The Politics and Potential of Everyday Life

The Politics and Potential of Everyday Life
Author(s): Claire Colebrook
Source: New Literary History, Autumn, 2002, Vol. 33, No. 4, Everyday Life (Autumn, 2002), pp. 687-706
Published by: The Johns Hopkins University Press
Stable URL: https://www.jstor.org/stable/20057751

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The Politics and Potential of Everyday Life
Claire Colebrook

On the very concept of everyday life

At FIRST GLANCE it might seem absurd to claim that the concept of everyday life could be tied to a specific politics—that the concept is in its very structure either revolutionary or conservative. Far from the concept being tied to a determined politics, it is difficult to imagine political contestation or difference without some concept of everyday life. Either we insist that everyday life is inauthentic, confused, or mystified${}^1$—requiring the transition to reflective theory—or we see everydayness as uncorrupted life, a life that in its animal or natural immediacy would bear all the joy and promise that political structures would subsequently enslave or enhance. Despite these conflicting possibilities, the relational structure of the concept demands that the everyday be defined against abstraction, reification, or decided cultural wholes. In this sense, the concept of everydayness owes a debt to the notion of life. Whether everyday life is defined as necessarily tending toward broader structures, or whether it is situated radically prior to all ideality, something like a metaphysical quality must be discerned in the structure of life if one is to make a general claim about everydayness.

At one extreme, then, we could situate the seemingly antimetaphyphical tradition of the Nietzschean and Bergsonian appeal to life as radically preconceptual, fluid, continuous, and singular, a life that can only be belied by concepts, reflection, or consciousness.${}^2$ The logics of philosophy, the norms of humanism, or the claims of morality, community, and convention, would all be violations of the very force of life. While everyday bourgeois existence would—from Nietzsche's and Bergson's point of view—also be guilty of the stultifying denial of life, their work has allowed for a valorization of a radical quotidian, evidenced in the epiphanies of modernist literature, the celebration of the body, the spontaneity of unreflecting life, or the antihumanism of abject existence. According to Jürgen Habermas, it is a certain reading of Nietzsche and Georges Bataille that has (mistakenly) led contemporary thought to be critical of all forms of reason;${}^3$ while for Charles Taylor the modernist distaste for everyday life has followed from a "subjectivism" that retreats

New Literary History, 2002, 33: 687–706

from any determined, social, or collective understanding of the good life.�� Habermas’s and Taylor’s criticisms of the contemporary appeal to a life before all collectively legitimated goods stress an inherent normativity in life that is best realized, not in the specialization of philosophy, but in the inclusion of the practices of reason and reflection in ordinary life. Habermas’s and Taylor’s work is part of a philosophical tradition that locates a tendency towards metaphysics in everyday life. Philosophy is not an arbitrary or academically enclosed activity imposed upon life; only through the practice of philosophy, only through reflection on the very forms through which we live life, can life realize its potential. Life, in itself, tends towards a truth that is other than mere life, but is also the realization of life.

It is possible to cast these two traditions in opposition, the one tending towards an inherent norm of reason, justification, and emancipation, the other refusing metaphysics and reason as the negation of life. What both traditions share, however, is a norm of life, or the very concept of life as a norm. It is assumed that life, in itself, has a certain value; life must, to be proper to itself, realize itself in some recognition of the truth of life. On the one hand everyday life would be, by its nature, always already normative. Life necessarily tends towards and is enabled by some idea of life, some notion of the good and true life. Philosophy, theory, or political reflection would be the very realization of life. On the other hand, life would be a pure force, potential, and production that must refuse all forms of non-life, all the negative, stultifying, and life-denying fictions of metaphysics. What cannot be allowed by either tradition, to anticipate an idea that I will expand in the conclusion to this paper, is immobility, non-being, inertia, or death in life. To the extent that everydayness has operated, at least since the enlightenment, as a critique of all those specters and abstractions that have come to enslave life, everydayness has always been the affirmation of the force and productivity of proper life. This is so even when the everyday is regarded as that which requires the demysification or illumination of theory to realize its inherent potential. Further, this emphasis on life as self-enhancing potential bearing an inherent tendency to its own proper actualization is defined through a highly gendered metaphorics. Man has always been the subjective, forming, active, expansive, and appropriating power of praxis, while the feminine has variously been defined either as the unthinking matter through which form realizes itself, or as the effect of forming activity that has become mere semblance and simulation.

The feminine, thought beyond philosophies of life and the normativity of everydayness, might have to consider an essential nonequivalence in the quotidian, where life is not self-realization—not the use of techne in

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order to realise living praxis—but "originally" technical: always other than itself, different without the possibility of appropriation. Both Jacques Derrida and Luce Irigaray are critical of the political and metaphysical determinations of the "physis-techne" opposition in Aristotelian metaphysics, where physis refers to an original and selfsufficient nature, and techne is a supplement, division, difference, or addition, which nature allows for its own enhancement but does not require. Traditionally, techne ought to be continuous with physis, allowing nature to become in its own way. Against this, Irigaray stresses discontinuity: there is no natural technology, no proper form for becoming. If one could imagine the everyday as nonactualized potential, as the thought of that which amounts to nothing, and is not only unproductive but also possibly counterproductive, then one might imagine a politics and ethics liberated from the knowledge of life.${}^6$ Such an ethics would be everyday, not because it released the potential of an already given ground, ultimately contributing to the emancipation and maximization of life, but because it began from the idea of thinking beyond life. It is precisely because everyday life offers no norm or principle, because it is so often perverse that it evidences the persistence of nonlife in life. The everyday is discontinuous: it neither leads inevitably to theoretical illumination, nor does it bear its own self-emancipating counterlogic. The everyday is not a potential that tends towards its own actuality, nor a principle from which we might judge the proper relation of the political to life.

Everyday Life: Critical and Dialectical Definitions

Everyday life can be defined either critically and dialectically—in relation to abstractions or fixed logics—or as having an intrinsic and singular power capable of taking us beyond all dialectic. As a singular power, everyday life can be understood radically, as pure unreflected life, freed from metaphysics, ideas, reflection, and abstraction. Critically and dialectically, by contrast, everyday life is an appeal; against the abstractions of metaphysics, the reification of ideas, or the illusion of universals, philosophers and theorists turn back to everyday life to study the forces from which ideas and abstractions emerge. The dialectical tradition stretching from Aristotle to contemporary Marxism allows for the political critique of any system, technology, or ideology that offers itself as the transcendent truth of life. Life itself can only be lived and affirmed if it goes beyond immediacy to some idea of life; all praxis is propelled from present life to enact and actualize an idea of life that is not yet present. But this very tendency to enhance life through a desire

for what is not yet present also turns life against itself. If life can be lived only through mediation—not just the present but the sense of this present for the whole of life—mediating ideas can also come to appear as other than life, as truths that govern experience. The enlightening critical spirit must recognize any idea, norm, or system that appears as an external law as both a fiction that has enslaved life and as evidence that life has the positive power to transform itself if it actualizes that ideal.

There have been recent attempts to overcome this dialectical understanding of life in favor of an immanent concept of the everyday. Far from being inherently metaphysical or having its end in some idea that transcends life, everyday life has been conceived as a singular power. Only if life is liberated from mediation, dialectics, or the phantom of negativity can the joy of humanity be realized. In its most extreme form, as articulated by Michael Hardt and Antonio Negri's Empire, which I will turn to later, the multitude is affirmed as pure act and self-creating community. In both the dialectical and the antidialectical criticisms of transcendent theory for the sake of everyday life, a certain idea of life remains as irreducibly normative. On the critical and dialectical understanding, all life tends towards active, conscious, and unifying realization; any idea, image, fiction, or determining element which appears to be other than thinking life and praxis ought to be returned to the life from which it emerges. On the singular and immanent understanding, there is a more intense commitment to life itself. Humanity can only achieve its potential if it eliminates dialectical production, if it frees itself from all mediation, negativity, and self-separation, if it becomes nothing more than life itself.

When philosophers, going back to Aristotle, have criticized metaphysics for situating the creations of life—such as ideas, values, or forms—as abstractions above and beyond life, they have done so by turning back to life. But this everyday life from which ideas emerge can itself only be known through the ideas and forms to which it gives rise. This is not a problem, of course, if one holds everyday life to be in essence proto-discursive—as having its proper end in some form of system, language or structure. Contemporary neo-Aristotelians, such as Alistair MacIntyre, Martha Nussbaum, and Charles Taylor are critical of any philosophy or theory that would try to establish its truth in some logical or universal space outside the ways of life of specific communities, but they are also insistent that any community or form of life can only exist with some transcendent structure or system of norms—some constituted regularity or idea of the good—which allows life to be lived to its full potential.7 Philosophy, metaphysics, and abstractions are not antithetical to everyday life per se; they become so only when their origin in daily life is forgotten and philosophers mistakenly try to establish a single and

immutable truth independent of the contingencies and values of daily existence. Everyday life, for this dialectical tradition, operates as a point of critique. Everyday life is already referred beyond itself to some sense of life as a whole. There can be no point of view outside specific contexts and communities, no transcendent point of justification, and any philosophy or theory that strives for such a universal Archimedean point has merely repressed its specific sociality.

Like the neo-Aristotelian tradition, the phenomenological movement also grounded itself in a return to everyday life and a criticism of any logic or system that appears as set over and against life. Phenomenology is, as Jacques Derrida notes, both the fulfillment of a metaphysical tradition that insists on the realization of universal truth and the beginning of a critique of truth in favor of the immediate dynamism of life.${}^8$ Phenomenology both appeals to a community and intersubjectivity without which there could be no world, and insists that this community is an Idea beyond any bodily life. Indeed one can only live life, or have a world, with some idea of an objectivity beyond me and any actual consciousness.${}^9$ For this reason it is not surprising that phenomenology leads to two incommensurable ways of approaching everyday life: the phenomenology of Alfred Schutz, which examines the emergence of truth and structure from life, and the deconstruction of Derrida, who tirelessly insists on the inescapability of metaphysics, nonlife, and absence.${}^9$ For Derrida experience is always already technical, possible only because what is experienced as "now" is enabled by some system of traces or anticipations which are not reducible to any single consciousness. The very structure of experience necessarily intends or posits what is not given or not present, and in order to think what is beyond my life I require some technology—some differentiating system—in order to mark or retain this "now" as a sign of some future.

For Edmund Husserl logical forms and concepts emerge from the Lebenswelt or life-world. There is not a life, nature, or objectivity that is then experienced; life is experience, nothing more than the synthesis of perceptions into a unified time, a time that is then capable of turning back and recognizing itself as having constituted the world. Philosophical responsibility and justification can only be achieved if truth is not simply accepted as an external norm but is grounded in the life from which it emerges. Only with the idea of transcendental subjectivity or consciousness in general—the idea of consciousness that is not identified with any actual consciousness—do we realize the very truth of life: that life is not an object to be observed but the horizon or ground from which all experiences of objectivity emerge.${}^{1}0$ The mistake of Lebensphilosophie, pragmatism, or cultural relativism, Husserl argues, is that they take some part of life—such as man, mind, or culture—to explain

life, whereas the only responsible philosophical question must ask how the very idea or experience of life emerges. For Husserl, the answer is experience; any term used to explain experience—such as mind, reason, or consciousness—must itself have emerged from experience, from daily intentional life. What Husserl refuses to admit is a determining or nonconscious element that would account for experience. Language, logic, ideas, and forms must have their genesis in life. The task of phenomenological critique is to ground science and technology in the life-world from which they emerge. Thought must no longer submit itself to the immanent rules of science but ought to question the life, intentions, and ends those systems serve. The “ought” of this imperative to return to life is grounded in the nature of life. Life is the very process of constituting truth; any truth that appears as other than life—as constituted—is completed only with the recognition, reflection, and appropriation of the constituting genesis.

Husserl's concept of the “natural attitude” expresses the ambiguous metaphysics of everyday life. On the one hand, like the critical and demystifying antimetaphysics of Wittgenstein and pragmatism, Husserl insists that the philosopher’s attempt to ground experience in a reality beyond experience is futile; any notion of what lies beyond experience can only be given from experience. Phenomenology returns to life itself, refusing the existence of any logic that would judge or order experience from outside. However, this very appeal to life and experience also identifies a tendency towards metaphysical illusion in everyday life. The “natural attitude” is just our assumption that there is a real world “out there” that transcends our experience. Without this idea of a reality beyond experience, towards which experience is directed, we could have no sense of the world. Husserl's phenomenology strives to explain, from within the history of experience, the emergence of the idea of reality. Reality is constituted through temporality or historicity, a synthesis or connectedness of experiences into a general horizon. Such a horizon of becoming is transcendental; any idea of other times, cultures, or forms of consciousness could only be thought through some synthesizing consciousness in general. Self-constituting consciousness is the final horizon from which all difference must be thought.

The experience of the real, as what lies beyond me, is formed and grounded in experience, and it is precisely the task of philosophy to disclose the very constitution of objectivity from the flux of experience. The very structure of experience is intentional; experience is always experience of what is other than consciousness and for this reason necessarily involves transcendence. There is a necessary absence at the heart of presence. In order to experience something as present, as having being or existence, I must experience it as having a being beyond my

experience, as remaining present beyond the “now” and as being there for others in my absence. The very sense of the world relies upon the synthesis of time or the constitution of a meaningful horizon within which my actions and intentions take place.

Life is, therefore, necessarily meaningful, for the experience of the world as present, as there for me, requires that I interpret my experience to be an experience of some presence. We are always already in the condition of interpretation and anticipation. And we are also, for this reason, in the condition of intersubjectivity; interpreting my world is also interpreting what it is and means for others. If everyday existence is always already social and meaningful it is also metaphysical, for once we posit the existence of a life-world or horizon of sense as the condition for singular experiences, we also acknowledge that something like meaning, conceptuality, or ideas are essential aspects of all life. Theory, or the sense of life as a whole, would not be an isolated philosophical activity added on to life, for there could only be life and world with some constitution of the sense of life. It is possible, then, not just to examine the fluid and dynamic life from which systems and technologies emerge; it is also necessary to reject any appeal to pure and immediate life before all sense. Any such original life would itself be intuited only from the already established horizon of sense. The relation between everyday life and philosophy must therefore be critical and dialectical. Any philosophical truths or logics need to be recognized as having their ground in the life-world, but the life-world itself cannot be appealed to as a pure datum, and can indeed be criticized, interrogated, and renovated, if not justified.

Immanent Everyday Life

There is, however, a far more radical appeal to everyday life that goes beyond critical correction and establishes everyday life as a utopian point beyond all sense and mediation. There must have been some preconceptual life or intuition from which concepts emerge. Everyday life, or the horizon of existence from which ideas, forms, concepts, and abstractions emerge, must be presupposed as the condition for experience but can never itself be experienced. When writers refer to everyday life as ungraspable, inefable, or ever-receding they resist the notion of life as always already structured and metaphysical. There is a qualitative distinction, here, between life in its full, dynamic, and productive unity and originality, and the disengaged concepts, systems, and logics through which that life is lived.

There is a distinct genealogy for this utopian appeal to everyday life, an everyday life that forms the milieu and horizon of experience but

recedes from any attempt to be grasped by experience. The first stage of this genealogy lies in a radical concept of life as dynamic, immediate, and unreflected production. Here, far from arguing that life is already metaphysical, meaningful, and tending towards ends beyond itself, life is affirmed as radically distinct from the systems and logics that have subsequently enslaved it. Today, a great deal of work influenced by Bergson stresses the revolutionary power of discerning the mobility of life beyond all the fixed logics that have emerged from life. When Nietzsche writes about the emergence of concepts from life, he not only sees concepts in their fixity and regularity as opposed to life, he also sees life as impersonal, inhuman, singular, and essentially meaningless. For Nietzsche, the everyday life of values, purposes, and intentions is the very denial of life. Far from returning philosophy and metaphysics to an everyday life of practices, Nietzsche posits "life" as a radically disruptive and violent force that only great souls can encounter. Eternal return is the ability to think the destruction of all constituted values and ends, the strength to allow each point of life to be lived in its singularity, without a sense of meaning or purpose. For if there is an eternity no point of life can be privileged over any other.${}^{13}$ Everyday life in its usual sense, with its acceptance of norms and ends, with its unreflected commitment to values that are taken as real, would be the very antithesis of true life, the bourgeois thinking of the herd.

While insisting on a radically impersonal eternity of singularities, there is an antimetaphysical strain in Nietzsche, an awareness of the lure of animal immediacy, which has major implications for the contemporary appeal to everyday life. Nietzsche himself may have realized that we can only look nostalgically upon the anti-self-consciousness of the animal; the task for Nietzsche was not to "become-animal" or anti-self-conscious but to live our finite and located worldly lives with a full sense of the eternity that is radically antithetical to any sense of the world or life that we live.${}^{14}$ We cannot return to unreflected immediacy. But a great deal of theory inspired by this Nietzschean and Bergsonian understanding of life as pure force and potential has turned to everyday life as somehow bearing this promise of un-self-conscious and unreflected joy. Indeed, even theories of everyday life that acknowledge the necessary relation of everyday life to transcendent and mediated structures have insisted on the inherently disruptive, unstructured, unintentional, and singular character of an everyday that exceeds the logic of the intersubjective life-world. Such theories correct the "earlier," supposedly Marxist emphasis on the poverty of everyday mystified life requiring the fulfillment of theory. For writers as diverse as Agnes Heller, Michel de Certeau, Henri Lefebvre, and Maurice Blanchot, the everyday is not only a confused imaginary awaiting emancipation through constituted norms

of reason. Everydayness bears its own promise and potential. But whereas Heller, Lefebvre, and Blanchot see the ambivalence of everyday life in a necessarily dialectical relation between immediate existence and transcendent ideas of existence, Certeau's work suggests that everydayness might have its own power regardless of any relation to realized social wholes.

More recently, work that has taken up the Nietzschean and Bergsonian philosophy of Deleuze and Guattari has insisted that the everyday power of the "multitude" is the power of life itself, a life liberated from transcendence, dialectic, justification, and normativity. In Empire, Michael Hardt and Antonio Negri insist that the inadequate ideas we form of life—all those ideas that personalize and locate life within a specific world-view, such as national or sexual identity—should be rejected in order to achieve the fullness of absolute immanence.${}^{15}$ Such immanence would be everyday because the present would not be referred to an ideal beyond life. Life would still be propelled towards a future, but the future would be nothing more than the expansion and maximization of productive potential. This notion of everyday life, far from being properly fulfilled in a reflected and transparent life-world of sense and recognition, here takes on a utopian force. Everyday life is not just the point from which concepts and technologies emerge; it is radically other than any constituted system. Life is constituent power (potentia), liberated from any constituted idea of life that would present itself as sovereign Power (potestas).

For Hardt and Negri, only the immanence of the multitude can justify life, a life that finally realizes itself in the philosophy of Spinoza ($E$ 91). Here, philosophy is not the creation of unnatural norms, of distant ideals, of difficult, unachievable or abstract utopia; philosophy in its proper form is just the practice through which creative life recognizes itself as nothing more than creation. Nature unfolds itself and affirms itself through human thinking—a thought freed of any norm that is other than life. Thought, therefore, cannot be personal and determined; it cannot be the thought of this finite life, from this specific context and community. True community is collective thinking, where thought has no end other than the inclusion, maximization, appropriation, and increase of its own activity. Far from affirming a world of competing definitions of the human, humanity would just be the collective activity of its own definition: "homothomo, humanity squared" ($E$ 72). From the specified and limited idea of nation or people, philosophy and life must arrive at the adequate idea of the multitude. The idea of the multitude, for Hardt and Negri, is not separate from life but is life expressing itself in full immediacy: "because there cannot be any external mediation, the singular is presented as the multitude" ($E$ 73).

Everyday life, here, takes on the normative force of life itself. If life is just desire, production, self-expansion, and creation that can only be impeded if it subjects itself to some illusion of what is not life, then the fulfillment of life will be a retreat from governing ideals to pure life: "When human power appears immediately as an autonomous cooperating collective force, capitalist prehistory comes to an end" (E 366). Everyday life is dynamic, unreflected, immediate, productive, and continuous with itself; it is fully immanent, with no end beyond itself. It is life as pure potential, not yet enslaved to one of its created or actualized products, "when social and subjective cooperation is no longer a product but a presupposition, when naked life is raised up to the dignity of productive power, or really when it appears as the wealth of virtuality" (E 366).

For Hardt and Negri this pure potential of praxis or "living labor" (E 357) can be realized only with a new understanding of the machine, but this is a machine that is neither a disparate collection of parts, nor an enclosed organism: it is the pure mobility of a technology that is no longer disjoined from the force of praxis. Whereas the capitalist notion of the market has already destroyed any transcendent governing idea or center to become a mechanism, it still centers the machine and labor on external production; we are enslaved, not to a sovereign form, but the mechanisms of the market. Rather than appropriating and maximizing human creative potential, we appropriate capital. Globalism no longer violates life by imposing an imperial order or sovereign form; globalism does its violence through a diffused transcendence: through a biopower that operates at the level of daily life. The global tyranny is achieved not by the imposition of a norm—such as the white man of reason of older empires—but by the creation of a network. Globalism can subsume hybrid, different, and distinct identities within the one system of profit and capital. Capital is not an external value imposed on life so much as a system that measures the flows of life.

With global capitalism, which has no outside and secures "sovereignty" only in its restriction of mechanisms to profit, there is also, however, the utopian possibility that this same globalism will pass over into one collective and flowing humanity, fully immanent and "machinic." This would be achieved in the elimination of mediation and nonlife, when the multitude are nothing other than their potential for production: pure constitutive power freed from any constituted end. Globalism is overcome when life becomes truly machinic, nothing other than motion, interaction, flow, production, and creation—without a value or product, such as capital, defining that flow. It is through everyday "immaterial labor," which is no longer oriented to spatio-temporal products so much as information, that life is freed from its specified location in factories and finite communities in order to become a

univocal multitude (E 294). Global networks of mass communication, such as the internet, allow for an immaterial labor that enables work to be at one with its product. Community and communication are liberated from specific locales or contexts, for the community has its own ongoing production as both its means and end. This communication is not the transmission of meaning through some sign for some end. There are not communities who then rely on channels and vehicles of communication. The immaterial communicational networks, the very machine of production, is the community (E 302).

Whereas the modern concept of the subject is transcendent—an ideal of the rational consciousness that constitutes and represents its world—Hardt and Negri’s subjectivity is collective and immanent: subjectivity in its personal and finite sense can be overcome only with the absolute recognition and appropriation of humanity. Whereas the critical tradition recognizes that any idea of life is not life itself, and must therefore be open to decision, legitimation, and justification, Hardt and Negri imagine a moment in which subjectivity is a collective expression of life as a whole: “Labor appears simply as power to act . . . Anything that blocks this power to act is merely an obstacle to overcome—an obstacle that is eventually outflanked, weakened, and smashed by the critical powers of labor and the everyday passional wisdom of the affects” (E 358). Empire’s insistence on one human, collective, and self-constituting life sets itself against the simple affirmation of “difference” and the local affirmation of national or sexual identities. What sets their affirmation of the life of the multitude apart from older (imperialist) appeals to a single norm of humanity or subjectivity is that, on their account, the multitude is not identity. It is other than any notion of the “people”; it is not a norm but a motion, not an actualized idea, but the pure potential to form ideas; it is capable of including all life because the recognition of humanity as love, joy, and production is not a specified image so much as the power of life itself: “The multitude today, however, resides on the imperial surfaces where there is no God the father and no transcendence.

Instead there is our immanent labor. The teleology of the multitude is theurgical; it consists in the possibility of directing technologies and production toward its own joy and its own increase of power. To the metaphysical and transcendent mediations, to the violence and corruption are thus opposed the absolute constitution of labor and cooperation, the earthly city of the multitude” (E 396). Hardt and Negri envision utopia as the continuity of the multitude’s power, where technologies of information no longer deflect life from its own expression but are recognised as nothing more than expressing and constituting power. Hardt and Negri refer, throughout Empire, to the new ontology of humanity, where being is no longer an object to be represented by

subjects. Subjectivity and being are one; there is nothing other than the expression of the whole, and this whole or absolute is humanity expressing itself as one productive life (E 357).

Hardt and Negri are not alone in their attack on the dialectical understanding of life. Like the poststructuralist tradition to which they appeal, they insist that a dialectical conception of life precludes the possibility of thinking a life beyond the received ideas and traditions of sovereignty (E 131). If we assume that life only fulfils itself through ideas, mediation, and some sense of a value or ideal of life, then we tend to defer the demand of present desire to some specter beyond life. Only an antidialectical theory can affirm the value of life, in all its immediate potential. This is where Hardt and Negri's reliance upon life connects with theories more explicitly directed to everyday life. Whereas the Marxist tradition, and enlightenment critique before Marx, had criticized any theory or system of beliefs that subordinates life to a distant ideal, Marxism nevertheless aimed to reactivate the promise of the ideal.

Only when everyday life is brought to the actual condition and self-realization of its inherent illusions, is the everyday fulfilled. By contrast, the affirmation of everyday life itself refuses the already constituted ideals of ideology; it does not seek to realize the inadequate ideals of fulfillment already located in life; it affirms the power of life itself. All those forms of the everyday that had once been interpreted as deflections or deferrals of the realization of the good life—all the banalities of popular culture, consumption, and time-wasting—are no longer seen as impediments to the realization of life but modes of life with their own disruptive temporality.

When Michel de Certeau writes about everyday life he appeals to the unintended and unreflective movements of tactics, set over against the constituted and end-oriented strategies of the social whole. Tactics have a force that is not yet intentional; they occur as a wandering, deflection, or purposelessness in life. His classic example is that of la perruque, or wigging off.${}^{16}$ Here, an action is undertaken not in order to disrupt the social whole—for in that case the act would still refer beyond itself to the social logic it negated—but without awareness of any produced effect or outcome. The tactic bears a relation to the dominant strategy, but this is an external or contingent relation. The tactic is not undertaken with the purpose of disruption or social engagement; but it is in this very purposelessness or refusal of engagement that a tactic exposes the limit of strategy. A factory worker who, from the point of view of external production and outcomes—the overarching logic of strategies—"wastes time" evidences the power of everyday life. An act is tactical when it is pure act, when its temporal motion and production are not yet accorded

an objective spatial locus; it is a mode of producing "without capitalizing, that is, without taking control over time" (PE xx).

The political struggles of strategies concern a common terrain, a common time and a shared frame of reference. Tactics, by contrast, are tied to an everyday life that bears no reference to a dominant strategy. Indeed an everyday tactic is everyday because it occurs without reference to a larger whole. It is a power sufficient unto itself. Instead of an identified women's movement that demanded inclusion, recognition, and transformation of the social whole, a tactic would occur without any aim beyond itself. Everyday women's activities—the seeming pointlessness of women's magazines, make-up, gossip, worthless romance fiction, window shopping—all those nonevents that had once been seen as deflections from the political could, viewed as tactics, be interpreted positively as liberated from the unified system of production, recognition, purpose, and self-definition. Such acts are "polymorphous mobilities" that precede "the frontiers of humanity" (PE 40).

For Certeau, strategies take the movements of life in all their fluidity and contingency and subject them to a repeatable and unified order. Whereas tactics are movements of life or pure acts without any general or common order, strategies give that life a unified time and place, a system of reference towards which all acts are referred. Tactics are not conscious disruptions of that order, but unintended dilations, wanderings, or events that occur beyond all sense of order. They are not strategic, not means for achieving some predetermined end in terms of what constitutes a good life. They are tactical only in the extent to which they are everyday, liberated from any idea or ideal of life. Everyday life is just that aspect of life that has not yet justified, defined, or organized itself, a life that proceeds as nothing more than action. This action is not the expression or fulfillment of some underlying subject, nor the production of some identity or purpose.

The radical everydayness of everyday life acts as a disruptive and redemptive force, a way of thinking beyond the closure of constituted powers. It may be the case that life in its political and meaningful form must adopt some strategic form, some sense of the end and meaning of action. But it is also the case that this strategic unity can only be disclosed as strategic—as the outcome of action rather than some immutable ground—through the disruptive and anomalous power of tactics. The supposed time-wasting that occupies everyday life—reading, wandering, consuming, idly imagining without any intention to actualize or produce that image—reveals a certain power of life as such, a power to spend that "does not keep what it acquires" (PE 177). In this pure expenditure life resists appropriation by external measures or

powers (PE 38). Before life is a unified whole of purposes, meanings, and values, there is a joy of action for its own sake. Actions and practices do not begin as directed towards some end or form; there are actions and practices from which regular forms or ends are constituted. The art of everyday life lies in the revelation of the act or geste itself (PE 46), and not the sense or meaning that defines the act (after the event). Certeau's criticism of Michel Foucault concerns just this issue. By assuming that there must be a power that enables and expresses itself in each point of the whole of life Foucault takes the constituted system of power—the system that explains and makes sense of life—as the limit and origin of life (PE xiv, 48). For Certeau, the value of everyday life is its singular, unsystemic, and dilatory character. There is not a power that then realizes and expresses itself through action, such that the everyday can be seen as an expression of some underlying logic. Rather, there are actions and everyday events that are then endowed with a logic from the point of view of a single and analyzing strategy.

Certeau's work is at once critical of and indebted to the Marxist tradition of demystification and revolutionary praxis. On the one hand, Certeau recognizes the ways in which everyday life, for the most part, is enslaved to a logic or strategy that is other than life. Strategies mobilize the power of everyday actions for increased productivity and efficiency, but they do so only at the expense of life itself—allowing the dynamism, fluidity, and immediacy of life to be subjected to an end beyond life. On the other hand, Certeau's appeal to everyday life does not just take the form of a critique of ideology in favor of an original lived and intentional praxis. Far from everyday life bearing a meaning and promise of totality which is then given an illusory form in ideology, Certeau's everyday life is entirely other than external production, meaning, and intentional practice. Instead of demystifying popular culture by disclosing its real meaning, or what it really wants to say, Certeau sees a radical potential in the popular precisely to the extent to which it has no meaning (PE 31). Popular consumption and time-wasting disclose the power of life to be other than any decided or intended end: the joy of action in and for itself, without reference to life as a whole, without deferral of gratification or pleasure for some transcendent end.

Like Hardt and Negri, and like the dialectical approaches to everyday life, Certeau defines life as a power of production, appropriation, and self-expansion. Everyday time-wasting and consumption is "an entirely different kind of production" (PE 31). Life is production. Life is not a body or thing that remains in itself without will, force, or becoming. It is this emphasis on production that reflects a quasi-theological, or what Derrida refers to as an "onto-theological," humanism that must "identify

itself with the free unfolding-refolding of the physis."17 Life must go forth from itself and multiply. What does not refer beyond itself and recognize itself in all life, or what refuses or perverts life is mere negation or nonlife. Life, here, includes nature and the human praxis that works upon and represents nature; technology is also, properly, subject to a logic of life—realizing itself properly only when the fluidity and production of life, the power of will, form and force, are no longer externalized and separated from their originating ground. By assuming that technology emerges from life (as force) and ought to be returned to or mediated by life as living praxis, technology is subordinated to physis. The refusal of mere technology is achieved only with the assumption of a proper ground from which technology emerges. This is why Hardt and Negri can cite Donna Haraway's cyborg as an historical event, for this assumes that bodies become technological in their departure from naked life (E 92). This refusal of any technology that is not grounded in will, force, and becoming is a refusal of what remains beyond comprehension, appropriation, and subjectivity. This techne-physis opposition is most apparent in the assertion that the multitude or everyday practices are the originally temporal productive force of life (PE 40), expressed properly in the realization of "humanity," where, "The poor is god on earth" (E 157). Life, therefore, must arrive at itself in a univocal conception of subjectivity, humanity, or "man." Heller insists that everyday life must expand to recognize its emergence from "species-being" (EL 258); while Lefebre sees the redemption of everyday life only in the recognition of life as a whole: "We are still dealing with philosophy and with an overall conception of man and the world, but in a renewed sense: concrete dynamic, linked to practical action as well as knowledge—and thus implying the effort to 'supersede' all the limitations of life and thought, to organize a 'whole,' to bring to the fore the idea of the total man."18 In all cases everyday life realizes itself in collective appropriation; what must be refused is an everyday life that remains, in itself, separate from the collective comprehension of life.

The Gender of Life

On the one hand, we could read the affirmation of everyday life as a final liberation from the life-enslaving logic of metaphysics. If life is desire, or the tendency to produce and sustain itself, then we could see metaphysics as the very negation of life. Those concepts and ideas created from life appear as laws or norms towards which life ought to be directed; only a return to the productivity of life itself, liberated from any idea of life can realize a political utopia. If critical philosophy, from

Aristotle onwards, has turned away from abstraction and reification to life, it has tended to do so with a sense of life as necessarily requiring a degree of abstraction; life deflects from immediate pleasure, desire, and joy in order to realize a value beyond life. The task of the dialectical tradition would be the realization of a norm or idea of life that fulfils, rather than negates, the everyday existence from which it emerges. By contrast Hardt and Negri’s Empire with its refusal of sovereignty or constituted power commits itself to life itself, the radical absolute of the multitude that requires nothing other than itself to be itself. It might seem, then, that the insistence on constituting life as the everyday power of the multitude that is “captured” by determinate ideas of the human would produce a far more radical, because inclusive and open, image of humanity than all those earlier hierarchies, where the everydayness of domesticity, desire, unreflected passion, and embodiment realized itself in the traditionally masculine domains of reason and reflection. For Hardt and Negri, life is humanity as absolute immanence, not a terrain upon which sexual and national identities compete for recognition.

However, we could also ask just whose image of life and humanity Hardt and Negri are presenting as the life of the multitude. One way in which we might pose this question is through the question of gender. In Hardt and Negri’s assumption of life as pure self-differentiating potential, existence is placed before all relation. There is a life, which then goes forth from itself in order to relate to itself. Such an understanding of life remains subjective in the broadest sense. The subject is that which underlies or precedes any apparent or perceived effect, the ground from which all differentiation emerges. This is what connects the notion of the human subject, as a norm of reason, with Hardt and Negri’s subjectivity of the multitude, and with philosophies of one immanent life from which relations emerge.

Any theory of the subject, according to Luce Irigaray, has always been masculinist: for what is refused in any notion of a life in general that is properly continuous with its manifestations, is the idea that difference might be positive.19 This would not be a difference from some ground of humanity, but between two human bodies, or two modes of relation. Irigaray’s feminine suggests that before there is a single power to differ, there might be incommensurable, distinct, or disconnected bodies that need to achieve and produce a relation. Bodies, then, would not be expressions or manifestations of “life,” not just powers to act, but points that determined and inflected acts and the idea of those acts. If we accepted that “life” was already different from itself, that it did not begin as a common self-expansive power, then we might have to accept a certain “technicity”20 or embodiment in life. Embodiment and technology are not vehicles through which life realizes itself. Life is not a pure

power so much as a disparate collection of parts, with the collection tending towards disconnection and misrecognition. Nowhere is this more evident than in everyday life, the domain of contingent, perverse, and resisting bodies.

If politics is seen as the realization and expression of life, with everydayness as either the ground or utopian outside of the political, then two problems ensue. First, the concepts and metaphors through which spontaneous life has been defined determine what counts as a proper political relation: the subject who realizes himself and presents himself without distortion or opacity. Second, if politics is deemed to be the expression of life then one positive possibility of everydayness is excluded. One dominant feature of everyday life is perversity, its deflection from the aims of life. "Activities" as diverse as marathon running, collecting, body-building, sado-masochism, cosmetic surgery, dieting, drug-taking, gambling, shopping, and even eating disorders can be interpreted as symptoms or signs of a deeper meaning, or can be explained as expressions of purposive life, as motivated by deferred pleasure or social recognition. But, often, such practices debilitate and impede the aim from which they emerge. I run or diet in order to improve my bodily well-being, but then I pursue the activity as an end in itself: starving myself to death, over-training to the point of collapse, ingesting substances that ultimately attack the body from which the aim supposedly emerged. Far from being the development of the human, it is possible to see everyday life as the refusal of life. In the face of a general, rational, and incontestable humanity a body engages in an act because it is possible. This possibility is not the realization of life, but the perverse delight taken in being at odds with life, where a body's power is not that of an intentional subjectivity so much as an assemblage: a collection of competing affects and powers. The body is not, as it was for phenomenology, the lived body expressive of a subject who transcends himself to constitute a life-world; it is not a body as the center of spatial and temporal coordination. The body is always already technical, and is at its most technical not in the image of a common self-defining rational humanity, but in its singular and perverse forms: when it refuses recognition. The body is everyday because it is that which resists collective justification, that which has a power irreducible to intentionality and consciousness.

The everyday is not a milieu of common opinion; nor is it the eruption of "life." It is a constant and overwhelming refusal of life. Philosophers who insist on the impossibility of contradiction, on the necessity of justification, on the humanity of life presuppose a common and self-realizing image of thought. What they must refuse is stupidity and malevolence (to use Deleuze's phrase)${}^{21}$ or the body that recoils

from itself through disgust (Derrida) (EM 14), or Irigaray's feminine: a body whose materiality is not potential awaiting form and reason. We could consider this potentiality or possibility that does not have its actuality in some immanent and imminent form as the everyday: all those refusals of recognition and corruptions of humanity that cannot be corrected. One way to interpret figures as diverse as Donna Haraway's cyborg, Franz Kafka's "hunger artist," and Dostoevsky's "underground man" is to see these bodies as peculiarly modern expressions of technology, as exceptional and existential refusals of the normality of the human. But to see these departures from life and humanity as postmodern and exceptional would be to miss one of the dominant features of everyday life—all the ways in which bodies embrace what is not conducive to self-expansion and recognition. If we accept that technology—the invasion of life by non-life—is not a postmodern accident but central to everyday life, then we might also have to arrive at a new concept of political responsibility.

Both the dialectical and immanent appeals to everyday life share a commitment to life that we could, following Derrida and Irigaray, refer to as phallogocentric (S 52). In the dialectical conception concepts, languages, ideas, and norms are ultimately fully human, capable in principle or at least ideally of being rendered transparent to the life from which they emerge. In the antidialectical refusal of mediation, life is defined as adequate to itself, as pure act liberated from the inertia or reification of ideas. If logocentrism is a commitment to a life which goes forth from itself, expresses itself, and requires nothing other than its own full presence in order to be, phallogocentrism is the traditionally gendered imagination of this myth of life. Indeed, according to Irigaray, there are not two sexes, with one sex being accorded a greater value. There is only one sex—an expansive, self-productive life whose "other" is nothing more than the vehicle through which production and self-recognition are mediated. The feminine is produced as that matter that is given form through life. Any element that is other than life, any body that cannot be consumed and rendered at one with productive life is refused as having any real being. As long as life is conceived as pure production that either generates what is other than life—some ideal of life—or proceeds fully only when liberated from the non-being of ideas and negativity, life is conceived as the univocal ground from which a proper political reality might be read. If life is a potential with a proper actualization then political disputes can, and do, concern the proper image of humanity on the basis of life. When this one proper life is interpreted as everyday life, and when that everydayness is given a common and human image, then the radical potential of the everyday is eliminated.

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POLITICS AND POTENTIAL

If everydayness is other than maximization, common production, shared norms, and already justified human interests, then a truly everyday ethics would act in the absence of humanity and sympathy and without reference to the increase of an overall human power. It is precisely because everyday life is already technical, already other than life, that it gives the lie to any inherent telos of humanity. Whereas Certeau's "tactics" emphasize acts before all recognition and end, we might also look at the non-acts in everyday life—the drugs, procedures, images, habits, addictions, and perversions that are radically passive, before all act and agency. If it is possible for a body to be other than life, possible for a body to pursue its own end despite reason, humanity, and purposiveness, then two political possibilities emerge.

Critically, one needs to think ethics and politics beyond the self-conscious and continuous act: how do bodily powers—that life that is not ours—determine and decide the domain of the political? How do all the indiscernible bodily powers, from genetics, drugs, morphology, and affect, constitute what is taken to be the norm of life and humanity? Positively, we could follow certain forms of feminism, such as Irigaray's, that put forward the project of an ethic irreducible to life. Irigaray refers to the feminine as the idea of that which is other than self-recognizing and self-constituting power. Not only does this suggest a gendered critique of the image of univocal and self-expansive life, it raises the possibility of a positive ethics already evidenced in everyday life. The political is not the realization of life so much as the recognition of all the ways in which an inappropriable non-life traverses bodies from the beginning.

UNIVERSITY OF EDINBURGH

NOTES

1 Such an understanding of everyday life is most evident in Martin Heidegger's Being and Time, where everydayness (Alltaglichkeit) is inauthentically dominated by an anonymous "they," where "das Mann" is both everyone and no-one, and where what is said and done is accepted without decision (Martin Heidegger, Being and Time, tr. Joan Stambaugh [New York, 1996]). Work on everyday life that, at least in part, adopts this Heidegerean tone includes Maurice Blanchot, "Everyday Speech," tr. Susan Hanson, Yale French Studies, 73 (1987), 12-20; Henri Lefebvre, Everyday Life in the Modern World, tr. Sacha Rabinovitz (London, 2000); and Agnes Heller's Everyday Life, tr. G. L. Campbell; hereafter cited in text as EL.

2 For every reading of Nietzsche that stresses the fluidity and impersonality of dynamic life, such as Gilles Deleuze's Nietzsche and Philosophy, tr. Hugh Tomlinson (London, 1983), there is also a reading that emphasizes Nietzsche's explicit use of persona, language, and perspective, such as Alexander Nehamas's Nietzsche: Life as Literature (Cambridge, Mass., 1985). Nietzsche clearly describes the ways in which concepts and human reason are

fictions imposed upon the flux of life in "On Truth and Lies in an Ultra-Moral Sense," in From Nietzsche's Notebooks of the Early 1870s, tr. Daniel Breazale (Atlantic Highlands, N.J., 1979). Henri Bergson emphasizes the primacy and power of mobile life in relation to fixed concepts and perceptions in Creative Evolution, tr. Arthur Mitchell (New York, 1911).

3. Jürgen Habermas, The Philosophical Discourse of Modernity: Twelve Lectures, tr. Frederick Lawrence (Cambridge, 1987), p. 389.

4. Charles Taylor, Sources of the Self: The Making of Modern Identity (Cambridge, 1989), p. 490.

5. Both these definitional tendencies in understanding woman are evidenced in Henri Lefebvre's Introduction to Modernity, where the feminine is both the body that must be conquered to realize civilization and the domination of nature, and the false development of autonomy, where the demand for women's rights perverts and distorts the passage to the full appropriation of nature and the realization of freedom. In this false appropriation, woman is against life: "She is undermining everything she lives for, everything she loves, everything she aspires to, life itself" (Henry Lefebvre, Introduction to Modernity: Twelve Preludes September 1959-May 1961, tr. John Moore [London, 1995], p. 154).

6. This would be in direct contrast to what Shawo ��ižek has recently referred to as the individual's commitment to the truth of life (On Belief [London, 2001]).

7. Alistair MacIntyre, After Virtue: A Study in Moral Theory (Indiana, 1984); Martha C. Nussbaum, The Fragility of Goodness (Cambridge, 1986); Charles Taylor, Sources of the Self.

8. Jacques Derrida, Edmund Husserl's Origin of Geometry: An Introduction by Jacques Derrida, tr. John P. Leavey (Lincoln, 1989), p. 153.

9. Alfred Schutz, The Phenomenology of the Social World, tr. George Walsh and Frederick Lehner (London, 1972).

10. Edmund Husserl, The Crisis of the European Sciences and Transcendental Phenomenology, tr. David Carr (Evanson, 1970), section 29.

11. Jacques Derrida, Speech and Phenomena and Other Essays on Husserl's Theory of Signs, tr. David B. Allison (Evanson, 1973), p. 6.

12. Edmund Husserl, Ideas Pertaining to a Pure Phenomenology and to Phenomenological Philosophy: First Book, tr. F. Kersten (Dordrecht, 1982), p. 52.

13. Friedrich Nietzsche, The Will to Power, tr. Walter Kaufmann and R.J. Hollingdale (New York, 1968).

14. Friedrich Nietzsche, "The Use and Abuse of History," tr. Adrian Collins, in The Complete Works of Friedrich Nietzsche, ed. Oscar Levy (London, 1910), vol. 5, part 2, p. 12.

15. Hartd and Negri argue that from an "ontological perspective"—the perspective of being or life itself—the "multitude is the real productive force of our social world" (Michael Hardt and Antonio Negri, Empire [Cambridge, Mass., 2000], p. 63; hereafter cited in text as E).

16. Michel de Certeau, The Practice of Everyday Life, tr. Steven Randall (Berkeley, 1984), p. 25; hereafter cited in text as PE.

17. Jacques Derrida, "Economimesis," tr. Peggy Kamuf, Diacritics, 11.2 (1981), 3-25, 6; hereafter cited in text as EM.

18. Henri Lefebvre, Critique of Everyday Life, vol. 1, tr. John Moore (London, 1991), p. 178.

19. Luce Irigaray, Speculum of the Other Woman, tr. Gillian C. Gill (Ithaca, 1985), pp. 134-46; hereafter cited in text as S.

20. Jacques Derrida, Spectres of Marx: The State of Debt, the Work of Mourning, and the New International, tr. Peggy Kamuf (New York, 1984), p. 75.

21. Gilles Deleuze, Difference and Repetition, tr. Paul Patton (New York, 1994).