The Threshold Between The Everyday and The Nonpareil
- Frazer Macdonald Hay
- Apr 29, 2024
- 2 min read
Updated: Jun 13
Written by #FrazerMacdonaldHay
This text explores the rich potential of the threshold space between the everyday and the exceptional (nonpareil)—particularly when freed from social conditioning and biases. It argues that focusing on both local (everyday) and elite or international (nonpareil) experiences does not necessarily aim to decentralize or destabilize power structures, but rather opens space for deeper understanding.
Citing Croft and Vaughan-Williams, Frazer supports the idea of developing an alternative genealogy of the everyday—one that highlights non-elite experiences of security and social life—but cautions against doing so at the expense of broader structures.
Instead, Mannergren Selimovic’s perspective is favored: the everyday is a space of entangled micro-practices, where agency is embodied and relational, offering individuals a way to shape their worlds and act ethically. This form of agency moves between private/public and unconscious/conscious realms.
Ultimately, the interplay between everyday and nonpareil—as expressed through language, action, and place—holds the potential to reshape world politics by recognizing the value of lived, local experience alongside dominant structures.
Main text:
There is so much potential in exploring the threshold spaces between the 'everyday' and the nonpareil especially when one escapes the burden of social conditioning, stereotypes and bias.
Giving attention to the everyday and nonpareil ( state or international agents to locally grounded agents) shouldn’t automatically signify an attempt to decentralise notions of the international or to remake and unsettle existing power relations.
There is potential in transitional spaces between these aspects of society and understanding it's not a binary condition. Scholars Croft and Vaughan-Williams call for ‘[a]n alternative genealogy of the “everyday”– one that pays specific attention to non-elite constructions, meanings and experiences of (in)security and their attendant rhythms and scales’ (Croft and Vaughan-Williams, 2017: 22). I can see the merit in developing alternative genealogy of the everyday but not at the expense of the other.
Selimovic seems to hit on a more agreeable note, suggesting that the everyday corresponds to ‘the entangled and organic micro-practices that […] are part of people’s ongoing work in the making of lifeworlds’.
Agency, therefore, is at the heart of the everyday; it ‘is grounded in the lived space, always embodied, and contingent on our relations with others in the places we share. The everyday is, according to Mannergren Selimovic, ‘the site for human beings to take their place in the world, make sense of it and forge themselves as ethical subjects that hold keys to transformation’.
The everyday, Mannergren Selimovic argues, turns our attention away from a state or international agents verses locally grounded agents and suggests a transformative agency that oscillates between the private and public, between the unconscious and the conscious
The threshold space where the everyday and the nonpareil inform language, performance and agency and place that could contribute to the remaking of world politics.
Images @marcijusaivision
