Introduction A poetics of everyday life? Perhaps I mean a poeticizing of everyday practices, looking at vernacular culture as animated by our making and doing things with style. Our lives are replete with artifacts growing from our propensity to form groups through the creation of ways of speaking which give form to shared concerns and ideals. As Kenneth Burke has it, "There are no forms of art which are not forms of experience outside of art" (Burke 1931). But how do we sense, in common, when art is present, and use this state of being as a way of understanding our own cultural practices? The line between those practices which ask simply for our conscious attention and those which call for aesthetic or, at least, stylistic judgment can easily be confounded. Richard Rorty describes this attempt to find whatever poetics there are in the vernacular and gives voice to its implicit assumptions.A poeticized culture would be one which would not insist that we find the real wall behind the painted one, the real touchstones of truth as opposed to touchstones which are merely cultural artifacts. It would be a culture which, precisely by appreciating that all touchstones are artifacts, would take as its goal the creation of ever more various and multicolored artifacts. (Rorty 1989: 53-54)We look for meanings, not behind our vernacular artifacts and interactions, but in them.

Edward Sapir, a poet as well as pioneer linguist, asserted that language itself constituted "the most significant and colossal work that the human spirit has evolved--nothing short of a finished form of expression for all communicable experience." Extolling its capacity to constantly reshape itself, he continues: "Language is the most massive and inclusive art we know, a mountainous and anonymous work of unconscious generations" (Sapir 1921: 220). Yet, as any writer will attest, language yields up its artful power only grudgingly. For there are other selves with whom we hold constant conversations, selves who speak in tongues not entirely under anyone''s personal control except the phantoms of these "unconscious generations." Studying other cultures from the perspective of our Western, Anglophonic tongue, we seek to familiarize ourselves with their keywords for life and art. Our own vernacular speech will bear up under such scrutiny as well. This address to vernacular culture may appear as an abomination to those not enamored of "the near, the low, the common," as Ralph Waldo Emerson put it in "The American Scholar": "the meal in the firkin, the milk in the pan; the ballad in the street; the news of the boat; the glance of the eye; the form and the gait of the body." Emerson, like many speakers in the early American republic, saw New World vigor in the juxtaposition of the highest and the most common registers of the vernacular.

The poetics of the vernacular begins with the ability of speakers to command the widest variety of ways of speaking, soaring high and digging deep with an understanding of the dynamic contrasts this code-switching animates. If freedom lies in the ability to make choices, dealing with vernacular life allows the whole ideal to be expressed within a single sentence, or represented in a representative object. Keeping Company This book considers the ways in which ordinary Americans keep company with one another, in casual and serious talk, at play, and in performance and celebration. It explores the entire range of social gatherings, from chance encounters and casual conversations to the heavily rehearsed shows found at theaters and stadiums, or in the more open venues of parades and festivals. It focuses not just on the ways we pull off our interactions, stylized or otherwise, but also on the vernacular terms we have developed in common to discuss and judge performances. Central to this understanding is the presumption of goodwill that we make about how others will treat us. We presume that our gregariousness reveals a useful excess of feeling and that having a good talk is a palliative for any misunderstandings that arise. We have learned from experience that this friendliness is not necessarily shared; unfounded assumptions about our cultural commonalities can lead to social and political complications, especially in times of declared animosity.

But the social compact is constituted by our talking with one another. With strangers and acquaintances alike, we act on the useful fiction that "talking it out" will lead to mutual understanding and the possibility of shared enjoyment. So this book explores not just our comfortable interactions with family and friends and the assumptions that underlie intimate acquaintance but also our naïveté and the high premium we pay for presuming the palliative powers of having a good talk, even an argument we can then talk through. Although friendly conversation seems natural, it is, in fact, deeply cultural, providing a moral center for everyday communication. Certain terms of judgment underlie our discussions of the everyday. The appropriateness of what we say and do is often debated; an action may be judged playful by some and offensive by others. How studied should one be, and how do we judge going through the formalities? The degree of self-conscious agreement that we feel impelled to uphold is itself revealing of the tensions that swarm beneath the surface of our interactions. Equally important for the purposes of this book, conversation conducted under the sign of friendliness provides a baseline against which other ways of speaking may be judged.

Consider the implications of the ubiquitous idea that when people sit down and talk together, our common human concerns can be relied upon to encourage agreement. Even if disagreement enters this terrain, it can fuel the sense of achievement when, at last, consensus is reached. This analysis of expressive interaction starts with the commonsense view that we are our own best interpreters and addresses the entire range of communicative acts through the terms we use to describe them ourselves. The rich resources of our everyday vernacular speech enable us to use words and gestures from the past as models for social interaction in the present. As a folklorist, I have catalogued the conversational repertoire we have inherited from our elders and forebears that we presume ties us together morally and serves to repair relationships. In the simple forms of vernacular expression, the proverbs we invoke and the jokes we tell, we see the elementary tactics of using the past to resolve problems in the present. These memorable, fixed phrases come to mind habitually, but they are far from simple when we attend to how they are deployed in daily interaction. To the extent that we repeat one another''s lines and go on to tell our life stories when encouraged by others, we purvey such fictions as our interpretation of what "really" happened at some point of passage in our lives.

As we attempt to craft and recraft our identities, the stories we tell on ourselves stake out our place whenever we choose to be sociable. To call this "self-fashioning" sounds a bit theatrical, but having so many choices and making them for ourselves calls for a good deal of anxious self-examination. Ironically, in engaging in the presentation of self, we make our choices more self-consciously. We transform our experiences into retellable and interpretable tales and turn our interactions with others into performances. Reducing the flow of life to story and performance carries a myriad of discontents. We attain a generic sense of order and common understanding, but we amplify the subjunctive while subduing the declarative side of life. We become conscious of how crafted our lives have become, and objectifying ourselves makes our lives seem awfully predicable. Freeze-framing social interaction helps us to interpret its possible meanings, but we lose the freedom and unselfconsciousness of the spontaneous play we enjoyed when we were children.

Here the machinery of nostalgia kicks in. In searching for ourselves amid the shifting scenes of daily life, and especially as we seek to alleviate the anxiety and depression that arise from facing personal losses or foreclosed possibilities, the everyday becomes a constant search for what goes by the term identity. How can one achieve identity in a world that promises an infinity of choices and then takes them away? In the worse case, we alienate ourselves from our own lives. So we live for those moments in which we lose ourselves, giving over to the flow of the occasion and experiencing the delights of letting go. We seek to merge our all-too-limited selves with some larger group of celebrants and to escape the constraints of our daily existence by plunging into in the seemingly unbounded possibilities offered by theater, rituals, and festivals. I am continually amazed by the creativity and diversity of people''s disposition to play, sing, and dance to one another as they introduce festivity into their lives. Such celebrations are not as separate from the social relations of common life as they may seem, despite their being set off in special times and places. Rituals and festivals constitute and renew social groups.

Power is asserted, parodied, overturned, and ritually reconfirmed through such customary practices. In the past, social relations were enacted, even embodied in rough and popular or royal and spectacular enactments: parades and processions, court proceedings, mock hangings, and ritualized shamings. The depth of historical memory conveyed in such high-energy performances as Carnival and Mardi Gras enters into the present as different cultural groups assert and renegotiate their places on a transnational stage. The seasonal celebrations once observed by custom have now become spectacular programmed events. Communal rituals that historically were.