Perspectives on Everyday Life

A Cross Disciplinary Cultural Analysis

Arthur Asa Berger

• Publisher: Palgrave Pivot
• Year: 2018
• Print ISBN: 9783319997940
• eBook ISBN: 9783319997957
• Topic: Social Sciences
• Subtopic: Media Studies
• Index: Social Sciences

Perspectives on Everyday Life: A Cross Disciplinary Cultural Analysis makes the argument for studying everyday life through a combination of introductory theoretical approaches and a grouping of applications to specific aspects of American culture. The first part of the book addresses the idea of everyday life as considered by distinguished thinkers who have written books about everyday life, such as Sigmund Freud, Fernand Braudel, Henri Lefebvre, Michel de Certeau, and others. The second part of the book uses theories dealt with in the first part of the book to explore objects—such as suitcases, alarm clocks, milk, pacifiers, pressure cookers, smart speakers, and super-glue—and their part in the various rituals of everyday life in America, revealing their hidden meanings.

Part IPerspectives on Everyday Life

© The Author(s) 2018

Arthur Asa BergerPerspectives on Everyday Lifehttps://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-99795-7_1

Begin Abstract

1. Introduction

Arthur Asa Berger¹

(1)

Department of Broadcast and Electronic Communication Arts, San Francisco State University, San Francisco, CA, USA

Arthur Asa Berger

Abstract

This chapter introduces the subject of everyday life and offers a quotation from Robert Musil’s classic work, The Man Without Qualities. Musil suggests that by the middle of our lives, we become caught, like flies, in what we might call the flypaper of life, and we only have the slightest resemblance to “our original shape.” This chapter asks whether Musil is a realist or a pessimist.

Keywords

Everyday life Routines Rituals HabitsData

End Abstract

At this moment he wished to be a man without qualities. But this is probably not so different from what other people sometimes feel too. After all, by the time they have reached the middle of their life’s journey few people remember how they have managed to arrive at themselves, at their amusements, their point of view, their wife, character, occupation and successes, but they cannot help feeling that not much is likely to change any more. It might even be asserted that they have been cheated, for one can nowhere discover any sufficient reason for everything’s having come about as it has. It might just as well have turned out differently. The events of people’s lives have, after all, only to the least degree originated in them, having generally depended on all sorts of circumstances such as the moods, the life or death of quite different people, and have, as it were, only at the given point of time come hurrying towards them…. Something has had its way with them like a flypaper with a fly; it has caught them fast, here catching a little hair, there hampering their movements, and has gradually enveloped them, until they lie, buried under a thick coating that has only the remotest resemblance to their original shape. (Robert Musil, The Man Without Qualities)

If you live to the age of 85, you will have been alive for 31,025 days. One day has 1440 minutes, so if you multiply 1440 times 31,025 days you get 44,676,000 minutes of life. If you drink two cups of coffee (starting at the age of 20), you will drink around 48,000 cups of coffee. If you start your day with a bowl of oatmeal at age 20, you will consume more than 24,000 bowls of oatmeal. I read a statistic on the Internet recently, on eMarketer.retail, which claimed the average consumer in America eats dinner out 2.1 times a week. That adds up to 109 times a year. In a year, if you multiply 365 days times 3 meals (breakfast, lunch, and dinner) you get 1095 meals, which means we dine out for one out of every ten dinners we eat.

Who, me? You ask.

We don’t think about how many cups of coffee we will consume during our lifetimes because we become immersed in this and that activity in our daily lives and don’t notice how repetitious many of our everyday rituals are and don’t think about what they add up to. Of course, even oatmeal lovers sometimes have a different cereal or no cereal to start their day, but even if you subtract 10 percent of time not having oatmeal for breakfast from these figures you find that you have consumed an enormous amount of oatmeal and many thousands of cups of coffee (or tea, or whatever it is that you prefer).

These figures offer us a statistical view of everyday life to which we are blind because we are such creatures of habit and because we tend to be immersed in the moment. I have a friend who told me that he has had a bowl of oatmeal every day for the past 50 years. That made me think about how many bowls of oatmeal a typical person might consume in a lifetime. In recent years, I noticed that my wife and I generally start off our days with oatmeal. It is supposed to be very good for you, it is delicious (at least we think so) and it is not expensive.

We generally live day to day and focusing our attention on problems we face each day we seldom think about our lives from a long range statistical perspective. We know that eventually we will die but while we live, unless we come down with a serious disease, we don’t think about our lives in terms of how much this or that I’ll consume in my lifetime or how many times I’ll drive down this street to get to work. I don’t think about my life in terms of the thousands of bowls of oatmeal I’ve had or tens of thousands of cups of coffee I’ve drunk. My use of statistics is a reaction to a comment the dean of the Annenberg School of Communication made (where I was visiting professor for a year in 1983) about one of my books, Media Analysis Techniques . He described it as “data free.” So this introduction is a response to that comment. What you’ve read, to this point, has some data but does it mean anything? Do all the statistics I’ve offered about eating oatmeal have any significance other than being curious and perhaps interesting in that it shines a different light on one trivial aspect of our everyday lives? I think statistics do tell us a great deal, though I don’t rely on them too often.

The subject of this book is everyday life—our habits, routines, and rituals that shape our lives from day to day. Because we are all so immersed in our everyday lives, we seldom think very much about them. There are also endless distractions. And so the days disappear from us and are lost, even though some days may have momentous experiences—we ask someone to marry us, we get a job, we are fired from a job, we are hit by a car. We find a way to deal with these events and then, the next day, we are back to our routines: a bowl of oatmeal, a cup of coffee or tea, toast or a bagel or an English muffin or whatever. Maybe bacon and eggs?

There are many variables that play a role in the kind of lives we lead. I am talking about things like how old we are, where we were born and grew up, our gender, our sexual preferences, our race, our religion, the socio-economic status of our parents, our personalities, our educational attainments (or lack of education), our politics, and so on. The Musil quote in the epigraph deals with the realization that people sometimes have, generally in mid-life, that not much is likely to change for them, and his notion that many, or possibly all, of us have been caught like flies on flypaper and our lives have turned out to be quite different from what we thought they would be. It is a very powerful metaphor.

We might say that Musil is a European pessimist and his description of what happens to people doesn’t apply to Americans. We believe we can recreate ourselves endlessly and our lives are full of possibilities at all times. This was the notion behind the American Dream, but in recent years we’ve concluded that the American Dream is just that—a dream, and not real. Relatively few Americans who are born into poverty are able to escape to the middle classes. This is not the case in most other advanced countries such as Canada, Great Britain, and France. Poverty in America we might say is “sticky” (Fig. 1.1).

Fig. 1.1

Robert Musil

I would suggest that Musil is a realist, who understands the human condition, and his book, The Man Without Qualities, is a literary masterpiece (though a bewildering read in some respects) and is a testimonial to the sense of futility we sometimes feel when we consider our futures. There are, we must recognize, many different kinds of everyday lives and that everyday life in the United States is different from everyday life in Europe or Asia or Africa. And everyday life in the American South is different from everyday life in the American Midwest or Northwest or East.

But what if Musil is right? What if, regardless of where we were born and grew up, we all end up, when we are middle aged, with lives that don’t have the promise of major changes in the future and we find ourselves stuck on flypaper that covers us all over and we only have the faintest or remotest resemblance to who were in our younger days and to who we thought we would become.

© The Author(s) 2018

Arthur Asa BergerPerspectives on Everyday Lifehttps://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-99795-7_2

Begin Abstract

2. Perspectives on Everyday Life

Arthur Asa Berger¹

(1)

Department of Broadcast and Electronic Communication Arts, San Francisco State University, San Francisco, CA, USA

Arthur Asa Berger

Abstract

In this chapter we focus on different perspectives of social scientists and others on everyday life. The Polish anthropologist Bronislaw Malinowski, who suggested that the “imponderabilia of actual life” is basic to studying everyday life, is cited. His work suggests that people may be involved in institutions of great scope but not realize it. This is followed by a discussion of the psychoanalytic approach to everyday life and the work of Sigmund Freud, Clotaire Rapaille, and others. This chapter also discusses James Joyce’s novel, Ulysses, which is a classic study of everyday life—in this case, one day in the life of Leopold Bloom and other characters.

Keywords

Everyday life Kula Psychoanalysis Unconscious Ulysses

End Abstract

Everyday life is a key concept in cultural studies and is a specialized subject in the field of sociology. Some argue that, motivated by capitalism and industrialism‘s degrading effects on human existence and perception, writers and artists of the nineteenth century turned more toward personal reflection and the portrayal of everyday life represented in their writings and art to a noticeably greater degree than in past works, for example Renaissance literature‘s interest in hagiography and politics. Other theorists dispute this argument based on a long history of writings about daily life which can be seen in works from Ancient Greece, Medieval Christianity, and the Catholic Enlightenment. In the study of everyday life gender has been an important factor in its conceptions. Some theorists regard women as the quintessential representatives and victims of everyday life. It is the non-negotiable reality that exists amongst all social groupings without discrimination and is ...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Front Matter
• Part I. Perspectives on Everyday Life
• Part II. Everyday Life in America