1. ID501
CRITICAL EVERYDAY LIFE
SOCIOLOGIES
Problematizing the Everyday
Michael E. Gardiner
Selma Kadiroğlu
1561729

2. 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

3. 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.

4. 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 )

5. 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)

6. 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.

7. Tragedy of culture
distinction between objective culture and subjective culture
consist of the objects that people the capacity of individuals to
produce in the realms of produce,absorb and control the
science,art , etc. elements of objective 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.

8. *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

9. 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

10. 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

11. 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.

12. Walter Benjamin: the ‘dream-houses of the collective’
• To understand everyday
confront the status of objects in our experience as commodities
how their effects are registered in human consciousness, social behaviour and cultural forms
Redemption: it was the eveyday world itself
The force of prosaic
The counter authencity
of the texture and
rhythm of our daily lives
and decisions
What is repressed in
modernity
The myriad of minute
Careful adjustments
that we are ready to
offer in the interests of
a habitable world

13. Everyday: not lacking completely in emancipatory possibilities
The minutiae of daily life gestures
The 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.

14. 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 environment
2. how this urban setting impacts on human psychology,bodies and social interactions
bombard develop
Continuous rush human sensory apparatus a blasé attitude
Tumult 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

15. 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.

16. *not regard the everyday as a backdrop for
ostensibly more important social institutions and
activities
Marx
Benjamin
*see the everyday as a crucial site of ideological
contestation and the formation of mass
consciousness
Simmel

17. The locus of counter-
ideological insights
habitualized or
The locus of
taken-for-granted
emancipatory
behaviours and
tendencies
attitudes
The
Everyday

18. Marx
Simmel
formulate the theories of
alienation&commodity fetishism seek to grasp modernity
& focus on how these related to as a distinct socio-
capitalist economic process cultural formation that
transformed daily life
and engendered a wide
range of new
affective, behavioural
and sensory effects

19. Benjamin ( more dialectical)
The objects, images and
practices of modern
Only hope is in the everyday life as a crucial
Messiniac figure of repository of collective
Lenin and the dreams and wishes of
dynamo of world humankind for a free and
communism egalitarian society
Michael Billig
Commodities 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.