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

Where you stand vis-à-vis the disenchanted world ushered in by modernity will determine where you stand in relation to the category of the everyday. As the very form and texture of our lives, it is massively saturated by the ideological machinery of naturalization, positing the given as made to the specifications of eternity, when in fact it is historically made and imposed. In modern times, the dominant history has been that of routinization, from mass production to bureaucratic organization (the kind of thing magisterially analysed by Max Weber), and is often contrasted with the rhythms of field and season (the pastoral version of the everyday before the fall into disenchantment). Those of Weberian and Marxist dispositions see the everyday as hopelessly compromised, a view that the critical 'semioclasm' of Barthes's Mythologies was to extend and refine. On the other hand, there are many influential versions which seek to unlock a promise buried beneath the congealed weight of routine, as so many attempts at re-enchanting the modern world. Some of these are nakedly regressive (the nostalgia industry); the more powerful, however, are cast more in the utopian than in the nostalgic mode.

The latter is where Michael Sheringham feels most at home, in a seriously learned and spiritedly engaged study of the rich variety of response to the quotidian in the thought and writing of twentieth-century France, across a range of disciplines and practices (from sociology to poetry). His starting point is Surrealism and its cultivation of the merveilleux as intrinsic to the quotidian if you know how to look at it in the right way, the true master in this idiom being perhaps the 'dissident' Surrealist, Raymond Queneau. Breton of course has to figure in the story, although the more sceptical (Sheringham himself is not of this party) may feel that in Breton's work we sometimes find a form of 'magical' thinking that borders on the self-indulgently childish. The core of Sheringham's book, however, consists of a suite of profiles of four figures: the historian-sociologist Henri Lefebvre, the critic-theoretician Roland Barthes, the maverick philosopher of the everyday, Michel de Certeau, and the incomparable Georges Perec. These are sustained readings, with a strong grip on theoretical articulations, sensitive to nuance and ambiguity, and an unflagging commitment to an upbeat tale of emancipatory possibilities. Lefevbre's seminal Critique de la vie quotidienne is 'critique' in the dual sense of castigating both Marx's subsumption of the everyday under 'alienation' and Breton's fantasmagorical transmutations subordinating the real to the imaginary. The everyday is nothing if it is not seen as 'lived', and as lived experience it is the site mediating between who we are (as historically produced) and what we might be. Barthes's Mythologies is also read (in conjunction with L'Empire des signes) as more than a semiological blueprint of the prison-house of consciousness-numbing stereotype; it is also, if only at its margins, an engagement with the ways in which 'lived experience' is 'constantly renourished by intelligibility'. Certeau takes this contestatory–emancipatory emphasis even further, in his celebrated account of the city-walker, resisting the rationalized city of modernity by means of trajectories made of short-cuts, detours and surprises, a whole synecdochic economy of movement through which the everyday world is reclaimed from its colonizers. Finally, there is the brilliantly inventive Perec and his 'cultivation' (the image is Perec's and is intended literally) of the multiple 'fields' of the 'infra-ordinary'. Perec is in a league of his own, almost impossible to summarize. It is a tribute both to Perec and to this book that Sheringham pulls it off, in a way that convinces even an inveterate sceptic such as myself of the refreshing virtues of his cheerful narrative.