Polity

. Volume 41, Number 4 . October 2009

r 2009 Northeastern Political Science Association 0032-3497/09 www.palgrave-journals.com/polity/

A Hundred Ways of Beginning: The Politics of Everyday Life Alexandra Kogl University of Northern Iowa Everyday life is political in that it takes place within the context of human-made conditions that are shaped by collective normative judgments. However, everyday life may seem apolitical since its characteristic activities tend to be performed routinely and aim in part at meeting physical needs, generating feelings of naturalness. This tendency is exacerbated by a late modern, capitalist pattern of the persons, practices, products, and spaces of everyday life appearing in isolation from one another, as if they had lives of their own and occurred spontaneously. This fragmentation or alienation exacerbates thoughtlessness and autonomism or nonresponsiveness to events in everyday life—a pattern that is particularly troubling in a U.S. political context marked by citizen apathy and fatalism. This article shares the concern with thoughtlessness and autonomism with Hannah Arendt, but applies that concern in ways Arendt herself did not. Polity (2009) 41, 514–535. doi:10.1057/pol.2009.9; published online 18 May 2009

Keywords

everyday life; politics; alienation; Arendt; Lefebvre

Alexandra Kogl is assistant professor of Political Science at the University of Northern Iowa, and is the author of Strange Places: The Political Potentials and Perils of Everyday Spaces (Lexington: 2007). She can be reached at ana.kogl@ uni.edu.

In the introduction to The Attack of the Blob, Hannah Pitkin offers a striking image, taken from the opening scenes of 1950s science fiction films, of ‘‘ordinary people doing ordinary things before the monster strikes . . . [that] depicts this daily life in ways so profoundly banal, conventional, and boring that one welcomes the horror when it comes.’’1 Some science fiction films still use this opening, portraying ordinary folk as slightly stupid, sheep-like, living lives that, at least from the perspective of the vast mothership looming on the horizon, are no 1. Hannah Fenichel Pitkin, The Attack of the Blob: Hannah Arendt’s Concept of the Social (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1998), 5.

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more meaningful than the lives of ants in a colony. For a moment viewers may ‘‘welcome’’ or even root for the ‘‘horror,’’ but by the end of the film brave heroes will have conquered the uncanny threat and ordinary folk (characters and viewers alike) will return to their banal, conventional, and boring everyday lives. Routine, focused around biological necessities, and apparently uneventful, everyday life looks like politics’ opposite. It seems to be closely akin to Hannah Arendt’s notion of ‘‘the social’’ (or at least one understanding of it): a mode of commonality that involves others, but only as repetitions or extensions of one’s own biology, and in which people behave thoughtlessly instead of acting according to normative judgments and choices. Thus linked with the social, the everyday would appear ‘‘prepolitical’’ and, if not kept properly within certain bounds, would seem a potential threat to the kind of politics Arendt advocates. Yet such identifications of the everyday with the uneventful and boring, and with the social—or at least with certain readings of the social2—are misleading. Everyday life is political to the extent that its routines and activities take place in the context of human-made conditions—laws, markets, spaces, norms, and so on—that are in turn shaped by collective normative judgments and the power relations that both shape and enforce those judgments. However, certain peculiarities of everyday life may render this human-made context invisible or seemingly natural, and as a result the everyday bears a special risk of generating citizen thoughtlessness and nonresponsiveness to events. We may perceive everyday life as banal and apolitical, and we may see ourselves in our everyday guises as walking zombies, but only because we cannot see the politics of the everyday; it is too close. Nevertheless, the possibility that we may to some extent, however briefly, welcome a ‘‘horror’’ that threatens to disrupt our routines implies both disgust with and the desire to transform everyday life. Strikingly, treatments of the politics of everyday life have tended to emerge in fields (feminist theory, cultural studies) or among thinkers (Henri Lefebvre, Michel de Certeau) at best loosely related, more often tangential or marginal, to democratic theory—especially Anglo-American democratic theory. My aim is to pull everyday life more explicitly and firmly into the circle of concerns addressed by contemporary democratic theory. Therefore I link my concern for the politics of everyday life to the Arendtian concerns with the lost potentials for political action—what Pitkin calls the political manque´—and the possibilities for beginning and democratic power. More generally, I seek to understand how everyday life is political by explicitly addressing the question, what is politics? Rather than attempting to wedge my concern about everyday life into an ill-fitting notion of politics, I explore the ways in which a plausible understanding of 2. I will not attempt to clarify Arendt’s notions of ‘‘the social’’ and the ‘‘social realm,’’ given the complexity and ambiguity of these concepts, but refer readers to Pitkin, The Attack of the Blob.

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politics, far from excluding the everyday, implies an imperative to interrogate it. In so doing I build on a certain reading of Aristotle’s understanding of politics as well as on Mary Dietz’s efforts to develop an understanding of politics that can adequately encompass feminist concerns. Viewing the everyday not as inherently prepolitical but as tending to appear apolitical allows us to consider everyday life as a key site of Pitkin’s political manque´: precisely that which does not appear political but must be (re)politicized. Thus my concern with everyday life is very much a product of certain readings of Arendt, especially Pitkin’s and Patchen Markell’s, both of which emphasize the need to address those situations in which events seem to ‘‘just happen,’’ and in which opportunities for action or beginning fail to prompt any response. However, Pitkin and Markell do not explicitly apply their readings of Arendt to the everyday. Furthermore, the status of everyday life as it relates directly to Arendt’s thought is not clear; it may even appear that Arendt’s warnings about the threats posed by the social realm to the political apply to everyday life as well. The first part of this article, therefore, addresses this puzzle, highlighting the ways in which certain Arendtian impulses would seem not only to allow but to require interrogation of everyday life, rather than a quarantining of it as merely biological, intimate, or otherwise nonpolitical. My primary intent in this discussion is neither critique nor exegesis of Arendt, although elements of both necessarily appear. Instead, my intent is to assess whether we can lay a groundwork for an analysis of everyday life upon those especially fruitful Arendtian impulses to seek opportunities for beginning and to interrogate that which seems to ‘‘just happen.’’ The second part of the article develops an understanding of politics that explicitly encompasses the everyday, arguing that politics is the process of shaping the common, human-made conditions that form the contexts of our lives in a particular polity. In short, politics addresses the question, how are we going to live together in order not merely to live, but to live well? This discussion is also inspired to some extent by Arendt, but turns to Aristotle for an understanding of politics that perhaps addresses some of the concerns critics have leveled at Arendt’s own understanding of politics: notably, that it can seem empty of all but ‘‘war and speeches,’’ in Mary McCarthy’s words, or that it is purposeless and avoids problem-solving, in Mary Dietz’s critique. Finally, I turn to everyday life itself. It is political in that it takes place within the context of human-made conditions that are shaped by collective normative judgments, but it may seem apolitical since its characteristic activities tend to be performed routinely and aim in part at meeting physical needs, generating a feeling of naturalness. This tendency is exacerbated by a late modern, capitalist pattern of the persons, practices, products, and spaces of everyday life appearing in isolation from one another, as if they had spontaneously occurring lives of their own. This fragmentation of everyday life in late modernity magnifies the

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thoughtlessness and autonomism that may, to some extent, be inevitable within everyday contexts. Thoughtlessness and autonomism may both result from a kind of powerlessness and also prevent the emergence of power, in the sense of people acting together to shape the common conditions of life in a particular polity or place. Everyday life cries out for critique and perhaps transformation, not despite but because it so easily comes to seem apolitical.

The Two Arendts Two distinct impulses in Arendt’s thought seem to have divergent implications for thinking about the everyday. The first seeks to recover opportunities for action and beginning in a world in which things seem to ‘‘just happen’’ without any exercise of human agency, without anyone obviously being powerful. The second aims at protecting the public realm from matters that are properly private or ‘‘social,’’ which ought to be dealt with in the household. These impulses are complementary to the extent that we need a public realm not dominated by ‘‘housekeeping’’ concerns in order to recover opportunities for action. However, the first impulse allows for a more agnostic, open-ended search for contexts for beginning, while the second seems to tend toward the drawing of firm boundaries between the political and the non- or prepolitical. My aim here is not to determine whether these two impulses are indeed contradictory or instead seamlessly complementary—a task for a much longer and more exegetical work—but to explore the implications of these impulses for thinking about everyday life. Several readings of Arendt present her basic project in The Human Condition as urging readers to think what we are doing, stressing the need to recover collective agency or efficacy in a world in which events appear to ‘‘just happen’’—as if independently of human agency. As Pitkin puts it, the problem is that ‘‘even the ‘powerful,’ whose decisions affect hundreds of thousands, are unable to alter the inertial drift as long as everyone keeps doing as we do now.’’ Thus she sees Arendt’s key concern as the recovery of the human ‘‘capacity to interrupt the causal chain of events and processes, to intervene in history and begin something new that may be taken up and carried forward by others.’’ The ‘‘social unmythologized’’ then becomes a site of ‘‘the absence of politics where politics belongs,’’ or what Pitkin calls the political manque´.3 For Jeffrey Isaac, Arendt seeks to ‘‘retrieve a conception of agency and autonomy in a disempowering and degrading world.’’4 For Markell, Arendt seeks to address the 3. Pitkin, The Attack of the Blob, 282, 252. There would thus seem to be a tension between an understanding of Arendt’s concept of ‘‘the social’’ as that which must be excluded from politics, and an understanding of ‘‘the social’’ as that which must be politicized. 4. Jeffrey Isaac, ‘‘Situating Hannah Arendt on Action and Politics,’’ Political Theory 21 (August 1993): 534–40, at 537.

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‘‘question of how to sustain, intensify, and democratize the beginnings with which we are already confronted.’’ Markell’s reading of Arendt suggests the need for an agnostic approach in the search for ‘‘beginnings,’’ rather than any a priori, philosophical determination of what spaces, activities, modes, and attitudes might constitute politics. A wide range of practices and institutions ‘‘may heighten or diminish responsiveness to events,’’ including the built environment, the aesthetics of various media, the discursive forms that make sense of events (or render them uneventful), and representations and identifications ‘‘that make some events but not others ‘our’ business.’’ For Markell, what makes a beginning is ‘‘our attunement to its character as an irrevocable event, which also means: an occasion for response.’’5 Such an emphasis on the recovery of democratic power, agency, and beginning contrasts with some critics’ focus on Arendt’s apparent tendency to empty politics of all activities and purposes by drawing stark boundaries between politics and other human activities, leaving nothing but speech behind. Mary Dietz, for instance, argues that ‘‘without a dimension of substantive purposefulness that finds positive expression in the vocabulary of ‘problem,’ ‘solution,’ ‘means,’ ‘end,’ and ‘method,’ Arendt’s politics cannot embrace performance as the carrying out or active pursuit of purposes in the very world it strives to vitalize.’’6 In an interview with Arendt, Mary McCarthy offers a similar critique, saying, ‘‘I am left with war and speeches. But the speeches can’t be just speeches. They have to be speeches about something.’’ Arendt graciously responds: ‘‘You are absolutely right, and I may admit that I ask myself this question,’’ but then she comments that there will always be something to talk about.7 The question, however, is what will there be to talk about? Other interlocutors push Arendt to clarify what are and what are not appropriate topics for political conversation; a discussion using housing as an example ensues. Arendt says: There are things where the right measures can be figured out. These things really can be administered and are not then subject to public debate. Public debate can only deal with things which—if we want to put it negatively—we cannot figure out with certainty . . . . [N]o amount of speeches and discussions and debates . . . will be able to solve the very grave social problems which the big cities pose to us . . . . The social problem is certainly adequate housing. But the question of whether this adequate housing means

5. Patchen Markell, ‘‘The Rule of the People: Arendt, Archeˆ, and Democracy,’’ American Political Science Review 100 (February 2006): 1–14, 12, 13, 10. 6. Mary Dietz, Turning Operations: Feminism, Arendt, and Politics (New York: Routledge, 2002), 174. 7. Hannah Arendt, ‘‘On Hannah Arendt,’’ in Hannah Arendt: The Recovery of the Public World, ed. Melvyn A. Hill (New York: St. Martin’s, 1979), 316.

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integration or not is certainly a political question . . . . There shouldn’t be any debate about the question that everybody should have decent housing.8 Adequate housing is a social question, not a political one, because ‘‘if it’s a question of how many square feet every human being needs in order to be able to breathe and to live a decent life, this is something which we really can figure out.’’9 Such a question is a matter for ‘‘administration’’ and is not worth talking about in a political manner because it pertains to biological needs, which are subject to scientific analysis (‘‘how many square feet every human being needs’’). Only if persons ‘‘don’t want to move, even if you give them one more bathroom’’ does the matter become political.10 Only in the latter situation, in which persons feel and act in ways that violate the dictates of mere biology, are we dealing with who we are, not what we are; only in the latter situation do we need to make thoughtful judgments. For Arendt, it is dangerous to treat certain matters in the public sphere because doing so will ‘‘overwhelm’’ the political realm, undermining its permanence and replacing the desire for freedom with the desire for abundance. Her sharpest statement of this view appears in On Revolution: Since the revolution had opened the gates of the political realm to the poor, this realm had indeed become ‘‘social’’. It was overwhelmed by the cares and worries which actually belonged in the sphere of the household and which, even if they were permitted to enter the public realm, could not be solved by political means, since they were matters of administration, to be put into the hands of experts, rather than issues which could be settled by the twofold process of decision and persuasion.11 Certain modes of relating to others and of functioning either threaten the political, are threatened by it, or both. At least some degree of tension thus seems to emerge between two possible readings of Arendt, or two different moments or impulses in her thought. Put simply, on the one hand she seems to be calling us to think what we are doing in any and every aspect of our lives, to engage in a Socratic and Aristotelian project of interrogating conventions, norms, institutions, habits, spaces, rhetorics, and so on, without making a priori determinations about what do and do not constitute proper objects of interrogation. On the other hand, she warns us about confusing and conflating matters that truly are political with those that are not, asserting that 8. Arendt, ‘‘On Hannah Arendt,’’ 317–18, emphasis in the original. 9. Arendt, ‘‘On Hannah Arendt,’’ 319. 10. Arendt, ‘‘On Hannah Arendt,’’ 318. 11. Hannah Arendt, On Revolution (London: Penguin, 1963), 90–91.

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there are matters that ‘‘we really can figure out’’ in a scientific mode and turn to administration to handle. What does this tension mean in terms of everyday life? Is it a site of the political manque´, which must be interrogated, or is it a realm that must be quarantined from politics, whose modes and activities would undermine the promises of political life if allowed to enter that life? Arendt herself offers a little guidance in her few specific references to the everyday—ambiguous and infrequent though they may be. In The Human Condition Arendt acknowledges the temptation to ‘‘submerge’’ oneself in the comforting flow of everyday life: Modern enchantment with ‘‘small things’’ . . . has found its classical presentation in the petit bonheur of the French people. Since the decay of their once great and glorious public realm, the French have become masters in the art of being happy among ‘‘small things,’’ within the space of their own four walls, between chest and bed, table and chair, dog and cat and flowerpot, extending to these things a care and tenderness which, in a world where rapid industrialization constantly kills off the things of yesterday to produce today’s objects, may even appear to be the world’s last, purely humane corner.12 She acknowledges the humane qualities of and the desire for such homey comforts, for such comfortable submersion, but as the objects she enumerates get smaller and the list ends with the most frivolous and feminine object of all, she seems at the same time to render these things petty, even childish, befitting a small happiness that contrasts with the grand, fully human happiness of the public realm. Here Arendt ultimately seems to re-establish the boundary between the intimate, trivial, and small, on the one hand, and the public, political, and grand, on the other. Small things have their charms, especially in an impermanent and often inhumane world, but must not be allowed to take precedence over the larger concerns appropriate in the public sphere. However, the everyday appears in a more deeply ambiguous and more interesting light in Arendt’s critique of statistical analyses of politics. She writes that ‘‘deeds and events are rare occurrences in everyday life and in history. Yet the meaningfulness of everyday relationships is disclosed not in everyday life but in rare deeds.’’ One cannot discern ‘‘meaning in politics or significance in history when everything that is not everyday behavior has been ruled out as immaterial.’’ She refers to ‘‘statistical uniformity’’ as ‘‘the no longer secret political ideal of a society which, entirely submerged in the routine of everyday living, is at peace with the scientific outlook inherent in its very existence.’’13 Her critique of 12. Hannah Arendt, The Human Condition (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1958), 52. 13. Arendt, The Human Condition, 42, 43.

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statistical analysis of political life is clear: such analysis dismisses as misleading outliers the very actions that exemplify human freedom. Statistical analysis may serve to illuminate the nature of behavior, but never action, in her specific understandings of the terms. Less clear are the implications for everyday life. ‘‘Everyday behavior’’ appears in contrast with ‘‘meaning in politics and significance in history,’’ and ‘‘deeds and events are rare.’’ A cursory reading might suggest that it is solely the ‘‘rare deeds’’ that are politically relevant. However, she refers to everyday relationships as meaningful, and assumes that their meanings can be disclosed through action. But in what sense are everyday relationships meaningful? Are they meaningful in the same way that intimate relationships are? They cannot be, because she sees the latter as privately meaningful but politically irrelevant; they cannot survive exposure in the public realm and need the protection of the private realm.14 Were the meaningfulness of the everyday of the same type as the meaningfulness of the intimate, ‘‘rare deeds’’ would do little or nothing to disclose them, or would destroy those meanings by dragging them into the harsh light of the public realm. Arendt’s acknowledgment that everyday relationships are meaningful and that those meanings can be disclosed through politics suggests that, while the everyday is usually a realm of habit and behavior in which individuals are ‘‘submerged,’’ in which we ‘‘behave’’ according to ‘‘routines,’’ nonetheless the everyday, unlike the intimate, can and should stand up to political scrutiny. Events such as a woman’s performance of a ‘‘second shift’’ of unpaid work at home may seem meaningless and uneventful until a political process exposes its (possible) meanings. Everyday life becomes on this reading a site of the political manque´: not that which is inherently nonpolitical or prepolitical, but ‘‘the absence of politics where politics belongs, a condition in which a collectivity of people—for whatever reason—cannot (or at any rate do not) effectively take charge of the overall resultants of what they are severally doing. The large-scale outcomes of their activities happen as if independent of any human agency.’’15 It is not the everyday as such, but the mindset often associated with it that poses the problems; it is not everyday behavior that is the problem, but everyday behavior. It is the uncritical, thoughtless submersion in the everyday that marks it as a site of the political manque´, not some essential characteristic of everyday life. Strikingly, Arendt implies that everyday life, however much it may be characterized by routines and behavior, is no more characterized by these antipolitical modes than history is: ‘‘deeds and events are rare occurrences in everyday life and in history.’’ 14. Arendt, The Human Condition, 51. 15. Pitkin, The Attack of the Blob, 252.

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This possibility fits closely with Markell’s recent reading of Arendt’s notions of rule, action, and beginning. Markell understands action as neither a state nor a subset of human activities but a response to a beginning, which may itself also constitute a beginning, occasioning response from others. Action, he emphasizes, cannot be divorced from its context. On Markell’s reading, natality and beginning are not ‘‘the spontaneous disruption of existing patterns, but the sense in which action, whether disruptive or not, involves attention and responsiveness to worldly events.’’16 Markell de-emphasizes heroic individual actors distinguishing themselves on the stage of politics, turns away from a reading of action as defined by some internal, essential characteristic, and focuses on the relationships among persons and between persons and their shared world. Action depends not only on the personal states or characteristics of actors, but also on the shared context within which it makes sense for others to respond to an act, and which in turn shapes those actors’ characteristics. In this view of action Markell closely follows Jill Frank’s reading of Aristotelian action ‘‘not simply as a deed but rather as including what gave rise to the deed in the first place, the conditions of its possibility.’’17 This argument extends to the notions of event and eventfulness. What defines a political event, as opposed to a mere happening, is not any internal, essential characteristic but the way the event illuminates the world and provokes responses. For Markell, the failure to experience any happenings as events, the experience of them as irrelevant, as mere data, as ripping us from contexts within which we might respond, as either at too great a distance or too little distance— as ‘‘imperceptibly close, so much the medium of your being that it never occurs to you that it might be something to which you could respond’’—indicates the ‘‘contraction of the dimension of activity that concerns Arendt.’’18 The problem is not simply that no one is acting spontaneously. The problem is that there is no response to those happenings and activities that could or should provoke response. The failure lies not within—or not only within—individuals, but between them, and between individuals and their conditions. The notion of the political event as gaining its meaning and status not from some essential characteristic but at least in part from its provocation of response offers a fruitful way of considering the relationship between the political and the everyday. That which is everyday appears to be ‘‘uneventful’’—the words are almost synonymous in ordinary usage—but the difference between the everyday and the eventful is not based on some essential aspect of either but is, to an important degree, a matter of whether and how persons respond to an 16. Markell, ‘‘The Rule of the People,’’ 2. 17. Jill Frank, A Democracy of Distinction: Aristotle and the Work of Politics (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2005), 10. 18. Markell, ‘‘The Rule of the People,’’ 12.

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occurrence that may have previously been deemed not an event but what one might call an unevent—an occurrence that does not get noticed, much less critiqued, not due to an essential meaninglessness but due to a failure to see the unevent’s possible meanings or even potential for meaningfulness. The goal becomes to interrogate ‘‘unevents,’’ to learn to see that which is too close, to identify what Markell calls ‘‘breakdowns of the nexus of event and response,’’19 to see patterns of engagement and patterns of inaction, to identify the ways in which particular practices and institutions encourage or quash responsiveness, including to themselves.

The Work of Politics On Markell’s reading of Arendt, as I understand it, it becomes not just acceptable but necessary to seek beginnings in everyday life. However, the peculiar tendency of the everyday to seem uneventful, uninteresting, apolitical, or even politics’ opposite throws up a potential obstacle to doing so. Clearly, strong efforts to overcome this obstacle have been made, notably by feminist theory and the feminist movement’s notion that ‘‘the personal is political,’’ assuming that ‘‘the personal’’ overlaps significantly with the everyday. In what follows I will make an additional effort to understand what is political about everyday life by offering an understanding of politics that conceptually encompasses everyday life. This understanding of politics will be informed by Arendt to some extent but will also turn to Aristotle to generate an understanding of politics as the process of answering the question, how will we live together in order not merely to live, but to live well? Politics—particularly conventional, state-centered politics—often appears as everyday life’s opposite. Formal political events such as elections seem to punctuate the flow of daily life’s apparent uneventfulness, meaninglessness, and privacy with dramatic events that are both shaped by and shapers of normative judgments, and that are experienced in common by a public. Following Sheldon Wolin and many others, however, I take such a ritualized, state-centered politics as a highly constricted, ‘‘domesticated,’’ pallid, and undemocratic politics.20 A more robust, less restrictive understanding of politics follows Aristotle in posing the fundamental political question, how ought we live together? Under what specific conditions do we want to live, in order not merely to live, but to live well? Human-made conditions in general—laws, the built environment, economic practices, and so on—are inescapable; as Arendt puts it, ‘‘men 19. Markell, ‘‘The Rule of the People,’’ 12. 20. Sheldon Wolin, ‘‘Fugitive Democracy,’’ in Democracy and Difference: Contesting the Boundaries of the Political, ed. Seyla Benhabib (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1996). I do not use Wolin’s distinction between ‘‘politics’’ and ‘‘the political,’’ however.

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constantly create their own, self-made conditions.’’21 However, any specific forms that human-made conditions take may be altered or destroyed altogether. This is the promise of politics, a liberatory and democratic politics in particular: it offers ordinary people the chance to shape and reshape the common or shared conditions of our lives deliberately, rather than thoughtlessly and passively accepting the conditions of the world into which we were born. Common conditions, as shaped by normative judgments, define multitudes of human forms of even the most straightforwardly biological necessities, as well as inventing ideas, faiths, arts, institutions. For Aristotle the uniquely human capacity is for engaging in all, even biological, activities according not only to instinct but also to normative judgment: human beings eat, sleep, build shelter, have sex, and die according to habit, law, convention, and aesthetics, not just instinct.22 It is not that adhering to certain specific normative standards for shaping our common conditions (and not others) renders those conditions humanizing; more basically, the very process of applying any normative standards is humanizing. There is, however, an apparent paradox in that specific conditions can appear to dehumanize some persons (or even all persons in some ways) precisely by denying to them all but the most seemingly functional forms of biological necessities—food without flavor, shelter bereft of comfort and beauty, sex reduced to reproductive function, cities that foreclose possibilities for spontaneous interaction, economics stripped of meaning—or by defining certain desires as inhuman, unnatural. Sometimes we do behave as if we were merely biological creatures or treat others as such. This tendency is one of Aristotle’s and Arendt’s abiding concerns: that we confuse life itself with a human life, even a good human life.23 But only in rare cases—Marx’s example is that of a starving man—do human beings truly confront nature as animals and do objects—such as food—appear merely natural, not in ‘‘human form.’’24 Virtually all of the time when we behave as if merely following nature’s imperatives, such behavior is far from truly natural but is ideologically mediated—as, for example, when we claim 21. Arendt, The Human Condition, 9 22. It is speech that allows us to make such judgments, in contrast to other animals, whose voices can only convey pleasure or pain. Aristotle, The Politics (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1984), 1253a5–15. Aristotle implies that persons are no longer human, strictly speaking, but beasts if separated from the city within which normative judgments are made and guide behavior. See The Politics, especially 1253a25–35. 23. See Aristotle’s discussions of money-making and household management. Unlimited moneymaking is the project of those who ‘‘are serious about living, but not about living well’’ (The Politics, 1257b40). 24. ‘‘For the starving man, it is not the human form of food that exists, but only its abstract being as food; it could just as well be there in its crudest form, and it would be impossible to say wherein this feeding activity differs from that of animals.’’ Robert Tucker, ed., The Marx-Engels Reader (New York: Norton, 1978), 89 (emphasis in the original).

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to be acting according to ‘‘merely natural’’ self-interest. A normative choice has been made—in this example, between self-interest and solidarity—and such choice is a fundamentally human activity. On Jill Frank’s reading of Aristotle, it is the fundamentally human activity.25 But sometimes such a choice may not be deliberate or conscious; it may appear that there was no choice, that behavior merely followed natural imperatives. Indeed, if we understand choice as necessarily entailing deliberate, conscious action, then we may regularly reinforce certain conditions without choosing at all. For example, it seems very plausible that we do not consciously choose to play binary gender roles; such roles may seem so natural that they are not even recognized as roles, therefore there is no choice whether or not to perform them. Linda Zerilli addresses this dynamic using gender roles as her example, albeit focusing on the absence of doubt rather than the nature of choice. She argues that ‘‘the varying types and degrees of our certainty (in the two-sex system) generally consist in the absence of doubt rather than in the logical or empirical refutation of doubt.’’ She anticipates Markell’s argument, pointing out that our notions of sex and gender are based on propositions that it is possible to doubt, ‘‘but which are unlikely candidates for doubt under ordinary conditions.’’26 To the extent that a choice implies an acting agent, it may be in such cases that there is no choice made. Nevertheless, even—perhaps especially—in such cases our behavior does reinforce one specific condition (or a specific set of related conditions) while rendering other possibilities latent, marginal, or invisible. An option has been chosen without anyone choosing anything, or doubting what was chosen. Without anyone deliberately judging, choosing, and acting to do so, one existing condition is nevertheless reinforced while the alternatives remain unnoticed. In such cases it becomes especially important to bring to light the implicit choice. Human-made, common conditions often appear to have just happened, caused by some human but irresistible force (‘‘they’’ did it). Or the conditions may not even ‘‘appear’’: they may shape thought (or the lack thereof), habit, and (in)activity without being noticed, much less named. It seems these are among the dangers that so worry Arendt in The Human Condition: we behave thoughtlessly, as if we were animals or machines, rather than fulfilling the peculiarly human potential for shaping and re-shaping the common, humanmade conditions of our lives together. Working deliberately with others to alter specific conditions, including conditions of everyday life—work, consumption, space, family life, and so

25. Frank, A Democracy of Distinction, especially 32–38 on ‘‘Prohairetic Activity.’’ 26. Linda M.G. Zerilli, ‘‘Feminism’s Flight from the Ordinary,’’ in Vocations of Political Theory, ed. Jason A. Frank and John Tambornino (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2000), 172–73.

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on—involves noticing and identifying conditions for which we may not even have names, comparing with others our individual experiences of conditions that affect many (if not all) of us, recognizing problems and working toward solutions. Such work restores deliberate, conscious choice-making to what previously may have been an arena of thoughtless acquiescence to what seemed inevitable and natural. Such deliberate, thoughtful, purposeful, and collective work is the basic work of politics. This work does not take place in a particular space or time or even manner. It may not even require (much) publicity, at least not to begin with, but it does require commonality: not biological sameness but the sharing of some human-made condition in common. The work may start with seemingly insignificant complaints and conversations, in which persons start to compare notes, identify patterns, and visualize alternatives. (Issues of work-life balance, for example, may become political issues as a result of women and men discussing the banalities of when to return to work after the birth of a child or how to get a sick child to a doctor during the work week.) It may start with one person resisting one specific condition, but it does not end there, instead leading to collective action to abolish old or invent new conditions. And of course the invention of new conditions is no ending either, but a provocation of new resistance. This notion of politics is inspired not only by readings of Aristotle and Arendt but also by Mary Dietz’s notion of ‘‘methodical politics,’’ which arises in part out of a critique of Arendt’s politics.27 For Dietz, a basic problem with Arendt’s politics is that ‘‘without a dimension of substantive purposefulness that finds positive expression in the vocabulary of ‘problem,’ ‘solution,’ ‘means,’ ‘end,’ and ‘method,’ Arendt’s politics cannot embrace performance as the carrying out or active pursuit of purposes in the very world it strives to vitalize.’’28 Dietz, by contrast, seeks an untamed notion of politics that does not restrict politics to that which takes place in a certain space or when people speak in a certain way, but that centers on the question, ‘‘what is to be done?’’ She points out that if our most democratic and praxis-oriented theories cannot deliver an action concept of politics that appreciates the significance of working (not just speaking) together and the centrality of strategic (not just communicative) purposes, then we should hardly be surprised to find political freedom undermined (if not defeated) by the nullity that is the new and globally encompassing world order.29 27. Dietz, Turning Operations, in particular the introduction and chapter eight. There are ways in which both Dietz’s and my understanding of politics is Arendtian, particularly in the insistence that we ‘‘think what we are doing’’ (The Human Condition, x), but both understandings de-emphasize the performative and aesthetic aspects of Arendt’s politics. 28. Dietz, Turning Operations, 174. 29. Dietz, Turning Operations, 13–14.

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Dietz offers a notion of politics that begins with problem identification and ‘‘reaches its full realization in the actual undertaking of the plan of action.’’ Its space is not that of an island; its mode is not that of respite or escape from the everyday. Rather, it is an activity in which citizens confront obstacles wherever they may be found, including in everyday sites, and transform those obstacles into problems to be solved. This politics is purposeful, and its primary purpose is problem solving, not the disclosure of agents. Like Arendt, Dietz views autonomism as a serious problem but her spatially unbound politics seeks autonomism wherever it may be found: ‘‘schools, universities, hospitals, factories, corporations, prisons, laboratories, houses of finance, the home, public arenas, public agencies.’’30 In short, Dietz’s notion of politics can encompass the politics of the everyday because it avoids confining politics within certain literal or metaphorical spaces or categories of activity. Arendt and Dietz (and I) agree that schools, factories, homes, and so on are often sites of thoughtless autonomism, but where Arendt seems to want those sites kept firmly separate from the public sphere because of that autonomism, Dietz (and I) want the political mode of critical interrogation to shine its light in those spaces. Unlike Arendt’s intimate sphere, which would be destroyed by such interrogation, such everyday spheres require it.

The Politics of Everyday Life Everyday life, far from being a realm of natural or spontaneous behavior, is a realm permeated by norms, customs, laws, habits, rules, and meanings: in short, by the very conditions that, on an Aristotelian view, we can and ought to shape through the work of politics. Meanings emerge not only in formal politics but also in the patterns of interaction that shape everyday life, defining human versions of functions and activities that otherwise might be merely biological, and creating a web of relations between past, present, and future, and between persons, groups, products, spaces, practices, institutions, and so on. However, the peculiar danger of everyday life is that, unlike in formal politics, which is (relatively) openly normative, this humanizing web as it shapes everyday life may not appear as a web of relations at all, but instead as a mere series of unrelated objects, happenings, or moments. When this happens, the opportunities for beginning that everyday life presents remain mere potentials. Put another way, the powerlessness often experienced in everyday life may go unnoticed. 30. Dietz, Turning Operations, 176, 178. To be fair to Arendt, she does not argue that such everyday spaces cannot be sites of action or power. However, neither does she help us to understand exactly how such spaces are political or may be politicized.

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Henri Lefebvre argues that, far from being a natural realm in which the human being as biological entity confronts necessity prepolitically, ‘‘it is in everyday life and in everyday life alone that the natural and the biological are humanized . . . and, further, that the human, the acquired, the cultivated, become natural.’’ Put more literally, ‘‘[i]t is in and through everyday life that organs (eyes, genitals) are humanized.’’31 Everyday life is the primary site of humanization of persons by culture, ideology, law, habit, geography and architecture—in short, by all the human-made conditions. In everyday life the human being and the animal being confront each other, not in a stalemate, not with the possibility of either ever emerging victorious, but in an ongoing relationship. Human standards, the human world, human culture, are always already present in the specific ways in which human beings meet their needs. To reduce the human capacity to confront one’s products according to human standards, or to create circumstances under which human beings are required to produce as animals produce, is to alienate them not merely from their individual selves, but from their humanity.32 While Lefebvre’s debts to Aristotle are less obvious than his debts to Marx, here we see the basically Aristotelian assumption that one of the meanings of being a political animal is that ‘‘human nature’’ is never a site that can (or should) be purified of politics. As Frank puts it, ‘‘human nature is . . . at least in part, constituted politically.’’33 Once we recognize this point, the political aspect of everyday life becomes more obvious, for it is to a significant extent in everyday life that this ‘‘nature’’ as a political animal is constituted. The ‘‘crucial constituents of a political life’’—‘‘character, constitution, property, justice, and law’’—are ‘‘not set structures and frameworks, as many moderns would have it, but everyday practices.’’34 However, the nature of everyday activities may make it especially difficult to recognize them as constituents of political life. One performs a series of daily routines for oneself and perhaps for others, many of which revolve around care of the body, directly or indirectly: preparing food and eating it; cleaning and caring for the body, its clothing, and its physical home; perhaps working outside the home at a job, which is likely to be at least somewhat routinized; perhaps

31. Henri Lefebvre, Critique of Everyday Life (London: Verso, 1991), 95, emphasis in the original. He appears to be basing this claim on Marx’s discussion of the humanization of the senses in the ‘‘Economic and Philosophic Manuscripts of 1844.’’ 32. See Pitkin’s critique of Arendt’s reading of Marx in The Attack of the Blob. Pitkin notes that for Marx it is not just individual alienation that is at stake, but all forms of alienation, including world alienation. See also the ‘‘Economic and Philosophic Manuscripts of 1844.’’ Lefebvre distinguishes between a partial alienation by which a particular practice confronts us as alien, and more ‘‘total’’ alienation in which everyday life in general confronts us as a series of random fragments. See Critique of Everyday Life, especially the Foreword, part VIII. 33. Frank, A Democracy of Distinction, 20. 34. Frank, A Democracy of Distinction, 8.

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enjoying a bit of leisure time, which likewise may be somewhat routinized. In all these activities we move along familiar routes, both in the home and outside it, literally embodying our routines. Obviously privilege and power influence what activities constitute one’s everyday life—for instance, how much and what kinds of paid and unpaid work one performs and how much and what kinds of leisure one enjoys—and the very experience of food and shelter as ‘‘everyday’’ indicates a degree of privilege.35 It remains the case, though, that everyday activities tend to be repetitive and easily become routinized; even the activities that clearly involve normative judgment, once performed a number of times, can be performed thoughtlessly. There is something, then, about the everyday that may be inherently hostile to thought, doubt, beginning, and responsiveness—namely, its repetitiveness, which arises in part from its attending to biological needs that must be met over and over again. Moreover, there is an additional, more contingent dynamic that makes it hard to see the political meanings of the everyday. In late modern everyday life, neighborhoods, houses, jobs, cars, food, and clothing just appear (or fail to appear), as if spontaneously, as if naturally. The trouble with this dynamic—which we might, following Lefebvre, term a kind of alienation—is that it contributes to the perception of everyday life as immutable, not as a context for action, not as a series of beginnings, but as inherently uneventful. As we move through our everyday lives, we are like shoppers in a familiar supermarket: we wander from aisle to aisle on autopilot, picking up the usual brands of the usual items, perhaps thinking about what we are doing, more likely not. Items appear on the shelves with dazzling spontaneity: their past is invisible, their makers are invisible, even the act of placing them on the shelves occurs out of our sight. A thought (about transfats or salmonella contamination) related to what we are placing in our cart may intrude but always must compete with the pressure of past repetitions, of habits pulling us in a familiar direction, like horses who know the way home.36 35. Iris Marion Young’s brief discussion of her childhood and her mother’s story in ‘‘House and Home: Feminist Variations on a Theme’’ makes this point powerfully in Intersecting Voices: Dilemmas of Gender, Political Philosophy, and Policy (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1999). One marker of individual privilege is the ability to escape having to perform such activities oneself. Martha Fineman points out that ‘‘[m]any people in our society totally escape taking care of others; in fact, they may be freed for other pursuits as a result of the caretaking labor of others.’’ Martha Fineman, ‘‘Cracking the Foundational Myths: Independence, Autonomy, and Self-Sufficiency,’’ in Feminism Confronts Homo Economicus: Gender, Law, and Society, ed. Martha Albertson Fineman and Terrence Dougherty (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2005), 185. 36. The supermarket example, as I have used it, may assume a certain level of privilege on the part of a shopper. Certainly one could argue that routinization is a luxury—that those with limited financial resources must think very carefully about what they are doing. On the other hand, one could argue that focusing very closely on costs—whether one needs to or not—can entail a broader thoughtlessness about how and by whom a product was produced, its possible effects on the consumer or the environment, and so on—in short, the normative implications of a particular purchase. Instrumental rationality is not at all the same as Arendtian ‘‘thinking what we are doing.’’

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It is so much easier to take the known path or to think of something else entirely—literally, not to think about what we are actually doing. A major life change—the loss of a job, birth of a child, death of a parent—may jolt us out of our routines, making it difficult to perform familiar tasks, but we do not consider such events everyday. This particular, late modern form of alienated everyday life clearly concerns Lefebvre but also touches on Arendt’s concern about world alienation. Lefebvre claims that when ‘‘an individual life is shaped by individualistic tendencies, it is literally a life of ‘privation’, a life ‘deprived’: deprived of reality, of links with the world—a life for which everything human is alien.’’37 Although his diagnosis of the cause differs from Arendt’s, Lefebvre is concerned about a dynamic similar to the world alienation that worries her: the tendency by which, instead of finding themselves at home in the world, persons confront a series of unrelated objects. Like Arendt’s, Lefebvre’s concern is historical: that modern individuals in particular are likely to fail to recognize those connections, imagining themselves in isolation from the web of relations, interacting with a series of objects that do not constitute a common world but merely appear, as if they had lives of their own, while politics seems to be located only in the ‘‘set structures and frameworks’’ that Frank mentions. Lefebvre’s aim, then, is to defetishize or disalienate everyday life as much as possible, to allow persons to recognize themselves, others, and products as relations, not a random series of objects. If we are to find a way out of this alienated experience of everyday life, however, we need to understand what generates that experience. For Lefebvre, alienated labor is the root cause of many specific forms of alienation. For Arendt, the dominance of the mode that she calls labor over the modes of work and action contributes to the appearance of the world as a heap of random objects. It is not entirely clear just how much Lefebvre’s alienated labor really differs from Arendt’s labor—a question that is beyond the scope of this article—but regardless, both Lefebvre and Arendt direct our attention to a peculiar phenomenon: moderns rarely experience the activity of making a world together according to deliberately chosen standards and in order to achieve certain conscious goals. As workers most of us function as a part of a larger organization and must respond to the imperatives of that organization, which are in turn likely to be shaped by ‘‘impersonal’’ market imperatives. As purchasers of goods and services we seem to function alone. We may make individual choices to consume responsibly, but this consumer choice, so celebrated in liberal economic theory, is not the same as deliberately working together to shape the conditions within which we make small, specific, everyday choices. For example, individually choosing not to purchase meat produced in facilities without adequate worker 37. Lefebvre, Critique of Everyday Life, 149.

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safety measures is not an adequate substitute, either in terms of practicalities or political meanings, for working with fellow citizens to ensure that strong, effectively enforced regulations prevent such unethical practices. Individual choice is an obviously necessary component of freedom, but it cannot substitute entirely for the power to shape the contexts within which we choose. Thus an alienated experience of everyday life is not simply the result of the way we produce and consume things, in a narrowly economic sense. Nor is it simply the case that an alienated experience of everyday life causes political alienation (the sense that things ‘‘just happen’’) and powerlessness. The alienation of everyday life also results, at least in part, from a kind of powerlessness. Alienated labor, viewed from this angle, is a kind of powerlessness in which we work with others to produce a good or service but do not have any ability to participate in determining the normative or aesthetic standards according to which we produce. While not producing exactly as animals purportedly do—according to instinct or hormonal signal from the queen or immediate biological imperative—neither are we producing precisely as humans can. Alienated consumption, on the other hand, is a kind of powerlessness in which the individual’s capacity to choose among proffered items is held out as not merely adequate but liberatory, in that it frees us from having to coordinate our personal preferences with others.38 We see, then, a linkage between powerlessness and alienation in everyday life not captured by a unidirectional causal arrow. But what about areas of everyday life not dominated by the activities of producing and consuming? Is family life, for instance, a less alienated site—either in the sense of the world appearing as a series of objects or in the sense of things seeming to ‘‘just happen’’? Is it a site in which citizens have some measure of power to shape their worlds? This question deserves a far more thorough treatment than I can give it here, but both common sense and recent work by feminist scholars in sociology, critical legal studies, and political economy suggests that the answer is no.39 Focusing just on parenting, we see many instances in which key familial decisions are significantly shaped by factors that lie outside the parents’ everyday control and may appear immutable or simply be invisible—‘‘that’s just the way things are,’’ we tell ourselves—but that could in fact be transformed through collective action. Decisions such as how much parental leave a mother or father can take after the birth or adoption of an infant, how much time is available to a 38. For an influential expression of these ideas, extended not just to economic freedom but political freedom as well, see Milton Friedman, Capitalism and Freedom (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1962). 39. See, for example, Arlie Hochschild, The Time Bind: When Work Becomes Home and Home Becomes Work (New York: Henry Holt, 1997) and Fineman and Dougherty, eds., Feminism Confronts Homo Economicus.

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parent to spend with a child on a day-to-day basis, whether a parent can opt for part-time work, whether a parent can take off from work to take a child to the doctor, whether a parent can afford to take a child to the doctor, and so on, are determined in part by social, political, and economic structures that may seem fixed or escape notice, even though they certainly could be transformed through collective action. Arendt claims that the loss of a sense of a human world as a web of relations stems in part from powerlessness. Power, she says, is the lifeblood of the human artifice, which, unless it is the scene of action and speech, of the web of human affairs and the stories engendered by them, lacks its ultimate raison d’eˆtre. Without being talked about by men and without housing them, the world would not be a human artifice but a heap of unrelated things to which each isolated individual was at liberty to add one more object.40 Powerless, speechless human beings still produce things and still engage in activities—reading magazines, shopping, watching television—but our products and our activities may seem, even to ourselves, meaningless. Yet the assumption that everyday life is inherently pointless or meaningless keeps us caught in the cycle whereby the powerlessness to build a human world together with others, according to human standards, generates a series of seemingly random, fetishized objects, which contributes to a sense of the world as impervious to one’s individual or collective efforts to shape it, which in turn contributes to practical powerlessness, and so on. For Lefebvre the alienation of everyday life, understood as the appearance of everyday life as a series of random, disconnected, pointless happenings and things, remains in and of itself the most fundamental reason for critique and transformation of everyday life. However, from a democratic perspective, the alienation of everyday life is troubling as well because it both indicates a powerlessness to shape the conditions of everyday life, and also undermines any potential awareness that the fabric of everyday life may be transformed by collective human actions. The perception that everyday life consists of a random series of objects and of chance interactions contributes to powerlessness, if we understand power as acting together. This is where Markell’s argument becomes so relevant: ‘‘what threatens ‘beginning’ . . . is not the enforcement of regularity, but the erosion of contexts in which events call for responses and, thus, in which it makes sense to act at all.’’41 Everyday life might, at least in certain specific

40. Arendt, The Human Condition, 204. 41. Markell, ‘‘The Rule of the People,’’ 2.

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instances, offer such contexts, but its alienation erodes that possibility by undermining the capacity to perceive the human, therefore the changeable, in the everyday. A heightened citizen critical responsiveness to everyday events becomes part of the solution rather than part of the problem. But does not such responsiveness have the potential for trivializing politics? Of course this formulation rests upon at least two questionable assumptions: that formal politics never revolves around the trivial, and that the everyday always does. Nevertheless, we might worry about a hypersensitivity to the many unpleasant moments or even specific alienations that arise in everyday life. Lefebvre warns against a purely subjective, individual critique of everyday life, which calls anything unpleasant alienating. Taking any and every specific experience as total alienation ‘‘permits the ‘free’ and empty affirmation of the self—in other words a return to the bourgeois individual, as well as to pessimism.’’42 Such an individual, subjective approach to a critique of everyday life makes it difficult, if not impossible, to gauge the relative importance of any particular concern; we cannot distinguish government sanctioned oral hygiene practices from homelessness if all we can say about them is that both are ‘‘alienating.’’ This lack of perspective may stem from subjectivist critique’s tendency to neglect the relationships between practices and products and persons by focusing too narrowly on a particular practice, which appears as if with a life of its own, or from subjectivist critique’s laudable reluctance to make a priori judgments about which practices are relevant and which irrelevant. A related, perhaps more significant limitation of individual, subjective critique of everyday life is that such critique, and perhaps even calls for ‘‘resistance,’’ delink critique from efforts to achieve collective agency or democratic power in order to transform the conditions being ‘‘resisted.’’ Of course, this may be entirely intentional in some cases. Drawing on Michel de Certeau’s work, Claire Colebrook writes that a tactic ‘‘bears no reference to a dominant strategy . . . occurs without reference to a larger whole’’ and ‘‘is a power unto itself.’’43 Whatever kind of ‘‘power’’ this may be, it is clearly not a notion of power as acting together to alter the context within which individuals experience the human-made conditions of everyday life, as well as the conditions themselves. Individualist critique of the specific, subjective ‘‘alienations’’ of everyday life is unlikely to escape or even effectively challenge the appearance of a series of products and persons as if all were isolated objects with entirely independent lives of their own. Yet it is this basic alienation that allows individuals to interact with these objects and each other not as members of that unique species that can create its own

42. Lefebvre, Critique of Everyday Life, 78. 43. Claire Colebrook, ‘‘The Politics and Potential of Everyday Life,’’ New Literary History 33 (2000): 687–706.

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conditions, but as if we were animals confronting a random collection of things. Thus everyday alienation and political alienation are mutually reinforcing, if we understand political alienation as the sense that politics consists in a series of happenings that occur without anyone actually having power.44 Individual thoughtfulness and responsible choice-making in everyday life are important, but not enough: they are no substitute for the collective power to transform the contexts within which individuals think and act. Individual resistance to specific everyday patterns or expectations may, however, constitute a beginning: an event that allows others to see that which usually passes unseen, provoking a response. If this beginning is to lead to acting together to transform common conditions, there must be communication about what ‘‘we’’ are experiencing—including about our differing individual experiences of common conditions. More fundamentally, there must be the ambition to do more than mitigate one’s own suffering or keep one’s own hands clean. If a beginning is to lead to the generation of power, the focus has to shift away from individual reaction and towards efforts to discern patterns by speaking and working with others who may share our individual concerns about apparently ‘‘small’’ everyday alienations, with whom we may begin to see the existence of a larger pattern, or who may point out that perhaps our individual concerns are, indeed, petty, or with whom we attempt to understand what marks a concern as ‘‘petty.’’ I think again of the small-scale, ongoing work of the feminist movement to identify problems and issues that the movement needs to address.

A Hundred Ways of Beginning Pitkin is surely right that the ‘‘only place to begin is where we are, and there are a hundred ways of beginning.’’45 But Markell is also right to point out that without an awareness that beginning itself is not purely spontaneous, is not an interruption, but emerges in response to particular contexts, we may ignore the ways in which some contexts quash or present obstacles to action, and as a result blame citizens themselves for failing to act. In a context of widespread fatalism; in a context in which individuals compare experiences only with intimates, friends, and occasionally co-workers; in a context in which ordinary citizens may be unaware of the successes of other, equally ordinary, citizens in transforming common conditions; in a context in which politics is confined within very rigid 44. What I am calling political alienation Pitkin calls ‘‘the social.’’ Regardless of terminological differences, my linkage of a Marxian/Lefebvrian critique of alienation and an analysis of political alienation closely parallels Pitkin’s argument that Arendt’s basic concern in The Human Condition is not so very different from Marx’s concern that ‘‘all of the species’ powers and accumulated achievements have not made humans either powerful or free’’ (The Attack of the Blob, 136). 45. Pitkin, The Attack of the Blob, 283.

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spatial and temporal boundaries; it is not enough merely to exhort greater ‘‘civic engagement’’ among citizens. On the other hand, it is also not enough to issue calls for individual resistance. The monstrous qualities of everyday life—the zombielike routine, the conformist hive mind—are not about to disappear. But it is precisely for this reason that it is not enough to long for escape from the banality and boredom of the everyday or for extraordinary circumstances in which one may disclose one’s true self and finally experience true freedom. The ‘‘horror’’ that might disrupt everyday life from without is no substitute for transformation of everyday life from within. Nor is it enough to revel in alienation and ironic distance from one’s own life, attempting to deflect politics by a pseudo-Buddhist absorption of the most aggressively pointless products of a hyperactive political economy. All these options allow individuals, in the meantime, to ensconce themselves in the familiarity of their everyday lives. Everyday life will never be a pure site of spontaneity, and will never be scrubbed clean of all alienations. Lefebvre suggests a more modest project: to find ways in which persons may come to love their lives, not despise them (and themselves). But what Lefebvre does not address is that, to the extent that human lives are lived in the context of shared circumstances, this project requires politics: it requires the power to make choices collectively about how we wish to live together.