Myth of Everyday Life
Myth of Everyday Life
Myth of Everyday Life
Barry Sandywell
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.
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
02 RCUS100228 (JB/D).fm Page 161 Friday, May 7, 2004 9:05 AM
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.
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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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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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.
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).
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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‘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
02 RCUS100228 (JB/D).fm Page 177 Friday, May 7, 2004 9:05 AM
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