ID501CRITICAL EVERYDAY LIFE SOCIOLOGIES

Problematizing the Everyday

Michael E. Gardiner

Selma Kadiroğlu1561729

Overview

Karl Marx: ‘the religion of everyday life’Georgy Simmel: the technology of metropolitan life

Georg Lukács: the ‘riddle of the commodity-structure’Walter Benjamin: the ‘dream-houses of the collective’

Conclusion

Karl Marx: ‘the religion of everyday life’

• The fundamental ambivalence regarding everyday life, in his writings• Warns to grasp actual social practices and relationships which are located in daily

life

The phenomenon of ideology deflects attention away from the realities of concrete social life ghostly abstractions and idealizations

The real socio-economic conflicts and contradictions were solved in a fantastical and imaginary level.

the Camera Obscura

‘The fetishism of commodities and the secret thereof’ (Vol 1-Capital)

Personal worth

Capitalism cash nexus mediates all activities,

Exchange value interactions, trumps other (more qualitative sociocultural values and interests )

fanciful abstractions Attention fetishes, hobby horses True nature of social life (under capitalism)

Cure: *reject the supposed autonomy of ideologic systems, *replace by empirical socio-historical research into the production and reproduction of human life within particular circumstances(study of actuality)

Georgy Simmel: the technology of metropolitan life

an innovative phenomenology of culture *grasp how the diverse practices, spaces and objects in an urbanized everyday life manifested latent significances.

the study of the everyday the microscopic analysis of cells social cells interact with each other continuously

this fleeting or enduring interactions make up day-to-day city life

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 ‘fundamental’.

Tragedy of culture: Grasp his distinction between objective and subjective culture.

Tragedy of culture distinction between objective culture and subjective culture

When? the growth of objective culture the growth of subjective culture.

an increasing division of labor forces individuals to specialize.

The consequence of this growth and specialization is that individuals are unable to grasp the totality of objective culture and are unable to control it.

consist of the objects that people produce in the realms of science,art , etc.

the capacity of individuals to produce,absorb and control the elements of objective culture

*frees up repressed human potentials Modernity *encourages a broader and cosmopolitan look *breaks down the stultifying prejudices & blind spots

inherited from traditional societies

* a kind of individual project Everyday life * a work of art constituting an end to itself * accomplished through the refinement of individual tastes & dispositions sypmtomatic of the general aestheticization of daily existence under modernity

Lukács: the ‘riddle of the commodity-structure’

capitalizm soulness, mechanical civillization in the place of an organic and integrated premodern community

The Messianic impulse (Löwy) ; restoration a hearful yearning for a lost Edenic paradise or ‘Golden Age’ utopia the desire to reestablish this paradisiacal condition at some future

Capitalism: *a totalizing structure in which the logic of commodity production seeped into all areas of daily existence *no reformed, but destroyed branch and replaced by socialism

reification and alienation derived from *commodity fetishism(Marx) *tragedy of culture(Simmel)

necessary, immediate reality of every person living in capitalis society

To liberate: Proletariat should challenge this metaphysical activity by developping a revolutionary class consciousness and confronting the ossified structures of bourgeois power.

Daily life of modernity was so debased that; redemption would only possible by superseding the everyday completely through a leap into completely different kind of community or a return to what is essentially a romanticized, pastoral and pre-capitalist society

undialectical and ahistorical:

• defining capitalism as a form of spiritual and social decay rather than as a contradictory social formation within both destructive and liberative forces,

• maintain the belief that history would culminate to reconcile subject and object.

Walter Benjamin: the ‘dream-houses of the collective’• To understand everydayconfront the status of objects in our experience as commoditieshow their effects are registered in human consciousness, social behaviour and cultural forms

Redemption: it was the eveyday world itself

What is repressed in modernity

The force of prosaic

The counter authencity of the texture and rhythm of our daily lives and decisions

The myriad of minute

Careful adjustments that we are ready to offer in the interests of a habitable world

Everyday: not lacking completely in emancipatory possibilities

The minutiae of daily life gesturesThe very banality of which is worth savouring practices symbols

Ex: boredom modern refusal to compulsion to consume passively an expression of non-alienated experience

source of experience lies in the totality of experience myriad passions epiphanies the systematic continuum irrationalities all such elements contributed to the raw material of our daily lives.

Benjamin vs Simmel

• Both tried to create a new kind of philosophically informed cultural criticsm that took as its objects the commonplace things and practices of present-day life.

• The exploration of everyday must occur on two different levels: 1. in terms of material culture and the built environment2. how this urban setting impacts on human psychology,bodies and social interactions

bombard develop

Continuous rush human sensory apparatus a blasé attitudeTumult of life (in capitalist metropolis)

• Benjamin focus on more: how capitalist industrialization and routinization effectively reengineers the human pshche and corporeal habitus.

People’s actions in their working and everyday lives become automized, more and more massified. interchangeable, isolated from each other

Result of reification and alienation; stereotypical everyday consciousness and manner of bodily deportment characterized by habituated ‘distraction’

Distraction;• prevent people from the continual shocks and traumas of modernity ,• allow to roll with the punches of rapid social changes(disorienting and anomic)

These adaptations have high cost; the collective rituals and traditions that bound premodern societies together , and transmitted, shared life narratives are effectively lost, only cash nexus is left.

*not regard the everyday as a backdrop for ostensibly more important social institutions and

activities

*see the everyday as a crucial site of ideological contestation and the formation of mass

consciousness

Lukcs

Benjamin

Simmel

Marx

The Everyday

habitualized or taken-for-granted

behaviours and attitudes

The locus of counter-

ideological insights

The locus of emancipatory

tendencies

formulate the

theories of

alienation&

commodity

fetishism &

focus on

how these relate

d to capita

list econo

mic proce

ss

Marx

seek to

grasp mode

rnity as a

distinct

socio-

cultural

formation that

transforme

d daily

life and

engendere

d a wide

range of

new affect

ive, behaviour

al and

sensory

effects

Simmel

Only hope is in the Messiniac figure of

Lenin and the dynamo of world

communism

Lukcs The objects, images and practices of modern

everyday life as a crucial repository of collective dreams and wishes of

humankind for a free and egalitarian society

Benjamin ( more dialectical)

Michael BilligCommodities have more transcendental qualities in postmodern society than the laissez-faire capitalism, once freed from the necessity of appearing Marxist, these ideas may be valuable to understand the everyday life.