Journal(ing) is one of three basic modes of writing in this assemblage. It's the most 'personal', in the sense of most immediate, and can be most 'poetic' too. It's the basic grounding of 'a view from somewhere': in a life, among lives, in relationship.
Journal(ing) - A main section of 'A book of skill'
Writing in journal mode is fairly raw reflection, in a day in a life. Its value is that it’s not over-digested or formularised; it’s as close as possible or helpful, to whatever is presenting. It can be ‘’poetic’.
Its limitation is that it’s very particular: this life, this day, here; a third person can find it hard to get context.
At the same time, if the ‘poetry’ is done well there are also possibilities for recognition of alikeness (although we refuse ‘universality’ or even ‘sameness’). The ‘view from somewhere’ is a basic commitment. View from somewhere - to be added xxx
Others might want to approach this kind of quality of insight through fiction (or indeed, poetry). But myself, I find that living the one actual life is quite enough, without also constructing and inhabiting fictional ones! Although a fiction, or a poem, can be useful exercises, my own experience is that this life doesn’t grant space for ‘exercises’: pretty well everything that is done needs to resolve an actual difficulty of living; there is ’no time out’- as Garfinkel and ethnomethodology take pains to point out. Journal(ing) might even be seen as a form of activist-ethnomethodological ‘fieldwork’ 🤔? Not exactly mundane then, shall we agree? Garfinkel and his symbolic-interactionist compadre Goffman are hard acts to follow. But they are at least practical - something we couldn't say about hermenutics or existentialism, for example. There's a whole bunch of 20th century subjectivist philosophising to (mundanely) rise above here. > Kelly, Russell (2019). “It’s Over There. Sit Down.” Indexicality, The Mundane, The Ordinary and The Everyday, and Much, Much More. *Human Studies* 42 (2):199-219.