Cultural Phenomenology and the Everyday
Cultural phenomenology and the everyday*
'The everyday is not merely one topic among others that philosophers might take an interest in, but one that a philosopher is fated to ...'
Stanley Cavell¹
In his 1927 essay 'The Mass Ornament', Siegfried Kracauer argued for the primacy of a cultural analysis which addressed itself to ephemeral, mass-produced artefacts – everyday objects whose very ubiquity and commonplace nature has rendered them almost invisible. 'The position that an epoch occupies in the historical process', Kracauer said, can be determined more strikingly from an analysis of its inconspicuous surface-level expressions than from that epoch's judgements about itself ... The surface-level expressions ... by virtue of their unconscious nature, provide unmediated access to the fundamental substance of the state of things.²
This 'materialist phenomenology of daily life', with its 'focus on scorned quotidian realms, artifacts and practices' and 'interpretive attentiveness to the castoffs ... of progress', was nothing less than a call for a 're-evaluation of quotidian superficiality'.³
Kracauer 'reads the mass-cultural artifact as an encrypted historic-metaphysical figure whose cultural marginality warrants its truth value ... it is the very insignificance of such quotidian artifacts that allows them to serve as reliable indices or symptoms of specific historical conditions'.⁴
Just as the phenomenological and ontological investigations of Husserl and Heidegger sought authentic meaning in the 'primordial world' of daily existence, the 'sphere of peculiar ownness',⁵ the 'everyday and undifferentiated character' of 'averageness' (Durchschnittlichkeit),⁶ the "public" we-world, or one's own closest (domestic) environment',⁷ that which is
- Earlier versions of this paper were presented at a CIRCH seminar 'Culture and the Ordinary', held at Birkbeck College, University of London, 30 May 1997, and the Æstetisk Seminar, Centre for Cultural Research, Aarhus, 11 November 1998. I would like to thank the participants of both seminars for their helpful criticisms and suggestions.
'ontically closest and well-known', and yet 'ontologically the farthest and not known at all', so cultural theorists since Benjamin have increasingly concerned themselves with the 'ownmost sphere' of daily existence, both as material culture and as phenomenal construct. Just as phenomenology sought to understand 'constituted consciousness' as 'consciousness of a certain objectivity', and the nature of objects as determined by their mode of presentation in consciousness as phenomena, by assembling the various 'profiles', or modes of phenomenal presentation, so cultural theory has increasingly sought to analyse the reciprocal constitution of cultural artefacts and constituted subjectivities. Phenomenological description, with its emphasis on recording the phenomenal constitution of objectivities in consciousness, has been a persuasive model for historians, sociologists and cultural historians wishing to investigate the experience of historical, social and cultural processes, and the meanings conferred on them by the historical, social and cultural actors who produce them, and are produced by them. But whereas the original objectives of phenomenological description were totalising and systematic (Husserl's transcendental phenomenological reduction, and Heidegger's pursuit of the 'essential structures' of Dasein), recent developments in phenomenology offer more local and regional solutions to the problems of description, which avoid some of the self-contradictions involved in the finite description of open-ended processes. The problems and difficulties of cultural phenomenological description are particularly visible in the case of the everyday.
While the everyday, as Maurice Blanchot suggests in his essay 'Everyday Speech', has played a decisive role in modernity's demand for 'an always more immediate knowledge', that immediacy itself has proven to be illusory, making it both transparent, but also 'that which it is most difficult to discover'. The everyday – the unremarkable, the habitual routines of 'ordinary life', the self-evidence of the 'daily round', with its repetition, recurrence and stability of places, faces, conversations, and scarcely registered flow of non-events and automatic actions – 'allows no hold. It escapes. It belongs to insignificance ... without truth, without reality, and without secret'. We are 'engulfed within and deprived of the everyday', or fitfully aware of 'the ambiguity of these two movements': that our ordinary world is the closest and yet the most distant from us, that it is both our 'ownmost' world and yet lost to us, familiar and yet strangely and repeatedly unfamiliar. Blanchot has the following to say about the internal contradiction of everydayness as concept: The everyday is platitude (what lags and falls behind, the residual life with which we fill our trash cans and cemeteries: scrap and refuse); but this banality is also what is most important if it brings us back to existence in its very spontaneity and as it is lived – at the moment when, lived, it escapes every speculative formulation, perhaps all coherence and regularity.15
The 'diverse figures of the True' have tended to rely on the unequivocal determinations of the remarkable, the extraordinary, the momentous, the memorable, the unfamiliar: in short, the eventful. Blanchot's essay seeks the restitution of the everyday as truth, by 'opening the everyday onto history', and yet here is the problem, for the everyday must be thought as the suspect (and the oblique) that always escapes the clear decision of the law, even when the law seeks by way of suspicion to track down every indeterminate manner of being: everyday indifference.16
Contemporary cultural critiques of everyday life: and especially those of Agnes Heller, Henri Lefebvre and Michel de Certeau, have all used this 'obliquity' of the everyday, its resistance to law, surveillance and control, as a resource for 'radical transformation' of the quotidian, producing the everyday as 'a category, a utopia and an Idea',17 rather than as 'average' existence.
The idea and category of the everyday has, as Blanchot and Lefebvre have noted, demanded investigations of an interdisciplinary nature. The 'various directions by which the study of the everyday might orient itself', Blanchot says, shift according to its mercurial aspect, 'bearing now on sociology, now upon ontology, at another moment upon psychoanalysis, politics, linguistics, or literature'. But this same mercurial instability, the 'inexhaustible, irrecusable, constantly unfinished' nature of everyday reality means that it 'always escapes forms and structures'. It is inaccessible to 'panoramic vision'; we cannot 'introduce it into a whole or "review" it',18 and its very amorphous, shifting and protean nature means that it resists thematisation or exhaustive description.
In his little book of anthropological excursions, L'Infra-ordinaire, Georges Perec sets out to rescue or recover the everyday from its thematic oblivion. 'It seems to me', he begins, 'that we're always speaking about the event, the strange, the extra-ordinary ... trains don't come into existence until they're derailed, and the more passengers that die, the more they exist; aeroplanes don't exist unless they're hijacked.'19 Our obsession with the momentous and the unexpected, Perec argues, 'our hurry to assess the historical, the significant, the revealing ... the essential', omits the truly essential and 'scandalous' facts of our day-to-day existence:
What really happens, what we actually live through, the rest, all of it, where is it? That which occurs each day, and which returns each day: the banal, the quotidian, the evident, the common, the ordinary, the infra-ordinary, the background noise, the habitual, how do we render an account of that? how do we interrogate it? how do we describe it?
The problem is, as Perec observes, that we are not accustomed to such interrogations, precisely because we are habituated:
We do not interrogate it, it does not interrogate us, it doesn’t seem to be a problem, we live through it without thinking about it, as if it conveyed neither question nor response, as if it was not the carrier of information. Conditioning is the same as anaesthesia. We sleep through our lives in a dreamless slumber. But where is it, our life? Where are our bodies? Where is our space?
‘Perhaps it’s a question’, Perec says, ‘of founding our own anthropology: an anthropology which would speak about us, which will help us find in ourselves that which we have always stolen from others. Not the exotic, but the endotic.’[22] His meticulous elliptical investigations into the ‘background noise’ of our existence problematise the ordinary, transforming the overlooked into a series of questions:
We walk, we open doors, we go downstairs, we sit at the table to eat, we lie on a bed to sleep. But how? where? when? why? Describe your street. Describe it to someone else. Compare [your descriptions]. Make an inventory of your pockets, of your bag. Question the provenance, the use and the evolution of each of the objects which you take out.[23]
There is a problem, however, with such projects: a problem of description.
‘How can we speak of these “common things”’, Perec asks, ‘how can we give them a meaning, a language: how can we speak, finally, of that which is, of that which we are?’[24] For Perec the solution was to be found in ‘making inventories’ (faire les inventaires), although the narrativisation of the banal and the trivial risks becoming banal in itself. Perec accepts that such a project will be ‘fragmentary, scarcely indicative of a method’, but it concerns him that they might seem ‘trivial and futile’, because ‘it is precisely this which makes them as essential (if not more essential) than all the other [narratives] through which we have vainly attempted to capture our truth’.[25]
How to interrogate the structures of our everyday lives, how to describe the conditions of our daily existence? That has been the perennial problem since Husserl’s phenomenology recalled philosophy to the ‘lifeworld’, the preconceptual world of intuitive lived experience in which ‘all predicating, theorizing activity … remains out of play’, a world ‘experienced prior to all talking about, thinking over, founding, [and] theorizing’[26], a ‘world which precedes all sciences and their theoretical intentions … a world of pre-scientific intuition’. But it is precisely the non-theoretical, and unconceptualised nature of the ownmost environment which makes its entry into philosophical discourse so problematic, for it enters philosophical discourse precisely as that which is non-philosophy.
Heidegger: thematising the unthematisable
Heidegger, for example, saw everyday Dasein as that which ‘shows itself unthematically’ but which can nonetheless ‘be brought thematically to show itself’,
In characterising everydayness in this way, Heidegger turns aside from everyday consciousness into a negotiation or critique of that consciousness. His phenomenology is in fact precisely opposed to those qualities which are constitutive of the quotidian: the aimless, the haphazard, the arbitrary.
Thus, while Heidegger’s thematisation of the everyday may provide useful starting points for investigations of the everyday, in that it seeks to ‘express what philosophy otherwise does not find worth speaking about’, we should be wary of its characterisation of everyday being as ‘a mode of groundless floating’, or ‘uncanniness’ which is ‘uprooted’ and ‘unattached’. Heidegger attempts to establish an ‘authentic existence’ which is ‘not something which floats above falling everydayness … it is only a modified way in which such everydayness is seized upon’, but this attempt is primarily a desire to ground the non-philosophical intransigence of the everyday, to de-estrange its floating character. While Heidegger focuses on what he considers to be the necessary attributes of the everyday such as ‘inconspicuousness’, ‘unobtrusiveness’ and ‘non-obstinacy’, he declares that phenomenology is ‘opposed to all free-floating constructions and accidental findings’. Phenomenology, he argued, is a way of ‘grasping and explicating phenomena in a way which is original and intuitive’, which is ‘directly opposed to the naiveté of a haphazard, “immediate” and unreflective “beholding”. Philosophers, as Nietzsche observed in his Will to Power, have often been ‘prejudiced against appearance, change, pain, death, the corporeal, the senses, fate and bondage, the aimless’, and it is these very prejudices which have impeded investigations of the ‘haphazard’, ‘free-floating’ and ‘accidental’ character of the everyday, which because of its ephemeral and unstable nature has constantly been consigned to non-philosophy, as Hegel, for example, dismissed the phenomenal totality as ‘a non-being’ which conceals the ‘true essence’ or ‘true background of Things’. The question of the philosophical reappropriation of the non-philosophical as a domain, however, does not concern us here. The objective of these reflections is not to consider ontological problems, but rather to consider the possibilities for quotidian research in cultural studies. In their own ways, both Theodor Adorno and Henri Lefebvre have attempted to address the problem of how to allow the non-philosophical to enter cultural theoretical discourse without denaturing its non-philosophical character, and both of them have had to negotiate difficulties involving the representation of the non-philosophical.
Adorno and the ‘non-object’
In his Negative Dialectics Adorno argues for a ‘changed philosophy’, which would achieve ‘a turn towards nonidentity’, a philosophy which would avoid the ‘concept fetishism’ of totalising systematic philosophies – overcoming the metaphysical ‘autarky of the concept’ by ‘seek[ing] to immerse ourselves in the things that are heterogeneous to [philosophy] …
without placing those things in prefabricated categories ...adher[ing] ... as closely to the heterogeneous as the programs of phenomenology and of Simmel tried in vain to do'. Although on one level Adorno believed that the idea that one could 'use concepts to unseal the nonconceptual with concepts, without making it their equal' was a profound philosophical naivety, he also maintained that concepts are not unavoidably and necessarily involved in 'idealistic decision'. He argues (in a passage reminiscent of Schopenhauer) that all concepts ultimately 'refer to nonconceptualities' and that 'every definition of concepts requires nonconceptual deictic elements'. The way is thus open to 'give [conceptuality] a turn towards nonidentity', by making it engage with the heterogeneous data of material reality. Adorno, however, realised that this new philosophical turn required that philosophers must necessarily address themselves to what had previously been excluded from philosophy as non-philosophy:
The matters of true philosophical interest at this point of history are those in which Hegel, agreeing with tradition, expressed his disinterest. They are nonconceptuality, individuality, and particularity – things which ever since Plato used to be dismissed as transitory and insignificant.
The task of the modern philosopher was seen as a search for new objects of philosophical attention, objects which would allow philosophy to disentangle itself from the snares of pre-formed metaphysical categories. 'We must be so wary of the beaten tracks of philosophical reflection', Adorno argued, 'that our emphatic interest will seek refuge in ephemeral objects not yet overdetermined by intentions'. This 'changed philosophy' would seek to ground itself (like Husserl's phenomenological project) in experience itself, 'scorning solidification in a body of innumerable theorems', finding its 'substance' in 'the diversity of objects it seeks', dealing with 'nothing but full, unreduced experience in the medium of conceptual reflection'. Adorno was not unaware of the difficulties of this project. Both Husserl and Bergson, he felt, had 'innervated this idea [of dealing with the non-conceptual]' but had 'withdrawn from it to traditional metaphysics'.
Adorno argued that there was 'no origin save in ephemeral life', but what would qualify as an 'ephemeral object' in Adorno's terms? What field of investigation would be 'transitory and insignificant' enough to have escaped the lures of the philosophical tradition? The everyday, domain of all non-conceptualities, ephemeral, arbitrary and aimless, self-concealing in its unquestioned familiarity, surely qualifies as a privileged 'ephemeral object' of non-conceptual investigations, perhaps the most ephemeral of all objects? Such an investigation would, as Adorno requires, derive its
'substance' from 'the diversity of objects it seeks', it would disperse itself into the material diversity of the everyday environment, following the projections of consciousness out into the quotidian realm of particularities, and tracing the insinuation of objects into the repetitive scenes of daily consciousness. What Adorno envisages here is a kind of 'negative phenomenology', which retains transcendental phenomenology's concern with the reciprocal constitution of consciousness and objectivity, without 'revert[ing] irresistibly to a system, at the price of formalization'. The 'restless ad infinitum' of concrete existence, Adorno says, 'explodes the self-contained system'.
By allowing everyday objects to invade consciousness rather than reducing them to preconceived formal concepts or categories, Adorno believed that it was possible to derive concepts from the objects themselves: 'If thought really yielded to the object,' he said, 'if its attention were on the object, not on its category, the very objects would start talking under the lingering eye'. This idealised conception of the cultural theoretical gaze, the 'interpretive eye which sees more in a phenomenon than it is – and solely because of what it is', is described by Adorno in quasi-religious terms, as a 'meditative contraction'. These contractions would not add up to a system, but would form discrete reflections, a 'philosophy in fragment form', which, despite its partial nature, would allow 'conceptions, in the particular, of the totality that is inconceivable as such'. The statements of this philosophy would be truthful to concrete experience without making transcendental claims:
The call for binding statements without a system is a call for thought models ... A model covers the specific, and more than the specific, without letting it evaporate in its more general super-concept.
These thought models would take the 'details' which systematic philosophy subordinated to its conceptual machinery, and allow them to enter philosophical discourse 'without advance assurance' to the concept. 'Not until then', Adorno argued,
would the steadily misused word of 'truth as concreteness' come into its own. It compels our thinking to abide with minutiae. We are not to philosophize about concrete things; we are to philosophize, rather, out of these things.
But whilst he endorsed philosophising 'out of [everyday] things', Adorno foresaw the risk which Heidegger was unwilling to countenance: 'The open thought has no protection against the risk of decline into randomness,' Adorno warned, 'nothing assures it of a saturation with the matter that will
suffice to surmount that risk. But, like Perec, Adorno saw the danger of triviality as the price to be paid for a commitment to 'open thought'.
As a Marxist, of course, Adorno did not plan to interrogate things in a merely random way. He sought the 'linguistic expression of ... the history congealed in things'. The purpose of meditation on concrete things was to uncover the 'sedimented history' within them, 'deciphering the constellation which, having come to be, it bears within it'. The history 'locked in the object' would be released by being 'mindful of the historic positional value of the object in its relation to other objects'. Once the object had been so positioned one would understand 'the process stored in the object' and it would become legible as 'a text of ... [its own] becoming' revealing the ideological 'untruth of concepts', but also 'its immediacy in being'. What Adorno seems to be envisioning here is something akin to Benjamin's reading of industrial products, such as nineteenth-century furniture, or wrought ironware, as 'dialectical images', which were 'texts of becoming' which concealed within them the 'congealed history' of proletarian labour.
Unlike Hegelian dialectic which seeks 'identity in the difference between each object and its concept' (i.e. a constant restless movement towards the identity of concept and object), Adorno's dialectic remains 'suspicious of all identity'. For Adorno, 'ideas live in the cavities between what things claim to be and what they are', and negative dialectics 'amounts to thinking so that the thought form will no longer turn its objects into immutable ones, into objects that remain the same'. The mutable nature of the object leaves its 'marks' in consciousness, and must be made to 'speak' through its presentation within consciousness:
Philosophy ... must, from without, imbue its objects with whatever moves them within it. What is waiting in the objects themselves needs such intervention to come to speak ... every theory that is brought to bear on the phenomena should come to rest in the phenomena.
For Adorno, as for Husserl, subject and object are neither a duality, nor a unity, but constitute each other dialectically. Despite the preponderance of the object, Adorno says, 'the thingness of the world is also phenomenal', but 'it is by passing to the object's preponderance that dialectics is rendered materialistic'. For Adorno, then, the thingness of the everyday constitutes consciousness, but consciousness also phenomenalises the things of the everyday, constituting them as reality. The thing and consciousness enter into a vertiginous (because endless) dialectic.
Adorno's theoretical vision, then, would suggest the possibility of intense 'meditative contractions' centred on the inconspicuous environment, which
are drawn from the things themselves, and their phenomenal entrance into consciousness. These meditations would be strictly provisional ‘thought models’ abandoning objects neither to systemic categorisation, nor to irrationalism, but charting instead the historical becoming of their concrete existence. But this project for a materialist phenomenology raises the problem of how these reflections are expressed. Adorno realised that the primary obstacle to a non-conceptual philosophy of particulars was a problem of representation. ‘[N]o philosophy’, he argued,
not even extreme empiricism, can drag in the facta bruta and present them like cases in anatomy or experiments in physics: no philosophy can paste the particulars into the text.
Adorno entertains, but rejects, the possibility of an aesthetic solution to conceptualising the heterogeneous in discourse:
A philosophy that tried to imitate art, that would turn itself into a work of art, would be expunging itself. It would be postulating the demand for identity, claiming to exhaust its object by endowing its procedure with a supremacy to which the heterogeneous bows a priori.
Although Adorno explicitly rejects aesthetic presentation as a modality of non-conceptual investigation (as can be seen from his criticisms of Benjamin’s Passagenwerk), it is worth considering whether there can be a non-systematic anthropology of the everyday which would answer in many respects to the characteristics of the artistic project, without engaging with the aesthetic as a set of privilegeging oppositions (high over low, valuable over valueless, durable over transient). Quotidian researches of the kinds undertaken by Walter Benjamin, Georges Perec, or Victor Burgin’s recent work on cities, for example, might provide a model for such investigations, and some recent artistic projects, such as Tom Phillips’s 20 Sites: n years (a long-term photographic record of the artist’s local environment in the Camberwell area of London)
Lefebvre’s critique of the quotidian
Like Adorno, Henri Lefebvre, in his La Vie quotidienne dans le monde moderne published in 1968, asked whether it was possible to ‘use philosophy as a frame of reference for the study of what it terms non-philosophical’, and his reflections lead him to similar questions regarding the representability of the concrete and the quotidian. Rejecting the idea of philosophy which claims to be ‘total abstraction’, Lefebvre argued that ‘Philosophy is self-contradictory and self-destructive when it claims its independence from the non-philosophical’. In his project (begun in 1946 and continued in 1962 and 1968), Lefebvre sought to make everyday life an object of philosophical reflection. He was not, however, unaware of the problematic nature of this undertaking, given the traditional devaluation of the quotidian in the philosophical attitude which privileges ‘Being, Depth and Substance’ and demotes ‘events, appearances and manifestations’. Everyday life is ‘non-philosophical in relation to philosophy’ and although it ‘represents reality in relation to ideality’, the ‘philosophical life’ (‘Secluded, abstract and detached’) is ‘considered superior to everyday life’. In this attitude philosophy is seen as ‘truth without reality’, and the everyday as ‘reality without truth’. Rejecting the idea that the everyday is ‘a collection of trivia not worthy of being associated with the “serious” preoccupations of modern philosophy such as Nature, Divinity, Humanity’, Lefebvre responds to the following rhetorical question:
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?
by arguing that ‘either philosophy is pointless or it is the starting point from which to undertake the transformation of non-philosophical reality, with all its triviality and its triteness’. Indeed, he goes so far as to suggest that ‘The Quotidian is a philosophical concept that cannot be understood outside philosophy’:
it designates for and by philosophy the non-philosophical and is unthinkable in another context; it is a concept that neither belongs to nor reflects everyday life, but rather expresses its possible transfiguration in philosophical terms … it is not the product of pure philosophy but comes of philosophical thought directed towards the non-philosophical, and its major achievement is in this self-surpassing.
However, this ‘self-surpassing’ of philosophy in its turn towards the non-philosophical, as Adorno emphasised, involves philosophical discourse
in a representational problem if its aim is to avoid the pre-categorisation of 'speculative systematisations'. The solution is then to attempt a philosophical inventory and analysis of everyday life that will expose its ambiguities, its baseness and exuberance, its poverty and fruitfulness and by these unorthodox means release the creative energies that are an integral part of it.94
Like Adorno, Lefebvre believed that the everyday 'can be reduced neither to philosophical subjective definitions nor to objective representations of classified objects such as clothing, nourishment, furnishings, etc. because it is more and other than these', it is, that is to say, the 'dialectical interaction' between objects and consciousness, which laid the foundations of utopian change, providing a 'starting point for the realization of the possible'.95 The ultimate objective of Lefebvre's quotidian researches is to 'refute the distinctions between philosophical and non-philosophical, superior and inferior, spiritual and material, theoretical and practical' and ultimately to effect a 'radical transformation of everyday life'.96 Lefebvre's is an ideological critique, and he believed that 'a critical analysis of everyday life will discover ideologies and the understanding of everyday life must include an ideological analysis'.97 For Lefebvre the structures of everyday life itself are determined by the laws of capital, it is 'made of recurrences: gestures of labour and leisure, mechanical movements both human and properly machinic ... cyclical repetitions'.98 Like Blanchot, he stresses the interdisciplinary nature of the everyday as a domain of investigation; it is 'a meeting place for specialized sciences and something more besides'.99 Like Perec, he feared that the contradictory, habituated and trivial character of the quotidian would make it impossible to question, describe or represent:
The quotidian is what is humble and solid, what is taken for granted and that of which all the parts follow each other in such a regular, unvarying succession that those concerned have no call to question their sequence; thus it is undated and (apparently) insignificant; though it occupies and preoccupies it is practically untellable, and it is the ethics underlying routine and the aesthetics of familiar settings.100
Again like Perec, Lefebvre saw 'philosophical inventory' as the primary means for bringing the protean forms of the everyday into discourse, but whereas Perec was resigned to the fragmentary and potentially trivial nature of his research, and playfully emphasises the arbitrariness and unfinished, provisional nature of his narratives, Lefebvre (like Agnes Heller)101 sought the 'axiomatisation' (axiomatisation) of the structures of everydayness, which (despite Lefebvre's explicit rejection of a 'closed system') exposes him to the dangers of that systematic formalism which
Adorno expressly warned against, descending finally into the virtual logical absurdity of a 'theory of moments' (theorie des moments). But if systematic description (the elaboration of categories and axioms, 'general schemes' and 'common properties') exhausts itself in the 'ad infinitum' of the everyday, what recourse is there for the cultural theorist? How can the cultural theorist negotiate the 'practically untellable' nature of the everyday with its 'peculiar horizon of open unfamiliarity?' How can we make the everyday 'tellable', without reducing it to a system?
De Certeau and the politicisation of the everyday
In his Practice of Everyday Life Michel de Certeau characterised the everyday (like Lefebvre and Blanchot) as that which is external to, and eludes, the discourses and techniques of power, remaining perpetually 'on the margins or in the interstices of scientific or cultural orthopraxis'. Whereas the social scientist 'exorcises' the 'aleatory and microscopic movements' of social processes in the name of totalisation (what de Certeau identifies as the 'ambition to dominate and control' the object of knowledge), de Certeau's critique aims at recovering the 'stubborn guileful everyday practices' through the 'tactics' or 'ruses' of subversive use. Using the linguistic theory of pragmatics as a model, de Certeau attempts to devise a 'rhetoric' (rather than a system) of these everyday tactics, by examining the 'micro-structures' of everyday life: whether it be the use of urban space, cooking, or the subversive use of labour (la perruque). While 'scientific writing' ('the constitution of a proper place') 'ceaselessly reduces time ... to the normality of an observable and readable system', de Certeau's rhetorical analysis seeks to reveal the resistance of the everyday in the fleeting figures and tropes of everyday practice. In this project, the role of description or narration is of central importance: 'A theory of practices', de Certeau says, is 'indissociable' from 'a theory of narration'. This narrativity, which cannot be reduced to the realism of 'classical' description, but relies on the tactical, metic use of the 'fictional space' of 'narrated history', that is the 'art of making "coups" with the fictions of stories'. De Certeau's project returns to the 'theoretical value of the novel', which he sees as a 'zoo of everyday practices', a repository of the 'micro-stories' of the quotidian, 'populated by everyday virtuosities that science doesn't know what to do with', recording the 'poetic or tragic murmurings of the everyday'. Just as Norman Bryson has used still-life paintings to recover what is 'overlooked' in the everyday environment, so de Certeau sees the narratives of the novel and 'ethnological descriptions' as 'schemas for action'. In a way which parallels recent trends in history towards
‘immersing itself in the quotidian, the ordinary, the “little things”’,
de Certeau’s critique seeks to recover and produce narratives of everyday realities which have been silenced by what Bryson calls ‘the Sleep of Culture’.
Blanchot’s ‘Everyday Speech’: destructive or productive potential?
In his suggestive essay ‘Everyday Speech’, Maurice Blanchot uses the everyday as an occasion to reflect on metaphysics (or rather antimetaphysics). The everyday, for Blanchot, ‘puts in question the notion of subject’.
Nothing happens. This is the everyday. But what is the meaning of this stationary movement? At what level is this ‘nothing happens’ situated? For whom does ‘nothing happen’ if, for me, something is necessarily always happening? In other words, what corresponds to the ‘Who?’ of the everyday?
For Blanchot, the everyday is ‘without a subject’, but neither is it objective (it ‘does not belong to the objective realm’). It is not (as Heidegger had suggested in his analysis of the everyday as that which is ‘ready-at-hand’) a ‘series of technical acts’, but rather an ‘indefinite presence’, a ‘movement’ in which we are perpetually ‘in relation with the indeterminate set of human possibilities’.
designates … a region or a level of speech where the determinations true and false, like the oppositions of yes and no, do not apply – the everyday being always before what affirms it and yet incessantly reconstituting itself beyond all that negates it.
It is a region (or form of speech), that is to say, which functions in the same way as Blanchot’s notions of the ‘disaster’ (le désastre) and the ‘neutral’ (le neutre) in The Writing of the Disaster,
to it'.126 Blanchot uses the 'inexhaustible ... constantly unfinished' nature of everydayness as a principle of 'radical nihilism'.127 The idea of creation is inadmissible' in Blanchot's everyday, which annuls the possibility of productivity and creativity in our daily lives: 'everyday existence never had to be created', says Blanchot, 'but is always already present'. Blanchot's project is to 'recapture the secret destructive capacity' within everydayness, which 'impugns all values and the very idea of value', 'ruining always anew the unjustifiable difference between authenticity and inauthenticity'. The everyday is thus said to 'hold the principle of its own critique'.128 But isn't everyday existence being perpetually created, or recreated? Would it not be possible (as Lefebvre and de Certeau have tried in their different ways) to seek the secret productive capacity of the everyday – which, as Blanchot says, finds us perpetually 'in relation with the indeterminate' set of human possibilities? Blanchot sees the 'infinity' or perpetual non-identity of everydayness (whose 'vicissitudes ... escapes all dialectical recovery')129 as a negative (or destructive) potential. He therefore does not seek to represent the everyday, but to represent its radical unrepresentability (a characteristic movement in Blanchot's discourse); but recent phenomenological theorists have been attempting to rehabilitate the principle of phenomenological description in directions which suggest that it may be possible to allow the everyday into discourse without doing violence to its open unfamiliarity.
Conclusions: the 'event' and negative phenomenological description
In his recent book L'Impossibilité de la phénoménologie, Eric Alliez, drawing sustenance from Alain Badiou and Gilles Deleuze's work on the phenomenology of the concept, has argued for what he calls a 'negative phenomenology' (une phénoménologie négative), which resists both the transcendental formalism of Husserlian phenomenology and the dangers of postwar 'phenomenological positivism'.130 Negative phenomenology, I would argue, suggests a possible convergence of aesthetic presentation and phenomenological description, which could form the basis for a cultural phenomenological approach to the everyday. Taking his title from Gérard Lebrun's attack on Foucault as the 'last phenomenologue' (l'ultime phénoménologie), in which he states that 'the greatest lesson of phenomenology will be the impossibility of phenomenology',131 Alliez rehearses a number of important postwar critiques of the phenomenological project, before gesturing at more recent attempts to accommodate the descriptive principle of phenomenology with the post-Heideggerean critique of the concept. The two principal areas of contestation are phenomenology's
claims to transcendental knowledge, and what Dominique Janicaud has called the 'theological turn' (le tournant théologique) in postwar phenomenology. Alliez cites with approval Maurice Merleau-Ponty and Marc Richir's attacks on Husserl's transcendental reduction of the eidetic flow as an 'impossibility' or a 'transcendental illusion', and sees the problem of 'evidence' as the central problem of phenomenology in so far as it is an a priori theory of the object in general, in that there is appeal to a 'special' or 'originary' transcendence, which is not constituted because it constitutes, or 'reconstitutes' the Lebenswelt in the 'absolute being of the ego'. It is precisely this 'auto-donation of absolute being' and the assumption of the 'profound unity of realism and idealism' which the critiques of phenomenology since Derrida's Speech and Phenomena have brought into radical question as part of a general critique of concept formation. The 'ideal-materialism' of phenomenology is also criticised as 'secretly theological' (secrêtement théologique'), unconsciously possessed by a "religious" non-thought (un impensé 'religieux'). In place of the transcendental guarantees and absolutist aspirations of Husserlian phenomenology, Alliez looks to the radical revisioning of philosophical discourse undertaken by Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari in their Qu'est-ce que c'est la philosophie? and Alain Badiou in L'Étre et l'événement, which attempts to rethink philosophy as a non-veridical discourse. When thought accedes to the infinite movement which frees it from the recognition of truth as its supposed paradigm', Deleuze and Guattari argue, 'it gains an immanent power of creation and heterogenesis which... makes appeal to a creation of concepts which give consistence to the virtual without actualising it'.
This idea of 'freeing' philosophical knowledge from the demand for absolute truth, and elaborating concepts which are consistent with their objects, without any pretence to adequation or identity between concept and object recalls Adorno's negative dialectics with its call for 'binding statements without a system', in which concrete particularities are no longer enslaved by 'super concepts'. This new idea of the 'concept' posits a new relationship between consciousness and the manifold or multiplicity of the object-world. Alliez discusses two views of multiplicity, which might be called 'soft' and 'hard' multiplicity. 'Soft multiplicity' sees multiplicity as 'necessarily implying a teleological unity which orders it', and sees that order as a 'guarantee' of multiplicity's ultimate rationality. This is essentially Husserl's view of the 'manifold' as implicitly ordered and 'coidealised'. 'Hard multiplicity' on the other hand, typified by Badiou's 'ontological thesis of the "event-fold"' sees multiplicity as heterogenetic, with no implicit unity or ultimate order. For Badiou, the 'consistency' of multiplicities occurs at the moment when philosophical procedures are
applied to the local ‘sites’ of multiplicity, to construct a ‘relational consistency’ between the given phenomena, a consistency which lays no claim to absolute verity. Philosophy, Badiou argues, ‘does not establish any truth, but it disposes a place of truths’, truths which are ‘possible’ or ‘compossible’ (compossible) rather than absolutely true. Philosophy is not a totalisable system but a contingent ‘science of possible universes’, which deals with the ‘thinkable conjunction of phenomenal truths’.
This new understanding of the relationship between concept and objectivities brings in its wake a new understanding of phenomenological description. Deleuze and Guattari, in attempting to develop a ‘completely new relationship between thoughts and things’, have argued the need for ‘morphological concepts which are essentially inexact’; these thought-entities would posit a ‘vague identity’ (une vague identité) between things and their appearance in consciousness: ‘Not a concept or a thing, but an event’. The Deleuzo-Guattarian ‘event’ is closely related to Badiou’s development of this concept in L’Ètre et l’événement, in which he sees ‘truth’ as ‘a unified conceptual space where the naming of events takes place’ (un espace conceptuel unifié où prenent place les nominations d’événements). The event itself is simply a ‘naming decision’ which ‘intervenes in the situation’ of a multiplicity. As naming itself is what intervenes in a situation to constitute an ‘event’, the role of description is vital, and (like Deleuze and Guattari ‘inexact morphological concepts’ or ‘events’) Badiou insists that ‘the concept must become the description of the figures of the multiple as a living tissue’, a coherent and consistent set of thinkable relations which are ‘descriptive and not really axiomatic’.
Alliez’s negative phenomenology is conceived as ‘a material ontology running parallel with (doubler) a conceptual phenomenology (or phenomenology of the concept)’, that is to say, a phenomenology which seeks to understand the object together with the process of its conceptualisation. Alliez’s belief that one can ‘accomplish the genesis of thought at the same time as one accomplishes the genesis of the object’, whilst setting aside any transcendental ambitions, recalls Adorno’s fragmentary materialist phenomenology which calls forth the ‘sedimented history’ or ‘becoming’ of its objects, by retracing their genesis, and suggests a fruitful approach to the transitory and multiple constellations of the everyday as both environment and event.
These new phenomenological concerns, the critique of concepts as arbitrary ‘events’ or ‘naming decisions’, the abandonment of adequation in favour of multiplicity and non-identity, the pursuit of the ‘vague’ consistencies between objectivities and subjectivities, all seem to draw the phenomenological description closer in spirit to ‘aesthetic’ or ‘literary’ narratives (de Certeau’s ‘fictional spaces’) which function by creating
multiple possibilities by means of ‘interventions’ which seek to designate events without overdetermining their significance, striving for verisimilar rather than veridical effects. In order to arrive at concepts which are ‘the description of the figures of the multiple as a living tissue’ negative phenomenological description would need to be: local or regional (rather than global), incomplete (rather than totalising), provisional (rather than absolute), rhetorical and gestural rather than scientific and definitive. This new mode of description has its parallels in the literary investigations of Georges Perec and Julio Cortazar, who commit themselves to an understanding of the everyday world through fragmentary, provisional modes of understanding, which describe (without pretence of exhaustion) the objectivities of the world as they enter consciousness, and trace the insinuations of thought into the fabric of things. Georges Perec’s ‘notes on a work in progress’, entitled Places (Les Lieux), for example, chose twelve locations in Paris (roads, squares, cafés, houses, an alleyway) and each month made a description of two places. One of these would be made at the location itself, and was ‘as neutral as possible’ (la plus neutre possible), the other would be made at a distance from the location, relying on his memory of the place, and would include any memories which were triggered by his memory of the location. He called these ‘memory places’ (lieux souvenirs). Perec’s ‘findings’ were also accompanied by photographic records, taken by an assistant, to be presented alongside the descriptions, recording the fluid interchanges between everyday place and consciousness. This work was a deliberately unfinished investigation (recalling Tom Phillips’s photographic record of Camberwell), which he planned to continue according to a preordained algorithmic variation of places.
Cortazar, like Perec, committed himself to recording the vagrant realities of the quotidian: ‘to accept without comment the meteor shower that came through the windows of streets, books, conversations and convert them into the passages, fragments … that formed around an ill-defined story of searches and missed encounters’. This commitment to the haphazard and the arbitrary is underpinned by a passionate belief in the value of limited phenomenological description:
[a] sense of virtual porosity, of moving forward only by opening interstitial inroads with no pretense of covering the whole surface of the phenomenological sponge.
Cortazar’s aim ‘to resist the sly deformation that the codified quotidian imposes on the consciousness with the active participation of reasoning intelligence … annihilating the scandalous difference between the exceptional and the ordinary’, while it seems primarily concerned with an
aesthetic recovery of the ‘non-aesthetic’ (finding the extraordinary within the ordinary) is at the same time an insistence on the non-identity and multiplicity of the everyday as that which escapes codification.
While he was wary of its tendency to promote ‘false mythological concreteness’, Siegfried Kracauer was committed (at least in his essays of the 1920s), to the role of aesthetic presentation in cultural research, arguing that ‘an aesthetic presentation is all the more real the less it dispenses with the reality outside the aesthetic sphere’. This was less about ‘realism’ (or its obverse) than about allowing the concrete particularities of our proximate environment (the ‘significant components of reality [which have] become invisible in our world]) to emerge into discourse without evaporating into aesthetic idealities. Writing as he was before the totalising aspirations of phenomenology had come into question, Kracauer argued (in his critical account of Georg Simmel’s sociological method) for a materialist phenomenology which would draw ‘numerous structural lines from the ideational center to the visible surface’ of everyday reality, finding ‘common meanings’ in the ‘multiplicity of events’ so as to ‘radiate out into the totality’. Although he criticised Husserlian phenomenology for attempting to ‘capture the material manifold’ with ‘wide-meshed general concepts’, Kracauer argued for the imposition of an ‘overarching unity’ on ‘multifariousness’ in the name of an ‘existential plenitude’. Although Kracauer’s analyses were underpinned by an unwavering belief in the ‘law-governed coherence of phenomena’, his aesthetic descriptions of the overlooked and the everyday, which commit themselves to ‘wandering along the exterior of … phenomena’ and ‘snuggl[ing] much closer to … objects’, resonate with the aspirations shared by many contemporary artists, writers and theorists who seek to investigate ‘the phenomenological sponge’ without recourse to totalising expositions. In his essay on ‘Tragic Thought’, in The Infinite Conversation, Blanchot speculated on the value of description in philosophical presentation:
Might not … description be the sole mode of presentation that does not disturb the strange disenchantment of appearances and disappearances in which we exist? a presentation that would not render impurity pure, but would give us the infinite unreality of our life for what it is: unreal and yet for all this very real?
If, as Rob Chapman recently said, ‘Culture is what goes on when we’re looking elsewhere … the residue that’s left when we’re finished scraping off everything we deemed to be significant’, then a cultural phenomenology might usefully concern itself with the overlooked residues of everyday life, thematising the inconspicuous as an object of attention. What a cultural
phenomenology might be (or become) is an investigation of what is not intended (or attended to) in culture: to make the givenness and obviousness of culture conspicuous by aesthetic presentations of the 'co-haunting' of the concrete and consciousness. The everyday, in its infinite surplus and renewal, is an exemplary type of Levinas's infinite (l'infini), 'that which always exceeds thought', (ce qui toujours déborde la pensée), the 'surplus of being over the thought which pretends to contain it' (le surplus d'être sur la pensée qui prétend le contenir); there will always be a tomorrow, with its ebb and flow of scarcely noticed occurrences. But if we cannot exhaust the everyday, we can at least record and rehearse its multiple figures, creating 'evenemental narratives' which seek to preserve its endlessly disseminated multiplicity, creating a series of contingent and local consistencies, which can help us to reflect on its continuous unfolding.
The contemporary refiguring of aesthetics as the 'extra-aesthetic', the 'found object', the 'site', the 'milieu-as-object', photography's long love affair with the casual, the serendipitous, the momentary. All these suggest a turn towards the aesthetic recording of the 'factual' as non-identical and unique – as 'events'. This brings us back to the radical problem: if (by definition) the correlate of the everyday is the non-event – that which falls outside of (and is excluded by) philosophical reflection as inattention, boredom, or automatism – then how can we narrate the everyday? To discourse on the arbitrary need not necessarily be an arbitrary or aimless discourse, but it presents us with problems of description: how can we represent the banal and the insignificant without succumbing to banality or insignificance (and thus returning it to the realm of inattention and boredom)? Perhaps Cortazar was right: only by 'annihilating the scandalous difference between the exceptional and the ordinary', and recognising the singularity of everyday phenomena as a unique point of access to our unrecorded history and culture, can we open ourselves to the 'event' as productive possibility and not as negation.
Notes
- Stanley Cavell, In Quest of the Ordinary: Lines of Skepticism and Romanticism (Chicago and London: Chicago University Press, 1988), ch. 6, 'The Uncanniness of the Ordinary', 171.
- Siegfried Kracauer, Das Ornament der Masse: Essays (Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp, 1963), trans. Thomas Y. Levin, The Mass Ornament: Weimar Essays (Cambridge MA: Harvard University Press, 1995), 75.
- Kracauer, The Mass Ornament, 20, 28.
- Kracauer, The Mass Ornament, 15.
28 Critical Quarterly, vol. 42, no. 1
5 Edmund Husserl, Cartesianische Meditationen, trans. Dorion Cairns, Cartesian Meditations: An Introduction to Phenomenology (The Hague: Martinus Nijhoff, 1960), sec. 44, pp. 92-9.
6 Martin Heidegger, Sein und Zeit, trans. John McQuarrie and Edward Robinson, Being and Time (Oxford: Blackwell, 1962; repr. 1990), 69.
7 Heidegger, Being and Time, 93.
8 Heidegger, Being and Time, 69.
9 Edmund Husserl, Einleitung in die Logik und Erkenntnistheorie Vorlesungen 1906/7, Husserliana, Edmund Husserl: Gesammelte Werke, vol. 24 (The Hague: Martinus Nijhoff, 1984), 231-2.
10 Maurice Blanchot, L'Entretien infini, trans. Susan Hanson, The Infinite Conversation (Minneapolis and London: University of Minnesota Press, 1993), 240. Cf. Theodor W. Adorno, Negative Dialektik, trans. E. B. Ashton, Negative Dialectics (London: Routledge, 1973; repr. 1996), 53: 'Ever since the foundation of knowledge came to be sought in supposedly immediate subjective data, men have been enthralled by the idol of a pure present. They would endeavour to strip thought of its historic dimension. The fictitious, one-dimensional Now became the cognitive ground of all inner meaning.' See also Henri Lefebvre, La Vie quotidienne dans le monde moderne, trans. Sacha Rabinovitch Everyday Life in the Modern World (London: Allen Lane, 1971), 25: 'The quotidian and the modern mark and mask, legitimate and counterbalance each other.'
11 Blanchot, Infinite Conversation, 238.
12 Blanchot, Infinite Conversation, 239-40.
13 Blanchot, Infinite Conversation, 239.
14 Cf. Cavell, In Quest of the Ordinary, 171: 'The everyday is what we cannot aspire to, since it appears to us as lost to us.'
15 Blanchot, Infinite Conversation, 239.
16 Blanchot, Infinite Conversation, 238-9.
17 Blanchot, Infinite Conversation, 239.
18 Blanchot, Infinite Conversation, 239-40.
19 Georges Perec, L'Infra-ordinaire (Paris: Editions du Seuil, 1989), 'Approches de quoi', 9: 'Ce qui nous parle, me semble-t-il, c'est toujours l'événement, l'insolite, l'exTRA-ordinaire ... Les trains ne se mettent à exister que lorsqu'ils dérillent, et plus il y a de voyageurs morts, plus les trains existent; les avions n'accident à l'existence que lorsqu'ils sont détournés.'
20 Perec, L'Infra-ordinaire, 11: 'Ce qui se passe vraiment, ce que nous vivons, le reste, tout le reste, ou est-il? Ce qui passe chaque jour, le banal, le quotidien, l'évident, le commun, l'ordinaire, l'infraordinaire, le bruit de fond, l'habituel, comment en rendre compte, comment interroger, comment le décrire?'
21 Perec, L'Infra-ordinaire, 11.
22 Perec, L'Infra-ordinaire, 11-12.
23 Perec, L'Infra-ordinaire, 12.
24 Perec, L'Infra-ordinaire, 11.
25 Perec, L'Infra-ordinaire, 13.
26 Edmund Husserl, Phänomenologische Psychologie: Vorlesungen Sommersemester 1925 Herausgegeben von W. Biemel, Husserliana, vol. 9 (The Hague: Martinus Nijhoff, 1962), trans. John Scanlon, Phenomenological Psychology: Lectures, Summer Semester 1925 (The Hague: Martinus Nijhoff, 1977), 59.
27 Husserl, Phenomenological Psychology, 41.
Cultural phenomenology and the everyday 29
28 Heidegger, Being and Time, 55.
29 Heidegger, Being and Time, 177: 'everyday circumspection goes wrong and to a large extent succumbs to delusion.'
30 Heidegger, Being and Time, 175.
31 Heidegger, Being and Time, 166.
32 See Peter Sloterdijk, Kritik der zynischen Vernunft, 2 vols (Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp, 1983), trans. Michael Eldred, Critique of Cynical Reason (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1987), 'Anyone: or: the Most real Subject of Modern Diffuse Cynicism', 195-210. Cf. pp. 536-7: 'From this height, everyday consciousness, with its acquired practical tricks, its short-winded conventionality, and its helplessness in the face of the emotions, appeared as an unrespectable, immature, preliminary form of developed reason. From then on, philosophy struggled with everyday consciousness with the aim of getting the better of its partly dull, partly cunning refusal to grow up in a philosophical sense, that is consciously shifting it into "meaningful wholes".'
33 Heidegger, Being and Time, 211.
34 Heidegger, Being and Time, 211.
35 Heidegger, Being and Time, 220.
36 Heidegger, Being and Time, 210.
37 Heidegger, Being and Time, 213: 'the dominance of the public way in which things have been interpreted'.
38 Heidegger, Being and Time, 222.
39 Heidegger, Being and Time, 214.
40 Heidegger, Being and Time, 220.
41 Heidegger, Being and Time, 223.
42 Heidegger, Being and Time, 220.
43 Sloterdijk, Critique of Cynical Reason, 196.
44 Heidegger, Being and Time, 221.
45 Heidegger, Being and Time, 214.
46 Heidegger, Being and Time, 224.
47 Heidegger, Being and Time, 106.
48 Heidegger, Being and Time, 50.
49 Heidegger, Being and Time, 61.
50 Friedrich Nietzsche, The Will to Power, trans. Walter Kaufmann and R. J. Hollingdale (New York: Vintage Books, 1968), 220.
51 Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel, Phänomenologie des Geistes, trans. A. V. Miller, Phenomenology of Spirit (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1977), 86-7.
52 Adorno, Negative Dialectics, 13.
53 Adorno, Negative Dialectics, 12.
54 Adorno, Negative Dialectics, 13.
55 Adorno, Negative Dialectics, 9-10.
56 Adorno, Negative Dialectics, 11-12. Cf. Arthur Schopenhauer, Essays and Aphorisms, trans. R. J. Hollingdale (Harmondsworth: Penguin Books, 1973), 118: 'An odd and unworthy definition of philosophy, which however even Kant gives, is that it is a science composed only of concepts. For the entire property of a concept consists of nothing more than what has been begged and borrowed from perceptual knowledge, which is the true and inexhaustible source of all insight.'.
57 Adorno, Negative Dialectics, 12.
58 Adorno, Negative Dialectics, 8. Cf. Jacques Derrida, Writing and Difference, trans. Alan Bass, 152: 'empiricism has always been determined by philosophy, from Plato to Husserl, as non-philosophy: the philosophical pretension to non-philosophy'.
59 Adorno, Negative Dialectics, 17.
60 Adorno, Negative Dialectics, 13.
61 Adorno, Negative Dialectics, 8.
62 Adorno, Negative Dialectics, 156.
63 Adorno, Negative Dialectics, 27.
64 Adorno, Negative Dialectics, 26. Adorno argues for the 'vertigo' of an endless dialectic, a dialectic which is no longer 'glued' to identity (p. 31), which 'throws itself to the objects à fond perdu' and is committed to 'the shock of inconclusiveness' (p. 33).
65 Adorno, Negative Dialectics, 27–8.
66 Adorno, Negative Dialectics, 28–9.
67 Adorno, Negative Dialectics, 28. See, however, Habermas's critique of what he considers to be Adorno's 'Platonistic' view of the fragment form in Jürgen Habermas, Nachmetaphysisches Denken philosophische Aufsätze (Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp, 1988), trans. William Mark Hohengarten, Postmetaphysical Thinking: Philosophical Essays (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1992), 225.
68 Adorno, Negative Dialectics, 29.
69 Adorno, Negative Dialectics, 33.
70 Adorno, Negative Dialectics, 35.
71 Adorno, Negative Dialectics, 52–3.
72 Adorno, Negative Dialectics, 163.
73 Adorno, Negative Dialectics, 52.
74 Adorno's analysis of a utopian 'possibility' within objects which has been 'cheated' by the reality of capitalism, whilst remaining 'visible in each one' (p. 52) seems indebted to Benjamin's Passagenwerk. Although in a curious and seemingly unrelated aside he insists that 'Benjamin's concepts still tend to an authoritarian concealment of their conceptuality' (p. 53).
75 Adorno, Negative Dialectics, 145.
76 Adorno, Negative Dialectics, 150.
77 Adorno, Negative Dialectics, 154.
78 Adorno, Negative Dialectics, 149: 'in placing its mark on the object, definition seeks to be marked by the object. Non-identity is the secret telos of identification'.
79 Adorno, Negative Dialectics, 29.
80 Adorno, Negative Dialectics, 174: 'the difference between subject and object cannot be simply negated. They are neither an ultimate duality nor a screen hiding ultimate unity. They constitute one another as much as – by virtue of their constitution – they depart from each other.'
81 Adorno, Negative Dialectics, 189.
82 Adorno, Negative Dialectics, 192.
83 Adorno, Negative Dialectics, 11, and cf. 52–3: '[No] matter how hard we try … the words we use will remain concepts.'
84 Adorno, Negative Dialectics, 15.
85 See Susannah Frankel, 'A donnish Quixote', Guardian Weekend, 1 November 1997, 30: 'Every summer for the past 25 years, Phillips has revisited the same
Cultural phenomenology and the everyday 31
20 sites in the Camberwell area and photographed them using the same camera, the same lens and the same type of film. He stands in the same place each year ... and takes the picture from exactly the same angle ... The photographs document in minute detail the physical and sociological changes in his local environment ... the locations for the project are situated around a perfect circle, a half-mile radius from his home at the time the project was conceived.'
Adorno, Negative Dialectics, 154-5.
Lefebvre, Everyday Life, 15.
Lefebvre, Everyday Life, 16.
Lefebvre, Everyday Life, 13.
Lefebvre, Everyday Life, 14.
Lefebvre, Everyday Life, 12.
Lefebvre, Everyday Life, 14.
Lefebvre, Everyday Life, 13.
Lefebvre, Everyday Life, 13.
Lefebvre, Everyday Life, 14.
Lefebvre, Everyday Life, 15.
Lefebvre, Everyday Life, 27.
Lefebvre, Everyday Life, 18.
Lefebvre, Everyday Life, 23.
Lefebvre, Everyday Life, 24.
Agnes Heller, A mindennapi elet (Budapest, 1970), trans. G. L. Campbell, Everyday Life (London and New York: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1984).
Henri Lefebvre, Critique de la vie quotidienne, vol. 2, Fondements d'une sociologie de la quotidienneté (Paris: L'Arche, 1961), 104: 'in the social sciences – and especially in sociology – it is possible to formulate axioms but impossible to constitute each particular science as a theory with a deductive character (that is, it is impossible to "saturate" the ensemble of axioms and establish a closed system)' ('dans les sciences sociales et singulièrement en sociologie, il est possible de formuler des axiomes mais impossible de constituer chaque science particulière en théorie de caractère déductif (c'est-à-dire de "saturer" l'ensemble des axiomes et d'étabir un système fermé'). For the 'theory of moments' see pp. 340-57.
See Edmund Husserl, 'Objectivity and the World of Experience' (1936), repr. as Appendix V in David Carr (trans.), Crisis of the European Sciences (Evanston: Northwestern University Press, 1970), 343: 'What becomes well known through repeated experience is always still only relatively known in regard to everything known about it, and it thus has in all respects a peculiar horizon of open unfamiliarity.'
Michel de Certeau, L'Invention du quotidien 1: Arts de faire (Paris, 1980), trans. Steven Rendall, The Practice of Everyday Life (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1984; repr. 1988), 70.
De Certeau, Practice, 59.
De Certeau, Practice, pp. xix-xx, 31-2.
De Certeau, Practice, p. xx.
De Certeau, Practice, 24-8.
De Certeau, Practice, 89.
De Certeau, Practice, 78.
32 Critical Quarterly, vol. 42, no. 1
111 De Certeau, Practice, 78–9.
112 De Certeau, Practice, 70.
113 Norman Bryson, Looking at the Overlooked: Four Essays on Still Life Painting (London: Reaktion, 1990).
114 De Certeau, Practice, 70.
115 Jacques le Goff and Pierre Nora (eds), Faire de l'histoire: Nouveaux problèmes, 3 vols (Paris: Gallimard, 1974), 'Presentation', vol. 1, p. xi: 'la tendance de l'histoire à s'enfoncer au niveau du quotidien, de l'ordinaire, des "petits"'.
116 Bryson, Looking at the Overlooked, 140: 'what runs the world is repetition, unconsciousness, the sleep of culture: the forces that stabilise and maintain the human world are habit, automatism, inertia'.
117 Blanchot, The Infinite Conversation, 244.
118 Blanchot, The Infinite Conversation, 242.
119 Blanchot, The Infinite Conversation, 241.
120 Blanchot, The Infinite Conversation, 244.
121 Blanchot, The Infinite Conversation, 240. Everyday reality, he says, is 'no longer what is lived, it is rather what can be seen or shows itself, spectacle and description, without any active relation whatsoever'. See Roger Silverstone, Television and Everyday Life (London and New York: Routledge, 1994).
122 Blanchot, The Infinite Conversation, 242.
123 Maurice Blanchot, L'Écriture du désastre, trans. Ann Smock, The Writing of the Disaster (Lincoln, NA, and London: University of Nebraska Press, 1986). On Blanchot's use of these terms, see Smock's introduction, pp. vii-xii.
124 Blanchot, Writing the Disaster, 53.
125 Blanchot, The Infinite Conversation, 241.
126 Blanchot, The Infinite Conversation, 245.
127 Blanchot, The Infinite Conversation, 245. Cf. p. 244, where Blanchot describes 'the uneasiness that seizes us each time that ... we stand back from [the everyday] and, facing it, discover that precisely nothing faces us'.
128 Blanchot, The Infinite Conversation, 244–5.
129 Blanchot, The Infinite Conversation, 243.
130 Eric Alliez, L'Impossibilité de la phénoménologie: sur la philosophie française contemporaine (Paris: Vrin, 1995), 116. On 'phenomenological positivism' see p. 80.
131 Gérard Lebrun, 'Note sur la phénoménologie dans Les Mots et les Choses', p. 48, cited in Alliez, L'Impossibilité, p. 70, fn. 1.
132 Dominique Janicaud, Le Tournant théologique de la phénoménologie française (Paris: Éditions de l'Éclat, 1991).
133 Alliez, L'Impossibilité, pp. 49n. and 79n.
134 Alliez, L'Impossibilité, 50: 'l'évidence est bien le problème central de la phénoménologie conque comme théorie apriorique de l'objet en général'.
135 Alliez, L'Impossibilité, 50.
136 Alliez, L'Impossibilité, 59, 82.
137 Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari, Qu'est-ce que c'est la philosophie? (Paris: Les Éditions de Minuit, 1991).
138 Alain Badiou, L'Étre et l'évenement, L'ordre philosophique (Paris: Éditions du Seuil, 1988). See also his Manifeste pour la philosophie, L'ordre philosophique (Paris: Editions du Seuil, 1989), and Court traité d'ontologie transitoire, L'ordre philosophique (Paris: Éditions du Seuil, 1998), which continue to develop his idea of a theory of 'pure multiplicity'.
Cultural phenomenology and the everyday 33
139 Deleuze and Guattari, Qu'est-ce que c'est la philosophie?, 27, cited in Alliez, L'Impossibilité, 72. Cf. p. 80, where Alliez asks 'Comment parler d'une connaissance philosophique si les concepts ne posent pas d'objet et que la philosophie n'est pas une science?'
140 Cf. Jacques Derrida, La Vérité en peinture (Paris: Flammarion, 1978), 9: 'De quels traits pertinents devrait-on rendre compte en une traduction qui ne regarderait plus à la dépense pédagogique?'
141 For Badiou, the 'pure multiple' (multiple pur) of being is the πληθος of Plato, 'the inconsistent multiple, the being-without-one, pure presentation', an 'endlessly disseminated multiple', given theoretical fixity by Cantor's 'theory of ensembles'. See Badiou, L'Étre et l'événement, 45-6, 49-59. Cf. Alliez, L'Impossibilité, 77.
142 Badiou, Court traité d'ontologie transitoire, 191: 'Being does not expose itself to thought except as a local site of its untotalisable deployment or unfolding' (L'étre ne s'expose à la pensée que comme site local de son déploiement intotalisable).
143 See Court traité d'ontologie transitoire, 195.
144 Badiou, Manifeste, 18.
145 Badiou, Manifeste, 195.
146 Badiou, Manifeste, p. 19: 'Philosophy pronounces not the truth, but the conjuncture, that is to say the thinkable conjunction of truths' (La philosophie prononce, non la vérité, mais la conjoncture, c'est-à-dire la conjonction pensable, des vérités).
147 Alliez, L'Impossibilité, 78.
148 Badiou, Manifeste, 17.
149 Alliez, L'Impossibilité, 86: 'la décision nommante pour décider qu'il est événement lui-même, qu'il intervient dans la situation'. See Badiou, L'Étre et l'événement, 193-8, 223-33.
150 Alliez, L'Impossibilité, 78: 'le concept doit devenir description des figures du multiple comme tissu vivant' (my emphasis in translated text).
151 Badiou, Court traité d'ontologie transitoire, 197.
152 Alliez, L'Impossibilité, 87.
153 Cf. p. 72, where Alliez cites Deleuze and Guattari's assertion that 'the concept itself is an ontological experience' (le concept est par lui-même une expérience ontologique), and Badiou, who says that 'the origin of a truth is of the order of an event' (l'origine d'une vérité est de l'ordre de l'événement), Manifeste, 17.
154 Gilbert Simondon, L'Individuation psychique et collective: à la lumière des notions de forme, information, potentiel et métastabilité (Paris: Aubier, 1989), 26, cited in Alliez, L'Impossibilité, 78: 'accompli[t] la genèse de la pensée en même temps que s'accompil la genèse de l'objet'.
155 Georges Perec, Les Lieux (1969), cited in Jacques Neefs and Hans Hartje, Georges Perec: Images (Paris: Seuil, 1993), 114-15.
156 Julio Cortazar, Around the Day in Eighty Worlds, trans. Thomas Christensen (San Francisco: North Point Press, 1986), 'The Broken Doll', 201, 206-7.
157 Cortazar, Around the Day in Eighty Worlds, 20-21.
158 Kracauer, The Mass Ornament, 81.
159 Kracauer, The Mass Ornament, 79.
160 Kracauer, The Mass Ornament, 255.
161 Kracauer, The Mass Ornament, 244.
162 Kracauer, The Mass Ornament, 242.
163 Kracauer, The Mass Ornament, 241.
164 Blanchot, The Infinite Conversation, 98.
165 Rob Chapman, Album Covers from the Vinyl Junkyard (London; HighFlyers Publications, 1997), Introduction.
166 Emmanuel Levinas, Totalité et Infini (Martinus Nijhof, 1971; repr. Kluwer Academic, Dordrecht 1987), 10, 13.
167 See, for example, Jean Baudrillard: 'I'm not a real photographer. I've got a camera and that's all. I look for pictures outside the aesthetic. Factual pictures, objects.' Interview with William Leith, 'A French Philosopher's Photos', in Life supplement, Observer, 15 February 1998, 12.
168 Mark Dion's quasi-curatorial (or quasi-archaeological) projects are exemplary manifestations of this tendency in recent art.