everyday places and practices, a project, an introduction

This experiment began when an anomaly was noticed. One day when travelling on a train from home to the white office in Farringdon. It was perhaps 2008, perhaps earlier and I became interested in the everyday aspects of the world, from the cafes and hotels I frequented to drinking coffee or buying a book or two in the Charing Cross Road or in a Barnes and Noble in Dallas or Plano. Perhaps the key moment was watching her get dressed in a sunny morning in June, 10,000 hours of watching her get dressed. The flaw in my world was the absence of this ordinariness in the cultural object I was reading, as the plain clothes ticket inspectors passed through the train. The emptiness of the world, the flaw is that nobody actually says anything about this, surely, I thought as I passed the ticket to the inspector, others have noticed this flaw, this anomaly in our overpopulated and spectacular world. In the cinema when the lights are up, looking at the screen and the architecture of this old building, and yet it seems redundant, empty. What is this place, these practices we are looking at before the film starts? The emptiness of place and practices. Outside the window, past the garden, beyond the trees I can see a brick house, with white window frames and red tiles on the roof, standing, reminding us, offering themselves to us, the gardens between us and the brick house are green and alive. It’s pointless to wonder, because no one actually lives there, no one goes into the conspiracy of place and practice that the glint in the window suggests is there.

The consequence for us is an extraordinary surplus of places hidden behind the human over-population. They move in, translate the place into something that is concealed by place and practices. But here we merge place and practices into the singular phrase everyday practices. Occasionally we notice something that opens out the conspiracy into daylight. A person walking a dog through the streets onto the common towards the woods, a wall light in the empty courtyard visible from the street as you walk pass the open entrance, the sound of people eating in a restaurant on a midsummer evening, the clink of glasses, a perfect espresso served in a white china cuo. The laughter of a child on a swing. The seduction of a gated luxury estate which seems to be sending us invitations. All we need to do is accept the invitation and take up a final residence in these spectacular places and we will be able to understand the ideologies and discourses that are hidden in the bricks, the roofs, the lampost, the keyboard my fingers are touching producing these words. Would this expose the mysteries of what is really happening as I walk towards the cafe down the hill? The fact is that my fingers touching the keyboard whilst looking at the brick house shows how we are part of the scen(a)ery that is the story perhaps even the solution to the experiment that began in, let us imagine in 2008.

This is the moment when we think there is still work to be done, like reading Capitalism and Schizophrenia again, a practice we have lived with since the 1980s. But this work, this practice is haunted by the research and finding of texts that studied the everyday (practices (and places)) that we explored after the experiment began. From Sarraute’s Tropisms, through the Empire of Things, the detournements of walking along side streets in cities reading signs. A sunday in Dallas watching people queue to enter a brick cathedral, to worship and be worshipped. We wondered if an inventory of these everyday practices was necessary which would reveal their qualities. Where we thought that the word was the smallest ideological unit, perhaps that arts and crafts brick in the wall in Hampstead, challenges that concept, just as the aubergine and artichoke in the fruit bowl at three AM in the morning does, there is then an ideological unit smaller than the word. This project, this experiment reveals the qualities, opens the multiplicit doors so that we can reveal their qualities, the ideologies and discourses that construct them, to enable their voices to be heard. We hope that exposing the secret world will make it available, tghings will flow from the their to here, to this side.

The everyday practices belong within the stream of our muiltiple long term engagements, philosophical, cultural, personal, buildings, streets, signs and trees, the enforced social. These things have accompanied me from early adulthood to now and we think contain (undisclosed here) the conceptual persona that stand in place for the trees we planted between the buildings. We are sitting and writing this and looking at the brick house out there. In this we hope(d) to take refuge from the spectacle that endlessly makes us short of breath. But after all this time its clear that we always start again, each day searching for places, things and practices which have the potential to touch us as Cecil Taylor’s piano playing does as this is typed. Are we getting anywhere in this project, or are we simply trying to abstract ourselves from the spectacle of these things, through these brief chronicles of the time. Though let’s be fair and acknowledge that we have never tried to organize this line of thought and production into something coherent, because we simply do not think like that. We have no wish to separate the everyday practice of Rain in Winter from the line of stories that began with Tokyo Bay and which is part of that other set of things written and thought that do not quite belong to this line of thought, this line of flight away, and then there is the machine-translation-project… These are all lines of flight away from the over segmented society of the spectacle. But these other collections of narratives need their own explanations… So instead let us feed this line of work, these arbitrary practices and places out in no articular order always watching the language disintegrate… Mathew Shipp playing … And then I wonder how to rewrite ‘foot’ and ‘stairs’…