Page 18 - Cultural Change and Ordinary Life

Concepts and theories of everyday and ordinary life 9

cultural studies, resemble what has been called the incorporation/resistance
paradigm (IRP) for the study of media audiences. In our book (Abercrombie
and Longhurst 1998: 15) on audiences, we argued, therefore, that:
The Incorporation/Resistance paradigm (IRP henceforth) defines the
problem of audience research as whether audience members are incorpor-
ated into the dominant ideology by their participation in media activity
or whether, to the contrary, they are resistant to that incorporation.
Theories of everyday life, in Silverstone’s account, are much the same.
One of the many problems with the account of everyday life as resistant or
oppositional is that it works with an idea of power that is based on a unified
dominant structure. Part of our argument in the audiences book was that once
power was conceptualized in a different (classically Foucauldian) way – as for
example fragmented and operating in micro-contexts to produce forms of
practice and discourse – such an account of audiences and indeed everyday life
could not be sustained, as it made it impossible to determine what was meant
by resistance and opposition (and indeed incorporation).
Silverstone offers another theory of everyday life that he argues can
overcome the deficiencies of those that have been discussed so far. This builds
on his account of how television is involved as a transitional object in the
building of human subjectivity in advanced capitalist countries, as well as
ideas of how television is a part of the management of ontological security.
Silverstone is indebted to the social theory of Giddens, especially his theory of
structuration. Insofar as this stresses the process-like nature of everyday life
and that human beings are both subject to structural constraint and able to
transform and activity engage in everyday lives, then it is an emphasis that I
will follow. On these psychological and sociological foundations, Silverstone
offers the following formulation:
Our everyday lives are the expression, in their taken-for-grantedness, as
well as (in popular culture) their self consciousness, of our capacity to
hold a line against the generalised anxiety and the threat of chaos that in
a sine qua non of social life. In this sense everyday life is a continuous
achievement (Garkinkel, 1967; Goffman, 1969) more or less ritualised,
more or less taken for granted, more or less fragile, in the face of the
unknown, the unexpected or the catastrophic.
(1994: 165)
This is a significant emphasis, in that it offers a starting point for an
attention to ordinary life that emphasizes everyday social interaction and
its dynamics, offering to use some emphases from interactionist sociology.
However, it does not take on some of the concerns that I wish to consider in
this book, such as social change, cultural dynamism and how life is lived out in
a consumerist society. Thus, Silverstone takes me only partly to where I
want to be in this chapter. To take the argument forward it is necessary first
to address some aspects of the literature introduced by the quotation from
Silverstone: interactionist sociology.
As with those theories of everyday life that have been based on Marxist
premises that have been briefly considered so far, interactionist sociology