Semiotics and Hermeneutics of the Everyday

emiotics
and Hermeneutics
of the Everyday

hemiotics
and Hermeneutics
of the Everyday

ed by
A Yoka and Gregory Paschalidis

Biotics and Hermeneutics of the Everyday

Edited by Lia Yoka and Gregory Paschalidis

The book first published 2015

Bridge Scholars Publishing

By Stephenson Library, Newcastle upon Tyne, NE6 2PA, UK

British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data
Catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library

Rights for this book reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced,
edited in a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means,
historic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise, without
prior permission of the copyright owner.

N (10): 1-4438-7192-3

N (13): 978-1-4438-7192-1

TABLE OF CONTENTS

Introduction: That Bloody Riddle... viii
Kaka and Gregory Paschalidis

Chapter 1: Concepts and Categories of the Everyday

Everyday is “Insignificant”... 2
A Vergopoulos

Five thousand breakfasts’: Banalizing Anti-Epiphany –
Thematical View... 14
Thehab

Biomiotics of Situationist Urban Theory... 25
Andros Ph. Lagopoulos

Chapter 2: The Everyday as Marketing Method and Ritual Practice

Table of Contents

Chapter 3: Style versus Constraint in the Languages of the Everyday

Day of the Earth: Everyday Objects, Functions and Thoughts
Poetic Creation of the Generation of the 1880s ... 130
A Pateridou

Under Daily Constraint(s): The Case of Administrative Logging ... 142
Campaignolle

A Dominant Text Type in Everyday Life ... 166
Wiedenmayer

The Flow of Signs: Everyday Creative Actions
Discontinuities of Museum and Gallery Display ... 176
Dorsett with Sachiyo Goda

Day Practices on the Internet and the Expansion of Crowdsourced Education ... 193
Dimitroulia

Chapter 4: Representing the Quotidian

African Quotidian of the Ivorian Society as Seen through

"Everyday is a whole story, even when you believe nothing’s happened":

Us Réda and the Everyday..... 290
Under Hertich

INTRODUCTION:
THAT BLOODY RIDDLE

BELIA YOKA AND GREGORY PASCHALIDIS

'The proposition here is to decode the modern world, that bloody riddle, according to the everyday'
—Lefebvre 1987

ure painters, novelists, ethnologists, psychologists and historians acknowledged the category of the everyday long before its utilization in the intellectual agenda of the late 20th century. As diverse air concerns were, they all shared a general appreciation of the way as a spatio-temporal backdrop, a framework of action, the basso wo to their leading themes. For cultural historian Johan Huizinga, the musical reference would mean much more than a metaphor. Day life in mediaeval villages and townships was, according to him, lessly orchestrated by the sound of church bells, whose familiar new call led upon the citizens to mourn and now to raise new

Life. It is here, in the context of his praise of the brisk sketches of Constantine Guys, a newspaper illustrator with a keen eye on contemporary modes and manners, that Baudelaire defines the objective of painting to be the quick capture of the transitory, fugitive and urgent element of modernity (Baudelaire 1992: 393-4). The delayedation of his essay in the autumn of 1863, a few months after the scandal provoked by the exhibition of Edward Manet’s Déjeuner derbe at the first Salon des Refusés, makes it the unwitting manifesto of nascent impressionist movement which was to excel in meeting Baudelaire’s demand for a vibrant ‘pictorial record of everyday life’ (Baudelaire 1992: 407). Baudelaire’s emphasis on innovative forms and techniques appropriate to the task of apprehending the complexity and nuance of the modern everyday permeates the whole of the subsequent period of visual modernism, generating a series of successive waves and faces, from the audacity of the early avant-gardes and the ceaseless teness of photography and cinema, to the bewildering diversity of modern polyglossia, encompassing pop and neo-pop art, Fluxus and vera, graffiti and performance art, video and digital art.

Longside the seemingly boundless fertility of Baudelaire’s programme of visual modernism, the question of the everyday became perhaps the distinctive feature of literary modernism as well. From the negation of the interface between internal and external world in Made Stein, James Joyce, Virginia Woolf, John Dos Passos and Alfred Hitchcock to the dense thing-worlds of George Perec or Alain Robbe-Grillet,

was the fundamental structure of our Being-in-the-world in his 1927
dedicated to Edmund Husserl" Sein und Zeit.) In any case, the
named effect of Freud’s analytics of the dream-world in his
deutung (1900) and his approach to everyday parapraxes was not
to expand the remit of psychoanalytic hermeneutics beyond the walls
abnormal into the realm of ordinariness, but also to effectively
close the riddle of common behavioral phenomena from the sphere of
tition and mythology to that of psychical dynamics.

The concept of the everyday, with its merging of repetitive, cyclical
with progressive, linear time, predicates a type of historical
mousness that weaves together the micro-level of social experience
action with the macro-level of socio-cultural development. In this way
is theorize the production and reproduction of norms, as well as the
ing and refashioning of norms. Hence the significance it acquired,
in only decades of the 20th century, for cultural sociologists like Georg
el and Norbert Elias, for cultural critics like Walter Benjamin,
led Kracauer and Adolf Loos, for both left-wing and right-wing
civil and moral reform programmes aimed at the construction of
New Man, and for cultural iconoclasts like the avant-garde artists of
ism and constructivism.

Most of these strands of early 20th century engagement with the
day can be found tangled together in a series of texts that have all the
journalistic immediacy, brevity and probing energy that, a century
paudelaire demanded from his fellow artists and strove to achieve

Mythologies was destined to become the foundational text of our semiotics, acting as a template for the subsequent development of ethics as ideological critique, as "semioclasm" (iconoclasm of signs), project of demystifying the social world of signs and meanings so to and closely associated with Lefebvre's simultaneously inspiring project of the critique of everyday life. The confluence of these projects during the ascent of the problematics of everyday life in the stamped the way the counter-cultural politics of the period dated its distinctively libertarian but also anti-speculative rhetoric.

Vaneigem’s aphorism that 'there are more truths in twenty-four of a man's life than in all the philosophies' (2001: 21), as well as Lebord’s key focus on concrete daily life, develop and re-politicise mystificatory drive inspiring both Barthes and Lefebvre while, at the time, radicalizing Husserl’s call for 'a return to the things ourselves' as a return to human praxis.

Husserl stopped short of unmooring the everyday from the fallacies common sense, failing thus to validate it in a manner that would make it active basis for the critique of rationalism, for Michel de Certeau, by rest, the everyday is inherently marked by the uncontrolled and covert, used, tactical, and makeshift creativity of groups or individuals' (de Luu 1988: xiv-xv). His path-breaking researches into the practices of everyday, the shadowy continent of microscopic, multiform techniques natural re-appropriation and re-employment resonate closely with what to Eco (1990) had described as 'semiological guerilla warfare', the

the canonization of the everyday in the past few decades is largely due to anthropological turn in the social sciences and humanities. Heavily on the use of ethnography and participant observation, both uses of micro-sociology – Harold Garfinkel’s ethnomethodology and Goffman’s dramaturgical approach – advanced the sociology of day life as the inquiry into how people make sense of and construct social world. The anthropological concept of culture, on the other hand, was the engine of growth of a new range of historiographical studies. Beginning with the rise of new social history in the 1960s, the 1980s saw the emergence of the French nouvelle histoire, the German Alltagsgeschichte, the Italian micro-history, as well as women’s history, new urban history, new cultural geography and new cultural theories.

The linchpin of the momentous paradigm shift that produced this new synthesis of everyday life was a focus on people as active agents in its cultural contexts, uses and practices, the merging of the national distinctions between the private and the public, the local and global, the material and the symbolic, the bridging of the micro-structure divide marking the grand historical and cultural lives. In their place a wealth of new kinds of narratives was produced what had been traditionally taken for granted, condemned or ignored, unmarked and overlooked as mundane, trivial and inconsequential. This conclusion to the first volume of his magnum opus on the rise of racism, whereby he introduced the everyday of life into the domain of

Concepts and Categories of the Everyday

In the vein of a “third generation” of cultural studies, and also forming of the inevitable negotiation of semiotic tools and hermeneutical, this volume attempts to re-examine dominant and peripheral aspects of the theory, performance and representation of the everyday, adding a few more flags onto its historical and conceptual map.

Vergopoulos speaks of the everyday as a category that passes with the semiotic to go beyond the semiotic by claiming Roland’s category of the “neutral” for the everyday. She speaks of the way as social experience of time and space, rather than as the time space of experience, and provides the postwar critical and philosophical itinerary that would lead to Poirier’s literary phrase: Instead searching for the meaning of things, it might be wiser to appreciate physical gravity: to palpate them, to taste them, to feel them.

Mathematical tools like statistics, the laws of large numbers, the notion “average man”, and the underlying probabilistic reasoning behind those tools lie at the heart of the concept of “everyday man”. May also examines this reasoning at the cross-section of mathematics and nature, mainly in the work of Robert Musil and Maguerite Yourcenar. In the context of the abandonment in modernity of traditional

Introduction

The geography on the one hand, and on the other within Marxist and social geographies that see social revolutionary potential in the formation of everyday culture.

Everyday as Marketing Method and Ritual Practice

An anthropologist Lilly Stylianoudi, in analyzing pre-European Maori living practices and their meanings today, proposes a dialectics of the day and the everlasting in order to understand the play of collective joy and history in the practice and ritual of “carving” the body, which is everyday appearance to primordial moments of society.

Mini Tsibiridou argues that the political production and marketing of pious signifiers amongst the Muslim population, particularly women, Middle East (and beyond) has created, since the 1980s, a “new field power, shaping gender, individuality, personhood, collectivities and virtue”. The creation of the identity of the pious Muslim consumer on manipulating representations of Islam has been the conscious, self-driven collaborative project of both local authoritarian rulers and market regulators.

Continuing the discussion of Salafi religious representations as being on the level of economic theory, Charitatos and Christodoulou on luxury, another aspect of immaterial capital. Their semiotic analysis of traditional economic categories shows how, in the global brand world, the “loop between the creation of imaginary money and the

ing point and school textbook reference for national ideology, and in a administrative writing that attempts to create a supra-stylistic form of state language. The next two texts take the game of education to its extremes: American action film subtitles seem to simplify, compress and level a narrative, while museum and gallery can completely dissociate exhibited objects from signification or retention.

Georgia Pateridou examines the new privilege of the “everyday” as a style and type of poetry, over the traditional types and narratives of state nationalism. Through little songs, unthreatening form, style at border of satirical criticism, representations of calm nature and innocent love, the 1880s generation of poets in modern Greece, later to be a prominent part of national literature, were the first to attempt to capture the heroic moments in the early canonical narrative of the state.

Overseeing the inquiry, this structural-anthropological issue of the meanings produced by the systematics of signification of the day is visited by Helene Campaignolle on the same testing ground of and linguistic functions. Exploring whether one can pinpoint the central moment of passage from the “singularity of writing” to a form of rules she asks whether “style” actually exists as a category for standing what it is that creates a “sense of everyday routine” in administrative writing, as opposed to the de-familiarizing effects ofness.

Introduction

Elia-specific studies. It opens with an exploration of Ivorian everyday life in the six volumes of the comics series Aya de Yopougon. Ferreira-Is places this sequential story of the 1970s and 1980s as seen by a woman, her family and friends within the realistic comic book thematizing everyday life in Africa.

Ana Mselmi turns to the contradictions of the Arab quotidian, where normality and repetitiveness associated with the modernist Western way are not to be taken for granted. She points to the narrative films which allegorize the silence imposed upon the extraordinary human everyday life in Elia Suleiman’s The Time That Remains, or highlight the interplay of the subjective and the documentary in named Zran’s Living Here, about living in a southeastern Tunisian stark contrast to the Arab filmmakers’ expressive intention to inform the general public about their countries, 17 Greek films, all competing for the Great Award of the Hellenic Film Academy, attempt to critically examine the complexities of self-identity and otherness in contemporary society. Rea Wallden’s semiotic study discusses the narrative and techniques that produce views of racism, sexism and homophobia as part of ‘othering’ today.

A different point of view of othering, for which the dominant identity stands on promoting and co-opting the diversity of local identities, is used by Evangelos Kourdis’s study of intra-linguual translation in television advertisement. TV product advertisements in historical

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Fernand (1992) Civilization & Capitalism, 15th-18th century, vol. 1

The Structures of Everyday Life, trans. S. Reynolds. Berkeley-Los Angeles: University of California Press

Guy (1995) The Society of the Spectacle, trans. D. Nicholson-Sith. New York: Zone Books

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