“Domestic Goddess”

I had a friend visit recently who was completely baffled by the way I eat. It wasn’t the raw ingredients or even the finished products that she was unfamiliar with, but the fact that I actually cook most meals from scratch. Then one morning, while we were eating the omelettes I had made for breakfast, she complimented my socks and asked where I bought them. When I told her I made them she was shocked. Who the hell knows how to make their own socks?! Who would even want to?! She then called me a “domestic goddess.”

This gave me pause. As a woman in the twenty-first century, it is impossible to hear that phrase and not wonder, even for just a moment, if there is an insult embedded in there somewhere. Or if it’s even a compliment at all. And then comes the bigger pause. When did knowing how to feed and clothe yourself become worthy of “goddess” status? Are we truly that alienated from our basic needs? I’ll readily admit – if modern civilization collapsed today, I probably wouldn’t last any longer than anyone else. Sure, I know how to make socks, but I certainly don’t know how to shear a sheep or spin wool. Maybe I would last until all the yarn shops had been fully looted, but then I’d have to move South like everyone else. And hell, I might know how to make bread, but I certainly don’t know how to grow wheat or grind flour. So I don’t think of myself as being more self-sufficient or as having a more authentic home life. What I do feel is that I am practicing an art. The art of “women’s work,” for lack of a less inflammatory description. This art takes everyday practices that are for the most part devalued and turns them into opportunities to create something new and beautiful, even if the result is only ephemeral, like a meal.

This might seem like a throwback, and I might be setting myself up for attack by decades of feminist progress, but I actually like domestic work. Or at least, I like my version of it. I sometimes fantasize about just not joining the labour force, even though that would probably require the justification of also being a wife and mother. I am happiest when I am at home cooking, knitting, mending, even sometimes cleaning. I gain great satisfaction from having an orderly but comfortable home, and even greater satisfaction from having made it that way myself. But let’s face it – my domestic oasis is pretty far from the everyday reality of modern life. With all the mod-cons having invaded the home so completely, managing a household can be just as alienating as working in a factory or being a cog in a major corporation. Not to demonize progress – some of those conveniences have indeed had positive effects. But the landscape of the home has certainly changed and become more mechanized. Style has given way to efficiency. And if I were, in fact, a stay-at-home mom, my domestic life would not be nearly so leisurely and – should I admit it? – pretentious as it is now. It wouldn’t be art, it would be work. Hard work. And how miserable would I be if I had to call my husband for permission to just watch TV and order pizza? On the flip side though, I don’t really want to submit to the double burden either – work all day at some shitty job then work all the rest of the time at home. Don’t get me wrong here, I’m not longing for some lost domestic ideal. “Women’s work” has never been ideal. What I long for is probably impossible unless one is independently wealthy. To live the everyday with style, as an art, and to gain access to the carefully guarded tradition of finding pleasure and power in the mundane.

Exhibit A

I don’t mind doing laundry but I hate putting it away after.

“Moments of Being”

How do we decide what is a significant moment?

When my boyfriend asks me how my day was I usually answer with a long and detailed run-down of everything I did that day. “I did some writing and then a bunch of reading then I went to the grocery store because we needed spinach but they didn’t have the big packages of spinach so I only got a small one sorry about that I guess I’ll have to go back tomorrow and then on the way home I was listening to this CD that my friend gave me and there’s this great song on it that got me thinking about…” I sometimes feel like I never stop talking. It must be incredibly boring for him but I keep going anyway. It’s a compulsion I have to share everything.

But I don’t actually tell him everything. To recount every single moment of a day would take another whole day. I’m selective about what I share, even if I feel like I’m not. I’m interested in how I choose those moments. What makes one moment significant enough to share and another insignificant enough to completely forget once it’s passed by? I wonder about this with things like Twitter and Facebook Status updates. Why do we share updates on what we’re eating for dinner but not on the day’s other minutiae? Do I choose an update because it’s somehow a significant moment, or because it just happens to be the content of a moment in which I’m trying to kill some time or reconnect with the world?

Virginia Woolf has a theory about “moments of being” – moments when we become completely conscious of our being and of the patterns underlying the everyday. These moments can be marked by traumatic or significant events, or they can be inspired by seemingly insignificant events. The content of the moment isn’t important – it’s the transcendence of that content towards a universal truth that makes it a “moment of being.” It’s an interesting theory but I can’t help but take issue with it’s metaphysicality. Why do we have to rise above  the everyday minutiae to experience a more authentic state of being? Doesn’t the actual content of the moment shape our experience of our real, material, social lives, and thus our being?

The Revolution of Everyday Life

I study theories of the everyday because I believe in them, not simply because they are interesting – and I believe in them on a practical level, not simply a theoretical one. A problem arises from this: on a practical level, in my real, everyday life, what does effective political action look like? What is a viable politics or style of living?

If Debord and Lefebvre are right, and I believe they are, everyday life has been colonized by capitalism. We don’t see how ideology encodes every aspect of our lives – mostly because we don’t look. The division of labour led to a division of the spheres of life (family, work, leisure), turning us into divided beings. In which sphere of life do we find authentic experience? Arguably, each sphere is authentic and they come together somehow to create a total being. But in reality, our everyday lives revolve around work and, even if we like what we do, we look for ways to escape the mundaneness and necessity of that labour. The quality of our family lives, in turn, is determined by our labour and is dictated in large part by consumption. Even if we “make time” to spend with our families, even if we try to prioritize our private lives, the quality of our domestic lives are still largely determined by capital – whether in terms of money, time, or status. We turn to leisure for a “break” from the demands of everyday life – but even our leisure activities are alienated. They are dictated by advertising, governed by capitalism, and serve only to appease our dissatisfaction so that we continue to be “productive” members of society. Even the most “authentic” of leisure activities or styles of living is quickly co-opted by capital and turned into a commodity. We don’t even understand our own needs or desires anymore, beyond the basics, because our needs and desires are dictated to us by capital. Leisure becomes an escape that only further alienates us from our social reality. And hey, why not? According to Lefebvre, the reality of our lives is something we should want to escape. Everyday life in modern society is impoverished, it lags behind what is possible. “‘Progress,’” he says, “has affected existing social realities only secondarily, modifying them as little as possible, according to the strict dictates of capitalist profitability. The important thing is that human beings be profitable, not that their lives by changed” (Critique of Everyday Life Vol. 1, 230).

Revolution, in the classical Marxist sense, isn’t viable anymore. This makes sense to me – can the working class really reclaim the tools of production and overthrow capitalism? We’re now dealing with a global capitalism that is so deeply embedded in every aspect of everyone’s lives that nothing short of a global catastrophe will overturn it. Instead, we need to effect change from the bottom up in order to truly increase the quality of our lives. We need to engage in resistance at the everyday level in hopes of changing the landscape of the everyday itself. All we really have is the everyday. This is where we live – rather than trying to escape it, we should embrace it, critique it, and change it in every way we can.

Theory proposes a variety of practices for a revolution of everyday life – détournement, or appropriating symbols and icons of the dominant ideology for different uses; dérive, or wandering the city in order to understand its ideological landscape and then make your own mark on it; tactics, ways of “making do” with the tools available to you in order to reclaim power over your daily activities in every sphere; potlatch or gift exchange as an alternative economy; creating “situations” that heighten the experience of real social life and de-alienate the individual. To me, this style of resistance includes activities like performance art, street art, avant-garde art, guerilla film-making, zine publishing, yarn bombing, and a number of other “anarchist” activities, no matter how benign they seem. Creativity gives the revolution of everyday life its utopian character.

Here’s the problem I have though: we still have to make room for collective political action, directed at political structures themselves. We may not be able to overturn the global political and economic system, but we still maintain influence over some policy decisions. I’m not so cynical yet that I believe all classical political action is futile. In this part of the world, we can vote for our leaders and our votes make a difference. Signing petitions and writing letters to our representatives still works, even if not in every single situation. Work strikes are complicated now because they are often seen as a means to support corrupt unions and feed their members’ greed – but that doesn’t mean there isn’t a place for them anymore. They still exert sufficient pressure on businesses and governments, they just need to be used better. I’m not sure about the value of protesting anymore. A peaceful protest will achieve visibility for an issue but little else; however, a violent protest usually just creates a stronger resistance against it while also undermining the protestors’ cause. I think more creative public statements, on the level of everyday life, are more effective.

I realize that most of what I’ve said is hugely generalized. Getting into the specifics of this problem demands the space of a book, or at least an ongoing conversation. The question that I want to work out is how I can reconcile the need for big political action with a politics of everyday life – not just in theory, but in practice, in real life. When do we move from one mode of resistance to the other, or how do we work them together? I suppose I won’t come up with one big answer because each situation calls for a different tactic.

I ♥ Discourse

I read an article in the New Yorker a while back called “I ♥ Novels.” It’s about a new genre of writing that has emerged in Japan over the past few years called keitai shosetsu, or cell phone novels. Most of their authors are young women who write novels in short installments from their cell phones, often under a pseudonym. I’ve never read a keitai shosetsu so I don’t know how good they are, but I find the general concept very compelling. Technology is changing the way we tell stories. It always has, of course, but I feel like we are in the midst of a significant shift.

I recently signed on to Twitter and, for the moment, I think it’s the greatest thing ever. We can now follow each other throughout the day by means of one line comments or status updates, but without the added apparatus of a Facebook or something like it. The only common tool I can think of right now that is similar is text messaging. But with text messaging there’s always the expectation of an immediate response and an ensuing dialogue, whereas with Twitter people don’t have to respond at all. One can update as much for themselves as for others.

I am a little excited already to look back on my updates after several months have gone by. Imagine how interesting it would be to reconstruct a story of your day-to-day activities and impressions using random single lines.

Creepy

There are a few blogs I follow that belong to people I don’t know. For some reason, I feel weird about it, like I’m some kind of online Peeping Tom. Sometimes I want to leave comments, but I never do because I don’t want them to know I was there.

The Meaning of Life

In a review of Dorothy Richardson’s Interim (1919), the 5th installment in the 13-volume novel Pilgrimage, Katherine Mansfield writes:

For them [certain modern authors] the whole art of writing consists in the power with which they are able to register that faint inward shock of recognition. Glancing through life they make the discovery that there are certain experiences which are, as it were, peculiarly theirs. There is a quality in the familiarity of these experiences or in their strangeness which evokes an immediate mysterious response — a desire for expression. But now, instead of going any further, instead of attempting to relate their “experiences” to life or to see them against any kind of background, these writers are, as we see them, content to remain in the air, hovering over, as if the thrilling moment were enough and more than enough. Indeed, far from desiring to explore it, it is as though they would guard the secret for themselves as well as for us, so that when they do dart away all is as untouched, as unbroken as before.

But what is the effect of this kind of writing upon the reader? How is he to judge the importance of one thing rather than another if each is to be seen in isolation? [...]

In it [Interim] Miriam is enclosed in a Bloomsbury boarding-house, and though she receives, as usual, shock after shock of inward recognition, they are produced by such things as well-browned mutton, gas jets, varnished wallpapers. Darting through life, quivering, hovering, exulting in the familiarity and the strangeness of all that comes within her tiny circle, she leaves us feeling, as before, that everything being of equal importance to her, it is impossible that everything should not be of equal unimportance.

Precisely the thing that Mansfield felt was a shortcoming of Pilgrimage is what I find most interesting about it. It seems to me that by focusing on the subjective experience of everyday moments and objects, and by refusing to frame them as part of a larger, more meaningful narrative, Richardson expresses that which is nearly impossible to express: the everyday itself, that which cannot be contained in any single detail but persists in the whole.

Mansfield’s argument that assigning “equal importance” to every detail causes every detail to become equally unimportant is exactly the mode of thought that has taken us away from the everyday. We focus on the marvellous, the inspirational, the philosophical, those things that stand out from the ordinary, and thus sacrifice our understanding of real experience as consisting of the mundane.

This is exactly why I love Monty Python’s The Meaning of Life. “What is the meaning of life?” It seems like such a big question. But it’s really not. Life is birth, death, sex, work, love, friendship, laughter. Life is, quite simply, the everyday.