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More notes on the quotidian

‘Structural forces only reveal themselves in the lived reality of social relations’ ((L. McNay, Agency and Experience, in ‘Feminism After Bourdieu’, Blackwell, 2004)) e.g. the idea of “class” will remain as such, because ‘people are never actually assembled in classes, and this cannot be easly expressed without reference to something like a common experience, a lived experience of the conflicts and struggles inherent in relations of exploitation’ (E. M. Wood, 1995 in McNay, cited).

The five axes of oppression (structural forces): exploitation, marginalization, powerlessness, cultural emperialism and violence (I. M. Young, 1997, in McNay, cited). The individuals move around multiple axis of oppression in the social action, e.g. between gender, ethic or racial belongings, which are also set in time and in place. ‘If the idea of agency refers, in some sense, to the individual’s capacity for self-reflection and self-evaluation then it needs to be examined from some kind of hermeneutic perspective: [that is] analysis of experience is central to the understanding of agency (McNay, cited).

But what do we mean by “experience”? The subjective realm, often associated with emotions and affect, taken as a given, the personal, personality. However, there is a risk of empiricism (‘which doesn’t scrutinize the conditions that determine how experience relates to knowledge’) and might establish ‘an arguably tendentious unity between women’ (McNay, cited). We need then to equip ourselves with a notion of social experience that is set in context:

‘This contexualization involves tracing the links between the phenomenal immediacy of experience and abstract system of power that operate at one remove from every day activity. At the same time, the way in which actors negotiate these power relations cannot be derived from an abstract analytics of power. To explain agency, it is not possible to bypass an analysis of experience. It is through the uncovering of immanent structures contained in the contingent that the singular complexity of actions and interactions can be understood’ (ibidem).

Drawing and developing on Bourdieu’s phenomenology, McNay proposes to see gender as lived relation that involves negotiation of social conflict and tension. A form of social interaction is posited by the analysis of the emotions: they are ‘both shaped by latent social structures and  also the vehicle through which  invisible power dynamics  are made present within immediate everyday  experience’.

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2009 01 21 pa_card Framing the City Comments (0)

The Body at War

I was daring thinking about a densely packed city under heavy attack from air strikes and cannons. I have tried to do this exercise for the last couple of days, sometimes at night time, in the almost absolute silence of our sleeping city. Will the market be there? Would I sleep comfortably ever again? How big is my grief? Would I ever recover from the death of my family members, my neighbours, my friends? Who keeps me informed of the events?

But, more importantly, and consequentially, I have been trying to imagine how everyday life gets distressed, changed, and adapts to the new dramatic regime. How would I go to the loo? Is there any water? How would I post my blog without electricity?  Could I send my children playing outside during the few hours ceasefire? How could I take my son to school? Is there any school?
I just cant get it, without the risk of falling into rhetoric, or worse, into a patronising attitude.  I cannot but think in fact I belong to that privileged minority in the western world. I can only be a spectator or worse watch the event on telly. But on the other hand I do believe that it is not just spectacle: the reality of the war out there needs some deep thoughts, reflections, and critiques. I do agree with the latest writing of Susan Sontag’s on the subject of the grief, the pain, the representation of the wars of the others. She writes:

‘To speak of reality becoming a spectacle is a breathtaking provincialism. It universalises the viewing habits of a small, educated population living in the rich part of the world, where news has been converted into entertainment. It assumes that everyone is a spectators…[and then, discussing Jeff Wall's famous transparency 'Dead Troops Talk', 1996]… “We” – this “We” is everyone who has never experienced anything like what went through – don’t understand. We don’t get it. We truly cannot imagine what it was like. We can’t imagine how dreadful, how terrifying war is – and how normal it becomes. Can’t understand, can’t imagine. That’s what every soldier, and every journalist and aid worker and independent observer stubbornly feels. And they are right’ ((S. Sontag, ‘Looking at War’, The New Yorker, 9/12/02))

Yes, I think Sontag is absolutely right. We don’t understand the direct experience of suffering, but we are eager to represent it. And images are the trickiest medium of all, inexorably real but incredibly able to be bend to this or that party. One example: pictures of dead children at war. They have been used many times either to arrest or to provoke a military action. Again, Sontag:

‘Awareness of the suffering that accumulates in wars happening elsewhere is something constructed. Principally, in the form that is registered by the camera, it flares up, is shared by many people, and fades from view. In contrast to a written account, which, depending on its complexity of thought, references, and vocabulary, is pitched at a larger or smaller readership, a photograph has only one language and it is destined potentially for all…The photographic image [on the other hand] cannot be a simply a transparency of something that happened. It is always the image that someone chose; to photograph is to frame, and to frame is to exclude.’ (ibidem).

Following these and other issues about representation, truth, and realism, that I preferred to turn my gaze to the pacifist movement (or I shall say demonstrations) rather than the conflict itself. It feels like there are two binary, parallel, different worlds. A Here and There. A space of suffering and one of representation of this suffering. On the other hand though, the possibility offered by the Internet are now wider, I mean, the chance to communicate, listening, interacting with the Others much more developed and sophisticated than ever before. For these reasons, I started reading, researching and annotating blogs from the warzone, mostly from Gaza, sometimes from people directly connected to the denied citizens (exiles, relatives, aid workers). I believe that in this way the spaces of representation and the representation of spaces collide to some extent. The pain of the others might be reflected and reproduced, bounced back and fro to Others, participated to some extent at last. What I am interested into is the direct experience of ordinary people under attack (rhetorically referred to as ‘civilians’ in the death toll), the emphasis being on the actual description of their daily life, rather than the much talked about political issues. I slowly started to feel a sense of grief, a general anxiety of mourning, and an inexorable sliding into the character of the sympathetic pacifist, rather different thing from a Palestinian Father under siege: this would have been at very least pretentious (a sort of Butlerian discursive magic spell).

In particular, I found incredibly inspiring and touching a blog from a Palestinian journalist, with a foot in the States and the mind in Gaza, as many exiles on the border, in-between identities and statuses. The reason I chose it from the many is that it comes from a mother and talks about the everyday life of exiles as well as continuously reminding us of the terrible situation in Gaza. The title is exemplar and I invite anyone to have a read:

Raising Yousuf and Noor: diary of a Palestinian mother.

Also of particular interest and full of ‘hands-on’ information from the Occupied Territories, a blog from Sharyn Lock, a human rights worker based in Gaza.

http://talestotell.wordpress.com/

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2009 01 08 pa_card Blogging the City
Imaging the City
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Comment and Response

I received this excellent comment via email to my post ‘Capitalism’s meltdown and the Body’ on Sociology Eye Blog (also on this blog), and am very happy to publish it here with my response thereafter.

Dear Paolo,

<<REMOVED>>

by sender’s request for alleged breach of confidentiality.

If you did get it, just forget it.

Here is my response:

Dear <<REMOVED>>

many thanks for your critical feedback, it is always good to have some and also gives me a chance to write more on the topic, without the constraints of the blog post, that is usually tight and fast. And this peculiarity of the medium gives room to mistakes quite often. For instance, as you said (my emphasis):

‘the last paragraph might be interpreted as symbolic interactionism, particularly as you point to the complications of daily life (terms that seem to be ubiquitous in responses to capitalism’s meltdown)’.

There is in my opinion some confusions here as I meant to address exactly the opposite: instead of using ‘complicate’ as adjective to ‘everyday lives’, I should have written in fact ‘complex’, in the sense of ‘differential’, ‘complicating’ and ‘always emergent’, in Delueze’s words ‘rhizomatic’. My apologies for the mistake, I amended this in the post, which is now: ‘He made me think that everyday’s life is a challenging terrain [for the social scientists], more complex, and fluid that we are usually inclined to think [as social scientists]‘. The sense of my post remains as polemics ‘against these increasingly common nightmare scenarios which seem to be so prevalent’ (Thrift 2004), dozens of which you might find in other contributors’ posts, maximalist representations of mainstream quantitative sociology.

On the other hand, though, you encourage me to develop in writing the situation in which I found myself at that precise moment of recording the story: ‘it might be a good idea to explore the interaction between you and him more fully’, as you wrote. This is a valid suggestion. I found symptomatic though that there is no mention at all in your comment to the overwhelming picture on the top of the post. The text there is intended in fact to be just a corollary, an accomplishment to the visual. I use often photographs to open up spaces, to invite the reader to enter the story, to invite them to imagine the lives of the people and the objects pictured in them, as well as their interrelations. More than pages of text, the scene – at least in my intentions – hinted at a usual performance made by the barber in his daily encounters with his clients, friends, people he might just known, and with whom he talks of all the possible subjects, including the economic crisis. There are daily performances, theatrical dramas, and hilarious vignettes unfolding in the life of the barber that written text, even if it not constrained by the 200 words of the blog post, cannot render effectively.

As my supervisor, professor Knowles writes:

‘Sociology has remained firmly focused on text and on narrative: on the written and spoken word. Sociologists listen and map and turn what they see into text. Sociology is effectively visual illiterate: picturing features neither as a technique for recording nor as a tool in social analysis’ (Bedlam on the Streets, 2000: 20).

How often have you found such an intruding scene where two relatively old men chat with vigour of the end of the capitalism, and with such a bodily expression? And doesn’t it happen in fact every day, in the cafés, stations, dole offices, on the buses, ‘as they exist in their hundreds of thousands at the same hour’? This is the ability of critical photography, to ‘pump the aura out of the reality’, to strip bare the objects, to initiate ‘the emancipation of objects from aura’, as Walter Benjamin would have perhaps maintained it (Short History of Photography).

In terms of non-representational theory, it seems to me that there is a drive towards a dialogue between writers, readers and subjects, as the space of rendering the story becomes infused with imagination, both of the author and the viewer, who should work together at making the story:

‘This is the difference, then, between representation and practice. In the one, we know the outcome. In the other, we can only, to insert a Wittgensteinian moment, guess. And this imagination extends to conceptual practice, as well as the realms of percepts, affects, and sensations’ (Thrift cited: 6, my italics).

It has been a pleasure to enlist such an authoritative comment, hope to have more in the future.

Many thanks.

Paolo

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2008 12 05 pa_card Blogging the City
Imaging the City
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Capitalism’s meltdown and the Body

My barber doesn’t bother at all: “Hair -he told me last week – will always grow on people’s head!”. The phantasmagorical numbers of the capitalist crisis do not mean anything at all to him (do they mean anything to most of us, by the way?). He carries on as he can, as he has almost always done, a coffee and a cigarette here and there, a joke quite often.

He made me think that everyday’s life is a challenging terrain for social scientists, more complex and fluid that we – social scientists – are usually inclined to think: it engages simultaneously with the real, the symbolic and the imaginary, and ‘how and what it is experienced as experience is itself variable’ ((N. Thrift, Non Representational Theory, 2008)) .

Thrift on malice and misanthropy

Non-Representational Theory

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2008 12 03 pa_card Blogging the City
Imaging the City
Remembering the City Comments (0)

Mr. Alemanno strikes again…

The ex-fascist mayor of Rome Mr. Alemanno made again the headlines lately, when while visiting Israel refused to call on Fascism ‘as absolute evil’ and labeled it as ‘a complex phenomenon’. The outcry of condemnation at this latest ‘slippage’ from the Italian Center-Left and the Jewish community is highly justified, but in my view missed the point: they are in fact rehearsing a view of Fascism (with capital letter) as ‘historical norm’ (see on this Walter Benjamin’s Thesis VIII), missing the true aspects of its strenght. Mr. Alemanno, in fact, suggested a more suttle reading of Fascism when he declared: “Many people joined it in good faith”. It is that ‘good faith’ which should have been addressed, as it highlights the deeply popular roots of fascist ideology, its ability to reinvent itself in many ordinary behaviors and daily actions, and bring back to Rome, for instance, people like Mr. Alemanno.

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2008 10 27 pa_card Remembering the City Comments (0)

Ludic City [II]

‘Splash in every puddle of the city’ Yoko-Ono

Lefebvre’s discussion of everyday life and urbanism centers around the contraddiction between use value (everyday life and the city) and exchange value (modern industrial production) and the dialectical tension between them. He draws on Marx’s analysis of the commodity to explain the implications of capitalist reorganization of everyday life and social practices ((Q. Stevens, The Ludic City, 2007 Routledge)).

Leisure is ‘the critique of everyday life from within: the critique which the everyday makes of itself, the critique of the real by the possible and of one aspect of life by another’ (Lefebvre’s Critique of Everyday Life, Vol 1, 1971).

This is the revolutionary aspect of the ‘play’ as arbitrary practices of the everyday: the ability to overtake structures and to discover new needs and forms of sociability. I am not thinking of the category of ‘play’ as kids’ fun, only. As I try to make clear in my photoblog, that can be structured and istitutionalized too (especially if surrounded by the concerns on Health and Safety, today another wording for Moral Panics). What I am more likely referring to is the concept of disruption, anarchic lack of moral order, and partial perception of own identity in the urban environment. In other words, in the cities…

‘the confrontation of different cultural traditions tends to expose their arbitrariness practically, through first-hand experience, in the very heart of everyday order, of the possibility of doing the same things differently, or, no less important, of doing something different at the same time’ (P.Bourdieu 1977:233)

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2008 08 08 pa_card Playing the City Comments (0)

Museum of the Childhood

‘Pedantic brooding over the production of objects – visual aids, toys or books – that are supposed to be suitable for children is folly. Since the Enlightenment this has been one of the mustiest speculations of the pedagogues. Their infatuation with psychology keeps them from perceiving that the world is full of the most unrivalled objects for childish attention and use. And the most specific. For children are particularly fond for haunting any site where things are being visibly worked upon’ Walter Benjamin in ‘One-Way Street’.

This piece is about my family’s excursion to the Museum of the Childhood, in Bethal Green (East London). I think it is important for the article to point out two things: firstly that ‘in its early days, the Museum’s purpose was a means of introducing disadvantaged East Enders to the cultural riches of the nation’s heritage’, and secondly that ‘it wasn’t until 1974 that the Museum would officially be dedicated to the subject of childhood. The V&A’s collections of children’s costume, books, nursery items, art and furniture were relocated and redisplayed in Bethnal Green, alongside the Museum’s existing toy collection’ (both quotes are from the museum’s website).
Joe Moran writes: ‘There is no doubt that a simplistic notion of childhood innocence has been co-opted into a soft focus heritage version of the national past…in order to valorise a more ‘innocent’ national past’. This middle-class cult of childhood is ‘a kind of Barthesian myth which works by virtue of its supposed naturalness; as a sphere that seems to erase cultural difference and exist outside historical change, it becomes a potent vehicle for all kinds of social meanings and desires [e.g. racial homogeneity, Englishness and ‘Victorian Values]’ (2002:198)

And in her own conclusion: ‘Nostalgia is produced not only by the smooth, sense-making mechanisms of narrative forms which conjure up imaginary childhoods, but by textual fragments, photographs and objects associated with the fleeting moments of an everyday life. In order to be aware of the importance of childhood nostalgia as a form of ‘false consciousness’ tied to dominant ideologies, we also need to recognize it as a sentiment that resonates with our own deepest longings for identity, security and belonging’ (p. 172).

Three boxes then: 1. Nostalgia is a totalitarian means in the discursive practices of the cultural and heritage industries; 2. Nostalgia has become a widespread and expensive set of goods and practices; 3. There are tensions and similarities between the normative narratives of Childhood and the personal, private, individualistic experience of own childhood.

The Museum of Childhood seems to tick them all.

‘Stories are becoming private [and their] dispersion points to the dispersion of the memorable as well. And in fact memory is a sort of anti-museum: it is not localizable’. Michel de Certeau // 1984:108

I dedicated a few pictures to the subject in my Photoblog. These try to communicate the sense of uneasiness I perceived since my first (of many others) visit to the Museum. In fact, at the end of the day, I like feeling nostalgic and cuddling. I even spotted my favorite train set and the Queen’s Guards in miniature, which I always wanted to play with (my big cousin had a few imported from England, and this made me extremely envious: did this toy trigger an unhomely feeling of love for this country or a nostalgia for my homely childhood abroad?).

My son, instead, found easier to start fiddling with the mini touch-screen info point (including x-ray pictures of toys’ internal mechanisms). Isn’t that stuff been put there for the adults, I wonder?.

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2008 08 04 pa_card Blogging the City
Playing the City
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Ludic City

‘Urbanism makes alienation tangible’ Vaneigem //1996

Where are the mysterious and the subjunctive, the profane and the sacred, the magic and the ritual, the diabolic and the mystical gone? The everyday practice of the modern metropolis has transformed the ‘play into toil, curiosity into fetishism, reciprocity into tyranny, spontaneity into drugery’ (Gilloch 1996 about W. Benjamin).

‘Children are irresistibly drawn by the detritus generated by building, gardening, housework, tailoring, or carpentry. In waste production they recognize the face that the world of things turns directly and solely to them. In using these things they do not so much imitate the works of adults as bring together, in the artifact produced in play, materials of widely differing kinds in a new, intuitive relationship’ (W. Benjamin. ‘Construction Site’ in ‘One-Way Street’)

‘The most beautiful cities were those where festivals were not planned in advance, but there was a space where they could unfold’ H. Lefebvre

One important aspect of ‘play’ is therefore the possibility of the unexpected, the unfamiliar and unhomely, what Lefebvre called the ‘social oeuvre’. ‘Dense spaces and heterogeneous populations can make a significant contribution to social development only where there are chance encounters, social mixing, exploration of the unfamiliar and risk’ ((Q. Stevens: The Ludic City, Exploring the Potential of Public Spaces, 2007: 8, Routledge)) . I added the emphasis to highlight my next point, which is also the point of departures from Stevens analysis: ‘While most of productive work and social reproduction occur in carefully framed settings, play thrives on the density and diversity of people and experiences to be found in urban public space’ (ibidem, my emphasis again). According to Stevens then, probably on the wave of early Lefebvre’s writing on urban public space (1970s), there is:

  • a striking division between public and private;
  • the private is istitutionalised and structured while the public is rather free and subject to change by the people in it;
  • people themselves do not seem to be affected by this division and are two-folded actors.
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2008 08 04 pa_card Playing the City Comments (0)

Who owns the Public Visual Sphere

‘It would be difficult to find a piece of modern architecture that inspires less interest than the bus shelter. It is an omnipresent object of everyday life that is usually only associated with graffiti and vandalism. But there has been an unnoticed bus-shelter revolution in recent years. Many of the worl’s shelters are now supplied by just two companies, both of which deal with outdoor advertising: Ashdel [80% UK market share] and JCDecaux. These firms have built themselves into global brand since the 1990s [and] bus-shelter design has become an adjunct of the advertising industry’. Joe Moran, Reading the Everyday // 2005

They are the visible manifestation of a sharpening battle for an increasingly valuable advertising business. Advertisers are beginning to see outdoor as the last mass medium. Rates have consequently been rocketing’. The Economist, May 2000

Names of bus-shelters: Metropolis, City 2000, Agoris, Avenue

Names of Architects for bus-shelters: Sir Norman Foster, Britain’s most famous architect, Richard Meier, who built the Getty Museum,

Councils enter into agreement with ADSHEL whereby, in return for sole advertising rights, their shelters are provided at no cost to the borough, they are illuminated 24/7, can have even two rotating ad panels and use the latest anti-graffiti materials.

Note the JCD market research findings: ‘Increased time out of home is challenging advertisers to find new, effective ways to reach consumers [?]. 15-24 year-olds are 70% more likely to see phonebox advertising. [We offer] Extensive coverage providing access to an urban youth audience. Strategically located on busy roads and in the heart of major cities, our 6-sheets deliver the highest audience coverage and frequency‘.

Antex Electronics Corp. has developed a technology to send advertising to bus stop shelters via high-speed Internet connection [so that] “McDonald’s could advertise McMuffins in the morning and Big Macs in the afternoon.” allbusiness.com

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2008 08 04 pa_card Framing the City Comments (0)

Notes from the Quotidian

‘Quotidian‘: Latin term from quotus “how many, which order or number” + dies“day” used to denote nothing banal or boring at all. It was in fact the moment of the distribution of bread in Medieval France for the poor. The everyday as we know it is a bourgeois concept denoting the rythmanalysis of the modernity: fast-paced, structured by the tempo of the working day/week, conceptually divided by the public and the private, the everyday of the modernity is either a glamorous spectacle or it is a residual category, with no interest whatsoever, whose main tag is ‘boredom’ .

What it follows is a collection of quotes and thoughts about the everyday, and can be thought also as a striking Manifesto of the Everyday Urbanite:

‘What interested Perec [George] was the potential of the banal to become remarkable, how an ordinary sign can become extraordinary. At the time we were discovering the values of observation – the fact that looking is not self-evident. We look but we do not see; so how must we look in order to see? We were very much aware that there are unknown things concealed by what is visible, things that are hidden not in the obscure, but in the obvious…For me the city is a film [visual text?] one in a state of continuous metamorphosis…Everything passes by, everything is always in the process of unreeling. And you cannot see this film if you stand still [can't you really?] walking is the tete de lectureof this film’ Paul Virilio on George Perec // 2001

But compare Perec’s own experiment of sitting at the cafe’ and starting writing down the street, there is almost an opposite tempo from the above one: ‘…nothing strikes you. You don’t know how to see. You must set about it more slowly, almost stupidly…force yourself to write down what is of no interest, what is the most obvious, most common, most colourless.. detect the rhythm…carry on until the scene becomes improbable, until you have the impression, for the briefest moments, that you are in a strange town or, better still, until you cannot longer understand what is happening or not happening, until the whole place becomes strange…strive to picture to yourself, with the greatest possible precision, beneath the network of streets, the tangle of sewers, the lines of the metro, the invisible underground proliferation of conduits (electicity, gas, telephone lines, water mains, express letter tubes), without which no life would be possible on the surface’. G. Perec: The Street // 1974

‘The everyday is human..we need these admirable deserts that are the word’s cities for the experience of the everyday to begin to overtake us. The everyday is not at home in our dwelling-places, it is in the streets if anywhere. Here I find one of the beautiful moments of Lefebvre’s books. The street, he notes, has the paradoxical character of having more importance than the place it connects, more living reality than the things it reflects. The streets renders public [whom?]‘. Maurice Blanchot, Everyday Speeches // 1962 (emphasis added)
‘Lefebvre made it clear that to formulate the quotidian as a concept, to wrench it from the continuum in which it is embedded (or better yet, the continuum that it is), to expose it, examine it, give it a history, is already to form of critique of it…In the very triviality and baseness lay its seriousness, in the poverty and tedium of the routine lay the potential for creative energy. After all, people don’t make revolutions because of abstract ideological principles; they make them because they want to change their lives…Kristin Ross, French Quotidian // 1997
[...Yeah, very interesting, but who is allowed to walk and be present in public? How is the 'public' changed and been represented since Lefevbre's and Blanchot's days? What was the girl doing in her bedroom while the heroic mod or punk brother was tagging the street? And the housewife? To what extend do we allow our children to walk the streets today?]
‘Writers like Michel de Charteau (1980) reinvented the quotidian…dispensed with Lefebvre’s emphasis on critique or transformation, and instead celebrated the homely practices – cooking, hobbies, strolling – of life as it is lived here and nowby individuals intent of escaping the rationalist grids of modern administration. Everyday life for de Carteau was a ‘complex geography of social ruses’ played out on the interstices of bureaucratic surveillance by the relatively powerless. In his work, the everyday coincides with the actual order of things, which is precisely what popular tactics turn to their own ends, without any illusion that it is about to change [cfr. chapter about street art in Visualizing the City]‘ Kristine Ross, French Quotidian // 1997

‘There is a dearth of work that engages with the conscious and unconscious defences necessary to cope with the exigences of the daily life’ (Walkerdine et alia, 2001:50).

Bradley’s three strategies to study inequalities:

  1. accept Lyotard’s idea that local narrative should replace grand narratives, and reject general theories of inequality, looking instead at the study of particular manifestation of inequality in specific contexts, tracing their history and the discourses implicated.
  2. 2 accept the first point, but recognise the local manifestations of inequality ‘exists within the framework of the powerful and controlling unitary tendencies, notably that of the globalization of capital.
  3. previous modernist theories failed to appreciate the way that different dynamics of inequality intersect, that societies are thus both fragmented and polarised (H. Bradley 1996:203-210)
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2008 08 04 pa_card Imaging the City Comments (0)

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