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Situatedness, or, Why We Keep Saying Where We're Coming Fromby: David Simpson
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Notes for this articleRec. J. Edbauer.
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Posting History Abstract"Let me tell you where I'm coming from." We hear the remark all the time, but do we understand what it means? And why do we say it so often? With a lighthearted tone, David Simpson plucks at some of the deeper chords of human experience. He is a keen analyzer of language use, and he casts a careful eye toward popular and academic efforts to situate ourselves. He concludes that "situatedness" is a tactic both modest (it acknowledges that our perspective is limited) and aggressive (it asserts that the other person's perspective is limited too).<p> At first blush, <I>Situatedness</I> explores an obscure topic, perhaps the province of postmodern skeptics. But the practical consequences of Simpson's book are profound. Why must we always say where we're coming from? Simpson's examination of our predilection for situating ourselves is remarkably broad. It includes, for example, a section on jurisprudence. He asks why the law pays so much attention to the situations we come from: Why does the law care "what is imposed, what is willed" by a person on trial? And he writes a section on literature: What does a novel allow us to understand about the experiences of other people? Simpson never really argues a point; he's more concerned with illuminating the phenomena of "situatedness," but it's an intriguing illumination. <I>--Eric de Place</I> “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.<P>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. <P>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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