Philosophizing the Everyday
Revolutionary Praxis and the Fate of Cultural Theory
Format:Hardback
Publisher:Pluto Press
Published:20th Mar '06
Currently unavailable, and unfortunately no date known when it will be back
After modernism and postmodernism, it is argued, the everyday supposedly is where a democracy of taste is brought into being - the place where art goes to recover its customary and collective pleasures, and where the shared pleasures of popular culture are indulged, from celebrity magazines to shopping malls.
John Roberts argues that this understanding of the everyday downgrades its revolutionary meaning and philosophical implications. Bringing radical political theory back to the centre of the discussion, he shows how notions of cultural democratization have been oversimplified. Asserting that the everyday should not be narrowly identified with the popular, Roberts critiques the way in which the concept is now overly associated with consumption and 'ordinariness'.
Engaging with the work of key thinkers including, Lukács, Arvatov, Benjamin, Lefebvre, Gramsci, Barthes, Vaneigem, and de Certeau, Roberts shows how the concept of the everyday continues to be central to debates on ideology, revolution and praxis. He offers a lucid account of different approaches that developed over the course of the twentieth century, making this an ideal book for anyone looking for a politicised approach to cultural theory.
An important study of the possibilities for cultural democracy has arrived in our midst. In his noteworthy short book, Philosophizing the Everyday, John Roberts pins down with all the forcible precision of a nail gun sixty years of critical theorising between 1917 and 1975 about everyday life and a conflicted reality.
-- Alex Law Variant, issuISBN: 9780745324111
Dimensions: unknown
Weight: 346g
160 pages