ECOLOGY OF EVERYDAY LIFE
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necessary to engender a false dilemma between spirituality and politics in
order to address issues of social and ecological change. Rather, we may
develop new ways to talk about questions of meaning, quality, sensibility or
spirituality, ways that are integral to talking about institutional and political
change. For the common link between ideas of meaning and ideas of structure
is the idea of relationality. The idea of social relationships is integral to the idea
of social structures—non-hierarchical structures that facilitate
meaningful
cooperative social relationships in all areas of our lives.
This
chapter
initiates
a
discussion
of
how
to
re-cast
common
understandings of ‘meaning’ that are conventionally framed in spiritual or
romantic terms, ways to discuss those meaningful aspects of social and
ecological life that are degraded by capital-driven technology and state
formations, ways to talk about those aspects of reality that cannot be reduced
to capitalist rationalization with its productionist idiom of means-ends, bottom
lines’, or standardization. Moving beyond dualistic concepts such as ‘spirit’
provides the opportunity to cultivate new metaphors for articulating that which
is intensely meaningful and connective, metaphors that are derived from a
relational tradition of Eros. By shifting from discussions of spirituality or
romantic idealization to idioms of the erotic and social desire, we are better
able to transcend binaries between the spiritual and the political that currently
limit discussions of social and ecological justice.
BEyoNd RATioNAlizATioN: From SpiRiTusTo Eros
The McDonaldsization of culture is often associated with the dramatic decline
in
the
quality
of social
and
ecological
relationships.
Reducing
social
relationships to predetermined interactions between server and servee, each
aspect of a McDonald’s is prescribed, regularized, number-crunched, and
market-analyzed. The McDonald’s idiom is so embedded in everyday cultural
practice that McDonald’s itself may serve as a symbol of the cultural effects of
advanced capitalist rationalization .1 McDonald’s translation of assembly-line
industrial practice to service production typifies all that is de-spirited within
‘advanced’ capitalism.
However, the problem of capitalist rationalization has a history that
began long before the appearance of those plastic golden arches. At the turn of
the century, Max Weber described the disenchantment of everyday life and
work due to modem capitalist rationalization .2 For Weber, a rationalized
capitalism implied a disciplined labor force and the regularized investment of
capital, practices that entail the continual accumulation of wealth for its own
sake. Contemporary critiques of such principles as ‘profit over quality of life’,
‘regularization over individual expression’, and ‘standardization of everyday