“for Japanese thinkers it was the potentiality of the everyday that held most interest. To think of the everyday as a (potentially) radical transformation of social life relies on the ability to recognise the present as already undergoing the most extreme forms of transformation. But it also requires a context where the forms that such transformations are taking are as yet undecided (or least appeared to be). It was precisely the revolutionary effects of modernisation that made the everyday a field of possibility for Japanese thinkers (whether this possibility included a rapprochement between tradition and modernisation or more radical overhauling of daily life in the name of scientific rationality).” (p.118)
“through an optics that produced differing effects according to the angle of the lens through which experience was being refracted. These refraction distilled certain intensities in the experience of modern life and privileged others to present a vision of everyday life that was both enabling for the present and promising for a future as of yet unenvisaged. What is important about this activity is the way is centered the category of everyday life- its performativity in the present- as the informing principle of modern life.”( p.119)
“thinkers as diverse as Kon Wajiro and Tosaka Jun saw in the performance of the everyday an escape from a binding past that still managed to lay claim on the present and the full promise of modern life- including the hope for a better future.”(p.119)
“one of the interesting problems of Japan’s modern history that so many thinkers were intensely concerned with the status of everydayness – a concern that often matched and even frequently exceeded European considerations.”p.119
“In Europe, concern for everyday life after World War 1 was dominated by the wiork of two thinkers, George Lukas and Heidegger, in the shadow of Max Weber’s meditations on the identity of modern society.” p.119
“As Lukacs’s understanding of reification was deeply embedded in a particular history of the capitalist present that marked historically, its production.”
“Kracaur’s brilliant essays on everyday life and his critique of the German white-collar class (Die Angeststellten, 1930) went a long way to simply confirming the effects of commodification on the masses and its political and cultural consequences for producing spiritual ‘homelessness’, while only Benjamin seemed willing to envisage a new historical materialist program that could acknowledge the existence of alienation in the everyday brought on by commodification and routine yet at the same time see in the ‘mystery’ of genuine possibility.”(p.119-120)
” constructivists like Boris Arvatov were trying to conceptualize a socialist everydayness that would make the consumer into a subject free from the commodity fetish by transforming objects into use-value. (p.120)
” the performative present altogether in favor of recalling an indeterminate past.”(p.120)
“With their call to memory of a past age or in their move to poeticize a mode of existence, they appealed to cultural forms and practices that claimed for themselves an as yet unrealized sociotemporality outside of a temporal and temporalizing present. To offset a present that alone gave direction to history, they recalled a historical reason that already prengured the whole history of the race from past to present and forged, therefore, an abstract and fictive continuity between then and now.” (p.120)
“constituted the sign of a historicity of the present, its historical moment, the temporality of modernity.” (p.120)
“To speak of the present, as against merely the modern”(p.121)
“A partial explanation of this inordinate emphasis on everyday life, I believe, but in the discovery of a personal and private world of experience available to large numbers of people for the first time in history now being installed in the 1920s and immediately juxtaposed to the public world of state and social system.” (p.121)
“ Without the rationalization of the ‘means of life’(Kon’s words) and ‘life attitudes’ linked to institution implicated in everyday life, there could be no chance for the development of a democratic subject.” (p.212)
“The appearance of modern life was seen as rational, efficient, and even scientific, requiring at all times the steady flow and circulation of information and knowledge.” (p.212)
“For some, transforming the experience of everydayness to conform more closely to the requirements of rationality constituted the principal condition for remodeling society itself and altering the received political and social relationship in the name of science.” p.122
“The idea of a better life retained the faith in rationality and science but in time developed a political purpose that took precedence and began to visualize new forms of political society.” p.122″
“”Both of its capacity to conceal (and thus induce social forgetting), its enabling conditions of production, and its aptitude for interpellating consumers revealed its role in making the everyday the space of differing historical temporalizations.” p.122
“At the same time the everyday become the only place for producing anew the redemptive power associated with tradition in the time of modernity. If the commodity from produced the ever new in the transform the empty, homogenous time of the Now. It should be recalled that progressive thinkers like Tosaka and even Kon opposed the Now to the present, rather than past to present. The ‘present’ from the now of immediate experience, what Benjamin once described as the ‘now of recognizability.’ “ p.123
“Social thinkers were thus left with the choice of finding a way to break through the commodity from that dominated modern life either to restore its forgotten history (Gonda), or to show how consumption was actually constitutive of a new subject capable of making choices for the first time(Kon), or to transform the daily objects in order to release a new aesthetic consciousness(Murayama), or to conceptualize it into a space that structured its temporality into accumulative layers that could only be disturbed by exploring the possiblities they offered at any given moment(Tosaka). p.123
“put into practice a new discipline devoted to studying the modern (kogengaku), this secondary revision upheld the claims of modernity as the product of a determinate history directed only by the present and a different temporality that would.” p.123
” In fact Japanese in the 1920s were driven to see in the hard commodification of life the promise and design of an even more human order reached not by overcoming modernity (which in the late 1930s was nothing more than an escape route to a national fantasy) but being overcome by it, by bringing it to complection,” p.123
