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  • Open Daily: 10am - 10pm
    Alley-side Pickup: 10am - 7pm

    3038 Hennepin Ave Minneapolis, MN
    612-822-4611

Open Daily: 10am - 10pm | Alley-side Pickup: 10am - 7pm
3038 Hennepin Ave Minneapolis, MN
612-822-4611
Situatedness, or, Why We Keep Saying Where We're Coming From

Situatedness, or, Why We Keep Saying Where We're Coming From

Simpson, David

Paperback

Series: Post-Contemporary Interventions

PhilosophyLiterary CriticismGeneral Psychology

ISBN10: 0822328399
ISBN13: 9780822328391
Publisher: Duke University Press
Published: Jan 9 2002
Pages: 304
Weight: 0.98
Height: 0.81 Width: 6.06 Depth: 9.04
Language: English
Let me tell you where I'm coming from . . .--so begins many a discussion in contemporary U.S. culture. Pressed by an almost compulsive desire to situate ourselves within a definite matrix of reference points (for example, as a parent of two children or as an engineer or as a college graduate) in both scholarly inquiry and everyday parlance, we seem to reject adamantly the idea of a universal human subject. Yet what does this rhetoric of self-affiliation tell us? What is its history? David Simpson's Situatedness casts a critical eye on this currently popular form of identification, suggesting that, far from being a simple turn of phrase, it demarcates a whole structure of thinking.

Simpson traces the rhetorical syndrome through its truly interdisciplinary genealogy. Discussing its roles within the fields of legal theory, social science, fiction, philosophy, and ethics, he argues that the discourse of situatedness consists of a volatile fusion of modesty and aggressiveness. It oscillates, in other words, between accepting complete causal predetermination and advocating personal agency and responsibility. Simpson's study neither fully rejects nor endorses the present-day language of self-specification. Rather it calls attention to the limitations and opportunities of situatedness--a notion whose ideological slippage it ultimately sees as allowing late-capitalist liberal democracies to function.

Given its wide scope and lively rendering, Situatedness will attract a range of scholars in the humanities and legal studies. It will also interest all those for whom the politics of subjectivity pose real problems of authority, identity, and belief.

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