The Politics and Potential of Everyday Life

Author: Claire Colebrook
Year: 2002 (New Literary History 33(4), "Everyday Life" issue)
Source type: article
Raw file: raw/articles/colebrook-2002.md

Summary

Colebrook examines the philosophical concept of everyday life and its politics, tracing two traditions: a dialectical/critical one in which everyday life is the ground from which concepts emerge and to which they must be returned, and an immanent/utopian one (Nietzsche, Bergson, Deleuze & Guattari, Hardt & Negri) in which everyday life is affirmed as pure, creative life freed from mediation. She argues that both traditions share a normative concept of "life," and — via de Certeau (tactics vs. strategies, la perruque) and Irigaray's critique — she proposes thinking the everyday otherwise: as discontinuous, perverse, "the refusal of life," a non-self-identical, always-technical domain.

Key Claims

• Two traditions, one norm of life: everyday life is defined against abstraction/reification, whether as requiring theoretical fulfillment or as radically prior to ideality. Both assume life "has a certain value" and tends to its own actualization.
• The dialectical tradition: from Aristotle to neo-Aristotelians (MacIntyre, Nussbaum, Taylor) and phenomenology (Husserl's life-world; Schutz), everyday life is the critique of any transcendent system; but they insist life needs some mediating idea of the good to be fulfilled. Philosophy is the realization of life.
• The immanent/utopian tradition: Nietzsche, Bergson, Deleuze & Guattari, and Hardt & Negri's Empire affirm the "multitude" as pure constituent power (potentia) against constituted Power (potestas); everyday "immaterial labour" and communication networks are the machine of the community; globalism does its violence through biopower operating "at the level of daily life."
• de Certeau on tactics: tactics are "pure acts" that expose the limit of strategies (e.g. la perruque — "wasting time"); "an everyday tactic is everyday because it occurs without reference to a larger whole," a power sufficient to itself; against Foucault's assumption of a constituting power, Certeau affirms "singular, unsystemic, and dilatory" everyday action.
• The gender of life (Irigaray): life as a single self-expansive power remains "subjective" and masculinist; Irigaray's feminine names an "essential nonequivalence in the quotidian" — difference as positive, bodies as "always already technical." The everyday as "the refusal of life," where "life does not begin as a common self-expansive power."
• Conclusion — the everyday 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, neither leading to theoretical illumination nor bearing its own self-emancipating counterlogic.

Connections

Concepts: Everyday Life · Everyday Architecture
Authors: Claire Colebrook
Debates: (theory of the everyday)
Related source notes: (related: everyday theory cluster)

Direct Quotes

"[E]verydayness owes a debt to the notion of life."

"[A]n everyday tactic is everyday because it occurs without reference to a larger whole. It is a power sufficient unto itself."

"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 not a milieu of common opinion; nor is it the eruption of 'life.' It is a constant and overwhelming refusal of life."

Open Questions

• Can the everyday be a site of resistance (de Certeau, Lefebvre) without reinstating a normative "life" the very critiques deconstruct?
• How does the philosophical theory of everyday life (Colebrook, de Certeau, Lefebvre) connect to the architectural everyday (Agarez & Mota, Boucsein) — as complementary or opposed?