Myth of Everyday Life

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Barry Sandywell

THE MYTH OF EVERYDAY LIFE


Toward a heterology of the ordinary
In Memoriam Steven A. Crook (1950–2002)

The aim of this paper is to contribute to the rethinking of everyday life as a central,
if highly diverse and problematic, theme of modern philosophy and social theory.
The focus of the essay concerns the uncertain ontological status of ‘the everyday’
within the human sciences. An initial exploration of the ambiguity of the expression
‘everyday life’ points to a more consequential type of undecidability once it is fully
recognized how the ideology of ‘everyday life’ functions to suppress the materiality,
contingency, and historicity of human experience. This can be seen in the contrast
between powerful atemporal conceptions of everyday life and more critical under-
standings of the lifeworld framed in temporal categories. The distinction between
everyday life and lifeworld proves useful as a marker for two very different approaches
to the ordinary. The paper claims that the ordinary has been systematically deni-
grated in the very act of being theorized as ‘everyday life’. A tradition of binary and
dichotomous theorizing is uncovered as one of the fundamental sources of the myth
of an ahistorical, unmediated everyday life. After mapping a range of more reflexive
perspectives toward the investigation of ordinary life, the paper concludes on a
positive and reconstructive note by suggesting that any attempt to go beyond the
dualisms and antinomies of contemporary theory must first abandon this mythology
to reveal the histor(icit)y and alterity of lifeworlds in their rich natural, incarnate,
political, and reflexive imbrications.

Keywords everyday life; the ordinary; historicity; lifeworld; alterity;


heterology

Introduction
The aim of this paper is to contribute to the rethinking of ‘everyday life’ as a
central, if highly diverse and problematic, theme of modern philosophy and
social theory. The focus of the essay concerns the uncertain ontological status of
‘the everyday’ within the human sciences. An exploration of the ambiguity of
the expression everyday life points to a more consequential type of undecidability

Cultural Studies Vol. 18, No. 2/3 March/May 2004, pp. 160–180
ISSN 0950-2386 print/ISSN 1466-4348 online © 2004 Taylor & Francis Ltd
http://www.tandf.co.uk/journals DOI: 10.1080/0950238042000201464
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THE MYTH OF EVERYDAY LIFE 161

once we recognize how the term has functioned ideologically to suppress the
historicity of human experience. This can be seen in the contrast between
powerful atemporal conceptions of everyday life and more critical understandings
of the lifeworld framed in temporal categories. The distinction between everyday
life and lifeworld proves useful as a marker for two very different approaches to
the ordinary. For example, across a range of philosophical perspectives everyday
life has been theorized as the sustaining ground, matrix and foundation for other
social practices, while on the other hand the ordinary is seen as an unfinalizable
force-field of living history and novel forms of selfhood. However, even this binary
divide between synchronic and diachronic perspectives is seen to be mapped
onto much more ancient binary oppositions that still operate as debilitating
dichotomies of modern thought (essence/appearance, theoria/praxis, universalism/
particularism, abstract/concrete, objective/subjective, form/content, cognitive/prag-
matic among the more notable of these). I argue that the ordinary has been
systematically denigrated in the very act of being theorized as ‘everyday life’.This
dichotomous theorizing has helped sustain the myth of an ahistorical, unmediated
everyday life. I conclude by suggesting that any attempt to go beyond the
antinomies of contemporary theory must first abandon this mythology to reveal
the histor(icit)y and alterity of lifeworlds in their rich material, incarnate, political,
and reflexive imbrications.
The essay is divided into four parts. First, a brief review of the grammar of
‘everyday life’. Second, an analysis of some of the persistent antinomies associ-
ated with the myth of everyday life. Third, a sketch of alternative accounts of
everyday experience aspiring to overcome the antinomies that accompany the
very idea of a theory of the pretheoretical. Finally, the essay will conclude with
observations about the prospects of a more reflexive approach to the heterology
of ordinary life.

The grammar of ‘everyday life’


Given a larger canvas, an exploration of the disparate meanings of ‘everyday life’
would require a critical deconstruction of different approaches to the analysis of
everydayness (for example, in the work of such figures as Dilthey, Wittgenstein,
Simmel, Husserl, Schutz, Heidegger, Dewey, Lefebvre, Kosik, Bakhtin,
Benjamin, Bloch, Habermas, Garfinkel, Debord and de Certeau, among others).
Given the limitations of a short essay, our sights are confined to a prolegomena
to this larger project. We first need to explore the ways in which the ‘ordinary’
and the ‘everyday’ have been imagined in mainstream/malestream philosophy
and social theory before assessing the limits of these approaches. We begin by
asking ‘what is meant by the expression everyday life’? What, in other words, are
the meanings implicated in this polysemic term? We can set the scene by asking
where and when ‘the everyday’ entered modern discourse.
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162 CULTURAL STUDIES

To begin with the word ordinary: from the Latin ordinarius (ordo -dinis, order,
arrangement, system), ordinary implicates a cluster of significations indexing the
habitual, customary, regular, usual, or normal. What is ordinary is ‘real’. Terms
for stability thus tend to borrow from Middle and Shakespearean English words
for order (order-ly, order-li-ness, order-ing, ordin-ance, ordin-ate, ordin-al, ordin-ar-y,
co-ordin-ate, sub-ordin-ate, and so forth). Like the dualism ‘real/unreal’, the
ordinary contrasts with the exceptional or unusual. Thus we say that something is
commonplace (and perhaps even mediocre or ‘of middling quality’) in contrast with
the shock of the extraordinary. The latter experience is literally ‘outside’ or
‘beyond’ the usual order or normal course of things (cf. Skeat 1963, pp.
205–206, p. 414). Where the ordinary is exemplified by commonplace phenom-
ena that are taken for granted and unnoticed, the extraordinary marks the
disturbing eruption of the rare and the highly valued. Like other forms of
extravagant experience, the extraordinary exceeds the limits and boundaries of
ordinariness.
Ordinariness is also one of the key features of ‘custom’ and ‘tradition’, the
‘non-place’ where ‘nothing happens’ (since ‘the real world’ is precisely that
order that guarantees that nothing extraordinary will happen). In this respect,
the ‘ordinary’ prepares the way for ideological interpretations of the related
idea of stable tradition (and thereby of traditional communality) as a timeless
sociality of the now (or in the watchword of modern capitalism, ‘business as
usual’). In social thought, this allows the dangerous elision between moral order
and social order. Thus, in medieval culture where routinization, customary
work patterns and status hierarchies codify the moral norm, periods of disrup-
tion – for example, in carnival – are the times when the ‘world is turned upside
down’, when once-ordered things wander beyond their limits, when class,
gender and sacred hierarchies are inverted, where everyday prodigality is over-
thrown in bouts of excessive expenditure, where the seriousness of the estab-
lished moral and political order is suspended in a temporary utopia of
irreverence, festivity and scatological laughter (Bakhtin 1984). What is ordinary
is subject to the ‘orders that be’, protected by the denizens of official culture.
What is extraordinary prefigures the ‘effervescence’ of social orders rendered
fluid and mobile. In this way, Bakhtin famously counterposes carnivalesque
temporality to quotidian time as the possible to the actual. Without exploring
this theme further, we can already see a whole metaphysics condensed in the
grammatical contrast of ordinary/extraordinary – or its sociological equivalent,
tradition/modernity.
In a related vein, ordinary language is seen as the unnoticed, but ever-present
discourse of everyday usage. Unlike the ‘extraordinary’ idiolects of specialisms
and professional discourses (the differentiated domains of law, science, philoso-
phy, theology, aesthetics and so forth), ordinary language is the realm of
mundane speech practices that predate the differentiated idioms of modernity.
Conversational usage operates as a pseudo-eternal form of life whereas
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THE MYTH OF EVERYDAY LIFE 163

‘extraordinary’ speech acts can be compared to the carnivalesque moments


within ordinary language, for example, the moment where traditional discourse
gives way to ‘the philosophical discourses of modernity’.
Similar associations and dualities cling to the term everyday. Everydayness
connotes the normal run of things, the usual and the commonplace. Everyday
experience is what happens in typical form today as it has done yesterday and
will do tomorrow. Everydayness is the positive continuity of endless repetition,
the ‘bad infinity’ of mundane temporality, to borrow Hegel’s idiom. For this
reason, the standing present – the present stripped of its possibilities – is the
grammatical tense of the everyday. Everydayness characterizes experiences that
appear to be firmly embedded in the known rituals of practical life separated
from the open realm of events and temporal flux. In their detachment from
change such experiences become mundane (Latin mundanus, from mundus, the
world). Things that are mundane are thus this-wordly, earthly, confined to the
horizon of commonsense knowledge and its presentist categories. Like the Greek
word kosmos, mundanity frames the order of daily life denuded of its ambiguities
as eternally the same. Depending upon the features we highlight this might be
variously described as a presentist, substantive or ontological conception of everyday
life.
These ancient senses are still preserved in the concept of Lebenswelt or
lifeworld that first appears in the philosophy of Husserl. The lifeworld is the world
of mundane knowledge presupposed by all scientific knowledge, a prelogical
realm composed of everyday experiential typifications and interpretive schemes
by means of which habitual patterns of social interaction are practically managed.
In contrast with extramundane ‘provinces of meaning’, the world of everyday
life is represented as a coherent intersubjective or public ‘domain’ of conscious-
ness shared by all members of society. Once reified into existential presuppositions,
the ‘structures of the life-world’ can be said to sustain the ‘paramount reality’ of
social coexistence and co-ordinated world-work (Schutz 1967, 1971). Phenom-
enology sometimes identifies and sometimes separates ‘the world of work’ (or
‘world of working’ (Wirkwelt) with the ‘world of everyday life’ as the sphère de la
vie pratique (Schutz/Gurwitsch 1989, p. 226). The commonality of la vie pratique
is ensured through its unproblematic and taken-for-granted status as an experi-
ential ‘ground’ for other ‘provinces of meaning’, ‘practices’ and life-world struc-
tures (Schutz & Luckmann 1973). Phenomenology thus both substantializes and
conflates ‘everyday life’, ‘the world of work’, ‘the ordinary’ and ‘quotidian
experience’. Another polemical and contrastive term is the specialized cognitive
‘attitude’ of science or philosophy that suspends the ‘natural attitude’ of everyday
life in order to thematize and describe previously taken-for-granted assumptions
and horizonal presuppositions: ‘The concept “life-world,” world of daily exist-
ence, etc., is after all a polemical concept. It signifies the world in which we live
and which for us – or for some other group – constitutes reality in contrast to
the “world” which science constructs’.1
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164 CULTURAL STUDIES

Irrespective of their provenance – whether embedded in ordinary language


or reformulated as theorists’ categories – the same insistent image of everyday
life as a static and ‘timeless’ sphere, a sustaining matrix, or ahistorical fundament
of repetitive behaviour is evident. Whether we speak in terms the le monde vécu
(le mode comme il est vécu), the pre-predicative realm of the lifeworld, the ‘para-
mount reality’ of mundane relevances, the ‘natural attitude of everyday life’ or
the microsociology of ordinary conversation that artfully produces ‘ordinariness’
makes little difference. Social reality as a cohesive identity is securely ‘anchored’ in
prosaic assumptions, typifications, and members’ collaborative, methodic work
of ordinariness. This is where essentialism and presentism actively occlude the
possibility of a more radical understanding of heterological experience (vécu),
obstructing the exploration of experience unhindered by received metaphysical
dualisms. Let us briefly itemize some of the sources of this ontologization of
ordinariness.
To condense a complex story we can simply assert that both ancient and
modern philosophy has, with notable exceptions, treated the ordinary as the
phenomenal world of doxa – of opinion, dogma, illusions and unreflexive
thinking that obstructs the efforts of philosophical reflection (and thereby truth-
saying). From Parmenides onwards, the complexities of everyday life are deni-
grated as ‘that’ which has to be abandoned or transcended in order to engage in
true theoria and to live the vita contemplativa. In the Eleatic vein, ordinary
experience understood as a sphere of illusory ‘knowledge’ has to be suppressed
as a negative obstacle to the positivity of ‘genuine’ theoria, philosophia, science.
This cultural amnesia is most visible in the tenacious hold of Platonic and
Cartesian ‘specular’ theories of knowledge which translate the essence/appearance
dualism of certain knowledge and dubitable experience – the Way of Truth and
the Way of Seeming – into the language of modern culture (Sandywell 1996,
1999). Indeed, orthodox philosophical traditions can be viewed as different
phallocentric attempts to escape from ordinariness into a pure realm of truth-
saying. Thus in the crucial century between 1750–1850 ordinariness formed one
of the epistemological adversaries of the Enlightenment project; the everyday
came to be projected as the target of radical scepticism, the source of ‘supersti-
tion’ and ‘prejudice’ (the modern form of denigration which represents every-
dayness as an adversary of what Habermas calls ‘the philosophical project of
modernity’). Closely associated with the devaluations of radical Enlightenment
is the image of everydayness as a bounded domain of ‘merely’ pragmatic interests
and fallible knowledge (of commonsense contrasted with science with its promise
of secure foundations and absolute self-certainty). In a more immediate way,
everydayness was simultaneously identified with the secular realm of ‘practical
activity’ and transmuted into the action pursued by ‘ordinary people’ (this-
worldly activity anchored in the rational subject as the sphere of practical life).2
Both movements involved a type of ‘reality-stripping’ in which the material
mediations of modernity (including the ravages of capitalist exploitation, gender
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THE MYTH OF EVERYDAY LIFE 165

oppression and colonial violence) were suppressed to secure the pseudo-


transparency of ‘mundane’ life.
An important chapter in this process coincides with the democratic politics
of modernity where ordinariness comes to be contrasted with ‘revolutionary’
periods of sudden change and transformation. Where the everyday is habitual
and static, political and social change is depicted as fluid and mobile (a contrast
that is still embedded in the expression ‘social movements’). More generally,
everydayness is frequently understood as the popular, the universal sphere of the
‘common good’, the ‘common wealth’ or even ‘common humanity’ expressed
in the activities of daily life as a cultural invention of democratic modernity
(privileging the popular as a source of authentic will-formation and societal
purpose). In this sense, ‘the everyday’ is a construction of modernity, following
the philosophical and institutional transformations of late-enlightenment
Europe. In the late nineteenth and through the first part of the twentieth century,
everydayness as commonality is reconceptualized as mass experience (providing a key
presupposition for accounts of popular experience couched in terms of the
commercialization, trivilization and banalization of experience as a consequence
of the new technologies of cultural (re)production and dissemination bewailed
by cultural critics of the right (from Arnold to Leavis) and the left (Adorno). As
‘low’ to ‘high’ culture, the ‘popular’ is whatever is common to or shared by a
collectivity, typically presented in terms of mass population groupings (implicit
in terms such as ‘the people’, ‘popular culture’ or the forms and practices of
‘ordinary people’ tacitly understood in terms of the large population-centres of
urban-industrial nation-states).
In sociological discourse, these meanings were incorporated into the
category of ‘community’ (Gemeinschaft in Ferdinand Tönnies terminology)
contrasted with the imposed and ‘artificial’ organization of ‘society’ (Gesellschaft),
‘mechanical solidarity’ displaced by ‘organic solidarity’ (Durkheim), substan-
tively rational action displaced by formal-instrumental action (Weber). In these
imaginary schemas, the associations and organizations of ‘society’ are repre-
sented as abstract systems arising upon a substructure of vital forms of face-
to-face community (thus, in Weber the forms of action associated with tradi-
tional authority are systematically replaced by rationalized forms geared to more
impersonal, abstract and instrumental forms of social organization). More
recently, everyday life has been presented as the ‘object’ of managerial systems
(the response of governmental authorities to the crisis of liberalism, corporat-
ism, welfare-state capitalism and the triumph of legislative reason; Bauman
1987). From here, it is a short step to theories of the state regulation and
colonization of everyday life (in both the liberal capitalist spheres and the
eastern-bloc communist states) framed in terms of the demise or disappearance
of ‘community’ before the bureaucratic juggernauts of corporate capitalism and
the modern state. Once these distinctions are in place, we can move from images
of eroded community, colonization and domination to a view of everyday life as
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166 CULTURAL STUDIES

an ‘object’ of political administration and reconstruction (the processes through


which the welfare/warfare state has reconstructed the basic terms of reference
of everyday life in the twentieth century).
These variant forms of devaluation have long been incorporated into the
fabric of modern social thought. Here everydayness is the habitual, the local and
the routine or, more generically, the domain of taken-for-granted practices and
assumptions shared by a ‘mass public’ (as in the expression ‘public opinion’ and,
of course, efforts to take the temperature of the public through ‘opinion
research’). This becomes the unquestioned premise of both normative sociology
and the ‘mass-observation’ studies in the 1930s and 1940s (see Adorno 1998,
Highmore 2001). Even more poignantly, in the tradition of Romantic anti-
capitalism, the everyday is troped as ‘fallenness’: the quotidian nihilism of
ordinary vacuity and banality (the ‘being-forgetful’Weltanschauung of ‘the They’,
or in less guarded terms the hegemony of mass-popular taste and mass-market
consumer culture that follows in the wake of ‘the revolt of the masses’).

The world we have lost


How has everyday life been viewed through these interpretations? What is
the question to which ‘everyday life’ is the answer?
(Crook 1998, p. 534)

In reality, there are a number of questions to which everydayness has been


commended as an answer. We have already noted one of the most pervasive
attitudes toward the everyday in the repression of ordinary life that forms a
presupposition of the quest for absolute wisdom (sophia) and the modern project
of cognitive foundationalism. We refer, of course, to the ancient dualisms of
essence/appearance and theory/practice (vita contemplativa/vita activa). A related
attitude is exemplified in the condescension of historical and descriptive social
science that views everyday life as a domain of banal popular culture. Finally, and
overlayered on these prejudicial images, the idea of everyday life is framed as
depoliticized private life, the affective realms of intimate sociation counterposed
to the public world of consequential, organized social action (typically divided
into the ‘spheres’ of work and politics). This topographical imagery is routinely
formulated in gendered terms where the private is the sphere of the ‘feminine’
and the public the sphere of ‘masculine’ interests.

Antinomies of everyday life


Sustained by these negative and formal conceptions of ordinariness, we should
not be surprised to find a series of persistent, if spurious, antinomies
characterized by a relentless drift toward universal, asocial and atemporal
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THE MYTH OF EVERYDAY LIFE 167

models of everydayness. These can be briefly sketched under the following


headings:

Ontologized dualism
The conceptual dichotomies of theory and practice (or theory over practice, when
troped into disinterested ‘knowing’ as against mundane ‘doing’, a putatively
extramundane realm of ‘pure cognition’ versus the mundane constraints of
‘action’). This either/or thinking is, of course, the root of the terminological
contrast between scientificity and ‘mere practice’, of abstract reflection vs.
habitual opinion, of rational versus non-rational ‘forms of life’. Once these
dichotomous frames are turned into transcendental schemas, the everyday
inevitably becomes the repressed ‘other’ of rational modernity.

Homogenization
The phenomenological concept of an aboriginal ‘Lebenswelt’ functions as a barely
disguised nostalgia for the sustaining source of meaning, of primal significances
occluded by the rise of modern science and technology. This forms the basic
premise for a ‘phenomenology of the social world’ and theories of the lifeworld
contrasted with the colonizing logics of systems (Schutz 1967, Habermas 1987).
In this approach, the Lebenswelt is a paradoxical ‘no-place’, a ‘horizon’ or ground-
less site for all other practices. In Gurwitsch’s phrase: ‘It is hopeless to start from
any place other than from the “life-world”. The whole question of the existence
of the sciences must be posed as a question of the transition from the order of
the “life-world” to the “Pythagorean” order’.3
The result is an originary, unitary and homogeneous ‘lifeworld’ set against
multiple, differentiated ‘spheres’ that announce the inception of modernity (the
Kantian triumvirate of science, morality and art as Lebenssphären (‘spheres of life’)
being the most influential differentiation paradigm in social theory).

Unity/plurality
This raises the question of whether there is one everyday world or many. Both
everyday language and philosophical discourse would have us talk of ‘everyday
reality’, as though it were a shared, homogenous and universal domain of experi-
ence; but reflection discloses plurality and multiplicity (everydayness as a field of
manifold cultures segmented and differentiated in terms of occupation, age,
class, gender and related sociological parameters): the everyday world of youth
(again sub-differentiated into agrarian, industrial, black, third world young,
etc.), the everyday world of professionals, the world of high politics, the world
of shopping and consumption, and so on. Hence the postmodernist antipathy
toward this kind of totalization: away with ‘the world’ and its legitimating
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168 CULTURAL STUDIES

metanarratives and welcome to the multiple, nomadic universes of polycentric


significance.

Essentialism
Speaking in dualist and essentialist terms of appearances, ‘masking’ essence tends
to support the institutional divide between things public (the political) and things
private (the domestic). The phallocentric binary of masculine/feminine is also
valorized in semiotic terms as a general ‘economy’ of images and representations
through which essence-talk is culturally reproduced.

Naturalization
The older metaphysical distinction between outer and inner (public/spiritual)
lends itself to naturalization into a cluster of related couplets: universal and
particular, ordinary and extraordinary, mundane and heroic (cf. Featherstone
1992).

Scientism
Resonating with the older terminology of appearance and reality scientism posits
an epistemological division between the ‘world of commonsense’ and ‘the
scientific world view’. Conflating the two as diachronically discrete domains,
phenomenology can then depict itself in totalizing terms as the ‘ultimately
grounding science’, which explores the prelogical lifeworld (Husserl 1970,
p. 131, Schutz 1971). In this way the theme of the Lebenswelt acquires mutually
exclusive scientistic and vitalist meanings as a changeless foundation of ‘lived’
intentionalities.

Fetishization of the immediate


This includes populism or the fetishization of the ordinary (for example as
‘popular culture’) and the valorization of the vivid and direct moments of ‘lived’
experience (overcoded in such dualities as immediate/mediate, local/general,
communal/societal, same/other where the opposites are tacitly valorized in a
spurious judgemental contrast between authenticity/inauthenticity. For phenom-
enological thought, the lifeworld functions as a symbol for the loss of originary
meaning, the world we have lost in the triumphant march of modernization,
urbanization, and globalization. For other theorists it operates like a normative
utopia and occasionally quite openly as a kind of post-theological nostalgia for
ontological security in a chronically indeterminate universe. It is, therefore, not
surprising that the theme of everyday life should reassert itself in critical diag-
noses of the postmodern age of’ totally mediated culture (Crook 1998, Chaney
2002, Lash 2002).
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THE MYTH OF EVERYDAY LIFE 169

Reclaiming the ordinary


However we ‘rethink’ the everyday, it is evident that answering the question
‘what is everyday life, how is it to be known and studied?’ involves an interweav-
ing of complex ontological, epistemological, methodological and cultural ques-
tions. We have suggested that recent social theorizing is characterized by at least
three conceptions of everyday life. First, everyday life as an empirical research
problematic where ‘doing being ordinary’ is framed as a foundational level or
ground in the edifice of social science knowledge. This is the grass-roots orien-
tation of the many sociologies of everyday life that project ‘the everyday world’
as a substantive domain stripped of history, conflict or ethicopolitical relations;
second, everyday life as a way of ‘transcending’ or ‘deconstructing’ philosophy
(in its speculative and metaphysical variants in powerful currents of ordinary
language philosophy, phenomenological, and post-phenomenological theory);
and third, everyday life as a vital source of transgression in contemporary culture
(the ordinary as a recalcitrant existential surd exposing the limits of specialist
disciplines, institutions and orthodoxies). The third orientation has been associ-
ated with a tradition of poststructuralist and postmodernist thought that includes
such names as Bataille, Foucault, Derrida, Deleuze, Debord, Virilio, Bakhtin and
Benjamin, among others.
Yet, the disquieting question remains: if ‘theorizing’ is partially responsible
for the denigration of everyday life, are we not inevitably involved in similar
aporiae in speaking of revisionary ‘theories’ of ordinariness? The problematic
nature of systematic reflection upon prereflective and pre-categorical experi-
ence that was already a theme of classical phenomenology returns in the para-
doxes associated with theorizing everyday life (see Gardiner 2000, Highmore
2001). How can theory articulate the pre-categorical and pre-theoretical? Can
we ‘recover’ a strong notion of everydayness while avoiding the antinomies of
theorizing? Can we demystify everyday life without rendering it into an
‘object’ or ‘topic’ of high-altitude inquiry? An incomplete list of contemporary
efforts to rethink everyday experience would include the following six
perspectives.

Phenomenological theories of everyday life


In phenomenological philosophy, everyday life is framed as the pre-interpreted
world or Lebenswelt, the forgotten realm of sedimented lived meanings whose
recovery through painstaking phenomenological ‘archaeology’ might resolve the
‘crisis of the European sciences’ (and, by implication the crisis of European
culture and ‘European humanity’) diagnosed by Husserl, Schutz, Gurwitsch and
others in the 1930s (Schutz 1967, Husserl 1970, Schutz & Gurwitsch 1989; see
also Pollio et al. 2001).
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170 CULTURAL STUDIES

Microsociological theories of everyday life


Phenomenological sociology approaches everydayness as a topic of descriptive
social science. Here we think of the empirical sociologies of everyday life and
the intersubjective structures of organized daily activities (from the Schutzian
phenomenology of the natural attitude to phenomenological sociology of knowl-
edge (Berger & Luckmann 1966), the dramaturgical interactionism of Goffman
(1969, 1974), and the ethnomethodological programmes of Garfinkel and Sacks
and their students). Let us simply index this strategy as the empirical thematiza-
tion of everday life as a series of ‘methodic appearances’ through which ‘doing
being ordinary’ is mundanely, methodically and reflexively accomplished
(Garfinkel 1952, 1967, Sacks 1992).
On a more interdisciplinary plane, everydayness operates as a kind of
‘basement’ for the micro/macro duality in orthodox sociology (Truzzi 1968).
Here the micro is typically interpreted as the interactional order in which daily
life is pursued, a web of interrelationships that sustains the macro institutions
power, authority and societal organizations. The everyday is then viewed as an
extraordinarily complex realm of micro interactions and interpretive reflexivities
through which the practices of everyday life and organized sociality are
constructed and maintained. Here mainstream sociology and ethnomethodo-
logical studies converge in seeing the interactive processes of ‘doing being
ordinary’ as the foundation of social worlds.

Everyday life as ordinary language


Another ‘foundational’ reading of everydayness can be found in the tradition of
‘ordinary language philosophy’. The descriptive recovery of the foundational
grammars of everyday language is a common rhetorical strategy in the pragmatic
critique of philosophy as epistemology and ‘philosophy of mind’ (in such diverse
writers as Wittgenstein, Dewey and Heidegger). As Cupitt has observed: ‘if there
is anything that stands upon its own feet, it is everydayness. Everything else is
derivative, including all expertise’ (1995, p. 29).

The critique of everyday life


The ‘critique of everyday life’ refers to a tradition that stems from Marx’s,
Lukács’ and Simmel’s critique of commodify reification to the situationism of
Debord and ideology-critique of Lefebvre. Debord’s Society of the Spectacle
centres on the claim that a grand ‘theory of the ordinary’ is a contradiction in
terms as the everyday is what eternally antedates and evades all theoretical
language. For Debord, everydayness is the sphere of commodity reification par
excellence and thereby the central target for a critique of the commodity spectacle.
The ‘revolution in everyday life’ is, in turn, part of a larger critique of
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mainstream social science and its inattention to the contingencies and situated
‘reality-work’ that produces mundane social orders of degradation, violence and
injustice (Lefebvre 1991). It is somewhat ironical, given their very different
political assumptions, that the central de-reifying epistemological strategy of
Situationist critique is shared by the sociology of knowledge (Berger &
Luckmann 1966), ethnomethodology (Garfinkel 1967), social constructionism
(Potter 1996), reflexive ethnography and sociology (Bourdieu & Wacquant
1992), feminism (Smith 1987, Butler 1997), SSK (Gilbert & Mulkay 1984,
Woolgar 1988, Collins & Pinch 1993), actor network theory (Law 1991) and
conversation analysis (Sacks 1992).

Critical cultural theories of everyday life: from cultural studies to the


ethnography of everyday cultures
In critical theory, everyday life appears as the occluded material substrate of the
sciences, modern technology and capitalist socieconomic systems driven by
instrumental reason (Kosik, Adorno, Horkheimer, Heller, etc.). In its political
orientation, it shares a great deal of common ground with the theory of the ‘crisis
of everyday life’ mentioned above. However, there has been a significant shift
from the tradition of French and Italian Marxism (Althusser and Gramsci) to the
empirical investigations of the lived experiences of subcultural groups and modes
of counter-cultural resistance associated with the cultural studies programme of
the Birmingham Centre for Cultural Studies (Hall & Jefferson 1976, Hebdige
1979, Tudor 1999). For cultural studies, everyday life is the site of the dominant
hegemonies and differential inequalities of class, age, sex/gender, race and
ethnicity. The recent ethnographic turn in cultural studies takes everyday life as
a site of sociotechnical transformations driven by global capitalism (or techno-
capitalism in Kellner’s (1989) terminology). Under this rubric, we can also
include investigations of everyday life as totally information saturated or media-
tized domain (Kellner 1989, Poster 1990, Lash 2002) and also the new sociology
of everyday artefacts that approaches everydayness as the central topic of an
enlarged and more critical cultural hermeneutics focusing upon the existential
and cultural functions of everyday objects, artefacts, technologies and material
complexes. More recent contributions to this critical ethnography present an
important alternative to mainstream sociology and philosophy.4

Globalized perspectives toward postmodern everyday culture


Theorists of late modernity and postmodernity have explicitly reassessed the
place of everyday life in modern societies dominated by the city-scapes of global
capital, media technologies, and the information revolution. In the ‘condition of
postmodernity’ daily life has become ‘disembedded’ and ‘glocalized’ (the theme
of time-space compression (Giddens, 1990, 1991)), consumerized (Featherstone
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172 CULTURAL STUDIES

1991, 1992), decentered, deracinated and detraditionalized (Harvey 1989). The


politics of pleasure displaces the politics of class struggle (Harris 1992). Post-
modernism abandons substantive and ahistorical conceptions of tradition and
everyday life to embrace the multiplicity of digitally driven quotidian lifeworlds.
We shift from substantive, vitalist and metaphysical conceptions of ‘life’ to
functional and post-metaphysical images of lifeworld heterology as one conse-
quence of global communications and capitalist ‘mediatization’ (with a conse-
quent shift toward ethnographic explorations of emergent virtual lifeworlds
brought into being by global cybersociety – for example, Hine (2000) and Miller
and Slater (2000)).
Ordinary, everyday experience is no longer denigrated as a sphere of
illusions nor posited as a universal foundational realm of ‘life-world structures’
and ‘methodic sense-making practices’, but is reconceptualized as a zone of
transformations in which every aspect of individual existence has been refigured
through global mediatization. Individuals are not prisoners of the mass-mediate
pleasure dome of consumption but agents in a centrifugal universe of life-style
experimentation, emergent practices, and experiences that resist and contest the
generalized sign values of consumer society. We need to think of the dialectics of
privatization and colonization of the lifeworld by the logics of the state and big
business: everyday life as both the site of media-ted power and surveillance and
of cultural forms that potentially disturb and resist the encroachment of the
entertainment industries and ‘information culture’ (Durrschmidt 2000, Lyon
2001, Chaney 2002).
In very broad terms, the essentialist concept of ‘everydayness’ (and everyday
identity) has been dilated, mediated and politicized as the point of intersection
of major economic, social, technological and political force fields. This is itself
part of a more generalized critique of culture in the age of mass-mediated
(re)production (leading to retrospective investigations of modernity in terms of
the geographical, political and sociotechnical transformations of everyday life
over the past two centuries). The result is a reappraisal of the complexity of the
sites of quotidian experience as these have become incorporated in the mediated
image-worlds of late modernity. On a philosophical plane, this paradigm shift
marks the intersection between postdeconstructionist heterology and critical
methodologies of the oppressed (Sandoval 2000).

Toward a heterology of everyday life


Accepting the tenacity of dichotomous thinking and shifting definitions we
return to the question, what exactly is ‘everyday life’? Like the omnipollent term
‘community’, ‘everyday life’ is in continuous use within lay and theoretical
discourse and yet continuously evades definition. Perhaps in the wake of
globalization and total commodification we should ask ‘where is everyday life’?
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THE MYTH OF EVERYDAY LIFE 173

We seem compelled to answer: everywhere and nowhere? Every human science


that strives to resist objectivism and scientism appeals to ‘life’, every minimally
reflexive hermeneutic study invokes ‘lived experience’, every critical theory
finds its ground in the liberation of reified socialities. Yet, the term has no
unequivocal meaning or fixed referent. How then can we overcome the disem-
bodied and essentialist view of everyday life common to philosophy and main-
stream sociology?

Epistemologies of everyday life


Given the aporetic nature of everyday life, it is not surprising that alternative
epistemologies of everyday life are now in circulation. By abandoning the appear-
ance/essence distinction, most of these positions have been inevitably linked with
postmodernism as the new cultural paradigm (Sim 2002). In passing, we might
note the following ‘postmetaphysical paradigms’: postphenomenological, struc-
turalist/culturalist, pragmatic, critical, ludic, dialogical and heterological orien-
tations:
• Postphenomenological: the descriptive recovery of personal lifeworlds, sedi-
mented horizons of meaning, subjectivity, intersubjectivity, the differentia-
tion of ‘multiple realities’ and ‘finite provinces of meaning’ mediated by
technology and science (e.g. Ihde 1995);
• Structuralist and culturalist programmes exploring the interplay of linguistic,
textual and societal structures/textual processes informing the fabric of
everyday experience (from Barthes to cultural studies);
• Pragmatic ‘postempiricism’: the lifeworld as a domain of pragma, contingency
and world openness; philosophy’s recovery of the complexity of the ordinary
(Wittgenstein 1958, Rorty 1989, Cavell 1990, 1995, Mulhall 1994, Critch-
ley et al. 1996);
• Critical: everyday reality as a domain of materializations and incarnate prac-
tices; technologically mediated interactions between lifeworld and systems;
technoscience as a powerful force in late modern societies (e.g. Lyon 2001);
• Ludic: the everyday as the play of différence (in signifiers, language-games and
signifying practices in the writings of Derrida, Lyotard and Kristeva respec-
tively);
• Dialogical: the complex heteroglossia of daily life articulated in speech
genres and cultural forms (Bakhtin); sociological hermeneutics investigating
the reflexivity forms in which different individuals and groups live out their
relationships to their everyday activities (Bauman 1990, Gadamer 1998,
Lafont 2000);
• Heterological investigations of ‘molecular’ power, the micropolitics of everyday
social practices, the multidimensionality of the ordinary (in the work of
Deleuze, Guattari, de Certeau, Maffesoli, and others).
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174 CULTURAL STUDIES

Lifeworlds and temporality


Each of these paradigms claims to provide a framework for studying everyday
experience free from the metaphysical presuppositions of traditional theorizing.
This is evident in a shared rejection of fixed, static and foundational presupposi-
tions with regard to ‘ordinariness’ and an awareness of the complex mediated
nature of ‘ordinary life’ situated in class, gender, ethnic and sexual differences.
We have been misled by grammar. There is no such thing as ‘everyday life’.
‘Everyday life’ as a homogeneous entity or as a veil of illusory experience has
never existed. In fact, this view is one of the myths sustaining the Eurocentric
social-imaginary universe (Crook 1998). The homogeneous category of ‘life-
world’ (and lifeworld subjectivity) is no longer seen as a simple identity, but is
redefined as a complex site of contestation and difference. Postmodern obses-
sions with plurality and différence have effectively destabilized the identitarian
metaphysics of ‘everyday life’. The task of thinking after postmodernism is to
imagine more constructive projects of alterity studies, to invent new kinds of
heterology in response to the mutations of globalized experience. This can best
be illustrated through the recognition of the historicity of change and transfor-
mation as this operates within the texture of everyday life worlds and micro-
cultural practices of globalized, postcolonial and decolonizing formations (with
the metropolitan-peripheral dynamics of these processes taking centre stage).
Ordinariness turns out to be the hybridized ‘non-place’ where collective
memory, the struggle for the meaning of sociality, identity and history are
represented and performed on a day-by-day basis across a spectrum of social and
political struggles and conflicts. In this sense, there can be no pure domain called
‘ordinary life’ separated from other spheres of struggle and contestation. In
reality, everyday experience is a wholly mediated, contested, and processual site
of material and ideological struggles, a screen of unsatisfied hopes, desires and
dreams as well as a nostalgic icon of value and order.5
What survives this demystification is a version of ‘ordinariness’ as an
exemplary site of otherness or alterity processes in sociocultural life. This is
reflected in a renewed awareness of the awesome complexity of everyday expe-
rience and the ways in which the dense interweaving of memory, identity and
power relations has become an insistent theme across a range of recent critical
problematics.6 In abandoning the traditional antinomies, the realm of mundane
experience can be revealed in its full contingency and complexity.

Conclusion
One of the recurrent themes in this brief essay is the inherent undecidability of
the category of everyday life. We have suggested that ‘everydayness’ has operated
as an equivocal signifier and an ideological category in many of the most
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THE MYTH OF EVERYDAY LIFE 175

important cognitive and political programmes of modern social life. Another


theme is the millennial-long denigration of ordinary experience (‘the devalua-
tion of the most valuable’). In one of its prominent meanings, everydayness is
manifestly a product of the rhetorics of modernity constructed upon the deni-
gratory dualisms of élite world-views that can be traced back to classical antiq-
uity. A third is the nostalgia for origins symbolized by ‘lifeworld’ theory. A fourth
is the persistent contrast of the ordinary with the symbolic icons of modernity.
In sum, the everyday remains an essentially contested concept (Gallie 1955/6).
Like a sociological inverse square law, the more everyday community appears to
retreat, the more theorists invoke the language of ‘communality’.
The chronic ambivalence of the everyday, however, does not remove the
place of the ordinary in ethicopolitical discourse. Quite the reverse. Once the
myth of everyday life has been placed ‘under erasure’ and fully concretized,
pluralized and historicized in terms of material relations and power networks, it
may be withdrawn from the categorical framework of ‘objects’, ‘topics’ or even
‘sites’ and ‘fields’, and recovered as an immense domain of defeasible practices
and transgressive experiences that are continuously in play as individuals and
groups construct and reconstruct the configurations through which they reflex-
ively make sense of their lives. We need to abandon the false security of everyday
life to reveal the complex play of decentered, heterological lifeworlds (and their
associated discourses and forms of subjectivity). From this perspective ‘everyday
life’ is no longer an object of social analysis, but an index of ‘the undecideable’
that resists theorizing, a recalcitrant ordinariness through which bureaucratized
and technocratic worlds and discourses are put in question and transformed.
‘Ordinariness’ becomes a generic index of hitherto uninvestigated processes
through which people make sense of their lives given the material and cultural
resources available to them. In this respect it is the transhistorical field par
excellence, the very crucible of historicity in which social worlds are constructed
and transformed (Sandywell 1996).
For the human sciences, this rethinking of one of its basic categories
promises a far-reaching shift of orientation away from its metaphysical legacy and
toward alternative ways of thinking beyond the canonical terminologies of social
theory. Where the grammar of everyday life intoned universality, homogeneity
and passivity, the heterology of ordinariness opens the way for a more radical
politics of experience informed by an agonistic conception of culture and soci-
ocultural change (Sandywell 2000a). It also foregrounds a more radical analysis
of the intertwining of the ‘natural’ and the ‘cultural’ – the organic and the
inorganic realms of existence – that destabilizes the traditional binarism that
organize our thinking about nature and the social. Thinking beyond the limits of
ethicopolitics and ecological thought in this way means recovering the everyday
in its dual aspect as both the incarnate locus of social experience and as the
irreducible source of transhuman reflexivities that are always-already at work in
transforming the world. From being a denigrated ‘topic’ or an investigative
02 RCUS100228 (JB/D).fm Page 176 Friday, May 7, 2004 9:05 AM

176 CULTURAL STUDIES

‘object’, ordinary experience reasserts itself as another name for historicity itself
as the medium of experimental forms of selfhood. But here, ‘historicity’ must
be rethought in terms of the dialectic of materiality and technicity, the inter-
minable play of the natural and the cultural in human affairs. The devalued
practices of the common life may then be reclaimed as an ethicopolitical force
field that holds open the possibility of new types of relationships, alternative
visions of the natural and the artificial and more humane forms of history.

Notes
1 Aron Gurwitsch to Alfred Schutz, in Schutz/Gurwitsch (1989, p. 235). For a
systematization of this theme of reality constitution into a full-blown ‘sociology
of reality’ see Berger and Luckmann (1966). Gadamer describes the term
‘Lebenswelt’ as ‘one of those rare and wonderful artificial words . . . that have
found their way into the general linguistic consciousness, thus attesting to the
fact that they bring an unrecognized or forgotten truth to language’ (1998, p.
55). We might also add Wittgenstein’s Lebensformen (‘forms of life’) and Sprach-
spiele (‘language-games’) to Gadamer’s category of ‘wonderful words’.
2 A more detailed reconstruction would need to document the convergent
transformations of Protestantism, the bourgeois political revolution, capital-
ism and the industrialization of society, and the longer-term disenchantment
of the medieval world view as a constellation of conditions for the contempo-
rary construction of the world-as-mundane-reality and the mundane subject as a
centred-rational-self.
3 Aron Gurwitsch, letter to A. Schutz, 3 September 1945, in Schutz and
Gurwitsch (1989, p. 75).
4 From the growing literature, we can mention Bennett and Watson (2002),
Chaney (2002), Highmore (2001), Gardiner (2000), Miller and McHoul
(1998), Osborne (2000) and Sandoval (2000).
5 On the grammar of ‘nature’ (and I would also suggest ‘life’, ‘culture’, ‘identity’
and ‘creativity’) as related screen memories and allegories of loss and redemp-
tion (see Sandywell 2000b, note 1, p. 117). Crook traces the mythology of
everyday life to three moments: ‘the unity of the social, of its inexhaustible
vitality and of its ineradicable capacities for resistance and renewal’ (1998, p.
537). He observes that: ‘the myths of the everyday ensure that organic proc-
esses, technical artefacts, bodies, texts, weather patterns, musical sounds and
all the threatening legions of otherness remain safely outside “the social”’
(1998, p. 524).
6 Among these: power/discourse problematics (Foucauldian models extended
to the micro-sociology of power networks as these operate in the fabric of
ordinary life): the work of de Certeau on the dialectics of everyday life or
Bakhtinian dialogics as a sociology of the democratizing and de-democratizing
processes of ordinary existence (Gardiner 2000); feminist critiques of power
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THE MYTH OF EVERYDAY LIFE 177

and relations of domination as constitutive processes within everyday life


experience (Smith 1987, Haraway 1991, Butler 1997); investigations of
everyday life mediated through advanced digital technologies (for the digital-
ization of everyday life, see Winston 1998, Bull 2000, Hand & Sandywell
2002); the global political economy of ‘everyday life’ dominated by transna-
tional corporations and cybercapitalism (everyday life transformed and
restructured through the effects of the mass cultural industries; the erosion of
active public spheres and the construction of fragmented ‘phantom public
spheres’ under the combined impact of new forms of mass leisure, tourism,
mass consumerism and globalization (Habermas 1987, Urry 2001); the
McDonaldization of civil society (Ritzer 2000, 2001), the tribalization of
communities (Maffesoli 1996); work on the transgressive dialectics of
everyday life: Lefebvre, de Certeau, Maffesoli (see Gardiner 2000, Chaney
2001, Highmore 2001); alterity paradigms: hybridized and heterological
conceptions of experience, new ways of writing the texts of history and
sociality (Bakhtin 1984, de Certeau 1988, Sandywell 1996, 1998, Gardiner
2000), everyday experience as the Jetztzeit of unanticipated possibilities,
subversive change and transformation (Sandywell 2000b).

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