The Ecstatic Quotidian: Phenomenological Sightings in Modern Art and Literature

Introduction

Introduction This book is devoted to an examination, through art, literature, and phenomenology , of that which is, by definition, the most ordinary and habitually unnoticed. The ‘‘quotidian’’ is the sense of life built up in daily experience, by everyday habits, by the sedimentation of ordinary expectations of the world, but also by the tensions between the regularity of the familiar and necessary innovation. The quotidian is that background in contrast to which new discoveries emerge and we are surprised; and more pointedly, it is a necessary condition for surprise, the regularity in contrast to which something new and unexpected occurs. Unfamiliarity, wonder, and mysteriousness are both embedded in and turnings-away from familiarity and predictability. These turnings-away, our stepping outside of the ordinary, do not leave it behind, but draw energy and vivacity from this deviation. It is not in denigration of everyday life—not to ‘‘repudiate the ordinary’’ as Stanley Rosen describes philosophies that befriend disruption of the ordinary (Rosen 2002, 291), and not only to ‘‘problematize everyday life’’ as Michael Gardiner summarizes a tradition of its theorization (Gardiner 2000, 6)—but with appreciation of it, that the notion of the ‘‘ecstatic quotidian,’’ the stepping outside or ‘‘ecstasis’’ of the ordinary feeling of the self’s familiarity with the world, is here presented. Not only the fantastical which, as in surrealist renderings, has left the everyday behind, but also the tension between everydayness and ecstasis, become essential in manifestations of modernism, re- flected in the interweaving expressions of literature, visual art, and phenomenology. A more intimate link between the quotidian and the ecstatic than a transparent opposition would seem to be nonsensical, yet their coupling is a persistent theme in modern art and literature. An intimacy between 2 Introduction the quality of life and ecstasis that can occur with reflection on it is suggested, amplified, and defended, if not sometimes radically exaggerated, in works of modern literature and painting, through which writers and painters embrace the paradox of seeing the everyday for its very everydayness and, yet, discerning within it latent possibilities of transformation. Of course, to look at the everyday with intensity and scrutiny is to already have stepped outside of it, to live primarily the reflection upon the quotidian rather than the quotidian itself. The quotidian usually remains hidden. In §129 of Philosophische Untersuchungen , Wittgenstein writes: Die für uns wichtigsten Aspekte der Dinge sind durch ihre Einfachheit und Alltäglichkeit verborgen. (Man kann es nicht bemerken,— weil man es immer vor Augen hat.) Die eigentlichen Grundlagen seiner Forschung fallen dem Menschen gar nicht auf. Es sei denn, daß ihm dies einmal aufgefallen ist.—Und das heißt: das, was einmal gesehen, das Auffallendste und Stärkste ist, fällt uns nicht auf. [The aspects of things that are most important for us are hidden because of their simplicity and familiarity. (It goes unnoticed— because it is always before one’s eyes). The real foundations of his enquiry do not strike a person at all. Unless that fact has struck him some time before.—And this means: we fail to be struck by that which, once seen, is most striking and most powerful.] (Wittgenstein 1953/2001, 43) While in everyday life we necessarily fail to be struck by what is so familiar, the fact of things’ familiarity to us becomes a subject of intense study in modern art and literature, for which not the content, but the very fact and structure, of experience are thematic. In modern art and literature, from the late nineteenth (perhaps as early as the French poet Charles Baudelaire) to the mid-twentieth century, quotidian life has been a subject of fascination, even if this fascination necessarily changes the everyday quality of the world. But quotidian life is also a persistent theme in phenomenology, which studies the structure of appearance or phenomena. Rosen has argued, to some extent justifiably, that phenomenological treatment among other philosophical approaches can reduce everyday life to concepts which ‘‘leave out everything that is characteristic of life’’ (Rosen 2002, 272). Yet the efforts and strategies of phenomenology have been various, from Edmund Husserl’s scientific description to Martin Heidegger’s early formal indication and later poetic studies (Rosen concentrates mostly on Sein und Zeit), to Maurice Merleau-Ponty’s Introduction 3 studies of perception through art, not to mention Gaston Bachelard’s poetic phenomenology and Jean-Paul Sartre’s literary...