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Mediations: From the Coffee House to the Internet Café 117

through my lecture catching up on her text messages: clearly, I’ve
made her bored, but can I also console myself with the thought that
she may in some way be resisting the colonisation of her lifeworld
by an opaque education ‘system’ that presents the canon of so many
dead-white-European-male theorists as ‘second nature’? How do we
read the commuter standing at the train station, who dreams up calls
she must make on her mobile in order to fend off the advances of a
market researcher or street evangelist (whose perceived ‘systematicity’
is carved not out of an indifference to questions of value – quite
the opposite – but out of an apparent extraterrestrial facticity that
intrudes upon the commuter’s lifeworld as if out of nowhere: she
cannot see what they can possibly share in common).
On one level, these simplistic vignettes recall Rey Chow’s resistive
reading of the Chinese youth plugged into his Walkman: ‘I am not
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there, not where you collect me.’ But we need to look beyond
the binaries of resistance and incorporation. It may not be at all
accurate to talk of ‘resistance’ when such devices are often implicated
in processes of confi guring those aspects of the system world (often
in the guise of the culture industries) that are admitted into the
lifeworld and those that are screened out. The ‘system’ is not a
monolithic or internally coherent beast: my ‘system world’ (which
includes the inescapable and pervasive facticity of mobile phones and
their irritating incursions) is not identical with my student’s (which
includes, say, reams of paper detailing syllabi, course requirements
and assessment criteria); the commuter’s ‘system world’ (trains
that run late or the daily hazards of street preachers and market
researchers) is not identical with the ‘system world’ of the man selling
religion at the train station (crowds so embroiled in the task of getting
from A to B that they have forgotten to question what it’s all about).
Furthermore, we need to investigate the extent to which conceiving
of these encounters as ‘boundary disputes’ actually resonates with the
self-understandings of social actors themselves, and, again, the extent
to which these encounters may gesture towards greater refl exivity
(a citizenry better equipped to ask questions about the nature and
scope of systemic logics), as opposed to the twin pitfalls of either an
anti-systemic (anti-modern) reactionism or an uncritical embrace of
the administered individualism on offer (both of which, it has to be
said, seem to enjoy plenitude today).
My point is that we need to be critical and discriminatory in our
investigations, but that theoretically informed research might help
us to acquire both a deeper understanding of some of the cultural

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