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The Politics and Poetics of Everyday Life
Using the concept of the everyday as a lever for social transformation
The texts in this volume represent Kristin Ross’s attempt to think the question of the everyday across a range of discourses, practices and knowledges, from philosophy to history, from the visual arts to popular fiction, all the way to the forms taken by collective political action in the territorial struggles of today. If everyday life is, as many have come to believe, the ideal vantage point for an analysis of the social, it is also the crucial first step in its transformation.
The volume opens with a return to Henri Lefebvre’s powerful attempt to use the everyday as both residue and resource, as the site of profound alienation and—by the same token—the site where all emancipatory initiatives and desires begin.
The second section focuses on our attempts to represent our lived reality to ourselves in cultural forms, from painting and literature and film to an analysis of the contemporary transformations of the sub-genre most embedded in the deep superficiality of everyday detective fiction.
The final section turns to present-day ecological occupations in the wake of the zad at Notre-Dame-des-Landes, and locates the everyday as a site for rich oppositional resources and immanent social creativity.
The texts in this volume represent Kristin Ross’s attempt to think the question of the everyday across a range of discourses, practices and knowledges, from philosophy to history, from the visual arts to popular fiction, all the way to the forms taken by collective political action in the territorial struggles of today. If everyday life is, as many have come to believe, the ideal vantage point for an analysis of the social, it is also the crucial first step in its transformation.
The volume opens with a return to Henri Lefebvre’s powerful attempt to use the everyday as both residue and resource, as the site of profound alienation and—by the same token—the site where all emancipatory initiatives and desires begin.
The second section focuses on our attempts to represent our lived reality to ourselves in cultural forms, from painting and literature and film to an analysis of the contemporary transformations of the sub-genre most embedded in the deep superficiality of everyday detective fiction.
The final section turns to present-day ecological occupations in the wake of the zad at Notre-Dame-des-Landes, and locates the everyday as a site for rich oppositional resources and immanent social creativity.
330 pages, Kindle Edition
Published May 2, 2023
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About the author
Kristin Ross
26 books37 followersKristin Ross is a professor of comparative literature at New York University. She is the author of numerous books, including Fast Cars, Clean Bodies: Decolonization and the Reordering of French Culture and May '68 and its Afterlives.
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April 3, 2025"I began my graduate studies in the mid-1970s, only a very few (post-structuralist) theoretical voices were audible, and deconstruction had attained a quasi-liturgical status. The general political environment was darkening quickly and, it seemed to me, quite abruptly, into what we have now come to recognize as the counterrevolution that set in after the emancipatory moment of the long 1960s. These factors helped draw my attention to the antiproductivist Marxism of Henri Lefebvre - my teacher and colleague
Fredric Jameson's enthusiasm for it also helped. Working through Lefebvre's theories of the everyday, and helping make his work familiar t an English-language readership, was, for me, a way of creatin ga solidarity with the recent political past" (1-2)
Lefebvre's "powerful intuition was that the level of shared existence which society relegates to its margin - its residues, its leftovers, - might well furnish the best access to the social as such. . . The rites and rituals of Zola's midinettes and lady shoppers, no less than the elaborate traffic patterns formed by Jacques Tati's trapped commuters a hundred years later - all those disregarded and unarticulated aspects of shared experience - could now be read as eminently communicable." (2)
The situationists interpreted everyday life spatially, "the active study of mental states and spatial ambiances produced by the material organization of the urban terrain . . . surveyed the city for what might be salvaged and used in a utopian reconstruction of social space . . ." linked to Nouveau Monde amoureux; the Lafargue of a Droit a la paresse; athe Elisee Reclus of a radical anticolonialist geography" (9)
Situationists moved from diachronic/Marxist realm of the factory to social reproduction - everyday life - "For everyday life has always weighed heavily on the shoulders of women. Quotidie: How many times a day? How many days? The quotidianis on the one hand the realm of routine, repetition, reiteration: the space/time where constraints and boredom are produced. Far from being an escape from this realm, segmented lesiure time such as the weekend is rather a final cog permitting the smooth functioning of the routine. Even at its most degraded, however, the everyday harbors the possibility of its own transformation; it gives rise, in other words, to desires which cannot be satisfied within a weekly cycle of production/consumption. the political, like the purloined letter, is hidden in the everyday, exactly where it is most obvious: in the contradictions of lived experience, i the most banal and repetitive gestures of everyday life - the commute, the errand, the appointment. It is in the midst of the utterly ordinary, in the space where the dominant relations of production are tirelessly and relentlessly reproduced, that we must look for utopian and political aspirations to crystallize. (11)
power of the city to constrain and alter consciousness (10) - why is this about the city and not every place?
Commune began as festival; women up early came out and got coffee for the soldiers; unpublished documentation from the Feltrinelli institute
Ranciere: "trained as a philosopher, a professor of philosophy at the University of Paris, but immersed rather unfashionably since 1974 in early nineteenth-century workers' archives, Ranciere wrote books that eluded classification - books that gave voice to the wild journals of artisans, to the daydreams of anonymous thinkers, to worker-poets and philosophers who devised emancipatory systems alone, in the semi-unreal space/time of the scattered late-night moments their work schedules allowed them. Le Maitre ignorant "given Jacotot's affirmation that anyone can learn alone" (54-55).
For Jacotot, Bourdieu, Althusser, and Milner "each [each begin] with inequality, proves it, and by proving it, in the end, is obliged to rediscover it again and again [Aux bords du politique, Ranciere]. Whether school is seen as the reproduction of inequality (Bourdieu) or as the potential instrument for the reduction of inequality (Savary), the effect is the same: that of erecting and maintaining the distance separating a future reconciliation from a present inequality, a knowledge in the offing from today's intellectual impoverishment - a distance discursively invented and reinvented so that it may never be abolished. The poor stay in their place. . . . All people are equally intelligent. This is Jacotot's startling (or naive?) presupposition, his lesson in intellectual emancipation . . . hasn't the pedagogical fiction o four own time been cast on a global scale? Never will the student catch up with the teacher; never will the 'developing' nations catch up with the enlightened nations. . . . It is above all in The ignorant Schoolmaster's formal procedures that have allowed Ranciere to think the social itself in such a distinctly original fashion" (citing Benjamin in Arendt's Illuminations: "the concept of the historical progress of mankind cannot be sundered from the concept of its pression through a homogenous, empty time. And a critique of such a progression must be the basis of any criticism of the concept of progress itself" (67-9)
Jacques Ranciere "On War as the Ultimate Form of Advanced Plutocratic Consensus" (74) - Ranciere wrote before the Iraq war on the "seamless integration of capital, state, military, and media power achieved in the US during the moths preceding the invasion" (73).
She has a set of the kind of general abstractions that presuppose some shared knowledge of specifics that I don't have: "This spatial turn - the imbalance in humanistic and cultural studies that has consisted in a privileging of space over considerations of temporality or change" (76). (a) what does this even mean? what are some examples? And did she really do some kind of analysis of the distribution of each type of study, or is this just some general sense or widely believed fact?
Ranciere's battle is with "strategies whose aim is the suppression of time" whatever that means (83)
Farmer-Worker party in Nantes organized a march of 100,000 people, mostly farmers, in May 68 under the slogan "The West wants to Live." it was "founded in response to the very direct and directed influx of industrial and finance capital into French agriculture after 1965" (275)
Fredric Jameson's enthusiasm for it also helped. Working through Lefebvre's theories of the everyday, and helping make his work familiar t an English-language readership, was, for me, a way of creatin ga solidarity with the recent political past" (1-2)
Lefebvre's "powerful intuition was that the level of shared existence which society relegates to its margin - its residues, its leftovers, - might well furnish the best access to the social as such. . . The rites and rituals of Zola's midinettes and lady shoppers, no less than the elaborate traffic patterns formed by Jacques Tati's trapped commuters a hundred years later - all those disregarded and unarticulated aspects of shared experience - could now be read as eminently communicable." (2)
The situationists interpreted everyday life spatially, "the active study of mental states and spatial ambiances produced by the material organization of the urban terrain . . . surveyed the city for what might be salvaged and used in a utopian reconstruction of social space . . ." linked to Nouveau Monde amoureux; the Lafargue of a Droit a la paresse; athe Elisee Reclus of a radical anticolonialist geography" (9)
Situationists moved from diachronic/Marxist realm of the factory to social reproduction - everyday life - "For everyday life has always weighed heavily on the shoulders of women. Quotidie: How many times a day? How many days? The quotidianis on the one hand the realm of routine, repetition, reiteration: the space/time where constraints and boredom are produced. Far from being an escape from this realm, segmented lesiure time such as the weekend is rather a final cog permitting the smooth functioning of the routine. Even at its most degraded, however, the everyday harbors the possibility of its own transformation; it gives rise, in other words, to desires which cannot be satisfied within a weekly cycle of production/consumption. the political, like the purloined letter, is hidden in the everyday, exactly where it is most obvious: in the contradictions of lived experience, i the most banal and repetitive gestures of everyday life - the commute, the errand, the appointment. It is in the midst of the utterly ordinary, in the space where the dominant relations of production are tirelessly and relentlessly reproduced, that we must look for utopian and political aspirations to crystallize. (11)
power of the city to constrain and alter consciousness (10) - why is this about the city and not every place?
Commune began as festival; women up early came out and got coffee for the soldiers; unpublished documentation from the Feltrinelli institute
Ranciere: "trained as a philosopher, a professor of philosophy at the University of Paris, but immersed rather unfashionably since 1974 in early nineteenth-century workers' archives, Ranciere wrote books that eluded classification - books that gave voice to the wild journals of artisans, to the daydreams of anonymous thinkers, to worker-poets and philosophers who devised emancipatory systems alone, in the semi-unreal space/time of the scattered late-night moments their work schedules allowed them. Le Maitre ignorant "given Jacotot's affirmation that anyone can learn alone" (54-55).
For Jacotot, Bourdieu, Althusser, and Milner "each [each begin] with inequality, proves it, and by proving it, in the end, is obliged to rediscover it again and again [Aux bords du politique, Ranciere]. Whether school is seen as the reproduction of inequality (Bourdieu) or as the potential instrument for the reduction of inequality (Savary), the effect is the same: that of erecting and maintaining the distance separating a future reconciliation from a present inequality, a knowledge in the offing from today's intellectual impoverishment - a distance discursively invented and reinvented so that it may never be abolished. The poor stay in their place. . . . All people are equally intelligent. This is Jacotot's startling (or naive?) presupposition, his lesson in intellectual emancipation . . . hasn't the pedagogical fiction o four own time been cast on a global scale? Never will the student catch up with the teacher; never will the 'developing' nations catch up with the enlightened nations. . . . It is above all in The ignorant Schoolmaster's formal procedures that have allowed Ranciere to think the social itself in such a distinctly original fashion" (citing Benjamin in Arendt's Illuminations: "the concept of the historical progress of mankind cannot be sundered from the concept of its pression through a homogenous, empty time. And a critique of such a progression must be the basis of any criticism of the concept of progress itself" (67-9)
Jacques Ranciere "On War as the Ultimate Form of Advanced Plutocratic Consensus" (74) - Ranciere wrote before the Iraq war on the "seamless integration of capital, state, military, and media power achieved in the US during the moths preceding the invasion" (73).
She has a set of the kind of general abstractions that presuppose some shared knowledge of specifics that I don't have: "This spatial turn - the imbalance in humanistic and cultural studies that has consisted in a privileging of space over considerations of temporality or change" (76). (a) what does this even mean? what are some examples? And did she really do some kind of analysis of the distribution of each type of study, or is this just some general sense or widely believed fact?
Ranciere's battle is with "strategies whose aim is the suppression of time" whatever that means (83)
Farmer-Worker party in Nantes organized a march of 100,000 people, mostly farmers, in May 68 under the slogan "The West wants to Live." it was "founded in response to the very direct and directed influx of industrial and finance capital into French agriculture after 1965" (275)
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