Highmore writes, “like fissures in a stream of constancy the everyday is also punctuated by interruptions and irruptions: a knock on the door, a stubbed toe, an argument, an unexpected present, a broken glass, a tear, a desperate embrace” (2010: 1). As Highmore argues, interruptions and change are just as much a part of the everyday as routine and repetition. Change in everyday life can be instigated from many sources.
As Edensor points out, interruptions and disruptions of the mundane performances of everyday life can also be initiated by collision with others’ “less predictable” routines or caused by “bodily discomfort” (2007: 212). Having a severe headache, a sprained ankle from training or a sick child who cannot go to kindergarten are all familiar disruptions that potentially instigate changes to our routines and habits in everyday life. Others around us, such as other family members, friends, colleagues, people on the bus, and their doings and routines, even their mere presence, can be a major source of interruption and change. When everyday practices intersect, they sometimes collide, and change is bound to happen as we try the best we can to course correct and keep on going. As Highmore states, as small a thing as the breaking of a glass when trying to get out the door with the kids in the morning can upset the morning commuting routine to such a degree that it can only be mended by reconfiguring from biking to taking the car in order to arrive on time.
However, change can also emerge from less tangible aspects of everyday life. The everyday and its routines and practices might, for instance, be contested by others or ourselves, especially then they grow too “rigid” and “prescriptive” (Edensor 2007:
211) or simply “too much” (Ehn and Löfgren 2009). Paradoxically, the everyday is, as Edensor writes:
… the realm suffused with habit, routine, unreflexive forms of common sense
… also contains the seeds of resistance and escape from uniformity. For not
only is the quotidian the sphere of a conservative reiteration of “the way things are,” but it is also susceptible to the intrusions of dreams, involuntary memories, peculiar events, and uncanny sentiments.
(2003: 154-5)
Indeed the desire to escape from uniformity can motivate change; for instance, trying another seat on the bus to work or driving a different route to the weekly family dinner are trivial ways of evoking change in uniform routines. As Edensor points out, the source of change is not always rational, predictable and identifiable; it might be a sudden change of heart or a sudden urge that seemingly comes out of nowhere.
Sometimes this can be brought about simply by being with others or watching their doings, and sometimes emotional intrusions in the everyday are afforded by the affective atmospheres in the environments we traverse. Whether the spatialities of everyday life provide for negative or positive sensorial experiences, they constitute a backdrop for the unfolding of everyday life in which interruptions and disruptions emerge and “constantly threatens to undermine the structure laid down by habit”
(Edensor 2007: 212).
However, in a slightly more violent fashion than the minor disruptions of the breaking of a glass or a sudden urge, change in everyday life is also often brought about by failures and breakdowns in massive technical systems beyond our individual control.
For most people, everyday life is performed in societies facilitated by all kinds of technical systems (Graham 2014). Some systems move people, such as infrastructural transport systems; some move objects and goods, such as the shipping industry; some move energy, such as oil and gas pipelines and massive electrical underground cables;
and some move information and communication, such as the internet and wireless cell phone networks. John Urry (2007: 59) invites us to think about the complexity and dependencies of these massive socio-technical systems as integrated parts of everyday life. These systems empower people in their everyday lives (and disenfranchise those left outside). In our daily use of and interconnection with these systems, ranging from driving the car to work through infrastructural systems and pumping gas at a gas station linked up to a vast network of oil; to buying all sorts of fresh fruit year-round or purchasing inexpensive mass-produced clothes shipped through networks of goods transportation; to baking a cake in an electric oven powered by energy networks, and so on, we accomplish our everyday lives. The everyday is deeply entangled in these massive and powerful systems; we rely on and trust in them even though they always carry risk and uncertainty. Failure and breakdown in such systems are always imminent; as Hannam, Sheller and Urry write, “complex systems have become especially vulnerable to what Perrow terms ‘normal accidents’ that are almost built in, almost certain to occur from time to time” (2006: 8). Pursuing this line of thought, the close interrelatedness of our everyday doings, routines and habits with these complex systems highlights the vulnerability of everyday life. Disruptions and “[b]reakdowns are a systemic part of everyday life” (Trentmann 2009: 80) that constantly require adaptation. Hence another major source of change is on-going adaptation to these
quasi-stable systems that we take part in and depend on in everyday life.
Non-representational thinking prompts us to understand this interrelation of mundane repetition and change in everyday life as a constant on-flow in dynamic world in motion (Anderson and Harrison 2010). Therefore, thinking about everyday life in processual terms undoes the image of quotidian doings, routines and practices as static and fixed orderings relatively indifferent to the dynamic world they are part of, and instead it favours a view in which the “quotidian practice is open-ended, fluid and generative”
(Edensor 2007: 212). Sometimes everyday doings change only very slowly and in small steps, making the change noticeable only in retrospect, while sometimes change happens fast and violently, creating ruptures in everyday routines. However, most of the changes in everyday life fall somewhere between these extremes, and most of the time we are able to absorb such disruptions and breakdowns and adapt through creative coordination and reordering of everyday routines and practice.
ADAPTING IN EvERYDAY LIFE
As Trentmann rightly notes, “Disruptions reveal the flexible side of habits and routines so often imagined as stable and stubborn” (2009: 68). He reminds us that change is a fundamental part of everyday life and that doings perceived as stable and relatively fixed are also flexible. Consequently performing mundane everyday practices in a constantly changing world necessarily involves flexibility, the ability and skill to adapt and conform to circumstances as they arise, whether they manifest as disruptions and breakdown or chances and potentials (Binnie et al. 2007: 517).
Adapting in everyday life is therefore not an exotic or alien ability; it is something everyone does, sometimes very purposely, as when faced with a breakdown on the Metro on the way to school and the necessity of figuring out how to get there in time.
Sometimes, however, adapting is done in the background of our consciousness, as when we sense the road ahead being clogged up by heavy traffic and instinctively reroute. However, figuring out what to do or how to proceed when confronted with disruption is not merely a cognitive process. The performance of everyday life is a skilled and creative process that actively involves “a mobilization of the mind/body within an environment of ‘objects’, which ‘afford’ different possibilities for human use” (Pink 2012: 52). Drawing parallels between the performance of everyday life and the skilled craftsmanship that goes into making something, Tim Ingold (2000:
346) terms the performance of practices in everyday life “weaving”, a practical and coordinated engagement in the world wherein the performer skilfully employs a creative coordination of perception and action within the environment.
Taking another perspective, Harrison illustrates how the on-going process of weaving in the performance of the everyday is emergent and generative:
Here is the sequence: relaxed readiness, a breakdown, a gap opens up, and then an emergent order takes place. There has been a move from the singular to the multiple, from the actual to potential and then back again. … What is going to happen has yet to be determined and, further, the manner in which this moving on will occur ``is neither externally decided nor simply [internally] planned'' (page 329). The interval is thus charged with potential, it is a ``swarming of possible and emergent modes of existence'' (Goodchild, 1996, page 60; see also Massumi, 1996), from which an emergent order, a consistency (of a sort) will occur.
(2000: 503)
Adapting is opportunism, a sensibility towards the “swarm” of potentialities that is dynamically present at any moment in the performance of everyday life. Creatively improvising to actualise these affordances as they unfold is crucial to weaving. Think about walking down the street: at any moment we are presented with an almost infinite abundance of potentialities for how to proceed; how to move; how to act in relation to the environment, other people, traffic, the physicality of space, the weather, talk, sounds, the atmosphere and ambience of the street. All these elements and more that we do not necessarily consciously pay attention to (although we sometimes do, as when someone bumps into us or when children playfully try to avoid walking on the lines between slabs of pavement are part of the weaving going on when we walk down the street. Hence weaving is the active and practical engagement with and coordination between oneself and the environment as it unfolds in everyday life. Although one may have a vague plan for or a theoretical image of walking down the street, the successful performance of walking down the street is not contingent upon mental representations or knowledge of walking; rather it is something that emerges in the act of doing, or as Ingold writes, “we know as we go” (2000: 230).
Though this may sound extraordinary, Ingold argues that it is simply an integral part of performing embodied doings in everyday life. We are constantly, almost instinctively, attending to stimuli and the situation as it unfolds, to the physical environment, people, things, atmospheres, past experience, and what is currently going on; in so doing, we are anticipating what might happen next. All of this goes into formulating an embodied response. Hence the mundane performance of everyday life is an active and on-going weaving of “complex topographies of apprehension and association … that does not merely involve linear passage through undifferentiated space in an allotted space of time when ‘nothing happens’ but always implicates other connections” (Edensor 2003: 152).