Television and Everyday Life

Capital,
I,
487–8, cited in Swingewood, 1975) there has been a recognition, albeit
differently inflected, that everyday life is constructed within capitalism at once
in both its negative and positive aspects. Capitalism’s efforts are directed at
creating a pliant and productive workforce, but one in which the worker is
encouraged, for the sake of ‘modern industry’, to develop his own ‘natural
and acquired powers’(Marx, ibid.). The worker is seduced by, and into, the
false realities (or real falsehoods) of the culture of everyday life and into
believing in his or her own freedoms and authenticities. Fulfilment is a motivated
and contained fulfilment, for under capitalism there is no escape from the
alienation that lies at its core and which is embodied in all acts of exchange
and communication.
Informing this critique, which in varying degrees is an essential dimension
of any radical approach to everyday life, is a sense of another form of life,
perhaps once lived, but in any event not difficult to imagine, against which to
judge the tragedies of the present. Lefebvre himself counterposes the
‘everyday’—the vital and the authentic, the active and the original—with
‘everyday life’—life under capitalism, life in ‘the bureaucratic society of
controlled consumption’ (Lefebvre, 1984, 68ff.). The latter has replaced the
former though not without the hope of its return. For in the critique of everyday
life lies the hope of its transcendence in the everyday, and of the realisation of
the otherwise denied potential of festival, carnival (see Bakhtin, 1984). Here
are reverse images, still visible in the avant-garde, in the drama of Brecht and
in the films of Chaplin (Lefebvre, 1991, 3–51).

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Television and Everyday Life
It is not always easy to endorse even this limited optimism, though the
space Lefebvre leaves for the ‘reverse image’, for the alternative and the
resistant, is one which later theorists will be perversely keen to exploit
(perversely because much of their analysis leaves the basic structures of society
unexamined or unchallenged). Indeed Lefebvre leaves the contradictions of
capitalism intact in his own theory, insofar as he appears to recognise that
everyday life is both the site of a potential critique and the necessary object of
critique; everyday life is both genuine and false at the same time. He argues
that everyday life consists in a complex of activities and passivities, of forms
of sociability and communication which
contain within themselves their own spontaneous critique of the everyday.
They 
are
that critique insofar as they are 
other
than everyday life, and yet
they are 
in everyday life,
they are 
alienation
. They can thus hold a real
content, correspond to a real need, yet still retain an illusory form and a
deceptive appearance.
(Lefebvre, 1991, 40, italics in original)
A real need falsely met. More pessimsistic, perhaps, and less closely grounded
in a theory of alienation, are the arguments of the Frankfurt School. They too
recognise in the developing industrialism of capitalist society, and the extension
of the forms of order and regiment that extend beyond the sphere of production
and into the sphere of consumption, an increasing and increasingly irresistible
reification of culture (see also Heller, 1984, 148ff.). In this reification, objects
are humanised and humanity becomes objectified.
1
The iron cage of a false
rationality leaches all originality from everyday life, leaving an empty husk of
false gods, false goods and false desires. The theories of Adorno, Horkheimer
and Marcuse are familiar and uncompromising. There is little hope of
transcendence simply because the world of everyday life is so completely
dominated by and through the combined pressures of bureaucratic and scientific
reason, technology and mass culture. Central, of course to this domination is
television (Lodziak, 1986) and other information and communication
technologies (Robins and Webster, 1988).
Despite the fact that both Bourdieu (1984) and Foucault (1977; Gordon, 1980)
provide accounts, both explicitly and implicitly, of everyday life as dynamic
either in terms of taste or power, they both see it still, to a significant extent, as
the result of social and political processes taking place elsewhere in the social
structure. Michel de Certeau, as I have noted, objects to both kinds of totalising
theory (1984, 45–60) and sees in even such a sensitive and suggestive concept
of the habitus a form of closure against the everyday which denies its dynamics,
its contradictions and its indeterminacies. And it is de Certeau’s theories, and
especially his consideration of the potential for resistance within the tactical
times of everyday life, that have provided the intellectual space for a more strident
populism, especially suggestive in the work of John Fiske (1989a).

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Television, technology and everyday life
163
However de Certeau’s work is itself actually still quite ambiguous and
contradictory and the metaphors he uses to encapsulate the dynamics of popular
resistance are inconsistent. So within the seized times of everyday life we are
told that we are engaged in a guerrilla warfare and a kind of terrorism (note that
Lefebvre uses the term terrorism to describe the activities not of the subordinate
but of the dominant), but we are also told that we are merely renting (de Certeau,
1984, xxi), and as renters we do not make property our own. We are condemned
to the leasehold: temporary and provisional occupiers. And elsewhere de Certeau
describes these activities as stealing and playing. Each of these metaphors for
the dynamics of the quotidian, as ways of conceptualising the uses that we make
in our daily lives of the objects and strategic spaces of social life, offer a different
inflection, and a different politics, of that activity. Brilliant those activities may
be (Miller, 1987) from time to time, but they will not always be so. And a mistake
is often made when the everyday and the popular are treated as coterminous, as
in John Fiske’s summary:
Everyday life is constituted by the practices of popular culture, and is
characterized by the creativity of the weak in using the resources provided
by a disempowering system while refusing to submit to that power. The
culture of everyday life is best described through metaphors of struggle or
antagonism… These antagonisms, these clashes of social interests…are
motivated primarily by pleasure: the pleasure of producing one’s own
meanings of social experience and the pleasure of avoiding the social
discipline of the power-bloc.
(Fiske, 1989a, 47)
This is simultaneously an oversimplification of de Certeau’s arguments and
also a misreading of the politics of everyday life.
2
It is however, even in its
own ambiguities and contradictions, an identification of that other space, that
of the everyday, in which the popular is constructed, and one in which everyday
life can be seen, through the products and commodities of mass culture, to
have become aestheticised. This is an aestheticisation which another critic has
also identified, though in this case in terms of more subtly controlled freedom
(Featherstone, 1991, 27).
3
The argument is not that we should replace one analysis by another. It is not
that there is a choice to be made between utopianism and dystopianism, between
control and freedom or between ideology and popular culture. Neither is it that
we can adjudicate conclusively, as I have already suggested, between activity
and passivity in the context of the audience’s relations to the media. In a sense
these questions are falsely posed, and these dichotomies are the wrong ones.
Lefebvre is offering a critique of domination which sees in the ‘everyday’ the
hope that capitalism has denied in its domination of ‘everyday life’. Horkheimer
and Adorno offer even less. Fiske provides an analysis of the popular which is
only to be valued in its capacity for resistance and transcendence. De Certeau

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Television and Everyday Life
requires us to focus on the everyday as a site for significant action. It is significant
because in the everyday our lives become meaningful, and without those meanings
and without understanding those meanings and properly locating them within
social space, we who participate (and also observe) will miss the dynamics of
the social, and fail to comprehend its politics.
Yet none have satisfactorily posed the question. None have quite accepted
the paradox of the everyday—a paradox that Winnicott elegantly identifies in
the context of the symbolic significance of the transitional object:
I should like to put in a reminder here that the essential feature in the concept
of transitional objects and phenomena…is