I have not seen any episodes of Tidying Up with Marie Kondo. And for me, that is quite shocking as I am very much a fan of decluttered, organized living. I say ‘fan’ because in reality I’m stuffed into a small house that has entirely too much stuff and most of it is not mine, so I cannot purge away my clutter demons. C’est la vie.
Olberding rasies the point that much of the success of Tidying Up has to do with the latent Orientalism still present in our North American culture. Our internalized mystic notions are somewhat problematic to say the least.
“At a practical level, as a professor who regularly teaches East Asian philosophies, I die a little inside every time we experience a cultural phenomenon with a veneer of ‘wisdom from the East’ on it. Having imbibed pop culture’s mystical Orient, students will arrive to my classes craving a deeper initiation into Eastern mysteries. Teaching these seekers of wisdom then becomes deflationary.
I was once at an art fair where there was a booth selling temporary tattoos. One of the tattoos was a Chinese character that was translated on the tattoo’s plastic label as ‘bitch’, an appealing bit of body art for the tough girls among us, I suppose. Except a far more straightforward and accurate translation of the character would be ‘prostitute’, or maybe ‘whore’.
Teaching students who fell in love with ‘Eastern philosophy’ via our culture’s myriad Mr Miyagis is like being the one to tell someone her tattoo says ‘whore’. The tattooed will be better off knowing, but she won’t thank you for telling her. Pop-culture-induced orientalism usually does wash off, but the cleanup is far less alluring than wearing the myth. At least, I console myself, Kondo’s target market is the middle-aged, so maybe my young college students won’t show up with this particular ‘tattoo’.
In some ways, I admire the impulse to reach outside familiar cultural traditions in order seek wisdom, or even household aesthetic advice. Both the urge to improve ourselves and the curiosity to look beyond our own boundaries seem salutary. The problem, though, is when doing so looks like one more iteration of what started our troubles in the first place. The distracted impulse to acquire the new and shiny, as well as the desperate hope that novelty might alleviate anhedonic consumerist malaise – these are why Kondo’s clients have houses overwhelmed with stuff. We have homes joylessly cluttered by the artefacts of a fruitless search for joy, or at least a reprieve from bathetic numbness. And wisdom from the ‘East’ has long been marketed to Westerners hoping to escape their existential maladies by seeking what is exotic, what promises to be more meaningful than what they have or can find locally.
My cynical concerns, to be sure, are not about Kondo herself. I assume that she is sincere in what she offers, and indeed I expect some might find her counsel truly useful. It is the nature of her attraction to Westerners that gives me pause. This registers most powerfully for me when I re-imagine what she offers in a distinctly American guise. Before I became a professor, I sometimes earned my keep as a maid. And this class-conscious part of me is more oppositional still where the fascinations of ‘tidying’ are concerned.”
The level confusion that Olberding presents, I think, is yet more evidence of the need to teach philosophy earlier, rather than later in the educational process.
5 comments
February 25, 2019 at 7:15 am
Bob Browning
I heartily second your notion for learning earlier. Information is power and since my “retirement”, I have been able to pursue subjects of interest rather than subjects mostly needed to participate in the rat race.
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February 25, 2019 at 7:22 am
john zande
I am very much a fan of decluttered, organized living
Heathen! Clutter is the penultimate state of human perfection. It is, without question, journeys end, Nirvana.
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February 26, 2019 at 11:04 am
The Arbourist
@Bob Browning
Yeah, I did the university thing, but jeepers, when you’re younger its hard to get an appreciation of what learning and understanding actually is. I learned some of the tools necessary for critical thinking while in school, but the actual refinement and study began *after* I graduated.
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February 26, 2019 at 11:04 am
The Arbourist
@JZ
Those almost seem like fighting words, my good sir. :)
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February 26, 2019 at 11:54 am
john zande
A war you’d lose, dear friend. You see, whereas I have weeks, if not months of lovely debris to hurl at you like some ghastly over-the-horizon rain, you and your stylised Japanese neatness could remain on the field for only a minute or two, and after that platinum Alessi juicer is gone, I’ll run riot through your naked ranks and still be armed to the teeth.
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