Belated retorts
Posted on | January 3, 2005 |
I hereby pledge that I will eventually write a report on the CSAA conference, probably sooner rather than later. But I’m only now getting round to reading Lefebvre’s Everyday Life in the Modern World, which I intended to read two years ago and - given the title, ‘Everyday Transformations: The 21st Century Quotidian’ - really really intended to read before the conference. Due to my Pollyanna tendencies, the report will most likely concentrate on the highlights of the event rather than the lowlights. But there were certainly quite a few of the latter. For instance, I distinctly remember at one point the question being asked of a keynote speaker, ‘If the everyday is so great, why do we have weekends?’. I could be wrong, but this may have been the same plenary session when it was decided that ‘multiple everydays’ was the politically correct way of acknowledging that the banalities of daily life in a privileged country like Australia can’t really be compared with those of a less fortunate place like Aceh - to take a current example.
At the time this seemed a long way from sounding like a scholarly discussion, but it probably had just as much to do with the time of day and the difficulty of communicating with a large and diverse audience. Still, what Lefebvre was getting at seems so much more intricate, poetic, and above all, mobilising:
The revolution of the future will put an end to the quotidian, it will usher in prodigality and lavishness and break our fetters, violently or peaceably as the case may be. This revolution will not be restricted to the spheres of economy, politics and ideology; its specific objective will be to annihilate everyday life; and the period of transition will also take on a new meaning, oppose everyday life and reorganize it until it is as good as new, its spurious rationality and authority unmasked and the antithesis between the quotidian and the Festival ñ whether of labour or of leisure ñ will no longer be a basis of society. pp. 36-7
Comments
5 Responses to “Belated retorts”
January 3rd, 2005 @ 9:16 pm
yeah, lefebvre not so big a fan of cooking and shopping, huh.
January 4th, 2005 @ 5:19 am
Lefebvre! He opens the door for critique along the lines of something like the “cult of lifestyles”. Where, for example, the Lacanian Other is of a temporal order, so life is lived as an anticipation, expectation and preparation of an Event that doesn’t come. The necessary conditions of the Event will be provided by a mutliplicity of events that have a stylistic coherence - ‘as good as new’ - enter above comments by Lefebvre. An early account of the new biopolitical-image-affective regimes bleeding into leisure-time (ie ‘free’, but value-adding) labour. Yeehaa!
I started on Rhythmanalysis a while ago, but it got put on hold cause of Sweden and so on…
January 4th, 2005 @ 12:19 pm
I love Lefebrve, but sometimes his revolution of the future sounds a lot like the kind of prodigial excess that Max Nordau was kicking in the teeth when the aesthetes pissed him off.
Still… Glen’s comments about expectation of the Event and the ability to annihilate the everyday that Lefebrve were talking about have just given my thinking on my thesis a shot in the arm.
January 4th, 2005 @ 6:08 pm
Christian,
I am not sure what your thesis is on(!!), but if you haven’t already seen it, you may want to check out:
Gomart, E. and A. Henion (1999). “A Sociology of Attachment: Music, Amateurs, Drug Users.” _Actor Network Theory and After_. J. Law and J. Hassard. Oxford, Blackwell: 220-247.
There are some brief comments on “event-network theory” and the ways drug and music dudes prepare for the drug- or music-event. Lots more needs to be said but the way they discuss the notion of ‘passing’ and the modulaties of active and passive anticipation is very interesting.
I have written a first draft of a paper on the temporalities of fandom between the initial example of a movie and then the measures of anticipations and expectations of the sequel. The ‘between events’ period is very interesting. In a fit of random stupidity I posted an extract of the paper to the cultstud-L a while ago during the US election changing the terms from movie/fan-events to political-events.
January 5th, 2005 @ 12:15 pm
My thesis is on computer games, so the movements of anticipation and event are like, *totally* of interest. I will check out that paper right now.
Drugs and games share a sense of continual thresholds, of delivery of the moment of apotheosis. Enough ecstasy. So maybe I’ve been lazy but I think Bataille’s been good for me here.
Your paper sounds like a more ninja version of my honours thesis; I’m not on CultStud (I don’t think.) Still, it sounds like good work, analysis of those types of cultural movements still hasn’t been done, and when it is, we cop shit for it.