Toward a Psychology of Everyday Living

Author: Charlotte Højholt & Ernst Schraube
Year: 2015 (Introduction to Psychology and the Conduct of Everyday Life, eds. Højholt & Schraube)
Source type: chapter (book introduction)
Raw file: raw/chapters/Toward_a_psychology_of_everyday_living.md

Summary

This is the introduction to an edited volume that takes psychology out of the laboratory and into the "conduct of everyday life." Drawing on German critical psychology (notably Klaus Holzkamp), the authors propose the conduct of everyday life (alltägliche Lebensführung) as psychology's basic category: the active, integrative, and collective way subjects arrange, coordinate, and make sense of the multiplicity of contradictory demands across the contexts of home, work, education, and leisure. The concept mediates between the individual subject and societal structures, overcoming psychology's "abstract individualism" while recognizing the subject's productive and reproductive agency within given conditions.

Key Claims

• The conduct of everyday life is "the elementary form of human existence" (Holzkamp). Psychology's proper subject matter is not the individual in isolation but "the subject within the context of her/his conduct of everyday life."
• Against the laboratory: conventional psychology's experimental construction isolates factors and variables in an artificial reality, raising the question of whether its findings transfer to everyday reality. A turn to everyday living re-grounds psychological knowledge in the contexts where phenomena actually unfold.
• Three dimensions of the conduct of life: (1) the ordinary/cyclical — habits, routines, rhythms that "relieve us of the need to constantly observe, negotiate and justify"; (2) the extra-ordinary/productive — transcending routines to meet disruptive or new demands; and (3) the subject's integrative sense-making — the broader imagination of how we see the world and what we want from life.
• It is fundamentally collective and conflictual: the conduct of life is "the arrangement of the individual arrangements," created, maintained, and negotiated in coordination with others' lives. Conflict is inherent to social practice, not an intermittent disturbance.
• Both a critique of individualization and a risk of it: the concept can expose how individualization and governance operate, but a scholarly interest in "conduct of life" may itself "gravitate toward individualistic discourses" enabling the "monitor[ing], discipline and regulat[ion] of the lives of others."
• The volume's methods favour participatory, situated research with subjects as "co-researchers," exploring societal problems "from the standpoints of the subjects."
• Related essays address homelessness and the ordinary in the extra-ordinary (Hodgetts et al.), the debt economy (Caffentzis), reproductive labour (Federici), learning and digitalization (Schraube & Marvakis), Gramsci/commons sense and memory-work (Haug), and Adorno's "no right life in the wrong one" (Osterkamp).

Connections

Concepts: Everyday Life · Ideology
Authors: Henri Lefebvre (Critique of Everyday Life, cited) · Michel de Certeau (cited)
Related source notes: The Practice of Everyday Life (de Certeau) · Critique of Everyday Life (Lefebvre) · Sociology of Everyday Life (Kalekin-Fishman)

Direct Quotes

"The conduct of everyday life is ... the elementary form of human existence." (Holzkamp, cited)

"Everyday life is profoundly related to all activities, and encompasses them with all their differences and their conflicts; it is their meeting place, their bond and their common ground." (Lefebvre, cited, p. 97)

"The conduct of everyday life represents a mediating category between the individual subjects and societal structures."

Open Questions

• Does the "conduct of everyday life" (critical psychology) offer a more rigorous subject-based account of the everyday than the cultural-theoretical ones (de Certeau, Lefebvre) that dominate Geoffrey's framework — or a complementary one?