Week 2 [Reading Notes] - Everyday Life as critical, practical, methodological and theoretical approach

Reading for Session 2 Seminar

Everyday Life as critical, practical, methodological and theoretical approach

Reading 1:

Ben Highmore (2012) 'Everyday life as a Critical Concept in Everyday Life' in Critical Concepts in Media and Cultural Studies. Routledge. Vol 1. pp. 1-16.

Everyday life offers an example of a crisis that is critiqued. However, the 'everyday' could be thought of as a location of stability: it is a realm of habit and repetition, it is an arena of domesticity, of our attempts to meet our daily needs (to eat, sleep, drink, wash, play, relax etc.).

(Highmore 2012, p. 1)

The world of the day-to-day is also an arena for conflict and stuggle; struggles to maintain continuity, the struggle to accommodate the constant disruption of tradition and the production of the new; struggles between classes, genders, sexualities, ethnicities, generations, and so on.

(Highmore 2012, p. 1)

Everyday life points to the material actuality of living through conflict and change: our day-to-day life is the site of the often invisible hurt of discrimination, of the constant negotiation of a changing world of our attempts to live. 

(Highmore 2012, p. 1)

The crises of the everyday might well be seen most immediately in a variety f emphatic symptoms. Perhaps the most obvious being the almost constant din of newspaper articles and radio and television programmes telling us about the changing terrain of everyday life. 

(Highmore 2012, p. 1)

Everyday life is the managed disruption of tradition and the incorporation of both the new and the traditional within constantly changing social arrangements. It is a process of managing change but also refusing it, altering it and becoming overrun by it.

(Highmore 2012, p. 3)

The everyday is where the modern find its material and complex expression but always in relation to its older forms. For example, shopping. Look at page 4 for a description of modern shopping.

What does shopping look like in the view of everyday life?

Shop Workers

Their jobs have changed and taken on several new dimensions:

- Spend time fulfilling online orders, answering customer queries and helping customers who are having trouble with their automated check-out machines.

- They require a great knowledge about a range of items and procedures and an increase in their 'affectivity', making the shopping experience and efficient and painless as possible.

Shoppers

The experience of shopping may well connect with other patterns of everyday life that are part of the contemporary world:

- Shoppers can feel more alienated by forms of the community that are disappearing to be replaced by a life conducted through 'interfaces'. 

- Shoppers can prefer it as they can have uninterrupted contact, meaning no distractions having to interact with people you may not know but who just happen to be in your immediate vicinity.

(Highmore 2012, p. 4 and 5)

Here, automated shopping acts as a continuum with a form of life that could be described as edited and mediated sociability and communication.

(Highmore 2012, p. 5)

Issues and Opportnities

One of the quickest ways to understand the critical power of 'everyday life' is to see it as the mutual testing of theory by social life and social life by theory. So, for instance, one of the most explicit definitions of everyday life by the philosopher and sociologist Henri Lefebvre claims that 'Everyday life, in a sense residual, defined by "what is left over" after all distinct, superior, specialised, structured activities have been singled out by analysis, must be defined at totality' (1991: 97)

To understand this statement we need to shift our understanding of the everyday life away from thunking of it as a given reality outside of our ability to attend to it. In other words, 'everyday life' is not a reality that exists separately from our attempts to make sense of the world.

(Highmore 2012, p. 6)

Page 9

Page 10

Another way of thinking about significance and insignificance in everyday life is to think about the taken-for-granted; the world of habit; the world we take no notice of because we have got the hang of it. The world of the habitual may well appear insignificant precisely because it no longer requires our conscious consideration, and yet this is where ts importance lies: it is the world we inhabit through habit.

(Highmore 2012, p. 11)

Page 12

The media bring the world to us in edited and packaged forms. Parts of the world are invisible to us unless they suffer catastrophes; other parts are all too present. The media gives us access to globalisation as an editorial form. But while we might be situated in relation to one 'view' of globalisation, globalisation by its uneven nature on-going to look very different depending on your geography and the editorial forms determining this view.

(Highmore 2012, p. 12)

The cultural politics of the everyday starts out by recognising everyday life as the site and the stake of the negotiation of difference. Its potential as a field of study is that as well as revealing the daily negotiations of difference, it might also discover unnoticed connections and solidarities across difference.

(Highmore 2012, p. 14)

_________________________________________________________

Reading 2:

Rita Felski (2002) 'Introduction' in New Literary History, Vol. 33, Number 4, pp. 607-622

The content of the notion of daily life expands or contracts according to one’s preferred definition, but it typically encompasses such commonplace activities as eating, sleeping, getting dressed, work- ing, home-making, and routine forms of travel, as well as the often elaborate rituals, taboos, protocols, performances, and other symbolic activities that encircle and define them. These recurring, un-momentous yet indispensable events, often spurned or ignored in the mainstream tradition of Western philosophy, comes to the fore in theories of everyday life.
(Felski 2002, p. 607)

everyday life comprises not just an array of behaviours and activities but also distinctive attitudes or forms of consciousness. It is often equated with a habitual, distracted, mode of perception; life conducted in what Alfred Schutz calls the natural attitude. We act without being fully cognizant of what we are doing, moving through the world with the uncanny assurance of sleep-walkers or automatons. Everyday life thus epitomises the quintessential quality of taken for granted-ness; it speaks to aspects of our behaviour that seem to take place without our conscious awareness or assent and to mundane events that unfold imperceptibly just below our field of vision.
(Felski 2002, p. 607/8)

The everyday is seen to harbour inchoate impulses and unconscious desires that foreshadow an incan- descent future of revolutionary upheaval. In the anticipated moment of collective euphoria, the Situationists declared, “everyone will become an artist in a sense which artists have never before achieved—in the sense that everyone will construct his own life” (RG 81). 
(Felski 2002, p. 609)

The extraordinary potential of ordinary life is also deemed to be latent, buried, embryonic or repressed. “Men have no knowledge of their own lives,” concludes Lefebvre; “they see them and act them out via ideological themes and ethical values. In particular, they have an inadequate knowledge of their needs and their own fundamental attitudes; they express them badly; they delude themselves about their needs and aspirations except for the most general and basic ones.
(Felski 2002, p. 609)

Everyday life, according to Lefebvre, is belated; it is characterised by circadian rhythms and forms of repetition that have changed little over the centuries. Debord refers to the backward and conservative tendencies of everyday life as a form of resistance to history. To redeem the quotidian is thus to transform the temporality of everyday perception, unsettling sluggish and habit-bound modes of thought through the revelatory force of the new. 
(Felski 2002, p. 610)

Michael Gardiner has recently contrasted theories of everyday life and the life-world. He argues that the idea of the life-world as it has developed in sociology is essentially formalist, serving a descriptive rather than critical function. It defines the everyday as a homogeneous and undifferentiated set of attitudes, practices, and cognitive structures that shore up the stability of the social order.  

(Felski 2002, p. 613)

Faced with an agonizing multiplicity of choices and decisions, buffeted by an endless array of stimuli and sensations, we could not function in the world without the protective cushion of habit. When individuals change their lives, James notes astutely, they do not abandon habit so much as replace their old habits with new ones. Agnes Heller reinforces this point in her pragmatic account of habit. “We simply would not be able to survive in the multiplicity of everyday demands and everyday activities if all of them required inventive thinking.” 
(Felski 2002, p. 615)

Specialized practices of art or philosophy do not escape their embed- ding in humdrum dailiness; the everyday, in turn, is imbued with diverse strands of thought and belief from the scientific to the sacred, is both heterogenous and hybrid. As Rey Chow points out, appealing to the everyday as either the “bedrock of reality” or as “collective false consciousness” is a gesture as predictable as it is arbitrary; each of these ideas invokes the everyday only to negate it, filling it with the phantasms of a pre-determined agenda.
(Felski 2002, p. 616)

To suggest that theories of everyday life engage with everyday attitudes to daily life is thus not to suggest a wide-eyed acceptance of what is, nor to treat the everyday as a transparent or self-evident category. But it is to begin by addressing the practical and experiential logic of everyday modes of orientation rather than seeking to transform or transcend them.
(Felski 2002, p. 617)  

Rey Chow turns her attention to the presentation of everyday life in film, drawing on two recent Chinese examples. She describes how a visual lingering on everyday objects and actions can become a powerful vehicle for the expression of elegaic emotion. Zhang Yimou’s The Road Home casts the everyday as meaningful activity, redemptive labor, and collective purpose, embedding the lives of the main protagonists in a rural tapestry woven out of traditional actions, textures, and objects. In Wong Kar-wai’s In the Mood for Love, by contrast, the everyday is no longer rooted but in flux, punctuated by aimless and arbitrary rhythms, even as the camera pans across a plethora of random objects that make up the flotsam and jetsam of Hong Kong modernity. Both films, however, are imbued with the register of nostalgic sentimentalism, a phenomenon that Chow suggests may be closely linked to the double nature of cinema, which combines metaphorical representation with visual refer- ence to a pre-existent world of semiotically dense and meaningful everyday things.
(Felski 2002, p. 618)

Mark Poster argues that the impact of new media technologies calls for a thorough-going revision of theories of everyday life. He sees Henri Lefebvre’s turn to lived experience as a challenge to traditional forms of “big politics,” while noting that his attachment to mythic notions of totality and human concreteness leaves him unable to confront the inescapability of mediation. We see an entrenched humanism at work in Lefebvre’s hasty dismissal of poststructuralist theories of language, his portrayal of consumer culture as pure mystification and his failure to theorize the role of the media in daily life. By way of example, Poster details the diverse ways in which media technologies ineradicably defined his own developing sense of self. He concludes by anticipating a future of ubiquitous computing that offers new risks as well as new possibilities, engendering a symbiosis of the human and machine that will reshape the boundaries of experiential possibility.  

(Felski 2002, p. 620)