Lefebvre's Lament

"Only a fool would leave the enjoyment of rainbows to the opticians. Or give the science of optics the last word on the matter." -Edward Abbey

I’m teaching an undergraduate class this semester on globalization, consumerism, & sustainability. I’ve structured the class as a seminar, heavy on reading, discussion, and writing with no formal lectures and no exams. I’ve utilized this format in two previous classes. The first time it went ok, but not great. The second time, it worked beautifully. Using this strategy in undergraduate classes reveals quite a lot about the ways in which the conventional educational model circumscribes the possibilities of active learning, and about the cultural consequences of passive learning.

In all three classes students have been initially confounded. Most of them have been conditioned to accept a hierarchy of knowledge that is legitimized through institutional endorsement. They display a deep suspicion of their own knowledge, experience, and opinions, believing the only person in the room qualified to talk authoritatively, or indeed talk at all, is the one standing up front. They generally accept this unreflexively, ready to absorb a one-way flow of information without question. It appears a self-evident truth that the person behind the podium is unequivocally qualified to be there and deliver all manner of pronouncements while those sitting are unequivocally not so qualified. Why else would the political anatomy of the classroom take the form it does?

This is the principle challenge of teaching in this format, and one that tells us a lot about social conditioning. It is symptomatic of a social formation in which certain kinds of knowledge and ways of knowing are valued above others; in which knowledge backed up by the credentialing apparatus of formal institutions is not only authoritative, but authoritarian. In other words, this differential valuation embeds the notion that formalized institutional knowledge is superior, and conversely that experiential knowledge is inferior. The societal result is a populace convinced that their own experiences—and the insights and working knowledge thus acquired—are worthless because they are not confirmed by the recognition of the formal merit system. The end result is a kind of systemic paralysis in which the undertaking of any action must first be legitimized by institutional knowledge—a kind of uncritical deference that operates at the intersection of distrust and authority. It operates at every level of social life. Indeed it has thoroughly colonized the lifeworld itself, to the point that the general populace lives in a state of constant uncertainty and doubt, uncertain as to whether it can trust its own intuition (intuition being equated to a sort of superstition), a society composed more or less of automatons. This finally yields what Henry Lefebvre called the “Bureaucratic society of controlled consumption.”



By way of illustration, a student approached me after class recently. I had just handed back the students’ first set of critical notes, an exercise in which I ask students to engage with the readings in a reflective manner. It is a highly flexible exercise, intended to generate creative responses (another mode of engagement that is seemingly foreign to many students, programmed as they are to carefully follow detailed instructions rather than improvise. In this general mode of existence, being correct is valued above being creative. Accordingly then, what students most fear is being incorrect, a state of being which is inherently prohibitive of creativity. It is not only students though, and this is the larger point. Their teachers are generally cut from the same cloth. As Jim Harrison wrote of the academic mode of intellectual production, “it is concerned above all else with being correct"). I emphasize to students that I do not want to see summaries of the readings, but critical engagements that can and do often bleed into that feared and oft disparaged territory known as opinion. This particular student had done a bit too much summarizing, and I made this clear in my grading comments. I wrote that next time I’d like to more of her own original thought, less summarizing. “I’m just don’t feel qualified to give my opinions” she said, at which point I encouraged to trust her experience and observations as a human being who inhabits the same world as those who presumably speak more authoritatively than she by virtue of their formal credentials.

However, there is one arena, and only one, in which the citizen (the student, the parent, the lover, the friend) may feel confident, and that is the arena of consumption. Which is I suppose a fortuitous confluence as far as my objectives for this particular class are concerned. So knowledge about the inner workings of the world we collectively inhabit (the world of nature, the world of physical bodies, the world of governance, and finance, and law) are left to an oligarchy of experts, to whom we must defer, while the outer manifestations of the world of commerce are democratized—the hollow “democracy of goods.” We can all be experts on different brands of footwear, but the important decisions are best left to the experts. We lack even a modicum of confidence when comes to matters of the observable world, but we are all supremely confident in issuing our opinion on which is the best brand of whitening toothpaste. And, perhaps most tragically of all, it is in conflating such acts of choice with freedom that we have perhaps irrevocably cheapened, if not entirely emptied the latter term of any vital meaning. Is a “freedom fighter” someone who is fighting to protect his/her “right” to choose between coke and pepsi? What kind of right is that? What kind of freedom? This is what I see as the ultimate consequence of an educational system that actively encourages students to doubt themselves, to refrain from issuing a statement until they can cite sources (issued of course by experts) by which that statement may be substantiated. Until that time, they are encouraged to provide their informed opinion in consumer surveys, so that corporate manufacturers and service providers might “better serve us.”



And so Lefebvre’s designation—a bureaucratic society of controlled consumption. It is bureaucratic because deference to expertise is the modus operandi, so much so that it has penetrated even the most trivial arenas of daily decision making. Thus we have people constantly fretting about what to eat and what not to eat (“They used to say eggs were high in cholesterol, now they say their high in omega 3 fatty acids. I don’t know whether to eat them or not!;” “Butter or margarine?”), or how much exercise they should get, and what kind, or whether paper or plastic is better, or whether this or that thing is carcinogenic, etc. etc. This is a condition that another prominent social theorist, Ulrich Beck, calls the risk society: a society characterized by a kind of totalizing internalization of pervasive risk. The resulting mode of engagement is one that requires constant recursive-ness—“Hold on, let me look that up online. Ok, we can do that. Wait, let me check one more source. No, never mind, we better not do that. Or should we? Oh goddamn, give that glass of wine.”

It is a society of controlled consumption because the same recursive-ness, the perpetual cross referencing, produces patterned modes of consumption informed by the often contradictory and thus disorienting pronouncements of the experts. It is, as I have already said, a sort of societal paralysis in which no one is quite sure what to do or who to trust—but most certainly, not yourself.

House Trailers

I was driving down I-40 the other day thinking about house-trailers and old trucks and how such things relate (negatively) to bourgeois sensibilities and proprieties. My wife and I lived in a trailer for a time in the Texas Hill Country. I remember sitting in the real estate office in Fredericksburg when Joe, the rental property point-man, first told us about the trailer.

“I mean, you may not want to live in a trailer . . . but it’s been well maintained by a sweet elderly German-Texan woman for years. I mean, it’s real nice . . . for a trailer. Her husband died a few years back and she’s all alone out there in Cherry Springs [an unincorporated community in the middle of nowhere, 17 miles from the nearest gas station]. She’d really like to have somebody living in it.”

It was the cheapest housing we could find, so we decided to give it a look. Now, I wouldn’t even be writing about this if not for the fact that over the course of my young life I had developed an aversion to house trailers. That aversion is not an uncommon sentiment among the middle class, or middle class aspirants (to say nothing of the upper class, for whom that aversion becomes something more like contempt). This is to say that house trailers (now euphemistically referred to as manufactured homes) are thoroughly stigmatized in our society. I often wonder now, later in life, how this came to be and what it means in terms of class formation and differentiation in our country. It appears obvious—there exist multitudinous derisive references in popular culture to trailers and their denizens. These images and references most often suggest that these are the habitations of that liminal category of fallen white people known most commonly as white trash. They are classified as such because they have failed, in the eyes of their detractors, to exhibit the ambition and drive for material success that is the sine qua non of the white middle class. They fall between the cracks precisely because in our hierarchical system of race/class designation, these people don’t act and look the way white people should in a society whose normative values are determined by an upwardly mobile middle class whose identity as such is symbolized by the things they own—by their stuff—which is in turn influenced by the advertising and marketing apparatus of multi-national corporations who rely on just such middle class aspirations to swell their profit margins.



Well, in my evolving struggles with questions and material realities of class distinction, I have come to perhaps romanticize house trailers, as well as those who choose to live in them despite all manner societal pressures ensuring them that to do so is to be relegated to marginal status, as a sort of site and practice of resistance to bourgeois hegemony. (But nobody would choose to live in a trailer, you object. But alas, that is only a reflection of your very own indoctrination in the ideology of middle class propriety). Yes, it is a romanticization, perhaps one grounded in my experience as a disaffected member of the privileged middle class whose tastes and preferences and values determine what is acceptable and unacceptable, what is moral and amoral in our society at large.

I do not wish to engage in a navel-gazing exercise enumerating my bona fides, but my childhood experience irrevocably shaped my current views on such matters, and so I can’t really talk about this subject without exploring that fact. My father grew up in the kind of abject poverty endemic to the Cumberland Mountains. So did my maternal grandfather. Both of them were determined to rise above the squalor they grew up in, and each managed to do so, in a purely material sense. Not by getting “edumacated” and finding respectable, good paying office jobs (my father dropped out of school in the eighth grade), but by working their asses off in the building trades (my father trained in vocational-technical school as a stone mason, my grandfather as a self-taught carpenter after a stint as owner of a full-service filling station). So in a way, they kept one foot firmly planted in a reality that fed their inherited working class sensibilities, as “working men.” This came with an in-built contempt, especially in the case of my father, for the rich and well-to-do—for those who inherited their wealth or attained it through means other than the sweat of their brow. This kind of sentiment was perpetually expressed throughout my childhood. In other words, I inherited a contempt for the rich. Even so, through my years as a young adult, I absorbed all the messages constantly streaming into and shaping our collective consciousness through media and societal institutions that reflect bourgeois “values.” I became an aspirant. I went off to college—the first in my family to do so—and became convinced for a time (though never entirely) that aspirations toward a middle class existence, one instantiated most saliently through material acquisition and status as a “professional,” was what life was all about. But, as my childhood had prepared me to do, I began to question the legitimacy of such truisms after being exposed to socialist, anarchist, post-colonialist or otherwise dissenting currents of thought and art.

So by the time I had migrated to the Texas Hill Country and was considering living in a house-trailer for the first time since I was a toddler, my aversions were somewhat tempered. We moved into the house trailer. It was the first place we lived independently (the two of us, together) after college. Our landlady, Cora Dieke, was indeed sweet and nurturing, as Joe back in the real estate office had assured us. It was an altogether satisfying existence. The trailer met our needs quite well, though it did get a little hot in the Texas summer heat. Since that time we have moved around quite a lot and we have never again lived in a trailer. We are now three-time homeowners (perhaps the most enduring mythological construction of middle class propriety and arrival). But I think back often to that trailer in Texas, and the sense of relative freedom that attends trailer living. First off, being much cheaper than “conventional” housing, trailers open up possibilities for engaging in the market economy on one’s own terms. What I mean is that buying a home on the conventional market binds one to the market economy in a kind of perpetual debt-peonage. At that point, one must work nearly incessantly as a wage earner in order to keep up with mortgage payments, and car payments (since the house is rarely located in an area amenable to any form of transportation other than the personal automobile), and equip the home with all the latest appliances, glossy magazine and catalogue derived decorative embellishments, entertainment centers, etc. And this is the good life, or so the popular mythology would have us believe.



While living in the third house we “owned,” we struggled to make a living as small market gardeners. We rather quickly realized that such a choice was incommensurate with the demands of mortgage payments based on market prices reflecting the normative status of an upwardly mobile class of homeowners. Such people do not typically work as farmers. It dawned on me one day that we might be able to make a go of such a life only if we purchased the cheapest land we could find and plopped a trailer down on it. Maybe we could slowly build a “real” house ourselves (I also inherited a good bit of skill in the building trades) without accumulating debt in the process.

It was also during this time that I was reading of good bit of literature in one of my favorite genres of fiction—Southern Gothic and derivative strains of contemporary literature sometimes known as “grit lit.” Faulkner, Flannery O’Connor and their heirs apparent: Harry Crews, Dorothy Allison, Larry Brown, William Gay, Chris Offut, and a whole slew of writers based in the American west who write in a similar vein.



Inspired after reading some of Annie Proulx’s short stories, I ordered an anthology titled The Best of Montana’s Short Fiction, edited by William Kittredge and Allen Morris Jones. I was really interested in reading a short story that is a beautiful compliment to Proulx’s “Brokeback Mountain”—Kim Zupan’s “The Mourning of Ignacio Rosa.” The collection contains several other excellent stories as well—Pete Fromm’s “Hoot,” and Chris Offut’s “Tough People” really stand out to me. But the main reason I bring it up is because of the image on the collection’s cover. It is a photograph, the dust jacket credits tell us, by Paul Edmondson. Roughly one third of the frame features an image of a woman’s figure from the waste down, standing in the open doorway of a “vintage” trailer in a blue paisley summer dress and block-soled sandals. The trailer is polychromatic, soft pastel-green and creamy white, accented by aluminum trim and black hardware. Both the main door and the screen door are standing open, with the interior side of screen door composing the left third of the frame. The screen door’s frame is made of plywood, with the screen in its lower half accented and reinforced by aluminum grillwork. I’m not sure why, but that photograph is very evocative to me. It seems to convey an ease-with-the-world kind of freedom—no posturing, no pretension—that just couldn’t be duplicated in an analogous image of a conventional house (think 50s era photos with the impossibly perfect lily-white family posing in front their new suburban house).

Ok. So what? First, another little vignette featuring a trailer. So, I was recently over at the house of friends for our weekly band practice session. Before we started playing I noticed a painting-in-progress on the easel of my band-mates wife, a multi-talented artist whose aesthetic sensibility is akin to my own. It is a painting of a house-trailer. It is one of those late 60s/early 70s models from back when trailers actually displayed some stylistic sophistication (or at least so it appears from my contemporary vantage). It looks a lot like the house trailer where my wife and I lived in Texas. I found myself irresistibly drawn to this painting—I think it is beautiful. It was an aesthetic response that I’ve had trouble nailing down. Is it reflective of some innate romanticizing tendency that refracts my middle class ennui? Is it reflective of an incipient aesthetic sensibility (that I am becoming increasingly aware of now, but that is decidedly new)? If so, where does this sensibility come from, seemingly all of a sudden, and what does it mean?

There is in fact a larger body of contemporary art (including in my definition of art both visual and performance art, especially music) that conveys a similar aesthetic, and to which I am also drawn. It is in fact the same aesthetic that populates that genre of literature sometimes referred to as “grit lit” that I mentioned earlier. It is embodied in a full-blown revival of outsider art styles in the fashion of Howard Finster et al. In fact, I think Finster can be thought of as one of the central iconic figureheads of this “movement,” and as a sort of heir to the counter-sensibility that Elvis and Sam Phillips helped bring about in the 1950s, one that went a long way toward dislodging staid white middle class virtues. Indeed, Elvis is a frequent subject in Finster’s paintings. It is also embodied in the music of a performer like West Virginian Hasil Adkins, who’s electrified, raucous, and often vulgar music was never included in any of those arcane museum-piece folk-song anthologies that have fueled waves of urban folk revivals. Some call it “primitive,” but that term is always and forever a degrading one, recalling as it does colonialism and its legacy of subjugation and domination, of the colonizer’s condescending and contemptuous gaze. The folk song collector and the primitive “folk art” collector both embody the colonizing impulse, seeking to galvanize a kind of counter-modern authenticity, but an authenticity that was already pre-determined in the bourgeois imagination. No, it’s not primitive—neither the art of Hasil Adkins nor Howard Finster. Their work is as modern as modern can be.



So with all these converging images and encounters it seems I’m nostalgic for house trailers. To return to the beginning, while I was driving down I-40 the other day, I was thinking how I might like to live in trailer again. There was uncertainty in the consideration, but it is undeniably attractive to me. What troubles me most is that I wonder if this desire, if you can call it that, derives from the same kind of identity-formation-via-commodities that I see as such a plague. You can be whatever you want now—you just have to buy it. In such a social reality, wherein agency is located largely in one’s ability (one’s “freedom”) to consume, lifestyle choice by way of stuff becomes the primary locus of identity. Class identity, ethnic identity, regional identity—all these are subsumed under lifestyle identity. I find this all a little troubling. Do such phenomena signal the final triumph of the ethic of consumption over the ethic of production (the latter being a time in which one self-identified by kind of work one did)?

I can’t help but place my desire (even if it is a desire I am unlikely to act on) in a position that is antagonistic to such processes, and certainly one that is antagonistic to standards of middle class propriety and comportment. For if I chose to live in a house trailer I would be exiled from bourgeois society, which is maybe what I most want. Not because I am seeking authenticity (as the cultural studies police would no doubt have it), but because I am tired of all the bullshit. Tired of keeping up appearances in a TV and glossy magazine fantasy-world that is all appearance, parading in the guise of “values,” or “morals,” or “ambition.” No place where people have ever lived their daily lives in the history of humanity has ever looked so perfect as that Country Living spread that people struggle to recreate in their homes. It is folly, and it is a ruse that keeps those selfsame people tethered to this vampiric economic machine that daily feeds on their life-force for its own sustenance. And I would be exiled because I failed to conform to the model of middle class respectability that takes as its benchmark these holographic images of non-reality that people everywhere attempt to emulate.

Besides all that, you can pull a trailer up just about anywhere. Back in high school my favorite television show was Northern Exposure. Chris, the poetic and pensive disc jockey of Sicily, Alaska’s only radio station, was my favorite character—a sort of hero (or counter-hero) in the facile way that TV drama characters can be. He lived in an airstream trailer parked beside a river. That seems pretty ideal to me. So I sometimes dream of a similar arrangement (even down to the gig as a disc jockey come to think of it), though in a warmer climate.