
It is interesting how many of the great theorists of everyday life were formulating their theories in periods of historical crisis. Siegfried Kracauer’s work on office life was conducted during the death throes of Weimar Germany, as the aftermath of the 1929 Crash destroyed the fragile social reforms and economic recovery of the Stresemann era; and his theories of film and photography were forged out of his subsequent experiences of fascism and exile. Henri Lefebvre wrote his first book on everyday life in France in the immediate postwar era, when fuel, food and housing shortages made the simplest matters of quotidian life of pressing concern. The everyday can seem like a banal continuum existing outside of historical change; but historical crisis also makes the everyday visible, makes its taken for granted routines suddenly seem hard-won and precious.
Mundane quote for the day: ‘History appears as a transcendental reality occurring behind its back and bursting into the everyday in the form of a catastrophe into which an individual is thrown as “fatally” as cattle are driven to the slaughterhouse. …While the everyday appears as confidence, familiarity, proximity, as “home”, history appears as the derailment, the disruption of the everyday, as the exceptional and the strange. … History changes, the everyday remains.’ – Karel Kosik
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