Writing the Ordinary

Harry Garuba presenting

Our session on the 13^th afternoon, featuring Meg Samuelson, Harry Garuba, and Laetitia Zecchini, was arguably the most literary of the JWTC sessions. Harry and Meg focused primarily on the novel, while Laetitia discussed the ordinary in poetry. Meg argued that the novel offers the theorisation of everyday lived reality, particularly in a mode of reading which views literary texts as offering novel ways of seeing. The South African novel, Meg argued, has sought to embed itself in the ordinary as a mark of its South Africanness, beginning with the first South African novel, Olive Schreiner’s 1883 The Story of an African Farm [http://www.gutenberg.org/ebooks/1441]. Such an embrace of the ordinary operated as an attempt to inscribe South Africa as a lived place, and not merely as an exotic backdrop. Within South African literary criticism, two major debates around ordinariness can be dated to the 1980s and to the last decade, corresponding roughly to major socio-political developments. Writing in 1984, Njabulo Ndebele’s essay, “The Rediscovery of the Ordinary” [http://www.jstor.org/stable/2636740 ], advanced the writing of the ordinary as a way of reclaiming political and epistemological agency in black South African thought. In 2003, in contrast, Neville Alexander’s book An Ordinary Country argued that the post-apartheid era had transformed contemporary South Africa into an ordinary country, no longer a moral or political exception but a nation like so many others, subject to the rule of neoliberal capital. This ordinariness is then signalled in the South African novel’s turning outwards: its discussion of other places whose conditions relate to the ordinariness of life here.

Harry Garuba also discussed Ndebele’s essay, pairing it however with debates from the other side of the Atlantic. For Harry, literary modernity arrived with an investment in the ordinary, with the novel operating as the genre which invested in the ordinary, particularly through realism. The ordinary in black critical thought, however, has been deployed not as the ordinary of realism and of journalism but rather as the ordinary of the everyday, the ordinary of lived experience in situations of racial oppression and exploitation. In such circumstances, the ordinary becomes a resource which can be mobilized as a resource for social change, an argument made forcefully by James Baldwin in the 1949 “Everybody’s Protest Novel” [eng794spring2010.files.wordpress.com/2010/03/baldwinprotest.pdf ] and the 1951 “Many Thousands Gone” [http://www.dcgogo.com/jamesbaldwin.html]. In a society of the image and spectacle, the representation of the ordinary tends towards a condition of impossibility. Consequently, Harry noted, black critical thought has deployed the ordinary in perverse or at least counter-intuitive ways. The ordinary for Baldwin, for instance, is understood to hold a complex fruit which mere realism cannot capture. In this vision, the ordinary resides in art, and art is the key to unlocking the ordinary.

For Laetitia Zecchini, drawing on Victor Shklovsky’s “Art as Technique,” the purpose of art is the salvaging of the ordinary from readymade forms. In the work of poets like Arun Kolatkar, the ordinary thus becomes a residual space wherein creation and realism can both take place. This idea of the relationship between the ordinary and poetry is deeply indebted to the legacies of modernism and surrealism, evidenced for instance in Georges Perec’s discussion of “The Infra-Ordinary” [http://www.daytodaydata.com/georgesperec.html ]

In the hopes of continuing our conversation in this arena, I will enumerate some of the questions we discussed:

• The ordinary can be understood as the self-evident, the commonsensical, the banal: that which is so unremarkable that it need not be said. Does this mean, however, that the ordinary tends towards the impossibility of its representation?
• How can we understand the position of the literary with respect to ordinary life? How might critical theory within literary studies consider seriously the vast array of storytelling practices which occur outside of the form of the novel? How might the study of the literary benefit from attention to non-fiction and oral forms?
• Attending to fiction enables us to attend to the relations among knowledge, imagination, and everyday lived realities, and, in addition, to the powers of language as such. This has resulted historically in a particularly significant role for literary theory in critical theory as a whole. How might we understand that special relationship between literary studies and critical theory today? Does this special role still hold after the end, as it were, of the linguistic turn?

My own inclinations regarding the ordinary in literary studies have centred less around the writing of the ordinary – its inscription or mobilisation in literary forms – than in something we might term ordinary reading. Such an examination of the ordinary through literary studies would necessitate, I suspect, greater attention to the ways in which unremarkable books are read by unremarkable people, whether in book clubs, in bedrooms, or in commuter transit, usually involving neither the favoured authors of literary studies nor the favoured techniques of academic reading. Ordinary reading is part of our inhabitation in mass culture, a space of literary practice which is mostly unremarked-upon but perhaps not unremarkable. Attending to ordinary reading, however, would take us beyond disciplinary boundaries, requiring, for instance, a nuanced theory of how people from a variety of linguistic and educational backgrounds interact with written materials. Such a project would transgress literary studies’ investment in singularity, necessitating a combined attention to the banality of literacy and the exceptionality of the literary.

Madhumita Lahiri

Traffic in words // breaking silence

If I say to you, “I am struck”, as in, “I am struck by the way we speak”, what kind of speech act would I be embroiling you in? Mostly, I want to say (and the very fact of my desire signals my failure), I am struck dumb. How could I possibly SAY this? What locutionary force could possibly be present in an act that cancels itself by its utterance? Entirely infelicitous, you would say.

This is precisely my predicament. And it is my predicament because I suffer it alone, I should properly say. My silence, my inability not just to express my thoughts (as if thinking were ever a purely interior experience, which I’ve never felt to be true), but to contribute generously to the collective conversation, I experience as a meanness on my part. (And if my silence is now marked by the recent outpouring of words concerning the necessary silence of white South Africans, I can do nothing about that except try to register my sense that MY silence is not that silence, that those words miss the mark – miss my mark).

And my mark, my aim, is to register some sense of the conversation, its qualities, textures, tones, excesses, brevities, of the JWTC this year. If the critical question of conversation is one of HOW we enter into it, how we enter the right words, transmit them, receive them, roll in them, then I want to say it should be, must be, mutual. Mutuality, after all, was staked as the vital source of redeeming the human from capital’s tendency to make waste human life – if I can retrieve Achille’s generous thought of 2009. What then of hesitation, accent, tone, unfinished thinking? What then of listening? Of performatively making hearing the critical question of conversation? What then of the question of voice and ear, rather than, or as well as, or alongside, eye and image? Commodity and spectacle and politics routed through image and screen contra voice, register, ear?

I am struck. The speech act again, but not just by accent and style and the profusion of words that trample, strike, drown, but by the queasy discomfort with thinking the ordinary, the everyday. I register the blow in the viscera. How much talk on the limit of the ordinary has turned on the capacities of the various parts of the body amenable to thinking? Those parts seem to stretch at the limit of metaphor, of metaphoricity, precisely because we want to resist the ordinary senses in which we speak with and from those capacities. We want them to perform extraordinarily, perhaps because we’re disappointed with the work they’ve done in the history of philosophy. But beneath, or alongside, our talk of the senses, in particular the eye and the skin in framing image and surface as concepts that labour across domains of thought and local instantiations, we have spoken of the psychoanalytics of teeth and power, of the political economy of evisceration, of the pulse of the archive, of the dialectics of tangibility (and striking and stroking). And yet we want not to take this kind of talk too seriously, as it were, for fear of being simple-minded, of taking it too literally, of missing some profundity. In this regard I am reminded of Stanley Cavell’s response to Derrida’s reading of Austin, in particular of Austin’s criticism of philosophy’s craven desire for profundity. Without developing fully the lines of thought I would otherwise want to, and putting aside the question of “ordinary language” (or at least our telling avoidance of the question of the ordinary as having something to do with fragility of the everyday, that is, the threat of our words missing their mark, of our saying more and less than we meant to, of our failing to recognise ourselves, or our world falling out from underneath our feet, as a condition of life not simply or entirely assimilable to a set of political, economic, psychic, or historical forces), I am tickled, as it were, by a week’s worth of sophisticated words and eloquent theories of the ordinary. We have battled with the question of what it is to enter into the mutuality of thought entirely implicitly – and thus regrettably. Big words up front about not doing Northern performance (by which we were meant to understand something like “showing off for the sake of appearing intelligent”), and self-reminders about “theorising from the South”.

I wager, here and now, late in the day though it is, that something of the form of conversation as we find it here in southern Africa would be useful as a mode through we might seek both theory and mutuality. It is a form that seeks to afford respect as much it seeks to garner it; it greets, enquires, affirms, honours, invites, circles, pauses, waits, deliberates, deflects, returns, and much more. Without descending to the order of proper or clean language, such a form, it seems to me, proceeds, can only proceed, because of some quiet acknowledgement of the capacity of these very words of ours for repudiation, failure, insult, or misdirection. Perhaps those meadows of communication* we all long for must remain just beyond our grasp, ever obscured by scepticism and its irritations. Or perhaps we relax into minor ordinariness.

* See Cavell, The Claim of Reason, p. 172.

Thomas Cousins, graduate student, Department of Anthropology, Johns Hopkins University

Wrecking Theory or Politics? Ackbar Abbas on Wrecked Objects and Poor Theory

Ackbar Abbas

Ackbar Abbas' wonderful talk, entitled "Wrecked Objects, the Ordinary, and Poor Theory," provided an opportunity to think more deeply about how it is that we can theorise the ordinary in light of its relationship with objects and situations of ruin. Drawing from examples ranging from Joseph Conrad's Lord Jim, Leo Tolstoy's Anna Karenina, to Junichiro Tanazaki's In Praise of Shadows and Wong Kar Wei's film In the Mood for Love, Professor Abbas led the workshop through an examination of the nature of objects, the concept of dis-appointment, and the impact of these reconceptualisations on the act of theorising (what Abbas calls "poor theory") and the politics that emanates from this version of theory.

The discussions of Lord Jim and Anna Karenina provided the first building blocks of Abbas' argument. Both texts, Abbas argues, show us one of the key unreflected-upon elements of objects - namely, that "the more they remain the same, the more they change." In leaving us with their ruin, we can only take either a position of melancholic longing for a former state, or one of boredom. Even though Walter Benjamin argues that boredom is a state of mental relaxation that prepares us for seeing the world in a different way (the "profane illumination" he draws from the Surrealists), Abbas' reading of Anna Karenina gives two different angles on this - the failed quest for the ever-new or interesting, and the realisation that the repetitive, irritative aspects of the undifferentiated object or life is what must be worked through, or as Freud put it, turning neurosis into "ordinary unhappiness."

Abbas then turned to a discussion of how it is that we can work through this "ordinary unhappiness," or what he termed dis-appointment. Here, he takes dis-appointment as not the sadness that comes from having expectations not be met, but rather as "things not being in their appointed places"; or, to put it another way, the disjuncture between how we expect the world to be and the card hand we are dealt (hence the hyphenation to distinguish between the two senses). Moving through discussions of Tanazaki's aesthetics and Julien's praise of blandness, as well as the experiences of boredom and distraction, Abbas draws out the insights that ordinary objects offer us in their ordinariness an opportunity to speculate on alternative possible histories and futures, and do so by opening not onto some new exciting metaphysical reality, but rather onto the plenitude of this reality, in which we should abide.

This then led Abbas to the discuss some of the contours of what he terms "poor theory." Drawing from Henri Lefebvre's work on the critique of everyday life, Abbas offered the insight that the goal is not the critique of the ordinary, but rather seeing the ordinary as a form of critique. Reading Charlie Chaplin's "Tramp" character as attempting, though humourously failing, to conform to the morés of contemporary society, Abbas offers the insight (in some ways paralleling Ann Stoler's earlier talk on "imperial debris") that theorising as a practice needs to begin from the ordinary, working with the ruins of the situation in which we theorise in order to develop the building blocks of a better society. But, Abbas argued, these blocks are incomplete; the objects and states of life from which they draw are in ruins, changed through their repetition and our changed frame of reference. Hence, we must work with what we have, "tinkering" with both theory and method in relation to our situatedness and the objects with which we work. Because we start from the ruins, the hope for some idealised state of affairs falls away as a possibility; we must necessarily move from a politics of hope to a politics of dis-appointment, recognising that objects, states of living, and even the unanticipated consequences of our actions are never quite where we think they should be, and may not end up necessarily fitting our vision of what the world should be or the time frame in which we think it should happen.

[It should be noted that, most likely for reasons of time, Abbas was unable to fully detail his conception of "poor theory." In the interests of figuring it out for myself, I found "Poor Theory: Notes Toward a Manifesto" online - http://www.humanities.uci.edu/critical/poortheory.pdf - and have incorporated elements of that manifesto into this discussion.]

There was much in Professor Abbas' talk to spark response, and the workshop certainly availed itself of the invitation, especially taking the discussion in the direction of playing with the distinctions and tensions offered in the conceptions of the politics of hope and dis-appointment. I won't take it in that direction. Instead, I want to play with two elements of Abbas' presentation that either tie directly to the theme of this year's workshop - "Ordinary States | States of Ordinariness" or to my own reasons for being here. The first has to do with Abbas' conceptualisation of the "ordinary" as, to paraphrase Abbas, the undifferentiated, that which either resists representation or can only be represented negatively as boredom. There are a couple of concerns about this version of the ordinary. The first is how this squares with what I have seen developing across the workshop to date - namely, a conception of the ordinary that is analytically circumscribed by its scale, the frame with which we orient to it, its frequency, and a dialectics of proximity to the situation we seek to understand as ordinary or in its ordinariness. This circumscription of the ordinary would seem to be extensible; that is, we can take it to places other than those we might common-sensically or automatically call "ordinary," such as interactions with one's local pub owner or experiences of commuting on a packed highway. Bringing to bear these four elements, we can begin to understand such experiences as those of Black men seeking to enter Johannesburg for work in their monthly dealings with the influx control bureaucracy (as illustrated during the Workshop's visit to the Old Pass Office -- http://www.southafrica.info/about/social/usindiso-shelter.htm) or of people's experiences of surveillance under Soviet rule as "ordinary." We could even go so far as to use it to examine "ordinary violence," whether exerted by states or other people. But what happens to this extensibility of "the ordinary" if we also insist that the ordinary must be undifferentiated, unable to be represented, or just plain boring? Do we lose a certain degree of that "profane illumination" by virtue of adding this fifth criterion? Does it reinforce a bias about the ordinary that has until recent times left it unexamined? Does it return us to an "extraordinary | ordinary" binary that leaves these kinds of experiences only able to be thought through a perspective of these moments as deviant, out of the norm, unusual?

The second concern I have has to do with what I am sure was a "throwaway" comment, in which Professor Abbas said, "Thinking from the South is not the same as Southern thinking." My primary reason for attending this workshop was precisely to work on this problem and to gain a deeper insight into both sides of this inequation, both what it means to theorise "from the South" and to understand Southern theory. If we take the invitation to do "poor theory" offered by Abbas, we must necessarily start with the ruins of things. For the South, this has an entirely different set of meanings and enacts an entirely different set of constraints and contours on theorising than it does from the North - and it necessarily means that there is not one "theory from the South," but multiple versions of this precisely because there are multiple Souths, itself an effect of the ruins of the various colonial empires, neocolonial relations, and experiences of the global hegemony exerted by the US and the increasing investment, especially here in Africa, by the Chinese government. As the "Poor Theory Manifesto" itself points out, "Poor theory thinks historically, relationally, and theoretically around and against denials of co-evalness. Through new mixings of the practical and the theoretical, it destabilizes prior and continuing formations of the national, the colonial, the imperial, and the postcolonial as pure categories." If that is indeed the case, when we think broadly about the South(s) or "thinking from the South," then the undifferentiatedness of the ordinary must necessarily and logically fall away from "poor theorising." But what does that leave us with as the building blocks, or even the broken stones, through which we can theorise? On the one hand, it seems to suggest that there are significant variations between versions of "Southern thinking"; on the other, we are left with an inability to think about the varieties of thinking of "the South" precisely because they are differentiated and therefore violate the starting premises.

To my mind, there is no easy way to solve these dilemmas. My own inclination is to preserve the profane illumination Abbas suggests is key to the endeavour of "poor theorising," and to follow the call to destabilise the conceptions of the national, the colonial, the imperial, the postcolonial, and even the South offered in the "Poor Theory Manifesto." However, much like the concept of the ordinary, we as theorists have not yet really unpacked the implications of the idea of "poor theory" nor heeded its demands, and seem to find it easier to assume the lowest common denominator of these analytic frames. If that is indeed the case with our discussions or our efforts, then I fear that we will fail to really develop either an agentic thinking from the South or Southern thinking, and will instead wreck Southern theory, leaving it trapped in a collection of dusty relics like Stein's butterfly in Lord Jim. Abbas' idea of "poor theory" appears to give us the tools to do what I think we should be doing; the question remains as to whether or not our project is already ruined.

Scott Schaffer is Associate Professor of Sociology at the University of Western Ontario in London, Canada, where he is a member of the Centre for the Study of Theory and Criticism and the Africa Institute. His research is in the areas of contemporary and non-Western/Northern social theory, cosmopolitanism, ethics, sacrifice, and the traces of the Protestant ethic in social development policies and programs. He is the author of Resisting Ethics (Palgrave Macmillan, 2004), the PDF of which he is happy to send you upon request as long as you promise to read it in its entirety and to find the joke. Email: sschaff2 [at] uwo [dot] ca.