Fiske Cultural Studies Ch 10

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Cultur l Studiesedited and wit an introduction by

Lawrence Grossbergary Nelson

Paula A Treichler

with Linda aughmanand assistance from J ohn Macgregor Wise

RoutledgeNewYork London THUNIVERSITY LIBRARY

WASH GTON LEE UNIVERSITYLEXINGTON VA 24450


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1ultural Studies and theulture ofEveryday Life

JoHN FisK

I want to start this paper from the premise th at both academics in cultural and mediastudies, and left-wing political theorists and activists have found th e everyday cultureof the people in capitalist societies particularly difficult to study either empirically ortheoretically. In this paper I wish, then, to interweave two lines of theoretical inquiry:one into the culture of everyday life within subordinated social formations and th e otherinto our own academic practices involved in such an inquiry.

I would like to start with the concept of distance in cultural theory. Elsewhere(Fiske, 1989a) I have argued that "distance" is a key marker of difference between highand low cultu re, between the meanings, practices, and pleasures characteristic of empowered and disempowered social formations. Cultural distance is a multidimensionalconcept. In the culture of the socially advantaged and empowe red it may take the formof a distance between the ar t object and reader/spectator: such distance devalues sociallyand historically specific reading practices in favor of a transcendent appreciation oraesthetic sensibility with claims to universality. It encourages reverence or respect forthe text as an art object endowed with authenticity and requiring preservation. Di stance" may also function to create a difference between the experience of the art workand everyday li fe. Such distance" produces ahistorical meanings of art wo rks and allowsthe members of its social formation the pleasures of allying themselves with a set ofhumane values that in the extreme versions of aesthetic theory, are argued to be universalvalues which transcend their historical conditions. This distance from the histor ical isalso a distance from the bodily sensations, for it is our bodies th at finally bind us to ourhistorica l and social specificities . As the mundanities of our social conditions are se t as ide,or distanced, by this view of ar t, so, too, are the so -called sensuous, cheap, and easypl easures of th e body distanced from the more comtemplative, aesthetic pleasures of themind. And finally this distance takes the form of distance from econom ic necessity: theseparation of the aesthetic from the social is a practice of the elite who can afford toignore th e constraints of mater ial necessity, and who thus construct an aesthetic w hichnot on ly refuses to assign any va lue at all to material conditions, but validates only thoseart form s which transcend them. This critical and aesthetic distance is thus finally, amarker of distinct ion between those able to separate th eir culture from the social andeconomic conditions of the everyday and those who cannot.

There is no d istancing," however, in the culture of everyday li fe. Both Bakhtinand Bourdieu show how the culture of th e people denies categorical boundaries betweenart and life: popular art is part of th e everyday, not distanced from it. The culture ofeveryday li fe works on ly to the extent that it is imbricated into its immediate historicaland social setting. This materiality of popular culture is di rectly related to th e economic

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THE CULTURE OF EV E RYDAY LIFE 155materiality of the conditions of oppression. Un der these conditions, social experienceand, therefore, culture is inescapably material: distantiation is an unattainable luxury.The culture of everyday life is concrete, contextualized, and lived, just as deprivation isconcrete, contextualized, and lived. It is, therefore, a particularly difficult object ofacademic investigation.I wish to turn to Bourdieu's (1977, 1984) theory of the habitus" as a way tothink through both the material practices of everyday culture and our difficulty instudying th em. The concept habitus contains the meanings of habitat, habitant , theprocesses of habitation and habit, particularly habits of tho ught. A habitat is a socialenvironment in which we live: it is a product of both its position in the social spaceand of the practices of the social beings who inhabit it. The social space is, for Bourdieu,a multidimensional map of the social order in which the main axes are economic capital,cultural capital, education, class, and historical trajectories; in it , the material, the symbolic, and the historical are not separate categories but interac tive lines of force whoseoperations structure the macro-social order, the practices of those who inhabit differentpositions and moments of it, and their cultural tastes, ways of thinking, of dispositions."The hab itus, then, is at one and th e same time, a position in the social and a historicaltrajectory thr i gh it : it is the practice of hiring wi th in that position and trajectory, andthe social identity, the habits of though ts, tastes and dispositions that are for med in andby those pract ices . The position in social space, the practices and the identities are notseparate categories in a hierarchical or deterministic relation to each other, but mutuallyinform each other to the extent that their significance lies in their transgression of thecategorical boundaries that produced the words have to use to explain them and wh ichare th erefore perpetuated by that explana tion.

The point wish to make at this stage of my argument is that the taste for"distance in art is part of inhabiting a definable habitus, one characterized by hi gheducational levels, high cultural but low economic capital that has been acquired ratherthan inherited. And within this same habitus we may find the taste for congruent socialand academic theor ies, a tas te expressed in the dispositions for macro heories thattranscend the mundanities of the everyday through distantiation, that move towardsgeneralized, abstracted understandings rather than concrete specificities and that try toconstru ct academic or political theories that are as distanced, detached, and self-containedas any idealized art object. This is, needless to say, the hab itus in which most of usacademics feel most at home.

But it is a habitus at odds with those through which the various formations of thepeople live their everyday lives. An explanation is necessarily of a different ontologicalorder from that wh ich it explains, but this difference should not be absolute: th e gapshould be both crossable and crossed. Bourdieu's theory of the habitus allows the possibility of such movement-we can, after all, visit and live in habitats other than theone in which we are most at home. But though such tourist excursions can give us sominside experience they can never provide the same experience of these conditions as thosew ho live or have lived there. Brett Williams 1 988) gives a good example of both livingin a main ly black, wo rking class culture, and providing an academic accoun t of it. Shemoves between th e two habituses in a way I believe to be exemplary.

Her study details some of the key features of a habitus whose culture is of thematerial density of embodied practices. One of these she calls " tex ture. By texture"she refers to dense, vivid, detailed interwoven narratives, relationships, and experiences.The materially constrained narrowness of the conditions of everyday life are compensatedfo r and con tradic ted by th e density and in tensity of th e experiences, practices, and objectspacked in to th em. She finds th is density as she follows a man do wn his neighborhood


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156 J O H N FISKEmain street, when every store, every encounter, every piece of gossip exchanged is packedwith concrete meanings in its minutiae. The de nsity of apartment life is part of th econditions of oppression, yet it is also available to be turned by popular creativity andstruggle, into a textured culture: "The Manor's dense living, in combination with thepover ty of its families is battering. Using a small space intensively, cleaning it defensively,and lacking the resources to expand or transform it, families need to work out ways tomake that density bearable."

Williams goes on to describe how Lucy and Robert, as typical renters, cope withtheir material conditions by texturing domestic density by weaving through it variedsights, sounds and rhythms (p. 1 02). To middle class taste their apartment would seemintolerably cluttered with knickknacks and decora tions yet Robert still feels a need tofill what seems to him to be a glaringly empty space. It is as though a density whichis chosen by Lucy and Rob ert becomes a way of negotiating and coping with a densitythat is imposed upon them: constructing a bottom-up density is a tactic of popularculture for turning the constraints of a top-down density. It is an instance of thecreative use of the conditions of constraint.

Television is used to increase, enrich and further densify the texture. It is typicallyleft on all the time, adding colo r, sound and action to apartment life: it is used to frameand caus e conversations, to fill gaps and silences. It can provide both a means of enteringand intensifying this dense everyday culture and a way of escaping it, for it is also usedto dilute the concentration ofcrowded families, whose members can tune into television,establish a well of privacy, and yet remain part of the domestic group (102-3).

Television not only enriches and enters the in terwoven texture of everyday life, itre-presents it, too. Programs like Dalla s with its vivid historically interwoven concreteness" offered renters the same kind of tex ture that is so valued on the street.The women in the apartments lived in and with allas over a number of years, growingto know each character in painstaking detail. W illiams concludes: As renters texturean already dense domestic situation by weaving in more density, shows like these favoritesare appropriate vehicles" (W illiams, 1988, p. 106)

Leal (1990; Leal and Oliver, 1988) too, has shown how cer tain formations of thepeople (in her case first generation urbanized Brazilian peasants) weave a densely texturedsymbolic environment through which they live. She analyzes in detail one such environment, or rather a mini-environment or entourage construc;ted from objects placedaround the TV set. Around the TV set were plastic flowers, a religious picture, a fa lsegold vase, family photographs, a broken laboratory glass and an old broken radio. Wil liams finds the culture in th e density itself, but Leal interprets this texture. Her analysisshows how th ese people live meani ngfully within the contradictions between the cityand the country, urban sophistication and rural peasantry, science and magic, the futureand the past. In the suburbs th ey are placed on the spatial boundary between the cityand the country, as first generation migrants they are on the equivalent historical boundary between the past and the future.

Their use of photographs wa s an instance of this cultural process. On the TV setwere large pictures of dead or absent family members, typically ones left behind in thecountry, and stuck into their frames were small I D . pictures of those who had movedto the city: The I.D . photos were not only sig ns of family, but also signs of modern,urban life . As Leal comments The social system that broke these kinship webs isreproduced m the symbolic system within the photograph frames" (p. 23) and theselost kinship webs are reasserted, reformed through bricolage. So, too, the plastic flowerswere constdered more beautiful than natural ones because they bore meaning of theurban, the manufactured, the new; and also because th ey cost money. They were validated

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THE CU LT URE OF EVERYDAY LIFE 157by their origins in the better life the people hoped to find by their move to the city.Natural flowers, on th e other hand, we re from th e life they we re fleeing. Leal alsoshows how class specific these meanings are-in the middle-class homes, for instance,there was a reversal of va lues so that peasant art would be displayed as bearers of validmea nings of th e country and an escape from the urban. In those homes , of course, plasticflowers would never raise their cheap, manufactured, urbanized heads. Her in terpretationof th is dense texture of objects continues, includ ing the TV set which is seen as avehicle of a knowledgeable and modern speech (p. 24). Her readings reveal a popularculture in process by wh ich the people live within the larger social order not in a reactive,but a proactive way. The entourage of objects around the TV set com pr ises

a symbo lic system, including an ethos of modernity, that is itself part of a largersymb olic universe that has as its principal focus of significance the city and ind ustry.This system of meanings seeks to conquer the urban power space (that of capitalisticrelations), while t e n t l trying t di ffe rent iate and de limi t urban cultural spacefrom the rural space that is still very close to the actors, by manipulating signs thatare shared by their group as ind icators of social prestige. (Leal, 1990, p. 25)Studies such as Leal's and Williams's show how the material , densely lived culture

of everyday life is a contradictory mixture of creativity and constraint. This is a way ofembodyin g and living the contradictory re lations between the dominant social orderand th e variety of subaltern formations within it. Williams comments somewhat sa rdonically that A pass ion for texture is not always rewarded in American society, andmore middle- class strateg ies for urban living aim at breadth instead 1 988, p. 48). Itis a comment that I w ish to extend to cover academ ic theory as part of middle-classstrategies for living.

The soci al order constrains and oppresses 'the people, but at the same time offersthem resources to figh t against those constraints. The constraints are, in the first instance,material, economic ones which de termine in an oppressive, disempowering way, thelimits of the social experience of the poo r. Oppression is always economic. Yet theeveryday cu lture of the oppressed takes the signs of that which oppresses them and usesthem for its own purposes. The signs of money are taken out of the economic systemof the dominant and inser ted in to the culture of the subaltern and their social force isthus comp licated. The plastic flowe rs are for Leal' s newly suburban ized peasants, deeplycontradictory. They have a mystique because of the mystery of their production (unlikenatural flowers)-th ey are fetishes, syntheses of symbolic meanings, of modernity: butthey are also commodity fetishes. They require money, another fetish, and transformth at money into an obj ect of cultural display. Real money is not an appropriate decorationor cultural object, but transformed money is; its transformation occurs not just in itsform, coin to plastic flower, but in the social formation, theirs to ours. The commodityfetish is deeply conflicted: it bears the forces of both the power bloc and the people. Itproduces and reproduces the econom ic system , yet simultaneously can serve the sym bolicinterests of those subordinated by it. The plastic flowers, Leal argues , because they cannotbe produced wi th in the domestic space but must be bough t, bring with them th e sociallegitimacy, prestige and power th at, in an urban capitalist society can most readi ly begained, in however transformed a manner, from the order of oppression

So, too, the accumulation of objects in Lucy and Robert's apartment is not a signof their having bought into the system by accumulating a literal, if devalued, culturalcapital. It is rather their way of fill ing their constrained lives with a variety of mu ltip licityof experiences that the more affluent can achieve by their greater mobility throughphysical and social space.


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158 J OHN FISKEOf course the desire for the expectation of variety and richness of experience is aproduce of capitalism, and serves to maintain the system-for such variety whether of

objects or experience-must usually be bought and paid for. But producing that variety,richness, density is also the work of popular creativity; it is the people's art of makingdo with what they have (de Certeau, 1984), and what they have is almost exclusivelywhat the social order that oppresses them offers them.Many of Williams's subjects were African-Americans who had moved from ruralNorth Carolina to Washington, D.C. and thus shared important social determinantswith Leal's. It is not surprising then, that both Williams and Leal find traces of a ruralfolk culture of previous generations within the urban popular culture of contemporarycapitalism. Our thinking about such a rural or folk culture should not be nostalgicallyromantic-it was a culture of deprivation, oppression, or slavery, which is why its popularcreativities of making do with limited resources transfer so readily to contemporaryconditions. The argument that some of those resources, at least, came from nature ratherthan the oppressor is hardly convincing-in both agrarian capitalism and feudalism naturewas transformed into land owned by the elite, its resources had to be poached aconstant cultural and material activity of the oppressed which de Certeau (1984) usesas a metaphor fo r popular practices in general. The material and cultural resources werelimited, they were the resources of the other, and they always worked, in part at least,to constrain or oppress. The continuing interplay of constraint and creativity, whichWilliams (1988, p. 4 7) identifies as characteristic of popular culture is a condition ofoppression, and thus transfers readily from rural to urban, from a slave or serf-basedrural capitalism to its urban industrial equivalent.

Williams describes how this creativity works in, for instance, the culture of collardgreens-the fertilizing, nurturing, and harvesting of them in urban backyards, and themultitude of ways of chopping, cooking, seasoning, and serving them. Collard greensare us ed to negotiate the differences and similarities between Carolina and W ashin gton,and also between individual creativities within a common se t of constraints. Barbecuesauce is another, equally important, opportunity for popular creativity. Because theingredients for the sauce, as the conditions for growing the greens, were different inWashington from Carolina, both greens and sauce were consciously used to make comparative sense of the difference: but the difference lay in the constraints, -n the resourcesavailable, not in the creativity of their use,Popular creativity is concretely contextual. It exists not as an abstract ability as 'thebourgeois habitus conceives of artistic creativity: it is a creativity of practice, a bricolage.It is a creativity which both produces objects such as quilts, diaries, or furniture arrangemen ts but which is equally if not more productive in the practices of daily life, inthe ways of dwelling, of walking, of making do. Objects are comparatively easy for th einvestigator to describe and transcribe from one habitus to another, but the specificitiesof their con text and the practiced ways of living are much more resistant; they const itutea culture which is best experienced from the inside and difficult to study from without.

Ethnographers attempting to get access to this culture frequently come up againstwhat Levine (1972, p. 140) calls sacred inarticulateness, by which he refers to people'sinability to explain their most sacred institutions in an objective discourse: instead theyresort to responses like It's hard to explain this one, but if you were one of us and didit, then you would understand (Levine, in Brett Williams, 1988, p. 104). Williamsargues that this inarticulateness, this reluctance to transform a contextualized experienceinto decontextualized discourse, extends beyond the sacred to the mundane; allas fansconstantly explained their experience of the program w ith remarks like if you watchit, you'll see.

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THE CULTURE OF EVERYDAY LIFE 159As Bourdieu (1977) points out, prac t ices can circulate and reproduce culture with

out their meanings passing through discourse or consciousness. He distinguishes betweenpractice and discourse, and notes somewhat sadly that to study practice we need to bringit to the level of discourse, but in doing so we change its on to logical status, for a definingfeature of practice is that it is ot discourse (pp. 110, 120). t is hard to find a finalanswer to this problem, and indeed there may not be one, but a partial solution maywell involve a discursive and social flexibility, the development of the ability to experience as fa r as possible from the inside other peoples' ways of living that must betheorized from the outside. This may well require cultural theorists to follow the exampleof some feminists, for example, in using their personal experience ofliving and practicingculture as a key element in the production ofa theoretical discourse and its more distancedand generalized explanations of the world.

It is not a coincidence that the devaluation of mundane culture in many academ ictheories goes hand in hand with the epistemological, methodological, and ethical problems of studying it, or even of describing it or identifying it as an object of study. Ascience of the particular is alien to our academic hab itus. T his problem is not confinedto social and cultural theory, it is also addressed in contemporary cognitive theory. Liketraditional cultural theory, cognitive psychology has tended to focus its attention upongeneralizable laws that transcend the immediate con texts of their uses. Cognitive theoryhas tended to devalue the contextual in favo r of the universal.

Jean Lave (1988), however, in her account of the Adult Math Project and subsequentinve stigations into mathematics in everyday life argues against these attempts to explaincalculation as a unive rsal, non-contextualized process:

Cognition observed in everyday practice is distributed stretched over, not div idedamong-mind, body, activity and cul turally organized settings. . . . Math activity(to propose a term for a distributed for m of cogn ition) takes form differently indifferent situations. (p. 1)

The main thrust of Lave's rhetor ic is to challenge traditional cognitive theory and itspedagogic application. She gives numerous examples from her own and from others'studies of successful contextualized math opposed to failures in th e decontextualizedmath performed in the classroom. A young scorer for a local bowling team performedcomplex, rapid error-free calculations in practice, but when asked to perform what theresearchers thought were the same cognitive operations out of context (i.e. in the classroom under test conditions) he was utterly unable to. Similarly, women in supermarketsnever made a mistake when comparing comparative values of different-sized, differentlypriced cans that th ey held in their hands, but were far less accurate wh en asked toperform the same calculations out of their social context.

Lave cites an example of contextualized math. A women shopper was faced withthe problem of how many apples to buy. She picked up the apples one at a time andput them into her cart as she verbalized her math processes to the researchers:

There's only about three or four [apples] at home, and I have fo ur kids, so you figureat least two apiece in the next three days. Th ese are the kind of th ings I have toresupply. I only have a certain amount of storage space in the refrigerator, so I can'tload it up totally . . . Now that I'm home in the summertime, this is a good snackfood. And I like an apple sometimes a t lunchtime when I come home. (Lave, 1988,P 2

Lave comments that there are a number of acceptable solutions, 9, 13, 21. It also seemssignificant that the ca lculations are performed th rough the actions of picking up apple s,the matching of the actions to the idea of her children eating them, and, I assume, a


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160 J OHN FISKEvisualization of the amount of space in her fridge at that time, not as an abstract capaci tybut as a concrete specificity. Lave observes that this woman is not interested in a generalizable answer that relates to the problem in terms of a universalized criterion ofright-wrong, but that problem and answer shaped each other in action in a specificsetting. In this material setting the shopper's cognitive processes are part of her physicalrelationship with the goods on display. The supermarket is a densely woven texture ofcommodity information and display, but th rough her routine practices the experiencedshopper transforms information overload into an information-spec ific setting. As sheselects the commodities she wants, so she selects the info rmation she wants. Her selections from th ir rep ertoi re constitutes he r setting whi ch is bo th produced by her cognitiveprocesses and plays a part in producing them. The setting is a coming together ofthe material specificity of the context and the mental processes by which th at contextis lived.

Lave's concept of the sett ing reminds us, in ma ny respects of Bourdieu's habitus.Settings are constructed with in the larger arenas w hich are th e products of the socialorder. The supermarket is an arena full of the goods and information produced by th epolitical economy of capi talism, but within it, shoppers construct for th e period andpurposes of shopping their own se tt ings. A setting is, in Lave 's definition, a repeatedlyexperienced, personally ordered and edited version of the arena (p. 151 .

A setting is generated out of the practice of grocery shopping but at the same timegenerates that practice:

[A setting's] articulatory nature is to be stressed; a setti ng is not simp le a mental mapin the mind of the shoppe r. Instead it has simultaneously an independent , ph ys icalcharacter and a pote ntial for realizat ion only in rela tion to shoppers' activ ity. (Lave,I988, p. 152-53)The se tting-arena relationship also relates to the difference between place and space

as theorized by de Certeau (1984). For him place is an ordered structu re provided bythe dominant order through which its po wer to organize and control is exerted. It isoften physical. So cities are places built to organize and control th e lives and movemen tsof their city subjects in th e interes ts of th e dominant. So, too , supermarkets, apartmentblocks, and un iversit ies are places. Bu t within and against them, the various for mationsof the people construct th eir spaces by the practices of living. So renters make theapartment, th e place of th e landlord, into th eir space by the prac tices of living; th etextu res of objects, relation ships, and behaviors wi th wh ich they occupy and possess itfor the period of their renting. Space is practiced place, and space is produced by thecreativity of th e people using the resources of the other. De Certeau stresses the politicalconflict involved, the confrontation of opposing social in terests that is central to th econstruction of space out of place. Lave focuses mo re on the functional creativity of theactivities involved in constructing a setting out of an arena. But her argument showsthat a setting is a material and cognitive space whe re the inhabitant or shopper is incontrol, is able to cope successfully.

The construction, occupation, and ownership of one's own space/setting withintheir place/ arena, the weaving of one 's own richly textured life within the constraintsof economic deprivation and oppression, are not just ways of controlli ng some of theconditions of social existence; they are also ways of constructing, and therefore exert ingsome control over, social identities and social relations. The practices of everyday lifewithin and against the determ inate conditions of th e social order construct the identitiesof difference of the social acto rs amongst the various formations of the subaltern. .

Th eories of subjectivity, even w hen elaborated into ones of sp lit or nomadic subj ec tivities, still stress th e top-down construction of socia l identity or social consciousness.

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THE CULTURE OF EVERYDAY LIFE 161Theories of split or multiple subjectivity, in particular, try to encompass the contradictions that produce differences, but these contradictions are traced back to the complexelaborations of late capitalist societies: splits in subjectivities are produced by splits inthe system. Theories of the nomadic subject so move more towards the idea of socialagentswho exert some control over their trajectories through the social space, but theiremphasis is still more upon the determining, if loosely determining, structures throughwhich they move, rather than the practices by which those movements are put in effectand made material.I want to help develop a cultural theory that can both account for and validatepopular social difference, for it is in these differences that we find what the people bringto the social order. In promoting this perspective, I am not devaluing those studies whichfocus on the pervasive and determining effectivities of the power bloc, but I am assertingthat accounts of the social and cultural systems which neglect the positive input of thepeople are not yet complete. The differences that I call popular are produced by andfor the various formations of the people: they oppose and disrupt the organized disciplined individualities produced by the mechanisms of surveillance, examination, andinformation which Foucault has shown are the techno logies of the mechanism of power.Popular differences exceed the differences required by elaborated white patriarchal capitalism. They are bottom-up differences which are socially and historically specific, sothey can not be explained by psychologically based theories of individual difference, norby idealist visions of free will. Popular differences are not the product of biologicalindividualism nor of any ultimate freedom of the human spirit. The embodied, concrete,context-specific culture of everyday life is the terrain in which these differences arepracticed, and the practice is not just a performance of difference, but producer of it.

The ody of ifferenceFoucault argues that the mechanisms which organize us into the disciplined subjectsrequired by capitalism work ultimately through the body. H e shares with ideologytheorists the attempt to account for the crucial social paradox of our epoch-that ourhighly elaborated social system of late capital ism is at once deeply riven with inequalitiesand conflicts of interest yet still manages to operate smoothly enough to avo id the crisesof antagonism that might spark revolution. He differs from them in disarticulating powerand its attendant disciplinary mechanisms from a direct correlation with the class system,and in focusing less upon the forces that produce subjects in ideology, than upon themicro-technologies of power which produce, organize, and cont rol social differences.

Within his enterprise the body replaces the subject. t is through the body and itsbehaviors that medicine, psychiatry, and the law define and impose our social normsand work to cure or punish those that exceed them. Within these norms the organizationof bodily behavior in space and time forms the basis of the social order. For the systemto work, we must occupy certain work stations" at certain times in the office or factory,the classroom or family home, th e shipping mall or holiday beach. These work stations"must be individualized so that any body not occupying them properly can be identifiedand disciplined. Similarly, every body s individual history, his or her accumulation ofbehaviors, is recorded and rated in school records and grade sheets, work records, creditratings, criminal records, driving records-our society works on a highly elaboratedsystem of surveying, and recording, ranking, and individuating our everyday behaviors.Individuality of this sort is a top-down product: individuals are differentiated accordingto the demands of the system, and individuation becomes a disciplinary mechanism. Itstechnologies of differentiation do not measure individual differences that pre-exist them,


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162 JOHN FISKEbut actively produce those differences as part of the operation of its power. This continuous process of individuation is power-in-practice, is discipline-in-practice. It is notthe power of one class over another, nor the discipline of officers over subalterns; it isa social technology of control that organizes the behaviors of everyone w ithin it , thebig cogs as much as the lit tle cogs. The social order, as Foucault analyzes it , dependsupon the control of people s bodies and behaviors: it couldn t give a damn about theirsubjectivities.

The body and its specific behavior is where the power system stops being abstractand becomes materia l. The body is where it succeeds or fails, where it is acceded to orstruggled against. The struggle for control, top-down vs. bottom-up , is waged on thematerial terrain of the body and its immediate context.

The culture of everyday li fe is a culture of concrete practices w hich embody andperform differences. T hese embodied differences are a site of strugg_le between themeasured individuations that constitute social discipline, and the popularity-produceddifferences that fill and extend the spaces and power of the people.

The body enters into immediate, performed relationship with the different settingsor spaces it inhabits. The shopper who picks up the apples as she calculates the relationship between the number of her kids, th e days till the next shopping trip, and th eroom in her refrigerator is not performing an abstract calculation that any ody couldbut is living a concrete relationship specific to her and thus different from every odyelse s. So, too, the memorabilia that fill Lucy and Robert s apartmen t are not commoditiesthat any ody could have bought; they are embodiments of unique, personal historiesthat are different from every ody else s, and they are part of the texture of c;verydayculture only because they carry this difference, because th ey bring the absent but uniquepast into the concreteness of the present where it is apprehensible by the senses o f thebody.

My argument s focus upon th e particularity of the body and its setting does notmean th at I wish to ignore or marginalize the relationship of the body of the personto the body politic, the social body. For the body is necessarily a socially situated body.Our bodies behav iors in time and space, our practices of habitation, extend the bodyinto the habitat and relate it to other similarly but differently habituated bodies. In thisbody-habitat, social space becomes geographical place, structural social relations becomelived personal relationships. The body-habit at is the materializing process of habitus nota subset of it, but an embodying perfo rm ance of it. The body-habitat incarnates thehabitus; the habitus informs the body-habi tat, and, at the same time, inscribes the largersocial order into its incarnated, practiced forms. This relationship of the concrete bodyhabitat through the habitus to th e historical social order is a synecdochal, contingentone, not a metaphorical, transformed one.

The body in this account differs theoretically though not politically from Bakhtin saccount of the relationship between the body pol itic, the body of the people, and th elicensed, excessive bodies, the grotesque bodies of carnival. For Bakhtin, th e relationshipbetween the carnivalesque bodies and the body po litic is one of metaphoric transformation: the social antagonisms in the body politic are given expressive, material formin the inversions and disorder of bodies in the carnival. For him , the body becomes theexpressive site of the life of the people only at moments wh en th e oppressive orde r istransformed into a liberato ry d isorder. T hese moments are historically produced by thedifferences within the body politic between the official order and th e li fe of the people,so the carnival body is th e materialization of social difference : but the carnival bo dy isa transformation of the mundane body. The theory I am exploring proposes the mundane

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THE CULTURE OF EVERYDAY LIFE 163body as the synecdochal embodiment of the social order, and therefore of the socialdifferences within that order.

Without social difference there can be no social change. The control of socialdifference is therefore always a strategic objective of the power bloc. A progressive theoryof social difference needs to include, but must go beyond, the analysis of differencesproduced and controlled by the dominant social order.

I am turned, then, towards an attempt to account for the origin of progressive orpopular social difference in the inescapable differences of the body's physical, geographical, and historical specificities. The fact that we have different bodies, and that no twoof those bodies can occupy the same place at the same time seems a reasonable startingpoint. But the body, its geography and history, are not empiricist facts in a Newtoniannature. Their natural essences are semiotically inert: they become epistemologicallyinteresting only when they en ter a social order, for only then do their differences becomestructured rather than essential; only a social order, therefore, can make differencessignify. The concrete practices of everyday life are the insertion of the body into thesocial order, and, de Certeau would argue, the inscription of the social order upon thatbody.

It is here that I find Bourdieu's theory of the habitus most helpful even if I pushit somewhat futther than he does. The habitus is located within a social space whichhas both spatial and temporal dimensions; the spatial dimension models the social spaceas a dynamic relationship among the major determining forces within our social ordereconomic, class, education, culture-and their materialization in the behavior, tastes, anddispositions of those who, because of their differential positioning within the socialspace, embody and enact those forces differently. The temporal dimension is where wecan trace the trajectories by which social formations or individuals within them, changetheir geographical positioning through historical movements.

The theory of the habitus collapses many of our conventional distinctions betweenthe individual and the social, between the interior and the exterior, between the microand the mac ro, between practices and structures, between time and place. The habitusis not just a pre-given environment into which we are born, it lives in us just as muchas we live in it, we embody it just as it informs us. It admits of no categorical distinctionsbetween the inhabitants, the habitat, and the practices of habitation.

Similarly, the habitus does not relate to the social space as does a social categoryclass, gender, race, age , or whateve r. A habitus is not distinguished from others by acategorical boundary; rather, it is a conju nctu ral process by which we experience andenact the forces that form (and potentially transform) the social space and th e loca tablepractices of habitation within it. It is a process with historical and social specificity, nota generalized category. But because the habitus disaltows traditional catego rical distinctions does not mean that its conceptual movement is towards a polymorphous homogeneity: far from it. The whole thrust of Bourdieu's work shows that the habitus is afactor of social difference. The habitus offers a theoretical framework within whichphysical difference and social difference can be related contingently, not metaphorically,and within which social processes can be analyzed in terms of concrete practices intersecting with the structuring forces of a particular social order. Because the habitus isnot circumscribed by catego rical boundaries it admits of greater mobility than Bourdieuhimself gives it credit for. His theory focuses on the homogenizing factors that enablehim to specify more precisely where each habitus is centered in the map of social space;the corollary of this is that he tends to ignore the contradictory forces that make itdifficult for some people to settle comfortably and make one habituated position th eirhome. All of us, I believe, experience enough of the contradictory forces of elaborated


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164 J OHN FISKEcapitalist societies to have developed a degree of familiarity with more than one positionin the social space. And some, particularly those who experience most acutely the crucialcontradictions that are often s t up when class, gender, and race intersect, can havemultiple homes or habitats, often quite distant from each other. The habitus, then,describes the ways of living within a social space rather than its inhabitants, and thoughthese ways of living are constitutive of social identity they do not constitute it totally.

As I argued at the start of this paper, most academics are most comfortable in thesame region in the map of social space, that of high education, relatively high-class,high-cultural, but low economic capital, most of it acquired rather than inherited. Thehabitus of this position disposes our habits of thought towards the generalizable andabstract; the equivalent disposition in the academic sphere to that which validates aesthetic distance in the sphere of art. We are habituatedly disposed to find the greatestsignificance, as the greatest beauty, in structures that s k to explain the concrete bydistancing themselves from it. We therefore, as historical products, find a science of theparticular particularly difficult to envisage.

Academic theory, no less than cultural taste, is produced within and for a habitusin order to draw social distinction between it and other, differently located, habituses.From this point of view, we can usefully extend the politics of Jean Lave s work oncognition in practice. Her rhetoric is intended to challenge first the traditional orthodoxyof cognitive psychology and its universalizing tendency, and then to challenge its adoption by the educational system so that the universalized laws of arithmetic are usedto make and measure individuated differences of mathematical competence. These laws,however, are the product of a particular academic habitus ---ours-which not only producesthem, but universalizes them in a way that obscures their social production-just as thetraditional theory of aesthetics universalizes and obscures its own social and historicalspecificity. It is more useful, then, to situate her argument more broadly and to see itas not just a marshalling of counter-evidence that orthodox cognitive theory has failedto accommodate but as symptomatic of a larger problem within academia in general.Understanding the disposition or practices of habituses that are alien to our own facesus directly with the need to recognize the socially produced dimensions of our habitsof thinking. I believe that the theoretical and empirical exploration of the relationshipsbetween practice, the body, and place will prove to be one of the more fruitful directionsthat the field will tak e In taking this direction, though, I hope that cultural studiesnever loses its political edge.

Politics have never been far below the surface in my attempt to think criticallyabout the relationships between dominant and subordinated habituses in cultural theory.

hop e we can narrow the gap and increase the travel between them because by doingso I believe we can help change the relationship between the academy and other socialformations, in particular those of the subordinate. Many of those living within suchsubordinated formations find little pertinence between the conditions of their everydaylives and academic ways of explaining the world. It is in none of our interests to allowthis gap to grow any wider, particularly when we consider that many of the most effectiverecent movements for social change have involved allegiances between universities andmembers of repressed or subordinated social formations.

Cultural studies has always been concerned to examine critically and to restructurethe relationship between dominant and subordinated cultures; it has always been concerned to in terrogate the relationship between the academy and the rest of the socialorder, and I hope that the development whose outline is sketched in this paper willoffer one way of continuing these traditions. Feminism, for example, has achieved muchin making us recognize how patriarchy has shaped and informed what once appeared

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T HE CULTURE OF EVERYDA Y LIFE 165to be disinterested academic though t. Similarly, those working in the cultural politicsof ethnicity are exposing the whiteness of tradi tiona l W estern theory. T hese movemen tsare so valuable because they do more than explain and validate the experiences of womenand people of color within a white patriarchy; they also refuse to admit that their waysof knowing and experiencing the world are in any way subordinate or in ferior: insteadthey position them as powerful challenges to the dominant epistemolog ical frameworks.I think there are signs that these challenges are being reproduced along other axes ofdomination, particularly those of class, age, educational atta in ment, and cultu ral prestige.

In this paper I have focused on one formulation of such a challenge and theproblems it poses. Thi s conference inv ites us to peer into the future of cultural studiesand one direction that I hope the field will continue in, and one tha t I intend to cont ribu teto , is the development of ways of theorizing culture that gran t the concrete practicesof subord inated ways of living a degree of importance in theory wh ich is the equivalen tto that which they have in their own habitus, even though th is is distanced from, andsocially subordinated to, the habitus whose discourses are necessary to produce theory.Such a cu ltural theory will, hopefully, not position itself too singu larly and securelywithin th e academic habitus, and will th us tr y to avoid th e risk of implicitly grantingits theoretical fliscourse a position of privilege which would reproduce in academic termsthe process of subordination which is characteristic of the social order that we wish tocriticize and change. Practice may h ave to be changed into discourse in order to beanalyzed; specificities inay have to be subjected to generalization for their significancesto be understood and communicated, however incompletely: but, equally, practice shouldbe allowed to expose the incompleteness of theory , to reveal the limits of its adequacy,and speci ficity should be able to assert the value of that which generalization overlooksor excl udes .

It should be possible to grant to the dispositions, tastes, and ways of know in g thatare germane to the habituses subordinated by our cur rent social hierarchy a legitimacyequivalent to those of a mo re dominant habitus. In achieving this, we should be ableto set up relatively more reciprocal relationships between the habituses involved so th atthe critical and explanatory perspective by which one views the other ca n wo rk in abottom-up direction as well as a top-down.

Such a way of theorizing culture may we ll produce insights into how social differences can be produced and maintained by the people in th eir own interests. Thisbottom-up production of difference is likely to be fou nd, nter lia in the specificitiesof everyday li fe , and I think there are th ree movements in cul tural studies wh ich areaddressing th is area with different but related foc i of interes t. These are the ethnographyof contextualized cultural practices, the theo riza tions of the cultural politics of the body,and the development of a cu ltural geography through wh ich to analyze the meaningsof place and environment at a particular historical conjuncture. In following thesethrough I hope we can minimize th e problems of es tablishing productive, rather thanreductive, relationships between pract ice and discourse, and between more dominan tand more subordi nated ways of living in and explaining our social wo rld.

ISCUSSION o N FisKME GH N MORRIS I have a real problem with the no tion of the habitus and withyour deployment of it , and with th e dichotomies that flow from it: the abstract vs theconcrete, the dominan t vs the popular, the coo l vs the warm (in Bourdieu) . You beganyour talk with a description of the academi c position and at the end of your talk youcame back again to an academic pos ition from which it s possible to talk about habituses

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