is called creepy?

The experience of creepiness is, at its most fundamental, the experience of an excessive, asymmetrical demand — someone is demanding something of us that we cannot and do not want to reciprocate.

The privileged field of creepiness is of course sexuality.

A plea for empty ritual

The Last Psychiatrist has a post up about narcissists at funerals, which resonated with my “religious but not spiritual” instincts. The gist is: “On the one hand they don’t know how to be real, on the other hand they they think protocol and formality is dishonest and insensitive. They can’t say, “my condolences” because it sounds fake. So they improvise, catastrophically.”

I found this to be something of a challenge to my call for improvisational awkwardness as a response to the breakdown of the social bond at the end of Awkwardness.

The return of Awkwardness

The Zero Books blog is running an excerpt from my book Awkwardness, which remains available for purchase (Amazon: US, UK; Book Depository).

A Rereading of Kotsko’s Pop Culture Writings

A couple years ago, I wrote a piece called On Male Culture, wherein I proposed that one of the best things men could do as feminist allies was to become internal critics of male culture. As I have taught feminist texts this semester in my social sciences class, it increasingly strikes me how much awkwardness vs. sociopathy maps onto typical ways of talking about women’s way of relating vs. men’s — relationality vs. hierarchy, connection vs. separation, etc. — as well as onto queer theoretical notions of straight male identity as defined by its very unattainability and its continual vulnerability (hence making the identification with the overwhelmingly male “fantasy sociapath” a perpetual temptation).

From this perspective, the fact that I wrote Awkwardness using all male examples (most controversially, Judd Apatow films) seems to make more sense.

The awkwardness of casual attire

The Guardian‘s Comment is free has a piece up responding to a campaign devoted to reassuring people that they can wear casual clothing to the opera. The author argues — correctly! — that formal dress can actually represent a more democratic ethos than the current tyrrany of casual. Formalwear may once have been the preserve of the leisure class, but it can make anyone look good regardless of their class background. Two remarks stood out to me as they pointed toward a connection between enforced casual and my theory of “cultural awkwardness”:

Another reason that a dress code is democratic in that you know in advance what you’re supposed to wear, rather than having to spend some time working out what might be acceptable, only to be condemned silently for misjudging an unwritten code when you arrive.

[...]

Cultural elitism is to be found in those places where there appear to be no rules, no obvious codes, but where the obscure knowledge needed to be involved is the preserve of a small group whose false claim to democracy is that they don’t wear a black tie.

The latter remark applies particularly well to the dystopian realms of “business casual,” “smart casual,” etc.

Breaking Bad between awkwardness and sociopathy

At my talk on Monday, I briefly addressed Breaking Bad, a show I’ve always really enjoyed but didn’t talk about a great deal in Sociopaths. Especially after watching the recent season premiere, I’m increasingly convinced that Breaking Bad represents the impossible union of the awkwardness and sociopath trends. In Sociopaths, I argue that it’s precisely our cultural awkwardness, which leaves us feeling completely powerless, that makes the fantasy of the ruthlessly effective sociopath appealling. “If only I really and truly didn’t give a fuck about anyone,” thinks the awkward viewer, “then I would be powerful and free.” And then in a second step, the awkward viewer receives back his fulfilling family life (or whatever) as the compensation that means he’s ultimately in an advantageous position over the sociopath — who is for whatever reason constitutionally incapable of enjoying the benefits of love (or whatever).

Breaking Bad breaks down this radical divide between the awkward person and the sociopath by presenting us with a story in which the awkward guy becomes the sociopath.

The unheimlich maneuver

Anna Kornbluh has sent me this excerpt from Jonathan Lear’s A Case for Irony (which includes a back-and-forth with Alisdair MacIntyre). She said it reminded her of my argument in Awkwardness, and in that respect, this passage especially stands out:

Ironic disruption is thus a species of uncanniness: it is an unheimlich maneuver. The life and identity that I have hitherto taken as familiar have suddenly become unfamiliar. However, there is this difference: in an ordinary experience of the uncanny, there is mere disruption: the familiar is suddenly and disruptively experienced as unfamiliar. What is peculiar to irony is that it manifests passion for a certain direction. It is because I care about teaching that I have come to a halt as a teacher. Coming to a halt in a moment of ironic uncanniness is how I manifest—in that moment—that teaching matters to me. I have a strong desire to be moving in a certain direction—that is, in the direction of becoming and being a teacher—but I lack orientation. Thus the experience of irony is an experience of would-be-directed uncanniness. That is, an experience of standard-issue uncanniness may give us goose bumps or churn our stomachs; the experience of ironic uncanniness, by contrast, is more like losing the ground beneath one’s feet: one longs to go in a certain direction, but one no longer knows where one is standing, if one is standing, or which direction is the right direction.

Awk-ward! (Bonus points for those who get the joke…)

Late Capitalist Television, or, Summer Reading

In Why We Love Sociopaths: A Guide to Late Capitalist Television, Adam Kotsko surveys the overwhelming fascination in contemporary culture with sociopathy. With readings spanning South Park, Dexter, Mad Men, and The Wire, Kotsko argues that the sociopath’s ability to instrumentalize all forms of social bonds critically discloses the arbitrary status of the codes, ties, and institutions that order collective experience. “Perhaps we might all benefit from being more sociopathic,” he provocatively concludes. Click here for recent footage of Slavoj Zizek’s enthusiastic discussion of the book.

With the generous hospitality of 57th Street Books, InterCcECT is proud to present a conversation on Kotsko’s work, joined by the author himself, Monday 16 July, 6pm, 1301 E 57th St, Hyde Park. For additional reading pleasure, we also recommend Kotsko’s prequel, Awkwardness.

Atop inducements to sociopathy, add a different kind of maddening to your summer reading list: join us for our ongoing group on Lacan’s Seminar 3: The Psychoses. Chapters 3 and 4 are up for Thursday 14 June, 5pm, at our salon in Bucktown. Write us  for PDF and details.

Alternately, or additionally, we recommend a companion reading group conducting weekly sessions on philosophy. Their latest text is Levinas’s Totality and Infinity, with the first session Wednesday 13 June, 6pm, at The Bourgeois Pig, covering the Intro, Preface, I Same and the Other: A. Metaphysics and Transcendence. Check our calendar for more info on their schedule of readings.

As always, we welcome proposals / announcements for other summer reading materials.

The day we saved Awkwardness?

I received a follow-up e-mail from my publisher yesterday afternoon saying that the mass e-mail I’d received about pulping the excess U.S. stock of Awkwardness (along with other titles for which they had a lot of extra copies laying around) was inaccurate. They do periodically pulp excess stock, but the e-mail made it sound like an automatic process. In reality, they choose on a case-by-case basis, and I would imagine that thanks to the outpouring of support for Awkwardness — still available for sale, by the way (Amazon: US, UK; Book Depository)! — over the past couple days, it will most likely not be among those heading for the shredder. (For instance, I was checking the Amazon rankings every couple hours to get a feel for whether people were buying copies, and it appeared that Amazon received an additional shipment of copies in response to the number of purchases, i.e., it went from “only 2 copies available” to “only 19 copies available.”)

Thanks very much to all those who bought a copy and passed around my post.