A highly contested term invented for the purpose of registering the effects on individuals of social and cultural change on both a micro and macro scale. Its importance can readily be seen in discussions of the impact of new technology. For example, when email was introduced it transformed (almost overnight) the way business is conducted and had a similarly significant flow-on effect on social life as well. It outmoded the letter and substantially changed the way we think about the telephone. In other words it changed the way life is conducted at its most mundane and basic level. This is what the concept of everyday life tries to capture: life as a set of routines, practices, ways of living, thinking, and doing things. Its purpose can be summarized by the paradox that it aims to see what is extraordinary about the ordinary. One has only to think of life before (or without) email to get a sense of the insightfulness of this paradox. The everyday has been the subject of critical attention for nearly a century and has drawn the attention of some of the most famous thinkers of our time. None more famous than Freud, Sigmund, whose concept of the unconscious is attributable to his interest in at least one aspect of the everyday. In Zur Psychopathologie des Alltagslebens (1901), translated as The Psychopathology of Everyday Life (1914), Freud set out to theorize what today are known as âFreudian slipsâ, namely the accidental (and sometimes obscene) confusion of words and ideas that frequently occur in the course of conversation. Freud hypothesized that these slips indicate that beneath our conscious activity in the unconscious there is an active set of processes which occasionally make themselves known to the conscious. He thus identified a fruitful tension between the conscious and the unconscious, the thought and the unthought, the intended and unintended, which continues to structure thinking about the everyday in all its guises. The everyday is simultaneously that which we attend to and that which we ignore or overlook. The French philosopher Lefebvre, Henri is undoubtedly the one who has done the most to bring the concept of the everyday to the attention of critical theory and it was precisely this tension between noticing the everyday and failing to see it that interested him. He wrote several books on this theme, the best known being the trilogy Critique de la vie quotidienne (1947â81), translated as Critique of Everyday Life (1991â2005). Lefebvre was particularly attentive to the transformations to daily life wrought by the introduction of new commodities (his one-time research assistant Baudrillard, Jean even more so), which he saw in terms of a colonization of the unconscious. But it was the vivid moments of disgust, shock, pleasure, and delight that interrupt the monotony of the quotidian that fascinated him most because he saw in them a kind of immanent critique of the everyday and the fleeting promise of a different life. He was in this regard very much a utopia thinker and his privileging of creativity as a force of social change in its own right exerts a strong influence on Cultural Studies still. This is in small measure because of Certeau, Michel deâs manifesto, LâInvention du quotidien 1. arts de faire (1980), translated as The Practice of Everyday Life (1984), which treats creativity as the one unquenchable form of resistance the weak use against the powerful. But in contrast to Lefebvre, Certeau is more interested in the evanescent than the material. His key exhibit is the practice known in French as âla perruqueâ (loosely translated as âwigging itâ), whereby workers conduct personal business on their employerâs time---probably the most common form of this today is the time people devote to Facebook while they are at work. For Certeau, the everyday is that which escapes any and all attempts to either control it or document it. As such, it doesnât even leave a trace and Certeau is scathing of attempts by sociologists to quantify it statistically or otherwise. Inspiring though this work has been from the point of view of trying to think about the possibility of resistance, it is also self-defeating inasmuch as its research object is by its own definition impossible to grasp. Between these two poles of interest in and indifference to the material, defined by Lefebvre and Certeau, there are a number of important authors whose work has touched on the question of the everyday. Most prominently, these include, Blanchot, Maurice for whom the everyday is the ineffable; Braudel, Fernand whose exhaustive trilogy The Structures of Everyday Life (1975â9) plumbs the depths of the everyday in all its minutiae going back to the Middle Ages; Goffman, Erving, for whom the everyday is a performance; Vaneigem, Raoul, the Belgian Situationism, and Agnes Heller, for whom (following LukĂĄcs, György) the everyday is the site of possible redemptive politics. To this list must be added the name Barthes, Roland, whose great Other-inspired Mythologies (1957), translated as Mythologies (1972) continues to set the standard for perceiving the extraordinary in the ordinary. Further Reading: M. Gardiner Critiques of Everyday Life (2000). B. Highmore Everyday Life and Cultural Theory (2002). A. Kaplan and K. Ross, (eds.) âEveryday Lifeâ, special issue of Yale French Studies, vol. 73 (1987). J. Roberts Philosophizing Everyday Life (2006).