Introduction

The everyday is everywhere in recent work in the humanities, but to what end? It is hailed as an escape route from the rarified realm of abstract ideas and esoteric knowledge, but it may ensconce us ever more firmly in that same realm. It beckons to us with the beguiling allure of the "really real," and yet discussions of everyday life are indelibly marked by the peculiar anxieties and obsessions of intellectuals. Such discussions are guided, or claim to be, by a democratic impulse; yet behind the tributes to vernacular wisdom and to the élan vital of the people, one often hears the wistful murmurings of a recurring refrain: why can't they be more like us?

In pursuing these paradoxes, we need to recognize the doubleness of everyday life, which enfolds two distinct constellations of issues; a mundane social world and a phenomenological relationship to that world. 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, working, 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, unmomentous yet indispensable events, often spurned or ignored in the mainstream tradition of Western philosophy, comes to the fore in theories of everyday life. We need, writes Henri Lefebvre, "a philosophical inventory and analysis of everyday life that will expose its ambiguities—its baseness and exuberance, its poverty and fruitfulness—and by these unorthodox means release the creative energies that are an integral part of it." ¹

At the same time, everyday life comprises not just an array of behaviors 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 epitomizes the quintessential quality of taken-for-grantedness; it speaks to aspects of our behavior that seem to take place without our conscious awareness or assent and to mundane events that unfold imperceptibly just below our field of vision. This quality is invoked by Victor Shklovsky when, in his well-known essay "Art as Technique," he quotes an essay from Tolstoy's diary:

I was cleaning a room and, meandering about, approached the divan and couldn't remember whether or not I had dusted it. Since these movements are habitual and unconscious, I could not remember and felt that it was impossible to remember—so that if I had dusted it and forgot—that is, had acted unconsciously, then it was the same as if I had not. If some conscious person had been watching, then the fact could be established. If, however, no one was looking, or looking on unconsciously, if the whole complex lives of many people go on unconsciously, then such lives are as if they had never been. ²

Shklovsky echoes Tolstoy's own sense of anxiety at this evidence of everyday inattentiveness. "And so life is reckoned as nothing. Habitualization devours works, clothes, furniture, one's wife and the fear of war" (12). In a gesture that will echo through subsequent theories of the everyday, habit is excoriated as the enemy of an authentic life, an insidious, invisible, corroding away of the soul. Routine reconciles us to the irreconcilable even as it transforms what was once magical into the drab and commonplace. The all-too-familiar numbs and pacifies us, lulling us into a trance-like forgetfulness; unable to experience the vivid, clamoring there-ness of the world and to be fully immersed in the moment, it is as if we had never truly lived.

Shklovsky, of course, diagnoses the disease only in order to extol the efficacy of the cure: "art exists that one may recover the sensation of life; it exists to make...