Everyday Life and Cultural Theory

An Introduction

Ben Highmore

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2002
• ISBN:
  9781134595594
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Social Sciences
• Subtopic: Ethnic Studies
• Index: Social Sciences

Everyday Life and Cultural Theory provides a unique critical and historical introduction to theories of everyday life. Ben Highmore traces the development of conceptions of everyday life, from the cultural sociology of Georg Simmel, through the Mass-Observation project of the 1930s to contemporary theorists such as Michel de Certeau.

Chapter 1

FIGURING THE EVERYDAY

Whatever its other aspects, the everyday has this essential trait: it allows no hold. It escapes.

(Blanchot [1959] 1987: 14)

Investigating the everyday

THERE IS NO ESCAPE: to launch an investigation into the theoretical practices of those who attend to everyday life requires attention to the everyday ‘itself’. To trace the troubled career of ‘the everyday’ as it is mobilized by a disparate collection of intellectuals from the late nineteenth century to the late twentieth century necessitates an attempt to gauge the specific gravity of the term, its connotations and its references. Unspecific gravity might be a better phrase. As the notion of ‘everyday life’ circulates in Western cultures under its many guises (Alltagsleben, la vie quotidienne, run-of-the-mill and so on) one difficulty becomes immediately apparent: ‘everyday life’ signifies ambivalently. On the one hand it points (without judging) to those most repeated actions, those most travelled journeys, those most inhabited spaces that make up, literally, the day to day. This is the landscape closest to us, the world most immediately met. But with this quantifiable meaning creeps another, never far behind: the everyday as value and quality – everydayness. Here the most travelled journey can become the dead weight of boredom, the most inhabited space a prison, the most repeated action an oppressive routine. Here the everydayness of everyday life might be experienced as a sanctuary, or it may bewilder or give pleasure, it may delight or depress. Or its special quality might be its lack of qualities. It might be, precisely, the unnoticed, the inconspicuous, the unobtrusive.

This ambivalence vividly registers the effects of modernity. If the everyday is that which is most familiar and most recognizable, then what happens when that world is disturbed and disrupted by the unfamiliar? If the ‘shock of the new’ sends tremors to the core of the everyday, then what happens to the sense of the everyday as familiar and recognizable? In modernity the everyday becomes the setting for a dynamic process: for making the unfamiliar familiar; for getting accustomed to the disruption of custom; for struggling to incorporate the new; for adjusting to different ways of living. The everyday marks the success and failure of this process. It witnesses the absorption of the most revolutionary of inventions into the landscape of the mundane. Radical transformations in all walks of life become ‘second nature’. The new becomes traditional and the residues of the past become outmoded and available for fashionable renewal. But signs of failure can be noticed everywhere: the language of the everyday is not an upbeat endorsement of the new; it echoes with frustrations, with the disappointment of broken promises.

The heterogeneous and ambivalent landscape of everyday modernity needs investigating. This investigation starts, like all investigations should, with a detective. For Sherlock Holmes ‘everyday life’ is decidedly undecided. While never in doubt about the correctness of his own investigative methods, Holmes’ relationship to the everyday is marked by a passionate ambivalence that takes us to the heart of the problem of everyday life in modernity. Sherlock Holmes gets bored. He gets bored when the mysterious and enigmatic side of life is not taxing his rationalistic intelligence. Conan Doyle’s detective is a man who is often bored. For him the world of the everyday is associated with the dull and the humdrum: ‘I know, my dear Watson, that you share my love of all that is bizarre and outside the conventions and humdrum routine of everyday life’ (Doyle [1892] 1993: 45). To what extent Dr Watson shares this love is an open question: one thing is for sure, his love of the bizarre does not have the passionate intensity of Holmes’. Nor does he suffer so much when faced with the everyday. Holmes is repulsed by the everyday and can only deal with its atrophying force by taking refuge in cocaine:

‘My mind,’ he said, ‘rebels at stagnation. Give me problems, give me work, give me the most abstruse cryptogram, or the most intricate analysis, and I am in my own proper atmosphere. I can dispense then with artificial stimulants. But I abhor the dull routine of existence.’

(Doyle [1890] 1995: 89–90)

Written over four decades (1887–1923), Sir Arthur Conan Doyle’s stories frequently picture Sherlock Holmes collapsing under the weight of the everyday. His friend, Dr Watson, fears for his physical health and sanity, hoping that some new case will appear to break through the life-threatening torpor that besets him. But this image of the everyday as a deadening force is only one of the elements of everydayness in the cosmos of the Holmes stories.

The everyday is also the home of the bizarre and mysterious. The ‘commonplaces of existence’ are filled with strange occurrences:

life is infinitely stranger than anything which the mind of man could invent. We could not dare to conceive the things which are really mere commonplaces of existence. If we could fly out that window hand in hand, hover over this great city, gently remove the roofs, and peep in at the queer things which are going on … the wonderful chain of events, working through generations and leading to the most outré results, it would make all fiction with its conventionalities and foreseen conclusions most stale and unprofitable.

(Doyle, quoted in Langbauer 1993: 94)

The non-everyday (the exceptional) is there to be found in the heart of the everyday. Indeed many of the Sherlock Holmes stories start with what seem to be ordinary, petty occurrences that hardly warrant the attention of the great detective. But for Holmes the everyday is not what it seems. Or rather the everyday is precisely the route to be taken in solving the mystery he is investigating. And here we come to the very core of Holmes’ relationship to the everyday: however much he loves the strange and bizarre, his entire being is dedicated to puncturing its mystery. Holmes works his disenchantment at various different levels. His power to solve cases works to bring the bizarre firmly down to earth: seemingly magical or ghostly events turn out to be ordinary acts of greed, spite, love, jealousy and other manifestations of ‘human nature’. In this, Holmes could be seen as demystifying the bizarre and returning events to the everyday. But it is Holmes’ method of detection that most captures the peculiar figuring of the everyday in Conan Doyle’s fiction.

Holmes is a genius; he is not ordinary. He continually astounds Watson and his clients by his uncanny divination of the details of a person’s life through the mere observation of an everyday object or the outward appearance of a person. In ‘The Adventure of the Blue Carbuncle’ (1892), Holmes has been given a hat to examine, and draws the following conclusions about the wearer of the hat:

He had foresight, but has less now than formerly, pointing to a moral retrogression, which when taken with the decline of his fortunes, seems to indicate some evil influence, probably drink, at work upon him. This may account also for the obvious fact that his wife has ceased to love him.

(Doyle 1993: 168)

Holmes takes the most everyday of objects and seems to have an extraordinary gift of being able to discover (as if by magic) the stories of those associated with them. But here again, what appears to be extraordinary is brought back within the realm of the ordinary and everyday. When Holmes explains his reasoning it appears banal, elementary; it seems to be merely a matter of being attentive to the most insignificant of details. As one client remarks: ‘“I thought at first you had done something clever, but I see that there was nothing in it after all”’ (Doyle 1993: 48). Like the mysteries that Holmes solves, the mystery of Holmes’ abilities turns out to be very ordinary indeed. Not that this stops us from being amazed. What appeared to be the gift of foresight is merely the systematic application of a method. But it is a method that transforms the insignificant into its opposite. Such a method should, according to Holmes, be dealt with by a proper scientific treatise, not via the frivolous and melodramatic form of detective fiction. To the mystery of the everyday, Holmes brings the disenchantment of rationalism. His ‘gift’ is nothing more or less than the extension of rationalistic and scientific principles to the seemingly unfathomable cases he investigates. If he loves the bizarre and mysterious side of the everyday, he loves its disenchantment through rationalism even more. Yet it is precisely this rationalism that transforms the insignificant and everyday into ciphers for the bizarre. Holmes’ approach to the everyday generates mystery at the same time as it demystifies it.

But Sherlock Holmes’ relationship with the everyday is clearly privileged: apart from occasionally being overcome by it, he spends most of his time analysing it, observing it and mastering it. While the particular mix of boredom, mystery and rationalism that he puts in play is central to figuring everyday life, we need to look elsewhere to see how this mix is related to everyday modernity. We need to disentangle this contrary mixture of forces to see how their entanglement figures the everyday as both known and unknown, comfortable and uncomfortable. This constellation needs to be related to ideas and practices that are central to modernity. Boredom, for instance, will connect us to the peculiar temporal experiences that seem to emerge from the patterns and arrangements of modern working life. From the ‘emptying’ of time in the modern factory to the extensive bureaucratization of governance, from the atomized working practices in the office to the industrialization of the home, the modern world seems characterized by routines, by systems and regulatory techniques. But Western modernity is also characterized by mystery. Whether it is the mystery of the unconscious and the gothic narratives it reveals, or the ‘exotic’ cultures of ‘other people’ (the ‘poor’ for the Western bourgeois, the ‘native’ for the West in general), mystery takes everyday forms. Freudian ‘slips’ are everyday occurrences. Popular anthropology renders the daily practices of other cultures as at once both strange and mastered.

Rationalism, the third term in our mix, binds these two aspects together, not in some kind of explanatory grid, but as an engine driving these forces. It too has two sides and we will need to see its multiform reflection in both ‘boredom’ and ‘mystery’. Paradoxically, rationalism holds within it an irrational kernel: it seeks to disenchant the world through an unquestioned belief in its own value. Rationalism is not the antidote to myth and ritual, but the emergence of new myths and rituals under the banner of the ‘true’.

Boredom: the emptying of time

If Western modernity can be seen as the emergence of new and different temporal experiences, then, for the most part, these experiences are connected to an institutionalized world of work and organized instruction. The prehistory of modern temporalities can partly be found in the gradual standardizing of time. Mechanical clocks, as they emerged in the fourteenth century, standardized the units of time and were dynamically related to changes in working patterns. As Richard Biernacki argues: ‘The introduction of the modern method of calibrating hours in a metric independent of tangible occurrences, with units that are interchangeable and uniform across the seasons, coincided with the expansion of urban wage labor during the fourteenth century’ (Biernacki 1994: 62). Clocks alone cannot account for the particularity of modern time. Dramatic changes in the representation and experience of time (the ‘nature’ of time) can also be related to the standardizing practices of the Church, the school and the hospital, which impacted fundamentally at the level of the everyday (see Adam 1995). So, for instance, at the beginning of the nineteenth century a school day could include an accounting of all the activities that had been scheduled for the day: the pupil ‘every day puts down in his book the day of the month, at the termination of his day’s tasks. And on a page at the end of his book, he daily registers the number of lessons said, pages written, sums wrought, etc.’ (Andrew Bell [1813] quoted in Jones and Williamson 1979: 74). This daily monitoring and accounting was a routine that marked each and every day, but it also continually divided and catalogued the day into countable segments. Such practices emphasized the routinization and regimentation of daily life.

Standardized time developed unevenly. Prior to the late nineteenth century standardized time was regulated only at a local level: to travel was to enter non-synchronized time. Steven Kern writes that in the 1870s ‘if a traveller from Washington to San Francisco set his [sic] watch in every town he passed through, he would set it over two hundred times’ (Kern 1983: 12). Unsurprisingly, perhaps, it would be the railway and telegraph systems in the 1880s that would set the pace for establishing a global standardization of time (Kern 1983: 11–15). Networks designed to increase the speed of communication and commerce, and to overcome the physical distance of space, reconfigured the tempo of the everyday. The everydayness of everyday modernity is a synchronization based on minutes and seconds. The modern spectacle of thousands of commuters converging on the metropolis by train each morning is dependent on timetables synchronized to the minute, even if these trains are regularly late.

Perhaps the most common analogy for characterizing ‘everyday life’ within modernity (its uniformity, its dullness and so on) is the assembly line. In an essay that explores the relationship between everyday life and boredom, Laurie Langbauer writes: ‘The boredom of everyday city life is the boredom of the assembly line, of one thing after another, of pieces locked in an infinite series that never really progresses: the more it changes, the more it remains the same’ (Langbauer 1993: 81). Similarly Susan Stewart writes:

The prevailing notion that everyday time is a matter of undifferentiated linearity may be linked to the prevailing forms of experience within the workplace. Such a notion presents us with an assembly line of temporality, an assembly line in which all experience is partial, piecemeal.

(Stewart 1993: 13)

Siegfried Giedion, in his evocatively titled book, Mechanization takes Command: A Contribution to Anonymous History, dates the assembly line (avant la lettre), not to Henry Ford in the early twentieth century, but to the continuous production line implemented by Oliver Evans at the end of the eighteenth century (Giedion 1969: 77–127). Continuous production, in whatever form, follows the logic of industrial capitalism in its drive to maximize output; it does so by ‘an uninterrupted production process’ which is characterized by ‘the inexorable regularity with which the worker must follow the rhythm of the mechanical system’ (Giedion 1969: 77). In seeing this form of work as exemplifying something fundamental about everyday modernity, the particularities of different ‘line’ systems are less important than the way continuous production in general can be seen to affect workers’ everyday lives. Karl Marx in the first volume of Capital (first published in 1867) sketches the transformation that such systems brought about:

In handicrafts and manufacture, the worker makes use of a tool; in the factory, the machine makes use of him [sic]. There the movements of the instrument of labour proceed from him, here it is the movement of the machine that he must follow. In manufacture the workers are the parts of a living mechanism. In the factory we have a lifeless mechanism which is independent of the workers, who are incorporated into it as its living appendages. ‘The wearisome routine of endless drudgery in which the same mechanical process is ever repeated, is like the torture of Sisyphus; the burden of toil, like the rock, is ever falling back upon the worn-out drudge.’

(Marx 1976: 548)

For Marx the shift in relationships, whereby the worker becomes the mere appendage to the machine, is part of the intensification of alienation brought about by modern capitalism. But rather than giving an abstract account of this alienation, Marx insists on the sensory-mental condition it generates:

Factory work exhausts the nervous system to the uttermost; at the same time, it does away with the many-sided play of the muscles, and confiscates every atom of freedom, both in bodily and in intellectual activity. Even the lightening of the labour becomes an instrument of torture, since the machine does not free the worker from the work, but rather deprives the work itself of all content.

(Marx 1976: 548)

Just as work is emptied of ‘all [creative] content’, so time is emptied of any significant markers that would differentiate one moment from the next (figure 1). In the varied literature on assembly line work the theme of regulated activity and the slowness of time are continually evident. In Ben Hamper’s account of life on the rivet line at the General Motors plant at Flint in Michigan, the clock becomes the number one enemy:

Figure 1 The inexorable regularity of modern work – photograph by Gjon Milli

But the clock was a whole different mammal altogether. It sucked on you as you waited the next job. It ridiculed you each time you’d take a peek. The more irritated you became, the slower it moved. The slower it moved, the more you thought. Thinking was a very slow death at times.

(Hamper 1992: 95)

Earlier in the book Hamper explains the relationship between the assembly line and the stretching out of time: ‘the one thing that was impossible to escape was the monotony of our new jobs. Every minute, every hour, every truck and every movement was a plodding replica of the one that had gone before’ (Hamper 199...