Banal retentive
SERIOUS SCHOLARS ARE MINING CULTURAL INSIGHTS FROM OUR
GROCERY LISTS AND MAILING LABELS
By Mark Scheffler
Mark Scheffler is a Chicago-based writer
October 20, 2002
Several years ago on a frosty Chicago
morning, Davy Rothbart emerged from a friend's house at 3 a.m. to find the
following note stuck to his windshield:
"Mario, I [bleeping] hate you. You
said you had to work, then why's your car HERE at HER place?? You're a [bleeping]
LIAR. I hate you, I [bleeping] hate you. Amber. P.S. Page me later."
After some initial confusion, Rothbart
concluded that it had to be a case of "mistaken Toyota Camrys."
Somewhere the real Mario was probably hard at work, not hard at play.
But more than simply offering a sordid
glimpse into a trainwreck of a relationship, the note was an epiphany for
Rothbart, yet another inspirational milestone in a lifelong fascination with
found items that started years earlier whenever he'd see stray notes bounding
across the schoolyard.
"I've always thought it's pretty
amazing how powerful a sense you can get of the world just by reading a half-page
letter that's been left behind. In just 50 words, you can really get inside
someone's head."
Thus, in 2001, with Amber and Mario as
Rothbart's unlikely muses, Found Magazine was born. The print version--along
with its accompanying Web site--is a catchall for stray notes, oddball sketches
and other weird miscellany.
"Just about anything has some appeal,"
Rothbart says. "Even if it's just a shopping list. Or sometimes it's
what they happen to write it on. There was a break-up note we featured that
really didn't say anything too unusual, but it was written on a barf bag from
an airplane." Details like that, he says, are what open up an infinite
number of interpretive possibilities.
The items Rothbart publishes--he receives
up to 10 submissions every day from all over the globe--seem as though they're
torn from the diaries of madmen or dispatched from the lunatic fringe. "Yes--it
is all about getting in touch with your pelvic floor," reads one note.
"All neuroses can be retraced to a lack of connection to the pelvic floor."
And yet, on closer inspection, Rothbart
says, it's clear that the lunatics are not wild-eyed eccentrics. The lunatics
are us, the whole human race captured in our most honest moments.
Rothbart is not alone in his affection
for the overlooked artifacts of daily life. While the rest of the world looks
to major cultural events such as presidential speeches and championship tractor
pulls for its big meanings and societal clues, fans of the mundane have been
busy going through the lint-trap of modern life. There are dozens of books,
Web sites, publications and associations that celebrate and elevate the quotidian
world--the world of discarded objects, commonplace items and micro-phenomena
that are a part of everyday living, but that lurk just below our collective
radar.
One such is the Ephemera Society of America.
Its president, Ron Stegall, relishes the perspective offered by the peripheral.
"You have the various drafts of the Declaration of Independence. Then
you have the Declaration itself," says Stegall. "But a true ephemeral
document would be, for instance, a letter or a note one of the signers of
the Declaration sent to another saying: 'I've just gotten a new draft. Stop
by and take a look at it.' And then you get a totally different slant on the
interchange--for example, the means by which they communicated or how they
addressed each other."
In addition to stray notes found on windshields
or retrieved from the dustbin of history, there is a whole other realm that
can loosely be called The Banal Reconsidered. Stegall, for instance, says
he once met a historian who could show the evolution of printing through his
collection of mattress tags.
Similar insights are on display in the
book "Speck: A Curious Collection of Uncommon Things" (2002). One
chapter features enlarged photos of the tips of various lipsticks, all of
which have strangely customized shapes that match the contours and application
techniques of the women to whom they belong. The book's editor, Peter Buchanan-Smith,
says the objects become, in effect, reflections of someone's personality.
"Most people, usually women, immediately
identify with them. They always say, 'Oh my god, you should see my friend's
lipstick,' or, 'Oh, yeah, I remember my mom's lipstick used to look like this.'
They in turn can make their own little discoveries. And at that point, lipstick
becomes an object you can't help but notice and contemplate."
We can also learn a lot from mailing labels,
Buchanan-Smith says. While working as an art director at a magazine, "Speck"
contributor Mark Ulriksen collected more than 100 such labels from packages
that had been sent to him over the years. On every one of them the spelling
of his name is butchered--Mark Orkson, Tom Urlichson, Mary Kvlriskcen. Individually
the labels would be nothing more than forgettable scraps of paper--minor travesties.
But taken as a whole, they offer up an unflattering portrait of society.
"It becomes an indication of how
stupid people can be," Buchanan-Smith says. "It also says something
about mail and the ways we correspond: It's amazing that people don't even
take the time to get someone's name spelled correctly."
Who we are, for better or worse, is also
played out in the little routines and ordinary behaviors we participate in
on a daily, even minute-to-minute basis.
"Although looking at the way people
stand in an elevator may seem irrelevant, if one makes enough analytic jumps,
one can get from that to why health care comes with your job rather than with
your existence," says Scott Schaffer, managing editor of the Journal
for Mundane Behavior, a 2-year-old academic publication produced jointly by
California State University, Fullerton and Millersville University in Pennsylvania.
Schaffer says that people in the U.S.
stand fairly far apart in an elevator and won't necessarily make room for
others trying to enter, indicating that personal space is prioritized over
the communal good of getting the maximum number of people to their destination
quickly. This valuing of individualism translates to other aspects of our
lives as well, including, in this case, health insurance, which is provided
to people on the basis of competitive success rather than on pure need. In
short, those who have jobs that are considered more productive--and "more
meritorious," as Schaffer says--are the ones who get health-care benefits,
as opposed to the way things are in societies such as Sweden's, where medical
benefits are considered a birthright.
Schaffer, who teaches in the sociology
and anthropology department at Millersville, also tells of William Cummings,
a Journal contributor who had arrived on the Indonesian island of Bali and,
upon entering a washroom, realized he hadn't a clue about how to use a squat
toilet.
"He became obsessed with the idea
of how people learn to use them and [why] it is that this, rather than another
kind of toilet, gets used. And he developed an entire analysis," says
Schaffer.
"Bathrooms . . . accentuate otherness," Cummings writes in his essay. Nowhere, he says, are cultures more different than in how they deal with bodily functions. "Most Americans reach their personal limit of cultural flexibility in the Indonesian bathroom. Many are they who
have faced their first squat toilet in
the dead of night with an apprehension that may fade over the months, but
never disappears entirely."
Because they scrape the pan of popular culture, because they focus on things
that seem irrelevant, those who study the mundane--the "Mundane Mafia,"
as Schaffer calls them--are often seen as second-class citizens in a world
that venerates greatness and beauty.
"Some people see it as trash,"
says Rothbart of the items in his magazine. "We get people who write
us and say, 'You're nuts,' " says Schaffer of his journal.
Traditionally, scholars tend to focus
first on extraordinary individuals or big events, and second on extreme behaviors
or perversions, Schaeffer says. But he feels they're missing a crucial point.
"So many of our relationships rely
upon things that are utterly boring: whether or not the other person puts
the cap on the toothpaste; whether someone can put up with how somebody else
manages the dirty dishes. Relationships die because of these things."
Some argue that the stakes are even higher
than that. "The mundane is truly the world where we manifest our responses
to society, the political, and the economic," says Susan Willis, a culture
critic at Duke University. "In the culture of the mundane, we don't necessarily
recognize that we're putting ourselves on the line, but in fact we are. That's
where we play out who we are and how we relate to the society that we live
in."
In her book, "A Primer for Daily
Life" (1991), Willis gleaned subversive political meanings from things
as banal as the stickers on bananas. "[I]n the absence of any clues as
to how the bananas were grown . . . packaged and shipped . . . [and] whose
hands and labor brought them from plantation to supermarket," Willis
writes, "the logo seems to offer itself as some sort of explanation.
It suggests that the multinational [corporations] made each banana possible.
The logo is emblematic of production without revealing anything specific about
production."
Willis says the task of those who observe
the trivial is to point out meanings that people may not grasp because the
behaviors or routines are so normalized as to be invisible. This has never
been more true than in the post-9/11 period, which Willis is now exploring.
While much attention has been paid to how people have put American flags out
in a show of patriotism, Willis started wondering why so many chose to put
them on their vehicles.
"I think we understand that our lives
really are about driving, and about preserving a way of life: road systems,
commuting," she says. "This is who we are, and all of this is essentially
tied to oil. I think we understand that, even if we don't consciously work
through the meanings associated with putting our flags on cars."
If such assertions elicit a collective
"Huh?" in certain pockets of culture, Willis says that's simply
because people--and, for that matter, the media--aren't accustomed to zeroing
in on humdrum behaviors. But to play devil's advocate for a moment: Is there
a sense of overreaching in all this? Isn't pocket lint sometimes just pocket
lint?
"That's for readers to determine.
You lay the evidence before them and tell them what you see," says Heather
Jackson, author of "Marginalia: Readers Writing in Books," (2001)
which makes a case for notations in texts constituting a legitimate area of
scholarly inquiry. "If they don't see it as well, then maybe you're wrong,
but good criticism generally has the effect of making readers say, 'Of course:
I hadn't put it into words, but that is what [marginalia is telling us].'
"
The interest value of the mundane isn't
lost on a growing constituency of the Internet. Though adopting an approach
that is generally less intellectual than that of scholars, numerous Web sites
have pages devoted to such detritus as people's shopping lists (keaggy.com/grocerylists)
or purchase receipts (http://lightning. prohosting.com/(tilde)receipts/).
Observers point out that the Web turns
people into curators of sorts: It provides them with an opportunity to showcase
whatever it is that pops into their heads. "There is a lot going on culturally
that is concerned with ordinariness," says Schaffer. "Web journals
are a good example, diaries that people put up that say: 'This is my life,
and yes, today may be entirely boring, but here's how it's boring and I'm
sure you can connect with that."
It's worth noting that embracing the prosaic
is not new. People have collected ephemera such as old postcards for eons.
And the Dadaists of the World War I era stoked the ire of more than one art
snob by exalting everyday objects. It was that eminent provocateur Marcel
Duchamp who submitted a urinal to a gallery show, deeming it every bit as
worthy as the canonized masterpieces in museums.
Anthropologists, meanwhile, have long
inferred meaning out of the remnants of earlier civilizations.
But why the fascination now? People could
just be taking cues from pop culture, where there have been any number of
startling references to the mundane. One of the most arresting moments in
the film "American Beauty" showed a wind-blown plastic bag floating
around in a ballet of randomness. Aside from imbuing trash with some poetic
stature, the scene suggested that there's a secret--if fragmented--history
contained in a swirling scrap of garbage: Whose bag was it? Where did it come
from? Where will it end up?
And no sitcom dealt with banal human behavior
quite as deftly as the mega-popular "Seinfeld." The show was famously
about "nothing," but nothing could be further from the truth. It
was really about the small-scale, everyday phenomena that most people never
think about--the loops we make looking for parking spots, the disapproving
glances we shoot at loudmouths at the movie theater.
But as far as contemporary theorists are
concerned, the foundation for a lot of today's ideas about "the ordinary"
was established in the 1950s and '60s by Frenchmen Henri Lefebvre, author
of "The Critique of Everyday Life," and Michel de Certeau, author
of "The Practice of Everyday Life." Both are regarded as pioneers
in the study of how the minutiae of daily life reflect more profound societal
influences and cross-currents.
"In modern times we tend to emphasize
big structures, big events, big names--everything is sort of hierarchically
organized," says Joe Austin, a pop culture-studies pioneer from Bowling
Green State University. "And what [Lefebvre and Certeau] decided was
that if that's the case, then let's start looking at the stuff that's basically
at the bottom of all these hierarchies and see what it means."
What it means is that nowadays, even the
most routine behaviors can be seen as valuable tools for interpreting culture--ours
and that of others.
"We don't necessarily think about
how we line up in a queue at McDonald's unless we're in an entirely different
kind of mundane context-- like another country--in which case we might very
well think of that," Schaffer says. "While I was [overseas], I was
constantly adjusting my mundaneness to match the mundane context I was in."
Schaffer, for example, changed the way
he used his silverware so that it was more European; that is, he stopped switching
his fork to his dominant hand after cutting his food the way Americans do.
There are plenty of Americans who go abroad
and don't know to adjust the way they do things, says Schaffer, who recalls
a scenario on the Paris Metro involving an American couple and a mentally
unstable passenger who was loudly reciting the names of all the stops on the
route. Parisian passengers completely ignored the man, Schaffer says. But
the tourists, whom he says were "probably in their mid-50s, from Scottsdale
or somewhere like that, reading an American paper," started accusing
the man of disturbing their peace.
"As soon as they said something,"
Schaffer says, "they became the center of attention on that train. And
part of it had to do with the fact that they were violating what was going
on in that ordinary context, which was that when you get on the Paris Metro,
you expect there to be at least one person on that train who's going to do
something [bizarre]."
A lot of people might find it hard to
question their own banal behavior, much less alter how they travel or handle
their dining utensils. But at the core of the deep-meaning-in-the-mundane
philosophy is an undeniably attractive notion: Gaining a broader perspective
on the world is simply a matter of knowing where to look.
"Some people ask: Isn't what you
do voyeuristic?" Davy Rothbart says. "And I say it totally is. But
maybe a certain degree of voyeurism is healthy."
Copyright © 2002, Chicago Tribune
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