Tony Trigilio: Additional remarks on “Passing Through Our Brief Moment in Time: A Poetics of the Ordinary”

My essay is inspired in part by the title of a 1959 experimental short film written and directed by Guy Debord, founder of the Situationist International, a French postwar arts and politics movement: On the Passage of a Few Persons Through a Rather Brief Moment in Time. Debord’s 1967 book, The Society of the Spectacle, is another key influence. The Situationists believed that the rise of new media and advertising in the postwar era had reduced tactile human experience to a series of transactional relationships organized around public relations and marketing spectacles. In response to what they saw as the commodification of everyday human experience, the Situationists elevated the ordinary to a level of primary importance in artistic expression. This re-envisioning of the significance of the ordinary was also a political act for the Situationists, as described in another of the movement’s foundational texts, Raoul Vaneigem’s The Revolution of Everyday Life. Inspired in part by Situationism, my goal is to create writing that expresses those moments, however brief or extended, when we can be seen outside of the constellations of market-driven data points that otherwise define our lives. I wish to document what is ordinary, everyday—and, ultimately, authentic—as I pass through my brief moment in time.