Cultural Studies

edited) and with an introduction) by

Lawrence Grossberg
Cary Nelson
Paula A. Treichler
with Linda Baughman
and assistance from J ohn Macgregor Wise
Routledge
NewYork London
THE UNIVERSITY LIBRARY
WASHINGTON & LEE UNIVERSITY
LEXINGTON VA. 24450
10
Cultural Studies and the
Culture of Everyday Life
JoHN FisKE
I want to start this paper from the premise that both academics in cultural and media
studies, and left-wing political theorists and activists have found the everyday culture
of the people in capitalist societies particularly difficult to study either empirically or
theoretically. 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 the other
into 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 high
and low culture, between the meanings, practices, and pleasures characteristic of em-
powered and disempowered social formations. Cultural distance is a multidimensional
concept. In the culture of the socially advantaged and empowered it may take the form
of a distance between the art object and reader/spectator: such distance devalues socially
and historically specific reading practices in favor of a transcendent appreciation or
aesthetic sensibility with claims to universality. It encourages reverence or respect for
the text as an art object endowed with authenticity and requiring preservation. "Dis-
tance" may also function to create a difference between the experience of the art work
and everyday life. Such "distance" produces ahistorical meanings of art works and allows
t he members of its social formation the pleasures of allying themselves with a set of
humane values that in the extreme versions of aesthetic theory, are argued to be universal
values which transcend their historical conditions. This distance from the historical is
also a distance from the bodily sensations, for it is our bodies that finally bind us to our
historical and social specificities. As the mundanities of our social conditions are set aside,
or distanced, by this view of art, so, too, are the so-called sensuous, cheap, and easy
pleasures of the body distanced from the more comtemplative, aesthetic pleasures of the
mind. And finally this distance takes the form of distance from economic necessity: the
separation of the aesthetic from the social is a practice of the elite who can afford to
ignore the constraints of material necessity, and who thus construct an aesthetic which
not only refuses to assign any value at all to material conditions, but validates only those
art forms which transcend them. This critical and aesthetic distance is thus, finally, a
marker of distinction between those able to separate their culture from the social and
economic conditions of the everyday and those who cannot.
There is no "distancing," however, in the culture of everyday life. Both Bakhtin
and Bourdieu show how the culture of the people denies categorical boundaries between
art and life: popular art is part of the everyday, not distanced from it. The culture of
everyday life works only to the extent that it is imbricated into its immediate historical
and social setting. This materiality of popular culture is directly related to the economic
154
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THE CULTURE OF EVERYDAY LIFE 155
materiality of the conditions of oppression. Under these conditions, social experience
and, therefore, culture is inescapably material: distantiation is an unattainable luxury.
The culture of everyday life is concrete, contextualized, and lived, just as deprivation is
concrete, contextualized, and lived. It is, therefore, a particularly difficult object of
academic investigation.
I wish to turn to Bourdieu's (1977, 1984) theory of the "habitus" as a way to
think through both the material practices of everyday culture and our difficulty in
studying them. The concept "habitus" contains the meanings of habitat, habitant, the
processes of habitation and habit, particularly habits of thought. A habitat is a social
environment in which we live: it is a product of both its position in the social space
and 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 sym-
bolic, and the historical are not separate categories but interactive lines of force whose
operations structure the macro-social order, the practices of those who inhabit different
positions and moments of it, and their cultural tastes, ways of thinki ng, of "dispositions."
The habitus, then, is at one and the same time, a position in the social and a historical
trajectory t hri.'JUgh it : it is the practice of hiring within that position and trajectory, and
the social identity, the habits of thoughts, tastes and dispositions that are for med in and
by those practices. The position in social space, the practices and the identities are not
separate categories in a hierarchical or deterministic relation to each other, but mutually
inform each other to the extent that their significance lies in their transgression of the
categorical boundaries that produced the words I have to use to explain them and which
are therefore perpetuated by that explanation.
The point I 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 gh
educational levels, high cultural but low economic capital that has been acquired rather
than inherited. And within t his same habitus we may find the taste for congruent social
and academic theories, a taste expressed in the dispositions for macro-theories that
transcend the mundanities of the everyday through distantiation, that move towards
generalized, abstracted understandings rather than concrete specificities and that try to
construct academic or political theories that are as distanced, detached, and self-contained
as any idealized art object. This is, needless to say, the habitus in which most of us
academics feel most at home.
But it is a habitus at odds with those through which the various formations of the
people live their everyday lives. An explanation is necessarily of a different ontological
order from that which it explains, but this difference should not be absolute: the gap
should be both crossable and crossed. Bourdieu's theory of the habitus allows the pos-
sibility of such movement-we can, after all, visit and live in habitats other than the
one in which we are most at home. But though such tourist excursions can give us some
inside experience they can never provide t he same experience of these conditions as those
who live or have lived there. Brett Williams (1988) gives a good example of both living
in a mainly black, working class culture, and providing an academic account of it. She
moves between the 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 the
material density of embodied practices. One of these she calls " texture." By "texture"
she refers to dense, vivid, detailed interwoven narratives, relationships, and experiences.
The materially constrained narrowness of the conditions of everyday life are compensated
for and contradicted by the density and intensity of the experiences, practices, and objects
packed into them. She finds this density as she follows a man down his neighborhood
156 JOHN FISKE
main street, when every store, every encounter, every piece of gossip exchanged is packed
with concrete meanings in its minutiae. The density of apartment life is part of the
conditions of oppression, yet it is also available to be turned by popular creativity and
struggle, into a textured culture: "The Manor's dense living, in combination with the
poverty 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 to
make that density bearable."
Williams goes on to describe how Lucy and Robert, as typical renters, cope with
their material conditions by "texturing domestic density by weaving through it varied
sights, sounds and rhythms" (p. 1 02). To middle class taste their apartment would seem
intolerably cluttered with knickknacks and decorations yet Robert still feels a need to
fill what seems to him to be a glaringly empty space. It is as though a density which
is chosen by Lucy and Robert becomes a way of negotiating and coping with a density
that is imposed upon them: constructing a bottom-up density is a tactic of popular
culture for "turning" the constraints of a top-down density. It is an instance of the
creative use of the conditions of constraint.
Television is used to increase, enrich and further densify the texture. It is typically
left on all the time, adding color, sound and action to apartment life: it is used to frame
and cause conversations, to fill gaps and silences. It can provide both a means of entering
and intensifying this dense everyday culture and a way of escaping it, for it is also used
to dilute "the concentration of crowded 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 interwoven texture of everyday life, it
re-presents it, too. Programs like Dallas, with its "vivid historically interwoven con-
creteness" offered renters "the same kind of texture that is so valued on the street."
The women in the apartments lived in and with Dallas over a number of years, growing
to know each character in "painstaking detail." Williams concludes: "As renters texture
an already dense domestic situation by weaving in more density, shows like these favorites
are appropriate vehicles" (Williams, 1988, p. 1 06)
Leal (1990; Leal and Oliver, 1988) too, has shown how certain formations of the
people (in her case first generation urbanized Brazilian peasants) weave a densely textured
symbolic environment through which they live. She analyzes in detail one such envi-
ronment, or rather a mini-environment or "entourage" construc;ted from objects placed
around the TV set. Around the TV set were plastic flowers, a religious picture, a false
gold vase, family photographs, a broken laboratory glass and an old broken radio. Wil-
liams finds the culture in the density itself, but Leal interprets this texture. Her analysis
shows how these people live meani ngfully within the contradictions between t he city
and the country, urban sophistication and rural peasantry, science and magic, the future
and the past. In the suburbs they are placed on the spatial boundary between the city
and the country, as first generation migrants they are on the equivalent historical bound-
ary between the past and the future.
Their use of photographs was an instance of this cultural process. On the TV set
were large pictures of dead or absent family members, typically ones left behind in the
country, and stuck into their frames were small I. D. pictures of those who had moved
to the city: The I.D. photos were not only signs of fami ly, but also signs of modern,
urban life. As Leal comments "The social system that broke these kinship webs is
reproduced m the symbolic system within the photograph frames" (p. 23) and these
lost kinship webs are reasserted, reformed through bricolage. So, too, the plastic flowers
were constdered more beautiful than natural ones because they bore meaning of the
urban, the manufactured, the new; and also because they cost money. They were validated
by their origin
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THE CULT URE OF EVERYDAY LIFE 157
by their origins in the "better" life the people hoped to find by their move to the city.
Natural flowers, on the other hand, were from the life they were fleeing. Leal also
shows how class specific these meanings are-in the middle-class homes, for instance,
there was a reversal of values so that peasant art would be displayed as bearers of valid
meanings of the country and an escape from the urban. In those homes, of course, plastic
flowers would never raise their cheap, manufactured, urbanized heads. Her interpretation
of this dense texture of objects continues, including t he TV set which is seen as "a
vehicle of a knowledgeable and modern speech" (p. 24). Her readings reveal a popular
culture in process by which the people live within the larger social order not in a reactive,
but a proactive way. The entourage of objects around the TV set comprises
a symbolic system, including an ethos of modernity, that is itself part of a larger
symbolic universe that has as its principal focus of significance the city and industry.
This system of meanings seeks to "conquer" the urban power space (that of capitalistic
relations), while tryi ng to di fferentiate and delimit urban cultural space
from the rural space t hat is still very close to the actors, by manipulating signs t hat
are shared by their group as indicators 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 of
embodying and living the contradictory relations between t he dominant social order
and the variety of subal tern formations within it. Williams comments somewhat sar-
donically t hat " A passion for texture is not always rewarded in American society, and
more middle-class strategies for urban living ai m at breadth instead" (1 988, p. 48). It
is a comment that I wish to extend to cover academic theory as part of middle-class
strategies for living.
The social order constrains and oppresses 'the people, but at the same time offers
them resources to fi ght against those constraints. The constraints are, in the fi rst instance,
material, economic ones which determine in an oppressive, disempowering way, the
limits of the social experience of the poor. Oppression is always economic. Yet t he
everyday culture of the oppressed takes the signs of that which oppresses them and uses
them for its own purposes. The si gns of money are taken out of the economic system
of the dominant and inserted into the culture of t he subaltern and t heir social force is
thus complicated. The plastic flowers are for Leal' s newly suburbanized peasants, deeply
contradictory. They have a mystique because of the "mystery" of their production (unlike
natural flowers)-they are fetishes, syntheses of symbolic meanings, of modernity: but
they are also commodity fetishes. They require money, another fetish, and t ransfor m
that money into an obj ect of cultural di splay. Real money is not an appropriate decoration
or cultural object, but transformed money is; its transformation occurs not just in its
form, coin to plastic flower, but in the social formation, theirs to ours. The commodity
fetish is deeply conflicted: it bears the forces of both the power bloc and the people. It
produces and reproduces the economic system, yet simultaneously can serve t he symbolic
interests of those subordinated by it. The plastic flowers, Leal argues, because they cannot
be produced within t he domestic space but must be bought, bring wit h them the "social
legitimacy, prestige and power" that, in an urban capitalist society can most readily be
gained, in however transformed a manner, from the order of oppression .
So, too, t he accumulation of obj ects in Lucy and Robert' s apartment is not a sign
of their having bought into the system by accumulating a literal, if devalued, cultural
capital. It is rather their way of fill ing their constrained lives with a variety of multiplicity
of experiences that the more affluent can achieve by their greater mobility through
physical and social space.
158 JOHN FISKE
Of course the desire for the expectation of variety and richness of experience is a
produce 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 making
do with what they have (de Certeau, 1984), and what they have is almost exclusively
what the social order that oppresses them offers them.
Many of Williams's subjects were African-Americans who had moved from rural
North Carolina to Washington, D.C. and thus shared important social determinants
with Leal's. It is not surprising then, that both Williams and Leal find traces of a rural
folk culture of previous generations within the urban popular culture of contemporary
capitalism. Our thinking about such a rural or folk culture should not be nostalgically
romantic-it was a culture of deprivation, oppression, or slavery, which is why its popular
creativities of making do with limited resources transfer so readily to contemporary
conditions. The argument that some of those resources, at least, came from nature rather
than the oppressor is hardly convincing-in both agrarian capitalism and feudalism nature
was transformed into land owned by the elite, its resources had to be "poached" -a
constant cultural and material activity of the oppressed which de Certeau (1984) uses
as a metaphor for popular practices in general. The material and cultural resources were
limited, 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," which
Williams (1988, p. 4 7) identifies as characteristic of popular culture is a condition of
oppression, and thus transfers readily from rural to urban, from a slave or serf-based
rural capitalism to its urban industrial equivalent.
Williams describes how this creativity works in, for instance, the culture of collard
greens-the fertilizing, nurturing, and harvesting of them in urban backyards, and the
multitude of ways of chopping, cooking, seasoning, and serving them. Collard greens
are used to negotiate the differences and similarities between Carolina and Washington,
and also between individual creativities within a common set of constraints. Barbecue
sauce is another, equally important, opportunity for popular creativity. Because the
ingredients for the sauce, as the conditions for growing the greens, were different in
Washington from Carolina, both greens and sauce were consciously used to make com-
parative sense of the difference: but the difference lay in the constraints, -in the resources
available, not in the creativity of their use,
Popular creativity is concretely contextual. It exists not as an abstract ability as 'the
bourgeois 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 ar-
rangements but which is equally if not more productive in the practices of daily life, in
the ways of dwelling, of walking, of making do. Objects are comparatively easy for the
investigator to describe and transcribe from one habitus to another, but the specificities
of their context and the practiced ways of living are much more resistant; they constitute
a 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 against
what Levine (1972, p. 140) calls "sacred inarticulateness, " by which he refers to people's
inability to explain their most sacred institutions in an objective discourse: instead they
resort to responses like "It's hard to explain this one, but if you were one of us and did
it, then you would understand" (Levine, in Brett Williams, 1988, p. 104). Williams
argues that this inarticulateness, this reluctance to transform a contextualized experience
into decontextualized discourse, extends beyond the sacred to the mundane; Dallas fans
constantly "explained" their experience of the program with remarks like "if you watch
it, you'll see."
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THE CULTURE OF EVERYDAY LIFE 159
As Bourdieu (1977) points out, pract ices can circulate and reproduce culture with-
out their meanings passing through discourse or consciousness. He distinguishes between
practice and discourse, and notes somewhat sadly that to study practice we need to bring
it to the level of discourse, but in doing so we change its ontological status, for a defining
feature of practice is that it is not discourse (pp. 110, 120). It is hard to find a final
answer to this problem, and indeed there may not be one, but a partial solution may
well involve a discursive and social flexibility, the development of the ability to expe-
rience as far as possible from the inside other peoples' ways of living that must be
theorized from the outside. This may well require cultural theorists to follow the example
of some feminists, for example, in using their personal experience ofliving and practicing
culture as a key element in the production of a theoretical discourse and its more distanced
and generalized explanations of the world.
It is not a coincidence that the devaluation of mundane culture in many academic
theories goes hand in hand with the epistemological, methodological, and ethical prob-
lems of studying it, or even of describing it or identifying it as an object of study. A
science of the particular is alien to our academic habitus. T his problem is not confined
to social and cultural theory, it is also addressed in contemporary cognitive theory. Like
traditional cultural theory, cognitive psychology has tended to focus its attention upon
generalizable laws that transcend the immediate contexts of their uses. Cognitive theory
has tended to devalue the contextual in favor of the universal.
Jean Lave (1988), however, in her account of the Adult Math Project and subsequent
investigations into mathematics in everyday life argues against these attempts to explain
calculation as a universal, non-contextualized process:
" Cognition" observed in everyday practice is distributed-stretched over, not divided
among-mind, body, activity and cul turally organized settings .... Math "activity"
(to propose a term for a distributed for m of cognition) takes form differently in
different situations. (p. 1)
The main thrust of Lave's rhetoric is to challenge traditional cognitive theory and its
pedagogic application. She gives numerous examples from her own and from others'
studies of successful contextualized math opposed to "failures" in the decontextualized
math performed in the classroom. A young scorer for a local bowling team performed
complex, rapid error-free calculations in practice, but when asked to perform what the
researchers thought were the same cognitive operations out of context (i.e. in the class-
room under test conditions) he was utterly unable to. Similarly, women in supermarkets
never made a mistake when comparing comparative values of different-sized, differently
priced cans that they held in their hands, but were far less accurate when asked to
perform the same calculations out of their social context.
Lave cites an example of contextualized math. A women shopper was faced with
the problem of how many apples to buy. She picked up the apples one at a time and
put 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 four kids, so you fi gure
at least two apiece in the next three days. These are the kind of things I have to
resupply. I only have a certain amount of storage space in the refrigerator, so I can't
load it up totally .. . Now that I'm home in the summertime, this is a good snack
food. And I like an apple sometimes at lunchtime when I come home. (Lave, 1988,
P 2)
Lave comments that there are a number of acceptable solutions, 9, 13, 21. It also seems
si gnificant that the calculations are performed through the actions of picking up apples,
the matching of the actions to the idea of her children eating them, and, I assume, a
160 JOHN FISKE
visualization of the amount of space in her fridge at that time, not as an abstract capacity
but as a concrete specificity. Lave observes that this woman is not interested in a gen-
eralizable answer that relates to the problem in terms of a universalized criterion of
right-wrong, but that problem and answer shaped each other in action in a specific
setting. In this material setting the shopper's cognitive processes are part of her physical
relationship with the goods on display. The supermarket is a densely woven texture of
commodity information and display, but through her routine practices t he experienced
shopper transforms information overload into an information-specific setting. As she
selects the commodities she wants, so she selects the information she wants. Her selec-
tions from their repertoi re constitutes her setting which is both produced by her cognitive
processes and plays a part in producing t hem. The "setting" is a coming together of
the material specificity of the context and the mental processes by which that context
is lived.
Lave's concept of the setti ng reminds us, in many respects of Bourdieu's habitus.
Settings are constructed within the larger arenas whi ch are the products of the social
order. The supermarket is an arena full of the goods and information produced by the
political economy of capitalism, but within it, shoppers construct for the period and
purposes of shopping their own settings. A setting is, in Lave's definition, a "repeatedly
experienced, 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 time
generates that practice:
[A setting's] articulatory nature is to be stressed; a setti ng is not simple a mental map
in the mind of the shopper. Instead it has simultaneously an independent, physical
character and a potential for realization only in relation to shoppers' activity. (Lave,
I 988, p. 152-53)
The setting-arena relationship also relates to the difference between place and space
as theorized by de Certeau (1984). For him place is an ordered structure provided by
the dominant order through which its power to organize and control is exerted. It is
often physical. So cities are places built to organize and control the lives and movements
of their " city subjects" in the interests of the dominant. So, too, supermarkets, apartment
blocks, and universities are places. But within and against them, the various formations
of the people construct their spaces by the practices of living. So renters make the
apartment, the place of the landlord, into their space by the practices of living; the
textures of obj ects, relationships, and behaviors with which they occupy and possess it
for the period of t heir renting. Space is practiced place, and space is produced by the
creativity of the people using the resources of the other. De Certeau stresses the political
conflict involved, the confrontation of opposing social interests that is central to the
construction of space out of place. Lave focuses more on the functional creativity of the
activities involved in constructing a setting out of an arena. But her argument shows
that a setting is a material and cogni tive space where the inhabi tant or shopper is in
control, is able to cope successfully.
The construction, occupation, and ownership of one's own space/setting within
their place/ arena, the weaving of one's own richly textured life within the constraints
of economic deprivation and oppression, are not just ways of controlling some of the
conditions of social existence; they are also ways of constructing, and therefore exert ing
some control over, social identities and social relations. The practices of everyday life
within and against the determinate conditions of the social order construct the identities
of difference of the social actors amongst the various formations of the subaltern. .
Theories of subjectivity, even when elaborated into ones of split or nomadic sub-
j ectivities, still stress the top-down construction of social identity or social consciousness.
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tts. Her selec-
her cognitive
g together of
1 that context
lieu's habitus.
: of the social
)duced by the
.1e period and
a "repeatedly
).
the same time
!ntal map
, physical
ty. (Lave,
>lace and space
:e provided by
; exerted. It is
nd movements
:ets, apartment
)US formations
.ters make the
of living; the
and possess it
oduced by the
:es the political
central to the
reativity of the
gument shows
r shopper is in
'setting within
the constraints
tg some of the
refore exerting
l everyday life
:t the identities
subaltern.
r nomadic sub-
! consciousness.
THE CULTURE OF EVERYDAY LIFE 161
Theories of split or multiple subjectivity, in particular, try to encompass the contradic-
tions that produce differences, but these contradictions are traced back to the complex
elaborations of late capitalist societies: splits in subjectivities are produced by splits in
the system. Theories of the nomadic subj ect so move more towards the idea of social
agentswho exert some control over their trajectories through the social space, but their
emphasis is still more upon the determining, if loosely determining, structures through
which they move, rather than the practices by which those movements are put in effect
and made material.
I want to help develop a cultural theory that can both account for and validate
popular social difference, for it is in these differences that we find what the people bring
to the social order. In promoting this perspective, I am not devaluing those studies which
focus on the pervasive and determining effectivities of the power bloc, but I am asserting
that accounts of the social and cultural systems which neglect the positive input of the
people are not yet complete. The differences that I call popular are produced by and
for the various formations of the people: they oppose and disrupt the organized disci-
plined individualities produced by the mechanisms of surveillance, examination, and
information which Foucault has shown are the technologies of the mechanism of power.
Popular differences exceed the differences required by elaborated white patriarchal cap-
italism. They are bottom-up differences which are socially and historically specific, so
they can'not be explained by psychologically based theories of individual difference, nor
by idealist visions of free will. Popular differences are not the product of biological
individualism nor of any ultimate freedom of the human spi rit. The embodied, concrete,
context-specific culture of everyday life is the terrain in which these differences are
practiced, and the practice is not just a performance of difference, but producer of it.
The Body of Difference
Foucault argues that the mechanisms which organize us into the disciplined subjects
required by capitalism work ultimately through the body. He shares with ideology
theorists the attempt to account for the crucial social paradox of our epoch-that our
highly elaborated social system of late capitalism is at once deeply riven with inequalities
and conflicts of interest yet still manages to operate smoothly enough to avoid the crises
of antagonism that might spark revolution. He differs from them in disarticulating power
and 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 the
micro-technologies of power which produce, organize, and control social differences.
Within his enterprise the body replaces the subject. It is through the body and its
behaviors that medicine, psychiatry, and the law define and impose our social norms
and work to cure or punish those that exceed them. Within these norms the organization
of bodily behavior in space and time forms the basis of the social order. For the system
to work, we must occupy certain "work stations" at certain times in the office or factory,
the classroom or family home, the shipping mall or holiday beach. These "work stations"
must be individualized so that any body not occupying them properly can be identified
and disciplined. Similarly, every body's individual history, his or her accumulation of
behaviors, is recorded and rated in school records and grade sheets, work records, credit
ratings, criminal records, driving records-our society works on a highly elaborated
system of surveying, and recording, ranking, and individuating our everyday behaviors.
Individuality of this sort is a top-down product: individuals are differentiated according
to the demands of the system, and individuation becomes a disciplinary mechanism. Its
technologies of differentiation do not measure individual differences that pre-exist them,
I '
162 JOHN FISKE
but actively produce those differences as part of the operation of its power. This con-
tinuous process of individuation is power-in-practice, is discipline-in-practice. It is not
the power of one class over another, nor the discipline of officers over subalterns; it is
a social technology of control that organizes the behaviors of everyone within it, t he
big cogs as much as the little cogs. The social order, as Foucault analyzes it, depends
upon the control of people's bodies and behaviors: it couldn't give a damn about their
subjectivities.
The body and its specific behavior is where the power system stops being abstract
and becomes material. The body is where it succeeds or fails, where it is acceded to or
struggled against. The struggle for control, top-down vs. bottom-up, is waged on the
material terrain of the body and its immediate context.
The culture of everyday life is a culture of concrete practices which embody and
perform differences. T hese embodied differences are a site of strugg_le between the
measured individuations that constitute social discipline, and the popularity-produced
differences that fill and extend the spaces and power of the people.
The body enters into immediate, performed relationship with the different settings
or spaces it inhabits. The shopper who picks up the apples as she calculates the rela-
tionship between the number of her kids, the days till the next shopping trip, and the
room in her refri gerator is not performing an abstract calculation that any body could
but is living a concrete relationship specific to her and thus different from every body
else's. So, too, the memorabilia that fill Lucy and Robert's apartment are not commodities
that any body could have bought; they are embodiments of unique, personal histories
that are different from every body else's, and they are part of the texture of c;veryday
culture only because they carry this difference, because they bring the absent but unique
past into the concreteness of the present where it is apprehensible by the senses of the
body.
My argument 's focus upon the particularity of the body and its setting does not
mean that I wi sh to ignore or marginalize the relationship of the body of the person
to the body politic, the social body. For the body is necessarily a socially situated body.
Our bodies' behaviors in time and space, our practices of habitation, extend the body
into the habitat and relate it to other similarly but differently habituated bodies. In this
body-habitat, social space becomes geographical place, structural social relations become
lived personal relationships. The body-habitat is the materializing process of habitus not
a subset of it, but an embodying performance of it. The body-habitat incarnates the
habitus; the habitus informs the body-habitat, and, at the same time, inscribes the larger
social order into its incarnated, practiced forms. This relationship of the concrete body-
habitat through the habitus to the historical social order is a synecdochal, contingent
one, not a metaphorical, transformed one.
The body in this account differs theoretically though not politically from Bakhtin's
account of the relationship between the body politic, the body of the people, and the
licensed, excessive bodies, the grotesque bodies of carnival. For Bakhtin, the relationship
between the carnivalesque bodies and the body politic is one of metaphoric transfor-
mation: the social antagonisms in the body politic are given expressive, material form
in the inversions and disorder of bodies in the carnival. For him, the body becomes the
expressive site of the life of the people only at moments when the oppressive order is
transformed into a liberatory disorder. T hese moments are historically produced by the
differences within the body politic between the official order and the life of the people,
so the carnival body is the materialization of social difference: but the carnival body is
a transformation of the mundane body. The theory I am exploring proposes the mundane
body as tl
difference:
Wit
difference
of social <
produced
I am
popular sc
ical, and. t
ofthose b
point. But
nature. T
interestin1
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signify. 1
social ord
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It is
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as a dynar
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sim
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THE CULTURE OF EVERYDAY LIFE 163
body as the synecdochal embodiment of the social order, and therefore of the social
differences within that order.
Without social difference there can be no social change. The control of social
difference is therefore always a strategic objective of the power bloc. A progressive theory
of social difference needs to include, but must go beyond, the analysis of differences
produced and controlled by the dominant social order.
I am turned, then, towards an attempt to account for the origin of progressive or
popular social difference in the inescapable differences of the body's physical, geograph-
ical, and historical specificities. The fact that we have different bodies, and that no two
of those bodies can occupy the same place at the same time seems a reasonable starting
point. But the body, its geography and history, are not empiricist facts in a Newtonian
nature. Their natural essences are semiotically inert: they become epistemologically
interesting only when they enter a social order, for only then do their differences become
structured rather than essential; only a social order, therefore, can make differences
signify. The concrete practices of everyday life are the insertion of the body into the
social order, and, de Certeau would argue, the inscription of the social order upon that
body.
It is here that I find Bourdieu's theory of the habitus most helpful even if I push
it somewhat futther than he does. The habitus is located within a social space which
has both spatial and temporal dimensions; the spatial dimension models the social space
as a dynamic relationship among the major determining forces within our social order-
economic, class, education, culture-and their materialization in the behavior, tastes, and
dispositions of those who, because of their differential positioning within the social
space, embody and enact those forces differently. The temporal dimension is where we
can trace the trajectories by which social formations or individuals within them, change
their geographical positioning through historical movements.
The theory of the habitus collapses many of our conventional distinctions between
the individual and the social, between the interior and the exterior, between the micro
and the macro, between practices and structures, between time and place. The habitus
is not just a pre-given environment into which we are born, it lives in us just as much
as we live in it, we embody it just as it informs us. It admits of no categorical distinctions
between the inhabitants, the habitat, and the practices of habitation.
Similarly, the habit us does not relate to the social space as does a social category-
class, gender, race, age, or whatever. A habitus is not distinguished from others by a
categorical boundary; rather, it is a conjunctural process by which we experience and
enact the forces that form (and potentially transform) the social space and the locatable
practices of habitation within it. It is a process with historical and social specificity, not
a generalized category. But because the habitus disaltows traditional categorical dis-
tinctions does not mean that its conceptual movement is towards a polymorphous homo-
geneity: far from it. The whole thrust of Bourdieu's work shows that the habitus is a
factor of social difference. The "habitus" offers a theoretical framework within which
physical difference and social difference can be related contingently, not metaphorically,
and within which social processes can be analyzed in terms of concrete practices inter-
secting with the structuring forces of a particular social order. Because the habitus is
not circumscribed by categorical boundaries it admits of greater mobility than Bourdieu
himself gives it credit for. His theory focuses on the homogenizing factors that enable
him 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 it
difficult for some people to "settle" comfortably and make one habituated position their
home. All of us, I believe, experience enough of the contradictory forces of elaborated
164 JOHN FISKE
capitalist societies to have developed a degree of familiarity with more than one position
in the social space. And some, particularly those who experience most acutely the crucial
contradictions that are often set up when class, gender, and race intersect, can have
multiple "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 though
these 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 the
same 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. The
habitus of this position disposes our habits of thought towards the generalizable and
abstract; the equivalent disposition in the academic sphere to that which validates aes-
thetic distance in the sphere of art. We are habituatedly disposed to find the greatest
significance, as the greatest beauty, in structures that seek to explain the concrete by
di stancing themselves from it. We therefore, as historical products, find a science of the
parti cular particularly difficult to envisage.
Academic theory, no less than cultural taste, is produced within and for a habitus
in 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 on
cognition in practice. Her rhetoric is intended to challenge first the traditional orthodoxy
of cognitive psychology and its universalizing tendency, and then to challenge its adop-
tion by the educational system so that the universalized "laws" of arithmetic are used
to make and measure individuated differences of mathematical competence. These laws,
however, are the product of a particular academic habitus'---ours-which not only produces
them, but universalizes them in a way that obscures their social production-just as the
traditional theory of aesthetics universalizes and obscures its own social and historical
specificity. It is more useful, then, to situate her argument more broadly and to see it
as not just a marshalling of counter-evidence that orthodox cognitive theory has failed
to 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 faces
us directly with the need to recognize the socially produced dimensions of our habits
of thinking. I believe that the theoretical and empirical exploration of the relationships
between practice, the body, and place will prove to be one of the more fruitful directions
that the field will take. In taking this direction, though, I hope that cultural studies
never loses its politi cal edge.
Politics have never been far below the surface in my attempt to think critically
about the relationships between dominant and subordinated habituses in cultural theory.
I hope we can narrow the gap and increase the travel between them because by doing
so I believe we can help change the relationship between the academy and other social
formations, in particular those of the subordinate. Many of those living within such
subordinated formations find little pertinence between the conditions of their everyday
lives and academic ways of explaining the world. It is in none of our interests to allow
this gap to grow any wider, particularly when we consider that many of the most effective
recent movements for social change have involved allegiances between universities and
members of repressed or subordinated social formations.
Cultural studies has always been concerned to examine critically and to restructure
the relationship between dominant and subordinated cultures; it has always been con-
cerned to interrogate the relationship between the academy and the rest of the social
order, and I hope that the development whose outline is sketched in this paper will
offer one way of continuing these traditions. Feminism, for example, has achieved much
in making us recognize how patriarchy has shaped and informed what once appeared
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T HE CULTURE OF EVERYDAY LIFE 165
to be "disinterested" academic thought. Similarly, those working in the cultural politics
of ethnicity are exposing the whiteness of traditional Western theory. T hese movements
are so valuable because they do more than explain and validate the experiences of women
and people of color within a white patriarchy; t hey also refuse to admit that their ways
of knowing and experiencing the world are in any way subordinate or inferior: instead
they position them as powerful challenges to the dominant epistemological frameworks.
I think there are signs that these challenges are being reproduced along other axes of
domination, particularly those of class, age, educational attainment, and cultural presti ge.
In this paper I have focused on one formul ation of such a challenge and the
problems it poses. This conference invites us to peer into the future of cultural studies,
and one direction that I hope the field will continue in, and one t hat I intend to contribute
to, is the development of ways of theorizing culture that grant the concrete practices
of subordinated ways of living a degree of importance in theory which is t he equivalent
to that which they have in their own habitus, even though this is distanced from, and
socially subordinated to, the habitus whose discourses are necessary to produce theory.
Such a cultural theory will, hopefully, not position itself too singularly and securely
within the academic habitus, and will thus try to avoid the risk of implicitly granting
its theoretical fliscourse a position of privilege which would reproduce in academic terms
the process of subordination which is characteristic of the social order that we wish to
criticize and change. Practice may have to be changed into discourse in order to be
analyzed; specificities inay have to be subjected to generalization for their significances
to be understood and communicated, however incompletely: but, equally, practice should
be allowed to expose the incompleteness of theory, to reveal the limits of its adequacy,
and specifi city should be able to assert the value of that which generalization overlooks
or excl udes.
It should be possible to grant to the dispositions, tastes, and ways of knowing that
are germane to the habituses subordinated by our current social hierarchy a legitimacy
equivalent to those of a more dominant habitus. In achieving this, we should be able
to set up relatively more reciprocal relationships between the habituses involved so that
the critical and explanatory perspective by which one views the other can work in a
bottom-up direction as well as a top-down.
Such a way of theorizing culture may well produce insi ghts into how social dif-
ferences can be produced and maintained by the people in their own interests. This
bottom-up production of difference is likely to be found, inter alia, in the specificities
of everyday li fe, and I think there are three movements in cul tural studies which are
addressing this area with different but related foci of interest. These are t he ethnography
of contextualized cultural practices, the theorizations of the cultural politics of the body,
and t he development of a cultural geography through which to analyze the meanings
of place and environment at a particul ar historical conjuncture. In following these
through I hope we can minimize the problems of establishing productive, rather than
reductive, relationships between pract ice and discourse, and between more dominant
and more subordinated ways of living in and explaining our social world.
DISCUSSION: JoHN FisKE
MEAGHAN MORRIS: I have a real problem with the notion of the habitus and with
your deployment of it, and with the dichotomies t hat flow from it: the abstract vs the
concrete, the dominant vs the popular, the cool vs the warm (in Bourdieu) . You began
your talk with a description of the academic position and at the end of your talk you
came back again to an academic position from which it's possible to talk about habituses