A second example is offered by ‘Eastern practices’ as assimilated in Western contexts – specifically Tai Chi and Buddhist meditation. These are practices based on a phenomenological engagement with routine: the endless but conscious repetition of the same few movements or breaths. In contrast to the first example, the aim is non-judgemental – neither to reject nor to embrace routines, but to enter into them with constant attention and consciousness. Routine is constituted as a technology aimed at increasing the ‘skilfulness’ with which one deals with the everyday, the inculcation of a kind of non-routinized response to the routine. The subject to emerge from this training is ‘skilful’ in that s/he is able to respond creatively to events rather than be overwhelmed by them or by habitual adaptations.
A final example – technology use in Ghana – contrasts with the first two in that unreflexive routine is highly valued. Routine and unthinking use of the internet in the North is treated as clear evidence of Northern superiority over Africa. Moreover, already-routinized Northern technology uses are stabilized and transmitted by official ICT (information and communication technologies) policies. By contrast, local technology use – however stably routinized – is negatively valorized as irrational and traditional.
Routine as Alienation
In critical theory, routine is part of a characterization of everyday life as reified and alienated. Particularly in the tradition that runs from Hegel through Marx, Lukács, Lefebvre and then Situationism and Baudrillard, the routinization of everyday life derives from a systematization of the world, which is experienced as natural and lawlike rather than historical and resulting from human agency (see, for example, Gardiner 2000; Lefebvre 1971, 1991 [1947]; Vaneigem 1979 [1963–1965]). Routine is therefore not just a subsumption under system constraints but also a loss of critical consciousness of the grounds of our own subordination. Routine constitutes a double loss of agency: we are caught up in a programmed flow of events; and we are unable to see that it is indeed a programme, and one we could change. In several variants, particularly in the work of Agnes Heller (e.g. 1984), the routine, the normal and the everyday are synonymous: it’s all bleakly mechanized and devoid of critical consciousness. Any practices conducted on this terrain are in principle complicit with the system, as in Adorno’s (1991) notion of the recuperative function of all consumption of culture industry products.
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• Don Slater