What is 'Everyday Life'? An Exploration of its Political Connections

Author: Grahame Thompson
Year: 2013
Source type: article (CRESC Working Paper No. 130)
Raw file: raw/articles/thompson-2013-what-is-everyday-life.md

Summary

Thompson explores the concept of everyday life (EDL) as it has re-emerged in socio-political analysis, arguing for an approach centered on the imaginary rather than social relations. The paper traces how EDL has been understood as residual, as critique (Lefebvre, de Certeau, Boltanski), and as constitutive of modernity itself. Thompson emphasizes that everyday life is organized desire, characterized by the explosion of non-commodifiable talk and communication under modernity.

Key Claims

• Two impulses drive EDL's reemergence: (1) a bottom-up turn away from macro political economy toward micro practices of governance and regulation; (2) a preference for "thick analytical description" over elaborate theorization — a "political arithmetic" that is empirically generous but theoretically parsimonious.

• EDL as imaginary, not social: Thompson argues against privileging "social relations" as the determinant of everyday life. The imaginary interpolates subjectivities and identities through psychic/symbolic/fantasy relationships, not just structural social positions.

• Three historical understandings of EDL:

  1. As residual — what is left over when structural explanations are exhausted; the unexplored remainder
  2. As critique — Lefebvre's Marxist recovery of EDL as the site where transformation begins; de Certeau's EDL as resistance through tactics; Boltanski's emancipatory critique
  3. As modernity — EDL and modernity coexist; modernity produces an explosion of non-commodifiable communication (talk, chat, nattering)

• The crowd as precursor: The 18th-century crowd/mob was the early concrete manifestation of EDL, later replaced by the electorate and fragmented into modern EDL. The crowd had no "ology" — EDL fills this analytical gap.

• Language is key to EDL: Modernity is characterized by an infinite production of talk and communication that resists commodification. "Language is not easily controlled or commoditized."

• EDL as organized desire: People organize their desires at the point of the everyday; desire drives the everyday through patterns of consumption, aspirations, and institutional location.

Connections

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

Direct Quotes

"Everyday life in a colloquial sense is generally considered as the mundane of ordinary life: something not much reflected upon because it seems so obvious and familiar. In an analytical sense, however, this just means that it is something 'left out' of an account. It is a kind of residual."

"The 'imaginary' occupies a different analytical space to that of 'social relations'... the imaginary is about interpolating subjectivities and identities as a consequence of psychically formed relationships in the first instance not social ones. It is about the symbolic and fantasy, the will, significatory practices and an often mobilizatory 'hailing' into a subject position at the behest of the unconscious."

"Modernity is characterized by the explosion of talk and chat, a huge and seemingly infinite production and accumulation of such stuff. Language is the key to EDL, and language is not easily controlled or commoditized."

Open Questions

• How does Thompson's emphasis on the imaginary relate to Bourdieu's habitus (embodied history) or Merleau-Ponty's lived body?
• What is the specific mechanism by which the imaginary organizes desire in everyday contexts?
• How does this political-imaginary approach connect to the phenomenological tradition (Heidegger, Merleau-Ponty) already in the wiki?