Reconfiguring “the everyday” in Cultural Studies

While “the everyday” could easily refer to the commonsensical, mundane, and repetitive
practices and experiences of ordinary people, the concept raises questions that demand
specifications of context and agency. Where/when does “the everyday happen”? Who enacts “the
everyday”?

Cultural Studies has tried to define and interrogate “the everyday” as one of the discipline’s
central areas of study. The relationship of the discipline and “the everyday” makes itself apparent
in Raymond William’s early essay, “Culture is Ordinary” (1958), where he argues that the
concept of culture does not just refer to the “special processes of discovery and creative effort,”
but that it more importantly refers to “a whole way of life—the common meanings.” Since then,
the concept of “the everyday” has made itself felt in the development of Cultural Studies as well
as in related disciplines in the humanities and social sciences.

The emergence of “the everyday”

The rise of “the everyday” as a concept may be traced to the reconfiguration of time or “temporal
experiences” at the turn of the nineteenth century, with the standardization of time in institutions
like the Church and schools. (Highmore 2002, 5). This period marked the beginning of Western
capitalist development, following the industrialization and urbanization that began in the late
eighteenth century. (Leonard 1996, 5). In presenting a brief history of modernity, John Leonard
points out that the modern period saw the transformation of the “temporalities” of human
existence1 (ibid, 7), motivated by the intensification of capitalist production, the “continuous
revolution in production” that characterizes the modern economy (ibid, 6). Society was
transformed into a “timekeeping” one, as symbolized by the individual ownership of clocks.

Compared to the pre-modern period of agricultural production, “Only modernity thinks of

prosperity as a precondition for civilised life…Thus it comes about that everything material in
modernity points to the one end, and for example, steam engines, the liberal subject, modern
banking, the nuclear family and so on, all of which had appeared or were appearing

1
Leonard makes it clear that he is talking about the rise of Modernity in Europe, and clarifies that the modern
temporality he is talking about may not be the case in countries that remains “agricultural temporalities”.
independently of modernity, became caught up in it, and found their places as adjuncts to its
development.” (ibid, 7)

The goal of modern capitalism was prosperity through the improvement and intensification of
production, and the way this was enacted permeated all aspects of everyday life. Ben Highmore
points to the formation of the assembly line as a model that best portrays the modern experience
of “the everyday.” He writes: “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…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.” (2002, 8). What followed was the routinization
of everyday life given the development of standard time and schedules, for the purpose of
improving production in the modern capitalist economy.

Leonard’s idea about the “revolution of production,” may be linked with Highmore’s assertion
that Marx and Engel’s Communist Manifesto may be considered as “one of the first texts to posit
modernity as a revolutionary experience to be located at the level of everyday life.” Highmore
cites this famous passage to explain how Marx and Engels understood the shift from pre-modern
to modern as a result of the changes in production as an assault to the everyday:

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 qtd. In Highmore 2002, 22)

The passage above is a lament for the transformation of social conditions brought about by the
revolutionising of production. Nothing is sacred (“all that is holy is profaned”) in the period of
modernity, social relations were reconfigured for the purpose of production. Highmore highlights
how the above passage relates to the transformation of “the everyday” because of
industrialization, but this also ties back to a change in consciousness and attitude towards
anything new, in the sense that “all new-formed ones become antiquated before they can ossify.”
The speed and efficiency of production may be likened to a new kind of attitude—a new kind of
boredom because of the monotony of the everyday—that emerged out of the modern period.
However, another set of attitudes was produced in this period as manifested in the passage:
“uncertainty and agitation”.2 The paradox of “the everyday” in the modern age is how it
simultaneously produced boredom and uncertainty.

This inherent contradiction in terms of approaching “the everyday” is, I think, at the heart of the
ambiguity of the concept. “The everyday” happens everywhere, all the time, and this is precisely
why it is so difficult to pin down. It is a concept that has produced several, often contradictory,
interpretations. The difficulty of identifying, defining, approaching, experiencing, and
representing “the everyday” is the very “intederminacy of the everyday”, to use the words of
cultural theorist Maurice Blanchot. (Qtd. in Sheringham 2006).

This brings us to the question of how “the everyday” has figured as one of the central concepts in
Cultural Studies. The names most often invoked as theorists of “the everyday” are Michel de
Certeau and Henri Lefebvre.

Even though Lefebvre predates de Certeau, it seems that the former’s works on “the everyday”
gained interest only upon the release of the English translations of the three volumes of The
Critique of Everyday Life (1945) in 1991, thirty years after the original publication. (Elden 2006,
6). This may have something to do with Lefebvre’s complicated relationship with Marxism and
The Situationists, but perhaps this also has to with the approach to “the everyday” that Lefebvre
suggests.

“Man must be everyday, or he will not be at all.” (Lefebvre 1945, 127). This is arguably one of
the most striking lines that Lefebvre offers in the first volume of The Critique of Everyday Life.
He writes: “The proposition here is to decode the modern world, that bloody riddle, according to
the everyday.” (“Everydayness”, 7). Following Marx, he locates the problem of “the everyday”

2
Highmore understands the contradiction towards “the everyday” as that between “boredom” and “mystery.” While
I agree with the notion of boredom, I am quite sceptical about Highmore seems to link mystery not to how people
approached “the everyday” but to how theorists of culture approached the ambiguity of the concept. This is why I
suggest that the contradiction of the everyday when gleaned from the passage from Marx and Engels is not between
boredom and mystery, but between boredom and uncertainty.
in modernity. “The everyday is covered by a surface: that of modernity…Modernity and
everydayness constitute a deep structure that a critical analysis can work to uncover.” (1987, 10-
11).

For Lefebvre, “the everyday” is a concept and a product of the modern world. It is “A condition
stipulated for the legibility of forms, ordained by means of functions, inscribed within structures,
the everyday constitutes the platform upon which the bureaucratic society of controlled
consumerism is erected.” (“Everydayness”, 9). Crucial to Lefebvre’s reading of “the everyday”
is how he applies Marx’s concept of the worker’s alienation from labour to the critique of the
everyday life. The experience of the everyday is the experience of alienation that has intensified
in the period of modern capitalism and the subsequent rise of mass production. Even the
experience of leisure activities can be alienating, because leisure is inextricably bound with
labour. Lefebvre uses the term “mystification” to refer to our unconscious experience of
alienation in our daily activities.

Lefebvre, for all his apparent distrust of the modern world, also offers an optimistic critique of
“the everyday.” Lefebvre explains that “The discreteness of the elements of the everyday (work -
family and 'private' life - leisure activities) implies an alienation; and perhaps at the same time a
differentiation - certain fruitful contradictions. In any event, like all ensembles (or totalities), it
must be studied in terms of the interrelation of its elements.” (1945, 31). Lefebvre’s key point,
which I believe deserves emphasis, is that we must approach “the everyday” as a concept to
understand how it works; only then will we be conscious of our alienation, and only then will we
be able to do something about it. In a sense, Lefebvre’s critique is highly philosophical, and he
himself recognized this with the warning that philosophy should not be the end in itself: “Once
he has established the notion and its universal significance, he must move over into other well-
defined areas – political economy, sociology - and above all he must confront the notion with
concrete situations in everyday life.” (ibid, 82)

Meanwhile, de Certeau’s The Practice of Everyday Life (1974) emphasizes that the ordinary man
is not passive or docile. The focus of De Certeau’s study is how the “ordinary man” navigates
through the sites of “the everyday”. De Certeau calls these “ways of operating.” The intention of
his study is to “perceive and analyze the microbe-like operations proliferating within
technocratic structures and deflecting their functioning by means of a multitude of “tactics”
articulated in the details of everyday life...” (xiv-xv)

De Certeau departs from Lefebvre’s focus on alienation and shifts to the ordinary man’s capacity
to appropriate and subvert the limitations of institutions that construct “the everyday.” For him,
“the everyday” refers to practices which can be transformed into “tactics of consumption, the
ingenious ways in which the weak make use of the strong, thus lends a political dimension to
everyday practices.” (vii). In the section, “Walking in the City,” De Certeau reads the act of
walking like a language, identifying “turns of phrase” and “stylistic figures” in the everyday
experience of walking. Walking can be subversive if the act runs contrary to the grand plan of
the city: “The surface of this order [of the city] is everywhere punched and torn open by ellipses,
drifts, and leaks of meaning: it is a sieve-order.” (107)

While I cannot delve into a detailed comparison between the two texts here,3 it is sufficient to
point out what, in my view, is the obvious difference between their approaches to “the
everyday.” Lefebvre’s focus is on the structure of “the everyday”; De Certeau’s focus is on the
“ordinary man’s” sense of agency within the structure4.

The use/misuse of “the everyday” in Cultural Studies

One way to define Cultural Studies is to view it as a “philosophy of plenty.” (Hartley 2003, 10)
considering the range of subject matters that the discipline has accommodated. Since its
establishment as a discipline in the 1950s, its interests expanded into practically all aspects of
culture. Marxist theorist Fredric Jameson once remarked that the discipline has become a rather
“populist” field in how it has incorporated and expanded to include studies that seem to belong to
other disciplines. (1993, 41). The concept of “the everyday” in itself also expanded to diverse
areas of popular culture.

3
For Highmore, a main difference between the two theorists is in terms of sensibility. Lefebvre is more grounded,
de Certeau is elusive. I am inclined to agree, especially considering de Certeau’s writing style.
4
I think it may even be argued that this goes back to the early debate on approaches within the discipline of Cultural
Studies that Stuart Hall had long ago raised: structuralism versus culturalism.
The way the discipline has approached “the everyday” has come under suspicion in recent years.
In my research, I came across two interrelated points in this regard: (1) that Cultural Studies has
dehistorized/depoliticized5 the concept of “the everyday” and that this has resulted in the (2)
“banalization” of the discipline. Michael Gardiner raised the following argument in Critiques of
Everyday Life (2000) , which I quote at length as it captures the main accusations against the
(mis)use of “the everyday”:

Cultural studies has, moreover, become increasingly amorphous and diffuse in

recent years, and has lost much of the critical and politically engaged character
that it displayed in its original incarnation. The result is a distressing tendency that
Meagan Morris (1988) has described as the ‘banalization’ of cultural studies,
whereby the critique of consumer capitalism and socioeconomic inequities has
been supplanted by a vague, depoliticized populism. Increasingly, the ‘everyday’
is evoked in a gestural sense as a bulwark of creativity and resistance, regardless
of the question of asymmetries of power, class relations, or increasingly
globalized market forces (McChesney 1996; McRobbie 1991). (8)

In response, Gardiner offers re-readings of everyday life studies that have not received much
attention, ranging from Dadaism to sociological feminism. He argues that the contemporary
study of “the everyday” should be able to locate the particular within larger sociohistorical
contexts so that it is able to go beyond the surface level descriptive accounts.6

John Roberts offers a similar critique of Cultural Studies and a more radical solution in
Philosophizing the Everyday (2006). He traces the philosophical emergence of the “the
everyday” from the Russian revolution to 1974 (which he identifies as the advent of the late
modernist period) as a counter-hegemonic and anti-capitalist concept in cultural theory. Roberts

5
Here is another related accusation:“Cultural studies today, writes Francis Mulhern, ‘leaves no room for politics
beyond cultural practice, or for political solidarities beyond the particularisms of cultural difference.’ It fails to see
not only that not all political issues are cultural, but that not all cultural differences are political.” See Terry
Eagleton, The Idea of Culture, Oxford:Blackwell, 2000, p. 43.
6
I am still quite sceptical about Gardiner’s re-readings of the various texts he chose to include in his book, but
perhaps this is the effect that this book wants to generate, a comment on the dynamism of the concept of the
everyday.
is especially critical of de Certeaunian approaches to “the everyday”, commenting that The
Practice of Everyday Life marks a paradigmatic shift, in which “the concept is largely overtaken
by aesthetic theory and the semiotic model of cultural studies, fundamentally transforming and
narrowing its political and philosophic character.” (11). In his discussion, Roberts shows a
preference for Lefebvre’s dialectical approach to the everyday and ends with a call for
revolutionary praxis in cultural theory.

Prospects

If it is true that Cultural Studies has lost its critical edge in its misuse of “the everyday,” how can
it be regained?

It seems that the task entails a step back and a step forward, a reassessment of the radical
potentials of “the everyday” and a reformulation of its relevance today. There is a need to
foreground that “the everyday” an intensely political concept, which means that it is a
time/space/site of conflict. As feminist Laurie Langbauer argues in her reading of the politics of
the everyday7: “The everyday becomes a crucial category because its consolidations and
deconstructions touch directly on the subject's relation to ideology and culture.” (1992, 51). This
should always be considered when assessing what sites of “the everyday” are worth
interrogating, and what merely contributes to the banalization of the concept and the discipline.

The current period has many names: the age of globalization, late capitalism, postmodern,
postcolonial, etcetera. These present various frameworks by which to view how “the everyday”
occurs today. Despite the name game, it cannot be denied that we live in the age of digital
technology. Although technology always has democratizing potentials, cultural theory should
respond to conflicts and divisions that this virtual cultural space has either deepened or produced.
I would argue that “the everyday” will only be useful if it is able to employ a materialist critique
on how to study the role of agency in the everyday. If the internet has proven to be a subversive

7
Langbauer has much more to say about how the politics of everyday can learn from the development of feminism.
She also points out the limitations of Lefebvre and de Certeau in terms of gender analysis of the practices of the
everyday.
tool for marginalized groups and individuals, how is this subversion carried out or experienced in
actuality?8

In the final analysis, perhaps it would do well for the discipline to remember its debt to Marxist
thought in its continuous engagement with “the everyday.” The point of the discipline should not
just be to interpret the culture of the everyday, but to change it.

8
There are many more issues that need to be addressed in relation to the specificities of “the everyday”,
particularly in postcolonial contexts. If the internet is part of the everyday experiences in developed
countries, this is certainly not the case in impoverished countries. An interesting reference that I came
across uses de Certeau to study the internet in the postcolonial context. See Franklin, M.I. Postcolonial
Politics, the Internet, and Everyday Life: Pacific traversals online. New York: Routledge, 2004.

References:

De Certeau, Michel. The Practice of Everyday Life. Trans. Steven Rendall. Berkley, University
of California Press, 1984.

Elden, Stuard. Understanding Henri Lefebvre: Theory and the Possible. London:Continuu, 2004.

Hartley, John. A Short History of Cultural Studies. London: Sage Publications, 2003.

Highmore, Ben. Everyday Life and Cultural Theory: An Introduction. London:Routledge, 2002.

Jameson, Fredric. On “Cultural Studies”. Source: Social Text, No. 34 (1993), pp. 17-52

Langbauer, Laurie. “Cultural Studies and the Politics of the Everyday.” Diacritics, Vol. 22 No. 1
(Spring 1992), pp.47-65.

Lefebvre, Henri. Critique of Everyday Life. Trans. John Moore. London: Verso, 1991.

---"The Everyday and Everydayness." Trans. Christine Levich. Yale French Studies 73 (1987):
7-11.

Leonard, John. Modernity. Australia: CPN Publications, 1996.

Gardiner, Michael E. Critiques of Everyday Life. London: Routledge, 2000.

Roberts, John. Philosophizing the Everyday: Revolutionary Praxis and the Fate of Cultural
Theory. London: Pluto Press, 2006.

Sheringham, Michael. Everyday Life: Theories and Practices from Surrealism to Present.
Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2006.
Williams, Raymond. “Culture is Ordinary.” (1989a) Resources of Hoe: Culture, Democracy,
Socialism. London: Verso, pp. 3-14.