Cultural Phenomenology and the Everyday

Author: Stephen Clucas
Year: 2000
Source type: article (Critical Quarterly, vol. 42, no. 1)
Raw file: raw/articles/clucas-2000-cultural-phenomenology-and-the-everyday.md

Summary

Clucas argues for a "materialist phenomenology of daily life" — a cultural phenomenology attentive to the overlooked, ephemeral, quotidian objects and practices that philosophy has consigned to non-philosophy. He reconstructs this project through a lineage: Kracauer's reading of mass-cultural artifacts as encrypted indices of historical conditions; Adorno's Negative Dialectics as a "negative phenomenology" that philosophizes "out of" concrete things rather than about them; Lefebvre's critique of the quotidian; de Certeau's politicization of everyday practices; and Blanchot's account of the everyday as the non-event. He concludes by proposing, via Alliez's "negative phenomenology" (drawing on Deleuze & Guattari and Badiou), a mode of description that is local, incomplete, provisional, and rhetorical — one that records the everyday's multiplicity without reducing it to a system.

Key Claims

• Kracauer's materialist phenomenology: the "position that an epoch occupies in the historical process can be determined more strikingly from an analysis of its inconspicuous surface-level expressions than from that epoch's judgements about itself." The very insignificance of quotidian artifacts makes them "reliable indices or symptoms of specific historical conditions."
• The everyday as philosophy's excluded non-philosophy: the everyday enters philosophical discourse "precisely as that which is non-philosophy." Heidegger thematizes everyday Dasein but codes average everydayness as inauthentic and deluded — an "evasive turning away" from primordial being — so his phenomenology is "precisely opposed to those qualities which are constitutive of the quotidian: the aimless, the haphazard, the arbitrary."
• Adorno's negative phenomenology: Adorno's Negative Dialectics seeks a "turn towards nonidentity," philosophizing "out of" concrete, ephemeral objects rather than subordinating them to prefabricated categories. The everyday is the privileged "ephemeral object" of such non-conceptual investigation. Adorno's "thought models" would uncover the "sedimented history" congealed in things — "the history locked in the object" — without reverting to a system. But he rejects an aesthetic solution: "A philosophy that tried to imitate art... would be expunging itself."
• Lefebvre's critique of the quotidian: Lefebvre makes everyday life an object of philosophical reflection, arguing "The Quotidian is a philosophical concept that cannot be understood outside philosophy" — it "designates for and by philosophy the non-philosophical." His aim is a "radical transformation of everyday life" and an ideological analysis of it, since the everyday is "made of recurrences... cyclical repetitions" determined by the laws of capital. But his "axiomatisation" of everydayness risks the systematic formalism Adorno warned against, descending into the "theory of moments."
• De Certeau's politicization: de Certeau recovers the "stubborn guileful everyday practices" through the "tactics" or "ruses" of subversive use, against the social scientist's "ambition to dominate and control" the object of knowledge. "A theory of practices" is "indissociable" from "a theory of narration."
• Blanchot's everyday as non-event: for Blanchot the everyday is "without a subject," the uneventful, "the movement by which man... holds himself back in human anonymity." It "puts in question the notion of subject." It is a region of speech where "the determinations true and false... do not apply." Blanchot reads its infinity as a negative/destructive potential, refusing to represent the everyday except as radically unrepresentable.
• Negative phenomenology as method: via Alliez (drawing on Deleuze & Guattari and Badiou), Clucas proposes a "negative phenomenology" that resists both Husserlian transcendental formalism and "phenomenological positivism." It would use "inexact morphological concepts" and treat the concept as "the description of the figures of the multiple as a living tissue." Description should be local, incomplete, provisional, rhetorical — "striving for verisimilar rather than veridical effects" — exemplified by Perec's inventories and Cortazar's fragmentary recording of the quotidian.

Connections

Concepts: Everyday Life · Dwelling · Atmosphere
Authors: Theodor Adorno · Henri Lefebvre · Michel de Certeau · Martin Heidegger
Debates: Theories of the Everyday
Related source notes: Critique of Everyday Life (Lefebvre) · The Practice of Everyday Life (de Certeau) · The Politics and Potential of Everyday Life (Colebrook)

Direct Quotes

"The position that an epoch occupies in the historical process can be determined more strikingly from an analysis of its inconspicuous surface-level expressions than from that epoch's judgements about itself." (Kracauer, quoted)

"The everyday is platitude... 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." (Blanchot, quoted)

"The Quotidian is a philosophical concept that cannot be understood outside philosophy." (Lefebvre, quoted)

"Not until then 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." (Adorno, quoted)

Open Questions

• Clucas's "negative phenomenology" is a methodological proposal — does it offer a usable critical apparatus for reading architecture's everyday reception, or does it dissolve into the very aestheticism (Perec's inventories, Cortazar's fragments) it claims to ground?
• How does the "materialist phenomenology" lineage (Kracauer → Adorno → Lefebvre) relate to the wiki's Phenomenology theme, which is dominated by the architectural phenomenology of dwelling/place (Heidegger, Norberg-Schulz, Pallasmaa)? Clucas's is a critical-materialist phenomenology of the everyday rather than an existential-normative one.