The Moving Ground: Locating Everyday Life

Author: Catherine Driscoll
Year: 2001
Source type: article (The South Atlantic Quarterly, vol. 100, no. 2)
Raw file: raw/articles/driscoll-2001-moving-ground-locating-everyday-life.md

Summary

Driscoll asks how cultural studies "locates" everyday life as its object, reading Michel de Certeau's model of the everyday against the broader frame of his work — especially his critiques of history and his psychoanalytic foundations. She argues that cultural studies, in taking up The Practice of Everyday Life, has largely neglected the Lacanian structure of the Other that underwrites de Certeau's account. The everyday is positioned as the "unknowable cultural substratum" — the Other of culture — and cultural studies grounds its own authorization by positing everyday life as an "unconscious" system of meaning. Driscoll concludes by asking whether the everyday can be rethought as "the practice of the subject through the position of everyday life" without the psychologized model of the Unconscious or the place of the Other.

Key Claims

• The everyday as the Other of culture: de Certeau specifies the everyday as "the cultural activity of the non-producers of culture, an activity that is unsigned, unreadable and unsymbolized." It is opposed, first and foremost, to cultural analysis — "the place from which one deals with culture." The everyday is thus positioned as the unknowable substratum, "the marginality of a majority."
• The psychoanalytic foundations of de Certeau: de Certeau's cultural analyses "consistently turn on a process of differential recognition and on a figure of unknowable but constitutive difference that, following Jacques Lacan, might be called the Other." Speech becomes possible only with the presumption of an Other — "there precisely as it is recognized, but as it is not known." The possibility of speaking of culture requires "the Other as the site of lack."
• Cultural studies' neglect of the psychoanalytic frame: cultural studies has appropriated de Certeau's tactics and "ways of operating" while evading the significance of psychoanalytic practice to his work — the model of the Unconscious upon which the resistance and productive redirection of culture was based. The everyday is posited as an "unconscious" system of meaning, which "establishes the grounds of its own authorization."
• The everyday as unknowable and unplaced: "the everyday is already arguably organized (placed) by either its exclusion from 'cultural analysis' or its placement as an object for cultural studies." It is "fundamentally unknowable" — "the place of the Other, excluded from the proper organization of culture." The everyday "accords with the Imaginary and the Unconscious."
• Certeau between Lacan and Foucault: de Certeau draws on both Lacan and Foucault — accepting and expanding on Lacan's interest in what appears outside discourse, while interrogating Foucault's claim of the internality of everything to discourse. His critique of Foucault (where does change come from? what about the Unconscious?) "enacts the foundational maneuver of cultural studies by pointing out the resistant aspects of practices that might otherwise seem complicit with 'dominant' discourses."
• Rethinking the everyday without the Other: Driscoll asks whether the everyday can be rethought as "the practice of the subject through the position of everyday life" — "the set of tactics and technologies by which the self is constituted (however transiently) within culture" — without the psychologized model of the subject (the Unconscious, the place of the Other). This would mean relinquishing "the romance of 'the ordinary man'" to whom de Certeau dedicated The Practice of Everyday Life.

Connections

Concepts: Everyday Life · Everyday Architecture
Authors: Michel de Certeau · Henri Lefebvre · Michel Foucault
Debates: Theories of the Everyday
Related source notes: The Practice of Everyday Life (de Certeau) · The Politics and Potential of Everyday Life (Colebrook) · Architecture in Everyday Life (Upton)

Direct Quotes

"The everyday is the cultural activity of the non-producers of culture, an activity that is unsigned, unreadable and unsymbolized." (de Certeau, quoted)

"Other regions give us back what our culture has excluded from its discourse." (de Certeau, quoted)

"The everyday is what we are first of all, and most often: at work, at leisure, awake, asleep, in the street, in private existence. The everyday, then, is ourselves, ordinarily." (Blanchot, quoted)

Open Questions

• Driscoll's metacritique — that cultural studies constitutes the everyday as an unknowable Other to authorize its own analysis — parallels Colebrook's and Upton's dissolution of the category. Does the everyday survive as an object once its "unknowability" is exposed as a disciplinary construction?
• The Lacanian reading of de Certeau (the everyday as the Imaginary/Unconscious) is a distinctive interpretive claim — does it sit with the wiki's more materialist readings of de Certeau (tactics, walking, poaching), or does it psychologize what Upton grounds in the habitus?