The Politics and Potential of Everyday Life: On the Very Concept of Everyday Life

On the very concept of everyday life

At first glance it might seem absurd to claim that the concept of everyday life could be tied to a specific politics—that the concept is in its very structure either revolutionary or conservative. Far from the concept being tied to a determined politics, it is difficult to imagine political contestation or difference without some concept of everyday life. Either we insist that everyday life is inauthentic, confused, or mystified ¹ —requiring the transition to reflective theory—or we see everydayness as uncorrupted life, a life that in its animal or natural immediacy would bear all the joy and promise that political structures would subsequently enslave or enhance. Despite these conflicting possibilities, the relational structure of the concept demands that the everyday be defined against abstraction, reification, or decided cultural wholes. In this sense, the concept of everydayness owes a debt to the notion of life. Whether everyday life is defined as necessarily tending toward broader structures, or whether it is situated radically prior to all ideality, something like a metaphysical quality must be discerned in the structure of life if one is to make a general claim about everydayness.

At one extreme, then, we could situate the seemingly antimetaphysical tradition of the Nietzschean and Bergsonian appeal to life as radically preconceptual, fluid, continuous, and singular, a life that can only be belied by concepts, reflection, or consciousness. ² The logics of philosophy, the norms of humanism, or the claims of morality, community, and convention, would all be violations of the very force of life. While everyday bourgeois existence would—from Nietzsche's and Bergson's point of view—also be guilty of the stultifying denial of life, their work has allowed for a valorization of a radical quotidian, evidenced in the epiphanies of modernist literature, the celebration of the body, the spontaneity of unreflecting life, or the antihumanism of abject existence. According to Jürgen Habermas, it is a certain reading of Nietzsche and Georges Bataille that has (mistakenly) led contemporary thought to be critical of all forms of reason; ³ while for Charles Taylor the modernist distaste for everyday life has followed from a "subjectivism" that retreats from any determined, social, or collective understanding of the good life. ⁴ Habermas's and Taylor's criticisms of the contemporary appeal to a life before all collectively legitimated goods stress an inherent normativity in life that is best realized, not in the specialization of philosophy, but in the inclusion of the practices of reason and reflection in ordinary life. Habermas's and Taylor's work is part of a philosophical tradition that locates a tendency towards metaphysics in everyday life. Philosophy is not an arbitrary or academically enclosed activity imposed upon life; only through the practice of philosophy, only through reflection on the very forms through which we live life, can life realize its potential. Life, in itself, tends towards a truth that is other than mere life, but is also the realization of life.

It is possible to cast these two traditions in opposition, the one tending towards an inherent norm of reason, justification, and emancipation, the other refusing metaphysics and reason as the negation of life. What both traditions share, however, is a norm of life, or the very concept of life as a norm. It is assumed that life, in itself, has a certain value: life must, to be proper to itself, realize itself in some recognition of the truth of life. On the one hand everyday life would be, by its nature, always already normative. Life necessarily tends towards and is enabled by some idea of life, some notion of the good and true life. Philosophy, theory, or political reflection would be the very realization of life. On the other hand, life would be a pure force, potential, and production that must refuse all forms of non-life, all the negative, stultifying, and life...