Everyday Life: The Transformation of the Meaning of Agency

Author: Zeynep Cansu Başeren
Year: 2011
Source type: article (unpublished paper)
Raw file: raw/articles/baseren-2011-everyday-life-agency-transformation.md

Summary

Başeren examines everyday life through the lens of agency, cross-reading Situationist theorists (Debord, Vaneigem, Lefebvre) with cultural studies scholars (Willis, Hebdige). The paper traces how everyday life has been associated with "chores, mindless activities, fulfillment of 'basic needs' and reproduction of banal social relations" based on cyclical time, but argues that everyday life can be a site of cultural activity and agency. Debord's spectacle renders the subject passive, creating "pseudocyclical time" of modern survival where experience is "cut off from decision-making." Vaneigem insists that liberation lies "in what is most familiar" and that revolution must address everyday life explicitly. The paper contrasts metaphysical approaches (everyday life as void of culture to be transcended) with broader cultural definitions (everyday life as product and reproducer of culture).

Key Claims

• Lefebvre's starting point: "If we wish to define everyday life," writes Lefebvre, "we must first define the society where it is lived, where the quotidian and modernity take root", since the quotidian is "a guide line for an understanding of 'society'" (Lefebvre 1971: 28).

• Everyday life defined: "The expression 'everyday life' most of the time refers to the collection of most routine, familiar and 'naturalized' practices that may be completely trivial, or on the contrary, essential for our survival."

• Cyclical time: Everyday life "implicates a certain type of 'time' in the sense that what makes 'the quotidian' is repetition and a particular familiar arrangement of actions (waking up, having breakfast, going to work at a certain hour, going to sleep at a certain hour, doing certain things on certain days of the week etc.)." This is "based on a 'cyclical perception of time', which is typically associated with agrarian communities and in general with 'pre-modernity'."

• Metaphysical vs. cultural approaches:

  • Metaphysical: If culture = "artistic forms, philosophical activity and all that is thought to 'cultivate' the human soul and mind, then everyday life becomes a space mostly void of culture and it therefore has to be transcended occasionally or entirely." This approach contains "a certain myth of interiority" — every human has an interior life to be discovered.
  • Cultural: If culture is taken "in its broadest sense... everyday life becomes a very important site for cultural activity: everyday life itself is a product of culture and it in turn reproduces cultural processes, forms and activities as well as transforming them."

• Marxist approach: "In Marxist line of thought, everyday life is the site of alienation, false consciousness and conformism; this being so however, it is also the site of class struggle and the very product of relations of production and labour." The critique concerns "routineness and mechanicity." "The project of 'the wholesome human being' is faced with the obstacle of 'everyday life' to which it is transcendental."

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

• Two points about spectacle:

  1. Passivity: "If modern life is fundamentally a spectacle, then the subject finds him or herself in a position of passivity. The 'spectator' does not have much agency and he/she is surely not an active agent of meaning-making." Social and political structures "seal off individual agency and creativity within semiotic and linguistic processes that imitate life itself."

  2. Historical rupture: "Assuming that 'there has been once a life directly lived' implicate a historical rupture: what is being experienced today, i.e. the spectacle, is strictly a modern phenomenon."

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

• Real unreality: "The expression 'real unreality' indicates that the world Debord conceives is, in fact, a world of duality, where reality is rendered inaccessible by 'the spectacle'." But spectacle and reality are not pure opposition — "The spectacle that falsifies reality is nevertheless a real product of that reality."

• Pseudocyclical time: Debord attributes to everyday life not "cyclical" but "pseudocyclical" time. "Pseudocyclical time is associated with the consumption of modern economic survival — the augmented survival in which everyday experience is cut off from decision-making and subjected no longer to the natural order, but to the pseudo-nature created by alienated labor" (Debord 2002: 86). "Everyday life in modern societies rests on cyclical time just like preindustrial societies; but if the latter depend on the cycles of nature, the former depend on alienating modern structures and relations of labour."

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

• Visual order: Modern societies value "'image' and 'appearance' above all and attribute a quality of truth and goodness to them." "The spectacle presents itself as a vast inaccessible reality that can never be questioned. Its sole message is 'What appears is good, what is good appears'" (Debord 2002: 9-10).

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

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

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

• Liberation in the familiar: "'The surest chances of liberation lie in what is most familiar' (Vaneigem 2001: 22) and this is exactly why everyday life has to be transformed."

Connections

Concepts: everyday-life, spectacle
Authors: debord-guy, vaneigem-raoul, lefebvre-henri
Debates: formal-vs-material-utopianism
Related source notes: debord-2021-society-of-the-spectacle, vaneigem-2001-revolution-of-everyday-life, lefebvre-1991-critique-of-everyday-life

Direct Quotes

"If we wish to define everyday life, we must first define the society where it is lived, where the quotidian and modernity take root" — Lefebvre

"In societies dominated by modern conditions of production prevail life is presented as an immense accumulation of spectacles. Everything that once was directly lived has receded into a representation." — Debord

"Understood in its totality, the spectacle is both the result and the goal of the dominant mode of production. It is not a mere decoration added to the real world. It is the very heart of society's real unreality."

"Pseudocyclical time is associated with the consumption of modern economic survival — the augmented survival in which everyday experience is cut off from decision-making and subjected no longer to the natural order, but to the pseudo-nature created by alienated labor."

"People who talk about revolution and class struggle without referring explicitly to everyday life, without understanding what is subversive about love and what is positive in the refusal of constraints — such people have a corpse in their mouth." — Vaneigem

"The surest chances of liberation lie in what is most familiar." — Vaneigem

Open Questions

• How does Başeren's reading of Situationist agency connect to de Certeau's "tactics" — are both accounts of resistance within the everyday, or do they differ fundamentally?
• What is the relationship between "pseudocyclical time" and Virilio's picnolepsy — both involve temporal disruption, but one is alienating and the other...?
• How does the cultural studies approach (Willis, Hebdige) differ from the Situationist approach to everyday agency? Is one more optimistic about resistance?
• Does the empirical finding "visuality peaks, function lasts" confirm or complicate Debord's spectacle theory?