ESSAY 4
TEXTS
• Noë, Alva. “Air Guitar Styles”
• Tolentino, Jia. “Always be Optimizing”
• Ho, Karen. “Biographies of Hegemony”
PROMPT
In essays two and three, we looked critically at terms community, belonging and performance. In essay four, I want to combine the above three terms with a new key notion of the “individual” in community. Alva Noë in his essay Air Guitar Styles draws attention to the individual through the image of the pop musician whose “attention to style and attitude and posture and politics” makes pop all “about the player” (172-173). At the same time that pop music is all about the player, it also makes identification with the player a tribal and communal experiences for the fans. Individual, (however famous or ordinary) and community are therefore closely tied and co-dependent on one another. Both Tolentino and Ho also seem to draw attention to the idea of social performance of an individual within community as central to the perpetuation of beauty and elite standards in women’s and bankers’ lives in society and Wall Street, respectively. The process of evolving into an ideal woman, as Tolentino’s states, requires performance of “maximal obedience” on the part of the individual woman in her community just as performance of schmoozing clients at Wall Street ensures individual acceptance of a new recruits in the banking world. Keeping our discussions of community, belonging and performance and now the individual in mind, write a response to the following question: In what ways, and if so, does an “individual” become central to a community?
THINKING QUESTIONS
• Who is the “individual” in each essay? How does individual and social performance work to maintain a community?
• What is the relationship between individual and community? How is the individual in community treated in each essay?
• What are the communities in each essay? How does individual acceptance and belonging compare in the communities described in each essay?
• What kind of individuals are valued in a community? Who are the trend setters and who are the trend followers?
