Podcast: Good Grief, rerun
In Good Grief, one week has gone by in the ’sham. I reflect on the difficulties I’m having with the flow of the project. I come to a resolution: that I need to be more forthright in demanding what I want, rather than just hoping it will happen and being disappointed when it doesn’t.
I discuss the problem of trying to be “normal”. One idea for the project was to just be a “normal” citizen, neighbour, resident whatever. In retrospect, this obviously is not going to work. In fact, now, a year later, I find it downright objectionable. Who am I to know what the hell “normal” even is?? And what a gall, to think I can lay aside my specific characteristics, the things that make me who I am, in order to try and fit in!
Of course, everyone has their own set of “these things that make me who I am”. In a way, that’s normal. It’s what the Italian philosopher Giorgio Agamben calls the “whatever singularity”. I might write more later about this idea of the “whatever”. Essentially, it’s not “whatever” like how, you know, like, teenage girls talk, like. Instead it is (as I (very sketchily) understand it) the idea that the particular characteristics I possess are not necessarily of earthshattering importance - in other words, they are no more important than anyone else’s characteristics - but they are at the same time, vital. The “whatever” of Agamben is not an indifference, but is instead a translation of the Latin term “quodlibet” which in English is roughly “being such that it always matters”. It can be whatever, anything, but that’s not to say that it’s transferrable, equivalent, or insignificant.
This is definitely in keeping with the ’sham philosophy, the idea that the more I look into the details, the more interesting a thing becomes, on its own terms.
Oh, listen to Good Grief, if you like! [6mb, mp3, 6min]
April 11th, 2007 at 7:33 pm
oh joy, the sham lives! Reading as comfort food if ever there was a likeness. And I do favour reading it, listening too tricksy on the sly in the workplace…