Blanchot, M. (1987). “Everyday speech” (S. Hanson, Trans.). Yale French Studies, 73, 12-20. (Original work published 1959)
Reviewed by Amy Macdonald, University of Alberta
What is the everyday? This question might seem unnecessary and superfluous. Are we not surrounded by it, steeped in it? Is it not something we can know and understand naturally, something we can safely take for granted? As Ben Highmore writes in the introduction to his Everyday Life Reader, “It is to the everyday that we consign that which no longer holds our attention. Things become ‘everyday’ by becoming invisible, unnoticed, part of the furniture. And if familiarity does not always breed contempt, it does encourage neglect” (2002, p. 21). This short paper is intended as a reminder. The enormous breadth and diversity of writers who have pursued the question of the everyday—including, but certainly not limited to, Roland Barthes, Maurice Blanchot, Michel de Certeau, Erving Goffman, and Henri Lefebvre—suggests that perhaps there is value in confronting this neglect, in attempting to define, or at least illuminate certain facets of, the everyday. I wish to narrow my focus to Blanchot’s (1987) essay “Everyday Speech,” which seems to resonate with a distinct feeling that underscores his conception of the everyday as an experience that always escapes, as something inaccessible through knowledge.
(Michael Gardiner’s related review essay on Sheringham’s ‘Reading Everyday Life’ appears in the journal issue 12.3)
For Blanchot, the everyday is, as suggested by his essay’s first paragraph heading, “what is most difficult to discover” (1987, p. 12). It cannot be captured through knowledge, “for it belongs to a region where there is still nothing to know” (p. 15). The capacity of the everyday to escape definition lends it a vitality, a “mobile indeterminacy and openness” (Sheringham, 2006, p. 16), which enables it “to subvert intellectual and institutional authority” (p. 17). As Sheringham notes, the indeterminacy of the everyday thus paradoxically becomes an identifying quality for Blanchot (2006, p. 16). Indeed, Blanchot’s somewhat striking proposal that “the everyday escapes. This is its definition” may seem internally contradictory (Blanchot, p. 15); how can the everyday be defined—pinned down, presented, accounted for—by its very ability to escape objectification? This definitive proposal, however, is just one of many that Blanchot scatters throughout his essay; it is not the only time he claims to be pointing directly to some definitional quality of the everyday. At the very beginning of his essay, Blanchot offers a “first approximation”: “the everyday is what we are first of all, and most often…. The everyday, then, is ourselves, ordinarily” (p. 12). It is ourselves, it “is human” (p. 17), and yet it “is the movement by which the individual is held, as though without knowing it, in human anonymity” (p. 17). We are both “engulfed within and deprived of” the everyday, and yet—“a third definition—the everyday is also the ambiguity of these two movements” (p. 13). Following Lefebvre, upon whose analysis Blanchot draws quite heavily (Sheringham, 2006, p. 17), Blanchot envisions the everyday as restless and in motion, “a storehouse of anarchy” (Blanchot, p. 17). However, despite this talk of movement, Blanchot also writes: “Nothing happens; this is the everyday” (p. 15). We cannot know it; “it is the unperceived,” and yet “we have always already seen it by an illusion that is, as it happens, constitutive of the everyday” (p. 14). Near the end of his essay, Blanchot offers this perhaps almost infuriating proposition: “In the everyday, everything is everyday” (p. 18). Due to the persistent recurrence of these definitions of the everyday, I do not sense that they are independently all-encompassing for Blanchot, that each one on its own communicates the everyday as a whole; if this were so, it would seem to render the others unnecessary. Similarly, viewed as multiple aspects of the everyday, they do not appear to be mutually exclusive, although they are often ambiguous. For instance, the “nothing happens” of the everyday certainly tends to escape; as the above quote from Highmore suggests (2002, p. 21), we easily take for granted those aspects of the everyday that fail to capture our conscious attention—but which, Blanchot’s formulations indicate, are crucial to the everyday itself. Thus, each new definition Blanchot gives us does not seem to completely displace the previous ones or suggest that they are false. Indeed, the everyday for Blanchot is “a region, or a level of speech, where the determinations true and false, like the opposition yes and no, do not apply” (p. 16). Why, then, does he write in this way? If the everyday escapes by its very nature, why does he repeatedly imply that he has located it?
By providing us, his audience, with several traits and characteristics of the everyday, each of which apparently is the everyday in some essential way (although, of course, we must “consider the everyday as without a truth proper to itself” [1987, p. 12]), my sense is that Blanchot seems to convey the everyday to us not only in so many words—it “escapes,” it “is the unperceived,” etc.—but also in the form of a distinct feeling that emanates from this technique. He presents several definitional pieces of the puzzle of the everyday that somehow do not seem to capture the everyday as a whole, unified concept. Thinking through each separate definition, summing each new essential trait on top of the preceding ones, I am left with the sense that the everyday has indeed escaped, that it is more than the sum of its parts; even when taken together, Blanchot’s multiple definitions are perhaps necessary in order to characterize the everyday without being sufficient. If any of these fragments were truly the everyday, were truly its definition—even if these fragments together truly constituted the everyday as a whole—it seems to me that Blanchot could have written much more precisely. Instead, he appears to delight in exploring the fogginess and ambiguity of the everyday, reveling in the space between apparent negations: the everyday is inaccessible yet always already accessible, we are deprived of it and yet it is all around us. With each of these new definitions, Blanchot offers his audience a new piece of knowledge; however, with each piece of knowledge we gain, we must reconsider the “essential” conception of the everyday that we have formed based upon his previous definitions. It seems, then, that our conceptions of the everyday are constantly gained, lost, and modified as we proceed through Blanchot’s many definitions; due to the very fact that he constantly claims to present it to us, it constantly evades us. Blanchot’s repeated articulations of the everyday place it into a state of constant motion, of “perpetual becoming” and indeterminacy (Sheringham, 2006, p. 16), which is for Blanchot the source of its transgressive political potential (Sheringham, 2006, p. 19). He therefore not only verbally communicates the everyday’s inevitable escape and its inaccessibility through knowledge, but also performs those features by using repeated claims of definitional knowledge to place the status of the everyday’s essence into constant flux. Blanchot thus provokes us to feel as if the everyday constantly evades our grasp; this feeling also underscores his contention that “the everyday is a dimension of human experience rather than an abstract category” (Sheringham, 2006, p. 16). The reader of “Everyday Speech” not only learns that the everyday escapes, that it is inaccessible yet always already within reach, but feels this as well.
It may be that this feeling is an inevitable effect of attempting to define the everyday. If, like Sheringham, we adopt the common view that the everyday is fugitive and ephemeral, something that “cannot be explored or explained but only apprehended, attended to, always obliquely” (2000, p. 188), it seems very possible that any attempt to definitively articulate essential characteristics of the everyday—any conscious direction of attention towards the everyday’s identity—has already lost a crucial aspect of the everyday: its proclivity to escape our attention (Highmore, 2002; Sheringham, 2006). The feeling of constant evasion that I have attempted to articulate with regard to Blanchot may, therefore, be far from unique to his work. Rather than leaving us entirely stranded, however, perhaps this feeling in fact makes us feel the everyday, and maybe even deepens our understanding of it, in an important way. Perhaps the seemingly hopeless attempt to define the everyday offers us valuable insights into its nature, in our very failure to capture it as a unified whole. In the context of “Everyday Speech,” then, Blanchot’s frequent insistence that he is defining the everyday might be said to paradoxically strengthen our understanding of the everyday as something ambiguous, transitory, and perhaps even ultimately indefinable.
References
Blanchot, M. (1987). Everyday speech (S. Hanson, Trans.). Yale French Studies, 73, 12-20. (Original work published 1959) Retrieved February 12, 2008, from the JSTOR database.
Highmore, B. (2002). Introduction: Questioning everyday life. In B. Highmore (Ed.), The Everyday Life Reader (pp. 1-34). London: Routledge.
Sheringham, M. (2000). Attending to the everyday: Blanchot, Lefebvre, Certeau, Perec. French Studies, 54,187-199. Retrieved February 5, 2008, from the Project MUSE database.
Sheringham, M. (2006). Everyday life: Theories and practices from Surrealism to the present. Oxford, England: Oxford University Press.