Television and Everyday Life

everyday life
. Where is
it to be found? In work or in leisure? In family life and in moments ‘lived’
outside of culture? Initially the answer seems obvious. Everyday life
involves all three elements, all three aspects. It is their unity and their
totality, and it determines the concrete individual. And yet this answer is
not entirely satisfactory. Where does the living contact between the
concrete individual man and other human beings operate? In fragmented
labour? In family life? In leisure? Where is it acted out in the most
concrete way? Are there several modes of contact? Can they be
schematized as representational models? Or must they be reduced to fixed
behaviour patterns? Are they contradictory or complementary? How do
they relate? What is the decisive essential sector? Where are we to situate
the poverty and wealth of this everyday life which we know to be both
infinitely rich (potentially at least) and infinitely poor, bare, alienated;
which we know we must reveal to itself and transform so that its richness
can become actualized and developed in a renewed culture?
(Lefebvre, 1991 (1958), 31)
Henri Lefebvre, writing a foreword to his 
Critique de la vie quotidienne
(1947) in 1958, reflected on the intensely complex but vital problem of
everyday life: on its material invisibility; on its contradictions; on its vitality
and its capacity for transcendence. He wrote as one of a number of voices
within the Marxian tradition who had engaged with everyday life as the site
for the exploration of alienation as a key dimension of life under capitalism,
both within French philosophy, sociology and history and within German
social critique. Their analyses still provide, despite and perhaps even more
because of recent history, timely and chastening insights into the
‘problematic’ of everyday life; thorns in the flesh of the new romanticism;
and a stimulus for the kind of investigation that I have thus far been
undertaking into the relationship between television and everyday life.
This investigation has involved considerations of a number of dimensions
of that relationship. But the discussion remains incomplete. The

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Television and Everyday Life
paradoxes—the essential tensions—have been expressed in a number of
different ways. They appear in the relationship between anxiety and
security; in that between activity and passivity, creativity and addiction; in
that between the public and the private; in that between dependence and
independence; and in that between consumption and production. They
appear in a number of different domains: in the domestic; in the suburban; in
the management of time and space; and in the construction of technology.
And although these various dimensions of analysis do indeed address the
problematic of everyday life as it was conceived by Lefebvre they do not do
so in a direct or coherent way. They do not confront everyday life as politics,
as a political domain.
This is what I want to attempt in this last chapter. I do not expect to succeed, if
by success is meant the production of a 
theory
of everyday life. Post-modernism
has taught us, if nothing else, that the time for such an undertaking is now past.
But I do want to try and offer a route through some of the paradoxes. Stephen Heath,
whom I cited in Chapter 1, referred to the seamless equivalence of television with
everyday life. Television was more than the totality of its transmitted programmes:
and television was coincident with everyday life in its extensiveness, expansiveness,
instability, interminability, and ubiquity. This is fine, and it leads him, too, to
consideration of television as essential to the politics of everyday life. He asks: ‘can
anyone in our societies be outside television, beyond its compulsions?’ (1990, 283).
Yet this seamlessness, these compulsions, this incorporation of television by and
within everyday life, is still only restating the problem in another way, for it is only
in our capacity to unpick the seams, and to understand the process of that
incorporation—the interweaving of television and everyday life—that we can begin
to think critically about it. It is all very well, too, to talk of the ‘complexity’ of those
relationships. The complex, like the seamless, returns the problem to where it began:
it consigns it, once again, to the invisible.
Michel de Certeau also reminds us of the politics of everyday life, and does
so in a particularly distinct and important way, for he links everyday life with
the sphere of the popular, and the popular he sees as a site of opposition. But his
influential intervention has itself to be understood within a broader historical
context, and one in which the terms of analysis are often transposed. On the one
hand we are confronted by the approaches defined by the post-Lukacsian critiques
of the Frankfurt School, by versions of French Marxism, such as those of Lefebvre,
Bourdieu and also Foucault, as well as by the mass society critics of the 1950s,
all of whom see in everyday life an expression of a defeated politics, politics
mistaking play for power. On the other hand de Certeau and representatives of
the new populism see in everyday life the possibilities for a transcending, if albeit
limited politics, real in its consequences; a politics in which play is power. They
represent and preserve a dichotomous approach to the study of everyday life which
tends to preserve and reinforce the equivalent, dystopian and utopian, dichotomies
of common sense. These dichotomies can no longer be sustained.

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Television, technology and everyday life
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Against this I want to interpose a hopefully more measured approach, an
approach based on an understanding of the dynamic and uneven politics of
everyday life; and an approach based both in cultural critique and empirical
research. That approach does seem to require a breaking down of the binary-
ism of contemporary theories in favour of a more processual, perhaps a more
provisional form of thinking. And it involves placing television and the
television audience at its centre in such a way as to identify each as multiply
structured and structuring, making, remaking and unmaking meaning as they
both respond and contribute to the twists and turns of social and technological
change. Let me begin, then, with a brief account of the questions that have
been, or can be, asked about everyday life.
There are, it seems to me, three ways in which the problem of everyday life
can be framed. The first takes as its starting point the early writings of Marx (in
the Philosophical Manuscripts of 1844) in which he offers an account of life
under capitalism in terms of alienation and reification (Meszaros, 1970). The
second involves theorising the popular and issues of pleasure and resistance.
And the third involves a much more hesitant approach released by object relations
theory, which identifies the fundamental paradoxes at the heart of creativity.
In fact of course the first two theories of everyday life are not simply
dichotomous, since from Marx’s early formulations onwards (e.g.