The Politics and Potential of Everyday Life: On the Very Concept of Everyday Life

Abstract

At first glance it might seem absurd to claim that the concept of everyday life could be tied to a specific politics—that the concept is in its very structure either revolutionary or conservative. Far from the concept being tied to a determined politics, it is difficult to imagine political contestation or difference without some concept of everyday life. Either we insist that everyday life is inauthentic, confused, or mystified 1 —requiring the transition to reflective theory—or we see everydayness as uncorrupted life, a life that in its animal or natural immediacy would bear all the joy and promise that political structures would subsequently enslave or enhance. Despite these conflicting possibilities, the relational structure of the concept demands that the everyday be defined against abstraction, reification, or decided cultural wholes. In this sense, the concept of everydayness owes a debt to the notion of life. Whether everyday life is defined as necessarily tending toward broader structures, or whether it is situated radically prior to all ideality, something like a metaphysical quality must be discerned in the structure of life if one is to make a general claim about everydayness.

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