The Everyday Life Reader

Excerpts of The Everyday Life Reader, edited by Ben Highmore.
Published by Routledge in 2002.

Introduction written by Ben Highmore
“Questioning Everyday Life”

page 3
For Henri Lefebvre, who spent his career working on the problem of the critique of everyday life, everyday life is 'defined by “what is left over” after all the distinct, superior, specialized, structured activities have been singled out of analysis' (Lefebvre 1991: 97). If we assume that 'fields' constitute such distinct and specialised forms of knowledge, then clearly, for Lefebvre, the everyday is precisely what lies outside the disciplines of knowledge. However, Lefebvre goes on to insist that 'everyday life is profoundly related to all activities, and encompasses them with all their differences and their conflicts' (Lefebvre 1991: 97). If we look at the various fields that make up what is optimistically called the human sciences, we might draw the following conclusion: everyday life is both remaindered from fields of study as well as impacting on every single attempt to register human life. Cultural studies, sociology, social history, anthropology, ethnography, literary studies, psychology and so on would all, I guess, want to lay some claim to attending to the everyday ̶ yet for the most part the tendency has been for specialised disciplines to invoke the everyday as a taken-for granted aspect of social life. While these fields have been significant contributions to the productive problematic of everyday life (as both an invisible singularity and overarching totality), they have rarely provided a space for putting such ideas at the centre of their inquiries. The potential of everyday life studies is not to unite disciplinary fields in some dream of multidisciplinary or interdisciplinarity ; its potential is essentially anti-disciplinary. If as Lefebvre suggests the everyday lies both outside all the different fields of knowledge, while at the same time lying across them, then the everyday is not a field at all, more like a para-field, or a meta-field.

page 5
Does the everyday provide the training ground for conformity, or is it rather the place where conformity is evaded?

page 8
Marx and Freud both attempt to reveal structures that might underpin (and undermine) the everyday reality of experience and to do this they both navigate across the poles of the particular and the general. If Marx and Freud set the scene for modern cultural theory they do so in a way that casts doubt on the veracity of perceived everyday actuality. But they do this contradictorily: on the one hand the surface of the everyday (its manifest content) needs to be given the closest of scrutiny (what you see is what there is), and on the other hand the project is precisely to go behind the scenes and reveal underlying structures and latent content.

page 21
“Before familiarity can turn into awareness the familiar must be stripped of its inconspicuousness; we must give up assuming that the object in question needs no explanation. However frequently recurrent, modest, vulgar it may be it will now be labelled as something unusual.” (Brecht 1964: 144)

page 21
The example that Brecht gives suggests a way of transforming something as overly familiar and everyday as a car into something strange. By insisting on 'the Eskimo definition' that 'A car is a wingless aircraft that crawls along the ground' (Brecht 1964: 145) the car is momentarily rescued from naturalised inattention by being made 'strange' (denaturalised).

page 24
The same argument could be made about sociological investigations of the everyday: in pursuing an everyday activity with the kind of attention brought to bear on it by sociology the activity is removed from the flow of daily life, transforming it (de-everyday-ing it) in the process.

page 26
Here is a Paris speeding up to the pace of rapid exchange, where relationships between people are becoming more and more governed by commodity exchange (department stores, for instance, allow for a new level of alienated communication between buyer and seller, as price tags are introduced).

page 29
If this is drifting towards an understanding that there is no 'outside' to representation, then this is only half the story. If a provisional agreement is made about the extensiveness of representation and its saturation of the social, then it might seem to make little sense to assume implicitly that 'something' is still out there being re-presented. Instead it might seem more feasible to suggest that the social is a culture of presentations and performances. And this in turn might mean that this world of presentations is the actual material reality of social and cultural life.

page 69
'Trajectory' suggests a movement, but it also involves a plane projection, a flattening out. It is a transcription. A graph (which the eye can master) is substituted for an operation; a line which can be reversed (i.e., read in both directions) does duty for an irreversible temporal series, a tracing for acts. To avoid this reduction, I resort to a distinction between tactics and strategies.
I call a 'strategy' the calculus of force-relationships which becomes possible when a subject of will and power ( a proprietor, an enterprise, a city, a scientific institution) can be isolated from an 'environment'. A strategy assumes a place that can be circumscribed as proper (propre) and thus serve as the basis for generating relations with an exterior distinct from it (competitors, adversaries, 'clientèles', 'targets', or 'objects' of research). Political, economic, and scientific rationality has been constructed on this strategic model.
“The Practice of Everyday Life” (1980) written by Michel de Certeau

page 71
In reality, the activity of reading has on the contrary all the characteristics of a silent production: the drift across the page, the metamorphosis of the text effected by the wandering eyes of the reader, the improvisation and expectation of meanings inferred from a few words, leaps over written spaces in an ephemeral dance. But since he is incapable of stockpiling (unless he writes or records), the reader cannot protect himself against erosion of time (while reading, he forgets himself and he forgets what he has read) unless he buys the object (book, image) which is no more than a substitute (the spoor of promise) of moments 'lost' in reading.
“The Practice of Everyday Life” (1980) written by Michel de Certeau

page 95
The Marxists said many things, but those that mattered were three. First, they said that a culture must be finally interpreted in relation to its underlying system of production. I have argued this theoretically elsewhere ̶ it is a more difficult idea than it looks ̶ but I still accept its emphasis. Everything I had seen, growing up in that border country, had led me towards such an emphasis: a culture is a whole way of life, and the arts are part of a social organization which economic change clearly radically affects. I did not have to be taught dissatisfaction with the existing economic system, but the subsequent questions about our culture, were in these terms, vague. It was said that it was a class-dominated culture, deliberately restricted a common inheritance to a small class, while leaving the masses ignorant. The fact of restriction I accepted ̶ it is still very obvious that only the deserving poor get much educational opportunity, and I was in no mood, as I walked about Cambridge, to feel glad that I had ben thought deserving; I was no better and no worse than the people I came from. On the other hand, just because of this, I got angry at my friends' talk about the ignorant masses: one kind of Communist has always talked like this, and has got his answered, at Poznan and Budapest, as the imperialists, making the same assumption, were answered in India, in Indo-China, in Africa. There is an English bourgeois culture, with its powerful educational, literary and social institutions, in close contact with the actual centres of power. To say that most working people are excluded from these is self-evident, though the doors, under sustained pressure, are slowly opening. But to go on to say that working people are excluded from English culture is nonsense; they have their own growing institutions, and much of the strictly bourgeois culture they would in any case not want. A great part of the English way of life, and of its arts and learning, is not bourgeois in any discoverable sense. There are institutions, and common meanings, which are in no sense the sole product of the commercial middle class; and there are art and learning, a common English inheritance, produced by many kinds of men, including many who hated the very class system which now take pride in consuming it. The bourgeoisie has given us much, including a narrow but real system of morality; that is at least better than its court predecessors. The leisure which the bourgeoisie attained has given us much cultural value. But this is not to say that contemporary culture is bourgeois culture: a mistake that everyone from Conservative to Marxist, seems to make. There is a distinct working-class way of life, which I for one value ̶ not only because I was bred in it, for I now, in certain respects, live differently. I think this way of life, with its emphases of neighbourhood, mutual obligation, and common betterment, as expressed in the great working-class political and industrial institutions, is in fact the best basis for any future English society. As for the arts and learning, they are in a real sense a national inheritance, which is, or should be, available to everyone. So when the Marxists say that we live in a dying culture, and that the masses are ignorant, I have to ask them, as I asked them then, where on earth they have lived. A dying culture, and ignorant masses, are not what I have known and see.
“Culture is Ordinary” (1958) written by Raymond Williams

page 98
I don't believe that the ordinary people in fact resemble the normal description of the masses, low and trivial in taste and habit. I put it another way: that there are in fact no masses, but only ways of seeing people as masses. With the coming of industrialism, much of the old social organization broke down and it became a matter of difficult personal experience that we were constantly seeing people we did not know, and it was tempting to mass them, as 'the others', in our minds. Again, people were physically massed, in the industrial towns, and a new class structure (the names of our social classes, and the words 'class' itself in this sense, date only from the Industrial Revolution) was practically imposed. The improvement in communications, in particular the development of new forms of multiple transmission of news and entertainment, created unbridgeable divisions between transmitter and audience, which again led to the audience being interpreted as an unknown mass. Masses became a new word for mob: the others, the unknown, the unwashed, the crowd beyond one. As a way of knowing other people, this formula is obviously ridiculous, but, in the new conditions, it seemed an effective formula ̶ the only one possible. Certainly it was the formula that was used by those whose money gave them access to the new communication techniques; the lowness of taste and habit, which human beings assign very easily to other human beings, was assumed, as a bridge. The new culture was built on this formula, and if I reject the formula, if I insist that this lowness is not inherent in ordinary people, you can brush my insistence aside, but I shall go on holding to it. A different formula, I know from experience, gets a radically different response.
“Culture is Ordinary” (1958) written by Raymond Williams

page 139
For instance the critique of anthropology as a perspective that necessarily implies that everyday life is what 'other' people are submerged in (while refusing to scrutinise its own everyday existence) could similarly be levelled at sociologies of working class life, or studies of subcultures. And, as interestingly, the way that anthropology has been problematised by, and has reflected on, cross-cultural encounters would make for a relevant perspective for examining empirical work in sociology or cultural studies.

page 140
The extracts in Part Three all implicitly pose ethnography as a question of practice. How should the everyday life of others be studied? Should anthropology in the West scrutinise its own everyday rituals and practices rather than the everyday life of its (presumed) exotic other? Can ethnography be a practice that does not render voices of its informants subservient to the interpretative performance of the ethnographer? How can the 'politics and poetics of ethnography' be reinvented for the future?

page 154
The means of investigation
An investigation must encourage the flow of concrete data, and therefore it must be flexible enough to include on-the spot documentation (descriptions of actual events, tape-recorded discussions, conversation with a minimum of direction).
It must capture the various dimensions of the phenomenon studied and make use of different approaches.
It must be capable of correction and verification in the development of an interpretation. The variety of approaches allows a concentration and concentration of means on points of verification.
We made particular use of the following:
1.Phenomenographic observation (which is related to methods in use in ethnography but neglected by standard sociology).
2.The interview.
3.Participation in group activities (social praxis).
“The Multidimensional Method” (1967) written by Edgar Morin

page 155
Each worker recorded his observations in a personal diary, which was not an accumulation of notes but a narrative that led of itself to the recall of a series of unconsciously recorded facts. The diary, complemented by subjective accounts of impressions and feelings, provides the external eye ̶ which may be the second sight of the observer himself ̶ with material that can assist in the elucidation of the observer-phenomenon relationship. This subject-object relationship is the key to any effort at objectification in research.
“The Multidimensional Method” (1967) written by Edgar Morin

page 156
We tried to confine our own role to that of initiating rather than directing the conversation, letting ourselves be guided by intuition rather than by preconceived rules. In fact, patience and sympathy, not technique and skill, were the determining factors of success.
“The Multidimensional Method” (1967) written by Edgar Morin

page 157
Our experience with the provoked tests and the youth committee brought us to the conclusion that intervention should be a necessary method of research. We used the basic idea of interventionist psychosociology, that of action-research, but without confining ourselves to the precepts of any particular school. Our principles of intervention were the following:
1.The maieutic principle. We were led to intervene when we thought we detected a situation pregnant with change or innovation.
2.The nondirective principle. Our intervention had to be catalytic. It could initiate movement, but not fix its norms and program. It could help, but not orient.
3.The principle of primitive experimentation (test situations or paraexperimental situations).
4.The principle of psychosociological 'Socratism'. The intervention must lead those involved to reflect on their principal problems.
5.The principle of utility, common to both research workers and their subjects.
“The Multidimensional Method” (1967) written by Edgar Morin

page 157
Our method seeks to envelop the phenomenon (observation), to recognize the forces within it (praxis), to provoke it at strategic points (intervention), to penetrate it by individual contact (interview), to question action, speech, and things.
Each of these methods poses the fundamental methodological problem: the relationship between the research worker and the subject.
It is not merely a subject-object relationship. The 'object' of the inquiry is both object and subject, and one cannot escape the intersubjective character of all relations between men
“The Multidimensional Method” (1967) written by Edgar Morin

page 159
Thus the constant effort to elucidate a social personality is one designed to isolate the subject's uniqueness and understand its metabolism, and to see it as well as a microcosm of the social macrocosm.
Is it paradoxical to affirm that the more particular a study should be, the more general it should be?
“The Multidimensional Method” (1967) written by Edgar Morin

page 159
In order to articulate our constitutive model, we had to historicize our study of Plodémet. We had to study the past (and here previous historical research was most valuable), and above all, at the level of our own research we postulated space in relation to time. We wished to situate the data we collected in relation to evolution.
“The Multidimensional Method” (1967) written by Edgar Morin

page 177
What speaks to us, seemingly, is always the big event, the untoward, the extra-ordinary: the front-page splash, the banner headlines. Railway trains only begin to exist when they are derailed, and the more passengers that are killed, the more the train exist. Aeroplanes achieve existence only when they are hijacked. The one and only destiny of motor-cars is to drive into plane trees. Fifty-two weekends a year, fifty-two casualty lists: so many dead and all the better for the news media if the figures keep on going up! Behind the event there has to be scandal, a fissure, a danger, as if life reveals itself only by way of the spectacular, as if what speaks, what is significant, is always abnormal: natural cataclysms or historical upheavals, social unrest, political scandals.
In our haste to measure the historic, significant and revelatory, let's not leave aside the essential: the truly intolerable, the truly inadmissible. What is scandalous isn't the pit explosion, it's working in coalmines. 'Social problems' aren't 'a matter of concern' when there's a strike, they are intolerable twenty-four hours out of twenty-four, three hundred and sixty-five days a year.
Tidal waves, volcanic eruptions, tower-blocks that collapse, forest fires, tunnels that cave in, the Drugstore des Champs-Elysées burns down. Awful! Terrible! Monstrous! Scandalous! But where's the scandal? The true scandal? Has the newspaper told us anything except: not to worry, as you can see life exists, with its ups and its downs, things happen, as you can see.
The daily papers talk of everything except the daily. The papers annoy me, they teach me nothing. What they recount doesn't concern me, doesn't ask me questions and doesn't answer the questions I ask or would like to ask
What's really going on, what we're experiencing, the rest, all the rest, where is it? How should we take account of, question, describe what happens every day and recurs every day: the banal, the quotidian, the obvious, the common, the ordinary, the infra-ordinary, the background noise, the habitual?
To question the habitual. But that's just it, we're habituated to it. We don't question it, it doesn't question us, it doesn't seem to pose a problem, we live it without thinking, as if it carried within it neither questions nor answers, as if it weren't the bearer of any information. This is no longer even conditioning, it's anaesthesia. We sleep through our lives in a dreamless sleep. But where is our life? Where is our body? Where is our space?
How are we to speak of these 'common things', how to track them down rather, flush them out, wrest them from the dross in which they remain mired, how to give them a meaning, a tongue, to let them, finally, speak of what is, of what we are.
What's needed perhaps is finally to found our own anthropology, one that will speak about us, will look in ourselves for what for so long we've been pillaging from others. Not the exotic any more, but the endotic.
To question what seems so much a matter of course that we've forgotten its origins. To rediscover something of the astonishment that Jules Verne or his readers may have felt faced with an apparatus capable of reproducing and transporting sounds. For that astonishment existed, along with thousands of others, and it's they which have moulded us.
What we need to question is bricks, concrete, glass, our table manners, our utensils, our tools, the way we spend our time, our rhythms. To question that which seems to have ceased forever to astonish us. We live, true, we breathe, true; we walk, we open doors, we go down staircases, we sit at a table in order to eat, we lie down on a bed in order to sleep. How? Where? When? Why?
Describe your street. Describe another street. Compare.
Make an inventory of your pockets, of your bags. Ask yourself about the provenance, the use, what will become of each of the objects you take out.
Question your tea spoons.
What is there under your wallpaper?
How many movements does it take to dial a phone number? Why?
Why don't you find cigarettes in grocery stores? Why not?
It matters little to me that these questions should be fragmentary, barely indicative of a method, at most of a project. It matters a lot to me that they should seem trivial and futile: that's exactly what makes them just as essential, if not more so, as all the other questions by which we've tried in vain to lay hold on our truth.
“Approaches to What? (1973) written by Georges Perec

page 227
Bourgeois society reasserted the value of labour, above all during the period of its ascendancy; but at the historical moment when the relation between labour and the concrete development of individuality was emerging, labour took on an increasingly fragmented character. At the same time the individual, more and more involved in complex social relations, became isolated and inward-looking. Individual consciousness split into two (into the private consciousness and the social or public consciousness); it also became atomized (individualism, specialization, separation between differing spheres of activity, etc.). Thus at the same time a distinction was made between man 'as man' an the one hand and the working man on the other (more clearly among the bourgeoisie, of course, than among the proletariat). Family life became separate from productive activity. And so did leisure.
“Work and Leisure in Everyday Life” (1958) written by Henri Lefebvre

page 261
Of course, a 'sense of history' is never confined to the past: it is always a seizure by history of the present, as Benjamin said. But it does require a delicate excavation, an archaeology, a tracing of the contradictory imprints which previous discourses have stamped, through those old images, on the iconography of popular memory.
“Images of Postwar Black Settlement” (1984) Stuart Hall

page 284
First, language as a practice and symbolic resource. Language is the primary instrument that we use to communicate. It is the highest ordering of our sensuous impression of the world, and the ultimate basis of our hope and capacity to control it. It enables interaction and solidarity with others and allows us to access our impact on others and theirs on us. It therefore allows us to see ourselves as others.
Second, the active body as a practice and symbolic resource. The body is a site of somatic knowledge as well as a set of sign symbols. It is the source of productive and communicative activity ̶ signing, symbolizing, feeling.
Third, drama as a practice and symbolic resource. Communicative interaction with others is not automatic. We do not communicate from head to head through wires drilled into our skulls. Communication is achieved through roles, rituals and performances that we produce with others. Dramaturgical components of the symbolic include a variety of non-verbal communications, as well as sensuous cultural practices and communal solidarities. These include dancing, singing, joke-making, story-telling in dynamic settings and through performance.
“Symbolic Creativity” (1990) Paul Willis

page 285
It is through knowing 'the other', including recognizing the self as an other for some others, that a self or selves can be known at all.
“Symbolic Creativity” (1990) Paul Willis

page 285
Third and finally, symbolic work and especially creativity develop and affirm our active senses of our own vital capacities, the powers of the self and how they might be applied to the cultural world. This is what makes activity and identity transitive and specifically human. It is the dynamic and, therefore, clinching part of identity. It is the expectation of being able to apply power to the world to change it ̶ however minutely. It is how, in the future, there is some human confidence that unities may be formed out of confusion, patterns out of irregularity. This is to be able to make judgements on who's a friend, who's an enemy, when to talk, when to hold silence, when to go, when to stop. But it's also associated with, and helps to form, overall styles of thinking which promise to make most sense of the world for you. It's also a cultural sense of what symbolic forms ̶ languages, images, musics, haircuts, styles, clothes ̶ 'work' most economically and creatively for the self. A culturally learned sense of the powers of the self is what makes the self connecting it to others and to the world.
“Symbolic Creativity” (1990) Paul Willis

page 288
There is a widespread view that these means and materials, the cultural media and cultural commodities, must appeal to the lowest common denominators of taste. Not only do they have no intrinsic value but, more disturbingly, they may have coded-in negative values which manipulate, cheapen, degrade and even brutalize the sensibilities of 'the masses'.
“Symbolic Creativity” (1990) Paul Willis

page 290
To identify the particular dynamic of symbolic activity and transformation in concrete named situations we propose the term 'grounded aesthetic'. This is the creative element in a process whereby meanings are attributed to symbols and practices and where symbols and practices are selected, reselected, highlighted and recomposed to resonate further appropriated and particularized meanings. Such dynamics are emotional as well as cognitive. There are as many aesthetics as there are grounds for them to operate in. Grounded aesthetics are the yeast of common culture.
“Symbolic Creativity” (1990) Paul Willis

page 309
The traditional environment
The arrangement of furniture offers a faithful image of the familial and social structures of a period. The typical bourgeois interior is patriarchal; its foundation is the dining-room/bedroom combination. Although it is diversified with respect to function, the furniture is highly integrated, centring around the sideboard or the bed in the middle of the room. There is a tendency to accumulate, to fill and close off the space. The emphasis is on unifunctionality, immovability, imposing presence and hierarchical labelling. Each room has a strictly defined role corresponding to one or another of the various functions of the family unit, and each ultimately refers to a view which conceives of the individual as a balanced assemblage of distinct faculties. The pieces of furniture confront one another, jostle one another, and implicate one another in a unity that is not so much spatial as moral in character. They are ranged about an axis which ensures a regular chronology of actions; thanks to this permanent symbolization, the family is always present to itself. Within this privat space each piece of furniture in turn, and each room, internalizes its own particular function and takes on the symbolic dignity pertaining to it ̶ then the whole house puts the finishing tough to this integration of interpersonal relationships within the semi-hermetic family group.
All this constitutes an organism whose structure is the patriarchal relationship founded on tradition and authority, and whose heart is the complex affective relationship that binds all the family members together. Such a family home is a specific space which takes little account of any objective decorative requirements, because the primary function of furniture and objects here is to personify human relationships, to fill the space that they share between them, and to be inhabited by a soul. The real dimension they occupy is captive to the moral dimension which it is their job to signify. They have as little autonomy in this space as the various family members enjoy in society. Human beings and objects are indeed bound together in a collusion in which the objects take on a certain density, an emotional value ̶ what might be called a 'presence'. What gives the houses of our childhood such depth and resonance in memory is clearly this complex structure of interiority, and the objects within it serve for us as boundary markers of the symbolic configuration known as home. The caesura between inside and outside, and their formal opposition, which falls under the social sign of property and the psychological sign of the immanence of the family, make this traditional space into a closed transcendence. In their anthropomorphism the objects that furnish it become household gods, spatial incarnations of the emotional bonds and the permanence of the family group. These gods enjoyed a gentle immortality until the advent of a modern generation which has cast them aside, dispersed them ̶ even, on occasion, reinstated them in an up-to-date nostalgia for whatever is old. As often with gods, furniture too thus gets a second chance to exist, and passes from a naïve utility into a cultural baroque.
“Structures of Interior Design” (1968) Jean Baudrillard

page 315
The entire conception of decoration has changed too. Traditional good taste, which decided what was beautiful on the basis of secret affinities, no longer has any part here. That taste constituted a poetic discourse, an evocation of self-contained objects that responded to one another; today objects do not respond to one another, they communicate ̶ they have no individual presence but merely, at best, an overall coherence attained by virtue of their simplification as components of a code and the way their relationships are calculated. An unrestricted combinatorial system enables man to use them as the elements of his structural discourse.
“Structures of Interior Design” (1968) Jean Baudrillard