This article is about alertness and depressive enactments in Seattle, Washington. It tracks depression and depressive disorder as something beyond a psychiatric diagnosis—more as a generative cultural analytic and mode of alertness that people use to track affect and a sense of ordinariness-gone-tilt. I argue that depressive enactments constitute a mode of alertness used to track something emergent, unknown, unpredictable, and often disruptive—affective currents that are sensed but not clearly understood. Based on 18 months of ethnographic fieldwork that I conducted (...) in Seattle in 2003–2004, I draw on examples of the cultural performance and training of alertness across a range of registers and spaces—individual sufferers, community mental health clinic routines, and popular culture figures such as Kurt Cobain and the “slacker”— in order to demonstrate how disturbances in normative modes of alertness are contested and worked through. Alertness in Seattle operates as a window onto cultural impasses at work in ordinary habits and dispositions. Thus, I suggest that figures of mental illness, as well as the slacker, are enactments through which individuals disengage from the reiteration of those impasses and attempt to reshape and relearn habits. (shrink)

This essay identifies two different methodological strategies used by the proponents of anarchism. In what is termed the "ontological" approach, the rationale for anarchism depends on a particular representation of human nature. That characterization of "being" determines the relation between the individual and the structures of social life. In the alternative approach, the epistemological status of "representation" is challenged, leaving human subjects without stable identities. Without the possibility of stable human representations, the foundations underlying the exercise of institutional power can (...) be challenged. This epistemological discussion is traced from Max Stirner to the twentieth-century movement known as poststructuralism. (shrink)

Kolb discusses postmodern architectural styles and theories within the context of philosophical ideas about modernism and postmodernism. He focuses on what it means to dwell in a world and within a history and to act from or against a tradition.