Everyday Life, Self-Narration and Identity

Abstract

Henri Lefebvre in an extensive foreword to his first study of the quotidian, Critique of Everyday Life: Volume One (1991), stresses first the utter ’familarity’ (I: 14) of the everyday, adding ‘but the familiar is not necessarily the known’ (15). Subsequently he highlights its ‘ambiguity [which] is a category of everyday life, and perhaps an essential category. It never exhausts its reality; from the ambiguity of consciousness and situations spring forth actions, events, results, without warning’ (18). Interestingly he demonstrates subsequently how an artist such as Bertolt Brecht draws upon the everyday, creating narratives of ‘the trivial and the extraordinary’ (20). Lefebvre positions narration and performativity as part of life and reality (135–136), concluding ‘where is genuine reality to be found? In the unmysterious depths of everyday life!’ (137). Later, he warns about externalizing its ‘real relations’ (239), and yet many critics assume that everyday life as it is lived, and any description thereof, represent or consist of a radically different orders of things, little connected in their comprehension and analysis as one is instinctual (and by implication fundamentally real in some fashion) and the other culturally constituted and imbued. Clearly, this has an effect upon how they are both interpreted and positioned. For instance, typically, in Craig Calhoun’s ‘Preface’ outlining the contents of his collection, Social Theory and the Politics of Identity (1994), he summarizes a sense of ‘the link between understandings of collective identity rooted in the pre-conscious practices and understandings of everyday life and those that depend more on the mediation of discourse and other means of making identity more self-conscious’ (6).