Page 16 - Cultural Change and Ordinary Life

2 Concepts and theories of everyday and
ordinary life

As I show later, the concept of everyday life has been central to a range of
theoretical developments in sociology, cultural and media studies. I begin this
chapter with a succinct overview of these theories. My reasons for brevity are
twofold. First, given that extensive reviews of the concept of everyday life
already exist (see for example, Gardiner 2000; Highmore 2002), it would seem
redundant to spend extensive space in this book repeating what has been done
elsewhere. Second, and far more importantly, my argument will be that much
of this literature is actually unhelpful for the project of this book. Bennett and
Silva (2004) argue in a similar vein, when in discussion of the work of Crook
(1998) who they suggest ‘proposes that it might be better to jettison the
concept of the everyday altogether’ (p. 3), they advance the view that:

To the contrary, the categories of the everyday and everyday life remain
valuable and valid in their references to the ordinary and mundane, but
only provided that these categories are emptied out of much of their
earlier theoretical and political content.
(Bennett and Silva 2004: 4)
My argument will be that if we are to focus on the ordinary and the mundane,
which I suggest is precisely what should be done, and how these are being
transformed in contemporary society, then it is best to take a leap and call this
ordinary life. This will be my contention. Thus, the overview of everyday life
theory will involve the pulling out of the key specific processes of everyday
life accounts that are best thought of as ordinary and mundane.
This leads logically to the second part of the chapter, which examines
the idea of the ordinary more carefully. I begin from the still significant work
of Raymond Williams (1989) on this topic, but suggest some refinements of his
approach. One important source for this revision is the work of Nick Couldry
(2000a), but I will also draw on other sources to ground this discussion. The
final part of the chapter seeks to show how this idea of ordinary life might
begin to work through looking at the way in which music and sound are
threaded through it. Two key sources are mobilized here from the work of
Michael Bull (2000) and Tia DeNora (2000). A further point of this aspect of the
discussion is to suggest that music and sound have tended to be underplayed in