What is Everyday Life? An Exploration of its Political Connections

The notion of ‘everyday life’ (EDL) has found renewed analytical purchase in recent years and has become a widely used term in explorations of social life, moving all the way from studies of the family to the financial system. But what exactly is EDL and how can we understand it? This paper undertakes a preliminary investigation into how the term has been interpreted in various literatures. There are a wide variety of analytical takes on EDL and the objective is to utilize this preliminary discussion to provide the intellectual resources to deal with its connections to politics and constitutionality in particular. Although the relationship between EDL and constitutionality might at first sight seem remote the argument is that there is an emerging constitutionalization of EDL that is heralding a potentially new form of citizenship amongst those subject to its strictures. Throughout the paper it is relationships operating in the imaginary that are stressed, contrasting this to a more normal emphasis on social relationships in the first instance.