There are moments in life when you just want to take and change everything. But what is “everything” is not clear, and even more so how to do it. Therefore, many remain in the routine and continue the fussy run through life.
There are 11 great ways to start making changes in your life right now. Thanks to them, your everyday life will become more colorful and positive. And this is the beginning of massive changes!
Change your usual routes
The roads we walk every day become automatic. You mechanically rush about business, thinking about something of your own, not noticing either the landscape, or the beauty, or the people around. Try to bring something new to your route every time: type of transport, road, corner, turn.
If you are constantly in a hurry to work, and it is problematic to think over a new route, then just start returning home in a different way. Surely, in the place where you live, there are places that you have not been to yet, or are very rare. Check them out this week!
Try a new flavor every week
Have you ever tried Vietnamese food? Or Italian paella? Or maybe you will be surprised by the taste of Mexican guacamole?
Make it a rule to try at least one new dish a week. Stop eating the same thing every day! Surprise yourself this week with a trip to a cute place where you'll taste something you've never eaten in your life! You will have a new experience and unforgettable sensations!
Make surprises
Bringing joy to loved ones is wonderful! Brings a lot of positive emotions! Small and unusual signs of attention bring people together and renew relationships. Try!
Also remember that there is a spiritual law of sowing and reaping, which says, "what you sow, that you will reap." While making surprises for others, expect surprises in your life!
Travel around the cities of your country
It is not expensive, does not require long visa processing and preparations. Just for the weekend, buy a ticket to some town and take a walk in it until the evening.
The road and walks will help you sort out your thoughts and feelings and return home refreshed and rested.
Change your image
You don't have to dye your hair red or have your nose pierced. No global changes needed. It can be a nice little thing, but definitely once a month.
Update your haircut, hooligan with bangs and makeup. If you always wear jeans, buy yourself a nice dress. And if you are a lover of official business style - allow yourself bright colors. Add positivity to yourself and others!
Do something you normally don't
But I always wanted to. Are you closed and modest in communication with colleagues? Come in the morning, wish everyone a good day, and, smiling, compliment each person in the office. Are you a greedy person in life? Invite friends over for coffee and treats to desserts. Do you go gloomy? Try to smile at everyone you see visually on the street. In general, do what is not expected of you.
Step over the zone of habitual comfort, and change the model of behavior. It's not easy, but believe me, the sensations will delight you!
Take courses
Find inexpensive master classes in some business "for the soul." Learn to dance, sing, play the balalaika, cut vegetables cool, learn basic Chinese phrases or master the skill of a relaxing massage. The choice is varied, as are your talents!
The goal is for you to rest your soul in the classroom, not to think about work and problems, but to be charged with new knowledge and positive.
Learning something new
This already applies to your professional and personal growth. Learning always brings new emotions and new results. Think about what skill will help you reach a new level in work or business and act!
Change at home and workplace
Small (or very big!) external changes will force your brain to think in a new way. You will definitely have new ideas, joy and a state of creation (this is when even in small things you can draw pleasure and inspiration).
Take a day off in the middle of the work week
And spend it how you want. Work is important, but sometimes it’s worth breaking out of the familiar circle. Feel like a schoolboy who skips a lesson and enjoys freedom.
Walk around the city, eat ice cream, go to the zoo or just read a book in the park. The main thing - you can not spend this day at home or in domestic matters. This is your freedom day!
Organize a photo session
Just let the photographer and stylist choose the image for you. So you can see yourself from a completely new perspective, and beautiful photos will collect a lot of likes and comments on your pages. It will inspire you!
Ask God for a miracle
The main difference between God and man is that we are natural, and He is SUPERNATURAL! Therefore, it can do for a person BEYOND what we can do for ourselves.
Sincerely ask Him for a clear miracle in your life and wait. Trust me, it works! In my life, I constantly see the wonderful manifestation of God's love and power simply because I allow Him to do it.
Believe and receive miracles!
Of course, this is not a complete list of how you can make life amazing, diverse and harmonious. Each person has their own unique way. Share your advice with me in the comments!
You will get a lot of positive, motivation and euphoria at the legendary live training of Itzhak Pintosevich ""! Come and reset your life!
EVERYDAY
EVERYDAY
EVERYDAYNESS is a holistic socio-cultural) life-like, appearing in the functioning of society as a “natural”, self-evident human life activity. Everyday life can be considered as a boundary condition of human activity. Studies of everyday life imply an approach to the world of a person and his very life as a value. Everyday life is significant in the culture of the 20th century.
Within the framework of classical approaches (represented, in particular, by Marxism, Freudianism, structural functionalism), everyday life was considered an inferior reality and a negligible value. It seemed to be a surface, behind which a certain depth was thought, a veil of fetishistic forms, behind which lay a genuine one (“It” - in Freudianism, economic ties and relations - in Marxism, stable structures that determine human and worldview - in structural functionalism). The researcher of everyday life acted as an absolute observer, for whom the living acted only as a symptom of this reality. In relation to everyday life, a “hermeneutics of suspicion” was cultivated. Everyday and non-everyday were represented by different ontological structures, and everyday life itself was tested against . Within the framework of classical methodologies, everyday life could act as an object of projection and rationalization. This tradition is quite stable (A Lefebvre, . Geller).
Grmeneutic and phenomenological schools in social philosophy and sociology acted as an alternative to the classical paradigm of social knowledge. The impetus for a new understanding of everyday life was given by E. Husserl in his interpretation of the life world. In the social phenomenology of A. Schutz, these ideas and the sociological attitudes of M. Weber were implemented. Schutz formulated the task of studying everyday life in the context of searching for the ultimate foundations of social reality as such. Various variants of this approach are presented in modern sociology of knowledge (P. Berger, T. Luckman), from somewhat different methodological positions in symbolic interactionism, ethnamethodology, etc. The evolution of studies of everyday life is associated with a change in the paradigms of social knowledge. In our understanding, the everyday and the non-everyday no longer act as different ontological structures that are incommensurable in their significance. These are different realities only insofar as they represent different types of experience. Accordingly, theoretical models are not opposed to the constructs of everyday mentality and everyday consciousness. On the contrary, the criterion of substantiation and validity of social knowledge is also the correspondence of the concepts of science to the constructs of everyday consciousness, and other non-scientific forms of knowledge. The central issue of social cognition is the correlation of social knowledge with everyday meanings (first-order constructs). The problem of the objectivity of knowledge is not removed here, but the very forms of everyday life and thinking are no longer checked for truth.
The formation of the “post-classical paradigm” of social knowledge is inseparable from understanding the problems of everyday life. The study of everyday life is moving from a branch dealing with a specific subject to a new definition of the “sociological eye”. The nature of the research object - the daily life of people - changes to the very idea of knowing the social world. A number of completely different researchers (P. Feyerabend and J. Habermas, Berger and Lukman, E. Vshdens and M. Maffesoli, M. De Serto and others) substantiate the idea of the need to rethink the social status of science and a new concept of the cognizing subject, the return of the language of science “ home”, into everyday life. The social researcher loses the privileged position of an absolute observer and acts only as a participant in social life on an equal footing with others. It proceeds from the fact of the plurality of experiences, social practices, including linguistic ones. Reality is seen only as phenomenal. Changing the angle of view allows you to turn to what previously seemed, firstly, insignificant, and secondly, a deviation from the norm to be overcome: the archaic in modern times, the banalization and technologization of images, etc. Accordingly, along with the classical methods of studying everyday life, methods are used based on approaching the narrativity of everyday life (case studies, or the study of an individual case, the biographical method, the analysis of "profane" texts). The focus of such studies is self-evidence of consciousness, habitual, abused practices, practical, specific “logic of practice”. The study turns into a kind of “commonsensology” (from lat. -) and “formology”, because it remains the only stable beginning in the conditions of alternativeness and instability of social and plurality of cultural principles (M. Maffesoli). Life forms are no longer treated as higher or lower, true or not true. No knowledge can be obtained outside the context of culture, language, . This cognitive gives rise to the problem of relativism, since truth is replaced by the problem of communication between people and cultures. The task of cognition is reduced to a historically conditioned “cultural action”, which is to develop a new way of “reading the world”. Within the framework of these approaches, “truth” and “emancipation” are transformed from immutable laws into value regulators.
Lit.: Berger P., Lukman T. Social construction of reality. M., 1995; Waldenfels B. Everyday life as a melting pot of rationality.- In the book: SOCIO-LOGOS. M., 1991; IoninL. G. Sociology of culture. M., 1996; Schutz A. Formation of concepts and theory in the social sciences. - In the book: American Sociological; Texts. M., 1994; ShutzA. On Phenomenology and Social Relations. Chi., 1970; GoffmanE. The Presentation of Self m Everyday Life. N.Y.-L., 1959; LefebvreA. La vie quotidienne dans le monde modem. P., 1974; MaffesoliM. La conquete du present. Pour une sociology de la vie quotidienne. P., 1979; HellerA. Everyday Life. Cambr., 1984; De Sgneai M. The Practice of Everyday Life. Berkeley; Los Ang.; L „1988.
H. H. Kozlova
New Philosophical Encyclopedia: In 4 vols. M.: Thought. Edited by V. S. Stepin. 2001 .
Synonyms:
See what "DAILY" is in other dictionaries:
Everyday life… Spelling Dictionary
Everyday life is an area of social reality, an integral socio-cultural life world, which appears as a “natural”, self-evident condition of human life. The phenomenon of everyday life is studied by a number of humanities: sociology, anthropology, ... ... Wikipedia
Everyday life is a process of life activity of individuals, unfolding in habitual well-known situations on the basis of self-evident expectations. Social interactions in the context of P. are based on the premise of the uniformity of perception of situations ... Encyclopedia of cultural studies Explanatory dictionary of Ozhegov
everyday life- EVERYDAY (German Alltaeglichkeit; English everydayness, common sense) is a concept introduced into philosophy by English empiricism and, later, by phenomenology and linguistic philosophy. The current situation and the context of the sound of the terms "P.", ... ... Encyclopedia of Epistemology and Philosophy of Science
EVERYDAY- an integral socio-cultural life world, which appears in the functioning of society as a natural, self-evident condition of human life. As a specific area of social reality acts as an object of a number of sciences and ... ... Modern Western Philosophy. encyclopedic Dictionary
J. distraction. noun according to adj. everyday Explanatory Dictionary of Efremova. T. F. Efremova. 2000... Modern explanatory dictionary of the Russian language Efremova
Everyday, everyday, everyday, everyday, everyday, everyday, everyday, everyday, everyday, everyday, everyday, everyday (
This material was sent to us by our regular reader Airat Yalaev.
In the daily routine, our life turns into a series of identical days.
What does it threaten? Our brains are plastic, so unused parts of the brain are absorbed by parts of the brain that we often use. For example, earlier (primary grades) we knew all subjects approximately equally, but then at the university we received a narrow specialization and used only the information that we needed to perform our direct duties. And they got a specialist who thinks better than at school, but knows less about the development of the embryo or even forgot that the strongest tissue in the human body is tooth enamel. Yes, this is not important information, someone will think. Who cares if our skin is the coolest self-healing survival tool or how perfect our body is. But we also drive to work the same way we took a week ago, breakfast and dinner differ only in content. In some cases, this leads to a deterioration in the pace and quality of work, apathy, sadness and creative decline.
Which exit?
1. Read. By reading we learn about how people lived and what they achieved. And we also get the fruits of the labors of scientists who have devoted decades to studying those topics that we would not have enough life to study. It is a sin not to take advantage of the opportunity to become an enlightened intellectual in our current information age. When the works of many recognized scientists, we can easily find on the shelves of bookstores.
2. Drink water a couple of hours before bed. Once I read about it in one article and decided to try it, just during this period, the morning heaviness was rather fed up. And lo and behold - one glass of water two hours before bedtime caused the heaviness to disappear in the morning.
3. Actively relax. Both those who spend a lot of time online with colleagues and friends, and those who are offline (work at home, etc.) need to rest. Having played tennis, football, volleyball at least once, having gone to the ski base, it will become clear how you need to relax with friends and colleagues.
4. Do not overeat and eat healthy food. As cliche as it sounds, we are what we eat. And this should not be in excess, because in fact we need very little to get enough. And most likely it is not in vain that we are given a feeling of satiety and hunger?
5. Contact relatives. Fortunately, some of us have relatives, so maybe we should be grateful for this? After all, many of them have contributed to the formation of our personality. In addition, a call from a distant relative will please many, so let's start with ourselves and be the initiators of the "good mood".
6. Do ordinary things, only differently. Try to leave early tomorrow and take a different route to work. If you had breakfast at the table, this time try to eat on the carpet with a tablecloth. If you weren't paying attention to the people around you on your way to work, this time smile and say hello.
How do you propose to diversify our life with you?
Everyday life: a brief history of the concept
Despite the fact that everyday life has been under the guns of artists for two centuries, art theory has not offered a consistent interpretation of it. Drawing on the heritage of psychoanalysis, sociology and critical theory, Nikos Papasteriadis offers a new perspective on the daily life of the modern world. Today, it is everyday life that provides the key to countering the homogenization of culture and the suppression of human individuality. T&P publishes a translation of a chapter from Spatial Aesthetics: Art, Place and Everyday, translated by the V-A-C Foundation as part of a collaborative project.
For most of the 20th century, the notion of "everyday" rarely surfaced, considered an unimportant component of the sociological tradition. It was popularized in the 1980s as part of the cultural studies controversy and entered the contemporary art discourse in the mid to late 1990s. The rise of the concept of everyday life to the fore was followed by a period of confusion and uncertainty in the field of theory. After decades of intense debate about the relationship between art, power, and discourse, a lull followed, with no new work on the meaning of the social context of art. It seemed that the introduction of the concept of everyday life into circulation was a neutral designation of the most diverse forms of artistic practice. If the relationship between art, politics, and theory is at an impasse, then the concept of everyday life was supposed to reveal the special forms of life experience that guide the work of the artist and interact with politics, without being guided by any theory with preconceived ideological attitudes.
Although this popular interpretation of the concept of everyday life may have contributed to the recognition of the specific position of art and its relationship with other socially significant activities, the history of ideas has underestimated this concept. The concept of everyday life can remain neutral only as long as it is used in its most direct and habitual sense. Throughout the 20th century, it periodically shifted from a simple designation of everyday elements of social life to a critical category that not only opposed the materiality and totality of modern culture, but also served as a means to redefine reality in order to bring about social transformations.
The Russian Formalists were among the first artists to rethink the relationship between art and everyday life. Recognizing that art always has a dialectical relationship with other cultural events, they invented new artistic practices that were directly involved in the materiality of production and various forms of media. The shift in perception of everyday life was not limited to artists because, as John Roberts noted, in the early stages of the Russian Revolution, both Lenin and Trotsky recognized the importance of a critical depiction of everyday life. They believed that literature, cinema, and theater could build a "proletarian culture" from a new universalist position:
Everyday life had to be created not on the basis of the narrow cultural experience of the working class, but on the basis of the entire world culture, to which the forms of European bourgeois culture made a particularly rich contribution, as well as world culture as a whole, which was inherited by the proletariat as the vanguard of all mankind.
In February 2015, the V-A-C Foundation launched a new program for the implementation of art projects in the urban environment of Moscow “Space Expansion. Artistic Practices in the Urban Environment”, aimed at recognizing points of mutual interest between art and the city, as well as exploring ways of their interaction that are adequate to the social and cultural life of Moscow. One of the most important tasks of the project is to stimulate public and professional discussion about the role and possibilities of public art in the modern Moscow environment. In collaboration with the V-A-C Foundation, Theories and Practices have produced a series of theoretical texts on public art and interviews with leading experts in the field of art in the urban environment, who share with readers their ideas about the future of public art.
Aligned with the history of the avant-garde, the concept of everyday life also allows for a reappraisal of artistic practices that mainstream culture might have considered banal or marginal. From the Dadaists and Surrealists to Situationism and the Fluxus movement, artists have experimented with subverting the conventional use of everyday objects and the habitual associations of modernist art. At the center of these experiments was not just the documentation of the artifacts and practices of the modern world, but also the combination of artistic practice with new industrial techniques to unleash the creative potential of modern life. These artistic unions were perceived as a vital force to counteract the homogenization of culture and the suppression of individuality in the modern world. Perceptual habits that develop in the city were understood as "problems". The German sociologist of the early 20th century, Georg Simmel, described this blunting of critical faculty as a consequence of the surfeit of life in the modern city. Maurice Blanchot underlined this discovery when he defined the main feature of modern culture as "boredom" - a form of consciousness where images lose their form and the "citizen within us" falls asleep:
Through the tactics of shock, juxtaposition and interaction, modernist artists tried to awaken the "citizen within us".
For Blanchot, everyday life was clad in several intellectual, political, and cultural straitjackets. Art was perceived as a means of exposing the totalitarian underside of social illusions and stimulating a critical perception of reality. Attention to the role of the voluntary and the subconscious in our daily life was endowed with a political and psychological dimension. In order to break the barrier of conventions, the functions of art expanded: from the transmission of a specific message, the avant-garde was supposed to lead to the transformation of everyday consciousness. By presenting familiar objects from unexpected perspectives, the artists sought not only to discover their hidden poetry, but to unleash a new, revolutionary understanding of reality. These ambitions were to support the controversy about the role of the artist. However, despite a long tradition of avant-garde experiments and repeated attempts to break down the boundaries between popular culture and high art, the concept of everyday life still did not receive proper theoretical understanding within the framework of the discourse of contemporary art. Most of the theoretical work on the concept of everyday life belongs to the fields of sociology, philosophy and psychoanalysis.
dora Maurer, Time, 1972
Within sociology, the category of everyday life is clearly contrasted with other concepts that emphasize structural, transcendent, or ahistorical forces. The concept of everyday life was not a way to get away from social problems or avoid them altogether, but a means of rethinking the relationship between the private and the general, or how attention to the details of everyday life helps to reveal the essence of a larger system. However, in relation to art, the concept of everyday life received a different interpretation: it was believed that it differs from earlier theoretical models in that it does not try to narrow the meaning of art to a priori categories of a given political ideology, nor to explain its content based on pre-established psychoanalytic and philosophical categories.
To consider art in the light of the concept of everyday life is to emphasize that the criterion for its evaluation should not be borrowed from other discourses, but rather from its expression in everyday life. However, this goal of penetrating straight into the life-world without recourse to other discourses cannot be achieved in its purest form. There is no direct access to the representation of everyday life. Theories of language, culture, and psyche are so closely intertwined with each other in our every attempt to represent the details of everyday life. Although the concept of everyday life may seem like a new way of expressing the context of artistic practice, we must not forget that it is rooted in a long sociological and philosophical debate about practice. In the discourse of art history, such as "art and everyday life", one can trace the transition from the art of living to the politics of social transformation.
The critical response to realism at the end of the 19th century, and the attempts to broaden the subject matter of the fine arts associated with it, were partly prompted by the reconsideration of bourgeois distinctions between the noble and the ordinary, the beautiful and the ugly, the elegant and the mundane. The main champions of modernism like Baudelaire had to pay special attention to the vital representation of the "everyday". It is not my intention to illustrate how artists either struggled with this process or tried to tie tighter knots between art and everyday life, rather I intend to contextualize the concept. As Scott McQuire noted:
“While the connotations of the term ‘everyday’ have a controversial history, going from Marxist sociology (especially Henri Lefebvre’s 1947 Critique of Everyday Life) and then through phenomenology and the Situationist International (Raoul Vaneigem’s Revolution of Everyday Life), published in 1967, was an appendix to Guy Debord's The Society of the Spectacle), its meaning has undergone significant changes since it became the doxa of modern cultural studies.
The genealogy of the concept of everyday life can be traced back to a much more distant past, and the web can be spread more widely. Mike Featherstone finds echoes of this concept in antiquity and relies in his research not only on the Marxist, but also on the phenomenological tradition. Ancient Greek philosophers closely considered and actively discussed the question of what constitutes a "good life". In the phenomenological tradition, the term "lifeworld" has played a central role, and when Alfred Schutz introduced it to sociology, he defined it in relation to the heterogeneity of positions in action and thought that clashed with dominant, institutionalized action and rationalized forms of thought. Agnes Heller's attempt to synthesize the phenomenological and Marxist traditions of everyday life led to its characterization as "encompassing various relations, including reflexive relations." These relationships include not only self-placement and understanding of the world around us, but also those relationships that have the critical potential to offer a vision of a "better world." In her interpretation, everyday life is seen as an integral part of the "I" and society. It is a combination of both the relationships that form the "I" and the processes that form the world.
Although the concept of everyday life resembles an amoeba, whose composition and contours change depending on what it comes into contact with and what meanings it absorbs, it must be emphasized that it is still not outside theory and politics. The concept of everyday life is not unlimited. While it is defined in defiance of unidirectional or reductionist theories of social change, it was not put forward to prove that there were some places that were completely open and free of any institutional constraints. The parameters of everyday life can be sharpened by comparing it with the opposite concept - non-everyday life.
Nam June Paik, Zen for TV, 1963/78
In sociology - especially in the ethnomethodological tradition - the concept of everyday life has been used to test whether a theory can withstand either a model world that lays down binding rules or a totalizing abstraction that lays down a precise sequence of cause and effect. The concept of everyday life also played an important role in rethinking the "place" of theory. If we understand theory as operating within, and not above or outside, a particular context, then this position, which implies that there is a process of representation in the very structures and institutions of participation, will open up to us such a level of criticism, will give us such a viewing angle from which we can observe behind the precise configuration of currents and collisions in social relations.
Thus, the theory of everyday life turned out to be located in the gaps, in the gaps, on the outskirts and in the border zones of the social. The place and manifestation of everyday life has been established, for example, when workers catch those moments that interrupt the monotonous course of work; or when we unexpectedly enjoy the products of popular culture, or when we appropriate someone else's space and call it home, or even when a pop song so coincides with our internal state that it becomes our anthem. Everyday life was intended to show that there are pockets of resistance, tactics of adaptation, and reflexive forms of agency (agency) that the essentializing and structuralist models of social theory have not taken into account.
Given the restless and subversive dynamics of modernity, this modality is best suited to comprehend the sense of displacement and rupture so symptomatic of our time. The concept of everyday life in critical theory has been closely linked to the conflict between freedom and alienation in modernity. More pessimistic offshoots of Marxist theory - especially theorists influenced by Adorno's writings on the negativity of culture - believed that at best everyday life echoes the forces of coercion inherent in modernity, or, even worse, that it is a manifestation of that false political truce that is possible with capitalism. Henri Lefebvre, on the other hand, was one of the first to claim that the concept of everyday life was a positive addition to Marx's notion of alienation.
While acknowledging that capitalism creates social relations that alienate people from their "generic essence" and from each other, Lefebvre also emphasized that the concept of everyday life can shed light on the complex ways in which subjects manifest their emancipatory and critical potential. In this way, Lefebvre marked a new place within the framework of Marxist theory. For Lefebvre, the significance of the concept of everyday life lies in the fact that it points to the way to overcome alienation. Lefebvre was convinced that alienation could not be overcome through political transformation alone. On the contrary, he noted that it only worsened under the Stalinist regime. Lefebvre believed that the energy contained in everyday life is filled with light. In contrast to the idealists, who regarded everyday life with arrogant contempt, Lefebvre believed that a creative understanding of everyday life could cause a desire to transform society. He emphasized that such popular art forms as cinema and photography have a radical content and offer a vague hope for a renewal of the Marxist theory of culture.
René Magritte
However, Lefebvre's concept of everyday life was limited by the fact that he reproduced two flaws in the Marxist theory of alienation. First, the self-theory, which served as a counterpoint to alienated subjectivity, assumed the existence of a whole person. Second, the emphasis on the commodification of labor in the definition of alienation overlooked the realm of non-economic labor. Alienation was thus reduced to forms of one-sided relations between the individual and his work. According to Marx, if the value is concentrated in the object of labor and if the worker is perceived as another commodity in the production chain, then the process of alienation of the worker from the product of his labor begins, which diminishes the sense of self-worth and leads to the reification of all social relations in the workplace. Ultimately, the worker feels alienated from his own nature, his own essence and consciousness of the totality of all human relationships. Therefore, Marx argued that the consequence of alienation is the loss of its generic essence.
In Marx's dialectic, the space of everyday life was defined as the reverse side of alienation. It is in it, as Marx argued, that the worker is freed from the pressure of labor relations and experiences a genuine sense of his own importance. In this space, according to Marx, it is possible to combine fragments of social reality with the essence of identity. Heller also continued this line of argument, emphasizing that the Marxist theory of the "I" implies a mandatory union between the individual and the sphere of activity that constitutes society. Such a holistic "I" is able both to be aware of the flow and fragmentation of social reality, and to offer criticism based on the synthesis of subjectivity and everyday life.
Lefebvre develops his theory, which is characterized by the logic of integration, meaning by everyday life all those spheres and institutions that, in their totality and totality, "define a specific individual." Looking at various aspects of everyday life - from the choice of leisure to the organization of the household - Lefebvre draws our attention to the complex ways in which social structures penetrate our lives. This process of internalization is neither passive nor neutral. As external social structures penetrate into the daily life of the individual, he actively transforms them. This process of internalization has a double effect. It transforms the internal personal space, bringing elements of external structures into it, but at the same time it causes a powerful response on the surface of the social. The two-way relationship between part and whole is a critical aspect of Lefebvre's theory. He believes that "the unremarkable events of everyday life have two sides": they are marked by the arbitrariness of the concrete and contain the essence of the social. Lefebvre believed that by tracing the reproduction of the whole in the practice of the partial, he was able to move away from the "base-superstructure" model, which made the Marxist polemic about culture meaningless. However, this double link between the particular and the general, where the former was seen both as an opposite and as an isomorph of the latter, led in turn to the fact that everyday life was dominated by another form of idealism.
Michel de Certeau's concept of everyday life goes even further and offers an understanding of everyday life that dispenses with the idealization of the integrative logic that underlies the Marxist tradition. Drawing an analogy between the part and the whole, de Certo also proposes a displacement effect. It turns out to be more sensitive to those quiet shifts that occur with any act of internalization:
“The presence and use in everyday life of a certain representation ... does not indicate in any way what it is for those who use it. It is necessary first to analyze how this representation is manipulated by those who resort to it, not being its producers. Only then can one appreciate the gap and the closeness that exists between the production of the image and the secondary production that is hidden in the process of its use.
It is this desire to discern the difference between the laws, rituals, and representations imposed by the dominant order, and the subversive practices of consent, adaptation, and interpretation by the powerless, that supports Michel de Certeau's study of social relations. His focus is not on the intended effects of a social system, but on how it is used by the people who make up that system. For de Certo, the politics of the everyday is aimed at the micro-ways in which people undermine the prevailing order. De Certo traces two levels of responses to the overwhelming and homogenizing influence that modernity has. The first is a reaction of an ethical nature, which allows people within the framework of a particular social system to humanize relations with each other. The second is the techniques of counteraction noted by de Certo, which, in the conditions of the order that constitutes the popular majority on its periphery, give the weak the opportunity to hypocritically and ingeniously use the strong. De Certo argues that these counter-tactics are necessary as individuals increasingly find themselves in situations where social structures are unstable, boundaries are fluid, and circumstances are too complex and expansive to be controlled or escaped from.
From this point of view, de Certeau's concept of everyday life differs significantly from Lefebvre's. Given the complexity and diversity of the social field of everyday life, de Certo does not undertake to assert that a part can convey the essence of the whole. Through the changing forms of production, the relocation of major centers of government, the rapid growth of international financial and speculative trade, the ever-increasing penetration of the media industry into local cultures, and the emergence of new migration routes, globalization has complicated and fragmented social fabric. The identity of the social "whole" can no longer be represented using unambiguous categories and clearly defined boundaries. This revision of the identity of the whole also complicates the representative status of the part. For example, can the art of everyday life represent the life world of the whole country? Or are we to draw less extensive and more specific conclusions about the connection between the particular, which is always a response tactic to a range of conflicting demands, and the whole, which has become too complex and fragmented, which can no longer look like a unity? Now every person at the micro level of their daily life is forced to show intelligence, cunning and resourcefulness both in order to survive and in order to please themselves. "These changes make the text habitable, like a rented apartment."
The metaphor of the house very well conveys the essence of this exiled era. According to de Certo, our stay in the modern world, that is, our ability to penetrate into the present and make the meaning of our time memorable and positive, is likened to renting an apartment. The space does not belong to us, the structures are already set, and we will live here forever. However, the practice of habitation is not limited or predetermined by the architecture of the building. We move into an apartment with our luggage, furnish it with our memories and hopes, and make changes that give shape to our desires and needs. The order in which our belonging is established is like the fingerprints of our social identity.
Fluxus
The house is full of emotive associations and social meanings, but unlike its historical predecessors, the modern house finds its identity in the oscillation between arrival and departure, integration and fragmentation. Zygmunt Baumann described our modern relationship with the home not so much as a change of place (displacement), but as the absence of a permanent place (unplacement). In addition to the fact that more people now live in distant and unfamiliar places, even those who have not gone anywhere are increasingly feeling the loss of a sense of place. The idea of home must be combined with a sense of belonging. "The house no longer means a dwelling - now it is an untold story of living life." The word "home" (home) should also act as a verb, and not just as a noun. Because the house is no longer reducible to some place from the past, where our idea of our own origin has a geographical certainty; it also appears as a kind of limit that avoids the present, but leads us to search for more and more "destinations". Like everything related to destination, the house arouses in us an endless desire to reach it, but now we never manage to experience the full and final sense of arrival. The meaning of "home" today combines the place of origin and our attempts to realize our destiny. In order to tell the story of a life spent in the home, we must do what John Berger calls "bricolage of the soul." When Gaston Bachelard applied the tools of psychoanalysis to the structure of the house, naming the attic the Superego, the ground floor the I, and the basement the It, and thus putting forward the method of topoanalysis, he allowed us for the first time to look into the soul of architecture. Or maybe he guessed the architecture of the soul? Turning to such figurative techniques, Bachelard showed how one can establish meaning through the assemblage of fragments that make up our house.
Psychoanalysis, which Freud aimed at revealing the secret meanings of the banal and insignificant in everyday habits, was taken by Bachelard from its purely therapeutic context and transferred to the field of critical poetics. Psychoanalysis deepens our understanding of everyday life, if its application is not limited to diagnostic and medical needs, but expands to the study of mental impulses in the constitution of the social. Although psychoanalysis is not able to rid us of all the disordered desires and neurotic habits of everyday life, by simply "working through" their origin from "primary scenes", it led us to an understanding of the repressed in everyday life, provided us with epistemological insight into the structure of the psyche and exposed layers of the unconscious, hidden behind the generally accepted distinction between truth and falsehood. In one of his early works, The Psychopathology of Everyday Life, Freud pointed out that something is always left out of sight, something remains unsaid, even if a person sincerely expresses his views and strains his memory. According to Freud, this elusive "something" is in the realm of the unconscious. Despite Freud's persistent attempts to establish psychoanalysis as a science, today it is of the greatest value as a creative method that allows us to extract fragments of truth from our silent denial and recognize the traces that they left in our everyday experience.
Based on the theories of psychoanalysis and Marxism, the Frankfurt School found even more “ways of desire” (itinerary of desire) in everyday life. Adorno and Horkheimer recognized that there were two significant shifts in the realm of politics. Unlike the classical Marxists, they no longer believed that the proletariat could be seen as the vanguard of society, and they also lost faith that internal historical dynamics would inevitably lead to the collapse of the capitalist system. Adorno and Horkheimer looked to psychoanalysis for new clues to help explain survival culture. Central to their critique of dominance and power was the theory of the redemptive potential of memory. The function of memory was not limited to a nostalgic return to the past - it was intended to become part of an emancipatory project to reveal the elements of subjectivity and strengthen the reflexive principle, suppressed by the instrumental rationalism of the modern world.
From this point of view, which combines Marx's theory of alienation and Freud's theory of repression, it can be argued that the dynamics of culture and the role of agency can never be reduced to a mere negative or positive manifestation of material forms of production. If Marx's great contribution to social theory was that he brought the intelligentsia to the battlefield, then Freud's equivalent epistemological achievement is the idea that the analyst is obliged, through the act of transference, to provide his own body as a model for revealing the meanings of the past and transforming everyday life. After Marx and Freud, the critical distance between subject and object was rethought. These theories have given hope to our understanding of the levels of freedom in everyday life. This gave rise to a new idea of how we are able to recognize the opportunities that are given to us within the framework of fate.
According to Peter Bürger, she also provided the basis for the renewal of both leftist and avant-garde art, bringing "art back into the practice of life".Agents cannot be perceived as mere "puppets" of an overarching ideology. By drawing attention to the complex two-way relationship between agent and structure, everyday theories challenged the notion that change could only be imposed from above or brought about solely by external forces. Everyday life became the concept that made it possible to understand that the strategies of resistance in the practice of life are not always openly oppositional. The heroism and ethics of everyday life do not appear before us in the guise of either a titan or a saint; instead, they manifest themselves in subtle acts of belonging and loss of place. The spirit of resistance does not always descend from above or come from outside - sometimes it originates from within.
It is important to emphasize the limitations of individual action. Choice is often confused with freedom, thereby exaggerating the scope of everyday life. The sociological controversy about subjectivity and everyday life has tried to trace the radial network and mechanisms of critical response that link individual choice and social structures. The individual's ability to make choices is always limited by the larger context, but these internal practices always have an impact on external structures. Therefore, the flow was considered not only as descending from above, but as chaotically circulating and running in different directions. Since people consciously use dominant structures, a double-shift effect is created: at the micro level, their subjectivity is affected, and at the macro level, the boundaries of the system are shifted in accordance with specific forms of use. External forces are transformed in the process of their internalization by the subjectivity of the individual, which has a destabilizing effect on social structures and causes a shift in the original state of identity. Thus, the notion of everyday life is part of a tradition of discovering the potential for critical practice and for putting forward alternative views of what constitutes a "good life".
A key benefit of the everyday concept was that it highlighted the potential for transformation at the level of individual experience. She showed that radical gestures are also observed in the insignificant acts performed by people in the course of their everyday life. However, as Lois McNay has observed, cultural theorists have begun to stretch the emancipatory potential of everyday life and fetishize the micro-revolutionary gestures of individual practices. According to McNay, the critical dimension of cultural theory has been disproportionately focused on the minor acts of the individual. Hybrid identities, assembled from the conflicting forces of everyday life, were seen as an ideal form of survival rather than a critique of shared structures. By emphasizing the freedoms and pleasures found in "counter-cultural" activities, theorists began to blur the political process of confrontation. They have raised the profile of the subjectivity of the individual and left the discussion of structural limits in the collective appropriation of power unaddressed.
What is everyday life? everyday life as a routine, repetitive interactions unreflexed part of life, taken for granted material human life, primary needs
Phenomenology Alfred Schütz (1899 -1959) Main works: The Meaningful Structure of the Social World (Introduction to Understanding Sociology) (1932) The Structures of the Lifeworld (1975, 1984) (published by T. Luckmann)
life world (Lebenswelt), this is the everyday world that always surrounds a person, common with other people, which is perceived by him as a given
the world is intersubjective from the very beginning and our knowledge about it is somehow socialized by mindsets n n mythological religious scientific natural
Practical meaning The concept of “habitus” (Pierre Bourdieu) Individual and collective habitus Fields of action and forms of capital The concept of practice
Habitus is a system of stable dispositions of thinking, perception and action, a cognitive “structuring structure” l habitus is a practical meaning, i.e. it is below the level of rational thinking and even the level of language, this is how we perceive language l
Social practices Practice is an active creative transformation by the subject of his environment (as opposed to adaptation), the unity of thinking and action. Practical activity is determined by the subject's habitus.
Field and Space Social field is a network of relations between the objective positions of agents in a certain social space. In reality, this network is latent (hidden), it can manifest itself only through the attitude of agents. For example, the field of power (politics), the field of artistic taste, the field of religion, etc.
Dramaturgy of Interaction Social Structures of Everyday Life Irving Goffman (1922 -1982) Main works: The Presentation of Self in Everyday Life (1959)
Interaction ritual: Essays on Face-to-Face Behavior (1967) Frame Analysis: An Essay on the Organization of Experience (1974)
analysis of frames our attitude to any situation is formed according to the primary model of perception, which is called “primary frames represent a“ point of view ”from which it is necessary to look at the event, then how signs SHOULD be interpreted, thereby they give meaning to what is happening, frames are primary (non-reflexive) structures perception of everyday
Ethnomethodology Studies in Ethnomethodology (1967) The everyday world is built largely on the basis of speech interactions, conversation is not just an exchange of information, but an understanding of the context of the situation and shared meanings, everyday conversation is built on vague statements that are deciphered over time and their meaning is not conveyed , but becomes clear in the process of communication
“background expectations” Everyday world is built on taking it “for granted”, the mutuality of perspectives of its perception is not questioned, it is believed that everyone is able to understand the actions of others on the basis of common knowledge
Structures of nutrition The subject of the sociology of nutrition is the study of nutrition as a social system, its tasks are to show the social, cultural, historical and economic conditioning of nutrition processes; reveal the nature of socialization and social stratification in the process of food consumption, explore the formation of human identity and social groups through sets and nutrition practices.
The function of nutrition is stronger than all others: during the period of hunger, even pain and sexual reflexes are suppressed, and people are able to think only about food, wrote P. Sorokin in his work “Hunger as a factor: The impact of hunger on people's behavior, social organization and social life” (1922)
in the life of human society, food is more fundamental than other needs, including sex. This idea is very important for sociology, because it essentially refutes Freudian psychology.
Being a primary human need, a material condition of life, nutrition acts as an institution of socialization and a mechanism for the social (and not just physical) reproduction of the group; in these processes, the social group restores the unity and identity of its members, but at the same time differentiates them from other groups.
Structuralism In On the Psychosociology of Modern Food Consumption, Barthes writes that food is not just a set of products, it is images and signs, a certain way of behaving; consuming something modern man necessarily means this.
Food is also associated by meaning - semiotically - with typical situations in the life of a modern person, food is gradually losing the meaning of its objective essence, but is increasingly being transformed into a social situation.
materialism Jack Goody "Cooking, Cuisine and Class: Study in Comparative Sociology" that nutrition as an element of culture cannot be explained without knowing the mode of economic production and the associated social structure
The materialistic method in the sociology of nutrition explains why people, with all the variety of foods, eat the same thing. It's not just class habitus, the economy is to blame. We eat what is sold in a nearby supermarket, what is offered to us by the economic system of the market and distribution of products, based on their understanding of the matter (standardization as a factor in increasing productivity).
Historical types of food systems Primitive societies “Humanity begins with the kitchen” (C. Levi-Strauss) Societies of hunters and gatherers: appropriating economy the first food revolution (F. Braudel) 500 thousand years ago
Food of the ancient world Neolithic revolution 15,000 years ago Second food revolution: sedentary lifestyle, productive economy Emergence of irrigated agriculture The role of the state in the distribution of food
Example: Sumerian civilization writing and cooking: Sumerians (6 thousand years ago) Discoveries of the Sumerians: wheel-sail irrigation agriculture osn. culture - barley drinks - the invention of beer
sweet invention: date molasses dairy products: method of storing milk (cheese) pottery and utensils: storage systems type of oven for cooking (lavash)
system of tastes At the heart of the taste of the ancient laws of nutrition is the observance of the balance of the elements. Every thing, including food, consists of four elements - fire, water, earth and air. Therefore, in cooking, the Greeks believed, the opposite fire against water, earth against air, cold and hot, dry and wet (and then sour and sweet, fresh and spicy, salty and bitter) should be combined.
The social space of food in the Middle Ages food as a need of the body suddenly receives a different moral assessment - Christianity calls for asceticism, restriction of nutrition, denies food as pleasure and pleasure, recognizes it only as a necessity - hunger is given to man by God as a punishment for original sin.
But in general, food - and this is extremely important - in Christianity is not divided into pure and impure, the church unequivocally states that food in itself does not bring a person closer or further away from God, the Gospel teaching clearly shows: "Not what enters the mouth defiles a person, but what comes out of the mouth."
Food in Christianity also loses the character of the sacrifice - this is its fundamental difference from Judaism and other (including monotheistic) religions. It is believed that one sacrifice is enough - Christ himself voluntarily sacrificed himself for the sake of saving everyone, the rest of the victims are simply inappropriate (including the sacrifices of various animals, like Eid al-Adha among Muslims
here's another piece of news - they began to eat not lying down, like the Romans, but sitting on chairs or stools at the table, finally, glassware and tablecloths appeared, and also a fork - from Byzantium it would later come to Venice,
Again, the culture of meat was revived for a while - war, hunting, game for the aristocracy, and pork (pigs graze in the forest, eating acorns) for the common people.
The opposition of “Terra e Silva” (Lands and Forests) in the food system became clear, among the Franks and Germans “forest” became the basis of nutrition against “earth” among the Romans - meat against bread; beer versus wine; lard versus olive oil; river fish against sea; gluttony (“healthy”=”fat”=”strong”) versus moderation
a man of the Middle Ages sought to change the natural taste of the product, transform it, replace it with an artificial - spicy taste and aroma. This also applied to drinks - spices were added without measure.
the Italian Renaissance is the greatness of sugar, it is still expensive, but it makes people happy, and it is added everywhere (in wine, rice, pasta, coffee) and of course - in desserts, by the way, the combination of spicy and sweet still dominates, sweetie of that time both sweet and spicy at the same time. But soon the sweet taste will crowd out and rise on everyone
Modern food system The third food revolution, associated with the export of American products to other regions, has borne fruit, but European cultures have mastered America, this feature - the interpenetration of crops - is an important characteristic of the modern food production system.
The industrial food system involves not only highly mechanized, standardized and automated agriculture based on scientific crop cultivation technologies, but also the food industry itself.
Storage technology also influenced the production of food, because now it was possible to produce partially cooked products and freeze them - semi-finished products. The modern food system changes not only the storage technology, but also the technology of food preparation.
The meaning of the kitchen is also changing. The task of cooks is now fundamentally different - to arrange semi-finished products, in this sense, the art of the cook has now become different, although it has not ceased to be art
The modern industrial food system relies on new ways of trading food. Hypermarkets are usually combined into a network, the largest is the Wal-Mart network in the USA, it unites 1700 hypermarkets around the world (they are designed the same way), in the USA Wal. Mart controls - imagine about 30% of all sales
The structure of food has changed significantly: the first difference is that if earlier all agricultural societies assumed carbohydrate nutrition as the basis, now protein nutrition will be considered the basis. Here is a significant difference - if they used to eat bread, now they eat it with bread.
The second difference is that if earlier a person ate what formed the basis of the diet of his region (the Japanese eat no more correctly than we do, it’s just that the basis of the diet of their region was seafood), now food is delocalized - we eat foods from all over the world, and often not according to season.
The third fundamental difference in nutrition: the industrial mass production of food products creates, accordingly, mass identical tastes. Here is an amazing feature of the tastes of modern people - we eat very, very monotonously
