Introduction

The April 2002 issue of Harper's Magazine carries the following correction to a previously published quotation from President Eisenhower's farewell address: "The word 'aesthetic' was printed mistakenly in place of the word 'atheistic.' The quotation should have read, 'We face a hostile ideology, global in scope, atheistic in character, ruthless in purpose, and insidious in method.' We regret the error." ¹ Regrets aside, what if the slip were allowed to stand? The sentence would then read as it did in the misprinted version: "We face a hostile ideology, global in scope, aesthetic in character, ruthless in purpose, and insidious in method." Harper's misprint fortuitously replaced the atheistic with the aesthetic, and if the former betokened Eisenhower's preoccupation with the perceived Communist threat, the latter may have become a theism of its own in literary and cultural analysis. Or, to put another spin on the matter, there is perhaps also an "insidious" aspect to the aesthetic itself insofar as questions of the aesthetic—under the sign of "relative autonomy," "discursive regimes," "the constitutive outside," and so on—have themselves replaced those of force, determination, history, and "real life" (which, without the scare quotes, today represents only an embarrassment). The nightmare of the present moment, in which the inheritors of Eisenhower as represented by Ashcroft, Bush, Rumsfeld, Sharon, and company make short shrift of personal, civil, and civic rights and aspirations, exemplifies parapraxis on a grand scale, where the disconnect between political reality and cultural theory seems magnified by, if not the product of, misdirection. But if the aesthetic or the cultural no longer gives the slip to the ways that lives are being "botched" (to adapt Freud's allusion to Patzerei in The Psychopathology of Everyday Life), ² and not just by psychophysical or linguistic pressures—we have yet to find models for understanding the world (let alone changing it) that are more than mere wish fulfillments, genres of the subjunctive that elude and even evade the actualities of existence.

When we at Cultural Critique decided to put together a special issue on everyday life, it was to square (as much as is possible within the terms of a call for submissions) the issue of prevalent paradigms of knowledge in the humanities and related social sciences and the emergence of others that challenge the ascendancy of the so-called linguistic turn as well as revisit previous interrogations of the fissures among physis, metaphysics, and material reality, in various traditions of materialist inquiry. Within the terms of such a broad optic, it seemed to us that everyday life could once more stand scrutiny— as an "object" of knowledge no less than as a "concept" for reckoning with the social and historical contradictions governing both the past and present. Even without hypostasizing the events of September 11, 2001, into a historical singularity (given the ways the everyday is routinely catastrophic in Ramallah, Rwanda, and, increasingly, Rawalpindi), we have perforce been made more conscious of the historical turn of the screw that risks rendering our subject matter here obsolete and our emphases very far from that required by engagé forms of critique. This is not to bemoan the irrelevance of sociocultural analysis, though it is to suggest that the question of relevance cannot be answered, pace Adorno, by simply referring it to an abstractly modernist sense of "resignation," ³ however much we might want to affirm the essential propriety of a negative relationship to the truth. So it is possible that the discussions gathered in this issue under the rubric of everyday life give the appearance of being at a tangent to the most urgent social and political questions of the day or, even if such is not the case, that this introduction to them is tendentious—as if to assert that now that things are really bad, nothing other than manifestos for the barricades will do. This is not the intention. But that aestheticism or theoreticism is insufficient, for the terms of what Edward Said has called "worldliness" ⁴ to obtain, seems at least to be clear...