Shiloh Krupar, Georgetown University
Folklore of Operational Banality – FOB – is a tongue-and-cheek organization dedicated to the vigilant detection and creative exposition of everyday protocols, organizational logics, normalized procedures, and bureaucratic orders. FOB combines sincerity with satire to probe the fabular routines and quotidian contradictions that underpin daily existence. We endeavor to coordinate critical-reflexive folklore that interrupts the status quo and encourages commonplace wishful thinking.
Per our mandate to audit operational banality, FOB frequently engages in review activities and parametric exercises to generate and curate cultural and intellectual resources. One recent effort was to organize a folksonomy of readings over the past decade. Under the working title “The decade that gave us aught but answers,” FOB derived the following categorized content of literature: “Forensics of Not Seeing,” “Critique of Wardinary Life,” “Corporate|Christian Operations of Populist Expressions (COPE),” and “Eco-compossibility.” Below is a list of highlights from these tags.
“Forensics of Not Seeing”
Some evidence links this category—“Forensics of Not Seeing”—to a statement made by former US Department of Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld during a 2002 press briefing: “There are known knowns; there are things we know that we know. There are known unknowns; that is to say there are things that, we now know we don’t know. But there are also unknown unknowns—there are things we do not know we don’t know.” On numerous occasions, FOB has turned to Robert N. Proctor and Linda Schiebinger’s edited volume Agnotology: The Making and Unmaking of Ignorance (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2008) to explore “why we don’t know what we don’t know,” and how we know to ask—or not. Barbara Ehrenreich’s Bright-Sided: How Positive Thinking is Undermining America (New York: Picador, 2009) opened our eyes to the “not seeing” inherent to positive thinking, and the disastrous structural effects of the American refusal to consider negative outcomes. China Miéville’s novel The City and the City (New York: Ballantine Books, 2009) extrapolates on the everyday juridical and social aspects of nation-state borders to such ridiculous extremes, that the problem of exposure—of one population being aggressively seen by another—profoundly unsettled FOB’s study of not seeing. In vivid forensic detail, Mike Davis’s Late Victorian Holocausts: El Niño Famines and the Making of the Third World (London, New York: Verso, 2001) historically reconstructs latter-19th century catastrophes to show how world-capitalist expansion and the colonial destruction of traditional support mechanisms arranged for famine in the global South—and how laissez-faire and Malthusian logics legitimated such mass death by “seeing but doing nothing.” Mary Roach’s engrossing and irreverent Stiff: The Curious Lives of Human Cadavers (New York: Norton, 2003) drew FOB’s attention to the unacknowledged material support of the very field of forensics—the human cadaver—and the seldom-seen political, economic, and social lives of dead bodies.
“Critique of Wardinary Life”
A second FOB area is creative criticism of the banal landscapes and ordinary practices that support, rehearse, and make possible war and neoliberalism. In the past decade, the two works ranking highest in this category have been theatrical plays; their leading position demonstrates the central problem of responding to the melodramatic discourse of evil, eschatological logics, and everyday extremisms hidden in plain sight in the US “War on Terror.” The theater responded to former President Bush’s 9/11 declaration “Our responsibility to history is clear: to answer these attacks and rid the world of evil” with two tragicomedies that, in their absurdity, attempt to give artistic form to collective dread and to cultivate prudence, moral sensitivity, and “good sense” against the nonsense of pre-emptive violence and torture. Marcus Youssef, Guillermo Verdecchia, and Camyar Chai’s The Adventures of Ali & Ali and the Axes of Evil: A Divertimiento for Warlords (Vancouver, BC: Talonbooks, 2005) is an agit-prop parody of 9/11 cultural representation and misinformation that employs skits, spoofs, and songs to deconstruct the War on Terror. Christopher Durang’s fang-toothed farce Why Torture is Wrong, and the People Who Love Them (theatrical premier in 2009; script published by Dramatists Play Service, 2011) confronts everyday paranoia and xenophobia through a hilarious and disturbing rendering of the banality of the torture chamber and the bumbling and bloody US counter-terrorism campaign. Other popular works in this category include experiments in writing, reading, listening, storytelling, and academic theorizing, including: Sven Lindqvist’s shattering history of aerial bombing—A History of Bombing (New York: The New Press, 2001)—which charts the terrorist imagination of “the West” rather than that of some alien or impoverished “Other”; Avery Gordon’s writings “to be read out loud,” collected in Keeping Good Time: Reflections on Knowledge, Power, and People (Boulder and London: Paradigm Publishers, 2004), that encourage us to take sides because that is where we can find the “imaginative means to render society adequate to human life”; Wendy Brown’s examination of political consciousness that activates history of and for the present—in contradistinction with moralism and melodrama—to generate material and modest possibilities for alternative futures, in Politics Out of History (Princeton and Oxford: Princeton University Press, 2001); Kathleen Stewart’s practices of “slow looking” and attention to the affective dimensions of ordinary life—how subjects have the capacity to affect and be affected—and to the noncoherent, incommensurate, banal, strange, scenic, and unlivable in her book Ordinary Affects (Durham and London: Duke University Press, 2007); and J.K. Gibson-Graham’s A Postcapitalist Politics (Minneapolis and London: University of Minnesota Press, 2006), a work that cultivates techniques of creatively rethinking the economy via a workbook style that eschews “pure positions” for theoretical commitment to an embedded politics of possibility.
“C.O.P.E. – Corporate|Christian Operations of Populist Expressions”
This category can be attributed to FOB’s combined interest in the evangelical dynamism of the contemporary American Right and the extension of the corporate body into new terrains of political and social life, ranging from the Tea Party, to the Citizens United Supreme Court decision, to Christian-evangelical cancer treatment centers. FOB’s 2008 book-of-the-year was Melinda Cooper’s Life as Surplus: Biotechnology and Capitalism in the Neoliberal Era (Seattle and London: University of Washington Press, 2008), which outlays structural co-operations between the born-again and pro-life movement of the evangelical Right, debt imperialism, and commercialized biotechnologies. Also popular were Andrea Smith’s Native Americans and the Christian Right: The Gendered Politics of Unlikely Alliances (Durham and London: Duke University Press, 2008) for its deft treatment of unexpected coalitions between Native struggles and the Christian Right and stunning challenge to many assumptions about American Right vs. Left affiliations and activisms; and Nikolas Rose’s The Politics of Life Itself: Biomedicine, Power, and Subjectivity in the Twenty-First Century (Princeton and Oxford: Princeton University Press, 2007) for its compelling examination of the many changes in conceptions of personhood, community, and kinship attendant to the ways that biological “life” has been drawn into speculation and surplus value production.
“Eco-compossibility”
Lastly, FOB could not put down the following efforts to imagine—and enact through research and writing—eco-compossible worlds: Ellen Meloy’s post-sublime and post-ecocidal creative nonfiction of the stark and beautiful militarized ecologies of the desert US Southwest in The Last Cheater’s Waltz: Beauty and Violence in the Desert Southwest (Tucson: The University of Arizona Press, 1999); Michael Taussig’s use of natural history and the modality of the museum to capture the charged substances of gold and cocaine within the muddy materiality of globalization, in My Cocaine Museum (Chicago and London: Chicago University Press, 2004); Donna Haraway’s ongoing discovery of human-nonhuman affiliations and co-habitations—and its implicit critique of human exceptionalism—in When Species Meet (Minneapolis and London: University of Minnesota Press, 2008); and last but not least, FOB’S best-book-of-the-aughts: Gay Hawkins’ The Ethics of Waste: How We Relate to Rubbish (Rowman & Littlefield Publishers, 2006), for its evocative suggestion that it might be waste that inspires an environmentalism—and folklore—grounded not in ecological moralism or austerity but habitual practices and the life we share with waste.
