ENG 549 Everyday Blog: "Here at the Historical Society" by Steven Millhauser

Tuesday, January 27, 2009

"Here at the Historical Society" by Steven Millhauser

It was good to finally meet everyone yesterday!

Our first set of readings and conversation kept bringing to mind Steven Millhauser's short story "Here at the Historical Society." The story is written as a sort of public letter defending the work of a fictitious Historical Society and, at first, the story is quite absurd. The narrator/letter writer establishes the Historical Society as a bizarrely micro-oriented institution engaged in preserving and documenting minutiae from the "New Past"--or, the present--as it ticks by from moment to moment. The Historical Society curators work tirelessly to gather and exhibit the plastic bags from morning newspapers, cellophane, candy wrappers, rubber bands and all kinds of seemingly mundane detritus from our daily lives.

But then there's a beautiful tone shift in the story, and what we at first encounter as silly, absurd, perhaps even satirical, grows into something else. When the story turns, we see that the obsession with the mundane is really a kind of praise or exaltation. I'm happy to bring copies of the story if anyone's interested.

- Esme

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Notes from Dr. M on Lefebvre

First, a review of key points concerning Lefebvre:

· By the 1970s, there’s a solid body of work in France that theorizes “the social” by means of an emphasis on “practice” (also known as Practice Theory). People like Bourdieu, Giddens, and deCerteau are part of that school. See this Blog by Professor John Postill on “what is practice theory.” This will give you a brief but helpful orientation: http://johnpostill.wordpress.com/2008/10/30/what-is-practice-theory/
· It is important to know that Lefebvre belongs to the generation that antecedes this body of work. In some ways, he foreshadows it.
· Lefebvre himself stands in the shadows of a long and solid tradition of analysis concerning the relationship of human life to social and economic structures (that’s the rub of all philosophy in a sense, no?)
· Obviously, in between the objects of analysis called SELF and SOCIETY a whole lot of things happen ---these “things” are, in a sense, LIFE as lived…..or, everyday life. YET…and this “yet” is very important: remember that a great deal of what philosophy is/has been about is exactly rising ABOVE the everyday (the mundane) to think what in Saturday Night Life was simply called “deep thoughts.”
· This penchant of philosophy to seek answers to our most human dilemmas is at the same time constrained by philosophy’s stressing that it is our very humanness (our banality) that prevents us from finding the answers (therefore creating our need for philosophers). This was partially what Karl Marx meant to address when he said: the philosophers have thus far only explained the world, the whole point however is to change it.
· So, let’s start there: with this desire to “change the world.” Actually, let’s take three steps back and assert what Marx asserted: humans live life in the everyday…..(even philosophers and movie stars and world leaders have to sit on the toilet everyday day like the rest of us). Lefebvre starts from this basic (and also foundationally Marxist) assertion: everyday life is where human activity takes place (where we “produce” the world and “reproduce” ourselves in it ---both biologically and socially).
· Remember the dichotomy SELF and SOCIETY and that “something” that connects the two? Well, Lefebvre understands everyday life as the site of culture ---(those “ways of being” that produce and reproduce life as we know it are in fact a wide inventory of “forms” to get things done and it is to those forms in their variation and uniqueness that we call “culture.” ) Thus, for Lefebvre, everyday life is “where culture informs the organization of society” (quote is from critic Michael Gardiner)…. (culture then is the translation device if you will that makes the social structure legible ). There is no “life” (of work, politics, leisure, family, etc) outside of cultural forms ---and how do we experience those forms? Most certainly, in the everyday.
· But Lefebvre argues: The problem with the cultural forms of our everyday life under capitalism and its ideological companion –modernity--- however, is that they are for the most part alienated, bureaucratized forms of being. The concept of “alienation” comes to Marxist thinking via Hegel (in a basic philosophical sense, alienation means the loss of control over essential human capacities). Marx (a Young Hegelian) takes the concept further to argue that this “loss” is nothing at all philosophical, it is rather material and it begins with the loss of control over my own labor, and yes….it is a profound diminishment of my humanity when all I can “sell” to live is my labor (which in turn is the only thing that truly produces value and things of value).
· The concern over the alienated nature of life in modernity was not an original Lefebvrian thought. Theorists of the Frankfurt School had pounded on this extensively (see this in Wikipedia as a basic Intro: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Frankfurt_School)
· One key point therefore for anyone who wishes to see a more just and equal society is that under capitalism and modernity, everyday life is so caught up in the trivial, mechanized, and regulated, that it is nearly impossible to develop at that level, among ordinary people, any chance for true social change. Thus, the main thing one needs to do to create social transformation is to “critique everyday life” (the main thrust –and title- of Lefebvre’s work).
· Lefebvre says that to contribute to the “art of living” it is first and foremost necessary to “critique” everyday life (in other words, to unmask or disclose its alienation, its dulling effect on consciousness). In the post WW II era, Lefebvre (along with people like Roland Barthes) sees the arenas of technology, mass media, and consumerism as the key problematic implicated in this critique.
· To make his point a historical argument with some traction (not just as “gesture” as he criticizes the Surrealists for doing) Lefebvre contrasts two approaches that he finds wholly unacceptable: the tendency both on the Right and the Left to occlude the everyday as a good place from which to start a project of social change. He is of course harsher with the Right –it is the elitist elevation of abstract thought in Modernity that most abhors the everyday as anything worth considering. Bourgeois society has accomplished something quite significant: has advanced economic development…but it has also segmented life into binaries that leave little room for the true “art of living.” Among these binaries Lefebvre is most upset about the divisions mental/manual labor, public/private, and the effects of these core divisions on our social ideas about labor, family life, leisure. Bourgeois ideology paints the everyday of the ordinary person as a series of unconscious actions and performances (c.f. Gardiner)
· Lefebvre’s critique of the Left (of Marxism) is somewhat different; yes, Marxists get that life IS “everyday” and that abstract high-falluting “culture” is not enough to change people’s consciousness. Lefebvre ‘s main problem with the Communists is that he believes they are dogmatic (caught in what he calls “a metaphysics of labor” ) and hence blind to a wide range of everyday experience that really matters to ordinary people: love, sensuality, pleasure, leisure.
· Lefebvre’s deployment of the concept of “alienation” is not the only true-blue Marxist tool he utilizes. He also applies “dialectics” to forge a different path (other than raw dogma of Right or Left) to understanding /valorizing everyday life.
· One example of the dialectical method as applied by Lefebvre is his notion that while Marxists critique “work” really well, they don’t quite understand how human “needs” function. Yes, it is true that capitalism has created a whole lot of empty and false needs (capitalism encourages the attainment of human desires only through capital, through consumption). Yes, Lefebvre goes to great pains to illustrate, leisure itself is an alienated practice in society today. In this sense, Lefebvre’s view of modernity (and all its pleasurable activities) comes pretty close to being one of dystopia. But……… (this “but” is why we read Lefebvre…..and how he sets us up to read deCerteau)
· So….Lefebvre wants to illustrate that while the “critique of everyday life” in capitalism is fundamental to any true possibility of social change, he also wants to distance himself from those who would see ONLY doom and gloom for the ordinary. Thus, he proceeds to argue in many convoluted ways throughout his book that there always remains a POSSIBILITY for a radical dis-alienation of everyday life. He thus engages in a journey to try to look for signs that indicate/foreshadow what a liberated everyday life would be like……
· Part of his argument is that everyday life, while 90% alienated, remains nonetheless a complex of “activities and passivities” that is illusory, but only partially so….because even in those instances when capital seems to have a hold on things quite firmly, everyday life always contains a kind of “spontaneous critique” of capital and alienation that is worth picking up on…… (one example he offers is the control of leisure through “human resources” life-work benefits in most corporations pp.39-40). In other words, for Lefebvre everyday life contains both repressive and emancipatory qualities. The emancipatory qualities, however, are never quite robust or well formed –they remain for him expressed in a residual manner (a trace, a ripple).
· Problem with all this is that Lefebvre, while not wanting to throw the baby out with the bathwater, also cannot bring himself to articulate a full theory of AGENCY ---that is, HOW would human beings actually navigate their desires for a good life vis-à-vis capitalist alienation. The only “signs” of something good in everyday life worth rescuing is the world of folklore of pre-capitalist modernity and its “traces” today in fairs, festivals, rituals of community. These moments are not, for Lefebvre, dis-alienated, but they offer a hint of what could be…..
· Historically, it would be a mistake that Lefebvre’s argument is the same as that of the Romantics (see basic Wikipedia entry on Romantism: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Romanticism)....but we do see in his argument, paradoxically, the seed of the very two things he most deplored: nostalgia and utopianism. Seems like Lefebvre was never able to overcome his own contradictions…..theoretically speaking (yet his awkward attempt to try to move the idea of everyday life towards a more productive terrain –freedom TO do things, rather than just freedom FROM—is tremendously important).
· Lastly, there’s one more point in which Lefebvre falls into his own vicious dialectical impasse: his only hope for social transformation is for a “total” change (he repeatedly argues this point in the book and that is precisely his anger towards the Surrealists….they are so partial in their aesthetization of everyday life!) . In the end we have to consider that Lefebvre offers a crippling type of critique to everyday life; in other words, if power is so effective in shaping the very essence of who we are /or can be in capitalism, then what? The only solution is a radical revolution guided by some political avant-garde? ---and if so….there we are back again at the Leninist/Stalinist solutions that he despised.
· As far as the topic of everyday life is concerned, the next extensive, complex articulation we get comes from deCerteau. {see however the work of Agnes Heller as another kind of intervention: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/%C3%81gnes_Heller)
· We find in Certeau an effort to craft what we can call a “specificity” regarding the “how-to” of transformation in everyday life –for him human AGENCY is the key conceptual piece that others fail to theorize. These others include Lefbvre as well as Foucault (both men for different reasons, he finds, come short of getting at the heart of how people actually live their lives).

Notes from Dr. M on De Certeau

Notes for a discussion of de Certeau’s “The Practice of Everyday Life”
(see also the following essay from 2008 in New York Review of Books on de Certeau: http://www.nybooks.com/articles/21375)

· Interestingly, de Certeau’s work is frequently invoked as an example of the postmodernist fascination with “resistance” and “meaning” ---wherein human beings engage in all sorts of liberatory activities to stand against the regimes of power that structure their lives. There has emerged, no doubt, a romance of resistance. The main arguments of this happy-school of thought are that people are never wholly alienated, they are always resisting, even when they are “couch potatoes” they are “resisting” the discipline demanded by capitalism. The term has become so overused and inflated that today it hardly holds any analytical traction anymore. In fact, when we actually read de Certeau we find that his argument is a whole lot more nuanced.
· Like Lefebvre and the Frankfurt School Marxists thinkers that preceded him, de Certeau begins from the premise that everyday life is highly alienated (and in a sense, “unconscious” to the average person). He is no happy-go-lucky celebrant of popular culture; but neither is he a heavy-handed dogmatist of radical social change. He is far more interested in the middle range of actual (empirical) activity in everyday life: in other words, things people do to “make do” within that deep ocean of alienated unconsciousness that we can neither negate nor overcome by sheer will. Or, put this way: we have to live life as best we can given the hand we have been dealt.
· De Certeau remains a thinker of the Left in as much as he is concerned less with individual attainment of freedom (a bourgeois dream) than with an explanation of social formations (what he calls “modes of operation” or an “operational logic” of and about capitalist society as is…).
· Much like we saw in Lefebvre, de Certeau is interested in what Michael Gardiner has called the problem of “the promise of human plenitude” (in modernity this promise, which at last seems attainable materially speaking, is at the same time farther from us than ever; under capitalism daily life is “irredeemably corrupted,” manipulated, passive, formulaic, dominated, etc.).
· Since the 1920s, we had already come to understand that this critique of everyday life implicated also, in the words of Adorno and Horkheimer, a critique of “the culture industries” (the forms of mass entertainment that, as the etymology of the word entertainment suggest, keep us “held in between” consciousness and unconsciousness”). One can say that de Certeau takes off from “the critique of everyday life” that had preceded him.
· De Certeau will make the concept of “consumption” the cornerstone of his argument. But his approach is already more anthropologic/ethnographic than philosophical: he is intrigued to ask, what exactly happens in that in-between process from when people are offered cultural representations and they, as consumers, have to appropriate them? (this question is “the” central question of the field we know today as “cultural studies” as originated in Birmingham, Great Britain).
· De Certeau’s methods constitute the quintessential example of a “heterology” (remember the concept from our first week of readings?) –in other words, meaning is constituted through a plurality of practices. There is no single sociological magic wand or any singular historic “moment” of total oppression or total liberation –what we have is a multiplicity of cultural forms interacting at once with structure (social) and agency (self). But MORE IMPORTANTLY, seen in this light, agency is less a matter of the self (what I will to do) and more akin to what Bourdieu called a “habitus” (or, a disposition to do / act/ be in some ways and not others).
· De Certeau believes that in the mechanics of everyday life there’s a “rationality” that is inherently “grassroots” (to use a common term) or in folkloristic terms “vernacular” to ordinary life itself. He refuses what he perceives to be the “conceit” of Lefebvre and other Left artists/thinkers that only “theory” can represent the total reality. De Certeau believes in a kind of “theory” from the ground up. One key element of disagreement with Lefebvre is, therefore, his belief that if there is going to be any articulation of meaning/conscience/critique on the part of everyday folks, such articulation will have to be perceived in the MOST mundane and ordinary of activities (walking, reading, shopping) and not simply in occasional “ruptures” of festivity.
· Indeed, by arguing in this middle range of the theoretical, de Certeau in effect gives up any aspiration to “total” transformation or, in other words, abandons the utopia of complete “revolution.” If something is to be shaken up, he figures, it would happen at the level of concrete everydayness. De Certeau is not romanticizing the everyday at all; in fact, he believes that the everyday in capitalism takes /siphons all the possible imaginative energies people can muster (and spent there, as it were….it is there, therefore, where one may find it still active for any kind of transformative aspiration).
· De Certeau thus determines to go beyond Lefebvre’s “traces” to find evidence of this human creativity in actual practices; and he takes on as object of study the most marginal and taken for granted: cooking, home decoration, clothing choices, etc. In this respect, his theoretical thrust is not very tidy: he looks to articulate a method and an insight that is de facto unsystematic and pluralistic. De Certeau’s BIG contribution is his analysis of the activity of make-do via a distinction between STRATEGIES and TACTICS. These two concepts constitute the core of his contribution.
· Key point developed by de Certeau in tandem with (and 5% degrees off from Bourdieu) is that there is no “single logic of practice” (an administration of life located in ideological sites such as schools, churches, the economy, etc). What there is, de Certeau argues, is a series of contradictory and multiple logics. In essence, institutions have “strategies” and people respond with “tactics.” Tactics are dispersed, hidden, and ephemeral. They are not assumed by de Certeau to be autonomous or rational –they are what they are in response to what society is at any given time. Tactics are opportunistic; in that sense, they are not exactly the best source (“place”) from which to launch “resistance” (but they ARE evidence of agency in human beings against something…..they want to challenge, but can only do so to an extent).
· Reading, for example, is a tactical enterprise par excellence (cg. Gardiner). Is reading “passive”? Or it is a kind of “human production” that we hardly understand at all, yet it is logical to each reader? How successful are authors in making readers “read properly”? Don’t people “roam” as they please over texts and construct as they please meanings from a multiplicity of sources leading to a multiplicity of interpretations?
· De Certeau’s approach has been noted for two particular elements: (a) his ethnographic approach to unearthing the terrain of everyday life ---not because he believes in “evidence” as a pure empiricist, but because he wants to stress the internal self-evident “logic” of mundane activities (as opposed to the “logic” of grand theorizing; and (b) an ethical dimension that argues that people ought to be considered more than just mopes caught in the schemes of power.

Class Structure

Introduction: Getting our Bearings on Key Terms (HIGHLIGHTS: read essays on "gardens," on "dust" as an exercize in microsociology, and listened carefully to Bob Dylan's song "Visions of Johanna")
Case Study on Food (HIGHLIGHTS: read selections from Masumoto "Epitaph for a Peach," anthropologist Steve Striffler's essay "Undercover in a Chicken Factory," Dr. Alvarez's essay on "Walter Benjamin at the Taqueria," William Roseberry's essay on "The Rise of Yuppie Coffees," and Lauren Berlant's essay "Slow Death" about obesity in the U.S.)
How does the Everyday figure in Art and Literature? (HIGHLIGHTS: read about Dada and Surrealism; Jamaica Kincaid's "A Small Place;" Sherman Alexie's "Business of Fancydancing;" selections from Leslie Marmon Silkon's Almanac of the Dead, "Book One: Tucson;" and a couple of poems by Wallace Stevens, "An Ordinary Evening in New Haven," and "Things of August."
Getting our Bearings in Macro Sociology (HIGHLIGHTS: read Freud's "First Lecture," a quirky essay by Mary L Pratt on "Jazzercise," selections from Durkheim, Goffman, Guha on Indian Historiography, Raymond Williams from Marxism and Literature, and Corrigan and Sayer from the book "The Great Arch."

ENG 549 Everyday Blog

Tuesday, January 27, 2009

"Here at the Historical Society" by Steven Millhauser

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Notes from Dr. M on Lefebvre

Notes from Dr. M on De Certeau

Class Structure