The arts of noticing (towards an experimental archive of everyday life)

This chapter makes three arguments. First, that attention to everyday life has often been most intense at moments when the continuities and traditions of the everyday were at their most precarious. Second, that modernity saw an enormous growth in the arts and techniques of noticing. From participant observation to street photography, from folk museums to modernist novels, these arts were aimed at capturing the everyday. Third, that everyday life exceeds any attempt to apprehend it, to catalogue and contain it. But just because the everyday escapes any final rendering or adequate representation doesn’t mean that all forms of registering it are similarly inadequate. Instead, I argue that there is no ontological reason why a work of anthropology would necessarily be better at capturing the everyday than a fiction film or a novel, or why photography would provide a more fertile realm for the quotidian than a museum. What is required is an experimental attitude towards the everyday, where its subterranean potentiality is treated as a subject without a prescribed methodology to capture it. By treating the arts of noticing that developed in the twentieth century as experiments, we open ourselves to an experimental future for the study of the everyday.