The Ethics of Routine Consciousness, Tedium and Value Don Slater
Introduction
This chapter opens up a slightly different analytical level: the ‘ethical framing of routine’. We need to look not only at empirically occurring routines, but also at the normative or ethical framing of the very notion of ‘routine’, ‘the routine’ (or the mundane, the habitual, the taken-for-granted), ‘being routine’, ‘routinization’. Notions like ‘routine’ and its cognates are labels that accord particular social status and value to forms of action and practice, and that strategically stabilize them in specific ways. This is true in two senses. Firstly, to label a structure of action ‘routine’ is always already a value judgement or ethical framing. As we will explore in a first example (the hobby), the idea of ‘routines’ occupies a conventional role in many Western moral cosmologies: routine distinguishes unthinking conformist ‘behaviour’ from critically conscious and ruptural ‘action’.
But beyond the question of moral judgement, I want to press a second, stronger claim, that the ethical framing of ‘routine’ is central to the different ways in which routines are themselves constructed and then related to other practices. In this sense, discourses on routine should be considered as performative, and processes of routinization (whether successful or resisted) centrally involve participants in taking an attitude to routinization itself: that is to say, the notion of ‘routine’ is topicalized by actors themselves, and this is consequential in the production (or the flouting) of routine. The way people frame the very notion of ‘routine’ becomes, in these circumstances, ‘ethical’ in the old Foucauldian sense – it is part of that orientation to the self by which we organize our subjectivity through the conduct of conduct; it is part of how we take a strategic position on self and other.
I’d like to explore this ethical framing of routine through some examples, any or all of which might be deemed eccentric: they were chosen simply to invoke this particular level of analysis and to argue that it might add something to the study of routines. No particular typology is being suggested. However, the contrast between the three examples is very sharp, and suggests a central issue that might be germane to this kind of analysis: actions are being framed and evaluated – very differently in each case – in terms of their potential for expanding or contracting social agency, reflexivity and critical consciousness. What is ethically at stake in invoking the very idea of routine is the question of whether participants are reflexively in control of the flow of events. We therefore start with Western Marxism, in which ‘routine’ indexes the systemic reification or colonization of everyday life, and always constitutes a diminution of agency or increase of alienation. This is of course only one Western tradition, but it provides a very strong statement of a common modern rejection of everyday life as routinized and therefore debased. The idea of a hobby provides an example: to label and organize a practice in the form of a hobby came to symbolize the illusion of freedom and social significance experienced within a reality of constricted and routinized private obsession.
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