Rethinking everyday life: And then nothing turns itself inside out

The contingencies and permeabilities and rhythms of everyday life make it notoriously difficult to pin down in any determinant way. Hence, everyday life places unique demands upon critical practice and conceptualization. In following one potential angle of approach, this essay looks at the influence that philosopher Gottfried Leibniz played in the thinking of sociologist and everyday life philosopher Henri Lefebvre. Lefebvre’s theory of moments and his conceptions of ‘the everyday’ draw upon often overlooked (and controversial) elements from Leibniz’s monadology and other later writings. This essay concludes by considering how substituting ‘everyday life’ for the ‘culture’ of cultural studies requires, among other things, a closer consideration of the immanently biopolitical implications that Lefebvre teased out of Leibniz. As the introductory essay for this special issue of Cultural Studies, we also set up, in the final section here, an overview of our contributors’ own unique angles of approach to the study of everyday life at the dawn of the 21st century.     

Talking Yiddish at the boundaries

This essay uses the contemporary urban consumption practice of speciality coffee as a means to explore the complex ways in which global brands seek to enhance the promotional currency of their products through the mobilizing of local ‘commodity biographies’. It begins by outlining the place-specific strategies of promotion employed by speciality coffee retailers such as Starbucks and the Seattle Coffee Company, examining the range of ways in which Seattle as centre of US ‘coffee culture’ was deployed as the locus of ‘origin’ in order to create lucrative distinctions between speciality coffee and homogenized, mass-market coffee products. It then places this symbolic geography of coffee within the long history of coffee as a global commodity, tracing the recent emergence of speciality coffee as a ‘niche’ product, and situating it in the context of restructuring urban economies geared towards service-sector, consumption-oriented activities. The essay then moves on to consider the difficulties encountered by Starbucks, the market leader in speciality coffee, in monitoring and manipulating the symbolic geographies of its coffee commodities as they migrated from the coffee shop and into other realms of representation. In particular it explores the issue of Starbucks’ product placement in the a number of motion pictures in the 1990s, arguing that such placements were embraced by the company as an opportunity to defuse criticism of the company's activities that amplified as the decade evolved. Finally, the essay looks at the high profile targeting of Starbucks coffee shops by protestors at the anti-globalization protests that accompanied the hosting of the 1999 WTO Ministerial Conference Meeting in Seattle, arguing that this moment can be seen to capture much of the complexity of mobilizing circumscribed place-specific ‘commodity biographies’ for a global product in an era characterized by increased scrutiny of the international division of labour.     

BANALITY FOR CULTURAL STUDIES

In her 1990 essay, ‘Banality in Cultural Studies,’ Meaghan Morris raises very serious concerns about the relatively unexamined role that banality plays in cultural studies' work. Taking up her challenge, this essay endeavors to unlock some of the ways that banality might be, as Morris suggests, ‘empowering’ and ‘enabling’ for cultural studies and, thus, not merely banality as something that is left behind after it has been exorcised or redeemed in the movements of cultural analysis itself. Beginning with a few of Morris' own critical coordinates (such as Michel de Certeau and Maurice Blanchot), this essay, then, looks to how banality enters into the triadic philosophical conceptualizations of Henri Lefebvre on ‘everyday life’ particularly through his concept of ‘everydayness’. Most of all, this essay investigates the ways that this often-undertheorized concept from Lefebvre might be brought to ‘life’ (in the widest sense imaginable) in the writings of Gilles Deleuze and Felix Guattari on ‘the virtual.’ The virtual is, in one sense, a means of grasping what lies beyond the realm of cognition a more diffuse view of the real that would include the incorporeal, the inorganic, and all points in-between (including a more broadly drawn version of consciousness). It will be argued that, through ‘the virtual,’ everyday life becomes available to cultural studies' accounts as a radically ‘open totality’ or Outside and, as such, the movements, as well as the politics, of critique take on a different sort of tone and trajectory.     

The Ecologies of Protest in the Theatre of Aztlán

Abstract

This essay looks at the work of the contemporary Mexican-American woman playwright, Cherríe Moraga. It focuses on two of her plays which were produced during the mid-1990s entitled Heroes and Saints and Watsonville: Some Place Not Here, although other plays from this period, such as Circle in the Dirt: El Pueblo de East Palo Alto, also appear in the study. The plays are based on Moraga’s responses to certain environmental and historical events which took place in California during this period. I explore how each work stages environmental protest in ways that reinscribe gender, myth, and indigeneity. In particular, I explore how Moraga recreates on stage utopian and dytopian and past and present landscapes, and how she stages feminist protest in response to both the levels of pesticides used in large-scale agricultural farming and the exploitation of the workers.     

De-publicized secularization and contemporary Chinese mass culture

This article attempts to distinguish two kinds of secularization and mass culture in contemporary China by creatively deploying Hannah Arendt, Jurgen Habermas and other western thinkers’ theories of secularization and modernity. It argues that, in the 1980s, China underwent a first process of secularization: that was characterized by liberating a secular society from the quasi-religious totalitarianism of the Cultural Revolution through the re-establishment of a civic society, which integrated individualism and publicness, with awareness of individual rights and rights for participation. The participation of new and self-disciplined rational individuals, who were concerned with pubic interests and issues. This essay takes Teresea Teng's popular songs as an important example of this first kind of secularization, as an attempt to demonstrate how the mass culture of the 1980s actively contributed to the construction of this new publicness. Since the 1990s, however, another kind of secularization emerged, one that did not care about the public world and others, but instead about material enjoyment and intimate private matters. Different from the religious path, this represents a way of abandoning the public world: it takes the form of a retreat into bodily/physiological happiness and one's secluded private world, leading to the development of a morbid narcissistic personality. This essay argues that these two kinds of secularization are the foundation and the starting point for us to understand the political effects of two kinds of mass culture.     

Managing Meaning: the constitutive contradictions of institutional culture

Abstract

This essay seeks to defamiliarise the currently dominant sense of institutional culture in South Africa. It does so first by examining the history of the emergence of the term in U.S. business studies in the late 1970s, and second, its translation/transposition into higher educational discourse in the 1980s. A third section examines the developing scepticism around the term in the 1990s, and the essay as a whole argues that the idea of institutional culture is based on a constitutive contradiction between instrumental and constitutive understandings of social process. The essay frames the debate around the ways in which the creation of new vocabulary responds either openly or in concealed ways to larger social trends and tensions, and notes the ways in which the current emphasis on institutional culture in South Africa curiously works to marginalise the dominant elements in the neo-liberal transformation of higher education.     

Expanding black subjectivities in Toni Morrison’s Song of Solomon and Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie’s Americanah

Deploying the call-and-response mode as the artistic premise of her fiction, foremost African-American author, Toni Morrison, has persistently called in her criticism for a participatory, intellectual and political, engagement with her position on and concerns around blackness. Morrison’s ideas are being critiqued and expanded to reflect contemporary ‘African’ attitudes and perspectives within the contemporary Afrodiasporic writing of critically acclaimed emergent author, Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie. In particular, Adichie has, in conversation and in her most recent fiction, suggested that Africans (in the diaspora) articulate themselves differently from African-Americans. Problematized and politicized thus as contested, rather than universally accepted, subjective terrain, blackness more significantly points to the diversity and dynamism of black culture and testifies, in the current socio-political/-historical moment, to recognition of the enduring complexity of black subjectivity. In a close, comparative reading of Morrison’s celebrated novel, Song of Solomon (1977), and Adichie’s popular text, Americanah (2013) – both recipients of the National Book Critics Circle award, this essay offers a fresh, specifically transatlantic and transnational, analysis of Morrison’s African-American views on blackness through the contemporary, Afrodiasporic lens of Adichie. Guided by the dialogic call-and-response mode, and underpinned by cultural, race and diaspora theory, the essay suggests and explores the ways in which Americanah speaks (back) to Morrison’s Song of Solomon, interrogating ontologies of race, particularly blackness, through an ‘Africanness’ that takes cognizance of culturally specific and context-responsive, globalized configurations of female subjectivity in particular. In this way, this essay seeks to expand understandings of, and discussions around, black issues and black life in order not just to resituate the relevance of black cultural ontologies but, through comparative engagement with the ‘politics’ of blackness, to revive in the political consciousness and imagination their crucial significance.     

Causativity in Czech: The Verbs dá(va)t and nech(áv)at

In the present essay I employ archetypal criticism to explore the mythological subtext of Valerii Shevchuk’s novella Hunchback Zoya. I argue that the theme of initiation of the male characters—congruous with the theme of healing repeatedly present in Shevchuk’s works—is central to this particular novella. My analysis of this topic relies on such Jungian notions as the archetype, the conscious and unconscious psyche, and individuation. I further argue, that like Shevchuk’s other works, his Hunchback Zoya endorses implicit post-colonial arguments, inviting parallels between the characters’ and the nation’s individuation. On this level the novella suggests that modern Ukraine is capable of reintegratiing its cultural and spiritual heritage and restoring its national selfhood.     

Creating Culturally Responsive Family Therapy Models and Research: Introducing the Use of Responsive Evaluation as a Method

Models of marriage and family therapy (MFT) typically reflect Western values and norms, and although cultural adaptations are made, many models/frameworks continue to be inappropriate or inadequate for use with non‐Western cultures. Worldwide, therapists are examining ways of using MFT models in a culturally sensitive manner, especially when working with clients who are seen as having minority status or perceived as “other” by the dominant group. This essay suggests the use of responsive evaluation as a theoretically consistent methodology for creating and evaluating culturally responsive therapies. This approach rigorously evaluates each unique client/therapist context, culture, power, needs, and beliefs. We describe responsive evaluation and discuss how each component addresses the research needs of examining culturally responsive family therapies. A case illustration is offered delineating the process of conducting culturally responsive therapy with a Cambodian sample using solution‐focused and narrative therapy.     

Pragmatics for the Production of Subjectivity: Time for Probe‐Heads

This article attends to the collaborative project of Gilles Deleuze and Felix Guattari, and specifically to their concept of “probe‐head” as mapped out in A Thousand Plateaus. Probe‐head names the rupturing of, and production of alternative modes of organisation to, the mixed semiotic of faciality that determines much of our lived life, in fact that constitutes us as “human”. In exploring this alternative “production of subjectivity” the essay attends also to Deleuze and Guattari’s notion of “several regimes of signs”, and to the idea of an experimental “pragmatics” of living. The essay goes on to map out what might be called two operating terrains of probe‐heads, in fact two different “times” of the contemporary – the past and the future – and looks at how these might be deployed against the impasses of the present. As far as the latter goes the essay looks at case studies of myth/modern paganism and contemporary art production.     

Translating Bourdieu into youth studies

ABSTRACT

Against a backdrop of lively discussion about the best ways to do youth studies, or sociology of youth, this article asks: Can Pierre Bourdieu’s work be translated into youth studies in ways that benefit the field? We begin by considering Bourdieu’s thoughts on the category of ‘youth’ using a new translation of this text, and then turn to an important discussion by Furlong, Woodman, and Wyn about certain long standing tensions in youth studies. These tensions are between writers engaging in the ‘structure versus agency’ debate that is mapped onto the ‘culture versus transitions’ binary. We consider the case for adopting a ‘middle-ground’ represented by Bourdieu’s writings. We argue that many in youth studies work from an unacknowledged substantialist tradition, which is contra to Bourdieu's relational perspective. The result includes misunderstandings of Bourdieu's thinking and expectations of his work, for example, that it can pass certain empirical tests. We argue that if Bourdieu's relational perspective is to be translated into youth studies, we will need a more determined effort to understand that perspective first.     

‘Intercourse in every direction’: America as global phenomenon

In news magazines and scholarly journals a wide‐ranging ‘globe‐talk’ has arisen since the 1970s in response to recent transformations in the world. Much of the discourse reflects a growing international concern about U.S. dominance of the world’s economy and cultural production. Understandably, the discourse is about agency. The United States has dominated global affairs since the Second World War and especially since the end of the Cold War ‐ militarily, economically, and culturally. It is sometimes forgotten, however, how much America is a product of the internationalizing processes it has come to symbolize. This essay argues that the United States is as much a product as an agent of globalization and that, if we accept the logic of globalization, the United States as a national culture is being undermined in much the same ways as other countries. The title of the paper is borrowed from the Communist Manifesto, an ironically prescient document that 150 years ago outlined the processes of globalization that characterize America’s global history and forecast the transformations we experience worldwide today.     

Situating Children's Voices: Considering the Context When Conducting Research with Young Children

I problematise my own concept of children's voices in research by reflecting on certain practices in a study that I conducted in a kindergarten classroom in a city in Saudi Arabia. I examine the cultural and social contexts of my research by drawing on my experience of obtaining children's assent or dissent, my assumptions regarding the possibility of reducing power differentials, and finally, my understanding of the ways children voice their feelings and views. I conclude that voices manifest themselves in multiple ways that extend beyond visual or verbal media. Voices are constructed socially and are shaped culturally to reflect norms regarding how individuals should express their views and feelings within a particular setting and time.     

Letters to the Editor

The 1990s have not been easy times for social welfare advocates and their clients. Not only must advocacy efforts contend with repressive new legislation, but the creation of a new, diffuse policy environment makes many traditional advocacy techniques either ineffective or difficult to use. This article examines the forces that confront today's advocate, suggests ways to address these issues with new technologically based advocacy techniques, and suggests ways to incorporate these techniques into the social welfare policy curriculum. Techniques discussed include database applications, e-mail, Internet publishing, and Internet-based research.     

Rethinking ‘Rethinking Convergence/Culture’

Responding to the September 2011 special issue on ‘Rethinking Convergence Culture’, this essay seeks to identify ways that the author's thinking about convergence and participatory culture have shifted over time, often in ways that are closely aligned with the issue's contributors. Throughout the essay, the author addresses the links between cultural and political participation, the challenges in using new media in support of democratic change, the ways that institutional power structures continue to exert strong influence on our culture despite or perhaps because of significant expansion of who has access to the means of cultural production and distribution and the challenges and opportunities for doing cultural theory in an era of neo-liberal capitalism.     

Goffman Against Postmodernism: Emotion and the Reality of the Self

Goffman has been read as arguing that selves are no more than images created in conformity with situational expectations. I read Goffman as saying that the reality of selfhood is not an image, but a psychobiological proces shaped by signs and symbols. Seen in this way, the reality of the self is evident, as Goffman suggested, not in conformity but in moments of feeling, resistance, and choice. Drawing out what is implicit in Goffman, this article proposes that all forms of signifying behavior, including self-presentations, are means to sustain the coherence of the self. For this to work, however, people must, as Goffman pointed out, trust each other to respect the rules governing signifying behavior and must care about the feelings attached to selves. The article argues that the inequalities of so-called postmodern society are undermining the trust and care on which the interaction order and coherent selfhood depend. Goffman's ideas about the self are used to develop an optimistic critique of the conditions that have produced these pernicious trends.     

Working Nine to Nine: The New Women of Prime Time

Contemporary psychoanalytic gender theory has posited two psychic structures typical of the heterosexual family's gender arrangements: male defensive autonomy and female relational submissiveness. This essay looks at recent television shows that normalize defensive autonomy in women. These shows, and the young women they reach, are products of a “stalled” feminist revolution and an impoverished cultural imaginary that offers its subjects, male and female, only these two split positions.     

Childlessness and Women Managers: ‘Choice’, Context and Discourses

Childlessness is increasing and might reflect acceptance of diversity, scope for individual choice and a creative ‘social imaginary’ about being feminine without being a mother. Childlessness also appears to have a contextual manifestation arising from the recognition that the long‐hours work culture in many organizations does not support appropriate parenting. A qualitative study of Australian managers reveals the contradictory discourses of childlessness around enlightened equality, maternalism, an elusive, ideal ‘work–life balance’ and individualism. The article explores a contextually nuanced, dynamic, generative theory of agency which does not hinge on the mother–child dyad, in explaining women managers’ choices to remain childless.     

Photographic portraits of migrants in South Africa: framed between identity photographs and (self-)presentation

This essay explores how migration within the African continent is framed visually by passport photos as well as artistic documentary projects based in Johannesburg, South Africa. It offers examples of what type of photographic (self-)portraits are constructed, which photographs circulate and how African migrants’ self-images as well as South African society’s perception of them are affected by certain photographic images. The method employed is a close reading of some paradigmatic photographs. In addition, I will discuss different – and often gendered – ways in which African migrant subjects may become visible. In short, this essay asks, what photographic portraits construct the hegemonic view of the African migrant subject in the public sphere? Accordingly, the tension between visibility and invisibility of African migrants’ lives emerges in the interstices of the inquiry. The paper first looks at the taking of identity photographs, since the passport photo exemplifies how the individual is made visible by the nation state. It can simultaneously serve as a poignant reminder of the ambivalent qualities of photography: on the one hand, documenting and codifying, and on the other hand, creatively representing. In this context, the essay explores the possibility of remaining invisible or “opaque,” but also the conceivably more empowering representational aspect of photography such as we see in participatory (art) projects, which may be connected to the visual politics of self-expression and reflection.     

FIGURES OF HOPE AND THE FILMIC IMAGINARY OF JIANGHU IN CONTEMPORARY HONG KONG CINEMA

Through an extensive allegorical reading of films, this paper attempts to capture a certain cultural form of imagination in Hong Kong during the transitional period leading up to the historical handover of power in 1997. Dwelling on the world of signification conjured up through what I call the jianghu filmic imaginary,the analysis focuses on the ideological and utopian impulses registered in relation to a whole emotional complex of anxiety, bewilderment and despair in the works of some highly creative local filmmakers of the genre: Ching Siu-Tong, Ann Hui, Tsui Hark and Wong KarWai. The study draws theoretically from Castoriadis's notion of the social imaginary and Bloch's aesthetics of hope, to focus on the textual and contextual re-constructions of a number of very unconventional martial arts swordplay (wuxia) films made in Hong Kong in the last two decades: namely, Tsui's Butterfly Murders (1979), Hui's Romance of Book and Sword (1987), Ching/Tsui's Swordsman II (1992), and Wong's Ashes of Time (1994). By identifying the ideological and affective moments in the filmic imaginary,I want to trace what has been left in a ruined culture for utopian longings, and point to the presence/absence of ‘hope’ as the cultural imagination for an unknown and unknowable future (beyond 1997). It is my contention that an understanding of that peculiar form of popular imaginary at the unusual juncture of Hong Kong's history can begin with a critical attempt to cope with this subtle practice of hope, so as to recognize (or reject) it as mediation in the process of our collective cultural crisis, anticipation and identification.