Page 43 - Cultural Change and Ordinary Life

34 Cultural change and ordinary life

the next chapter, Sandvoss’ argument takes us a good way along that road,
but more needs to be done to secure the dialogue that is necessary.

Conclusion
In this chapter, I have undertaken the discussion of the second broad strand of
my contextualizing work in this book. On the basis of the characterization and
theorization of ordinary life in Chapter 2, I have argued that there are four
broad areas of social and cultural change that are impacting on and flowing
through social and cultural life that are changing the processes of ordinary life.
While these have technological outcomes, they are, I want to argue, more
basic than that. In many ways it is important to recognize that these are not
new processes in themselves. Thus, capitalism has always involved a global-
izing logic that brings different forms of culture and ways of life into new
interactions. Moreover, cultural change has often been characterized as involv-
ing fragmentation of previous organic cultures. In addition, as Mathiesen
argues, the surveillance and performing processes of panopticism and synopti-
cism are long-run historical processes. Likewise social and cultural capitals (as
well as habituses and fields) are subject to processes of logic and change.
Despite this continuity, I argue first that these different processes have
not been sufficiently examined in the ways in which their interrelations are
impacting on contemporary ordinary life. Moreover, I argue that there is
a need to understand their specific interrelations in the society and cultural
form that has been captured in Lipovetsky’s characterization of hyper-
modernity. Again as will be further discussed in subsequent chapters, thus it
is possible to begin from his position that:

Hypermodernity has not replaced faith in progress by despair and nihil-
ism, but by an unstable, fluctuating confidence that varies with events
and circumstances. As the motor driving the dynamic of investments
and consumption, optimism in the future has shrunk: but it is not dead.
Like everything else, the sense of confidence has broken away from
institutions and become deregulated; it now manifests itself only as a
series of ups and downs.
(Lipovetsky 2005: 45)
These ups and downs can, in one sense, as I will further suggest, manifest
themselves in the dynamic of the ordinary and the extraordinary. Having made
these points, I now wish to bring together the strands so far to argue on the basis
of some earlier work that this ordinary life should be seen critically as an audi-
enced process based on spectacle, performance and audience processes.

Notes
1 There are, of course, a number of writers who have also used the term hypermodern. I
think that the discussion by Lipovetsky has some important features that I draw out
here.
2 This is now an exceptionally wide debate, but a good statement of many of the issues
remains Portes (1998).