Everyday (Virtual) Life

Author: Mark Poster
Year: 2002 (New Literary History 33(4))
Source type: article
Raw file: raw/articles/poster-2002.md

Summary

Poster reviews the category of the everyday (via Lefebvre) and tests its critical capacities in the age of information machines. He argues Lefebvre's humanist concept — the everyday as "residual," "total," "human concreteness" — is limited by its reliance on the figure of the human/subject, and that the media transform place and space so that the everyday can "no longer be distinguished as separate from its opposite." He proposes three analytic keys — language, consumption, and media — and, via his autobiographical account of radio/TV/typewriter-computer/Walkman and ubiquitous computing, argues for a reconfigured, "virtual" everyday that may still be a site of critique and possibility.

Key Claims

• Lefebvre's everyday and its limits: the everyday as "residual" (outside politics/economics, a locus of resistance to oppression), "total," and "human concreteness"; but these terms "are mythic and ontological, wanting to insert into the everyday the prefigured telos of freedom." Lefebvre's humanism "limits his ability to discern crucial qualities of the everyday" and "leads to a blindness concerning the media." In 1968—the same week France erupted—he announced everyday life "had ceased to be a 'subject' ... it had become an 'object' of social organization," a "closed circuit (production-consumption-production)."
• Three analytic keys: language (Lefebvre's "floating signifiers," taken up by Baudrillard), consumption ("the consumption of symbols," a shift registered by Lefebvre as a fall from "reality"), and — crucially — media, which Lefebvre never touched. "Once everyday life is extracted from the humanist frame of Lefebvre, it becomes available for a cultural study of the position of specific media."
• Media transform the everyday: radio/TV/computer bring diverse cultures into proximity, destabilize local customs, "alter[ed] significantly the contours of everyday experience"; the shift from typewriter to computer keyboard is "ontological" — instantiating a cyborg/human-machine symbiosis rather than a subject-object relation.
• Ubiquitous computing: computing "will fade into the background of our lives" (Weiser); "Ubiquitous computing disturbs the sense of physical location, extending and multiplying the body throughout the globe" — with dangers (permanent surveillance, control society) and possibilities (globalized democracy, identity experiment).
• Conclusion — the posthuman everyday: "Paradoxically, only as we leave the human behind ... and enter the posthuman epoch, does [Lefebvre's 'city as play'/'permanent festival'] take on the force of political possibility."

Connections

Concepts: Everyday Life · Consumerism · Communicative Capitalism · Semiocapitalism
Authors: Mark Poster · Henri Lefebvre
Debates: (theory of the everyday)
Related source notes: Everyday Life in the Modern World (Lefebvre) · The Invention of Everyday Life (Felski)

Direct Quotes

"The media transform place and space in such a way that what had been regarded as the locus of the everyday can no longer be distinguished as separate from its opposite."

"Everyday life ... must be defined as a totality ... it is their meeting place, their bond, their common ground." (Lefebvre, as quoted)

"Lefebvre's humanism ... leads to a blindness concerning the media."

"Ubiquitous computing disturbs the sense of physical location, extending and multiplying the body throughout the globe."

Open Questions

• Does the "virtual everyday" (cyborg, ubiquitous computing) still offer a locus of resistance, or does it dissolve into the very spectacular/communicative-capitalism it was meant to critique?