ABSTRACT
Building on Thomas Leddy’s interpretation of current everyday aesthetics, I take a critical look at the position he terms “restrictivism,”
concentrating especially on the work of two of its important representatives, Arto Haapala and Ossi Naukkarinen. I begin the paper by providing a glimpse of the everyday of Valery Gergiev, the dynamo conductor famous for his frantic lifestyle, and argue that the kind of everydayness of the everyday which Haapala and Naukkarinen place at the heart of everyday aesthetics is not as necessary and all-encompassing a component of our everyday lives as they assume.
Another important part of my argument is an analysis that seeks to uncover some important distinctions between our possible everyday routines. I by no means aim to question the restrictivist understanding of the everyday completely. However, I do believe that the picture of the everyday emerging from my account of Gergiev’s everyday, together with the outline of everyday routines I present, show restrictivism’s scope to be more limited than Haapala and Naukkarinen believe.
This conclusion, in turn, clears the way for a more expansionist understanding of everyday aesthetics, such as the one Leddy builds on Dewey’s aesthetics.
S
ome years ago the London Symphony Orchestra (LSO) published a series of YouTube videos in which some of its members were followed for a day. One of these videos depicts a day in the life of the orchestra’s then chief conductor, Valery Gergiev, arguably one of the most powerful figures in classical music today, who is infamous for his hectic work schedule.1 The video begins in the arrivals terminal of Heathrow Airport, London. It shows Gergiev entering the terminal from the baggage claim area, after a flight from Düsseldorf, where he had a concert with the LSO the previous evening, with an assistant dragging his very minimal luggage. Gergiev explains that upon1 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fHg0EWkL73Q
waking up in Düsseldorf he watched Australian Open on TV for a while before having breakfast at the hotel, after which he headed to the airport to catch a plane to London. Looking as if he would not have had a decent haircut or a proper shave in ages, and wearing a down jacket one or two sizes too large for him, Gergiev slips into a luxury BMW that has come to pick him up from Heathrow to travel to the Barbican Centre, where the LSO is already preparing for a rehearsal with Gergiev before the evening’s concert. Unsurprisingly, upon waiting for the driver to get everything ready, Gergiev twiddles with his cellular phone and when the car leaves the airport carpark he is already engaged in a conversation on the phone.
The video moves to the Barbican Centre, where the LSO is shown to be rehearsing Tchaikovsky’s First Symphony with Gergiev. As the piece was part of their recent concert tour repertoire, Gergiev divulges that there is no need for any in-depth rehearsal of the piece; it suffices just to get everyone’s musical muscles warmed up for the concert. After the concert, Gergiev meets some 20 people who have come to greet him backstage. This is something he says he does regularly after concerts. After a quick bite to eat, Gergiev heads toward Heathrow again to take a plane to Moscow, where he states he will be conducting his Mariinsky forces on the following day. The video ends with Gergiev dashing off from the Barbican, again in the backseat of the black BMW seen earlier.
The video is called “Life in a Day: Valery Gergiev.” It might, however, just as well have been called “The Everyday of Valery Gergiev.” The day the video depicts is in no way unusual to Gergiev – he actually describes the beginning of the day as “boring, nothing exceptional.” This is a person who is known to have conducted two concerts in two different continents on a single day and who at one point commuted between New York and St.
Petersburg as some of us do between Helsinki and its neighboring cities.
In this paper, I use Gergiev’s life as a kind of thought experiment to test some of the conceptions of the everyday present in everyday aesthetics. My focus will be on those views that have been named “restrictivist” and which define the everyday in terms of factors to which we have a recurring, routine-like relationship.2 Instead of the extraordinary moments that sometimes raise
2 The term “restrictivism” derives from (Leddy 2015). As restrictivists Leddy names such
the everyday above the level of the ordinary and the mundane, restrictivists argue that the aesthetics of everyday life is to be found in the routines of the everyday and in the feelings of safety and of being “in control” their carrying out can engender (Haapala 2005, 52). Gergiev is admittedly a rather extreme example – although some of the best thought experiments, of course, are generally such – and it is clear that we cannot all be Gergievs; society as we know it would most likely collapse in that case. However, I do believe that a look at Gergiev’s everyday does raise some interesting concerns for the restrictivist position. Restrictivists believe that the structure and attitude that they see as essential to the everyday characterize even the lives of figures such as Gergiev. The everydayness of the everyday is something that we cannot escape from, they insist. One restrictivist, Ossi Naukkarinen, for example, claims that “it is difficult to even imagine a life that would be completely non-everyday-like” (Naukkarinen 2013, section 2). I think Gergiev’s everyday serves as a very good candidate for such a life.
Below, I will critically examine the restrictivist account of the every-dayness of the everyday, with Gergiev’s life as a backdrop. My examination aims to show a significant weakness in the restrictivist position:
everydayness is a far less fundamental factor of our waking life than restrictivists believe. I do not deny the value of the notion of everydayness completely, but I do believe there is no necessary reason why most of our waking life has to be characterized by the kind of everydayness structure and attitude restrictivists posit to the heart of the everyday. It is clear that our relationship, for example, to our everyday environment is different from that of a visitor’s. The restrictivists, however, overemphasize this difference.
It is equally clear that without routines and habits human life would become a real drudgery; however, again, the restrictivists attach far too much significance on this fact. This is what I hope my examination of the restrictivist take on the everydayness of the everyday will show. Following this, I take up the other term in the notion of everyday aesthetics and show some problems that I believe restrictivists face on this front.
everyday aestheticians as Kevin Melchionne, Yuriko Saito, Arto Haapala, and Ossi Naukkarinen. Of these four, I will concentrate on the views of Haapala and Naukkarinen.