Editors Note: We’ve written about the intersection of everyday life and politics before on this blog (here and here, for instance), focusing mainly on the salience of broad, national developments in the daily lives of some of our contributors. Our latest set of diaries reflect a more localized issue, one that, for a few EDLM contributors, will directly impact their professional lives. It raises a few questions for us.
Political Moods
Can politics pre-empt the everydayness of the everyday? When do things become so grave, unpredictable, or disorderly that life no longer proceeds according to habit? When does a sense of political crisis, or a specific political conflict, stop life from feeling ordinary, orderly, habitual, sustainable?
And when things fall apart or get gummed up, when and how does the human capacity for habituation, the human will to create (or perceive) routine, re-establish something that can be called ordinary life?
When, in contrast, does everyday life continue in spite of political upset? Or alongside it?
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These questions were prompted by several diaries from our most recent collection, especially the diary of volunteer writer C46. For her and several others who recorded their day on February 13, wider political currents were washing up on the local shore, in the form of Indiana Senate Bill 202.
C46 has been active in efforts to resist the bill, which instituted a post-tenure review to ensure that faculty uphold “intellectual diversity” and free speech in their classrooms and do not express political opinions irrelevant to their fields of study; the bill also created a complaint process in which students or colleagues may charge faculty with failure to meet these standards, which the university must investigate and report on to the Indiana Commission for Higher Education.
For C46 and others, this was the dreaded knock on the door—the arrival of an attack on academic freedom and progressive values in education that has visited states such as Texas and Florida in recent years but had, until this legislative session, not yet arrived with force in Indiana.
“Today will be an interesting day to document,” C46 wrote. “As I sit down to write this morning, I imagine years down the line someone reading these to watch America’s slow decline towards fascism as observed by everyday people in Indiana.”
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On February 13 (our most recent diary day), C34 spoke at a “teach-in” about the bill for students. She finished planning her remarks and tended to other tasks related to efforts to raise awareness, pressure university administrators, and lobby lawmakers against the bill.
All of this made February 13 an unusual day. Several times, C46 notes the co-existence of routine, banal occurrences (cleaning the litter box, looking at a friend’s cat photos) with a heightened affective state, linked to the day’s events and their relation to a larger, collective political anxiety.
Indeed, what would normally qualify as routine tasks have political stakes on this day. A routine email check yields mostly emails about SB 202 opposition. Communicating with allies around the state, she parries frustration at some of her team’s messaging, balanced by satisfaction with her local group’s statements.
“Meanwhile, mundane life goes on, like playing phone tag with a doctor’s office about a bill and scooping the litter box,” she writes.
Later, sitting at the speaker’s table as she waits for the teach-in to begin, she remarks on the cat hair on her sweater. A colleague holds up her phone to display photos of her cat. “A little everyday moment in a non-everyday day.”
Amidst all this, there is plenty of routine professor-stuff. Zoom meetings with research colleagues. A no-show for a student conference. Some comfort food. Video games. It’s as though February 13 operated, for C34, in two interlaced and sometimes simultaneous registers—one exceptional, and political, and informed by both motivation and dread, running alongside another—routine and everyday, taken up with the usual heterogenous mix of work tasks, the physical business of living (eating, grooming, taking medicine), and domestic life.
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Political upset is, of course, a matter of degree. C34’s account emphasizes a feeling of intensified political entanglement/engagement; February 13 feels extraordinary (in a literal and neutral sense), even as C34 acknowledges that many of the routines of daily life go on.
What about more extreme settings? Can we talk of an everyday life in Gaza, eastern Ukraine, or Sudan today? When the day is reduced to hoping and searching for food, and riven by realistic fears of imminent physical harm, are we even in the realm of the everyday? Or are we closer to what Giorgio Agamben called “bare life,” life reduced to its biological imperatives and deprived of its meanings and potentialities?
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Even within the same place and time, the ordinariness or extraordinariness of daily life varies from person to person and day to day, in ways tied up with wealth, class, relative privilege.
In 2020, Sri Lankan writer Indrajit Samarajiva described how everyday life persisted for him amidst the late stages of that country’s civil war. “Do you know what it was like for me?” he wrote. “Quite normal. I went to work, I went out, I dated.”
Writing at the height of the pandemic and at the conclusion of the George Floyd summer, Samarajiva argued that Americans at that moment were living in a failing state—a fact that the ongoing-ness of everyday life obscured from them.
“This is what Americans do not understand,” he wrote. “They’re waiting to get personally punched in the face while ash falls from the sky. That’s not how it happens. This is how it happens. Precisely what you’re feeling now. The litany of bad news. The ever-rising outrages. People suffering, dying, and protesting all around you, while you think about dinner.”
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If Samarajiva is right that, for relatively privileged people, political upheaval may not drastically disrupt the practicalities of everyday life, what of that feeling of “waiting to get personally punched in the face”?
At the time of this writing, four years after the start of the pandemic, three years after the fault lines in the American polity produced the quake of January 6, 2021, a sense of living in between convulsions is widespread. So is the corrosive experience of imagining how and when the wider calamity might arrive at your personal doorstep.
The Irish poet Seamus Heaney, who came of age in Northern Ireland in the time of the “Troubles,” wrote about the everyday psychology of this waiting, of ordinary people with their “back doors on the latch/For the bringer of bad news, that small-hours visitant/Who, by being expected, might be kept distant.”
Disruption is a matter of degree, and thoughts of imagined or anticipated terrors are disruptive in their own right, even if they do not end in being “personally punched in the face.” Intrusive thoughts of a near-future dystopia do not match the peril of refugees or people living under bombardment, but both are experiences of everyday life when one is “ensnared in history,” in the phrase of the Polish poet Wislawa Szymborska.
And waiting for the broader crisis to arrive for you, in its uniquely local form, is also an unfolding process, in which the day of reckoning may seem to approach and recede, approach and recede, to the rhythm of the daily news cycle.
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Two other diarists—both university professors—also attended the February 13 teach-in, and both also describe a larger, dark political mood that frames that event and the issue. Diarist A02 first invokes this mood in the morning, when his annoyance that his credit union is closed provokes a brief meditation on large, entropic forces.
I stop at the bank/credit union, but it’s not open until ten, so I wasted time trying to deposit a check….The fact that they randomly open at 10 instead of 9 on Tuesdays is annoying. No idea why, but it makes me think about how everything seems a little worse than before. A larger institution bought our local credit union, which has only made the place less efficient and accessible, even as they tried to pretend this change would improve things. A symptom of broader decay?
As with C46, routine matters and exchanges can raise this narrative of decay. Talking to an undergraduate student about the possibilities of graduate school, he feels obliged to give the student “The Speech”—about the poor job prospects for Ph.Ds in the humanities “as well as the current and ongoing efforts to lessen pay, job security, and independence for college faculty.” He continues:
It’s depressing to have this kind of exchange with a bright young person. I feel a little bit guilty about leaving things worse than I found them, both in my field and at this institution. It’s not really my fault, of course, but nevertheless….
He later leaves the teach-in “disheartened (which is in part the purpose of the bill) and angry.”
Diarist A01 describes leaving the meeting “vexed and agitated” amid a day that’s been too overscheduled to allow much time for dwelling on politics. But he appends a post-script characterizing his mood on Feb. 13 as distinct from the surrounding days, in which he describes feeling “a constant but variable sense of hauling around a political burden which one has responsibility for, but not power over.” This burden produces a daily moodscape of “moments of dread or heaviness or mental/spiritual fatigue, relieved by moments of a stoical ‘let’s take things one at a time’ posture, punctuated by various, random, fleeting ups and downs.”
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The similar political moods of these three diarists are obviously tied to their cultural location: they’re all Ball State professors. The version of American political conflict that has roiled their affective waters has not caused a ripple for other diarists.
Indeed, if you filter these three documents out, the remaining ten diaries submitted by our volunteers on February 13 are among the least political collections we have received since Everyday Life in Middletown began, in 2016. The project has spanned the rise of Trump in that year’s Republican primary season, the pandemic and the Black Lives Matter uprisings of Summer 2020, and the attack on the U.S. Capitol in January 2021. Discussion of news and politics have been, if not ubiquitous throughout, a consistent theme.
But that has changed recently. The February 13 diaries (again, filtering out those written by Ball State professors) contain virtually no reference to politics or even to news, beyond a few mentions of the Super Bowl, played two days earlier. The difficulties they recounted (adjusting to a new job, grieving) and joys (snuggling with grandchildren, appreciating a spouse) were personal, familial, ordinary.
We noted a similar pattern in our May, 2023 diary collection, which were marked by a relative silence about the pandemic, even greater silence on politics, and a stunning, complete absence of discussion of the day’s news.
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If there is a noticeable shift away from politics and news in the diaries, we should be careful about generalizing about it. Certainly some people, even people who are politically engaged, are making mental health decisions to limit their news consumption, or have grown exhausted with tuning in to political conflict. And while the eight years since 2016—the eight years of EDLM—have politicized a significant number of people in the U.S., it has not politicized everyone, and not with the same intensity, direction, or duration.
One way of describing the February 13 diaries is this: a small number of people registering the larger political crisis though its heightened presence for them (for local reasons), while others signal their adaptation to the same larger landscape through its absence from their accounts.
What the February 13 diaries do demonstrate is that if we are to talk of political mood in a time and place, we need to describe a range of varying positions that, when juxtaposed, illuminate each other. Journalists and commentators like to posit overarching claims about mood and atmosphere, especially in times of intensified political conflict—and to seize on (and simplify) social science work that theorizes such generalizations: we’re unhappy, anxious, polarized.
This is, indeed, one benefit of our project’s focus on everyday life: by revealing ordinary details, we are reminded of the limitations of broad claims about what people of a community are thinking or feeling. In Muncie on February 13, that was: a range of things, from intense political upset to an apparent lack of thought about politics or news.
Such a range is probably the case in all but the most catastrophic moments. W. H. Auden suggested that historical ensnarement happens “While someone else is eating or opening a window or just walking dully along.”
Juxtaposing the EDLM writers who were absorbed in the SB 202 saga with those who were not points to what may be a typical array of political moods (as distinct from political positions) in a given place and time. Absorption in one, locally pressing governmental issue is a political mood; so is an absence of concern with the day’s news.
Moods are like weather: there are no weatherless days.
Perhaps only the most dramatic and catastrophic political events—say, September 11, 2001—reach virtually everyone and dominate the everyday. And perhaps February 13, 2024, in Muncie, Indiana was a normal day in a politically fraught time.