The everyday / Everydayness Dr. Linda C.H. LAI Visual ethnography
Theorizing the Everyday
Heidegger: being-in-the-world Heidegger: 'average everydayness' is the general structure in which being [Dasein] exists
2 traditions of everyday life in the social sciences & humanities A. Describe lived experience B. Transform lived experiences by turning the everyday into critical knowledge
'repetitive' character of Everyday Life Routinization Repetition Stability (to release the eveyday person from doubts) Submission to authority
Themes: Everyday and the machine-technical: -everyday as the focus of the achievements of the Revolution and the site where the Revolution is to be defended and deepened (see Trotsky s writings) -shift from political work to cultural work: Leninism is the knowledge and ability to turn culture, i.e. all the knowledge amassed in previous centuries, to the interests of the working masses. -problem: a technical / technist transformation of pre-capitalist forms, NOT an aesthetic critique of capital and political economy -response: Constructivism and Productivism: to break down the boundaries between intellectual labour and manual labor, artistic labour and productive labour, under revolutionary culture Everyday culture and cultural theory: dialectical materialism -Lukacs, Benjamin, Lefebvre The Everyday and culture from below: -Antonio Gramsci Everyday as organized, disciplined space: domination and resistance (total transformation of everyday life) -Lefebvre s production of space: representational space, represention of space, spatial practice Everyday as a performative category: everyday creativity -Michel de Certeau
What is the everyday? Everyday for history-writing Everyday as praxis Revolutionary theory and Marxist theories of cultural democracy and transformation (first half of 20th century)
What is the everyday? Modes of attention / (photography) (See John Roberts earlier work The Art of Interpretation: Realism, Photography, and the Everyday 1998 and his article Philosophizing the Everyday: the philosophy of praxis and the fate of cultural studies, in Radical Philosophy 1999) -Photography in the 20th century developed at the intersection of the philosophical claims of realism and the cultural claims of the everyday. -The development of photography in turn transformed the concept of the everyday in cultural theory. [Recommended viewing: Dziga Vertov s The Man with a Moving Camera (1929) and Walther Ruttmann s Berlin, Symphony of a Great City (1927)]
The Surrealist s everyday in photography See Surrealist André Breton s Nadja: - terms to qualify the everyday: ghostly / haunting / indefinable / unverifiable - observable (on the street) [yet] inbetween and indefinable (the other side of life, the other side of a person, the lived but unnoticeable) - chain and network of associations; ranges of things that form hierarchies:
Do not expect me to provide an exact account of what I have been permitted to experience in this domain. I shall limit myself here to recalling without effort certain things which, apart from any exertions on my part, have occasionally happened to me, things which, reaching me in unsuspected ways, give me the measure of the particular grace and disgrace of which I am the object; I shall discuss these things without pre-establishedorder, and according to the moodof the moment which lets whatever survives survive. My point of departure will be the Hotel des Grans Hommes, Place du Pantheon, where I lived around 1918
Turn to the ordinary Writings since 1945 engaged in the everyday Numerous international exhibitions and biennials have borne witness to the range of contemporary art engaged with the everyday and its antecedents in the work of Surrealists, Situationists, the Fluxus group, and conceptual and feminist artists of the 1960s and 1970s. This art shows a recognition of ordinary dignity or the accidentally miraculous, an engagement with a new kind of anthropology, an immersion in the pleasures of popular culture, or a meditation on what happens when nothing happens.
Turn to the ordinary Writings since 1945 engaged in the everyday...(cont'd) The celebration of the everyday has oppositional and dissident overtones, offering a voice to the silenced and proposing possibilities for change.
** Everyday and the philosophy of Praxis : Critique of the everyday as praxis 1975 as the dividing line: Before: the everyday as praxis for cultural production After: re-orientation of the debate towards the productive consumer / overtaken by aesthetic theory and the semiotic model of cultural studies
** Everyday and the philosophy of Praxis : Critique of the everyday as praxis 1975 is the end of 20 years of the critique of the everyday as the theory of praxis in the form of the Situationist International. 1975 is also the beginning of Lefebvre moving away from the direct theorization of the everyday after spending 1917-1975: 1917-1939; 1948-49; 1966-74 [realism; counterhegemonic alliance; modernism]
Henri Lefebvre: the everyday and everydayness The everyday cannot be tidily fit into existing systems of classification e.g. 'housing, modes of dress, eating and drinking' Ordinary things in our daily life are 'at once connected and distinct'.
Michel de Certeau: Agency / intervention Practice of everyday life: Ways in which individual 'individualizes' mass culture, Ways in which individuals turn elements of popular into something of their own
B. Transform lived experiences by turning the everyday into critical knowledge Dada and Surrealism: poetics of everyday life Bakhtin: philosophy of the act Henri Lefebvre: critique of everyday life (neocapitalism, the festival and urbanism) S.I.: the spectacle and everyday life; resisting the spectacle Michel de Certeau: the grammar of everyday practice
Umberto D Vittorio Desica (1959) Ah Ying 半 边 人 Alan Fong 方 育 平 (1983) The Rise of Louis XIV TV film (1966) by Roberto Rossellini http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qajct-7vkuw Jeanne Dielman: 23, quai du Commerce, 1080 Bruxelles A film by Chantel Akerman (1975) Berlin, Symphony of a Great City Walther Rutmann (1922, Germany)
From WHAT is the everyday to WHERE is the everyday
Everyday the space of the sleeping curve (1) Everyday is viewed as a location where one engaged with regular nonpurposeful / non-functional / unproductive activities over a prolonged period of time. (2) To Johnson, the everyday has existed for many years since his childhood as forms of obsession with modeling complex simulations, which later on turned out to be ordinary behavior for most consumers of digital entertainment. (3) The everyday is also informal education via playing and gaming a kind of education not happening in classrooms or museums, but in living rooms and basements, on PCs and television screens. This is the Sleeper Curve: The most debased forms of mass diversion [that] turn out to be nutritional after all. (4) Johnson recommends a flexible assemblage of methodologies in collaboration: Systems analysis, probability theory, pattern recognition, popular culture analysis, symbolic analysis, textual studies etc. (Steven Johnson)
The Everyday as Things A New Vocabulary The rich and varied lives of things How objects are patterned with meanings & values in actual everyday life [new task of ethnography] *To track down uses & usage *To track down how objects trap (capture) historically transient experiences
Michel de Certeau Beyond poaching Consider the use of things as analogous to the speech act within the linguistic system.
More on use It will be foolish to propose a formal grammar of things. The best I can hope for is a momentary snap shot by attending to the rich collisions of objects, the playful frictions, the linguistic diversity of culture via use. (Neil Cummings)
Reading things: new concern How to read an object: Tip of the ice berg principle (synchronic trope) Past in present principle (the temporal trope) Things flow past and rest silently as a sediment shaping our consciousness. Emphasis on subjectivity, role of the ordinary individual in the creation of culture without centering on the individual alone
Things: personalized objects How people actually utilize things is extremely resistant to representation. more than functional usage Many current discussions of use ignore the creative aspects of how people relate to objects, i.e. such discussions work against the tactics for art, and therefore close down the room for creative intervention.
Further critique In discussions on art, too, art objects representational function has dominated and killed our understanding of many other aspects of art. (++over-emphasis on text and mining the interpretable meanings of the artifact) (--insufficient attention to the materiality of objects) Utility unites critique and art (creative activities).
Questioning Everyday Life : ethnography & historiography as 2 privileged perspectives - language and everyday life (Wittgenstein s input to anthropolopy) -works on the concrete lived-ness of everyday life (phenomenology and existentialism) Ethnography s role in revealing the notion/term of everyday life as a construction Highmore, introduction
Ethnography questioning Everyday Life : the politics of the term s usage - Everyday life is NOT just out there (a ready reality). It is a construction. -The immediate question to ask is: whose everyday life? -- Everyday life must also be understood as an invocation: whoever cites the term (or similar terms such as ordinary people ) is citing it for a particular purpose, for example, to hail attention to a common culture. -It is also, therefore, necessary to ask the next questions: who is the implicit others of the everyday life invoked, i.e. who supposedly live outside the ordinary, the everyday? - Everyday life is a problematic, a contested terrain where meanings are NOT to be found ready the objective of ethnography Highmore, introduction
Ethnography questioning Everyday Life : the politics of the term s usage: some common usage (1) the everyday = the dominated (as opposed to those who dominate); shorthand for voices from below, such as women, children, migrants etc. for social historians; Problem with this view: everyday life assumed as a transparent realm (2) the everyday = aspects of life that lie hidden To invoke the idea of ordinary culture = to make the invisible visible To invoke does not only mean to call upon (what is already there), but also to produce a category (that does not already exist), or, to problematize, e.g. the assumed naturalness of a woman s daily routine (differences). (But in the broader projects of feminism, everyday life produces both differences and commonality.) (p. 2, introduction) (3) use the term the everyday to produce the re-imaging of the study of culture to demand a difference Highmore, introduction
BIBLIOGRAPHY Fernand Braudel (1979) (1992): The Structures of Everyday Life: the limits of the possible (U of California Press, Berkeley, Los Angeles). [See Introduction ] Michel de Certeau (1984): The practice of everyday life; translated by Steven Rendall (University of California Press, Berkeley). Ben Highmore, ed. 2002: The Everyday Life Reader. Routledge, London and New York. Steven Johnson (2005) (2006), Everything Bad is Good for You: how popular culture is making us smarter (Penguin Books, London, New York, Toronto). [See Introduction ] Henri Lefebvre (1992): Critique of Everyday Life; translated by John Moore (Verso, London, New York). John Roberts (2006): Philosophizing the Everyday: revolutionary praxis and the fate of cultural theory (Pluto Press, London, Ann Arbor).
READING LIST From Ben Highmore (ed.), The Everyday Life Reader: Raymond Williams, Culture is Ordinary (1958) Henri Lefebvre, Work and Leisure in Everyday Life (1958) Erving Goffman, Front and Back Regions of Everyday Life (1959) Michel de Certeau, General Introduction to The Practice of Everyday Life (1980) Tang Xiaobing, The Anxiety of Everyday Life in Post-Revolutionary China (2000) Ben Highmore: Introduction: Questioning Everyday Life (2002)