A Politics of the Ordinary

Thomas L. Dumm

• Publisher: NYU Press
• Year: 1999
• ISBN:
  9780814769645
• Topic: Filosofia
• Subtopic: Storia e teoria della filosofia

In A Politics of the Ordinary, Thomas Dumm dramatizes how everyday life in the United States intersects with and is influenced by the power of events, on the one hand, and forces of conformity and normalcy on the other. Combining poststructuralist analysis with a sympathetic reading of a strain of American thought that begins with Emerson and culminates in the work of Stanley Cavell, A Politics of the Ordinary investigates incidents from everyday life, political spectacles, and popular culture.

Whether juxtaposing reflections about boredom in rural New Mexico with Emerson's theory of constitutional amendment, Richard Nixon's letter of resignation with Thoreau's writings to overcome quiet desperation, or demonstrating how Disney's Toy Story allegorizes the downsizing of the American white-collar work force, Dumm's constant concern is to show how the ordinary is the primary source of the democratic political imagination.

1
A Politics of the Ordinary

And it does look, after the death of kings and out of the ironies of revolutions and in the putrefactions of God, as if our trouble is that there used to be answers and now there are not. The case is rather that there used not to be an unlimited question and now there is.

—Stanley Cavell, Must We Mean What We Say?

Being Bored, Living Here

The television set is on in the middle of the day in western Massachusetts; it is deep in the winter of 1991. CNN Headline News tells its viewers about a multiple murder that has occurred somewhere in northern New Mexico. The outline of a mesa serves as a backdrop for a reporter on the scene set along an arroyo in Chimayo, a village in the heart of the Sangre de Christo Mountains. The reporter tells of a man who has just slain his estranged common-law wife, her sister, her mother, his daughter, and a sheriff and deputy who had come to the house to arrest him for violating a restraining order. This is an ordinary mass murder: the man is distraught and crazed in the way that men dispossessed of their (minimal and compensatory) privilege can become; his heartbreak is as violent as it can be; no court order is able to keep him away, and technologies of death are ready at hand. Murder is in his heart and murder is on his mind when he drives out that dirt road. Even as the reporter speaks, this man, now a fugitive, has so far eluded state law enforcement officials. He is arrested a couple days later, about one hundred miles west in Albuquerque, where he turns himself in. He had run to a safer place, having feared death at the hands of local policemen in the nearby town of Española. These comrades of the fallen policemen might have expressed their loss, their rage and heartbreak, and demonstrated the strength of the still unbroken, subterranean, and ancient chain of blood justice.

Chimayo is located on the “high road” to Taos, which wends its way through tiny villages, mountain meadows, and canyons to end near an ancient pueblo/modern resort. In Chimayo one can find “lowriders”—Chi-cano car customizers, young men and some women, families even sometimes, who cruise the main drag in Española on Route 68, the “low road” to Taos.¹ The lowriders are a reminder of urban space in a rural locale. (Española is called Little L.A. by locals.) Up the road from this larger town, Chimayo’s small fame rests on three tourist attractions associated not with lowriders but with peasant life: a shop that sells high-quality blankets woven at the same site by eleven successive generations of a single family, a well-regarded restaurant specializing in New Mexican cuisine, and a chapel of miracles. The last of these, the Sanctuario de Chimayo, is the destination of pilgrims who come thousands of miles to eat the sacred dirt and who leave behind crutches, white canes, messages of praise and thanks, and small gifts for the Holy Virgin. A secret society of penitentes, mystics who engage in rituals of self-flagellation, organizes an annual procession commemorating the Passion of the Cross, in which a young man carries a crucifix some twenty miles from Sante Fe to the Sanctuario on Good Friday in memory of the horrible suffering endured by Jesus Christ. (The penitentes have been known in the past to have crucified one another in secret ceremonies, a sign of their ecstatically intense worship.)

Chimayo is also a place of desperate poverty and the kind of violence that accompanies such despair. In 1990, Chimayo’s county of Rio Arriba was said to have the second highest rate of death from unnatural causes of all counties in the United States. Between drunken accidents on narrow highways, suicides, and murders, the area is known throughout New Mexico as a dangerous place. It is wise not to travel the road between Chimayo and Española after dark on Saturday nights; the drunken drivers make travel too hazardous.

In Chimayo the farmers’ fields are irrigated by acequias, irrigation ditches. Many acequias date back to the sixteenth century, and some of them predate the Spanish Conquest and exploration. For as long as the acequias have existed, local people have chosen major domos to regulate their flow. Water from the acequias irrigates the chili fields and orchards of apricot trees. The man who killed his family first drove up the arroyo, which was called Daniel’s after the name on the mobile home court that marked the turnoff from the blacktop road. The summer before his rampage, telephone company employees in cooperation with the county had numbered the arroyos and the homes along them, establishing addresses for everyone there. By establishing addresses, the telephone company would be able to find their customers more easily. Of course, it also made it easier for government authorities to track down people who previously had enjoyed a greater anonymity.

This neighborhood looks out onto Truchas Peak, about twenty miles in the distance. At thirteen thousand feet, the peak is visible from many windows and is the backdrop for the drama of every unfolding day, every evolving season. Summer in the high desert is the monsoon season. Each morning begins crisp, clear and chilly, and during the course of the day the temperature rises to the mid-nineties. Then a touch of humidity perfumes the air with the complex scent of desert, and thunderheads, visible for many miles, build up. By late afternoon, with astonishing regularity, there are thunderstorms. Afterward the air clears, and after sunset the sky is bright with the glow of stars, brilliant at eight thousand feet. It is a wonderful place. People fall in love with it.

Sam and Angie Martinez lived on the very arroyo where the slaying occurred, in an adobe house where they were raising their three children. An electrician by trade, Sam is a resourceful and skilled craftsman, in the fashion of someone raised on a farm, someone who has lived in a rural area and often has had to improvise solutions to problems. A local person—the lineage of his family can be traced back over three centuries—he once worked in nearby Los Alamos as a maintenance man at the government laboratories. By 1990 he had his own electrical business and was always doing many other small things to make life comfortable for his family. (He could gather a winter’s worth of wood chopping trees by permit in Kit Carson National Forest; he was remodeling another adobe house on his property; and with his cousin he was raising chilis—Chimayo chilis have a great reputation in New Mexico, though Hatch chilis are more famous and abundant.) Angie mainly stayed home, raising the kids, though she also did some houseclean-ing in the area.

One evening in the summer of 1990, Sam was doing some work in the house he was remodeling. A visitor from New England who was in Chimayo for the summer (and who was renting a small cabin on their property) offered to help him with some of the simpler chores. As they went about moving some sheets of chipboard into an empty room, Sam asked this easterner how he liked Chimayo so far. The visitor started talking about the beauty of the mountains, the silence of night, the stars, the desert, the fragrance of the air before a thunderstorm. Sam allowed him to go on in this vein for a while, and when the visitor had run out of things to say he responded, “Oh. Well, I was asking because we find it really boring living here.”

What does it mean for Sam to find it boring living in Chimayo? Most obviously, there is the dull quietness that one experiences in the countryside in contrast to urban life. Does his experience correspond with the problem of many who have thought of boredom as a distinctly modern experience? For many such thinkers, to be bored is to suffer from tedium or ennui. But even here, there is no clear sense of what it means to be bored. Some of this incoherence is echoed in etymology. The word bored has no indisputable etymology that might move one beyond imagining the labor of drilling to explain how the idea of drilling a hole—to bore—could also describe the process of being dull and stupefied; how a meaningful activity can gradually be transformed into a drudgery; and how a more distant perspective that overlooks the details of the everyday might become desensitized to the time-boundedness of a meaningful activity becoming meaningless. Here is where some turn to Hannah Arendt’s deprecation of labor and work to seek sustenance for meaning in some higher activity.² Sam’s experience as a laborer may be connected to this sense of boredom: the repetitions of work, the enslavement to routine, the troubles of scrambling to keep up—with bills, with family obligations, with chores.

But a boring moment may be filled with meaning. Gilles Deleuze has noted that Samuel Beckett “spoke of ‘drilling holes’ in language in order to see or hear ‘what was lurking behind.’”³ And Jean-Luc Nancy can even be interpreted as having defined truth as a bore:

Truth punctuates, sense enchains. Punctuation is a presentation, full or empty, full of emptiness, a point or a hole, an awl, and perhaps always the hole that is pierced by the sharp point of an accomplished present. It is always without spatial or temporal dimensions.⁴

Perhaps the acute observatory powers that accompany being bored suggest that the claim of seeing something behind language depends on the language itself. In this sense, the labor of boredom prepares one for an insight into something even deeper and stranger than meaninglessness. Boredom may be understood as a preparation for telling oneself something. In boredom, something is wanting explanation, and someone is refusing to be distracted from the wanting.

Of course, Sam may not have been as bored as he claimed to be—his life seemed full, busy, rich in incident and concerns. He was, in the words of Primo Levi, “unhappy in the manner of free men.”⁵ And yet he knew that rural life in New Mexico wasn’t as the visitor from the east seemed to want it to be. The visitor’s description, a sentimental tourist’s description, was devoid of people, for one thing; and the people who were struggling to get by in that small village weren’t simply characters in a travel sketch. The visitor started to wonder if Sam might have thought life in New England, for instance, was somehow more meaningful than the life he had made here in the town of his ancestors. Perhaps Sam wondered at the visitor’s interest in the New Mexican desert.

The experience of boredom may be connected to the feeling of being uninterested, and hence uninteresting even to oneself; feeling left out, existing on the margins of events that powerful people represent as central to what matters in the world. Perhaps the opposite is also true: boredom may be understood as a symptomatic response to an unsought inclusion, a reaction to the invitation to observe, an expression of discomfort at not wanting to be a part of a larger narrative while being acutely aware that one is. In such a situation boredom becomes a recognition of the terror that prefaces the moment one is forced to see what might lurk behind language; the deadening power of the force of events as they are about to thrust themselves on ordinary life; the punctuation of truth as it is bearing down but before it has broken through, harrowing, inscribing—enlightening us in an untimely fashion, like a prisoner in Kafka’s penal colony.

It is the moment before something happens that marks the apex of boredom. This is one reason we may be so often tempted by the comfort of television. Television distracts us from the boredom of anticipation by substituting a spectacle, a synthetic resolution, serially, with the regularity of a schedule. I once was suspicious of wide-screen televisions in desert villages, the ubiquitous satellite dishes that pull in Chicago superstations, because they seemed to contribute to making local life in lands of enchantment appear dull and idiotic by comparison. But I have come to think that my suspicion is misplaced, that in some ways the comparison of city and country is itself vacuous. If one recognizes the ordinary as existing below the threshold of a certain register of representation, then it is not to be found by television, nor overcome by the spectacles that television miniaturizes. But matters are not that simple. The entanglements of the ordinary in spectacular events and in entertainments are complicated and partial, not simple and pure: its losses and gains seem to be the negative images of what may matter and what may not. In fact, the spectacular event may be composed of bits and pieces of the exemplary ordinary—distorted, perhaps; destroyed, in some ways; but returning to the scene of the everyday. So it may be that the ordinary is not overshadowed by Michael Jordan floating above a basketball rim on television. The ordinary may actually sometimes be enhanced. The network of communications that allows us to compare ourselves to others is not by itself a threat to the ordinary. The ordinary does not exist on a simple scale of desire but is itself a compositor of desires.

Sam Martinez found it boring living in Chimayo. Would he have found it less boring living in Los Angeles? How would he like being part of that (much larger) desert village, a member of what one denizen of the city has found to be a “gesellschaft community?”⁶ Many villagers from Chimayo have made the trek to Los Angeles to find work. Many have returned as soon as they could. Sam himself has done this. There are times when boredom is an accomplishment, the triumph of local carefulness over the recklessness of distance. Boredom seems to be the loss of a sense of the familiar in the presence of all that is familiar. This defamiliarization, the accompaniment of the drilled hole that exposes the death behind language, goes some way toward explaining how the experience of being bored is akin to the experience of fear. Both reflect a sense of a loss of familiarity. With fear, the loss is pronounced. With boredom, it is compounded by the presence of what should be familiar and hence is not easily perceivable as having anything directly to do with a trauma.

The anxiety that boredom expresses may be appreciated as a loss of the familiar by its absorption into a larger context. Boredom may be a response to a strange liminal state—when people find experience infiltrated by processes of ordering that diminish the uniqueness of their lives, on the one hand, and by the representation of events as being of overwhelming import, on the other. This sense of loss becomes a common denominator of ordinary life as it is invaded by the eventful and strip-mined by normalizing strategies. In the face of this loss, boredom expresses an anxiety that is distinctively modern. William Connolly has put it this way:

Underlying persistent boredom is anxiety, a mood we are not encouraged to articulate in the subject-centered world, but which, once articulated, discloses or expresses something that had been obscurely present in the initial feeling. Anxiety is a vague malaise about the human condition itself . . . which is hidden when subjects are active, interested, involved, in charge of things, but which disturbs us vaguely and darkly when we step outside the hustle and bustle of everyday life. . . when we are bored, for instance.⁷

Outside the hustle and bustle, not distracted, we have trouble avoiding our condition. And what is that condition?

Sam Martinez’s boredom may be a warning, a sign of the gradual dimin-ishment of the ordinary. The losses he experiences in the village of Chimayo are repeated every day in city and in suburb. It is not the idiocy of the countryside that afflicts him: Karl Marx’s idiots were not bored.⁸ Their relationship to language, their familiarity with death, bespoke other terrors, but not the terror of boredom. They placed their faith in God, to be sure, but also more or less knew the practical wisdom of Thoreau, who, on being asked when dying if he saw anything beyond this life, replied, “One world at a time.”⁹ A particular kind of patience is required to work through boredom, to face the unease of a possible meaninglessness. A different recovery of the world is required of us. Here and now, the diagnosis of the condition itself might influence the action that could be taken. How do the conditions of boredom inflect a willingness to be patient?

Being Free, Averting Boredom

The problem of boredom is intimately linked to the question of how to be free. To be bored is too often to be free in one way and not to know what to do as a consequence; to face a truth and to assume a posture of despair; to be fixed in a place, not knowing how to move beyond what one knows. There is a place of boredom, and it is a place we make in our attempts to think of how to be in the world. The thought of a place of boredom coincides with the way in which we think about the categories of ordinary freedom. In this way, formal freedom may be thought of as the emergence of a neutral space, or even spaces, in which action occurs afterward, and the actor is bereft for not knowing what to do in this empty, completed space. Alternatively, ethical freedom may be understood as a complicatedly related set of practices and relationships that entail the creation, negotiation, and traversing of multiple and overlapping spaces.¹⁰ Under the rubric of ethical freedom, the work of constructing spaces enables people to avert boredom by re-cognizing the space of boredom as a space in need of reworking, where one has the opportunity to turn around and reattain an interest in others and hence in oneself. One will never totally avert boredom, but one may be able to dissipa...