The global flows of capital and technology have been drastically (re)shaping our ways of living since the nineteenth century. As David Harvey points out, it is the postmodern condition that we are experiencing shifting uses and meanings of space and time, a new phase of time-space compression caused by global flow of capital (284). The socioeconomic processes and techno-scientific transformations have been changing the ways we are sensing our living conditions temporally and spatially, so much so that we also discover drastic changes in cultural formation. For example, the forming of global markets attributes to frequent exchanges of commodities among various places and peoples and thus throws different cultures in contact. This is what John Tomlinson means by “complex connectivity:” “globalization refers to the rapid developing and ever-densening network of interconnections and interdependences that characterize modern social life” (2).
Succinctly put, political-economic transformations have direct impacts not only on economic activities but further on social life and cultural practices since economic life and cultural life are intricately tied together, particularly in the age of globalization. In short, globalization should never be separated from “life” itself. It is our “every day life” that attests to or is being modified by the globalizing forces. For instance, invention of new technology changes the way we communicate with one another by using computers, the Internet or e-mails. Global trade changes the way we eat, wear, and live by providing more
options of commodities for daily use. Moreover, cultural practices such as cultural creations and expressions in one place interact with those in another place due to the transnational encountering of different cultures, economic systems and political philosophies. Take music culture for example, in Taiwan we can listen to and learn from various music styles, such as Blues, Hip-hop, R&B, Reggae, and Folk music from America, England, India, Spain or Japan, without leaving our place. By just one click of mouse, the Internet will connect us to various radio stations all over the world to get in touch with various types of music. Aside from music, the other life-styles such as eating, shopping and reading habits are evolving with the emerging malls, restaurants, bars, shops and bookstores coming from different parts of the world. Through these daily examples, we find our everyday life embedded in the global process and economic systems. However mundane and ordinary, everyday life is a starting point to investigate the effects of globalization.
Embodying social forms and relations, everyday life engages in various cultural politics. To understand the relationship between everyday life and the cultural complexities of globalization, we should return to Karl Marx, Georg Simmel, and Henri Lefebvre7 to better understand the concepts of everyday life, modernity, and global capitalism. Basically, they all agree that the process of modernization and modernity has drastically penetrated into our daily life and propose to problematize everyday life as a category of cultural
7 The reason I discuss Karl Marx, Georg Simmel, and Henri Lefebvre is to show how the everyday life is closely connected to the social structures from the rise of capitalism to the era of globalization.
analysis and social relations.
Even though in his works Marx does not intend to deal with “everyday life,” his theory on commodity first contours the relationship between commodities and modern life and addresses the commodified social relations of daily life. For Marx, human social relations are embedded in the “phantasmagoria” of commodities through our everyday practices. The daily life of modernity is significantly characterized by commodities, in which the social relations are being disguised (Marx 165). As Ben Highmore comments, the representation of modern life in such fantastic forms of commodities is “the spectacularization and exoticizing of everyday life” (16). The seemingly tedious and boring everyday life, in this sense, has been de-familiarized and fantasized by the display of commodities. Marx leads us to problematizing everyday life that has been eroticized as commodities because social relations such as social organization of production, labor skills and labor time are being entangled in the commodified everyday life.
While Marx engages in social relations that are affected by and expressed in modern commodities, Georg Simmel stresses cultural analysis of modern life. Focusing on the culture of interaction, Simmel believes that social structures are profoundly reflected in the microscopic elements of life, diverse individualities, and the interactions of one another.
Embarking on microscopic investigation, Simmel draws an analogy between the social elements of life and the organic cells of body. Social elements analogous to cells represent
everyday life itself, which are being “revealed as the genuine and fundamental basis of life”
(Simmel 109). In this sense, everyday life experiences serve as the foundation of cultural expressions. Only by re-examining the aesthetic styles and social elements of daily life could one get into cultural analysis then.
In his article, “The Metropolis and Mental Life,” Simmel gives clear daily examples to account for how the money economic in capitalist society changes “the sensory foundations of psychic life.” He argues that the “blasé attitude,” the numbness and indifference of modern people, is caused by the “intensification of nervous stimulations which result from the swift and uninterrupted change of outer and inner stimuli” in modern life (410). In other words, our sensory responses in everyday life are related to the social structures of modern economic systems and life. From the details of psychic life, we can understand the large scope of city life and its economic changes. This is why I stress that the “trivial” of everyday life might hold the key to a wider social structure.
Among these theorists, Henri Lefebvre deploys the concept of everyday life in the cultural and social domain (space) of transnational encountering. Lefebvre particularly brings out global capitalism as the dominant force on everyday life: “The commodity, the market, money, with their implacable logic, seize everyday life. The extension of capitalism goes all the way to the slightest details of everyday life” (79). Lefebvre indicates the colonization of everyday life by the globally expanding capitalism. Too often, we incline to
equate everyday life to boredom and commonplace and thus leave it aside from the academic domain while discussing globalization. Globalization, associated with macro/global structures manifested in politics and economics, is assumed to have nothing to do with the trivial/local everydayness. Lefebvre’s observation of global capitalism instead reminds us it is everyday life that reflects and witnesses most of the political and economical effects of globalization.
How do we understand the effects of global capitalism on everyday life? We should take two axes of time and space into consideration as Lefebvre reminds us. Capitalist divisions of working hours and leisure time regulate our daily life about when to work and when to rest. This standardized concept of time has gone globalizing to fulfill the efficiency that capitalism demands. Not only Lefebvre but Marx and Harvey recognize how the rhythm of modern life corresponds to capitalist systems. Notably, Lefebvre pulls another facet, (urban) space, in discussion of everyday life. Under the influence of global capitalism, urban restructure and renewal have become a global trend. Urban planning manipulated by the global flow of capital has re-scaled the urban space where we are living everyday.
Lefebvre’s comments on the tangled relationship between every life and urban space in relation to the global power of capitalism provide us with many insights to comprehend the triangular tensions of local life, global operation and (urban) space. In Production of Space, he explicates the impacts of globalization on our “lived experience,” our perceptions of
space and time, by highlighting the disparity between how the space is mapped out cognitively and how the space is experienced lively. The contradiction between representations of space and representational spaces exemplifies the effects of globalization on our everyday sense and sensibility of space. Specifically, the way we sensually interact with our space is being structured by and also restructuring the process of globalization.
Reviewing these theories on everyday life helps us to re-think the dialectics of globalization by starting with the problematic of everyday life since all these theories prove that everyday life is imbued with social relations that require detailed analysis. Everyday life might suggest the ordinary, the banal, and the mundane but these daily details are the crucial accesses to the core of all kinds of social relations and activities and the components of our cultural/social life. For example, a daily practice like shopping for a pair of shoes would have involved several social relations including the shoes-makers, shop clerks, shoppers and probably the transnational corporations especially in the global age. In other words, daily practices point to the complicated power relations interwoven with the various social and cultural relations. In this sense, everyday life is “politics” itself. Repetition of everyday life itself is repeating different relations in various spheres and such daily practicing implies replicating the hierarchical social orders imposed by global power. As Lefebvre argues, “everyday life is profoundly related to all activities, and encompass them with all their differences and their conflicts; it is their meeting place, their bond, their
common ground” (97).