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This chapter discusses various theories of everyday life and their implications for cultural studies. Based on the works of surrealism, Mass-Observation, Walter Benjamin, George Simmel, Henri Lefebvre and Michel de Certeau, the everyday evidences a range of temporalities that makes it impossible to think of modernity as a straightforward narrative. The everyday, for cultural theory, has moved in and out of focus due to reasons related to cultural life. Perhaps 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 everyday life theory discussed in the book needs to be recognized as operating within an international frame. It allows for a complex account of the way modernity articulates itself in different geographical settings. This suggests that modernity is the global condition of the success of capitalism, but everyday life becomes the cultural experience of modernity that is never simply equivalent to what might seem to be the homogenizing ambitions of capitalism. The everyday is not simply reducible to the significations of material culture or the characteristics of national cultures. If a cross-cultural attention to the everyday keeps alive something of the problematic spirit that is the subject of this book it may provide an opportunity to re-imagine cultural studies.

This chapter discusses the works of scholar Michel de Certeau on the poetics of everyday life. Certeau's writing is said to be often elliptical and elusive, but this can be interpreted as indicative of the central problematic facing de Certeau: the everyday is hidden and evasive, and to attempt to attend to it requires something like a leap of faith. In his writing there is no finished system, no structure that can be overlaid on the everyday to produce neat schemas and mappable territories. The first volume of his L'invention du quotidien discusses a generalized and theoretical approach to everyday life. The second volume consists of the work of de Certeau with two other colleagues, which offers a more sustained involvement with empirical material. For de Certeau, the popular culture of everyday life presents ways of using the products imposed by a dominant economic order. What characterizes the everyday is a creativity that responds to the situation. De Certeau figures everyday life as a sphere of resistance. It is much an activity born of inertia as it is a result of inventive forms of appropriation. His everyday life project continually evokes the everyday as a theoretical and practical possibility.

This chapter focuses on the work of philosopher Henri Lefebvre on the dialectics of everyday life. The everyday signaled for Lefebvre a speculative attempt to register the social as a totality. He claims that capitalism has penetrated modern everyday life. As a Marxist, he saw contemporary everyday life as exploitative, oppressive and relentlessly controlled. He believes that moments are those instances of intense experience in everyday life that provide an immanent critique of the everyday. The dialectic between the practical and the theoretical, between the concrete and the abstract, requires a mutual and continual testing. According to Lefebvre, philosophy acts as a critical tool that can be used in the attempt to uncover the natural appearance of objects and relations. It is necessary to understand both the philosophical and cultural milieu and the rapidly changing social environment in approaching his work on everyday life. His continual references to the colonization of everyday life by capitalism can be taken literally as the continuation and transformation of the processes and forces of imperialism. He claims that the study of everyday life is a study of alienation under conditions of modernity, and that the transformation of everyday life will be brought about by the de-alienation of human beings.

This chapter examines the works of philosopher Walter Benjamin in relation to the theme of everyday life as problematic. His approach to history is through trash, through the spent and discarded materials that crowd everyday life. His later works deal with the interlinked themes of the decrease in communicable experience and the problem of finding a poetics that is capable of articulating the actuality of modern life. For Benjamin the historicity of experience needs to be recognized, apprehended and made available for criticism. His theoretical attention to the historicity of the everyday is based on the idea of the dialectical image. According to Benjamin, surrealism finds the right field for attending to the modern and performs the poetic operations necessary for apprehending it, but fails to mobilize its tools in a critical way. Surrealism must be put at the service of making the historicity of the modern recognizable. The question that everyday modernity poses for Benjamin concerns the way that the experience of modern life might find a communicable form. He believes that modern everyday life is characterized by shock and any theory of modern experience has to confront this historically specific quality of experience.

This chapter discusses the Mass-Observation project that aimed to record everyday life in Great Britain. It started in the winter of 1936 when a group of individuals from London, England discussed the possibility of enlisting volunteers for the observation of social happenings and everyday life. Recruitment efforts were launched, and by the end of 1937 Mass-Observation has published a booklet outlining the project. From the start, Mass-Observation was characterized by tensions and conflicts across its practices and between the perspectives of those involved in the project. Various cultural and social materials allowed Mass-Observation's attention to the everyday. The project combines surrealism with an ethnographic approach to everyday life. The project imagined by Mass-Observation fits much more closely with the early potential of surrealism as a heterological research activity. The project also employed a range of tropes associated with science. Mass-Observation's science is aimed at the emergence and circulation of an affective economy of representations. 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. Psychoanalysis played a significant role in the project.

This chapter discusses surrealism as a form of social research into everyday life. Surrealism entails making the ordinary extraordinary. It is about an effort to find the marvellous in the everyday, to recognize the everyday as a dynamic montage of elements. The collage provides a persistent methodology for attending to everyday life in surrealism. It is important to separate surrealism from art and science. The kind of aesthetic-science proposed by surrealism would make it incompatible with either the doctrine of autonomous aesthetic activity or the beliefs of a positivist empiricist science. The existence of the extraordinary in the everyday is alienated from consciousness by forms of mental organization. Psychic automatism was the name given to the processes of surrealistic production that tried deliberately to negate the control of reason. Significant to all surrealist practice is the production of juxtaposition. The privileging of consciousness over social relations has resulted in surrealism being designated as a form of idealism. Cultural differences also have to collide in a way that could not be managed by dominant accounts of civilization for everyday life to become both vivid and other.

This chapter discusses a body of writing addressing everyday modernity as a problem for cultural theory. This version of everyday modernity is characterized by ambiguities, instabilities and equivocation. The tradition of theory to be discussed will not focus on the everyday associated with the self-evident and the taken-for-granted, but on the everyday as a site of resistance, revolution and transformation. This tradition of cultural theory must be seen as a heterogeneous mix of divergent interests and different positions. The works of several scholars, such as Georg Simmel and Walter Benjamin, as well as the cultural formations of surrealism and mass-observation, will be the main points of reference. This approach is based on the idea that the concept or problem has a social life, that it undergoes an adventure as it is reformulated, reemployed and reused in different contexts and under different conditions. It insists on the importance of situating theory within specific historical conjunctures and geographical terrains. Several factors must be considered in examining contemporary everyday life using the approach: aesthetics, the problem of the archive and practices and critiques.

This chapters discusses the contributions of the works of sociologist George Simmel in analyzing the problem of everyday life. His writing spans a broad culturalist perspective, including philosophical work on aesthetics and the cultural effects and affects of the money economy. Many critics and theorists have been influenced by Simmel, but they remain skeptical due to his failure to provide a workable system for examining the totality of the social experience. Simmel's own understanding of his sociological project is given in his preface to The Philosophy of Money. According to Simmel, the attention to the details of everyday life means that the experiential, instead of being located in great events, is extended to the non-eventness of the everyday. His value lies in his refusal of a unifying system for the fragments of daily life that articulate the modern experience. Simmel's sociological 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. Examples of the way in which everyday materials are made to register more general social forces are numerous in his work. Simmel's aesthetics of the everyday is closely linked to social interaction.

This chapter examines the heterogeneous and ambivalent landscape of everyday modernity. To launch an investigation into the theoretical practices of those who attend to everyday life requires attention to the concept of everyday itself. Everyday life signifies ambivalently. It points to those most repeated actions, most travelled journeys and most inhabited spaces that make up day-to-day living. It also signifies the value and quality of everyday life. This ambivalence reflects the effects of modernity. 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 trying to incorporate the new and adjusting to different ways of living. In analyzing everyday life, three concepts must be applied and related to everyday modernity, namely, boredom, mystery and rationalism. The works of psychoanalyst Sigmund Freud contributes greatly in understanding the reasons and feelings that underlie certain behaviors and everyday modernity. The phantasmagoria of modernity offers an image, a simulation of other everydays. According to philosopher Karl Marx, the phantasmagoria of modernity is characterized by the commodity, which disguises human social relationships in the form of a fantastic relationship between things.

Focuses on individuals who contributed in writing the book "Everyday Life and Cultural Theory."

Focuses on several topics discussed in the book "Everyday Life and Cultural Theory."