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Everyday Life and Cultural Theory
Ben Highmores engaging and readable study of how modern and contemporary theories have defined and examined everyday life provides a lens for students and scholars alike through which to examine a central issue in cultural studies and social thought. Ivan Karp, Emory University
Highmore has produced a valuable resource for teachers in all the disciplines that are concerned with the study of culture. He addresses the key thinkers who have defined the major variants of this crucial construct of cultural theory, and he has done so both accessibly and brilliantly. George Marcus, Rice University
Everyday Life and Cultural Theoryprovides a unique critical and historical intro- duction to theories of everyday life. Ben Highmore traces the development of conceptions of everyday life from the cultural sociology of Georg Simmel, through the Mass-Observation project of the 1930s to contemporary theorists such as Michel de Certeau. Individual chapters examine:
Modernity and everyday life Georg Simmel and fragments of everyday life Surrealism and the marvellous in the everyday Walter Benjamins trash aesthetics Mass-Observation and the science of everyday life Henri Lefebvres dialectics of everyday life Michel de Certeaus poetics of everyday life Everyday life and the future of cultural studies
Ben Highmore is a Senior Lecturer in Cultural and Media Studies at the Univer- sity of the West of England. He is editor of the Everyday Life Reader(forth- coming, Routledge 2002).
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NAMING NAMES
i
CONTENTS
ii
Everyday Life and Cultural
Theory
An Introduction
Ben Highmore
London and New York
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CONTENTS
iii
Ta
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r&F
rancisG
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First published 2002
by Routledge
11 New Fetter Lane, London EC4P 4EE
Simultaneously published in the USA and Canada
by Routledge
29 West 35th Street, New York, NY 10001
Routledge is an imprint of the Taylor & Francis Group
2002 Ben Highmore
All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reprinted or reproduced or
utilised in any form or by any electronic, mechanical, or other means, now
known or hereafter invented, including photocopying and recording, or in
any information storage or retrieval system, without permission in writing
from the publishers.
British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data
A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library
Library of Congress Cataloging in Publication Data
Highmore, Ben, 1961
Everyday life and cultural theory : an introduction/Ben Highmore.
p.cm.
Includes bibliographical references and index.
- Life. 2. Civilisation, Modern20th century. 3. CulturePhilosophy History20th century. BD431 .H475 2001 306dc21 2001034793
ISBN 0415223024 (hbk)
ISBN 0415223032 (pbk)
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CONTENTS
iv
ISBN 0-203-46422-2 Master e-book ISBN
ISBN 0-203-77246-6 (Glassbook Format)
This edition published in the Taylor & Francis e-Library, 2002.
Contents
Illustrations vi
CONTENTS
-
- Figuring the everyday Preface and acknowledgements vii
-
- Arguments
-
- Simmel: Fragments of everyday life
-
- Surrealism: The marvellous in the everyday
-
- Benjamins trash aesthetics
-
- Mass-Observation: A science of everyday life
-
- Henri Lefebvres dialectics of everyday life
-
- Michel de Certeaus poetics of everyday life
- cultural studies 9. Postscript: Everyday life and the future of
- Bibliography
- Index
Illustrations
Figure 1 The inexorable regularity of modern work photograph
by Gjon Milli 7
Figure 2 Magasin, avenue des Gobelins photograph by
Eugne Atget (1925) 15
Figure 3 Berlin, Friedrichstrasse, at the turn of the century 42
Figure 4 Photograph by Jacques-Andr Boiffard (1928) of the
Place Dauphine for Nadja 53
Figure 5 Ragpicker(18991900) photograph by Eugne Atget 64
Figure 6 Children in paper hats, Bolton photograph by
Humphrey Spender (1937) 89
Figure 7 Tom Harrisson with Mass-Observers, Bolton
photograph by Humphrey Spender (1937) 97
Figure 8 Brandt refrigerator advertisement, Marie-Claire, May 1955 114
Figure 9 Still from Jeanne Dielman, 23 Quai du Commerce,
1080 Bruxelles, directed by Chantal Akerman (1975) 147
Figure 10 Paris graffiti, May 1968 151
Figure 11 Red Strip Kitchen, from Bringing the War Home:
House Beautiful photomontage series by
Martha Rosler (196772) 176
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CONTENTS
vi
Preface and acknowledgements
This book is an introduction to everyday life and cultural theory. It is an introduction, not so much because it is written in an introductory style (though I hope that it is written in a way that avoids some of the more unap- petizing conventions of academic writing), but because work on the everyday is, as I argue, only just beginning. The everyday life theory that I write about here is both an introduction and an invitation to start thinking about an arena of life that manages, for the most part, to avoid scrutiny. Or rather, the kinds of interventionist scrutiny that it has received have often been undertaken in the name of governing the everyday. Here, instead, a form of inventive and critical attention allows, potentially at least, another everyday to begin to appear. The order of the chapters in this book may seem a little odd. Chapter 2 (which tells you what the rest of the book is about, and tries to knit together some of the main arguments) might seem more like an introduc- tory chapter than chapter 1. My decision to place a very general chapter about everyday modernity in front of this is because I wanted to be able to ground the arguments with some historical description of a world out there, which cultural theory might be seen as responding to. After chapter 2 the book progresses in the usual chronological fashion. The choice of which theorists and theories are included within this account probably also needs a word or two. This book is a route-map of one particu- lar path through the many varied possibilities that are suggested by connect- ing the terms everyday life and cultural theory. It strikes me that theory (a much overused term, of course) could be the name we reserve for the most insistent puzzling about aspects of life that are taken as problematic. Now
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CONTENTS
vii
while there is a whole variety of theorists who deal with problematics and
the everyday (Erving Goffman, Harold Garfinkel, Martin Heidegger, Agnes
Heller, Dorothy E. Smith to mention just some of the most obvious ones),
they dont necessarily deal with the everyday as a problematic. As such the every-
day often becomes the occasion, the territory for a puzzling that is often
directed elsewhere. The theorists and theories chosen here seem to me to be
characterized by a much more directed attention to the everyday as a prob-
lematic. They all seem to bring the everyday into an awkward focus.
The writing of any book voraciously consumes vast swathes of everyday life.
This book was no exception. So my first acknowledgement must be to Wendy
Bonner who has had to endure God knows how many hours (days, years)
of this book. For suffering bad moods, garbled monologues, missed meal
times, and much besides, I dedicate this with all my love. Our children have
probably not come out of this unscathed either. To the question Wheres
daddy? the answer Hes in his working room became something of a
haunting and guilt-inducing refrain. So thanks then to Molly for not taking
any of this too seriously and for continually disturbing me with new tricks
and new ways of wearing clothes. Thanks also to Zebedee who came along
just at the right time.
From the start Steven Connor helped shape this project and kept it on
course as it weaved (sometimes precariously) about. His unflagging enthu-
siasm and pertinent advice made writing this book much less onerous than
it could have been. A number of people have read part or all of earlier
versions of the book (some were hoodwinked into it, others volunteered
themselves; all of them helped). So Id like to thank Ian Buchanan, Barry
Curtis, Iain Hamilton Grant, Michelle Henning, Alan Read, Simon Sadler
and Morag Shiach. Various anonymous readers read some of this with an eye
to its publication their support gave me the encouragement to finish it.
Thanks as well to Rebecca Barden and Alistair Daniel at Routledge for getting
the book to publication. I want to thank everyone in the School of Cultural
and Media Studies at the University of the West of England and especially
all those involved in the everyday life research group. Finally I want to
thank my parents, who have supported a career which for so many years
must have seemed invisible.
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PREFACE AND ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS
viii
Whatever its other aspects, the everyday has this essential trait: it allows no
hold. It escapes.
(Blanchot [1959] 1987: 14)
Investigating the everyday
T
HERE IS NO ESCAPE: to launch an investigation into the theoret- ical practices of those who attend to everyday life requires attention to the everyday itself. To trace the troubled career of the everyday as it is mobilized by a disparate collection of intellectuals from the late nineteenth century to the late twentieth century necessitates an attempt to gauge the specific gravity of the term, its connotations and its references. Unspecific gravity might be a better phrase. As the notion of everyday life circulates in Western cultures under its many guises ( Alltagsleben , la vie quotidienne , run- of-the-mill and so on) one difficulty becomes immediately apparent: everyday life signifies ambivalently. On the one hand it points (without judging) to those most repeated actions, those most travelled journeys, those most inhab- ited spaces that make up, literally, the day to day. This is the landscape closest to us, the world most immediately met. But with this quantifiable meaning creeps another, never far behind: the everyday as value and quality
- everydayness. Here the most travelled journey can become the dead weight of boredom, the most inhabited space a prison, the most repeated action an oppressive routine. Here the everydayness of everyday life might be experi- enced as a sanctuary, or it may bewilder or give pleasure, it may delight or depress. Or its special quality might be its lack of qualities. It might be, precisely, the unnoticed, the inconspicuous, the unobtrusive.
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NAMING NAMES
Chapter 1
FIGURING THE EVERYDAY
This ambivalence vividly registers the effects of modernity. If the every-
day is that which is most familiar and most recognizable, then what happens
when that world is disturbed and disrupted by the unfamiliar? If the shock of
the new sends tremors to the core of the everyday, then what happens to the
sense of the everyday as familiar and recognizable? In modernity the everyday
becomes the setting for a dynamic process: for making the unfamiliar familiar;
for getting accustomed to the disruption of custom; for struggling to incor-
porate the new; for adjusting to different ways of living. The everyday marks
the success and failure of this process. It witnesses the absorption of the most
revolutionary of inventions into the landscape of the mundane. Radical trans-
formations in all walks of life become second nature. The new becomes
traditional and the residues of the past become outmoded and available
for fashionable renewal. But signs of failure can be noticed everywhere: the
language of the everyday is not an upbeat endorsement of the new; it echoes
with frustrations, with the disappointment of broken promises.
The heterogeneous and ambivalent landscape of everyday modernity
needs investigating. This investigation starts, like all investigations should,
with a detective. For Sherlock Holmes everyday life is decidedly undecided.
While never in doubt about the correctness of his own investigative methods,
Holmes relationship to the everyday is marked by a passionate ambivalence
that takes us to the heart of the problem of everyday life in modernity.
Sherlock Holmes gets bored. He gets bored when the mysterious and enig-
matic side of life is not taxing his rationalistic intelligence. Conan Doyles
detective is a man who is often bored. For him the world of the everyday
is associated with the dull and the humdrum: I know, my dear Watson, that
you share my love of all that is bizarre and outside the conventions and
humdrum routine of everyday life (Doyle [1892] 1993: 45). To what extent
Dr Watson shares this love is an open question: one thing is for sure, his
love of the bizarre does not have the passionate intensity of Holmes. Nor
does he suffer so much when faced with the everyday. Holmes is repulsed
by the everyday and can only deal with its atrophying force by taking refuge
in cocaine:
My mind, he said, rebels at stagnation. Give me problems, give me
work, give me the most abstruse cryptogram, or the most intricate
analysis, and I am in my own proper atmosphere. I can dispense then
with artificial stimulants. But I abhor the dull routine of existence.
(Doyle [1890] 1995: 8990)
Written over four decades (18871923), Sir Arthur Conan Doyles stories
frequently picture Sherlock Holmes collapsing under the weight of the
everyday. His friend, Dr Watson, fears for his physical health and sanity,
hoping that some new case will appear to break through the life-threatening
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EVERYDAY LIFE AND CULTURAL THEORY
torpor that besets him. But this image of the everyday as a deadening force is only one of the elements of everydayness in the cosmos of the Holmes stories. The everyday is also the home of the bizarre and mysterious. The commonplaces of existence are filled with strange occurrences:
life is infinitely stranger than anything which the mind of man could
invent. We could not dare to conceive the things which are really mere
commonplaces of existence. If we could fly out that window hand in
hand, hover over this great city, gently remove the roofs, and peep
in at the queer things which are going on... the wonderful chain of
events, working through generations and leading to the most outr
results, it would make all fiction with its conventionalities and fore-
seen conclusions most stale and unprofitable.
(Doyle, quoted in Langbauer 1993: 94)
The non-everyday (the exceptional) is there to be found in the heart of the everyday. Indeed many of the Sherlock Holmes stories start with what seem to be ordinary, petty occurrences that hardly warrant the attention of the great detective. But for Holmes the everyday is not what it seems. Or rather the everyday is precisely the route to be taken in solving the mystery he is investigating. And here we come to the very core of Holmes relationship to the everyday: however much he loves the strange and bizarre, his entire being is dedicated to puncturing its mystery. Holmes works his disenchant- ment at various different levels. His power to solve cases works to bring the bizarre firmly down to earth: seemingly magical or ghostly events turn out to be ordinary acts of greed, spite, love, jealousy and other manifesta- tions of human nature. In this, Holmes could be seen as demystifying the bizarre and returning events to the everyday. But it is Holmes method of detection that most captures the peculiar figuring of the everyday in Conan Doyles fiction. Holmes is a genius; he is not ordinary. He continually astounds Watson and his clients by his uncanny divination of the details of a persons life through the mere observation of an everyday object or the outward appear- ance of a person. In The Adventure of the Blue Carbuncle (1892), Holmes has been given a hat to examine, and draws the following conclusions about the wearer of the hat:
He had foresight, but has less now than formerly, pointing to a moral
retrogression, which when taken with the decline of his fortunes, seems
to indicate some evil influence, probably drink, at work upon him. This
may account also for the obvious fact that his wife has ceased to love him.
(Doyle 1993: 168)
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FIGURING THE EVERYDAY
Holmes takes the most everyday of objects and seems to have an extraordi-
nary gift of being able to discover ( as if by magic ) the stories of those associated
with them. But here again, what appears to be extraordinary is brought back
within the realm of the ordinary and everyday. When Holmes explains his
reasoning it appears banal, elementary ; it seems to be merely a matter of being
attentive to the most insignificant of details. As one client remarks: I
thought at first you had done something clever, but I see that there was
nothing in it after all (Doyle 1993: 48). Like the mysteries that Holmes
solves, the mystery of Holmes abilities turns out to be very ordinary indeed.
Not that this stops us from being amazed. What appeared to be the gift of
foresight is merely the systematic application of a method. But it is a method
that transforms the insignificant into its opposite. Such a method should,
according to Holmes, be dealt with by a proper scientific treatise, not
via the frivolous and melodramatic form of detective fiction. To the mystery
of the everyday, Holmes brings the disenchantment of rationalism. His gift
is nothing more or less than the extension of rationalistic and scientific
principles to the seemingly unfathomable cases he investigates. If he loves
the bizarre and mysterious side of the everyday, he loves its disenchant-
ment through rationalism even more. Yet it is precisely this rationalism that
transforms the insignificant and everyday into ciphers for the bizarre.
Holmes approach to the everyday generates mystery at the same time as it
demystifies it.
But Sherlock Holmes relationship with the everyday is clearly privi-
leged: apart from occasionally being overcome by it, he spends most of his
time analysing it, observing it and mastering it. While the particular mix of
boredom, mystery and rationalism that he puts in play is central to figuring
everyday life, we need to look elsewhere to see how this mix is related to
everyday modernity. We need to disentangle this contrary mixture of forces
to see how their entanglement figures the everyday as both known and
unknown, comfortable and uncomfortable. This constellation needs to be
related to ideas and practices that are central to modernity. Boredom, for
instance, will connect us to the peculiar temporal experiences that seem to
emerge from the patterns and arrangements of modern working life. From
the emptying of time in the modern factory to the extensive bureaucrati-
zation of governance, from the atomized working practices in the office to
the industrialization of the home, the modern world seems characterized by
routines, by systems and regulatory techniques. But Western modernity is
also characterized by mystery. Whether it is the mystery of the unconscious
and the gothic narratives it reveals, or the exotic cultures of other people
(the poor for the Western bourgeois, the native for the West in general),
mystery takes everyday forms. Freudian slips are everyday occurrences.
Popular anthropology renders the daily practices of other cultures as at once
both strange and mastered.
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EVERYDAY LIFE AND CULTURAL THEORY
Rationalism, the third term in our mix, binds these two aspects together, not in some kind of explanatory grid, but as an engine driving these forces. It too has two sides and we will need to see its multiform reflection in both boredom and mystery. Paradoxically, rationalism holds within it an irra- tional kernel: it seeks to disenchant the world through an unquestioned belief in its own value. Rationalism is not the antidote to myth and ritual, but the emergence of new myths and rituals under the banner of the true.
Boredom: the emptying of time
If Western modernity can be seen as the emergence of new and different temporal experiences, then, for the most part, these experiences are connected to an institutionalized world of work and organized instruction. The prehistory of modern temporalities can partly be found in the gradual standardizing of time. Mechanical clocks, as they emerged in the fourteenth century, standardized the units of time and were dynamically related to changes in working patterns. As Richard Biernacki argues: The introduction of the modern method of calibrating hours in a metric independent of tangible occurrences, with units that are interchangeable and uniform across the seasons, coincided with the expansion of urban wage labor during the four- teenth century (Biernacki 1994: 62). Clocks alone cannot account for the particularity of modern time. Dramatic changes in the representation and experience of time (the nature of time) can also be related to the stan- dardizing practices of the Church, the school and the hospital, which impacted fundamentally at the level of the everyday (see Adam 1995). So, for instance, at the beginning of the nineteenth century a school day could include an accounting of all the activities that had been scheduled for the day: the pupil every day puts down in his book the day of the month, at the termination of his days tasks. And on a page at the end of his book, he daily registers the number of lessons said, pages written, sums wrought, etc. (Andrew Bell [1813] quoted in Jones and Williamson 1979: 74). This daily monitoring and accounting was a routine that marked each and every day, but it also contin- ually divided and catalogued the day into countable segments. Such practices emphasized the routinization and regimentation of daily life. Standardized time developed unevenly. Prior to the late nineteenth century standardized time was regulated only at a local level: to travel was to enter non-synchronized time. Steven Kern writes that in the 1870s if a traveller from Washington to San Francisco set his [ sic ] watch in every town he passed through, he would set it over two hundred times (Kern 1983: 12). Unsurprisingly, perhaps, it would be the railway and telegraph systems in the 1880s that would set the pace for establishing a global standardization of time (Kern 1983: 1115). Networks designed to increase the speed of
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FIGURING THE EVERYDAY
communication and commerce, and to overcome the physical distance of
space, reconfigured the tempo of the everyday. The everydayness of everyday
modernity is a synchronization based on minutes and seconds. The modern
spectacle of thousands of commuters converging on the metropolis by train
each morning is dependent on timetables synchronized to the minute, even
if these trains are regularly late.
Perhaps the most common analogy for characterizing everyday life
within modernity (its uniformity, its dullness and so on) is the assembly line.
In an essay that explores the relationship between everyday life and boredom,
Laurie Langbauer writes: The boredom of everyday city life is the boredom
of the assembly line, of one thing after another, of pieces locked in an infi-
nite series that never really progresses: the more it changes, the more it
remains the same (Langbauer 1993: 81). Similarly Susan Stewart writes:
The prevailing notion that everyday time is a matter of undifferentiated
linearity may be linked to the prevailing forms of experience within the
workplace. Such a notion presents us with an assembly line of tempor-
ality, an assembly line in which all experience is partial, piecemeal.
(Stewart 1993: 13)
Siegfried Giedion, in his evocatively titled book, Mechanization takes Command:
A Contribution to Anonymous History , dates the assembly line ( avant la lettre ),
not to Henry Ford in the early twentieth century, but to the continuous
production line implemented by Oliver Evans at the end of the eighteenth
century (Giedion 1969: 77127). Continuous production, in whatever form,
follows the logic of industrial capitalism in its drive to maximize output; it
does so by an uninterrupted production process which is characterized by
the inexorable regularity with which the worker must follow the rhythm of
the mechanical system (Giedion 1969: 77). In seeing this form of work
as exemplifying something fundamental about everyday modernity, the partic-
ularities of different line systems are less important than the way continuous
production in general can be seen to affect workers everyday lives. Karl
Marx in the first volume of Capital (first published in 1867) sketches the
transformation that such systems brought about:
In handicrafts and manufacture, the worker makes use of a tool; in the
factory, the machine makes use of him [ sic ]. There the movements of
the instrument of labour proceed from him, here it is the movement
of the machine that he must follow. In manufacture the workers are
the parts of a living mechanism. In the factory we have a lifeless mech-
anism which is independent of the workers, who are incorporated into
it as its living appendages. The wearisome routine of endless drudgery
in which the same mechanical process is ever repeated, is like the
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EVERYDAY LIFE AND CULTURAL THEORY
torture of Sisyphus; the burden of toil, like the rock, is ever falling
back upon the worn-out drudge.
(Marx 1976: 548)
For Marx the shift in relationships, whereby the worker becomes the mere appendage to the machine, is part of the intensification of alienation brought about by modern capitalism. But rather than giving an abstract account of this alienation, Marx insists on the sensory-mental condition it generates:
Factory work exhausts the nervous system to the uttermost; at the same
time, it does away with the many-sided play of the muscles, and confis-
cates every atom of freedom, both in bodily and in intellectual activity.
Even the lightening of the labour becomes an instrument of torture,
since the machine does not free the worker from the work, but rather
deprives the work itself of all content.
(Marx 1976: 548)
Just as work is emptied of all [creative] content, so time is emptied of any significant markers that would differentiate one moment from the next (figure 1). In the varied literature on assembly line work the theme of regulated activity and the slowness of time are continually evident. In Ben Hampers account of life on the rivet line at the General Motors plant at Flint in Michigan, the clock becomes the number one enemy:
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FIGURING THE EVERYDAY
Figure 1 The inexorable regularity of modern work photograph by Gjon Milli
But the clock was a whole different mammal altogether. It sucked on
you as you waited the next job. It ridiculed you each time youd take
a peek. The more irritated you became, the slower it moved. The
slower it moved, the more you thought. Thinking was a very slow
death at times.
(Hamper 1992: 95)
Earlier in the book Hamper explains the relationship between the assembly
line and the stretching out of time: the one thing that was impossible to
escape was the monotony of our new jobs. Every minute, every hour, every
truck and every movement was a plodding replica of the one that had gone
before (Hamper 1992: 41).
The repetition-of-the-same characterizes an everyday temporality experi-
enced as a debilitating boredom. What makes the assembly line such a telling
exemplification of everyday modernity is not the specificity of the factory
environment, but the generalized condition that it points to: plodding,
monotony the emptiness of time. What makes continuous production reg-
ister so vividly is the regulating of time within the widespread conditions of
industrialization. From the point of view of the everyday, industrialization is
not something limited to factory production, but something registered in
nearly all aspects of life. Writing about the cultural effects of railway travel,
Wolfgang Schivelbusch subtitled his book the industrialization of time and
space (Schivelbusch 1977). The extensiveness of industrialization needs to
be noted, not simply as a technological condition, but as a sensory-mental
experience. The salaried masses (the salariat) of clerks, secretaries, execu-
tives and stenographers, wielding typewriters, telephones and now, of course,
computers, operate within an industrial and rationalized environment (see
Kracauer [1929] 1998). Giedion finds intensified mechanization in nearly every
form of everyday culture: bread, chairs, death, washing and so on (Giedion
1969). The uneven extension of industrialization brought industrial technolo-
gies and management techniques into the home, and under the guise of effi-
ciency and ease, worked to regulate and rationalize home life. The results of
this have been well documented and synoptically signposted by the title of Ruth
Schwartz Cowans book More Work for Mother (Cowan 1989). Industrialization
in general is locked into the uneven and unequal experiences of social differ-
ence in a dynamic that homogenizes and differentiates at the same time (see,
for instance, Kramarae 1988). The experience of homogenized time is
unevenly distributed across social differences: the boredom of factory work is
differentiated from the boredom of the computer operator, which is differen-
tiated from the boredom of the domestic worker, and so on.
The phrase marking time brings with it some of the flavour of everyday
modernity in its ambiguous play on the literal process of marking (differ-
entiating, discriminating) and its everyday meaning of dull waiting, of
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boredom. The standardizing of time and the routinization of daily life that accompanies it operate across this ambiguity:
The pages falling off the calendar, the notches marked in a tree that
no longer stands these are the signs of the everyday, the effort to
articulate difference through counting. Yet it is precisely this counting
that reduces differences to similarities, that is designed to be lost track
of. Such counting, such signifying, is drowned out by the silence of
the ordinary.
(Stewart 1993: 14)
To account for this peculiar monotony (the deadening routinization of everyday modernity) a technological account is not enough. Written at the beginning of the twentieth century Max Webers investigation of the spirit of modern capitalism suggests that the modern Western form of capitalism has been, at first sight, strongly influenced by the development of technical possibilities (Weber [19045] 1991: 24). Weber goes on to suggest that technical possibilities are in themselves not enough to encourage the devel- opment of modern capitalism. Weber emphasizes the importance of social structures: among those of undoubted importance are the rational structures of law and administration. For modern rational capitalism has need, not only of the technical means of production, but of a calculable legal system and of administration in terms of formal rules (1991: 25). A world governed by the exhaustive protocols of bureaucracy and the administrative rigour of official life figure, not only a different framework for understanding modern capitalism, but also an everyday life continually plagued by government. In the fictions of Franz Kafka, the everyday is invaded by a maze of bureaucratic officialdom that seems entirely designed to frustrate and destroy (Kafka [1925] 1994, [1926] 1997). The everyday is caught in a web of administration with terrifying effects. Administrative government in modern- ity permeates the everyday, from the collection of taxes to the policing of families (Donzelot 1980). For Weber, the iron cage of bureaucratic ration- ality is the opposite of spontaneous enjoyment and he nostalgically pictures it as a renunciation, a departure from an age of full and beautiful humanity (1991: 181). Tracing the cultural conditions that have allowed this form of life to dominate, Weber recognizes the mark of a Puritanical asceticism. Modernity, for Weber, is asceticism secularized, generalized and enforced:
The Puritan wanted to work in a calling; we are forced to do so. For
when asceticism was carried out of monastic cells into everyday life,
and began to dominate worldly morality, it did its part in building the
tremendous cosmos of the modern economic order. The order is now
bound to the technical and economic conditions of machine production
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which to-day determine the lives of all the individuals who are born
into this mechanism, not only those directly concerned with economic
acquisition, with irresistible force. Perhaps it will so determine them
until the last ton of fossilized coal is burnt. In Baxters view the care
for external goods should lie on the shoulders of the saint like a light
cloak, which can be thrown aside at any moment. But fate decreed
that the cloak should become an iron cage.
(Weber 1991: 181)
Webers iron cage is everyday modernity as machine-like and bureaucratic.
It is an everyday life governed by asceticism. If the result of Weberian and
Marxian everyday modernity is boredom, this is a boredom that is cut through
with a murderous insistence.
But boredom is also a subtle tool for forms of cultural discrimination
aimed at differentiating everydayness. Writing about boredom, Patricia Meyer
Spacks states:
Although the spread of boredom has coincided with and reflected an
increasing stress on subjectivity and individualism, the state of mind
carries social as well as personal meanings. From the eighteenth century
on, one can note a tendency to attribute boredom to members of groups
other than the writers own. Middle-class journalists in the eighteenth
century believe the nouveaux riches to be bored. In the nineteenth
century (encouraged by Lord Byron) the middle class assigns the condi-
tion to the aristocracy. The old think the young are bored.
(Spacks 1995: xxi)
The designation of particular classes and their gendered variations as bored and
boring nearly always centred on a notion of everyday life. Seen from the point
of view of an emergent middle class, aristocratic everyday life was decadent
(luxury and excess as daily routine) and lacking in the kind of differentiation
that could enliven it. Such a condition produced boredom as a sign of the his-
torical redundancy of the class. Boredom was a sign for denigrating the every-
day life of other social groups. In London Journal: A Survey of London Life in the
1830s , Flora Tristan, a French writer visiting London, sees the signs of bore-
dom everywhere: on the one hand there is the busy population of the city
whose only motive is desire for profit, on the other there is the haughty, dis-
dainful aristocracy who come to London each year to escape from boredom
(quoted in Spacks 1995: 15). And later in the same journal: English womens
lives are unbelievably monotonous, sterile and drab. Time has no meaning for
them the days, months and years bring no change to this oppressive unifor-
mity (in Spacks 1995: 164). The use of boredom to differentiate between
everyday lives is directed, here, through an idea of national differences. Social
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difference is writ large in the boredom of the everyday. But just as it can be used to denigrate, it can also be used to diagnose: boredom can become a sign of social critique. In the culture of modernity the boredom of women offers a vivid example of this. Often portrayed as the bored housewife, the middle-class woman of nineteenth-century representation was often portrayed as fickle and unable to occupy herself with serious projects. Her everyday life was cluttered with cultural debris that showed her as an easy target for the peddlers of an infe- rior and industrial culture. The classic example of such a portrayal is Emma Bovarys fondness for reading romantic novels in Flauberts Madame Bovary. Andreas Huyssen describes the fictional Emma Bovary as a woman who tried to live the illusions of aristocratic sensual romance and was shipwrecked on the banality of bourgeois everyday life (Huyssen 1986: 45). A banal and boring everyday life is mingled with a desire for a cultural form that is seen as, ultimately, boring. But boredom could also be used as an index of unful- filled desires and unnamed anxieties. It could work as a synecdoche for more general, critical dissatisfactions within culture (seen as exploitative, patriar- chal, capitalistic). The boredom of everyday life can be, and often has been, an area of social and political struggles. Coupled with the rational analysis of exploitation is the great mumbled scream of boredom. In the 1960s, heralding a second wave of feminism, Betty Friedan attempted to give voice to this muffled scream and the problem that has no name:
Each suburban wife struggled with it alone. As she made the beds,
shopped for groceries, matched slipcover material, ate peanut butter
sandwiches with her children, chauffeured Cub Scouts and Brownies,
lay beside her husband at night, she was afraid to ask even of herself
the silent question: Is this all?
(Friedan 1965: 13)
The use of boredom both to mark social distinctions and to diagnose cultural domination points to one inescapable factor: everyday life (like any other aspect of life) is marked by difference. Such differences in the experience of everyday life (differences most obviously noted by class, gender, race, sexu- ality, etc.) will also be marked in the different approaches to theorizing the everyday. As Naomi Schor suggests:
Two widely shared but diametrically opposed views inform what theor-
ies we have on the everyday: one, which we might call the feminine
or feminist, though it is not necessarily held by women or self-described
feminists, links the everyday with the daily rituals of private life carried
out within the domestic sphere traditionally presided over by women:
the other, the masculine or masculinist, sites the everyday in the public
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spaces and spheres dominated especially, but not exclusively, in modern
Western bourgeois societies by men.
(Schor 1992: 188)
It will become evident, as this book progresses, that the masculinist perspec-
tive predominates: it is the street rather than the home that is seen as the
privileged sphere of everyday life.
Strangeness at the heart of the everyday
To see everyday modernity as boring or relentlessly routinized is to capture
only one side of its general articulation. Alongside this, and overlapping with
it, is the everyday as mystery. If a certain form of spiritual rationalism can
be seen as the motor of deadening routines, rationalism can also be seen to
generate more mysterious forms. Indeed some of the most productive guides
to everyday modernity (as both boredom and mystery) operate, like Sherlock
Holmes, within the terms of a disenchanting rationalism. But, also like
Sherlock Holmes, the material that they dredge up is both mysterious and
banal. Writing about the ethnological orientation of Durkheim, Marx
and Freud, Nancy Bentley comments:
It is hard to overlook the fact that the writings of these three thinkers,
for all their rational mastery, helped to make strange and almost unfath-
omable the territories of self and society that are usually the most
familiar to us from everyday life. A certain irony obtains: ethnological
analysis always makes partly alien what it masters.
(Bentley 1995: 77)
It is the ability of making strange within a culture of rationalism and
of finding the strange within everyday life that is central to this study of
everyday life and cultural theory. In his Introductory Lectures on Psychoanalysis
(published 1917), Freud rhetorically defends his insistence that psychoanalysis
is of central importance for understanding everyday life. In attending to the
parapraxes of everyday life (slips of the pen, of the tongue, of the body and
the memory), Freud imagines his audience as complaining that there are so
many marvels in the field of mental disorders, which require and deserve to
have light thrown upon them, that it does really seem gratuitous to waste
labour and interest on such trivialities (Freud 1973: 51). To investigate the
everyday world and consider why a speaker at a banquet uses one word
instead of another or why a housewife has mislaid her keys would seem
commonplace and paltry in relation to the marvels of madness. Freud, in
what could be read as a homage to Sherlock Holmes, replies:
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And if you were a detective engaged in tracing a murder, would you
expect to find that the murderer had left his photograph behind at the
place of the crime, with his address attached? or would you not neces-
sarily have to be satisfied with comparatively slight and obscure traces
of the person you were in search of?
(1973: 52)
The revolutionary theories of Freud conjure up a world of repressed desire; they articulate stories that, because of their claimed ubiquity, can be seen as everyday but are made up of materials that seem a world away from the humdrum routines of everyday life. Freud identifies an intimate link between psychoanalysis and the everyday:
It is true that psychoanalysis cannot boast that it has never concerned
itself with trivialities. On the contrary, the material for its observations
is usually provided by the inconsiderable events which have been put
aside by the other sciences as being too unimportant the dregs, one
might say, of the world of phenomena.
(1973: 52)
Such a picture of psychoanalysis figures it as a very ordinary science, or rather a science of the ordinary, a surface psychology of everyday life (Ferguson 1996: vii). The everyday life that Freud describes is a world of everyday manners and conventions, continually disrupted by repressed thoughts. Here the propriety of custom can at times seem to be a mere patina on more basic instincts. In the examples that Freud offers, the everyday is animated by a dynamic contest between the forces of propriety and the unmanageable material of repression, as, for example, in the professor who remarks: In the case of the female genitals, in spite of many Versuchungen [temptations]
- I beg your pardon, Versuche [experiments].. . (Freud 1973: 52). While Freud will not be a specific focus of this book, his work is of singular importance for the everyday. On the one hand, the idea of the Freudian slip has entered everyday language, insisting that everyday commu- nication is continually betraying unintended desires. On the other, the idea of the unconscious as something that is both everywhere and nowhere offers a compelling analogy for the everyday. Although theorists of the everyday dont explicitly apply the full machinery of psychoanalysis, there is often an insistence that the realm of consciousness doesnt exhaust the everyday. The everyday as non-conscious life is a vivid aspect of the tradition that I will describe. In another reference to detective fiction, Freud recognizes that science flirts uneasily with sensationalism: I am aware that in this city, at least there are many physicians who (revolting though it may seem)
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FIGURING THE EVERYDAY
choose to read a case history of this kind [Dora] not as a contribution to
the psychopathology of the neuroses, but as a roman clef designed for their
private delectation (Freud [1905] 1977: 37). Setting himself up as a figure
of propriety it may be that Freud protests too much and that sensationalism
is more fundamental both to the project of psychoanalysis and to everyday
modernity. Both Freud and Holmes have a distaste for sensationalist forms
of representation, yet both struggle to pursue the fantastic in the most seem-
ingly banal places.
Alongside the dull routines of existence, modernity invades the everyday
as phantasmagoria. For Marx the phantasmagoria of modernity is charac-
terized by the commodity, which disguises human social relationships in the
fantastic form of a relationship between things (Marx 1976: 165). The daily
life of modernity is, of course, saturated with commodities, and some of the
most vivid aspects of the phantasmagoria were to be found in shop window
displays and exhibitions (figure 2). Both of these instances push the magical
to the forefront of the everyday. In Emile Zolas phantasmagoric hymn to
the marvels of modern commerce (Kristin Ross in her introduction to Zola
1992: v) the department store is animated by fantastic relationships. Zolas
Au bonheur des dames ( The Ladies Paradise ) (1883) describes a big Paris depart-
ment store as seen through the eyes of an enamoured provincial shop worker:
Groups of women pushing and squeezing, devouring the finery with
longing, covetous eyes. And the stuffs became animated in this
passionate atmosphere: the laces fluttered, drooped, and concealed the
depths of the shop with a troubling air of mystery; even the lengths of
cloth, thick and heavy, exhaled a tempting odour, while the cloaks
threw out their folds over the dummies, which assumed a soul, and
the great velvet mantle particularly, expanded, supple and warm, as if
on real fleshly shoulders, with a heaving of the bosom and a trembling
of the hips.
(Zola 1992: 1617)
Here mere product takes on magical properties and comes to life. Modern
everyday life is sensational (alive with desire) even if the ability to purchase
the commodities on offer is highly regulated.
In the phantasmagoria things appear to be alive and people appear as
objects of display. In modern exhibitions (ethnographic and folk museums,
Worlds Fairs, and so on) the everyday is put on display as phantasmagoria.
Crucial to this phantasmagoric representation is an exoticism: not everyday
everyday life, but the everyday life of others. Historically, geographically
and ideologically distant, the phantasmagoria of modernity offers an image,
a simulation of other everydays. The visitor to the Paris Exposition
Universelle of 1889 would find human showcases in the Senegalese, the
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Figure 2 The fantastic form of a relationship between things. Magasin, avenue des Gobelins photograph by Eugne Atget (1925). Albumen-silver print from a glass negative, 8 1/8 6 5/16 (20.6 16 cm). The Museum of Modern Art, New York. Abbott-Levy Collection. Partial gift of Shirley C. Burden. Copy Print 2001 The Museum of Modern Art, New York
Congolese, New Caledonians, Gaboonese, Dahmeyans, a Cochin-China and
a Kampong-Javanese settlement (Greenhalgh 1988: 88). The Pall Mall Gazette
describes these living exhibitions:
Each village is built in its own grounds, enclosed by a fence, and inhab-
ited by its own natives... All these natives have been specially
imported for the exhibition. They have brought with them the materials
for their huts, their tools, and everything for them to reproduce in the
capital of the civilised world the everyday life of Africa, the Pacific,
and the Further East.
(quoted in Greenhalgh 1988: 88)
The intensive and relentless cataloguing and displaying of the everyday
lives of others is, of course, a central aspect of the culture of colonialism:
colonial capitalism that imports exotic lives as exotic goods. The 1908
Franco-British Exhibition shows how extensive this was in its inclusion of
both a Senegalese and an Irish village (Coombes 1994: 187213). The spec-
tacularization and exoticizing of everyday life should be seen as a far-reaching
aspect of modernity, bringing together such distinct materials as the work
of someone like Henry Mayhew with his London Labour and the London Poor
(Mayhew [18612] 1967), with the life group displays in ethnographic
museums, folk museums and heritage museums (Jacknis 1985; Sandberg
1995). Using reportage, mannequins, pretend or real actors, everyday life
is experienced (as directly as possible) as something other.
The everyday offers itself up as a problem, a contradiction, a paradox: both
ordinary and extraordinary, self-evident and opaque, known and unknown,
obvious and enigmatic. In seeing the everyday as bizarre and mysterious, while
at the same time distancing himself from such a world (hover over this great
city), Sherlock Holmes can be seen as figuring the peculiarity of everyday
modernity as phantasmagoria. In seeing the everyday (an everyday not so
distanced) as a fearful, life-threatening condition that could ensnare you in its
grasp, Holmes connects with everyday life as both relentless routine and
the marker of social distinction. In being caught in a process of both estranging
the mundane and making banal the strange, Holmes figures a condition that
might seem inescapable to the writers of everyday modernity. What this book
concerns itself with are not writers who somehow imaginatively escape the
dilemma of a Holmes or a Freud, but writers who, in attending to everyday life
as a lived experience, embrace more directly the ability to make strange. If
the culture of everyday modernity does evidence the process of making the
unfamiliar familiar, the group of writers that I am concerned with work to defa-
miliarize this condition. In attempting to make the everyday vivid, phantas-
magoric representation is replaced by practical, poetic and critical operations.
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EVERYDAY LIFE AND CULTURAL THEORY
W
HAT FOLLOWS IS NOT an attempt to add detail to this version
of everyday modernity. Rather, I want to provide an account of a
body of writing that has specifically addressed this everyday modernity as
a problem for cultural theory. However, this doesnt mean that we leave
behind the ambivalence of the everyday and its contradictory trajectories.
The everyday use of the term everyday life, a use that evidences an uncer-
tainty about the precise contours of everyday life, points to the same vague
and amorphous space that is indicated by the critical tradition that is the
subject of this book. This is an everyday life characterized by ambiguities,
instabilities and equivocation.
The tradition of theory that I pursue here can best be characterized by
a stubborn refusal to underwrite some of the most everyday meanings that
are attached to the everyday. So while it is common practice to describe
everyday life as a scene of relentless tedium, this tradition has often tried to
register the everyday as the marvellous and the extraordinary (or at least
to combine dialectically the everyday as both extraordinary and tedious).
Similarly, if it is more usual to associate the everyday with the self-evident and
the taken-for-granted, this tradition has stressed its opacity and the difficulty
of adequately attending to it. This has resulted in a concern with representa-
tional forms (montage, for instance) that can seem the very opposite of what
might be thought of as an everyday style of presentation. Another example
of a general recalcitrance towards more traditional meanings of the everyday
is the refusal to reduce everyday life to an arena for the reproduction of
dominant social relations. While this is an important focus in some of the
theories that I discuss (Lefebvre, for instance), much more stress is placed on
the everyday as a site of resistance, revolution and transformation.
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Chapter 2
2. Arguments
The tradition of cultural theory that Im writing about must be seen as
a heterogeneous mix of divergent interests and different positions. These
theories of the everyday are not brought together in the hope of establishing
identity, or of telling a coherent story of the progressive refinement of an
idea. This is instead a story of a range of moments when the idea of the
everyday becomes enlivened, when it is set to work and put in crisis, and
what links these moments are not shared aims, or similar outcomes, but a
comparable set of responses to a dominant understanding of the everyday.
The theories and practices that are investigated here offer a fundamental chal-
lenge to the idea of everyday life as self-evident, and it is this more than
anything that allows me to bring together such a disparate collection of writ-
ings. There is a refusal in the work of all the writers that are discussed to
see the realm of the everyday as unproblematic. It may be that this is all that
unites them. Self-reflexive and struggling with the unmanageability of the
everyday, this is a story of various attempts to find approximations of everyday
life, to fashion out forms more adequate to the task of attending to the
everyday than those that might see it as all too easily knowable.
The works of Georg Simmel, Walter Benjamin, Henri Lefebvre and Michel
de Certeau, as well as the cultural formations of Surrealism and Mass-
Observation, are the main points of reference for what follows. Between
Lefebvre and de Certeau is a gulf that is not easily breached, nor should it be.
Between Surrealism and Walter Benjamin lies Benjamins critique of Surrealism.
Yet, for all the arguments and incompatible epistemologies, there seem to be
affinities that should be recognized alongside the substantive differences.
Adopting and adapting the title of one of Martin Jays books would
provide an alternative title for this book: Everyday Life The Adventures of
a Concept from Simmel to de Certeau (see Jay 1984). The idea that the con-
cept (or problem) has a social life, that it undergoes an adventure, as it is
reformulated, re-employed, re-used, in different contexts, under different
conditions, is the implicit understanding of my approach. In approaching
these varied writers my main concern has been with elucidating the work in
relation to a number of questions that I will outline shortly. The central
motivating force has been to tackle questions and problems that I see as
productive for approaching contemporary everyday life. While my approach
insists on the importance of situating theory within specific historical conjunc-
tures and geographical terrains, none of this would be important if I didnt
think that such work mattered for an approach to the everyday for the present,
and for present-day historical research. The critical rehearsal of Simmels
ideas, for instance, is not a matter of purely historical and academic interest.
The Simmel I am interested in is a Simmel who is contemporary, who has
something to offer the re-imagining of cultural studies and its attention to
the everyday.
Animating this account then are three clusters of questions.
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Aesthetics
The first series of questions need to be understood as aesthetic ones. At first glance such an orientation might seem slightly at odds with the topic of this book. Isnt the field of aesthetics concerned with the values and practices of high culture, which if not antithetical to the world of the everyday, tend to be removed from it? Our initial move then will have to be to ignore such insistent associations for the moment. If we swap the world of everyday life for the socio-historical terrain of Western fine art (in which aesthetic ques- tions have taken root) what then becomes of aesthetics? Aesthetics, I want to argue, allows us to consider two questions simultaneously. On the one hand, by foregrounding the world as both mental and sensual experience it problematically expands the range of meaningful elements attributable to the everyday. If, for instance, boredom is seen as a central experience in everyday life, then it is clearly not limited to the realm of thought (which is usually where meaning is located). Boredom can affect the body and mind as a form of existential and physical tiredness. How should this experience (or these experiences) be understood? How should they be described? This takes us directly to the other central aspect of aesthetics: aesthetics insists on examining the way in which experiences are registered and represented. So aesthetics is concerned with experience and the form such experience takes when it is communicated. Such concerns are clearly crucial for theorizing the everyday. It should also be noted that thinking of aesthetics in this way takes us back to a realm of high culture, though not exclusively. After all, the province of poets, painters, novelists and composers has often been to try and register ordinary experience. The relevance of so-called high culture becomes even more vivid when the formal experimentation of avant-garde artists is taken into account. The attempt to locate and apprehend modern everyday life, and to find forms that are capable of articulating it, might be seen as the overriding ambition of many avant-garde artists of the late nine- teenth and early twentieth century. The importance of such an avant-gardist ambition will be central to this book. First though we need to flesh out a notion of aesthetics as it might impact on the theorizing of everyday life. In his discussion of the term everyday life in his book Undoing Culture (1995), Mike Featherstone suggests that it appears to be a residual category into which can be jettisoned all the irritating bits and pieces which do not fit into orderly thought. He goes on to write that to venture into this field is to explore an aspect of life whose central features apparently lack method- icalness and are particularly resistant to rational categorization (Featherstone 1995: 55). This suggests that the everyday cannot be properly accommo- dated by rationalist thought and that the everyday is precisely what becomes remaindered after rationalist thought has tried to exhaust the world of meaning. It also implies that the concept of everyday life has much in common
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ARGUMENTS
with the incipient meaning of aesthetics. When the term aesthetics emerged
in the work of the German philosopher Alexander Baumgarten at the end of
the eighteenth century, it was going to be the science of the senses (Battersby
1991: 35) a philosophical and scientific attention to sensory, corporeal
experience (perhaps the very stuff of the everyday). As Terry Eagleton writes:
It is as though philosophy suddenly wakes up to find that there is a
dense, swarming territory beyond its own mental enclave which
threatens to fall utterly outside its sway. That territory is nothing less
than the whole of our sensate life together the business of affections
and aversions, of how the world strikes the body on its sensory surfaces,
of that which takes root in the gaze and the guts and all that arises
from our most banal, biological insertion into the world.
(Eagleton 1990: 13)
The history of attempts to attend to these experiences, like the history of
attending to the everyday, is fraught with contradiction. Eagleton suggests
that rationalist philosophys approach to sensory experience operates as a
form of colonization: the colonization of reason (1990: 15). What Eagleton
points to is the tendency of philosophy to submit sensate experience to the
procedures of reason and science without questioning the adequacy of its
form of attention. Indeed some philosophers have embraced this colonizing
operation with a missionary zeal: Science is not to be dragged down to the
region of sensibility, but the sensible is to be lifted to the dignity of knowl-
edge (Baumgarten, quoted in Eagleton 1990: 17).
The example of Baumgarten demonstrates a problematic: to borrow the
procedures and materiality of a scientific discourse for attending to everyday
life can be seen to remainder precisely that which is the object of study.
How often is the particularity of the everyday lost as it is transformed in the
process of description and interpretation? As rationalist discourse expands to
cover areas of life that are non-rational, that do not follow patterns of logical
reasoning, what is lost (as these aspects of life are transformed into suitable
objects for attention) is the very stuff-ness that made them urgent prob-
lems in the first place. Of course for Baumgarten the intention is precisely
to rescue such material from its inchoate state, to transform the material
to the point where it transcends its status as mere sensation living in the
lowly realms of the everyday. Significantly, much of aesthetics (as a discourse
about art) is concerned with the everyday only at the point of such tran-
scendence. Even in the aesthetic discourses that are most concerned with the
everyday world of experience, transformation and transcendence are the
operative procedures.
At this level of argument the everyday represents an impossibly evasive
terrain: to attend to it is to lose it, or as Blanchot writes: We cannot help
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but miss it if we seek it through knowledge, for it belongs to a region where there is still nothing to know (1987: 15). But this should not be taken to suggest that the everyday is completely unyielding to forms of representa- tion (description or theory); rather it is to suggest that certain forms of discourse (discourses of knowledge in Blanchots words) are not adequate to their objects and at times fail to accommodate them at all. The other side of this is that there might well be forms of representation that are more appro- priate, more adequate, for attending to the everyday. To suggest that the sensory and the everyday are outside representation, and that they are funda- mentally incommensurate with forms of representation, is to miss the fact that sensation and the everyday are already part of a world of repre- sentation. To treat everyday life as a realm of experience unavailable for representation or reflection is to condemn it to silence. However, if the sensory and the everyday are seen as already fully colonized by discourse and representation, as if nothing could possibly be outside the forms of repre- sentation that are currently in use, then everyday life is neither problematic nor capable of generating counter-discourses. It becomes merely a term used to designate an area already fully represented. An everyday aesthetics would have to negotiate to avoid either one of these endgames. Tradition might suggest that certain forms of representation are more appropriate for attending to specific aspects of the world. For instance, a poem might be seen as a more fitting form for attending to the world of feelings and emotions than a sociological study; the economic treatise more capable of apprehending capitalism than a novel. Yet in relation to the everyday, all forms of representation are hampered by a similar problem. If, for example, the everyday is seen as a flow, then any attempt to arrest it, to apprehend it, to scrutinize it, will be problematic. Simply by extracting some elements from the continuum of the everyday, attention would have transformed the most characteristic aspect of everyday life: its ceaseless-ness. As far as this goes, a good starting point would be to suggest that no form of discourse is ever going to be proper (appropriate) to everyday life. The everyday will necessarily exceed attempts to apprehend it. This would simply mean that the search for the perfect fit between a form of representation and its object (the everyday) needs to be called off. Instead we might say that different forms of representation are going to produce different versions of the everyday. But if what is deemed to be the appropriate form for attending to the everyday (mainstream sociology, say, or novelistic descrip- tion) has resulted in a lack of attention to certain aspects of the everyday, then the everyday might benefit from the attention of purposefully inappro- priate forms of representation. Or rather, the everyday might be more productively glimpsed if the propriety of discourses is refused. In the work of Simmel or Benjamin, or in the avant-garde practices of Surrealism or the College of Sociology, or in the Anthropology at Home of Mass-Observation,
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a form of representation is fashioned that might be seen as improper. To use
Surrealism to conduct sociological research or to insist on montage as the
technique for historical study is to cut across discursive decorum. It is also
to test the potential of different forms of representation to apprehend the
experience of everyday life.
One of the main arguments of this book is that something like an avant-
garde sociology is being fashioned when the everyday is taken as the central
problematic. A significant concern for theorizing the everyday is the problem
of generating a suitable form for registering everyday modernity. In other
words, all the projects dealt with here can be seen to contribute to the cre-
ation of an aesthetics of and for everyday modernity. That the very form of
articulating the everyday is seen as a problem, or that describing the everyday
might require formal experimentation, implies not only that the everyday has
suffered from inattention, but that the kinds of attention that are available are
severely out of step with the actuality of the everyday. There is a historical
dimension to this that cannot be ignored. The dramatist Bertolt Brecht once
suggested that new problems appear and demand new methods. Reality
changes; in order to represent it, modes of representation must also change
(Brecht 1980: 82). The projects I go on to discuss can all be seen to respond
to a sense of everyday modernity as described in the previous chapter. It is this
sense of modernity as complex, contradictory (both boredom and mystery)
and dynamic that makes traditional forms of representation appear unfit for
dealing with modern everyday life. Perhaps the most famous text that deals
with the revolutionary aspects of modernization is Marx and Engels Manifesto
of the Communist Party [1848]. In this, they treat modernization as an assault on
all forms of tradition:
Constant revolutionising of production, uninterrupted disturbance of all
social conditions, everlasting uncertainty and agitation distinguish the
bourgeois epoch from all earlier ones. All fixed, fast-frozen relations,
with their train of ancient and venerable prejudices and opinions are
swept away, all new-formed ones become antiquated before they can
ossify. All that is solid melts into air, all that is holy is profaned...
(Marx and Engels 1968: 38)
Marx and Engels insist on the everydayness of modernization. As a form of
consciousness (uncertainty and agitation) modernization is unsettling, as an
attack on traditional beliefs (ancient and venerable prejudices and opinions
are swept away) it is disorientating, and as an assault on perception (all
that is solid melts into air) it is unnerving. By connecting technological and
social changes with changes in everyday experience the Communist Manifesto
becomes one of the first texts to posit modernity as a revolutionary experi-
ence to be located at the level of everyday life.
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What then would constitute a suitable aesthetic form for registering daily life in all its newness, uncertainty and lack of tradition? How might such an unsettled form of life register? This might well be the question that the everyday poses to the avant-garde sociologist. The necessity of fashioning new forms (or tools) for apprehending new kinds of experiences (new real- ities) might be seen as the general impetus and problematic attendant on theorizing daily life. What is called the artistic avant-garde seems to offer a repertoire of formal devices for registering a world that appears chaotic, disrupted and radically new. The projects discussed in this book might be seen to exist on the boundaries of art and science, borrowing from the artistic avant-garde (or working in sympathy with them) and yet directing their concerns towards other ends. Here I shall only give a very quick synopsis of some of the formal aesthetic devices that might coexist in both an artistic avant-garde and in a more sociological one. If everyday life, for the most part, goes by unnoticed (even as it is being revolutionized), then the first task for attending to it will be to make it noticeable. The artistic avant-gardes strategy of making strange, of ren- dering what is most familiar unfamiliar, can provide an essential ingredient for fashioning a sociological aesthetic (to use Simmels term). Aesthetic tech- niques, such as the surprising juxtapositions supplied by Surrealism, provide a productive resource for rescuing the everyday from conventional habits of mind. Similarly, if the everyday is conventionally perceived as homogeneous, forms of artistic montage work to disturb such smooth surfaces. But this sociological aesthetic isnt simply designed to shock us out of our estab- lished forms of attention; its ambition is to attempt to register the everyday in all its complexities and contradictions. For this montage might be seen as an aesthetic form particularly well suited to the complex and contradic- tory. Yet if everyday life theory is to promote and practise montage, then, unless it is going to simply register the cacophony of the everyday, it has to find some way of ordering, of organizing the everyday. Here the theoretical is precisely the problem of ordering and arranging, of making some kind of sense of the endless empiricism of the everyday. The theorists and theories explored in this book (Georg Simmel, Walter Benjamin, Surrealism, Mass-Observation, Lefebvre and de Certeau) can be seen to begin to fabricate an alternative aesthetic for attending to the expe- rience of modern everyday life. It is an alternative to a range of options in regard to the everyday: it is alternative to the instrumentality of governmental attempts to catalogue the everyday; to high cultures propensity towards expressive subjectivism in relation to the everyday; and to sciences dour positivism. Theirs is an aesthetic that in negotiating the experience of everyday life never claims to exhaust it. It is an aesthetic of experimentation that recog- nizes that actuality always outstrips the procedures for registering it. The work of these everyday life theories can be characterized by a hybrid mode
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ARGUMENTS
of representation. Never simply theory or fiction, philosophy or empirical
observation, everyday life studies exist on the borders and the gaps between
these representational categories. It is an aesthetic that questions the suit-
ability of system, rigour and logic for attending to the everyday. As such
its theoretical resources emerge from a variety of sources, from writers
such as Brecht and Joyce as much as from Marx, from daily observations as
much as from intellectual encounters. It is an aesthetic struggling to find a
place within a field (social and cultural theory) that is often oblivious to its
own aesthetic protocols.
Archives
The second cluster of questions concerns the (related) problem of the archive.
At one level this might be thought of as a simple practical question: what
would an archive of everyday life include? What could it possibly exclude?
For instance, if an archive of the everyday (for example, the one Mass-
Observation produced) were to include a potentially infinite number of items
(diaries, photographs, observations and so on, compiled by anyone who wants
to participate), then how could it be organized? The question of what to
include in an everyday life archive raises questions about the appropriate form
for collating everyday life material. In the case of Mass-Observation the
desire to let the everyday speak for itself resulted in an archive on an
unmanageable scale. Two problems immediately become clear. First, if the
everyday is going to be represented from within, so to speak, then ques-
tions emerge about the organization and limits that might be placed on such
a necessarily disordered archive. Will everything and anything be included?
Will there be any way of organizing this material? A second and related
problem becomes evident in any use of this archive. If the archive is made
up of a polyphonic everyday, then how is it to be orchestrated into mean-
ingful themes or readable accounts? How can one construct an intelligible
articulation from the archive that doesnt submerge the polyphonic beneath
the editorial voice at work? In other words the possible use of the archive
seems to linger between two extremes: on the one hand an unmanaged accu-
mulation of singularities, and on the other a constrictive order that transforms
the wildness of the archive into tamed narratives. The history of Mass-
Observation is the history of negotiating this problematic.
So even at the level of collecting and organizing data, more fundamental
problems intrude, namely the problem of making the everyday meaningful
in a way that doesnt imprison it at the level of the particular, or doesnt
eradicate the particularity of the particular by taking off into abstract gener-
alities. This problem can be seen as the dilemma of negotiating between the
microscopic levels (most frequently classed as everyday) and macroscopic
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levels of the totality (culture, society and so on). The issue that this articu- lates is about the privileging accorded to either one of these perspectives. In recent years (in the wake of certain kinds of arguments associated with accounting for postmodernism) the privilege has tended to fall on the side of the microscopic. Yet, if everyday life theory is a meaningful and histor- ically urgent form of attention, I would want to argue that this is because at some level it simply refuses to remain at the microscopic scale. After all doesnt the notion of the everyday suggest a desire for something more than an endless series of singular everydays? Simply put, everyday life might be the name for the desire of totality in postmodern times. However, if the argument that the desire to attend to the totality must be a totalitarian desire is overblown (which it clearly is), then the tendency of grand narratives to erase and ignore vast terrains of experience cant be so easily dismissed. Indeed, as should be becoming clear by now, much everyday life theory is purposefully addressed to responding to the way in which conventional discourse has erased and ignored the everyday. So if general accounts of society or culture are seen as oblivious towards the everyday, then before any general account of these can be proffered the absolute priority is going to be to rescue the everyday from oblivion. If this is the case, the initial move for a cultural theory of the everyday will be to bring to recognition this benighted realm of the everyday to allow it to become visible in all its particularity. But (and this may be the central dilemma of the everyday archive) if this is the case, might it not become impossible (or at least, less likely) to generate new and better accounts of the social totality as the archive literally submerges this possibility in its expo- nentially increasing textuality? There is of course no recourse to a solution here. For someone committed to Marxism, such as Lefebvre, without a philo- sophical (abstract and critical) orientation it made no sense to attend to the empirical. Lefebvre provides a useful approach to this problematic in that he treats everyday life as the relationships between different registers of social life. In his Critique of Everyday Life he suggests that the singularity of the everyday event (a woman buying sugar, for example) reverberates with social and psychic desire as well as with the structures of national and global exchange (Lefebvre 1991a: 57). The question that this poses for the archive is a massive one. Not only does it suggest the endless proliferation of singular events, but also it demands the relating of these events to economic struc- tures of desire and exchange. The methodological problems this poses for Lefebvre are dealt with in a variety of ways, but as the focus of his work shifts from everyday life in general to the urban everyday, the unmanage- ability of the everyday archive is increasingly managed by spatializing the interrelations of the everyday. A more epistemological problem exists in relation to the history of archival practices. For de Certeau, what united the archival practices that
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ARGUMENTS
emerged in the West as a corollary to colonial expansion (both at home
and abroad) was a combined operation that both repressed the culture that
was supposed to be conserved by the archive, and inscribed there a desire
of its own. For de Certeau it is the translation of a lived culture into a written
culture that marks the taming of the everyday and the inscription of a disci-
plinary writing. It is clear in de Certeaus work that those discourses (at
once archival and scriptural) that might at first glance be seen as attending
to the everyday (anthropology, official studies of daily life and so on) work
to erase the everyday. Yet it also becomes clear that they are never entirely
successful. The everyday exists between the lines (so to speak) of archival
practices. So for de Certeau attending to the everyday will also mean
attempting to rescue the traces, the remainders of the overflowing unman-
ageability of the everyday that erupt within representation, and mark the
work of repression.
The question of methodology is raised again by the heterogeneity of the
material that could be included in an archive of everyday life. While Cultural
Studies has developed sophisticated ways of attending to the semiotic material
of the visual and verbal, it is massively underdeveloped in relation to the
aural, the olfactory and the haptic. An archive of everyday life based on
the writings of de Certeau, for instance, might include: walking, talking,
cooking, eating, slouching and so on. Both Simmel and Benjamin recognize
the everyday of modernity as assaulting the totality of the sensate body. While
the theories being considered here dont result in a worked-through approach
to the totality of sensory life, they do point to the lack of attention to non-
visual and non-scriptural senses. The historicity of everyday sensation might
well be a necessary accompaniment to any future theorizing of everyday life.
It might also mean that the archive of everyday life includes not only
the recording and collection of everyday voices, everyday events, everyday
materials and everyday sensations; it should also include a process of everyday-
ing archives already in existence. For instance, this might mean attempting
to read the haptical (through posture, gait, the sense of a body holding itself)
in the negotiated moments of visual description that make up a photographic
archive. It might also suggest that the presentation of archival material would
benefit from experimental approaches that attempt to articulate the everyday
as a sensory realm.
Practices and critiques
The third cluster of questions (again related to the previous ones) circulates
around the problem of the everyday as a critical practice and as a form of
practical criticism. To put it starkly these questions stress the problem of both
description and critique in attending to the everyday. The field of Cultural
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Studies (if it is a field) has done much to promote the project of critiquing everyday life. But in many ways this critique has been played out as a theo- retical endgame. In an article published in 1990, Meaghan Morris character- ized a tendency within cultural studies:
But sometimes, when distractedly reading magazines such as New
Socialist or Marxism Today from the last couple of years, flipping through
Cultural Studies , or scanning the pop-theory pile in the bookstore, I get
a feeling that somewhere in some English publishers vault there is a
master disk from which thousands of versions of the same article about
pleasure, resistance, and the politics of consumption are being run off
under different names with minor variations.
(Morris 1990: 21)
Morris complaint is that within Cultural Studies a form of analysis has emerged that privileges an essentially active and resistant subject of everyday culture. From this perspective it doesnt matter what kind of cultural material you look at because potentially it is all open to being used in similarly creative and subversive ways at the point of consumption. While the historical reasons for this approach can partly be explained by seeing it as an over-compensation for a previous formulation that took the subject of everyday culture to be passive and easily manipulated, the result is an endless search for the progressive within the dominant, a search that seems locked into telling the same story time and time again. Whether the everyday is seen as a realm dictated to by overarching structures of power, or as a realm characterized by an endless refusal of such power, the job of critique might seem too easy, too glibly confident of its meaningfulness. Or rather, the practice of critique might simply be premature. If, for many of the cultural projects discussed in this book, the everyday (as a lived actuality) is absent from the professional discourses that might supply critical purchase (philosophy, politics and so on) then, as already suggested, the first priority would be to bring the everyday into the light (so to speak). Until this has happened a critical practice relevant to the everyday will remain undeveloped. Critique, in the sense of mobilizing an available politics, would have to be postponed, because such politics would have already played a part in rendering the everyday mute. In its place a number of other operations would need to be performed. For the likes of Mass-Observation and Michel de Certeau the necessary operation is to reverse the picture we have of the social. Instead of picturing the world as a drama of significant (and exceptional) events and people, set against a backdrop of everyday life, the relation between foreground and background needs to be reversed. For de Certeau this was the necessary prerequisite for a theory of everyday that might begin to sketch the forms that ordinary practice takes. To do this then
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ARGUMENTS
requires temporarily surrendering the normal codes of political propriety that
often drive work seen as critical.
But lest this is seen as some nave liberal fantasy, it is worth remem-
bering how social forms of critique can emerge. The example of second-wave
feminism (briefly discussed in chapter 1) remains pertinent. It was not by
setting in motion some abstract political notion of equality and liberty
that feminism became such a driving force in the 1970s and 1980s. Rather
by first taking on the empirical job of bringing womens lives into discourse
(often generating new forms of discourse in the process), a critical account
of the psychical depth of patriarchy emerged that simply wouldnt have been
possible if the empirical had been approached in the name of previously
constituted abstractions such as equality. The very fact that such a broad
social and cultural movement immersed itself in the everyday (domestic
routines, sexual identity and so on neatly designated by the slogan the
personal is political) should alert us to the potential of the everyday to
generate new political forms. In other words, the job of description can be
the necessary prerequisite for allowing new forms of political critique to
emerge. By locating the politics of gender in the everyday, feminism provoked
a transformation of politics itself: who could have predicted that politics
would come to include the sexual and domestic? If the projects outlined in
this book never mutated into immense social movements like second-wave
feminism, then their critical potential remains necessarily unknown (or rather,
untested). To force them into a political critique based on the kinds of world-
pictures that they were experimentally challenging would also have to be
seen as premature. Instead, critical evaluation would require a more specu-
latively sympathetic orientation.
Lefebvre on the other hand employs a more deliberate critique to allow
the everyday to come into focus. But it should be noted that the critical
procedures that Lefebvre uses (generally Marxist) are not those that are
welded to an existent politics. This may seem like a strange thing to say in
regard to one of the most insistently political philosophies of the modern
age. None the less I would argue that the terms of Lefebvres Marxism (based
as it was on recognizing capitalist society as a radical alienation of men and
womens potential humanness) were the very terms that Marxism drops when
it is turned into a practical and professional political programme. Indeed the
Marxism that Lefebvre privileges for his critique can be seen as oriented
more towards anarchism than communism. And perhaps the one explicit
principle of anarchism is the forfeiting of a political programme in the
name of an experimental orientation that desires to release the unknown (and
historically unknowable) potential of human life.
In the work of Lefebvre the residues of rural festivals are seen as offering
liberatory potential for everyday life. This privileging of ritualistic material
in the everyday suggests the possibility of an attention to the everyday that
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promotes a cross-cultural perspective (even if the comparative culture is to be found within the culture being examined). The basis for this is an orien- tation that is necessarily anthropological: it compares and contrasts two or more cultures, not by privileging the one over the other, but by a kind of mutual testing that works to denaturalize both cultures. What is crucial to Lefebvre (and I think to Mass-Observation and de Certeau in some ways) is that this cross-cultural anthropology insists that the critique of everyday life can and should be found within the everyday. Thus festival in modern capitalist culture may have become tawdry and commercial, but even in this alienated state it can still point to the possibility of life lived differently (to another tempo, a different logic). Yet Lefebvres project was fashioned at a time when the knowledge of Fascisms promotion of ritualistic and irrational material into the everyday was inescapable. The rise of Fascism in the 1930s might be seen to consti- tute a crisis of critique: it places the terms of critique into doubt at the same time as it makes its deployment terrifyingly urgent. If Fascism does produce some kind of crisis in relation to critical authority, then it does so because it confuses the terms of critique. Fascism might look simply like the outpouring of irrationalism and myth that should be met by a relentless reasoning that would result in the destruction of Fascist myth. Yet it became increasingly clear that the stronger party in this struggle wasnt always (or very often) the clear light of reason. If Fascist myth was to be defeated, how was this to be achieved if not by reason? The alternative was to begin to search out myth and ritual within an everyday culture that might be mobi- lized against Fascism (a trick learned by propagandists as they promoted the most mythic of irrationalism nationalism). But Fascism, as well as being a form of irrationalism, can also be seen as a form of ultra-rationalism. Or rather Fascism reveals the ends to which reason (or what has been done in the name of reason) can be put. Thus the link between the racial theory of the nineteenth century and the Jewish Holocaust places an indelible question mark on the innocence and emancipatory potential of reason (see for instance Bauman 1989). For the likes of Mass-Observation (or in another way for Walter Benjamin) Fascism urgently focused attention on to the subject of the everyday. What all this results in is, I think, a suspicion (sometimes confusingly articulated) about translating everyday life theory and practice into the available language of critical politics. Rather than placing their faith in an emancipatory politics that would be found in the abstractions of philosophy or the pragmatics of politics, writers such as de Certeau seem unerringly to cast their lot with the everyday. It is in the everyday that emancipation might be found (if it is to be found at all); critiques of the everyday will emerge in the practices of everyday life, not in the rarefied or deadeningly realist programmes of political parties. Thus, to return to the problem of Cultural
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ARGUMENTS
Studies, everyday life theory holds out an invitation to rethink such dualisms
as resistance and power. It does so by re-evaluating the productivity of
description (as a foregrounding and recognizing of the everyday) and by re-
imaging the practice of critique (by potentially generating new forms of
critical practice). As such it is the symptomatic result of a frustration aimed
at both politics (as conventionally and endlessly played out) and traditional
social and cultural theory (understood as oblivious to the everyday).
Structure
The chapters that follow develop these arguments by focusing on particular
theoretical writers or cultural projects. The next three chapters (3, 4 and 5)
can be seen as outlining some of the elements of an aesthetics of the everyday
(if by this we mean an engagement with both the experience of the every-
day and the problem of registering it). These chapters look at the work of
Simmel and Benjamin and at various forms of Surrealism. Simmels method-
ological approach claims to reveal general qualities of social life by focusing
on the incidental and the meagre. For Simmel such work doesnt resolve
itself into elaborate theoretical schemas; instead it can be seen to be a soci-
ology of the fragment, where the part is seen as registering the general but
is never simply reducible to it. It always remains specific, an unassimilable
fragment. Walter Benjamin can be seen as continuing Simmels project of a
sociology of modernity. Benjamins massive and unfinished Arcades Project
(unfinishable, I would argue) was to map a prehistory to modernity, to grasp
the emergence of modernity in all its contingencies as it hardened into cultural
forms. Benjamins interest is also in the everyday detritus, but there is a
reason for this that extends Simmels approach. For Benjamin the recently
outmoded can point us towards a revolutionary contingency, which is capable
of demonstrating that things could be different. Between Simmel and
Benjamin lies the project of Surrealism, a project whose importance as a
resource for attending to the everyday cannot be overstated. It should also
be seen as one of the most important aspects of Benjamins cultural constel-
lation. Surrealism and forms of dissident Surrealism allow the everyday to
be othered in a move that forces a denaturalizing of the everyday. It is also
in Surrealism that we find two methodological tools for attending to the
everyday: the first is the process of montage, seen here as the most crucial
representational form for the everyday; the second is a reworking of social
anthropology that mobilizes it for attending to the domestic everyday.
The themes of the everyday as modern experience and the difficulty of
finding modes of representation that might be used to articulate it are
continued in chapter 6 which discusses the work of Mass-Observation. Mass-
Observation is a movement that emerged in Britain in the 1930s, partly as
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a response to the surfacing of ritual and myth within the everyday. Against the view of Mass-Observation as a resolutely positivist project tied to state bureaucracy, I emphasize the aspects of it that can be seen to problematize such a reading. One of the most productive aspects of Mass-Observation has been the unlikely and disquieting marriage of Surrealism and social anthro- pology. The potential of applying ethnographic protocols to domestic cultures continues the avant-garde practice of making the familiar strange. From this emerged the beginnings of a poetics of the everyday that might, potentially at least, transform the social and cultural realm of the daily by the very act of mobilizing mass attention towards it. In chapter 7 I review Henri Lefebvres life-long project of a critique of everyday life. This project extends some of Marxs early writings and applies them to the decades of radical social change that took place during Lefebvres career. Lefebvres Critique of Everyday Life emerges from a brew of Western Marxism, Surrealism and observations of social transformation. In it he stresses the political imperative of transforming everyday life, and this can be seen as a response to the failure of the Soviet Revolution to change the social and cultural conditions of everyday life in the USSR (or rather, to change them for the better). Lefebvres continuation of the critique of everyday life focused on the urban environment as a space for the intensifi- cation of the alienation of everyday life, as well as a site for its possible transformation. Chapter 8 focuses on Michel de Certeaus The Practice of Everyday Life , and sees it as responding to a very different intellectual and social climate from Lefebvres project. In its emphasis on the imaginative and inventive practice of everyday life, it is a critique of a theoretical position that sees the social as saturated by the dominance of powerful interests. In his writing on everyday life and popular culture, de Certeau sets up a colonial encounter where the cultures of everyday life are erased by the professional bodies that attend to them. The cultures of everyday life are therefore submerged below the level of a social and textual authority. While they tend to remain invis- ible and unrepresentable, they perform something like a guerrilla war on these authorities (though the limitations of de Certeaus war metaphors will, I hope, become obvious). This position offers a valuable view from below, and productively foregrounds a range of practical forms of resistance within everyday life. But at the same time it reworks the very notion of resistance. I argue that de Certeaus poetics problematize cultural theory as a theoretical architecture based on a division between power and resistance. In this his work suggests a productive affinity with the project of psychoanalysis. In a final and relatively short chapter I speculate on how everyday life theory might be used to re-imagine and relocate Cultural Studies. I also address (all too briefly) some of the more urgent cultural issues that might be seen as missing from such a body of theory, namely some alternative to
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ARGUMENTS
the European focus of these accounts. What might everyday life theory look
like from the perspective of an international frame? Where might everyday
life theory (literally) go to consolidate and extend the tradition outlined
here? In place of a conclusion, then, chapter 9 simply tries to encourage and
expand the broadly experimental project of theorizing everyday life.
Everyday life in this account is not a given that cultural theory simply
investigates. In some ways it can be seen as the product that is generated by
the kinds of inquiry that I will be looking at. It is not until we reach the
work of Lefebvre and de Certeau that something like the everyday as a
specific problematic emerges. The ambitious projects of Simmel and Benjamin
(for instance) grapple with the monstrousness of modernity. In their searching
for a form of attention that can offer some productive hold on modernity,
the everyday begins to emerge as a critical concept and as an imaginative
fiction for approaching social life. In the cultural theory that such projects
generate, the everyday is linked to an experience of modernity that privileges
the urban and the unconscious (or the non-conscious). Here and in the cultural
formations that follow, the everyday is not something to be condemned or
condoned, evaded or embraced. The imaginative fiction of the everyday
points to something unavoidable and inescapable, but it also points to some-
thing that in crucial ways is unformed. Perhaps then the tradition of theory
that is the topic of this book evidences an approach to social and cultural life
that in both theory and practice is radically (and literally) reformist.
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I actually consider it a cultural task not unworthy of a philosopher to present
to the broadest possible public a certain intellectual opinion on and absorp-
tion in precisely the most superficial and everyday phenomena.
(Simmel, quoted in Rammstedt 1991: 126)
W
RITING ACROSS THE END of the nineteenth century and the
start of the twentieth, it is hard to place Georg Simmels work within
the now established contours of intellectual work. Most famous for his contri-
bution to a nascent sociology, Simmels writing spans a very broad culturalist
perspective, including philosophical work on aesthetics and the cultural effects
and affects of the money economy. The most vivid assessment of his achieve-
ment comes, not from his immediate contemporaries, but from the next
generation of theorists and critics, many of whom were Simmels students.
A number of writers, either responding directly to Simmels work or
attempting to register his impact on those critical theorists he taught, have
offered condensed and telling accounts of his work that go to the heart of
the problem of everyday life. For Theodor Adorno, writing (in 1965) about
Simmels importance for understanding the work of Ernst Bloch (a student
and friend of Simmel), Simmel was, for all his psychological idealism, the
first to accomplish the return of philosophy to concrete subjects, a shift that
remained canonical for everyone dissatisfied with the chattering of episte-
mology or intellectual history (Adorno 1992: 213). For Jack Zipes, writing
again about Bloch, Simmel was one of those remarkable intellectuals who
believed that a philosopher must be concerned with everyday occurrences
and small events (Zipes, in the introduction to Bloch 1989: xiv). Former
students such as Karl Mannheim and Georg Lukcs thought Simmel was best
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Chapter 3
SIMMEL
3. Simmel: Fragments of everyday life
described as a sociological impressionist a philosophical sociologist who
attended to the experience of a fragmented everyday world and the trivial
objects it contains in ways analogous to the way in which impressionist
painters attended to these same aspects in their paintings. But while these
writers are unambiguous about Simmels achievement, they remain sceptical
about its cost. For both Mannheim and Lukcs, as well as for Siegfried
Kracauer, Simmel stops short of offering any workable system that could
make sense of the totality of social experience. Mannheim writes that
Simmels ability was not an ability to take a constructive view of the whole
of society (Mannheim, quoted in the introduction to Simmel 1990: 32),
while Kracauer writes (in 1920) that he never discovered the magic word
for the macrocosm that underlies all forms of existence, and he still owes
us a far-reaching, all-encompassing notion of the world (Kracauer 1995:
225). For Lukcs (in 1918), Simmel was a Monet of philosophy who has
not yet been followed by a Cezanne (Lukcs 1991: 147). I will have more
to say about Simmel as an impressionist below; for now it is enough to
note that, while Simmels approach to the everyday, and to the experience
of modernity, was viewed as innovative and productive, its value has been
seen as being seriously undermined by a failure to synthesize his investiga-
tions into a philosophical world-view. The complaints that have framed
academic contact with Simmels work have been consistently aimed at an
estimation of his work as fragmented, undisciplined and unscientific (see
Axelrod 1994).
Simmels own understanding of his sociological project is given in his
preface to The Philosophy of Money (1900, revised 1907). Simmel notes two
central and overlapping directions in his work. On the one hand, the unity
of these investigations does not lie... in an assertion about a particular
content of knowledge and its gradually accumulating proofs but rather in the
possibility which must be demonstrated of finding in each of lifes details
the totality of its meaning (1990: 55). On the other hand, his aim was to
construct a new storey beneath historical materialism such that the explana-
tory value of the incorporation of economic life into the causes of intellectual
culture is preserved, while these economic forms themselves are recognized
as the result of more profound valuations and currents of psychological or
even metaphysical pre-conditions (1990: 56). These two directions consti-
tute a move in the field of theory that massively widens the scope for
investigating the social. The attention to the details of everyday life (a form
of sociological microscopy) means that the experiential, instead of being
located in great events, is extended to the non-event-ness of the everyday,
while the notion of economics is expanded from a Marxist understanding of
economics (a limited economics), to a more general economics that can
include an economics of the senses, an economics of nervous energies, an
economics of affect.
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In investigating the productivity of Simmels work for theorizing everyday life in modernity, I want to argue that it is precisely in Simmels use of the fragments of daily life to articulate modern experience that his value lies. Simmels refusal of the unifying system, the philosophical macroview, is not the result of an inability to connect these fragments; rather it emerges from the attempt to find a form of attention that is adequate (or more adequate) to its object (everyday life in the modern world). To synthesize this into a system would mean erasing not just the singularity of the detail, but the vitality of the relations between details. What has been called Simmels soci- ological formalism (an interest in the formal arrangements of social relations) needs to be rethought. Simmels formalism can be seen as an approach that takes style seriously: the style of living, the style of objects, and the poetics of representing the modern. As another of Simmels students suggests, Simmel conceives of sociology as the study of the forms of sociation. But whoever speaks of forms moves into the field of aesthetics. Society, in the last analysis, is a work of art (Salz, quoted in Davis 1994: 46).
Impressionism, fragments and totalities
In developing an argument that sees Simmels project as an everyday aesthetics of the fragment, it is worth exploring Karl Mannheims description of Simmel as a sociological impressionist. Mannheim suggests that Simmel used
the same method for the description of everyday life that was previ-
ously used to describe pictures or to characterize works of literature.
He had an aptitude for describing the simplest everyday experiences
with the same precision as is characteristic of a contemporary impres-
sionistic painting which has learned to reflect the previously unobserved
shades and values of the atmosphere. He might well be called the
impressionist in sociology, because his was not an ability to take a
constructive view of the whole of society but to analyse the significance
of minor social forces that were previously unobserved.
(Mannheim, quoted in Simmel 1990: 32)
Crucial to this designation of Simmels work as impressionistic is an understanding of it as being concerned with forms of expression that are associated more with literary and artistic production than with social science. The characterization of Simmels sociology as impressionism has also been the route for a major reassessment of his thought in recent years. David Frisby, who has energetically re-examined Simmels work, entitled his first book on Simmel, Sociological Impressionism: A Reassessment of Georg Simmels Social Theory (Frisby 1992b; see also Frisby 1984, 1985, 1992a). Frisbys
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SIMMEL: FRAGMENTS OF EVERYDAY LIFE
investigations of Simmel make suggestive connections between Simmels
attitudes and those to be found in the literary and artistic avant-garde in Paris
during the Second Empire. Frisby uses the Baudelairian figure of the flneur ,
the passionate but detached observer of modern life, to elicit crucial simi-
larities and differences between Simmel and the project of the Painter of
Modern Life (see Baudelaire 1964; Clark 1985). But while this association
with the Parisian avant-garde has provided useful insights, the term impres-
sionism needs to be set in a context closer to Simmel. To pinpoint what
impressionism may have meant for Simmel and how it was being used by
his students to describe him, we need to look at the particular currency the
term had in Germany and especially Berlin at the turn of the century.
In an essay by Lothar Mller called The Beauty of the Metropolis:
Toward an Aesthetic Urbanism in Turn-of-the-Century Berlin, the term
impressionism is examined in the specific context of Berlin, Simmels home
town. Mller suggests that crucial to this context was an understanding of
Berlin, not as an artistic capital, but as a technological capital: the Berlin
of this era, in contrast to Paris, the capital of aesthetic modernity in the nine-
teenth century, was perceived as a centre of a technological , civilizing
modernity (Mller 1990: 378). It is in relation to this that impressionism
was understood not simply as artistic expression but as a diagnostic approach
to the condition of modernity: Impressionism was transformed into a diag-
nostic category of reflection on the period as a whole, a category in which
ultimately the artistic style was only epiphenomenon, a symptom of the
underlying style of life (Mller 1990: 43). Mller draws attention to a book
published in Germany in 1907 called Impressionismus in Leben und Kunst by
Richard Harmann, where impressionism in life was seen as characterized
by acceleration and transitoriness, hectic activity and mobility, as well as
the erosion of all established norms and values. For Lothar Mller the impor-
tance of this book lies in the way it treats impressionism not simply as an
artistic technique but as something that exists both in the lived experience
of modern life and across a variety of different cultural expressions:
In the books diagnosis of impressionism, the impressionist life-style,
as manifested in all social and cultural phenomena, becomes synonymous
with the fugitive, with the dissolution of form, with the antiarchitec-
tonic. In philosophy impressionism is evident in the aestheticization of
thinking; in ethics it is manifest in the tendency to reject any moral
imperative; in drama it is the development of the undramatic; in music,
the sublime cultivation of sonority and atmosphere.
(Mller 1990: 44)
A crucial link was made between modern lived experience and cultural
expressions in this Berlin context, and this link was most vividly signalled
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by the figure of the modern everyday as a site of overstimulation and nervousness. In this regard, impressionism, in this expanded sense, was both the name for the neurasthenic experience of everyday life and the cultural form most suited to representing it. As Mller suggests, a discursive equa- tion of impressionism and nervousness (45) emerged at the turn of the century. It is impressionisms adequacy as a form for articulating the discon- tinuous in the everyday, and for attending to particularly modern forms of experience, that can be seen as the relevant context for situating Simmels impressionistic approach. This characterization of Simmels project is useful for understanding his project as a form of sociological microscopy, which employs impressionistic descriptions of everyday life within a philosophical approach where the particularity of the everyday is made to register more general social forces. Simmels sociological microscopy should be seen as a response to what he sees as the propensity of sociology to attend to the macroscopic: social science generally is still situated in this stage of being able to only consider the very large and clearly visible social structures and of trying to be able to produce insight from these into social life in its totality (Simmel [1907] 1997: 109). In designating his project as microscopy he suggests a perspec- tive within the social sciences analogous to that produced within the natural sciences by the advent of microscopic investigations. This analogy produces an equivalence between the body as an object of scrutiny for the natural sciences and the social as the object of scrutiny for sociology:
the life process now revealed itself first in its ties to its smallest
elements, the cells, and in its identity with the innumerable and cease-
less interactions between these cells. How they adhere to one another
or destroy each other, how they assimilate or chemically influence one
another only this gradually permits one to see how the body shapes,
maintains or changes its form.
(Simmel 1997: 109)
Clearly these cells are the everyday for Simmel. Such a microscopic approach figures the encounters of everyday life as the genuine and fundamental basis of life (109). But what is most significant about Simmels attention to the everyday is that it is in the everyday that he also finds the macroscopic. While the impressionistic description of everyday life can be seen as the basic ingre- dient for Simmels sociology, it is not in itself the telos of his project. For Simmel the everyday must be made to reverberate with the interactions, networks and force of social life. The everyday must be made to register vividly the social totality from within. Rather than using the everyday as illus- trative of abstract social systems, the everyday must be made to give up its own secrets, the secrets of sociality. In this way the particularity
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SIMMEL: FRAGMENTS OF EVERYDAY LIFE
of the everyday isnt reducible to a general theory of society (a system, a
world-view); the particularity of the everyday remains unassimilable within
such a system. But neither does the everyday fragment remain a singular
atom, disconnected from other atoms:
The fact that people look at and are jealous of one another, that they
write each other letters or have lunch together, that they have sympa-
thetic or antipathetic contacts, quite removed from any tangible
interests, that one person asks another for directions and that people
dress up and adorn themselves for one another all the thousands of
relations from person to person, momentary or enduring, conscious or
unconscious, fleeting or momentous, from which the above examples
are taken quite at random, continually bind us together. On every day,
at every hour, such threads are spun, dropped, picked up again, replaced
by others or woven together with them. Herein lie the interactions
between atoms of society, accessible only to psychological microscopy,
which support the entire tenacity and elasticity, the entire variety and
uniformity of this so evident and yet so puzzling life of society.
(Simmel 1997: 109)
Here the everyday is represented as an accumulation of moments. The
everyday is a plethora of irreducible particularity, yet across this unmanage-
able actuality is a language of woven threads that bind us together, that
point to the possibility of mapping a heterogeneous, diversified and complex
totality. While the everyday is unpredictable and indeterminate there is within
it the possibility of mapping its equivocality, of situating its ambivalence at
the centre of the social. As we shall see, Simmels diagnosis of modernity is
one in which the everyday registers diverse and contrary experiences.
Examples of the way in which everyday materials are made to register
more general social forces are numerous in Simmels work. Essays such as
The Sociology of the Meal, Bridge and Door, The Philosophy of Fashion
(collected in Simmel 1997), for example, continually move back and forth
between impressionistic descriptions of the everyday event and speculative
accounts that treat such material as symptomatic of a dynamic and forceful
culture. The process of combining impressionistic particularity with a philo-
sophical form of attention that would extract a dynamic totality from this is
summed up in the title of many of his Jugend essays: Momentbilder sub specie
aeternitas. Simmel thought of himself as taking snapshots of everyday life,
but viewed from the aspect of eternity (Frisby 1985: 71). Thus the most
distracted and impressionistic form of attention (the snapshot) is combined
with another form of attention that treats such materials as if they were
divorced from the contingency of their here and now (Simmel, quoted in
Rammstedt 1991: 139). To treat the everyday in this way can be seen as a
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form of aesthetics. I would suggest that such an aesthetics should be seen as part of an aesthetic avant-gardism in which the everyday is rendered as vivid, without its everydayness being remaindered in the process. Simmel announces his project of sociological avant-gardism in his essay Sociological Aesthetics of 1896. This essay presents a sociological aesthetics of the fragment, where the particularity of daily life would reveal funda- mental forces. Thus, What is unique emphasizes what is typical, what is accidental appears as normal, and the superficial and fleeting stands for what is essential and basic (Simmel 1968: 69). In Sociological Aesthetics beauty becomes a form of analysis linked to dialectics, where the everyday is open to aesthetic attention by making it connect with the social totality. In an exuberant passage, Simmel conjures up his avant-garde sociology:
Even the lowest, intrinsically ugly phenomenon can be dissolved into
contexts of color and form, feeling and experience which provide it
with significance. To involve ourselves deeply and lovingly with the
even most common product, which, would be banal and repulsive in
its isolated appearance, enables us to conceive of it, too, as a ray and
image of the final unity of all things from which beauty and meaning
flow. Every philosophical system, every religion, every moment of our
heightened emotional experience searches for symbols which are appro-
priate to their expression. If we pursue this possibility of aesthetic
appreciation to its final point, we find that there are no essential differ-
ences among things. Our world view turns into aesthetic pantheism.
Every point contains within itself the potential of being redeemed to
absolute aesthetic importance. To the adequately trained eye the totality
of beauty, the complete meaning of the world as a whole, radiates from
every single point.
(Simmel 1968: 69)
Simmels aesthetics of the everyday offers a radical programme that takes social interaction as its muse. In this way it doesnt matter what material is scrutinized; all paths lead to the same place culture writ large. In 1896 such a radical call to register the most marginal, discarded, banal aspects of society must have sounded more like the rhetoric of a bohemian poet than someone setting out the contours of sociology. Here the connoisseur is replaced by the social analyst (the adequately trained eye) who, steeped in the insignificance of everyday life, finds in it the elementary forces of the social totality. Such an aesthetic, rather than eradicating the everydayness of the everyday, is intended to reveal the everydayness at its core. Such a socially aesthetic programme, for Simmel, is mobilized, not just for social analysis, but also for social change: The more we learn to appreciate composite forms, the more readily we will extend aesthetic categories to forms of society as
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SIMMEL: FRAGMENTS OF EVERYDAY LIFE
a whole (Simmel 1968: 74). As an example, he offers a reading of the
aesthetic basis of socialism: that society as a whole should become a work
of art in which every single element attains its meaning by virtue of its contri-
bution to the whole (74).
Where Simmels attention to the everyday most explicitly evidences
the productivity of his analysis is when it attends to the historicity of the
experience of the everyday, nowhere more so than when he diagnoses
the modern everyday as a neurasthenic experience.
Diagnosing the modern everyday
At the end of his essay Sociological Aesthetics Simmel writes: Exhausted
nerves which are drifting between hypersensitivity and lack of sensitivity
can be excited only by the most opaque forms and rudely accurate details,
or else by the most tender and starkest stimuli (Simmel 1968: 80). For
Simmel, the modern everyday evidences a continual assault on the nervous
system but the effect of such an assault is radically ambivalent: drifting
between hypersensitivity and lack of sensitivity. In the same year that he
wrote Sociological Aesthetics he attended the Berlin Trade Exhibition and
wrote an analysis of it for the Viennese newspaper Die Zeit. His description
of the exhibition reads like an allegory of the commodification of the urban
everyday: The way in which the most heterogeneous industrial products are
crowded together in close proximity paralyses the senses, while every few
steps a small entry fee is charged for each special display (Simmel [1896]
1991: 119). The exhibition, like the metropolis he will write about, is both
a continual assault on the nerves and the form most suited to those whose
nerves are shattered. The urban everyday is a form of desensitization that
also provides the sensory material that is loud enough to affect tired and
battered nerves. At the Berlin Trade Exhibition,
Every fine and sensitive feeling, however, is violated and seems deranged
by the mass effect of the merchandise offered, while on the other hand
it cannot be denied that the richness and variety of fleeting impressions
is well suited to the need for excitement for overstimulated and tired
nerves.
(Simmel 1991: 119)
Simmels review of this event figures an ambivalent relationship between the
almost shell-shocked visitor to the exhibition and the mass of different
commodities on display. But what is even more striking is that he makes the
relationship between commodities themselves register the ambiguous situation
of the modern individual:
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Indeed it strikes one as curious that the separate objects in an exhibi-
tion show the same relationships and modifications that are made by
the individual within society. On the one side, the depreciation of an
otherwise qualified neighbour, on the other, accentuation at the expense
of the same; on the one side, the levelling and uniformity due to an
environment of the same, on the other, the individual is even more
accentuated through the summation of many impressions; on the one
side, the individual is only an element of the whole, only a member
of a higher unity, on the other, the claim that the same individual is a
whole and a unity.
(Simmel 1991: 122)
Simmel, it would seem, is an analyst of the phantasmagoria of moder- nity, lived out as the contradictory experience of individuality in everyday life. For Simmel, individuality is the dominant mode of experience in a money economy and it is essentially ambivalent. It is lived as atomized, alienated, uniqueness at the same time as it is experienced as uniformity and monotony. The individual and the commodity share a similar fate, and for the purpose of analysis can be used to highlight each others condition. In his most famous essay, The Metropolis and Mental Life, Simmel gives his most succinct account of the effects and affects of the modern everyday on consciousness. It is worth noting that between the years 1871 (when it became the capital city of a united Germany) and 1919, the population of Greater Berlin quadrupled, from 915,000 to 3.7 million (Haxthausen and Suhr 1990: xv). When the editors of a recent volume of essays about Berlin culture during these years state that Berlin was experiencing a period of runaway growth, intense social flux, and industrial expansion (Haxthausen and Suhr 1990: xv) they are clearly not overstating their case. Berlin was a city honeycombed by the notorious tenement blocks into which the majority of the population
- primarily the office and factory workers who by now [around 1900] repre- sented more than half of the citys inhabitants were penned (Brodersen 1996: 23). Lothar Mller points out that Berlin at this time was a city of intense contrasts between wealth and poverty, decay and modernization, a city of tensions between traditional and modern rhythms of life. Berlin, with its factories, its dense traffic, its advanced technology, its expansive dynamism (Mller 1990: 38), was a border-town of advancing modernity (figure 3). It is a fitting production site for Simmels 1903 essay The Metropolis and Mental Life. Simmels essay figures the metropolis as a sensory situation that gener- ates a psychological condition: The psychological foundation, upon which the metropolitan individuality is erected, is the intensification of emotional life due to the swift and continuous shift of external and internal stimuli (Simmel 1971: 325).
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To the extent that the metropolis creates these psychological condi-
tions with every crossing of the street, with the tempo and multiplicity
of economic, occupational and social life it creates in the sensory
foundations of mental life... a deep contrast with the slower, more
habitual, more smoothly flowing rhythm of the sensory-mental phase
of small town and rural existence.
(325)
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Figure 3 Berlin, Friedrichstrasse, at the turn of the century
Against this experiential residue of a rural everyday that exists as a shared cultural memory, the everyday life of the metropolis is experienced as dis- orientating, aggressive a continual barrage of shocks. Rather than the entrepreneurial asceticism that Weber diagnoses, Simmel finds sensory bombardment: a helter-skelter rather than an iron-cage. For Simmel the city is a space of over-stimulation, where stimuli force the nerves to make such violent responses, tear them about so brutally that they exhaust their last reserves of strength (1971: 329). On the one hand this produces the neurasthenic and the agoraphobic (Simmel 1991: 4746; Vidler 1991), but on the other it produces a new type of indifference:
There is perhaps no psychic phenomenon which is so unconditionally
reserved to the city as the blas outlook. It is at first the consequence
of those rapidly shifting stimulations of the nerves which are thrown
together in all their contrasts and from which it seems to us the inten-
sification of metropolitan intellectuality seems to be derived.
(Simmel 1971: 329)
The sensory condition of the metropolis (sensory bombardment) will disrupt the subjects capacity to negotiate everyday life. But this will also provide the conditions for the metropolitan type to function in spite of this. What Simmel is keen to register is the cost involved in adapting (or not) to this sensory environment. At one extreme lies the neurasthenic fate of a pathological response, at the other lies the total indifference toward the distinction between things (Simmel 1971: 329). If the metropolis is the expressive environment of the money economy, the cost in terms of social interaction and experience is a decrease in emotional responses, a general transformation from qualities to quantities: It has been money economy which has thus filled the daily life of so many people with weighing, calcu- lating, enumerating and the reduction of qualitative values to quantitative terms (3278). Simmels approach to everyday life continually moves from impression- istic detail to abstraction and back again. In an attempt to capture the everydayness of everyday life, Simmel works to hold on to the experience of everyday life without erasing it under the auspices of an abstract philo- sophical system. But while the impressionistic details puncture any claim to homogeneity, the aesthetic field that they present is one of a generalized experience of modernity. This is partly due to the practice of philosophical impressionism that in its very form tends towards the general. For Simmel this is the value of sociological work, but it is not a generalized view from above; rather it works to construct a new storey beneath historical materi- alism. Simmels sociology is a form of base materialism that seeks to diagnose fundamental forces by treating the everyday as the most significant material
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SIMMEL: FRAGMENTS OF EVERYDAY LIFE
for analysis. As a form of attention to the everyday, such impressionism was
both complemented and disrupted by the practice of montage that would
emerge as the predominant avant-garde technique of the twentieth century.
It is significant that Walter Benjamin followed the path laid down by Simmel
in his attention to the urban everyday of modernity, but insisted on the prac-
tice of montage as his basic methodology. For Benjamin to travel from Simmel
to montage he had to pass through Surrealism.
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Any serious exploration of occult, surrealistic, phantasmagoric gifts and phe-
nomena presupposes a dialectical intertwinement to which a romantic turn of
mind is impervious. For histrionic or fanatical stress on the mysterious side of
the mysterious takes us no further; we penetrate the mystery only to the degree
that we recognize it in the everyday world, by virtue of a dialectical optic that
perceives the everyday as impenetrable, the impenetrable as everyday.
(Benjamin [1929] 1985: 237)
How long shall I retain this sense of the marvellous suffusing everyday existence?
(Aragon [1926] 1987: 24)
Surrealism and the everyday
T
HERE IS A DANGER THAT Surrealisms attempt to make the
familiar (the everyday) unfamiliar has itself become all too familiar. The
term surreal has become part of a general social currency to be used in
reference to everything from advertising to talking about personal experi-
ence it has become everyday. The art historian Thomas Crow has written
of the fate of the artistic avant-garde as a kind of research and development
arm of the culture industry (Crow 1985: 257). For Crow,
The case of Surrealism is perhaps the most notorious instance of this
process. Breton and his companions had discovered in the sedimentary
layers of earlier capitalist forms of life in Paris something like the
material unconscious of the city, the residue of earlier repressions. But
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Chapter 4
SURREALISM
4. Surrealism: The marvellous in the everyday
in retrieving marginal forms of consumption, in making that latent text
manifest, they provided modern advertising with one of its most pow-
erful visual tools that now familiar terrain in which commodities
behave autonomously and create an alluring dreamscape of their own.
(Crow 1985: 257)
Worn thin by over-use and ambivalently linked to processes of commod-
ification, Surrealism is reduced to a set of formal techniques exemplified by
the chance encounter on a dissecting table of a sewing-machine and an
umbrella (Lautramont, quoted in Ades 1986: 115). To recover Surrealisms
potential for attending to the everyday we need to return to moments when
the Surrealist project refused either to inhabit the separate realm of art and
design or to be reduced to supplying it with innovative techniques.
Peter Brgers Theory of the Avant-Garde also privileges Surrealism. His
account sees Surrealism as an attempted sublation of art in the praxis of life
(Brger 1984: 51). Terry Eagleton has explained this as an impulse to
dismantle the institutional autonomy of art, erase the frontiers between
culture and political society and return aesthetic production to its humble,
unprivileged place within social practices as a whole (Eagleton 1986: 131).
In essence then, Surrealism would have to become everyday; it would have
to be of the everyday. While the history of Surrealism (see Gersham 1974;
Lewis 1988; Nadeau 1987) has evidenced the difficulty of maintaining such
an impulse, the task here is to recover something of its possibility. To do
so will require a tactical refusal to treat Surrealism as an art form. Instead
I want to see it as a continuation of avant-gardism in general, an avant-
gardism that belongs to sociology as much or as little as it does to art.
I want to read Surrealism as a form of social research into everyday life
(Surrealism as ethnography, sociological Surrealism, Surrealistic cultural
studies and so on), to see its products not as works of art but as documents
of this social research. In this way artistic techniques such as collage become
methodologies for attending to the social. Collage (or montage) provides a
persistent methodology for attending to everyday life in Surrealism. In its
juxtaposing of disparate elements (umbrellas, sewing machines, etc.) it gener-
ates a defamiliarizing of the everyday. If everyday life is what continually
threatens to drop below a level of visibility, collage practices allow the
everyday to become vivid again by making the ordinary strange through trans-
ferring it to surprising contexts and placing it in unusual combinations. But
Surrealism is not just a technique for making the ordinary extraordinary; the
everyday in Surrealism is already strange (it is collage-like). In Surrealism
the everyday is not the familiar and banal realm that it seems to be; only
our drab habits of mind understand it in this way. Instead the everyday is
where the marvellous exists. As such, collage is both a way of breaking habits
of mind that would submit the everyday to normalizing impulses and a suit-
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EVERYDAY LIFE AND CULTURAL THEORY
able form for representing the everyday. It is in the actuality of the everyday, when passing a second-hand shop, for instance, where umbrellas and sewing- machines find themselves collaged together on a dissecting table. Surrealism is about an effort, an energy, to find the marvellous in the everyday, to recognize the everyday as a dynamic montage of elements, to make it strange so that its strangeness can be recognized. The classic Surrealist can be seen as Sherlock Holmes-like: faced with the deadly boredom of the everyday, the Surrealist takes to the street, working to find and create the marvel- lousness of the everyday. If Surrealisms impulse is to overcome the separate spheres of knowing, so as to achieve practical operations in everyday life, then our first task will be to see how it negotiates its way out of the enclave art. Ironically, it is the rhetoric of science that provides the possibility. By dressing the move- ment in the garb of science, Surrealism effected a refusal of both art and science; or rather it rendered both terms inoperable within conventional use. The kind of avant-garde aesthetic-science that Surrealism proposed would make it incompatible with either the doctrine of autonomous aesthetic activity or the beliefs of a positivist empiricist science. This was a science that threw scientificity into crisis. As we will see in other contexts (Mass-Observation, Michel de Certeau), such a tactical use of science provided avant-garde theorists of the everyday with a powerful resource, a resource that coun- tered the rationalism of science with the possibility of a science of everyday life that would operate in the murky waters of myth and ritual. It is enough here to provide just a couple of examples. The first journal of Surrealism, La Rvolution Surraliste (19249), edited initially by Pierre Naville and Benjamin Pret, was designed to mimic the popular scientific journal La Nature. As Dawn Ades suggests:
Naville chose La Nature as his model partly to distance the new review
deliberately from other art and literary magazines, but also to suggest
a commitment to research, the gathering of evidence although it
was evidence of a kind meant to subvert or question the scientific
certainties of a reign of logic.
(Ades 1986a: 159)
At the same time the main participants in the Surrealist project opened a Bureau of Surrealist Research ( Bureau de Recherches Surralistes ) at 15 rue de Grenelle in Paris and advertised for revolutionary research participants (Lewis 1988: 20; Nadeau 1987: 913). As if the refusal of art-ness was not evident enough, the Bureau of Surrealist Research published a declaration in January 1925 in which they state: We have nothing to do with literature; but we are quite capable, when necessary, of making use of it like anyone else. Surrealism is not a new means of expression, or an easier one, nor a metaphysics of poetry
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SURREALISM: THE MARVELLOUS IN THE EVERYDAY
(quoted in Nadeau 1987: 2401). Surrealism continually employed a scientific
language, writing of research, exploratory investigations and laboratory
work. The authentic feel of much of this is provided by the fact that a good
proportion of first-wave Surrealists, including Andr Breton, came from
medical backgrounds (see the biographies in Krauss and Livingston 1986:
193237).
As well as embracing a certain discourse of science, Surrealism worked to
refuse the material trappings of art and design. As we will see, the literary
practices of Breton and Aragon work against the conditions of literary narra-
tive. But perhaps the most productive refusal of the trappings of art and
design comes from Pierre Naville in the third issue of La Rvolution Surraliste :
I have no taste except distaste. Masters, master crooks, smear your
canvases. Everyone knows there is no surrealist painting. Neither the
marks of a pencil abandoned to the accident of gesture, nor the image
retracing the forms of the dream, nor the imaginative fantasies, of
course can be described.
But there are spectacles... The cinema, not because it is life, but
the marvellous, the agency of chance elements. The street, kiosks, auto-
mobiles, screaming doors, lamps bursting in the sky. Photographs:
Eusebius , Le Matin , Excelsior , La Nature the smallest ampoule in the
world, followed by a murderer. The circulation of blood in the thick-
ness of a membrane.
(Naville, quoted in Ades 1986a: 160)
The fact that Pierre Naville was very quickly ousted from his editorial
role in the journal to be replaced by Breton, who was at the same time
writing a number of essays on painting (which would make up Surrealism and
Painting [Breton 1972b]) shows the difficulty of providing any definitive
account of Surrealism (Krauss 1987: 989; Krauss and Livingston 1986:
1920). Our task is not, however, to account for internecine struggles, but
to try and recover the possibilities Surrealism offers for an approach to
everyday life; as such the Naville quote is exceptionally useful. In this polemic
Naville condemns painting and drawing as unserviceable for Surrealism, but
at the same time he suggests a number of places where the Surrealist everyday
will be found. In Navilles text Surrealism has no need of invention; the
surreal is already there in the everyday: in the street, kiosks, automobiles,
screaming doors, lamps bursting in the sky. Alongside this, the surreal
everyday exists in popular magazines: in scientific journalism where micro-
scopic photography renders the body strange, or in the sensationalist press
where images of crime scenes exist side by side with pictures of celebrities.
The Surrealist sociologists of the everyday have no recourse to the studio; it
is in the street and the kiosk that materials will be found. The everyday
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EVERYDAY LIFE AND CULTURAL THEORY
(encounters, happenings, suggestive juxtapositions), and the representational realm that inhabits it, not only provides the material for Surrealist investi- gation, it also provides the form: montage. Later I will consider two Surrealist documents of everyday life: Louis Aragons Paris Peasant and Andr Bretons Nadja. But first a brief word on Surrealisms methodology.
Marvellous montage
Philippe Soupault, looking somewhat haggard, would ring the doorbells
and ask the concierges if Philippe Soupault did not live there. Benjamin
Pret would insult priests on the street... Robert Desnos went into
trances at Bretons house. Georges Limbour, famished and simulating
Desnoss trance, would get down on all fours, bark, and eat the dogs
food. Louis Aragon sang softly: No, I wont go home. Jacques Prvert,
at night dressed as a hooligan, would lead astray the innocent passer-by
in the bourgeois quarters. Tanguy captured spiders, which he ate alive
to terrify the neighbourhood. Dali... gave lectures at the Sorbonne
with his bare right foot soaking in a pan of milk.
(Waldberg 1997: 345)
About thirty-five years later Guy Debord would call these types of opera- tions conscious alterations in everyday life (Debord [1961] 1981b: 6875). Surrealisms attention to everyday life stands the everyday on its head. If the everyday was to be perceived as the marvellous, against common under- standing of the everyday as ordinary and drab, then an alteration was necessary. A Surrealist politics of the everyday always included a dual perspec- tive: Transform the world, Marx said; change life, Rimbaud said. These two watchwords are one for us (Breton [1935] 1972a: 241). The capitalist everyday was impoverished and alienated, and required social revolution to transform it. But rationalist consciousness was also impoverished and this required Rimbauds long, boundless, and reasoned disordering of all the senses (Ross 1988: 102). Surrealisms commitment to the Communist Party was as vociferous as it was unorthodox, and its hard not to feel that Rimbaud figured ahead of Marx in the pantheon of Surrealist heroes. For Surrealism, contemporary social organization (capitalism) hadnt eradicated the marvel- lous in the everyday, even if it had sidelined it to marginal pockets. More importantly, the existence of the marvellous in the everyday was alienated from consciousness by forms of mental organization. What was needed was a systematic attack on such mental bureaucracy. Bretons definition of Surrealism provided the terms for such systematic disorganization:
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SURREALISM: THE MARVELLOUS IN THE EVERYDAY
SURREALISM, n. Psychic automatism in its pure state, by which one
proposes to express verbally, by means of the written word, or in
any other manner the actual functioning of thought. Dictated by
thought, in the absence of any control exercised by reason, exempt
from any aesthetic or moral concern.
(Breton 1924: 26)
Psychic automatism was the name given to the processes of surrealistic
production that tried deliberately to negate the control of reason. If states
of mind could be found that would make the subject more responsive to
chance encounters, hypnotic trances for instance, then there were also oper-
ations within representation that could capitalize on chance.
When the conversation on the days events or proposals of amusing
or scandalous interventions in the life of the times began to pall, we
would turn to games; written games at first, contrived so that elements
of language attacked each other in the most paradoxical manner possible,
and so that human communication, misled from the start, was thrown
into the mood most amenable to adventure. From then on no
unfavourable prejudice (in fact, quite the contrary) was shown against
childhood games, for which we were rediscovering the old enthusiasm,
although considerably amplified.
(Breton, quoted in Waldberg 1997: 93)
One such game was Exquisite Corpse , described as a Game of folded paper
played by several people, who compose a sentence or drawing without anyone
seeing the preceding collaboration (Waldberg 1997: 934). The name itself
comes from the results obtained the first time Surrealists played it: The
exquisite corpse will drink the new wine (94). Other practices included
seances, forms of automatic writing deliberately designed to privilege uncon-
scious associations and visual forms of automatic production that find images
in the abstract landscapes of paint surfaces (Lewis 1988: 1820).
For this study it is a moot point whether such production becomes an
end in itself, or if it is used as a training ground for altering consciousness
in everyday life. No doubt it was at times both. What is more important are
the operations themselves and the values they are predicated on. Crucial to
all Surrealist practice is the production of juxtaposition. As such, all forms
of practice can be seen as collage practices even if they dont follow the
cutting and sticking implied by the term. For Breton there was a way of
evaluating such juxtapositions:
It is, as it were, from the fortuitous juxtaposition of the two terms
that a particular light has sprung, the light of the image, to which we
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EVERYDAY LIFE AND CULTURAL THEORY
are infinitely sensitive. The value of the image depends upon the beauty
of the spark obtained; it is, consequently, a function of the difference
of potential between two conductors.
(Breton 1924: 37)
What is at stake here is the production of the spark, generated by the juxta- position of different materials, juxtapositions possible in a range of spheres: in poems and paintings, in everyday encounters in the street or in the everynight encounters of the dream. The more difference there is between the two (or more) ingredients, the greater the spark. Slight differences remain within a familiar world; massive differences produce shocks and sparks that jolt us out of the familiar. As such it becomes the perfect foil for habits of mind that have become blinkered by routinized thought. The privileging of consciousness over social relations has resulted in Surrealism being desig- nated as a form of idealism. This is not without its truth, though the weight of such an insult seems to have lessened in recent years. On the other hand, idealism doesnt come close to the materiality of Surrealist practice, both on the page and in the actuality of everyday life. If there is one material site for studying the everyday for Surrealism it must be the streets of Paris (the city that exemplifies the birth of urban modernity). Such pedestrian produc- tion is exemplified by Nadja and Paris Peasant.
Nadja and Paris Peasant
Bretons Nadja ([1928] 1960) is made up of a number of elements that mark it out as distinct from mainstream novelistic narration. Composed of: a contemplative preface where a number of anecdotes of coincidence are recounted and reflected upon; the story of Bretons various encounters with a woman called Nadja; photographs that relate to this story and to other parts of the text; drawings and other evidence related to the text; and a final afterword Nadja doesnt add up to a novel. Maurice Blanchot suggests that the main text of Nadja should be seen as a rcit , a tale that tells of a singular and exceptional event. In relating this to other rcits , such as The Odyssey , Blanchot claims:
Something has happened, something which someone has experienced
who tells about it afterwards, in the same way that Ulysses needed to
experience the event and survive it in order to become Homer, who
told about it. Of course the tale ( rcit ) is usually about an exceptional
event, one which eludes the form of everyday time and the world of
the usual sort of truth, perhaps any truth. This is why it so insistently
rejects everything which could connect it with the frivolity of a fiction
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SURREALISM: THE MARVELLOUS IN THE EVERYDAY
(the novel, on the other hand, contains only what is believable and
familiar and yet is very anxious to pass for fiction).
(Blanchot 1981: 109)
He adds: The tale is not the narration of an event, but that event itself, the
approach to that event, the place where that event is made to happen (109).
If, for Blanchot, the novel deals in the everyday, it does so in a way that
evades the everyday. On the other hand the tale is the everyday when the
everyday is exceptional or marvellous. In its refusal to exercise the rhetor-
ical tropes of the novel and persuade us we are entering a world, Nadja
offers us the marvellous everyday stripped of description. Here places are
actual. As a tale, Nadja is a chronicle of Bretons relationship (sexual, finan-
cial, poetic) with a woman he meets by chance. The tale chronicles the
various meetings he has with her and the walks they take around the city
and outskirts of Paris. Nadja herself is both femme fatale and a helpless
woman in need of Bretons care. The ambivalent representation of Nadjas
relationship to the everyday is exemplary of the Surrealist conception of
everyday life: she is seen as having escaped the everydayness of the everyday,
at the same time as being in danger of falling back into its routines. The
gendering of the everyday is ambivalent but powerful the marvellous
everyday is made vivid by a femininity out of control; at the same time,
another feminine everydayness threatens to engulf Nadja in the domestic.
We will return to this shortly.
One of the elements that mark the actuality of Nadja s surrealistic
everyday, are the photographs by Jacques-Andr Boiffard. Boiffards photo-
graphs punctuate the tale of Nadja as a form of evidence, not of the event
but of the place of the event. The photographs are empty of episode. Here
is Michel Beaujour describing Boiffards photographs in Nadja :
What we are shown is nothing: not only have the places defended them-
selves against the photographer, but those that have allowed themselves
to be captured... are quite dumb: nothing is suggested in these banal
photographs. These photographs almost empty of human presence,
proceed from a zero ground of representation: they never move away
from the amateurs snapshot or out-of-date picture postcard.
(Beaujour, quoted in Ades 1986a: 163)
In an apparent condemnation of Boiffards photographs Beaujour finds the
most adequate terms to attend to them: amateur snapshots and out-of-date
picture postcards (figure 4). The scene of Nadja is an artless and outmoded
presentation of places that themselves refer to another time than the actu-
ality of the tale. While Nadja and Breton traverse Paris and its environs, the
everyday spaces that they encounter echo with the ghosts of the past, but
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these ghosts can only signify as an absence. This is the heroic everyday of popular struggles that never found a place in the monuments of official history. In a recent rereading of Nadja , Margaret Cohen takes seriously Benjamins claim that Nadja effects a substitution of a political for a historical view of the past (Benjamin, quoted in Cohen 1993: 80). The sites of meetings and
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SURREALISM: THE MARVELLOUS IN THE EVERYDAY
Figure 4 And the dead, the dead photograph by Jacques-Andr Boiffard (1928) of the Place Dauphine for Nadja
wanderings become an index of a repressed history of struggles, revolutions
and betrayals. Thus the Place Vendme is remembered not for its column
and statue, but for the toppling of this column during the Commune of 1871
(an act organized by Courbet). Nadja is a tour and a detour of the non-
monumental history of repressed popular struggles, struggles that can be seen
as the eruption of everydayness in the everyday. As Blanchot suggests,
everyday life becomes vivid in moments of effervescence those we call
revolution when existence is public through and through (Blanchot 1987:
12). When Breton and Nadja reach the Place Dauphine (figure 4), Breton
writes: Where only two or three couples are at this moment fading into
the darkness, she seems to see a crowd. And the dead, the dead! (Breton
1960: 83). Such a space as this reveals, as Cohen suggests, traces of the
insurrectional past in the uncanny present: Multiple ghosts of revolutionary
violence moreover descend on the place Dauphine from all sides, from the
Pont-Neuf, where the Revolution tore down the bronze statue of King Henri
IV to the Palais de Justice burned down by the Commune (Cohen 1993:
1001). Thus, in the everyday environment of Parisian streets lies a history
of insurrection and struggles, struggles that Breton uses as a ghostly pres-
ence and a reminder. These were attempts to transform not the means of
production, but the fabric of everyday life.
And it is this fabric that Bretons writing ambiguously articulates, for it
is Nadja herself who Breton recognizes as having transformed her everyday
life (a transformation that Breton is often deeply resistant to), but it is also
everyday life that is the threat that will possibly normalize her. In this Breton
plays the part of the paternalistic artist, who alone can save his muse from
a fate she doesnt recognize:
Astonished as I continued to be by her behaviour, based as it was on
the purest of intuition alone and ceaselessly relying on miracle, I was
also increasingly alarmed to feel that, when even [ever] I left her, she
was sucked back into that whirlwind of ordinary life continuing around
her and eager to force her, among other concessions, to eat, to sleep.
(Breton 1960: 11415)
Nadjas behaviour as a fatale femininity transcends the humdrum everyday
at the same time as the domestic (managed femininity) continually threatens
to bring her down to earth so that she can live (eat, sleep). Where is Breton
in all this? Where is his everyday? Does he sleep and eat? And does this force
him back into the everyday? In many ways Nadja demonstrates Surrealisms
tendency to depict a radically ambivalent everyday (that is both marvellous
and stultifying) and figure it through femininity. Breton figures the everyday
from outside: if he is absent from the domestic everyday he is also excluded
(or excludes himself) from the everyday as marvellous. The marvellous is
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always elsewhere along with the feminine; Breton remains a tourist in the everyday as both marvellous and mundane. Similar ambiguities of everyday life can be seen to be in operation in Louis Aragons Paris Peasant (Aragon [1926] 1987). The first half of the book offers a tour through the Passage de lOpra. This seems to provide Aragon with a mnemonic device as he recounts reminiscences of past encounters in the various bars and shops in the Passage. Paris Peasant is made up of a variety of types of representation (including a mini-play) as well as a typographically varied text where textual bits of actuality find their way on to the page in the shape of labels from bottles, newspaper articles, shop signs and so on. But what gives the Passage its ambivalent everydayness is its historicity. Paris Peasant offers an evocation of the everyday as marvellous in an actuality that places it on the brink of destruction. Aragons text is dated 1924 and was published in 1926; between these dates the Passage was sacrificed to the extension of the Boulevard Haussmann (Geist 1983: 476). The destruction of the Passage had been threatened since 1860 and in 1873 the arcades raison dtre , the opera house, was burnt down: the arcade was left as a fragment of a no longer existing architectural ensemble (476). If the arcade lost its power of attraction for the rich and powerful, it, in turn, became host to a variety of social types including the various Dada and Surrealist groups that met in the Bar Certa. The faded grandeur is, of course, what attracts them, as well as the possibilities of sexual and alcoholic intoxicants. The Passage presents a geography of everyday pleasure, the best antidote to the everyday as mundane. In the sensual realm of the hairdressers, Aragon contemplates the teaching of a bodily geography:
As far as I know, the geography of pleasure has never been taught,
although proficiency in this subject would constitute an effective weapon
against lifes tediums. No one has assumed the responsibility of assigning
its limits to the frisson, of drawing the boundaries of the caress, of
charting the territory of ecstasy.
(Aragon 1987: 578)
Other shops offer opportunities to remember: the stamp shop, for instance, offers Aragon reminiscences of childhood. But if this is the everyday as marvel- lous, then the easy nostalgia this affords is continually undercut by the social actuality of the planned destruction. Aragons text details, through newspaper clippings and the posters displayed by shops in the arcade, the struggle of the arcade. The shopkeepers have formed themselves into a collective to try and fight the BD Haussmann Building Society. At the same time newspapers are revealing a conspiracy that shows the building society (a supposedly civic department) as involved
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financially with the massive department store, Galeries Lafayette. With hind-
sight, but also plainly visible at the time, the battle has already been lost. If
this is a site of the everyday as marvellous, then its destruction is already
guaranteed. Against the forces of big business what political will can the
marvellous muster? A handful of shopkeepers and a few bohemian types.
Paris Peasant is politically and surrealistically pessimistic; it holds little hope
for the everyday, in terms of both the actuality of everyday and the effort
of will needed to find the marvellous in the everyday.
Reading the preface of Paris Peasant you can hear the voice of someone
who recognizes the impossibility of the Surrealist project:
Each day the modern sense of existence becomes subtly altered. A
mythology ravels and unravels. It is a knowledge, a science which begets
itself and makes away with itself. I am already twenty-six years old,
am I still privileged to take part in this miracle? How long shall I retain
this sense of the marvellous suffusing everyday existence? I see it fade
away in every man who advances into his own life as though along an
always smoother road, who advances into the worlds habits with
an increasing ease, who rids himself progressively of the taste and
texture of the unwonted, the unthought of. To my great despair, this
is what I shall never know.
(Aragon 1987: 24)
The historicity of the everyday and the marvellous is stressed, but its a losing
battle. The question of the marvellous in the everyday can only solicit anxiety.
The sacred in the everyday
If, in the dialectic between finding the Surreal in everyday life and manu-
facturing it in artistic products, a history of mainstream Surrealism privileges
the latter over the former, then there are pockets of dissident Surrealism
that redress this balance. The potential of Surrealism as a sociology of everyday
life is perhaps most fully realized in the poet-ethnologists who gather around
the journal Documents (192930) (see Bataille et al. 1995) and the Collge
de Sociologie (19379) (see Hollier 1988). In the pages of Documents , the
editors Georges Bataille and Michel Leiris brought together a heterogeneous
range of materials (body parts, old coins, new movies, festive rituals) in an
onslaught against conventional ascriptions of aesthetic value. By combining
Western fine art with ethnographic and archaeological studies, Documents
ruptured the domain of aesthetic value; as Denis Hollier suggests, ethnog-
raphy exceeds the auspices of the fine arts geographically, as archeology
exceeds it historically (Hollier 1992: 5). In juxtaposing cultural materials
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from a range of societies (societies ideologically represented as structurally exclusive the West versus the rest), a radical cultural relativism was produced that combined the corrosive analysis of a reality now identified as local and artificial with the supplying of exotic alternatives (Clifford 1988: 130). By drawing connections across cultures as well as privileging other cultures, Documents used ethnography to perform a radical questioning of norms as well as a levelling and a reclassification of familiar categories (129). What this suggests is the possibility of rethinking and re-imagining Western everyday modernity by juxtaposing it with other cultures by a global cross-cultural perspective. In the Collge de Sociologie such a perspective was taken as the basis for a research group dedicated to the Sacred Sociology of the Contemporary World (Hollier 1988: 1578). The term sacred is a reference to Durkheims sociology, particularly The Elementary Forms of Religious Life , where indigenous Australian society is examined as structured across two worlds the sacred and the profane (Durkheim [1912] 1995: 21625). Such a division is easily translated into the non-everyday and the everyday, and Durkheims work reveals the structural reliance these two worlds have on each other. Of course Durkheim is looking at what he sees as an elementary culture, not a modern Western culture that might be considered as post-sacred. The radical nature of the Collge is exemplified by its refusal to buy into this myth of rationalist post-sacred modernity, and instead to pursue the possibilities offered by ethnography for finding the sacred in the heart of the modern Western every- day. For Michel Leiris such a project results in a self-ethnography an other- ing of the self and the everyday world it inhabits, that focuses on the sacred not as a separate realm, but as a realm that lies at the centre of the everyday. Between the demise of Documents and the emergence of the Collge, Leiris joined Marcel Griaules Mission DakarDjibouti (19313), an ethno- graphic mission that crossed Africa from the Atlantic to the Red Sea along the lower rim of the Sahara (Clifford 1988: 55). From this emerged his LAfrique fantme (1934) a text composed of dreams, fragments of obser- vation, and a consistent self-analysis of his fears and desires (see Clifford 1988: 16574; Torgovnick 1990: 10518). If this is ethnographic field- work, it is never clear who or what the object of study could be aside from Leiris himself. Such a work can be seen as a prologue to the sustained auto- biographical project that continued during Leiris life. Starting with Manhood and culminating in his four-volume Rules of the Game (see the two volumes so far translated into English: Leiris [1948] 1991, [1955] 1997), the subject, Michel Leiris, is subjected to an ordeal analogous to the bullfight: The Autobiographer as Torero as Leiris titles his Afterword to Manhood (Leiris [1939] 1992). In January 1938, Leiris gave a lecture to the Collge de Sociologie called The Sacred in Everyday Life (which was published in July in the Nouvelle
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Revue Franais , along with texts by Bataille and Roger Caillois that together
constituted For a College of Sociology [Hollier 1988: 7, 2431, 98102]).
The text, which maps out his autobiographical project, begins with a ques-
tion, the answer to which is the everyday:
What, for me, is the sacred? To be more exact: what does my sacred
consist of? What objects, places, or occasions awake in me that mixture
of fear and attachment, that ambiguous attitude caused by the approach
of something simultaneously attractive and dangerous, prestigious and
outcast that combination of respect, desire, and terror that we take
as the psychological sign of the sacred?... It is a matter of searching
through some of the humblest things, taken from everyday life and
located outside of what today makes up the officially sacred (religion,
fatherland, morals).
(Hollier 1988: 24)
The everyday that is the site for Leiris sacred is the stove in his familys
house, his parents bedroom, the bathroom toilet, the racecourse, his fathers
gun, and various words and names. The details need not concern us. Here
is the material geography of Freuds The Psychopathology of Everyday Life , and
like Freuds book, here the modern everyday is removed from the Iron
Cage of reason and is recognized as a world of myth, superstition and the
sacred. In an assessment of Leiris contribution to the Collge, Denis Hollier
writes:
The College of Sociology cast its lot against life that would be exclu-
sively quotidian. It was imperative to escape. The exception, that which
eluded dailiness, was deemed sacred. The strength of Leiriss contri-
bution, indicating how much he has to offer, is summed up in the
wording of his title: The Sacred in Everyday Life replaces simple
antagonism by polemical inclusion.
(Hollier 1997: 122)
Whether it was necessary to travel to Africa to realize the possibilities
that Surrealism offered for an ethnography of everyday life in Western moder-
nity is hard to say. It does seem clear, though, that cultural differences had
to collide in a way that couldnt be managed by the dominant accounts of
civilization for everyday life to become both vivid and other. At the same
time that Leiris was publishing The Sacred in Everyday Life the seeds had
already been sown for an Anthropology at Home in England. Such a project
(the subject of chapter 6 on Mass-Observation) contained the same constel-
lation of ingredients (a Surrealist poetics coupled with an application of
ethnographic perspectives on Western culture) while directing them (as we
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will see) to quite different ends. Before looking at Mass-Observation, we need to follow the deployment of Surrealist poetics as Walter Benjamin critically negotiated them. Benjamins approach to Surrealism makes vivid the themes around everyday life that we will need to insist upon again and again: the privileging of a specifically urban everyday and the investigation of the everyday as a non-conscious realm.
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Method of this project: literary montage. I need say nothing. Only exhibit
( zeigen ). I wont filch anything of value or appropriate any ingenious turns of
phrase. Only the trivia, the trash which I dont want to inventory, but
simply allow it to come into its own in the only way possible: by putting it
to use. (Benjamin 1989 [N1a, 8])^1
S
ITUATING THE WORK of Walter Benjamin in a tradition for theo-
rizing the everyday is not without its problems. As the editors of a
collection of writings on Benjamin suggest, if we are to search for the actu-
ality of Walter Benjamin, perhaps it is to be found in his quietly determined
failure to belong to a speciality, to an institution, to an easily specifiable
tradition of thought (Marcus and Nead 1993: v). Such a failure is clearly
productive and has generated a secondary literature that is overwhelming in
its scale. As well as being an indication of the works range and productivity,
it is also a sign of the works ambiguities. Commentary on Benjamins work
is always answerable to the charge that in privileging one aspect of the
work it fails to attend to another: a Marxist Benjamin ignoring a Benjamin
informed by Jewish mysticism; a Benjamin interested in the possibilities of
new technologies neglecting a Benjamin fascinated by historical remains. Yet
the very fact that Benjamin is not easily assimilated within definable cate-
gories should signal the potential of the everyday as a useful non-category
for attending to his work. When Peter Osborne comments that everyday
life flows through the whole of Benjamins later writings, he also warns that
it is rarely to be found reflectively, as the object of an explicit theorization
(Osborne 1995: 180). To fashion Benjamin into a theorist of the everyday
requires privileging certain moments across a body of work and forging the
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5. Benjamins trash aesthetics
links between them. While this might obscure some of the tensions oper- ating in any single text, it has the advantage of bringing together aspects of the work that might otherwise seem irreconcilable. From the point of view of the everyday, Benjamins interest in the epic theatre of Brecht (for instance) is not a rejection of his commitment to a messianic belief in redemption. Instead they both become part of a heterogeneous project for rescuing the everyday life of modernity from silence. The theme of everyday life as a problematic is central to Benjamins work. His approach echoes Simmels interest in the microscopic and the unassimilable particularity of the material world. When Benjamin describes his project as being [T]o detect the crystal of the total event in the analysis of the small, individual moment [N 2, 6] he could almost be quoting from Simmel. In comparison with Simmel though, Benjamin seems less certain about the possibility of uncovering a base that might make sense of the modern everyday. To bring everyday material together in a productive juxta- position seems to look more like a chance encounter than a methodological procedure, a daring wager rather than a sure thing. Such differences produce telling contrasts between the two writers while at the same time pointing to historical changes in the perception and condition of everyday life. Benjamins approach to history is through trash through the spent and discarded materials that crowd the everyday. In this everyday material world different temporalities exist side by side: the latest version alongside last years model. Everyday life registers the process of modernization as an incessant accumulation of debris: modernity produces obsolescence as part of its continual demand for the new (the latest version becomes last years model with increasing frequency). But for Benjamin the modern everyday is not to be found just in material objects; the world of affects, of sensation is equally important. Benjamins project charts a time of both increased accu- mulation and intensified sensation. In Benjamins unfinished Arcades Project (Benjamin 1999) nineteenth-century Paris is the scene for tracing the modern everyday. Here the city is orchestrated by the flow of commodities and their apparitions (advertising, cinema and so on). The Paris of the Arcades Project teems with bodies, images, signs, stimulants, movement, and is experienced as a perpetual assault on both tradition and the human sensorium alike. But if modernity evidences a wealth of material goods and an intensification of sensation, for Benjamin it paradoxically displays a paucity of communicable experience. Benjamins importance as a theorist of the everyday is most evident in his attention to the everyday experiences of modernity. Evident throughout Benjamins later work are the interlinked themes of the decrease in commu- nicable experience and the problem of finding a poetics that is capable of articulating the actuality of modern life. If traditional narrative forms are no longer adequate for representing the modern everyday, it is not because they
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have become shop-worn, but because the transformation of everyday life
itself has meant that everyday experience is no longer available to this form
of representation. As his friend Brecht put it, and as we have already quoted,
Reality changes; in order to represent it, modes of representation must also
change (Brecht 1980: 82). For Benjamin the historicity of experience needs
to be recognized, apprehended and made available for criticism. To a certain
degree Benjamin finds a poetics for apprehending the modern everyday in
Surrealism, but Benjamins take on Surrealism is a dissident one. If Surrealism
finds the right field for attending to the modern (everyday life) and performs
the poetic operations necessary for apprehending it (montage), it fails to
mobilize its tools in a resolutely critical way. While Surrealism finds the
mythic in the everyday, it also falls under its spell. Surrealism has the tools
to puncture the dream of modernity, but fails to cash in. Thus, Benjamin
describes his Arcades Project in relation to the failure of Surrealism:
Setting off the slant of this work against Aragon: whereas Aragon persis-
tently remains in the realm of dreams, here it is a question of finding
the constellation of awakening. While an impressionistic element lingers
on in Aragon (mythology) and this impressionism should be held
responsible for the many nebulous philosophemes of his book what
matters here is the dissolution of mythology into the space of history.
[N1, 9]
If Surrealism fails (and in practice it clearly does for Benjamin), then it is due
to a lack of attention to the historicity of modern experience. Benjamins the-
oretical attention to the historicity of the everyday is inscribed in his writings
in the idea of the dialectical image: these are specific constellations that can
awaken thought and history from its slumber in the mythic realm of the
dream. Dialectical images operate for Benjamin as dialectics [history] at a
standstill [N 2a, 3]. What this requires is the arrest of the flow of history (par-
ticularly its representation as the march of progress) so that it can be recog-
nized as a specific experience of a moment. Benjamins thought is historical,
but it does not set out to weave a convincing narrative of the past: For every
image of the past that is not recognized by the present as one of its own con-
cerns threatens to disappear irretrievably (Benjamin 1982: 257). Surrealism
must be put at the service of making the historicity of the modern recogniz-
able, and for this it cant be treated as part of an unfolding story or remain
within the charm of the dream: Can it be that awakening is the synthesis whose
thesis is dream consciousness and whose antithesis is consciousness? Then the
moment of awakening would be identical with the Now of recognizability,
in which things put on their true surrealistic face [N 3a, 3].
Suggestive as such ideas are they are hard to pin down to a practice.
Benjamins Arcades Project was part homage and part antidote to Aragons
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book and it grew to gargantuan proportions. By the time Benjamin died (overtaken by the historicity of his moment^2 ) the project was a collection of quotes, ideas and historical fragments. To see how Benjamins thinking and his concept of the dialectical image might impact on a theory of everyday life, we need to see it in operation, to see it put to use. As well as the theo- retical fragments, Benjamin has left us a series of snapshots of the Arcades Project in his 1935 Arcades Expos Paris the Capital of the Nineteenth Century (Benjamin 1983a: 15576). These will provide the material for the final section on Benjamin.
Ragpicking
In the mass of commentary that has attended Benjamins work, particularly his monumental Arcades Project , the most vivid characterization of his approach to the everyday is to be found in the title of an essay by Irving Wohlfarth: The Historian as Chiffonnier [ragpicker] (Wohlfarth 1986). This description of a methodological approach to culture, analogous to ragpicking, is first offered by Benjamin himself to describe the work of his friend Siegfried Kracauer: And if we want to visualize him just for himself, in the solitude of his craft and his endeavour, we see: a ragpicker at daybreak, lancing with his stick scraps of language and tatters of speech in order to throw them in his cart, grumbling, stubbornly, somewhat the worse for drink (Benjamin 1998: 114). The words chiffonnier and ragpicker, or the German term Lumpenhndler , designate a practice and a person with an uneasy relationship to the everyday life of modernity. Ragpicking is the career of those who have been remaindered by capitalist modernization (figure 5); for instance, the one-time craft worker made redundant by industrialization, or impover- ished aristocrats, or the present-day homeless. In The Eighteenth Brumaire of Louis Bonaparte , Marx refers to these members of the lumpenproletariat as the whole indefinite, disintegrated mass, thrown hither and thither (Marx [1852] 1968: 137). Ragpickers, outmoded by modernization, struggle to get by, by finding value in what has been devalued, outmoded. The detritus of modernity is scoured for its use-value. It is here that the analogy between the ragpicker and the cultural historian has importance for theorizing everyday life. Benjamin, like Simmel, will look to the meagre materials of everyday life in his attempt to apprehend actuality. As Richard Wolin suggests, Benjamins project is to extract the noumenal from within the phenomenal realm: to reverse the terms of Western metaphysics by ceding pride of place in the field of philosophical inquiry to what had previously been merely derided and scorned: the ephemeral and transient aspects of the phenomenal world (Wolin 1989: 210). Such a description echoes forcefully with the words of Charles Baudelaire, Benjamins literary guide to the everyday life
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Figure 5 Ragpicker (18991900) photograph by Eugne Atget. Albumen-silver
print, 9 3/8 x 7 (24 x 18 cm). The Museum of Modern Art, New York.
Abbott-Levy Collection. Partial gift of Shirley C. Burden. Copy Print 2001
The Museum of Modern Art, New York
of modernity: By modernity [ modernit ] I mean the ephemeral, the fugitive, the contingent (Baudelaire 1964: 13). But Benjamins project isnt just about attending to the infinitesimal, the overlooked (Sieburth 1989: 14); its material objects must also signal a different temporality, another time (or rather they must live in two times). Crucially, they must be out of fashion. The object of fascination that animates Benjamins later work is the Parisian arcade, not in its heyday but as a ruin existing in a time when it has been superseded, outmoded. The ragpicker deals in the second-hand, in the dreams of the past for a future that was never realized. The modern-day ragpicker treads a fine line between a sentimental attitude towards the past and a revo- lutionary nostalgia for the future. When the latter takes precedence over the former, the ragpickers radical task becomes one of cataloguing the broken promises that have been abandoned in the everyday trash of history. The focus on trash, on the detritus of modernity as it exists in the actuality of everyday life, allows Benjamin to perform a double operation. On the one hand it allows his account of modernity to refuse the lure of celebrating the new, of eulogizing progress. On the other hand it also prevents a sentimentalizing of the past. For Benjamin these two would only get in the way of recognizing the now-ness of everyday life: Overcoming the concept of progress and the concept of period of decline are two sides of the same thing [N 2, 5]. Debris allows for a radical refusal of progress; it allows for a vision of history that is nothing if not attentive to its unreason. In one of his most poetic utterances, Benjamin figures history as nothing but detritus:
His eyes are staring, his mouth is open, his wings are spread. This is
how one pictures the angel of history. His face is turned toward the
past. Where we perceive a chain of events, he sees one single cata-
strophe which keeps piling wreckage upon wreckage and hurls it in
front of his feet. The angel would like to stay, awaken the dead, and
make whole what has been smashed. But a storm is blowing from
Paradise; it has got caught in his wings with such violence that the angel
can no longer close them. This storm irresistibly propels him into the
future to which his back is turned, while the pile of debris before him
grows skyward. This storm is what we call progress.
(Benjamin 1982: 25960)
But Benjamin doesnt remain within the melancholy realm often ascribed to him. His project is an attempt to redeem the everyday experience of modernity from silence. In the face of the endless proliferation of trash, Benjamin potentially suggests a trash aesthetics that could be used radi- cally and critically to attend to the everyday. The method might be thought of in terms of recycling an ecology of everyday experience.
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Articulating the experience of the everyday
The most sustained reflection on the experience of the modern everyday
occurs in Benjamins essay of 1939, Some Motifs in Baudelaire. But to reach
this essay we need to turn to an earlier essay, The Storyteller: Reflections
on the Works of Nikolai Leskov (1936). In this earlier essay Benjamin vividly
conjures an image of modern experience as devalued:
It is as if something that seemed inalienable to us, the securest among
our possessions, were taken from us: the ability to exchange experiences.
One reason for this phenomenon is obvious: experience has fallen
in value. And it looks as if it is continuing to fall into bottomlessness
… With the [First] World War a process began to become apparent which has not halted since then. Was it not noticeable at the end of the war that men returned from the battlefield grown silent not richer, but poorer in communicable experience?… For never has experience been contradicted more thoroughly than strategic experi- ence by tactical warfare, economic experience by inflation, bodily experience by mechanical warfare, moral experience by those in power. A generation that has gone to school on a horse-drawn streetcar now stood under the open sky in a countryside in which nothing remained unchanged but the clouds, and beneath these clouds, in a field of force of destructive torrents and explosions, was the tiny, fragile human body. (Benjamin 1982: 834)
The juxtaposition of the fragile human body with a landscape destroyed by
modern industrial warfare vividly figures a world that has been utterly changed
by modernization (all that was solid has melted into air so to speak).
Everything has been transformed: the tempo of everyday life and the land-
scape the body exists in. The loss of experience that the passage articulates
is to do not with a lessening of the event-ness or episode of the everyday,
but with the meaningfulness and communicability of its modern form. We
may experience more in a quantitative manner but we cannot make more
of it. It cannot be incorporated into the meaningfulness of life. The modern
experience of the everyday leaves us silent. It is this silence that needs to be
challenged, not so as to provide coherence or amelioration, but so that it
can be recognized, criticized and changed. Finding forms for articulating the
everyday is for Benjamin a politics of everyday life.
The question that everyday modernity poses for Benjamin (and is
answered to some degree by the work of Baudelaire) concerns the way that
the experience of modern life might find a communicable form. As for many
German writers, for Benjamin the investigation of experience plays on the
nuanced distinction between experience as that which is simply lived-through
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( Erlebnis ) and experience as something that can be accumulated, reflected upon and communicated ( Erfahrung ). If Erlebnis is immediate it also tends towards being inchoate (it is pre-language, pre-reflection). Erfahrung on the other hand is what makes Erlebnis socially meaningful; it is the point at which experience is examined and evaluated. In English this distinction is made through context rather than by use of a different word. For instance, to talk about an experienced mechanic or cook suggests a world of experience that accumulates into a form of knowledge and know-how that can be commu- nicated to an apprentice. This is the world of Erfahrung. Erlebnis on the other hand is in English signalled by the same word, but now it means simply the sensate registering of the world: Erlebnis is what we do moment by moment. For Benjamin everyday modernity evidences a major trauma: modern Erlebnis is no longer registered as Erfahrung. The fragile human body that has been bombarded on the battlefield and whose senses have been daily assaulted in the modern city has had a glut of Erlebnis. What has been blocked is the sense-making that would give account of this within a collective culture. And this is because those forms of communication, consciousness and represen- tation simply havent been revolutionized in the way that daily experience has. What we are left with is experience that doesnt enter into meaning- fulness, cant be reflected on, and so is unavailable for criticism. In Benjamins essay Some Motifs in Baudelaire modern everyday life is characterized by shock and any theory of modern experience has to confront this historically specific quality of experience. It is the modern everyday as shock experience that needs addressing, and to attend to it only within the terms of the authentic moment of Erlebnis is to condemn it to silence, and to lose it for a political struggle of the everyday. Benjamin writes about Baudelaire as a poet of modern everyday shock experience: Of all the experiences which made life what it was, Baudelaire singled out his having been jostled by the crowd as the decisive, unique experience (Benjamin 1982: 154). For Benjamin the experience of shock is to be found in the metropolitan crowd, in the industrial mode of production, in traffic and advertising. For Benjamin, Moving through this traffic involves the individual in a series of shocks and collisions. At dangerous crossings, nervous impulses flow through him in rapid succession, like the energy from a battery (Benjamin 1982: 132). These moments of shock experience ( Erlebnis ) fail to enter into the shared discourse of experience ( Erfahrung ) that could give the modern everyday a voice that would allow for both critical attention and critical practice. In exemplifying the difference between Erlebnis and Erfahrung , Benjamin cites the unskilled factory worker: The unskilled worker is the one most deeply degraded by the drill of the machines. His work has been sealed off from experience [ Erfahrung ]; practice counts for nothing there (Benjamin 1982: 133). The experience of factory work (which, Benjamin suggests, corresponds to the experience of a passer-by in a crowd) remains
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at the level of Erlebnis precisely because practice counts for nothing.
Experience in this sense cant accumulate, because the nature of this expe-
rience is not available for attention. To privilege the moment of experience
( Erlebnis ) over the possibility of Erfahrung (experience as accumulated and
communicable knowledge) is to remain locked into an eternal repetition of
the same.
But how could Erfahrung be reconfigured so that it could communicate
modern everyday experience? How could it redeem the silence of moder-
nity? Isnt it the very nature of modern shock experience that makes it
unavailable for communicable experience? This is where Benjamins dialec-
tics of experience and expression are most valuable and most optimistic for
attending to modern everyday life. On the one hand it becomes clear that
the reason for giving such weight to Baudelaire is precisely because Benjamin
sees Baudelaire as a poet who can give Erfahrung to the shock experience
( Erlebnis ) of modern life. As Andrew Benjamin writes:
The importance of Baudelaires poetry is that it has allowed Erlebnis to
be enframed by Erfahrung. For Benjamin, Baudelaires battling crowd
is the nature of something lived through ( Erlebnis ) to which Baudelaire
has given the weight of experience ( Erfahrung ). Baudelaire turned
Erlebnis into Erfahrung. Perhaps this is Benjamins final conclusion.
(Benjamin 1989: 133)
On the other hand Benjamin will find the possibilities of Erfahrung in the
actuality of modern shock experience itself: a poetics of distraction is imag-
ined emerging from an everyday shock life. If Baudelaire offers a form for
articulating the modern everyday experience that doesnt render it dumb, so
too do a number of other representational forms. Indeed a central concern
of Benjamins work can be seen as promoting forms of representation that
offer (potentially) a political articulation of modern experience. Benjamins
interest in montage in film, his promotion of Surrealism, his continued
dialogue with the work of Bertolt Brecht, can all be seen as an attempt to
find cultural forms that could give voice to the experience of everyday life.
Benjamin is a dialectical thinker, and modern cultural forms and modern
experience are not autonomous (and discrete) realms. Margaret Cohen sug-
gests that Benjamin concludes One-Way Street by dissolving the texts opposi-
tion between proto-Chock [shock] and Erfahrung , asking whether violent
contemporary contact with external reality may in fact be the precursor of
Erfahrung not yet recognized as such (Cohen 1993: 185). Benjamins task is
not simply to find suitably modernized forms for Erfahrung , but to suggest that
Erfahrung has itself changed. Thus for Benjamin the theme of distraction
becomes something that might characterize both the lived experience of
everyday modernity (the multifarious pulls on attention) and the forms most
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productively able to articulate it (hence Benjamins optimistic view of popular cultural forms). If the experience of modern life can be seen as characterized by the pene- tration of technological and industrial forms into everyday life, then this works as both poison and cure i.e. it is what casts experience into oblivion, at the same time as it offers the resources for a new Erfahrung (not yet recognized as such) that can rescue experience and open it to critical atten- tion. The relationship between technological experience (the factory, say) and technological forms of representation is recognized. Both can be seen as the cause of alienation while potentially being analytic tools for dealing with such alienation (again we are within a stones throw of Simmel):
Whereas Poes passers-by cast glances in all directions which still
appeared to be aimless, todays pedestrians are obliged to do so in
order to keep abreast of traffic signals. Thus technology has subjected
the human sensorium to a complex kind of training. There came a day
when a new and urgent need for stimuli was met by the film. In a film,
perception in the form of shocks was established as a formal principle.
(Benjamin 1982: 132)
The modern everyday shock experience is the training ground for being able to articulate it. So too is modernitys most celebrated representational device cinema. In one of his most famous essays, The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical (Technological) Reproduction (1936) Benjamin offers a vision of the technical device of cinema as the most capable technology for rec- ognizing the Erlebnis of everyday life in the Erfahrung of communicable form:
Our taverns and our metropolitan streets, our offices and furnished
rooms, our railroad stations and our factories appeared to have us locked
up hopelessly. Then came the film and burst this prison-world asunder by
the dynamite of the tenth of a second, so that now, in the midst of its far-
flung ruins and debris, we calmly and adventurously go travelling. With
the close-up, space expands; with slow motion, movement is extended.
(Benjamin 1982: 238)
The cinema that Benjamin imagines is a cinema of the everyday, founded on principles of montage. It offers itself not in the form of traditional narrative, but as an analysis of everyday experience. In some ways it is a cinema of experience that is never limited to the purely optical:
Even if one has a general knowledge of the way people walk, one knows
nothing of a persons posture during the fractional second of a stride.
The act of reaching for a lighter or a spoon is familiar routine, yet we
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hardly know what really goes on between hand and metal, not to
mention how this fluctuates with our moods. Here the camera inter-
venes with the resources of its lowerings and liftings, its interruptions
and isolations, its extensions and accelerations, its enlargements and
reductions.
(Benjamin 1982: 239)
Here is imagined a cinema that evades the phantasmagoria of modernity by
invoking the haptical as much as the optical, where the embodied experi-
ence of navigating modernity is open to representation. It is also a cinema
that turns the distraction of everyday life back on itself. A poetics of distrac-
tion is seen as the potential that cinema (as a montage practice) promises.
Benjamins project is focused on the search for new forms that might allow
distracted experience to become meaningfully articulated. The influence of
his friend Siegfried Kracauer is crucial here. In a number of essays in the
mid-1920s Kracauer diagnoses distraction in cinematic experience as both
a symptom and a (potential) cure (Kracauer 1995). It is a symptom of an
alienated and modern form of life, where tradition is continually blasted by
modernity. Cinema reproduces this through the spectacle of the phantas-
magoria. But cinema also allows for a new form of seeing that might be
characterized as distracted; this form of attention (or non-attention) not only
is appropriate to the modern everyday but might also provide for potentially
critical articulations of it.
In Benjamin a poetics of cinematic distraction is only hinted at:
Reception in a state of distraction, which is increasing noticeably in all
fields of art and symptomatic of profound changes in apperception,
finds in the film its true means of exercise. The film with its shock
effect meets this mode of reception halfway. The film makes the cult
value recede into the background not only by putting the public in
the position of the critic, but also by the fact that at the movies this
position requires no attention. The public is an examiner, but an absent-
minded one.
(Benjamin 1982: 2423)
What this might mean in terms of the viewing practices of audiences or
in terms of the kind of films that might mobilize distraction for the poli-
tical aims that Benjamin has in mind isnt made clear. In putting forward
an absent-minded critical examination, which might be able to articulate
aspects of modern everyday life, Benjamin is positing the everyday as some-
thing that cant be approached as a fully conscious experience. This is
experience that is partly inchoate, and it will need to generate poetic
forms that allow this to be articulated. It is only in this way that the modern
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form of Erlebnis can become a new Erfahrung. The key to this is montage (this is what seems to be suggested by a distracted poetics or a poetics of distraction). While Benjamin is keen to promote a range of sites for the transformation of the modern Erlebnis into Erfahrung , the place where we should most expect to find a new articulation of everyday life is in Benjamins own practice.
Dialectical images of everyday life
What differentiates images from the essences of phenomenology is
their historic index... These images must be thoroughly marked off
from humanistic categories, such as so-called habitus, style, etc. For
the historical index of the images doesnt simply say that they belong
to a specific time, it says above all that they only enter into legibility
at a specific time. And indeed, this entering into legibility constitutes
a specific critical point of the movement inside them. Every Now is
determined by those images that are synchronic with it: every Now
is the Now of a specific recognizability... It isnt that the past casts
its light on what is present or that what is present casts its light on
what is past; rather an image is that in which the Then and the Now
come together into a constellation like a flash of lightning. In other
words: an image is dialectics at a standstill. [N3, 1]
Nowhere is Benjamins thinking more suggestive for a theory of everyday life than in his notion of the dialectical image. Here the historicity of the everyday enters into legibility. The dialectical image is a constellation (a montage) of elements that, in combination, produce a spark that allows for recognition, for legibility, for communication and critique. What Benjamin is aiming at is a collage practice that can arrange the materiality of moder- nity into a design that awakens it from its dreamscape and opens it out on to history (the awakening that he finds missing in Surrealism in general). For this Benjamin was explicit: he would intervene as little as possible, merely orchestrate: I need say nothing. Only exhibit. For his friend Adorno this practice was open to the critique that it lacked a theory of mediation: Materialist determination of cultural traits is only possible if it is mediated through the total social process (Adorno 1980: 129, emphasis in original). He continues: calling things by their names tends to turn into a wide-eyed presentation of mere facts. If one wished to put it very drastically, one could say that your study is located at the crossroads of magic and positivism. That spot is bewitched. Only theory could break the spell (129). For Adorno, in a critique that echoes Benjamins own critique of Surrealism, Benjamin is seen as remaining within the bewitched spot of
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Surrealism (magic and positivism) and in desperate need of theoretical rigour.
But for Benjamin the explicit historicity of everyday life is the only theory
that could break the spell of the dream. But if this mixture of magic and
positivism could operate to concoct constellations that would throw the
experience of everyday life into recognizability, how was this going to work
in practice? What were the conditions of Benjamins dialectical image that
could puncture the dream of modernity and spill out its contents into
the realm of legibility? A section (Louis-Philippe or the Interior) from the
Arcades Expos (1935) will serve as an example.
The Expos consists of micro-chapters that offer a truncated version
of the Arcades Project (or what the Arcades Project might have been). All follow
the same title format: a proper name followed by a social phenomenon;
either one or the other the two become equivalent. The Expos is made
up of six such chapters and apart from the one on the interior includes
Fourier or the Arcades, Daguerre or the Dioramas, Grandville or the
World Exhibitions, Baudelaire or the Streets of Paris and Haussmann or
the Barricades. Benjamin begins the Louis-Philippe or the Interior chapter
by invoking a moment for the lived and private experience of the interior:
Under Louis-Philippe, the private citizen entered upon the historical scene
(Benjamin 1983a: 167). This historical moment emerges as a separation of
the private and the public as a structural division of everyday life: For
the private citizen, for the first time the living-space became distinguished
from the place of work. The former constituted itself as the interior. The
office was its complement (167). As such the private realm became the priv-
ileged site of fantasy: His drawing-room was a box in the world-theatre.
This box was operated on by all sorts of phantasmagoric practices, particu-
larly Art Nouveau. But it was also a site for the transformatory practices of
the inhabitant as collector:
The collector was the true inhabitant of the interior. He made the glori-
fication of things his concern. To him fell the task of Sisyphus which
consisted of stripping things of their commodity character by means of
his possession of them. But he conferred upon them only a fanciers
value, rather than use-value. The collector dreamed that he was in a
world which was not only far-off in distance and in time, but which
was also a better one, in which to be sure people were just as poorly
provided with what they needed as in the world of everyday, but in
which things were free from the bondage of being useful.
(Benjamin 1983a: 1689)
If the interior offered the chance to transform (magically) the lived commodity
relationship, it also opened itself to a form of investigation that treated
material goods with the forensic gaze of the detective:
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Living means leaving traces. In the interior, these were stressed.
Coverings and antimacassars, boxes and casings, were devised in abun-
dance, in which the traces of everyday objects were moulded. The
residents own traces were also moulded in the interior. The detective
story appeared, which investigated these traces.
(Benjamin 1983a: 169)
The materiality of the interior and the experience of those who use it come together in the historicity of the moment. In radically synoptic details a constellation is generated that takes the reader from the emergence of a specific private realm, through the interior design practices of the time, to the psychology of collecting and its employment of the commodity against itself, to the emergence of the detective novel as the form for linking the traces of experience to the notion of crime. If Benjamin is operating at the crossroads of magic and positivism such a bewitched spot might be the very site of everyday life. But reading through Benjamins notes about the Arcades Project and the singular importance given to montage as an orga- nizing principle, the Expos disappoints. You cant help but imagine that Benjamin envisaged a much more radical formal presentation of these facts. The small book he published as One-Way Street , with its photomontaged cover and its juxtapositions of different elements, is probably much closer to how he would have wanted to present the Arcades material. Of this though we will never know. What Benjamin leaves is an architectural theory for attending to the modern everyday.
In chapters 3 to 5 a theory of the everyday is presented that is both emergent and protean. In the very different practices that Ive considered, the everyday is not something that has become a galvanizing object for consideration. But what is being generated is a range of approaches that are crucial for theorizing everyday life. In the work of Simmel, Surrealism and Benjamin an approach is being forged that attempts to attend to a side of life that is not simply con- tained (or containable) by consciousness. Without employing a fully psycho- analytic framework, both Simmel and Benjamin can be seen as treating the ephemera of the everyday as symptoms of much larger forces. How they go about this is very different: Simmels impressionism is directed at philo- sophical insights, while Benjamins montage practice is dedicated to a critical history of the present. Surrealism, of course, was much more insistent on a psychoanalytic framework, and yet for Benjamin it could never achieve a critical distance from phantasmagoric representation. The everyday as non- conscious experience is a thread that I will pick up in the chapters that follow; here it is enough to say that a nascent theory of the everyday offers an approach to experience that treats the everyday as a demand for inventive forms for attending to it. An approach that favours distraction and montage is arrived
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BENJAMINS TRASH AESTHETICS
at, not through abstract thought, but by foregrounding experience as modern,
urban and everyday.
In the work of Simmel, Surrealism and Benjamin, the sphere of everyday
life is seen as quintessentially urban. The modern metropolis is seen as a
realm where the problem of the everyday is unavoidable. Partly this is due
to the spectacular technological changes brought about by modernity; partly
it is due to a romanticism of the city. At this point we should look to see
what is being excluded from this approach to everyday life. How would the
everyday lives of women feature in this project? For the most part women
are absent. Part of the project of developing theories of the everyday is
going to be rescuing pre-feminist theory from its gendered orientation. There
is much here that might be useful: Simmels emphasis on spheres of socia-
bility (the meal, for instance) might be reworked in a way that articulates
the gendering of the everyday; Benjamins work on interiors might similarly
be explored.
In approaching the everyday, the work of Simmel, Surrealism and
Benjamin has begun to explore the possibilities of forms of representation
that move away from realism and naturalism. Most significant has been the
engagement with avant-garde forms. The radical practices of montage offer
a vivid way of making the familiar strange, and it is this as much as anything
that will offer something like a methodological base to this tradition of
everyday life studies. To what ends such montage practices are employed
(in the name of the everyday) is not determined in advance, and we have
little idea of how Benjamin might have brought together his massive Arcades
Project. Benjamins suggestive hints about a poetics based around distraction
and awakening remain abstract.
In chapter 6 I will look at a project that combines the legacy of Surrealism
with an ethnographic approach to everyday life. As we will see aspects of the
radical formal potential of montage are accompanied by an equivocal desire to
awaken consciousness from its dream world. In Mass-Observation the theo-
retical density of a Benjamin or a Simmel is missing, but instead there is a prac-
tical density that points to a theory not yet recognized as such.
Notes
1Walter Benjamins Konvolut N: Re the theory of knowledge, theory of
progress is part of Benjamins Arcades Project that has now been translated
in its entirety (Benjamin 1999). Konvolut N is the metacritical heart of
the Arcades Project and central to my reading of it. Further reference to
this Konvolut will simply be signalled by Benjamins numbering system
in square brackets.
2Benjamin committed suicide while fleeing from the Nazis in 1940.
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We shall collaborate in building up museums of sound, smell, foods, clothes,
domestic objects, advertisements, newspapers, etc.
(Mass-Observation 1937a: 35)
Ethnography cut with surrealism emerges as the theory and practice of juxta-
position.
(Clifford 1988: 147)
I
N OVER A THOUSAND FILE reports and a similar number of boxes
of raw materials can be found the strangely ordinary documents of everyday
life. Accounts of nightmares; meticulously detailed records of drinking habits
in Bolton pubs (timed to the second with a stopwatch); pages and pages of
diary records; thoughts on margarine such items make up just part of the
archive of everyday life generated by Mass-Observation. At one and the same
time mundane and poetic, Mass-Observation offers an interminable attention
to the daily. In the years leading up to and during the Second World War,
Mass-Observation sought out the ordinariness of extraordinary times. Yet if
the extraordinary could also show an ordinary face (a face that was extraor-
dinary in a different way), the very banality of the daily could reveal a poetics
that was saturated with myth. The status of the mythologies of daily life was
the problem that Mass-Observation faced.
In the winter of 1936, at the time of the Abdication crisis of Edward
VIII, a group of people living in Blackheath in London discussed the possi-
bility of enlisting volunteers for the observation both of social happenings
like the Abdication and also of everyday life, as lived by themselves and
those around them (Madge 1976: 1395). This group consisted of Charles
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Chapter 6
MASS-OBSERVATION
6. Mass-Observation: A science of everyday life
Madge (a poet and reporter for the Daily Mirror ), Kathleen Raine (a poet and
critic), Humphrey Jennings (a painter, writer and documentary film-maker),
David Gascoyne (a poet and a painter), Stuart Legg (who, with Jennings,
was working with the GPO Film Unit in Blackheath), and various friends.
In January 1937, in a letter to the New Statesman and Nation , Charles Madge,
writing on behalf of the group, invites voluntary observers to write to 6
Grotes Buildings, Blackheath (the home of Madge and Raine) to co-operate
in this project of collecting mass observations. In the letter Madge suggests
that a combination of psychoanalysis and anthropology is needed to deal with
elements so repressed that only what is admitted to be a first-class upheaval
brings them to the surface (Madge 1937a: 12). At the same time Tom
Harrisson, a self-taught anthropologist, is applying the methodology of partic-
ipant observation to the wilds of Lancashire, in an attempt to bring
anthropology home and to understand the everyday life of his native culture
(Tom Harrisson, quoted in Jeffery 1978: 20). Just back from Malekula in
what was then called the New Hebrides (now Vanuatu), he takes a variety
of manual jobs (mill worker, lorry driver, ice-cream vendor) in preparing
himself to become the ethnographer of Bolton (Madge 1976: 1395). By a
strange coincidence a poem Harrisson wrote about his experience in Malekula
( Coconut Moon: A Philosophy of Cannibalism, in the New Hebrides ) is published
by the New Statesman and Nation and is printed directly below Madges letter.
Recognizing similarities between his Bolton project and the interests of
the Blackheath group, Harrisson suggests a collaboration, and together with
Madge and Jennings a further letter is written, a letter that has all the hall-
marks of a manifesto (Harrisson et al. 1937).
In the attempt to establish a national panel of part-time observers who
will provide accounts of their everyday life, further invitations are made
through the pages of the Daily Express , the Daily Herald , the News Chronicle
and Left Review , and within a couple of months about a thousand offers of
participation are received (not all of which will materialize). One significant
feature of this drive was the large number of women recruited, partly due
to the inclusion of an account by a housewife of the details of her everyday
life in some of the adverts. In Bolton Tom Harrisson manages to persuade
a number of people (including unemployed workers, a tramp preacher
called Brother Joe Willcock, as well as a variety of students, artists and
writers) to become full-time observers for the Worktown project. By the
end of 1937 Mass-Observation has published a booklet outlining the project
(Mass-Observation 1937a) and a collection of observations by the national
panel in response to day-survey directives (Mass-Observation 1937b), and
is preparing a book of its first year of work (Mass-Observation 1938). After
the publication of the day-surveys Humphrey Jennings distances himself from
the project (he shied away from what he felt to be a banal streak in Toms
expressionist quasi-anthropology [Madge 1976: 1395]). The two sides of
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Mass-Observations operation, the part-time national panel (providing a cross- section of accounts of daily life as well as responding to other directives) and the work of full-time observers (focusing on the observation of others in geographically specific regions such as Bolton, Blackpool and London), are organized and co-ordinated by Madge and Harrisson. In 1940, Madge (who had swapped roles with Harrisson in 1938, and was conducting a survey on economic attitudes in Bolton) leaves Mass-Observation on account of Harrissons decision to affiliate the project with the Home Intelligence Department of the Ministry of Information. In this chapter I will focus on this initial stage, the first few years of Mass-Observation, before it is tied to a government body and while Madge is still part of the equation.^1 It is during this period that the questions of everyday life (What are the particular expe- riences and activities that characterize everyday life in the modern world? How do different social groups experience everyday life? How can these experiences and activities be attended to and represented?) are at their most productively problematic. It is the unresolved and experimental side of Mass- Observation that I take as being of most interest for theorizing everyday life.
Tensions in Mass-Observation
From the start, Mass-Observation can be seen as characterized by tensions and conflicts, both across its various practices and between the perspectives of those involved in the project. Most of these tensions are not only productive for the project, but an inevitable and a necessary response to its initial conception. Emerging, as it does, on the fault-line between science and art, objectivity and subjectivity, rationalism and irrationalism, there is something necessarily unsta- ble about the project. While attempts at accounting for Mass-Observation often end up privileging one side of this divide at the expense of the other, the diffi- culty of maintaining the precarious balance of its conflicting aims is often evi- denced in the work of those who participated in it. The association of Madge and Harrisson, the two main protagonists, each with one side of this divide has worked to compound the perceived division of Mass-Observation into two distinct spheres. Even in Mass-Observations own work, Madge and Harrisson continually mark out their differences: Charles [Madge] is a poet… he is interested in feelings… My interest was to describe as exactly as possible how people behave (Mass-Observation 1983: A26, 2). Such distinctions seem to fit the stereotypes of dreamy poet versus hard empiricist, but they are never static in Mass-Observation literature and dont stand up to prolonged scrutiny. Take, for instance, this attempt at differentiation at an earlier point:
Tom Harrisson believes that Mass-Observation, by laying open to doubt
all existing philosophies of life as possibly incomplete, yet by refusing
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MASS-OBSERVATION
to neglect the significance of any of them, may make a new synthesis
… In the other authors [Madges] opinion, Mass-Observation is an instrument for collecting facts, not a means for producing a synthetic philosophy, a super-science or super-politics. The availability of the facts will liberate certain tendencies in science, art, and politics, because it will add to the social consciousness of the time. (Mass-Observation 1937a: 47)
Here, there is no simple recourse to positivist empiricism on either side.
The use of the word facts does not denote a belief in a scientific objec-
tivity that sees the representational world as transparent; rather the facticity
of an observers account resides in its ability to tell us not what society is
like, but what it looks like to them (Mass-Observation 1938: 66).
The critical attention that Mass-Observation has received over recent
years has tended to reinforce and fix one side of the dynamic that the project
tried to negotiate. Most frequently asserted is the idea that Mass-Observation
continues the kind of social exploration practised in the nineteenth century,
where the scientific objectifying gaze, which had been aimed at colonized
cultures, was turned towards the bodies and everyday life of the poor and
marginalized who live in the physical centre of Western metropolitan society.
This argument has seen Mass-Observation as a symptom of the dominance
of white bourgeois masculinity, which fashions and fixes its identity by copi-
ously describing another group (another class, another race) as exotic,
uncivilized and barbaric in relation to itself, which is taken as the norm.
Writing about the Mass-Observation photographs of Humphrey Spender^2 (but
by implication, applicable to their other observational activities), Jessica Evans
comments on the dominant trend of characterizing the project:
much has been written of the way... [they] reproduced the structure
of a colonial-bourgeois gaze on to the anthropological other. The very
presumption of realism in these photographs effaced the position of
knower and thus rendered the other as a savage yet paradoxically
impoverished threat.
(Evans 1997: 145)
Such a reading seems to me, not only negligent of the variations in Mass-
Observation activity, but to be deploying a methodological instrument that
is historically blunt and cant differentiate between cultural practices in the
1930s and those in the 1830s. It de-differentiates by imposing overarching
meanings on the social function of technologies such as photography and jour-
nalistic reportage. Such a position towards Mass-Observation has often taken
the Bolton project (Worktown) as embodying Mass-Observation, and has
treated Tom Harrisson as its main and sometimes only voice. While such an
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approach necessarily has to edit out the heterogeneity of Mass-Observation practices, it has provided much damning evidence to bolster its account. In establishing Mass-Observation as enacting a colonial gaze on to the exoticized bodies of the working class, the words of Tom Harrisson seem to provide all the ammunition the historian could need. When Harrisson moves from the New Hebrides to Lancashire his intention is to employ the same ethno- graphic approach to the inhabitants of Bolton as had been used on the natives of Malekula. Steve Edwards makes the point by using a quotation from Tom Harrisson:
The wilds of Lancashire or the mysteries of the East End were as little
explored as the cannibal interior of the New Hebrides, or the head
hunter hinterland of Borneo... In particular, my experience living
among cannibals in the New Hebrides... taught me the many points
in common between these wild looking, fuzzy haired, black smelly
people and our own, so when I came home from that expedition I
determined to apply the same methods here in Britain. As the site of
the expedition shifted from the New Hebrides to Bolton, scrutiny was
transferred directly from the black smelly savages with their fuzzy
hair to the dirty working class with their flat caps or curlers.
(Edwards 1984: 18)
Tom Harrissons words invoke a world formed by colonial relations. His words echo those of social explorers such as William Booth, who in his cru- sading pamphlet In Darkest England and the Way Out asks: May we not find a parallel at our own doors and discover within a stones throw of our cathe- drals and palaces similar horror to those which Stanley has found existing in the great Equatorial forest? (quoted in Jackson 1992: 90). Published in 1890, the pamphlets very title was meant to indicate an immediate connection between colonial Africa (darkest Africa) and the East End of London. But while the analogy that Harrisson makes between fuzzy haired, black smelly people and the inhabitants of the East End and Lancashire seems to concur with a colonial attitude to working-class life, such analogies were used by Harrisson to refer to a much wider range of classes in Britain. While the quote that Edwards uses is from a piece of writing produced in 1947,^3 eight years earlier Harrisson was accentuating the analogy in a very different direction:
Well at the age of 22 I went to an island in the pacific called Malekula
and spent three years living among cannibals, whom I found were
neither better nor worse than old Harrovians [Harrow is where
Harrisson went to school]. I tried to get an inside picture of their
customs and ways of thinking, and for this I found it essential to live
as they live. Then I came back to England and went to live in an
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industrial town, trying to apply the same principles of observation to
our own civilization.
(Mass-Observation 1983: A26, 2)
Here any indication of class specificity for cannibals is aimed at the privileged
ex-pupils of a public school (which significantly includes Harrisson himself)
and the application of an ethnographic approach in Bolton suggests a wider
purview than simply working-class culture. The use of the term cannibals in
Harrissons writing is clearly designed to be polemical: it is used in a classic
avant-gardist attempt to de-naturalize cultures perceived as self-evident,
normal. Of course, when used in relation to working-class culture, what
Harrisson forgets is the way that such a primitivist term can simply be seen
to continue an established practice of racing the working class.
The reading of Mass-Observation as enacting a colonial-bourgeois gaze
is further extended by John Taylor, by reading the Bolton project in rela-
tion to the work of the national panel (Taylor 1994: 15281). The split
between observational activities in Bolton and the observational activities of
the national panel is read as a division of intellectual labour that reflects and
intensifies class divisions. Thus the observation of working-class Boltonians
is seen as a mainly visual scrutinizing gaze: the ideal instrument for the job
is an ear plug. See what people are doing. Afterwards , ask them what they
think they are doing, if you like (Harrisson, quoted in Picton 1978: 2). Such
a form of attention enacts a dumbing of the working-class objects of inves-
tigation, fetishizing and othering them. The national panel, however, works
in reverse in that it enables volunteer diarists... coming mostly from
the middle and lower-middle classes... the newly voluble classes of non-
professional writers or speakers to be read and heard, to signify at some
higher national level in the publication of books (Taylor 1994: 158).
This argument, that Mass-Observation works to intensify class differ-
ences by giving a voice to the middle classes while simultaneously dumbing
the working classes, is at first glance compelling. However, this is not some-
thing borne out by a detailed historical inquiry into a movement that in
actuality was much more complex and contradictory. In a number of ways
Mass-Observation can be seen to work across this divide: for instance, in the
panel surveys emphasis is given to accounts by people precisely because they
are underrepresented by the panel as a whole. An example of this is in the
book May 12th Mass-Observation Day Surveys , where accounts by the unem-
ployed and manual workers are given more space because they were
comparatively rare (Mass-Observation 1937b). This follows the scientific prin-
ciple of the cross-section, as Mass-Observation makes clear: It is essential
that Mass-Observation should recruit from all classes, from all localities and
from every shade of opinion (Mass-Observation 1937a: 32). Similarly, in a
Mass-Observation radio broadcast the voices that were heard were not those
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of the southern middle class, but the accents of northern working-class men and women. It also would appear that, in criticisms such as the ones I have outlined, Bolton itself is not allowed to have any class complexity, being seen as made up entirely of workers with their flat caps or curlers. I will return to some of these criticisms when I consider the particularity of the Bolton project and I will also look more closely at the ethnographic approach that was being employed there. In arguing against such accounts of Mass- Observation I am not arguing against the partial truths that they contain, merely calling for an account more attentive to the complexity of the project. In this account I want to keep the tensions within Mass-Observation alive, and to try and maintain the precarious balance in their attention to everyday life. Writing about the cultural politics of the period in a review of Humphrey Jennings Pandaemonium , E. P. Thompsons suggestion is that writers take the pulse of the time itself (Thompson 1985: 165). Such a view might reveal a moment of political and intellectual eclecticism, where the boundaries of knowledges and methodologies werent completely fixed by institutional and academic professionalism, where what would now be called a left liberal humanism could accommodate both a Marxist-Leninist notion of the vanguard leading the masses and radical ideas of democracy, and where intellectual interest in popular culture and everyday life could include talk about such a shabby, old fashioned, suspect, uncerebral thing as the imagination (Thompson 1985: 165). This was a moment when the amateur and the specialist could participate in a social experiment such as Mass-Observation. Perhaps the best way of describing the moment of Mass- Observations attention to the everyday is to suggest that it was characterized by an attitude that Kathleen Raine describes as at once irrational and objec- tive (Raine 1967: 47). To understand Mass-Observations articulation of this moment, it is necessary to look at the social and cultural materials that allowed it to emerge.
Surrealist ethnography
In an essay exploring the relationship between ethnography and Surrealism in France between the wars, James Clifford suggests that a tradition of ethno- graphic surrealism characterizes the work of dissident Surrealists such as George Bataille. While he focuses on the influence of ethnography on Surrealist activity, he comments that a converse tradition, where Surrealism has been a resource for ethnography, could also be delineated. In a footnote he points to the work of Mass-Observation as an example of this Surrealist ethnography (Clifford 1988: 1423). If Surrealism included a vague adher- ence to the work of psychoanalysis joined with an aesthetic practice based on the principle of montage, and an anthropological approach (ethnography)
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focuses on the macro-analysis of the meanings and experience of a culture,
then their combination could be characterized as a practice of understanding
society as a totality of fragments : the montage of incidents seen as symptomatic
of repressed forces. In this characterization of Mass-Observation the admix
of Surrealism and anthropology forms the vital core. By employing Surrealism
for an ethnographic project, the will to order of anthropology is seriously
undermined, while at the same time Surrealisms tendency to revel in mythic
individualism is effectively countered.
The year of those initial conversations about the possibility of Mass-
Observation, 1936, was also the year of the first International Surrealist
Exhibition in London. This huge and chaotic exhibition at the New Burlington
Galleries, curated by a committee that included both Humphrey Jennings
and David Gascoyne, contained works by every prominent Paris surrealist,
and also featured Jennings and Gascoynes paintings (Ray 1971: 136). Charles
Madge was also instrumental in promoting Surrealism in Britain, writing one
of the earliest essays [in Britain] devoted to literary surrealism, in 1933
(Madge 1933). What is so striking about Madge and Jennings relationship
to Surrealism is their critical attitude towards what they see as a tendency
for aestheticism within Surrealism. For Madge, writing in 1934, this was
caused by a failure to recognize the radical interdisciplinarity of Surrealism
as a project. Quoting George Hugnet he insists that surrealism is not a
literary school but a laboratory of studies, of experimentation, that rejects
all inclinations of individualism, and goes on to write that this should act
as a warning to readers who are too apt... [to] treat surrealist poetry sepa-
rately from the other activities of the surrealist laboratory (Madge 1934:
13). In Britain this tendency of containment was seen as being exemplified
by Herbert Read who promoted Surrealism as a new form of romanticism,
rather than as a revolutionary attempt to overcome the separation of art and
everyday life. It was in a review of Reads collection Surrealism (so expen-
sive, so well produced) that Humphrey Jennings draws connections between
Surrealism as romanticism, as a style , and the functional use of surreal-
ism for capitalism. In response to Reads critique of classicism as a tool of
a classical-military-capitalist-ecclesiastical racket, Jennings writes:
Is it possible that in place of a classical-military-capitalist-ecclesiastical
racket there has come into being a romantic-cultural- soi-dissant co-
operative-new uplift racket ready and delighted to use the universal
truths of romanticism co-eval with the evolving consciousness of
mankind as symbols and tools for its own ends? Our advanced poster
designers and emancipated business men what a gift Surrealism is
to them when it is presented in the auras of necessity, culture and
truth with which Read and Sykes Davies invest it.
(Jennings in Jackson 1993: 220)
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The limitations of Surrealism as an aesthetic style, narrowly defined as the province of professional cultural producers (to be already a painter, a writer, an artist, a surrealist, what a handicap [Jennings 1993: 221]) is set against Surrealist coincidences in everyday life:
Coincidences have the infinite freedom of appearing anywhere, anytime,
to anyone: in broad daylight to those whom we most despise in places
we have most loathed: not even to us at all: probably least to petty seekers
after mystery and poetry on deserted sea-shores and in misty junk-shops.
(Jennings 1993: 220)
The Surreal poetry of everyday life would be found in everyday life by those unconnected to specialized aesthetic movements. Mass-Observation, which was going to be the observation by everyone of everyone, including them- selves (Mass-Observation 1937a: 10), would find Surrealist material within the everyday world. Such critiques parallel those of Walter Benjamin: it is not Surrealism as a revolutionary project that is being critiqued, but its failure to distance itself from the phantasmagoria of modernity (advertising, aestheti- cism and the like). As we shall see, the project imagined by Mass-Observation fits much more closely with the early potential of Surrealism as a hetero- logical research activity. It also (in the work of Humphrey Jennings) evidences an interest in dialectical images. Where Mass-Observation seems to differ is in the participants insistence on attending to the everyday as a mass project of collecting facts. The radical positivism of Mass-Observation suggests (potentially) a project so vast that, rather than commenting on the everyday, it would become conterminous with it. As in early Surrealism, Mass-Observation employed a range of tropes associated with science (terms such as research data and laboratory, as well as the continual use of science and scientific) in a struggle to distance itself from the aestheticizing tendency in Surrealism. The use of the term science in Mass-Observation is insistent, but it is also precarious and open to a wide range of meanings. The use of such tropes, while dialogically opposed to aestheticism, wasnt merely a tactical use of science rhetoric, meaningless in itself. But neither did it mean buying into the dominant scien- tific paradigm of the time. The sciences that Mass-Observation references are precisely those whose status as science was open to question: psychology, anthropology and sociology. Science as objectivity is asserted at the same time as its possibility is put in crisis. In Mass-Observations initial manifesto a list is given of the various topics that it will focus on. In the list science and everyday life are negotiated in a Surrealist montage:
Behaviour at war memorials.
Shouts and gestures of motorists.
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The aspidistra cult.
Anthropology of football pools.
Bathroom behaviour.
Beards, armpits, eyebrows.
Anti-semitism.
Distribution, diffusion and significance of the dirty joke.
Funerals and undertakers.
Female taboos about eating.
The private lives of midwives.
(Harrisson et al. 1937: 155)
Most items on the list could be imagined to fit a social scientific investiga-
tion (though a couple seem altogether too wayward Beards, armpits,
eyebrows, The private lives of midwives, for instance). But taken together
the effect is of a random selection of topics from the margins of social life,
an obsession with the oddities of everyday life. While the use of a list might
suggest a scientific desire for exhaustive and rigorous investigation, the actu-
ality of this particular list seems to be a studied attempt at being systematically
unsystematic.
Elsewhere the reference to science is used by Mass-Observation for
political purposes; the deployment of a scientific approach in the use of social
anthropology and psychoanalysis is a weapon that will counter contemporary
tendencies such as the outbursts of atavism and racial superstition in
Germany (Mass-Observation 1937a: 11). Mass-Observations science is
aimed at the emergence and circulation of an affective economy of repre-
sentations, a social imaginary made up of mass images that can be treated as
dream elements and wish fulfilments of a social unconscious. By treating
modern forms of ideology as a continuation of sympathetic magic, ritual and
superstition, a scientific ethnography can reveal the emotional depth of the
political in everyday life (Mass-Observation 1937a: 14). Such a science can
also be seen to offer a resistance to the lure of these affective economies,
particularly the racist economy of Nazi culture. The problem that Mass-
Observation poses, but never resolves, is the question of critical distance in
relation to myth: can science offer a form of analysis that can simply point
out the error of myth and read it as ideology? Or, if this position is unavail-
able, should it set itself the task of privileging counter-myths that offer more
liberatory potential? Given the political situations of the time economic
depressions, the rise of Nazism and other Fascist formations (one of the first
file reports for Mass-Observation is a detailed observation of Mosleys march
through Bermondsey [Mass-Observation 1983: A3]) and the emergence of
a Popular Front against Fascism the function of political symbolism in
everyday life had a terrible urgency. In attending to the circulation and
consumption of such symbolism it was perhaps inevitable that Mass-
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Observation would evidence a particularly forceful engagement with the mass media. While both Jennings and Madge continued to produce Surrealist poetry in the mid-1930s (a poetry marked by the collaging of the actuality of everyday life (Chaney and Pickering 1986: 39; Raine 1967: 501)), both were moving in a direction that brought them into a productive contact with the social practice of the mass media: Madge by becoming a journalist for the Daily Mirror and Jennings by joining John Grierson at the GPO Film Unit in 1934. This involvement in the mass media signals a number of impor- tant elements for the emergence of Mass-Observation and for understanding its approach for attending to everyday life. On the one hand newspapers, magazines, the radio and cinema articulated a fantasy world of superstition and ritual (advertising and horoscopes, for example) which increasingly pene- trated daily life. On the other hand media representations of contemporary events and their impact on daily life were being produced by an elite who continually manufactured an idea of the people to legitimate their own interests. What was needed was a mechanism for non-elite voices to be heard that would give accounts of everyday life and everyday responses to social and political events. Rather than offering a simple split between mass-media representation (false) and everyday life experience (true), Mass-Observation can be seen to be working with an understanding of everyday life that is inseparable from the mass media, while clearly not being reducible to the image it presents. As well as focusing on the ephemera of everyday life, Mass-Observation sought to attend to politically important events, where the penetration of the mass media was inescapable, and where the non-fit between a representation of the people and the heterogeneous actuality of people could be most vividly articulated. As has already been noted, the event that provoked the formation of Mass-Observation was the 1936 Abdication crisis. The relationship between events of national and international significance and the world of everyday life needs some explanation. Firstly, events such as the Abdication crisis are seen as moments when mythic and ritualistic elements of a culture come to the surface. Thus the marital status of the king and the woman he wants to marry is seen as providing materials for an anthropology of sexual taboo, mythic rituals of crowning and uncrowning, superstition and so on. This suggests that the everyday (its social rules) is seen most vividly at points of crisis, moments when everyday life becomes public. Secondly, the investigation of everyday life at the point of political crises might reveal gaps between mass representation (in the media) and the lived experience of the masses at such moments. By collecting accounts of everyday experience at times of crises, Mass-Observation can be seen to be set up in response and antagonism to the machinery of the mass media, its interests and its forms of (mis)representation. Mass-Observations publi- cations often begin with a montage of newspaper headlines and editorials,
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which produce a sharp contrast with the everyday accounts that follow.
Thirdly, and related to this second point, is the distinction between a media-
tic representation that promotes an idea of consensual meaning to the event
and the everyday world which is demonstrated as being radically heteroge-
neous and where such events are met with unanticipated responses and
indifference. In some ways this can be seen as a relationship between a media
technology which had come to saturate the everyday to the point where
nearly everyone was living in relation to the same world of representation
(everyday life as homogeneity), and the active and lived experience of people
which not only couldnt be reduced to this representation, but in many ways
was radically removed from it (everyday life as heterogeneity). By engaging
with forms of communication distinct from state and commercial media,
Mass-Observation can be seen as privileging an alternative mass media, made
up of networks of communication based in pubs and clubs and in the gossip
networks of local communities. Alongside this, Mass-Observations produc-
tion, its attempt to produce collective newspapers, can be seen as galvanizing
some of these networks into a potential counter mass media (where mass
points to the side of production rather than consumption).
While the Abdication crisis (because it was seen as making socially
repressed material apparent) was the event that first interested Mass-
Observation, other similar events were used as subjects for investigation. The
coronation of George VI became the putative event for the publication of a
collection of day-surveys made by the national panel (Mass-Observation
1937b), and the Munich crisis is the event that kicks off the 1939 book Britain.
This last example offers a typical instance of Mass-Observations perspective.
Starting with a quote from a newspaper While Europe was tensely watch-
ing the crisis over Czechoslovakia.. . it continues by asking who exactly is
tensely watching? How many more were more tensely watching the racing
news and daily horoscope? (Mass-Observation 1939: 7). It was in this way
that a mass-media representation could be countered by an everyday repre-
sentation where the observers who made up Mass-Observation will be the
meteorological stations from whose reports a weather-map of popular feeling
can be compiled (Mass-Observation 1937a: 30).
It was the assembling of a body of observers (both the panel and the
investigators) that constituted the explicitly ethnographic aspect of Mass-
Observation and established it as a form of social movement. As has already
been mentioned, the observers in Mass-Observation were split between the
national panel of part-time unpaid observers (who either volunteered after
reading about Mass-Observation or found out about it by word of mouth,
often from other observers) and the full-time paid observers. The split is
more than a question of time and money. While the full-time trained
observer (often paid only a pittance, and then only when funds allowed) was
ideally a camera with no distortion and spent most of their time watching
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and listening to others, the part-time untrained observer, who would send in accounts (day-surveys) of themselves and their immediate group, would be subjective cameras, each with his or her own individual distortion (Mass- Observation 1938: 66). While this seems to demarcate knowledge between the objectivity of scientific training (such as it was) and the subjectivity of lived experience, the line between the two was much more blurred than this suggests. For instance in the forward to Mass-Observation , Julian Huxley could write: In fact, some of the day-surveys I have seen, made by observers with no scientific training, would put many orthodox scientists to shame in their simplicity, clearness and objectivity (Mass-Observation 1937a: 6). It would also seem that if these were subjective accounts, then they would require some form of objective interpretation from the ethnographer to make them usable for scientific analysis. In practice, however, such observations were used in a way that allowed them to speak for themselves (as much as this is ever possible). Similarly, the full-time observers (who certainly didnt receive much training that could count as scientific) filed observa- tions of activities in pubs and on beaches without recourse to a set of criteria, often giving very vivid accounts that include their own responses (see the various examples in Calder and Sheridan 1985). This blurring between what an anthropologist at the time would call native informants and participant observer, which has often been taken as evidence of Mass-Observations unscientific confusion,^4 needs to be under- stood as a practical and ethical response to the project of applying anthropology to ourselves by refusing the interpretative authority of specialist ethnogra- phers. I would argue that Mass-Observation is most productive, as an approach to everyday life, when it treats natives as the ethnographers. In doing so (par- ticularly through the structure of the national panel), Mass-Observation can be seen as generating a radically democratic project. It is here that Mass- Observation can be seen to fulfil the promise of Surrealist ethnography: the potential for everyone (academic ethnographers, capitalist industrialists, work- ing men and women, and so on) to become natives. The move towards ethnography by Surrealists like Madge and Jennings can be explained with recourse to their critiques of the aestheticizing tenden- cies within Surrealism and their understanding of Surrealism as a social involvement in everyday life. What also needs understanding is the surreal potential of ethnography as a practice for attending to everyday life at home. In this, ethnography and Surrealism share a number of common features: both abandon the distinction between high and low culture (Clifford 1988: 130); both can be seen as ways of defamiliarizing the everydayness of the everyday; and both question the taken-for-granted-ness of everyday activi- ties. It is when ethnography is practised at home that its most surreal and critical possibilities are revealed. Most important here is the way in which the taken-for-granted aspects of daily life can be questioned by treating them
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in the same way as if they were part of a totally unfamiliar culture. In this
single move the question of which activities contain meaning, which practices
are most important, is left open, and investigation into the significant aspects
of a culture should have no recourse to pre-established hierarchies of taste
and import.^5 In bringing anthropology home, everyday life becomes the
privileged scene for ethnographic investigation. That which might have
become invisible through over-familiarity is re-invested with the potential for
surprise and meaning. Here the ritual elements that make up the everyday
are taken as the culturally significant, but the significance is seen as neither
self-evident nor easily available for interpretation.
Ethnography practised at home meant that the most banal of everyday
activities could have the potential for revealing cultural meanings; at the
same time, the most exceptional events are studied not in terms of their
declared significance, but in terms of the activities and practices they
engender. In this way an understanding of the way a vague concept like class
operates in a culture must be seen in the everyday practices and preferences
of people in their responses towards margarine and butter (Mass-Observation
1983: A9). Similarly the everyday activities of smoking (Mass-Observa-
tion 1938: 824) and drinking (Mass-Observation 1938: 2431; 1943) are
seen as potential material for understanding the cultural meanings of everyday
life within everyday life. The activities of observers charting drinking and
smoking habits with stopwatches and notebooks have been seen by a number
of historians and critics as proof of the fact that the kind of knowledge Mass-
Observation was to gather was positivistic (Evans 1997: 146). In this way
Mass-Observation is seen as the ghosts of those earnest Victorians collecting
butterflies, classifying fossils, pressing botanical specimens into their note-
books, but without any theories to tie all the information together (Picton
1978: 2). In a particularly telling phrase Tom Picton suggests that in Mass-
Observation time and motion study was confused with documentary (Picton
1978: 2). From the point of view of Surrealist ethnography such practices
are the very opposite of the instrumental rationality of scientific manage-
ment. The utilitarian positivism of time and motion is a world away from
treating activities as if they were magical rituals. For some of those involved
in Mass-Observation it was not the trappings of scientific rationality that
caused problems, but the perceived tendency to see ritual everywhere in the
everyday:
I think Tom [Harrisson], having worked a lot in remote parts of the
world, was perhaps too anxious to find parallels in the life of this
country. And so having observed ritualistic dancing, and the masks, the
costumes and other art connected with it, he would constantly be on
the lookout for the same sort of thing in Bolton. For example, at every
possible opportunity the children used to put on paper hats and dance
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about [see figure 6]: these were quite innocent, childish affairs, but
Tom was inclined to put rather mysterious interpretations on them.
(Spender 1982: 16)
For the Surrealist ethnographer of everyday life everything is potentially mysterious, nothing is innocent of meaning.
Poetry of everyday life
While a small panel had been organized before Mass-Observation was offi- cially formed, its expansion in response to the publicity generated by the formation of Mass-Observation was massive and at times overwhelming. This growing national panel wrote reports in response to a number of different directives concerning specific areas of investigation: reading choices, reac- tions to advertising, smoking habits, social attitudes to margarine, newspaper reading, bad dreams and nightmares, personal appearance and clothes (Mass- Observation 1983). These directives required the panel members to gather opinions of friends and acquaintances as well as voicing their own views and experiences. Alongside this, Mass-Observation asked the panel to record their everyday life in a loosely directed diary form. These day-surveys (as they were known) took place on the twelfth day of each month and panelists were asked to report on conversations they had had, on their dreams, local events,
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Figure 6 Children in paper hats, Bolton photograph by Humphrey Spender (1937). Courtesy of Bolton Museum and Art Gallery
feelings, the weather and so on. The fourth day-survey fell on the day of the
coronation of George VI (12 May 1937) and would make up the bulk of
Mass-Observations first book-length publication (Mass-Observation 1937b).
By the end of the first year, Mass-Observation had collected a total of 1,730
reports from the national panel, consisting of about 2,300,000 words (Mass-
Observation 1938: 47). Given the scale of the material and the difficulty of
dealing with such an exponentially expanding archive, they decided
temporarily to suspend the day-surveys (which made up the majority of the
material), concentrating instead on surveys of special days (holidays, etc.)
and topic-based research (pursued through directives by the national panel).
The formation of a national panel and the amassing of observational
material seemed to be relatively easy compared with the problem of knowing
what to do with the collected material. Given that Mass-Observation had
not set out in quest of truth or facts for their own sake, or for the sake of
an intellectual minority, but aims at exposing them in simple terms to all
observers, so that their environment may be understood, and thus constantly
transformed (Harrisson et al. 1937: 155), it was crucial that the material
was published. The methodological and theoretical approaches to the
collecting and organizing of this material for publication are of crucial signif-
icance for understanding Mass-Observations attention to everyday life.
Looking at the very first directive, the importance of psychoanalysis is
immediately evident. This initial directive, written in December 1936 (prob-
ably by Madge in consultation with Jennings, Raine and others), was sent
out to about twenty people, who were required to ask a number of ques-
tions of as many people as they could. The directive stated: Answers should
be obtained from the person questioned at a speed which will prevent him
[sic] from taking refuge in a merely conventional and socially correct response
(Mass-Observation 1983: A 4). This form of questioning was designed to
encourage free association and discourage forms of normative self-regula-
tion, in relation to both social conventions and the policing activity of the
super-ego. One noticeable element of this is a tactic of surprise, where a
seemingly straightforward question is followed by a more bizarre one, for
instance, after being asked about the importance of religion, the interviewee
is asked, Do you welcome or shrink from the contact by touch or smell of
your fellow men? The ordering of questions points to a specific montage
practice:
Name
Address
- Age
- Married or unmarried
- What are your superstitions, in order of importance?
- Do you pay attention to coincidences?
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- What is your class?
- What is your Fathers profession, and your own?
- Do you or did you hate your Father, and if so, why?
- Do you or did you hate your Mother, and if so, why?
- Do you or did you want to get away from home, and if so, why?
- Do you want to have a son, or a daughter, or both?
- Do you hate your boss; do you hate your job?
- What is your greatest ambition?
- Did you want the King to marry Mrs. Simpson, and if so, why?
- Were you glad or sorry when the Crystal Palace was burnt down and if so, why?
- Do you approve of the institution of marriage as it exists in this country at present? If not, how would you wish it changed?
- Are you in favour of the disestablishment of the Church of England?
- Are you religious? If so, in what form?
- Do you welcome or shrink from the contact by touch or smell of your fellow men?
- Can you believe you are going to die?
- How do you want to die?
- What are you most frightened of?
- What do you mean by freedom? (Mass-Observation 1983: A 4)
What is at stake here is a use of psychoanalysis aimed at revealing more than the repressed prehistory of the individual. The movement from questions concerning a subjects affective relationship with their parents to questions about feelings towards their boss suggests that purposeful connections were being made between social structures and personal life in relation to the workings of the unconscious. Similarly, responses to questions concerning the destruction of the Crystal Palace are followed by a consideration of the subjects own mortality, again making connections between the personal and the social which suggests that material in the everyday public world can be invested with unconscious meanings. There is no need to assume that Madge and others are expecting to find or interested in finding Jungian symbolic archetypes of the collective unconscious, or for that matter, the common outpourings of a national psyche (such approaches might simply figure the social unconscious as too unified). What they are interested in, as an exper- imental approach, is the possibility of using psychoanalysis for looking at everyday life. This unsystematic use of psychoanalysis should come as no surprise given their involvement in Surrealism, but it does suggest a rather different use of psychoanalysis. Rather than providing an interpretive frame, or a mechanism for producing works of art (automatic writing and the like), psychoanalysis is a tool (or set of tools) that is being used to encourage the
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emergence of unconscious material in the everyday world. The importance
of the unconscious in everyday life (and everynight life) is continually asserted,
as panel members are asked to record their dreams for day-surveys, and are
asked to make reports of Bad Dreams and Nightmares for a special survey
on anxiety dreams and their relationship to the social anxieties on the eve
of war (Mass-Observation 1983: A 20).
If these special directives allowed a number of particular issues to be
investigated, they didnt offer the range of materials that the day-surveys
produced. By taking one specific day, and seeing how it is being lived and
dreamed across the country, by people unknown to each other, the full
totality of fragments of the everyday could be envisaged. These day-surveys
took the basis of commonality (everyone experienced the same day, the same
coronation) to emphasize the diversity of the lives being lived. It is the
mixture of diversity and commonality (diversity as commonality) that I think
is particularly important to Mass-Observation, and crucial to its understanding
of everyday life. What continually needs asserting is the historical context of
these experiments crucially, their critically dialogic response to the image
of a society where diversity was being brutally and systematically eradicated
(Nazi Germany), in comparison to their political support for the Popular
Front and the possibilities of a consensus of radically different political posi-
tions against a common enemy. How Mass-Observation translates this is in
the practice of promoting a totality of fragments, of a society united by
a heterogeneous everyday, a commonality of diversity. What remained was
how to find a form for producing such an image of society.
For Humphrey Jennings the idea of the image was of crucial signifi-
cance. As Kathleen Raine remembers, he spoke always of the image never
of the symbol (Raine 1967: 49). Using an example from Jennings collec-
tion of images, Pandaemonium: The Coming of the Machine as seen by Contemporary
Observers (Jennings 1995), Charles Madge explains the particularity of the
image for Jennings. Referring to an extract from the diary of Michael Faraday,
where Faraday observes a balloon dropping ballast over Vauxhall on a sunny
day, producing the effect of a stationary cloud of golden particles, he writes:
The image here consists not only of the balloon, the golden cloud
of dust particles, Vauxhall, the date, Faraday watching and Faradays
physical discoveries, but of the relations between these elements
and other elements, all ordered into a larger universe of imagery. The
individual image, and the imaginative eye that seizes it, is a point
of ordonnance in such a universe. It is not only verbal, or visual,
or emotional, although it is all these. It is not in the elements, but
in their coming together at a particular moment, that the magical
potency lies.
(Madge 1982: 47)
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Such an understanding of the image connects powerfully with Benjamins notion of the dialectical image as a dynamic moment capable of interrupting historical narratives of progress. The material of the day-surveys would together constitute such an image, an image where the fragments of daily life could come into meaningful relationship. Charles Madge and Humphrey Jennings decided that the day-surveys of the coronation could be edited together to make an image of an extraordi- nary picture of England extraordinary, though the material they report is completely ordinary (Mass-Observation 1937a: 31). In practice the editing of the manuscript that would become May 12th: Mass-Observation Day-Surveys involved a complex montage, where the two hundred or so observations could be disassembled into moments or themes, so that they could be reassembled in a way that allowed the reader to move through the day contin- ually immersed in a mesh of different experiences rather than presented with consecutive accounts of the day. They needed to present the material in such a way as to avoid imposing overarching patterns of interpretation on to it (Our first concern is to collect data, not to interpret them [Mass- Observation 1937a: 34]). The practice of montage signals not only the importance of Surrealism (the umbrella and a sewing machine lying together on a dissecting table), but also the filmic montage practices of the Soviet avant-garde (theorized and exemplified by Eisenstein and Vertov), a practice that would have been familiar to Jennings and Stuart Legg as well as prac- tically engaged with at the GPO Film Unit at Blackheath. Collage and montage are the materials of Mass-Observations practice and it is worth returning to montage theory (as discussed in chapter 4) to explain in more detail why it was so important and what it allowed them to do. In a number of ways montage is the most appropriate form for repre- senting everyday life as the pell-mell of different worlds colliding. Firstly, collage can be seen as a theory of shock. Important for Surrealism and Soviet film-makers is the idea that the collaged fragment has some kind of charge that is released when it is brought into contact with a different kind of element: thus one charged fragment detonates another, which in turn produces a reaction. In the heterogeneous world of everyday life, such colli- sions are inevitable. The collaging of day-surveys could bring an account of a day in the life of a wealthy suburban woman (entirely ordinary in itself), into collision with the same day as experienced by a working woman in Glasgow to produce a shocking contrast, which not only vivifies both accounts, but allows them both to be defamiliarized, made strange. Clearly, there is a huge potential for montage to generate critical forms of reading, by making contradictions and antagonisms explicit within the social realm.
My brother took a little brandy as we sat down in the drawing room
and played a quiet game of chess. I turned on the radio and so listened
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to the descriptive account of the Coronation being broadcast at the
moment. We seem fated to hear the actual crowning ceremony, which
we intended to ignore when we set out to play tennis.
I laid in bed till 6.15 a.m. and got up, washed and shaved. I ate my
breakfast and read the paper. On leaving the house I encountered a
tramp who asked if I could make him some tea. He looked a pitiable
creature and held out two half-pennies in a grimy hand as if to offer
payment for the service.
(Mass-Observation 1937b: 322)
But while this collage practice could articulate social differences, it could also
be a space that allows for unexpected contacts to be made, and unantici-
pated coincidences to be found; montage is capable of revealing explosive
links where they are least expected.
Secondly, montage allows for the simultaneity of difference within the
everyday to be represented. The effects of the uneven and unequal devel-
opment of a capitalist society produce a range of temporalities that exist at
the same time. Rather than seeing a culture as at a particular stage of devel-
opment, society is best thought of in terms of a non-synchronic simultaneity,
whereby groups of people are living across different temporalities. So, for
instance, expressions such as still living in the 60s can have more than
metaphoric meaning. Similarly, unequal access to new technologies and
emerging lifestyles produces different temporal consciousnesses. Collage,
then, is a synchronic representation of non-synchronic simultaneity.
10.30 a.m. Arrive at S Theatre to connect up radio set to talkie equip-
ment in order to relay the Kings speech at 8 p.m. This is being done
in 15 shows in town. Many adjustments required to get satisfactory
performance.
(Mass-Observation 1937b: 271)
Out they came from the cart off came harness, and for ten or fifteen
minutes each horse was gone over. Hell be dangling his ticket round
Ilkla on his round tomorra. Butchers cart with pastoral group of very
dead skinned sheep in red white and blue bows.
(Mass-Observation 1937b: 329)
Thirdly, and associated with this, is the refusal of montage to subsume
these diverse elements into a homogeneous whole. Instead of accumulating
these elements into a resolved and meaningful unity, collage offers a bombard-
ment of materials that resist narrative resolution. Rather than placing events
and images into a seemingly natural order (the linearity of progressive
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sequence), collage allows its condition as an articulation to be made evident: the relationships between elements are denaturalized, suggesting that they can always be re-articulated in different arrangements. Similarly, because the elements of a collage often utilize different representational modes (in May 12th these would include different vernaculars, different ways of writing), there is the possibility of disarticulation, where the disruption of one element by another challenges the authority of any one representational mode and allows the problematizing of representation itself. Lastly, and again related to the previous points, the potential of montage is the production of a repre- sentation where the fragments of everyday life arent welded together in the service of an overarching framework, but neither is the idea of totality abandoned in favour of endless fragments. Rather a critical totality of frag- ments is possible that attempts to see the world as a network of uneven, conflicting, unassimilable but relating elements:
Its [collages] heterogeneity, even if it is reduced by every operation
of composition, imposes itself on the reading as stimulation to produce
a signification which could be neither univocal nor stable. Each cited
element breaks the continuity or the linearity of the discourse and leads
necessarily to a double reading: that of the fragment as perceived in
relation to its text of origin; that of the same fragment as incorporated
into a new whole, a different totality. The trick of collage consists also
of never entirely suppressing the alterity of these elements reunited in
a temporary composition. Thus the art of collage proves to be one
of the most effective strategies in the putting into question of all the
illusions of representation.
(Group Mu, quoted in Ulmer 1985: 88)
These aspects of montage are only potential qualities rather than neces- sary characteristics of the practice. It should be remembered that daily newspapers practise a form of montage, but to very different ends. The radi- cality of Mass-Observations montage technique in May 12th should be seen as a critical response to the techniques of newspapers, as well as to the insti- tutionalized forms of social criticism to be found in government agencies. By using montage in this way May 12th also suggests a different relationship between reader and text: rather than being the recipient of knowledge, the reader is left to make their own connections within a work that appears to have no ordering principle apart from disorder. In one way, though, May 12th was a significant failure for Mass- Observation: it was a large hardback book (over 400 pages), very expensive (12s 6d) and sold only about 800 copies (Calder and Sheridan 1985: 62). The price was a particularly sore point given Mass-Observations stress on the importance of feeding back information for a non-elite public, and is in
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striking contrast to the availability of a monthly book from the Left Book
Club for only 2s 6d. A number of attempts were made to rectify the situa-
tion by trying to persuade local libraries to buy it and by offering it for hire
through the mail. What was most awkward was the antagonism it raised
amongst the national panel who were in fact the authors of the book, but
couldnt afford a copy. Whatever the shortcomings of the experiment (and
these lessons would be taken to heart) it can be seen as a significant moment
for Mass-Observation in generating a form for the articulation of everyday
life. If Mass-Observation publications after May 12th can be seen to dilute
the radicality of this technique, offering more editorial comment, framing
and ordering material in less polyphonic ways, they should still be under-
stood as continuing the practice of montage. Perhaps, though, the practice
of montage (as an epistemological and practical orientation) is least evident
in the more conventionally anthropological work of Mass-Observation in
Worktown.
Worktown: cannibals in Bolton
The image that most often accompanies mention of Mass-Observation in
recent critical accounts is an image of the educated middle-class English south-
erner observing (or spying, tracking and so on) the impoverished
working-class northerner (Edwards 1984: 19; Picton 1978: 2). This image
of intrusive voyeurism is partly a product of self-representation by Mass-
Observation. Writing an article for the Daily Mirror about a piece of research
on razor slashing in Halifax, Harrisson had himself photographed, notebook
and pencil in hand, crouched and peering through a key-hole. The title of
the piece, Public Busybody No.1 ( Daily Mirror 6 Dec 1938: 14), alongside
the staged photo of Harrisson, suggests a range of meanings. Harrisson appears
as the hybrid detective, somewhere between an American private eye and
the more scientifically minded Sherlock Holmes (the trope of detection was
already in use in the first booklet not for nothing has the detective become
a figure of popular admiration [Mass-Observation 1937a: 30]). But
Harrissons image also suggests the voyeur or Peeping Tom (playing of course
on his first name and his dirty Mac coat) and brings to mind the sexual
connotations of through the key-hole films, which is also reinforced through
the content of the accompanying article about slashers and their female
victims. Lastly (and least evident) is the meaning of social anthropologist in
the field, notebook at the ready. The voyeuristic aspect of Mass-Observation
was also something that contemporary criticism focused on with accusations
of interfering, Mass-eavesdropping, Busybodies of the left, and produc-
ing a psychoanthroposociological Nosey Parker Bill (quoted in Mass-
Observation 1938: 589). Such attacks, however, were at the time aimed
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not at the Bolton project, but at the first two publications: the Mass- Observation booklet and May 12th. The move in recent years has been to make the Bolton project stand in for Mass-Observation in general and for Mass-Observation to be seen as part of a general documentary project of the 1930s, a project seen as unified by the trope of the Oxbridge intellectual making his (the gender here is of course intentional) expedition to the North.^6 The most famous example of this is George Orwells The Road to Wigan Pier (1937), with its excessive commentary on the smell and the bodies of the working class of Wigan.^7 The class-racism that is implied in such accounts has rightly been a subject for critique, but in the case of Mass-Observation it has unproductively closed off inquiry into the particularity of the Bolton project. Writing in 1970 for a republication of The Pub and the People , Tom Harrisson is keen to distance himself from projects like George Orwells:
It is difficult to remember how in those far-off days, nearly everybody
who was not born into the working-class regarded them almost a race
apart. Even good books like George Orwells Road to Wigan Pier , which
really tried to get under the surface, started out from this underlying
and sociologically miserable premise. The biggest thrill which this
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Figure 7 Tom Harrisson with Mass-Observers, Bolton (Harrisson is the one standing) photograph by Humphrey Spender (1937). Courtesy of Bolton Museum and Art Gallery
lately initiated cannibal experienced was finding it no more difficult
to be accepted as an equal in a cotton mill, as a lorry driver or ice-
cream man.
(Harrisson 1970: 6)
This claim of social ease fits easily within the domain of the anthropologist
as hero and should be treated sceptically. Of more interest is Harrissons
identification of himself as a cannibal. I have already shown how Harrisson
uses this term for characterizing (by analogy) the general population of Britain,
as well as more specifically the pupils at the public school he attended
(Harrow). That this is also a term of self-identification suggests that Harrisson
is using it to insist on a version of cultural relativism that, potentially, has
the power to destabilize and problematize ethnographic authority, as well
as to counter notions of cultural superiority. I want to suggest that the Bolton
project drew on a loose paradigm of British social anthropology and tried to
apply it to British society, and that in doing so it partly undid the contra-
dictory strands that were holding such a paradigm together. In looking at
the intellectual materials that Harrisson and others were employing in Bolton
and in other towns in Lancashire, what becomes evident is the strangeness
that results from deploying them within a domestic context. Thus in bringing
anthropology home, anthropology itself became significantly altered. My
argument is that in transforming these materials, Mass-Observation put them
in crisis and, up to a point, made them unusable as instruments for producing
conclusions about cultures. One of the most striking features of the Bolton
project, and an ironic fact considering the privileged position it has in the
representation of Mass-Observation, must be the lack of published results
that it generated. Considering that Mass-Observation was committed to
turning around research by putting it back into the public realm, and had
managed to produce three books within a year using the meagre resources
of the Blackheath group, it is surprising that only one publication resulted
from the Bolton project, and this came out several years after the project
finished. Given that the Bolton project had a large number of full-time
observers, that it was relatively well funded and had been given (generous)
advances by Victor Gollancz for the publication of four books (Jeffery 1978:
26), the failure of this part of the project must be seen as an important
question in attending to it. To treat the Bolton project as a failure is not
to dismiss it but to open it up to questions that are generally productive for
theorizing everyday life.
Towards the end of the Mass-Observation booklet, Harrisson and Madge
point to the intellectual materials that they will be using for research. They
mention a book by the Lynds called Middletown (1929), a book which, if
nothing else, accounts for the decision to refer to Bolton as Worktown, or
Northtown as it was originally called. But most significantly they stress the
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importance of British social anthropology. Readers of Mass-Observation are encouraged to buy Notes and Queries on Anthropology , a general guide-book to anthropological research methods drawn up by a committee that includes nearly every significant anthropologist working from Britain at the time (Seligman, Haddon, Malinowski and so on). Madge and Harrisson point to the section on sociology (social anthropology rather than physical anthro- pology) as the basis for Mass-Observation research: Such a framework as this will be most useful as a starting point (Mass-Observation 1937a: 58). But they go on to insist it will be developed, modified and supplemented until it becomes unrecognisable. The social anthropology on which they are basing their work needs investigating, partly to reveal the theoretical basis for the investigation of everyday life in Bolton, and partly to demonstrate how this basis became unrecognizable in the actuality of observation. When Harrisson started the Bolton project in 1936, he had completed three years fieldwork in Malekula, which had resulted in the book Savage Civilisation (1937) the title of which suggests that the dominant distinctions between primitive culture and civilized culture were already being pur- posefully problematized. During the 1910s to 1930s, Malekula and its sur- rounding islands had been the site and subject of a number of intensive anthropological studies by anthropologists such as W. H. R. Rivers, T. T. Barnard, John Layard and Bernard Deacon (Stocking 1996: 3004). Writing Components of the National Culture in 1968, Perry Anderson could com- pare the relative lack of sociological work in twentieth-century Britain with the vibrancy of its anthropological intellectual culture. Anderson writes, the failure of a body of classical sociology to emerge in England, and its conse- quence, the withered half-life of the subject to this day, were of large intel- lectual moment (Anderson 1992b: 52). However, Anderson suggests that, If modern British society was distinguished by its failure to produce any classical sociology, there was no less arresting obverse of this phenomenon. For the same society produced a brilliant and flourishing anthropology (92). The rea- son for this, in Andersons view, was that the question of the social totality of British culture remained unposed because British society was never chal- lenged as a whole from within (92). However, because of Britains imperial- ist project it exported its totalizations onto its subject people (93). What Andersons characterization of British social anthropology leaves out (it is specifically a synoptic overview of a national culture) are the differences within anthropology, and the critique of colonialism that emerged (albeit in a piece- meal and inconsistent fashion) in the practice of cultural relativism. The period between the wars can be seen as a moment within British social anthropology of concentrated critical debate, a period when a number of different theories and methods for ethnographic fieldwork were being proposed and challenged. Significantly the debates not only concerned how to attend to a culture (the meanings and beliefs of everyday life), but
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included questions of what a culture was. The focus for debate ranged
across a number of issues. The question of whether a genealogical perspec-
tive should be adopted (Rivers historical reconstruction [Stocking 1996:
236]) was pitted against a proto-structuralist approach (Malinowskis interests
in the relation between beliefs and actions within a synchronic view of
culture). Similarly the importance of Freudian psychoanalysis for anthro-
pology was a subject fraught with debate (Frazers that creature Freud versus
Rivers myth reveals the unconscious history of the race just as the dream
reveals the unconscious history of the individual [Rivers, quoted in Stocking
1996: 242]). Perhaps most important was the question of whether a culture
should be understood as a unity in the Durkheimian sense of collective repre-
sentation or whether conflict and contradictions are essential ingredients of
a culture. Such issues would clearly impact on any attempt to write the
everyday culture of Bolton.
The negotiation of these questions in the work of Bronislaw Malinowski
(who became a member of Mass-Observations funding committee, and their
most critical and enthusiastic supporter) should be seen as the single most
influential version of social anthropology available during this period, and a
significant point of reference for the Bolton project. Malinowski took a perma-
nent position at the London School of Economics in 1922, and immediately
began publishing the results of fieldwork conducted in the Trobriand Islands
during the First World War. His Argonauts of the Western Pacific appeared in
1922 followed by The Sexual Life of Savages in 1929. In these and other books
Malinowski outlined a methodology of participant observation. Participant
observation required that an ethnographer, so as to understand the unfamiliar
host culture, has to attune himself as far as possible to the strange mode
of behaviour of his human material (Malinowski in Mass-Observation 1938:
98). To do this requires anthropologists immersing themselves in the culture,
empathizing with the natives and sympathetically following their cultural
practices. For Malinowski, ethnography meant going native in an attempt
to grasp the natives point of view, his relation to life, to realise his vision
of his world (Malinowski 1922: 25). While (for Malinowski) this is what
allows access to a culture, it is not what guarantees scientific knowledge, as
James Clifford explains: the ethnographers personal experiences, especially
those of participation and empathy, are recognized as central to the research
process, but they are firmly restrained by the impersonal standards of obser-
vation and objective distance (Clifford 1986: 13).
In this way it becomes clear that the Trobriand Islanders account of
Trobriand society is necessarily insufficient (for social anthropology), and that
the anthropologists account of the institutions of kinship or whatever is a
(scientific) form of attention not available to the untutored awareness of
the native informant (MacIntyre 1984: 214). The relationship between this
position and colonial domination is founded on the assumption that what is
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objective is the meta-language of the ethnographer, a thinly disguised variant of the ethnographers own cultural language, and it is in this way that cultural superiority is written into the activity of ethnography. The work of Tom Harrisson in Malekula can be seen as immersed in the practice of participant observations. As Charles Madge notes:
Tom Harrisson had recently returned from Malekula, in the New
Hebrides. His book about it, Savage Civilization , could be read as a
manifesto for the view that the only way to understand and enter into
the Malekulan way of life was by living among them, eating their food,
drinking kava and taking part in Malekulan rituals and activities. Tom
followed this up by taking a job in a Lancashire mill and preparing
himself to become the ethnographer of Bolton.
(Madge 1976: 1396)
The methodology of participant observation is a vague and open one, but if it exists in the work of Malinowski as structured on the superior inter- pretative knowledge of the scientific observer over the un-knowledge of the native informant, then in the work of Mass-Observation in general this para- digm is significantly problematized. For one thing, in the work of the national panel the native informants are also the scientific observers in that they are given the platform to speak. If proper anthropological participant obser- vation necessarily relies on a cultural separation between the observer and the observed, then any cultural identity between the two is likely to undo participant observation from the start. In the Bolton project, where partici- pant observation is more fully embraced, the interpretative framework that Malinowski would insist on seems to work to frustrate the production of Mass-Observation material. Now while it is clear that the Bolton arm of Mass-Observation (under the jurisdiction of Harrisson) was more straight- forwardly anthropological in its outlook, I want to argue that the general problematic of Mass-Observation can be seen in evidence here too. To put it more categorically: if the Bolton project was dedicated not simply to collecting ethnographic material but also to making anthropologically coherent interpretations of this material then it failed to achieve this. My argument, however, would be that anthropologically coherent interpretation is precisely not the operative basis of Mass-Observation, and that participant observation (much like psychoanalysis) is best seen as an investigative tool rather than an interpretative position. If the Bolton project at times tends towards conventional anthropology it never really attains it, and this is because Mass-Observation is dedicated to an understanding of everyday culture as contradictory and resolutely heterogeneous. The adoption of a specifically Malinowskian framework can be seen in Harrissons timetable for the Bolton pub project:
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Main stages in the Worktown survey were thus:
a. Public house reconnaissance and description; preliminary penetra-
tion. 3 months.
b. Penetration by observers into all parts of Worktown pub life. 2
months.
c. Observation without being observed. 10 months.
d. Work conducted more openly; active co-operation with all sorts of
people in all spheres of local life. The study of individuals, letters,
diaries, documents. 3 months.
e. Data from important people. 2 months.
f. Studies of statistics, organizations and published sources. 3 months.
(Mass-Observation 1943: 11)
Malinowskis approach to fieldwork can be seen as a three-stage practice:
participation, observation, interrogation. This approach is clearly what is
being enacted in the Bolton timetable, where participation and observation
make up the bedrock of research, to be supplemented by interviews and
formal research at the end. Of course, participant observation also includes
conversation and involvement, rather than simply invisible observation. In
the above timetable, what is being investigated by Mass-Observation in Bolton
isnt limited to northern working-class everyday life (though this is part of
the reason for choosing Bolton), but includes the investigation of class in
general (relations between classes, class aspirations and so on) as well as
economic and cultural institutions and forms of authority. So, as well
as spending a good deal of time in pubs, the full-time observers spent a lot
of time attending religious services and getting involved in cult religions
that were popular in Bolton, such as the Mazdaznans (Calder and Sheridan
1985: 309). Attending football matches was accompanied by involvement
in every political meeting and political party in Bolton.
The four books that Gollancz was expecting to publish were The Pub and
the People , by John Sommerfield and Bruce Watkin; Politics and the Non-Voter ,
by Walter Hood and Frank Cawson; How Religion Works , by J. L. Wilcock
and others; and Blackpool: One Week a Year , by Herbert Howarth and Richard
Glew (Mass-Observation 1939: 227). The only book that actually got to press
was The Pub and the People in 1943. Of course a number of reasons can be
given as to why these books never saw the light of day (as well as the hundreds
of photographs that were taken and paintings that were painted): the ambi-
tiousness of the project, the disruption of war and the unsystematic collection
of materials are all probable causes. But while the outbreak of war might be
seen as an unforeseen contingency (though this is doubtful given Mass-
Observations continual concern with the rise of Fascism), they can all be
seen as symptoms of the difficulty or impossibility of applying a Malinowskian
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framework to the Bolton research. My speculative understanding of the rela- tive failure of the Bolton project is that it constituted an implicit and necessary critique of the scientificity of a Malinowskian framework that never found its way to explicit critique. The difficulty that Mass-Observation had in producing an account of Worktown society within the scientific paradigm of social anthropology can be seen in its account of class. Class was a major orientation for Mass- Observation, but although Madge was a member of the Communist Party, their approach to class can be seen to be significantly different from a tradi- tional Marxist one. Rather than working with an abstract assumption that society was organized by the conflict of two main classes, their research allowed a notion of class to emerge from everyday life that can be seen as much more mutable, heterogeneous and performative. For instance, in a directive to panel members in 1939 on the subject of class, one woman offered an analysis of class that included twenty-eight different categories, from 1. Royalty, to 28.: people who are crude, dirty and irresponsible. Have no community feeling outside their own grade and 27. Quite content to live and produce children on the dole. Of their circumstances they would say Its good enough for the likes of us. It seems they know their own value (Calder and Sheridan 1985: 159). The writer who invented this range of classes was someone who was born into category 28, but who lived in grade 19, although her husband was from grade 10. The importance of such a system of classification is not that it offers a coherent understanding of class, but that it shows what the experience of class feels like to someone. In this case it is not just something complexly stratified, but something that is malleable and ranges across economic and cultural categories organized around the poles of historical memory and social desire. What becomes clear is that class as a meaningful distinction within everyday life is open to any number of eccentric readings which cant be subsumed into overarching inter- pretations. The idea of class as something to be looked at from the position of everyday life is evident in Tom Harrissons account of it in an essay of 1942, significantly titled Notes on Class Consciousness and Class Unconsciousness:
The idea of looking upwards and working upwards in a clear-cut form
first impressed itself on me at my public school, where there was an
elaborate system of privilege and caste, mainly based on the length of
time you had been there, but also on how good you were at games.
The speed at which you could move down stairs, which waistcoat button
could be undone, which hand you could put in your pocket, what
cereals could be eaten at breakfast, where you could walk, a hundred
habits, were determined entirely in this way.
(Harrisson 1942: 152)
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Class has become something much more complexly open to both the inves-
tigator and the classed actor even if its forms of operation appear to be
obsessively fixed. Seen in more nuanced forms, it is understood as complex
identification that includes not just economics, but also emotional invest-
ment, social aspiration, as well as a malleability that allows for a certain
amount of play between the categories. The malleability and performativity
of class can be seen in the emphasis on social signification, clothing, move-
ment and speech the symbolic gestures or semiotics of everyday life. In
the work conducted on pubs Harrisson suggests that the class that is enacted
is something that takes significantly different forms across the week:
Broadly, we found the whole of Worktown went up the social scale
at the weekend. On a weekday, anybody in Worktown wearing a
bowler hat was either B class or a mourner. At the weekend, anybody
could and did wear a bowler, and the visible class distinctions of Tuesday
became inextricably confused on Saturday afternoon. Weekend
Worktown was a place superficially populated by well-to-do middle-
classites on an ordinary weekday, a city of wooden clogs, grimy faces,
manual workers.
(Harrisson 1942: 156)
This is a performative understanding of class that can speculate about the
unconscious articulations of class, without being in any position to fix it
into a coherent pattern. The understanding of class is as something that
doesnt take coherent and systematic forms, and in many ways cant be
exhaustively recorded and analysed. In stressing that class operates uncon-
sciously and is not available for conscious scrutiny, Harrisson might be seen
as challenging the empiricist basis of much of the Worktown project.
In treating Worktown as a failure (in terms of its productivity) I want
to suggest that the anticipated transformation of social anthropology (social
anthropology becoming unrecognizable) was in practice replaced by a recog-
nition of such a framework as unwieldy and in the end unusable. The potential
critique of social anthropology and its authoritative forms of cultural knowl-
edge and narration are only present as an absence in the Bolton project (the
unwritten books). The material that was published doesnt challenge the
authoritative power of ethnography. Perhaps if it had, other, more produc-
tive forms of presenting the material might have emerged. Perhaps a
continuation of a montage practice might have produced a different practice
and alleviated the protracted struggle to write an authoritative ethnography
of the culture of Bolton. In many ways Tom Harrissons book Savage
Civilisation offers evidence of an experimental ethnography (it is a hybrid
practice of auto-ethnography, historical ethnography and poetry) that is
missing in the Bolton project. If the Bolton project failed, it failed as Surrealist
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ethnography and showed evidence of Mass-Observations move towards more conventional attention to everyday life.
A politics of everyday life
Mass-Observations methodological and theoretical approach to the everyday was contradictory, confused and emphatically unsystematic. But this confu- sion and contradiction needs to be seen as offering productive responses to an everyday world that could itself be seen as contradictory and unsystem- atic. If Mass-Observation is seen as a response to everyday life at a particular historical conjuncture, then the conflicts it evidences can be much more clearly understood. The historical moment of Mass-Observation is dominated by anticipation of war, a war that by 1936 could be seen as being generated by the mass mystificatory powers of Fascism throughout Europe (including Britain). This would be a war that would not just require physical force, but necessarily entail weapons that could defeat what was clearly a spectacular and seductive enemy. Looking back on Mass-Observation, in 1976 Tom Harrisson could sum up its emergence as a several-pronged reaction to the disturbed condition of western Europe under the growing threat of Fascism (Harrisson 1976: 11). It is worth emphasizing Mass-Observations several-pronged-ness, as this suggests an awareness of a heterological approach to the problem of the everyday. There are a number of themes around which this contradictory approach is evident. To start with Mass-Observation continually vacillates between claiming that the people lack political agency, and championing a grass-roots politics that is simply marginalized (or more usually ignored) by those who represent them (particularly the mass media). At issue as well is the question of whether social transformation will come from a vanguard movement by an elite, or will be generated from within everyday life. Similarly problematic is how to respond to the affective power of Fascism: should Fascism be countered through scientific de-mystification, or through the promotion of an affective economy of a different order an alternative system of myths? The several-pronged reaction to the threat of Fascism found Mass- Observation pursuing conflicting aims. Again it is tempting to see this in relation to the personalities involved. For instance, writing in 1940, Tom Harrisson could defend, in the name of science, a certain approach to doorstep surveys on behalf of Mass-Observation, the Ministry of Information and corporate capitalism (Harrisson 1940b: 31). Writing in 1937 as a commu- nist, Charles Madge would critique the capitalist press and call for a popular poetry for mass circulation. His example of what a popular poetry could be is a story from the Daily Mirror about a Human Mole who lived in a potting
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shed in a public park in the heart of Nottingham (Madge 1937b). Such contra-
dictions are not unique to Mass-Observation, but it would be hard to imagine
a more vivid picture of contradiction than a group of avant-garde Surrealist
ethnographers working for the government.
The moment of Mass-Observation coincided with the high point of the
Popular Front: a united front against the threat of Fascism, which produced
surprising coalitions and victorious Popular Front governments in France and
Spain. The Communist Party (of which Charles Madge was a member) had been
encouraging Popular Frontism since 1933. But while the Popular Front pro-
duced a necessary sense of optimism, to take a Popular Frontist position in the
late 1930s would mean having to hold intellectually contradictory positions.
For one thing the Popular Front was geared to producing images of unity, of
trying to find ways of getting people to come together en masse. At the same time
the danger of Fascism could be seen precisely in the spectacular lure of the
mass coming together in an erasure of difference. Similarly, Popular Frontism
might mean holding on to a belief in a popular and stubborn refusal of Fascism
in everyday life (a common sense anti-Fascism and anti-anti-Semitism), while
at the same time recognizing the power of superstition and myth to hypno-
tize the mass into holding racist superstitions. Popular Frontism as a contra-
dictory orientation was Mass-Observations position in the late 1930s.
By way of example, on the subject of the agency of the mass, Mass-
Observation could characterize the people as passive and obedient, sleep-
walking automata. In describing the effects of the Abdication crisis,
Mass-Observation wrote, at last England had to face a situation to which there
was no stock response. Millions of people who passed their lives as the obe-
dient automata of a system now had to make a personal choice, almost for the
first time since birth (Mass-Observation 1937a: 9). Or a little later in the same
booklet it could make the following claim for the practice of observation:
It will encourage people to look more closely at their social environ-
ment than ever before and will place before them facts about other
social environments of which they know little or nothing. This will
effectively contribute to an increase in the general social consciousness.
It will counteract the tendency so universal in modern life to perform
all our actions through sheer habit, with as little consciousness of our
surroundings as though we were walking in our sleep.
(Mass-Observation 1937a: 9)
This understanding of people as living in a dream should be seen as one
prong of Mass-Observations approach to everyday life, an approach that
demands a reflexive consciousness in attending to the details of everyday life
and the political events that impinge on it. It is also this prong that can be seen
to promote science in the face of superstitious and mythic belief (the very
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breeding ground of Fascism). But another prong is also clearly visible and can be seen as the obverse of this, stressing instead the creativity and agency of the mass within the everyday. For instance, rather than seeing people as passively led by the mass media, Mass-Observation instead sees a huge gulf between mass media representations and the experience and understanding of the world in everyday life. Mass-Observation continually juxtaposes newspaper by-lines on current events with the heteroglossia of everyday life, where responses vary from antagonism to cynicism, from outrage to bewilderment, from refusals to acquiescence. Mass-Observations 1939 publication Britain provides a vivid example of the several-pronged approach. Britain should probably be seen as the most successful working through of some of the problems evidenced by the Bolton project and the radical experimentation of May 12th. While Britain doesnt have the radical formal (dis)order of the May 12th experiment, or the exhaustive scope of the Bolton project, it can be seen as a reconciliation between the two projects. Britain came out as a Penguin Special and is said to have sold about 50,000 copies within 24 hours of publication (Jeffery 1978: 34). While this book was framed by an organizing editorial voice, the sections it contained were made up of quotes that were not merely supportive of this editorial voice. In some ways the editing voice has the effect of a chorus that doesnt so much interpret as question the possibility of interpretation. Reading through the sections that make up the book, the reader is not being guided towards conclusions; rather the book evidences a continuation of the destabilizing effects of collage. If the title of Britain might suggest totalizing accounts of the State of the Nation kind, a glance at the contents page alerts the reader to other aims. The book includes a chapter on popular attitudes towards science, a section on the Munich crisis, accounts and discussions of wrestling, and detailed investigation of the popular dance craze the Lambeth Walk. The disconti- nuities between the sections suggest the kind of approach that will become familiar in the work of someone like Roland Barthes in his Mythologies (Barthes [1957] 1973), or the uneven attention to the everyday by British cultural studies in the 1970s and 1980s. A comparison between the chapter on the Munich crisis and the one on the Lambeth Walk highlights the difficult productivity of Mass-Observations approach. The chapter on the Munich crisis analyses media representations of popular opinion of Chamberlains policy of appeasement towards Nazi Germany, and contrasts them with views and opinions gathered from a ran- dom selection of people. The result is a stark contrast between media repre- sentation (a continually changing representation that works by speaking in the name of the people) and the dissent and outright hostility towards Chamber- lain in the quoted vox populi. A version of the Munich crisis chapter was broad- cast on the BBC in June 1939, and as Paddy Scannell suggests, it was the only piece of broadcasting that gave a dissenting voice to appeasement (Scannell
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and Cardiff 1991: 101). This wasnt to suggest that a public was untouched by
the creation of public opinion in the media (how else did people know about
such events?); rather it suggested an active process of reading these represented
events. Similarly, the Lambeth Walk isnt a piece of popular culture exempt
from the processes of the mass media; rather its popularity is partly a result
of mass media forms. What connects the Lambeth Walk and the Munich
crisis is a much-expanded notion of politics and culture that is articulated in
everyday life:
What people feel about the war danger is an obviously serious subject,
but it is less obvious why the popularity of a dance is anything more
than a frivolous interest. But if we can get at the reason for the fashion,
and see it in its setting, it may help us to understand the way in which
the mass is tending. We may learn something about the future of democ-
racy if we take a closer look at the Lambeth Walk.
(Mass-Observation 1939: 140)
The Lambeth Walk is shown as evidencing a number of features: it is a mass
participatory spectacle (in August 1938, 3,000 dancers took part in an outdoor
Lambeth Walk in Camberwell [177]); it is not dogmatic and allows for all sorts
of improvisations; and it can be seen as a continuation of festival culture and the
world turned upside down (Men dress up as women or pretend to be animals
[145]). The craze for the dance also evidences the way that popular culture
doesnt solicit a consensual response, but generates a whole host of different
attitudes towards it. The heterogeneity to be found within this one form is
evidenced internally in the various versions of the song that accompanied
the dance. Perhaps surprisingly some versions of the song included self-
reflection about the nature of the dance: whether it is an escapist response
to the anxieties of war, or an affective opposition to war. The idea of the dance
functioning in democratic struggle is evidenced in the example of the Anti-
Fascists who broke up a Mosleyite [the British Fascist leader] demonstration
in the East End by doing the Lambeth Walk (175). Such uses of the
dance can be seen as the exemplification of a Popular Front culture that
comes out of the everyday: the feeling of the Lambeth Walk is unsectarian
but not unsocial (175).
If the section on the Munich crisis offers an example of the gap between
representations of political events (the collective sigh of relief that is repre-
sented as the popular response to the Munich accord) and responses to those
representations in everyday life, then the discussion of the Lambeth Walk
demonstrates another reading of the politics of everyday life. Here is an affec-
tive cultural practice emerging from everyday life distinct from the cultural
practices associated with Fascism. It is not a scientific critique of Fascist
culture; it too is bound up in ritual and superstition, and for this reason
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offers an alternative imaginary identification that can be seen as (effectively) resistant to Fascism. The culture of the Lambeth Walk is also seen as resis- tant to the false promises of a mainly US commercial culture (as well as to the aggressive allure of Fascist culture) due to its ability to express the poly- phonic voices of the Lambeth Walkers:
It [commercial dance music] is no more about reality than Hitlers
speeches are. Ballroom dancers sleep-walk to its strains with the same
surrender of personal decision as that of uniformed Nazis. These
Lambeth Walkers are happy because they find they are free to express
themselves without the hypnosis of a jazz-moon or a Fhrer.
(Mass-Observation 1939: 183)
The Lambeth Walk is seen as a cultural form that is ritualistic without being hypnotic. It is a form that prides itself in a joyful disdain of respected proto- cols, a form that delights in an endless variation of ironic commentary, and a practice that unites without unifying. The politics of Mass-Observation needs to be seen as a politics of everyday life. Tom Picton suggests that Mass-Observation did not want to change the world, they were reformist. They did not examine unemployment in Bolton, infant mortality, malnutrition, housing, health, or any of the parameters of poverty. Their approach was as fatalistic as a photograph (Picton 1978: 2). Here politics is understood as being practised from above and as being deployed on everyday life. Mass-Observations politics can be seen to emerge from everyday life. So, for instance, if Mass-Observation can be seen as a social movement (which is partly how it saw itself) then its idea of changing the world would have to include the transformation of everyday life in the act of attending to it, within everyday life. This act of transforming the everyday by being attentive to it is seen most vividly in womens experience of Mass-Observation. In this respect Mass-Observation provided a space for womens experience that has been absent from other attempts to articulate the everyday that we have looked at so far. Mass-Observation supplied a structure and an invitation to write about the everyday, but crucially one that didnt prescribe what counted as everyday life or what should be privileged. This evidences a huge differ- ence between Mass-Observation and those who insist implicitly on an equation between the everyday and metropolitan street-life. A vast number of recruits to the national panel were women and their experience in Mass-Observation evidences that for the first time the domestic everyday realm (at the time the dominant arena for the majority of women) could be taken seriously and could be transformed through conscious attention to it. This suggests a politics of the everyday that could articulate the interests of those most marginalized by official politics:
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I read in the News Chronicle articles about the work, and especially the
account by an ordinary housewife of her day. Mass-Observation, it was
something new, something to talk about; the things I do in the house
are monotonous, but on the 12th, they are different somehow, letting
the dog out, getting up, making the dinner, it makes them important
when they have to be remembered and recorded.
(Mass-Observation 1938: 70)
Being attentive to areas of life that were systematically down-graded by
culture at large allowed for both an analysis and a revaluation of experiences.
If the work of Simmel and Benjamin can be seen as a struggle to find a form
of representation that can register the particularity of daily experiences, Mass-
Observation offers an invitation to alter practically the experience of
everydayness.
This politics of everyday life must be seen as similarly several-pronged;
if it includes a conscious attention to the everyday (and alteration of the
everyday), it also includes a celebration of the non-rational, the affective and
the oppositionally ritualistic within the everyday. Writing from a barrack
room during the war, Tom Harrisson introduces the publication of The Pub
and the People by stating:
Plans are being made about the future of Britain, and these are often
being made as if the prejudices and habits of ordinary people can be
ignored; publication [of The Pub and the People ] might serve some
constructive purpose in reminding the planners, in their valuable work,
of one of the habits they most often ignore. I say this with some feeling
myself, as since the war my family have lived at Letchworth Garden
City, one of the key towns of the planning movement, and one of the
few places in England where no pub is allowed: this book could not
have been written at all if Worktown had been Letchworth.
(Mass-Observation 1943: 9)
Rather than seeing this as a nostalgic image of quaint old England, something
worth fighting for, it should be seen as an image of affective and ritualistic
attachments that can generate a culture that (potentially) can counter Fascism,
as well as resisting the culture of the official institutions of Britain.
In Mass-Observations several-pronged approach to everyday life, a
science of everyday life is fashioned that has as its potential the purposeful
destruction of the hard and fast distinction between specialist and amateur,
between objectivity and subjectivity, between science and art. In its Surreal-
istic practice of ethnography, its attention to the mythic is both critical and
celebratory, suggesting that any affective opposition to the forces of hatred
will have to generate imaginary and affective images as counter-attacks, as well
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as rational critiques. This is a science of everyday life that is being made up as it goes along, and that is making do with whatever comes to hand. It is a science significantly different from that practised by government agencies at the time. In Malinowskis supportive yet damning critique of Mass- Observation, he suggests the only question worth asking is the question of science (the answer to which, according to Malinowski, sees Mass-Observation as sorely lacking). In his articulation of science Malinowski is unswerving: For let us be quite clear about it: the sociologist cannot be interested in the indef- initely and infinitely varied minor diversities of feeling, idea or behaviour during the Two Minutes silence, or a Coronation or an abdication crisis (Malinowski 1938: 118). Malinowskis science is not the science of everyday life that Mass-Observation practises. For a Surrealist ethnography, negotiating a complex historical moment, the infinitely varied minor diversities of feel- ing, might be, precisely, the very stuff of everyday life.
Mass-Observation should be seen as both modest and ambitious. At its most radical and ambitious it proposes a mass movement of direct democracy that, rather than commenting on everyday life, provides the conditions for partici- pation in the alteration of everyday life. Here dreams can become a critical response to general social conditions; likes and dislikes can become subtle indi- cators of dreams. Benjamins rhetorical desire to put cultural material to work (I need say nothing. Only exhibit) is given a practical demonstration in the modest proposal that participants speak for themselves (Mass-Observation 1937d: 3742). But this modesty can also be seen as a radical challenge to the disciplinarity of anthropology and its desire to write culture from above. By establishing the conditions for a participatory practice, and by working to orchestrate the material through montage, Mass-Observation should be seen as the production of a popular poetry of everyday life. Unlike either Benjamin or Simmel, Mass-Observations understanding of everyday life isnt characterized by modernity or the metropolis, and as such everyday life becomes a diverse ensemble of different practices and experiences. Urban modernity isnt written out of this account, but in allowing a much larger range of cultural practices to emerge (domestic cultures, residual and local customs, and so on) everyday life becomes radi- cally heterogeneous. Mass-Observation set in motion an archival practice of the present that tried to attend to the conscious and unconscious aspects of everyday life. Within months of its launch the material archive was already unmanageable. If Mass-Observation is an example of an avant-garde going public, then perhaps the tendency towards bureaucracy was an inevitable condition of its continuation (Mass-Observation as an arm of government or commercial research). Mass-Observation has a number of similarities to, and differences from, the work that this book has so far discussed. One of the biggest differences
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has been the way that the idea of the everyday has taken centre-stage and
has become the explicit object of inquiry. As the front cover of Britain
boasts: Mass-Observation, a movement started early in 1937 by two young
men and now embracing some two thousand voluntary observers all over
the country, exists to study everyday behaviour in Britain THE SCIENCE
OF OURSELVES (Mass-Observation 1939: cover).
Notes
1During most of the war Tom Harrisson directed Mass-Observation. In
1944 he was sent to Borneo where he remained after the war ended.
In the post-war period Mass-Observation transformed itself into Mass-
Observation Ltd. and became involved in market research, mainly for
commercial products.
2This archive of photographs has been singled out for comment, and for
evaluating the project of Mass-Observation even though the photographs
were never included in any Mass-Observation publication and can be seen
to be a minor and unsuccessful (in Mass-Observations eyes) part of the
project.
3The original quote is from Harrisson (1947). See Jeffery (1978: 20).
4Liz Stanley (1990: 27) gives a range of examples of this criticism. See
also the numerous criticisms that Mass-Observation analyses in Mass
Observation (1938), as well as the essay by Malinowski included in that
volume.
5This point is made by Ruth Benedict in her 1934 book Patterns of Culture :
To the anthropologist, our customs and those of a New Guinea tribe are
two possible schemes for dealing with a common problem, and in so far
as he remains an anthropologist he is bound to avoid any weighting of one
in favour of the other (Benedict 1989: 1).
6See Taylor (1994: 15281) and Edwards (1984). The BBC TV series about
the 1920s and 1930s in Britain, The Long Summer , forcefully made this
connection in its representation of Mass-Observation. Exceptions to
this account would include the work of David Chaney, Michael Pickering
and Alan Read.
7It should be noted that Orwell doesnt blindly inhabit such a class posi-
tion. The examination of how sensory norms affect class perception is
one of the topics of his writing.
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T
HE EVERYDAY THAT GRIPS Henri Lefebvres voluminous writ- ings on the subject is one orchestrated by the logic of the commodity, where life is lived according to the rhythm of capital. In an often repeated anecdote Lefebvre remembers his wife holding up a newly bought box of detergent and exclaiming, This is an excellent product (see Ross 1997a: 22). For Lefebvre its as if the commodity, in an act of ventriloquy, echoes in the words of his wife. Of course the gendering of this should alert us to the way that women are seen, not simply to bear the burden of the everyday, but to be the most susceptible and the least resistant to its demand. I will return to this shortly. Yet for Lefebvre, what he sees as the postwar exten- sion of capitalism, thoroughly penetrating the details of daily life (Lefebvre 1988: 75), is an inescapable fact for everyone. Its most insistent voice is advertising; its most unrestrained form is the New Town. In postwar France the transformation and commodification of daily life took on an unprece- dented force. As France reconstructed in the wake of the war, moderniza- tion became synonymous with consumer culture. Blue jeans, electric cookers, fridges (figure 8), washing machines, Coca-Cola, television and so on became so many instances of the American temptation (Kuisel 1993: 10330), a temptation that was often specifically directed at women. Yet, as we shall see, however bleak Lefebvres view of modern everyday life became, the everyday always held out the possibility of its own transformation. Secreted within the everyday were the elemental demands for everyday life to become something other (something more) than bureaucratic and commodified culture allowed. As a philosopher, the everyday signalled for Lefebvre a speculative attempt to register the social as a totality, and in this his work can be seen
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Chapter 7
HENRI LEFEBVRES DIALECTICS
OF EVERYDAY LIFE
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Figure 8 This is an excellent product. Brandt refrigerator advertisement, Marie-
Claire , May 1955
as a continuation of Simmels. But the everyday also signalled a frustration with philosophy and a desire to connect with the lived actuality of the present (a present seen as going through a consumer revolution). As a Marxist, he saw contemporary everyday life as exploitative, oppressive and relentlessly controlled (he wrote about the terrorism of advertising [Lefebvre 1984: 106] and the bureaucratic society of controlled consumption [Lefebvre 1984: 68109]). As a romantic he sought energies within the everyday that could be used to transform it. For Lefebvre everyday life was quite simply lived experience , and in contemporary society this meant that together modernity and everyday life constitute a deep structure (Lefebvre 1987: 11). But if it was a deep structure, everyday life was also an opaque one that was to be defined by what is left over after all distinct, superior, specialized, struc- tured activities have been singled out by analysis (Lefebvre [1958] 1991a: 97).^1 For traditional specialized analysis, the everyday was at once too small and too big, too trivial and impossibly ambitious. For Lefebvre it was a lifes work struggling to maintain a critique that he recognized as continually lagging behind the perpetually changing actuality of the everyday. Born at the start of the century and dying at the age of 90, Henri Lefebvres work spans nearly the entire twentieth century. This life work consists of over sixty books (see the bibliography in Shields 1999) and is marked by a heterogeneity of voices, of registers, of objectives. And yet it also pursues particular interests with a relentless fervour that didnt diminish in old age. As is appropriate for a thinker whose thought is dialectical, the heterogeneity and the obsessions can be found in the same places, accounted for via similar explanations. Born in the small town of Hagetmau in the south- west of France, he continually alternates between the rural and the urban, spending much of his life in Paris, but constantly returning to the French Pyrenees at key moments. Such movement is not just the result of the vagaries of modern living; rather it hints at a life lived across boundaries, both phys- ical and mental. Rather than denoting home, the Pyrenees is a space of continual inquiry. After returning there during the war as a resistance fighter, he begins what will be his doctoral thesis on a sociological study of peasant communities in the Campan valley (Lefebvre 1962). It is amongst these villages and towns that Lefebvre thinks out his project for a critique of everyday life. It is the multiple perspective offered by a traditional and yet changing countryside mixed with a profound engagement with the transfor- mation of urban life that can account for the huge scale of the project a cause of both its richness and confusion. It is the unevenly modernizing towns of the French Pyrenees that will provide visual and theoretical moments that will fire his critical account of everyday life and modernity. For Lefebvre, moments are those instances of intense experience in everyday life that provide an immanent critique of the everyday: they are moments of vivid sensations of disgust, of shock, of delight and so on, which
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although fleeting, provide a promise of the possibility of a different daily life,
while at the same time puncturing the continuum of the present (see David
Harveys Afterword in Lefebvre 1991b). Such moments can be glimpsed
in the pages of his books, chapters that take on an almost visionary feel,
made up of passages that depart from the world of academic argument to
locate their author in the lived experience of actual social spaces. A Sunday
morning watching people attend a village church becomes a scene that reveals
the extent to which religion penetrates the everyday, while it also reminds
Lefebvre of his adolescent struggles to escape Christianity (Lefebvre [1947]
1991a: 20128). Sitting on top of a hill, looking down as the New Town
of Mourenx is being constructed, becomes a moment when the production
of the everyday as a readable urban script becomes undecidable as it awaits
the consequences of use (Lefebvre [1962] 1995: 11627). Other moments
are supplied by Parisian experiences: looking through his window on to a
view of a major intersection of roads conjures up a reverie of the rhythms
that make up city life (Lefebvre 1996: 21927); a view from another window
at another time shows the shifting class relations that find expression in the
suburban landscape (Lefebvre [1958] 1991a: 423).
This intense scrutiny of the everyday and the processes of moderniza-
tion is the result of experience and observation, but it is the observation and
experience of a philosophical mind. The dialectic between the practical and
the theoretical, between the concrete and the abstract, requires a mutual and
continual testing. There is no empirical reality that can simply be encoun-
tered so that it will reveal the forces that produced it. Nor is there a world
of thought that can tell us essential truths. As Lefebvre writes, The limita-
tions of philosophy truth without reality always and ever counterbalance
the limitations of everyday life reality without truth (1984: 14). Philosophy
for Lefebvre acts as a critical tool that can be used in the attempt to shatter
the natural appearance of objects and relations. Critical philosophy holds
out the promise of its own dissolution as it connects with the everyday in
order to transform itself (and everyday life), and in so doing mark the end
of philosophy as a specialized activity. Seeing philosophy as so many critical,
or potentially critical, tools allowed Lefebvre a very eclectic range of philo-
sophical references. But the combining of, for instance, the work of Marx
and Nietzsche is done not in an effort to synthesize the two, but so as to
allow for the fracturing of both in a critical movement to dislodge the lure
of the total system.
Lefebvres practice is philosophical and throughout his work there is a
running critical dialogue with a number of thinkers, few of whom escape
unscathed. The attacks that Lefebvre makes on thinkers such as Althusser,
Sartre, Foucault and Barthes are polemical and extreme, but in the act of
negation they allow Lefebvre to rescue something of use for his project.
These critical dialogues are never abstract theoretical differences, but differ-
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ences of consequence in the life-world. So, for instance, in his dispute with the work of structuralists such as the Foucault of Les mots et les choses ([1966]
- (published in English as The Order of Things ) and the Barthes of Le systme de la mode ([1967] 1983) (published in English as The Fashion System ), he acknowledges their contributions to academic disciplines, but also points up the proximity between their theoretical systems and the fetishizing of systems by the new technocrats who are controlling and transforming France. As a way of differentiating his own project Lefebvre treats the project of Barthes as symptomatic of a general social trend technocracy while also seeing it as offering insights as to the nature of such a trend. Thus Barthes book Le systme de la mode is seen as constructing a rhetorical system of fashion by studying fashion magazines while ignoring the actuality of bodies wearing clothes; yet it also becomes the inverted basis for Lefebvre to analyse fashion as part of the terrorism of everyday life (Lefebvre 1984: 16375). It is in this critical dialogue with cultural theory, coupled with a continual attention to lived experience (the uses of fashion, not just its abstract meaning), that Lefebvre articulates his dialectics of everyday life. It is necessary, in approaching Lefebvres work on everyday life, to understand both the philo- sophical and cultural milieu, as well as the rapidly changing social environment. Lefebvres work is a socially grounded (historically and geographically) critical approach to everyday life, and it, in turn, demands such an approach in attending to it. In an essay marking the centenary of Marxs death and written towards the end of Lefebvres life, he reasserts the centrality of everyday life for a critical Marxism: the commodity, the market, money, with their implacable logic, seize everyday life. The extension of capitalism goes all the way to the slightest details of everyday life (Lefebvre 1988: 79). And as if to insist on the point: A revolution cannot just change the political personnel or insti- tutions; it must change la vie quotidienne , which has already been literally colonized by capitalism (80). Kristin Ross argues that in Lefebvres work the continual references to the colonization of everyday life by capitalism should be taken literally as the continuation and transformation of the processes and forces of imperialism, and that colonialism must be seen as central to the development of capitalism (Ross 1995: 113). Rather than seeing colonialism as having been eradicated by the success of the struggles for independence by many African and Asian countries, modernity witnesses a continuation of colonialism in a re-ordering of the world whereby the processes of imperialism have taken on new configurations at a local and global level. What this meant in postwar France was a multiplication of colo- nial relations that emerge at the same time as the end of empire. On the one hand the process of decolonization had profound effects not just in the liberation war in Algeria but in the way that the urban geography of French cities internalized relations of colonization. Urban space articulates relations
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of global domination in its ethnicization of inner cities into impoverished and
racialized zones. On the other hand, France, like many other countries,
entered into colonial relations with the United States that had inescapable
consequences. Americanization becomes an umbrella term that signals all
those cultural changes that are seen to stand in for the end of a particular
(traditional) way of life, and mark the move towards a cultural globaliza-
tion. The continual references by the film-makers of the French New Wave
(Godard, Chabrol, Varda and others) to Hollywood movies, to streamlined
commodities, to American style in advertising, to American automobiles,
become so many synecdoches that point to this colonized relationship. For
Lefebvre such massive historical and geographical shifts dont demand simple
condemnation or celebration; they demand analysis both for the new
problems that they generate and for the possibilities they signal.
These massive social changes are the material from which Lefebvres
critique of everyday life emerges. As this critique develops in response to
these events, Lefebvre focuses more and more insistently on the urban as
the site for apprehending the everyday. But to understand Lefebvres orien-
tation to such events I need to start by discussing the philosophical and
cultural beginnings of his project, beginnings that would shape all his writing
about everyday life.
Foundations
Martin Jay in his book on Marxism and the concept of totality puts the work
of Lefebvre together with Surrealism and the emergence of a French Hegelian
Marxism. Jay usefully sets up a constellation for investigating the foundations
of Lefebvres thought and even gives us a scenario that sets them all in
motion. Quoting from one of Lefebvres autobiographical works, Le temps des
mprises (1975), he points to a decisive meeting between Lefebvre and Andr
Breton: He showed me a book on his table, Veras translation of Hegels
Logic, a very bad translation, and said something disdainfully of the sort:
You havent even read this? A few days later, I began to read Hegel, who
led me to Marx (Lefebvre, quoted in Jay 1984: 293). It is this constella-
tion of the avant-garde movements of Dada and Surrealism (he remained
life-long friends with Tzara) linked to the philosophical work of Hegel and
its materialist reshaping in the early works of Marx that gives Lefebvres
work its thematic insistence on the everyday as a site for the investigation
of alienation. Alienation and the possibility of dis-alienation receive a number
of articulations in Lefebvres work as he negotiates the various forces of this
constellation. His use of the concept of total man or total person (human-
kind no longer alienated) which would result in the end of history (the
telos of history having been reached) follows the axis of Hegelianized
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Marxism, whereas the insistence on la fte (the festival, particularly during the Middle Ages) as a moment other to the capitalist everyday and enacting a critique of the separation of the aesthetic from the social (or of art from life) emerges from his involvement with the Surrealist avant-garde and his intense and continual study of rural France. At first glance the bacchanalian indulgence of la fte , with its celebration of the low material body and satir- ical inversions of dominant social relations, seems a world away from Hegelian Marxist ideas about the end of history and the emergence of the total person. This mix of ideas, while evidencing contradictory and conflicting tendencies, is what gives Lefebvres position its critical purchase; indeed it is the artic- ulation of these ideas together that allows Lefebvre to navigate a path that avoids a simple nostalgic and romantic celebration of la fte on the one hand, and a dogmatic assertion of social homogeneity (the universality of the total person) on the other. I want to argue that the combination of these positions allows Lefebvre to make two related moves: to privilege creativity for the transformation of daily life (let everyday life become a work of art [Lefebvre 1984: 204]) and to argue for the decline of centrally organized society. For Lefebvre, capitalist modernity can be characterized by contradictory tendencies that increase homogeneity in everyday life (a standardization in work and objects through a general commodification) at the same time as social differences are extended and deepened (the intensification of hierarchical differences of class, race, gender, age, etc.). These forces are combined in an experience of fragmentation as time, space and knowledge are parcelled up into a multi- tude of discrete units. By placing la fte at the end of history, Lefebvre suggests (and desires) a historical telos of non-hierarchical play (creativity) and the radical democratic right to difference. While this suggests that Lefebvre had more in common with anarchism than with the communism of the Third International, it can be seen as a play oriented reading of Marxs early writings, combining a critique of both institutional social difference and the relentless routine of modern life. Related to this is a dialogue with philoso- phies of history (from both the left and the right) that enables him to argue for an anti-statist and anti-bureaucratic idea of society, without promoting individualistic ideologies. The total person, as festive and carnivalized, is the unknown potentiality of humankind (unknown, because the effects of the materialist negation of the present cant be known in advance) for a socia- bility based in a radical understanding of community. Not only will this transform everyday life, it will do so from the bottom up from within the everyday. Crucial to every aspect of Lefebvres emerging critique of everyday life is the complex political situation of the French Left as its various factions navigate across the changing circumstances of revolutionary possibility. From the utopian moment of the prewar Popular Front and the postwar promise
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of the Liberation, to the growing difficulty of maintaining the Communist
Party line in the face of the dogmatism, brutality and the imperialist aggres-
sion of Stalinism the Left is characterized by a growing disenchantment
with the revolution as exemplified by the Soviet Union. Lefebvres position
in the Left is an unenviable one as he remained within the Communist Party
from 1928 until he was expelled in 1958 and, although he did his fair share
of intellectual hatchet jobs for the party, he maintained a critical stance within
the party (see Kelly 1982; Poster 1976). Part of what allowed left-wing intel-
lectuals (outside the Soviet bloc) a certain amount of critical distance from
Stalinized Marxism was an involvement with abstract philosophical and
aesthetic problems. Lefebvre followed both these paths and became one of
the main proponents of Hegelian Marxism in France. The form that this took
was varied and changed over time, but essential to it was the restoration of
some of Marxs early texts, particularly the Economic and Philosophic Manuscripts
of 1844 (Marx 1977) where Marx establishes a form of materialist humanism
using Hegels notion that human society is in a state of self-alienation. Marxs
conceptualization of alienation is rooted in the production process of capi-
talism and is understood as being generated from the division of labour. But
in more general terms he suggests that human beings are alienated from
themselves (and each other) because their social conditions have postponed
the expression of their human potential the historic possibilities humans
have for creative and productive work (Marx 1977: 6174). It is this aspect
of alienation from the possibilities of human development, as well as alien-
ation between human beings and in human processes, that Lefebvre takes as
central to Marx and Hegel.
In both sections of Volume I of the Critique of Everyday Life Lefebvre
proposes, not only that the study of everyday life is a study of alienation
under conditions of modernity, but that the transformation of everyday life
will be brought about by the de-alienation of human beings and the creation
of the total person, and that this can be seen as an end of history. The
logic of this is fairly straightforward: to talk about the alienation of human
beings necessarily suggests that there is a state of un-alienated human life
where life can finally be lived as the ideal. In more fully Hegelianized terms
the dialectical conflict between the master and the slave, which can be seen
as the motor of history, is finally overcome as their differences disappear.
Such an overcoming would result in the realization of the idea pure spirit
- and would mean the end of history. Although such a synoptic account offers little in the way of a nuanced investigation of the dialectic, it does allow us to point to the major area of contention for a politics rooted in the transformation of everyday life (which is the central orientation of Lefebvres project): what kind of society will result from such an overcoming? What kind of people will live in it? What are the conditions that will realize this transformation? What is the idea or spirit that will emerge?
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The project of imagining a world outside the terms and conditions of the present, or as the culmination of those aspects in the present that are able to promote the ideal, is one fraught with problems. For Hegel it meant a symbolically strong state. The history of Marxism (in many ways the inher- itor of these debates) can be seen as caught between, on the one hand, the radical reworking of this overcoming, whereby it is the state that neces- sarily withers away as the end of class struggle arrives, and on the other hand the seemingly inevitable growth of a state-led communism. Given the circum- stances in which Lefebvre and other left-wing intellectuals found themselves, debates about these themes couldnt fail to resonate with the image of Stalin as the figurehead of an all-powerful communist state. But this Hegelian archi- tecture was open to being employed for a number of different ends. In the Paris of the interwar years and after, it became an area of contestation, a space that allowed for a number of alternatives to the Stalinist state to be theoretically rehearsed, without necessarily having explicitly to denounce Stalin and the French Communist Party. Although Lefebvre and his friend and colleague Norbert Gutterman had been publishing work on Hegel for several years, it was in 1933 that Hegel got his most influential introduction into Parisian intellectual society through the lectures of Alexandre Kojve. These lectures ran from 1933 to 1939 and have taken on a particular significance in intellectual history because lumi- naries such as Lacan, Bataille, Queneau, Breton and Merleau-Ponty attended them. Kojves reading of Hegels Phenomenology of Mind was based on the understanding that when Hegel writes of the end of history he is referring to the real historical success of the Emperor Napoleon, with whom Hegel was enamoured. So, for Kojve, the end of history in a Hegelian schema is synonymous with the emergence of a powerful head of state. But Kojves exegesis continues this form of reasoning until the idea of the end of history becomes the legitimation for the Stalinist state. Roger Caillois recalls:
He gave a lecture at the College [of Sociology: see chapter 4] on Hegel.
This lecture left us all flabbergasted, both because of Kojves intel-
lectual power and because of his conclusion. You will remember that
Hegel speaks of the man on horseback, who marks the closure of History
and of philosophy. For Hegel this man was Napoleon. Well! That was
the day Kojve informed us that Hegel had seen right but that he
was off by a century: The man of the end of history was not Napoleon
but Stalin.
(Caillois quoted in Hollier 1988: 86)
This was in December 1937. Eleven years later, at the start of the Marshall Plan, Kojve had rethought the end of history and had concluded that Hegel had been right all along, in that history had ended at the battle of Jena, but
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he concluded that the American way of life was the one fitted to the posthis-
torical period (Niethammer 1992: 67). In terms of the emerging New Left,
Kojve had simply swapped one form of state capitalism for another. I think
it is in the light of the New Lefts refusal of both Soviet state capitalism and
the United States entrepreneurial capitalism (signalled in synecdochal form
by the slogan neither Moscow nor Washington) that Lefebvres accentua-
tion of the end of history and the total man must be seen. If French
Hegelianism was open to a number of different articulations (as the example
of Kojve demonstrates), then Lefebvres articulation must be seen in a
dialogic context, explicitly as accentuating it against the conclusions of people
like Kojve, against those promoting a form of statist transformation. This
is achieved through the coupling of the total person with the idea of la fte
(the festival or carnival). Crucially, the promotion of festival as a model for
the ultimate overcoming of history means that the end of history is synony-
mous with the dissolution of the state. In subsequent years, this argument
would take practical shape in the call for autogestion (workers councils and
forms of self-management).
La fte is a continual reference point for Lefebvre as he outlines his
critique of everyday life. Festival holds an equivocal position in the everyday:
it is part of popular everyday life but it is also a radical reconfiguring of daily
life that is anything but everyday. In Maurice Blanchots review of Lefebvres
Critique , he suggests that the everyday becomes visible at moments of effer-
vescence, when existence is public through and through (Blanchot 1987:
12). For Blanchot, as for Lefebvre, such moments of effervescence are
evidenced in revolutionary situations, but they can also be found in festival.
In the chapter of Critique of Everyday Life entitled Notes Written One Sunday
in the French Countryside festival is given a vivid and ambiguous account.
Here Lefebvre draws on the research he had been doing during the war, on
the history of peasant society in the Pyrenees, in particular the history of
medieval society, and combines it with histories of Greek and Roman culture.
What interests Lefebvre is the idea of a community celebrating by excessive
expenditure, by turning the world upside down:
During the feasts there was much merry-making: dancing, masquerades
in which boys and girls changed clothes or dressed up in animal skins
or masks simultaneous marriages for an entire new generation races
and other sports, beauty contests, mock tournaments... It is the day
of excess. Anything goes. This exuberance, this enormous orgy of eating
and drinking with no limits, no rules...
(Lefebvre [1947] 1991a: 202)
While this connects with some of the (admittedly milder) cultural practices
that are privileged by Mass-Observation (particularly the Lambeth Walk),
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Lefebvres interest is in festivals ability to overturn cultural values for (poten- tially) revolutionary ends. Festival or carnival, then, is the overturning of established differences: differences of gender and class that have fixed hier- archical determinations. Such an overturning is not the erasure of difference; rather it is a negation that generates the possibility of re-ordering difference. The utopian possibilities of carnival are summed up in a more recent celebration of carnival culture:
Carnival, in our sense, is more than a party or a festival; it is the oppo-
sitional culture of the oppressed, a countermodel of cultural production
and desire. It offers a view of the official world as seen from below
not the mere disruption of etiquette but a symbolic, anticipatory over-
throw of oppressive social structures. On the positive side, it is ecstatic
collectivity, the joyful affirmation of change, a dress rehearsal for utopia.
On the negative, critical side, it is a demystificatory instrument for
everything in the social formation which renders collectivity impossible:
class hierarchy, sexual repression, patriarchy, dogmatism, and paranoia.
(Stam 1989: 95)
For Lefebvre, carnival is a moment when everyday life is reconfigured, but this different order of things is present in everyday life itself: Festival dif- fers from everyday life only in the explosion of forces which had been slowly accumulated in and via everyday life itself (Lefebvre [1947] 1991a: 202). This positive evaluation of medieval carnival can be seen as part of a more general intellectual current that will include the likes of Bakhtin, Bataille and the Situationists. Again, it can be argued that this attention to carnival is a desire to find alternative cultural formations to the two major bureaucratic state capitalist formations the USSR and the USA. For Bataille, carnival and other festivals were seen as exemplifying the basis of human society, annihilating the distance between primitive and so-called civilized societies and allowing him to conceive of another kind of economy, linked to expenditure rather than profit. In particular he used the cultural practice of Potlatch, as practised by native Americans of the Northwest, to write about the excessive giving and spoiling of gifts (Bataille 1991). This privileging of the practice of Potlatch is linked back to Lefebvre as the Letterist International, a proto-Situationist group (whose close but troubled relationship with Lefebvre will be discussed below), entitled their journal Potlatch (see Wollen 1991: 4656). Bakhtins work on carnival (Bakhtin 1984) is, of course, emerging from another cultural context, but it too can be seen as in dialogue with some of the same socio- political forces (although under considerably more duress) and employing sim- ilar cultural material. Bakhtins work on Rabelais, which he finished in 1940 but which was not published until 1965 (Lefebvre wrote a book on Rabelais in 1955), has been instrumental in disseminating a theorization of carnival
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whereby ideas of the world-turned-upside-down, the extravagance of festivals
and the insistence on the corporeality of pleasure are seen as critical and poten-
tially revolutionary responses by the dominated to the dominating. A host of
historians must also be included in this list of those writing about a cultural
form that has received so much attention and produced so much debate
(including Le Roy Ladurie [1980], Davis [1987] and Burke [1994]).
For the purpose of looking at Lefebvres use of la fte in conjunction
with his Hegelian conception of the end of history and the total person,
I think it is worth considering a number of questions and criticisms that have
usefully been asked of some of these other writers. The first question has to
do with the revolutionary potential of the idea of carnival:
The most common objection to Bakhtins view of carnival as an anti-
authoritarian force that can be mobilized against the official culture of
Church and State, is that on the contrary it is part of that culture; in
the typical metaphor of this line of argument, it is best seen as a safety-
valve, which in some functional way reinforces the bonds of authority
by allowing for their temporary suspension.
(Dentith 1995: 73)
Or in the words of Peter Osborne, carnival can be seen as a licensed compen-
sation for the medieval everyday (Osborne 1995: 242). So, although carnival
can be seen to turn the world upside down and in doing so overturn social
hierarchies, it can actually work to maintain the world the right way up
by allowing the forces that might destroy this world order a chance to let
off steam. This line of critique does problematize the assertion that carnival
is simply the radical voice of subversion. But within Lefebvres argument the
medieval carnival is not itself an example of either subversion or dis-alienation
but must necessarily be seen as alienated, in that it is only a moment when
the possibility of living otherwise is glimpsed (festival in the modern world
can be seen as a further alienation where that glimpse has been packaged
into consumable holidays and so on). The transformation of everyday life can
only be accomplished when the festival is no longer a few dazzling moments
(Lefebvre [1947] 1991a: 251) but has penetrated life and transformed it. The
effective radicality of carnival is not at issue with Lefebvre; the value of
carnival is as a promissory note signalling the possibility of another way
of being a way of being and an order of life based on the desires and frus-
trations of those whose interests are not at present being catered for.
Critical attention needs to be directed to the functioning of carnival as
a yet-to-arrive telos of history. There is a paradox in the choice of la fte as
signalling the end of history, in that, as an example of everyday life (or
everyday life transformed), it doesnt suggest so much the end of history as
the beginning. Lefebvres invocation of medieval carnival could be seen simply
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as a yearning for pre-industrial history, suggesting not a working through of historical processes but a nostalgia for an unrecoverable past. This mode of nostalgia can also be seen as employing one of the key tropes of cultural theory, whereby the alienated everyday of the present is set against a more authentic way of life situated prior to industrialization, or prior to any other dramatic social change that comes to be seen as responsible for social ills. While Lefebvres historical logic is riddled with contradictions (implicit, I think, in the logic of an end of history), I think that he is struggling precisely against this jargon of authenticity. More specifically, the opposition set up by Heidegger (to whom Lefebvre continually refers) and Lukcs (to whom he doesnt) of an everyday life ( Alltglichkeit stressing the triviality of the daily) where people have become object-like, versus an authentic life of the spirit, is something that Lefebvre struggles to refuse (see Trebitsch 1991: xviixix). The particularity of la fte (rather than a general celebration of pre-industrial past) is of crucial importance here: Lefebvres use of carnival continually asserts dialogic moments of struggle, where the dominated respond to their domination in excessive and festive ways, and in the end suggests the exact opposite of authenticity: the critique and contestation of authenticity. This critique is precisely the content of turning the world upside down, of cross-dressing, of the symbolic reversals of master and peasant. It is the process of taking the culture of domination, a culture ordered in the name of the authentic, and overturning it, which allows for the critique of authentic culture as interested culture. This is a far cry from the motifs of forests and Volk that can be found in Heideggers Being and Time (see Niethammer 1992: 7781). Perhaps Lefebvres coupling of Hegelianism with the radical potential of carnival demonstrates that Lefebvres intentions have as much to do with critically responding to writers such as Kojve and Heidegger as to do with creating a coherent system. Given the influence that such writers were having, Lefebvre could be seen as performing a powerful and important critique of the cultural articulations with which such philoso- phies were cloaking themselves, while utilizing the same philosophical architecture an architecture that had established a high degree of intellec- tual currency. If the critical debate about carnival can be seen as offering little purchase on Lefebvre, a more serious challenge might be that the Hegelian architecture that Lefebvre employs is structured on the aggressive erasure of differences (ethnic, gendered, sexual and classed differences) in the name of a universality or totality that implicitly privileges the heterosexual masculine, ethnocen- tric, bourgeois self. Laurie Langbauer in an article titled Cultural Studies and the Politics of the Everyday suggests that such a feminist critique can be made of Lefebvres work. While Langbauer is concerned with Lefebvres work of the late 1960s, Everyday Life in the Modern World , she could also have included Lefebvres earlier work in her discussion. Although she goes on to
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show how Lefebvres work problematizes its own claims, she situates Lefebvre
with a general New Left whose abrogation of difference remains a spectre
in any attempt to constitute culture as a field (Langbauer 1992: 48). Lang-
bauer alerts us to the vexed question of the position of women in Lefebvres
theorization of the everyday. Here we seem to be meeting Lefebvre at his
most contradictory. On the one hand, as Langbauer points out (and as I
mentioned at the start of this chapter), Lefebvre sees women as both carrying
the heaviest burden of the everyday and least able to recognize it as a form
of alienation. Thus Lefebvre can claim that everyday life weighs heaviest on
women (Lefebvre 1984: 73) and go on to explain that women are in an
ambiguous position as both consumers of commodities and symbols for
commodities (73). It is womens ambiguity in relation to the everyday which
leads Lefebvre to make the startling claim that women are incapable of
understanding the everyday (73) and to characterize womens protests as
clumsily formulated, directionless claims (92). Perhaps such statements (in
the 1960s) were a common enough reaction to the emergence of feminism,
even a predictable one. But what is more surprising is that earlier on in the
same book Lefebvre sets up a contrasting diptych that sees women in a totally
different light. This diptych contrasts womens intimate knowledge of
poverty, repressed desires and the endlessness of want with the power
of woman, crushed and overwhelmed, object of history and society but
also the inevitable subject and foundation (35). Here women not only are
given a critical consciousness in relation to the everyday but are also seen as
agents of a historical struggle to transform it. Perhaps this contradictory take
on women and the everyday is a result of the rather hurried way in which
Lefebvre seems to have written his books (he dictated them to a secretary)
(see Shields 1999). Perhaps it is an example of Lefebvre trying to satisfy two
contradictory demands. On the one hand, by distancing himself from femi-
nism as a political movement he can try and satisfy the revolutionary Marxist
who might see feminism as a distraction from the true revolutionary cause.
On the other hand, the very logic of Lefebvres dialectical approach to
everyday life should suggest that women are going to be at one and the same
time the most alienated of individuals and the most active resistors of such
alienation.
Langbauer ends up suggesting that in contrast to Lefebvre, modern
feminism should revise the category of the everyday from a seemingly
unproblematic ground supporting shared experience, theoretical consistency,
and ultimate social harmony to a site of irresolvable difference, of conflict
whose resolution is not simply delayed, but theoretically impossible (1992:
48). While I agree that such an unproblematic notion of everyday life needs
problematizing, I would argue that this is not characteristic of the concept
of the everyday that Lefebvre mobilizes (despite his lapses into patriarchal
ideology). Although Lefebvre quite clearly sees the notion of totality as crucial
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to his project, it doesnt seem to be a totality that erases difference: in this totality needs to be differentiated from universalism. In fact, in as much as Lefebvre works with the desire for totality (rather than a dogmatic asser- tion of it) he seems bent on trying to offer more and more complex attempts to reveal the unevenness of capitalism and its structuring of difference. If Lefebvres theory can partly be seen as attempting to do what Mass- Observation set about doing in practical ways (charting the everyday as heterogeneity), then for Lefebvre, totality will always be a totality of differ- ences. Lefebvre is faced with the same problem that Simmel sought to negotiate: the need to attend to the everyday in general, without assimilating the particular differences of daily life within an overarching schema. The conceptual architecture (Hegelian) that Lefebvre initially uses is problematic and does suggest the possibility of the erasure of difference; in particular the idea of the total person or total man can suggest a universal subjectivity, a vague invocation of the true nature of humankind. While I think that such an idea is used as a heuristic tool in Lefebvre, the danger is that it can be employed as legitimation for other projects (the openness of this architecture is demonstrated by the different inflections that Kojve gives it). As Martin Jay notes, the terms of his 1940 book, Dialectical Materialism , in particular the concept of total man, were vague and imprecise enough to be used by fascists as well as Marxists (Jay 1984: 296). For Lefebvre, in the 1950s the notion of the total person was necessary if the theoretical conception of the human wasnt to fall back into an incoherent pluralism (Lefebvre [1958] 1991a: 68). And I guess by this he is also pointing to the need for some kind of utopian focus (however unspecifiable) for galvanizing people together for collective social transformation (the historical echo of the Popular Front). Lefebvres vagueness on the actual nature of total man and the end of history is a necessary condition of his attempt to posit a pure potentiality for humankind rather than any actuality of what an unalienated humanity is or will be. Two observations need to be made here. The first is that the conceptualization of the total man is gradually played down after the 1960s. So, whatever value there was in re-accentuating Hegelianism between the wars and directly after, in the 1970s and 1980s this was no longer a major concern. The second point is to insist on the discord that results in combining la fte with the universalism that might be implied by some versions of Hegelian Marxism; indeed the concept of carnival can be seen as providing the terms for a critique of such Hegelian beliefs. The act of coupling Hegelian Marxism with la fte produces a philosophy of internal contradictions that provides the basis for its own critique and dissolution. Ideas of carnival and festival (ideas that continue throughout Lefebvres work) do not fit with ideas of totality and universalism. The kinds of sociality implied by carnival can be much more productively seen in terms of radical hetero- geneity a moment of heterotopian possibility in a dystopian reality.
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That which repeats itself constantly
La vie quotidienne (everyday life) suggests the ordinary, the banal, but more
importantly, for Lefebvre, it connotes continual recurrence, insistent repe-
tition. It is repetition that is crucial to Lefebvres meaning of the term
everyday life: the daily chores as well as those routinized pleasures that are
meant to compensate for the drudgery. Even that which is out of the ordi-
nary, for example a camping trip, is part of everyday life, because it is part
of the cycle of work and leisure: the yearly holiday, le weekend , the birthday
celebration, the office party and so on. As Lefebvre writes in Everyday Life
in the Modern World , Everyday life is made of recurrences: gestures of labour
and leisure, mechanical movements both human and properly mechanic,
hours, days, weeks, months, years, linear and cyclical repetitions, natural
and rational time (1984: 18). If Lefebvre stresses the repetition and tempo
of everyday life, then the reason for this is that by emphasizing ideas of recur-
rences he can articulate his most fundamental and radical working of the
concept of everyday life: everyday life as the interrelationship of all aspects
of life. By looking at the way the daily cycles of commuters relate to their
weekly visit to the cinema, and how this might relate to an irregular regu-
larity such as visiting a member of the family, everyday life can be seen as
the relationship between different spheres. In this way the everyday cant be
seen as relating to only certain kinds of activities, or social spheres: Everyday
life is profoundly related to all activities, and encompasses them with all their
differences and their conflicts; it is their meeting place, their bond, their
common ground (Lefebvre [1958] 1991a: 97).
Lefebvres most compelling working of this theme is his analysis of leisure
in the 1958 Foreword to The Critique of Everyday Life. Leisure, for Lefebvre,
is a sphere of activity that needs to be seen in conjunction with social spheres
such as work and the family; to see it independently of this would be to
misapprehend it. One of the reasons that it cant be separated is because
leisure is not one thing but many: the hobby (photography, painting), the
holiday, sitting in a cinema and so on. Leisure constitutes a diverse range of
activities that dont contain a particular common orientation, apart from their
differentiation from the world of work. But this is where Lefebvres dialectic
is in play: for him the world of leisure is both a continuation of the alien-
ation of work and also its critique. So the example of the camping holiday
bears the complex interaction of work and the negation of work: in the
camping holiday, work and leisure are barely distinguishable, and everyday
life in its entirety becomes play (Lefebvre [1958] 1991a: 33). In as much
as a camping holiday is a compensation for work, a temporary amelioration
of its conditions of exhaustion as well as necessary for its efficient continu-
ation, then it bears the stigmata of alienation (alienation in leisure just as in
work [39]). Similarly camping is, like most modern leisure, intimately
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bound up with commercialism. Not simply the commercialism of the holiday but all those commodified desires to buy the latest in tent and camping tech- nology. But it also articulates real needs that are other than the everyday world of work and in so doing criticizes and negates this world (for instance, camping might articulate the desire to live in a different relationship with nature). For Lefebvre, leisure in the modern world is a routinized instance of a capitalist everyday life, as well as evidence of the continuation of festival. Festival might be drastically alienated by the commodification of leisure, but it is still present, and still potentially critical. In writing about how a soci- ology of the everyday might attend to this dialectic of leisure, he notes:
Thus is established a complex of activities and passivities, of forms of
sociability and communication which the sociologist can study. Although
he [sic] cannot describe or analyse them without criticizing them as being
(partially) illusory, he must nevertheless start from the fact that they con-
tain within themselves their own spontaneous critique of the everyday.
They are that critique in so far as they are other than everyday life, and
yet they are in everyday life, they are alienation.
(Lefebvre [1958] 1991a: 40)
This dialectical reading of leisure is a crucial aspect of Lefebvres critique of the everyday and bears similarities to other versions of Western Marxism, for instance Herbert Marcuses critique of the aesthetic realm (Marcuse 1972). What makes the dialectical method so crucial for Lefebvre is the idea that everyday life provides its own moments of critique, which means that the project of attending to it can be aligned with the project of transforming it. Fundamental to this is a double critique: on the one hand it is a critique of the separation of life into specialized areas of activity and professionalism, and on the other (but closely related to it) it is the critique of academic and intellectual life into specialized ways of understanding and investigating society. For Lefebvre, everyday life is a challenge to general social atomization: a separation of society and experience into discrete realms of the political, the aesthetic, the sexual, the economic and so on; of life divided into labour, love, leisure, etc. It is also a challenge to a specialized disciplinarity, which can be seen as the intellectual articulation of such divisions and separations: economics, philosophy, sociology and so on. Such disciplinary isolation must be overcome in the same way that their social cognates must be overcome. The critique of everyday life must be seen as both attending to such sepa- rations (intellectual and social) and holding out the promise of their overcom- ing. By stressing the interrelatedness of all these social realms from the point of view of everyday life, Lefebvre also points out the limitations of transforming any one particular sphere in isolation. Similarly, the criticality of the study of everyday life is only guaranteed by the purposeful interdisciplinarity (or
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anti-disciplinarity) of the investigation. Crucial to Lefebvres position is the
critique of the separation of politics from realms such as the aesthetic and the
everyday, necessitating a critical politicization of the everyday that is also (and
dialectically) a critique of the political realm as one divorced from the every-
day. Thus, writes Lefebvre, the critique of everyday life involves a critique
of political life, in that everyday life already contains and constitutes such a
critique: in that it is that critique (Lefebvre [1958] 1991a: 92). The possibility
of transforming society via independent economic and political solutions is, for
Lefebvre, not just a mistake, but a fundamental misunderstanding of the revolu-
tionary project. Nowhere was this more keenly felt than in the failure of the
revolution of 1917 to transform everyday life by overcoming alienation. At the
start of his 1958 Foreword he writes rhetorically: is alienation disappearing
in socialist society? In the USSR or the countries which are constructing social-
ism, are there not contradictions indicative of new or renewed forms of
economic, ideological and political alienation? ([1958] 1991a: 5).
In relation to this heretical scepticism (for someone who was still, but
only just, a member of the Communist Party) the politicizing of the everyday
can be seen as related to other attempts at critically overcoming atomized
society a reminder of avant-garde Surrealism, but also a prescient future
echo of the feminist insistence that the personal is political. For Surrealism
the link with revolutionary Marxism was always strong but problematic;
Bretons insistence on Marxs Change Society was always linked to
Rimbauds Change Life. Lefebvres Surrealist heritage can be seen in his
politicization of the everyday for its revolutionary potential, which would
mean overcoming the discreteness of such separations of art and the everyday
- Let everyday life be a work of art! Let every technical means be employed for the transformation of everyday life! (Lefebvre 1984: 204). Such state- ments relate back to Simmels sociological aesthetics as well as to Surrealism. But whereas Surrealism remained within the aesthetic realm, Lefebvre insists that the everyday is the only site for such transformations and locates his critique in relation to new radical social movements, where the historical possibilities of transformation are due, precisely, to the experience of certain groups of people living across and against such social separations. Again the example of feminism is useful: as a politicization of the historical experience of living across and against the separation of the public and the private as gendered realms, it evidences the possibility of a critique from within everyday life. Lefebvres insistence on everyday life (as a space for both possible transformation and the most vivid and concrete of alienations) is linked to an understanding that class needs rethinking beyond economic strictures and that not only are other forms of classification just as socially operative, their potential for critical refusal is all the more evident. As such his demand that the critique of everyday life is an investigation of alienation is explicitly linked to the practical experience and possibilities of such groups:
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Is the notion of alienation an operative one? Can one derive a political
strategy from it? No. Is it easily detachable from the conceptual arma-
ture of Hegelianism? Hardly. Is it unambiguous, precise, analytical? No.
These are the wrong questions to put. The real question is that of the
role, of the practical efficacy of alienation, as an awareness of lived
experience and as a concept. It brings about self-revelation for different
conditions and situations (those of women, students, the colonized, the
colonizers, the masters, the workers, and so on).
(Lefebvre [1975] quoted in Reader 1987: 55)
If the Soviet revolution of 1917 had failed it was because everyday life had not been transformed. Or rather the revolution failed to release the creative potential of human beings on a daily basis.^2 Lefebvres revolution would be continual and cultural. In 1967 the transformation of everyday life that would herald a Permanent Cultural Revolution would concentrate on three areas: sexual reform and revolution; urban reform and revolution; and the redis- covery of the festival (Lefebvre 1984: 2046).
Hypermodernization
It was only after the Second World War that capitalism succeeded in
thoroughly penetrating the details of everyday life. We need new
concepts in Marxism if it is to retain its capacity to help us both under-
stand and transform this radically commodified contemporary world.
(Lefebvre 1988: 70)
These remarks occasioned by the centenary of Marxs death insist that the project of Marxism must continually renew its conceptual framework if it is to have relevance for modern everyday life. It is an insistence that could be seen as the main motivation of Lefebvres career, a career that has offered Marxism a productive range of conceptual tools. The focus of the critique of everyday life is, of course, the understanding and transformation of the contemporary world, even if it uses as old a concept as alienation for its analysis. But because everyday life is crucially a dynamic concept, it is contin- ually responding to an observable reality that will necessarily rework its theoretical co-ordinates, offering a much-expanded analysis of alienation as it is experienced under conditions of increased modernization in the postwar period. If the first part of the critique is written under conditions of a gener- ally optimistic nature (memories of the Popular Front, the Liberation of France and all the possibilities that that suggested), then the continuation of the project was responding to a very different situation. The 1950s and 1960s can be seen as a period of hypermodernization, a process that hit France (and
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Germany) more forcefully than most other Western countries (see Ardagh
1977). Kristin Ross gives a vivid account of French social and cultural trans-
formations in the late 1950s and early 1960s (the years after electricity but
before electronics):
The unusual swiftness of French postwar modernization seemed to par-
take of the qualities of what Braudel has designated as the temporality
of an event: it was headlong, dramatic, and breathless. The speed with
which French society was transformed after the war from a rural,
empire-oriented, Catholic country into a fully industrialized, decolo-
nized, and urban one meant that the things modernization needed
educated middle managers, for instance, or affordable automobiles and
other mature consumer durables, or a set of social sciences that fol-
lowed scientific, functionalist models, or a work force of ex-colonial
laborers burst onto a society that still cherished prewar outlooks with
all the force, excitement, disruption, and horror of the genuinely new.
(Ross 1995: 4)
This massively accelerated modernization, with its panoply of social symp-
toms, can be seen in a particularly dynamic way in the double articulation of
colonial processes. This double articulation is the complex colonial relations
between a traditional France, a general but uneven Americanization (Holly-
wood films, the Marshall Plan, juke boxes and so on), and the decolonization
of French colonies, most importantly, Algeria. As already mentioned such
processes mean that local and global relations are reconfigured as the urban
fabric of France is itself transformed by such diverse forces as the returning
pied noirs (white settlers), the increasing exploitation of immigrant (Algerian)
workers confined to particular banlieus , and the wholesale onslaught of inter-
national (i.e. North American) culture industries (Hollywood, le Big Mac ,
etc.). It is in attending to such social transformations that the critique of every-
day life as it continued during the postwar period gradually turned away from
the emphasis on some of the philosophical themes developed before the war
(though never entirely abandoning them) and increasingly concerned itself
with a Marxist sociology of everyday life, which takes as its subject matter
modernity and the spatial forms it generates.
Lefebvres work, partly because of the sheer longevity of his working
project, evidences a capacity to transform itself continually in the light of
circumstances. The shift from a philosophical approach to a more sociolog-
ically concrete one is similar to Simmels, though Lefebvre is adapting his
thought to different social circumstances. These different circumstances are
most evident in the way that Simmel and Lefebvre treat the urban environ-
ment: if Simmel offers something like a social psychology of urban modernity,
Lefebvres explicit emphasis on everyday life incorporates everything from a
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critique of urban planning to a poetics of movement. A critical response to Americanization (or the globalization of capitalism) is seen in both Lefebvres work and the work of Mass-Observation (the Lambeth Walk as an antidote to American commercial dance music), but Lefebvres work extends the idea of colonization to take in a much larger range of forces and circumstances. The concept of la fte and its revival continues to dominate, as it did in a variety of postwar French writing that attended to popular culture (Rigby 1991: 1738), but increasingly the focus of Lefebvres project is an attention to the latest aspects of social life. These are the results of observation and experience, the insights of a philosophical taxi driver.^3 The significant features of modernity are, for Lefebvre, the latest developments of the urban fabric, but not the metropolitan centre so much as the variety of suburban forms: the bidonvilles that house Algerian workers and the pavilions that house an affluent middle class in a fortress-like privacy (Lefebvre [1958] 1991a: 423). Rather than focusing on the glamour of new forms of travel, Lefebvre insists on the new time and space relationships that result from the urban process of suburbanization and the need for commuting. Commuting is a relation- ship of space and time that he refers to as constrained time (Lefebvre 1984:
- and which the Situationist International wrote about in their 1959 text, Situationist Theses on Traffic: Commuting time, as Le Corbusier rightly pointed out, is a surplus labour which correspondingly reduces the amount of free time (Debord [1959] 1981c: 57). Lefebvres focus on what Brecht called the bad new things is particu- larly strong in a chapter of his book Introduction to Modernity ([1962] 1995) entitled Notes on a New Town. Here Lefebvre, at his most visionary, is watching the construction of a New Town at Mourenx, designed to cater for the increase in population being caused by the discovery of the new oil wells at Lacq. As he watches the construction of this urban text, a text that fills him with dread, he contemplates the possibilities of French state capi- talism and asks are we entering the city of joy or the world of unredeemable boredom? (119). The city reveals itself as a series of possibilities as well as the closure of possibilities through the production of boredom and constraint: in a sense the place is already nothing but traffic lights: do this, dont do that… Everything is clear and intelligible. Everything is trivial (119). It is this dialectical approach of Lefebvres (the continual and mutual testing of an observable and dynamically changing reality with critical theory) which allows Lefebvre to develop, in the 1960s, a social theory that closely resembles aspects of the theories of postmodernism as articulated by Jameson and others in the 1980s. Indeed it appears that Lefebvre was instrumental in the moment of postmodernisms North American exemplification: the moment when Fredric Jameson, Ed Soja and Lefebvre all got lost in the Bonaventure Hotel in down-town Los Angeles. Anecdotes aside, Lefebvre
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might be claimed as a theorist of the everyday condition of postmodernity
( avant la lettre ) but only if such a claim is heavily qualified. In a section of
Everyday Life in the Modern World entitled What Happened in France Between
1950 and 1960, he points to a number of changes that will be seen as defin-
itive of postmodernity.
One of the most significant features of postmodernism for Jameson is
the idea of depthlessness: The first and most evident [aspect of postmod-
ernism] is the emergence of a new kind of flatness or depthlessness, a new
kind of superficiality in the most literal sense (Jameson 1991: 9). Jamesons
examples for the most part remain within the sphere of aesthetic objects
(books, paintings, etc.) and, while his theories have been subjected to a range
of critiques for the contradictory use of these examples, the shift that he
examines in relation to signs has become recognized as characteristic of the
postmodern. As one critic vividly puts it, A garden gnome is no longer a
garden gnome... These days one cannot help suspecting a garden gnome
of being an ironic quotation (Brger 1991: 3). It would seem that aesthetic
signs have moved from the authentic to the ironic, or from having the crit-
ical ability of parody to being merely capable of pastiche. Or to put it another
way, cultural forms that once offered a fullness of experience and meaning
have given way to forms that have been emptied, and so appear as depth-
less (Jameson 1991: 1619). While such theorizing of the postmodern has
concentrated on the aesthetic sign, Lefebvres interest in the social changes
in cultural signification has a much broader purview. Lefebvre sees the distinc-
tive shift to be from the semiotics of the symbol to the semiotics of the
signal. For Lefebvre the symbol relates to a society where meaning is expe-
rienced in a way that relates everyday life to the general narrative themes of
a culture; by signal he is suggesting a much more instrumentally reduced
form of meaning, a kind of on/off communication exemplified by the traffic
light. To some extent this is consistent with the theorizing of postmodern
culture: the symbol for Lefebvre designates the signification of a society more
replete than the present one. And like the discourses of postmodernism this
can be taken as a nostalgic position that is continually in danger of mysti-
fying and reifying the past.
In other ways, though, the idea of the signal suggests an important differ-
ence from theories of postmodernism. If signification in postmodern culture
is seen as tending towards polysemy (towards ambiguity rather than fixed
meaning), Lefebvre sees the signification of the signal as a loss of both full-
ness and multiplicity. The movement from the symbol to the signal is a
movement that closes down the possibilities of meaning (in Bakhtinian terms,
this is a movement from the dialogic to the monologic): the signal commands,
controls behaviour and consists of contrasts chosen precisely for their contra-
dictions (such as, for instance, red and green); furthermore, signals can be
grouped in codes (the highway code is a simple and familiar example), thus
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forming systems of compulsion (Lefebvre 1984: 62). Although the reign of the signal doesnt mean that symbols no longer exist, the growing ubiquity of this instrumental signification does suggest to Lefebvre a society that is becoming more and more based around prohibitions and commands. Later on, in the Production of Space , Lefebvre implies that the way urban space signi- fies is by dos and donts (Lefebvre 1991b: 142), spaces that allow and disallow. While this can seem to offer a theory of power that dominates the urban everyday leaving little room for resistance, Lefebvre reads this dialec- tically and continues to emphasize agency as much as structure: urban space demands particular order because those who organize it recognize the pres- ence of disorder. In this way it isnt assumed that the dos and donts have been successfully deployed. In fact Lefebvres understanding of the use of instrumental signification in everyday life might suggest the very opposite. It may well be precisely because the lunatics are taking over the asylum (so to speak) that social planners try and clamp down on the openness of meaning and use. Examples like this distinguish Lefebvres work from the work that has been associated with postmodernism. Recognizing that Lefebvre has attended to the same social phenomena as theorists of the postmodern might suggest a sobering alternative to the more millennialist versions of postmodernity. For Lefebvre the social changes that mark his contemporary modernity are not to be thought of as radically different from capitalist modernity in general. Rather it is capitalist modernity itself that must be seen as a dynamically changing force that continually throws up new and unpredictable situations. As such the words of Alan Pred might suggest that Lefebvre is best thought of as a theorist of the hypermodern rather than the postmodern:
… everyday life and experiences of the here and now… however clearly distinctive and dramatic they may seem, however radically altered they may have become by post-Fordist, post-colonial or post-cold war circumstances, are best characterized as modernity magnified, as capitalist modernity accentuated and sped up, as hypermodern, not postmodern. (Pred 1995: 15)
Although this necessarily qualifies Lefebvres relationship to postmodernism it is still worth looking at other themes stressed in various accounts of post- modernity which are also articulated by Lefebvre as he analyses shifts in French society in the 1950s and 1960s. Jamesons understanding of postmodern
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society as what you have when the modernization process is complete and
nature is gone for good (Jameson 1991: ix) finds itself represented by Lefebvre
as the final reduction and absorption of pre-capitalist production and traditions.
Similarly, the focus on the production and accumulation of information as a
significant aspect of (post)modern society, as well as the changes in the nature
of time and space (timespace compression), are all part of the society that
Lefebvre is observing in the late 1960s. But rather than just remark on the
foresight of all this, we might ask instead why it was that such themes took
so long to find an audience. Some of the most influential accounts of post-
modernism seem to take as their condition of possibility a rediscovery of
Lefebvres critical project (for example, Harvey 1989), leaving us to ask why
Anglophone academics never really discovered Lefebvre in the first place.
Not only do Lefebvres writings of the 1960s and 1970s appear resolutely
political (in the activist sense of the term), but their dynamically unsystematic
approach sits uncomfortably with the hegemonic success of structuralism. The
export of structuralism into Anglo-American academia might have been
uneven and at times heavily contested by traditionalists, but the penetration
of the academy by French structuralism and poststructuralism (in all its
varied forms) was so thorough, that to speak of theory in the 1970s and 1980s
was to invoke a role-call of intellectual stars, most of whom had been targets
of Lefebvres scorn. By the late 1970s and early 1980s a heady brew of French
structuralist and poststructuralist theory had become a kind of official opposi-
tion to purveyors of traditional values. Such waywardly unsystematic and prac-
tically political work as Lefebvres was left without a platform.
The revitalization of Lefebvre in the Anglo-American university in recent
years (still on a small scale) can be seen as a reaction to the success of this
official opposition through a return to older problematics. The return to a
more socially grounded sense of the history and geography of culture has
allowed a more responsive context for Lefebvre, particularly within the
expanding field of cultural geography (for instance, in the work of David
Harvey and Edward Soja). Such a shift in approaches to culture has allowed
more attention to be paid to the forces of colonialism and globalization. But
cultural geographys account of Lefebvre has (not unexpectedly) often
resulted in a privileging of his more explicitly geographical work at the
expense of a general understanding of his work as a critique of everyday life.
Lefebvres contribution to a geographical understanding of the social is, I
think, substantial, and his dialectical studies of urban space as a tripartite
relationship between the particularities of the locality, the forces of trans-
global capitalism and the forces of the nation-state offer a usefully complex
form of attention for everyday life in neo-colonial society. But while
Lefebvres work becomes more explicitly focused on urban space, this needs
to be seen as the continuation of his critique of everyday life. In much of
the tradition that we have been mapping out the everyday and the urban
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seem necessarily connected. By understanding the urban as a general condi- tion of modern life (to be found in small towns and suburbs, etc.), Lefebvre allows for a more inclusive approach to modern everyday life. One way of insisting on the relationship between Lefebvres urban geography and the critique of everyday life is to emphasize the dialogue that took place between Lefebvre and the Situationists in the 1960s, and to see it in the context of the quasi-revolutionary events of May 1968.
May 1968, urbanism and the Situationists
When Paris exploded^4 in the spring of 1968 a number of themes that had dominated Lefebvres writing converged and sprang into the public sphere with a ferocity that shook, but never toppled the established order. As students took control of their institutions and as workers formed strike committees and workers councils ( autogestion ) it seemed, for a while, as if a permanent cultural revolution might result from what was appearing to be the re-emergence of the festival within the urban everyday. Here a form of revolutionary urbanism was transforming everyday life, turning it into carnival. Lefebvres writings take on an extraordinary prescience when viewed in the light of the May events. His idea that urban processes would provide the conditions for the overturning of commodity culture, his call for the restoration of la fte to the city and his insistent demand to transform everyday life through a critical de-alienation are crucial themes for understanding the revolutionary moment of May 1968. Just the year before, in the books Right to the City (see Lefebvre 1996) and Everyday Life in the Modern World (see Lefebvre 1984), he reiterated his understanding of the radical potential of the festival (still present in everyday life) for transforming everyday life:
Urban reform and revolution. There should be no misunderstandings
at this point; urbanism will emerge from revolution, not the revolu-
tion from urbanism; though, in fact, urban experience and in particular
the struggle for the city (for its preservation and restoration, for the
freedom of the city) provide the setting and objectives for a number
of revolutionary actions...
The Festival rediscovered and magnified by overcoming the conflict
between everyday life and festivity and enabling these terms to harmo-
nize in and through urban society, such is the final clause of the
revolutionary plan.
(Lefebvre 1984: 2056)
These words might sound like those of a would-be soothsayer if we didnt restore the intellectual and social context that they were party to. For one
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thing Lefebvre had by this time been teaching in a number of different insti-
tutions and had been involved in research with a generation of radicalized
students who would play significant parts in the May events. For example,
the student leader Daniel Cohn-Bendit, whose involvement in the mouvement
du 22 mars can be seen as sparking the May events, was studying sociology
with Lefebvre at Nanterre (a university cit on the outskirts of Paris). A more
substantial relationship, however, is that between Lefebvre and the
Situationist International (SI), who are often seen as the spiritual instigators
of the May events. The productive ground that Lefebvre and the Situationists
shared was the revolution of everyday life. The details of their fiery rela-
tionship and their reciprocal influence are now buried under a barrage of
resentment and acrimony (for Lefebvres account, see Ross 1997b). It seems
that the most useful approach is to see their work as differently articulating
a number of shared themes, and while the working relationship between
Lefebvre and the SI broke down irreparably in 1962, it is still productive to
follow both articulations.
The SI was established in 1957 as an avant-garde group spread across a
number of European countries and coalescing round a journal and irregular
conferences in a variety of host cities. The themes of the SI were both
aesthetic and social; indeed it was the indivisibility of the two that demon-
strates their links back to Surrealism and it is their insistence on the social
sphere as the sphere of action that caused rifts with more art-centred groups.
Formed out of a number of radical art collectives (the International Letterists
and the International Movement for an Imaginist Bauhaus), the SI should be
seen as both politically and aesthetically avant-garde. From an SI perspective
the problem with a purely artistic avant-gardism is that its revolutionary
intent is too easily bought off by money, fame or institutional recuperation.
Yet theirs is also a critique of political orthodoxies of both the Right and the
Left. The theoretical concept most associated with the SI is Guy Debords
analysis of social relations based on reified images in his Society of the Spectacle
(Debord [1967] 1983) and results in a relentless critique of an everyday life
saturated and impoverished by the spectacle. The SI demanded revolution,
and while their analysis of how this would come about is in opposition to
Lefebvres, the envisaged outcome can be seen to be similar: Proletarian
revolutions will be festivals or nothing, for festivity is the very keynote of
the life they announce. Play is the ultimate principle of this festival, and the
only rules it can recognize are to live without dead time and to enjoy without
restraints (Situationist International 1966: 337).
Crucial to both the SI and to Lefebvre is an understanding of the Paris
Commune as a revolutionary moment whose value had not been fully recog-
nized by the Left. For Lefebvre the interest in the Commune of 1871 is that
it can be seen as a radical negation of the urban processes that became
its condition of possibility. The urban development of Paris, under Baron
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Haussmann, from the 1850s to the 1870s created its own gravediggers. By recruiting masses of workers from the countryside to rebuild Paris for bour- geois rule, and by moving the workers out of the centre of Paris, Haussmannization was a condition that allowed for the possibility of the Paris Commune:
One strong aspect of the Paris Commune (1871) is the strength of the
return towards the urban centre of workers pushed out towards the
outskirts and peripheries, their reconquest of the city, this belonging
among other belongings, this value, this oeuvre which had been torn
from them.
(Lefebvre 1996: 76)
This analysis leads both Lefebvre and the SI to focus on the possibilities of the urban fabric to restore la fte to the city and to transform everyday life. It is ironic then that the break between Lefebvre and the SI should come about over what had been an agreement between the two parties: the SI accused Lefebvre of stealing their analysis of the Commune (see Kofman and Lebas 1996: 1118). What adds to the irony is the SIs position with regard to ownership of ideas: Plagiarism is necessary, progress implies it (Debord and Wolman 1981: 10). The founding theoretical texts of the Situationists establish a range of concepts and practices that are central to their understanding of the urban everyday as containing the conditions of possibility for its own transforma- tion. The idea of the drive brings a number of these elements together. To drive is to wander, to drift around the city. It can be seen as an important part of a more general activity dtournment , an approach to montage that stresses the necessity of negating elements of culture as a prelude to their transformation. A drive is a practical dtournment whereby the order of the city is negated in favour of a drift that allows the disordered forces of the city to be revealed: the play of affects and attractions of an urban psycho- geography. An often quoted example of this is the friend of Guy Debord who wandered through the Harz region of Germany while blindly following the directions of a map of London (Debord 1981a: 7). While this offers a certain flavour of the drive it misses out on the importance of analysis and observation for psychogeography (the urban affects of place and space), and of giving yourself over to the pull of attractions of the urban environ- ment in order to understand it. While this distinguishes it from the more purely aleatory drift of the Surrealists, it remains within a Surrealist under- standing of the city. It also suggests a connection with the Surrealist-derived work of Walter Benjamin as he attempts to write the prehistory of modern- ity by resurrecting the nineteenth-century figure of the flneur and the rag- picker. The drive , in its observant aimlessness, assumes that the urban
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everyday can best be perceived as a form of unconsciousness. Drifting around
cities is a form of urban free association that is designed to reveal the hidden
secrets of the urban everyday. If this focus on the urban everyday as precon-
scious or unconscious connects with the urban perspective of Simmel,
Benjamin and Surrealism, it also, perhaps, offers another method for doing
Surrealist ethnography (a method that Mass-Observation, for example, might
have benefited from in the Bolton project).
If the Situationist drive can be illuminated by reference to Benjamin, it
is because both can be seen as collage activities that can embody a dialec-
tical approach that productively negates the coherency of modern culture by
introducing other times and other spaces. In his Surrealism: The Last
Snapshot of the European Intelligentsia, Benjamin argues that the Surrealist
endeavour to win the energies of intoxication for the revolution (Benjamin
1985: 237) was attempted by focusing on the outmoded spaces of the city
(229). Such a claim can be seen as a description of Benjamins work as he
follows a historical process that continually foregrounds the outmoded of
nineteenth-century Paris with its dioramas, arcades and such like. In Hal
Fosters (Benjaminian) analysis of Surrealism, Compulsive Beauty , he considers
the Surrealist drive of Andr Bretons Nadja , with its fascination with the
outmoded spaces of Paris (in particular the flea market), and suggests the
analytic possibilities of the outmoded:
To invoke such outmoded forms is to advance a twofold immanent
critique of high capitalist culture... On the one hand, the capitalist
outmoded relativizes bourgeois culture, denies its pretence to the
natural and the eternal, opens it up to its own historicity. In effect, it
exploits the paradox that this culture, under the spell of the commodity
has any history at all. On the other hand, the capitalist outmoded chal-
lenges this culture with its own forfeited dreams, tests it against its
own compromised values of political emancipation, technological eman-
cipation, technological progress, cultural access, and the like. It may
even intimate a way to tap the utopian energies trapped in these histor-
ical forms to tap them for other political purposes in the present.
(Foster 1993: 162)
This critique of capitalist culture brings the Situationist drive in line with
Benjamins project and Lefebvres understanding of the urban everyday. The
dialectical approach that combines critical analysis with the rescuing and resus-
citating of utopian energies is located in the actuality of urban life. Common
to all three is an understanding of capitalist progress as uneven and radically
discontinuous, while at the same time presenting itself as homogeneous. For
the Situationists, as for Lefebvre, the contemporary urban everyday of capi-
talism is characterized by the saturation of mass cultural forms (such as TV
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and radio), penetrating everywhere as an act to cover over and hide the discontinuities of everyday life (Lefebvre 1996: 72). These discontinuities are the fissures in the urban fabric, the rents in the weave that reveal the way in which everyday life lags behind what is technically possible, the uneven development which characterizes every aspect of our era (Lefebvre [1958] 1991a: 8), a process that can be seen as a kind of general banlieuization of the city. The discontinuous city is the city of quartiers , spaces of different temporalities, outmoded spaces with distinct cultural characteristics that, although in danger of becoming homogenized, can interrupt the homoge- nizing and hypnotizing effects of capitalist standardization through their cultural and historical differences. The city that evidences dereliction and decay alongside glamour and wealth is a city that can rupture the false histori- cism of modernity, a revelation that can awaken us from the dream of commodification. This is what Hal Foster sees as the potential of the Surrealist project, and what Walter Benjamin took to be the secret cargo of Surreal- ism. For the Situationists and Lefebvre it was the basis for an analysis of the urban scene, a psychogeography that would reveal the unevenness of capitalist development, a critical geography that was practical as well as theoretical. Such an investigation meant veering off the beaten track, avoiding the official city of the tourist guide. The Situationist drive was first introduced by Ivan Chtcheglov in his Formulary for a New Urbanism of 1953 (Chtcheglov 1981: 14), and the first reported drives were by Chtcheglov (under the pseudonym Gilles Ivain) and Guy Debord. These wanderings take the two International Letterists into bars that are distinguished by their ethnic identity: the first bar is Algerian and they return there several times between 25 December 1953 and 1 January
- The second bar is a Yiddish-speaking bar which generates an acute sense of fear in the drivers. These wanderings can be seen as a modern day form of flnerie : to be away from home and yet to feel oneself everywhere at home; to see the world, to be at the centre of the world, and yet to remain hidden from the world (Baudelaire 1964: 9). And while it allows the unevenness of the everyday to be revealed, the unproblematic privileging of an easy spatial and social mobility is symptomatic (as well as diagnostic) of the unevenness of urban experience. The centrality of the urban flneur , as the exemplary experience of moder- nity, has recently been scrutinized by a number of feminist cultural historians. Pointing out that such an experience fails to reveal its own situated-ness in terms of gender and class, they show the unequal access men and women had to the spaces of modernity, and examine the spaces of femininity, spaces that have been left out of the story of modernity.^5 While the flnerie of Baudelaire might be seen as allowing for an implicit critique of modern everyday life, the drives of the Situationists were intended to be part of an explicit social critique and their practice should be opened to a similar kind of analysis. What the
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Situationists fail to reflect on is their own position as white male Parisians who
are able to go botanizing on the asphalt, or in this case, to enact what seems
to be a kind of tourist relationship with the colonized spaces of Paris and the
lived experiences within them. The maps of influence that the SI want to
make from their psychogeographical experiments end up trapped in a language
of atmospheres and feelings (Debord 1981d: 504): a language which can
only attend to the effects of colonialism as exotic, repeating the discourse of
orientalism. In this ethnically fragmented space of Paris, global inequalities are
articulated at a local level: for instance, as part of an international proletariat,
Algerian French citizens were in receipt of the worst housing in Paris
(Hargreaves 1995: 1215). Debord and Chtcheglovs drive spills over into the
eve of New Year 1954, the year the war for Algerian Independence began, a
war that had major effects in Paris, resulting in heavy restrictions being placed
on Algerian movement, restrictions based on the visibility of cultural dif-
ferences for establishing an ethnically specific curfew. For all of Debords
interest in images, the SI seem unaware that they may inhabit a different rep-
resentational space from those with whom they sit and chat. The radical dif-
ferences of lived experience (experiences made up of different historical and
spatial representation) are either ignored or played down by the Situationists
and result in severe limitations to their geography of everyday life.
Perhaps the relationship between the Situationists and Lefebvre was
always in danger of breaking down. The kind of politics of the everyday that
Lefebvre favoured always allowed for gradual and reformist revolution. It
allowed Lefebvre to have a much more amenable relationship with govern-
ment agencies and institutions. For the Situationists such recuperation was
unthinkable. Theirs was a revolutionary agenda that demanded the total and
immediate overthrow of the present. Yet the Situationists provide (however
problematically) everyday life theory with a practice and an activism which
is often sorely lacking in the more abstract discussions of Lefebvre and the
other theorists we have discussed.
An unfinishable project
A quote from Hegel resonates across four decades of Lefebvres writing:
Was ist bekannt ist nicht errant (what is familiar goes unrecognized).
Lefebvre spent a large part of the century struggling to recognize the over-
familiar world of the everyday. His critical perspective applies a dialectical
approach to the seemingly most mundane aspects of everyday life (com-
muting, for instance). Such an approach continues the work of Simmel in its
attempt to register the general in the particular. In bringing such attention
to bear on the trivialities of life he dislodges their over-familiarity. Such
work is intimately connected with the avant-gardist practice of making the
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familiar strange. As we have seen, Lefebvre worked with and against a number of avant-gardist groups and his writing evidences a literary inclination that works to defamiliarize the familiar. If Lefebvre can be seen to evidence an avant-garde sociology of the everyday, then the means for doing this seem closer to the work of Bertolt Brecht than to the Surrealism of Andr Breton. It is Brecht whom Lefebvre references in 1958 in demanding that the everyday must be defamiliarized (directly invoking Brechts alienation effect or Verfremdungseffekt ). It would seem that a critical attention to everyday life as an alienated reality requires an alienating perspective: It is then that consciousness of alienation that strange awareness of the strange liberates us, or begins to liberate us, from alienation (Lefebvre [1958] 1991a: 20). Everyday life in modernity evidences an all-pervasive alienation: the alienation from the recognition of alienation. In other words, alienation is the condition of being alienated from our alien- ation. Here, in a dialectical twist, the route to dis-alienation must start out from more alienation: it is only by defamiliarizing the everyday that the everyday can be recognized as alienation. Lefebvre doesnt supply any systematic methodology for such a form of attention but he does seem to offer a set of concerns, ways of operating, that I think are invaluable for thinking critically about the everyday. In the following passage he suggests a kind of analytic perspective that transforms our perception of everyday actions by insisting that they reverberate across a number of different registers:
Thus the simplest event a woman buying a pound of sugar, for
example must be analysed. Knowledge will grasp whatever is hidden
within it. To understand this simple event, it is not enough merely to
describe it; research will disclose a tangle of reasons and causes, of
essences and spheres: the womans life, her biography, her job, her
family, her class, her budget, her eating habits, how she uses money,
her opinions and her ideas, the state of the market, etc. Finally I will
have grasped the sum total of capitalist society, the nation and its history.
And although what I grasp becomes more and more profound, it is
contained from the start in the original little event. So now I can see
the humble events of everyday life as having two sides: a little, indi-
vidual, chance event and at the same time an infinitely complex social
event, richer than the many essences it contains within itself.
(Lefebvre [1958] 1991a: 57)
The defamiliarization of the everyday requires a plurality of approaches, a range of attentions that place it radically within a framework of critical inter- disciplinarity. The everyday, Lefebvre insists, is not an object or a place, but a totality of relationships.
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The above quote conjures up a multitude of narratives, all of which
impinge on each other. Each narrative unfolds in a different spatial organi-
zation: from the mnemonic geography of the home and the locality, to the
global unevenness of world trade. These narratives would each require crit-
ical forms of attention: questions associated with feminism and political
economy would need to be asked, methodological problems to do with the
use of autobiographical materials and the traces of experience could be raised.
In the end it is the tangle of relationships to which the desire for the critique
of everyday life must aspire a desire that finally is unsatisfiable for a project
that is unfinishable.
Where Lefebvres project differs from the work that we have been
looking at so far is in its commitment to the revolutionary transformation of
everyday life. Where Mass-Observation saw the foregrounding of the
everyday as leading to a transformation of daily life within daily life, for
Lefebvre the goal of transformation must be the overcoming and oblitera-
tion of the everydayness of everyday life. The privileging of creativity and
play as the basis for a social life stripped of boredom and routine places
Lefebvre in a much more utopian tradition than we have seen so far. But in
as much as this revolutionary energy is always within the everyday (however
alienated) his utopianism is tied to the possibilities present within contem-
porary life. In this way a dialectical foregrounding of everyday life, which
recognizes the alienation in everyday life at the same time as it attempts to
grasp the utopian element that alienation tries to hide, is an act of bringing
to consciousness (theoretically and practically) a non-conscious and non-
apparent everyday.
Notes
1Lefebvres Critique of Everyday Life: Volume I was first published in France
in 1947. It was republished in 1958 with a long and important Foreword.
In referencing this work I will use square brackets to make it clear to
which section of the book I am referring.
2For an account of the kinds of transformations of everyday life that did
occur in the wake of the Soviet revolution, see Boym (1994).
3David Harvey notes the importance of Lefebvres early career as a taxi
driver in his Afterword to Lefebvre (1991b: 426).
4Lefebvres written response to the May events is given in a book entitled
The Explosion: Marxism and the French Revolution (Lefebvre 1969).
5See Pollock (1988); Wilson (1995); Wolff (1989). Also of interest for its
attention to the suburban spaces of femininity in nineteenth-century Paris
is Adler (1989).
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For what I really wish to work out is a science of singularity; that is to say,
a science of the relationship that links everyday pursuits to particular circum-
stances.
(de Certeau 1984: ix)
T
O MOVE FROM LEFEBVRES writing to the work of Michel de
Certeau (19251986) is to do something more than simply jump a gener-
ation. The shift is in many ways more fundamental. For one thing, de Certeau
is sympathetically engaging with a tradition of thought (structuralism and
poststructuralism) that met with little but scorn in the work of Lefebvre.
Yet this doesnt quite capture the differences between the two. Perhaps it
is best to locate their difference at the level of sensibility. The general sure-
footed-ness of Lefebvres approach and the declamatory style of his writing
are sustained by an orientation that is firmly grounded in a critical architec-
ture (supplied by treating the everyday as an alienated condition). Michel de
Certeaus writing, on the other hand, is often elliptical and elusive; often his
arguments seem to meander beneath an edifice made up of a startlingly
eclectic array of examples and theoretical perspectives. It marks an approach
that is tentative, yet evidences an unquestioned faith in the potential of a yet
to be recovered everyday. And this is perhaps the central problematic facing
de Certeau: the everyday is hidden and evasive; to attempt to attend to it
requires something like a leap of faith. De Certeaus work is perhaps the
most wholehearted attempt to fashion an approach to the everyday from the
material of the everyday itself. If he approaches it in the name of faith, then
this is because faith and belief are the characteristics of the kinds of knowl-
edge that circulate in the everyday. If his theorizing is labyrinthine and his
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Chapter 8
8. Michel de Certeaus poetics of everyday life
OF EVERYDAY LIFE
arguments unsystematic, then this is because the everyday might be thought
of as patterned in this way. If de Certeaus writing can be described as both
suggestive and evocative, then the everyday too can be seen as textured by
evocations that point to a sensory realm never fully mappable by images and
words. Perhaps then with de Certeau we find a style for writing the everyday
that comes closest to being in tune with its subject.
Assembling a poetics of everyday life
A Jesuit, a member of the psychoanalyst Jacques Lacans Ecole Freudienne ,
a scholar in early modern mystic possessions, a critical historiographer, a
committed practitioner of plural writing, and an ethnographer of everyday
life, Michel de Certeaus writing presents the image of an itinerant
thinker. In a career marked by journeys that were both intellectual and spatial
(he worked in France, Brazil, California, Argentina and Chile) travel figures
as a constant metaphor. The theme of an active movement through time in
space brings together a number of operations that will make up the materi-
ality of the everyday for de Certeau. Whether it is reading or walking, a
complex of spatio-temporal activities is at stake. Travelling suggests a journey
that alters not only the traveller but also the spaces travelled; it suggests an
encounter with other cultures, with difference. Journeying is as apt a
metaphor for de Certeau as it is for the everyday: it falls on the side of unfin-
ished business, of becoming rather than being. In de Certeaus writing there
is no finished system, no structure that can be overlaid on the everyday to
produce neat schemas and mappable territories. De Certeaus work on the
everyday is nothing if not an adventure.
The path of this adventure in theorizing everyday life is mapped across a
number of single- and joint-authored works. The most significant co-ordinates
are provided by the two volumes of Linvention du quotidien ( The Practice of
Everyday Life ), first published in Paris in 1980 (de Certeau 1984; de Certeau
et al. 1998). Taken together they present a theoretical and empirical monu-
ment to the everyday. The first volume is authored by de Certeau alone and
though peppered with exemplification, articulates a generalized and theoreti-
cal approach to everyday life. The second volume consists of the work of Pierre
Mayol and Luce Giard (punctuated by short essays by de Certeau) and offers
a more sustained involvement with empirical material. De Certeaus work
needs to be seen in conjunction with the work of his colleagues, and
throughout this chapter I will insist on the productivity of reading the first vol-
ume through the material of the second. The Michel de Certeau in whom I
am interested includes the work of both Giard and Mayol.
The two volumes were the result of a research project (19748) directed
by de Certeau under the auspices of the prestigious Dlgation Gnrale
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la Recherche Scientifique et Technique (General Office for Science and Technology Research) (de Certeau et al. 1998: xiiixxxiii). While its insti- tutional circumstances provide an ironic setting for a project that champions the clandestine tactical arts of the weak over the strategic and powerful projects of political, economic, and scientific rationality (de Certeau 1984: xix), they also point to the possibilities of producing tactical research within a host culture organized by academic protocols, scientific research lan- guages, and economic and physical structures of support and dependence. But, as is evident from the two collections entitled Culture in the Plural (de Certeau 1997b) and The Capture of Speech and Other Political Writings (de Certeau 1997a), the theoretical and practical terms for de Certeaus atten- tion to everyday life precede the inauguration of the research for Linvention du quotidien. It is a historical rupture that initiates the adventure. Brian Rigby in his Popular Culture in Modern France: A Study of Cultural Discourse (Rigby 1991) situates de Certeau alongside a number of other intel- lectuals as part of a general re-assessment of culture that emerges vividly in the wake of May 1968. For de Certeau the turn towards studying everyday culture was not about finding new cultural texts to interpret, value and cele- brate; instead it was an attempt to focus investigation on the way people operate, the way they practise everyday life. For de Certeau the popular culture of everyday life evidences ways of using the products imposed by a
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Figure 9 Still from Jeanne Dielman, 23 Quai du Commerce, 1080 Bruxelles , directed by Chantal Akerman (1975). Akermans film inspired Luce Giards contribution to Volume II of The Practice of Everyday Life
dominant economic order (de Certeau 1984: xiii). Everyday life is the scene
of use within a system that, far from being their own, has been constructed
and spread by others (de Certeau 1984: 17). What characterizes the everyday
for de Certeau is a creativity that responds to this situation. By making do
with a ready-made culture, but also, and crucially, by making with this
culture (through acts of appropriation and re-employment), everyday life
evidences an inventiveness. In circumstances limited to the material at hand,
everyday life witnesses the creative arrangements and re-arrangements of
bricolage : Creativity is the act of reusing and recombining heterogeneous
materials (de Certeau 1997b: 49). But these assemblages are not just the
products of an individuals will or actions; they are the products of a culture
seen as heterogeneous, of culture in the plural. The heterogeneity of culture
asserts itself, not just through the inventive juxtapositions that people make,
but through the stubborn insistence of the body, of childhood memories and
cultural histories. The resistance of the everyday (de Certeaus leitmotif)
is a resistance born of difference, of otherness: bodies that are at variance
to the machines that they operate; traditions that are unlike those being
promoted; imaginings that are different from the rationale governing the
present.
For de Certeau, the journey starts in 1968, in participation in and
response to the events of that Paris spring:
One fact is more important than the claims or even the contestation
that expressed it in terms prior to the event: a positive fact, a style of
experience. A creative that is, poetic experience. The poet has lit
the fuse of speech, stated a flyer at the Sorbonne. It is a fact that we
can attest to for having seen and been participants: a throng became
poetic. Hidden, perhaps, until then (but that means that it was not
alive), speech exploded in the relations that fostered it or that it appro-
priated, with the joy (or the seriousness?) of shattered categories and
unforeseen bonds of solidarity.
(de Certeau 1997a: 13)
Written in the summer of 1968 as an act of political clarification, de
Certeaus description of the May events marks out some of the terms that
will continually inform his investigations of popular culture and everyday life:
the creativity of appropriation; a poetics of experience; a style of everyday
life. Of course, that moment of emergent culture (the capturing of speech)
could be seen as, precisely, the overcoming of everyday life, but in seeing
it come to visibility (or orality) in the May events, de Certeaus project will
work to find such festive and inventive poetics in a more general everyday
culture. As Ian Buchanan suggests, for de Certeau the everyday is already
extraordinary; a virtual carnival (1997: 177). But so as not to take this as
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some nave misrecognition of those aspects of the everyday that are dreary and repetitive, the virtuality of this position needs stressing. Buchanan supplies a further clarification: that the everyday itself be treated as always already containing the possibility of carnival (179, emphasis added). To figure the everyday as a potentiality that points to an overcoming marks de Certeaus work as a continuation of Lefebvres project, but it is a continuation that needs clarifying in relation to both similarities and differences. Writing in 1967, Lefebvre would describe the everyday life of capitalist modernity as being characterized by its lack of style, and by its prosaic mode:
With the Incas, the Aztecs, in Greece or in Rome, every detail (gestures,
words, tools, utensils, costumes, etc.) bears the imprint of a style;
nothing had as yet become prosaic, not even the quotidian; the prose
and the poetry of life were still identical. Our own everyday life is
typical for its yearning and quest for a style that obstinately eludes it
… the prose of the world spread, until now it invades everything literature, art and objects and all the poetry of existence has been evicted. (Lefebvre 1984: 29)
The total invasion of prose is, for Lefebvre, the colonization of everyday life by the commodity form: modernity is characterized by an alienation that has penetrated, not just the workplace, but crucially, everyday life itself. The seeds for overcoming this condition exist in the everyday but only as an alien- ated possibility. De Certeaus work articulates a question that might jeopardize the success of such an analysis:
If it is true that the grid of discipline is everywhere becoming clearer
and more extensive, it is all the more urgent to discover how an entire
society resists being reduced to it, what popular procedures (also
minuscule and quotidian) manipulate the mechanisms of discipline and
conform to them only in order to evade them, and finally, what ways
of operating form the counterpart, on the consumers (or dominees?)
side, of the mute processes that organize the establishment of socio-
economic order.
(de Certeau 1984: xiv)
Popular procedures constitute a style that is evasive. Yet it is also a style that evidences a resistance to the colonization of everyday life. So by starting out from the position that the everyday presents an obstacle (and a residue) to systematic forms of government and domination, the accounts of everyday life offered by Lefebvre and the Situationists, but also by Foucault (the specific
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addressee in this quote) can appear overblown. Although Lefebvre, as we
have seen, argues for a nuanced version of everyday life (which dialectically
positions the everyday as the sphere of cultural reproduction while, at the
same time, offering moments of possible transformation), the emphasis is
clearly on the extension of capitalist logic into the everyday. In comparison,
de Certeaus position serves to confirm the unsutured nature of the social,
the impossibility of the full colonization of daily life by the system, the
continued fact of resistance to the temporal logic of democratic capitalism,
and the ubiquitous eruption of the heterogeneous (Poster 1997: 125).
Where the difference between de Certeau and Lefebvre is most clearly
visible is in the political outcomes that result from their similar yet different
staging of the everyday. For Lefebvre the outcome of analysis is a revolu-
tionary praxis that will capitalize on those moments of possibility, those
moments that germinate the seeds of a different everyday. For de Certeau
the instrumentality of politics necessarily has to be held in abeyance; nothing
could be more damaging to the study of everyday life than to greet it with
a prescriptive political assessment. This is not to evacuate the political from
the field of everyday life; rather it is to re-imagine it for the everyday: what
would a politics be like that emerged from the everyday, instead of one that
was simply applied to the everyday? For de Certeau the lesson of May 1968s
failure is of a popular poetics being met by the language of official reform
and organized politics, which results in the recapture of speech and the
deadening of its possibilities (de Certeau 1997a: 2931). Writing of the wild-
cat protests that marked 1968 and subsequent years, de Certeau explains
that they offer a type of movement whose form is cultural because their
participants can no longer make their requests clear within traditional socio-
political frames of reference (de Certeau 1997b: 112). Such requests are
irruptions from everyday life, irruptions that have no chance of being heard
against the blunt thunder of traditional politics.
In the wake of May 1968, traditional politics was precisely the formal
antagonisms that had nothing to say in response to the graffiti that emerged
on the walls of Paris. The Right and the Left, Gaullisme and Gauchisme , became
as one, as the enrags occupied a ground that was not in-between, but distinctly
other. The writing on the wall spoke of demands eccentric to such an order:
I take my desires for reality because I believe in the reality of my desires
(figure 10); We wont ask for anything. We wont demand anything. Well
just take and occupy (Vinet 1992: 524). Such slogans resonated with a
range of cultural and political references that mixed Surrealism with anar-
chism. If such desirous language was recaptured by the language of reform,
or of reconditioned Marxism, de Certeau remained preoccupied by the echo
of the desire for something other.
To weigh Lefebvre and de Certeau only in terms of political outcomes
is to miss some of the more productive similarities they share. Both are
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concerned with the everyday as an ensemble of practices. Both bring the language of avant-gardism to bear on the business of attending to the everyday (collage, Brecht, Surrealism). Both note the extensive ambition of rationalism, while recognizing its mythic and irrational underside and its failure to erase ritual and superstition in general. Both concern themselves with the everyday as phenomenal and sensual: an aesthetic realm that requires attention to the style and poetics of living (even if style, for Lefebvre, cant be fully real- ized under present conditions). Such a list of commonalities begins to make vivid connections, not just between Lefebvre and de Certeau, but across the range of writings and practices that we have so far been discussing. Indeed it is the strength of de Certeaus contribution to this tradition that it allows the threads we have been uncovering to be brought together into some sort of loose weave. What de Certeau attempts is nothing less than the production of a poetics of everyday life. Such a poetics (emerging from the practices of everyday life and allowing those practices to become visible and audible) must mark its distance from traditional sociopolitical frames of reference. For de Certeau this will mean negotiating his way out of the stark polarizing language of such a tradition. It will mean having to side-step the binary logic that infects the analysis of the social. It will mean generating a poetics subtle and tactical enough to allow for the differentiation of a multiple everyday. Beginning with the problematic that the everyday gets remaindered in forms of analysis that offer an overarching perspective of social relations, de Certeau figures everyday life as a sphere of resistance (both virtually and actu- ally). But this resistance is not synonymous with opposition. Resistance in de Certeau is closer to the use of the term in electronics and psychoanalysis:
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Figure 10 The writing is on the wall (take your desire for reality). Paris graffiti, May 1968
it is what hinders and dissipates the energy flow of domination, it is what resists
representation. In de Certeaus writings about everyday life, resistance is
as much an activity born of inertia as it is a result of inventive forms of
appropriation:
On the one hand, there are slowly developing phenomena, latencies,
delays that are piled up in the thick breadth of mentalities, evident
things and social ritualizations, an opaque, stubborn life buried in every-
day gestures that are at the same time both immediate and millenary.
On the other hand, irruptions, deviations, that is, all these margins of
an inventiveness from which future generations will successively draw
their cultivated culture.
(de Certeau 1997b: 1378)
The thick breadth of opaque, stubborn life walks hand-in-hand with inven-
tive deviations in this picture of everyday life. While this might seem to
echo the work of Raymond Williams, and his emphasis on residual and
emergent cultures that are differentiated from dominant cultures (Williams
1977: 1217), for de Certeau the residual or opaque, stubborn life is not
to be found simply in the continuation of cultural practices and values no
longer in vogue (rural traditions, for instance). Instead de Certeau and his
research colleagues want to register a cultural density around objects and
practices that evoke what might be thought of as a cultural unconscious or
cultural imaginary. In her writing on Kitchen Women Nation Luce Giard
portrays the everyday art of cooking as a subtle intelligence full of nuances
and strokes of genius, a light and lively intelligence that can be perceived
without exhibiting itself, in short, a very ordinary intelligence (de Certeau
et al. 1998: 158). But this celebration of womens know-how is also haunted
by reminiscence. Each gesture, each smell, each culinary trick is thick with
the condensation of memories. Doing cooking is never simply the more or
less inventive response to the limitations of circumstance; it always smells
and tastes of the past. Cooking, like psychoanalysis, recognizes the past in
the present (de Certeau 1986: 4).
For Giard, cooking is situated within a family saga, reverberating with
childhood memories and histories of migration. Her account tells of her own
ambivalent feelings towards cooking; from the teenager who thought of
cooking as a bit stupid she learns that surreptitiously and without suspecting
it, I had been invested with the secret, tenacious pleasure of doing-cooking
(de Certeau et al .: 153). Such pleasure offers a way of being-in-the-world
and making it ones home (154). But it also marks the stubbornness of
memory: these are memories stubbornly faithful to the marvelous treasure
of childhood flavors. The almond cakes, for example, about which my father,
an old man already suffering, used to repeat to me the tasty secret that disap-
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peared with his beloved grandmother, who passed away at the beginning of the century, before he was seven (188). Cooking, eating and drinking are multiple activities: This glass of pale, cool, dry wine marshals my entire life in the Champagne. People may think I am drinking: I am remembering
.. . (Bachelard, quoted in de Certeau et al. 1998: 188). If such practices are resistant (and they clearly are for de Certeau and Giard), then such resistance is clearly not synonymous with being opposi- tional or progressive. Any attempt simply to mine de Certeaus work for an easily identifiable assemblage of oppositional culture will miss the nuances of the project. Resistance here is both a preservative and a creation of some- thing new: rather than presenting the inverse of power, it offers a different and pluralized account of powers:
Between the symmetrical errors of archaistic nostalgia and frenetic over-
modernization, room remains for microinventions, for the practice of
reasoned differences, to resist with a sweet obstinance the contagion
of conformism, to reinforce the network of exchanges and relations,
to learn how to make ones own choice among the tools and commodi-
ties produced by the industrial era. Each of us has the power to seize
power over one part of oneself. This is why the gestures, objects, and
words that live in the ordinary nature of a simple kitchen have so much
importance.
(213)
For Giard the resistant nature of everyday life is revealed as (partly) a conser- vative response, precisely because industrial modernity is figured as revolutionary (frenetic overmodernization). The project of attending to the invention of everyday life requires qual- ification. It is not a catalogue of data: if everyday life is inventive it also requires an invention by the writer of a language that will make possible the registering of the everyday. If The Practice of Everyday Life is an investigation of the ways in which users operate, its object is not so much to discuss this elusive, yet fundamental subject as to make such a discussion possible:
This goal will be achieved if everyday practices, ways of operating or
doing things, no longer appear as merely the obscure background of
social activity, and if a body of theoretical questions, methods, cate-
gories, and perspectives, by penetrating this obscurity, make it possible
to articulate them.
(de Certeau 1984: xi)
The condition of possibility for such a project is the invention of a poetics, a poiesis an inventive language that will register the inventiveness, the
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poiesis of the everyday. Poetics needs to be understood both as an inquiry
into the forms that the everyday takes and as an inventive activity within
language and life: de Certeau reminds us that the etymology of poetics is
from the Greek poiein to create, invent, generate (1984: 205). It is this
inventive language of insinuation, of ruses and poaching, and multi-
form, tricky, stubborn ways of operating that should determine the
success or failure of de Certeaus project. But this aspect of de Certeaus
work has remained hidden (tricky? stubborn?) for most Anglophone commen-
tators on de Certeau. Tony Bennett writes for a number of people when he
states that,
What de Certeaus account of everyday practices most lacks... is
anything approaching an adequate sociological or historical description
of those practices that would be capable of locating them within, and
accounting for them in terms of, specific social milieux. Instead, what
is offered is a poetics of the oppressed, an essentially aestheticising
strategy in which the prospect of understanding the specific logics
informing specific forms of resistance is traded in, far too easily, for a
generalised account of transgression.
(Bennett 1998: 174)
Somewhere along the line, de Certeaus struggle to register that which isnt
reducible to structures of domination has been interpreted simply as a gener-
alized account of transgression. The desire to extricate analysis from
traditional sociopolitical frames of reference has been met by their return.
The language of law and transgression, of power and resistance, has
stymied investigation of the heuristic possibilities opened up by de Certeau.
Crucially, the productivity of de Certeaus poetics is seen as the projects
biggest flaw.
De Certeau plays a tricky game. In trying to escape from the reductive
language of bipolar thought his writing insists on employing a series of
binary terms. The first volume of The Practice of Everyday Life reads as a
sustained orchestration of binary terms: consumption versus production;
reading versus writing; tactics versus strategies; space versus place; the spoken
versus the written. What makes de Certeaus manoeuvre so awkward (and
seemingly so easy to mistake) is this use of binary terms to challenge the
structures of binary thought. Semantically overlapping, terms such as strate-
gies and tactics refuse to be straightforward antagonists in a debate about
power and resistance. Instead they allow, I will argue, the opportunity for
differentiation. What de Certeaus work employs are non-oppositional binary
terms. Not only do the terms production and consumption, for example,
fold back on each other, but each provides the other with the very essence
that would define them:
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In reality, a rationalized, expansionist, centralized, spectacular and clam-
orous production is confronted by an entirely different kind of
production, called consumption and characterized by its ruses, its frag-
mentation (the result of circumstances), its poaching, its clandestine
nature, its tireless but quiet activity, in short by its quasi-invisibility,
since it shows itself not in its own products (where would it place
them?) but in an art of using those imposed on it.
(de Certeau 1984: 31)
Consumption in this account is essentially a form of production, while a centralized production can only be thought of as a form of expansionist consumption. In establishing such terms, de Certeau destroys the very ground that would separate them, but not in an act of de-differentiation. In privi- leging consumption, de Certeau works towards a differentiation of production: productions become multiple; whole networks of different produc- tive assemblages emerge. Such productive assemblages have crucial repercussions for employing other binary terms. For instance, in mobilizing the terms reading and writing, de Certeau dissolves the differences between them:
We have to quit thinking that a qualitative gap exists between the acts
of reading and writing. The first is a silent creativity invested in what
the reader does with the text; the second is this very creativity, but
made explicit in the production of a new text. Already present in
reading, cultural activity merely finds a variant and a prolongation
in writing. From the one to the other, no line of difference separates
passivity from activity, except the line that distinguishes different ways
or styles of socially marking the gap opened up by a practice in a given
form.
(de Certeau 1997b: 145)
The only difference that can be maintained between reading and writing is the socially peculiar act of valuing the more visible activity (writing). When this has been made evident both reading and writing become practices that have to be differentiated, not according to their visibility, but by their ways of operating. But now such a differentiation would no longer be able to operate within the conventions designated by the terms reading and writing. This tactical use of binary terms is not without its problems and de Certeaus success with them can seem uneven. Their successful use seems to depend upon a relational logic that must relate practices to circumstances; it is a use that requires that the terms take on a metaphorical density above and beyond being verifiable and circumscribable activities (orality versus the scriptural, reading versus writing).
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If commentary on de Certeau has been transfixed by a desire to uncouple
these slippages and re-establish binary oppositions, it is partly because the
work can be read as re-activating a split between absolute power and its lack.
It can be read as straightforwardly celebrating and privileging the opposi-
tional character of the everyday and championing its general condition of
resistance. De Certeaus texts have the same porous density that he finds in
the everyday: they are relatively open to different readings, they are capable
of supplying the material for very different kinds of arguments. My account
of de Certeaus everyday isnt simply aimed at countering the arguments
put forward by Bennett and others. My aim is to recognize de Certeaus
work as a poetics that might allow for the everyday to emerge. I want to
set about excavating this poetics , which I see as being at the heart of de
Certeaus project, because this is the projects productivity, its potential and
its invention.
Age-old ruses
Analysis shows that a relation (always social) determines its terms, and
not the reverse, and that each individual is a locus in which an incoherent
(and often contradictory) plurality of such relational determinations
interact. Moreover, the question at hand concerns modes of operation
or schemata of action, and not directly the subjects (or persons) who
are the authors or vehicles. It concerns an operational logic whose
models may go as far back as the age-old ruses of fishes and insects
that disguise or transform themselves in order to survive, and which
has in any case been concealed by the form of rationality currently
dominant in Western culture.
(de Certeau 1984: xi)
What does it mean when a book on the practices of everyday life starts out
by refusing to link actions to their authors? What kind of everyday is describ-
able when modes of operation and schemata of action replace subjects
and persons? What kind of historicity is imaginable for the everyday when
such activities are seen not simply as age-old but as the business of fishes
and insects? If The Practice of Everyday Life is seen as attempting to register
the poiesis of everyday life through a poetics, then it is a poetics that articulates
activities rather than expresses identities a poetics of uses rather than users.
De Certeau attempts to disentangle people and practices by generalizing
the operational logic of the everyday so that it includes all living beings.
While this might be seen as evidence of de Certeaus poststructuralist orien-
tation (a post-humanist death of the subject), or as a form of global
biological essentialism, it is equally understandable as part of his attempt to
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disengage from traditional sociopolitical frames of reference. Such frames of reference might take comfort in ascribing resistance to identities (the working class, sub-cultures and so on) rather than activities. If de Certeau is going to find something new and different in the everyday (something more than the dress rehearsal of an endlessly deferred revolution or the satu- ration of everyday life by networks of micro-power) then the dropping of identity categories (already dense with the terms and conditions of limited analysis) might offer an initial tactical manoeuvre. This is not to say that individuals and groups are missing from the swarm of examples that make up The Practice of Everyday Life , but in the attempt to generate A Practical Science of the Singular the category of the subject is already too prolific. By relating the everyday to circumstantial practices, de Certeau liberates analysis from the burden of having to identify progressive social identities. The science of singularity will be concerned with relations of difference, with instances of culture, which are already overtaken by a plurality. The Practice of Everyday Life is peopled with moments and practices, rather than subjects; it is a book teeming with actual individuals (and groups) and individual actualities, where the familiar signposts of identity are tacti- cally missing. The usual categories for conducting a discussion of the subject (agency, domination, resistance, consciousness, unconsciousness and so on) are not lacking, however, but are extended and altered. It will be an urban unconsciousness as much as an individuals which will guide trajectories through the city. It will be techniques, gestures, machines, buildings, beliefs, as much as the bosses and the bossed, that will be invested with the power to dominate and resist. The slippery intricacies of the terms strategies and tactics can act as a guide to how the practice of everyday life can escape without leaving the dominant social order (de Certeau 1984: xiii). Clearly employing the metaphorics of war, de Certeau writes:
I call a strategy the calculation (or manipulation) of power relationships
that becomes possible as soon as a subject with will and power (a busi-
ness, an army, a city, a scientific institution) can be isolated. It postulates
a place that can be delimited as its own and serve as the base from which
relations with an exteriority composed of targets or threats (customers
or competitors, enemies, the country surrounding the city, objectives
and objects of research, etc.) can be managed.
(1984: 356)
A strategy assumes a place that can be circumscribed as proper (propre) (xix). Occupying specific places, de Certeau suggestively sees strategies as proprieto- rial. The term is linked to a whole host of other terms that de Certeau will make use of: place, property, propriety, own, owning, ownership, and
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crucially, proper ( propre clean, correct, ones own). The terms speak
of a place of appropriate manners and proper conventions, somewhere satu-
rated by a regimen of seemly actions. The connotations of war that are asso-
ciated with the term strategy prepare the reader for the use that de Certeau
will make of it to describe the abysmal practices of colonization, or the bleak
protocols of scientific management, but what is more unexpected and in need
of clarification is the actual and possible generalization of the term.
In Volume II of The Practice of Everyday Life , Pierre Mayol presents an
account of everyday life in the Croix-Rousse neighbourhood of Lyons. His
intention is to study the way that the organization of everyday life is artic-
ulated on at least two registers (de Certeau et al. 1998: 8). Mayol divides
these registers into behaviors (walking, greeting, visiting and so on) and
expected symbolic benefits (linked to the consumers art of coexisting
and the social unconscious or imaginary of the neighbourhood). Without
explicitly mobilizing the term strategy (although he does make some use
of it), Mayol recognizes that a regulatory activity is in place: One regula-
tion articulates both of these systems, which I have described and analyzed
using the concept of propriety (8). In his wonderful reading of the cultural
density of bread and wine, Mayol suggests that wine drinking is subject to
neighborhood checks (90). While it supplies the festive face of the meal
and is the vehicle for an exuberant celebration of life, it is also regulated by
propriety: Propriety thus requires the drinker to situate himself [ sic ] on the
threshold immediately below the foreboding signs of reprobation, in the plau-
sible not too much category that does not cast a slur on an individuals or
a familys reputation (89). For Mayol the strategic form of this propriety
is nuanced to the practices under consideration: rather than equate it with
the disciplinary regime of a prison, Mayol describes it as the communal
kitty (8). What is crucial here are the relations that are established between
particular actions (getting drunk, for instance) and the regulatory operations
of a place. It is the formal character of these operations (their logic, so to
speak) that is being designated by the term strategy.
Clearly, any workable political assessment of cultural practices would
need to differentiate between the probity that relates to alcohol consump-
tion and the relentlessness of colonialism (for instance). To generalize the
contents of the term strategy would constitute a dangerous aestheticism that
would result in homogenized relations of power. The ranking of strategies,
however, is not something that The Practice of Everyday Life volunteers. To
open up the productivity of the project requires recognizing it as a poetics,
as a differentiation (always circumstantial) of the form of actions. The urgency
and instrumentality of politics (what must we do?) is exchanged for an analysis
(whats going on?). A general poetics of everyday life is being sketched out;
to designate a practice as strategic is akin to claiming it as metaphorical rather
than metonymical.
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To further differentiate forms of action, de Certeau distinguishes between strategies and tactics:
A tactic is a calculated action determined by the absence of a proper
locus... Thus it must play on and with a terrain imposed on it and
organized by the law of a foreign power... It takes advantage of
opportunities and depends on them, being without any base where it
could stockpile its winnings, build up its own position, and plan raids.
What it wins it cannot keep. This nowhere gives a tactic mobility, to
be sure, but a mobility that must accept the chance offerings of the
moment, and seize on the wing the possibilities that offer themselves
at any given moment. It must vigilantly make use of the cracks that
particular conjunctions open in the surveillance of the proprietary
powers. It poaches in them. It creates surprises in them. It can be
where it is least expected. It is a guileful ruse.
(de Certeau 1984: 37)
This description of tactics extends the war analogy, but this time it is directed towards guerrilla combat. Tactics is the inventive employment of possibili- ties within strategic circumstances: disguise, surprise, discretion, secrecy, wit, play, bluff and so on. Crucially, tactics dont operate outside a strategy that they can confront; to do this would require a counter-strategy, they are in the ambiguous position of being inside but other: they escaped it without leaving it (xiii). The correlation of everyday life and war, which the terms strategy and tactics generate, is useful for making vivid the formal differences of actions, but the price of this is that it can lead to unhelpful confusions. For instance, the descriptions of tactical practices as guerrilla activity hardly prepare the ground for de Certeaus claim that many everyday practices (talking, reading, moving about, shopping, cooking, etc.) are tactical in character (xix). While it is precisely the character of activities that de Certeau is concerned with, the extension of metaphors of war does suggest a much greater degree of purposeful opposition than is evident from the examples. At this point it is worth remembering that the urgency of de Certeaus inquiry is aimed at finding out not how power is deposed (an investigation of successful revo- lutions would surely be needed for that), but how an entire society resists being reduced to the grid of discipline [which] is everywhere becoming clearer and more extensive (xiv). These two perceptions (the extension of power and the everyday as non-reducible to it) produce the asymmetry of tactics and strategies where inventive and sluggish practices exist along- side proprietary powers. Different forms and logics are at work, but their non-symmetrical combination results in the friction of rubbing along, rather than in direct conflict.
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The most vivid example of tactical activity that de Certeau gives is la
perruque : la perruque is the workers own work disguised as work for his [or
her] employer (25). De Certeau illustrates this: La perruque may be as simple
a matter as a secretarys writing a love letter on company time or as
complex as a cabinetmakers borrowing a lathe to make a piece of furniture
for his living room (25). Putting aside the gendering implicit in these
examples,^1 de Certeau offers examples of tactics that, rather than confronting
and opposing a strategic form, take place in its blindspots. Such operations
leave the proprietary power relatively unscathed, while at the same time
not complying to the spirit of their rationale: Accused of stealing or turning
material to his [ sic ] own ends and using machines for his own profit, the
worker who indulges in la perruque actually diverts time (not goods, since he
uses only scraps) from the factory for work that is free, creative, and precisely
not directed towards profit (25).
Yet the example of la perruque also misguides the reader; it sets up the
unhelpful expectation that resistance is best thought of in terms of such
minor victories against the system. A more de Certeauian evocation of
tactical practices in the factory is supplied by Robert Linhart describing his
experience of working on an assembly line in a Citron factory in Paris.
Describing the relentless pace and repetition of the assembly line, Linhart
contemplates the possibility of giving into its temporal logic: and suppose
you said to yourself that nothing matters, that you need only get used to
making the same movements in the same way in the same period of time,
aspiring to no more than the placid perfection of a machine? (Linhart 1981:
17). Linharts response suggests an invisible and bodily resistance:
But life kicks against it and resists. The organism resists. The muscles
resist. The nerves resist. Something, in the body and the head, braces
itself against repetition and nothingness. Life shows itself in more rapid
movements, an arm lowered at the wrong time, a slower step, a seconds
irregularity, an awkward gesture, getting ahead, slipping back, tactics at
the station; everything, in the wretched square of resistance against the
empty eternity of the work station, indicates there are still human inci-
dents, even if theyre minute; theres still time, even if its dragged out
to abnormal lengths. This clumsiness, this unnecessary movement away
from routine, this sudden acceleration, this soldering gone wrong, that
hand that has to do it all over again, the man who makes a face, the man
whos out of step, this shows that life is hanging on. It is seen in every-
thing that yells silently within every man on the line, Im not a machine!
(17)
This long quote makes vivid, I think, some of the everyday practices that de
Certeau recognizes as tactical in form but which dont correspond to the
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subversive creativity that he also recognizes. This is tactics in its inert and stubborn guise. This wretched square of resistance insists that we see the resistance of the everyday as extending from subversive poaching to a brute facticity of a body that is not a machine. Tiredness here would be resistant to efficiency drives. For de Certeau, the everyday is far from being a local, and thus classifiable, revolt, it is a common and silent, almost sheeplike subversion our own (de Certeau 1984: 200). If such examples are coupled with the dreamy and stubborn reminiscences that accompany de Certeaus, Giards and Mayols accounts of walking, cooking, reading, drinking, etc. (remembering the town where you used to live while drinking a glass of wine, for instance), then the differences between strategies and tactics might be accounted for in relation to the temporal logics that they connect with.
Murmurs in the archive
For research in general the problem of the archive (constructed from materials from the present or the past) is both practical and theoretical: on the one hand a question of resources (what have I got?), on the other a question of method (what will I do?). To research the everyday intensifies these ques- tions ad infinitum. In some ways everyday life is an archive yet to be catalogued, an archive that might also resist cataloguing. Inexhaustible and boundless, everyday life offers unmanageable resources that provide little guidance to the appropriateness of approach. Attempts to manage the everyday through systematic procedures and scientific attention have, perhaps, added to the secret of everyday life by a studied avoidance of its mysteries. So far we have sought to track a tradition less encumbered by the desire to exhaust and manage its object. The evidence of this tradition consists of a range of imaginative responses to the archive that have resulted in a variety of projects: Georg Simmels archive, made up of cell-like instances and micro- materials that find the general in the particular (small objects with big stories); Walter Benjamins dialectical-images, constellations of new and old materials (emergent, outmoded, too early, too late), emerge from an archival practice of extraordinary diversity; for Surrealism, an archive based on collaged arrangements of the ordinary and the bizarre attempts to bring out the fantastic in the everyday; Mass-Observations surreal empiricism gener- ates, potentially at least, an archive that could be as extensive as the everyday; and for Lefebvre the search for a differentiating totality leads him to treat the urban environment as an archive of moments and forces. Such a tradition does little to establish rules and protocols for an archival practice. Ambitious and unsystematic, this tradition, however, offers us one guiding principle: the everyday doesnt have a form of attention that is proper to it. Michel de Certeaus work is particularly useful for making this point vivid
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and for offering a perspective on the theoretical practices that make up this
book. The theme of the proper, of propriety, falls, as we have seen, on the
side of the strategic. Michel Foucault, more than anyone else, has insisted on
a strategic characterization of archives and the dominating and disciplinary
forms they have taken. He suggests that the operating model of fact col-
lecting has been the Inquisition. He goes on to claim that, although it is true
that, in becoming a technique for the empirical sciences, the investigation has
detached itself from the inquisitorial procedure, in which it was historically
rooted, the examination has remained extremely close to the disciplinary
power that shaped it (Foucault 1982: 226). Clearly indebted to Foucault, de
Certeaus perspective, however, casts a more hopeful light on the archive; on
the one hand it sees archival procedures as maintaining a disciplinary form, but
on the other it sees the tactical aspects of the everyday as irrepressible. It is
the tenacity of the everyday that allows archives to be a space for something
more than just the systematic erasure of the everyday. I want to suggest that,
following a tactical model of everyday life, de Certeaus work offers two
positive ambitions for archival work. On the one hand it creates the possibility
of putting together archives that dont work to erase the tactical in the every-
day (Mass-Observation might be understood in this way), archives that might
allow the everyday a more productive forum for speaking for itself. On the
other it suggests the possibility that existing archives might be attended to by
focusing on the everyday as a tenacious irruption and interruption within them,
or as a potentiality to be extracted by a range of speculative approaches. On
the one hand an archive of the everyday; on the other the everyday-ing of
archives. To understand the archival ambitions of de Certeaus project two
elements will need emphasizing: the psychoanalytic-like topography of the
everyday; and the distinction between orality and writing.
In a historical study written in collaboration with Dominique Julia and
Jacques Revel, de Certeau argues that the study of the popular culture or
everyday life presupposes an unavowed operation: to conceal what it claims
to show (de Certeau et al. 1974: 121). De Certeau and his colleagues outline
the practices of alteration and erasure that accompany a strategic and archival
attention to popular culture. In their historical research into early accounts
of popular culture, they find that it is at the very same time that street liter-
ature is pursued [by the police] with the utmost vigor that the scholars turn
their attention with glee to popular books and contents (123). Knowledge,
de Certeau claims, remains linked to the power that authorizes it (121).
But the combination of academic cataloguing and political censorship is only
one aspect of the strategic operations that greet popular culture. The other
is a kind of rusticophilia, an approach which assumes the oppression of the
very reality it objectifies and idealizes (121).
This is an exoticism that erases as it celebrates it turns the dialogic
practices of the popular into a monologue. De Certeau, Julia and Revels
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essay looks at historical moments in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries when popular culture was simultaneously studied and suppressed, and suggests that more recent historical practices continue this suppression. What they find is a geography of the eliminated:
Beyond the question of method and contents, beyond what it says, the
measure of a work is what it keeps silent. And we must say that
the scientific studies and undoubtedly the works they highlight
include vast and strange expanses of silence. These blank spots outline
a geography of the forgotten.
(131)
Such practices of suppression do not mean the extinction of the everyday. As the quotation suggests, a signifying residue remains even if it is only to be measured as an absence within the activity of suppressing it. Tactics, we must remember, are not to be found in some putative outside to strategic operations. A different form of attention is needed that can listen to the silences and see the gaps within the archive as positive signs. In a memorable passage from The Practice of Everyday Life , de Certeau evokes an everyday that is at one and the same time both absent and present in the archive:
Was it fate? I remember the marvelous Shelburne Museum in Vermont
where, in thirty-five houses of a reconstructed village, all the signs, tools
and products of nineteenth-century everyday life teem; everything, from
cooking utensils and pharmaceutical goods to weaving instruments, toilet
articles, and childrens toys can be found in profusion. The display
includes innumerable familiar objects, polished, deformed, or made more
beautiful by long use; everywhere there are as well the marks of the active
hands and laboring or patient bodies for which these things composed
the daily circuits, the fascinating presence of absences whose traces
were everywhere. At least this village full of abandoned and salvaged
objects drew ones attention, through them, to the ordered murmurs of
a hundred past or possible villages, and by means of these imbricated
traces one began to dream of countless combinations of existences.
(1984: 21)
While the activities of use are missing, the marks they have left are not. These signs (the presence of absences) are just audible to those who are prepared to dream of countless combinations of existences. De Certeaus everyday life project is not simply mourning the impos- sibility of ever registering the everyday. Part of its power is that it continually evokes the everyday as a theoretical and practical possibility. The everyday
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that it does evoke is, however, never simply open to easy registration: the
subterranean, blind and opaque practices of everyday life are other to a field
of pure visibility or strategic cataloguing. By looking at the way the everyday
is evoked through the construction of new archives (the folk museum, for
instance) and by looking at de Certeaus general poetics, we can see a prac-
tice that insists on the speculative possibilities of registering the everyday even
in the least opportune environments. To see this more clearly I need to make
more explicit something I have been implicitly arguing: that the relationships
between the tactical and strategic forms of everyday life are being imagined
as something like the relationship between the unconscious and the conscious
modes in Freudian psychoanalysis. I have already insisted that tactics draw
on different temporalities from those that dominate the present and that this
is analogous to the assertion in psychoanalysis of the continuation of the past
(or pasts) in the present. Two other but related propositions central to
psychoanalysis are crucial for an analogous understanding of the topography
of everyday life and the formal aspects of strategies and tactics. The first is
that consciousness cannot completely eradicate the unconscious. Freuds
examples of parapraxes (slips of the tongue, bungled actions and so on) are
evidence of the unconscious exerting itself on everyday consciousness. Indeed,
the whole of psychoanalysis can be seen as explaining and treating the symp-
tomatic irruptions of unconscious material as they press upon ordinary
consciousness: obsessions, repetitions, remembered dreams, sublimations
not to mention the vast symptomology of the ordinary and extraordinary
instances of neurosis and psychosis (for example, Freud 1977).
The second, and again related, proposition is that there is never the
possibility of direct access to the unconscious in consciousness: it never declares
itself but always inscribes itself in obscure and roundabout ways (dreams and
neurotic symptoms, for example). Jean Laplanche and Jean-Bertrand Pontalis
tell us that unconscious energies seek to re-enter consciousness and resume
activity (the return of the repressed) but they can only gain access to the system
Pcs.-Cs [Preconscious-Conscious] in compromise-formations after having
undergone the distortions of censorship (Laplanche and Pontalis 1983: 474).
On the one hand then, we have unconscious energies insinuating themselves in
numerous guises and disguises, operating various ruses, articulating themselves
through condensations and displacements, mounting a range of attacks, and so
on. On the other hand we have censorship, repression, revision and defence.
The usefulness of this model for understanding the practices of strate-
gies and tactics should be clear at a metaphorical level: de Certeau is imagining
something similar happening in the everyday. The tactical side of everyday
life continually irrupts in the strategic (as ruses, rebuses and creative assem-
blages); it cant be simply written off, or written out. Similarly, the tactical
cant be attended to in a direct or unproblematic way: tactical forms are
resistant to the ways of cataloguing and collecting that are the familiar staples
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of archival work. Strategic archival work, de Certeau would argue, is an activity of censorship, of interpretative defence, of compromise. The chal- lenge then of de Certeaus work is to provide an archival practice that allows such tactical material to proliferate, a practice that can listen to the everyday and hear there the tales of repressed activity. Psychoanalysis, though, is not easily translated into other situations and de Certeau, though he frequently refers to Freud, does not offer anything that would count as a systematic application of psychoanalysis to the everyday. For one thing psychoanalysis wouldnt fit easily with the subject-less account that de Certeau wants to give. For another the everyday doesnt make for favourable circumstances to translate the diagnostic mechanisms so central to psychoanalysis (the everyday as neurotic or psychotic). Perhaps we can simply say that de Certeau hijacks the form of psychoanalysis without insisting on its content. Psychoanalytic form, I would argue, is crucial to understanding de Certeaus work even if it does nothing more than allow us to think our way out of a purely physical understanding of the topography of strategies and tactics. A psychoanalytic topography is one that cant be understood in purely visual or physical terms: strategies and tactics, like consciousness and unconsciousness, take place simultaneously, under the same roof so to speak. While Freud battled with the problem of how to attend to the topography of the psychoanalytic subject, making use of various models (neurological, economic, etc.) and inventive analogies (childrens writing toys, for example), we can limit ourselves to one intuition from Freuds second topography where the systems are pictured as relatively autonomous persons-within- the-person (Laplanche and Pontalis 1983: 452). Such a topography describes two radically different registers (split and relatively autonomous) that, in most situations, are hardly able to recognize one another, yet most of the time rub along together (so to speak). It is the radical formal differences between the two worlds that de Certeau insists on when he describes the relationships between tactics and strategies in terms of otherness. Strategy, he writes, is an effort to delimit ones place in a world bewitched by the invisible powers of the Other (1984: 36). A tactic insinuates itself in the others place (xix); its space is the space of the other (37). The Practice of Everyday Life operates across another non-oppositional binary that metaphorically continues to figure strategic and tactical opera- tions. The metaphorics of speaking and writing are crucial to an under- standing of the archive (its limits and possibilities). Voices (the voices of the people) are, for de Certeau, strategically reconfigured within a scrip- tural economy (writing). By scriptural economy de Certeau doesnt mean writing in general, but particular kinds of scriptural registering (statistical analysis of consumption practices, for instance [1984: 34]). Writing, in this metaphorical sense, is strategic. Jeremy Ahearne gives a useful account of the kinds of writing techniques that would count as part of a scriptural
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economy: these techniques comprise for example operations of recording,
transcription, registering, stocking and standardization, as well as the prop-
agation and dissemination of information (Ahearne 1995: 53). While at times
de Certeau writes as if all writing is the inscription of the law, this needs
to be understood in relation to a metaphorical understanding of language
practices as social techniques related to strategic and tactical forms. Too
literal a take on this division would assume that the parents command to
sit up straight falls on the side of orality, while the childs scrawling writing
falls on the side of the scriptural economy.
Orality in de Certeaus work is given a historical depth through his work
on religious history and early forms of ethnography. De Certeaus historical
work centres on orality in a number of forms: the heretical speech of the
possessed and religious mystics (de Certeau 1992, 2000); the policing of
popular speech forms (patois) (de Certeau et al. 1975); and the way that oral
forms possess the writings of early ethnographers (de Certeau 1988:
20943). In the two volumes of The Practice of Everyday Life , de Certeau uses
speech to relate implicitly to this work, but also to invoke the capture of
speech that he witnessed emerging and being recaptured in May 1968. Within
the milieu of 1960s and 1970s French intellectual culture, speech also held
particular resonance. For instance, Julia Kristevas Revolution in Poetic Language
gives an account of a pre-figural or pre-symbolic language that is seen as
analogous only to vocal or kinetic rhythm (Kristeva 1984: 26). For Kristeva
such rhythms could be found in the writing of avant-gardist poets such as
Stphane Mallarm. Another example, and one close to de Certeau, would
be the psychoanalyst Jacques Lacan who was known for an idiosyncratic
speaking style, which de Certeau describes as a speaking body: Coughing,
slightly grumbling, clearing the throat like tatoos [ sic ] on the process
of phonation punctuate the chain of words and indicate all their secret of
being for the other (de Certeau 1986: 50). Such language practices were
seen as offering a privileged access to more somatic and repressed aspects of
signification: speech in this sense tends to fall on the side of the uncon-
scious. For de Certeau, as for Kristeva, the speaking voice is to be found
not only in actual speech: the literary text is modified by becoming the
ambiguous depth in which sounds that cannot be reduced to a meaning move
about (de Certeau 1984: 162).
This catalogue of speech acts is not intended to do much more than
indicate the density that the terms speech, voice and orality have for de
Certeau and the way that orality potentially extends the archive beyond any
notion of straightforward empirical examples of speech. The non-oppositional
division between writing and speech is not, however, without its problems.
At first it is easily understood within the formal logic offered by strategies
and tactics. For instance in describing the way that media forms can be seen
as part of a scriptural economy (even though they take oral forms), de
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Certeau writes about the way that the voice of the people is recorded in every imaginable way, normalized, audible everywhere, but only when it has been cut (as one cuts a record), and thus mediated by radio, television, or the phonograph record, and cleaned up by the techniques of diffusion (1984: 132). If media forms can be seen as tending towards the strategic, then the tactical forms within speech can be seen as the first casualty of such mediation. What de Certeau seems to be referring to is a whole host of different practices that could be seen as cleaning up speech: from the censoring of dirty talk, or the control of who speaks and when, to the electronic smoothing-out (balancing) of speech through sound production (erasing click- ings, wheezings, slurpings and the like). What is more confusing is the topographical relationship between speech and writing. De Certeaus negotiation of the binaries voice and writing appears contradictory. On the one hand voice does not represent an outside to scriptural systems: These voices can no longer be heard except within the interior of the scriptural systems where they recur. They move about, like dancers, passing lightly through the field of the other (1984: 131). This, for de Certeau, is due to the historical circumstances of mass mediation, in which the mass media (TV, radio, etc.) provide one set of powerful examples. Other examples would include the regularization of language (Standard English, for example) through mass education, a regularization that is seen as de-corporealizing language. Such a historical saturation of language practices by strategic forms results in a situation where there is no pure voice, because it is always determined by a system (whether social, familial, or other) and codified by a way of receiving it (132). Seen in this way the voice (or at least a tacticalaspect of it) is equivalent to the speech of the body: a wild orchestration that can never be pure but can only insinuate itself into the text as a mark or trace, an effect or metonymy of the body (155). But de Certeau also conceives of the voice as precisely characterized by being outside scriptural systems: The place from which one speaks is outside the scriptural enterprise. The uttering occurs outside the places in which systems of statements are composed (158). Whether or not de Certeau has moved into another mode of metaphorics (from historical to phenomenological, for instance) the inconsistencies are confusing. In understanding wild sounds as the speech that cant be managed by the scriptural, de Certeaus argument might also suggest that they cannot reside there either:
The name wild both creates and defines what the scriptural economy
situates outside of itself. It is moreover immediately given its essential
predicate: the wild is transitory; it marks itself (by smudges, lapses,
etc.) but it does not write itself. It alters a place (it disturbs), but it
does not establish a place.
(1984: 155)
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These are difficult waters to navigate and the abstract prose of de
Certeaus arguments doesnt make rigorous consistencies the norm. Seen in
literal terms this contradiction does pose some serious problems when consid-
ering the archive. On the one hand we have the possibility of archives at
least bearing the traces of the tactical side of life; on the other, orality is
hard to imagine at all within writing. De Certeau, in the end, privileges the
possibility of registering voices within texts, and partly this is because
the project of constructing a general poetics of the practices of everyday life
is itself dedicated to a practice of listening, inscribing and describing. De
Certeaus psychoanalytic topography allows for orality to be both inside and
outside at the same time, to be repressed and censored and also to appear
as a symptom (a mark, a trace). The ethnographer of the everyday, like the
psychoanalyst, conducts a practice of listening.
This positive practice of listening and inscribing is vividly demonstrated
in the second volume of The Practice of Everyday Life. In Luce Giards account
of cooking, speech archives are given priority, precisely because they can
register what cant be registered within Giards own writing practice. Both
Giards Doing-Cooking and Mayols Living consist of ethnographic
accounts that weave together description and the quotation of voices elicited
from informal interviews, and both include a separate section that consists
of a complete transcript of one of these conversations. Luce Giard writes
about the nature of these interviews that were conducted for the cooking
project by Marie Ferrier:
They had as a goal neither to record opinion frequencies nor to consti-
tute a representative statistical sample, but rather to allow us to hear
womens voices; they talk about their way of doing-cooking, of orga-
nizing this work, of living and experiencing it this will give us a way
of knowing their own language, their words, and even the inflections
in their voices, even the rhythm of their speech. These interviews aimed
neither to sort out underlying images nor to reveal unconscious roots,
nor to define and classify attitude types. Their sole intention was to
hear women speak : to talk about the very activity that is generally accorded
no attention.
(de Certeau et al. 1998: 15960)
It is in this attempt to hear women speak that the decision was made to
include an uncut transcript. This doesnt mean that the voices that are
woven more thoroughly into the text are compromised to the point that
their orality is lost or that the uncut transcripts are free from strategic
forms: the quotation of voices mark themselves on an everyday prose that
can only produce some of their effects in the form of statements and prac-
tices (de Certeau 1984: 164). In Giards text the voices of the interviewees
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arent subjected to a rigorous and measuring scrutiny. What is insisted upon is the intractability of the voice:
These voices, whose faces will remain unknown to us, make up a melo-
dious polyphony. They are diverse, living voices that approve of, are
moved, and remember themselves; voices that regret, answer, and
contradict themselves. They are voices that talk simply about ordinary
practices with everyday words, womens voices that talk about the life
of people and things. Voices.
(de Certeau et al. 1998: 161)
The rhythm, melodies and wild orchestrations of speech and gesture are foregrounded in a tactical reversal of usual ethnographic practices. The materials that make up Mayols and Giards project are not wholly different from the materials that are included in other sociological and ethnographic texts, but what is becoming different is the relationship of the authors to these materials: Giards voice starts to take on a singularity (rather than a generality) and begins to sound like one of many voices in the text, rather than a strategic master-voice. The voices of the Kitchen Women Nation are imagined sounding alongside her own voice which, instead of framing these other voices, provides a kind of harmonic descant for them. The attempt to make polyphonic (multi-voiced) texts suggests a writing and research practice that would embrace artistic forms both in content and style. The polyphony of The Practice of Everyday Life (the first volume) can be seen in the absolute abundance of quotations from all kinds of sources
- games and stories as much as historical and sociological accounts. It might also read more easily as novelistic than as a consistent and deductive argu- ment about everyday life. De Certeaus practice offers an archival practice based in heterological sources that doesnt reduce these sources to illustra- tions of theoretical arguments, but uses the sources to provide and provoke theory. Faced with an archive of unmanageable proportions (novels, ethno- graphies, sociologies, police reports, interviews, conversations, diaries, newspapers and so on), the researcher of everyday life is faced with the demand to find ways of listening that are capable of hearing the tactical where it can. The two ambitions (to produce an archive of the everyday and to everyday existing archives) become one: a practice of listening to the murmurs of everyday life. Michel de Certeaus general poetics of everyday life is intended to provide ways of doing this (of operating in the archive), or at least to make a start at listening to the practices of everyday life. Its success or failure should be judged in these terms.
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Foregrounding the everyday
De Certeaus general poetics of everyday life evidences a tension implicit in
the desire to produce a science of singularity (1984: ix): on the one hand
the generality of a science, and on the other the particularity of the actual.
This tension isnt new and links de Certeau with the likes of Simmel, Benjamin
and Freud. The problem of finding generalizable meaning in cultural practices
that are only understandable and analysable within the most particular of
circumstances is the problem of attending to culture. The example of psycho-
analysis is again useful. Freuds understanding of the dream departed from
tradition because it refused to treat dreams as a kind of cryptography in
which each sign can be translated into another sign having a known meaning,
in accordance with a fixed key (Freud 1976: 171). Freud maintained that
all the material making up the content of a dream is in some way derived
from experience, that is to say, has been reproduced or remembered in the
dream (69) and insisted that meaning is only recoverable by attending to
the particular histories of dreamers. In this way Freud refuses to produce a
general interpretation of dreams (despite the title of his book). Freuds theory
of dreams is a theory of interpretation determined by the particularity of the
circumstances of the dreamer. It too is a science of the singular. What
Freud offers instead of a general interpretation of dreams is the investigation
of the conditions that make the interpretation of dreams possible. Faced with
the particularity of the dreams meaning Freud produces a general poetics of
dreaming. It is this general poetics, whereby the dream can be understood in
relation to a series of operations and functions (condensation, displacement,
revision, wish-fulfilment and so on) that makes it a science of the singular.
It provides the conditions of possibility for making singularity understand-
able; it provides the tools for recognizing the dream as singular and a way
of attending to its formal generalities. In other words Freud is interested in
finding the peculiar logic of dreaming, just as de Certeau is interested in finding
the peculiar logic of everyday practices.
A general poetics of everyday life is a science of the singular in that it
allows for the differentiation of the relationships that link everyday pursuits
to particular circumstances (de Certeau 1984: ix). De Certeaus project of
theorizing everyday life attempts to lay the groundwork for understanding
these relationships. But we shouldnt assume that this project was completed
in de Certeaus lifetime, or that it is a project that could be easily completed.
After both volumes of The Practice of Everyday Life had been published, de
Certeau and Giard could still write,
We know poorly the types of operations at stake in ordinary practices,
their registers and their combinations, because our instruments of
analysis, modeling and formalization were constructed for other objects
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and with other aims. The essential analytic work, which remains to be
done, will have to revolve around the subtle combinatory set of types
of operations and registers, that stages and activates a making-do, right
here and now, which is a singular action linked to one situation, certain
circumstances, particular actors.
(de Certeau and Giard 1998: 256)
De Certeaus work should serve as a precaution when it comes to evaluating or interpreting the everyday: as in Freud, a fixed key that could unlock the puzzle of the everyday needs to be refused. The desire to produce a cata- logue of minor subversions (ripped jeans, skateboarding and so on) needs to be replaced by a form of attention that necessitates the invention of a tool- kit that might allow the everyday to be heard, not as background noise, but as foregrounded voice. Or rather, what is needed are tool-kits that can perceive different registers of a polyphonic everyday. The singularity, the here-and-now-ness of everyday culture, requires invention in a variety of ways. It requires invention both on the everyday and in the everyday: a poetics of everyday life. De Certeaus work serves to sketch out an ambi- tious language for making the everyday vivid, of rescuing it from an undifferentiating scrutiny. The language that de Certeau supplies can be seen as a series of fluid and purposefully unstable categories (space and place, tactics and strategies, speaking and writing, and so on). But these language tools are also signs of passionate intensities opaqueness, stubbornness, poachings, ruses, insinuations and so on that point to practices that swarm and proliferate as soon as the everyday becomes foregrounded. To see The Practice of Everyday Life and its related texts as setting out a position in regard to the field of political action is to miss both the modesty and the ambitiousness of the project. The tactical activities that de Certeau sees as so essential to everyday life are a mixture of creative moments of getting by (making the best of things) and a host of stubborn insistencies (the past, the body, the unconscious). To imagine a transformatory politics based on the attempts to describe this everyday life is restrictive. In an effort to avoid misrecognizing de Certeaus poetics as a politics of cultural practices I have emphasized those aspects of tactical life that cant easily be recu- perated for an up-beat politics of culture. In doing so I have underplayed aspects of the work that do celebrate the oppositional character in everyday life, and might provide some of the forms for intervention and transforma- tion. De Certeaus project of foregrounding the everyday can be understood as a phenomenology of everyday life that takes as its precondition the possi- bility of discovering the peculiar logic at work in everyday practices. In this it is a massively ambitious project that demands a subtle and imaginative sensibility from those who would follow in his wake. Yet there is also a fundamental modesty at work here when it comes to suggesting actual social
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and cultural changes. De Certeaus practice was never simply limited to
supplying theoretical attention to the everyday. As a public intellectual he
continually worked with government agencies in the area of cultural policy.
But if this is where we might expect to find a more resolutely political
orientation towards everyday life, de Certeau once again frustrates expecta-
tion. At the heart of the project is an absolute refusal to speak in the name
of a vanguard that would lead the people to their liberation or even better-
ment. Theoretically de Certeau staked his faith on the tenacious otherness
of everyday life. The ambitiousness of his project was in finding ways of fore-
grounding this otherness. The modesty of his approach to cultural policy was
determined by a similar desire. As far as this goes, a politics of everyday
life would simply be premature. As such his cultural policy was simply
oriented to foregrounding the everyday. Only after the everyday is allowed
to emerge would something like a politics of the everyday become possible.
For de Certeau the management of a society leaves in its midst an enor-
mous remainder (1997b: 134). This remainder, an ebb and flow of muffled
voices on the architects blueprints (134), is the culture that de Certeau
wants to see take centre stage. Such culture is evident in a variety of forms.
The residual practices that pertain to collapsed or abandoned systems
(certain gestures, certain objects, expressions, birthdays, and perfumes) act
like punctuation in the text of daily activities (1997a: 172). But alongside
these epochal residues is an inventive emergent culture that, in France in the
1970s, de Certeau saw as lacking a form of representation:
Becoming increasingly opaque, a marginalized life has no escape in our
system of representations. Rural areas and cities and not just labor
unions or universities are populated with silent subjects. And it is
not because they lack ideas or criteria! But their convictions are no
longer affiliations.
(1997a: 9)
What is being described is a culture that cant be expressed within the cultural
forms of democratic capitalism (including, and perhaps especially, their
oppositional forms). In a report prepared for the French Ministry of Culture
and published as Lordinaire de la communication in 1983, Luce Giard and Michel
de Certeau combine description with specific recommendations for a politics
of possibility. The report doesnt offer a revolutionary or oppositional form
of politics; rather it offers a series of modest and everyday proposals. In
an article published at the same time as this report (and clearly part of the
report) they mention an example that seems as vivid as it is ordinary:
In a declining industrial region, the Lorraine Coeur dAcier station [a
local radio station] established the bias of live broadcasting, each person
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being able to have access to the airwaves by coming in to the studio
or by calling in... The experiment acted as a revelation or a spur:
someone astonishingly discovered that his or her coworker secretly
wrote poems, and someone else confessed to being an amateur painter
… A steelworker, overwhelmed by the experience summed it up beautifully: There, on the radio, it was possible to say, youd say things to yourself, and you wanted to say it. It was possible to send words down into homes and after a while the listener would become the actor and inevitably he or she sent the words back up… It was a reflec- tion of life life is a kind of disorder, freedom is a kind of disorder. And he concluded marvelously: Now I have a certain rage inside me. I want to write with an I, and on all subjects, that way no one will stop me anymore. I want to do it. (de Certeau and Giard 1998: 255)
If the promotion of such speech events is a politics of everyday life, it isnt about having certain ends in mind, but about generating beginnings. Such modest and ambitious everyday politics makes connections with the project of Mass-Observation and the possibilities of speaking for yourself (the radio programme mentioned above was called Listen to Yourself). The cultural politics of everyday life that emerges is one that both taps into the energies present in the everyday and uses them to transform it. Such a poli- tics (if it is one) doesnt offer solutions, nor does it offer to overthrow oppression. This is a heuristic, experimental politics that puts its faith in the everyday as a means for its own transformation.
Note
1An indifference to gender is evident in much of de Certeaus work. Luce Giards contribution to the project (Doing Cooking) can therefore be seen as both an intervention in the project and as a partial corrective to this indifference.
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I
N THE WORK OF MASS-OBSERVATION , Benjamin, Simmel,
Surrealism, Lefebvre and de Certeau, the everyday evidences a range of
temporalities that makes it impossible to think of modernity as a straight-
forward narrative. Everyday modernity begins to look like a patchwork of
different times and spaces. I began this book by sketching an account
of modernity as a contradictory picture of the everyday as both boring and
mysterious, as both disconcerting and routine. The theories of everyday life
we have looked at extend and deepen this sense of ambiguity. The everyday
as poverty and oppression vies with the everyday as culturally rich and
animated by festive forces. There is no comfort here for anyone wanting an
object simply to celebrate or condemn.
As we have moved from the beginning of the twentieth century to its
end, the everyday, for cultural theory, has moved in and out of focus. The
reasons for this are no doubt complexly related to cultural life: we have
seen, for instance, the everyday come into sharp relief at moments of social
and cultural crisis such as May 1968. But the vividness of the everyday is
not simply related to the events of the social; it is animated by a will, a
struggle to rescue the everyday from conformity. The question that the
everyday makes vivid for cultural theory is the question of how to attend to
the social. From Simmel onwards, this question has foregrounded (in my
account at least) a notion of form, of arrangement, of aesthetic procedures,
either explicitly or implicitly. The everyday makes the particularity of lived
culture inescapable. But unless this is to result in an endless cataloguing, an
infinite inventory, then forms must be found to make such particularity
legible, meaningful or just simply productive. The tradition that this book
has narrated offers a range of aesthetics for registering the unregistered:^1
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Chapter 9
POSTSCRIPT
Everyday life and the future of
cultural studies
dialectical approaches that reveal the general in the particular; explosive juxta- positions of disparate material; productive assemblages of related phenomena; a general poetics of the singularity of living. Perhaps then, the everyday is the name that cultural theory might give to a form of attention that attempts to animate the heterogeneity of social life, the name for an activity of finding meaning in an impossible diversity.
Everyday life theory in an international frame
The everyday life theory that I have considered here needs to be recognized as operating within an international frame. This, as should be clear, does not give it a global truth; far from it. The work Ive been considering is tied to specific geographies as much as specific histories. Yet these geographies are not simply gripped in the hold of what might be considered eccentric national cultural traditions. Lefebvre for instance is clearly relating the everyday life of postwar France to the moments of decolonization and what he came to think of as the reconfiguring of colonialism as a form of neo-colonialism. In Kristin Rosss Lefebvrian book Fast Cars, Clean Bodies: Decolonization and the Reordering of French Culture ,the everyday life of French national culture rever- berates in relation to these more global considerations. In a fascinating discussion of 1950s French hygiene adverts (for washing machines, fridges, polish and the like), Ross draws out a set of housekeeping tropes that would also be used to refer to the Algerian war (Ross 1995: 71122). Housekeeping, as a familiar, domestic and everyday realm, echoes with the same language as Frances attempt to keep house (to keep its colonies in order). To make the leap from torture to shampoo (108), and to insist on the histor- ical actuality of this relationship, suggests a historiographic practice akin to Martha Roslers photomontages, which insert the Vietnam war into well- heeled, Western, colour-supplement homes (figure 11). Roslers photo- montage series, titled Bringing the War Home, demands that we read the outrages of neo-colonial wars in the domestic environments of Western everyday life. Such an orientation to the everyday has stressed a reading of commodity culture within the terms of global structures, for instance, Anne McClintocks reading of everyday Victorian commodities (soap, toothpaste, biscuits, etc.) as registering the complex desires and fears of colonial attitudes (McClintock 1995). In a recent book entitled Historys Disquiet: Modernity, Cultural Practice, and the Question of Everyday Life , Harry Harootunian makes a number of crucial points that suggest the fruitfulness of insisting on cross-cultural figuring of everyday life. For one thing the everyday allows for a nuanced and complex account of the way modernity articulates itself in different geographical settings (his continued point of reference is Japan between the two world
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POSTSCRIPT: THE FUTURE OF CULTURAL STUDIES
wars). In this regard modernity is the global condition of capitalisms fero-
cious success. Everyday life, however, becomes the cultural experience of
modernity that is never simply equivalent to what might seem to be the
homogenizing ambitions of capitalism. For one thing everyday life becomes
an arena for cultural survivals and revivals, the reconfiguring of specific tradi-
tions under the domain of the modern. In Harootunians words:
If modernity was driven by the desiring machine of capitalism, promising
to install its regime of production and consumption everywhere, the
everyday, serving as a minimal unification of the present and signaling
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Figure 11 Red Strip Kitchen , from Bringing the War Home: House Beautiful
photomontage series by Martha Rosler (196772). With kind permission from
the artist
the level of lived experience and reproduction would, in fact, negotiate
the compelling demands of homogeneity through the mediations of a
past that constantly stood in a tense, often antagonistic, relationship to
the present of the new.
(Harootunian 2000: 63)
It is precisely by bringing together the global generality of modernization with the specificity of regional and historical cultural continuities and discon- tinuities, that the everyday is seen as a particularly appropriate perspective for cross-cultural studies of modernity. For Harootunian it allows the measure of the not quite the same to be taken across different cultures. In other words a focus on everyday life would insist on the uneven experiences of modernity on an international and intranational scale (for instance, the different everydays of rural and urban communities). Harootunians Historys Disquiet is mainly a theoretical book. He considers some of the same theorists as Ive considered here (specifically Lefebvre, Benjamin and Simmel). But Harootunian also points to a range of Japanese intellectuals working in the 1930s who insisted that philosophy should become everyday. The writing of philosophers such as Tosaka Jun, Harootunian tells us, anticipates the thought of Lefebvre in crucial ways. Yet within Anglophone cultural studies it is the name of Lefebvre that is known, not that of Tosaka Jun. This example, of course, needs multiplying and extending globally. Non-Western cultural theory remains invisible. If the project of everyday life studies is to go in search of the hidden and the ignored, then, this should apply to its theoretical resources as much as to the cultural practices it pursues. In this sense one direction that everyday life theory would want to take would be geographical: to cast the everyday within an international frame of theories and practices. The everyday is not, as we have seen, simply reducible to the significa- tions of material culture or the characteristics of national cultures. The everyday, in important and challenging ways (especially in the work of de Certeau), is about the density of cultural life and its refusal to be contained by the parameters of what would pass for national life. This doesnt mean that ideas of national culture arent going to be important, merely that they wouldnt be the end point of everyday life studies. In many ways the idea of the national is going to be the ground that a study of the everyday seeks to recode and pluralize. As far as this goes a cross-cultural approach to everyday life might start, not from the perspective of known and identifi- able cultural differences, but (perhaps more polemically these days) from a sense of a common global invisibility to everyday life. Thus an attempt to foreground the murmuring voices of the everyday could (as in de Certeaus work) make connections between (for instance) peasant cultures in Brazil and North African factory workers in France (de Certeau 1984: 1517). This
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is not to suggest a global sameness to the everyday, but to map out formal
contiguities across specific socio-cultural situations.
Finally then Id like to think that if a cross-cultural attention to the
everyday keeps alive something of the problematic spirit that is the subject
of this book it may well provide an opportunity to re-imagine cultural studies.
In other words it might help to re-animate cultural studies in imaginative
ways. To adopt something of the inventiveness of these approaches, as well
as to extend everyday life theory in more international ways, seems to me
to be a worthwhile ambition.
Note
1Thanks to Stephen Clucas for this formulation.
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Adam, Barbara (1995) Timewatch: The Social Analysis of Time , Cambridge: Polity Press. Ades, Dawn (1986a) Photography and the Surrealist Text, in Rosalind Krauss and Jane Livingston, LAmour Fou: Photography and Surrealism , London: Arts Council of Great Britain, pp. 15389. (1986b) Photomontage , London: Thames & Hudson. Adler, Kathleen (1989) The Suburban, the Modern and Une Dame de Passy , The Oxford Art Journal , 12.1: 313. Adorno, Theodor (1980) Letters to Walter Benjamin [19358], translated by Harry Zohn, in Theodor Adorno, Walter Benjamin, Ernst Bloch, Bertolt Brecht and Georg Lukcs, Aesthetics and Politics , London: Verso, pp. 11033. (1992) Notes to Literature: Volume II , New York: Columbia University Press. Adorno, Theodor, Benjamin, Walter, Bloch, Ernst, Brecht, Bertolt and Lukcs, Georg (1980) Aesthetics and Politics , London: Verso. Ahearne, Jeremy (1995) Michel de Certeau: Interpretation and its Other , Cambridge: Polity Press. Anderson, Perry (1979) Considerations of Western Marxism , London: Verso. (1992a) A Zone of Engagement , London: Verso. (1992b) Components of a National Culture [1968], in Perry Anderson, English Questions , London: Verso, pp. 48104. Aragon, Louis (1987) Paris Peasant [1926], translated by Simon Watson Taylor, London: Picador. Ardagh, John (1977) The New France: A Society in Transition 19451977 , Harmondsworth: Penguin.
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Chapter 3
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BIBLIOGRAPHY
Adam, B. 5
Ades, D. 46, 47
Adler, K. 144
Adorno, T. 33, 71
aesthetics 1924, 120, 129-30, 151, 174;
emergence of term 20; of experimentation
234; form of experience 19; mental/
sensual experience 19, 20, 21; socialist
389; transformation/transcendence 20;
and use of juxtapositions 23
Ahearne, J. 1656
Akerman, C. 147
alienation 118, 120, 124, 125, 126, 1301,
143, 145
Althusser, L. 116
Americanization 118, 133
Anderson, P. 99
anthropology 76, 82, 87; British social
98, 99100, 1045; cannibals and
heroes 978; domestic 58, 98;
Malinowskian 1003; mythic/
ritualistic 85, 106
Aragon, L. 45, 49, 556
Arcades Project (Benjamin) 61, 623, 73, 74
archives 1619; and concealment/suppression
1623; construction of new 164;
microscopic/macroscopic dilemma 245;
practices of 256; problem of 161;
psychoanalytic aspects 1645; sensory
aspects 26; speech/writing dichotomy
1659; strategic characterization of 162,
168; suppression of 1623; and urban
environment 161
Ardagh, J. 132
art 456, 47
ascetism 910
Atget, E. 15, 64
avant-garde 74; artistic 456; sociology
212, 23, 389, 143
Axelrod, C.D. 34
Bakhtin, M. 123, 124
Barnard, T.T. 99
Barthes, R. 107, 116, 117
Bataille, G. 56, 58, 81, 121, 123
Baudelaire, C. 36, 63, 65, 141
Bauman, Z. 29
Baumgarten, A. 20
Beaujour, M. 52
Bell, A. 5
Benedict, R. 112
Benjamin, A. 68
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Chapter 3
Index
Benjamin, Walter 18, 21, 23, 26, 30, 32, 44, 45, 53, 59, 83, 111, 174; Arcades Project 61, 623, 73, 74; and articulation of experience of the everyday 6671; and the cinema 6970; dialectical images of 713, 161; and failure of Surrealism 62; and the flneur 139; importance of 612; and problematic of the everyday 61; and shock of experience 6671; situating work of 601; and theme of distraction 6870; and trash 61, 63, 65; and the urban 13940, 141 Bennett, T. 154 Bentley, N. 12 Berlin 40, 42 Berlin Trade Exhibition 40 Biernacki, R. 5 Blanchot, M. 1, 201, 512, 54, 122 Bloch, E. 33 Boiffard, J.-A. 52, 53 Bolton project 76, 78, 89 , 96105; and class 1034; failure of 98, 1045; and lack of published results 98; and use of British social anthropology 98, 99100; use of Malinowskian framework 1003 boredom 23; affect on the body 19; and emptying of time 512; and gender 1012 Boym, S. 144 Brecht, B. 22, 24, 61, 62, 68, 133, 143 Breton, A. 48, 118, 121, 140, 143; definition of Surrealism 4950; rcit of relationship with a woman 515 Buchanan, I. 148 Bureau of Surrealist Research 47 Brger, P. 46, 134 Burke, P. 124
Caillois, R. 58, 121 Calder, A. and Sheridan, D. 87, 95, 102 capitalism 9, 113, 117, 119, 133, 1401, 149, 172 carnival see la fte Chaney, D. 112 Chtcheglov, I. 141, 142 cinema, as distraction 70; film montage in 68, 6971, 93
Clark, T.J. 36
class system 7981, 88, 978, 1034, 131
Clifford, J. 57, 75, 81, 87, 100
Cohen, M. 53, 54
Cohn-Bendit, D. 138
collage 467, 104; chance encounters of
objects 46, 93; in newspapers 95; and
non-subsuming of diverse elements
945; practice of 834, 90, 935; and
reader/text relationship 95; and
simultaneity of difference 94; and social
difference 934; and totality of fragments
95
Collge de Sociologie 21, 57, 58, 121
colonialism 78, 79, 80, 11718, 142
commodities 113, 114 , 115, 117, 175, see also
individual/commodity relationship
Communist Party 49, 120, 130
consciousness 4950, 106, 144, 1645
consumption 1545
cooking project 1523, 168
Coombes, A.E. 16
Cowan, R.S. 8
criticism 2630; anthropological 29;
emergence of social forms of 28; of
everyday life 12930; Fascist 29; Marxist
28; moments of 129; of politics 130; as
premature 278; as theoretical endgame 27
Crow, T. 456
Cultural Studies 267, 2930, 312, 174
culture 80, 99100; authentic 125; capitalist
1401; geographical understanding of
1367, 139; heterogeneity of 148;
myth/ritual 85, 106; and politics 1079,
1713; popular 1478; practice of 158;
residual/emergent 152
Davis, M.S. 35
Davis, N.Z. 124
de Certeau, Michel, 18, 256, 27, 29, 31, 32,
47, 174; and archives 1619; belief/faith in
the everyday 1456; binary language of 151,
1546, 165; and disentanglement of
people/practices 1567; and foregrounding
of the everyday 1703; impact of summer
1968 on 1489; and metaphorics of
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speaking/writing 1659; poetics of everyday
life 14656; and the political 150; and the
popular 149, 1623; and the practice of
everyday life 1478; and psychoanalysis
1645; and resistance 1512, 153;
similarities/differences with Lefebvre
14951; and strategy/tactics 15761, 162,
1645; and travel 146; works by 1467
Deacon, B. 99
Debord, G. 49, 133, 138, 139, 141, 142; and
Wolman, G.J. 139
Dlgation Gnrale la Recherche
Scientifique et Technique 1467
Dentith, S. 124
drive 13941, 142
dialectical image 713, 83, 93
distraction 689, 70
Documents 567
Donzelot, J. 9
Doyle, A.C. 24
dreams 62, 92, 170
Durkheim, E. 12, 57
Eagleton, T. 20, 46
economics 34, 43, 129
Edwards, E. 112
Edwards, S. 79, 96
Erfahrung 679
Erlebnis 679
ethnography 98, 1001; practised at home
878; Surrealist 569, 819
Evans, J. 78, 88
Evans, O. 6
everyday, as accumulation of fragments
378; ambiguities of 2, 16, 546;
archives of 246; arguments concerning
1718; articulation of 22; as bizarre/
mysterious 34, 1214, 16; conscious
alterations in 4950; as cyclical 12831;
as dull/boring 23, 512; experience
of 1; foregrounding of 1703; as hidden/
evasive 145; imaginative/inventive
practices 31; international frame 1758; as
marvellous 49, 4951, 546; as non-
conscious 1314, 59; notion of 1; poetics
of 8996, 14656, 1701; practice/
critique of 2630, 1478; as problematic
61; as rational 5, 12; representations of
201, 24; transformation of 31
experience, as Erlebnis or Erfahrung 679;
shock of 6771
exquisite corpse game 50
familiar 1424
Faraday, M. 92
Fascism 29, 84, 105, 1089
fashion 117
Featherstone, M. 19
feminism 28, 1256, 130, 141, 144
Ferrier, M. 168
festival see la fte
flneur 36, 141
Flaubert, G. 11
Foster, H. 140, 141
Foucault, M. 116, 117, 162
Franco-British Exhibition (1908) 16
Freud, S. 1214, 16, 58, 100, 164, 170
Friedan, B. 11
Frisby, D. 356, 38
Gascoyne, D. 76, 82
Geist, J. 55
gender 74, 97; and boredom 1012; domestic
sphere 10910; and erasure of difference
119, 1257; feminine ambiguity 52, 54,
126; and womens voices 1689
Gershem, H.S. 46
Giard, L. 146, 147, 1523, 161, 168, 1701,
1723
Giedion, S. 6, 8
globalism 11718, 133, 1758
Gollancz, V. 98
Greenhalgh, P. 16
Griaule, M. 57
Grierson, J. 85
Gutterman, N. 121
Haddon, A.C. 99
Hamper, B. 8
Hargreaves, A.G. 142
Harisson, T. 76, 77, 79, 80, 88, 96, 97 8,
99, 101, 1035, 110; et al. 76, 84, 90
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INDEX
Harmann, R. 36 Harootunian, H. 1757 Harvey, D. 116, 136, 144 Haussmann, Baron 1389 Haxthausen, C.W. and Suhr, H. 41 Hegel, G.W.F. 1201, 125, 142 Hegelian Marxism 11820, 127 Heidegger, M. 125 history, approach through trash 612, 63, 65; dialectics of 723; end of 11819, 1202, 124; and failure of Surrealism 62; as nostalgia 556, 125; and presentation of place 524, 556; as revolution 54 Hollier, D. 56, 57, 58, 121 Holmes, Sherlock 24, 1213, 16, 47, 96 Hood, W. and Cawson, F. 102 Howarth, H. and Glew, R. 102 Hugnet, G. 82 Huxley, J. 87 Huyssen, A. 11 hypermodernization 1317
impressionism 34, 357, 43, 73 individual/commodity relationship 401, see also commodities interiors 723, 74 International Surrealist Exhibition (1936) 82 iron-cage analogy 910, 43, 58
Jacknis, I. 16 Jackson, K. 82 Jameson, F. 133, 134, 1356 Jay, M. 18, 118, 127 Jeffery, T. 76, 98, 107, 112 Jennings, H. 76, 81, 823, 85, 87, 90, 92, 93 Jones, K. and Williamson, K. 5 Joyce, J. 24 Julia, D. 162 Jun, T. 177 juxtapositions 73; cinematic 68, 6970; of cultural materials 567; evaluation of 501; feminine 52, 54; fragile body/destruction of landscape 66; as marvellous montage 4951; of place 524, 556
Kafka, F. 9 Kelly, M. 120
Kern, S. 5
Kofman, E. and Lebas, E. 139
Kojve, A. 1212, 125, 127
Kracauer, S. 8, 34, 70
Kramarae, C. 8
Krauss, R. 48; and Livingston, J. 48
Kristeva, J. 166
Kuisel, R. 113
la fte 29, 119, 1225, 129, 133, 137, 1389
La Nature 47
La Rvolution Surraliste 47
Lacan, J. 121
Lambeth Walk 1079, 122
Langbauer, L. 6, 1256
Laplanche, J. and Pontalis, J.-B. 164
Layard, J. 99
Le Corbusier 133
Le Roy Ladurie, E. 124
Lefebvre, Henri 17, 25, 289, 31, 32, 149,
1501, 174, 175; and alienation 118, 120,
124, 126, 1301; and capitalism 117, 119;
and colonialism 11718; contribution to
geographical understanding of the social
1367; and the end of history 11819,
1202, 124; and erasure of difference
1257; and the festival 119, 1225, 133,
137; influence of French politics on
11920; and leisure 1289; and logic of the
commodity 113; moments of 11516,
122, 124; and movement from symbol to
signal 1345; as philosopher 113, 115,
11617; philosophical/sociological shift
1323; and postmodernism 1356;
practical/theoretical dialectic 11618,
1334; and recognition of the familiar
1424; rural/urban life 115; and separation
of politics from the aesthetic/everyday 130;
similarities/differences with de Certeau
14951; and social transformation 1312,
134, 135, 1378; and stress on
repetition/recurrence 12831; and total
man concept 11819, 122, 124, 1267;
urbanism and the Situationists 13842
Legg, S. 76, 93
Leiris, M. 56, 57, 58
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INDEX
leisure 1289
Letterist International 123, 138
Lewis, H. 46, 47, 50
Linhart, R. 160
literature 48
lived space 723
Lukcs, G. 33, 34, 125
McClintock, A. 175
MacIntyre, A. 100
Madge, C. 757, 82, 85, 87, 90, 92, 93, 98,
99, 101, 103, 1056
Malinowski, B. 99, 100, 1013, 111, 112
Mallarm, S. 166
Mannheim, K. 33, 34, 35
Marcus, L. and Nead, L. 60
Marcuse, H. 129
Marx, K. 67, 14, 24, 49, 63, 116, 120, 130,
131, 177; and Engels, F. 22
Marxism 25, 28, 34, 103, 126, 129,
130
mass media 856
Mass-Observation 18, 21, 23, 122, 144, 173;
background 757; Bolton project 96105;
and centrality of everyday life 11112;
collecting/organizing of material 90, 93;
contradictory, confused, unsystematic
approach of 10511; day-surveys 8990,
92, 93; and distancing of myth 84;
emergence of 301; and Fascism 29;
full-time observers 77; and inclusion of
housewives 76; as modest and ambitious
111; and negotiation of the managed/
unmanaged archive 24, 161; and
ordering of questions 901; part-time
panel 756; as poetry of everyday life
8996; as politics of everyday life
10511; and practice of montage
834, 90, 935, 104; psychoanalytic
aspects 902, 100; radical positivism
of 83; recruitment to 7981, 867,
89; scientific aspects 834, 87;
several-pronged approach 10511; as
Surrealist ethnography 819;
tensions in 7781; and use of
crisis moments 85, 86; use of mass
media 856; and use of newspaper by-
lines 86, 107; voyeuristic aspect 967
Mayhew, H. 16
Mayol, P. 146, 158, 161, 168
Merleau-Ponty, M. 121
metropolis 403, see also urbanism
Milli, G. 7
modernity 32, 115; and articulation of
experience 6671; as assault on tradition
22; capitalist 119, 149; as complex/
contradictory 22, 23; focus on detritus
of 63, 65; global 1757; Holmesian
aspects 24; lived experience/cultural
expressions link 367; phantasmagoria
of 14, 16, 70, 83; rethinking/
re-imagining 57; strangeness of 1214,
16, 70; temporal concept 512; urban
forms 133
moments 11516, 122, 124, 129,
150
montage see collage
Morris, M. 27
Moseley, O. 84, 108
Mller, L. 367, 41
Nadeau, M. 46, 478
Nadja (Breton) 515, 140; political aspects
534; as a rcit 512; use of photographs
in 52 3
Naville, P. 48
New Left 122, 126
Niethammer, L. 125
Nietzsche, F. 116
Orwell, G. 97, 112
Osborne, P. 60, 124
Paris Commune 54, 1389
Paris Exposition Universelle (1889) 14, 16
Paris Peasant (Aragon) 556
participant observation 867, 101
philosophy 33, 116
Pickering, M. 112
Picton, T. 80, 88, 109
pleasure 55
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INDEX
politics 84, 10511, 150; Abdication crisis 75, 85, 86, 106; and culture 1079, 1713; domestic sphere 10910; and Fascism 1056, 107, 1089; and Munich crisis 1078; separation from aesthetic/ everyday 130; as several-pronged 110; sleep-walking aspect 1067; traditional 150 Pollock, S. 144 Popular Front 106, 119, 127, 131 Poster, M. 120, 150 postmodernism 1336 Potlach 123 Pred, A. 135 psychic automatism 50 psychoanalysis 1314, 73, 76, 902, 100, 1645 public/private realm 723
Rabelais, F. 123 ragpickers 63, 64 , 65 Raine, K. 76, 81, 90, 92 Rammstedt, O. 33, 38 rationalism 19, 20, 29 Ray, P.C. 82 Read, A. 112 Read, H. 82 Reader, K.A. 131 resistance 1513, 154, 157, 160 Revel, J. 62 revolution 1389, 172 Rigby, B. 147 Rimbaud, A. 49 Rivers, W.H. 99 Rosler, M. 175, 176 Ross, K. 14, 49, 117, 132, 138, 175 ruralism 42, 43, 115
sacredness 579 Sandberg, M.B. 16 Sartre, J.-P. 116 Scannell, P. and Cardiff, D. 1078 Schivelbusch, W. 8 Schor, N. 1112 science 478, 834, 87, 106, 107 scriptural economy 1657
Seligman, C.G. 99
Shields, R. 115, 126
Sieburth, R. 65
Simmel, Georg 18, 21, 23, 26, 30, 32,
73, 127, 132, 174; archive of 161;
assessment of 334; avant-gardism of
3940; impressionistic aspects 357, 43;
and the metropolis 403; microscopy of
34, 378, 61; sociological formalism of 35;
and theorizing of everyday life 345;
totalities of 3740
Situationists 123, 133, 13842,
149
society, anti-bureacratic 119; image of
923; management of 172; primitive/
civilized 123; signification of 1345; as
totality of fragm of 1201, 1312,
134, 135, 1378
sociology 33, 129; avant-garde 212, 23,
389; impressionistic 34, 357, 43;
Surrealist 489
Soja, E. 133, 136
Sommerfield, J. and Watkin, B. 102
Spacks, P.M. 10
speech 1657, 1689, 171, 173
Spender, H. 78, 89
Stam, R. 123
Stanley, L. 112
Stewart, S. 6, 9
Stocking, G.W. Jr 99, 100
strategy 147, 154, 15761, 162, 1645,
see also tactics
structuralism 117, 136
Surrealism 18, 21, 22, 23, 30, 73; archive
of 161; and collage 467; definition of
4950; ethnographic perspective 569;
failure of 62; as form of idealism 51; as
form of social research 46; importance of
montage to 93; impossibility of 56; as
interdisciplinary 82; limitations of 83;
link with Marxism 130; and materiality
of the city 516; methodology of 4951;
modern everyday in 62; over-use of
term 456; and refusal of trappings of
art/design 489; and romanticism 82;
and science 478
11111
2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9
10111
1
2
3
4
15111
6
7
8
9
20111
1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9
30111
1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9
40111
1
2
311
INDEX
Surrealist ethnography 819, 140; and
blurring of native informants/participant
observer 87; common features 878; and
perception of ritual 889; relationship
812; and use of time and motion 88
tactics 15961, see also strategy
Taylor, J. 80, 112
Thompson, E.P. 81
time, assembly line of 68; bureaucratic
910; gendered 1012; industrialization
of 8; marking 89; standardization of
56, 9
Torgovnick, M. 57
totality 113, 11819, 122, 124, 125,
1267
tradition 213, 32, 70, 136, 150,
151, 174
trash 61, 63, 65
travel 146
Tristan, F. 10
Ulmer, G.L. 95
universalism 127
urbanism 516, 74, 115, 11718, 1323,
135, 1367, 13842, see also metropolis
Vinet, R. 150
Waldberg, P. 49, 50
Weber, M. 910, 43
Wilcock, J.L. et al 102
Williams, R. 152
Wilson, E. 144
Wohlfarth, I. 63
Wolff, J. 144
Wolin, R. 63
Wollen, P. 123
Worktown project see Bolton project
writing 155, 1659, 171
Zipes, J. 33
Zola, E. 14
11111
2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9
10111
1
2
3
4
15111
6
7
8
9
20111
1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9
30111
1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9
40111
1
2
311
INDEX