There are many approaches to studying the quotidian, as is evident in the variety of academic disciplines that show an interest in the everyday due to its close proximity to many aspects of human life. However, everyday life is particularly central to fields such as sociology, anthropology, ethnology, human geography and psychology, where it usually serves as a theoretical backdrop for the subject of research. Sarah Pink writes, “for many contemporary sociologists and anthropologists, everyday life is a given” (2012: 7-9). Hence, given this broad interest in and attention to the everyday found in many fields of research, there are many approaches to studying everyday life, and there is no unambiguously precise definition of it, although the term is used extensively in both public and academic discourse (Sandywell 2004: 172).
However, this study draws upon an understanding in which everyday life can be described as the “host of routine activities, private and public, carried out on a regular, if not actually daily, basis; such as eating, sleeping, working, commuting, shopping and so on” in which “occasional, incidental and unusual events also take place”
(Ferguson 2009: 164). Coupling this understanding with inspiration from recent non-representational ways of thinking in human geography (see Thrift (2008), Anderson and Harrison (2010), Lorimer (2005) and Vannini (forthcoming) for introductions to non-representational theory), the study will approach the everyday and ordinary life by taking as its point of departure human doings, actions and practices. Thereby this approach argues for investigating and understanding the quotidian based on what we do in everyday life rather than explicitly focusing on “discourses, symbols, cultural codes, or representations” (Vannini 2012: 13).
TOWARDS A NUANCED UNDERSTANDING OF EvERYDAY LIFE The notion of everyday life is often associated with the ordinary (Highmore 2010: 5);
the tedious, uneventful, banal and mundane (Binnie et al. 2007: 515); and the hidden and unnoticed (Pink 2012: 4). This image carries over to the habits and routines that populate everyday life. Everyday routines have, as Tom O’Dell writes:
… long been characterized as the epitome of that which is grey, bland and stifling. These are the black holes of joy, spontaneity and inspiration from which scholars have all too often presumed we need to escape (Cohen and
Taylor 1992)—simple, mindless activities which we do over and over again.
(2009: 85-6)
However, as O´Dell also argues, this is a far too myopic and one-sided conception, and it fails to apprehend the full scope and nuances of everyday life. The quotidian, habits, and routines are often characterised by ambiguity and ambivalence. Sometimes a dystopian image is justified and everyday life feels dreadful, just as at other times it can be meaningful and pleasurable. Binnie et al. (2007: 515) point out that it is often the diverse spatialities we travel in, such as the streets and roads, the bus shelter, the commuter train compartment, the suburbs, and other distinct parts of the urban environment that everyday life is part of and takes place in, that are associated with the banal and mundane. As in the quotidian, many of the spatialities in everyday life can be perceived as instrumental, sterile and boring, although the opposite can also be true.
For example, Peter Merriman investigates how landscapes and environments in everyday life are sometimes explicitly designed or “choreographed to generate particular movements, sensations, aesthetic experiences and emotions” (2011: 133).
We may think of many of the spatialities and places of everyday life that we traverse as being designed to hold practical and instrumental functions, but at the same time they afford experiences, sensations and affect that can undoubtedly be perceived as both pleasant and unpleasant. Indeed everyday spatialities in the transportation modes we employ day in and day out are marked by ambivalence, as they carry and evoke both positive and negative experiences and feelings. Mimi Sheller (2004) write about how mundane car driving produces feelings of both exhilaration and pleasure and frustration and fear, while Philip Vannini (2012) explores how everyday ferry journeys entail and elicit a broad spectrum of sensorial and social experiences, everything from play, and recreation to sightseeing, seasickness and boredom. Hanne Louise Jensen (2012) unfolds how everyday commuter train journeys produce recreational, therapeutic and meaningful encounters with social and emotional content in everyday life. Jensen, Sheller and Wind (2014) explore the affective ambiences in everyday family mobility and show how the quotidian is not only responsible for producing positive and negative experiences but also affects how people engage in “emotional management” through their mobility in everyday life.
This is just a tiny subset of recent research, part of the flurry of academic literature on mobilities that seeks to transcend an instrumentalist and one-sided reading of the mundane spaces and mobility in the everyday. Put more simply, the argument here is that everyday life, populated as it is with routines and habits, should not as a rule be categorised as grey or boring and be regarded as an indifferent part of life; rather it should be approached with greater sensitivity towards its fluidity, ambivalence and nuances (Edensor 2003: 155). One-sided conceptions tend to miss out on seeing everyday life as inherently open, labile and teeming with potentialities.
Much of what we do in everyday life goes unnoticed by us, as it has, through countless
repetitions performed in familiarised spatialities and temporalities, been naturalised and inscribed into the body. Everyday life seems to become, as Joe Moran (2010:
3) puts it, “infra-ordinary”, as it falls outside the conscious realm of thought, just as infrared light falls outside the visible spectrum. For instance, simply trying to recall the exact doings of last week, even yesterday, can be hard. As one respondent said,
“You simply don’t notice it; it slips your mind”, as these activities are done without much contemplation. Hence this also means that we do not question the normative dispositions of the habits or routines of everyday life, but perform them relatively un-reflectively. Through the many repetitions of everyday experiences the spatialities and temporalities that interweave with the performance of habits and routines are gradually familiarised. At first, before cementing a routine and prior to performance, we might start by acquiring theoretical knowledge of rules and regulations and plan how to proceed. However, over time, through practice, we accumulate practical knowledge, know-how, what Polanyi (1966) regards as “tacit knowledge” of the appropriate conduct and social conventions, and slowly we learn the skills of performing everyday life, eventually becoming seasoned experts. One might think of learning to ride a bike: no easy feat at first, demanding all the mental and physical resources available.
However, over time, repetition and practice we learn how-to, and eventually bike riding becomes a mundane and embodied everyday activity.
Paul Harrison claims it is from the “embodiment of habit a consistency is given to the self which allows of the end of doubt” (2000: 503). In effect, this relieves us of the necessity of being endlessly be reflective and of being forced to make conscious decisions about every little detail we stumble upon in everyday life. The everyday as routines can relieve one of burden and boredom; as Ben Highmore elegantly puts it,
“Repetitive rhythms can lull us into calmness or drag us into machinic compliance [and] release us from the metronome of clock time but connect us as willing (or reluctant) supplicants to the time of labour” (2010: 110). Moreover, as Tim Edensor points out, embodied routines and habits have a tendency to “accumulate over time to consolidate a ‘common sense’, which is usually shared by those around you, so that these habits become further ingrained through interactions with others” (2007:
211). This self-reinforcing process is particularly evident in how family members construct collective habits and routines in the family, such as afternoon routines of shopping together; family commuting to kindergarten, school and work; or walking the same paths to the local playground, which over time become familiar, and the common-sense way everyday life is practically performed. Furthermore, as Edensor also states, such familiarised routines often resonate with those around us. When performed in social groups, such as families, they simultaneously strengthen and reaffirm the emotional bonds among family members and the collective sense of community. This notion of how family is produced through practice will be further explored shortly (see section 4-6). Therefore, everyday life as mundane and habitual repetitions and routines offers a sense of security and certainty (Binnie et al. 2007).
Crafting everyday doings into habitual practices bestows predictability and offers a temporal ordering that “provide[s] the basic intelligibility” (Thrift 2008: 8) of our
lifeworld, thereby stabilising it, if only momentarily.
However, if all our doings and actions in everyday life were nestled within completely stabilised and perfectly formed routines and habits, each day would look very much the same; or, as Edensor puts it, “if this static scenario was the totality of the quotidian, there would be no social and cultural change” (2007: 211). Hence, focusing overly much on the cyclical aspects of everyday life, the repetition of its doings, routines and habits, has the downside of potentially deflecting attention from the dynamic side of everyday life and thereby clouding the constant motion and continual evolution and mutation of routines and habits. Hence to evoke a nuanced perspective on the everyday arguably entails understanding it not only as endless cycles of routines but concurrently as “the inclusive arena in which occasional, incidental, and unusual events also take place” (Ferguson 2009: 164).