Everyday Life and Cultural Theory(2002) – Ben Highmore

The attempt to locate and apprehend modern everyday life, and to find forms that are capable of articulating it, might be seen as the overriding ambition of many avant-garde artists of the late nineteenth and early twentieth century. The importance of such avant-gardism ambition will be central to this book. First though we need to flesh out a notion of aesthetics as it might impact on the theorising of everyday life.

In his discussion of the term ‘everyday life’ in his book Undoing Culture(1995) Mike Featherstone suggests that ‘it appears to be a residual category into which can be jettisoned all the irritating bits and pieces which do not fit into orderly thought’. He goes on to write that ‘to venture into this field is to explore an aspect of life whose central features apparently lack methodicalness and are particularly resistant to rational categorisation’ (Undoing Culture, 55). This suggests that the everyday cannot be properly accommodated by rationalist thought and that the everyday is precisely what becomes remaindered after rationalist thought has tried to exhaust the world of meaning. It also implies that the concept of everyday life has much in common with the incipient meaning of aesthetics.

(…)

“It is as though philosophy suddenly wakes up to find that there is a dense, swarming territory beyond its own mental enclave which threatens to fall utterly outside its sway. That territory is nothing less the whole of our sensate life together – the business of affections and aversions, of how the world strikes the body on its sensory surfaces, of that which takes root in the gaze and the guts and all that arises from our most banal, biological insertion into the world.” – Terry Eagleton, The Ideology of the Aesthetic(1990), 13)

The history of attempts to attend to these experiences, like the history of attending to the everyday, is fraught with contradiction. Eagleton suggests that rationalist philosophy’s approach to sensory experience operates as a form of colonisation: ‘the colonisation of reason’ (The Ideology of the Aesthetic, 15) What Eagleton points to is the tendency of philosophy to submit sensate experience to the procedures of reason and science without questioning the adequacy of tis form of attention.