Withered houseplants, shopping bags

What was "everyday life"?

Image via Flashbak / JR James Archive

I’ve recently been reading some of Georges Perec’s essays, in John Sturrock’s Penguin edition of Species of Spaces. He produced probably the most advanced attempts of the last century to manufacture a writing of everyday life. I’ve read none of his novels, the most famous of which, Life: A User’s Manual, attempted to create a mathematically-arranged portrait of the sum of the quotidian goings-on of a Paris apartment block. I’d long been interested in the OuLiPo and Perec, going back at least to my undergraduate degree in creative writing, without ever really finding a way in, a point of affinity. I was interested at the time in procedural forms, collaged material and diaristic forms of writing, as a way of getting round what seemed to be the ancient problem of “inspiration”. Jumpstarting composition, deceiving internal censors that kept material off the page, making kernels that works could grow from, was what many of the course’s techniques aimed at; what could be easier than to start with a few rules telling you what (within certain parameters) to write? It’s a problem I’ve thought about more recently, as I’m going through a fallow period on a long writing project and wondering whether to keep using this newsletter. (More of that in a second.) In a number of Perec’s essays these formal questions of how prose can be organised, separated from the privileged Romantic view of imagination creating ex nihilo, intersects strongly with the problem of the desiccated everyday life of postwar France. Thus ‘The Rue Vilin’, a flat, factual record of his visits between 1969 and 1975 to the street in the 20th arrondissement where he grew up, acts as a kind of deadpan documentary version of the critiques of Paris urbanism in the Situationist International’s early texts, documenting demolitions, creeping Gauche Proletarianne posters and the uses the new urban poor make of the remaining buildings. (The slapstick version of Perec’s text is, of course, Tati’s M. Hulot films.)

“We go through life in a dreamless sleep”, he writes in 1973. “But where is our life? Where is our body? Where is our space?” In that text, and the later ‘Twelve Sidelong Glances’, he posited a formal project of enunciating these parts of life that the novel had absorbed and mystified, allowed to congeal into commodities, even in modernism, retraining the attention and descriptive apparatus to deal with, “exhaust”, a life that presents itself as immediate and “natural”, though without using the heavy demystifying apparatus that preoccupied much of the French left after structuralism. It’s an attractive idea, in the abstract, where it mostly stayed after his untimely death in 1982. But it struck me that the reason I never quite responded to the notion of a writing of everyday life is I don’t have any intuitive, present notion of what “everyday life” would mean, as a shared and social texture and rhythm of existence. It isn’t that everyday life is too shapeless to represent—certain Perec texts, like ‘Attempt at an Inventory of the Liquid and Solid Foodstuffs Ingurgitated by Me in the Course of the Year Nineteen Hundred and Seventy-Four’ and ‘Two Hundred and Forty-Three Postcards in Real Colour’ show how a temporal structure can emerge through dumb accumulation that makes “everyday life” legible. Rather, it’s that when I think of what others talk about when they talk about “everyday life”, it doesn’t sound like an experience I’ve been through. Depression, anxiety and avoidance meant I spent most of my 20s after finishing my BA not getting out of bed until it became inevitable. For most of the period I lived in London, between 22 and 26, I spent most days just looking at social media, a pattern repeated at intervals in the years after. When I went out during my worst periods it was frequently torture—just getting the bus or going to the shops was a ritual of irritation, shame, despair. (I have a particular memory of going past Khan’s Bargain in Peckham, feeling untethered to the world, that would never offer me anything but false hope. This isn’t, of course, the shop’s fault.) When I did have jobs, I could often do little else except write, that low-tech salvation of sedentary inwardness. Time and the space everyone else seemed to inhabit slipped away. What would a writing of such everyday life look like, except counting the unrested mornings, emails not sent, minutes spent looking at peeling wallpaper? Les choses: Sainsburys bags for life, unopened books, cactuses dying under dust. (I’ve often been struck by the paradoxical muteness of depression: it’s produced a lot of books, but always written after the condition has abated; it seems to inexorably generate language, the inner monologue of uselessness and failure, but the words never seem legible, useable.)

I don’t want this post to be a request for pity (though I wouldn’t say no). I think many of the social-media attempts to posit a radical political value in mental illness—that it represents an affront to the late capitalist determination every scrap of living time by the value-form, etc—are often just special pleading. And I’d be the first to admit that many of the practical consequences of having no everyday life of which I’m painfully aware—having few close friends, a deficit of “experience” with the fabric of life that composes the material of fiction, and what used to be called “defects of character”—are “a YP, not an MP”. But aside from the recognition that “everyday life” is itself a consequence of commodification—of the “colonisation” of every aspect of life and its insertion in the circulation process that Guy Debord observed in 1961—a fact that no-one seems much to mind, there is still a political problem of genre. For there is already a writing of everyday life, and quite a profitable one. There’s the pop-therapeutic business of journalling and self-care, tracking in minute detail the circadian bowel-movements of the spirit. But there’s also what used to be called the thinkpiece, now more often just the “take”, pretty much the only way freelance writers of my generation could and can make a living. An anecdote, an observation from a vibrant metropolitan life that sacralises the writer-narrator, metastasises into a hypothesis about certain facets of Society In General. Once tethered to the temporality of daily newspaper publication, it now moves with the more fine-grained schedule and rapid turnaround of online platforms. The everyday becomes contemporary mythology (in Barthes’ sense). (I think this is true of many contemporary novels too, which often resemble extended thinkpieces—not just those props of moral self-regulation that Ed Luker writes about in this productive piece, but those that perform a fashionable ambiguity and ambivalence too, signalling not virtue but capital-A Adulthood.) And this relates back to my own writing. When I first set up this newsletter, when “everyday life” meant staying indoors, I thought it might serve as a way of producing regular, less unwieldy commentaries on the symptoms of a disappearing dailiness—to combine timely and untimely thoughts in one. (Like all Substack idiots, I also thought I was owed a living.) The writing of everyday life, in both its “political” and commodified guises alike, had once promised a form of aesthetic periodicity, a rhythm of production within the non-existent everyday life of subjective depletion; maybe they could again. Of course life gets in the way even if you don’t really have one. “Everyday life” is back and more annotated than ever, perhaps precisely because all the things that were supposed to make it work—supply chains, public transport, housing, public events, reliably low food prices—are degrading at remarkable rates. I don’t have any neat conclusions to make here—I specifically promised myself I wouldn’t, as a sort of Oulipian constraint—except perhaps to suggest that even the forms of writing that proffer an alternative to the temporality of the take will need to shape newly dissident or deconstructed temporalities in their form, and that the spaces to nurture such a refracted everyday life hardly exist.