Page 22 - Cultural Change and Ordinary Life

Concepts and theories of everyday and ordinary life 13

idea of community as defining ‘an abode marking people’s ways of belonging
within the structured mobilities of everyday life’.
A second revision of Williams is to further emphasize, even more than he
did, the dynamism of culture. Such a dynamism can, I suggest, be thought
through how the processes of ordinary life and the ways in which they become
of extraordinary significance to people in particular contexts of ordinary life
lead to everyday cultural creativity and the investment of great value by
people in processes and objects that have particular meanings for them. So in
addition to ordinary life being dynamic, social and personal it is also about the
interaction of the processes of ways of life and involves differential levels of
investment by people that can be theorized in the interaction between the
ordinary and the extraordinary.
In my account, ordinary life is both mundane and involves low and
high investments in different types of process. This idea develops another
emphasis in the work of Grossberg (1992), who has drawn a distinction between
daily life and everyday life. For Grossberg, everyday life (which I will call
ordinary life) has a number of luxuries, which are not available to those whose
choices are limited by, for example, poverty and social exclusion (for whom
Grossberg coins the term daily life). Thus, concerning everyday life, for him:
There is a real pleasure and comfort in its mundanity, in the stability
of its repetitiveness. Not only its practices but also its investments are
routinized. In a sense, one need never worry about living within the
maps of everyday life. Instead, one gets to ‘choose’ how one instantiates
the maps, what matters, where one invests. In everyday life, one has the
luxury of investing in the mundane and trivial, in the consumption of
life itself. To offer the simplest example, there is a real security and pleas-
ure in knowing when and where and exactly for what (including brands)
one will go shopping next.
(Grossberg 1992: 149)
Ordinary life provides a number of modes of security and routine (see
also Silverstone 1994) that enable it to carry on. More recent work has also
sought to develop some of these ideas from Williams and also to place
increased emphasis on ideas of ordinary culture. In the context of the former, I
will draw on the specific arguments of Couldry (2000a), which have also influ-
enced other aspects of my thinking in this book. For the latter, I will begin the
consideration through the work of Gronow and Warde (2001a and 2001b).
In Inside Culture (Couldry 2000a) offers a variety of important arguments
concerning cultural studies and its future directions. While these are signifi-
cant, I focus on a number of the points that he makes that are of particular
concern for the argument and approach under development here. Couldry
points out the significance of Williams’ arguments concerning common cul-
ture, emphasizing that Williams was not simply replacing an elitist approach
to culture with an anthropological one (p. 23). For Couldry, ‘it is the complex
interrelation of the “textual” and the “anthropological” approaches to culture
which is important to his thesis’ (p. 24). In an emphasis already briefly
introduced, he argues in a way that makes the significance of the points
exceptionally clear, that: