Roberts (1999) Philosophizing the everyday

The piece offers a coherent genealogy and critique of the concept of the 'everyday'. In this respect, it is useful for a wider discussion about the status and nature of situated knowledge, because it brings together the philosophy of praxis developed by Lukacs and the critical theory of Benjamin, with Lefebvre's ideas about resistance (and their incorporation into the Situationists' thinking) and with de Certeau's thoughts about everyday practices.

The following presents a genealogy and critique of the concept of the 'everyday', looking at the philosophical, political and cultural conflicts and contexts which radically transformed its contents after the Russian revolution from a term synonymous with the 'daily' and 'contingent' to one identifiable with the vicissitudes of cultural and social transformation and democratization. It aims to bring into focus the revolutionary prehistory of the 'everyday'. [...] As such it concentrates on the two major cultural-national formations which gave ideological shape and direction to the emergence of the concept before its assimilation into cultural studies proper in the 1970's: the German-Soviet debates in Marxist philosophy and culture from 1910 to 1939, and the postwar reconstruction of the concept in the new [post] Marxism and the arrival of cultural studies in France after World War II.