Critiques of Everyday Life

Michael E. Gardiner, Critiques of Everyday Life. London & New York: Routledge, 2000, 242 pp.

In Critiques of Everyday Life, Michael E. Gardiner writes about a "counter-tradition" in social theory about everyday life, by which he means the twentieth-century European intellectual tradition embedded in the philosophical and cultural debates with Marxism, and challenged by the historical and political contradictions of Western modernity. In particular, Gardiner revisits the often neglected contributions of Dada and Surrealism, Mikhail Bakhtin, Henri Lefebvre, The Situationist International and Guy Debord, Agnes Heller, Michel de Certeau and Dorothy E. Smith, devoting a chapter to each and weaving through them important themes about the contingencies and promises of everyday experience as a simultaneously "alienated and potentially liberated state" (p. 17).

While interest in Dada, Surrealism, and The Situationist Internationalist movements is drawn to historical context rather than reviving their poetical and Utopianist interventions, Gardiner emphasizes how the ideas of the others remain very much with us; for example, Bakhtin's concept of carnival (developed in his book Rabelais and His World). The chapter on Bakhtin is edifying, demonstrating how his brilliant 'prosaic imagination' combined phenomenology, linguistics and cultural history into a new analytical passion for everyday life. Likewise, the chapter on Lefebvre as a thinker whose work spans the twentieth century, clearly shows how critical developments in Marxism, existentialism, phenomenology, cultural studies,...