The turn to ordinariness

[Paul Nightingale]

Michael Pickering, History, Experience and Cultural Studies.
London: MacMillan, New York: St Martin's Press, 1997.

Briefly from the Introduction:

"The book's primary concern is to foster a more interactive relationship
between history and cultural studies, and to think through some of the
conceptual and theoretical issues that follow for cultural studies in
attempting much more assiduously to realise Frederic Jameson's
injunction to 'always historicise'" (p. 4).

"If, for instance, we take an interest in cultural processes as a banal
connection between social history and cultural studies, the difficult
question which follows is how such processes may be approached
historically" (p. 6).

And then Ch. 3, "The Turn to Ordinariness":

"... at its most promising cultural studies has been concerned ... with
the interactive dynamics of cultural forms and social formations, with
the intersections of social formations, situated and mediated
experience, and social subjectivities and relations. Instead of the
idealised aesthetic qualities of experience deriving from the study of
the isolated literary text, the objects of inquiry are a range of
heterogeneous cultural texts, practices and experiences, with an
emphasis on the generation of meanings and values as an active social
process occurring in particular forms of life in definite historical
contexts" (p. 59).

So far, a working definition of cultural studies. When I referred to
Pickering earlier, I was thinking of the title of this chapter,
explained below:

"The turn to ordinariness involves examining the construction and
consequences of a broad variety of forms of cultural production, rather
than focusing only on the historically determinate category of
'literature', and understanding these as inseparable from the social
relations and arrangements in which they are embedded. In other words,
all aesthetic and cultural experience is seen as social, as integrally
folded into forms of sociality and necessarily bound up with different
interests and identities which are historically conditioned and
historically in struggle" (p. 68).

The chapter concentrates on Williams, but also mentions Anthony
Easthope's Literary into Cultural Studies (1991) - that perhaps gives an
idea of where Pickering's coming from. In conclusion I cannot resist the
temptation to offer the final quotation above as a quite exemplary
commentary on what Pynchon is doing in the Foreword, and most certainly
in the "fascistic dispositions" passage.