This chapter introduces theories of everyday life and examines how modernity has impacted the everyday. It discusses how the familiar became unfamiliar with industrialization and standardization of time. Everyday life involves contradictions between the ordinary and extraordinary, obvious and enigmatic. Theories look at how boredom, rationalism, and mystery are investigated in relation to the dynamics of modern everyday life across social differences with industrialization.

1. Everyday Life and Cultural Theory
An Introduction
Ben Highmore
‘Chapter 1: Figuring the Everyday’
METU Faculty of Architecture Department of Industrial Design
ID501 Advanced Project Development in Industrial Design
Nur Yıldırım

2. Overview
• A critical and historical introduction to theories of everyday
life
• Modern and contemporary theories of everyday life are
examined
• route map for connecting the terms ‘everyday life’ and
‘cultural theory’

3. Keywords
ceaselessness, ordinary and extraordinary,
boredom, rationalism, mystery,
social differences, industrialization, capitalism
Aim and Scope
• two sidedness of everyday: familiarity and everydayness
• effects of modernity on everyday life
• interlaced cycle of everyday life dynamics

4. Notion of Everyday Life (alltagsleben, la vie quotidienne, run-of-the-mill)
most repeated actions, most travelled journeys, most inhabited spaces
closest to us
everyday as value and quality - everydayness
effect of modernity - familiar becomes unfamiliar
in modernity everyday becomes the setting for a dynamic process: making the
unfamiliar familiar, getting accustomed to the disruption of custom.
heterogeneous and ambivalent landscape of everyday modernity

5. Investigating Everyday Life
sm
li Mystery
Boredom n a
io
R at
Sherlock Holmes gets
comfortable
bored when mysterious side
Everyday Life of life is not taxing his
rationalistic intelligence.
Non-Everyday uncomfortable

6. Investigating Everyday Life
Boredom
patterns and arrangements of modern working life
modern factory, office, industrialized home, routines and regulatory techniques
Rationalism
Mystery
exotic cultures of other people

7. Investigating Everyday Life
popular anthropology
‘Culture’ ‘cultures’ (exotic)
daily practices daily practices
Boring Mysterious

8. Boredom: Emptying of Time
Western modernity
institutionalized world of work and organized
instruction
emergence of new and different
experiences
standardization of time
wage labor
representation and experience of time
routinization of segmentation of daily life
church pupils

9. assembly line
uniformity, dullness
‘one thing after another, the more it
changes the more it remains the same’
continuous production, industrial capitalism to maximize output
uninterrupted production process characterized by 'the inexorable regularity with
which the worker must follow the rhythm of the mechanical system'
Marx: alienation brought by modern capitalism
sensory-mental condition, labour becomes torture
pupils

10. the industrialization
of time and space
both technological conditions and
sensory-material experience
mechanization in nearly every form of everyday
culture: bread, chairs, death, washing...
Siegfried Giedion, Mechanization Takes Command
industrialization brought technology into home, under guise of efficiency, worked to
regulate and rationalize home life
dynamic
uneven and unequal industrialization homogenized and
experiences across social differences differentiated

11. Max Weber
modern Western deadening routinization of
form of capitalism everyday modernity
development of world governed by protocols
social structures
technical possibilities and bureaucracy
legal system and
administration technical means of
production ‘official life’ by government,
people forced to work
modern economic order with
machine production
boredom as a tool for poor thinks rich are bored particular classes and
cultural discrimination old think young are bored gendered variations
...
use of boredom to mark social
differences noted by class,
distinctions and diagnose social and political
gender, race, sexuality etc. struggles
cultural domination points
boredom of everyday life with a cultural form: unfulfilled desires and unnamed anxieties

12. mystery of
everyday life
study of everyday life: ability of making
strange within a culture of rationalism
Freudian slip
psychoanalysis, a science of
ordinary, everyday life
fantastic in banal,
exceptional in ordinary

13. phantasmagoria
modernity is characterized
by commodity
shop window displays
and exhibitions
sensational products, people
appear as objects of display
colonial capitalism
imports ‘exotic lives’ as
‘exotic goods’

14. everyday life as a
contradiction
known and ordinary and obvious and
unknown extraordinary enigmatic
shop window displays
and exhibitions
modernity is characterized
by commodity sensational products, people
appear as objects of display
exoticism, everyday life of others

15. Conclusions
relationship between modernisation, industrialization and everyday life
changing dynamics of everyday life in relation to ideas and practices of
modernity
everyday life as a contradicting notion