1. The myth of everyday life: Toward a heterology of the ordinary
- Author
-
Barry Sandywell
- Subjects
Cultural Studies ,Literature ,Materiality (auditing) ,Lifeworld ,business.industry ,media_common.quotation_subject ,General Social Sciences ,Modern philosophy ,Epistemology ,Arts and Humanities (miscellaneous) ,Expression (architecture) ,Anthropology ,Historicity ,Sociology ,Ideology ,Everyday life ,business ,Social theory ,media_common - Abstract
The aim of this paper is to contribute to the rethinking of everyday life as a central, if highly diverse and problematic, theme of modern philosophy and social theory. The focus of the essay concerns the uncertain ontological status of ‘the everyday’ within the human sciences. An initial exploration of the ambiguity of the expression ‘everyday life’ points to a more consequential type of undecidability once it is fully recognized how the ideology of ‘everyday life’ functions to suppress the materiality, contingency, and historicity of human experience. This can be seen in the contrast between powerful atemporal conceptions of everyday life and more critical understandings of the lifeworld framed in temporal categories. The distinction between everyday life and lifeworld proves useful as a marker for two very different approaches to the ordinary. The paper claims that the ordinary has been systematically denigrated in the very act of being theorized as ‘everyday life’. A tradition of binary and dichotomou...
- Published
- 2004