How do moments and episodes of practice combine to form new configurations, and how do these combinations play out in the longer run? In addressing this question, chapters by Billy Ehn and Orvar Löfgren and by Tom O’Dell elaborate on a series of middle-range concepts like those of routine, career and generation. The daily rhythm of commuting exists before and persists beyond the ‘career’ of any single commuter – at the same time, that regular flow of people from home to work and back is felt in the precise timing of the bike ride to the station and in the seconds saved and spent along the way. These contributions provide us with insights into how micro-social temporalities, including the detailed scheduling of the day, play out across years, over decades and between generations.
Routine and Rupture
While much of the existing literature and some of the chapters included in this book concentrate on regularities of habit, ordering only makes sense in relation to processes or threats of disruption and fracture. Frank Trentmann consequently writes about daily life as a process in which permanently fragile orders are ruptured and restored – an approach that positions routine and habit as an outcome not of casual dis-attention but of concerted repair work. As he explains, greater material and technological interdependence has arguably increased the risk of breakdowns in everyday life, and our sensibility towards them. Ironically, the consequences of failure increase the more we rely upon systems and infrastructures designed to sustain the safe and secure flow of materials, resources and people.
In highlighting intriguing paradoxes in which security begets risk and in which routine and rupture are never far apart, Trentmann’s contribution disturbs and disrupts conventional representations of time in which the mindless grind of habit is set against the energizing thrill of spontaneity. As Don Slater’s chapter shows, we do not come to routines fresh. Routines are positioned, disclosed and evaluated within established ethical frameworks. Many traditions in the West, especially in the line stretching from Marx to the Frankfurt School, have presented routines as structural, non-reflexive processes that alienate individuals from their authentic, true self. Slater’s comparison between the negative evaluation of hobbies in this tradition with quite different framings of meditation and technological routines in other contexts brings to light the considerable ideological and moral work that goes into how and what people see as routines.
Richard Wilk’s essay extends this critique to the level of personal mind and action, showing that the extent to which regularity figures as comfort or constraint is in part a matter of subjective experience and perception. That ‘choice’ is rarely completely free or sovereign has been a mantra of much recent research. Similarly, we need to recognize that habits are not automatically a tool of disciplinary restraint. They can have liberating features too. It is probably unwise, Wilk argues, to look for different accounts of habitual and spontaneous action or to treat these as somehow separate domains, one marked by discipline the other by liberation, as has been common in much of the human sciences. In part, these chapters can be read as exercises in retrieval, pointing back to more organic treatments of habit and choice which recognized their creative interdependence, most notably exemplified in the works of the pragmatist philosophers William James (1890) and John Dewey (1922).
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Elizabeth Shove, Frank Trentmann and Richard Wilk