‘Quotidian‘: Latin term from quotus “how many, which order or number” + dies“day” used to denote nothing banal or boring at all. It was in fact the moment of the distribution of bread in Medieval France for the poor. The everyday as we know it is a bourgeois concept denoting the rythmanalysis of the modernity: fast-paced, structured by the tempo of the working day/week, conceptually divided by the public and the private, the everyday of the modernity is either a glamorous spectacle or it is a residual category, with no interest whatsoever, whose main tag is ‘boredom’ .
What it follows is a collection of quotes and thoughts about the everyday, and can be thought also as a striking Manifesto of the Everyday Urbanite:
‘What interested Perec [George] was the potential of the banal to become remarkable, how an ordinary sign can become extraordinary. At the time we were discovering the values of observation – the fact that looking is not self-evident. We look but we do not see; so how must we look in order to see? We were very much aware that there are unknown things concealed by what is visible, things that are hidden not in the obscure, but in the obvious…For me the city is a film [visual text?] one in a state of continuous metamorphosis…Everything passes by, everything is always in the process of unreeling. And you cannot see this film if you stand still [can't you really?] walking is the tete de lectureof this film’ Paul Virilio on George Perec // 2001
But compare Perec’s own experiment of sitting at the cafe’ and starting writing down the street, there is almost an opposite tempo from the above one: ‘…nothing strikes you. You don’t know how to see. You must set about it more slowly, almost stupidly…force yourself to write down what is of no interest, what is the most obvious, most common, most colourless.. detect the rhythm…carry on until the scene becomes improbable, until you have the impression, for the briefest moments, that you are in a strange town or, better still, until you cannot longer understand what is happening or not happening, until the whole place becomes strange…strive to picture to yourself, with the greatest possible precision, beneath the network of streets, the tangle of sewers, the lines of the metro, the invisible underground proliferation of conduits (electicity, gas, telephone lines, water mains, express letter tubes), without which no life would be possible on the surface’. G. Perec: The Street // 1974
‘The everyday is human..we need these admirable deserts that are the word’s cities for the experience of the everyday to begin to overtake us. The everyday is not at home in our dwelling-places, it is in the streets if anywhere. Here I find one of the beautiful moments of Lefebvre’s books. The street, he notes, has the paradoxical character of having more importance than the place it connects, more living reality than the things it reflects. The streets renders public [whom?]‘. Maurice Blanchot, Everyday Speeches // 1962 (emphasis added)
‘Lefebvre made it clear that to formulate the quotidian as a concept, to wrench it from the continuum in which it is embedded (or better yet, the continuum that it is), to expose it, examine it, give it a history, is already to form of critique of it…In the very triviality and baseness lay its seriousness, in the poverty and tedium of the routine lay the potential for creative energy. After all, people don’t make revolutions because of abstract ideological principles; they make them because they want to change their lives…Kristin Ross, French Quotidian // 1997
[...Yeah, very interesting, but who is allowed to walk and be present in public? How is the 'public' changed and been represented since Lefevbre's and Blanchot's days? What was the girl doing in her bedroom while the heroic mod or punk brother was tagging the street? And the housewife? To what extend do we allow our children to walk the streets today?]
‘Writers like Michel de Charteau (1980) reinvented the quotidian…dispensed with Lefebvre’s emphasis on critique or transformation, and instead celebrated the homely practices – cooking, hobbies, strolling – of life as it is lived here and nowby individuals intent of escaping the rationalist grids of modern administration. Everyday life for de Carteau was a ‘complex geography of social ruses’ played out on the interstices of bureaucratic surveillance by the relatively powerless. In his work, the everyday coincides with the actual order of things, which is precisely what popular tactics turn to their own ends, without any illusion that it is about to change [cfr. chapter about street art in Visualizing the City]‘ Kristine Ross, French Quotidian // 1997
‘There is a dearth of work that engages with the conscious and unconscious defences necessary to cope with the exigences of the daily life’ (Walkerdine et alia, 2001:50).
Bradley’s three strategies to study inequalities:
- accept Lyotard’s idea that local narrative should replace grand narratives, and reject general theories of inequality, looking instead at the study of particular manifestation of inequality in specific contexts, tracing their history and the discourses implicated.
- 2 accept the first point, but recognise the local manifestations of inequality ‘exists within the framework of the powerful and controlling unitary tendencies, notably that of the globalization of capital.
- previous modernist theories failed to appreciate the way that different dynamics of inequality intersect, that societies are thus both fragmented and polarised (H. Bradley 1996:203-210)
Also tagged boredom, everyday, roadworks, street
