If I have made a discovery through writing here it is only one of what I have always tried to suppress: empty time, unemployment, watching dust motes in the air. Why did this come to me? Because I write here when I cannot write elsewhere; this is a fallen writing which cannot assemble itself into a whole. Sometimes I fantasise that this same experience of inadequacy, of inadequation, but above all, of what might be called the quotidian might have some strange political force, that boredom and lassitude place strange weapons in our hands.
The quotidian (there’s a bug in Typepad which is preventing me using the word in the title of this post): who would look to it for liberatory force? Is it not what reveals itself in the stagnant provinces of Chekhov’s plays? Or in the pettiness of life in the midst of the vast bureaucracies of which Kafka writes? The quotidian appears to be superficiality itself; it is that experience of nullity that reveals itself in tedium and boredom. Whence the desire to escape from the quotidian through the busyness Heidegger calls Erlebnis, the active seeking of sensation. Heidegger considers the quotidian under the heading of inauthenticity; this is not intended as a moral category, he insists, but this is disingenuous. When he writes of idle curiosity and aimless chatter his tone is unmistakably condemnatory.
There is no question that the quotidian can lapse into the most grave depoliticisation: we watch television by ourselves in the evening, each separated from another in our houses. But the quotidian also contains the potential for a repoliticisation: the streets from which revolutions are born are part of the same ordinary life. ‘The quotidian is not at home in our dwelling places’, Blanchot writes, ‘it is not in offices or churches any more than in libraries or museums. If it is anywhere, it is in the streets’. In the streets: in the essay from which I am quoting, Blanchot is writing of Lefebvre’s studies of the quotidian and wondering to himself what sense there might be in calling for a critique of quotidian life.
What would such a critique imply? For Lefebvre, the quotidian is an untapped political reserve. The fluidity and contingency of quotidian life is always made to conform to an overall order, a system of purposes, meanings and values. Yet there is always a deviation, always unintended deflections which no longer aim to produce an outcome linked to the social whole. Such purposelessness appear spontaneously in quotidian life. To dream idly, to read, to write: such actions are undertaken for their own sake; they have a dynamism and fluidity which escapes the attempt to bind quotidian actions to what is productive or efficient.
This is why the quotidian is always suspect: it is the breeding ground of ideologies. This is why the secret police keep files on everyone, why Mandelstam’s friends had to memorise poems of which no written copy could exist. An analogous fascination drives the market researcher: what is that determines why it is this product that is purchased and not that one? When politicians use focus groups, it is in order to predict and contain the quotidian: to understand the segmentation of swing voters into particular groups in order to target them by specific methods.
You’ve see someone on the street you half-recognise. Who is it? She resembles your friend, and yet she is an anonymous passerby. Yet in the moment of non-recognition it is as though you caught sight of the anonymity of the quotidian itself. Here is another experience of the image of the Other that would allow the relation to any given human being to become indefinite. I have experienced the nudity of the Other – of the other person who no longer presents herself within the cultural categories which allow me to determine my relations to others. The Other, now, keeps me at a distance, at her distance.
The philosophical suspicion of the quotidian lies in this same anonymity. The quotidian human being is anyone at all. I am Heidegger’s Das Man, never yet myself, always distracted and dilatory, ill-disciplined and irresolute and unaware, above all, of the fact I will die. But Heidegger’s recipe for authenticity betrays something telling: what is feared is the limitlessness of the quotidian, its indefinite expansiveness. After claiming the quotidian is capable of ‘ruining always anew the unjustifiable difference between authenticity and inauthenticity’, Blanchot observes:
Day-to-day indifference is situated on a level at which the question of value is not posed: there is [il y a] the quotidian (without subject, without object), and while there is, the quotidian ‘il’ does not have to be of account; if value nonetheless claims to step in, then ‘il’ is worth ‘nothing’ and ‘nothing’ is worth anything through contact with him. To experience quotidianness is to undergo the radical nihilism that is something like its essence and by which, in the void that animates it, quotidianness does not cease to hold the principle of its own critique.
Such nihilism (see the posts at Philosophical Conversations) suspends the relation to death what would allow us to decide between authenticity and inauthenticity. It suspends values, meaning and truth. It is experienced as a wearing away of the power to decide, to resolve, to bring oneself into relation to oneself. The ‘il’, the companion is the ‘subject’ of the quotidian, understood as the locus of experience of the il y a.
What does this mean? In his early writings, Levinas writes of the impersonal “il” as the locus of an an exposure, an opening to what Levinas calls existence in general, existence, as he puts it, without existents: the il y a. The il y a is not linked, unlike Heidegger’s “es gibt” according to Levinas, to “the joy of what exists” but to “the phenomenon of impersonal being,” or what he calls in another essay, “horrible neutrality”. If the “I” opens from the “il” , it does not leave it behind; the il y a may always return. If it does so it is as a horrifying eruption of chaos and indeterminacy. But why does the ‘il y a’ need to be horrifying? Could this ontological insecurity permit the world we share and the others with whom we share it to bring us into relation with what escapes determination?
There is the quotidian : the quotidian is without subject or object; the locus of the experience of the quotidian is the ‘il’: Blanchot presents the quotidian itself as existence without existents, as the il y a and as, here, what is called nihilism. Yet it is not horror he links to the ‘il y a’ of the everyday, but boredom. It is boredom which plays the role of the Grundstimmung which opens up the quotidian.
There is the quotidian: each in the quotidian exists, through boredom, in relation to what is called the ‘il y a’ – to the there is of chaos and indeterminacy. Comes the moment of critique when it is such boredom that brings us together: when we respond to the summons of the Other such that it brings forward in each of us what is called the ‘il‘, the impersonal opening. Critique comes as the everyday allows there to awaken the sharing of that great reserve named by the ‘il y a‘. Thus it is that shared boredom causes there to be born the great movements of rebellion, where each is the passerby and the utopic space of the street bears us towards the future.
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