Awkwardness: An Essay

Adam Kotsko’s short book hinges on a popular, perfunctory interjection: “Awkward!”

Pervasive across age groups, defining a lucrative brand of aughts humor, awkwardness is, for Kotsko, a defining quality of the present age. Awkwardness investigates the theory of a concept most often left to practice, mining it for a sort of world-making potential.

Kotsko builds his theory of awkwardness out of Heidegger’s writing on boredom. Heidegger conceptualizes boredom as the breakdown of a person’s reaction to social stimuli, thereby isolating the person. Awkwardness is a breakdown of social interaction in the context of protocols which become impossible to uphold. Unlike boredom, awkwardness is not isolating but inherently social. Rather than isolate, it spreads and incorporates its subjects.

Kotsko’s genealogy proves useful and effective in producing an epistemology of awkwardness, and the text is no doubt at home under the label of Zer0 Books (which announces its mission as restoring the public intellectual, and the intellectual to the public). Indeed this is not theory for theory’s sake, but theory which hopes to promote some form of praxis.

It is theory which relies on the pop culture of The Office, the films of Judd Apatow and Curb Your Enthusiasm, opening the text beyond a small academic audience. Although Kotsko’s investigation through pop culture may prove accessible and enjoyable, his theoretical goals seem at odds with his couch and DVD-based research. The first world, Anglo-cultural products which form the basis of Kotsko’s inquiry (Heidegger aside) compromise the intensity and intrigue of Kotsko’s final suggestion for us—to embrace awkwardness in an utopian exercise of alternative world-making. Certainly Larry David’s HBO series, and Kotsko’s reading thereof, offer insight into the lunacy of social protocol. But this embrace of awkwardness does not push his radical form far enough.

Whatever imagination this inquiry into awkwardness may be missing, Kotsko provides a theoretical apparatus for a concept lacking one, opening the doors to further probing into a defining characteristic of the contemporary era.