A mundane voice

This essay offers strategies of speaking and studying 'the mundane' as a means to inaugurate an interventionist politics in cultural studies. Using Meaghan Morris's example of anecdotal and colloquial address, a mundane voice is shown to situate and contextualize our understanding of major concepts circulating in international theory, and broaden the audience for academic debate. Studies of 'everyday life' have been hampered by a too-close affinity with hegemonic structures of knowledge production, requiring further gestures of parochialism to hasten a speaking position aware of its own partiality and limitations. Attention to the singularity or 'thisness' of a cultural site humbles the tasks cultural studies can perform, introducing some curiosity to what we think we know about the cultures from which we speak. Reflecting on the fate of Michel de Certeau's work in the boom period of cultural studies' expansion, the paper suggests that cultural studies' radical potential can be expanded if we are not inflected by preconceptions about what defines politics, especially against the fashions of intellectual commodification. Morris creates affective connections between past, present and future political concerns: a different temporality for political investment than the cycles of electoral models, or the dictates of commodity culture, afford, and one that cultural studies might still learn to adopt.