Everyday Life: Theories and Practices from Surrealism to the Present (review)

For three months beginning in December 1978, Roland Barthes wrote a column for the weekly news magazine Le Nouvel Observateur that consisted of brief responses to “a few things that had caught his attention that week” (209). These “few things,” as Michael Sheringham writes in his impressive new book on everyday life, were to be distinguished from “events” in that their selection was tied explicitly to their lack of newsworthiness. As Sheringham writes, Barthes considered his weekly “Chroniques” column “an experiment, a quest for a new form of writing that would be deliberately brief, minor, and gentle, whilst at the same time political” (220).

When Barthes suspended the column in March 1979, he explained the difficulty of such a project in terms that reveal much about Sheringham’s Everyday Life and the French discourse of le quotidien it examines. For Barthes, “to use the pages of a political weekly to talk about incidents that had struck him that week . . . was to counteract the scale of values imposed by the press’s obsession with big events” (220). Barthes’s problem, though, was that writing about unspectacular everyday incidents risked reifying them as events, as well as subjecting them to a language of spectacle, mastery, and moralism—that is, of seeking to have the last word.

Sheringham’s Everyday Life heeds Barthes’s statements about the appeals and difficulties of writing about everyday life, reflecting Barthes’s self-critique in both the book’s structure and in its eye toward the intellectual history of postwar French theory. Sheringham documents how certain left intellectuals in France turned their attention toward a sociology of the quotidian and away from totalizing master-narratives; his book demarcates a coherent tradition of intellectual discourse that began with surrealism and reached its apex in the work of Barthes, Henri Lefebvre, Michel de Certeau, and Georges Perec. For these writers and their contemporaries, the unspectacular vicissitudes of daily life in modern France became a central preoccupation that projected 1930s discourses of urban experience into the rapidly shifting intellectual landscape of the 1960s. This turn to the quotidian might seem to represent a lowering of expectations for the Left: in place of global revolutions, anti-colonial struggles, or massive economic upheavals, a substantial body of French intellectuals directed their critical efforts toward what Lefebvre described as “a dimension of human reality irreducible to historical understanding.” At a time when much leftist thought was still dominated by a deterministic relationship to historicism, these intellectuals saw the everyday as something other than simply History’s raw material. For the likes of Lefebvre, Barthes, Certeau, and Perec, the everyday offered a field of praxis and experiment delimited only by its capacity to be inhabited.

In contrast to writers who dismiss the everyday as bankrupt and depoliticized, or, conversely, who aestheticize private moments of lived experience as pleasures to be savored, Sheringham charts a tradition of French thinkers who regard the everyday as an indeterminate field that both demands and resists functional order, political expediency, and conceptual objectification. Sheringham phrases this ambiguity in Heideggerian terms: “‘Everydayness is a way to be’: it comprises both dullness and ‘moments of vision’ yet if, for the duration of such moments, ‘existence can ever gain mastery over the “everyday”. . . .it can never extinguish it’” (33). Sheringham’s book studies quotidian experience as both the measure of liberatory politics and, most intriguingly, as a site of its inveterate possibility, thus abandoning the “big events” of historicism and political militancy. To this end, Sheringham tends to downplay the militancy of some of the figures he studies: he studies the surrealism of Paris Peasant and Nadja, but not the surrealism of anti-colonial and anti-fascist activism; he marginalizes the Situationist movement, itself dedicated to the study of everyday life, as reductively Manichean. Yet this is largely on purpose: Sheringham’s principle intervention into French intellectual history resides in his claim that not all theorists on the left couched their...