Banality for Cultural Studies more

C U LT U R A L S T U D I E S 1 4 ( 2 ) 2 0 0 0 , 2 2 7 –2 6 8 Gregory J. Seigworth BANALITY FOR CULTURAL ST UDIES A b stract In her 1990 essay,‘Banality in Cultural Studies,’ M eaghan M or ris raises very serious concer ns about the relatively unexam ined role that banality plays in cultural studies’ work. Taking up her c hallenge, this essay endeavors to unlock som e of the ways that banality m ight be, as M orris suggests, ‘em power ing’ and ‘enabling’ for cultural studies and, thus, not m erely banality as som ething that is left behind after it has been exorcised or redeem ed in the m ovem ents of cultural analysis itself. Beginning w ith a few of M orris’ ow n critical coordinates (such as M ichel de Certeau and M aurice Blanchot), this essay, then, looks to how banality enters into the triadic philosophical conceptualizations of H enri Lefebvre on ‘everyday life’ – particularly through his concept of ‘everydayness’. M ost of all, this essay investigates the ways that this often-under theorized concept from Lefebvre m ight be brought to ‘life’ (in the widest sense im aginable) in the w ritings of G illes D eleuze and Felix G uattari on ‘the virtual.’ The virtual is, in one sense, a m eans of grasping w hat lies beyond the realm of cognition – a m ore diffuse view of the real that would include the incorporeal, the inorganic, and all points in-between (including a m ore broadly draw n version of consciousness). It w ill be argued that, through ‘the virtual,’ everyday life becom es available to cultural studies’ accounts as a radically ‘open totality’ or O utside and, as suc h, the m ovem ents, as well as the politics, of critique take on a different sort of tone and trajectory. K eyw ords Banality; virtual; everyday life; the outside; rhythm analysis; the w hole/totality; incorporeal Cultural Studies ISSN 0950-2 386 pr int/ISSN 146 6-43 48 online © 2000 Taylo r & Fran cis Ltd http://w w w.tandf.co.uk/journals/routledge/095023 86 .htm l 228 C U LT U R AL S T U D I E S There is still the dream of the transcendence of the banal through the banal, the dream of the transcendence of everyday life through the transform ation of everyday life. The m etaphor of the jour ney – the hard road and the river – is the m ost trite, overused, banal m etaphor im aginable for the way we m ove forward through tim e; yet it is also worth rem em bering the power of this m etaphor as a focus for collective as well as per sonal identi cation in an always un nished narrative of historical loss and redem ption, as a lens through w hic h the past is given shape and direction, and hence redeem ed as it delivers us here, now, in front of a future w hich is pulled sharply into focus as a virtual space – blank, colourless, shapeless, a space to be m ade over, a space where everything is still to be won. (D ick H ebdige, 1993: 278) . . . the d ream of transcend ence of the banal throug h the b anal . . . M cultural studies’ is easily one of the m ost disquieting essays ever w ritten on cultural studies. I have always presum ed that alm ost anyone w ho encounters it m ight, henceforth, decide to swear off banality, if not also cultural studies itself. It is not exactly the kind of essay that m ight inspire anyone to pick up his or her pen (or turn on their com puter) and begin w riting. To read it is to risk an unusual sort of paralysis: the brain freezes, the eyes tem porarily lose their ability to focus quite so unproblem atically on the apparent object of their gaze, and the tongue refuses to reproduce anyone else’s speech except its ow n (if even that). To cut-and-paste (in order to distort the m eaning of) a wonderful blurb from Ann Curthoys found on the back cover of M orris’ (1998) edited collection Too Soon Too Late, ‘Banality in cultural studies’ causes its readers to beg in to ‘fret about m ethod, m use on theory, and probe the contextual in a way w hich m akes it hard [in fact, nearly im possible!] . . . M orris m akes ideas we thought sim ple dif cult again’. 1 Luckily, I am here to report that these paralysing after-effects are usually only tem porary and m ight turn out to be transform ative. And it is w hat can be transform ative about ‘banality’ in cultural studies that I want to explore in this essay. It is im portant to recognize that M eaghan M orris does not intend to c hase away banality (in all of its potential m odes) from cultural studies. Indeed, she acknow ledges that a certain version of banality is an inescapable and, even, a necessary com ponent for the project of cultural studies. U ntil this other banality is m ore directly reckoned w ith, M orris (1990) cautions that attem pts to m erely ignore it or negotiate a w ide path around it w ill only cause banality to continually return to trouble cultural studies as an ‘irritant’ (p. 40). The best option, then, m ight be to peer into this m atter of banality m ore closely and EAG HA N M ORRIS’ ‘BANALITY IN B AN A L IT Y F O R C U LT U R AL S T U D I E S 229 attem pt to understand w hatever potentials it m ight have to offer. A s M orris asserts, in w hat I take as one of the pivotal sentences of her ‘Banality’ essay: ‘w hat m ay transform analytical procedures at their frontiers is precisely a ‘banality’ of which the repression has constituted historically an enabling, even em powering, condition for the study of popular culture’ (p. 32). Q uite convinced, then, by M orris’ cultural studies critique (even as m uch as I was, adm ittedly, once laid low by it), I w ish here to nd a way – and, of course, there is always m ore than one w ay – toward this other ‘banality’, one that m ight be ‘enabling, even em powering’: a banality for cultural studies, and not just another banality in (or by or of) cultural studies. 2 A t tim es, getting to this other banality for cultural studies m ay prove to be a rather circuitous journey (although w hether it is by hard road or river, I cannot say). But m any of the initial steps along this route need not take us very far from som e of the sam e travelling com panions that M eaghan M orris picks up along her ow n path. Indeed, in her ‘Banality’ essay, M or ris sketches out one potentially productive version of this other banality in the w ritings of M ichel de Certeau. By explicitly turning to de Certeau, M orris is, in part, responding to those profoundly sincere but overly rom antic critical rein ections of his work that have used it to uncover those various ‘resistances’ and ‘tactics’ w here, ultim ately,‘[t]he people are . . . the textually delegated, allegorical em blem of the cr itic’s ow n activity’ (p. 23). M or ris shifts her critical attention to de Cer teau’s argum ent that, if banality belongs anyw here as transform ative potential, it is in ‘the arrival at a com mon ‘place’, which is not (as it m ay be for populism ) an initial state of grace, and not (as it is in Baudr illard) an indiscrim inate, inchoate condition, but on the contrary, som ething that ‘com es into being’ at the end of a trajectory’ (p. 35). But it is the trajectory’s very m ovem ent that m ight bear the closest attention: if only because the notion of an ‘arrival at a comm on place’ raises som e pertinent questions, as well, about the tim e and locale of departure. Turning to de Cer teau’s ow n words, one nds that this trajectory never fully separates itself from his ow n repeated accent on a banal ‘over ow ’. In the pages from The Practice of Everyday Life that are so cr ucial to M orris’ argum ent, M ichel de Certeau (1984) returns again and again to this ‘over ow ’: ‘banality over ow s specialty and brings knowledge back to its general presuppositions’ (p. 4); ‘an over ow ing of the com m on in a particular position’ (p. 5); ‘the work of overow ing operates by the insinuation of the ordinary into scienti c elds’ (ibid). Finally, de Certeau concludes this particular section of his text w ith a fully resonant ourish on the enunciative-position and the analytical ‘task’ that coincides with this notion of a banal over ow: Even if it is draw n into the oceanic rum ble of the ordinary, the task consists not in substituting a representation for the ordinary or covering it up w ith m ere words, but in showing how it introduces itself into our tec hniques – in the way in w hic h the sea ow s back into pockets and crevices 230 C U LT U R AL S T U D I E S in beaches – and how it can reorganize the place from w hic h discourse is produced. (de Certeau, 1984: 5) It is in this w ay that a cr itical trajectory and an ‘over ow ’ m ight be im agined together – not as an ‘analytic technique’ that works in a theoretical lift-up-outof-the-m undane m anoeuvre so as to leave banality behind in an act of mutual elevation for both theory and the everyday, nor, from a different direction (but with sim ilar end-effects), as a critical rope-repelling exercise into banality that, then, achieves it for both critical discourse and ‘popular’ context. In regard to these two trajectories, M ichel de Cer teau calls the form er ‘the privilege of speaking in the nam e of the ordinary (it cannot be spoken)’ and the latter ‘claim ing to be in that general place (that would be a false “mysticism ”)’ (p. 5). And even worse than these two, he adds, is ‘offering up a hagiographic everydayness’ (ibid). For now, however, the m ere m ention of this third and worst alternative w ill have to serve as a bit of foreshadow ing since its fullest im plications can be m ore easily delineated later. In lieu of these three alternatives, M ichel de Certeau’s particular conceptualization calls for a course of action that locates banality (a productive banality) as ‘the place from which discourse is produced’ (M orris, 1990: 35). No m utual elevation, no descent as critical rope-repelling, no saintly chronicle of always unglim psed, but later redem ptive, everyday salvation: it is a trajectory that is only and ever extruded through the banal as im m anent (over) ow. There is no room , then, for the kind of path tow ard transcendence that would dare to dream itself as above or som ehow detachable. 3 Q uite adm ittedly, this m ight seem to be a rather strange trajectory since its m ovem ent as an analytic technique never beg ins from an ‘elsew here’ nor does it conclude there. Rather, its m ovem ent – always in conjunction w ith a banal over ow – em erges from a spatio-tem poral suspension of sorts: w here effective difference and transform ative potential are not achieved in the apparent distance between departure and destination, but, through traversing along the cusp of inseparable points of ow, as a trajectory or line in continual variation w ith itself. In other words, this is a trajectory not unlike an ‘oceanic rum ble’ or wave: capable of in nite variation in its undulations, capable of im m easurable alterations in its force and sweep, capable of returning w ith all m anner of things to its own beac h (as well as sending other elem ents out and aw ay), capable of nearly anything except granting itself the other shore. Interestingly, then, w hen M eaghan M orris returns to further explore the interstices of som e of these very issues, she does so in an essay entitled ‘O n the beach’. M aking a m ove from M ichel de Certeau’s m odel of everyday praxis as enunciation/evasion to Henri Lefebvre’s w ritings on everyday life, M or ris nds her pivot point in M aurice Blanchot’s review -essay of Lefebvre’s work, ‘Everyday speech’ (1993). Blanchot’s essay has a deceptively sim ple refrain – ‘The B AN A L IT Y F O R C U LT U R AL S T U D I E S 231 everyday escapes’ – that M orris converts into a phrase of her ow n: ‘pure process in excess’ (1998: 111). Everyday life escapes; it exceeds. But w hat is the nature of this everyday excess or banal over ow ? H ow does it escape? W here does it escape to? W hat does it do and, m ore crucially, w hat can be done w ith it? After all, M orris adds alm ost as soon as she brings it up, that this ‘pure process in excess’ is ‘always . . . potentially political’ (p. 111). W hat, then, if the ‘potential politics’ that follow s from this processual excess of everyday life – as banal over ow – nds the potential of its politics w ithin that virtual space ‘w here’, as H ebdige says, ‘everything is still to be won?’ . . . throug h th e transform ation of everyday life . . . U nder takings of this order give a m eaning to apparent m eaninglessness and insigni cance – and w hat could be m ore m eaningless than everyday life? (H enri Lefebvre 1968/71: 27) C an we say that all lives, works, and deeds that m atter were never anything but the undisturbed unfolding of the m ost banal, m ost eeting, m ost sentim ental, weakest hour in the life of one to whom they per tain? W hen Proust in a well-know n passage described the hour that w as m ost his ow n, he did it in such a w ay that everyone can nd it in his ow n existence. We m ight alm ost call it an everyday hour. (Walter Benjam in, 1969: 203) Before going further, I would like to pause for a m om ent, for a m om ent of clari cation about banality – m ost of all, so that it m ight be released from any obligatory or otherw ise im m ediate af liation with notions like tedium or boredom . Yes, as Lefebvre m aintains, banality is intim ately intertw ined with m eaninglessness and insigni cance; yes, it alw ays persists alongside the ‘undisturbed unfolding’ of the m ost ‘everyday hour’, according to Benjam in, and, yes, it is ‘incised into the prose of the passage from day to day’ in the words of de C er teau (1984: 163). To beg in, then, it m ight be useful to consider how the in nitely diffuse nature of banality as ‘com mon place’ unfolds – surreptitiously, insigni cantly, and nearly im perceptibly – w ithin and around the passages of the everyday. Indeed, its folding and unfolding occur s so surreptitiously, so insigni cantly, and so im perceptibly that it would, no doubt, be better to consider how banality resides, m ore properly, outside of the sphere of ‘m eaning’ and hum an em otion. Banality is a radical passivity that persists beyond recognizably endured states such as boredom or tedium . 4 Perhaps this is one reason that M aur ice Blanchot often uses ‘banality’ alm ost interchangeably w ith term s like ‘the outside’ and ‘neutrality’. Boredom can serve as one of the ways that banality m ay be m ade m anifest or actualized (conversely, 232 C U LT U R AL S T U D I E S vitality is another way (M assum i, 1995: 970)) but, then, only ‘as a consequence of [banality] having lost its essential – constitutive – trait of being unperceived ’ (B lanc hot, 1969/93: 242). This ‘unperceived’ is the over ow of the banal that insists/subsists, ex-centrically, in both the m ost easily distracted and the m ost closely attentive acts of perception. It is an unperceived w hich, in the end, actually has little to do w ith the various adequacies or inadequacies of any particular apparatus of perception nor in the unity that m ight harm oniously connect all of them (to quickly head off any prem ature departure tow ard the Kantian sublim e). 5 A lthough it is peripherally co-extensive – in m atters decidedly hum an – with consciousness, sense, and sensation, the ‘unperceived’ of the banal overow properly belongs to neither the subject nor the object of any encounter but to the m ovem ents and variations of intensity (as potential to affect or to be affected) that constitute a ceaselessly oscillating foreground/background or, better, an im m anent ‘plane’ (i.e. this is an in-between w ith a consistency all its ow n). 6 Very few things m ay seem as initially oxym oronic as the linkage of banality and intensity, but their connection proves quite essential to grasping the signi cance of the term ‘life’ (or, for G illes D eleuze, Life w ith a capital ‘L’) in everyday life and, sim ilarly, as we w ill later see, the curious vitality that inhabits the ‘-ness’ of Lefebvre’s everydayness. But, again, it is Blanchot (1980/95), this tim e from his The W riting of the Disaster, w ho provides one of the best (as well as m ost poetic) insights into what can be gained through such a linkage. H ere he w rites (in a m anner that can only be effectively quoted at som e length): Intensity cannot be called high or low w ithout reestablishing the scale of values and principles characteristic of m oderation’s m ediocre m orality. Be it exertion or inertia, intensity is the extrem e of difference, in excess of being that ontology takes for granted. Intensity is an excess, an absolute disruption w hich adm its of no regim en, region, regulation, direction, erection, insur-rection, nor does it adm it of their contraries; thus it w recks w hat it m akes know n, burning the thought that thinks it and yet requiring this thought in the con agration w here transcendence, im m anence are no longer anything but am boyant, extinguished gures. . . Intensity: the attractiveness in this nam e lies not only in its generally escaping conceptualization, but also in its w ay of com ing apart in a plurality of nam es, de-nom inations w hich dism iss the power that can be exer ted as well as the intentionality that orients, and also sign and sense, and the space that unfolds and the tim e that expatiates. But along w ith all this com es som e confusion, for intensity’s nam e seem s to restore a sort of corporeal interiority – vital vibrancy – w hereby the faded teac hings of consciousnessunconsciousness are im printed anew. W hence the necessity to say that only exteriority, in its absolute separation, its in nite disintensi cation, returns B AN A L IT Y F O R C U LT U R AL S T U D I E S 233 to intensity the disastrous attractiveness that keeps it from letting itself be translated into revelation – a surplus of know ledge, of belief – and turns it back into thought, but thought w hich exceeds itself and is no longer anything but the torm ent – the tortuousness – of this return (Blanchot, 1995, 1980: 56–7). W ith this redraw ing of ‘intensity’ – w ithout highs or low s, w ithout any requisitely dialectical interplay of interiority/exteriority, w ithout sim ply secur ing som e m anner of equivalence or connection w ith the contrariness of transcendence and im m anence, there is the presupposition of a reciprocal banality as an ‘exteriority’ of ‘in nite disintensi cation’. As such, it is a banality that has been widened out (or attened) – no inside/outside, no high/low – into a eld or ‘plane’ that holds the intensities ow ing over it in a turbulent suspension even as it helps to pre gure their arrival (as actualization) and their potentials of relation. 7 This, by now, rather lengthy ‘m om ent of clari cation’ about banality m ay only have served to m ake everything seem even m ore com plicated or m ore abstract than before. So, let’s bring it back m ore closely to the earlier discussion of ‘pure process in excess’ and cast it in light of ‘everyday life’ because, then, we m ight beg in to see how certain con gurations and relations begin to sort them selves out. Taken m ore im m ediately in regards to Lefebvre on everyday life, Blanchot (1969/93) describes the banal over ow as: (W hat lags and falls back, the residual life w ith w hich our trash cans and cem eteries are lled: scrap and refuse); but this banality is also w hat is m ost im portant, if it brings us bac k to existence in its very spontaneity and as it is lived – in the m om ent when, lived, it escapes every speculative form ulation, perhaps all coherence, all regularity. (B lanc hot, 1969/93: 239) This is the banal as residue and escape at once: m aking (and rem aking and unm aking) itself into a m obile plane of intensive ows of excess. It is an excess that – w ithin the realm of everyday life – is im m ediately allaccessible, so accessible that there is no way of not having always already acceded to it. A s Blanc hot points out, it could just as easily be said that the banality of ‘the hum an everyday’ is likew ise inaccessible because one cannot m ake the choice of entering or not entering into it: it exists at the level of ‘ “there is”. “there is” the everyday’ (p. 245). The sheer com m onplace/m atter-of-fact nature of this ‘there is’ helps to illum inate a subtly expressive event-structure for everyday life by which an integrative and cyclical connection of its different com ponents can be discer ned: the (hum an) everyday as an inextricable access to and im m ersion in ‘process’, intensity as a non-hierarchical, diffuse ‘excess’ of process, and the banal as a ‘pure’ processual plane w here the alw ays already accessible and residual m eet 234 C U LT U R AL S T U D I E S the lines of escape and open onto an over ow. This latter (the banal) is a plane m oving in parallel (as side-real space) w ith the ‘actual’ existence of the hum an everyday, affording per petual access to excess (in one form , as perception at its peripheries), precipitating, shifting, and accreting ever new m om ents and layers of residue in an everyday im m ersive process. O r, to bor row a line from an old com m ercial for Palm olive dishwashing liquid: the banal? ‘You are soaking in it right now ’. Working through (or soaking in) very sim ilar territory, Brian M assum i details som e of the particularities of this event-structure’s arc hitecture: Tim e is no longer a progression to and from pr ivileged points – beg innings, clim axes, and ends – that give a priori order and a depth of per sonal or historical m eaning to the cour se of things . . . There is no overarc hing standard by w hic h to prefer any particular course from one m om ent to the next. A ll m om ents are m om ents without qualities, indifferently divisible and possibly connectable, as if laid out on a single surface of availability, indeterm inate until a contingent encounter m akes one m om ent stand out or fall out. W hen any-m om ents-w hatever collide: the course of things follows. It is [an] open-ended process of contingent tim e-triage . . . Its m edium is banality, under stood as a tim e-form , in turn under stood as a m ode of availability, or presentation, from which things ow, in openendedness. (M assum i, 1998: 746) Banality is tim e off its hinges – no longer passing through the present in a neat linear succession that places the past behind and the future always out in front. Banality is tem poral succession tipped on its side: m aking way for the sim ultaneous and the subjacent. And, sim ilarly, banality is spatiality arranged (perhaps deranged) in a m anner that allow s for a plurality of spaces to inhabit any single space. But it is im portant to highlight one potentially troublesom e aspect here. N am ely, in the ‘contingent encounter’ that causes a m om ent to stand out or fall out, the m om ent that does the standing out or falling out is not the ‘null m om ent’ that has been awaiting its ‘ “splendid m om ent” so that the latter would give it a m eaning, do away w ith it, or suspend it’ (Blanchot, 1969/93: 242). Saying ‘yes’ to a philosophical/critical trajectory that has travelled all this way only to im agine the passing everyday ‘null m om ent’ as that w hich could, later, be redeem ed as the ‘splendid m om ent’ would m ean calling up that even worse pitfall m entioned earlier by de Certeau: ‘hagiographic everydayness’. If the banal of the everyday is an im m anent plane of ‘pure process in excess’, then its radical open-endedness only carries it away from any m anner of sim ple recoverability, reclam ation, or redem ption (as found, if only im plicitly, in m any m odern philosophical – generally post-Kantian/phenom enologically derived – narratives). In one sense, this m eans avoiding the m atter of ‘tracing’, as Deleuze B AN A L IT Y F O R C U LT U R AL S T U D I E S 235 (1968/94) says of Kant, the ‘so-called transcendental structures from the em pirical acts of a psyc hological consciousness’ (p. 135) and, thus, constructing a plane of im m anence that com es to be too intim ately tied to the subject ‘of all possible experience from w hich nothing, the external as well as the internal, escapes’ (Deleuze and G uattari, 1991/94: 46). As we have seen, the banal is predicated, precisely, upon w hat escapes; it is predicated upon all access to process in excess: The everyday escapes. This is its de nition. We cannot help but m iss it if we seek it through know ledge, for it belongs to a region where there is still nothing to know, just as it is prior to all relation insofar as it has always been said, even w hile rem aining unform ulated, that is to say, not yet inform ation. It is not the im plicit (of which phenom enology has m ade broad use); to be sure, it is always already there, but that it m ay be there does not guarantee its actualization. O n the contrary, the everyday is always unrealized in its very actualization w hich no event, however im portant or insigni cant, can ever produce. N othing happens; this is the everyday. (B lanc hot, 1969/93: 241) No reversibility or recapture of the escape, no redem ption in som e divinely scripted narrative for a recuperable event-structure of the everyday. ‘[T ]he event is pure im m anence of w hat is not actualized or of w hat rem ains indifferent to actualization, since its reality does not depend upon it. The event is im m aterial, incorporeal, unlivable: pure reserve’ (D eleuze and G uattari, 1991/94: 156). For Deleuze and G uattari (1991/1994), it is Blanchot’s writing of ‘the event’ that has proven to be one of the m ost nuanced at distinguishing: Between, on the one hand, the accom plished or potentially accom plished state of affairs in an at least potential relation w ith my body, w ith myself; and, on the other hand, the event, that its ow n reality cannot bring to com pletion, the interm inable that neither stops or begins, that rem ains w ithout relation to myself, and my body w ithout relation to it – in nite m ovem ent. (p. 156–57) In this passage from their last book together, W hat is Philosophy?, D eleuze and G uattari are explicitly aligning Blanc hot’s philosophy of ‘the event’ with their ow n notion of ‘the virtual’ and its relationship w ith ‘the actual’ and ‘actualization’. A s I w ill argue across the next two sections, it is the lifetim e of work that Deleuze (and D eleuze and G uattari) devoted to unfolding the various facets of ‘the virtual’ that m ight bring them , via a slightly different route, into cultural studies, discovering in their w ritings w hat M ichel Foucault – in his rhapsodic introduction to D eleuze and G uattari’s Anti-Oedipus (1972/1977b: xiii) – claim ed it offered up m ost per tinently: a m anual or handbook for ‘everyday life’. 236 C U LT U R AL S T U D I E S . . . p ulled sharp ly in to focus as a vir tual sp ace . . . G ive m e your hand. N ow I am going to tell you how I went into that inexpressiveness that w as alw ays my blind, secret quest. H ow I went into what exists between the num ber one and the num ber two, how I saw the mysterious, ery line, how it is a surreptitious line. Between two m usical notes there exists another note, between two facts there exists another fact, between two grains of sand, no m atter how close together they are, there exists an interval of space, there exists a sensing between sensing – in the interstices of prim ordial m atter there is the mysterious, ery line that is the world’s breathing, and the world’s continual breathing is w hat we hear and call silence. (Clarice Lispector, 1964/88: 90) W hatever the breaks and ruptures, only continuous variation brings forth this virtual line, this virtual continuum of life, ‘the essential elem ent of the real beneath the everyday.’ (D eleuze and G uattari, 1980/87: 110) The notion of ‘pure process in excess’ is w hat Deleuze’s concept of ‘the vir tual’ (as borrowed from the philosophy of H enr i Bergson) addresses in its ow n speci c w ay. The virtual m ight be m ost readily described as the excess or in nitely particulate atm osphere that circulates about an occurrence or event: the contextual space of an ‘actual’ m om ent in tim e. 8 M ore exactly, the virtual gives account to the contextual space of an actual m om ent in tim e without necessarily abstracting or arresting this m om ent from the movem ent that brought it into this space and m ade it available to this tim e. N o wonder, then, that D eleuze (1964/72) w as rather fond of referring to a quote from Proust as per tinent to the virtual: ‘Real w ithout being present, ideal w ithout being abstract’ (p. 57). No wonder, too, that D eleuze believed that the in nitive m ode of the verb – to cut, to leap, to fall, to act – offered the gram m ar best suited to the expressive potential of the virtual. The in nitive can com e to speak in any-present-m om ent-w hatsoever: im plicitly carrying its ow n past and future along w ith it and, all the w hile, speaking in the tone (‘to live’, ‘to dance’, ‘to love’, ‘to die’, and so on) of an ethical im perative. The vir tual, in its guise as in nitive m ode of language, offers a m om ent or interstice w here expectancy (as a return or past tendency) and anticipation (as open-ness to future or new variation) are brought to bear w ith equal force. 9 That is, the verb tense of the in nitive feels like a suspension in tim e, across space – overfull with potential and, yet, of itself, neutral. Deleuze (1969/1990b) w rites that: Between the verb as it appears in language and the verb as it subsists in Being, we m ust conceive of an in nitive w hich is not yet caught up in the B AN A L IT Y F O R C U LT U R AL S T U D I E S 237 play of gram m atical determ inations – an in nitive independent not only of all per sons, but of all tim e, of every m ood, and every voice (active, passive, or re ective). This would be a neutral in nitive for the pure event. . . . From this pure and undeterm ined in nitive, voices, tenses, and persons w ill be engendered. (p. 214–15) The m ost im m ediately lim ited m ode of the in nitive that one can possibly invoke, rem ark D eleuze and Parnet (1977/87), is ‘to be’ since it carries ‘the characteristic – like an original taint – of referring to an I, at least to a possible one, which over codes it and puts it in the rst person indicative. But in nitive-becom ings have no subject: they refer only to an “it” of the event’ (p. 64). Thus, the in nitive ‘to be’ serves as a sort of philosophical bookend in the in nite gram m ar of the virtual. And, if there is another alm ost equally lim iting bookend, it is ‘to think’ – w hic h, together w ith ‘to be’, helps give voice to two of the proxim ate enem ies of the vir tual: ‘being’ and interiority. There are other term s that suit the virtual quite nicely; m ost usually, these words tend to have either a ‘-sist’ (such as per sists/insists/subsists) or a ‘-cede’/‘-ceed’ (such as precedes/recedes/proceeds/exceeds) as part of them . These words m ark the virtual’s com bination of carry-over and dispersion. The vir tual is the incessant sludging of contexts as they each com e to persist-insistsubsist. It is the saturation and bleed of an event or situation: as a situation is given shape and tone by how it is preceded, how it recedes, how it proceeds into the next situation, how it exceeds the m om entarily xed situatedness of any actual occurrence. The virtual ‘hovers’ about ‘the actual’ as a resonating accum ulation and as the ongoing m odulations of a non-linearized/non-sequential space-tim e. For these reasons, the virtual is both m utably stic ky and irrevocably slack. Its stic kiness is the quality that follow s from its various ‘sist’-ibility, w hile its slac k nature is due, in part, to its nature of escape (its perpetual ‘ceed’-iness). 10 Because the virtual is com posed of m ovem ent, transition, and process – rather than discretely separable m om ents/things/states, it cannot be returned to the actual m om ent (w hatever its previous nullity) in order to elevate it in an act of hagiographic salvation. There is no ‘it’ to return; w hat returns is not a thing, a point, a m om ent, or an elem ent but a process in excess (‘only the excessive returns’ (D eleuze, 1968/94: 299)). A dditionally, this ‘excess’ of pure process does not com e to constitute an im aginary supplem ent or an aporia/gap that can, then, be read back into an actual m om ent in order to undo it. That is, the virtual does not perform the work of a deconstructive ever present-absent snag that, when pulled, causes one to readjust the supposed surety with w hich a particular determ ination (say, a text or a body or an event) has been knit. 11 If the virtual should ‘return’ – and, in fact, it does return continually (because it never fully departed) as the ‘eternal return’ of sheer access to process in excess, or, as Deleuze (1962/83) says, returning as the af rm ation of the w hole of becom ing 238 C U LT U R AL S T U D I E S that belongs ‘to a single m om ent’ (p. 72) – it returns through the production of ‘difference’, as m odulating change, as prolongation of variable process. The philosophical im port of the ‘virtual-actual’ m ight be best explained by follow ing the exam ple of both D eleuze and Bergson and counter-posing it to the discourse of ‘possible-real’. The possible-real is the rather well- (re)m arked route that can be traced along an adm ittedly disjointed but still discernible historical thread running through certain ‘core’ philosopher s like Descar tes-Kant-H egelH usserl-H eidegger w ith occasional sw irls and swoops through sim ilar deep thinkers. If these key gures can be provisionally linked, it is because they have each, albeit in different w ays, tended to m ake signi cant use of term s like ‘reason’, ‘cogito’, ‘thinking’, or ‘being’, and, thus, typically chosen to dwell for rather extended periods of tim e on the workings of re ective consciousness and often pr ivilege dualistic/binaristic categories of thought. O ne of the m ore interesting road m aps through and around this philosophical discourse of the possible-real can be found in Rosi Braidotti’s chapter-long critique of it, ‘un-C artesian routes’, from her book, Patterns of Dissonance. O f the inherent Cartesianism that sends the m ajority of philosophy dow n the path of the possible-real, Braidotti (1991) w rites: ‘By m aking hum an essence a thinking substance, the cogito de nes subjectivity as a xed interior space, w hich receives its stim uli from the external world, but is distinguished above all by its capacity to correct these stim uli according to the rules of reason’ (p. 71). In this (my necessarily shor thand) version of these well-travelled C artesian routes, w hat the philosophy of consciousness asks, at its m ost basic, is: W hat does it m ean to be, to think being? H ow does my m ind, through its internal operations and its relations w ith w hat exists outside of it, com e to realize w hat it is capable of? These are a few of the kinds of questions w hic h presum e a cer tain centeredness and stability for consciousness: a consciousness founded upon the initial exclusion of that w hich is other than thought and Reason and whose subsequent thought-m ovem ents serve to negate, subsum e, and/or supersede that which is exterior to it. The outside of the possible-real is w hat alw ays stands to be realized through a projection of a ‘possible’ thought-action from an already enclosed interior. Stating it straightforw ardly in term s of ‘thought’: to inhabit the world as if it were only a realm of ‘possible-real’ actions/encounters is to form ulate the myriad possibilities available w ithin any given m om ent and, thereupon, attem pt to bring one or m ore of these ‘possibles’ toward their realization. There are, then, m ore than a few notable dif culties w ith philosophies that take – even if only im plicitly – the possible-real as the rst and last word on the general state of things and on our, as well as the world’s, potentials and tendencies. O ne of these dif culties should probably be plainly obvious from the very word ‘possible’ itself. To be a ‘possibility’ is to beg in at a state that is, by de nition, som ewhat less than real and, then, either this ‘possibility’ has reality added to it (by being realized) or it rem ains unrealized (as a possibility som ehow thw arted or unfullled). Thus, one of the chief outcom es of such form ulations is to (re)produce B AN A L IT Y F O R C U LT U R AL S T U D I E S 239 yet another version of the Car tesian m ind-body problem ; that is, it is a perspective which is im m ediately faced by the obscurity of how conceptual know ledge (as a possible) can interact w ith or in uence c hanges/m ovem ents in substance or corporeality (as reality). Bringing the virtual-actual into this account doesn’t necessarily entail denying that such possible-real concerns are, indeed, regularly part of the lived equation – although som etim es not w ithout unfortunate consequences (m ost especially w hen ‘possible-real’ thought-action turns decidedly instrum ental). 12 But, w ith the virtual-actual, one m ust add that, at the very least, our bodies and, indeed, a vast universe of quite diverse (hum an and non-hum an, organic and inorganic, corporeal and incorporeal) m atters com e to par ticipate – through countless num ber of w ays – in the m ovem ents of thought, in the workings of m em ory and forgetting, in the m odalities of habit, in the m achineries of the unconscious, in the experience of lived/living/im passive tim e and space, in all of the m ost extraordinary and absolutely ordinary parts of our ‘selves’. Therefore, one of the rst – and, initially, m ost attractive – reasons for m aking an appeal to the virtual-actual is sim ply, as D eleuze (1962/83) says (this tim e follow ing N ietzsche), ‘to rem ind consciousness of its need for m odesty’ (p. 113). Throughout the history of Western philosophy, there has been an abundance of speculation and debate on the extensiveness and intensiveness of the eld of consciousness, the nature of being, the powers of thought, and the workings of reason. But one of the questions that has been asked far less frequently is: what can a body do?: Spinoza offers philosopher s a new m odel: the body. H e proposes to establish the body as a m odel: ‘We do not know w hat the body can do . . .’ This declaration of ignorance is a provocation. We speak of consciousness and its decrees, of the w ill and its effects, of the thousand w ays of m oving the body, of dom inating the body and the passions – but we do not even know w hat a body can do. (D eleuze, 1970/88b: 17–18) Im portantly, this is not just a call to understand a body or bodies in isolation (Deleuze is no m ere corporealist or ontologist) but, rather, to grasp bodies in the m idst of doing. Bearing in m ind that a ‘body can be anything; it can be anim al, a body of sounds, a m ind or an idea: it can be a linguistic corpus, a social body, a collectivity’ (D eleuze, 1970/88b: 127), the virtual serves to designate how bodies enter into a ‘becom ing’ w ith the world: how bodies and worlds interpenetrate, fold and unfold, disrupt and enjoin, exceed and im m erse at all points, everyw here and at once. Foucault (1970/1977a) refers to the virtual as Deleuze’s ‘incorporeal m aterialism ’ because it gives attention to w hat: 240 C U LT U R AL S T U D I E S Arises between surfaces, w here it assum es m eaning, and in the reversal that causes every interior to pass to the outside and every exterior to the inside, in the tem poral oscillation that always m akes it precede and follow itself [. . .] on the bold condition that instead of denouncing m etaphysics as the neglect of being, we force it to speak of extra-being. Physics: discourse dealing w ith the ideal structure of bodies, m ixtures, reactions, internal and external m echanism s; m etaphysics: discourse dealing w ith the m ateriality of incorporeal things (p. 169–170) This extra-being is the im personal/a-hum an ‘excess’ that D eleuze’s philosophy endeavour s to explore. But it is an excess that der ives, neither from a body or a world in isolation, but from the banal m ovem ents of pure process: ‘the event’. D eleuze sought, m ost of all, a philosophy that would be worthy of the event and, im portantly, ‘the vir tual’ w as one of the key m eans by w hich he believed that thought could m ove with and alongside the event. 13 It should not be entirely surprising that, when it com es to accounting for the m ovem ent or transition between supposedly separable states of existence, a philosophy of possible-real can only offer a rather static m odel w ith sudden and inexplicable lurchings and/or the freeze-fram ing of living and once- uid m otion into a series of well-illum inated, captured or articulated poses. Deleuze (1968/94) w rites,‘Every tim e we pose the question in term s of possible and real, we are forced to conceive of existence as a brute er uption, a pure act or leap w hich always occurs behind our backs and is subject to the law of all or nothing’ (p. 211). W ith the virtual-actual, there is no such surreptitious line of existence m oving forever behind our bac ks – requiring (as in the possible-real) a sudden leap over it as the line crosses, in thought-projection, out in front. Instead of a leap, the virtual-actual locates itself directly on the line. If these distinctions still seem slightly vague, it m ight help to brie y consider the exam ple of proprioception: the body’s m otion-sense. 14 In The M an W ho M istook His Wife for a H at, O liver Sac ks (1987) discusses the unique case of ‘C hristina’: a wom an w ho, because of speci c dam age to the sensory roots of her spinal and cranial ner ves, has lost all direct connection w ith those just-outsideof-consciousness autonom ic functionings of body-m ovem ent and body-position. These various functionings – in their co-functionings w ithin their environm ent – usually exist in an im m ediate feedbac k loop w ith other, m ore ‘aw are’ sensory/sense-m aking aspects of consciousness. If this were not the case, our bodies would sim ply m ove about by their ow n volition and som ething as sim ple as reaching for a spoon at the dinner table would prove to be next to im possible. It is this feedback (and feedforward) loop continually cycling through these other lower, sensory levels of consciousness – providing the body w ith its ‘sixth sense’ (p. 43) – that has been severed in Christina’s case. She has, however, found w ays to com pensate (after all, her joints and m uscles and tendons rem ain physically B AN A L IT Y F O R C U LT U R AL S T U D I E S 241 unaffected and are quite capable of functioning). Christina has retaught herself how to m ove and how to adopt a w ide variety of body-postures, even if she is only rem aining stationary. Since her body can no longer constantly survey itself and its relative position in space-tim e, Christina has learned how to be its ‘eyes’. She has substituted a conscious-visually-representational m odel for the body’s autonom ic-feedbac k system . Every m ovem ent, in C hristina’s case, m ust beg in as a ‘possible’, as som ething that m ust, rst, be consciously thought and, next, projected outward onto a body-par t (‘hand: please hold spoon’): beginning w ith a ‘possible’ that, w hen translated into ‘real’ bodily m ovem ent, can nally be realized (or not). A lthough, as Sacks notes, C hristina’s adaptation to her condition has been absolutely extraordinary, her sense of m otion and posture has not returned to her in an altogether sm ooth running fashion. H er posture appears ar ti cial/posed and her body tends to m ove in ts and starts because, as Sacks notes, ‘there is no inbetween, no m odulation’ (p. 50). It is alm ost as if there is a line that is continually being jum ped over: a possible and, suddenly, w ith a thought-projection and a jerk of m otion – a ‘real’. A gain, in the possible-real, bodies and their potential doings are, as D eleuze noted, ‘subject to the law of all or nothing’ and the mysterious, ery line that runs dow n the m iddle can only be leapt over, not inhabited. Instead, the virtualactual locates itself directly upon this line. But w hat is this line? D eleuze (1990/95) refers to it as ‘the line outside’ and rem arks: ‘We need both to cross the line, and m ake it endurable, workable, thinkable. To nd in it as far as possible, and as long as possible, an art of living. . . . We have to m anage to fold the line and establish an endurable zone in w hich to install ourselves, confront things, take hold, breathe’ (p. 111). The virtual-actual turns the line outside into a plane for living, a plane of life. The line outside is a lifeline of becom ing, the line of the world’s continual breathing. The vir tual-actual is a m ovem ent of becom ing in relation to the forces on its outside, not the possible-real realization of being as self-contained and interiorized. W hen an action that has been conjured up as a possibility is realized, it does not constitute a becom ing – but a being stepping always into its ow n light. 15 D ue to its inherent pre-form ism and its exclusion or negation of the outside, the possible-real cannot help but function as a logical tautology or closed system . The vir tual-actual precedes, by contrast, as an open system that addresses m atters of being and becom ing without ever depar ting the real ux of the lived, without arresting the vibrancy and on-going m ovem ent of the living. And ‘to live’ is, after all, the prim ary in nitive-m ode that belongs to everyday life. C lar ice Lispector (1964/88) writes: To live is a gross, radiating indifference. To be alive is inhum an – the deepest m editation is one that is so em pty that a sm ile is exhaled as though it cam e from som e m atter. . . . I sense that ‘nonhum an’ is a great reality, 242 C U LT U R AL S T U D I E S and that that does not m ean ‘inhum an’: to the contrary, the nonhum an is the radiating center of a neutral love in radio w aves. (p. 165) This is the nonhum an living that goes on, simultaneously, alongside or on the outside of experience as lived by one’s conscious subjectivity. It is the life in and across the interstices of substance: the world’s continual breathing as im m anence, its breathing in and out of the utter com m onplaces of banality. To re-inject the philosophy of consciousness with its language of transcendence and possible-real into this world ‘is not dif cult’, w rite D eleuze and G uattari (1991/94), ‘all that is necessary is for m ovem ent to be stopped. Transcendence enters as soon as m ovem ent of the in nite is stopped. It takes advantage of the interruption to re-em erge, revive, and spring forth again’ (p. 47). As a system (although, adm ittedly, this gives an unique tw ist to the m ore usual m eanings of the word ‘system ’), the virtual-actual is radically open, in continual m ovem ent, and im m anent to absolutely nothing other than itself. But one of the m ost noteworthy aspects of this system is that it does not set: Closure entirely aside as its other, as a closed system purports to do with openness. An open system is open even to closure. A closed system locally integrates openness in order to rem ain the sam e, as opposed to its other; an open system integrates closure as one of its local conditions (the condition under w hich it effectively becom es other). (M assum i, 1996a: 402) C onsider, for instance, the opening m om ent in the ‘Refrain’ chapter of A Thousand Plateaus – the exam ple is a c hild hum m ing to him self as he skips a ner vous song in the dark – w here Deleuze and G uattari (1980/87) speak about the necessity of som etim es sketching a circle in the m idst of chaos in order ‘to organize a lim ited space’ but, also, observe that, in the sam e instant, ‘one opens the circle a crac k . . . not on the side w here the old forces of chaos press against it but in another region, one created by the circle itself ’ (p. 311). H ere, the outside does not precede closure but is continually being created by closure, by the processual act (or actualization) of closure. As M assum i (1996a) obser ves, ‘In the D eleuzian system , closure and openness are two phases in a single process bringing self-preser vation (capture) and transform ation (escape) into a close em brace’ (p. 402). In any and every instance, there w ill always an inside and an outside but their boundaries are never constituted once and for all. This open ‘system ’ of virtual-actual consists of two reals in absolute proxim ity to one another but w ith different sets of urgencies: one insists in the in nitely m odulating, contextual space-tim e of every action (the virtual) and one acts (actualization). And, in the m om ent of actualization, there is m om entary (and, in the case of habit, near-rhythm ic) closure accom panied by B AN A L IT Y F O R C U LT U R AL S T U D I E S 243 a resonance that opens itself up to the return of process. The possible-real – as transcendence, as the point w here m ovem ent is stopped, as closure – is, then, certainly a part of the virtual-actual system ; it just does not begin to describe a ‘system ’ in its entirety or even at its m ost incorporeally substantial. 16 Tellingly (because of how it explicitly draws upon a body’s doing as its m odel), Deleuze and G uattari’s m ost notorious alternate designation for the virtual is their concept of ‘the body without organs.’ Even here, however, Daniel Sm ith (1997) explains that, like the circulating unthought of thought or the incorporeal spatio-tem poral processes of corporeal being, the virtual as ‘the body without organs is not som ething that exists “before” the organism ; it is the intensive reality of the body, a m ilieu of intensity that is “beneath” or “adjacent to” the organism and continually in the process of constructing itself (p. xxxvii). In his ow n description of D eleuze’s philosophy as an ‘incorporeal m aterialism ’, Foucault (1970/77a) sought to describe this ‘intensive reality’ as a ‘boundless m onotony [in w hich] we nd the sudden illum ination of m ultiplicity itself . . . arising from the bac kground of the old inertia of equivalences, the striped form of the event tears through the darkness’ (p. 189). H ere, Foucault adds, we nd ourselves ‘at the lim it’ w here: Thought would be the intense contem plation from close up – to the point of losing one’s self – of stupidity; and on its other side is form ed by lassitude, im m obility, excessive fatigue, obstinate m uteness, and iner tia – or rather, they form its accom panim ent, the daily and thankless exercise w hich prepares it and w hich it suddenly dissipates. (p. 190) To D eleuze’s Spinozist call for under standing what a body can do by giving consideration to its longitude (its m ode of com position) and latitude (its capacity for being affected), there must be, as D eleuze also knew, the additional consideration of a body’s lassitude. This lassitude of a body is its ongoing virtual com position as a ‘zone of indiscernibility’: the boundless m onotony of in nite disintensi cation, the body w ithout organs w here intensity = 0 (not because there is zero or no intensity but because it is suspended in an excess that has not yet tilted in any particularly actualized direction). The unhinged space-tim e of a body’s lassitude is found in the quelconque (or, literally, whatever) of an ‘any-space-w hatever’ (‘the white space of conjunctions, m eetings, and divisions; the part of the event which is not reducible to the state of things, the mystery of the begun-again present’ (Deleuze, 1983/86: 108)) and in the ‘m eanw hile’ (un entre-temps or betweenm om ent that ‘neither takes place or follow s, but presents the im m ensity of the em pty tim e w here the event can be seen that is still to com e and yet has already passed’ [Deleuze, 1995/97b: 5], and, nally (w holly), in the ‘L’hom me quelconque’ of Blanchot’s everyday (1969/93: 244), or, in sum , the nonhum an banality of processual excess. 244 C U LT U R AL S T U D I E S . . . blank, colourless, shap eless, a space to b e m ad e over . . . Besides consciousness and science, there is life. Beneath the principles of speculation, so carefully analyzed by philosophers, there are tendencies of w hich the study has been neglected, and w hich are to be explained sim ply by the necessity of living, that is, of acting. (Bergson, 1896/88: 198) True lived experience is an absolutely abstract thing. The abstract is lived exper ience. I would alm ost say that once you have reached lived experience, you reach the m ost fully living core of the abstract. In other words, lived experience represents nothing. And you can live nothing but the abstract and nobody has ever lived anything else but the abstract. I don’t live representation in my hear t, I live a tem poral line w hic h is com pletely abstract. W hat is m ore abstract than a rhythm ? (D eleuze, 1978/1997a: 4) The potential that such a philosophy of the vir tual could speak to the everyday w as certainly not unknow n to H enri Lefebvre. After all, his long life and the incredible intellectual trajectory of his career were m arked by, am ong myriad other coordinates, an on-again, off-again, and, then, on-again relationship with the thought of H enri Bergson. 17 In this regard, Eleonore Kofm an and Elizabeth Lebas (1996), the translators/editors of Lefebvre’s nal published w ritings, draw attention to how he had returned (‘on-again’), in his last works, to concentrate ‘on philosophical issues of representation and a phenom enological description of the body, its rhythm s and surrounding space, w hich rem ained a vir tuality’ (p. 30). The utter lassitude of the virtual – as banality – was not lost to Lefebvre either. In his Lefebvre, Love, and Struggle, R ob Shields (1999) em phasizes that banality occupies ‘an im portant position for Lefebvre throughout his w ritings’ (p. 15) and, m ost especially, in Lefebvre’s w ritings on everyday life. And Lefebvre (1988) him self proudly claim ed that, above all else, the conceptualization of ‘everyday life’ w as the one thing for w hich he would be ‘m ost well know n for adding to the vocabulary of M arxism ’ (p. 78). Shields (1999) notes that Lefebvre held ‘everyday life as the plane of im m anence in w hich m om ents of enlightenm ent em erge and ash, like sparkles of light on a eld of snow ’ (p. 77). G iven its accounting already in this essay, banality would be such a eld at its m ost evenly ( atly) lit and stretched to its furthest expanses. W hen directly addressing banality in his work on everyday life, Lefebvre referred to it as ‘everydayness’. 18 As with so m any of Lefebvre’s theorizations, ‘everyday life’ is a concept that actually arrives as part of a packet of three. The three ‘everyday life’ term s have generally been translated into English as follows: ‘daily life’ (la vie quotidienne), ‘the everyday’ (le quotidien), and ‘everydayness’ B AN A L IT Y F O R C U LT U R AL S T U D I E S 245 (quotidienneté). In a few sentences, Lefebvre (1988) brie y differentiates them as suc h: Let us sim ply say about daily life that it has alw ays existed, but perm eated w ith values, w ith myths. The word everyday designates the entry of daily life into m oder nity: the everyday is the object of program m ing, w hose unfolding is im posed by the m arket, by the system of equivalences, by m arketing and advertisem ents. As to the concept of ‘everydayness,’ it stresses the hom ogenous, the repetitive, the fragm entary in everyday life. (Lefebvre, 1988: 87) Although helpful as a beg inning, let’s develop these differences a bit m ore. Daily life (la vie quotidienne) is everyday life as ‘it has always existed’ – life in its m ost concrete m ateriality – but it is also com pletely susceptible to all m anner of hum an intercession. As such, daily life is not som e eternally or purely objective realm of ‘nature’ at its m ost raw ly physical but is always already a site w here hum an practices and w hat is perceived as the m ateriality of an ‘outside world’ are continually and sim ultaneously constituted/reconstituted. In this case, the study of ‘daily life’ belongs m ore im m ediately to sociological/historical analyses than to m ethods or techniques from the hard sciences. M eanw hile, the everyday (le quotidien) is everyday life itself risen to the status of a concept. At a particular m om ent in tim e – speci cally, m odernity – ‘everyday life’ becom es its ow n kind of object for theoretical under standing, political debate, aesthetic representation, and philosophical re ection. O ne of the questions that Lefebvre asks is ‘w hy?’ W hy did ‘the everyday’ becom e an object of study, a recognizable and ‘representable’ terrain, a new epistem ological concern? And w hy did this happen w hen it did? The short answer to this question is that, in m odernity, a space opened up that never had quite been there before: a rift between ‘the subjective, phenom enological, lived experience of the individual and objective institutions’ (Ross, 1984: 35). U nlike the category of daily life, which ser ves to describe that which has always been (but has also always been outside the spheres of contem plation, adm inistration, and representation), the everyday has not always been but is, rather, a historically produced plane of existence w ith its ow n speci c con guration of practices and unequal distribution of resources (G rossberg, 1997b: 99). Lefebvre’s concept of ‘the everyday’ also ser ves to describe, then, w hat transpires upon this (m odern) plane follow ing the advent of a system of com m odity relations, form s, and functions: a system that Lefebvre called ‘the bureaucratic society of controlled consum erism ’ (or w hat is otherwise know n as ‘consum er culture’). N ot surprisingly, this is the terrain that cultural studies has com e to criss-cross with alm ost com plete fam iliarity. But it is everydayness (la quotidienneté) – or, som etim es, what Lefebvre w ill also tellingly call ‘the extra-daily’ or ‘the extra-everyday’ (‘extra-’, I would argue, because it is the processual excess of the rst two term s) – that has been the m ost 246 C U LT U R AL S T U D I E S overlooked m em ber of the ‘everyday life’ trio. This concept has been regularly neglected not only by m any com m entators w ho have taken up Lefebvre’s work, but also by Lefebvre him self who tended, som etim es, to collapse the distinctions between ‘the everyday’ and ‘everydayness’. Initially, one of the sim plest ways to m ark a separation between ‘the everyday’ and ‘everydayness’ is to note that, w hile the everyday describes a historically determ ined plane of existence and a speci c system of operations upon it – a plane w here ‘the everyday, in the m oder n world, has ceased to be a “subject” to, instead, becom e an object of social organization’ (Lefebvre, 1988: 87) – everydayness addresses the way that this plane (of im m anence) is lived: a single and boundless space-tim e for ‘living’. H owever, as before, this attention to the ‘lived’ or ‘living’ aspect of everyday life, as everydayness, m ust be cautiously approached because it does not carry the m ore usual phenom enological in ection of ‘lived’ as a particular version of (past or passed) exper ience nor does it carry any kind of accordance w ith subject/object relations and their subsequent m ediation. Lefebvre rem ained fairly critical of m any of the starting prem ises of phenom enology: m aybe m ost of all because phenom enology ‘refused the concept [such as “everyday life” risen to the status of a concept] as a m eans of investigation and lim ited itself to the im m ediac y of the lived. M odern physics has taught us that things, w hich appear inert, are not, so that we need to go beyond appearances’ (Kofm an and Lebas, 1996: 32). Everyday life, Lefebvre (1968/71) argued, cannot be neglected and disow ned, eluded or evaded but, instead, one must work: Actively to rediscover it while contributing to its trans guration; this undertaking involves the invention of a language – or, to be precise, an invention of language – for everyday life translated into language becom es a different everyday life by becom ing clear; and the trans guration of everyday life is the creation of som ething new, som ething that requires new words. (p. 202) In order to ‘go beyond appearances’, a philosophy of everyday life m ust have its attention directed toward ‘Life’ – not m erely in its im m ediacy (nor as a return to a F. R. Leavis-style subjectivist ‘life’ as found at the earliest dawnings of cultural studies) but life in all of its stic ky and slack hum an/nonhum an, inorganic/incorporeal, phenom enal/epiphenom enal, and banal/intense everydayness. And, for Lefebvre, it is through the creation of concepts that an avenue m ight be opened toward w hat always persists (and insists and subsists) in this ‘beyond.’ N ot dissim ilarly, D eleuze and G uattari (1991/94) argue, ‘The philosophical concept does not refer to the lived, by way of com pensation, but consists, through its own creation, in setting up an event that sur veys the whole of the lived no less than every state of affairs’ (em phasis added, 33–4). It is, here, in this conjunction of the lived/living (or, m ore barely, ‘Life’) w ith the vitalistic call to conceptcreation that one m ight rst beg in to consider how Lefebvre m ay also have B AN A L IT Y F O R C U LT U R AL S T U D I E S 247 envisioned suc h a role for his notion of ‘everydayness.’ That is, as a concept – and no longer, ordinally, a ‘third’ term but as his philosophy’s very ground, Lefebvre saw, in everydayness, a m eans of surveying ‘the w hole’ of the lived. In fact, if the notion of everydayness as ‘lived [living] space’ has already begun to set off bells and w histles for those fam iliar w ith Lefebvre’s philosophy and, m ost particularly his w ritings on space, it m ight not be a coincidence. The trio of daily life, everyday life, and everydayness nd their relative com plem ents in Lefebvre’s conception of the ‘three m om ents of space’ (1974/1991b: 36–46) – respectively, the perceived, the conceived, and the lived, or, as expressed in m ore strictly spatially-in ected term s: spatial practices, representations of space, and representational space (the translation of the last term here (les espaces de representation) has resulted in som e confusion and, so, follow ing the lead of m any Lefebvrians – including Edw ard Soja (1996) and R ob Shields (1999) – I too prefer its m ore literal render ing as ‘spaces of representation’). 19 The alignm ent of the different triads is, then, as follow s: daily life the everyday everydayness – > spatial practice – > representations of space – > spaces of representation – > the perceived – > the conceived – > the lived Daily life is ‘practiced space’ and a space of practices. It is always bound up w ith a m aterial world and its relative situatedness through collective and individual acts of perception. All the w hile, daily life rem ains constitutively open to historical shifts in w hat counts as the im perceptible and the im m aterial – from superstition, rum or, and myth to the various invisibilities investigated (and perhaps turned ‘visible’) by science – to w hatever extent that these realm s, then, com e to shape/rede ne daily practices. The everyday is the conceptual (everyday life as itself a concept): capable, in the m oder n era, of a cer tain level of conceptual self-re exiveness. In the everyday an additional distance has opened up and it is, thereby, a space through w hich subjects and objects nd a w hole host of different m eans for representing them selves, as well as their shared and con icted spaces, to one another. O r, in other words, the everyday is the organization (through system s of production/reproduction) of the spaces of everyday life as they becom e increasingly aestheticized, bureaucratized, psyc hopathologized, theorized, colonized (in both an interior and exterior sense), and adm inistered. 20 But m ost central to this essay’s concer ns is the af liation of everydayness w ith Lefebvre’s spaces of representation (or ‘representational space’) and the lived and, particularly, how their position of thirdness w ithin each of their ow n triads constitutes their ‘virtuality’. A gain, one of the m ost signi cant aspects to consider is how the third term in all of these triads serves to open onto ‘the outside’. W hen Edward Soja (1996) addresses this preference for ‘thirdings’, he m aintains that, for Lefebvre (and for him self), a new aw areness arises in ‘the creation of another m ode of thinking about space that draw s upon the m aterial and m ental spaces of 248 C U LT U R AL S T U D I E S the traditional dualism but extends well beyond them in scope, substance, and m eaning’ (p. 11). Shields (1999) adds that, although Henri Lefebvre never ‘fully pursued’ his (re-)respatialization of the dialectic (rem aining, in the end, closer to the H egel), there is a notable shift in Lefebvre’s conception of the dialectic from w hat was, at one tim e, ‘ “af rm ation-negation-negation-of-the-negation” to “af rm ation-negation-other ness” ’ (p. 152). H ere, Lefebvre’s third elem ent as ‘excess’ behaves ‘not as the point set in m otion (line) but as a radical “outside”, a “beyond” or “other ness” ’ (ibid). This is som ething shared, as D eleuze (1990/95) rem arks, by m any of those w riters w ho have a preference for undertaking their analyses in ‘threes’: ‘Three som etim es ser ve to close everything up, taking two back to one, but som etim es, on the other hand, takes up duality and carries it far away from unity, opening it up and sustaining it’ (em phasis added, p. 79). 21 This is the conceptual vitalism proper to the third term : a life – as im m anence (in the bare in nitive: ‘to live’) – that inheres, rst and forem ost, to everydayness. H owever, Lefebvre would never quite ‘let him self get carried away – even w hen one expects it’ or, at least, rarely to such a deg ree; but, if and w hen it happened – in those m om ents w hen Lefebvre dared to ‘m ove beyond rational calculation’, it was when he spoke of ‘spaces of representation’ (Shields, 1999: 74). In such m om ents as Lefebvre allowed him self, the vitality of the virtual in his everydayness and spaces of representation and the lived com es through loud and clear: Representational space [spaces of representation] is alive; it speaks. It has an affective kernel or centre . . . It em braces the loci of passion, of action, of lived situations, and this im m ediately im plies tim e. C onsequently, it m ay be quali ed in various ways: it m ay be directional, situational or relational, because it is essentially qualitative, uid and dynam ic. (Lefebvre, 1974/1991b: 69) Tim e as lived/living is introduced into spaces of representation as central in a w ay that it isn’t in either of the other two conceptual triads of space or the concepts of ‘the everyday’ and ‘daily life’ but exceeds them as process: uid and dynam ic, ‘extra-.’ In fact, w hen it com es to the lived, Lefebvre (1974/1991b) w ill say that ‘tim e [is] even closer to us, and m ore fundam ental [than space itself]’ (p. 95). W hat m ight be am ong m ost revealing, then, is this special attention – as found in these ‘third’ term s: everydayness, spaces of representation, and the lived – that Lefebvre gives to a decidedly D eleuzian-Bergsonian notion of ‘tim e’ in its particular conjunctions w ith spatiality. Folding tim e and space w ith life m akes for an altogether strange geography but one that is entirely appropr iate for sur veying – in an im m anent, im m ersive sweep – the w hole of the lived. Brian M assum i (1992) presents this as the unique topology of the virtual:22 Term s like ‘far’, ‘deep’, ‘distant’, would in fact lose all m eaning in relation B AN A L IT Y F O R C U LT U R AL S T U D I E S 249 to the vir tual, and ‘level’ would have to be conceived nonspatially (as a deg ree of im m anent vibratory intensity). If the virtual is a space of pure exteriority, then every point in it is adjacent to every point in the actual world, regardless of w hether those points are adjacent to each other (otherw ise som e actual points would separate the virtual from other actual points, and the vir tual would be outside their outside – in other words relative to it and m ediated by it). (p. 170) And this is precisely the kind of orientation that m ust, by necessity, per tain to Lefebvre’s ‘everydayness’ if it is to avoid the trap of falling into a hagiographic everydayness. So, this is m ay explain w hy: Lefebvre refuses to m ake a C artesian division between two solitudes w here the everyday w as condem ned to perpetual alienation, w ith perplexed academ ics debating the ef cacy of strategies for transform ing elem ents of the everyday into elem ents of an unalienated extraordinary set of ‘m om ents’. Instead of two distinct sets – one alienated, bad, everyday; the other special, good, unalienated m om ents – Lefebvre proposes two overlapping sets. Each elem ent of the alienated everyday is also potentially an elem ent of the unalienated extraordinary set. (Shields, 1999: 70) Any-extra-ordinary- (or extra-daily)-elem ent-w hatever (quelconque) of the unalienated is potentially available as a singular elem ent in the alienated everyday in such a way that it is im possible to read this as sim ply an exchange relationship of one-to-one w here the ‘overlapping sets’ line up point for m atching point (because then, as M assum i notes, they would be separated and m ediated by the outside rather than constituting – and continually reconstituting – it in their undulating m ovem ent). A gain, this is the case only if every singular elem ent carries w ith it an in nite m ultitude,‘an inessential com m onality’ that renders any[. . .]-w hatever universal and singular at once (A gam ben, 1990/1993: 18–19). O r, think of it this way: ‘whatever’ – as a ‘thing with all its properties’ (Agam ben, 1990/1993: 19) – is a body’s or thing’s extruded belong ingness to ‘the w hole’ of banality in process. W ith such a notion of the w hole as virtual (the in nite m ultitude of singularity), ‘the w hole’ com es to serve as another elem ent alongside any (actual) elem ent in a processual set of singular elem ents or m om ents: w ithout encircling an elem ent or m om ent, w ithout sim ply closing it off but, rather, extending it out to in nity. 23 The whole, then, does not form a xed boundary nor constitute a totalizing ensnarem ent; it is a place of passage to the outside and, thus, provides access to the boundlessness of pure process in excess. In G iorgio A gam ben’s (1990/93) words: 250 C U LT U R AL S T U D I E S The outside is not another space that resides beyond a determ inate space, but rather it is a passage, the exteriority that gives it access – in a word, it is its face, its eidos. The threshold is not, in this sense, another thing w ith respect to the lim it; it is so to speak, the experience of the lim it itself, the exper ience of being-within an outside. (p. 68) This being-w ithin is the im m anent m ovem ent of the in nite into this world (at this m om ent, in this space): closure and openness as single process, capture and resonance in close em brace, actualization alternating between the integrative (sticky) and the dispersive (slack). It is a belonging to this m om ent and to this tim e w hile belonging also to the outside – w hat Agam ben (1990/93) calls ‘whatever’ [in his case, qualunque] as ‘being-suc h that it always m atters’ (p. 1). In ‘the passage from potentiality to act, from com m on form to singularity, [the lim itexperience of the outside] is not an event accom plished once and for all, but an in nite series of m odal oscillations’ (p. 19). 24 A nd to grasp these m odal oscillations of being-w ithin an outside, Lefebvre believed that, at the level of everydayness, one was required to pay attention to the rhythm s and polyrhythm s of the everyday – w hat he called ‘rhythm analysis’. For Lefebvre, the rhythm analyst is attentive to the w ays in w hic h, through the lived, tim e and space are folded in their com plete inseparability into rhythm s: ‘every rhythm im plies the relation of a tim e w ith a space, a localized tim e, or if one w ishes, a tem poralized place’ (Lefebvre, 1996: 230). Working ‘closer to the lived’, a rhythm analyst is ‘m ore aware of tim es than of spaces, of m oods than of im ages, of the atm osphere of particular spectacles’ (p. 228–29). Referring to rhythm s as they directly bear upon a body, Lefebvre w rites: Consequently, every body m ore or less anim ated and a fortiori, all gatherings of bodies are polyrhythm ical, that is, com posed of various rhythm s, each part, each organ or function having its ow n in a per petual interaction w hich constitute an ensem ble or a w hole. This last word does not signify a closed totality but, on the contrary, an open totality. Suc h ensem bles are alw ays in a ‘m etastable’ equilibrium . . . . (p. 230) N ot m erely a polyrhythm ical analysis of bodies but their organs and, then, not m erely organs but their functions (what can an organ do?) w ithin the w hole (what can the outside do?) as m etastable equilibrium . Interestingly then, in The Production of Space w hen Lefebvre (1974/1991b) describes his three par t schem a of perceived-conceived-lived in regard to that m ost peculiar and unlocalizable of organs, the heart, he notes: ‘The heart as lived is strangely different from the heart as thought and perceived . . . Localizations can absolutely not be taken for granted w here the lived exper ience of the body is concer ned under the pressure B AN A L IT Y F O R C U LT U R AL S T U D I E S 251 of m orality, it is even possible to ac hieve the strange result of a body w ithout organs’ (p. 40). This surely m ust be one of those rare m om ents w hen Lefebvre lets him self get carried away: one of those singular m om ents w hen ‘everydayness’ – the often allusive but potentially productive elem ent left under theorized in his ow n philosophy – nds its ow n intensive m ultitude in ‘the virtual’ of Deleuze’s. But there is som ething more to everydayness as well, an even larger claim that could be m ade for it. Lefebvre (1974/1991b) w rites that ‘everyday life . . . gures in representational spaces [or ‘spaces of representation’] – or perhaps it would be m ore accurate to say that it form s such spaces’ (p. 116). A nd, on m ore than one occasion, Lefebvre w ill ask him self about the intricate m ixity of spacetim e in the everyday lived.25 To reach it analytically m eant keeping one’s ‘ears open’ to their intricate and inseparable rhythm and texture and, then, to how these rhythm s and textures form system s or networks that: are not closed, but open on all sides to the strange and the foreign, to the threatening and the propitious, to friend and foe. As a m atter of fact, the abstract distinction between open and closed does not really apply here. W hat m odes of existence do these paths assum e at those tim es w hen they are not being actualized through practice, w hen they enter into representational spaces? (p. 118) I would argue that, for Lefebvre, ‘everydayness’ is the nam e reserved for those ‘m odes of existence’ as they com e to precede (and recede and exceed) their actualization into representational spaces: real w ithout being present, ideal without being abstract. 26 That is, w hile it serves as the third term in Lefebvre’s ‘everyday life’ triad (gather ing together and opening up the rst two term s: daily life and the everyday), everydayness also extends its thirdness across and into other two triads (the perceived/the conceived/the lived and spatial practice/representations of space/spaces of representation): at once all em bracing and opening them up as a single plane. Everydayness is ‘the space’ of all spaces, the ‘life’ of all the lived. Indeed, everydayness is not just a plane of im m anence but the very plane of im m anence of Lefebvre’s entire philosophical project. Find the plane of im m anence and you have found w hat ‘constitutes the absolute ground of philosophy’ (D eleuze and G uattari, 1991/94: 41). And, even further, the plane of im m anence: is A LIFE, and nothing else. It is not im m anence to life, but im m anence w hich is in nothing is itself a life. . . A life should not be contained in the sim ple m om ent when individual life confronts universal death. A life is everyw here, in all the m om ents a cer tain living subject passes through and that cer tain lived objects regulate: im m anent life carrying along the events 252 C U LT U R AL S T U D I E S or singularities w hich do nothing m ore than actualize them selves in subjects and objects. . . A life contains only vir tuals. It is m ade of virtualities, events, singularities. W hat we call virtual is not som ething that lacks reality, but som ething that enters into a process of actualization by follow ing the plane that gives it its ow n reality. The im m anent event actualizes itself in a state of things and in a lived state w hich bring the event about. The plane of im m anence itself is actualized in an O bject and Subject to w hich it attributes itself. But, however hard it m ight be to separate them from their actualization, the plane of im m anence is itself virtual. (D eleuze, 1995/97b: 4–5) The plane of im m anence is the ‘a powerful w hole . . . an unlim ited one-all . . . the plane is the breath that suffuses the separate parts’ (Deleuze and G uattari, 1991/94: 35–6): not as an interior or an enclosure, but the whole is the outside, that ery line of the world’s breathing. Lefebvre w anted to form ulate a theory of everyday life that could grasp everyday life as a w hole, as an ‘open’ totality – by draw ing to attention w hat w as m ost com m on, m ost non-hum anly banal. Thus, for instance, in ‘the everyday’ and ‘daily life’ of consum er culture, the ‘concept of everydayness does not therefore designate a system but rather a denom inator com m on to existing system s including judicial, contractual, pedagogical, scal, and police system s’ (Lefebvre, 1987: 9). Everydayness surveys the w hole of the lived as it extends into and alongside all the singularities and relations (of lived system s as well as conceptual triads), drawing out any-w hatever-elem ent/any-w hatever-m om ent into a larger set, to in nity.‘It is on the one hand a relationship of the hum an being with his ow n body, w ith his tongue and speech, w ith his gestures, in a cer tain place and w ith a gestural w hole, and on the other hand, a relationship w ith the largest public space, w ith the entire society and beyond it, the universe’ (Lefebvre, 1996: 235). Although Lefebvre believed that, w ith rhythm analysis, his concept of everydayness could be m ade into a realizable critical project, he also knew that it ran a certain risk in its direct and critical encounter w ith w hat resided w ithin and across all of these par ts and relations. ‘Banality?’ Lefebvre (1987) asks him self. ‘W hy should the study of the banal itself be banal? Are not the surreal, the extraordinary, the surprising, even the m agical, also part of the real? W hy wouldn’t the concept of everydayness reveal the extraordinary in the ordinary?’ (p. 9). Indeed! W hat could be m ore banal than the steady accumulation and dispersion of insigni cances, the perpetual folding in and out of contexts, the boundless m onotony of in nite disintensi cation but, also, w hat could be m ore m agical and surreal and vital? The perpetual escape of the everyday into everydayness. ‘In this consists its strangeness – the fam iliar show ing itself (but already disper sing) in the guise of the astonishing’ (Blanchot, 1969/93: 240). In w hat is one of the earliest and one of the m ost perceptive passages that B AN A L IT Y F O R C U LT U R AL S T U D I E S 253 Lefebvre (1947/91a) w rote on everyday life, he captures nearly all of it in a single paragraph: Everyday life, in a sense residual, de ned by ‘what is left over’ after all distinct, superior, specialized, structured activities have been singled out by analysis, m ust be de ned as a totality. Considered in their specialization and their technicality, superior activities leave a ‘technical vacuum ’ between one another w hich is lled up by everyday life. Everyday life is profoundly related to all activities, and encom passes them w ith all their differences and their con icts; it is their m eeting ground, their bond, their com m on ground. And it is in everyday life that the sum total of relations which m ake the hum an – and every hum an being – a w hole takes its shape and form . In it are expressed and ful lled those relations w hich bring into play the totality of the real, albeit in a cer tain m anner w hic h is always partial and incom plete: fr iendship, com radeship, love, the need to com m unicate, play, etc. (p. 97) Alm ost im m ediately follow ing this passage, Lefebvre seem s to catch him self in the full-force of their im pact – as if suddenly seeing, in these words, the outline of the project that would continue to anim ate his thought for the rest of the century. H e pauses, then, to ask him self a question. So, w hat w ill becom e of ‘the function of the philosopher? W ill philosophy still retain a m eaning as a specialized activity?’ To w hich Lefebvre replies: ‘Yes, it w ill. O nce the philosopher is com mitted to life . . .’ (em phasis in original, p. 97). . . . a sp ace w here everything is still to be w on The totality would allow us to utter in the sam e breath . . . ‘Everything is ordinary!’ and ‘Everything is unique!’ (G illes D eleuze, 1988/1993: 91) Near the conclusion of his Lefebvrian ‘Everyday speech’ essay, Blanc hot (1969/1993) speaks to the potential politics of everydayness: ‘to exper ience everydayness is to undergo the radical nihilism that is som ething like its essence and by w hich, in the void that anim ates it, everydayness does not cease to hold the principle of its ow n cr itique’ (p. 245). In the virtual multitude or void (‘w hatever is a singularity plus an em pty space’ [A gam ben, 1990/93: 67]) that circulates about and anim ates life in its everydayness is the potential for an im m anent-ist form of cultural critique and political action/transform ation. This point is m ade m ost im m ediate in a m arvellous essay by M ichael Taussig (1992) – an essay that has Walter Benjam in at its center and breaths not a word about 254 C U LT U R AL S T U D I E S Blanc hot, Lefebvre, or D eleuze (but resonates w ith them com pletely anyway). 27 Taussig w rites that: ‘The everyday’ seem s, in the diffuseness of its ineffability, to erase difference in m uch the sam e way as do m odern European-derived notions of the public and the m asses. This apparent erasure suggests the trace of a diffuse com m onality in the com m onweal so otherwise deeply divided, a com m onality that is no doubt used to m anipulate consensus but also prom ises the possibility of other sorts of nonexploitative solidarities w hich, in order to exist at all, w ill have to at som e point be based on a com m on sense of the everyday and, w hat is m ore, the ability to sense other everydaynesses. (p. 141) Building upon Walter Benjam in’s concept of the ‘optical unconscious’, Taussig argues for a critical project that nds in ‘everydayness’ ‘an activist, constructivist bent; not so m uc h contem plative as it is caught in media res working on, m aking anew, am algam ating, acting and reacting’ (p. 142). Catc hing everydayness in m edia res sounds, of course, a great deal like Lefebvre’s rhythm analysis: calling for an entry into ‘everydayness’ in the way – an often tactile, distracted, ahum an/non-hum an, and im per sonal way – that a body (of any sort w hatever) intersects w ith and slips into a rhythm . O r, as D eleuze (1970/88b) w rites, ‘[I]t is by speed and slow ness that one slips in am ong things, that one connects w ith som ething else. O ne never com m ences; one never has a tabula rasa; one slips in, enters in the m iddle; one takes up or lays dow n rhythm s’ (p. 123). And it is this notion of catc hing a rhythm in its m iddle that m ight also help to de ne one of the m odulations in (the com ing) cultural studies, de ning its ow n role – particularly w ith regard to the rhythm s of everydayness – in a m anner that is situated just slightly an angle w ith how Lefebvre conceives philosophy’s function. That is, at som e point, one m ust beg in to ask som e of the sam e questions of cultural studies that Lefebvre asks of philosophy. G iven w hat should be its own unique ‘com m itm ent to life’, w hat will, then, becom es of the function of cultural studies? W ill cultural studies ‘retain a m eaning as a specialized activity’ (and an activity suf ciently different from philosophy, especially given their con uence in this essay, to rem ain specialized)? 28 O f course, it w ill. But it also depends upon reconceiving the trajectory by w hich analyses m ove, rhythm ically, into the events, the m om ents, the elem ents, and the ‘w hatevers’ that provide the horizon of the cultural studies’ terrain. And this is w here cultural studies needs banality: a productive banality: the banality of the ‘nothing happens’ of the everyday. Finding a w ay to enter into the rhythm s of ‘nothing happens’ w ithout com m itting any one or all of the three deadly sins of everyday cr itique (displacem ent, mysticism , and hagiography) as described by M ichel de Certeau and M eaghan M orris. Finding along the cusp of the lived, the zigzagging hor izon-line of B AN A L IT Y F O R C U LT U R AL S T U D I E S 255 banality (alw ays exceeding, extending beyond, stretc hing itself out in one long, oscillating in nitive: to live) even as it is w rapped in and continually interleaved with the a-tem poral cycling of the astonishing: capable of saying, then, in a single breath (and never two), everything is ordinary! everything is unique! Sim ilarly, Lefebvre (1987) w rites: In m oder n life, the repetitive gestures tend to m ask and cr ush the cycles. The everyday im poses its m onotony. It is the invariable constant of the variations it envelops. The days follow one after another and resem ble one another, and yet – here lies the contradiction at the hear t of everydayness – everything changes. But the c hange is program m ed: obsolescence is planned. Production anticipates reproduction; production produces change in such a way as to super im pose the im pression of speed onto that m onotony. Som e people cry out against the acceleration of tim e, others cry out against stagnation. They’re both right. (p. 10) Thus, Lefebvre looked to how ‘the everyday harbors the possibility of its ow n transform ation; it gives rise, in other words, to desires that cannot be satis ed within a weekly cycle of production/consum ption’ (Kaplan and Ross, 1987: 3). It is here that cultural studies, by bringing a productive banality fully on-board, nds its function (or, anyway, one of the m ost potent of its potential functions) and its area of specialization – cultural studies as a relay of desire (of the m ost in nitely disintensi ed sort): in par t, as sprung from the desires that bleed out from w ithin and around the repetitions and cycles of m odern life. 29 I say ‘in part’ because it is not m erely the m atter of a cultural studies that attends to desires as they bleed out and around – after all, cultural studies has spent nearly the entirety of its relatively shor t and politicized existence traversing over and between, in one way or another, the planes of ‘daily life’ and ‘the everyday’ w ith the innum erable joys, pains, com for ts, accom m odations, refusals, and resistances that com e w ith them and then, call for action/counteraction/continuation/transform ation/alliance. But, m ore so, this is a cultural studies that is also w illing to take a rhythm ic soak in the banal diffuseness of everydayness (in its w holly im m anent bleed-up and across). This is a cultural studies, as Brian M assum i sets it out in his ow n essay in this issue, that would work as affective contagion – crucially, a contagion that can only work to its fullest and m ost actively contagious capacity w hen it no longer m isses, am ong other things, ‘the qualitative excess of liveliness overspilling every determ inate expression’ and ‘the im personal and over-personal excesses of ongoing transform ation’ (M assum i). In productive banality (all-access to pure process in excess) lies the potential for cultural studies as affective contagion. A s M eaghan M orris (1998) w rites, at the end of her ‘O n the Beac h’ (in the m idst of an ongoing m ini-debate w ith cultural polic y studies), cultural studies 256 C U LT U R AL S T U D I E S can never turn a blind eye to the w ays in w hich ‘all this living “exceeds” (to w heel in a useful term )’ (p. 118). Yes, as it turns out, ‘excess’ is a useful term : useful, in this m om ent, for revealing w hat sets cultural studies apar t from philosophy and w hat would m ake its working as ‘affective contagion’ uniquely different from m uch of w hat has gone on in the diverse ‘functionings’ of cultural studies before. 30 W hen D eleuze and G uattari speak of ‘function’ (or ‘functives’) in relation to concepts, they use it to trace two separate vectors that sweep into and out of ‘actual states of affairs’ and ‘virtual events’. Philosophy follow s one vector ‘back up to the event that gives its virtual consistency to the concept’ (1991/94: 159). In the other vector – as the line of descent from virtual event to actual state of affairs, there is (in the m om ent of actualization), a space that opens and a tim e that never stops taking place. It is the instant, say D eleuze and G uattari, w hen and w here ‘nothing happens’: Each com ponent of the event is actualized or effectuated in an instant, and the event in the tim e that passes between these instants; but nothing happens w ithin the virtuality that has only m eanw hiles as com ponents and an event as com posite becom ing. N othing happens there, but everything becom es . . . N othing happens, and yet everything changes, because becom ing continues to pass through its com ponents again and to restore the event that is actualized elsew here, at a different m om ent. (p. 158) This ‘other line’ (as M assum i sim ilarly notes) is w here cultural studies nds its ow n distinct wedge: descending from virtual event to actual state of affairs but, then, not reascending on the other line bac k up to ‘the concept’ (and, thus, not joining philosophy on the way to its ‘glow ingly useless’ plane of consistency). Instead, the virtual line of cultural studies descends to the actual and de ects laterally upon it, m oving and branc hing horizontally. 31 W hat ultim ately separates the tasks of cultural studies and philosophy (as different functions and specialized activities) is how, then, eac h proceeds through pure process in excess. In cultural studies, the open or outside is not reached in ascension to the concept but through proliferative extension from w ithin the horizon of the event itself: opening out in a lateral and processual spread on an event’s in nit(iv)e hor izon. 32 U pon this horizon, there is ‘a potential or power’ to be found in the state of affairs: in the way that ‘the state of affairs actualizes a chaotic virtuality by carrying along w ith it a space that has ceased, no doubt, to be vir tual but that still shows its origin and ser ves as absolutely indispensable correlate to the state of affairs’ (p. 153). Singularly differentiated in w hatever state of affairs it is actualized, this space, as carried along, is ‘a space w here everything (indeed, everything) is still to be won’ – because it ‘cannot be separated from the potential through which it takes effect, and without w hich it would have no activity or developm ent’ (em phasis in original, ibid). And, hence, the potential – through cultural studies’ B AN A L IT Y F O R C U LT U R AL S T U D I E S 257 practice – in the further resonant and rhythm ic chaining of this carried-over event-space’s power s of effectuation/counter-effectuation (or, m ore sim ply, its processes of affective contagion). These are potentials that m ight be divulged in any num ber of ways: by ‘extending singularities up to the neighbourhood of new ones, or follow ing bifurcations that transform it, or passing through a phase space whose num ber of dim ensions increases w ith supplem entary variables, or, above all, individuating bodies in the eld that it form s w ith the potential’ (p. 153–54). Individuating through affective contagion calls upon a belonging of bodies beyond the bounds of any m ere representational constitution of their relation: a belonging that, by affective necessity, relies on ‘the ability to sense other everydayness’ and the ability to act w ithin the suspended, utterly banal (virtual) space of belonging’s rhythm ic (if only tem porarily) coherence. Catching everydayness in m edia res. A cultural studies that discovers a m eans of productively proceeding through the banality m ust, however, reckon not only with the prolongation of process but also w ith access to excess: the excess of ‘living’ (of ‘a life’, of everydayness) that will always exceed. This requires the ‘activist, constructivist bent’ that Taussig nds in Walter Benjam in (and, of course, this bent is shared by D eleuze and Lefebvre as well). A s Theodor Adorno notes, Benjam in felt very keenly that that which exceeds the received notions of the real and that w hich exceeds, as well, what counts as ‘experience’ had com e, in his tim e, to be unbearably narrow and, thus, Benjam in sought after w ays to m ake room for expansion: 33 Benjam in never once acknow ledged the boundary taken for granted by all m odern thought: the K antian com m andm ent not to trespass into unintelligible worlds . . . For Benjam in everything habitually excluded by the norm s of exper ience ought to becom e part of experience to the extent that it adheres to its ow n concreteness instead of dissipating this, its im m or tal aspect, by subordinating it to the schem a of the abstract universal. (Adorno, 1955/1988: 4) In Benjam in’s work, the m ost seem ingly ephem eral, transient, incorporeal, and inorganic aspects of everyday life and exper ience are granted equal standing w ith the presum ably m uc h harder and faster world of m ateriality and corporeality. O r, as D eleuze (1968/94) also rem arks, those well-know n Kantian ‘conditions of experience’ are always surrounded by ‘subjacent conditions of real exper ience’ (p. 231). A nd there are the supra-jacent conditions too. In w hat w ays does the current pinch (the narrow ness and redundancies) of cultural studies result from som e of the sam e gradually w innowed away sub- and supra-conditions of its terrain? 34 H ow w ide and how at can cultural studies go? H ow can it take into account the ways that living exceeds, always exceeds? Both inorganically and incorporeally (as a start). W hen Benjam in (1918/1996: 100–110) rst set dow n his thoughts m ost fully in this w hole m atter, he gave his essay the m ost im possibly 258 C U LT U R AL S T U D I E S bold title: ‘O n the program m e of the com ing philosophy.’ N ot nearly so bold, I do som etim es wonder though if, on a road through the banal itself, it m ight be possible to discer n the blank, colourless, and shapeless contours of a com ing cultural studies. 35 N otes 1 Perhaps the m ost succinct description of M eaghan M orris’ work or, at least, the role that it plays in regards to cultural studies m ight be offered by M ic hel de C erteau (1984) at the end of his chapter ‘The arts of theory’. H e w rites (w ith par ticular reference, in his case, to B ourdieu and Foucault) that this is ‘a discourse w hic h would be the art of talking about or constructing theory as well as the theory of that art – that is, a discourse that would be the m em ory and the practice, or in shor t, the life-story of tact itself ’ (p. 76). T here are several w ays tow ard describing this ‘other’ banality that m ight be enabling and em powering for cultural studies. For an absolutely resonant alternative w ay that I w ill only be able to allude to, at tim es, in this essay (especially around the issue of ‘w hatever’-ness), see G iorgio Agam ben’s work, especially in The Coming Comm unity (1990/93) and Homo Sacer (1995/98). In the latter, Agam ben, follow ing Jean-Luc N ancy, gives the nam e ban to the potentiality ‘that designates both exclusion from the com m unity and the com m and and insignia of the sovereign’ (p. 28). Agam ben’s book is, in par t, an investigation of the progressive ‘banalization’ of this ban (the origins of w hich he traces back to Aristotle) that rst set ‘the law ’ in relation to ‘life’. T here are direct linkages in Homo Sacer to several of the coordinates in my essay here: especially, D eleuze and G uattari on virtual/actual and A gam ben’s discussion of Aristotle and potentiality/actuality. T his autonom ous, yet never fully separate, realm of potentiality – as derived from the originary ban – is, at once, the site of Lefebvre’s ‘everydayness’ in all of its incandescent banalities and potentialities w hile it is, sim ultaneously – as Agam ben so soberingly concludes – the site of variously enhanced bio-political m achinations and intrusively everyday perm eabilities. Perhaps this inextricability of critique of theories of everyday life from within the everyday is one of the reasons w hy M orris (1998) rem arks: ‘my term s, necessarily, are caught up in the problem that they try to de ne. I can only gesture at my problem , and say w hy I think it m atters’ (p. 109). For an illum inating essay on the genealogy of the concept of ‘the everyday’ and its em ergence from G erm an-Soviet debates in M arxist philosophy and from the French context, see John R ober ts’ ‘Philosophizing the everyday: the philosophy of praxis and the fate of cultural studies’. See especially Robert’s discussion of Schelling and the notion of the ‘irreducible rem ainder’ (1999: 22) in regards to the discussion of excess of process in this present essay. See, for exam ple, T hom as C arl Wall’s Radical Passivity: Levinas, Blanchot, and Agamben (1999). 2 3 4 B AN A L IT Y F O R C U LT U R AL S T U D I E S 259 5 6 7 8 9 See, also, D eleuze and G uattari (1991/94) in their W hat is Philosophy? , ‘W hat is called “perception” is no longer a state of affairs but a state of the body as induced by another body, and “affection” is the passage of this state to another state as increase or decrease of potential-power through the action of other bodies’ (p. 154). But, im portantly, these bodies need not be ‘hum an’ and, thus, even ‘non-living, or inorganic, things have a lived experience because they are perceptions and affections’ ( ibid ). And, in A Thousand Plateaus , ‘perception w ill no longer reside in the relation between a subject and an object, but rather in the m ovem ent serving as the lim it of that relation, in the period associated w ith the subject and object. Perception w ill confront its ow n lim it; it w ill be in the m idst of things, throughout its ow n proxim ity . . .’ (D eleuze and G uattari, 1980/87: 282). T hus, if and w hen there is a split of subject and object, they arrive as m utually constitutive ‘agglom erations’ upon a eld of banal intensities. See G uattari (1995/1992) w here he w rites: ‘. . . a block of percept and affect, by w ay of aesthetic com position, agglom erates in the sam e transversal ash the subject and object, the self and other, the m aterial and incorporeal, the before and after’ (p. 93). As reconceived, it is this im m oderate current- ow of intensity that can m ake som ething com e into being at the end of its trajectory; it can produce difference from out of itself (i.e. not just a difference that m arks its ow n difference by being different from som ething else), and its arrival w ill alw ays be in the form of an eternal return to the ‘com m on place’ of a banal over ow. Although problem atic, see also M ic hel Foucault’s (1981/91) discussion of the concept of the ‘lim it-experience’ as w hat unites N ietzsche, Bataille, and Blanchot against any phenom enology that seeks to unify the subject w ithin a eld of experience. Instead, they each tur n ‘experience’ into a ‘task of “tearing” the subject from itself in such a w ay that it is no longer the subject as suc h, or that it is com pletely “other” than itself so that it m ay arrive at its annihilation, its dissociation’ (p. 31). ‘It is less a space in the em pirical sense than a gap in space that is also a suspension of the nor m al unfolding of tim e’ (M assum i, 1996b: 29). Sim ilarly, in the essay from w hich I took this essay’s epigraph, D ick H ebdige (1993) w rites: We m ight talk about the inscription w ithin particular uses of language of structured and structuring potentialities, of alternative and even antithetical futures, hiding, w aiting, in the sam e array of signifying elem ents, the sam e array of pent-up social forces, in a gural relationship between signifying elem ents and pent-up social forces, w hich is alm ost there, virtually there, w aiting for syntactical articulation. (p. 275) 10 ‘Slac k’ and ‘steady accretion’ serve to describe, as well, how the vir tual acts or, rather, how the vir tual m oves to act. T hat is, the virtual never acts except 260 C U LT U R AL S T U D I E S 11 by ‘ceding’ its transform ative force-production over to actualization at the point w here a diffusely neutral accretion of banal intensities crosses a threshold and passes – in the case of ‘the hum an’ – w ithin a m ore palpable range of perception, cognition, or feeling. Also, see Rob Shields (1999) on H enri Lefebvre as the creator of ‘a “slacker” philosophy before its tim e’ (p. 136). D eleuze on D errida: I adm ire it [deconstruction] very m uc h but it has nothing to do w ith my m ethod. . . . In no sense do I present myself as a textual com m entator. A text, for, m e is only a little cog w ithin an extra-textual practice. It is not a m atter of com m enting [on] the text in term s of textual practice, nor of any other m ethods, but of seeing its use in the extra-textual practice into w hich it extends. (translation m odi ed, quoted in Braidotti, 1991: 69) 12 13 Like R aym ond W illiam s defending his ‘structure of feeling’ from the charge of offering ‘a kind of pristine contact between the subject and the reality in w hich this subject is im m ersed’ (1979: 167), there is no desire here to sim ply m ake a ‘god of unexam ined subjectivity’ by going so far as to rule out the very real existence of ‘conscious’ intentionality, subjective self-re ection, the powers of the m ind to reason, and all the rest. But, also like W illiam s, there is a real sense that a certain narrow ness entered cultural studies soon after its ‘two paradigm s’ shift, w hich seem s to have foreclosed particular approaches to ontology, experience, m ateriality, and affect. For an attem pt, by tim es successful, to address som e of w hat w as lost in the transition from ‘culturalism ’ to ‘structuralism ’ (and, then, post-structuralism and theories of ar ticulation), see M ic hael Pic kering’s (1997) History, Experience, and Cultural Studies. As H enri Bergson (1968) rem arks in his ‘T he possible and the real’ (quite obviously, it is an essay that helped to establish several of the distinctions between virtual-actual and possible-real): Philosophy stands to gain in nding som e absolute in the m oving world of phenom ena . . . [in revealing a reality] to us, beyond the xity and m onotony w hich our senses, hypnotized by our constant needs, at rst perceived in it, ever-recurring novelty, the m ov ing originality of things. (p. 124) 14 15 Brian M assum i has w ritten on proprioception in a num ber of essays. See, for exam ple, ‘The bleed: w here body m eets im age’ (1996b) and ‘T he autonomy of affect’ (1995). M y brief recounting of Sacks here is quite indebted M assum i’s prior conceptualizations. M ore pointedly, the possible-real denies any actual potential for outside in uence, contingency, c hance, or reciprocity because, even if a possibility has been realized, it unfolds w ithin ‘the sam e’. U ltim ately, in the act of realization, nothing has really changed. N or w ill it ever. W hereas the possible-real B AN A L IT Y F O R C U LT U R AL S T U D I E S 261 16 17 18 19 20 proceeds through processes of resem blance and representation, the virtualactual operates by acts of creation and differenciation. In this sense, then, to realize a possible is to be over and done w ith it: because, in its realization, all of the once-contending possibilities w ill have been elim inated. But, even further restricting, the seem ingly full range of available possibilities had already been drastically lim ited from the very start by one’s ability to, rst, think them . For the em phasis that D eleuze (1966/88a) places on these particular points, see particularly his Bergsonism (p. 96–7). T hus, the virtual offers a thoroughly additive w ay (‘and . . . and. . . and. . .’) to understand how the non-discursive acts upon the discursive (or, for that m atter, how the non-representational intersects w ith the representational and a-signifying processes w ith signifying processes, etc), how unthought inhabits thinking, how (apparently) iner t m atter affects living processes, how a nonhum an excess em erges from everyday banal process and, of course, how the reverse is true in all of these cases as well. T he m om ent w hen Lefebvre rst went ‘off ’ B ergson (follow ing a paper by Alber t Einstein at the Societe francaise de philoso phie that, Lefebvre claim s, ‘crushed’ Bergson) is described in an interview conducted w ith him in 1987 (quoted in G regory, 1994: 392). H owever, I don’t think that Lefebvre rem ains entirely or eternally ‘off ’ Bergson (again, the last w ritings of Lefebvre appear as evidence of a reconciliation of sor ts w ith Bergson’s thought) and, thus, I would argue that Shields (1999) often paints Lefebvre’s philosophical antagonism w ith B ergson too broadly or, anyw ay, too nally. See B ergson’s Duration and Simultaneity for a book length response to Einstein. See, also, D eleuze (1966/88a: 79–89) for an inspired defense of Bergson’s philosophy w ith regard to Einstein’s theory of relativity. Although I don’t have the space to pursue it in any detail here, for the reasons w hy Lefebvre’s ‘everydayness’ is not H eidegger’s ‘everydayness,’ see Peter O sborne’s The Politics of Time (1995). But, brie y, som e of the distinctions between Lefebvre and H eidegger are, respectively: a ‘quasi-vitalist’ sense of life versus a ‘dissatisfaction w ith life’, a ‘we’-structure versus a ‘they’-structure, and an affectual incom pleteness/openness structured by repetitions and rhythm s versus ‘the tem porality of w ithin-tim e-ness’ that view s in nity as ‘ “self-forgetful” representation’ (p. 160–96). Even the m ost sym pathetic followers of Lefebvre, like Soja or Shields, w ill acknow ledge that his conceptual delineations never stay in one place for very long; once-m arked boundaries often unexpectedly shift or m igrate and his concepts, in their trialectic relations, internally/contextually self-deviate in w hat seem , som etim es, a fairly haphazard fashion. So, sim ply overlapping these different triads can be a som ew hat risky proposition. Still, I’d argue that m ore than suf cient evidence can be found across Lefebvre’s work to w arrant such a convergence of his triads. T he m ost logical culm ination of cultural studies’ criss-crossings of this plane of ‘the everyday’ is, as M eaghan M orris know s (see also Brian M assum i’s essay in this issue), ‘cultural policy studies.’ W hile acknow ledging its per tinence, 262 C U LT U R AL S T U D I E S 21 22 23 M orris (1998) adds that cultural policy work is ‘strongly founded on closure against the inde nite in social life’ (p. 231). E verydayness and ‘the vir tual’provide m eans for recognizing how this living alw ays ‘exceeds’ this policy closure. D eleuze and C laire Parnet (1977/87) m aintain: ‘you only escape dualism s effectively by shifting them like a load, and w hen you nd between the term s, w hether they are two or m ore, a narrow gorge like a border or a frontier w hich w ill turn the set into a m ultiplicity, independently of the num ber of parts’ (p. 132). T his m ultiplicity is a virtual ‘assem blage’ and the narrow gorge is a ‘line of ight’ or line outside constituted by ‘several rhythm s, at several speeds’ (p. 125). We nd ourselves on this line ‘w henever we think bew ilderingly enough or live forcefully enough. They’re lines that go beyond know ledge (how could they be ‘know n’?), and it’s our relations to these lines that go beyond power relations’ (D eleuze, 1990/95: 110). For one of the best discussions of D eleuze’s use of Spinozian philosophy to forego the negations and m ovem ents of the H egelian dialectic, see Pierre M acherey (1996: 146–47). M assum i (1992) also notes how D eleuze and G uattari m ove from their earlier and closer adherence to B ergson’s original form ulation of the vir tual tow ard a ‘m ore Blanc hotian position’ (p. 170). See D aniel Sm ith (1997) on D eleuze and ‘the w hole’: This w hole is itself a par t that m erely exists alongside the other parts, w hich it neither uni es nor totalizes. Yet it nonetheless has an effect on these parts, since it is able to create non-preexistent relations between elem ents that in them selves rem ain disconnected, and are left intact. . . . [T he W hole] is not a set and does not have par ts; it is rather w hat prevents each set from closing in on itself, forcing it to extend itself into a larger set, to in nity. T he W hole, in other words, is the O pen, because it is its nature to constantly produce or create the new. (p. xxiii) 24 In a paragraph that sits very strangely in the essay (‘Perspective or Prospective?’) in w hich it appears but resonates powerfully w ith Agam ben’s thoughts on the outside , Lefebvre (1996) w rites the follow ing: Thus, direction is not de ned by an effective synthesis, but by a convergence, a vir tuality is outlined but realized only at the lim it. T he lim it is not som ew here in the in nite, and yet it can be reached by successive leaps and bounds. It is im possible to settle in it and to establish it as an accom plished reality. H ence this is the essential feature of the m ethod already considered and nam ed ‘transduction’, the construction of a vir tual object approached from experim ental facts. The horizon opens up and calls for actualization. (p. 165) See D eleuze and G uattari (1980/87) on ‘transduction’ (and rhythm ) and its relation to ‘the outside’ (chaos and cosm os) in A Thousand Plateaus (313–20). B AN A L IT Y F O R C U LT U R AL S T U D I E S 263 25 Lefebvre (1974/91b) asks the sam e question in the star t of his conclusion (‘O penings and C onclusions’) to The Production of Space and, then, adds a couple of m ore questions: [W ]here does a relationship reside w hen it is not being actualized in a highly determ ined situation? H ow does it await its m om ent? In w hat state does it exist until an action of som ekind m akes it effective? (p. 401) 26 27 28 29 T his is, of course, D eleuze’s form ula for the vir tual as pinched from Proust. For Lefebvre, on the ‘real and ideal’ in relation to actualization and the questions he raises to him self in his attem pt to transfor m dialectical thought, see the conclusion of his ‘Seen from the w indow ’ (1996: 227). T he resonances between Benjam in and these three (Blanchot, D eleuze and Lefebvre) are, of course, not a m atter of m ere coincidence. D eleuze and B enjam in – even at the level of nam es only – shared a m utual affection for K afka, N ietzsche, K lee, Proust, Bataille, K lossow ski, Bergson, D uns Scotus, etc. D eleuze and B enjam in also share som e m utual equivocations, if not som etim es-outright antagonism s, w ith H egel, K ant, and H eidegger. Shields (1999) brie y addresses several points of connection between Lefebvre and Benjam in: including the fact that B enjam in ‘read and enthusiastically annotated’ one of Lefebvre’s earliest published works (p. 25). A dditionally, Shields notes how, in linking the banal and the spatial, Lefebvre w as in very close proxim ity to B enjam in’s notion of the ‘optical unconscious’ – w hich is, in fact, the philosophical im petus behind the Taussig passage quoted here (p. 61). Although I have violated her dictum at num erous points along the w ay, M eaghan M orris (1998) states that ‘it is certainly not useful . . . to pose problem s as though in studying ‘the everyday’ one is always directly involved in a m ortal com bat w ith the history of Western philosophy’ (p. 117). And I would agree com pletely (in par t because I also take M orris’ statem ent to be m eant as hum orous and slightly self-deprecating) that suc h a study of the everyday would be useless (even ‘glow ingly useless’ as Brian M assum i assesses the role of philosophy elsew here in this issue): if that is all it is (a staged com bat echoing through the halls of philosophy). B ut I also believe, follow ing Law rence G rossberg (1997a), that cultural studies still has m uch to gain by nding the myriad w ays (for good and for bad) that ‘almost all of the available theories of culture can be traced back to and located w ithin the terrain of a K antian philosophical discourse’ (p. 19). In the end, I suppose it depends upon w hat cultural studies does w ith the ‘glow ’ of philosophy’s glow ing uselessness. Fredric Jam eson’s Social Text review of the 1992 Routledge Cultural Studies book (edited by Law rence G rossberg, C ary N elson, and Paula A. Treichler) beg ins w ith the words, ‘T he desire called cultural studies . . .’ (1993: 17). As Peter O sborne (1995: 241) points out, this is an allusion to Jean-Francois Lyotard’s use of the expression ‘the desire called “M arx” ’ in his Libidina l Economy . O sborne is also quite good on dem onstrating how cultural studies as 264 C U LT U R AL S T U D I E S 30 31 this kind of desire m ixes, in Lefebvre’s work, w ith M arxism , Surrealism , and Existentialism (p. 190). Thus, my ow n calling attention to ‘totality’ as conceived by D eleuze and Lefebvre has som e real and not-so-accidental resonances w ith Fredric Jam eson’s work. M ost especially, I would argue, along w ith Jam eson, that cultural studies would do well to beg in rethinking its theory of articulation by looking at how M arx conceived the ‘organic’ and ‘m etabolism .’ D oing so m ight at least rid the cultural studies’ theory of articulation of its ‘bony’ and ‘m ec hanical quality’ and return it to the sinew y and softer tissue of a body w ithout organs – or, as Jam eson (1993) rem inds:‘the ‘organic’ . . . once designated [for M arx] the radical difference in function between the various organs’ (p. 30). For an enlightening discussion of som e of these very issues, see Ric hard D ienst’s Still Life in Real Time (1994: 36–65). T here is a lengthy and potentially fruitful argum ent that could be m ade here for a reinvigorated return to Raym ond W illiam s’ work, particularly by looking once again – after cultural studies’ long and w inding two-decade structuralist/post-structuralist detour – at how W illiam s alw ays attended to c hange, culture-in-process, structures of feeling, and concept-creation. (See also footnote # 12 above.) I don’t think, however, that it can be a m ere retur n. T hat is, like D eleuze’s ‘return to Bergson,’ such a return to W illiam s cannot only m ean a renewed adm iration but also ‘a renew al or an extension of his project today, in relations to the transform ations of life and society, in parallel w ith the transform ations of science’ (1966/1988: 115). I would hold that all of these aspects (including and especially ‘science’) are equally im portant for any retur n to W illiam s. It seem s to m e that M assum i, in his essay for this issue, m isses this W illiam s’ lineage: one that continues to inhabit, albeit in often-m inor w ays, som e por tion of the cultural studies’ work happening today. B ut I also think that, ironically enough, in M assum i’s ow n close attention to m atters of ‘science,’ one begins to see a w ay that W illiam s’ project can nd its extension into m any of the issues currently at greatest concern for cultural studies. See M ichael H ardt’s (1993) Gilles Deleuze: An Apprenticeship in Philosophy : The skyline of society is perfectly at, perfectly horizontal, in the sense that social organization proceeds w ithout any predeter m ined design, on the basis of the interaction of im m anent forces, and can thus, in principle, be thrust back at any tim e, as if by the indefatigable pressures of gravity, to its zero state of equality . . . T he horizontality of the m aterial constitution of society puts the weight on practice as the m otor of social creation. (p. 121) 32 33 M cKenzie Wark’s (1994) Virtual Geography is one of the best exam ples of how cultural studies can enter (in media res ) into the rhythm ic space-tim e of ‘the event’. Rather interestingly, T heodor Adorno (1955/88b) also rem arks that B enjam in’s w ay of conceiving ‘experience’ w as so w ildly at odds w ith the criteria B AN A L IT Y F O R C U LT U R AL S T U D I E S 265 34 35 by w hich others had long rendered and evaluated it ‘that it never even occurred to him to defend him self against them as Bergson did’ (p. 4). See also H ow ard C aygill’s extraordinary book Walter Benjam in: The Colour of Experience for additional detail on Benjam in’s interest in set theory (like Agam ben and D eleuze) and, hence, his notion of ‘an im m anent absolute.’ ‘In order to sustain the idea of an im m anent absolute it w as necessary to im agine a totality capable, paradoxically, of containing elem ents w hich exceeded it’ (1998: 14). C aygill’s book beg ins w ith a chapter-long discussion of Benjam in’s im por tant ‘Program m e of the com ing philosophy’ essay. Lawrence G rossberg’s (1997a: 21) call for a ‘spatially m aterialist’ cultural studies has, of course, a great deal of potential resonance w ith these brief rem arks here on rethinking K ant (and, especially, the post-K antians) and the concept of ‘experience.’ O n the road through the banal itself, see Walter Benjam in’s ‘Agesilaus Santander (Second Version)’ w here he w rites of how, in Jew ish tradition, each hum an being has a ‘personal angel . . . w ho represents the latter’s secret self and w hose nam e nevertheless rem ains hidden’ (Sc holem , 1976: 213). Im agine this angel in a m ore im personal (and ungendered) w ay, as one that m ight ‘belong’ to a com ing cultural studies: . . . O n that road to the future along w hic h he [the angel] cam e, and w hich he know s so well that he can traverse it w ithout turning around. H e w ants happiness – that is to say, the con ict in w hich the rapture of the unique, the [‘once only’] new, as yet unlived is com bined w ith that bliss of the ‘once m ore,’ the having again, the lived. T his is w hy he can hope for the new in no w ay except on the w ay of the return hom e, w hen he takes a new hum an being along w ith him . (translation m odi ed, Benjam in, 1933/76: 715) Likew ise, see G illes D eleuze and C laire Par net (1977/87) on ‘souls’ along the road: . . . T he soul is neither above or inside, it is ‘w ith’, it is on the road, exposed to all contacts, encounters, in the com pany of those w ho follow the sam e w ay, ‘feel w ith them , seize the vibration of their soul and their body as they pass’, the opposite of a m orality of salvation, teaching the soul how to live its life, not to save it. (p. 62) R eferences Ador no, T heodor (1988[1955]) ‘Introduction to Benjam in’s Schriften ’, in G. Sm ith (ed.) 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