Rethinking everyday life: And then nothing turns itself inside out

The contingencies and permeabilities and rhythms of everyday life make it notoriously difficult to pin down in any determinant way. Hence, everyday life places unique demands upon critical practice and conceptualization. In following one potential angle of approach, this essay looks at the influence that philosopher Gottfried Leibniz played in the thinking of sociologist and everyday life philosopher Henri Lefebvre. Lefebvre’s theory of moments and his conceptions of ‘the everyday’ draw upon often overlooked (and controversial) elements from Leibniz’s monadology and other later writings. This essay concludes by considering how substituting ‘everyday life’ for the ‘culture’ of cultural studies requires, among other things, a closer consideration of the immanently biopolitical implications that Lefebvre teased out of Leibniz. As the introductory essay for this special issue of Cultural Studies, we also set up, in the final section here, an overview of our contributors’ own unique angles of approach to the study of everyday life at the dawn of the 21st century.     

Suburban ethnicities: Home as the site of interethnic conviviality and racism

This article explores the ways in which the white working-class residents of a suburban English town reflect on their relationships with their British Asian Pakistani Muslim neighbors. Its focus is on how everyday constructions of home become sites for the intermingling of discourses of intercultural conviviality and racism. My contention is that the idea of home has not yet been given the detailed critical attention that it deserves in the sociological literature on everyday manifestations of multiculturalism, conviviality, and racism. My supposition is that a special focus on the idea of home as the site of conviviality offers a productive avenue to analyze how intercultural relationships are formed and how the norms of neighborliness are thought to break down, opening a space for commonplace racialized and racist stereotypes to take hold. The idea of home is central to the rhythm and landscape of the English suburbs. It conjures up the idea of a uniform and aspirational white space. Drawing on this imaginary of home, I shall trace how “white working class” “English,” “Scottish,” and “Anglo-Italian” residents’ everyday constructions of home become embroiled with their relationships with their British Asian Pakistani Muslim neighbors.     

Interstate Relations and the Sociological Imagination Revisited: From Social Distance to Territoriality*

This essay presents a conceptualization basic to the development of a global sociology. Claiming that territoriality is the successor concept to social distance, the author provides an extension of the aspects of territorialization to the entire globe. A global sociology requires a reactivation and global application of two nearly forgotten subdisciplines: sphragistics, that is, the discipline that investigates ideas and practices related to the use of seals and signet rings; and ekistics, that is, the scientific study of human settlements. Among the subconcepts that are elaborated in service to these developments are home territorialization, boundaried communication, and the territorialization of the body politic. Examples are drawn from post-cold war developments in Eastern Europe.     

The myth of everyday life: Toward a heterology of the ordinary

The aim of this paper is to contribute to the rethinking of everyday life as a central, if highly diverse and problematic, theme of modern philosophy and social theory. The focus of the essay concerns the uncertain ontological status of ‘the everyday’ within the human sciences. An initial exploration of the ambiguity of the expression ‘everyday life’ points to a more consequential type of undecidability once it is fully recognized how the ideology of ‘everyday life’ functions to suppress the materiality, contingency, and historicity of human experience. This can be seen in the contrast between powerful atemporal conceptions of everyday life and more critical understandings of the lifeworld framed in temporal categories. The distinction between everyday life and lifeworld proves useful as a marker for two very different approaches to the ordinary. The paper claims that the ordinary has been systematically denigrated in the very act of being theorized as ‘everyday life’. A tradition of binary and dichotomous theorizing is uncovered as one of the fundamental sources of the myth of an ahistorical, unmediated everyday life. After mapping a range of more reflexive perspectives toward the investigation of ordinary life, the paper concludes on a positive and reconstructive note by suggesting that any attempt to go beyond the dualisms and antinomies of contemporary theory must first abandon this mythology to reveal the histor(icit)y and alterity of lifeworlds in their rich natural, incarnate, political, and reflexive imbrications.     

Children's Development from a Cultural–Historical Approach: Children's Activity in Everyday Local Settings as Foundation for Their Development

A central dilemma in developmental psychology has been to combine general concepts with research of the individual child in all her complexity in everyday life activities. Psychologists such as Riegel, Bronfenbrenner, Burman, Morss, Hedegaard, and Walkerdine have criticized research approaches that study child development from a functional view. Sociologists and anthropologists, such as Corsaro, James, Jenks, Prout, and Qvotrup have instead argued for childhood studies as the alternative to developmental psychology. None of these approaches is alone sufficient; instead, it is important to formulate a theoretical approach of child and youth development that combines general psychological concepts with research of children and youth in concrete settings, such as home or school. The aim of this article is to argue that this will be possible by building on Vygotsky's cultural–historical theories of the zone of proximal development and developmental crises. A theory of children's development should include more directly than it has in the past the practice in children's everyday institutions and the conditions the society give children for development and at the same time attempt to grasp the child's perspective. A theory of children's development has to be anchored in societal values, that is, what different institutions value as a good life. Examples from my research on children in Danish kindergartens and immigrant children in Danish schools are used to exemplify the arguments.     

An immense and unexpected field of action: Webcams,surveillance and everyday life

The essay uses a quotation from Walter Benjamin to ask what ‘immense and unexpected field of action’ is revealed through the numerous web-cameras connected to the internet. The essay considers the subject of the webcam gaze to be that of everyday life in a society of surveillance and control. Drawing on Mark Andrejevic’s concept of digital enclosures and Michael H. Goldhaber’s argument that the Internet is an attention economy, the essay considers webcams and other means of online expression in the context of Gilles Deleuze’s notion of a society of control. In the end, the essay considers the webcam to reveal aspects of everyday life through senses of thisness, durée, awareness, embodiment and care, as everyday life is caught up in and constituted by intertwined networks of care and control.     

International Transitions: Generating Subjective Sense and Subjective Configuration in Relation to the Development of Identity

This article provides an in-depth examination of the emerging identity of a 5-year-old child during her international transition from Saudi Arabia to Malaysia. Observations of the child’s everyday life at home and school, alongside interviews with the child’s mother and teacher, enabled an understanding of the dynamic relation between past, current, and future events. The process of forming a new friendship foregrounded shared motives, emotions, and actions that ameliorated a transitional crisis and supported the child during this international transition.     

Housing,memory and everyday life in contemporary Britain

With specific reference to public policy and the housing market in post-Second World War Britain, this article explores the relationship between housing, memory and everyday life. It argues that the house owes its cultural and emotional power to its capacity to separate itself ideologically from what Marc Augé calls the ‘non-places’ of everyday life. The extent to which houses have come to be seen as refuges from the non-place requires a great deal of symbolic work to conceal their sameness and everydayness. The association of the house with nostalgia, in particular, represents a denial of what Henri Lefebvre sees as the ‘residuality’ of the everyday, its capacity to lag behind the more dramatic transformations of modernity. In order to explore these questions, the article focuses on different types of housing in contemporary Britain, which are all based on a serial repetition and collectivity that are often denied. It examines: how the demolished terraced house and the surviving slum reveal the broader structures of everyday life in a way that the refurbished middle-class town house, alternating between a commodified past and a self-promoting futurism, specifically conceals; how the high-rise estates represent the most visible manifestation of the residuality of the everyday; and how new suburban houses are built in ‘timeless’ vernacular styles and sold as well-equipped interiors for exclusively privatized use, in a way that obscures their links to systems of mass production and consumption. The article concludes that the cultural economy of houses denies the reality of uneven development, and the ways in which our carefully refurbished homes are achieved at the expense of other everyday spaces.     

Music to Remember Me By: Technologies of Memory in Home Recording

This article presents ethnographic data on home music recording to advance the concept of technologies of memory as way for interactionists to understand memory work as a practice of self. John Dewey's classic ruminations on memory as process are combined with Tia DeNora's contemporary articulation of music as a technology of the self to explain data on home recording as individually and socially meaningful mnemonic work. This specific case study demonstrates how home recordists use material technologies (technics) and technological practices (techniques) to form and reform the self in everyday life. More generally, this article demonstrates the efficacy of interpretive studies of memory, creativity, technology, and the self in everyday life.     

BANALITY FOR CULTURAL STUDIES

In her 1990 essay, ‘Banality in Cultural Studies,’ Meaghan Morris raises very serious concerns about the relatively unexamined role that banality plays in cultural studies' work. Taking up her challenge, this essay endeavors to unlock some of the ways that banality might be, as Morris suggests, ‘empowering’ and ‘enabling’ for cultural studies and, thus, not merely banality as something that is left behind after it has been exorcised or redeemed in the movements of cultural analysis itself. Beginning with a few of Morris' own critical coordinates (such as Michel de Certeau and Maurice Blanchot), this essay, then, looks to how banality enters into the triadic philosophical conceptualizations of Henri Lefebvre on ‘everyday life’ particularly through his concept of ‘everydayness’. Most of all, this essay investigates the ways that this often-undertheorized concept from Lefebvre might be brought to ‘life’ (in the widest sense imaginable) in the writings of Gilles Deleuze and Felix Guattari on ‘the virtual.’ The virtual is, in one sense, a means of grasping what lies beyond the realm of cognition a more diffuse view of the real that would include the incorporeal, the inorganic, and all points in-between (including a more broadly drawn version of consciousness). It will be argued that, through ‘the virtual,’ everyday life becomes available to cultural studies' accounts as a radically ‘open totality’ or Outside and, as such, the movements, as well as the politics, of critique take on a different sort of tone and trajectory.     

Hyperstructures and the Biology of Interpersonal Dependence: Rethinking Reciprocity and Altruism

Fluctuations in endogenous opioid activity in the brain, controlled under ordinary conditions by attachment, are capable of producing patterns of dependence in social behavior resembling those appearing in substance abusers. Withdrawal symptoms arising in relation to these fluctuations, short of producing dependence, ordinarily fuel everyday social interaction, and interaction then serves to modulate opioid activity within a range associated with comfort. Comfort-constraints in this sense operate in all settings of social interaction, part of an innate caregiving mechanism conserved by evolution in human behavior. In this paper we present a formal model of the neurosociological mechanism embodying these comfort constraints. Conceptualized as a hyperstructure , the mechanism grounds thinking about social interaction in recent biological discoveries about the brain, and enables sociologists to study how activity in core brain systems constrains deep patterns in social life, including the human tendencies to altruism and reciprocity. Using computational methods, we undertake simulations to study the mechanism, deriving implications about moral behavior. The theory of the hyperstructure leads to new conclusions about reciprocity and altruism, and bears upon sociological understanding of related subjects such as justice and social comparison.     

‘All together now!’ Couples and the ontological problem of cohabitation as a form of life

The aim of this essay is that of analysing cohabitation as a form of life, according to its ontological status. This way of investigating leads to a comparison with marriage as a specific institution and with the conversation rules between partners. From the empirical analysis of more than 50 interviews with cohabitating couples comes the idea of a relationship whose intent is reciprocal care and assistance in everyday life. In other words, cohabitation is not a mere refusal of marriage as an institution, in the perspective of the interviewed, but seems to represent the lifestyle that best expresses the political ideal of a liberal-democratic society based on conversation between free and consenting individuals. At first glance cohabitation shows an ontological status of its own, a sort of ‘marriage conversation’. Yet, deploying a deeper way of analysis and following a critical realist and relational epistemology, one can notice that such status is influenced by an abstract expansion of the present as the only possible dimension for the couple. As soon as one thinks about shared future plans, the implied call of a married perfection of one's life experience strikes back, revealing the existence of a hidden rule towards marriage as a form of life. The importance of cohabitation is now conceived as the relevance of contingency and unselected opportunities. This fact reveals the limits of the individualized perspective influencing the everyday life of cohabiting couples. Doubts on ontological independence of cohabitation are still many, with its constant and ambivalent reference to the marriage dimension.     

Seeking exemptions from nursing home routines: Residents' everyday influence attempts and institutional order

Using ethnographic data collected from a Swedish nursing home, this article analyzes residents' everyday or subtle influence attempts relative to the maintenance of institutional routines. Residents' efforts to carve out some autonomy or fulfill personal preferences in everyday matters could be categorized as (1) disruptions, (2) disturbances, or (3) “good matches” relative to ongoing and up-coming nursing home routines. Striking disruptions were often fruitless, while attempts rendered as disturbances were typically postponed or modified. In general, the outcomes of residents' maneuvers were shaped by brief and situational negotiations of whether (and how) temporary exemptions from the institutional order were deemed accountable or not by the staff. Although the staff sometimes arranged situations in which residents were given some defined or symbolic decision-making authority, the findings of this study show how an inflexible local routine culture can constitute a constraining and only occasionally porous framework for residents' self constructions and everyday life.     

Catching a glimpse: Corona‐life and its micro‐politics in academia

The spread of COVID‐19 acutely challenges and affects not just economic markets, demographic statistics and healthcare systems, but indeed also the politics of organizing and becoming in a new everyday life of academia emerging in our homes. Through a collage of stories, snapshots, vignettes, photos and other reflections of everyday life, this collective contribution is catching a glimpse of corona‐life and its micro‐politics of multiple, often contradicting claims on practices as many of us live, work and care at home. It embodies concerns, dreams, anger, hope, numbness, passion and much more emerging amongst academics from across the world in response to the crisis. As such, this piece manifests a shared need to — together, apart — enact and explore constitutive relations of resistance, care and solidarity in these dis/organizing times of contested spaces, identities and agencies as we are living–working–caring at home during lockdowns.     

Photographical History,Everyday Life,and Memory: Wang Anyi as a Storyteller

Postmodernists view all reality as representation and visual spectacle. This essay challenges this claim through film analysis of third world cinema and by tracing the tension between photography and history to the earlier debate of modernity in Siegfried Kracauer's work. The essay goes on to show the possibility of historically grounded visual images. By looking at the Chinese novelist Wang Anyi's photo narratives, the essay argues for a photographical image capable of fostering a sense of history deeply rooted in everyday life, communal practice, and social reality. Instead of being the inauthentic mirror of consumer culture, the photographical image is integral to historical imagination, narratives of everyday practice, and cultural memory.     

House Haunting: The Domestic Novel Of The Inter-War Years

In this article we attempt to historicize and address the literary manifestations of the meaning and idea of home culture in the English domestic novel of the inter-war years. During this period, the cult of domesticity was avidly promoted by the government and popular magazines. We discuss how both houses and novels furnish a dwelling place that invites the exploration of private and social relations. In their turn to domestic space and the domestic interior, domestic novelists of the inter-war years inaugurated a turn to interiority, feminine subjectivity and the everyday.     

INTERFACING FEMINISM AND CULTURAL STUDIES IN HONG KONG: A CASE OF EVERYDAY LIFE POLITICS

Cultural studies, as a cultural and political re-articulation of common sense, knowledge and community practices, aims at opening up new cultural space for criticisms, reflections and action. Originating from the women' movement and later flourishing in the academy as well, feminism espouses similar aims to cultural studies. Both cultural studies and feminist/gender studies have a strong sense of intervening into everyday life politics. This paper is an attempt to discuss how feminism and cultural studies interface with each other, largely based on examples of gender-related everyday life politics taken from the feminist movement in Hong Kong. It will examine issues concerning the conflict of consumption and female subjectivities, the reconceptualization of home and housewives, and the representation of everyday life for women and history writing. It is argued that by blurring, negotiating or deconstructing the boundary or division between positions, identities and domains–such as subject and object, housewives and workers, private and public, personal and political, consumption and production–the re-articulation of knowledge about ‘victim’, ‘exploitation’, ‘home’ and ‘history’ in the feminist movement will not only provide the movement with new impetus and insight to reconsider its strategies in fighting for more cultural, social and economic space for women and other marginal groups at large in Hong Kong, but will also ‘metabolize’ the newly developed discipline of cultural studies in Hong Kong by providing a platform to strengthen the dynamic arm of cultural studies education and research. Based on her feminist and teaching experiences in Hong Kong, the author has highlighted activism and pedagogy as the two important dimensions of feminism and cultural studies in this paper.     

Intimations of everyday life: Ubiquitous computing and the city

Ubiquitous computing seeks to embed computers into our everyday lives in such ways as to render them invisible and allow them to be taken for granted, while social and cultural theories of everyday life have always been interested in rendering the invisible visible and exposing the mundane. Despite these related concerns, social and cultural studies have been almost entirely absent in discussions of the design of ubiquitous technologies. This essay seeks to introduce researchers in both fields to each other, and begin to explore the ways in which collaboration might proceed. By exploring mobile and ubiquitous technologies currently being used to augment our experiences of the city, this paper investigates notions of sociality, spatialization and temporalization as central to our experiences of everyday life, and therefore of interest to the design of ubiquitous computing.