Page 19 - Cultural Change and Ordinary Life

10 Cultural change and ordinary life

(considered in the broadest sense) has had much to say on the topic of every-
day life – indeed the topic has been part of sociology since its classical period,
especially in the work of Simmel (see, for example, Highmore 2002: 33–44).
Particularly important in the theorization of everyday life has been the work of
Goffman (1969, 1974), especially via his emphasis on the idea of the way in
which everyday life consists of forms of performance. This seminal idea will be
developed in various ways during the course of the discussion in this book. An
important debt to this analysis has already been paid in earlier work on
audiences (Abercrombie and Longhurst 1998: 74), where we suggested that
Goffman’s work ‘indicates that performance is entirely pervasive in everyday
life and practically constitutive of it’ (p. 74). While this therefore will be an
important influence on the account here, the critical points made in the earlier
work still stand. The argument that we made was our view of contemporary
audiences, based on the specificity of the nature of contemporary perform-
ance, rather than its essential character as part of the human condition. In a
connected way, the key reason for this specificity ‘is that the media of mass
communications provide an important resource for everyday performance’
(Abercrombie and Longhurst 1998: 74).
While the emphasis on ethnography that has been a key part of the
interactionist sociology tradition is one that must be followed, the key issue
for the tradition for the argument that I make here is specificity and, in
particular, the way in which the media drenching identified in the Intro-
duction is progressing at some pace. Thus, as with the quasi-Marxist tradition
there are problems here of how to deal with social and cultural change, the
dynamic modes of interaction based on new and more extensive forms of
mobility, and the way in which ordinary life is lived out – rather than the
formal categories of everyday life. The role of the media is insufficiently
emphasized.
In broad terms, the terrain that has been discussed here so far has been
captured in a similar way in the work of Bennett and Watson (2002a), who
discuss the European critical Marxist tradition, the North American tradition
from the Chicago School to Goffman and Garfinkel. They go on to consider
work in the British cultural studies tradition, which I discuss at further length
later. Three other traditions, which have degrees of overlap, should also be
recognized: the surrealist critique of everyday life; the attempt to capture
everyday life in documentary projects like Mass Observation and the feminist
critique of everyday life.
The project of surrealism has been seen by a number of commentators as
offering resources for the social and cultural analysis and critique of everyday
life. The tradition connects with Marxism and Mass Observation, but also feeds
into the activities of later art/political movements such as situationism. Thus,
Gardiner (2000) points out that while the Dada/situationist movement was
not that influential in its own period on politics, it did have later effects on
social and cultural theory and other movements. In particular, its emphasis on
the role of art in everyday life has been an important influence on under-
standings of consumer practices as they become more aetheticized. Likewise,
Highmore (2002) points to the influence of surrealism on social and cultural
theory in general and particularly on that of Walter Benjamin. Another key