The opposite of routine, in this framing, involves radical and conscious rupture: revolutionary praxis, ‘situations’, Marcusian libidinal hedonism and Adornian autonomy – all forms of intransigent and reflexive non-complicity. There’s also a strong dash of ‘authenticity’ running through this tradition: routine as alienation diverts the evolution of human species-being in directions that are warped and subordinated to systemic needs (as in Leo Lowenthal’s famous characterization of mass culture as ‘psychoanalysis in reverse’ [cited in Jay 1996 [1973]: 173], as increasingly neurotic adaptations); whereas a radical rupture with everyday life presages human evolution pursued according to its own intrinsic logic. The romanticism at the root of this ethical vision is fairly clear, and comes to its full flowering in the 1960s, in often highly gendered ways. The hero of the ‘revolution in everyday life’, like the hero of artistic romanticism from the 1780s onwards, allows himself to be directed by forces – libido, history, spontaneity – that fracture routine and fracture his routine/routinized self. At the limits, this way of thinking and acting is not only anti-bureaucratic but contests the very notion of structure itself, of stabilization or normality – all of which are intrinsically oppressive (because they are stable structures). Poststructuralisms, particularly of the Deleuzian sort, persist in all this.
This ethical framing of everyday routine has consequentially framed consumption studies for many generations: consumption long appeared as the exemplary site of routinized alienation and oppressive normality, in which the appearance of constant change, variety, desire and satisfaction is unveiled, through critique, to be in reality the routine and eternal recurrence of the ever-same – a conveyor belt of programmed choices that is the very opposite of free choice. The move against older theories of consumption really starts with cultural studies, which was driven specifically by its desire to find radical political agency located in those spectacular sub-cultures that turned the everyday inside out. And yet, sub-cultures appeared as ruptural interventions, thus allowing the cultural studies analyst to persist in regarding normal, everyday life as dead, unconscious, conservative and without agency – in a word, routinized. By contrast, the emergence of contemporary consumption studies has been conditional on rejecting this problematic, and re-valorizing the everyday as a site of agency, negotiation, creativity and cognition.
Obviously, the tradition of alienation is only one route by which to arrive at this critical framing of routine. Crucially for this volume’s attempt to open up routine as an object of social research, ‘interpretative’ (largely phenomenologically based) challenges to structuralist sociology have long relied on a view of everyday routine as taken-for-granted, unthinking, ‘bracketed’, and only brought to light – reflection, critique, change – in extra-ordinary moments of rupture. Truth lies in those moments when we briefly awake; and this includes sociological truth, as exemplified in Garfinkel’s famous routine-breaking experiments. Similarly, Latour – in this respect entirely true to his own ethnomethodological origins – defines his ‘sociology of associations’ as the tracing of associations in the process of their assemblage; he allows that a ‘sociology of the social’ is entirely appropriate for the already-assembled, ‘to designate a stabilized state of affairs’ (2005: 1). Only the not (yet) routine is sociologically or politically interesting.
The Ethics of Routine
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