Critical everyday life sociologies Micheal E.Gardiner

Chapter 6: Critical Everyday life Sociologies

Problematizing the Everyday

Michael E. Gardiner

Milad HajiamiriID 501

Encountering the Everyday

-Introduction

-Karl Marx: The religion of everyday life

-George Simmel: The technology of Metropolitan life

-George Lukacs: The Riddle of the commodity-structure

-Walter Benjamin: The dream-houses of the collective

-Conclusion

Introduction

Introduce basics of a critical theoretical tradition with respect to study of everyday life from different perspectives

Analyzing the nature of Capitalism as an economic system

Ways that modernization indirectly imply into the everyday life

The everyday that must be regarded as a ‘Contested and opaque terrain, where meanings are not to be found ready-made`

Ben Highmore (2002a: 1)

Introduction

Turn out thoughts away from theological and philosophical debates to actual social practices and relationships which are located in the daily existence.

Theory has to be fixed in tangible problems.

Karl Marx The religion of everyday life

Marx an Hegel: such ideological transposition prompt social

actors to attribute the determination of history and society wholly to ideas, and philosophical and religion systems rather that social organization of economic production.

The result Cash-nexus


AS a result, relation that involves the interaction of people, turn into relation entirely between objects.


We cannot ignore or trivialize the everyday, because the daily life is where humanity`s essential powers and specific activities is located and expressed fundamentally. Yet, we also need to understand capitalist modernity as a complex, historically situated totality , with the practical goal of ending the systematic oppressions and alienations of class society and realizing the full range and wealth of human potentialities. We require a dialectical science that neither primly abstract from the extended wealth of human activity, nor remains entangled in mere phenomenal appearance.


Lukacs(1991: 145): “Simmel is the most important and interesting

transitional phenomenon in all modern philosophy”

Social “cells” interact with each other continuously in the innumerable fleeting and more enduring interactions that make up day to day daily life.

George Simmel The technology of Metropolitan life

The main different between Simmel`s reification account and Marx`s theory is that:

While Marx restrict alienation to the commodity-form and economic production, Simmel claims it permeates all domains of modern society.


In general, although Simmel works might be compatible with Marxism on the level of general theory and concepts but he was not attracted to revolutionary social change and his political sympathies were always more reformist than radical.


Lukacs agreed with many disillusioned intellectuals of this generation that they were living in an age of intense cultural and spiritual crisis. Especially in his early, pre-marxist writings he argue that capitalist civilization represented a materialistic and God-forsaken social order that had destroyed the last remains of genuine community.

George Lukacs The Riddle of the commodity-structure

For Simmel capitalist existence the possibility of enhanced personal freedom and self-expression, in which a successful balance could be achieved between social interests and individual desires. For Lukcs, by contrast, the daily life of modernity was so debased that redemption would only be possible by replace the everyday completely through a ‘leap’ into a completely different kind of community.


In general as Frankfurt school agreed with Lukacs, that reification is an all-encompassing process that “false consciousness” had become so spread and deep-rooted that people could no longer comprehend their experience of alienation, much less do something about it.

Ironically, the only transitory moments of non-alienation could be seen in most avant-garde of artworks but because of their very complexity and symbolic opacity it resisted to be absorbed into the culture industry.


For Walter Benjamin it is the everyday itself that is open to redemption to positive transportation.

He also knew, however that everyday life in modern world was not lacking completely in freedom possibilities. Although he was not as upbeat as Simmel about modernity, he did believe that there is always a hidden “constellations” of qualitative meaning of modern capitalist city.

Walter BenjaminThe dream-houses of the collective

We can find numerous gestures, practices and symbols that are not entirely over-shadowed by the logic of commodity form. For example, Boredom for Benjamin was a particularly a modern refusal to conform to consume passively an extra-expanding range of goods and services, and hence it is a n expression of non-alienated experience.


Therefore, Benjamin`s project can be read as a “heterogeneous project for rescuing the everyday life of modernity from silence”

Ben Highmore (2002b: 61) This ‘heterogeneous work’ involves assessing the

nature of human experience and the ways it has been transformed in the wake of capitalist modernization, but also how the everyday has been ignored or disabused by most Western philosophical traditions.


Benjamin`s approach here has many similarities with Simmel`s focus on the everyday very small details of capitalist modernity. Like Simmel, Benjamin tried to create a new philosophically informed cultural criticism that took as its object not the supposedly noble ideals and platonically eternal values of traditional Western thought, but rather the commonplace things and practices of present-day life.


Another similarity with Simmel is the idea that the exploration of the modern everyday life must occur in tow different levels;

- First, in terms of material culture and the built environment (specifically, the capitalist city)

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


Simmel argue that the continues rush and crowd of life in the capitalist metropolis bombards human sensory tools, to which individuals adopt psychologically by developing a ‘blasé’* attitude of emotional distance and self-interested, rational calculation.

*blasé: not important, excited or worried about sth, because you have seen or experiences it many times


Benjamin totally agrees, but places considerably more emphasis on how capitalist industrialization and routinization effectively re-engineers the human and corporeal habitus.

For him, people`s actions both in working and everyday lives become increasingly atomized: they are more and more ‘massified’ constituting an ‘amorphous of passers-by’ rather than a true community.


This chapter Focused on critical understanding of ‘everyday life’ by Marx, Lukacs, Benjamin along with key ‘transitional’ figure, Simmel.

It is noted that they share similarity in positions for demonstrate the important social institutions or activities. And formation of a mass consciousness, wherein essential human powers and characteristics are formulated and expressed. As such, the everyday does not consist only in habitulized or taken-for-granted behavior and attitudes, but can also be the place of counter-ideologocal insight and freedom tendencies that can be identified and potentially activated.

Conclusion

It is Simpsons Time!1. Intro

2. Marge become a ‘Hoarder’ in The episode one before the latest episode.

(season 22, Episode 16: A Midsummer's Nice Dream)Original Air Date—13 March 2011

Spiritual

Critical everyday life sociologies Micheal E.Gardiner