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

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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 production 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

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 has in a sense paralleled Lefebvre; he certainly fits into the "structuralist" influence that StuartHall finds formativein culturalstudies, and EdwardBall suggests thatan emphasis similarto Lefebvre's on "la vie quotidiennemay be familiarto English readersas the targetof critiquewithin the body of 'CulturalStudies' that has grown up in Britainsince the 1950s"[29]. Lefebvre's discussionof the everyday,however, doesn't just inform such work; it also helps us to reflect on and problematizeit. Just what is the everyday-or culturefor thatmatter-and whatmight Lefebvre and cultural studies mean by the relationbetween them? Such questions are difficult to answer because their terms seem undefined. And, according to Lefebvre, defining the everyday might not be easy. People meet with a certain opacity, a resistance in comprehendingthe term the everyday, he suggests, because that opacity is partof its meaning. Lefebvrecan only gesture to it: for him, the everydayis "theunrecognized' ["Leftist"78], whatis "practicallyuntellable" [Everyday 24]. Invoking the everyday is an attempt to invoke "lived experience"; "It is lived experience [le vecu] elevated to the status of a concept and to language"["Leftist" 80]. Yet, in equatingthe everyday with the "real,empirical, practical" [Everyday 1 ], Lefebvre also recognizes that "the real" is precisely what cannot be represented. Everyday life eludes metaphor,"evades the gripof forms"[Everyday 182]. "Writingcan only show an everyday life inscribedand prescribed"[Everyday 8] because "everydayinsignificance can only become meaningfulwhen transformedinto somethingother than everyday life" [Everyday98]. Althoughin his Marxismand TotalityMartin Jay singles out Lefebvre as one of the Western Marxists to whom the concept of totality is central, in Lefebvre's discussion of the everydaythe possibility of such totalityis also put into question.2With the introductionof the everyday,Lefebvre's structuralismbecomes poststructuralism. The opacity of the everyday,then, is crucial. It reflectsthe poststructuralrecognition thatall anyone can do is gestureto the real;subjects can not experienceit unmediatedand untransformedby expectation, by representation,or by their own attention to it. In resisting definition, the everydaybecomes a category thatforegrounds those mediations and, in that sense, becomes a position or markerrather than a stable referent. And as a

1. Fora relatedcritique of theimperialism of culturalstudies, see Jose'David Saldivar, "The Limitsof CulturalStudies." 2. Thisis a contradictionin Lefebvre's work that Jay attemptsto resolvewith the (similarly contradictory)idea of an openand indeterminate totality [296-99]. Jay emphasizesLefebvre's otherwork but barely mentions Everyday Life in theModern World, perhaps because it beginsto deconstructthe verystructures Lefebvre elsewhere constructs. diacritics / spring 1992 49

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 shifting marker,it tends to point in many, even opposite, directions. What it marksis precisely the impossibility of its definition. For Lefebvre, it exposes "irreducibles, contradictions and objections that intervene and hinder the closing of the circuit" [Everyday 75]. By making the invisible visible, by giving form and content to an experience so vague and seemingly naturalthat part of its significance is thatits subjects cannot define it, by defining, or theorizing,the everyday,it is transformedinto what it is not: "Itis not possible to constructa theoreticaland practical system such thatthe details of everyday life will become meaningfulin and by this system" [Everyday98]. Yet attentionto the everyday is importantbecause it is there that we can see how society works. Lefebvreargues that "daily life is the screenon which our society projects its lightand its shadow,its hollows andits planes,its powerandits weaknesses"[Everyday 64-65]. Everydaylife is one mediumthrough which capitalismestablishes itself: "The pyramidalstructure of modem society rests on the broadbase of everyday life which is the lowest level" [Everyday57]. The everyday's contradictionsare crucial to Lefebvre, however; the everyday encodes society's power as well as its weaknesses. Attentionto the everydaytherefore becomes a formof "culturalrevolution" [Everyday 204]. To make the everyday into an object of study carrieswith it "the distinct advantageof orienting oneself towardthe future"["Leftist" 75]. It marksa change thatis utopic in the way that "we are all utopians, so soon as we wish for something different"[Everyday 75]. This utopia grows out of an attentionto the everyday, a defamiliarizationof it, because, for Lefebvre,such defamiliarizationis itself whatrevolutionizes culture: "A revolutiontakes place when and only when... people can no longer lead theireveryday lives" [Everyday 32]. The very attemptto put the everydayinto a system, constantlyrefined by its refusal and deconstructionof that system, becomes a model of representationor theory trans- formedby the resistantand elusive real thatit also transforms,and provides Lefebvre with what he considers an adaptive and creative political practice. He insists that "the limitations of philosophy-truth without reality-always and ever counterbalancethe limitationsof everyday life-reality without truth"[Everyday 14]. In insisting on a system, Lefebvrestill gesturesto totality,but his system continually calls its own notion of totalityinto question. Althoughhis strategyis to "gathertogether culture's scatteredfragments for a transfigurationof everyday life" [Everyday38], the stylistic twists and turns of Lefebvre's own mercurial prose and his emphasis on contradictionsuggest thatpart of thattransfiguration is a stubbornrefusal of coherence, an insistence on fragmentation.Emphasizing such "contradictionsof lived experience" (as Alice Kaplanand KristinRoss suggest) is how Lefebvre's work helps us find "the Political, like the purloinedletter... hiddenin the everyday"[3]. Yet Lefebvre's work is not free of the attemptto resolve such contradictionsinto coherence. The need for totality asserts itself strikingly in places where a different politics, or a politics of difference,makes Lefebvre recodify and stabilize the politicaland theoreticalmodel that his gestures to the everyday also open up. The differenceof genderin particularseems to threatensuch stability. Considering the everyday,Lefebvre argues, allows him to focus on the collective subject-no less than all of mankind: "Homo sapiens, homo faber and homo ludens end up as homo quotidianus"[Everyday 193]. Despite the contradictionsimplied by the decenteringof the subject,such a collective subjectremains for Lefebvrean entitynonetheless: "A class cannot be consideredas a philosophical 'subject' any more thancan a society; but they possess unity, wholeness, totality,in a word 'system"' [Everyday41-42]. Yet a curious division goes on within this supposedly unified collective: mankind, perhaps not surprisingly,comes to meanman in particular.Lefebvre admits that everyday life actually "weighs heaviest on women.... They are the subjectsof everydaylife and its victims or objectsand substitutes" [Everyday 73]. But in a move long familiarto feminists,Lefebvre also argues that "because of their ambiguous position in everyday life . . . they are

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 incapable of understandingit" [73]. According to the old logic that women cannot understandsomething because they embody it, the contradictionsof the everyday,which make it opaque to everyone, make it particularlyso to women. Women become responsiblefor a constraintthat afflicts some people more thanothers, a "they"placed in opposition to some implied "we." Lefebvrefurther suggests thatmankind's "condition- ing, seeping throughthe channels of a highly organizedeveryday life, succeeds mainly on the level of woman or 'femininity.' Yet femininityalso suggests feminism, rebellion and assertiveness" [67]. For Lefebvre, the feminine indoctrinates mankind into a dominantculture whose termsof everydaynessit also teachesthese subjectsnot to contest, even though"femininity" is itself an ambiguousterm thatcarries with it an oppositional force-"feminism"-that might be put to better use. The implication is that because women cannotunderstand 3uchi ambiguity or recognize theircontradictory position, they squanderthat feminism-it turnsinto mere "assertiveness";Lefebvre writes of women's attempts "to escape by the roundaboutmethod of eluding the responsibilities of consciousness, whence their incessant protests and clumsily formulated, directionless claims" [92]. In refutingthis (failed) feminism, Lefebvre reassertsnotions of teleology with a vengeance;yet the roundaboutand directionlessprotests of women he condemns, rather than eluding responsibility, may be precisely the place to locate feminism's politics. Partof those politics involves directly asking in what ways politics are tied to the idea of having a directionand the drive to an end-what end? whose utopia? whose politics? In blamingwomen for people's unconsciousrelation to the everyday,Lefebvre casts women in anothertoo-familiar role: both women and the everyday come to standfor an overwhelmingtotality. Each comes to representthe very forces thatcreate subjects, both in literallyproducing them and then normalizingthem into culture. This meaning of the everyday helps to explain its collapse with culture("Culture can no longer be conceived outside the everyday"). Women and the everyday in this sense representthat definition of cultureas a mediumembracing its subjects,one sustainingand shaping them (people cannot conceive outside it). In this chain of synonyms, the everyday, synonymous with culture,also becomes synonymouswith ideology: "Ideologiesare made of understanding and interpretation... of the world and knowledge plus a certainamount of illusion, and mightbear the nameof 'culture"'[Everyday 31], or, "ideologies, institutions,in one word culture"[198]. Such ideology is not false consciousnessbut whatcreates and determines consciousness itself. The everyday becomes the term for the embracing totality that politics needs to seize andchange, the termfor the forces thattend people, mold them,and make them into subjects. Lefebvre himself seems to try to elude such a determiningforce in a roundaboutway when he barswomen fromeffective agencyand critical consciousness. In makingthe lack of critical consciousness and agency an issue of gender (of essential, biological lack), Lefebvre repeatsthe old adage thatasserts that man, somehow naturallymore complete, might have morepower and might more easily escape constraint. But this all-embracing totalityis one the everydayalso complicates,if not resists. Ratherthan posing a dilemma one might settle, an either/orin which some subjectsare constrainedwhile othersescape (that scapegoats some into constraint in order to provide the illusion of freedom for others), the contradictionsof everydayin Lefebvre's account make it stand instead for a more complexpolitical relation of the subject to cultureand ideology. It marksthe site not only wherepeople are determinedin ways they cannotsee, but wherethey projectand imagine utopically how to think outside and elude what determinesthought and imagi- nation. Consideredin this light, the difficulty of defining the everyday comes to reflect the very impossibility of thinkingoutside the structuresof our thought. This unravelingof Lefebvre's discussion suggests thatthe everydaycultural studies builds upon doesn't provide a stable ground. It's not simply that its meaning and value diacritics / spring 1992 51

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 change depending on the needs of the system that invokes it, but that the shifts and contradictionsin its meaningdemonstrate the complications of fixing one simple or stable relationshipbetween cultureor ideology and the subjects they create, of encompassing cultureand ideology within a single field called politics, theory,or culturalstudies. For Lefebvre, the everyday enforces a constrainingpolitics when it keeps people from recognizing it as political. Yet Lefebvre only dances aroundthe understandingthat to bringthings to consciousness-to put them into a system-does not, however, dispel the political unconscious. Part of the complexity of the everyday is that it represents conflicting registers and assumptions at one and the same time; it charts a fault-line between the conscious andunconscious, between determining powers people can see and those they cannot,between theoriesthat seek change andthose thatenmesh theirsubjects in determinism. It marksa site of conflict that makes consensus-about "our"shared sense of lived experienceas well as ideas aboutsuch everyday experience's transforma- tive potential in culture-difficult if not impossible. The everyday becomes a crucial category because its consolidationsand deconstructionstouch directly on the subject's relation to ideology and culture.

CulturalStudies

The use of the everydayin Britishcultural studies reflects its Marxistheritage differently but maintainsthis tensionbetween totality and conflict. Justwhose claim best reflects the Marxist totality and whose theory most coherentlydescribes culture's coherence is the focus of this earlydebate between Raymond Williams andE. P. Thompson(whom Stuart Hall and RichardJohnson identify as theirprecursors). To read their work in this way might itself seem to be a theoreticalcommonplace, a banality: it is accepted now, one might argue, that the illusion of coherenceis a repressedpart of any theory,a productof the desire to accountfor everything. The explicit claim for totalityand coherenceis just an early, insufficiently theorized position of the new left, especially of those like Thompsonwho wereparticularly hostile to theory. Yet despitethe implicitclaims of such an argument,this early position is still an enduringone. The claim to be able to account for everythingcontinues to informaccounts like Hall's andJohnson's,which only gesture to a poststructuralismthat foregoes totalism. The role of this claim in culturalstudies deservesreexamination not merelybecause it repeatsexclusions (as any theorymust), but because it repeatsthe very exclusion of marginalizedgroups it claims to remedy.3Such exclusions resultfrom an emphasison synthesis. One of thetexts mostfrequently invoked

3. This is a problem especially recognized by StuartHall. In his latest history of cultural studies and the BirminghamCentre, "CulturalStudies and its TheoreticalLegacies," even as he arguesfor "an arbitraryclosure" [278], Hall also contends that his notion of cultural studies is open-ended; he points to the argumentsand tension within the Centre, emphasizingthem as a "politicsof contention,of continuousargument, of continuousdebate" [291]. (This essay appears in the anthology CulturalStudies, a collection of essays from the 1990 University of Illinois conference "CulturalStudiesNow and in the Future,"which waspublished after my own essay was in press, but which makes explicit some of the competinggoals and models of politics in cultural studies that I chart here: as progress to a social collective "in the future," as open-ended contestation.) He refers to the Centre's collections Women Take Issue [282] and The Empire Strikes Back [283] as momentsin this ongoing quarrel. But, as Andrew Ross points out in the discussion afterward(and Hall acknowledges),despite his disclaimers, Hall's vision of cultural politics continuesto have a "sortof narrativeof progress smuggled into it" [289] thatpoints to a familiar vision of utopia. Interestingly,that discussion itself became a moment of contention, interruptedby conferenceparticipants who felt marginalizedby the hierarchyand exclusion they saw within the structuresof the conference.

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 by this cultural studies as it constructs its genealogy is an early essay of Williams's, "CultureIs Ordinary,"which unites questions of culture and the everyday as lived practicalexperience, and directscultural studies precisely to foregroundingand examin- ing the everyday. WhereLefebvre's treatmentof the everydayemphasizes its fracturing possibilities, Williams's focuses on the ordinaryfor its power to unite and integrate. To Williams, the everyday reveals that culture is not just Culture, is not just the special provinceof the artsand learning, but "a whole way of life" ["Ordinary"4]. Like Lefebvre, Williams suggests that the role of the critic is to bring recognition of the everyday to criticalconsciousness, but this recognitionmeans a recognitionspecifically of synthesis: people need to see that cultureis ordinary"so that the whole actual life, that we cannot know in advance, that we can only know in part even while it is being lived, may be broughtto consciousness and meaning"["Ordinary" 9]. But such totalityonce againprecludes difference, especially the differenceof gender. Although Williams acknowledges that the understandingof the "whole actual life" can only be partial, such failure to understandit does not devalue the whole itself; the achievement of that total knowledge become a promise, a historical process in which individualsand society are always engaged. The influence of Marx on Williams here is clear. The sense of "cultureas a process,"culture as "thecultivation of something,"a kind of "'long revolution'... [a] sense of a movement througha very long period"[Politics 154-55], which Williams lateremphasizes in his morecomplicated definition of the term in Keywords,is alreadyimplicit in this early essay. In "CultureIs Ordinary,"Williams especially identifies the ongoing process of ordinaryculture with the very process of genealogy itself: he locates culturein generationsof descent, with a specific patrilinear inheritancethat moves from his grandfatherto his fatherto himself:

Cultureis ordinary:that is where we must start.... To grow up in [my]family was to see the shaping of minds.... My grandfather,a big hard labourer,wept while he spoke,finely and excitedly,at the parish meeting, of being turnedout of his cottage. Myfather, not long before he died, spoke quietly and happily of when he starteda trade-unionbranch and a LabourParty group in the village, and, withoutbitterness, of the 'keptmen' of the newpolitics. I speak a different idiom, but I thinkof these same things. ["Ordinary"4]

AlthoughWilliams gesturesto a few women in this essay, they are denied this patternof relationand connection. The inheritorsof the whole way of life, shapedby the everyday but also shapingit, are men. They forge its historyand bringit to criticalconsciousness.4 Yet Williams's oedipal narrativeactually puts into question his idea of ordinary cultureas a whole way of life. Williams's most famous critic,E. P. Thompson,questions

4. This view of culture as an active process played out by men is actually very similar to Lefebvre's;Lefebvre also constructsculture as a process, a narrativein which men are heroes. To him, it evokes an image

of SleepingBeauty. She doesnot doze on flowersand on fragrantgrass but on a thick mattressof texts, quotations,musical scores-and undera vast canopyof books, sociological,semiological, historical, and philosophical theses. Then one day the Prince comes;he awakensher and everything around the forest comes to life alongwith her- poetspoetizing, musicians musicking, cooks cooking,lovers loving, and so on... cultureis notmerely a staticpalimpsest of texts;it is lived,active, which is whatthe fable of thewakened princess suggests to me. ["Leftist"81-82]

Like Williams,Lefebvre here gives culturea tradition("the vast canopy of books"), and suggests how that tradition,through the interventionof the cultural critic (who else is the prince?), comes alive, is seen to be lived, active, everyday. diacritics / spring 1992 53

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 this allegory of the everyday. Thompsonis botheredparticularly by Williams's sense of a shared traditionbuilt on relation and commonalty. For way of "life" he wants to substituteway of "conflict"or way of "struggle,"and by so doing, Thompson argues, focus on "activityand agency" ["Long"33] ratherthan on the impersonalcontinuity of life implied by generationalprogression. Yet, in seeming to disagree with Williams, Thompson winds up soundinga lot like him. In using genderto clinch his own argument,Thompson simply continuesthe oedipal progressionWilliams charts,restoring its repressedsubtext. In Thompson's recasting, once again woman standsfor a cultureshe embodies but does not share, specifically the male Tradition of (high) Culture itself (Burke, Carlyle, Mill, Arnold, and Eliot), the reverencefor which Thompsonfeels occludes conflict in Williams's account. He writes:

At times, in Cultureand Society, Ifelt that I was being offered a procession of disembodiedvoices-Burke, Carlyle, Mill, Arnold-... the whole transmitted througha disinterestedspiritual medium. I sometimesimagine this medium.. . as an elderly gentlewomanand near relative of Mr. Eliot, so distinguishedas to have become an institution: The Tradition. There she sits, with that white starched affair on her head, knittingdefinitions without thought of recognition or reward... and in herpresencehow one mustwatch one's LANGUAGE! The first brash word, the least suspicion of laughterorpolemic in herpresence, and The Traditionmight drop a stitch and have to start knittingall those definitions over again. ["Long"24-25]

A derided tradition becomes an elderly gentlewoman, whose near relation to Eliot (anotherkept man?)points up his effeminacy-and, throughhim, the effeminacy and the passivity of therest of the tradition.The burlesqueof thispassage wrests the fate of history out of the hands of this harmlessClotho (a monitoryfigure only to those still scaredby women). A polemic so brashthat she would dropher yarn completely, Thompson implies, is the very antidote to the outdatedand elitist malaise of history this figure represents. And, throughher unattractiveness,Thompson rids the oedipal line of historyof the need for a (contested)woman altogether. Williams's allegoryfor ordinaryculture still implies some woman (wife, mother)as a vehicle throughwhich the generationsof men mustpass. By personifyinghigh cultureas a maidenlyold woman (by suggestingthat the tradition's writersare themselves somehow old-maidenly),in dispelling the need for high culture, Thompson gets rid of the need for woman, too. Woman is a scapegoat that allows Thompson to conjure and dispel Williams's Leavisite reliance on the great traditionand to assert instead a culture that really is ordinary. In attackingthe greattradition, he admonishesWilliams for the homogenizing tendencyimplied in it: "Hemust resist the temptationto takehis readersand himself into the collective 'we' of an establishedculture, even when he uses this device to challenge assumptionswhich 'we' are supposedto hold (and yet which have been underchallenge from a minorityfor over 100 years)"["Long" 26]. He asserts that the pictureWilliams gives of the 1840s is very differentfrom his own and that the principles Williams sees ordering the social totality of the time are "an arbitraryselection" [28]. Yet such ambiguitiesand uncertaintiesdo not, for Thompson,point to any underlyingproblems in the writing of history, especially in conceiving of it as a totality. On the contrary,if Williams "hasnot yet succeeded in developing an adequategeneral theoryof culture,"it is simply because his understandingof it is not Thompson'sown-or, rather,not really Marx's [28]. For Thompson, an adequatetradition does exist, "notably that tradition which originatesin Marx"[30], especially in Thompson's own kind of Marxisthistory. Any other "synthesizingdiscipline will very soon make imperialistclaims.... Now if Williams by 'the whole way of life' really means the whole way of life he is making a

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 claim, not for culturalhistory, but for history"[31]. Such history somehow elides the problems of imperialism implicit in synthesis because it focuses on the ordinary,the everyday: "the workingpeople's daily 'way of conflict"' ["Long-II" 38]. Although Thompsonpays lip service to such problemsof imperializing,he repeats themanyway. He suggeststhat "unless we insist uponthe role of minoritiesand of conflict in the process of making[the whole way of life] we might get an unpleasantlyconformist answer"about what that culture looks like ["Long--II" 36]. Yet therole of minoritiesand conflict drops out of his own account as well. Criticizing a fragment of Williams's language("a society which hadchanged its economy, which underpressure was changing its institutions,but which, at the centres of power, was refusing to change its ways of thinking"),he suggests that"certain difficulties in Mr. Williams' style... arise from his determinationto de-personalisesocial forces.... If Dame Society was changingall these garments,who or what bewhiskeredagent was standingoutside the boudoirand forcing her to this exercise?" ["Long"26]. By genderingsociety as female, Thompson places himself outside of it andbecomes the bewhiskeredagent of male potency. For Thompson too wants to effect some changes in society; the thrustof his argumentis thathis kind of Marxistsynthesizing will allow such agency, while Williams's will not. In Thompson's version too, woman is excluded froma role in the makingof the whole way of life-she just passively embodies it, and is acted upon. This is indeed unpleasant,but what of the other"minorities" so excludedas not even to figurein this drama?Can any synthesiskeep from being imperialist?If the need to take"into account the cultureof Congo exploiters" (which Thompsonsays Williams has not done) to bringthings into a properlywhole view "demand[s]the takingof sides," will the cultureof those exploited come to embody and underwritesuch ordinarydramas of white male agency in the way thatwoman does here? ["Addendum"70]. Williams himself and his inheritors,such as Hall andJohnson, can see these dangers. Williams's laterwork takes Thompson'scriticism into account,especially in the attempt to theorize the role of conflict and difference within a common culture:5

The idea of a commonculture is in no sense the idea of a simplyconsenting, and certainly not of a merely conforming,society. One returns, once more, to the original emphasisof a commondetermination of meaningsby allpeople, acting sometimes as individuals, sometimes as groups, in a process which has no particular end, and which can never be supposed at any time to havefinally realized itself, to have become complete. ["Idea"37]

Yet this idea of common cultureremains a process that is itself a kind of knitting up of wholes, of "criticizingthat divided and fragmented culture we actuallyhave" ["Idea" 35]. As StuartHall notes, ratherthan modifications and qualificationsin Williams's thought, "one is struck by a markedline of continuity throughthese seminal revisions" ["Two Paradigms"60]. Discontinuities,fragmentation, contradiction, conflict: all just become part of a larger-seminal-pattern. Hall writes that for Williams and Thompson, "'culture' is those patternsof organization. . . which can be discovered as revealing themselves-in 'unexpectedidentities and correspondences' as well as in 'discontinuities of an unexpected kind'-within or underlyingall social practices" ["Two Paradigms" 60]. Discontinuitiesare importantbecause they point to the largerpattern. Throughout his life, Hall argues, Williams continued to stress "the interactivityof practices and ... the underlying totalities, and the homologies between them" ["Two Paradigms"61]. When Williams writes, then, that"culture is ordinary: throughevery change let us hold

5. See his direct response to this critique in Politics and Letters, 134-36. diacritics / spring 1992 55

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 i ....::.~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~...... II . .. -ii-ii:--iii . .

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 fast to that"["Ordinary" 6], he holds fast to an identificationof the everyday with some ultimate totality. Althoughclearly outliningwhat he calls the "totalizingmovement" in Williams and Thompson,Hall himself repeatsit in his own definitionof culturalstudies. In "Cultural Studies: Two Paradigms,"an essay thatcites Williams's "CultureIs Ordinary"[59] and is itself often cited by others in defining culturalstudies (see Johnson and Brantlinger), Hall's stated purpose is to find out "aroundwhat space [are culture's] concerns and conceptsunified?" [59].6 In this essay, he chartshow thedivergent strands of whathe calls Williams's andThompson's "culturalism" and a "structuralism"he associates with Levi- Straussand Althusserare actually"integrated" into one another[59]. Hall is interested in structuralism,which he associates elsewhere with the everyday;the early Barthesand Levi-Straussare useful, he argues,because they bring "the term 'culture' down from its abstractheights to the level of the 'anthropological,'the everyday"["The Centre" 30]. He is interestedin structuralismbecause it "hasthe conceptualability to thinkof a unitywhich is constructedthrough the differencesbetween, ratherthan the homology of, practices"; but when structuralismshades over into poststructuralismhe balks: "of course, the stress on difference can-and has-led the structuralismsinto a fundamental conceptual heterogeneity,in which all sense of structureand totalityis lost" ["TwoParadigms" 68]. Like Marx,he wishes instead"to thinkof the 'unity' of a social formationas constructed, not out of identity but out of difference"[68]. Crucialto Hall is retainingthe model of unity, which he recastsas "unity-in-difference,""complex unity," a way of incorporating differences"without losing ... grip on the ensemble which they constitute"[68-69]. He refers elsewhere to "the contradictionsof everyday life" ["Media Studies" 121]-a particularemphasis of feminism, he suggests. Althoughthey might seem to emphasize differencerather than coherence, these contradictionsget resolved again at those abstract heights in which culture is somehow made whole again, as it has been in the early "culturalism"that Hall repeatsrather than modifies. Hall's colleague RichardJohnson also attemptsto synthesize away the troubling heterogeneityof differencewhile still paying it lip service. In his essay "WhatIs Cultural Studies Anyway?"Johnson works to give "anaccount of the whole" [73]. Attemptingto preserve the idea of unity or coherence, he observes that "a lot hangs ... on the kind of unityor coherencewe seek" [38] andargues for a coherencethat would somehow connect yet preservefragmentation. He would do this, it seems, simply by a substitutionof terms: "We need ways of viewing a vigorous but fragmentedfield of study, if not as a unity at least as a whole" [41]. For Johnson,cultural studies provides this kind of wholeness: no "one discipline or problematic[can] graspthe objects of cultureas a whole," but cultural studies, encompassing all disciplines, can [41]. Within cultural studies, conflicting approachesand readings of culture harmonize-"all [become] true";"theoretical and disciplinaryfragmentations" join together[45-46] (in a diagramJohnson maps cultural studies as a connectingcircle). Like Thompson,who arguesthat a focus on synthesis will allow "theNew Left... to gain in intellectualcoherence" ["Long-II" 37], for Johnson a theoreticalvalorization of wholeness somehow upholdshis theory'sown completeness. The challenge of integratingthe complexity of everydaylife into this circle provides cultural studies with its focus. Johnson argues that cultural studies began when its practitioners"tured [their] assessments from literatureto everyday life" [38]. It is precisely because everyday life seems so ambiguousthat it needs to be embracedwithin culturalstudies: "Ineveryday life, textualmaterials are complex, multiple,overlapping,

6. Hall elsewhereidentifies "culture" and "totality";see his "CulturalStudies and the Centre,"in whichhe writes "PerryAnderson has-in our view,correctly-argued that such a [Parsonian]sociology could produce no conceptof 'totality'and, without that, no conceptof 'culture'either" [21]. diacritics / spring 1992 57

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 co-existent, juxta-posed,in a word, inter-textual"[67]. He writes, "culturalstudies is a heightened,differentiated form of everydayactivities and living. Collective activities of this kind, attemptingto understandnot just 'common' experiencesbut real diversitiesand antagonisms,are especially important,if they can be managed,and subjectto the caveats thatfollow" [79n51]. Johnson'scaveats, however,manage the threatof antagonismright back into commonalty. Johnson admits that attempts by ethnographersto map the intertextualityof everyday life into a coherentpattern has seemed to annul differences within the everyday;such ethnographiesfit "the Other"into theirown patterns,thereby "pathologisingsubordinated cultures" [70]. But Johnsonargues that such problemsare simply temporary: in their understandableenthusiasm for the social totality, such ethnographieshave forgotten that "fundamentalsocial relations have not [yet] been transformed"[70]. And Johnson himself synthesizes the differences of various critical othersinto his own approach,downplaying the way feminismand critiques of racismhave directly criticized the ethnographicmode, for which he becomes an apologist, and recasting feminism as a handmaidento cultural studies: "Feminism has influenced everyday ways of workingand broughta greaterrecognition of the way thatproductive resultsdepend on supportiverelationships" [40]. For Johnson,feminism and critiquesof race become supportive (not at odds with him, or within themselves), and what they especially support is the idea of synthesis that they supposedly act out in everyday practice. In this way, "feminismand anti-racism" are important not so muchin themselves but because they "have kept the new left new" [40]. Any differences from Johnson's position are simply incorporatedwithin it. It is preciselythis process of unificationthrough incorporation thatPatrick Brantlinger highlights in his summaryof the work of the BirminghamCentre: "One of the disabling aspects of academic work culturalstudies aimed to overcome was the alienationof the disciplines fromeach other:knowledge should be madewhole again"[62]. Like Hall and Johnson,Brantlinger knows enoughabout the critiqueof transcendentunity to qualifyhis insistence on synthesis (he writes thatcultural studies is "a coalescing movement,a sort of magnet gathering the various theories that now go under the label 'theory' into a problematicand perhapsimpossible synthesis" [10]), but he takes that synthesis as his goal nonetheless, and it is not long before he acts as though he has achieved it. In fact, the subtext of his book is to defend the version of culturalstudies that comes from the BirminghamCentre against the fragmenting influence ofpoststructuralism.7 To Brantlinger, despite poststructuralattacks on "the (supposedly)failed Enlightenmentproject," "some version of historyand of the social totalityis necessaryfor thereto be any form of social criticism";it is in Marxismthat one can find an "effective concept of social totality that would unify the cognitive field in a rigorous manner"[72].

7. YetBrantlinger is worriedthat even StuartHall hasfallen prey to this influence;he writes of one essay in which "Hall himselfoffers a historyof British culturalstudies as a sort of French dependency. This is undoubtedlythe weakest version of the story" [63]. Just what is wrong with poststructuralismis actuallyquite shifting and contradictoryin Brantlinger'saccount. On the one hand,even thoughhe is infavor of his own versionoftotalism, he criticizesdeconstructionfor being too totalistic;ofDerrida's accounthe writes, "thereis 'nothingoutside the text' or beyondourfield of representation. As with totalistic versions of ideology, representationconceived as consciousness as such makes critique difficultor impossible: startingfrom Derrida's position, there seems to be no way to distinguishmore or less accurate representationsfrom misrepresentations,truth from falsehood, reality from fiction" [104]. On the other hand, what is dangerous about deconstructionis that it is fragmenting; he writes elsewhere of "the deconstructionist'abyss' of completelyindeterminate 'difference"' [116]. Althoughdeconstruction itself mightbe able to play effectively with such contradictoryand opposed drifts within it, given Brantlinger's (supposed) emphasis on logic, closure, and unity, such contradictory assertions become problems in his argumentand unsettle his claims.

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 Justwhat happens when you worktoward "some version of... unification"[73] is perhapsclearest in his own treatmentof those groupsconsidered other, exactly those groupshe feels culturalstudies can empower. Despite his own clearrecognition of the problemsof the assimilationmodel underlyingthe early constructionof American studies,the route Brantlinger suggests to empowerthose others actually works through theirassimilation into the dominantculture.8 Brantlinger's reading of marginalized groupsconcludes that not only arethe "Crusoes... ourselves;so arethe Fridays" [11]. Implicitlyopening up Marx's reading of RobinsonCrusoe to includeFriday, Brantlinger is ina sensetoo inclusive: Friday becomes simply anotherprojection and part of dominant culture.The statement that Friday is "ourselves"(who is this"we"?) seems precisely the appropriationof otherraces and cultures that programs such as African-Americanand women'sstudies have worked to overcome-by uncoveringhow the other (black people or women)might have its own manyvoices, in sharpdiscord with dominant culture. It is explicitlyas thesite on whichto incorporatesuch other approaches into cultural studies'own unifyingdiscourse that Brantlinger values the everyday:

Class, gender, and race are central topics for cultural studies.... These categories signify the majorforms of division and difference between people. Understandingtheir historical,social construction,their complexinterconnec- tions, and their effects on 'everydaylife' .. . is the chief aim of oppositional criticism. Therole of culturalstudies... maybe precisely to prod the traditional disciplines into recognizing ... that their subject-matteris or ought to be what divides and unifies us as humanbeings, in the larger workingsof society and culture, but also in 'thepractice of everydaylife.' [147-48]

Class,gender, and race shift from "the major forms of divisionand difference between people"through "complex interconnections" to "what divides and unites us as human beings,in the larger workings of societyand culture"; once gender and race are juxtaposed withclass in thisaccount, their divisions begin to turninto connections and unities as well (perhapsbecause Brantlinger feels theyare properly comprised within society's larger, economicworkings). Brantlingeruses theundefined practice of theeveryday as a benchmarkto evaluate andreject approaches that might otherwise be divisive,especially feminism. Associating theeveryday with women and feminism, he refersdirectly to Lefebvre'sassociation of womenand the everyday [138] and quotes Michele Barrett's contention that "feminism haspoliticized everyday life-culture in theanthropological sense of thelived practices of a society"[ 136]. An identificationof womenand the everyday as livedexperience is crucialbecause, when feminism strays from such experience, it ceasesfor Brantlinger, as for Lefebvre,to functionas feminism.Only an attentionto the everyday,Brantlinger argues,can rescuefeminism from poststructuralism: he quotesCatherine Stimpson to blamethe breakdown of feministsolidarity on deconstruction'sfragmenting of "consensus"[130]. To Brantlinger,it is poststructuralism'sarrogance about matters of theeveryday that makesit apolitical;he writesthat Derrida is actuallytrapped in themetaphysics he wishes

8. Brantlingercriticizes "the American rhetoric of unifyingthe plural and harmonizing differences,"and the attemptby Americanstudies to reconciledifferent disciplines and create social harmony[271; a "'balance'or a unitythat minimizes conflict" [28] is the liberalgoal of Americanstudies, according to Brantlinger.He neverdifferentiates just how his ownform of "oppositional"criticism [32] is differentfrom this model,especially given its own continued assumptionof social totality,which (magically) no longer appearsto annuldifference. Once again, it seems simply a question of whose version of the social totality should prevail. diacritics / spring 1992 59

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 to deconstruct,"a metaphysicswhich (as Derridarecognizes) tries to look over the heads of most people and to transcendeveryday language use, and thereforeoverlooks the fact that'culture is ordinary" [41]. Poststructuralismincreases the "distance between theorist and 'the masses'-real people, 'lived experience,' 'the practiceof everydaylife"' [170]. Not only does such supposedlyelitist theorizingweaken feminism's consensus, but it is just such fragmentationthat makes feminismpolitically neutralenough to succeed where Marxismfails (for Brantlinger,a very back-handedcompliment). Accordingto him, the very lack of unity within feminism,by bluntingits political effect, has been the means to its acceptancewithin the (conservative)academy [136-37]. What'sespecially interesting about this claim is not whether it is wrong or how much it oversimplifies, but that Brantlingermakes it in the midst of his own attemptto establish culturalstudies within the academy too. He implicitly discreditsfeminism-because, he asserts, it has already been successful-in the attemptto be successful himself. The everydayin this account, ratherthan preserving difference, becomes the meansto annulother theories of cultureor to reconstructthem in Brantlinger'sown image. The heritageof Britishcultural studies becomes a kind of closed family circle, a patriarchalinheritance, invoked in the name of the everyday.

Feminism

It is precisely to open the hermeticand insularfield that has come to be called cultural studies thatfeminists such as GayatriSpivak and MeaghanMorris redefine the category of the everyday. In her feminist critique,Gayatri Spivak, puttingAmerican borrowings of British cultural studies in their own culturalcontext, suggests that the particularly Americandependence on the idea of a united"we" helps explainthe recent attraction here of this versionof culturalstudies. In herreading, this valorizationof unitylinks American cultural critics with the very powers they oppose-as does their manipulationof the categoryof the everyday. Justas thosedominant politically offer the illusionof something called "We the People," promising throughthis consensus an agency supposedly not availableto the electoratein theireveryday lives, culturalstudies itself is involved in the production of a managed and controlled category of the "we." (Spivak writes, "the electoral mobilizationof We the People providesan alibi for crisis managementamong the powers by allowing the party to claim 'A People's Mandate,' while the citizen's political everydaylife operateswithout the necessity of her/hisparticipation" ["Making" 782].)9 Part of "the academic's [unexamined]social task" ["Making"782], is the same "productionof somethingcalled a 'People'" ["Constitutions"134] (a task that becomes

9. Such crises normalize the everyday and define it in the terms of those in power: "For trouble-freenormal politics, there must be the gradualconstitution ... normalization,regulariza- tion of somethingcalled t/e People ... as a collective subject (We), called up in times of trouble, in the interest of crisis-management"["Making" 782]. That "normal"politics depends on such "crisis management,"and vice versa, begins to breakdown the opposition betweenthe everyday politics and exceptional ones. In making her argument, Spivak is working from Derrida's deconstructionof "We the People" as the origin for a political state that is itself actually their origin: Derridapoints out that 'thegood People of these Colonies' in whose name the represen- tativessign the AmericanDeclaration ofndependence do not, strictlyspeaking, exist. As such they do not yet have the name and authoritybefore the Declaration. At the same time, they are required toproduce theauthorityfor a Declarationwhichgives thembeing ["Constitutions" 142]. Although the tautologicaland unstableconstitutionof a collective entityis invokedas the exceptionalstrategy ofcrisis-management (here, ofrevolution), at the same time, Derrida argues that "'this outrageous thing [is] quotidian'"[ "Constitutions"142] and, as bothnormal and exceptional,begins to put its own logic into question.

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 obvious, for example, in the cultural managementthat goes on in Hirsch's Cultural Literacy). But, Spivakargues, in participatingin thisproduction, cultural studies must ask questionsabout its own "constitution"["Constitutions" 144]. Criticsneed consciously to recognize and intervene in their own productionof this illusion of consensus, and to recognize especially just how cultural studies' own formation as a field depends on dangerousassumptions about unity and consensus. Such consensus needs especially to be called into question because the dominant powers use theconsensus theycreate as a way to define themselvesas coherentand unified in the face of unsettlingdifference. For Spivak,however, the dynamicthat unsettles such power alreadylies "dormantand uncriticalin the everyday"["Making" 782]; critics need to bringsuch contradictionsinto consciousness, especially throughthe attemptexplicitly to insertwomen or people of color into thereigning consensus, thereby fracturing it. Such terms cannot easily be introducedinto this equation: introducingwomen, who function in culture as pluralizedsubjects ["Constitutions"145] and introducingAfrican-Ameri- cans, alreadyrepresented within the Constitution'sdiscussion of representationnot as complete but as fractional (as slaves, counted as "'three fifths of all other persons'" ["Constitutions"136]), both put the notionof completenessand coherenceinto question. One way to go beyond Spivak's plain-and perhapsoverly optimistic-deconstruction here might be by recognizing that such corporate entities do constitute themselves precisely by writing such fracturedsubjects into their very Constitutions. Is simply pointing up such contradictionsenough? Might those contradictionshelp form, rather than undermine,the constructionsthat write them in the first place? Spivak arguesthat the everydayas a categoryis especially useful when attendingto the differencesexcluded fromstories of consensus;she in fact redefinesthe everyday,not as lived experience,or "real"underlying consensus, but as the ongoing deconstructionof thatillusion of experience. Spivakargues that such an illusion is still necessaryto groups like women or people of color in theirself-definitions: "Itcannot be denied thatthe best andthe worstin the historyof the feministmovement... entails thepresentation of woman as unifiedrepresentative subject" ["Making" 795]. Yet such unificationmust be endlessly interrogated-and cannot help but be interrogatedby postcolonial subjects caught between cultures-even as it is assumed: "Thisimpossible 'no' to a structure,which one critiques, yet inhabits intimately, is the deconstructivephilosophical position, and the everyday here and now of 'postcoloniality'is a case of it" ["Making"794].10 Feminists, in deconstructingthe unity appealed to in culture and cultural studies as well as in feminism, need to play uponthe tensionbetween the need for theirown consensus andthe price paid for that (temporary)wresting into a collective. To construct entities like culturalstudies and feminism, while useful and effective, "is thus not an unquestioned teleological good but a negotiation with enabling violence" ["Constitutions"146].11 Spivakattempts in this essay to workcarefully between deconstruction and construction, to unsettle the foundationof dominantpowers while providing some ground for political action (her politics, like BarbaraJohnson's, are characterizedby that very unsettling). To recognize the illusion of consensusas an illusion (even while invoking it),

10. For those feminists not defined as third-worldor women of color, Spivak writes, "U.S. women... are in a uniqueand privileged position to continuea persistentcritique of mere apologists for their Constitution,even as they use its instrumentsto secure entry into its liberatingpurview. Favoritesons and daughterswho refuseto sanctifytheirfather's house have their uses. Persistently to critique a structure that one cannot not (wish to) inhabit is the deconstructive stance" ["Constitutions"147]. 11. The utopia inscribedhere within culturalstudies becomes its recognition of its interven- tions as provisional, limited,and incomplete: "Indeed,the hoped-forfuture of everythingwritten in the name of cultural studies today must, I think, be the classroom staged as intervention,too painfully aware of its limits to dream only of integration"["Making" 796]. diacritics / spring 1992 61

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 so that the recognitionbecomes partof everyday life, seems to be the majorstrategy of these politics. Butjust what Spivak's enabling"everyday here and now"is remainsto be deconstructed;it is a category Spivak herself cannot help assuming-the very category to which it remains impossible to say no. Though refusing a notion of harmonyand coherence, Spivak's culturalstudies is similarto thatof the new left in thatthe everyday remains the locus and groundingof her constructionof cultureand politics. Paradoxi- cally, the source of deconstruction'svision of how things might be lies in things as they alreadyare-the everydayas some dormantaporia already invisibly doing the very work we need yet to imagine. For MeaghanMorris, what differentversions of culturalstudies share in using the category of the everyday is a tendencyto attemptto discredittheir opponents with it. In "Banalityin CulturalStudies," she argues that in this regardboth the Continentaland British, poststructuraland humanist, practionersof supposedly progressive cultural studies become practicallyindistinguishable.12 "It is remarkable,"Morris writes, "given the differencesbetween them ... thatneither... leaves muchplace for an unequivocally pained, unambivalentlydiscontented, or aggressive theorizingsubject" [20], the kind of subject Morris locates in feminism or radical left politics: "Thereis an active process going on in both of discrediting-by directdismissal... or by covert inscriptionas Other ...-the voices of grumpyfeminists and crankyleftists" [20].13Cultural studies works these exclusions specifically in attemptingto define "anappropriate theoretical style for analyzingeveryday life" [6]; it begins "to define and restrictwhat it is possible to do and say in its name" [4]. In critiquingcultural studies' aim to take everyday banality as its subject,to createthrough it a restrictivefield for itself, Morrisputs into questionthe idea of any "aim"at all: "I'm not surebanality can have a point, any morethan cultural studies can properly constitute its theoretical object" [3]. The aim to dismiss or inscribe opposition becomes the attemptto extinguish politics. Culturalstudies' attemptto create"a collective subject,'the people"' [ 17] recordsthe price of this endeavorin its ethnographiesof the everyday;because the ethnographerfails to take into account her or his own investmentin and productionof this collective, "the people" actually becomes the ethnographer'smask, circularly"both source of authority for a text and a figure of its own critical activity,"in parta figure for its own coherence and completeness [ 17]. Morrisargues that if critics take seriously the ways the everyday "'canreorganize the place fromwhich discourseis produced'"(as de Certeauhas argued),

12. In writing about her "irritationabout two developmentsin recent cultural studies," Morris states that one of them is Continentaltheory, including "JeanBaudrillard's revival of the term 'banality'toframe a theoryof media. It is an interestingtheory that deals in part with the tele- visualrelationship between everyday life and catastrophicevents. Yetwhy should such a classically dismissive term as 'banality' reappear,yet again, as a point of departurefor discussingpopular culture?" [3]. The other is British cultural studies, "theprogram of the Birminghamschool in England" [5], which she associates especially with the work of Ross Chambersand John Fiske:

The thesis of culturalstudies as Fiske andChambers present itruns perilously close to this kind of formulation:people in modem mediatizedsocieties are complex and contradictory, mass cultural texts are complex and contradictory,therefore people using them producecomplex and contradictoryculture. To add thatthis popularculture has critical and resistant elements is tautological-unless one . . . has a concept of culture so rudimentarythat it excludes criticismof andresistance from the practiceof everydaylife. [19]

Morris wishes to "framea comparison"[11] between these two groups. 13. Morris suggests, as I have, that British cultural studies "most often proceeds from admittingclass, racial, and sexual oppressions to finding the inevitable saving grace" [20].

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 that"means being very carefulabout our enunciativeand story-tellingstrategies-much more carefulthan much culturalstudies (and feminist writing)has been in its mimesis of a popular-or 'feminine'-voice" [24]. Morris'sown "our"here shows thatit is difficult to be careful enough; it is perhapsimpossible to keep from creatinga sense of collective endeavorin the very act of critiquingthat move.l4 But what's involved for her in making the attempt is a revision of the everyday that "may also come aroundeventually in a different,and as yet utopian,mode of enunciativepractice" [27]. Such an opening up of restrictive conformity to something as yet unspecified is encoded for her in the very historyof the word "banal":"'Banality' is one of a groupof words-including 'trivial' and 'mundane'-whose modem historyinscribes the disinte- grationof old ideals about the common people, the common place, the common culture" [26]. She emphasizes that, in medieval French,"banal" originally meant "communal," until that focus on things held in common began to deteriorateinto an understandingof such things as unoriginaland trivial [26]. And for Morris,cultural studies risks making itself trivialunless it complicatesits notionsof commonalty.Morris doesn'tdispense with this notionaltogether, but urgescultural studies to go beyond conformityin its definitions to ones that allow for antagonism, complexity, a "range of moods" [23]; otherwise, cultural studies will be "extraordinarilydepleted" [26]. Part of Morris's sense of community turninginto conformity comes from the other sense of "banality,"the old English and Germanicbannan ("to summon, or to curse";"to proclaim underpenalty" [27]), a restrictiveact of enunciativeforce (as in banishingor announcingbans). Morris wishes cultural studies, in order to keep from becoming banal in its attention to the everyday, to itself avoid such compulsory platitudinizing: "Minoritariantheorizing subjects in culturalstudies have to work quite hardnot to become subjects of banalityin that old double sense: not to formulateedicts and proclamations,yet to keep theorizing ... to refuse to subside permanentlyeither into silence or into a posture of reified difference. Through some such effort, pained and disgruntledsubjects, who are also joyous and inventive practitioners,can articulateour critiqueof everyday life" [27]. To keep from being discreditedwithin cultural studies, oppositional "minoritarian" critics- pained and disgruntledfeminists, poststructuralleftists, people of color-need to resist the easy and exhaustedcongruences drawn for them within the categoryof the everyday. In part, Morris wishes culturalstudies to resist recycling the same old things (her epigraph is "What goes around, comes around");she argues against the "routinized, repetitive,banal" [8] ways of seeing thatreduce (popular)culture once again simply to banality,and so implicitlydiscredit it. And yet, becauseshe has learnedfrom de Certeau's work that "'People have to make do with what they have"' [24], she realizes that it is precisely because such banalities"kee[p] on coming back aroundin our polemics" [26] thatwe need to look at them, to "engag[e] with the[ir]contradictions" [27]. It is the way "'everydaypractices... alternatelyexacerbate and disruptour logics"' [23] thatMorris would like culturalstudies to makeexplicit-to open itself up to politics which disruptit, "'dilemmas, which... no moderncritical model can resolve"' [7]. The utopian mode Morris gestures to works to keep open the dilemma of the everyday. The very difficulty of Spivak's and Morris's essays, the difficulties of teasing out from them the implicationsof the everyday, reflects (as it does in Lefebvre's work) the complications of keeping questions open, of eschewing resolution for an as-yet-undefined alternative-one whose ambiguities seem to its critics a weakness ratherthan a strength.The very open-endednessof theirwork seems to me, however, to be its promise. The challenge of following throughon such thinkinglies in doing so withoutconstructing new destinations,new conclusions, new utopias.

14. Thatthis "our"leaves some people out is pointedup by bell hooks'sexplicit criticism of Morrisas onepoststructuralfeministwhodoes not mention writing by women ofcolor[ "Postmodern" 24]. diacritics / spring 1992 63

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 Although feminism is not the handmaidento cultural studies that some critics imagine, cultural studies could do no better than to learn from and acknowledge the lessons of feminism. As feminists now regroupduring a period of culturalpolitics that Judith Butler tells us "some would call 'postfeminism"' [5], the struggle will be to maintaindifferent feminisms that can also be open-ended. In workingto keep a focus on the oppressionof woman thatalso assertsthe differencesof women, such feminisms will have a lot to teachcultural studies. Perhapstheir everyday politics will be to questionthe everyday in a way that allows the fields we now call feminism and culturalstudies to continue to have politics.

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