Television and Everyday Life

the paradox, and the acceptance
of the paradox:
the baby creates the object, but the object was there waiting
to be created and to become a cathected object. I tried to draw attention to
this aspect of transitional phenomena by claiming that in the rules of the game
we all know that we will never challenge the baby to elicit an answer to the
question: did you create that or did you find it?
(Winnicott, 1974, 104, italics in original; and see Chapter 1 p. 14)
‘Did you create that or did you find it?’ This seems to me to be the key question
at the centre of the problematic of everyday life, but it is the one question that
Winnicott suggests that we cannot ask. If it were to be answered—and popular
culture does answer it in its own way—then the reply would be both and neither.
Everyday culture is in this sense, and within this paradox, transitional. Everyday
life appears in use, in practice, as de Certeau is at pains to argue, but that use is
itself preconditioned by a ‘capacity’ in Winnicott’s (psychodynamic) terms, by
symbolic capital in Bourdieu’s (sociological) ones: a competence and a facility
no less relevant, then, to the individual than to the group. And the terms of that
paradox—the found object and the created object—the imposed meanings and
the selected meanings—the controlled behaviour and the free—the meaningless
and the meaningful—the passive and the active—are in constant tension. These
tensions can be observed in everyday behaviour and traced through the study
of the individual and the group. They can be deciphered through ethnographic
or psychoanalytic case studies—studies which must be firmly grounded in the
mutuality of empirical and theoretical understanding. For it is in the dynamics
of the particular that we will be able to identify, if not fully comprehend, the
forces of structure: the forces both of domination and resistance.
In this sense the problematic of everyday life is not one of strategies and
tactics which are, albeit unequally, opposed. On the contrary it is the expressions
of activity and creativity 
within,
and constitutive of, the mobile forces of
structure. If this is what Giddens means by structuration then my argument
follows very closely the models that he has explored. Everyday life becomes
then the site for, and the product of, the working out of significance. The
meanings that we produce, the representations that we reject or appropriate,
the identities we attempt to secure, the rituals which we accept, are all both

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Television, technology and everyday life
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found and created within a shared, often disputed and always highly
differentiated social space. In the paradox of finding and creating—and in the
constant tension that results—structures are simultaneously accepted, exploited
and challenged. Herein lies the possibility, indeed the necessity and inevitability,
of change. Herein too lie the ambiguities at the heart of the popular, and the
source of the essential tensions that I have recognised in so many dimensions
of my analysis of television’s role in everyday life thus far.
One dichotomy is perhaps salvageable as long we recognise that it too is
only meaningful in the same terms of the essential tension that I have insisted
on in relation to the others. It is that between security and anxiety. Both
psychoanalysis and sociology have indicated the fundamental significance of
both. And I too have begun this argument with an attempt to locate the media’s
role in the articulation of the relationship between the two, both for the
individual and the social. To talk of existential anxiety and ontological security,
as I have done, is not to offer a reductive account of the social or the everyday,
but to provide an account of the ground base, of the preconditions, of the
possibility, of the social and, most importantly, of the increasing significance
of the media in the dynamics of that possibility. Our everyday lives are the
expression, in their taken-for-grantedness, as well as (in popular culture) their
self-consciousness, of our capacity to hold a line against the generalised anxiety
and the threat of chaos that is a