The Discovery of Daily Life

     There is a project that has been on the back of mind for the past decade or so, something that I've never really put on paper or even really seriously discussed in any situation.  It's a point that influences my dissertation, a study of feminist science fiction over the last century, but it's hardly a central point to that study.  That is the discovery of daily life as a site of political struggle and as a site of academic study.  It's a journey that draws together a wide swath of often quite disparate academic disciplines and political movements, ranging from cultural studies, John Burger's studies on paintings, the study of history from below, to a network of dissident small groups such as the Forrest-Johnson tendency, Socialisme ou Barbarie, and the workerist networks in Italy that arose in the post war period.  At the same time, feminist networks transformed the formerly ostensibly private space of the household into a space of political inquiry, both through political intervention and the construction of an academic discipline.  It's a process that both culminates and dies with the brief rise of cultural studies as a celebrated interdisciplinary process in the 1980's and 1990's.  With a multiplicity of theoretical lens and objects of study, these disparate groups began to see the rich complexity of daily life as a something to study, and perhaps more significantly, as a terrain of struggles that define the process of both reproducing dominant social structures, both in the form of institutions and disciplinary practices, as well as challenging those institutional and disciplinary practices.

     While there are precedents to this examination, often taken up by governmental agencies to understand social strife in the 19th century or by radical activists to create that strife, the study of daily life really takes life after the second world war.  The first major academic study is taken up by Henri Lefebvre in 1947 with his first volume of the The Critique of Daily Life, which was to be continued with two other volumes published in 1961 and 1981 respectively.  Only a decade later, literary critic Richard Hoggart published The Uses of Literacy and in collaboration with Raymond Williams and others launches the cultural studies project in the UK.  Interwoven with that narrative is the rise of the study of the history of resistances and domination in the workplace taken up by EP Thompson and other, which inadvertently launches a study of the history from below, which takes on a myriad of forms such as the practices of the Subaltern Studies collective in the 1970's.  At the same time, the Forrest-Johnson tendency is involved in the creation of a series of political pamphlets discussing the revolutionary possibilities of working class organizing in the United States. 

      A similar analysis is taken up by militants in France in the form of Socialisme ou Barbarie and by Italian militants connected to Mario Tronti under the framework of 'workerism.'  These militants were interested in the questions that were taken up by all the other thinkers within this framework.  How had the radical transformations that occurred after the second world war transformed the working class and what possibilities for radical transformation still existed?  This work challenged a consensus that assumed that Keynsian economic interventions had stabilized capitalist accumulation and created what might be called a capitalism with a human face.  Their studies found that such resistance and self-organization still existed but that the forms of militancy took on very different forms than they previously had taken and in the views of these groups called for very different kinds of organization to fulfill their potential.  In that sense, despite their very real antagonisms, feminist thought and practice is very similar to these intellectual formations, seeing the household as a space of domination and resistance in which a very new political project could be launched. (This topic deserves far more attention than is given here, and is by no means a unified project itself.)

      These collectivities are intertwined with the stalled world revolution of 1968, but are only a part of the story, and in many ways, a less significant part of the story than the long history of decolonization that might be argued to be the central narrative of the 20th century.  But there's something really interesting in that story, which follows the creation of the great economic boom of the second half of the 20th century, a boom that does not only benefit the bourgeoisie but creates a level of comfort, albeit unevenly, for working class groups that had never been seen before.  In doing so, it transformed formerly oppositional institutions into part of the hegemony of the new system, but that process didn't lead to the labor peace that was expected.  Instead, following the lead of the rest of the world, we see new forms of militancy and new forms of life.  In this sense, following the framework of Michel Foucault, the newly minted disciplinary structures of capitalist accumulation that, for lack of a better word, colonized daily life, created new modes of resistance that couldn't easily map onto the formerly dominant forms of resistance.  Those who wanted to contribute to those practices then had to take up that study of daily life, to discover that world and to intervene in it.

A Short Comment on the Language of Fandom

      I've found myself reading quite a bit of fan discussion during the recent conflict over the Hugo awards.  The pages of File 770 have become my lunch time reading for the past few months.  That process of reading has really reminding me of the very subcultural behaviors of the group, particularly around the construction of language.  It struck me that a dictionary of fandom might be a very interesting literary and sociological project.  Not surprisingly, there are a number of efforts already in existence on the internet, and I suspect probably quite a few in book or magazine form as well.  Most of these efforts cover both the types of short hand developed in fan circles, such as the now fairly ubiquitous fanfic and slash, as well as specifically fannish language such as ghu and fugghead.  Additionally, such publications will often give definitions for the often obscure acronyms such as SMOF (Secret Master of Fandom).

       Clearly, this is relevant and interesting work if you want to develop an understanding of the fractured and conflictual subgenre, but, for me, it misses out on another dimension of language that you find in fannish conversations, which is not found in specific words or terms, but in conventional turns of phrase.  One clear example that I have found over these last months is the phrase, "It bounced off of me."  The phrase is designed to accomplish a couple things.  1.  It indicates that the commenter didn't particularly like the book or film. and 2.  It makes that dislike a matter of personal preference, one that indicates more about the particular tastes of the reader, rather than the quality of the book or film.  At an immediate level, the phrase is an indication of the commitment to pluralism and relativism within fandom.  It insists that one's personal taste is not universal, and that a book may have qualities that are simply not appreciated because of the limitations of the reader or viewer.  This set of particular commitments is often expressed sentiments, such as "We are all fandom" and the Vulcan phrase, "infinite diversity in infinite combinations."

     I don't want to dismiss that commitment, but it is a commitment that is often undermined by the frequently explosively agonistic nature of fandom.  After all, we are talking about an archipelago of people who enjoy argument and frequently get into explosive conflicts that lead to the splitting of organizations, and to long standing enmities.  Fandom is certainly pluralistic, but that pluralism is fraught with rivalries, rants, insults, arguments, and lengthy diatribes that define the lay of the land.  Rather than being a recent phenomenon, we can find these fights at the origins of the formal existence of fandom, and in the Amateur Press Association, which is probably the closest antecedent to that formation.   In this sense, we see a second pole to the structure of pluralism so celebrated by fandom, one that is already implicit the word 'fan' itself, which simply shortens the term 'fanatic'.  While on the surface, this may seem like the unpleasant underbelly of fandom, it's important remember that the forms of intolerance found within this pole often challenge deeply disturbing aspects of the subculture, such as the forms of racism and sexism found in the genre.  Tolerance, after all, often becomes a form of complacency within the context of an unjust system.

      It also adds a second and unspoken dimension to the statement, "It bounced off of me."  Within the context of a subcultural group that so often descends into futile and bombastic argument, the phrase becomes a way of avoiding such conflict.  That is to say, the pluralism and relativism of fandom becomes a way of both regulating and temporarily avoiding the stasis that lays at the heart of its formation.  In a curious sense, fandom is defined by stasis, precisely because so little as at stake.  It is, after all, not a form of citizenship, an ethical system, or anything other than groups of people who share nothing in common but to enjoy a literary form, an act of enjoyment that millions engage in without any need for a subculture or even a community to do so.  Perhaps, within that context, we can give a third definition to the term, and see it as a form of deferment.  "I bounced off of it" becomes a way of say, "We're not going to agree on this one, but rather than getting into a heated discussion, let's wait and see if there is something to discuss that we will both find amenable."  The statement then becomes a sort of rhetorical border, a way of marking what is open for discussion, and what is not, as well.  In a curious manner, the process then mirrors the production of genre that is its reason for existence.