Everyday Life: The Transformation of the Meaning of Agency

Everyday Life: The Transformation of the Meaning of Agency

Zeynep Cansu Başeren

January 2011

“If we wish to define everyday life,” writes Henri Lefebvre in Everyday Life In The Modern World (1967), “we must first define the society where it is lived, where the quotidian and modernity take root”, since the quotidian is “a guide line for an understanding of ‘society’” (Lefebvre 1971: 28). The expression ‘everyday life’ most of the time refers to the collection of most routine, familiar and ‘naturalized’ practices that may be completely trivial, or on the contrary, essential for our survival.

In this paper, we will attempt to look at ‘everyday life’ in terms of agency, which relates to cultural practices. In order to do that, however, we should in the first place consider the contexts in which ‘everyday life’ appears as a category of praxis, and track down the significations and values it has taken on in these. Afterwards, we hope to be able to do a rigorous crossreading of certain theorists, who develop very different approaches towards everyday life, but who, nevertheless, share a common ground for their premisses and convictions in both pointing at a certain possibility of agency of the subject within the quotidian. We will therefore look at ‘everyday life’ as conceived and critiqued by the Situationists, such as Vaneigem, Debord and also Lefebvre, and ‘everyday life’ as scrutinized and designated by two theorists working within the domains of cultural studies and material culture studies, namely Willis and Hebdige.

Until recently, ‘everyday life’, as a category of praxis, has almost always been associated with chores, mindless activities, fulfillment of ‘basic needs’ and reproduction of banal social relations. Everyday life also implicates a certain type of ‘time’ in the sense that what makes ‘the quotidian’ is repetition and a particular familiar arrangement of actions (waking up, having breakfast, going to work at a certain hour, going to sleep at a certain hour, doing certain things on certain days of the week etc.). In a way, everyday life is based on a ‘cyclical perception of time’, which is typically associated with agrarian communities and in general with ‘pre-modernity’. We can claim that the meaning of everyday life is determined by

what is exterior and opposed to it: disinterested contemplation of the world, transcendental moments in which one sees ‘the truth’ lying behind appearances, and so forth. This metaphysical approach to everyday life parallels the antagonism generated by the debate of the so-called elite (high) and popular (low) cultures. In fact, the relationship between everyday life and culture is constructed according to the particular definition of culture one sees as valid. If ‘culture’ is taken to be artistic forms, philosophical activity and all that is thought to ‘cultivate’ the human soul and mind, then everyday life becomes a space mostly void of culture and it therefore has to be transcended occasionally or entirely in order for ‘the realization of the self’. In this approach, we may find the traces of a certain myth of interiority, according to which every human being has an interior life that has to be discovered. If ‘culture’ is taken in its broadest sense, on the other hand, everyday life becomes a very important site for cultural activity: everyday life itself is a product of culture and it in turn reproduces cultural processes, forms and activities as well as transforming them.

Similarly, in Marxist line of thought, everyday life is the site of alienation, false consciousness and conformism; this being so however, it is also the site of class struggle and the very product of relations of production and labour. Here, we come across the critique of the quotidian temporality concerning its routineness and mechanicity. ‘The self’ (particularly the proletarian subject), once again, is not permitted to realize itself or to be ‘whole’ because of the restrictive temporal and spatial configurations of everyday life. The project of ‘the wholesome human being’ is faced with the obstacle of ‘everyday life’ to which it is transcendental. These characteristics of everyday life stem from the characteristics of the oppressive political and economic structures, meaning that daily life will take on a much different quality once these structures are demolished and replaced with those foreseen by the communist ideal. In this regard, Marx’s critique of everyday life is a strictly political one, taken up and interpreted by numerous others. The critique brought to everyday life by the Situationists, too, is in essence a Marxian one. At this point, we would like to look more closely at the works of three individual thinkers, Debord, Vaneigem and Lefebvre, in that order.

Debord has developed an all-encompassing and rather provocative idea of modern life not being anything but a ‘spectacle’:

“In societies dominated by modern conditions of production prevail life is presented as an immense accumulation of spectacles. Everything that once was directly lived has receded into a representation.” (Debord 2002: 7)

From the outset, we can specify two relevant points about his assertion. Firstly, if modern life is fundamentally a spectacle, then the subject finds him or herself in a position of

passivity. The ‘spectator’ does not have much agency and he/she is surely not an active agent of meaning-making. However, this is precisely the critique elaborated by Debord about modern everyday life; social and political structures seal off individual agency and creativity within semiotic and linguistic processes that imitate life itself and therefore render it impossible. Secondly, assuming that ‘there has been once a life directly lived’ implicate a historical rupture: what is being experienced today, i.e. the spectacle, is strictly a modern phenomenon. Today’s ‘autonomous movement of the nonliving’ (Debord 2002:7) differs radically, then, from an ideal and/or authentic conception of pre-modern life.

“Understood in its totality, the spectacle is both the result and the goal of the dominant mode of production. It is not a mere decoration added to the real world. It is the very heart of society’s real unreality. In all of its particular manifestations—news, propaganda, advertising or entertainment—the spectacle represents the dominant model of life.” (Debord 2002:8)

The expression ‘real unreality’ indicates that the world Debord conceives is, in fact, a world of duality${}^1$, where reality is rendered inaccessible by ‘the spectacle’. Everyday life in such a society is marked by a permanent state of falsity and by the alienation and illusionment of the subject. Debord makes use of Marxian terms and approaches such as ‘false consciousness’${}^2$ to describe this. We cannot, however, understand the relationship between ‘the spectacle’ and ‘reality’ as a relationship of pure opposition, where the two exist separately and despite one another${}^3$. The spectacle is ‘real’ as well—the fact that the society of spectacle exists and reproduces itself is a reality. We do not think it would be wrong to say that the category of ‘truth’ would come in handy in this analysis, since what ‘spectacle’ lacks is indeed truth${}^4$.

Let us recall the argument of temporal configuration of everyday life being essentially cyclical. Debord touches on this point, by attributing everyday life a concept of time that is not “cyclical”, but “pseudocyclical”${}^5$.

1. “Separation is itself an integral part of the unity of this world, of a global social practice split into reality and image.” (Debord 2002: 8)
2. “Society has become what ideology already was. The repression of practice and the antidialectical false consciousness that results from that repression are imposed at every moment of everyday life subjected to the spectacle—a subjection that systematically destroys the “faculty of encounter” and replaces it with a social hallucination: a false consciousness of encounter, an ‘illusion of encounter.’ In a society where no one can any longer be recognized by others, each individual becomes incapable of recognizing his own reality. Ideology is at home, separation has built its own world.” Ibid., p. 101.
3. “The spectacle cannot be abstractly contrasted to concrete social activity. Each side of such a duality is itself divided. The spectacle that falsifies reality is nevertheless a real product of that reality. [...] Objective reality is present on both sides.” Ibid., p. 8.
4. “In a world that is really upside down, the true is a moment of the false.” Ibid., p. 9.
5. “This general time of human nondevelopment also has a complementary aspect—a consumable form of time based on the present mode of production and presenting itself in everyday life as a pseudocyclical time.” Ibid., p. 86.

“Pseudocyclical time is associated with the consumption of modern economic survival — the augmented survival in which everyday experience is cut off from decisionmaking and subjected no longer to the natural order, but to the pseudo-nature created by alienated labor.” (Debord 2002: 86)

Everyday life in modern societies rests on cyclical time just like preindustrial societies; but if the latter depend on the cycles of nature, the former depend on alienating modern structures and relations of labour.

“Considered in its own terms, the spectacle is an affirmation of appearances and an identification of all human social life with appearances. But a critique that grasps the spectacle’s essential character reveals it to be a visible negation of life- a negation that has taken on a visible form.” (Debord 2002: 9)

The last important point we should make about Debord concerns how his work relates to ‘the visual order’. According to him, modern societies value ‘image’ and ‘appearance’ above all and attribute a quality of truth and goodness to them. These include the images these societies produce about themselves, such as narratives and myths of progress and development, which are justified through ‘visible means’ (spatial forms, statistics, etc). The economy, for instance, has become a system that refers nothing but to its own existence and survival. Again, the critique of overvaluation of appearances indicate a sense of duality of reality: on the one hand we have the spectacle which is real; on the other, we have ‘reality’ that is made invisible, obsolete or distorted by the former.

“The spectacle is able to subject human beings to itself because the economy has already totally subjugated them. It is nothing other than the economy developing for itself. It is at once a faithful reflection of the production of things and a distorting objectification of the producers.” (Debord 2002:10)

Vaneigem, similarly to Debord, does not recognize much space for individual agency and action in a world where each and every social activity, conveying subtle constraints and demonstrating an oppressive character, refuses the subject the position of an active maker or creator. Constraints are visible and affective particularly in everyday life. Moreover, ‘the surest chances of liberation lie in what is most familiar’ (Vaneigem 2001: 22) and this is exactly why everyday life has to be transformed. Vaneigem stressed this point strongly:

6 “This pseudocyclical time is in fact merely a consumable disguise of the production system's commodified time.” Ibid.

7 “The spectacle presents itself as a vast inaccessible reality that can never be questioned. Its sole message is ‘What appears is good, what is good appears.’” Ibid., p. 9-10.

8 “In the spectacle- the visual reflection of the ruling economic order- goals are nothing, development is everything. The spectacle aims at nothing other than itself.” Ibid., p. 10.

9 “Constraints have become less occult, more blantant; less powerful, more numerous. Docility is no longer ensured by means of priestly magic, it results from a mass of minor hypnoses: news, culture, city planning, advertising, mechanisms of conditioning and suggestion ready to serve any order, established or to come. We are like Gulliver, lying stranded on the Lilliputian shore, with every part of this body tied down [...]” (Vaneigem 2001: 22)

“People who talk about revolution and class struggle without referring explicitly to everyday life, without understanding what is subversive about love and what is positive in the refusal of constraints - such people have a corpse in their mouth.” (Vaneigem 2001: 26)

In his work, too, everyday life is a site of alienation and decay${}^{10}$, to say the least. The culture of the consumer society has killed the individual${}^{11}$. Cyclical time of alienated labour surrounds the individual and engulfs his or her creativity by pulling him or her into a ‘hellish cycle’${}^{12}$ of work and consumption, which both have survival as their objective. Vaneigem, however, sees an immense potential in this barren site of falsity, nothingness and alienation called everyday life${}^{13}$; in fact, he believes the ‘Revolution’ will take this space as its center. He remedies everyday life with ‘carnival’, which is the antithesis of it${}^{14}$. The state of exception, then, becomes the rule in the brand new world Vaneigem designs for future generations. Thus, building on a Marxian duality of appearance and reality, Vaneigem proposes to turn everyday life upside down and inside out to release the energy buried within it; this will be done by ‘subversion’${}^{15}$. Only with a revolution of everyday life can the human being achieve ‘wholesomeness’ and therefore realize him or herself${}^{16}$. In Vaneigem’s work, the ideal of wholesomeness${}^{17}$ serves as a landmark that gives direction to his revolutionary thoughts.

Vaneigem, like Debord, regards consumer culture as a sum of structures and activities that trap human beings and prevent them from having truth or beauty in their lives, from being the wholesome individual mentioned above. This point is crucial to our subsequent comparison between the different approaches elaborated about everyday life by the Situationists and material culture theorists.

${}^{10}$ “From the perspective of Power, everyday life is a latticework of renunciations and mediocrity. A true void.” Ibid., p. 115.
“Everyday life has crumbled into a series of moments as interchangeable as the gadgets which distinguish them: mixers, stereos, contraceptives, euphorimeters, sleeping pills. Everywhere equal particles vibrate in the uniform light of Power. Equality? Justice? Exchange of nothings, restrictions and prohibitions. Nothing moving, dead time passing.” Ibid., p. 81.
“The roles we play in everyday life, on the other hand, soak into the individual, preventing him from being what he really is and what really wants to be.” Ibid., p. 127.
“Work to survive, survive by consuming, survive to consume: the hellish cycle is complete. Under the reign of ‘economism’, survival is both necessary and sufficient. This is the fundamental truth of bourgeois society.” Ibid., p. 70.
“Soon we shall find that an energy is locked up in everyday life. which can move mountains and abolish distances.” Ibid., p. 62.
“Revolutionary moments are carnivals in which the individual life celebrates its unification with a regenerated society.” Ibid., p. 110.
“Historic or not, all roles are in decay. The crisis of history and the crisis of daily life are no longer distinct. An explosive mixture. The task now is to subvert history to subjective ends - and this with the participation of humanity. Marx, be it said, never wished for anything less.” Ibid., p. 232.
“[...] new revolutionary tactics which will be based indisolubly on the historical tradition and on the practice, so widespread and so disregarded of individual self-realisation - will have no place for people who want only to mimic the gestures of Ravachol or Bonnot.” Ibid., p. 115.
“The complete unchaining of pleasure is the surest way to the revolution of everyday life, to the construction of the whole man.” (Vaneigem 2001: 12)

“The more oppression is justified in terms of the freedom to consume, the more the malaise arising from this contradiction exacerbates the thirst for total freedom. [...]The idea is that, as they gradually free themselves from the imperatives of production, men should be trapped by the newer obligations of the consumer. [...] Now that the alienation of the consumer is being exposed by the dialectic internal to consumption itself, what kind of prison can be devised for the highly subversive forces of individual creativity?” (Vaneigem 2001: 192)

Lastly, we will briefly touch on Lefebvre’s work, who has never been officially ‘named’ a Situationist, but who has had an impact on Situationist thought. Just like the previous two authors, Lefebvre places everyday life within a cyclical perception of time${}^{18}$, but he is relatively moderate in his critique of the conceived opposition between ‘philosophy as the tool giving access to truth’ and ‘everyday life as a site of empty routine${}^{19}$; in fact, this opposition is what he criticizes:

“Is the quotidian an obstacle to the revelation of truth, an unavoidable triviality, the reverse of existence and the perversion of truth, and, as such, another facet of existence and of truth? [...] The solution is then to attempt a philosophical inventory and analysis of everyday life that will expose its ambiguities [...]. The quotidian is a philosophical concept that cannot be understood outside philosophy [...]” (Lefebvre 1971: 13)

Themes of ‘hidden potentials of everyday life${}^{20}$, ‘festival as opposed to routine${}^{21}$ and the “non-human human being’ that everyday life creates${}^{22}$ are also present in Lefebvre’s work. He comes up with a description of, almost a recipe for, ‘the revolution of the quotidian’, pointing out the aspects of everyday life that need to be transformed, and he gives hints of the direction of these transformations. The ulterior objective, however, is to annihilate ‘everyday life’ altogether as the way it is, as a concept, as a catgeory. Since, according to Lefebvre, modern societies lack a general (aesthetic) style${}^{23}$, that would manifest itself in spatial forms, social and economic activities and so forth, everyday life itself, which too reflects this absence, should be

18 “Cyclical time underlies all quotidian and cosmic duration. Everyday life is composed of cycles within wider cycles; beginnings are recapitulations and rebirths.” (Lefebvre 1971: 5)
19 “Should philosophy be isolated for ever from the contamination of everyday life and detached from everyday contingencies? Is the quotidian an obstacle to the revelation of truth, an unavoidable triviality, the reverse of existence and the perversion of truth, and, as such, another facet of existence and of truth?” (Lefebvre 1971: 13)
20 “If the potentialities of everyday life could be realized it would be possible for people to adapt to their existence once again—such a possibility being one of the requirements of creative activity, by which the products of nature and necessity are turned into creations and assets, into a form of human freedom.” (Lefebvre 1971: 24)
21 “[...] and a revolution, whether violent or non-violent, consequently acquires the new significance of a liberation from the quotidian and the resurrection of the Festival. The revolutions of the past were, indeed, festivals - cruel, yes, but then is there not always something cruel, wild and violent in festivals?” (Lefebvre 1971: 36)
22 “Homo sapiens, homo faber and homo ludens end up as homo quotidianus, but on the way they have lost the very quality of homo; can the quotidianus properly be called a man? It is virtually an automaton, and to recover the quality and the properties of a human being it must outstrip the quotidian in the quotidian and in quotidian terms.” (Lefebvre 1971: 193)
23 “[...] today there is no style, notwithstanding the attempts to achieve one by resurrecting former styles or by settling among their ruins and memories [...]” (Lefebvre 1971: 29)

subjected to a ‘cultural revolution’${}^{24}$ that will transform it into ‘art’. This is the route, according to Lefebvre, that leads to a taking of conscience, to the achievement of a genuine self, in brief, to the empowerment and enchantment of the subject.

“The objective and the directive of our cultural revolution is to create a culture that is not an institution but a style of life; [...] our cultural revolution has no purely ‘cultural’ aims, but directs culture towards experience, towards the transfiguration of everyday life. [...] Let everyday life become a work of art! [...] the word ‘creation’ will no longer be restricted to works of art but will signify a self-conscious activity, self-conceiving, reproducing its own terms and its own reality (body, desire, time, space) [...]” (Lefebvre 1971: 203-4)

Moving towards more recent studies in cultural theory and material culture studies, we can argue that the total ‘style’ of an epoch referred to by Lefebvre finds an interesting response in the work of Dick Hebdige. As consumption became more and more of a tool of identity-fabrication in the second half of the twentieth century, especially from 1980s onwards, phenomena and items of consumer culture, ‘ordinary things’, have enjoyed new attention both from the entirety of modern societies and from academics. Society of consumption and its consumer culture, from this contemporary perspective, may not look so oppressive and constraining after all. Hebdige, who studies subcultures, such as Punks, considers these as ‘symbolic violation of the social order’ (Hebdige 1986: 19). The subject of everyday life, then, possesses a certain agency concerning the manipulation of codes of social meaning, stemming from the consumer culture itself. Reading Lefebvre and Hebdige together, we could say that the contemporary aesthetisation of everyday life through styles of fashion and subcultures fills up the void left behind by the absence of a total ‘style’ that would characterize ‘current times’.

In regard to ‘culture’, Hebdige claims from the outset in his book Subculture: The Meaning of Style, that “culture is a notoriously ambiguous concept [...] and has acquired a number of different, often contradictory, meanings” (Hebdige 1986: 5), while the Situationists were not interested in defining culture nor showing the difficulties arising from the word itself. Moreover, Hebdige makes use of and criticizes the heritage of the semiotic${}^{25}$ studies which culminated during the 1970s; he focuses his attention on everyday objects and discourses, unlike for instance, Foucault’s historical objects and grand Discourses claiming truth, and, unlike the society described by the Situationists, there exist ways of dodging the dominant

${}^{24}$ “The Festival rediscovered and magnified by overcoming the conflict between everyday life and festivity and enabling these terms to harmonize in and through urban society, such is the final clause of the revolutionary plan.” Ibid., p. 206.

${}^{25}$ “As semiotics gets increasingly annexed by advertising and marketing industries, information and knowledge begin to circulate outside the old parameters on the other side of the established institutional circuits.” (Hebdige 2002: 211)

cultures and discourses: One of them consists of attacking, manipulating or transforming the mechanisms of production of meaning that are a product of these${}^{26}$. Strategies concerning the production of meaning, however, do not operate freely from hierarchical differences and class structures:

“For instance, if we pause to reflect for a moment, it should be obvious that access to the means by which ideas are disseminated in our society (ie. principally the mass media) is not the same for all classes. Some groups have more say, more opportunity to make the rules, to organize meaning, while others are less favorably placed, have less power to produce and impose their definitions of the world on the world.” (Hebdige 1986: 14)

Hebdige touches on the debate of postmodernism and ‘map(s) out a more bounded, hence more habitable, version of postmodern space’ in order to be able to affectively put this notion into theoretical use. He identifies three main focal points: the dissolving ideology of ‘progress’, the shift from the ‘total’ towards the ‘fragment’, and lastly the limits of control and mastery. Although all of these three points concern a study of everyday life, we would like to concentrate on ‘the limits of totalisation’. Hebdige writes that

“It may be that we have to learn that, as Benjamin put it, ‘the fragment is the gateway to the whole’ instead of seeking to refer each case up to some prefabricated meta-system.’ (Hebdige 2001: 230)

The Situationists look at everyday life through the lens of a grand ideological-theoretical framework, and the idea of revolutionizing it is part of a desire to make history. We can assert that what Hebdige is defending in his approach to everyday life is the direct opposite: it would be erroneous to ignore the particular, the fragment, and the local${}^{27}$ in favour of a political/ideological metanarrative. Relations of power are understood through these fragments of micro-power. Moreover, the concept of ‘festival’ used by the Situationists finds an indirectly retaliatory response in youth subcultures: The stylization of everyday life in subcultures proves to be local, micro-level and usually ephemerary in comparison with the idea of a ‘perpetual festival’ which would be possible through a total and fundamental change in the relations of production.

Another theorist interested in the particular type of creativity stemming from everyday experience, is Paul Willis. Common Culture, fruit of Willis’ fieldwork effectuated with working class youth, aims to outline the everyday strategies through which the working class (youth)

${}^{26}$ “The struggle between different discourses, different definitions and meanings within ideology is therefore always, at the same time, a struggle within signification: a struggle for possession of the sign which extends to even the most mundane areas of everyday life.” (Hebdige 1986: 17)

${}^{27}$ “A critical attention to terms like ‘consumption’ and ‘mass’ imposes a shift in the analysis towards particulars and details. Everywhere the tesselated surfaces and plural textures of contemporary popular culture require us to remain alert to possibility and contradiction.” (Hebdige 2002: 211)

creates a position for themselves in the social world and interprets their own activities. He coins
the concept of ‘common culture’, which he sees as a product of the weakening of the dominance
of ‘elite culture’ in everyday life.

“The strengthening, emerging profane common culture is plural and decentred but nevertheless
marks a kind of historical watershed. [...] élite or ‘official’ culture has lost its dominance.” (Willis 1990:
128)

Here, we come across once again a distinction between the ‘élite’ and the ‘ordinary’ or
the ‘quotidian’; the argument is elaborated to the detriment of the dominant culture and, a type
of newly emerged agency, therefore, is welcomed into the everyday life.

“These creative practices produce their own grounded aesthetics [...] Elite and ‘official’ culture
can no longer hope to colonize, dominate or contain everyday life because there is already something
there which grows from its own resources. [...] Grounded aesthetics [...] rebuke those who see social
and cultural change being produced simply as a result of macroeconomic, social or political forces and
trends somehow producing and sustaining themselves, to be commented upon and analysed by the élite
but with ‘ordinary people’ serving only as their bearers, the passive medium through which they work.”
(Willis 1990: 128-9)

Not only is there an element of class consisting of the empowerment of the lower strata
in their praxis of production of meaning, but there is also a claim to democracy in Willis’ work.
Mass culture and ‘widely available cultural commodities and cultural media’ (Willis 1990: 129)
have an impact on societal structures and relations of power. This, however, is done not through
the transformation of economic production, but of consumption: As commodities are
consumed, meaning is made and put into circulation. ‘Common culture’ announces the dawning
of a new era in the class relations in terms of cultural practices- a period of change that might
eventually see ‘the final emergence of common culture as the norm’ (Willis 1990: 129). ‘Worst
truths of the market’ (Willis 1990: 130) are recognized but tolerated for the sake of ‘the best
side of this trend’ (Willis 1990: 130):

“One simple way of pursuing the ‘best side’ is to seek to give everyday culture back to
its owners and let them develop it. Let them really control the conditions, production and
consumption of their own symbolic resources!” (Willis 1990: 130)

The transformative character of consumer culture is emphasized in Willis’ work;
surprisingly enough, even a ‘revolutionary’ power is attributed to it since “consumerism [...]
unsettles tradition and convention [...], melts tradition and unpicks convention” (Willis 1990:
138). The important thing is to note that, both in Hebdige and Willis, this new empowerment
of the everyday human being, this newly found agency take their support from consumer
culture, and, this is almost the exact opposite of what the Situationists had in mind for ‘cultural
revolution’.

At two different points in the history of the second half of the twentieth century, then, everyday life has been problematized in almost opposite manners, which both advocate, nevertheless, a greater agency and freedom for the subject in the face of wider economic, political and social structures. Both the Situationists and the cultural theorists we have discussed seem to take ‘the emancipation of the subject’ as an explicit or latent point of reference in their approach. The question is to know where the resources that will drive to this objective lie. The Situationists produced their work in late 60s, a turning point in contemporary history: the movements of 1968 seemed to promise a radical transformation in societal structures and social norms in the direction of an ‘anti-consumerist’ ideal. According to this, the subject would never be free nor would he or she be able to find ‘truth’ in his/her life within the structures and the culture created and perpetuated by the capitalist system.

In turn, we can assert that the changing paradigm of agency in everyday life, that is to say, consumer culture now being viewed as a source of action and agency as well as a site within which social identity is constructed${}^{28}$, parallels the changing ethos of modern societies resulting from major political and economic transformations. The settling of neoliberalism during the 1980s, the fall of the Berlin Wall in 1989, global capital gaining more fluidity, immense developments in communication technologies and a more encouraging approach towards individualism mark a changing ambiance in the world. The metaphysical distinction between reality and apperance, which is an indispensable tool for Marxist critique of everyday life, is being employed less and less. This shows that approaches to thinking about everyday life will inevitably alter, and sometimes greatly too, as values and norms undergo transformation and even when physical realities of everyday life may remain more or less the same. In this sense, the study of everyday life rests right at the heart of the study of the cultural, whether it is considered a prison of determinations or a site of inconsumable possibilities provided by consumerist agency.

${}^{28}$ [...] consumption with its connotations of passivity, of waste, digestion, disappearance, needs to be replaced by some other term capable of conveying the multi-accentuality and duration over time and in different cultural-geographical contexts of commodified objects and forms as they move from one dislocated point to the next [...]

(Hebdige 2002: 211) Hebdige proposes to seek a new terminology for a renewed outlook on consumerism.

Bibliography

DEBORD, Guy (2002). The Society of the Spectacle, Canberra: Treason Press.

HEBDIGE, Dick (1986). Subculture: The meaning of style, Suffolk: The Chaucer Press.

HEBDIGE, Dick (2002). Hiding in the Light: on images and things, London: Routledge.

LEFEBVRE, Henri (1971). Everyday Life In The Modern World, New York: Harper & Row.

VANEIGEM, Raoul (2001). The Revolution of Everyday Life, London: Rebel Press.

WILLIS, Paul (1990). Common Culture: symbolic work at play in the everyday cultures of the young, Buckingham: Open University Press.