It is, because that’s where the subject lives as theorist, consumer, grocery shopper, got-to-pick-up-the-mail-now, let’s get to the bank. That subject is really living in the everyday. The question for me is how do you talk about or think about those different beats or rhythms through which you live your life. In other words, there is a doing and then there is a contemplating the doing. Those are two kinds of emphasis in the life of the same subject. There is the standing in relationship to an event, anticipating an event, and then there’s a getting a perspective on the event. One lives in the everyday and that’s one of the reasons why I’m a little concerned that our discussions about internationalism have made it harder for us to focus on the everyday. There might in fact be a global village, I can email or call someone right now, I can certainly go to Canada and instantly exchange money and vice-versa. All the trade agreements have made us a little closer to each other in the world across barriers of languages and cultures. But, I live my life everyday with a postal system, a system of currency, a certain set of neighbors, a certain kind of foodstuff and food culture.. There are certain people that I think about and call up. I live in a national culture, in the everyday world. So how do you think about that in relationship to Homi Bhabha’s “escalator” that he introduces in The Location of Culture. (see: Homi Bhahbha. The Location of Culture New York: Routledge, 1994) The notion of hybridity and ambiguity is a very powerful notion, it has a certain glamour and sex appeal, but I don’t live on an escalator. I mean at some point, I land. Theoretically that might not be interesting but that’s what happens and so that reality has to be worked into the theoretical configuration, or we are misleading or perverting what actually happens. I live in one culture at a time, I might speak several languages or idiolects in it. The post-colonial and the post-modern have a way of always moving the discussion somewhere else. But you take the “local” with you, whatever your “local” is, into these various cultural and theoretical zones. A lot of this comes back to what you actually do on the ground, in the everyday. What I’m suggesting is that it is one thing to make pronouncements in public spaces about fraternity, brotherhood, liberty, and justice. But it’s another thing to come back where you live and to make that a part of your practice. The disparity between those two things is what we call hypocrisy, and observing it makes me realize that I don’t like my own lapses, I don’t like other people’s lapses, even though we know we have to live with them. It’s a way of making people responsible beyond the pressures of their own rhetorical commitments, and the realization that commitments have to be something other than rhetorical; they have to be practical or praxial, in the sense of a practice. That’s what I see missing in our discussions today about race, gender, class, sexual preference. We talk a lot of stuff about openness and plurality and diversity and so on, but what’s the practice? What is the actual practice between one subject and another, between one leftist and another? There are troubling conclusions you have to draw about the generation of the ‘60s and its actual practices, what we actually do when we get home or when the television cameras are not there. You can’t believe that Clinton ought to come out more strongly for children’s rights, one asserts out of his mouth if you don’t take care of your own children. Women should have access or rights, but you don’t treat your women colleagues very well, the women around you, and the same relating to men. What’s the practice? The question is: Is there a place in theory today for us to to be critical of various gaps or lapses or aporias in the theoretical?
snowghoul
2087
vaporwave
