Conclusion
‘Routine’ is a performative term in a fairly conventional way: it is not our neutral descriptor but is rather a term through which practices are structured and valorized. Given the history of critiques of everyday life from which we started, we need to regard it as a fairly strongly charged term. Obviously, this also raises the question of our own analytical use of the term: what new positions on practice, what ethical framings might arise from topicalizing routine in a volume and research agenda such as this one? What do we do to practices by researching them under the category of ‘routine’?
The aim of this chapter has been rather more limited, simply desiring to highlight this performativity, and to explore some of the diversity of ethical framings that might arise in the process of acting on the notion of routine. In our examples, the respective framings might be described as critical, technical and normative: routine as the critical negation of agentic consciousness (the hobby); routine as technique for transcending unthinking routine (mindful meditation); routine as an identification of normative practices (everyday life in the North; chaos in the South). These framings contrast nicely but do not claim to exhaust the field or constitute specific dimensions to be applied elsewhere; they are just examples.
Nonetheless there are at least two central features running through the three examples which warrant treating their juxtaposition as more than simply random, as indicating themes to be pursued more generally. Firstly, in all three there is a concern with the ‘quality’ of experience, and in particular as this is manifested in different temporalities. The hobby is problematic for critics of alienation because it replicates the temporalities of alienated, mechanized labour on the very terrain of ‘free time’. By contrast, the supposedly mundane character of Northern technology use testifies to its internalization of the temporalities of the ‘new economy’, to kwame obranyi’s capacity to be governed by such things as networking, digital efficiencies, efficient information circulation – to live in a new kind of temporal flow of practice that is allied to the future. The practitioner of Tai Chi or meditation inculcates a notion of cyclical time within an open-ended flow of experience: it disrupts ‘normal’ temporalities in order to transform the practitioner’s relationship to them. Temporalities may be the symptom or the technique; what is at stake in the ethical framing of routine is the quality of everyday experience.
Secondly, the label of ‘routine’ assesses experience in relation to structure, constraint, something external and determining. However we might like, rightly, to cleanse our analytical languages of the structure/agency dichotomy, it is alive and kicking in the notion of routine: what is at stake is the way in which actors deal with the sedimentations of structure within everyday life. The critical take on hobbies tells a story about experience as colonized by structure, structured unconsciously so as to replicate and reproduce the capitalist system. The meditation story is about the reclamation of experience from habitual operations in an ordered world. The technology story is about how to achieve normative experience, experience structured by a desired future of global development. In this contrast, recurrent practices may be seen as variously tied to reproduction (they may keep systems alive, may contest them, may be central to anchoring them in a new place), but the very invocation of ‘routine’ as a way of seeing practices testifies to a concern with how different structures of experience mediate something big and out there.
The Ethics of Routine
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