What do you think?
Rate this book
Everyday Life: Theories and Practices from Surrealism to the Present
The notion of the everyday is at the heart of modern French cultural and Anglo-American cultural studies. Since the 1960s numerous writers, artists, philosophers, and social theorists have tried to home in on the patterns and rhythms of our daily activities. This book provides a detailed map of this territory, linking the pioneering work of such key figures as Georges Perec and Michel de Certeau, to currents in Surrealism, ethnography, fiction, film, and photography.
- GenresArtPhilosophyTheory
448 pages, Hardcover
First published January 1, 2006
5 people are currently reading
139 people want to read
Ratings & Reviews
Friends & Following
Create a free account to discover what your friends think of this book!
Community Reviews
Displaying 1 - 3 of 3 reviews
February 10, 2024
periodic check in with "theory" complete , diagnosis : still maddeningly dense. drawn to read this by my recent reading of a perec book and i hoped it could maybe ease me into to and map the various bobs and weaves and intersections of theory and art and literature in mostly france in the 20th century. did it map those intersections out , sure , was there anything easy about it ? not really . i feel only fractionally smarter on these issues. i'd rather read more perec !
December 23, 2025
There is an irony at the heart of the idea of studying the ‘everyday’, and that is that our most common understanding of the everyday is that it is boring, repetitive and simply not worth our effort to study. Many of the books I’ve read about this topic are discussed here – and in more detail that I have given them in my reviews. This book has made me think again about what the authors were seeking to achieve – particularly Roland Barthes and his Mythologies, which I hadn’t quite thought of as being about the everyday, although, clearly it is. I think, if you are considering finding out about why we might study the everyday, this is the book to read.
Probably one of Marx’s top ten quotes of all time is the one on his headstone – the philosophers have only interpreted the world, in various ways; the point, however, is to change it. That is the guiding idea throughout this book. The point of studying the everyday was rarely seen as an object in itself, but rather to see if everyday life could be changed in ways that would make it impossible for the old ways of living to continue on – particularly when those ways were exploitative.
Think Pascal’s Wager – this is the idea that if you are an atheist and god exists, you are going to pay for your disbelief throughout the whole of eternity – god being even more vengeful than Donald Trump, he can think of nothing better to do with his time than come up with eternal punishments as his chief means of vengeance. I can only hope that our god is one of the lesser ones or I’m in deep trouble. Anyway, the solution is to pretend that you believe in god, and then, if, in the unlikely eventuality that he actually exists, you’ve had your each-way bet and you get rewarded with eternal life, rather than eternal punishment. Atheists often reply to this by saying that it would be a sorry excuse for a god who did not see through our ‘I’m pretending to believe’ act. But this is where atheists have gotten the whole thing wrong. Pascal is right on this one – you become what you do – if you pretend to believe for long enough and you will eventually believe. Or, as Sartre would say, existence proceeds essence.
Well, that is what everyday life is – the near endless repetition of things that structure our thoughts and understandings of the world in ways that make, due to their endless repetition, themselves seem natural, inevitable and true. As Bourdieu would say, they become the kinds of ideas we think with rather than about. The everyday, by its boring repetition becomes our truth, with each repetition accreting upon the last.
This book starts with the surrealists and with the idea that they were seeking to point to the absurdity of so much of existence as a way to force us to think again. I’m going to have to look more deeply into their work.
Like so many books, this one had a line that stopped me in my tracks and forced me to think again about things. The line was about memory – you know, I remember things like 9/11 or the Whitlam dismissal. And I remember things that happened before I was born – the holocaust, the JFK assassination. But what does it mean to remember these things that did not really happen in my life, my everyday life? On Facebook I’ve been seeing a series of short videos where someone asks mostly young people questions that I would otherwise have thought everyone knew the answer to. Questions like, what country are you in? What is the capital of the USA? What is 100 minus 14? What country is the Queen of England from? Invariably, the people asked are unable to give the correct answer. At first, I found these sort of funny – but then I kept thinking of Neil Postman and how he said that so much of what we take for ‘general knowledge’ is facts we have no real access to knowing just how true they are and that ultimately have little or no impact on our daily lives. The videos show young people who are basically adults who have lived seemingly happy lives without ever knowing that the earth goes around the sun and not the other way. Perhaps they are the smart ones – like Sherlock Holmes in that early story where he claims to not know this and if he ever did, he intentionally has forgotten since it would clutter up his brain which only has so much space for useful facts. My point is less grandiose, it is merely to note, as Postman did, how disconnected most ‘general knowledge’ is from our everyday lives.
The demand that we never forget the holocaust is an interesting case in point – something Susan Sontag noted somewhere too – particularly when it happened before most of us were born. What is it to never forget something you have no real memory of? And it goes further than this. Our lives are not just made up of things that happen to us in the everyday – at least, not in the sense that this was the case 100 years ago. Now, much of what we do in our everyday lives is made up of watching television or playing computer games. These parts of our lives are much more heavily scripted and more ideological than we might otherwise think or acknowledge. They provide us with a kind of moral guidance that once would have been more closely linked to the church. They are not propaganda in the simple sense of telling us what is right thinking, but are more indoctrination through a vicarious lived existence through the lives of the heroes on our screens. I recently played a virtual reality game where furry creatures came into my house and I had to kill them. Other games are more frightening, with zombies or aliens attacking you in your living room. The lines between fantasy and life could hardly be more blurred. I told my daughter that if I wanted to go on sleeping alone in my house, it could not become a battle ground for zombie wars.
I think of the everyday in much the same way as I think of advertising. The reiteration is the point, the message becomes true upon repetition – but the imperative to question the everyday is the same as the obligation to question other forms of stereotypes. It is only by challenging some of the most banal aspects of our everyday habits that we can see the constraints they impose upon us and in whose interests those habits ultimately serve.
Probably one of Marx’s top ten quotes of all time is the one on his headstone – the philosophers have only interpreted the world, in various ways; the point, however, is to change it. That is the guiding idea throughout this book. The point of studying the everyday was rarely seen as an object in itself, but rather to see if everyday life could be changed in ways that would make it impossible for the old ways of living to continue on – particularly when those ways were exploitative.
Think Pascal’s Wager – this is the idea that if you are an atheist and god exists, you are going to pay for your disbelief throughout the whole of eternity – god being even more vengeful than Donald Trump, he can think of nothing better to do with his time than come up with eternal punishments as his chief means of vengeance. I can only hope that our god is one of the lesser ones or I’m in deep trouble. Anyway, the solution is to pretend that you believe in god, and then, if, in the unlikely eventuality that he actually exists, you’ve had your each-way bet and you get rewarded with eternal life, rather than eternal punishment. Atheists often reply to this by saying that it would be a sorry excuse for a god who did not see through our ‘I’m pretending to believe’ act. But this is where atheists have gotten the whole thing wrong. Pascal is right on this one – you become what you do – if you pretend to believe for long enough and you will eventually believe. Or, as Sartre would say, existence proceeds essence.
Well, that is what everyday life is – the near endless repetition of things that structure our thoughts and understandings of the world in ways that make, due to their endless repetition, themselves seem natural, inevitable and true. As Bourdieu would say, they become the kinds of ideas we think with rather than about. The everyday, by its boring repetition becomes our truth, with each repetition accreting upon the last.
This book starts with the surrealists and with the idea that they were seeking to point to the absurdity of so much of existence as a way to force us to think again. I’m going to have to look more deeply into their work.
Like so many books, this one had a line that stopped me in my tracks and forced me to think again about things. The line was about memory – you know, I remember things like 9/11 or the Whitlam dismissal. And I remember things that happened before I was born – the holocaust, the JFK assassination. But what does it mean to remember these things that did not really happen in my life, my everyday life? On Facebook I’ve been seeing a series of short videos where someone asks mostly young people questions that I would otherwise have thought everyone knew the answer to. Questions like, what country are you in? What is the capital of the USA? What is 100 minus 14? What country is the Queen of England from? Invariably, the people asked are unable to give the correct answer. At first, I found these sort of funny – but then I kept thinking of Neil Postman and how he said that so much of what we take for ‘general knowledge’ is facts we have no real access to knowing just how true they are and that ultimately have little or no impact on our daily lives. The videos show young people who are basically adults who have lived seemingly happy lives without ever knowing that the earth goes around the sun and not the other way. Perhaps they are the smart ones – like Sherlock Holmes in that early story where he claims to not know this and if he ever did, he intentionally has forgotten since it would clutter up his brain which only has so much space for useful facts. My point is less grandiose, it is merely to note, as Postman did, how disconnected most ‘general knowledge’ is from our everyday lives.
The demand that we never forget the holocaust is an interesting case in point – something Susan Sontag noted somewhere too – particularly when it happened before most of us were born. What is it to never forget something you have no real memory of? And it goes further than this. Our lives are not just made up of things that happen to us in the everyday – at least, not in the sense that this was the case 100 years ago. Now, much of what we do in our everyday lives is made up of watching television or playing computer games. These parts of our lives are much more heavily scripted and more ideological than we might otherwise think or acknowledge. They provide us with a kind of moral guidance that once would have been more closely linked to the church. They are not propaganda in the simple sense of telling us what is right thinking, but are more indoctrination through a vicarious lived existence through the lives of the heroes on our screens. I recently played a virtual reality game where furry creatures came into my house and I had to kill them. Other games are more frightening, with zombies or aliens attacking you in your living room. The lines between fantasy and life could hardly be more blurred. I told my daughter that if I wanted to go on sleeping alone in my house, it could not become a battle ground for zombie wars.
I think of the everyday in much the same way as I think of advertising. The reiteration is the point, the message becomes true upon repetition – but the imperative to question the everyday is the same as the obligation to question other forms of stereotypes. It is only by challenging some of the most banal aspects of our everyday habits that we can see the constraints they impose upon us and in whose interests those habits ultimately serve.
September 4, 2009
He actually discusses the processes of artists and writers dealing in the everyday. Barthes, de Certeau, Lefebvre, and Perec (of course). Very worthwhile, and lots of translated citations from Perec texts not yet available in English.
Displaying 1 - 3 of 3 reviews