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Cultural Studies and the Politics of the Everyday

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Cultural Studies and the Politics of the Everyday Cultural Studies and the Politics of the Everyday Crusoe's Footprints: Cultural Studies in Britain and America by Patrick Brantlinger; Everyday Life in the Modern World by Henri Lefebvre; Philip Wander Review by: Laurie Langbauer Diacritics, Vol. 22, No. 1 (Spring, 1992), pp. 47-65 Published by: The Johns Hopkins University Press Stable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/465237 . Accessed: 18/12/2014 20:18 Your use of the JSTOR archive indicates your acceptance of the Terms & Conditions of Use, available at . http://www.jstor.org/page/info/about/policies/terms.jsp . JSTOR is a not-for-profit service that helps scholars, researchers, and students discover, use, and build upon a wide range of content in a trusted digital archive. We use information technology and tools to increase productivity and facilitate new forms of scholarship. For more information about JSTOR, please contact [email protected]. The Johns Hopkins University Press is collaborating with JSTOR to digitize, preserve and extend access to Diacritics. http://www.jstor.org This content downloaded from 128.235.251.160 on Thu, 18 Dec 2014 20:18:17 PM All use subject to JSTOR Terms and Conditions CULTURAL STUDIES AND THE POLITICS OF THE EVERYDAY LAURIELANGBA UER Patrick Brantlinger. CRUSOE'SFOOTPRINTS: CULTURAL STUDIES IN BRITAIN AND AMERICA.New York:Routledge, 1990. Henri Lefebvre. EVERYDAY LIFE IN THE MODERNWORLD. Trans. Philip Wander. New Brunswick:Transaction, 1984. Promptingthis paper is a meditationabout the relationshipof feminism to culturalstudies, especially the ways we define and thinkabout those terms- andjust who that"we" might be. Feminismseems a good model for keeping the great promise of multiculturalismfrom being codified into something more mainstream,more familiar, more reassuring, that sometimes gets called cultural studies. It is a good model precisely because it has not been so successful itself: feminismtoo (as an entitysome people claim in the singular) threatensto become a homogenized whole. In this paper, I want to ask, In what ways do differentpractices assume-perhaps as a goal, even a utopia- a certain ideal of consensus? How does discomfort with real conflict- radical disagreement unbridgeableby compromise-oblige critics unwit- tingly to close off dilemmas they cannot solve, to pretendinstead (and at a price, usually to others) that they can? In thinkingabout the use of the term "theeveryday" in culturalstudies, the goals projectedby its construction,and the politics forgedthrough it, I am wonderingtoo aboutways to reimaginethe groundsof feminist politics and ways to deconstructfeminist utopias. "Theeveryday" is a foundationalcategory in culturalstudies, a category so importantto thatfield, and so takenfor grantedby it, thatit is almost never defined. Yet the everydayas a conceptualcategory has a history:one source is in the work of Continentalthinkers such as the historianHenri Lefebvre, whose work is currentlybeing rediscoveredand translatedperhaps because of culturalstudies' renewedattention to the everyday[see LeFebvre,Critique of EverydayLife]. Despite thatinterest, much recent work in culturalstudies sees itself as growing more directly out of the Centre for Contemporary CulturalStudies at the University of Birminghamin England; the work of RaymondWilliams and E. P. Thompson,among others, has been cited as a heritage for it by such critics as StuartHall, one directorof the Centre,and Richard Johnson, essays that have influenced the work of such critics as PatrickBrantlinger. And all of thiswork depends upon, but leaves unexamined, the category of the everyday. Categoriessuch as the everyday and utopia come, of course, out of the theory of the left on whom the influence of Marx makes such terms crucial. The influence of Marx is clear in the work of Continentaltheorists of the diacritics / spring 1992 diacritics22.1: 47-65 47 This content downloaded from 128.235.251.160 on Thu, 18 Dec 2014 20:18:17 PM All use subject to JSTOR Terms and Conditions everyday, such as Lefebvre or Femand Braudel,and remainsstrong in those who came afterthem, such as Michel de Certeau. The BirminghamCentre also locates itself firmly within this tradition,and StuartHall writesthat cultural studies as a whole is a field which "essentially ... is determinedby the reception, development and transformationof Marxisttheory" ["Survey" 6]. CatherineGallagher cites thecomplication of theFrankfurt School's suggestions aboututopia as especially influentialon "thegeneration of cultural critics that came of age in the 1960s," and argues that such critics saw their role as uncovering the hidden social contradictionsthat, to them, differentiateda fragmented bourgeois culture(that attempted to pass as whole) from the real (but still utopic) social totality-a utopia whose promise was encoded in the very desire for wholeness that organizedthe everyday [39]. Lefebvre'sand British cultural studies' locationof the traces of that utopic social totality in everyday life merely continues this tradition. A survey of the left's role in defining culturalstudies also suggests that the ideal of totality,of consensus,of a sharedand common goal, which groundssuch approaches,also works in spite of itself to annul difference. One source of such a critique might be the deconstruction of closure and consistency distinguishing Continental poststructural theorythat, as Britishcultural studies is well aware,begins to make the discussion of the categoryof the everydayeven by a structuralistcritic like Lefebvredifferent from its own. As a numberof feministessays (for instance,those by GayatriSpivak or MeaghanMorris, both also influenced by the left) suggest, the abrogationof differenceremains a specter in any attemptto constituteculture as a field. These feminist essays help us revise the category of the everyday from a seemingly unproblematicground supportingshared experience,theoretical consistency, and ultimatesocial harmonyto a site of irresolvable difference, of conflict whose resolution is not simply delayed, but theoreticallyimpos- sible. The idea of difference-of andwithin gender, race, even class-perhaps by necessity cannotbe reassuringlyembraced under any single system: examiningmodes of produc- tion cannot completely account for genderoppression and emphasizinggender oppres- sion will not takecare of racism. Seen in these terms,the new left, whateverits important contributions,is not so new; it retainsa heritageof teleology and closure, a nostalgia for a once and futureharmony and fullness, that poststructuralismputs into question. Yet such questioningis often misinterpretedas attack. As GayatriSpivak has observed, the poststructuralistcritique of culturalstudies can be "misreadas 'postmodernmodesties replac[ing] Marxistcertitudes.'... This is therisk thatone mustrun in orderto understand how much more complicatedit is to realize the responsibilityof playing with or working with fire than to pretend that what gives light and warmth does not also destroy" ["Constitutions"145-46]. In negotiating such impossible distinctions, one avenue of approachmight be to investigatethe way thatcultural studies repeatsthe very universal- izing moves it wishes to put into question,the way that it annuls differenceand invokes consensus precisely at those momentsit conjuresup its talismanof the real, the category of the everyday. Consideringcultural studies' pervasivereferences to the everyday,then, is one way to consider(if not try to change) its politics. By politics hereI mean morethan the idea of basic change, often associated with social interventionand collective action. One poststructuralrevision of this termhas been BarbaraJohnson's, who, througha focus on a feminist debateabout irreconcilable difference-the undecidablecontroversy about abortion-associates politics insteadwith undecidability,the very provincethe left often derides as apolitical. "Thereis politics precisely because there is undecidability,"she writes [194]. Perhapsanother way to thinkabout politics is to associate it with conflict- not with settling conflict, which usually means dominationanyway, but with sustaining it. Politics can also mean contestation,the fight not to nullify but to assertdisagreement, the struggleto be heardrather than silenced, to uncoverthe vision of unity and harmony as what seeks to silence, to show it up as somebodyelse's ideal. It is precisely the promise 48 This content downloaded from 128.235.251.160 on Thu, 18 Dec 2014 20:18:17 PM All use subject to JSTOR Terms and Conditions of this politics that makes the idea of culturalstudies exciting and compelling to a critic concerned with race and gender as well as with class, such as bell hooks. She writes, "Usually scholars in the academy resist engagements in dialogues with diverse groups where there may be critical contestation, interrogation,and confrontation. Cultural studiescan serve as an intervention,making a space for forms of intellectualdiscourse to emerge thathave not been traditionallywelcomed in the academy"["Culture" 125].1 To do so may requireundoing the complacenciesof commonalty;to allow for differencemay mean continuallydestroying the sense of shared goals "we" build up in order to have a sense of"we." The everyday,a site where culturalstudies has traditionallylocated those commonalties, also refuses them and, in this sense, keeps politics going. The Everyday "Culturecan no longerbe conceived outsidethe everyday"["Leftist" 82]. So writesHenri Lefebvre, identifyingthe studyof culturewith the studyof the everyday. Britishcultural studies
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