Page 59 - Cultural Change and Ordinary Life

50 Cultural change and ordinary life

(or unbelonging) from which one comes, and possible future states of
belonging to which one may aspire.
(Savage et al. 2005: 11–12)
This approach builds on the arguments concerning spectacle, perform-
ance and audience processes examined in the previous chapter, especially in
exploring the diffused audience of ordinary life, focusing on the producing
of belonging from local sites. Key aspects of this approach are captured in the
term ‘elective belonging’, which seeks to combine modes of agency and the
processes of belonging, that are affected by external forces (job moves, for
example) and which are fluid. Furthermore: ‘Belonging is not to a fixed
community, with the implications of closed boundaries, but is more fluid
seeing places as sites for performing identities’ (Savage et al. 2005: 29, my
emphasis).
The key here is the idea of performing (like the idea of belonging). This
term draws attention to the audienced nature of these processes as theorized
in Chapter 4 and further their (recursive) process-like nature. I therefore, wish
to avoid the idea of the one-off event of ‘performance’, which is like a simple
audience experience, or that of performativity, which can be theorized as a
sophisticated IRP argument. The point is that performing encompasses a range
of experiences that are sedimented aspects of ordinary life – in some respects
like performativity (and the habitus) and the performance of the simple audi-
ence experience. Performing as a key mechanism of elective belonging implies
a degree of openness and contingency in social relations that other concepts
discussed here have a tendency to close off. This is the case with performance,
as it involves a one-off event, the subsequent effects of which are themselves
variable, and performativity, as it involves a rather too closed circuit of ideo-
logical incorporation and disputation.
The analysis of media and other ordinary experiences in diffused audi-
ence terms via the ideas of belonging and performing therefore, I suggest,
opens up a new terrain of analysis. Aspects of this are outlined in arguments
such as that ‘the media need to be understood in relation to the other dimen-
sions of daily life, and connect to the meaning of place and imagination in
crucial ways . . . Family life is played out in relation to television and cinema
as much as it is with connection to schooling and membership of the PTA’
(Savage et al. 2005: 179).
The point of this approach then shows how the routine aspects of
media use, as articulated around the meanings of, for instance, concrete
places, spaces, patterns of sociation and enthusiasm (what has often been
theorized as fandom; see the discussion in Chapter 4 and Chapter 9) is part of
the audiencing processes of the production via processes of performing that
allow the development of elective belonging.
For example, an audience in a theatre, which is a good example of a
simple audience, is framed by the diffused audience processes of ordinary life.
Neither one nor the other of these experiences can be fully understood with-
out reference to the other. Analysis may begin from either the experience of
the theatre audience member in the theatre, thereby being very likely to raise
wider issues of sociability, and so on, or it begins from the wider processes.