CRITICAL EVERYDAY LIFE SOGIOLOGIESPROBLEMATIZING THE EVERYDAY

MICHAEL E. GARDINER

PINAR ŞİMŞEK ID 501

Karl Marx

“Marx admonishes us to turn our thoughts away from arcane theological and philosophical debates in order to grasp actual social practices and relationships as these are located in

the sphere of daily existence.”

Karl Marx

“According to Marx capitalism had transformed personel worth into exchange value.”

cash nexus

humanactivities

humaninteraction

Karl Marx

“The spontaneous ‘commensense’ generated by capitalismprevent us from looking beyond the surface appearanceof the commodity so as to grasp the underlying

socio-economic relations that, in reality, produced it.”

commodity fetishism

cognitive dislocation

collectiveamnesia

Karl Marx

As Michael Billig notes, Marx locates the concealment of socio-economis realities in:

the intercourse of everyday life. Custom, or habit, fixes a price to commodities; and, in consequence, the hidden secret disappears from awareness. Marx’s brief remarks contain an implicit psychology: custom sets routines, for which we use ‘obvious’ commonplace notions, but these notions drive from awareness the full nature of these routines. In this way, there is a link between custom and lack of awareness, so that an unconciousness is built into the accomplishment of social customs.the accomplishment of social customs.

Karl Marx

T”he supposed autonomy of ideological systems must be rejected decisively, and replaced by empirical socio-historical research into the production and reproduction of human life within particular historical circumstances - what Marx refered to as

the ‘study of actuality’.”

Georg Simmel

“Although Marx did formulate initially the theories of alienationand comodity fetishism, he focused primarily on how these related to capitalist economic process. Simmel, by contrast, sought to grasp modernity as a distinct socio-culturel formation that transformed daily life engendered a wide range of new affective,

behbehavioural and sensory effects.”

Georg Simmel

“Simmel sought to understand the very ‘everydayness’ of mundane social existence, not only to see

in the objects and passing moments of daily life a sign of something ‘deeper’ or more ‘fundemental’.”

Georg Simmel

MARX vs SIMMEL

“The main difference between Simmel’s account of reificationand Marx’s theory is that the latter tended to restrict alienation to commodity-form and aconomic production,whereas for Simmel - presciently, to say the least- it permeates all domains of modern society.”

Georg Simmel

“Technical considerations of efficiency and narrowly goal-oriented behaviour tend to supplant

relationships of an ethical and qualitative nature.”

Georg Simmel

“Everyday life becomes a kind of individual project, a ‘work of art’ constituting an end to itself, accomplished through the refinement of individual tastes and dispositions symptomatic of the general ‘aestheticization’ of

daily existence under modernity”

Georg Luckacs

“what Gearge Luckas himself once described as ‘romantic anti-capitalism’, the belief that modern capitalism had created a soulless, mechanical civilization in the place of

an organic and integrated premodern community,was very wide spread at the time”

Georg Luckacs

Michael Löwy has identified two central features of the Messianic impulse during this period:

Restoration: A heartfelt yearning for a lost Edenic padise or ‘Golden Age’

Utopia: The desire to reestablish this paradisiacal condition at some future time

Georg Luckacs

“The everyday was viewed increasingly by Lukacs, not so much as a sphere of metaphysically ‘inauthentic’ existence, but as the primary social terrain wherein class contradictions were manifested and a militantly anti-capitalist consciousness

might be generated.”

Georg Luckacs

Simmel: “Capitalist existence the possibility of enhenced personalfreedom and self-expression, in which a successful balance could be achieved between social interests and individual

desires and impulses.”

SIMMEL vs LUKACS

Lukacs: “The daily life of modernity was so debased that redemption would only be possible by superseding

the everyday completely, through a leap into a completely, through a ‘leap’ into a completely different kind of community.”

Walter Benjamin

“It was the everyday world itself that was open to redemption, to positive transformation, although he would hardly dispute

the notion that the highest achievements of art orcritical intellectual inquiry were integral to

a fully lived human existence.”

Walter Benjamin

“Boredom was for Benjamin a peculiarly refusal to confrom to the omnipresent compulsion to consume passively an ever-expanding range of goods and services,

and hence was an expression of non-alienated experience ”

Walter Benjamin

Benjamin agrees with Simmel that the exprloration of modern everyday must occur on two different levels:

First: In terms of material culture and the built environment

Second: With respect to how this urban settings impacts on human psychology, bodies and social interactions.

Walter Benjamin

“Benjamin does not prompt us to look backwards at a ‘Golden Age’ of presumptively genuine community, but rather to detect the pulsof utopian energies in the here and now, to tap into these forces,revivify them, and link them to transformative political paxis.”

Common Ground

Determination not to regard the everyday as a ‘backdrop’

They tend to see the everyday as a crucial site of ideological contestation and the formation o mass consciousness

The everyday does not consist only in habitualized or taken-for-granted behaviour and attitudes