Everyday Life

This book, first published in 1984, examines the politics and philosophy of ordinary men and women, and their ordinary transactions. It analyses the interaction between the individual and the social, both for the roots of everyday behaviour and for the means to change the social fabric. Using an approach that combines Marx, Husserl, Heidegger and Aristotle, Agnes Heller defines categories such as ‘group’, ‘crowd’, ‘community’, and deals with characteristics of everyday life such as repetition, rules, norms, economics, habits, probability, imitation. She also analyses everyday knowledge, and concludes by looking at the place of personality in everyday life.

Most of the stories we tell are about great feats, dangerous journeys, or daring confrontations—exceptional moments in our existence. But what about how we live every single day? In Everyday Life, Joseph A. Amato offers an account of daily existence that reminds us how important the quotidian is. Ranging across social, economic, and cultural history—as well as anthropology, folklore, and technology—he explores how and why the pattern of our lives has changed and developed over time. Amato examines the common facts and occurrences in lives from all spheres, whether of a pauper or a noble, a criminal or state official, or a lunatic or a philosopher. Such facts include basic aspects of human existence, such as play, work, conflict, and healing, as well the logistics of survival, such as housing, clothing, cleaning, cooking, animals, plants, and machines. Tracing core historical developments like efficiency of production and greater mobility, Amato shows how we became modern in everyday ways. He explores how, paradoxically, commerce, technology, design, industrialization, nationalism, and democratization—which have so undercut traditional culture and have homogenized, centralized, and secularized masses of people—have also profoundly transformed daily life, affording citizens with materially improved lives, individual rights, and productive and rewarding expectations. A wide-ranging account of lives throughout history, this book gives us new insights into our own condition, showing us how extraordinary the ordinary can be.

A notable contribution to our understanding of ourselves. This book explores the realm of human behavior in social situations and the way that we appear to others. Dr. Goffman uses the metaphor of theatrical performance as a framework. Each person in everyday social intercourse presents himself and his activity to others, attempts to guide and cotnrol the impressions they form of him, and employs certain techniques in order to sustain his performance, just as an actor presents a character to an audience. The discussions of these social techniques offered here are based upon detailed research and observation of social customs in many regions.

The power of music to influence mood, create scenes, routines and occasions is widely recognised and this is reflected in a strand of social theory from Plato to Adorno that portrays music as an influence on character, social structure and action. There have, however, been few attempts to specify this power empirically and to provide theoretically grounded accounts of music's structuring properties in everyday experience. Music in Everyday Life uses a series of ethnographic studies - an aerobics class, karaoke evenings, music therapy sessions and the use of background music in the retail sector - as well as in-depth interviews to show how music is a constitutive feature of human agency. Drawing together concepts from psychology, sociology and socio-linguistics it develops a theory of music's active role in the construction of personal and social life and highlights the aesthetic dimension of social order and organisation in late modern societies.

Henri Lefebvre’s magnum opus: a monumental exploration of contemporary society. Henri Lefebvre’s three-volume Critique of Everyday Life is perhaps the richest, most prescient work by one of the twentieth century’s greatest philosophers. Written at the birth of post-war consumerism, the Critique was a philosophical inspiration for the 1968 student revolution in France and is considered to be the founding text of all that we know as cultural studies, as well as a major influence on the fields of contemporary philosophy, geography, sociology, architecture, political theory and urbanism. A work of enormous range and subtlety, Lefebvre takes as his starting-point and guide the “trivial” details of quotidian experience: an experience colonized by the commodity, shadowed by inauthenticity, yet one which remains the only source of resistance and change. This is an enduringly radical text, untimely today only in its intransigence and optimism.

BIO 50 breaks with the traditional system of awards, choosing instead to award collaboration, its process and outcomes. Recognizing the idea that design is a discipline that permeates all layers of contemporary life, BIO launches an unprecedented effort to engage designers and agents from Slovenia and abroad in a collaborative approach that will address themes that affect everyday life. Guided by a group of mentors from various disciplines, eleven teams have tackled the topics Affordable Living Knowing Food Public Water, Public Space Walking the City Hidden Crafts The Fashion System Hacking Households Nanotourism Engine Blocks Observing Space Designing Life Each team has created specific projects that are developed and implemented during the Biennial. Drawing from the complex network generated around BIO 50, "Designing Everyday Life" serves as a reader, compiling written and visual material on the many layers that compose the biennial. Notes, essays, and interviews, along with sketches, photographs, and diagrams, are aggregating the manifold dimensions of each team s collaborative work process, and illuminate strategies and roles for design in a contemporary world. An opening section introduces the topics discussed throughout the different components of the publication, arguing new priorities for the design discipline in contemporary times. Essays and visual material come together to articulate new roles for a discipline that has changed beyond the universe of mass-made products and solutions, and instead inhabits a fundamentally new universe in a series of small-scale, customized scenarios. Exploring the changing definition of design will illuminate its possible future. The concluding chapter reflects on the history and legacy of the world s oldest design event. It uses the history of BIO as an opportunity to explore changes in the last fifty years within the design discipline, western society and everyday life. With contributions by Slovenian and international experts, a series of reflections on BIO as a meeting point for design between East and West in Central Europe allow to extrapolate conclusions about European design in the immediate future. "Designing Everyday Life" also features interviews with Alice Rawsthorn, design critic at New York Times, Konstantin Grcic, industrial designer, and Sasa Machtig, industrial designer. MAO co-produces "Designing Everyday Life" with "Z33," a space for contemporary art based in the Belgian city of Hasselt. Since 2002, Z33 has been realizing projects and exhibitions that encourage visitors to see everyday things in a new way. http: //www.z33.be/en/z33/mission "

Television is a central dimension in our everyday lives and yet its meaning and its potency varies according to our individual circumstances, mediated by the social and cultural worlds which we inhabit. In this fascinating book, Roger Silverstone explores the enigma of television and how it has found its way so profoundly and intimately into the fabric of our everyday lives. His investigation, of great significance to those with a personal or professional interest in media, film and television studies, unravels its emotional and cognitive, spatial, temporal and political significance. Drawing on a wide range of literature, from psychoanalysis to sociology and from geography to cultural studies, Silverstone constructs a theory of the medium which locates it centrally within the multiple realities and discourses of everyday life. Television emerges from these arguments as the fascinating, complex and contradictory medium that it is, but in the process many of the myths that surround it are exploded. This outstanding book presents a radical new approach to the medium of television, one that both challenges received wisdoms and offers a compellingly original view of the place of television in everyday life.

An incisive study of situated learning, analyzed through a critical theory of social practice as transformational change in everyday life.