Television and Everyday Life

part of the everyday, by virtue of their capacity both to reflect and reflect
upon the everyday. This is so despite, or even because of, their more or less
intensely marked difference from everyday life (see Bakhtin on carnival for
example). But they were also part of the everyday because they generated
the forms of culture which could then be seen to be incorporated through
more practical or mundane attitudes and behaviours into the daily round.
The ‘sacred’ spaces occupied by the media have this quality, and our
relationship to them reinforces it. The spoken and displayed narratives of
television have their equivalent and their extension in the lived narratives of
daily life, and of course both gain their meaning precisely through this
constant juxtaposition (Ricoeur, 1984).
Once again de Certeau recognises the persistence of this and also the
disjunction which it marks, for the myths of public texts and strategic culture
are not simply reproduced in the storytelling of everyday life. The rhetorics
of the dominant in strategic places are matched and both explored and
exploited by the disjunctive tactical rhetorics of everyday life. In a passage
in which he addresses the specific example of television de Certeau appears
to recognise this tension, for television has the capacity, and at the moment
of reception, it fulfils that capacity (‘The television viewer cannot write
anything on the screen of his set’) of turning the viewer into a ‘pure receiver’
and television itself becomes a ‘celibate machine’. But in reality the
consumption of television is no different from other acts of consumption,
revealing in 
use
the contrary capacity to turn a trick or two with the objects
and logics of a ‘rationalized, expansionist, centralized, spectacular and
clamorous production’ (De Certeau, 1984, 31).
The tricks that are turned, in the gossip, the rhetoric and the rumours of
everyday life, the metaphors and myths of the stuff of everyday experience
and discourse, depend crucially on the raw material, albeit highly refined raw
material, that the media, both in their primary and secondary textualities,

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produce. At the core of the experience of everyday life is a form of practical
rationality that we recognise as common sense, and within which the forms
and order of our capacity to manage the ordinariness of the everyday are
embodied and expressed. Agnes Heller (1984; see Bourdieu, 1977) describes
common sense as 
doxa
and distinguishes it from scientific rationality 
(epistémé):
Certain items in our everyday knowledge can be much firmer, less subject
to change, more ‘eternal’ than our stock of scientific information… We
have known that we can buy things for money for several hundred years;
monetary theory has changed several times in the same period…
doxa
is
inseparable from practical activity: it is in practical activity and nowhere
else that 
doxa
is verified… 
Doxa
is the knowledge for which the information
and values contained in the world of everyday knowledge and everyday
norms are obvious or self-evident.
(Heller, 1984, 203–4)
And 
doxa
is the product not only of direct experience but of mediated
experience, as our knowledge of the world, and especially our taken for granted
knowledge of the world, is conditioned by our consumption of information,
ideas and values that television and other media provide. There is no mystery
in this, nor is it necessarily to be condemned, since that knowledge too has to
be tested in practice in and through the forms of communication that in turn
define our capacity to act—our status as agents in the management of our
daily lives. Everyday life has the paradoxical character of being both creative
and blind to its own creativity, even in most of the forms of popular culture (it
is usually only analysis that makes popular culture ‘see’).
Yet the ordinariness of everyday life, its taken-for-grantedness, is not
homogeneous. Not only is it profoundly differentiated by virtue of culture—
ethnic, religious, class, national or gendered culture—but it is also uneven in
its formal quality. Everyday life is marked by a continuous, predictable and
unpredictable, series of shifts between the marked and the unmarked, the sacred
and the profane. Daily life is studded with ritual times and spaces in and through
which the insistence of the daily round is momentarily put to one side. Stolen
moments in front of the television set. The scheduled rituals of the annual
calendar, informed and prescribed now in broadcasting. In each of these events
and in our participation in them (with or without the media) we move perceptibly
from one domain of everyday life into another, crossing a boundary or a
threshold into a clearly if often weakly marked ritual space: a space where the
intense ordinariness of the everyday is replaced by a different kind of intensity—
heightened and symbolically charged. In these ritual spaces the culture of
everyday life is reinforced. In our participation in them, and especially in those
ritualised activities that by virtue of mass production, most of us can share—
for example reading the morning newspaper (Anderson, 1983; Bausinger,
1984), or watching a favourite soap opera—our place and position in the world

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169
is symbolically defined. And that definition is reinforced by our activities once
we return to the mundane and the quotidian, in the talk and gossip, in the
sharing of information: in our mutual construction of the news of the world.
Some have seen this shifting in and out of the mundane as a form and
expression of play, and one at least (Stephenson, 1988) has gone so far as to
construct a theory of mass communication as play on the strength of it. The
theory itself is disappointing and inconclusive, but along the way it draws
attention to the seminal work of a number of play theorists (Huizinga, 1959;
Callois, 1961) each of whom, though in different ways, finds in play a (the)
source of culture. Play is pursued within a distinct and distinguishable social
and cultural space. It is rule-governed but protected and differentiated from
the rule-governed normality of other (principally work-related) spaces of the
rest of everyday life. There are difficulties with many of these theories, not
least the elision of play and leisure, but what makes them collectively suggestive
(and it should be remembered that Winnicott’s own theories of child
development also insist on play as a central component of cultural experience)
is their stress on the privileged kinds of creativity that are possible in the more
or less clearly differentiated times and spaces which in turn, make play possible.
Within play ‘realities’ are suspended in favour of fantasies, since the rules of
play are not those of ordinary everyday life. Indeed de Certeau also draws on
game theory, only this time to make the case for the transcendence of playing
the game (tactics) over the rules of the game, the game itself (strategy). While
the game is defined by the governing rules which make it playable, it is in the
play itself that the game comes alive and, in that vitality, gains its uniqueness
and significance.
Implicit in these arguments, especially of the boundedness of play, and indeed
in the identification through everyday life of the notion of agency, as well as of
doxa,
is a critique of those other arguments that imply that within everyday
life, and particularly through the highly mass-mediated everyday life of
contemporary societies, the boundaries between fantasy and reality are
becoming less and less clear. One might be inclined to think that they are
indeed no longer as clear as they once were, and that television’s habit, both in
its primary and secondary textuality, to elide the real and the imaginary, is
telling. Yet empirical evidence, as well as the kind of theoretical arguments
that I have been advancing, suggests that this boundary is still held by most of
us, and the theory requires that it should be the case, since the practicalities of
everyday life require and depend on it.
Agency then, our capacity to act within the ongoing normality of everyday
life, is a precondition for our involvement with television and other media.
And to present the argument in this way makes the idea of a passive viewer a
nonsense, and the dichotomy of activity and passivity, as I have suggested,
redundant. Instead we are confronted with a different kind of empirical problem,
which is not to discover presence or absence, activity or passivity, but on the

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contrary to understand engagement. That engagement might be weak or strong,
positive or negative in its implications. But it is, in the sense in which I have
identified it, always dynamic, and dynamic in the specific sociological sense
of agency. We engage with television through the same practices that define
our involvement with the rest of everyday life, practices that are themselves
contained by, but also constitutive of, the basic symbolic, material and political
structures which make any and every social action possible.