20 Everyday Life
Sanghamitra Dey
Content:
- Introduction: Theorising “Everyday”
- Objectives
- Ordinary vs. Extraordinary: Demystifying Everyday Life
- Philosophy of Everyday Life and Cultural Studies
- Society of the Spectacle
- Psychogeography
- Production of Space
- Culture as Ordinary
- Practising Everyday Life: Spatial Practices and Tactic
- Critique of Everyday Life
- Space and Everyday Life
- Time and Everyday Life
- Feminist Perspective on Everyday Life
- Conclusion
- References
Introduction: Theorising “Everyday”
The routinized landscape of everyday life replete with the deadening force of familiar boredom and its tedium has been metonymically associated with the way we think about the commonplace and mundane affairs hardly represented in conventional critical discourse. The tendency to relegate the study of everyday as a critical concept to the periphery is common in conventional discourse. The reasons may be eluding but we can begin with the vast, eclectic and sometimes chaotic range of topics and theories. Moreover, everyday life is a dynamic concept to the core and hence underpinning all the theories of everyday life; there lies the recognition of the transformative and phantasmagoric potential of it. The mechanized environments of mundane everyday harbours the possibility of translating the familiar into unfamiliar through the process of systematic dismantling of conceptual categories. Although the notion of everyday life as multiform, multidimensional has always been an integral part of our cultural experience, the essence of everyday life, i,e. the “everydayness of everyday life” (Highmore, 1Everyday Life and Cultural Theory: An Introduction) lies in looking at the term “as value and quality”(Highmore, 1 Everyday Life and Cultural Theory: An Introduction ).Therefore, the ambivalent domain of everyday life with discontinuous and heterogeneous effects of contradictory modes of living eludes systematic conceptualization as it is replete with multiplicity of possibilities. The readers may confront the mysterious, uncanny and unobtrusive fragments challenging the conventional methods of knowledge production anywhere. So, deciphering the everydayness is like charting a problematic, hybrid but familiar terrain which poses a challenge to rationalist thinking and disciplinary categories as voiced by Kaplan and Ross “to advance a theory of everyday life is to elevate lived experience to the status of a critical concept—not merely in order to describe lived experience, but in order to change it”.
Keeping in mind the heterogeneity, the study of everyday life is therefore inclusive of the categories of literature, arts, cultural theory, history, films, advertisements, posters etc. the readers face an interesting as well as bewildering variety of contents and themes as the category is amorphous and ubiquitous generating heterogeneous discourses and counter-discourses spanning across disciplines. In his discussion of the term ‘everyday life’ in his book Undoing Culture (1995) Mike Featherstone suggests that “it appears to be a residual category into which can be jettisoned all the irritating bits and pieces which do not fit into orderly thought’. He goes on to write that ‘to venture into this field is to explore an aspect of life whose central features apparently lack methodicalness and are particularly resistant to rational categorization”.
The poetics and politics of representing the everyday in terms of the conventional representation and definition of everyday life appears limited as it fails to address the inherent dynamic potential within the category itself. Recent theories see it as a site of intense transformative resistance and struggle for power. The theoretical framework in this module aims to address the complex nuances of the representational apparatus used to explore the aesthetic of everyday life as the study cannot be contained only within the contours of established theoretical framework. Hence the aim is to assess everyday life as a critical conceptual category and practice, a site of intense and contradictory struggle and a mode of sensual and philosophical experience as evident in the eclectic range of works of cultural historians, sociologists, writers, film critics like Georg Simmel, Walter Benjamin, Michel de Certeau, Henri Lefebvre and the avant-garde movements like Surrealism and Mass-Observation. Moreover, the notions of class, gender, race, sexuality characterizing the themes of the everyday life are also highlighted.
Objectives
The raison de erte of everyday life lies in the dynamic and complex envisioning of inchoate and incoherent material into a lived experience. Hence the unit aims to:
- provide a systematic methodology and conceptual framework for the study of everyday life
- provide analytical and critical perspective to address the heterogeneity of registers in everyday life
- provide interdisciplinary theoretical framework to address the plural and provisional experience of everyday life
- provide conceptual co-ordinates to address the range of cultural theories
Ordinary vs. Extraordinary: Demystifying Everyday Life
The attempt to mystify/demystify the everyday is the effect of modernity as in the wake of modernity the everyday emerges as the dynamic realm marked by the repetitive process of dismantling the familiar, mundane ambience as voiced by Highmore “even in the aesthetic discourses that are most concerned with the everyday world of experience, transformation and transcendence are the operative procedures” (Everyday Life and Cultural Theory: An Introduction20). The everyday harbours the potential of translating the unfamiliar into familiar and vice versa as Kaplan and Ross opine, “everyday life is situated somewhere in the rift opened up between the subjective, phenomenological, sensory apparatus of the individual and reified institutions” (Everyday Life and Cultural Theory: An Introduction79). The discourse on everyday life draws attention to the vestiges of subconscious desires, dormant but potentially emergent and the attempt to theorise the everyday is inclusive of these mystical and apparently trivial and tiny fragments replete with the traces of our unconscious desire. Such fragments are part of everyday psychology as voiced by Ferguson, “such a picture of psychoanalysis figures it as a very ordinary science or rather a science of the ordinary a’ “surface psychology” ‘of everyday life (Ferguson 1996: vii).To elaborate, we can cite the ‘Freudian slip’, an integral part of the manifestation as well surfacing of hidden desires in terms of everyday communication. Freud’s The Psychopathology of Everyday Life projects the experience of modern everyday eluding the demands of reason, logic and rational categorization and is replete with contradictory, phantasmagoric and residual elements in the form of desires, myths and superstition.
Perhaps the best example of negotiating the mysterious potential of everyday material is the avante-guarde practice of Surrealism and forms of dissident Surrealism which defamiliarise and thereby mystify the experience of ordinary everyday. According to Ben Highmore, collage or montage, the representational tools best applicable to the study of everyday is found in Surrealism, a sociology of everyday life. In terms of the juxtaposition of conscious and non-conscious realms of experience, this practice of ‘psychic automatism’ denaturalizes the everydayness of everyday by taking recourse to the process of releasing familiar objects from the category of reasoned understanding. The Surrealist poetics aims to make the non-visible visible and thereby rescues the everyday from the forced archive of silent invisibility. The journal Documents(1929-30) and the College de Sociologie (1937-9)surface as the platform where the “editors Georges Bataille and Michel Leiris brought together a heterogeneous range of materials (body parts, old coins, new movies, festive rituals) in an onslaught against conventional ascriptions of aesthetic value. By combining Western fine art with ethnographic and archaeological studies Documents ruptured the domain of aesthetic value”.
Philosophy of Everyday Life and Cultural Studies
As we have seen, the study of banalized mundanity offers a sustained critique of the complex rituals of everyday life. Acknowledging the ubiquitous and strange potential of everyday formerly neglected in Cultural Studies is perhaps the best starting point to philosophize the mundane practices of daily life. Exploring the distinct topographies of the everyday life, this section explores the dialectical relation between spatial structure and social relationship as theorized in Cultural Studies.
Society of the Spectacle
A term proposed by the French Marxist critic Guy Debord to describe the latter half of the 20th century where extreme alienation ensuing from the mode of commodity production is widely extended in the realm of human relations in terms of electronic media and mass communications. Credited with having inspired the Situationist International (SI), Debord is an active member of the Situationists, a group of political theorists and activists based in Paris and influenced by Dadaist and surrealist movements. Founded in 1957 this group has considerable influence on the May 1968 event and as argued by Debord a spectacle is symbolic of the ensuing alienation and the consequent fragmented self. Hence, everyday life is characterized by this aspect of capitalism identified by Marx and a deluge of representations wash away the real life with representations or spectacles, “in societies where modern conditions of production prevail, all of life presents itself as an immense accumulation of spectacles” (The Society of the Spectacle). Debord’s idea is similar to Jean Baudrillard’s ideas on hyper reality and the society of the image as both offers a critique of contemporary society in terms of the increasing accumulation of images which poses a challenge to the accumulation of commodities thereby reducing individuals into actors playing artificial roles thereby suffocating their subjectivity. Everyday life is therefore a spectacle to watch and no longer to be lived. The influence of Lukas can also be traced in Debord’s theory of alienation characterizing the experience of everyday life.
Psychogeography
A term associated with Guy Debord, psychogeography can be defined as a set of cultural strategies to counter the proliferation of increasing commodification of everyday life under the alienating effects of capitalism in contemporary society. Debord’s conceptualization draws attention to the psychic and emotional aspects of experiencing the urban every day. Psychogeography is defined as “the study of the specific effects of the geographical environment, consciously organized or not, on the emotions and behaviour of individuals”(Knabbed 1981:45). Debord suggests two significant strategies—de´rive and de´tournement.(210). De´rive, literally meaning ‘drifting’ entails a subversive and disorienting strategy practiced by the Situationists in groups for a period of time. They used false or new maps for this purpose. ‘Detourement’, on the other hand, meaning ‘diversion’ or ‘re-routining’ is a more general category asPeter Brooker argues, “Thus, Debord writes of the ‘detourement of preexisting aesthetic elements’ and their combination through the ‘situationist use’ of past means or media into a new form or ‘superior construction of a milieu’ superseding the previous work and its assumed meaning”(210). Detourement therefore resembles the ideas of defamiliarisationand estrangement and thecombined effect of the ‘derive’ and ‘detourement’ is to experience and encounter an urban environment as an EVENT or ‘situation’ the wayapsychogeographer aims to offer a cognitive mapping of the urban space.
Production of Space
Henri Lefebvre’s idea of the ‘production of space contributes to the understanding of everyday spaces as ‘(social) space is a (social) product’ (Lefebvre 26). An eminent theorist of everyday life, for Lefebvre, socio-cultural processes and spatial forms are interrelated and contribute to the production of social space. No social space can be seen as an empty, inert and passive locus of social relations and practices as space is a product of practice and hence actively and creatively produced. The complex and creative modes of conceiving social space project space basically as a social product which “can be decoded, can be read. Such a space implies a process of signification” (Lefebvre 17).Such ‘production of space’ (Lefebvre 26) foregrounds the performative aspects of everyday identities as subjectivity is a product of the experience of negotiating spaces as well as the creative acts of spatial appropriation. Lefebvre’s distinction between ‘spatial practices’, formal ‘representations of space’ and the ‘representational spaces’ that subjects invest with meaning is an useful method to study the mundane spaces oblivious to critical understanding which he brings to the forefront. To elaborate,. ‘representations of space’ is a scientific or architectural treatment of space, “conceptualised space, the space of scientists, planners, urbanists, technocratic subdividers and social engineers” (Lefebvre 38). Unlike ‘representations of space, ‘representational space’ is “alive: it speaks. It has an affective kernel or centre: Ego, bed, bedroom, dwelling, house; or: square, church, graveyard. It embraces the loci of passion, of action and of lived situations, and thus immediately implies time” (Lefebvre 42). This space we encounter on everyday basis. Lefebvre’s “triad of the perceived, the conceived, and the lived” spaces opens up vistas of “the dialectical relationship”.
Culture as Ordinary
In Culture and Society, exploring the changes in meaning of the term ‘culture’ from 1780 to 1950, Raymond Williams shows how such changes document and reflect the changing conditions of everyday life. As he argues, the Leavisite model hardly paid any attention to the society or the realm of ‘lived experience’. Hence, the concepualisation of ‘culture as ordinary’ evidences his preoccupation with the experience of ‘lived culture’ thereby freeing the word from the limiting conditions of operation. Now, everyday life too forms a part of culture, it is elevated as culture in the anthropological sense is synonymous with everyday life. For Williams, culture means ‘a whole way of life’ and the forms of signification circulating in society. David Macey comments on William’s coinage ‘structures of feeling’, “throughout his work, Williams contrasts the Arnoldian view with the ethnographic view that defines culture as a way of life or, as he puts it, a structure of feeling. Defined in this sense, culture is ‘ordinary’ in that it refers not to a ‘high’ culture but to the totality of practices and modes of communication that make up a way of life and a community. For Williams, the study of culture is the study of the relationships between all the elements that contribute to a way of life” (399).Mapping the history of the idea of culture therefore, provides a record of basic, elementary social reactions integral to the common life of the nation.
Practising Everyday Life: Spatial Practices and Tactic
For Certeau, everyday life replete with archival residues is creative and hence the poetics of everyday life must take into consideration the science of its practice. Hence, Certeau’s science of the singularity is therefore, concerned with the relations of difference; “a science of the relationships that link everyday pursuits to particular circumstances” (1984:ix). In his book The Practice of Everyday Life, in two volumes Certeau undertakes the project of outlining the mundane as the creative ensemble of everyday practices which Highmore describes as a “poetics of uses rather than users”(156). His range includes everyday practices like walking, cooking, eating, drinking, reading, shopping, being in a neighbourhood-all elements of everyday life and ordinary culture. Certeau’s argument situates the everyday hitherto ignored in cultural studies as the site of the resistance and oppositional strategies. Exploring the everyday practices tactical in nature and form; Certeau opines “many everyday practices (talking, reading, moving about, shopping, cooking, etc.) are tactical in character” (xix) as the repressed everyday is manifested in strategic and tactical maneuvers. Certeau takes recourse tothe binaries of space and place, tactics and strategies, speaking and writing. As he defines:
Tactic is manifested in activities like surprise, disguise, secrecy etc. Certeau offers the example of tactical activity of la perruque, “la perruqueis the worker’s own work disguised as work for his [or her] employer”.The binaries are integral to his conceptualization of the exploration of ordinary practices. In his effort to offer apolyphonic catalogue of everyday life, Certeau opines “a tactic insinuates itself in the other’s place (xix)”; and “its space is the space of the other”(37).Strategy, too echoes the inversion of power structure in terms metaphors of war extended to realm of everyday actions and behaviours:
In volume II of The Practice of Everyday Life, Pierre Mayol outlines the everyday practices prevailing in the Croix-Rousse neighbourhood of Lyons in ‘Living’ whereas Luce Giard’s ‘Doing-Cooking’ offer a subversion of conventional ethnographic practices of everyday life.Mayol’s argument takes recourse to Certeau’s conceptualization of the two registers of everyday life which he divides into actual ‘behaviors’ in the form of walking, loitering, greeting people, visiting the neighbours etc. and the ‘expected symbolic benefits’ generated by the practice of co-habitation as well as the unconscious and imaginary archive of the neighbourhood. Mayol proceeds through the strategic potential of the regulatory concept of ‘propriety’ in the context of consumption of wine which is integral to festivity but at the same time subject to the checks of the “communal kitty”.
Critique of Everyday Life
The concept of everyday life as the intersection of dialectical relations, a transformative space replete with diverse rhythms is elaborated by Lefebvre in his phenomenal three volume study. As specified by him, everyday is a zone of residual conflicts and fragmentation as capitalism turns it into a place of consumption thereby reproducing the structures of capitalism itself. Hence the dialectic of contradictory impulses like boredom and leisure rule everyday life. In the wake of capitalist consumerism and a commodified culture in France affecting the quality of life, Henri Lefebvre sketches a bleak landscape of modern everyday life. But everyday also possess the transformative potential, primeval and elemental which escapes the logic of capitalist modernity. For Lefebvre everyday life is a lived experience and together “modernity and everyday life constitute a deep structure” (Lefebvre, “The Everyday and Everydayness”11),‘defined by “what is left over” after all distinct, superior, specialized, structured activities have been singled out by analysis’(Lefebvre Critique of Everyday Life: Volume I ).In his attempt to study the society, the study of everyday life and modernity contains his frustration with philosophy as an adequate tool to analyse the actuality of the lived experience of the present life colonized by consumerism and capitalism. The critique of everyday life is basically centred on the transformative potential of urban space and he chooses the towns of the French Pyrenees as the site of his exploration of ‘moments’; “instances of intense experience in everyday life that provide an immanent critique of the everyday” (Highmore 115). Lefebvre’s dialectics of everyday life draws attention to the urban as the space of reading the everyday. Influenced by Marx and Hegel, Lefebvre focuses on the concepts of ‘total man’ or ‘total person’(an individual no longer alienated)denoting the de- alienation of human beings leading to the ‘end of history’ where the goal or telos of history is achieved to investigate everyday life as the terrain of alienation generated by the conditions of modernity. La fete or festival especially during Mididle Ages and rural offers liberatory potential for the transformation of everyday life and consequently leading to the end of history. This privileging of ritualistic celebration of festival suggests its radical potential of subverting cultural norms and categories but the reconfigured order is already visible in everyday life; “festival differs from everyday life only in the explosion of forces which had been slowly accumulated in and via everyday life itself”.
Space and Everyday Life
The emphasis on the spatiality of experiencing the urban space is central to the conceptualization of the rhetoric of everyday life. The urban space appears to be a strategic location where counter- hegemonic tendencies of everyday practices are effectively played out. As pointed out by Michel de Certeau in his book The Practice of Everyday Life, everyday spatial practices secretly structure the determining conditions of social life and urban identities are constituted through the spatial practices and the consequent tactical seizure and production of urban space as “space is a practiced place”. Lefebvre’s typology of the three levels in social ‘production of space’ resembles the strategies or ‘spatial tactics’ described by Michel de Certeau. Concerned with the ways subjectivity is construed in urban space schematized by plans, regulatory codes and maps, Michel de Certeau illustrates the artful ways of deciphering and ‘producing’ the everyday fabric of urban life. His conceptualisation of the production of urban space in terms of the mundane and absent level of everyday practice in terms of the creative manoeuvres of the urban users relates to his idea of the concept city. To elaborate, Certeau offers the lived reality of the everyday spatial practices as evident in the representation of the minor practices unfolding in urban fabric. For him, there are, “multiform, resistance, tricky and stubborn procedures that elude discipline without being outside the field in which it is exercised, and which should lead us to a theory of everyday practices, of lived space, of the disquieting familiarity of the city”.
The cultural historian of everyday life, Joe Moran extends the notion of the non-place characterised by its blank homogeneity and explored by Marc Augé in his Non-Places as a site of cultural politics. Marc Augé’s conceptualization of the non-place offers a new kind of space which is a result of the advanced capitalist societies and produced by the accelerated movement of people and goods. Augé defines non-places as the everyday sites such as supermarkets, chain hotels, airports and motorways where human interaction is replaced by the anonymous, contractual obligations. His notion of the ‘non-place’ concentrating on the routine landscapes of daily life in the Western world offers an extremely suggestive way of thinking about these commonplace environments replete with interesting problems and ambiguities. Augé’s ‘anthropology of the near’ (1995:7) helps Moran to explores this politics by examining two particular aspects of non-places: their underexplored histories, which complicate Augé’s characterization of them as products of the acceleration of time and shrinkage of space in ‘super modernity’ (1995: 110); and their cultural representation, which has often served to obscure their political meanings. Moran extends the cultural associations of the idea of a non-place, archetypal in nature, the motorways, service stations and new towns in the context of the construction of a public service infrastructure in Britain in the 1950s and 1960s.
Georg Simmel, hailed as the ‘sociological impressionist’ (Karl Mannheim, quoted in Simmel 1990:32) projects “an everyday aesthetics of the fragment” in terms of his exploration of the everyday residual materials designed to replicate a zone of stimulation and sensory experience. Simmel’s psychological microscopy (1997:109) is best expressed in his conceptualization of the urban everyday as a form of ambivalent assault on our nervous system affecting our senses. The urban space provides the sensory material instrumental in affecting our senses. The Berlin Trade Exhibition emerges as the best example to illustrate such experience of feeling simultaneously deranged and desensitized by the mass display of commodified culture. We cannot deny the intensity of the impressions generated for the “over stimulated and tired nerves” (Simmel 1991: 119). ‘The Metropolis and Mental life’, Simmel’s best known essay gives the most poignant account of the sensory experience of the environment of everyday urbanity as he projects the metropolis as a sensory situation that generates a psychological condition “the psychological foundation upon which the metropolitan individuality is erected is the intensification of emotional life due to the swift and continuous shift of external and internal stimuli”.
Like Simmel, Walter Benjamin also highlights the waste products and residual and discarded materials that flood the everyday. In his unfinished Arcades Project, he explores the cultural and historical changes in the perception of everyday as a problematic. In the words of Ben Highmore, Benjamin offers an “approach to history is through trash” (61). Tracing the historicity of the mundane, Benjamin analyses everyday modernity not only in terms of the material conditions and objects but also in terms of the world of effects of stimulus and sensation. The locus of Benjamin’s project is the nineteenth-century Paris, the ideal scene for tracing the modern everyday characterized by increased accumulation and intensified sensation. The Paris of the Arcades Project “teems with bodies, images, signs, stimulants movement and is experienced as a perpetual assault on both tradition and the human sensorium alike”.Benjamin’s idea of dialectical image; a “constellation (a montage) of elements that in combination produce a spark that allows for recognition for legibility for communication and critique” (71) specifies his theoretical position on everyday life. His aim is to opt for a collage like “practice that can arrange the materiality of modernity into a design that awakens it from its dreamscape and opens it out onto history”(Highmore, 71).The analogy between the rag picker and the cultural historian has importance for theorizing everyday life in terms of the residual materials of everyday. As argued by Benjamin, the complex distinction between experience which is immediate, chaotic and simply lived-through (Erlebnis) and experience which has social relevance and can be examined, evaluated, accumulated and reflected upon and communicated (Erfahrung) is central to the investigation of experience of everyday.
Gendered public space harbours within itself a transformative potential. ShilpaPhadke in “Why Loiter? Radical Possibilities for Gendered Dissent” talks about the female quest for pleasure and the struggle against violence in the context of public space characterized by the practice of loitering as loitering is viewed as the act of claiming public space “for loitering, the lack of demonstration of a visible purpose, is usually perceived as a marginal, sometimes downright anti-social, even extra-legal act of being in public city space” (185). Her article co- authored with Shilpa Ranade and Sameera Khan draws on the insights of the Gender & Space Project (2003-2006) at PUKAR (Partners in Urban Knowledge, Action &Research) and aims to examine the ways women access to and use public space in Mumbai. Focusing on the gendered spatiality in Mumbai she argues further, the possibility of finding an exclusive right to public place remains a fantasy as the binary of public/private and the complex and multi-layered hierarchies of class, community and gender pose as obstacles. Her article explores the categorical and transgressive notions of feminity and masculinity and how these constantly subvert social order in terms of transgressing the structures of power in public space. Loitering disrupts the post-feminist assumption of equal access to the public as well as the performance of normative feminity mostly based on the hegemonic discourses based on the binary ‘good’ private woman and the bad public woman.
Time and Everyday Life
In Albert Camus’ The Myth of Sisyphus, Franz Kafka’s The Trial, we experience the absurdity of mundane experience in terms of spatio-temporal hollowness. Such representations basically evidence the contested category of the homogenous, uniform and mechanical representation of time in western modernity. Experiencing everyday life is a spatio-temporal experience albeit conceptual ruled by “the routinization and regimentation of daily life” (Highmore 5). As experienced by the social agents, everyday life is basically governed by a different temporality writ large in the mundane landscape not always measured by strict codes of chronology only. But extreme temporal repetition leads to the experience of “emptiness of time”, a characteristic feature of the discourse on everyday modernity ruled by “homogenized time”. In this context of banal, monotonous and repetitive experience of everyday, boredom is a characteristic feature of Weberian and Marxian everyday modernity. Boredom can become a pretext as well as index of implicit social critique. It contests the temporal logic of the mechanical routine often valorized for timelessness. As specified by Lefebvre, “boredom is pregnant with desires, frustrated frenzies, unrealized possibilities” (Introduction to Modernity, 124). Time and history comingle in the new town and an alluring boredom replaces time and history in the new town. According to him, new time and space relationships emerge from the process of suburbanization and commuting. He refers the commuting as “constrained time” (Lefebvre 1984: 53). For Certeau, everyday activities like walking, loitering, travelling, reading in short the metaphor of itinerant journey is basically a spatio-temporal experience as the subjects traverse through time and space.
Feminist Perspective on Everyday Life
A gendered experience of everyday life explores the unique potential of the everyday lifeto generate newer socio-cultural as well as political forms of representation. Women are conventionally relegated to the realm of mundane household work as the burden of the domestic everyday is always undertaken by them. But, as suggested by Lefebvre in his Critique of Everyday Life, any everyday event like a housewife buying sugar is replete with psychic, social desire and we can trace the structures of national and global exchange in mundane everyday affairs(Lefebvre 1991a: 57).Georg Simmel too emphasizes on gendered experience of realms of socialibility, the serving of meal and Walter Benjamin’s work on interiors can be read in the context of the gendering of the everyday. The credit of restoring everyday life as a dominant theme in family studies and feminist theory to offer a gendered experience of mundane reality goes to second-wave feminism. The theorists first undertook “the empirical job of bringing women’s lives into discourse (often generating new forms of discourse in the process)” (Highmore 52). The empirical breakdown of conceptual categories of equality and power helped to contextualize the politics of gender in everyday domestic affairs thereby transforming its course in the process.
Various theorists have attempted to theorise the everyday from a gendered perspective thereby highlighting the politics of representation where women occupy a mere object status. In her attempt to reclaim working-class identity, Carolyn Steedman’s method in “Landscape for a Good Woman” is to locate the experience of class at the level of everyday life in terms of a narrative of self-understanding mediated through the experience of an everyday replete with remembrances of past struggles as experienced in her mother’s latent politics. In The Everyday World as a Problematic, Dorothy E. Smith’s methodology is structured around the concepts of gender and class as she aims to opt out from the academic framework of sociological study aiming to translate social agents and subjects especially women into mere objects of study. Her aim is there reclaim the lost, hidden and hitherto silent females voices and offer a gendered point of view. Kristin Ross in Fast Cars, Clean Bodies: Decolonization and the Reordering of French Culture offers an eloquent investigation of the everyday life of the French culture in terms of the global considerations in the context of general culture represented by advertisements, cinemas, magazines especially the ‘hygiene’ advertisements for fridges, washing machines etc. She extends the “set of housekeeping tropes” (175 Highmore) to refer to the Algerian War as the domestic realm is invaded by the metaphors of war in the attempt of the country to keep its borders intact. Her practice resembles the historiographic practice employed by Martha Rosler in her photomontage in the series “Bringing the War Home: House beautiful”. Alice Kaplan and Kristin Ross Introduction to Everyday Life: Yale French Studie (1987) was dedicated to the exploration of everyday life in terms of a productive and critical engagement with the continental theories of Everyday life within Anglophone culture. The blindness of structuralism towards the theories of everyday is addressed in the context of incorporation of French structuralism into US universities which failed to address the social, political questions related to everyday. Hence, they desire to open vistas for the study of culture in the context of the lived experience of social agents.
Betty Friedan in The Feminine Mystique addresses the emergence of second wave feminism. In “The Problem that has no Name” she offers an assessment of the social position of women in postwar America focusing on the everydayness of women’s life which is full of poverty and emptiness of value symptomatic of the affluent culture. She explores the social psychology of feminine space both domestic and public structured by codified gender norms and female anomie and shows how the mystique of feminine fulfillment was the cherished goal till the psychological and socio-cultural implications of the problem without name surface when women were not satisfied with everyday drudgery. Her choice of the subjects is from suburban and middle class population. Luce Giard’s theorizing of everyday feminity is gathered from ethnographic accounts and informal interviews basically translated into the project of analyzing the mundane practice of doing-cooking. As the ‘Kitchen Women Nation’ materialises, culinary activities and food behaviour operates as a semiotic system where the rhythms and codes of the everyday life are actualized as women “entering into the vocation of cooking and manipulating ordinary things” use the “subtle intelligence full of nuances and strokes of genius, a light and lively intelligence that can be perceived without exhibiting itself, in Short, a very ordinary intelligence” (Giard158). While defining ‘doing-cooking’, Luce Giard in ‘The Nourishing Arts’ says how women are traditionally confined to the domestic space especially the kitchen. According to her women occupy a “level of social invisibility” and a “degree of cultural non recognition” (Giard 156). As she argues culinary practices are believed to occupy a basic, marginal position; “at the most rudimentary level, at the most necessary and the most unrespected level” (Giard 156). Commonly judged as repetitive and devalued as monotonous, such practices are excluded from the practical world of archival knowledge. But, in reality they are part of the ordinary culture as Giard restores the status of these everyday practices; “with their high degree of ritualization and their strong affective investment, culinary activities… rightly make up one of the strong aspects of ordinary culture”.
Conclusion
This module on everyday life in cultural theory has helped you to delve into the stultifying mundane environment of everyday life and its manifestation in literature, art and film.The irreconcilable differences and heterogeneity of registers of everyday life is addressed in terms of a systematic methodology and conceptual framework. By now, you must have developed an analytical, critical and interdisciplinary perspective on everyday life. The module is designed to provide you with a theoretical framework to address the plural, provisional and partial fragments of everyday life which Lefebvre in Critique calls a transformative project.
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