{"id":1093,"date":"2018-06-01T18:33:59","date_gmt":"2018-06-01T18:33:59","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/bsudsl.org\/edlmiddletown\/?page_id=1093"},"modified":"2022-01-24T16:16:02","modified_gmt":"2022-01-24T16:16:02","slug":"theories-and-theorists-of-the-everyday","status":"publish","type":"page","link":"https:\/\/bsudsl.org\/edlmiddletown\/theories-and-theorists-of-the-everyday\/","title":{"rendered":"Theories and Theorists of the Everyday"},"content":{"rendered":"

Here are short introductions to some of the thinkers whose understanding of everyday life inform this project.<\/span><\/p>\n

Mass Observation<\/span><\/h1>\n

Mass Observation was a collective of artists, film-makers, and poets who conducted a massive study of everyday life in Britain beginning in the late 1930s.  These amateur sociologists were hoping to discover a politically progressive, collective unconscious through studying the everyday. They recruited more than a thousand informants, who kept day diaries, answered questionnaires, and recorded observations of their fellow citizens. They taught methods of observation to these non-professional volunteers and sought to break down the hierarchical relation between the observers and the observed. In the 1940s Mass Observation became part of the wartime propaganda effort. A new version of Mass Observation began in the 1980s and continues today.<\/span><\/p>\n

Virginia Woolf<\/span><\/h1>\n

Virginia Woolf (1882-1941) was an English novelist, essayist, and publisher. Her novel <\/span>Mrs. Dalloway <\/span><\/i>(1925) offers a singular vision of everyday life, using stream-of-consciousness narration to tell the story of a set of characters on a single day in London in 1923. Her posthumously published essay \u201cMoments of Being\u201d offers a concise theory of everyday life. There Woolf separates daily consciousness into \u201cnon-being\u201d\u2014a distracted semi-consciousness in which we perform routine tasks\u2014and \u201cbeing\u201d\u2014a fleeting state of intense awareness and perception, grounded in the physical details around us but connected to a deeper, quasi-mystical state of connection with others and with the universe.<\/span><\/p>\n

Rita Felski<\/span><\/h1>\n

Rita Felski is the William R. Kenan Jr. Professor of English at the University of Virginia. She has written on a wide range of subjects but her most insistent intellectual move is to place women at the center of theory, literary history, and cultural studies. This emphasis informs the early essay, \u201cThe Invention of Everyday Life,\u201d which has become a touchstone in everyday life studies. In it she disputes with Henri Lefebvre and Michel de Certeau, seeking a middle ground between Lefebvre\u2019s dystopian view of they everyday as alienation (and women as the victims of everyday life) and de Certeau\u2019s reading of the everyday as a sphere of resistance and self-expression. She insists that the everyday is constantly \u201cboth\/and\u201d\u2014oppressive for some people more than for others, liberating at one moment and stultifying the next. Her essay provides the following durable analysis of the everyday: that its typical time-function is <\/span>repetition<\/span><\/i>; its typical space <\/span>the home<\/span><\/i>; and its typical mode of operation <\/span>habit<\/span><\/i>. Habit and repetition, her essay insists, are best understood as essential to the human ability to survive and thrive\u2014not as symptoms of alienated modern living.<\/span><\/p>\n

Henri Lefebvre<\/span><\/h1>\n

Henri Lefebvre (1901-1999) was a French philosopher and sociologist whose life-work includes the massive, three-volume <\/span>Critique of Everyday Life<\/span><\/i> (1947, 1961, and 1981). Lefebvre\u2019s theories are too complex to be summarized easily, but they hinge on an understanding of the everyday as the sphere where the forces of history, politics, and economics collide with the life of the individual. A Marxist, Lefebvre insists on modern life as \u201calienated\u201d and finds that even activities that seem very personal and individual\u2014such as how we spend our leisure time\u2014have been commodified under capitalist culture. In a much-cited essay on \u201cWork and Leisure in Everyday Life,\u201d Lefebvre argues that the separation of our waking lives into seemingly exclusive spheres of \u201cwork\u201d and \u201cleisure\u201d is a mark of alienation: modern people see their lives subdivided into distinct activities rather than experiencing their lives as unified wholes. In this way the existence of modern leisure is, for Lefebvre, a critique <\/span>of the everyday<\/span><\/i> from <\/span>within the everyday<\/span><\/i>.<\/span><\/p>\n

Walter Benjamin<\/span><\/h1>\n

Walter Benjamin (1892-1940) was a German Jewish philosopher and critic of popular culture. Among his most influential works is <\/span>The Arcades Project<\/span><\/i>, a massive set of personal reflections based upon areas in Paris, France. Written between 1927 and 1940, it was never finished (and is unfinishable, says everyday life theorist Ben Highmore) but still remains an invaluable source for the theory of everyday life. In the <\/span>Project<\/span><\/i> and other works such as <\/span>Illuminations<\/span><\/i>, Benjamin speaks about the modern everyday as the \u201coverstimulation\u201d of the senses, likens the everyday to cinematic montage, and introduces the concept of the \u201cdialectical image.\u201d A dialectical image represents contending historical forces in miniature, freezing a moment where the past gave way to the future and making visible the social, economic, and political forces battling at that point of transition.<\/span><\/p>\n

Michel de Certeau<\/span><\/h1>\n

Michel de Certeau (1925-1986) was Director d\u2019Etudes at the Ecole des Hautes Etudes en Sciences Sociales in Paris and Visiting Professor of French and Comparative Literature at University of California, San Diego. De Certeau\u2019s <\/span>The Practice of Everyday Life<\/span><\/i> volume 1 sketches out a complex and ambitious theory of everyday life. Volume 2, co-authored with Luce Giard and Pierre Mayol, presents sociological studies based on the theoretical ideas of the first volume. The foremost theorist of everyday life, de Certeau distinguishes \u201ctactics\u201d\u2014the small, improvisational, everyday decisions people make in order to make their lives livable\u2014from \u201cstrategies\u201d\u2014the larger social forces (work, career, media) that determine and oppress individuals\u2019 freedom. Strategies come from our workplaces, from the media, from society: the pressure to work hard, the rules of the workplace, and the media\u2019s high expectations for living. Tactics are how we react to strategies, adapting to them in small, personal, and sometimes unconscious ways in order to cope and to enjoy life. While de Certeau\u2019s thought has been considered obscure and idealistic, it remains unmatched in identifying and articulating in new ways the mysteries of the everyday.<\/span><\/p>\n

Ben Highmore<\/span><\/h1>\n

Ben Highmore is a professor of cultural studies with an emphasis in media, film and popular culture at the University of Sussex in Brighton, England. With seven books and dozens of articles to his credit, Highmore has been one of the most articulate voices in searching for ways of studying and representing everyday life for the last fifteen years. Key works include <\/span>Everyday Life and Cultural Theory<\/span><\/i> (2002), which works through the theories of a number of major figures, including Walter Benjamin and Michel de Certeau. Its companion volume, <\/span>The Everyday Life Reader<\/span><\/i> (also 2002), assembles excerpts from more than 25 scholars and groups who have worked on the study of everyday life. In later works such as: <\/span>Ordinary Lives: Studies in the Everyday<\/span><\/i> and <\/span>A Passion for Cultural Studies<\/span><\/i>, Highmore turns from theory to practice, training his analysis on phenomena ranging from Indian food in British life to home decor, including a lyrical and critical meditation on an inexpensive, mass-produced chair from his parents\u2019  house that now rests in his den. In <\/span>Ordinary Lives<\/span><\/i>, Highmore offers a description of the everyday as an \u201caccumulation of \u2018small things\u2019 that constitute a more expansive but hard to register \u2018big thing\u2019.\u201d Yet, the everyday is also \u201cpunctuated by interruptions and irruptions\u201d such as a knock on the door, a stubbed toe, or an unexpected present among many examples. Highmore visited Muncie and took part in the seminar for two days in February.<\/span><\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n

In his most recent book on Everyday Life, <\/span>Cultural Moods<\/span><\/i>, Highmore <\/span>asserts the existence of \u201ccultural moods\u201d\u2014structured ranges of affect that are widely shared and substantially created by material, social, and historical conditions. Cultural moods are experienced with variations from person to person but they are not subjective; they are \u201cexperienced through our <\/span>acculturated<\/span> nervous systems and through our <\/span>worlded<\/span> skin,\u201d he writes. The book seeks to identify and understand such cultural moods, to probe how they function as \u201crelays between feelings and various cultural phenomena.\u201d He traces how various, powerful cultural actors, including corporations and government entities expend resources (through advertising, marketing, \u201ccustomer experience,\u201d and other activities, to create cultural moods.<\/span><\/p>\n

Kathleen Stewart<\/span><\/h1>\n

Kristen Stewart is professor of anthropology at the University of Texas at Austin. Her 2007 book <\/span>Ordinary Affects <\/span><\/i>attempts to attend to the often-fleeting emotional\/sensory states that make up much of everyday consciousness. In Stewart\u2019s view, \u201cordinary affects\u201d are convergences of forces that flow through us; she describes them repeatedly as \u201ccircuits,\u201d which are sometimes short-circuited before or immediately-upon-becoming conscious, but sometimes crystallize into something more conscious and lasting. She defines \u201cordinary affects\u201d in multiple ways, as \u201cforces that come into view as habit or shock, resonance or impact\u201d; \u201csomething that throws itself together in a moment as an event or sensation, something both animated and habitable\u201d (1); \u201cvaried, surging capacities to affect and be affected that give everyday life the quality of a continual motion of relations, scenes, contingencies, and emergences\u201d (2). Crucially, ordinary affects circulate in the culture–they are public and shared (though not universally) even though they are \u201cthe stuff that intimate lives are made of\u201d (2). They are the \u201ccontact zones\u201d where \u201cthe overdeterminations of circulations, events, conditions, technologies, and flows of power literally take place\u201d (3). Ordinary affects are thus not something we control but they are rich in potential for change and knowledge; they differ from ideologies in being \u201cmore fractious, multiplicitous and unpredictable than symbolic meanings\u201d (3). <\/span><\/p>\n

This territory is laid out in the introduction to <\/span>Ordinary Affects<\/span><\/i>, which then proceeds through a series of small, focused, experimental essay-meditations on everyday life and affective phenomena\u2014many of them based on personal observation (though typically written in third-person and a number of them reflecting travels in the U.S. southwest and people or moments in Stewart\u2019s own life. This episodic structure is in keeping with Stewart\u2019s sense that the everyday resists social-scientific generalization and should not be approached as a stable object of study. Her book rejects \u201cdemystification and uncovered truths that support a well-known picture of the world\u201d in favor of a position of \u201cspeculation, curiosity, and the concrete\u201d (1). <\/span><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Here are short introductions to some of the thinkers whose understanding of everyday life inform this project. 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