Doing Time: Feminist Theory and Postmodern Culture

THE INVENTION OF EVERYDAY LIFE

THE INVENTION OF EVERYDAY LIFE Everyday life is the most self-evident, yet the most puzzling of ideas. It is a key concept in cultural studies and feminism and an important reference point in other scholarly fields, part of a growing interest in micro-analysis and history from below. Yet those who use the term are often reluctant to explain exactly what it means. While doing the research for this chapter, I was struck by how many recent books mention everyday life in the title and how few list everyday life in the index. This reticence is surely intentional; recourse to the everyday often springs from a sense of impatience with academic theories and hairsplitting distinctions. After all, everyday life simply is, indisputably: the essential , taken-for-granted continuum of mundane activities that frames our forays into more esoteric or exotic worlds. It is the ultimate nonnegotiable reality, 3 the unavoidable basis for all other forms of human endeavor. The everyday, writes Guy Debord, “is the measure of all things.”1 The powerful resonances of such appeals to everyday life are closely connected to its fuzzy, ambiguous meanings. What exactly does it refer to? The entire social world? Particular behaviors and practices? A specific attitude or relationship to one’s environment? At first glance, everyday life seems to be everywhere , yet nowhere. Because it has no clear boundaries, it is difficult to identify. Everyday life is synonymous with the habitual, the ordinary, the mundane , yet it is also strangely elusive, that which resists our understanding and escapes our grasp. Like the blurred speck at the edge of one’s vision that disappears when looked at directly, the everyday ceases to be everyday when it is subject to critical scrutiny. “The everyday escapes,” writes Blanchot, “it belongs to insignificance.”2 Yet everyday life is also a concept with a long history. Beyond the often cited work of Michel de Certeau, there is an extensive tradition of writing on the everyday. This includes not just the work of Henri Lefebvre, but also of philosophers and sociologists such as Lukács, Heidegger, Heller, Schutz, Goffman, and Habermas among others. The fact that much of this writing has not been taken up in feminism and cultural studies may be partly due to its often abstract philosophical character. Given the current interest in the concrete and the particular , and the enormous variations in human lives across cultural contexts, in what sense is it meaningful to talk about everyday life in general?3 As a result of this focus on the particular, however, everyday life is rarely taken under the microscope and scrutinized as a concept. Like any analytical term, it organizes the world according to certain assumptions and criteria. For example, everyday life bears a complicated relationship to the distinction between private and public; it includes domestic activities but also routine forms of work, travel, and leisure. Furthermore, everyday life is not simply interchangeable with the popular: it is not the exclusive property of a particular social class or grouping. Bismarck had an everyday life and so does Madonna. What, then, does the term signify? What are its parameters? To what is it opposed? Lefebvre argues that everyday life is a distinctively modern phenomenon that only emerged in the nineteenth century. The claim seems counterintuitive, going against the presumed universality of the everyday. There is in fact a long history of writing on daily life extending from ancient Greece to medieval Christianity to the Enlightenment.4 But it is true that everyday life becomes increasingly important in the nineteenth century as an object of critical reflection and representation in literature and art. What is the cause of this new visibility? Lefebvre points to the impact of capitalism and industrialization on human exT H E I N V E N T I O N O F E V E R Y D AY L I F E 78 istence and perception. As bodies are massed together in big cities under modern conditions, so the uniform and repetitive aspects of human lives become more prominent. Similarly, Alvin Gouldner suggests that the rapidly changing fabric of ordinary lives creates a new awareness of the mundane. That which was previously taken for granted becomes visible, in both its new and its traditional , disappearing forms. Everyday life is also a secular and democratic concept. Secular because it conveys the sense of a world leached of transcendence; the everyday...