Everyday Practices and Practical Formalization: The Jurisdiction of Indifferent Everydayness

Author: Kolyo Koev
Year: 2010
Source type: article (Critique and Humanism Journal, Issue 35, pp. 203-227)
Raw file: raw/articles/koev-2010-everyday-practices-practical-formalization.md

Summary

Koev reconstructs Heidegger's concept of "indifferent everydayness" from Being and Time and juxtaposes it with Garfinkel's ethnomethodology to develop a radical vision of everydayness that avoids institutional overcodification. The article distinguishes everydayness (Alltäglichkeit) as "a way to be" from everyday life (Alltag) as calendrical regularity. Koev argues that indifferent everydayness is an a priori totality "on the point of departure" — a tense structure of potentialities that precedes empirical actualizations. Through analysis of care (Sorge), concern (Besorgen), worldhood, and privation, Koev shows how everydayness is the privileged access to Dasein's being-in-the-world. The article connects Heidegger's "disturbance tendency" to Garfinkel's breaching experiments and develops the concept of "practical formalizations" as everyday means of counteracting possible disturbances.

Key Claims

• Indifferent everydayness as methodological imperative: Heidegger's shibboleth "proximally and for the most part" — "Dasein should not be interpreted with the differentiated character of some definite way of existing, but... in the undifferentiated character which it has proximally and for the most part. This undifferentiated character of Dasein's everydayness is not nothing, but a positive phenomenal characteristic of this entity" (Heidegger, 1962, p.69).

• Everydayness vs. everyday life (Alltag): Heidegger differentiates everydayness (Alltäglichkeit) as "a definite 'how' of the being of Dasein" from everyday life (Alltag) as "the sum of those 'days' which have been allotted to Dasein in its 'lifetime'" — calendrical regularity. "We are reporting no particular everyday life but we are seeking the everydayness of everyday life, the fact in its facticity" (Heidegger, 1985, p.155).

• Indifference as a priori totality: "Indifference" does not mean neutrality/unconcern. "The thus presented totality is a tensed structure, modo potentiali; it is in a state maintained just before its manifestation in different empirical actualizations: it is, as it were, 'on the point of departure' (auf dem Sprung)." Indifferent everydayness is "a perfect tense a priori which characterizes the kind of Being belonging to Dasein itself."

• Pre-ontological closeness: Everydayness in its indifference expresses Dasein's "pre-ontological closeness" — "ontically 'closest' to itself and ontologically farthest; but pre-ontologically it is surely not a stranger" (Heidegger, 1962, p.37). We start from a "vague average understanding of Being" as a fact.

• Disturbance tendency (Störungstendenz): Following Rainer Schubert, Koev identifies "a situation in between total absence of disturbance and factual disturbance of the functioning of what is ready-to-hand." "What we have in the disturbance tendency is not an alternation in time of unproblematic functioning... and factual disturbance... but an internal interconnection, preceding every factual disturbance, between unproblematic functioning and the possibility that it may be disturbed" (Schubert, 1995, p.42).

• Practical formalizations: "Everyday means of initial counteraction against possible disturbances of ordinary everyday functioning... things present-at-hand that result from everyday interactions themselves but that are seen as unavoidable elements of the reproduction of everyday life." These are "unintended, non-negotiated, liminal upshots of everyday actions" that become habitualized, acquiring "naturalness." They are "an autonomized (and eventually institutional) expression of embodied patterns of action" — not externally imposed norms.

• Care and concern: "The structural totality 'care' (Sorge) permeates the being of Dasein and can be described only through its everyday concernful being-in-the-world." "Concern resides within it [Dasein] but does not recognize it as such. Concern, however, knows its environing world [Umwelt] perfectly well" (Heidegger, 2004a, p.23).

• Privation as positive phenomenon: Life is structured by care, which reflects its "in-principle privation." "'Privation' (privatio, carentia) is both the relational and intrinsic basic mode and sense of the Being of life." In "unobtrusiveness," "inconspicuousness," the practical invisibility of what is ready-to-hand is a positive phenomenon. Even smoothly functioning readiness-to-hand is "a sign of overpowered resistances" — conformity with the disturbance tendency.

• Worldhood and everydayness: Worldhood is "the a priori character of worldhood in general" — an a priori condition for the functioning of world. "The everydayness of the world, however, is also a fundamental structure proper, insofar as the world is 'always already' given as the common world." The common world as public governs every interpretation of world and Dasein.

• Environing world (Umwelt): "The world is 'something being encountered as what we are concerned about' which, being closest to us, 'gives to the world of everydayness the character of an environing world, a world round-about'" (Heidegger, 1999, p.66). The environing world is "the world of life," with dimensions of withworld (Mitwelt) and selfworld (Selbstwelt).

• Life-world interchangeability: "Life" and "world" are "not just interdependent (world of life, life-world: Lebenswelt) but also interchangeable, as indicated by everyday expressions such as 'to go out into life', 'out into the world', 'to live totally in one's world', 'totally in one's life'" (Heidegger, 2001a, p.65).

• Power as live practice: Following Dimitar Vatsov, power should be viewed not through institutionalized forms but as "'an immediate evaluative force' which, precisely as such, unavoidably produces sociality." The level of "competing performative acts in immediate encounters (mutual contestation, ignoring, recognition) is crucial for understanding the secondarily sedimented crystallizations of sociality (power)."

Connections

Concepts: everyday-life
Authors: garfinkel-harold
Related source notes: betilmerzaeva-2019-daily-life-philosophical-discourse, kalekin-fishman-2013-sociology-of-everyday-life

Direct Quotes

"This undifferentiated character of Dasein's everydayness is not nothing, but a positive phenomenal characteristic of this entity." — Heidegger

"We are reporting no particular everyday life but we are seeking the everydayness of everyday life, the fact in its facticity, not the everyday of the temporally particular Dasein but to be the everydayness for its particular while as Dasein is what matters to us." — Heidegger

"What we have in the disturbance tendency is not an alternation in time of unproblematic functioning in which the ready-to-hand withdraws [into invisibility] and is thus ready-to-hand proper, and factual disturbance in which the purely present-at-hand announces itself in the ready-to-hand, but an internal interconnection, preceding every factual disturbance, between unproblematic functioning and the possibility that it may be disturbed." — Schubert

"Indifferent everydayness is a priori in character, but it is not an 'aprioristic construction'... 'a perfect tense a priori which characterizes the kind of Being belonging to Dasein itself'."

"Power as 'an immediate evaluative force' which, precisely as such, unavoidably produces sociality." — Vatsov

Open Questions

• How does Koev's "indifferent everydayness" relate to the wiki's existing synthesis on "Picnolepsy and the Everyday"? Is indifference a form of absence, or distinct from Virilio's picnoleptic gaps?
• What is the relationship between "practical formalizations" and Bourdieu's habitus? Both are embodied, sedimented, but Koev emphasizes their emergence from interaction rather than inculcation.
• How does the "disturbance tendency" connect to the "uncanny" (Vidler, Freud) — is the unhomely the actualization of the disturbance tendency?
• Can Koev's reading of Heidegger bridge the phenomenological and ethnomethodological traditions in the wiki?