Fittedness of home

The Everyday Work of Lists

In the contemporary era, media spectacle organizes and mobilizes economic life, political conflict, social interactions, culture, and everyday life. My recently published book Media Spectacle explores a profusion of developments in hi-tech culture, media-driven society, and spectacle politics. Spectacle culture involves everything from film and broadcasting to Internet cyberculture and encompasses phenomena ranging from elections to terrorism and to the media dramas of the moment. For ‘Logo’, I am accordingly sketching out briefly a terrain I probe in detail in the book from which these examples are taken.1 During the past decades, every form of culture and significant forms of social life have become permeated by the logic of the spectacle. Movies are bigger and more spectacular than ever, with high-tech special effects expanding the range of cinematic spectacle. Television channels proliferate endlessly with all-day movies, news, sports, specialty niches, re-runs of the history of television, and whatever else can gain an audience. The rock spectacle reverberates through radio, television, CDs, computers networks, and extravagant concerts. The Internet encircles the world in the spectacle of an interactive and multimedia cyberculture. Media culture excels in creating megaspectacles of sports championships, political conflicts, entertainment, "breaking news" and media events, such as the O.J. Simpson trial, the Death of Princess Diana, or the sex or murder scandal of the moment. Megaspectacle comes as well to dominate party politics, as the political battles of the day, such as the Clinton sex scandals and impeachment, the 36 Day Battle for the White House after Election 2000, and the September 11 terrorist attacks and subsequent Terror War. These dramatic media passion plays define the politics of the time, and attract mass audiences to their programming, hour after hour, day after day. The concept of "spectacle" derives from French Situationist theorist Guy Debord's 1972 book Society of the Spectacle. "Spectacle," in Debord's terms, "unifies and explains a great diversity of apparent phenomena" (Debord 1970: #10). In one sense, it refers to a media and consumer society, organized around the consumption of images, commodities, and spectacles. Spectacles are those phenomena of media culture which embody contemporary society's basic values, and dreams and nightmares, putting on display dominant hopes and fears. They serve to enculturate individuals into its way of life, and dramatize its conflicts and modes of conflict resolution. They include sports events, political campaigns and elections, and media extravaganzas like sensational murder trials, or the Bill Clinton sex scandals and impeachment spectacle (1998-1999). As we enter a new millennium, the media are becoming ever more technologically dazzling and are playing an increasingly central role in everyday life. Under the influence of a postmodern image culture, seductive spectacles fascinate the denizens of the media and consumer society and involve them in the semiotics of a new world of entertainment, information, a semiotics of a new world of entertainment, information, and drama, which deeply influence thought and action. For Debord: "When the real world changes into simple images, simple images become real beings and effective motivations of a hypnotic behavior. The spectacle as a tendency to make one see the world by means of various specialized mediations (it can no longer be grasped directly), naturally finds vision to be the privileged human sense which the sense of touch was for other epochs; the most abstract, the most mystifiable sense corresponds to the generalized abstraction of present day society" (#18). Today, however, I would maintain it is the multimedia spectacle of sight, sound, touch, and, coming to you soon, smell that constitutes the multidimensional sense experience of the new interactive spectacle. For Debord, the spectacle is a tool of pacification and depoliticization; it is a "permanent opium war" (#44) which stupefies social subjects and distracts them from the most urgent task of real life -- recovering the full range of their human powers through creative praxis. The concept of the spectacle is integrally connected to the concept of separation and passivity, for in passively consuming spectacles, one is separated from actively producing one's life. Capitalist society separates workers from the products of their labor, art from life, and consumption from human needs and self-directing activity, as individuals passively observe the spectacles of social life from within the privacy of their homes (#25 and #26). The situationist project by contrast involved an overcoming of all forms of separation, in which individuals would directly produce their own life and modes of self-activity and collective practice. Since Debord's theorization of the society of the spectacle in the 1960s and 1970s, spectacle culture has expanded in every area of life. In the culture of the spectacle, commercial enterprises have to be entertaining to prosper and as Michael J. Wolf (1999) argues, in an "entertainment economy," business and fun fuse, so that the E-factor is becoming major aspect of business.2 Via the "entertainmentization" of the economy, television, film, theme parks, video games, casinos, and so forth become major sectors of the national economy. In the U.S., the entertainment industry is now a $480 billion industry, and consumers spend more on having fun than on clothes or health care (Wolf 1999: 4).3 In a competitive business world, the "fun factor" can give one business the edge over another. Hence, corporations seek to be more entertaining in their commercials, their business environment, their commercial spaces, and their web sites. Budweiser ads, for instance, feature talking frogs who tell us nothing about the beer, but who catch the viewers' attention, while Taco Bell deploys a talking dog, and Pepsi uses Star Wars characters. Buying, shopping, and dining out are coded as an "experience," as businesses adopt a theme-park style. Places like the Hard Rock Cafe and the House of Blues are not renowned for their food, after all; people go there for the ambience, to buy clothing, and to view music and media memorabilia. It is no longer good enough just to have a web site, it has to be an interactive spectacle, featuring not only products to buy, but music and videos to download, games to play, prizes to win, travel information, and "links to other cool sites." To succeed in the ultracompetitive global marketplace, corporations need to circulate their image and brand name so business and advertising combine in the promotion of corporations as media spectacles. Endless promotion circulates the McDonald’s Golden Arches, Nike’s Swoosh, or the logos of Apple, Intel, or Microsoft. In the brand wars between commodities, corporations need to make their logos or “trademarks” a familiar signpost in contemporary culture. Corporations place their logos on their products, in ads, in the spaces of everyday life, and in the midst of media spectacles like important sports events, TV shows, movie product placement, and wherever they can catch consumer eyeballs, to impress their brand name on a potential buyer. Consequently, advertising, marketing, public relations and promotion are an essential part of commodity spectacle in the global marketplace. Celebrity too is manufactured and managed in the world of media spectacle. Celebrities are the icons of media culture, the gods and goddesses of everyday life. To become a celebrity requires recognition as a star player in the field of media spectacle, be it sports, entertainment, or politics. Celebrities have their handlers and image managers to make sure that their celebrities continue to be seen and positively perceived by publics. Just as with corporate brand names, celebrities become brands to sell their Madonna, Michael Jordan, Tom Cruise, or Jennifer Lopez product and image. In a media culture, however, celebrities are always prey to scandal and thus must have at their disposal an entire public relations apparatus to manage their spectacle fortunes, to make sure their clients not only maintain high visibility but keep projecting a positive image. Of course, within limits, “bad” and transgressions can also sell and so media spectacle contains celebrity dramas that attract public attention and can even define an entire period, as when the O.J. Simpson murder trials and Bill Clinton sex scandals dominated the media in the mid and late 1990s. Entertainment has always been a prime field of the spectacle, but in today's infotainment society, entertainment and spectacle have entered into the domains of the economy, politics, society, and everyday life in important new ways. Building on the tradition of spectacle, contemporary forms of entertainment from television to the stage are incorporating spectacle culture into their enterprises, transforming film, television, music, drama, and other domains of culture, as well as producing spectacular new forms of culture such as cyberspace, multimedia, and virtual reality. For Neil Gabler, in an era of media spectacle, life itself is becoming like a movie and we create our own lives as a genre like film, or television, in which we become "at once performance artists in and audiences for a grand, ongoing show" (1998: 4). On Gabler’s view, we star in our own "lifies," making our lives into entertainment acted out for audiences of our peers, following the scripts of media culture, adopting its role models and fashion types, its style and look. Seeing our lives in cinematic terms, entertainment becomes for Gabler "arguably the most pervasive, powerful and ineluctable force of our time--a force so overwhelming that it has metastasized into life" to such an ext

Boris Arvatov is best known as an art historian and critic who championed the utilitarian production art of the Russian Constructivist avant-garde during the 1920s. He was notorious for his single-minded interest in production and technology, but in the essay Everyday Life and the Culture of the Thing (1925), translated for the first time in this issue, he unexpectedly turns his attention to consumption and everyday life.' The essay attempts to imagine how socialism will transform the passive capitalist commodity into an active socialist object. This object, connected like a co-worker with human practice(126), will produce new relations of consumption, new experiences of everyday life, and new human subjects of modernity. Today, as the promise of industrialism recedes into the past and we search out pockets of resistance to global capitalist (post)modernity, the topics of everyday life, consumption, and commodity culture have become familiar in cultural theory. But they are not usually associated with early Soviet Marxism. What makes Arvatov's theory of modernity so unusual for his time, and so strangely familiar today, is his conviction that the subject is formed as much through the process of using objects in everyday life as by making them in the sphere of production. His essay focuses on everyday life in the industrial city of the West-the city that we, to a certain extent, still inhabit, and familiar territory in twentieth-century cultural theory--because Moscow was no modern consumer metropolis in 1925. Russia's already modest industrial base had been catastrophically decimated by seven years of world war, revolution, and civil war, and was only slowly rebuilding in the 1920s. I suppose we have a proletariat in the West and an ideology of proletarian culture in Arvatov once admitted. We have Constructivist ideologists in Russia, and technological industry in the West. This is the real tragedy.2 As we know with historical hindsight, the version of modernity

Reviewed by: Fight for Your Long Day by Alex Kudera Peter Faziani (bio) fight for your long day Alex Kudera Atticus Books https://atticusbooks.net/books/2010-releases/fight-for-your-long-day/ 266 pages; Print, $17.95 Alex Kudera's Fight for Your Long Day criticizes an under-discussed issue in the literary conversation surrounding higher education—adjunct labor. The book's main character, Cyrus Duffleman, is a man of few lauded traits; he lacks confidence, is overweight, struggles economically, and is often distracted by the stress and expectations of his overworked life. Although this novel successfully forces the reader to analyze the adjunctification and abuse of faculty across higher education, it does so by what feels like an intentional exaggeration of reality as Duffleman works through his "long day." This intentional over-exaggeration skews the reality of adjunct labor in such a way that the reader questions not only the message but also the plausibility of Duffleman's narrative. Kudera's intimate understanding of the stressors placed on adjunct faculty members on any day, but especially their long day, is powerful. Throughout the development of the novel, Duffleman takes on many different identities as he puts on the hats of different universities, deals with the demands of the students, and faces the unplanned situations that happen on a college campus. That said, Kudera's portrayal over-exaggerates the frequency of such situations as a challenge to daily life. Although the stressed, overworked, and underpaid life of the adjunct faculty is the primary focus of Kudera's novel, Duffleman's increasingly downtrodden experience, his strange and sole focus on the negative or erotic, and the ultimately deceitful nature of his experience forces the reader to push back on the reality of Duffleman's everyday life. Even as caricature, it's overdone. The beginning of the novel grounds Duffleman's rushed and exhausted morning to get to his first class as a routine of his overworked reality. Although he would love the life of a tenured faculty, "Duffy accepts his adjunct status and pay, choosing to ignore the fact that most college instructors earn [End Page 34] less than sanitation engineers and public bus drivers, and significantly less than sales professionals and accountants, never mind the management types in pornography and terrorism." The problem is that Duffleman's reality is anything but real. Although the scope of the novel distinguishes a fundamental flaw in higher education's labor model, Kundera pushes the believability of Duffleman's daily life into unbelievable moments. The daily life and the ritual that any person must endure on a given day often catalogs breaks in reality as unusual, whereas the rest is established as mundane and ordinary. In fact, scholars such as Michel de Certeau, Henri Lefebvre, and more recently Ben Highmore have all studied "everyday life" as a means of thinking critically about the experiences that go overlooked. Highmore suggests in Everyday Life and Cultural Theory (2001) that contrary to the argument of Jessica Evans, a scholar studying the Mass-Observation movement in England during the 1930s and 1940s, the observation of the routine and ritual is rooted in documenting and understanding rather than the intent to other them. Highmore ties his understanding of the everyday to the way an observer is documenting without influence, much like the way a reader reads without sway over the text. Kudera, like Evans, seems to view his subject through a lens of oversimplified and exaggerated terms. Ultimately, these terms push the reader into questioning the plausibility of the long day's relentless and unmitigated negative events that tear through multiple campuses across Philadelphia. Kudera's push into exaggerated reality is not instantaneous. It happens throughout the day as Duffleman's energy level drops and his ability to continue wanes without a cup of coffee or a chance to close his eyes on the train. However, it is worth noting that even though the novel was published in 2010 and reflects America's palpable and present fear of terrorism in almost every facet of life, a racist outburst turned fistfight to the assassination of a federal official with a bow and arrow is a giant leap. Although the...

Children are essentially invisible in theories of consumer society and culture, despite their presence and centrality in everyday life. In this article, I argue that children and childhood, and thus mothers and motherhood, must be acknowledged and investigated as constitutive of — rather than derivative of or exceptional to — commercial, consumer culture generally. The focus here is not on how to better accommodate children and childhood (and mothers and motherhood) within extant notions of consumption and consumer culture, but to begin to open up the field of consumption studies to the essential and non-negotiable presence of children and childhood throughout social life.

Implications – The insight that the market and media discourse organizes also the world of dreams has implications to the existing literature on fantasy and fun, marketization, and mediatization of everyday life and on the literature on consumption places and spaces. More generally, the study unsettles the disciplinary habit of taking the waking and alert consumer as the unquestioned starting point of knowledge production and theory-making in cultural consumer research. Dreams provide an angle for further theorizing many key aspects of consumer culture, such as the notion of active consumer and meaning-making.

Reviewed by: After Theory Jeffrey R. Di Leo Terry Eagleton , After TheoryNew York: Basic Books, 2003, ix + 231 pp. Terry Eagleton's important recent book After Theory is both a look back to the "golden age of cultural theory" (1) and a look forward to the new challenges faced by contemporary cultural theory. In effect, it places both the "high theories" of Raymond Williams, Luce Irigaray, Pierre Bourdieu, Julia Kristeva, Jacques Derrida, Hélène Cixous, Jürgen Habermas, Fredric Jameson, Edward Said, and others, and the current orthodoxies of cultural theory, in the rear-view mirror, and looks forward to an age of cultural theory yet to be written. Because the book is intended for "students and general readers," one cannot help but believe that Eagleton is looking to set the charge of the forthcoming generation of cultural theorists, a charge that he believes must go against the current state or "orthodoxies" of cultural theory. Writes Eagleton, "I do not believe that this orthodoxy [viz., the current state of cultural theory] addresses itself to questions searching enough to meet the demands of our political situation" (ix). After Theory not only shows how orthodox cultural theory has lost its connection with the moral and the political, but is also a valiant effort to retune cultural theory to the demands of our current social and political situation. The book is divided into two parts. The first half, comprising the chapters "The Politics of Amnesia," "The Rise and Fall of Theory," "The Path to Postmodernism," and "Losses and Gains," is an overview of the early days of theory, or what is now called "high theory"; the second half, comprising the chapters "Truth, Virtue and Objectivity," "Morality," "Revolution, Foundations and Fundamentalists," and "Death, Evil and Non-being," is a discussion of a number of issues that cultural theory must now take up or risk losing its relevancy. For Eagleton, the ambitiousness and originality of high theories such as Derridian poststructuralism has given way to the laziness and derivativeness of the current practices of cultural theory such as some of the current instantiations of identity theory and postcolonial theory. Whereas high theory was formed out of a real sensitivity to the social and political realities of the 1960s, current cultural theory appears to Eagleton to be born out of attempts merely to be fashionably obscure. [End Page 122] For example, Eagleton bemoans that while high theory established the body as a locus of cultural theory, it was the laboring and famished body, not the erotic and coupling body. Whereas sexuality and gender began as two of the "towering achievements" of cultural theory, over the years they seem to have been reduced to intellectual amusements. What has been lost in the current state of cultural theory, according to Eagleton, is a "seamless continuity between the intellect and everyday life" (3). Whereas the golden age of cultural theory was invested in critical agency, that is, in producing theoretical interventions that would result in praxis and have an actual effect on consciousness, the current state of cultural theory is regarded by Eagleton as primarily reverential and uncritical. Even so-called cutting-edge and innovative contemporary cultural theory such as identity theory and postcolonial theory is on the whole, for Eagleton, politically empty. To be sure, this is a contentious claim. Most postcolonialists today, for example, would vigorously charge, contra Eagleton, that they are politically engaged theorists. However, for Eagleton, the case of postcolonial criticism is symptomatic of much of what was lost in the transition from a golden age of cultural theory (work done by figures such as Raymond Williams, Pierre Bourdieu, Julia Kristeva, and Jacques Derrida) to the present—namely, the loss of a connection with the politics of our daily lives and lived experience in the world. In the case of postcolonial criticism, this came about through the displacement of class conflict in cultural theory. Writes Eagleton, "Much postcolonial theory shifted the focus from class and nation to ethnicity. This meant among other things that the distinctive problems of post-colonial culture were often falsely assimilated to the very different question of Western 'identity politics.' Since ethnicity is largely a cultural affair, this shift...

This article is a comparison of two remarkably different takes on a single subject, namely the shifting meaning of the word ‘publishing’ brought about by the changes in literacy habits related to Web 2.0. One the one hand, we have Andrew Keen’s much lambasted 2007 book The Cult of the Amateur, which is essentially an attempt to defend traditional gatekeeper models of cultural production by denigrating online, user-generated content. The second is Spin journalist Andy Greenwald’s Nothing Feels Good, focusing on the Emo subculture of the early 2000s and its reliance on Web 2.0 as an integral medium for communication and the accumulation of subcultural capital. What I want to suggest in this article is that these two books, with their contrasting readings of Web 2.0, both tell us something specific about what the word “publishing” means and how it is currently undergoing a significant change brought about by a radical adaptation of literacy practices. What I think both books also do is give us an insight into how those changes are being interpreted, to be rejected on the one hand and applauded on the other. Both books have their faults. Keen’s work can fairly easily be passed off as a sort of cantankerous reminiscence for the legitimacy of an earlier era of publishing, and Greenwald’s Emos have, like all teen subcultures, changed somewhat. Yet what both books portray is an attempt to digest how Web 2.0 has altered perceptions of what constitutes legitimate speaking positions and how that is reflected in the literacy practices that shape the relationships among authors, readers, and the channels through which they interact. Their primary difference is a disparity in the value they place on Web 2.0’s amplification of the Internet’s use as a social and communicative medium. Greenwald embraces it as the facilitator of an open-access dialogue, whereas Keen sees it as a direct threat to other, more traditional, gatekeeper genres. Accordingly, Keen begins his book with a lament that Web 2.0’s “democratization” of media is “undermining truth, souring civic discourse and belittling expertise, experience, and talent … it is threatening the very future of our cultural institutions” (15). He continues, Today’s editors, technicians, and cultural gatekeepers—the experts across an array of fields—are necessary to help us to sift through what’s important and what’s not, what is credible from what is unreliable, what is worth spending our time on as opposed to the white noise that can be safely ignored. (45) As examples of the “white noise,” he lists some of the core features of Web 2.0—blogs, MySpace, YouTube and Facebook. The notable similarity between all of these is that their content is user generated and, accordingly, comes from the position of the personal, rather than from a gatekeeper. In terms of their readership, this presents a fundamental shift in an understanding of authenticated speaking positions, one which Keen suggests underwrites reliability by removing the presence of certifiable expertise. He looks at Web 2.0 and sees a mass of low grade, personal content overwhelming traditional benchmarks of quality and accountability. His definition of “publishing” is essentially one in which a few, carefully groomed producers express work seen as relevant to the wider community. The relationship between reader and writer is primarily one sided, mediated by a gatekeeper and rests on the assumption by all involved that the producer has the legitimacy to speak to a large, and largely silent, readership. Greenwald, by contrast, looks at the same genres and comes to a remarkably different and far more positive conclusion. He focuses heavily on the lively message boards of the social networking site Makeoutclub, the shift to a long tail marketing style by key Emo record labels such as Vagrant and Drive-Thru Records and, in particular, the widespread use of LiveJournal (www.livejournal.com) by suburban, Emo fixated teenagers. Of this he writes: The language is inflated, coded as ‘adult’ and ‘poetic’, which often translates into affected, stilted and forced. But if one can accept that, there’s a sweet vulnerability to it. The world of LiveJournal is an enclosed circuit where everyone has agreed to check their cynicism at the sign on screen; it’s a pulsing, swoony realm of inflated emotions, expectations and dialogue. (287) He specifically notes that one cannot read mediums like LiveJournal in the same style as their more traditional counterparts. There is a necessity to adopt a reading style conducive to a dialogue devoid of conventional quality controls. It is also, he notes, a heavily interconnected, inherently social medium: LiveJournals represent the truest and easiest realization of the essential teenage (and artistic) tenet of the importance of a ‘room of one’s own’, and yet the framework of the website is enough to make each individual room interconnected into a mosaic of richly felt lives. (288) Where Keen sees Web 2.0 as a shift way from established cultural forums, Greenwald sees it as an interconnected conversation. His definition of publishing is more fluid, founded on a belief not in the authenticity of a single, validated voice but on the legitimacy of interaction and communication entirely devoid of any gatekeepers. Central to understanding the difference between Greenwald and Keen is the issue or whether or not we accept the legitimacy of personal voices and how we evaluate the kind of reading practices involved in interpreting them. In this respect, Greenwald’s reference to “a room of one’s own” is telling. When Virginia Woolf wrote A Room of One’s Own in 1929, Web 2.0 wasn’t even a consideration, but her work dealt with a similar subject matter, detailing the key role the novel genre played in legitimising women’s voices precisely because it was “young enough to be soft in [their] hands” (74). What would eventually emerge from Woolf’s work was the field of feminist literary criticism, which hit its stride in the mid-eighties. In terms of its understanding of the power relations inherent to cultural production, particularly as they relate to gatekeeping, it’s a rich academic tradition notably lacking in the writing on Web 2.0. For example, Celia Lury’s essay “Reading the Self,” written more than ten years before the popularisation of the internet, looks specifically at the way in which authoritative speaking positions gain their legitimacy not just through the words on the page but through the entire relationships among author, genre, channels of distribution, and readership. She argues that, “to write is to enter into a relationship with a community of readers, and various forms of writing are seen to involve and imply, at any particular time, various forms of relationship” (102). She continues, so far as text is clearly written/read within a particular genre, it can be seen to rest upon a more or less specific set of social relations. It also means that ‘textual relations’—that is, formal techniques, reading strategies and so on—are not held separate from ‘non-textual relations’—such as methods of cultural production and modes of distribution—and that the latter can be seen to help construct ‘literary value.’ (102) The implication is that an appropriation of legitimised speaking positions isn’t done purely by overthrowing or contesting an established system of ‘quality’ but by developing a unique relationship between author, genre, and readership. Textual and non-textual practices blur together to create literary environments and cultural space. The term “publishing” is at the heart of these relationships, describing the literacies required to interpret particular voices and forms of communication. Yet, as Lury writes, literacy habits can vary. Participation in dialogue-driven, user-generated mediums is utterly different from conventional, gatekeeper-driven ones, yet the two can easily co-exist. For instance, reading last year’s Man Booker prize-winner doesn’t stop one from reading, or even writing, blogs. One can enact numerous literacy practices, move between discourses and inhabit varied relationships between genre, reader, and writer. However, with the rise of Web 2.0 a whole range of literacies that used to be defined as “private sphere” or “everyday literacies,” everything from personal conversations and correspondence to book clubs and fanzines, have become far, far more public. In the past these dialogue-based channels of communication have never been in a position where they could be defined as “publishing.” Web 2.0 changes that, moving previously private sphere communication into online public space in a very obvious way. Keen dismisses this shift as a wall of white noise, but Greenwald does something equally interesting. To a large extent, his positive treatment of Web 2.0’s “affected, stilted and forced” user-generated content is validated by his focus on a “Youth” subculture, namely Emo. Indeed, he heavily links the impact of youthful subcultural practices with the internet, writing that Teenage life has always been about self-creation, and its inflated emotions and high stakes have always existed in a grossly accelerated bubble of hypertime. The internet is the most teenage of media because it too exists in this hypertime of limitless limited moments and constant reinvention. If emo is the soundtrack to hypertime, then the web is its greatest vehicle, the secret tunnel out of the locked bedroom and dead-eyed judgmental scenes of youth. (277) In this light, we accept the voices of his Emo subjects because, underneath their low-quality writing, they produce a “sweet vulnerability” and a “dialogue,” which provides them with a “secret tunnel” out of the loneliness of their bedrooms or unsupportive geographical communities. It’s a theme that hints at the degree to which discussions of Web 2.0 are often heavily connected to arguments about generationalism, framed by the fie

In 2002, the cultural scholar Ben Highmore observed, are witnessing something of an academic boom in every day and he was right.1 The concept of _has indeed emerged as an important organizing principle and theoretical problem in literary and cultural studies, popular culture and media studies, sociology, and across the humanities in general. Recent years have seen the publication of Michael Gardiner's Critiques of Everyday Life (2000) and Highmore's own Everyday Life and Cultural Theory (2002), two excellent overviews of the major theories of everyday life. In 2002, New Literary History devoted a special issue to everyday life, while at the same moment, a special issue of Cultural Critique (Fall 2002) had pre cisely the same focus. When an area of inquiry gets its own Reader you know it has truly arrived, so perhaps the most prominent sign that a field we might think of as life studies is beginning to be consolidated is Routledge's 2002 publi cation of The Everyday Life Reader. Edited by Highmore, this inter disciplinary anthology consists of important theoretical texts on everyday life by a wide variety of thinkers. Scholars devoted more

Ulrich Beck theorized the contemporary world as the ‘age of risk’. Taking the cue from Beck, this paper focuses on the ecological aspect of this risk society which looms large over the life and wellbeing of the entire planet – the intrusion of toxics in our everyday lives – thereby also making it the ‘age of toxicity’. Toxics have permeated the entire ecosystem – from land to water to atmosphere – making it difficult for any life form to escape their impact. The paper attempts to explain the main features of this age of toxicity in an effort to find solutions to this problem. It might be noted that the problem of toxicity is not evenly distributed across the countries and the Global South bears the brunt of the problem. Further, toxicity has a disproportionate impact on the economically weaker and marginalized sections within the developing countries as they are forced by economic circumstances to live in areas which are environmentally degraded and polluted. The paper proposes that toxicity is engendered within a global system structured by three factors– international power conflicts, activities of corporate houses and the consumerist culture – which together create a vicious circle of toxicity. The paper therefore proposes that the concerned civil society groups could advocate policies aimed at weakening this vicious circle of toxicity and campaign for small steps in the direction of larger changes.

Hong Kong has one of the least affordable housing markets in the world, but little is known about its housing advertisements, which constitute important discourses that shape the cultural ideal of homeownership. In many ways, Hong Kong’s property market represents that of other ‘global cities’, which are important nodes of global culture and capital flows. How do private property developers market housing in this context, where the nature of housing has developed from accommodation to investment/speculation? What can housing advertisements tell us about the nature of housing consumption, the role of the state and housing developers in a global city like Hong Kong? Using both content and textual analyses, this article presents findings from a longitudinal study of Hong Kong’s private housing newspaper advertisements between 1961 and 2011 and examines how and why representations of the ideal home have changed. Unlike the existing literature on housing advertisements which are mostly ideological critiques or socio-historical accounts of housing advertisements in consumer capitalism, our analysis utilises insights from Baudrillard’s political economy of the sign and Lipovetsky’s concept of hypermodernity. Our contextual and longitudinal analysis contributes to the existing literature by integrating temporality with the three modalities of housing consumption, that is, as living space, investment and financial speculation. We argue that from the late 1970s onwards, Hong Kong government policy actively promotes homeownership and a housing hierarchy discourse, as housing advertisements changed from emphasising functionalities and everyday living in 1961–1981, to privatised quality living in 1991–2001, and abstract living and ‘hyperindividualistic’ political subjectivity in 2011. By demonstrating the increased abstraction of living, the promotion of the hyperreal, and private housing as objects of financial speculation as evidenced in the construction of ideal homes, we illuminate key features of and inequalities associated with housing advertisements in a global city in neoliberal, late capitalism.

'Everyday life' is today a serious and increasingly fashionable subject of academic study. We have now a sociology, a phenomenology, a philosophy, and a cultural theory of everyday life, drawing on methods as diverse as psychoanalysis, ethnomethodology and dramaturgy in order to capture, comprehend, classify or find sites of resistance or quiet revolution in the daily lives of 'ordinary' people. In one sense, of course, everyday life is the common portion of humanity, peculiar to no time or place; yet, as sociologists attest, 'there is another sense in which everyday life is a relatively recent invention'.1 It is generally agreed that the work of Georg Lukács in the 1920s marks the earliest appearance of a fully developed concept of everyday life,2 a concept that emerges out of a number of shifts within Western social and cultural life over the course of the late eighteenth and nineteenth centuries.

Risk perception and the cultural theory of risk have often been contrasted in relation to risk-related policy making; however, the local context in which risks are experienced, an important component of everyday decision making, remains understudied. What is unclear is the extent to which localized community beliefs and behaviors depend on larger belief systems about risk (i.e., worldviews). This article reports on a study designed to understand the relative importance of health risk perceptions (threat of harm); risk-related worldviews (cultural biases); and the experiences of local context (situated risk) for predicting risk-related policy preferences regarding cosmetic pesticides. Responses to a random telephone questionnaire are used to compare residents' risk perceptions, cultural biases, and pesticide bylaw preferences in Calgary (Alberta), Halifax (Nova Scotia), and London (Ontario), Canada. Logistic regression shows that the most important determinants of pesticide bylaw preference are risk perception, lack of benefit, and pesticide "abstinence." Though perception of health risk is the best single predictor of differences in bylaw preferences, social factors such as gender and situated risk factors like conflict over chemical pesticides, are also important. Though cultural biases are not important predictors of pesticide bylaw preference, as in other studies, they are significant predictors of health risk perception. Pesticide bylaw preference is therefore more than just a health risk perception or worldview issue; it is also about how health risk becomes situated-contextually-in the experiences of residents' everyday lives.

Making an Impact: Cultural Studies, Media and Contemporary Work

Since the mid-1990s there has been an extraordinary proliferation of representations of maternity within popular culture, arts, literature, politics, consumer culture and ‘everyday life’. The fascination with celebrity pregnancy and motherhood, the emergence of ‘momoir’ literary genres, a new emphasis on the maternal in the visual and performance arts and the ascendance of ‘Maternal TV’ reality formats, are indicative of this new visibility. The maternal is no longer confined to traditionally domestic or child-orientated spaces, such as private homes, hospitals, parks and playgrounds,1 but is present in spectacularly public forms: think of British artist Marc Quinn’s 12ft statue of a naked, heavily pregnant, disabled artist Alison Lapper, in Trafalgar Square, London in 2005 (see Betterton, 2006) or pregnant beauty contests (see Longhurst, 2000).