Commonplaces: Private selves in public places

A commonplace is a setting, a reworking, reordering, and/or compilation of knowledge, experience, values, material that not only describes but also redefines the language, practices, patterns, and ideas of a discourse community. Discourse community “identifies a grouping of people who share common language norms, characteristics, patterns, or practices as a consequence of their ongoing communications and identification with each other.” Commonplace thrives on a familiarity, a “standardized” setting, implying the sense of normalcy from which the commonplace book derives its coinage. Mundane, ordinary, status-quo is the source material before the discourse community commandeers it and transforms it into symbolic gestures.

As Kenneth Lockridge writes of commonplace books, “the passages selected reveal the deepest concerns of the person that selects and possesses those words...as a medium of the creation of the modern sense of self, a private, internal, and enduring self.” The idea of possession in commonplaces is an interesting one. It suggests that the material, taken and internalized, transformed into a mode of expression—scrapbooking, blogging, posting to a Facebook page, or pasting together as collage art—updates the person behind the act.

 Looking back to commonplaces in my life, collages and music collections rank high in activities I shared with the closest of friends. To this day, my sister and I make and exchange button bracelets (in tribute to a Victorian tradition we read about in a book as kids, carried out between two sisters). It is the collection, the display of individual personality, and my knowledge of my sister that makes the choosing and collecting of these buttons a meaningful act. However, it is meaningful also because it excludes others without the experience, the knowledge, or the inclination to track down antique 19^th century buttons. The common feature of commonplaces that strikes me most is the display aspect. Does a commonplace always fulfill a need to be a private self in a public place?

References

Commonplaces. 2012. web . 12 07 2012. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Commonplace

Discourse community . n.d. web. 12 07 2012. http://www.ncte.org/college/briefs/dc
Lockridge, Kenneth. Individual Literarcy in Commonplace Books. n.d. web.