Page 17 - Cultural Change and Ordinary Life

8 Cultural change and ordinary life

previous discussions of everyday life and that indeed this is one of the reasons
for their deficiencies (see also Hesmondhalgh 2002).

The everyday
In his book, Television and Everyday Life, Silverstone (1994) offers a succinct and
pointed discussion of theories of everyday life. In suggesting that it is import-
ant to show how television is implicated in the flow and processes of everyday
life, Silverstone argues that previous theories of everyday life with particular
reference to media fall into two broad camps, which actually share a number
of assumptions. The first approach is that associated with a range of Marxist
writers who, from the standpoint of arguing for a fundamental change in
economic, political and social life, offer a critique of the way in which life is
lived in societies where human beings are alienated due to the way in which
they are estranged from the products of their labour and the fundamental
tenets of what it is to be human. Thus in Silverstone’s words such accounts are
critical of everyday life in capitalist societies as ‘a real need falsely met’ (p. 162).
A critical point is that human beings have real needs for sociability, enter-
tainment, interaction, and so on, but these are met and organized by the
institutions of capitalism, such as the entertainment corporations that pro-
duce ‘false’ wants and that do not fundamentally satisfy ‘real’ human needs.
In general terms, the problems with such arguments are well known. Most
significantly, it is actually difficult to specify what real human needs might be
in the abstract beyond the most basic for human sustenance, warmth and
reproduction. This means that the critique of everyday life is carried in the
name of an account or theory of everyday life that can only be ultimately that
which the theorist has constructed. While this may have polemical and polit-
ical import, it skews social and cultural understanding fundamentally from the
beginning. On this basis, I suggest that these sorts of account should and must
be rejected. Of course, this does not mean that other Marxist-derived insights
concerning, for example, economic exploitation, social and cultural exclusion
and social conflict should also be rejected. Rather the principle of analy-
sis should be that the forms of everyday life that may be based on such
arrangements should not a priori be subject to critique because they are so
based.
The second version of everyday life that Silverstone identifies, while it
shares a number of premises with the critical Marxist approach such as an
argument that suggests that everyday life rests on structures that are funda-
mentally exploitative, comes to a different account. It focuses on the way in
which everyday life contains a range of activity that is resisting or opposing
the forms of domination that fundamentally structure everyday life. Silver-
stone argues that this sort of approach that has been appropriated from the
work of de Certeau was fed into the study of media and especially television by
Fiske, who emphasized the way in which resistant or active audiences were
able to oppose the dominant messages sewn into the media texts promulgated
by media corporations.
In many ways therefore, theories of everyday life, that have been based
on some Marxist premises and which have been influential in media and