Page 97 - CULTURE IN THE COMMUNICATION AGE

DAVID C. CHANEY

pattern that is recognizable to those who share it and probably to outsiders. Of
course sensibilities are vague, amorphous orientations that do not lend them-
selves to precise definition but crucially they do enable actors to know how to
keep going. I wrote above of the practice of improvisation being embodied – it
is a creative practice that employs a sensibility as the grounds of expression. I
began by saying that cultures for communities were invisible, unconscious. The
difference with the idea of sensibility is that while in everyday terms it is largely
taken for granted by actors in the instability of lifestyle practice, sensibilities are
continually being foregrounded, made self-conscious, so that the improvisations
of everyday life are being rethought as genres or styles.
The central roles of sensibility and reflexivity in lifestyle formation mean
that as social groups lifestyles are loose agglomerations. Any attempt to map
them is chasing after a vague and constantly changing constellation of attitudes.
I have therefore previously suggested that this new social form can best be
characterized by distinctive focal concerns with sites and strategies (Chaney
1996). Sites are the sorts of places and spaces that lifeworlds inhabit, and
strategies are the sorts of projects that are pursued – whether it is maximizing
child growth, or spiritual development, or acquisition of certain types of expen-
sive consumer goods. Sites are meaningful not because they are necessarily
identifiable places in a physical environment but because they are physical
metaphors for the spaces that actors can appropriate or control. And strategies
must be acknowledged because lifestyles are best understood as characteristic
modes of social engagement, or narratives of identity, in which the actors con-
cerned can embed the metaphors at hand. Sites and strategies work together
then because lifestyles are creative projects – they are forms of enactment in
which actors make judgments in delineating an environment.
In conclusion, I hope it will be apparent that I am trying to o ffer an inter-
pretation of cultural and social change as it is happening – a form of con-
temporary history. Cultures are now so much a routine part of the conceptual
furniture of contemporary social discourse that they cannot be abolished.
Indeed one cannot legislate for how the term should be used and, like many
other social concepts, it will doubtless continue to accumulate layers of confus-
ing, possibly contradictory, usage. I have not tried to ‘clean up’ this conceptual
confusion, but in responding to perceived shifts in meaning I have pointed to
congruent changes in social forms that help to make sense of the ‘cultures’ of
post-industrial societies at the beginning of the third millennium.

Notes
Fragments of this chapter have been presented to a graduate seminar in communications
at the University of Oslo, and to the Theory, Culture and Society conference in Berlin in
1996. I am grateful for the opportunities to have made these presentations, and for the
comments made by members of the audiences. I am also very grateful to James Lull for
his help and support in the preparation of this chapter.

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