her own. If she is an academic, she is less Hkely than her Hberal and radical
counterparts to beheve that any sort of revolution wiU begin in academia.Yet her
own academic work is informed by the need to address the specific in terms of
the general and to uncover the seeds of change in the materials she has to work
with.
A good example of the potentiaHties of this sort of work can be found in
Susan WiUis’s book A Primer for Daily Life. An American academic with 5
children she draws both from her inte∏ectual theoretical heritage and from the
ways in which the larger Socio-Historical processes clarified by theory can be
read in the most trivial aspects of domestic Hfe. In ‘Learning from the Banana’,
she explains that her project of looking at the phenomena of daily Hfe is inspired
by Walter Benjamin’s materiaHst approach to history as defined in his Arcades
Project. Her cha∏enge is to read culture by looking backwards into history and
thus ‘recognize moments of rupture in a cultural fabric that appears a∏ too
continuous.’18
A citizen of the leading country in late CapitaHsm, Susan WiUis fiJly
understands Lukacs’s development of commodity fetishism as being both a
subjective and an objective phenomenon.‘Under capitaHsm, human quafities and
the sensual dimension of experience are objectified and abstracted - or detached
from people - so that they become commodities in their own right, ‘reified’ or
‘aestheticized’. A critical reading would be the one that points ways in which we
could reverse - or break through - ‘the process so as to recover and affirm aU the
human quaHties that the commodity form negates by abstraction’(8).
The OriginaHty of her project is that she proceeds to present creative
oppositional interpretations not only of works of Hterature but of many other
social practices of contemporary Hfe: she juxtaposes a series of‘readings’ of the
ideologies of cleanHness expressed in the arrangements of goods in the
supermarket, the gender training structured in children’s toys, the
commodification of women’s fitness programmes, the culture of domestic
labour: she directs her critical attention to the most common sites for gendering
processes in contemporary urban societies.
She also draws evidence from... her children’s own reactions. It is
enhghtening to see Cassie’s and Cade’s remarks quoted alongside Adorno and
Benjamin. It is not that Wilhs subscribes to the IeveUing of theories that is one
of the effects of the current commodification of everything, including of
theories of culture. It is just that she recognizes that theoreticians can teach us a
lot because they have grasped fundamental aspects of the ways and reasons of
18 Willis, Susan, A Primerfor Daily Life, LondonZNewYork, Roudedge, 1991.
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