The concept of ‘the everyday’: Ephemeral politics and the abundance of life
| Author | Jef Huysmans,Xavier Guillaume |
| DOI | 10.1177/0010836718815520 |
| Published date | 01 June 2019 |
| Date | 01 June 2019 |
| Subject Matter | Articles |
https://doi.org/10.1177/0010836718815520
Cooperation and Conflict
2019, Vol. 54(2) 278 –296
© The Author(s) 2018
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DOI: 10.1177/0010836718815520
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The concept of ‘the
everyday’: Ephemeral politics
and the abundance of life
Xavier Guillaume
Rijksuniversiteit Groningen, the Netherlands
Jef Huysmans
Queen Mary University of London, UK
Abstract
Against the background of a continuing interest in the everyday in international relations, this article
asks what kind of analytics upon and within the world mobilises one through the concept of the
everyday and what consequences this may have for thinking about politics. In particular, it explores
a conception of the the everyday that foregrounds the abundance of human life and ephemeral
temporalities. The abundance of life invites a densification of politics combined with an emphasis
on displacing levels or scales by associative horizontal relations. The ephemeral introduces a
conception of temporality that foregrounds the political significance of fleeting practices and the
emergent nature of life. When applied to politics, this conception of the everyday performs politics
as emergent, as possibilities that are not already defined by fixing what politics can possibly be.
The order of politics is then understood as an immanently precarious succession of situations and
practices in which lived political lives remain inherently aleatory, momentary and emergent rather
than as an order of mastering the political. The concept of the everyday, thus draws attention to
the immanent elusiveness and fragility of politics as it loses its ground, its referent.
Keywords
ephemeral, everyday, international relations, politics, social theory
Introduction
Claiming a turn to the everyday or a revival of interest in the everyday in the field of
international relations (IR) would be overstating the point. Yet, there is a continuing
Corresponding author:
Xavier Guillaume, Faculty of Arts, IRIO, University of Groningen, Oude Kijk in ‘t Jatstraat 26, 9712
Groningen, the Netherlands.
Email: x.guillaume@rug.nl
815520CAC0010.1177/0010836718815520Cooperation and ConflictGuillaume and Huysmans
research-article2018
Article
Guillaume and Huysmans 279
interest in the power of subjects, practices, relations, sites and things that are usually kept
out of the political and analytical vision that is pervasive in IR. Those variables are
assumed to be largely insignificant in world politics, either because they are considered
simply not to matter or because they are merely reproductive of given structural relations.
Among many examples are lay persons in expert environments (Hobson and Seabrooke,
2007b), domestic servants in the world economy (Enloe, 2014), garbage bins (Acuto,
2014), a TV series (Davies, 2010; Rowley and Weldes, 2012), tourism (Lisle, 2016), Key
Performance Indicators for security personnel in airports (Schouten, 2014), the vernacular
(Jackson and Hall, 2016; Jarvis and Lister, 2012; Vaughan-Williams and Stevens, 2016),
and the sociology of IR as a discipline (Kessler and Guillaume, 2012), to name but a few.
The concept of ‘the everyday’ is one of the concepts employed to express such an
analytical interest in exploring the social and political significance of what some have
referred to as ‘little nothings’ (Bayart et al., 2008; Macherey, 2009). Their inclusion
helps to correct skewed analytics of power that focus on elites or structural power.
However, adding ignored actors, practices and things is not all there is to ‘the everyday’.
The concept also mobilises distinct philosophical, sociological and literary lineages that
organise our understanding of lives and worlds. ‘The everyday’ is more than a particular
kind of site, such as private life, or a particular quality of objects and persons, such as
time sheets, everyday political idioms, or military wives, situated at an infra-political
level. It is a nominalist device1 that brings distinct lineages of thought to bear upon a
wide-ranging set of practices through which we engage the meanings of lived lives,
including literature, political analysis, plastic art, philosophy, film, folklore. An answer
to the question ‘what is the everyday?’ then does not lead to listing a set of artefacts, sites
or subjects but clarifies what specific operations one seeks to perform – in our case on
the understanding of politics – through analytically mobilising particular lineages of
thought that named themselves, or have been named by others, as ‘doing the everyday’.
The first section develops this understanding of the concept of the everyday.
In the next two sections, we introduce two key operations that are central to the con-
cept of the everyday in the lineages we draw on: taking life as abundant, and time as
ephemeral. More specifically, we explore the challenging implications for understand-
ings of politics of foregrounding the abundance and continuous emergence of life. The
familiar categories in IR of arranging political life such as ‘the state’, ‘the international’,
‘global civil society’, ‘elite politics’ or ‘the public sphere’ are not particularly well suited
to engage the multiple entangled and fragile lives that are highlighted by ‘the everyday’.
They tend to fix and rarify in acting units, structural givens, or metaphysical categories
that which is always emergent and abundant. Our aim in this article is to introduce how
embracing the idea of ‘the everyday’ implies a distinct mode of opening the question of
politics that cannot be reduced to introducing a different level of politics (infra-political
or bottom-up) or scale (local or micro-politics). The stake in taking ‘the everyday’ seri-
ously is thus not in the first instance a widening of politics by including small scale, local
or bottom-up conceptions of politics (for a recent argument in this direction, see Solomon
and Steele, 2017), but a distinct analytics of politics as such. Taking flight from ‘little
nothings’, the everyday disrupts claims that we already know what politics must be
because we know where politics is – we know the sites of politics – and/or how politics
takes place – we know the processes called ‘political’ (Walker, 2010). ‘The everyday’
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