Plotting

We all know that history can’t be objective, right? Every story is told from a particular vantage point, with its own interests, perspectives, and agendas. But even though I know this, I find it easy to slip into complacency sometimes and just take what I am told at face value. I like to believe, at these times, that I am at least taking my history from credible sources. Then again, the other day I marvelled at learning that Jane Seymour died of post-childbirth complications and didn’t, as I had always assumed, have her head chopped off. I learned this on the Showtime show The Tudors. I didn’t even look for another source. Turns out I’m not always the critical thinker I’d like to be. Anyway, enough about me.

I like those moments when history’s problems make themselves evident. Take Guy Fawkes and the Gunpowder Plot, for example. For some inexplicable reason, Guy Fawkes has been on my mind at several different occasions this year. I always assumed that the Gunpowder Plot was meant as an attack on the institutions of the English Parliament and Monarchy. Well, after a bit of lazy research, I learned that it was actually an assassination attempt on King James I of England (VI of Scotland), his family, and his inner circle of Protestant lords. As it happens, Guy Fawkes and his co-conspirators were Catholic rebels. Yet the story becomes even more interesting when taken from another perspective. In the BBC series “A History of Scotland,” Neil Oliver claims that the Gunpowder Plot was a special attempt on King James’ life because he was Scottish, not simply because he was Protestant. Oliver makes the whole thing sound like a plan to thwart the “Scottish takeover of England.” Apparently, Fawkes’ co-conspirators were even found to have a hit-list of Scottish nobles living in London – although I haven’t found any other mention of this. So was the Gunpowder Plot an attack on an institution, an attack on Protestants, or an attack on the Scots? Or was it all of these things?

I used to think that Guy Fawkes Day was a celebration of the Gunpowder Plot, which never made sense to me. Surprisingly, I even asked some British people and they couldn’t really tell me what it was about. Finally, a relative in London explained that Guy Fawkes Day and the burning of the effigies is a celebration of the foiling of the plot and the execution of the rebels. So it makes more sense to me now why the English celebrate it. And even more so that the Scottish do. After all, no matter what the actual motivations of the plotters, it seems widely accepted that the target was James – the Scottish King and champion of the Scottish religion.

I had the good fortune of stopping in to The Guy Fawkes Inn for a drink this past Fall, while visiting York. It is reputedly the building in which he was born – but as with all history, that might not be true. Another building around the corner sports a similar plaque. The Inn was dark, lit only by tall, dripping candles. The windows were thin, the rooms drafty, and, as with many Tudor-era buildings, the walls looked like they might cave in at any minute. The beers were fantastic and the atmosphere eerie – the kind of place you might quietly gather to plot something terrible.

the Guy Fawkes Inn, York UK

“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 working. 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 as it is now. It wouldn’t be art, it would be work. Hard work. 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.

Beautification, Anarchy, or just plain fun?

I’m a little obsessed with what I’ll call Anarchist Knitting. I came to it through a Vancouver-based blog called Yarn Bombing. It turns out there have been anarchist knitting groups cropping up all over the place for the past few years, the most notable of which seems to be Knitta. Their objective is to beautify the urban landscape by “tagging” urban structures with patches of knitting. It’s also a movement to reclaim knitting as an aesthetic activity, as knitting is one of those things that we are usually only expected to do for others or for a particular purpose.

I’m drawn to anarchist knitting for other reasons in addition to these. To me, it seems like a way to not just beautify the urban landscape, but also a way to critique it. Tagging a structure draws attention to it, makes people acknowledge and think about it. How many telephone poles, signs, benches, mailboxes, etc. do you walk by every day without even noticing them? In a way, we are alienated from the very spaces within which we live. Not only do we not build them, we don’t even really see them. To go a step further, tagging doesn’t just make us think about urban space, it seems to me like a nice way of making that space our own.

The other day I tagged a sign in my neighbourhood. Two elderly women were walking by while I was sewing the tag on and they stopped to watch me for a moment. They initially looked confused, then one of them said: “You’re giving that pole something to wear on this chilly day. That’s very kind of you!” She wasn’t being sarcastic, she was genuinely pleased, if a little mystified. That’s exactly the reaction I was hoping for.

If you live in Victoria, keep your eyes peeled for more…

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.