Everyday continued

According to Blanthot, the everyday’s glaring manifestation is boredom. Silence constitutes it, amid endless idle chatter, around an unrelenting murmuring that behooves us to remain still, even in movement. 

Blanchot adds, “The everyday is human. The earth, the sea, forest, light, do not represent everydayness, which belongs first of all to the dense presence of great urban centers. We need these admirable deserts that are the world’s cities for the experience of the everyday to begin to overtake us” (17) The everyday does not inhabit private, demarcated quarters, but the cluttered, roaming, ample space of the streets. Lefebvre says, “The street tears from obscurity what is hidden, publishes what happens elsewhere, in secret; it deforms it, but inserts it in the social text”. To this Blanchot adds that the street “has the paradoxical character of having more importance than the places it connects, more living reality than the things it reflects. The street renders public” (17). 

More Blanchot

“…the everyday is what we never see for a first time, but only see again, having always already seen it by an illusion that is, as it happens, constitutive of the everyday” (14). 

“We believe we know things immediately, without images and without words, and in reality we are dealing with no more than an insistent prolixity that says and shows nothing. […] One can say that in this attempt to recapture it at its own level, the everyday loses any power to reach us; it is no longer what its lived, but what can ben seen or what shows itself, spectacle and description, without any active relation whatsoever. The whole world is offered to us, but by way of a look” (14).

The everyday escapes the grasp of knowledge. “…for it belongs to a region where there is still nothing to know, just as it is prior to all relation insofar as it has always already been said, even while remaining unformulated, that is to say, not yet information. It is not the implicit (of which phenomenology has made borad use); to be sure, it is always already there, but that it may be there does not guarantee its actualization. On the contrary, the everyday is always unrealized in tis very actualization which no event, however important or however insignificant, can ever produce” (15). Then he concludes, “Nothing happens; this is the everyday” (15). 

Everyday speech

In 1959 Maurice Blanchot publishes an essay title “La Parole Quotidienne”. The English translation is published in the Yale French Studies in 1987. According to Blanchot, the everyday is us, anybody, in a state of ordinariness. Not being a proper noun, the everyday does not have, Blanchot says, a truth proper to itself. Though ubiquitous, the everyday cannot be properly discerned anywhere, thus engulfs individuals while also alienating them, distancing them. He says, “The everyday is platitude (what lags and falls back, the residual life with which our trash cans and cemeteries are filled: scrap and refuse); but this banality is also what is most important, if it brings us back to existence in its very spontaneity and as it is lived–in the moment when, lived, it escapes every speculative formulation, perhaps all coherence, all regularity” (13). In short, for Blanchot the everyday flees, runs away and thus refuses to be held still, to be held at all. “It belongs to insignificance, and the insignificant is without truth, without reality, without secret, but perhaps also the site of all possible signification” (14).