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).
Access this chapter
Tax calculation will be finalised at checkout
Purchases are for personal use only
Preview
Unable to display preview. Download preview PDF.
Similar content being viewed by others
Note
See also: Radvansky, G. A., Copeland, D. E., Berish, D. E. & Dijkstra, K. (2003). ‘Aging and Situation Model Updating’. Aging, Neuropsychology and Cognition, 10, 158–166; additionally: Radvansky, G. A. (1999) ‘Aging, Memory and Comprehension’. Current Directions in Psychological Science, 8, 49–53; and Radvansky, G. A., Copeland, D. E. & Zwaan, R. A. (2005). ‘A Novel Study: The Mental Organization of Events’. Memory, 13, 796–814.
Author information
Authors and Affiliations
Copyright information
© 2013 Nick Hubble and Philip Tew
About this chapter
Cite this chapter
Hubble, N., Tew, P. (2013). Everyday Life, Self-Narration and Identity. In: Ageing, Narrative and Identity. Palgrave Macmillan, London. https://doi.org/10.1057/9780230390942_3
Download citation
DOI: https://doi.org/10.1057/9780230390942_3
Publisher Name: Palgrave Macmillan, London
Print ISBN: 978-1-349-35142-8
Online ISBN: 978-0-230-39094-2
eBook Packages: Palgrave Social Sciences CollectionSocial Sciences (R0)