Peculiar cosmology: not the world born out of the great darkness, the separation of the elements, the face of the sky above the waters, but your emergence from the everyday. You’ve come in from the cold, gathered yourself together. Who are you now? A worker; you work; no need to fear the everyday, you have your place …
Your opposite, your nemesis – you see them from the windows of the bus or the train: the ones who inhabit the bright daylight; who pulse like the sea-anemones in the great currents which traverse the day. Who are open to the back and forth of everyday communication: to the television show, the radio that speaks only to itself until they are nothing but the necessity of this back and forth: relays in the great circuit of impersonal loquacity, the babble of gardening and makeover programmes, the movement of chatter about property prices and school league tables.
The everyday: what changes? In one sense, nothing at all; it is still, as Philip K Dick argued, AD 51: it was always the same, the circulation of rumour, the flux and reflux of a kind of indecision. No one is sure what they think; or if they are sure today, they will not be sure tomorrow. This is what fascinates the politicians, and makes them send out focus groups into the great unknown as they would scouts into an alien territory.
The step into a lifestyle politics – the division of the populace into groups (pools and patios, etc) is one response to the everyday, as are the new technologies in manufacturing which allow shops like Zara to recirculate their stock every couple of weeks. The ‘short run’ of products is supposed to be infinitely responsive to changes in the market; the turnover of stock is more rapid than ever. Everything turns over in the shops that line the everyday, everything is new. Novelty is the novelty of products. True, there is also the novelty of the news, the turnover of events, but these events happen elsewhere, life is elsewhere; meanwhile there is only the everyday, eternal and consoling in its eternullity.
Global warming doesn’t happen here; this is just an unusually warm summer or a wet spring; terrorism won’t touch us so long as a war is being fought on our behalf in the dusty countries of the Middle East; what matters is that asylum seekers are housed any place but here and certainly there is misery, you saw them on the television the other night: kids in the third world sewing footballs together, this is lamentable …: this is the voice of the everyday, a voice without subject, a kind of murmuring which is relayed from speaker to speaker. A drifting voice, which inhabits this person and then that. A voice which is never certain of itself, whose back and forth in its lightness is subject to sudden change. Once it was acceptable to say x, now it is no longer acceptable; times are changing, tastes are transformed – and it is this transformation which is the object of the new sciences of the everyday (the sciences of the marketer which transforms politics into a kind of marketing): but the mobility of the everyday change nothing of its form. It is the white hole of common sense the philosophers fear and despise because it draws everything into its indifferent light.
There are times, it is true, where everyday life becomes public, when every individual falls under the suspicion of the Law. Such was the French Revolution, which suspected everyone. And wasn’t it the attempt of the state-machines of the former Eastern bloc to survey every corner? Private life disappeared in Czechoslovakia, writes Kundera; this is why he swears he will never fictionalise his life or transform his friends into characters in his books: it would only complete that monstrous rendering-public which dominated that time. Some speculate that advances in communications technology, a certain density of the telephone network, defeat such state apparatuses: never again will it be possible to expose every secret to publicity. Perhaps; perhaps not.
Are we seeing something the perfection of the everyday in our time? Lefebvre is always equivocal: on the one hand, it is true, the everyday is the repository of old alienations and a dried up metaphysics; on the other, it is a utopia and an idea. At once it is amorphous and inexhaustible, painful and irrecusable, stagnant and rebellious, refusing the domination of the bureaucracy and political parties. Here is the hope: the everyday bears an immense potential even if it can never be marshalled in the name of a particular cause. For it sometimes allows itself to be discovered in the streets; men and women come onto the street, march, protest, and disappear again.
What is feared by the marketer and the politician (the politician as marketer) alike is the crowd in its impersonal multiplicity, the indefiniteness which sweeps each along and dissolves them in its flight. Dream of it: the crowd ruled by dispersal, disarrangement, which reduces to insignificance every organised power. It belongs to the middle, to the space between, the crowd moves too quickly, it multiplies itself and then disappears, awakening at another point. It is elsewhere. Beautiful, a beautiful dream, Lefebvre’s, and not only a dream. What will happen today? Will anything happen? In the slums and the shanty towns? In Bracknell? And if nothing happens (if it is perpetually AD 51)?
The everyday is a movement, a flux and a reflux. At one and the same time – in the instant which passes and at the same time stretches itself into an empty perpetuity, an unceasing disquiet – we are each engulfed and deprived of the everyday. This is its movement, its opening-withdrawal. Heidegger’s mistake: to assume the everyday could give birth to the authentically existing human being, that the ‘who’ of this or that person could become resolute Dasein. But if this is a mistake, then the everyday remains mysterious, perhaps the source of the revolution, perhaps nothing at all.
