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Everyday Knowledge
Michael E. Gardiner
Theory Culture Society 2006; 23; 205
DOI: 10.1177/026327640602300243

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Problematizing Global Knowledge – Poetic Knowledge 205

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Press of Harvard University Press.
Rancière, Jean (1994[1992]) The Names of History: On the Poetics of Knowledge, trans. Hassan Melechy,
foreword by Hayden White. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press.
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Toronto Press.
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Sharon B. Powers. New York: Norton.

Rajeev Patke teaches at the National University of Singapore. Forthcoming publications

include Postcolonial Poetry in English (Oxford University Press, 2006) and the co-edited
Historical Companion to Postcolonial Literatures: Continental Europe and its Empires (Edin-
burgh University Press, 2007).

Everyday Knowledge
Michael E. Gardiner

one to become a full participant in social life,

Keywords everyday life, Heller, knowledge,
especially through what Heller identifies as the
Lefebvre, modernity
crucial media of language, tools and norms.
Although the actual content of these knowledges is
subject to enormous historico-cultural variability,

‘E
veryday knowledge’ (or more precisely
knowledges) is a sociocultural universal.
All human societies build up a repertoire
of shared and embodied norms, techniques and
interpretive frameworks. Such ‘stock knowledge
at hand’, as the phenomenologist Alfred Schütz
(1967) has described it, allows for the formation
of personal identities, facilitates mundane social
interactions, and enables practical engagements
with the material world. This realization led Agnes
Heller to suggest that the everyday represents
society’s most fundamental ontological category,
which she characterizes as the shared ‘life-experi-
ence on which our intersubjective constitution of
the world rests’. It is within this sphere that a
human being acquires certain skills and competen-
cies, via acculturation and socialization, that allow
we can, nevertheless, point to several key features:
typically (though not inevitably), everyday knowl-
edges are ruled by emotion and affect rather than
formal logic; they tend to be repetitive, prone to
analogical forms of reasoning and over-generaliza-
tion; and they are pragmatic, based upon immedi-
ate perceptions and experiences and subordinated
to the requirements of mundane tasks. Everyday
knowledges are a form of doxa, legitimated by
commonsensical opinions and not reliant on
‘certainty’ in any scientific sense.
In most premodern societies, such everyday
knowledges were complexly intertwined with
their more specialized counterparts, to the point
where it becomes difficult to separate them. In
tribal societies, for example, practical knowledges
are imbricated fully with a wider gamut of

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12_poeticknowl_062574 10/5/06 10:22 am
206 Theory, Culture & Society 23(2–3)
mythopoetic, festive and religious rituals, symbols
and discourses. These integrated activities, objects
and knowledges constitute an overarching totality,
a distinctive ‘style’ of common existence that is
permeated with poetical and aesthetic qualities
that shape every aspect of sociocultural life. In the
premodern context, as Henri Lefebvre (1987: 8)
observes, ‘the smallest tool to the greatest works
of art and learning possessed a symbolic value
linking them to meaning at its most vast’.
What seems to be largely peculiar to the
Western world, at least since the time of the
ancient Greeks, but especially with the advent of
modernity, is a heightened reflexivity vis-à-vis the
boundaries that delineate everyday from more
formalized knowledges. Insofar as asymmetries of
power are brought to bear on any exercise of
boundary-maintenance, this has, historically
speaking, involved a tendency to valorize the
formal and specialized at the expense of the
prosaic, the mundane and the practical. Western
history has occasionally been witness to a creative
osmosis between the everyday and more special-
ized knowledges (both Heller and Mikhail Bakhtin
mention the Renaissance in this context).
However, modernity is generally characterized as
a form of social organization wherein human needs
and actions become increasingly subordinated to
the technical requirements of a rapidly expanding
and centralized apparatus of commodity produc-
tion, distribution and consumption, instead of
being rooted in the more ‘organic’ rhythms and
textures of daily life in the premodern world.
Within ‘learned’ discourse, everyday knowledges
became the target of ridicule and vilification.
Descartes, for instance, argued that the paradigm
of certain knowledge lay not in the evidence of the
embodied senses, but in the abstract and timeless
propositions of mathematics. These axioms were
located within a purely mental space surveilled by
the imperious, rational Mind, the (in)famous
cogito. As Lefebvre has argued, this Cartesian
mind–body dualism, like similar idealist philoso-
phies, represented a systemic denigration of
everyday knowledges and the aforementioned
‘intersubjective constitution of the social world’.
Evoking Marx, for Lefebvre such an outlook had a
distinct sociohistorical origin: it was an expression
of alienation, a loss of control over elemental
human capacities and powers, which are banished
to a nebulous fantasy world of rarified ideas
instead of being rooted in the lived, intersubjec-
tive experience of time, space and the body.
Everyday knowledges ‘came to be thematized
from the standpoint of a “truth” which then
defined this life as void of truth’ (Heller, 1985:
80).
It is therefore not surprising that everyday
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© 2006 Theory, Culture & Society Ltd.. All rights reserved. Not for commercial use or unauthorized distribution.
Page 206
knowledges have only rarely been considered
worthy objects of study during the last two and a
half thousand years of Western thought. One
exception was the emergence of such social
philosophies as hermeneutics, existential phenom-
enology, and Verstehen sociology in the late 19th
and early 20th centuries. Max Weber, Wilhelm
Dilthey, Schütz and other sociologists sought to
develop the necessary conceptual and methodo-
logical tools for a systematic analysis of the
everyday Lebenswelt or ‘lifeworld’. (There were
parallel developments in philosophy, such as
Ludwig Wittgenstein’s attempt to conceptualize
pragmatic usages of language within specific ‘forms
of life’, helping to spawn an entire genre of Anglo-
American ‘ordinary language philosophy’.) Heller
argues that these intellectual developments were
premised on two key assumptions. First, the
everyday was perceived as separate and distin-
guishable from specialized knowledges and prac-
tices; and, second, everyday life was thought to be
problematic, mainly because it is widely felt that
modernity represented a distinct threat to the
integrity of the everyday, insofar as daily existence
was subjected to an extensive process of economic
and bureaucratic restructuring, rationalization and
commodification. As Mike Featherstone (1992:
162) puts it,
science, art, philosophy and other forms of
theoretical knowledge originally embedded
within everyday life become progressively
separated and subjected to specialist develop-
ment, followed by a further phase whereby this
knowledge is fed back in order to rationalize,
colonize and homogenize everyday life.
Viewing the everyday and its requisite knowl-
edges as both distinct and ‘problematic’ has
compelled particular strains of modern social and
philosophical thought to be aware of the existence
of ‘everyday life’ as a central ontological
component of the social world. For example,
theories such as Schützian phenomenology or
ethnomethodology celebrate the ongoing accom-
plishments and practices of everyday life, but they
do so in an uncritical and essentially descriptive
fashion. In part, this is because they tend to
conceptualize the underlying structures of the life-
world as essentially ‘taken-for-granted’, and there-
fore an unchanging and immutable stratum of
human existence. These theories therefore repro-
duce, rather than subvert, the pervasive hierarchy
between specialized and non-specialized knowl-
edges, thereby bolstering what André Gorz (1993)
has called the ‘expertocracy’.
There is, however, another significant approach
to the understanding of everyday knowledges,
which, arguably, does not fall prey to the
12_poeticknowl_062574 10/5/06 10:22 am
Problematizing Global Knowledge – Poetic Knowledge 207
descriptively ethnographic, empiricist and covertly
positivist orientation of various phenomenologies
and micro-sociologies. This refers to a group of
theorists, which would include the likes of
Bakhtin, Walter Benjamin, Michel de Certeau,
Heller, Lefebvre, Michel Maffesoli and others,
who view the everyday in more complex and
nuanced terms. Rather than interpret everyday
practices and knowledges as either trivial or
merely ‘problematic’, these theorists set out to
actively problematize everyday life, to expose its
myriad contradictions, effects, determinations and
hidden potentialities. This is accomplished
through various techniques of estrangement or
‘defamiliarization’ that aim to disrupt the state of
habitualized ‘dreaming’ or distraction that consti-
tutes the everyday life of modernity, and jolt it into
a state of (relative) wakefulness (see Highmore,
2002). So whereas for mainstream sociological
approaches the everyday is the realm of the
ordinary, the alternative sketched out by Lefebvre
et al. is to treat it as incipiently extraordinary. The
ordinary can become extraordinary not by eclips-
ing the everyday, or imagining we can arbitrarily
leap beyond it to some ‘higher’ level of cognition,
knowledge or action, but by fully appropriating
and activating the possibilities that lie hidden, and
typically repressed, within it. Such an enriched
experience can then be re-directed back to daily
life in order to transform it. The goal here is to
elevate ‘lived experience to the status of a critical
concept – not merely in order to describe lived
experience, but in order to change it’ (Kaplan and
Ross, 1987: 1).
Although everyday life does display routinized,
static and unreflexive characteristics, as Schütz
and others have argued, the work of Lefebvre and
others has led us to realize that it is also capable
of a surprising dynamism and moments of pene-
trating insight and unbridled creativity. And insofar
as everyday lives and knowledges evince an irre-
ducibly imaginative and dynamic quality, they
cannot simply be written off as the realm of the
trivial, inconsequential and habit-bound (see John
O’Neill, 1995). Many aspects of daily life remain
hidden and obscure, beyond the understanding of
the fully legible ‘Cartesian space’ that scientific
rationalism strives to construct and enforce. It is
the very ‘messiness’ of daily life, its unsystem-
atized and unpredictable quality, that helps it at
least partially escape the reifying grip of nomo-
thetic social science and technocratic planning (see
de Certeau, 1984). In the minutiae of everyday
life, therefore, we find a polysemy of gestures and
symbols the very ‘banality’ of which is worth
savouring; for, as Maurice Blanchot (1987: 13)
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Page 207
suggests, the everyday constitutes ‘a utopia, and an
Idea, without which one would not know how to
get at either the hidden present, or the discover-
able future of manifest beings’. If this is so, then
the task of the critical theorist of everyday life
conforms to what Rob Shields (1999: 188) has
usefully termed a ‘utopian humanism’: it cele-
brates the intrinsic but oft-hidden promises and
possibilities of ordinary human beings and the
inherent value of commonsensical forms of knowl-
edge, but recognizes shortcomings in the mundane
world as it is currently constituted, and is attuned
to the transgressive, sensual and incandescent
qualities of everyday existence, whereby the entire
fabric of the daily social world can take on a festive
hue and be considered akin to a ‘work of art’.
References
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Gorz, A. (1993) ‘Political Ecology: Expertocracy
vs. Self-Limitation’, New Left Review 202:
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Heller, A. (1985) The Power of Shame: A Rational
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Highmore, B. (2002) Everyday Life and Cultural
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Routledge.
Michael E. Gardiner is a Professor of Sociology at
the University of Western Ontario, Canada. His
single-author books include Critiques of Everyday
Life and The Dialogics of Critique, and edited
works include Bakhtin and the Human Sciences,
Rethinking Everyday Life and Mikhail Bakhtin (4
vols). He is currently working on a book on utopia
and social theory.