Semiotics and Hermeneutics of the Everyday

#everyday-life #semiotics #hermeneutics #barthes #lefebvre #de-certeau #cultural-studies #quotidian

Semiotics and Hermeneutics of the Everyday

Author: Lia Yoka & Gregory Paschalidis (eds.)
Year: 2015
Source type: article (raw file contains the book's front matter, table of contents, and the editors' Introduction "That Bloody Riddle"; deposited in raw/articles/)
Raw file: raw/articles/semiotics-hermeneutics-everyday.md

OCR caveat. The raw file is a heavily corrupted OCR scan. Sentences are routinely truncated mid-word, author names are garbled (e.g., "A Yoka"/"BELIA YOKA" for Lia Yoka; "Kaka" for Yoka; "Campaignolle" for Hélène Campaignolle; "Us Réda"/"Under Hertich" for an unreadable chapter author), and the publisher prints as "Bridge Scholars Publishing" (the ISBN prefix 978-1-4438-7192-1 suggests Cambridge Scholars Publishing, but the file itself does not say so clearly). Quotes below reproduce the damaged text where it is legible, with bracketed repairs; no text has been invented. Page numbers for the Introduction (printed as starting at p. viii) are not recoverable from the scan, so quotes are cited without page numbers.

Summary

The Introduction ("That Bloody Riddle," titled from the editors' epigraph quoting Lefebvre 1987) to this edited volume sketches a pre-history and historiography of the everyday as an object of semiotic and hermeneutic inquiry: from Baudelaire's programme for a "pictorial record of everyday life," through literary modernism, Freud's hermeneutics of the ordinary, Heidegger's everydayness, the sociologists and critics (Simmel, Elias, Benjamin, Kracauer, Loos), Barthes' Mythologies as "semioclasm" alongside Lefebvre's critique of everyday life, de Certeau's tactics, Eco's "semiological guerilla warfare," to the anthropological turn (Garfinkel, Goffman, microhistory, Alltagsgeschichte) that "canonized" the everyday. The volume's own project is announced as a "third generation" of cultural studies that negotiates semiotic tools with hermeneutics across the theory, performance, and representation of the everyday; chapter-by-chapter summaries cover the everyday as an "insignificant" category beyond the semiotic (Vergopoulos, via Barthes' "neutral"), the everyday as marketing method and ritual practice (Maori body carving, pious Muslim consumers, luxury as immaterial capital), style versus constraint in everyday languages (Greek 1880s poetry, administrative writing, museum display, crowdsourced education), and representations of the quotidian (Ivorian comics, Arab cinema, Greek film, TV advertising).

Key Claims

The everyday was acknowledged by painters, novelists, ethnologists, psychologists and historians long before its late-20th-century theorization — as a spatio-temporal backdrop, a "framework of action," the basso continuo beneath their leading themes.
For Johan Huizinga, everyday life in mediaeval villages and townships was "ceaselessly orchestrated" (text partially damaged) by the sound of church bells — everyday time has an auditory, collective structure.
Baudelaire, in "The Painter of Modern Life" (1863), defines painting's objective as the quick capture of "the transitory, fugitive and urgent element of modernity" (Baudelaire 1992: 393–4); the essay's timing after the Salon des Refusés scandal makes it the "unwitting manifesto" of Impressionism, the movement that excelled in a "pictorial record of everyday life" (Baudelaire 1992: 407).
Baudelaire's demand for innovative forms adequate to the everyday's "complexity and nuance" permeates all subsequent visual modernism — from the early avant-gardes and photography/cinema to pop and neo-pop art, Fluxus, graffiti, performance, video and digital art.
The everyday is "perhaps the distinctive feature of literary modernism" — from the negation of the internal/external interface in Stein, Joyce, Woolf, Dos Passos and Hitchcock to the "dense thing-worlds" of Georges Perec and Alain Robbe-Grillet.
Freud's Traumdeutung (1900) and his analysis of everyday parapraxes relocated common behavioral phenomena "from the sphere of [supersti]tion and mythology to that of psychical dynamics" — expanding psychoanalytic hermeneutics from the abnormal into the realm of ordinariness.
The concept of the everyday merges repetitive, cyclical time with progressive, linear time, predicating a "historical [simulta]neity" that weaves the micro-level of social experience and action with the macro-level of socio-cultural development — and thus theorizes the production, reproduction, and refashioning of norms.
This double temporality explains the everyday's significance, in the first decades of the 20th century, for cultural sociologists (Georg Simmel, Norbert Elias), cultural critics (Walter Benjamin, [Siegfried] Kracauer, Adolf Loos), for left- and right-wing civil and moral reform programmes aimed at constructing the "New Man," and for the avant-garde iconoclasts (…ism and constructivism).
Barthes' Mythologies (1973) "was destined to become the foundational text of our semiotics" — a template for semiotics as ideological critique, as "semioclasm" (iconoclasm of signs), a project of demystifying the social world of signs, closely associated with Lefebvre's "simultaneously inspiring" critique of everyday life; their confluence stamped the counter-cultural politics of the period with a distinctively libertarian but anti-speculative rhetoric.
Vaneigem's aphorism that "there are more truths in twenty-four [hours] of a man's life than in all the philosophies" (2001: 21), and Lefebvre's focus on concrete daily life, develop and re-politicize the demystificatory drive of Barthes and Lefebvre while radicalizing Husserl's call for "a return to the things [them]selves" as a return to human praxis.
Husserl is judged to have stopped short: he "failed to validate" the everyday in a manner that would make it an active basis for the critique of rationalism, leaving the everyday moored to the fallacies of common sense. (A notable, critical assessment of the phenomenological founding gesture.)
For Michel de Certeau, by contrast, "the everyday is inherently marked by the uncontrolled and covert, [obli]que, tactical, and makeshift creativity of groups or individuals" (de Certeau 1988: xiv–xv); his "microscopic, multiform techniques" of natural re-appropriation and re-employment resonate with what Umberto Eco (1990) described as "semiological guerilla warfare."
The canonization of the everyday in the past few decades is largely due to the anthropological turn in the social sciences and humanities: Garfinkel's ethnomethodology and Goffman's dramaturgical approach advanced the sociology of everyday life as the inquiry into how people make sense of and construct the social world.
The anthropological concept of culture drove a historiographical wave: after the new social history of the 1960s, the 1980s saw the French nouvelle histoire, the German Alltagsgeschichte, Italian microhistory, women's history, new urban history, new cultural geography and new cultural theories.
The linchpin of this paradigm shift was a focus on people as active agents in cultural contexts, uses and practices; the eroding of the distinctions private/public, local/global, material/symbolic; and the bridging of the micro/macro divide — producing a wealth of narratives about what had been "taken for granted, condemned or ignored… as mundane, trivial and inconsequential."
The volume positions itself as a "third generation" of cultural studies, negotiating semiotic tools and hermeneutical approaches to re-examine dominant and peripheral aspects of the theory, performance and representation of the everyday.
Vergopoulos's chapter treats the everyday as a category that "passes with the semiotic to go beyond the semiotic," claiming Barthes' category of the "neutral" for the everyday, and speaking of the everyday as social experience of time and space rather than "the time [and] space of experience" — an itinerary leading to Poirier's advice that instead of searching for the meaning of things it might be wiser to appreciate their physical gravity: "to palpate them, to taste them, to feel them."
Mathematical tools — statistics, the laws of large numbers, the "average man," probabilistic reasoning — "lie at the heart of the concept of 'everyday man'" (a chapter examining this at the cross-section of mathematics and literature in Robert Musil and Marguerite Yourcenar).
In the volume's ethnographic chapters: Tsibiridou argues that the political production and marketing of pious signifiers among Muslim populations, particularly women, has since the 1980s created "a 'new field [of] power, shaping gender, individuality, personhood, collectivities and virtue'" — the pious Muslim consumer as a deliberate collaborative project of local authoritarian rulers and market regulators; Charitatos and Christodoulou analyze luxury as immaterial capital, showing the "loop between the creation of imaginary money and the [signifier]" in the global brand world.
In the chapters on style and constraint: museum and gallery display can "completely dissociate exhibited objects from signification"; administrative writing raises the question whether "style" exists as a category at all, against the "sense of everyday routine"; the 1880s generation of Greek poets made the "everyday" a poetic style and type against the narratives of state nationalism.
In the chapters on representation: the Arab quotidian's "normality and repetitiveness associated with the modernist Western way are not to be taken for granted" (films of Elia Suleiman, Nacer [?] Zran); "othering" (racism, sexism, homophobia) is produced by narrative techniques in contemporary Greek cinema; and TV advertising's intra-lingual translation shows a dominant identity "promoting and co-opting the diversity of local identities."

Connections

Concepts: semiotics (Barthes' Mythologies as the foundational text of the semiotics of the everyday; "semioclasm"; the volume's semiotic tools) · hermeneutics (Freud's expansion of hermeneutics to the ordinary; the volume's negotiation of semiotics and hermeneutics) · everyday-life (the historiography and canonization of the everyday) · strategy-and-tactic (de Certeau's "tactical, and makeshift creativity"; Eco's "semiological guerilla warfare") · the-neutral (Barthes' category claimed for the everyday by Vergopoulos) · semiological-guerrilla-warfare (Eco's concept, resonating with de Certeau) · theory-of-the-everyday (the debate the Introduction surveys) · the-history-of-the-everyday (the Introduction is a compact historiography of this arc)

Authors: Henri Lefebvre (the epigraph; the critique of everyday life as twin project to Barthes' semioclasm) · Michel de Certeau (tactical creativity of the everyday) · Raoul Vaneigem (the "twenty-four hours" aphorism) · Edmund Husserl ("return to the things themselves" — judged to have stopped short) · Harold Garfinkel (ethnomethodology in the anthropological turn) · Johan Huizinga (church bells and mediaeval everyday time) · Georges Perec (the "dense thing-worlds" of literary modernism) · Walter Benjamin, Georg Simmel, Adolf Loos (early-20th-century critics of the everyday) · Sigmund Freud (hermeneutics of the ordinary) · New author pages for the volume's editors: Lia Yoka and Gregory Paschalidis

Debates: Theories of the Everyday (the Introduction surveys the field the debate stages) · Phenomenology vs. Semiotics (the volume's explicit "negotiation of semiotic tools and hermeneutical [approaches]")

Direct Quotes

"'The proposition here is to decode the modern world, that bloody riddle, according to the everyday'" — epigraph of the Introduction, attributed to Lefebvre 1987 (n.p.)

"there are more truths in twenty-four [hours] of a man's life than in all the philosophies" — Vaneigem 2001: 21, as cited in the Introduction (OCR gap repaired in brackets)

"the everyday is inherently marked by the uncontrolled and covert, [obli]que, tactical, and makeshift creativity of groups or individuals" — de Certeau 1988: xiv–xv, as cited in the Introduction (OCR damage mid-quote)

"the objective of painting to be the quick capture of the transitory, fugitive and urgent element of modernity" — Baudelaire 1992: 393–4, as cited in the Introduction

"'pictorial record of everyday life'" — Baudelaire 1992: 407, as cited in the Introduction

"radicalizing Husserl's call for 'a return to the things [them]selves' as a return to human praxis" — Introduction (the scan prints "ourselves"; repaired in brackets)

"'semiological guerilla warfare'" — Eco 1990, as cited in the Introduction

"[Mythologies was destined to become] the foundational text of our semiotics, acting as a template for the subsequent development of [semi]otics as ideological critique, as 'semioclasm' (iconoclasm of signs), [a] project of demystifying the social world of signs and meanings" — Introduction (OCR damage at line edges, repaired in brackets)

"Instead [of] searching for the meaning of things, it might be wiser to appreciate [their] physical gravity: to palpate them, to taste them, to feel them" — Poirier, as paraphrased/quoted in the Introduction's summary of Vergopoulos's chapter (OCR damage repaired in brackets)

"a 'new field [of] power, shaping gender, individuality, personhood, collectivities and virtue'" — Tsibiridou, as cited in the Introduction (OCR gap repaired in brackets)

Open Questions

How exactly does Barthes' category of the "neutral" (as claimed for the everyday by Vergopoulos) differ from the "paramount reality" of Berger & Luckmann and the "non-event" of Blanchot — are these three ways of saying that the everyday resists signification, or three distinct register-failures? (See theory-of-the-everyday.)
The editors claim the everyday "passes with the semiotic to go beyond the semiotic" — what would a hermeneutics of the everyday look like that is not simply an application of semiotic tools, and how would it differ from the phenomenology of everydayness (Heidegger, via Koev)?
Does the editors' verdict that Husserl "stopped short" of validating the everyday against common sense hold against the Husserl-to-Schütz lineage reconstructed by Betilmerzaeva et al. and Berger & Luckmann in this wiki — or does it understate the Lebenswelt's critical potential?
The Introduction links Barthes' "semioclasm" and Lefebvre's critique as one confluence that stamped 1960s counter-cultural politics — but the wiki's Maycroft source questions whether such demystification projects can survive empirical contact with everyday life. Does the "third generation" of cultural studies announced here answer Maycroft's empirical challenge or repeat it?
Several chapter authors' names are unrecoverable from the OCR (the "Five thousand breakfasts" chapter; "Us Réda and the Everyday"); a clean copy of the volume's table of contents is needed to complete the chapter map.