1926
"In utilizing public means of transport and in making use of information services such as the newspaper, every Other is like the next. This Being-with-one-another dissolves one's own Dasein completely into a kind of Being of 'the Others', in such a way, indeed, that the Others, as distinguishable and explicit, vanish more and more. In this inconspicuousness and unascertainability, the real dictatorship of the 'they' is unfolded. We take pleasure and enjoy ourselves as they [man] take pleasure; we read, see, and judge about literature and art as they see and judge; likewise we shrink back from the 'great mass' as they shrink back; we find 'shocking' what they find shocking. The 'they', which is nothing definite, and which all are, though not as the sum, prescribes the kind of Being of everydayness." - Heidegger 2001 [1926]: 164
1936
"The film has enriched our field of perception with methods which can be illustrated by those of Freudian theory. Fifty years ago, a slip of the tongue passed more or less unnoticed. Only exceptionally may such a slip have revealed dimensions of depth in a conversation which had seemed to be taking its course on the surface. Since the Psychopathology of Everyday Life things have changed. This book isolated and made analyzable things which had heretofore floated along unnoticed in the broad stream of perception. For the entire spectrum of optical, and now also acoustical, perception the film has brought about a similar deepening of apperception. It is only an obverse of this fact that behavior items shown in a movie can be analyzed much more precisely and from more points of view than those presented on paintings or on the stage. As compared with painting, filmed behavior lends itself more readily to analysis because of its incomparably more precise statements of the situation. In comparison with the stage scene, the filmed behavior item lends itself more readily to analysis because it can be isolated more easily." - Benjamin 2007 [1936]: 235-6
1984
"The procedures of everyday creativity ... [In Michel Foucault's Discipline and Punish], instead of analyzing the apparatus exercising power (i. e., the localizable, expansionist, repressive, and legal institutions), Foucault analyzes the mechanisms (dispositifs) that have sapped the strength of these institutions and surreptitiously reorganized the functioning of power: 'miniscule' technical procedures acting on and with details, redistributing a discursive space in order to make it the means of a generalized 'discipline' (surveillance). This approach raises a new and different set of problems to be investigated. Once again, however, this 'microphysics of power' privileges the productive apparatus (which produces the 'discipline'), even though it discerns in 'education' a system of 'repression' and shows how, from the wings as it were, silent technologies determine or short-circuit institutional stage directions. If it is true that the grid of 'discipline' is everywhere becoming clearer and more extensive, it is all the more urgent to discover how an entire society resists being reduced to it, what popular procedures (also 'miniscule' and quotidian) manipulate the mechanisms of discipline and conform to them only in order to evade them, and finally, what 'ways of operating' form the counterpart, on the consumer's (or 'dominee's'?) side, of the mute processes that organize the establishment of socioeconomic order.
"These 'ways of operating' constitute the innumerable practices by means of which users reappropriate the space organized by techniques of sociocultural production. They pose questions at once analogous and contrary to those dealt with in Foucault's book: analogous, in that the goal is to perceive and analyze the microbe-like operations proliferating within technocratic structures and deflecting their functioning by means of a multitude of 'tactics' articulated in the details of everyday life; contrary, in that the goal is not to make clearer how the violence of order is transmuted into a disciplinary technology, but rather to bring to light the clandestine forms taken by the dispersed, tactical, and makeshift creativity of groups or individuals already caught in the nets of 'discipline.' Pushed to their ideal limits, these procedures and ruses of consumers compose the network of an antidiscipline which is the subject of this book." - de Certeau 1984: xiv-xv
"These 'ways of operating' constitute the innumerable practices by means of which users reappropriate the space organized by techniques of sociocultural production. They pose questions at once analogous and contrary to those dealt with in Foucault's book: analogous, in that the goal is to perceive and analyze the microbe-like operations proliferating within technocratic structures and deflecting their functioning by means of a multitude of 'tactics' articulated in the details of everyday life; contrary, in that the goal is not to make clearer how the violence of order is transmuted into a disciplinary technology, but rather to bring to light the clandestine forms taken by the dispersed, tactical, and makeshift creativity of groups or individuals already caught in the nets of 'discipline.' Pushed to their ideal limits, these procedures and ruses of consumers compose the network of an antidiscipline which is the subject of this book." - de Certeau 1984: xiv-xv
2004
"Whilst everyday life is of course a broadening of the scope of Marx's notion of alienation to areas outside the economic, it is equally very close to Lukács' [1971] and Heidegger's [1962] notion of Alltäglichkeit [everydayness] ... . Just as Marx turned Hegel’s abstract notion of alienation into a concrete analysis of human reality, Lefebvre is critical of both Heidegger’s abstraction, and the attribution of primitivity, triviality and anonymity to the notion of everyday life ... . Lefebvre sees Marx’s Capital as making the abstract concepts of 'man' and 'humanity' concrete, into praxis ... " - Elden 2004a: 91 (see also Elden 2004b: 112)
2005
"The turn to an overly systematized theory of governmentality, derived from Foucault, only compounds the theoretical limitations of economistic conceptualizations of 'neoliberalism'. The task for social theory today remains a quite classical one, namely to try to specify 'the recurrent causal processes that govern the intersections between abstract, centrally promoted plans and social life on the small scale' (Tilly, 2003, p. 345). Neither the story of neoliberalism-as-hegemony nor neoliberalism-as-governmentality ... can account for the forms of receptivity, pro-activity, and generativity that might help to explain how the rhythms of the everyday are able to produce effects on macro-scale processes, and vice versa." - Barnett 2005: 11
2005
"Heidegger's suggestion — and quite possibly the most complicated one that he makes in the Beiträge in relation to geography — is that we should think time-space as Abgrund. What does he mean by this? Abgrund is the German word for abyss, so time-space is abyssal, unfathomable, without ground ... or, rather, from ground, from the depths. An impossible encounter that makes possible what follows. From the Ab-grund comes the Grund, from the abyss, the foundation, and this 'in the way of temporalising and spatialising'. ... [Abgrund evokes a path] from the commonplace to the elevation of being. In other words, it is a move from the everyday ... to the question of being." - Elden 2005a: 823
2007
"Engels, when he rediscovered the concept of ideology in 1888 (in Ludwig Feuerbach and the End of Classical German Philosophy), already proposed to demonstrate what makes the State the 'first ideological power' and to uncover the law of historical succession of the 'world-views' or forms of the dominant ideology which confer their (religious or juridical) legitimacy on class-based states. By contrast, it is within the legacy of the analysis of fetishism that one must look both for the phenomenologies of 'everyday life' governed by the logic of the commodity or by the symbolics of value (the Frankfurt School, Henri Lefebvre, Guy Debord, Agnes Heller) ..." - Balibar 2007: 78-9
