strangeness at the heart of SFU

Anecdote time!

This morning I had arranged to meet a friend from Halifax for lunch up at SFU. He’s in town for a few days on his way back from a conference in Prince George, and there was no other time or place we’d both be able to meet. (I’m not actually in the habit of entertaining visitors by inviting them to school with me). After some confusion, and some difficulty on his part in navigating our school’s maze of a campus, he arrived with an equally out-of-town acquaintance in tow. It was actually pretty fun getting to guide a little tour. They were both impressed by how big (?) and unique SFU’s campus is.

Weirdly, someone was filming some sort of movie or t.v. show today, and as I was showing around my two visitors, already feeling self-conscious about how my university appears to outsiders, I was picking my way around movie sets filled with actors who were posed and dressed up all “student-like.” I actually came upon a “scene” before I even noticed it was being filmed, and felt like there was something very peculiar about the way everyone was stationed evenly around the convo mall, looking colourful and happy and ethnically diverse. It was strange to experience this place where I so spend much of my everyday life as “other." Suddenly I felt like I was inhabiting someone else’s idea of a university rather than the real thing.

This made me think of two things: firstly, Highmore’s discussion from “Figuring the Everyday” about finding strangeness in the day-to-day. He says that everyday life is made ‘sensational’ when we put it on display. Frequently, he argues, these kinds of representations are concerned not with “everyday ‘everyday life,’ but the everyday life of ‘others.’” (14). As I mentioned, I think part of the reason I felt so odd was that I was witnessing the material of my own everyday life being other-ized. When I tried to frame my daily experience for my visitors, and as the film crew did so on a grander scale, SFU became an object of display. For a moment I didn’t see it as simply the backdrop to my daily routine, but strange and exotic, as I imagine it is in the eyes of people not accustomed to post-apocalyptic style architecture.

Second, the event got me thinking about tourism. Often when we visit new places we do so with the intent of escaping our everyday lives. But don’t we also travel in order to ogle the everyday lives of others? Not to suggest that my visitors were out to make me feel exploited, or that I necessarily felt that way. But there’s something inherently voyeuristic about the desire to observe, and to consume the experience of other people’s daily lives. Is it really possible? I guess my question is somewhere along the lines of something Susan asked last class. That is, when we put the everyday on display, or put a viewfinder around it and label it “the everyday,” (as in, “the everyday life of university students,”) does it retain or transcend that category?

I don’t know, but I’ll be happy when all the film crews are gone and I can walk distractedly to the library in peace.

DIY or die (of boredom)

This week was my first encounter with Adorno, and I have to say I found him quite unpleasant. In “Free Time” it felt as though he was deliberately constructing a theory that would justify his feelings of superiority over all manner of non-intellectual types, whom he refers to repeatedly and sweepingly as “people.” “People” encompasses sun-tanners, hobbyists, vacationers, amateur artists, and athletes, to name a few, and always implies the exemption of the author.

I was particularly struck by his discussion of the “do-it-yourself” ethic. Adorno associates this with “people’s” resentment at mechanization, a product of the industrial age that “unburdens people, without … their having any use for the newly acquired time” (193). According to Adorno, no one actually undertakes tasks that others could perform more efficiently for them out of sheer desire. Secretly, they despise these tasks, but take them on in a misguided attempt to express their individuality and throw off “the yoke that weighs upon them."

Adorno goes on to explicitly connect ‘do-it-yourself’ activity with “those people who regard themselves as anti-establishment” (194). I can’t help anachronistically thinking about this in terms of the DIY punk/grassroots ethic, a movement of the last 30 years that has been responsible for championing everything from self-publishing through zines, self-tutelage in music, and self-promotion through touring, all while assuming a counter-cultural attitude. Adorno would refer to these types of projects as “pseudo-activity,” activities designed to give the individual the illusion that s/he is challenging the status-quo, while simultaneously allowing them to ignore their “dim suspicion” of the actually miniscule possibility for change.

Adorno has a point when he states that pseudo-activities are “fictions and parodies” of the same productivity that society calls for. One of the contradictions in the DIY ethic is that it purports to challenge capitalist ideology by championing some of the very values that sustain it: for instance, productivity and individuality. In some ways DIY simply recreates the capitalist modes of production on a smaller scale, and it places a similar demand on the individual to be productive in their leisure time.

However, I think Adorno misjudges some of the motivations for doing things oneself. Doesn’t the will to write a zine, or form a band, or build your own bicycle stem from the desire to create personal meaning, even if it is within the constraints of a dominant system? I think the idea is that if we can reinvest both time and objects with meaning that isn't "predigested" we are subversively challenging a system that attempts to keep us complacent through boredom. Perhaps this sentiment takes us back to Svendsen’s claim that we are all hopeless Romantics, ever seeking self-actualization, but it also reminds me a little of something that came up in the Langbauer article: that is, that one can accomplish things by working within ideology rather attempting to escape it.

I have a feeling I am rambling and now it’s time for class. Next post should be more directly boredom-related!