“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.

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.

Sunday Baseball

I have come to the conclusion this summer that baseball is really fun. I was always so bad at it when I was younger. I was always the last person to get chosen for a team in gym class and I was so bad that even my friends made fun of me. It was humiliating. It didn’t help that, in my left-handed awkwardness, and due to budgetary restraints at my school, I had to both catch and throw with my left hand. Even if I magically caught the ball, by the time I was able to remove my glove to throw the ball in, the batter could have run all the way home with ease. I looked ridiculous. And at bat, I was even more incompetent. I’m pretty sure that before this summer I had only once ever made contact with the ball.

But somehow I’ve gotten better with age, even though, until this summer, I hadn’t played since Junior High school. Maybe my hand-eye coordination has just naturally improved. Or maybe I’m not as nervous and self-conscious. Picking baseball up again was almost like therapy. The first few times I swung, missed, and didn’t get booed, it was like unloading years of gym class baggage. Now I can hit the ball most of the time. It doesn’t go very far, but there is contact. I’m quickly learning to catch with my right hand and I can actually throw the ball a reasonable distance for someone who doesn’t play baseball. Yesterday I even got someone out at third base for the first time in my life. I cheered a little too loud and I felt bad for it after, but I think everyone forgave me my competitive outburst when I said it was the first time I’d ever taken anyone out.

It’s not really about being good though. Especially since I play in the least competitive game going. My roommate only convinced me to play by reassuring me about how non-competitive it really is. Seriously. Sometimes people wear dresses or flip-flops. Yesterday someone was batting in their bare feet. Someone else was swinging one-handed with a beer in the other hand. We had a player come in who said “how do you play this game again?” There are no strike-outs and I’ve definitely seen people swing at the ball so many times that everyone loses count. Some of them are good and some of them (myself included) really suck, but no one cares either way. It’s really just about getting outside, spending the afternoon with friends, and having a good time. It may be the only genuinely non-competitive sports situation I’ve ever found myself in. And now I really like baseball.

If It Worked For Derrida, It Must Work For Me Too

I love finding little tidbits in literature or philosophy or intellectual culture that validate my own lifestyle. Like today, I learned that until Jacques Derrida had to be somewhere in particular during the day, he stayed in his pajamas. Or, in Joseph Conrad’s The Secret Agent, one of the characters says that 11:00 am seems like a perfectly reasonable time at which to start the day’s duties.

So maybe I’m not quite the social deviant or general slacker that I sometimes appear to be. Or better yet, maybe being a slacker by contemporary standards isn’t such a bad thing anyway.

Simplicity

When I think about my ideal future I always imagine myself living on a farm or on a small island. Something about simplicity is very attractive to me. I want to wake up with the sunrise and be met with no distractions other than simple daily living. I imagine making coffee, having a simple and healthy breakfast, doing errands around the house, reading and writing for most of the day, taking time out to do some gardening, cooking a nice dinner, enjoying a glass of wine, having no noise around me save for CBC radio or perhaps a little music, maybe knitting during the evening, or sitting on the porch drinking tea, maybe even with the company of whomever I’ve decided to live with out in the middle of nowhere. I want to be part of a small community, where we all work together to supply those things we need to live on and provide each other with company when wanted. Who knows if that kind of life even exists anymore but the one thing that really draws me to the possibility is the hope that a simple life would afford me more time. And not just more time with which to do things, but more time with which to not do anything. I suppose I have plenty of time now — but I feel like I waste a lot of it by just engaging with the world. I suppose if I wanted to sit through the evening with the CBC and knit I absolutely could. It would just mean not going out with my friends, avoiding the phone, avoiding the television, and maybe even dragging myself away from my computer!

I’m thinking sometime next year, while I’m working on my dissertation, I’ll take a few months away. Maybe rent a place on one of the gulf islands and just hang out away from the world for awhile. Read and write my days away and relax through the evenings. Although I’ve been specifically told not to do that. I guess people in my program go away in hopes of getting more done and end up just disappearing. But somehow I think it would work better for me. I work so well without distractions and I’m really self-motivated. But I’m too social a person to take the time out that I really need. Finding balance is definitely not a strength I have.

Anyway, when you break it right down, all I really long for is simplicity. I feel like life is far less chaotic and complicated lately than it was even just a couple of months ago, but it’s still not quiet enough. I feel like I still have something to unload — I just don’t know what.