Stagnant lives, bored, caught in the great non-event of the everyday, that place where no one speaks and no one listens. The everyday! Politicians are scared by it. That’s why they have focus groups and phone surveys. But you will never plumb the depths of the everyday, I say to myself. Because it has no depths. It is superficiality, nullity, the eternal nullity politics cannot penetrate.
The politician shaking hands with ordinary folks, the Prince who starts foundations for the unemployed and hopeless: it is a mockery. You will never understand, you busy politicians, how the everyday revolves like a great hurricane, slowly absorbing into itself all meaningful action. You are too busy to be engulfed, to understand that great ennui so beautifully captured by Shane Meadows in 247 which stops you from trying anymore. I won’t fill in that application form, or that claim for benefit. I won’t come in to sign on. And soon, I will never leave the house at all. I will stay in, now and forever.
It happened to a schoolfriend … we visited our friends to see what had become of them, they were inside, living with their parents, watching Eastenders. A life inside. There was nothing of them left. Did they recognise us, their old friends? We weren’t sure. It was disturbing. Something had devoured them from the inside, our old friends. It took years to understand that it was the everyday that had eroded them. That infinite wearing away.
Some, it is true, found jobs and lived together. They passed the time (there was always too much time) with the help of marijuana. It helped them endure the evenings and weekends. That and consumer durables – the video recorder and the television, and later, when they’d made some money, the DVD player and the widescreen TV.
All this in a town where there was work – plentiful work, and some of it well paid for what it was. But a town infested with the everyday, in which only the money-makers existed in their big houses. Whose sons and daughters, we knew, would exist as they did.
Imagine our delight when those sons and daughters tumbled to our level! When they had crashed through drug abuse or depression to the level of the everyday! When they were cast out of their homes because they were touched by madness! We loved that madness – we marvelled to hear when one rich individual or another had joined the travellers.
We, however, we protected from it. We were steeled to the everyday. We understood it at its own level. Yes, it was nullity itself, it was the great whirlwind which turned inside us. It was the madness of the day which lasted forever, of one day after another in weeks which were mini-eternities. Belle and Sebastian sing about it: ‘A Summer Wasting’. And there are the Smiths too, of course: ‘Still Ill’.
But we paced ourselves. We were like the characters in 247: there were slow pursuits to undertake, analogous to fishing, which were counterforces to the infinite wearing away. We knew nothing happened in the everyday; that there was no ‘subject’ to its experience. But we knew, too, that there were ways of passing the time without allowing ourselves to be spun in all directions, spun apart and scattered across the world.
Always, though, that dispersal. Friendships ended for no particular reason. One person moved away, then another. Until only you were left, reading the papers in the town library, cycling to Tescos in the afternoon for bargain sushi. True, you saw others like you, other ghosts. But they worried you: did you want to spend time with those who mirrored you own dissolution? Did you want to see what you might become? Because there are casualties of the everyday: the mad, the depressed. What is Prozac but a cure for the infinite wearing away? No: you had to be careful.
One solution was television, which was always at a safe distance from the everyday. You became a spectator, especially with daytime television. Watch Oprah or Trisha, The Wright Stuff or This Morning: these are programmes for those who want to brace themselves against the centripedal force of the great whirlwind.
For myself, television has always been a great bulwark against formless time. Especially News 24, when I had it: there on the screen the time was always displayed. One minute, another, and then a news update after fifteen minutes. Beautiful! Calibrated time!
Heidegger, by the way, is wrong to claim that everydayness is characterised by the time of now-points. He didn’t know unemployment, for then he would know that it is infinite time, the instant which doesn’t pass which is the temporality of the everyday. The nonsense of the distinction between authentic and inauthentic life!
The great achievement is not to seize one’s project as one’s own, but to live time in a series of now-points. To hold onto time. To escape the infinite wearing away which turns the instant into an eternity. For nothing happens in the everyday – no event completes itself, which means there are no events.
For Lefebvre, it is still possible to speak of the everyday as a utopia, as an idea. He still has faith in the people of the streets, of those who gather in the places between other places, who find common cause in the demonstration. Ah, but did he know the poison of television? Did he know the extent to which it would withdraw us from the streets? No one speaks and no one listens.
As I type, Saturday morning television plays in my flat. It is true, I have switched sides, I have a job, this is a miracle, and barely experience the great scattering and dispersal, the infinite wearing away. When the revolution erupts from the street, I saw to myself, put me up against the world. For I am on the enemy’s side.
Proof: I visited, a few years ago, some friends who never found a foothold in the world of work. Who was adrift. We went out, there was trouble at the nightclub, a hospital visit. I should have phoned, visited, but I never did. Much later, an accusatory phonecall: he had been beaten up, he said, he was still scarred, and where had I been? Why hadn’t I phoned? It was my idea to go to the club where the squaddies went! We spoke until I thought: I need to escape him. He said: I’ll come and visit; I thought: no way. So it was that I never again sought the open spaces of the everyday from which, I dream idly, pathetically, derisorily, the revolution will come.
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