Time, Consumption and Everyday Life Practice, Materiality and Culture

1. http://archive.corren.se/archive/2006/10/27/ix6llnpjjto6z9d.xml (accessed

3 April 2009). I have translated all quotes which originally appeared in Swedish.

1. http://www.corren.se/asikter/forum/archive/2006/10/43/ix6lndqpfwc4n7t. xml?category1=1097835189-26&category2=1100702641-0& (accessed 3 April 2009).

1. Admittedly, the car, and act of commuting by car, has received a growing degree of scholarly attention in recent years (Laurier 2004; Miller 2001; O’Dell 1997; Thrift 2004); however, the cultural dynamics surrounding commuter trains and buses has remained largely overlooked in the literature (although see Evans and Wener 2006 for a psychological consideration of stress amongst rail commuters). In contrast, there is a great deal of literature of a more technical nature focusing on such things as air quality in trains, risk management, engineering advances, and so on (see, e.g., Letherby and Reynolds 2005).

1. For example, fights over the seats for the physically disabled were, if nothing else, fights over the cultural identity of being not only ‘disabled’ but even ‘most disabled’.

1. In November and December 2006, one of the local newspapers in southern Sweden carried a series of articles that critically described the crowded conditions on the commuter trains running in the region. The two quotes presented here are parts of letters that were sent to the newspaper in response to their articles, and later published on the newspaper’s homepage (see http://sydsvenskan.se/skane/ article199243.ece?context=print, accessed 3 April 2009).

1. This ritual of departure is so exact that some of the people the Folk Life Archive in Lund interviewed reported that they even set their clocks and daily rhythms based upon the departure time of neighbours (see Ewert 2007).

1. It is interesting to note that while Swedes generally regard themselves as a conflictavoiding people (see Daun 1996), the ritualized form of aggressivity expressed here is strongly bound to the public sphere in times of crowding. It would never be tolerated in the home or amongst friends.

References

My Soul for a Seat

97

98

• Tom O’Dell

Routines – Made and Unmade Billy Ehn and Orvar Löfgren

Introduction

– So what did you do today?

– Nothing, just the usual things . . . .

Such an exchange presents a challenge for cultural analysis. What’s going on when nothing seems to happen? If you ask people to narrate what they have done during the day, they might answer like this or just mention something that happened out of the ordinary. It is rare that people start listing all the minor routines that carried them from the bed to work, and if they did, all the details would probably feel extremely tedious. If we were really persistent ethnographers, trying to either observe or interview about such routines, the chances are that even then we would miss many of the small micro-routines, bodily reactions or examples of ‘just going through the movements’, which seem more like reflexes than culturally learned habits.

Doing Nothing?

This problematic has been a starting point for a research project titled The Secret World of Doing Nothing (see Ehn and Löfgren 2007, in press). In this chapter we draw on our ongoing work, looking at the large undercurrent of routines, creating rhythms and temporalities in everyday life, rarely noticed or reflected upon. We want to explore some aspects of how this undercurrent is made visible or slowly sinks into invisibility. How is an activity routinized into a habit? Why is it that some activities form more or less unnoticed platforms for other, more conscious activities? In many everyday situations the autopilot takes care of the routines and sets the body or mind free for other parallel activities.

Routines are interesting because their seeming insignificance or invisibility may hide questions of power, freedom and control, for example in the power play of ‘my routines, your bad habits’. By looking ethnographically closer at certain routines, we also want to destabilize the notion that they are about ‘just going through the same movements’. The repetitious nature of routines often hides important micro-changes that eventually may transform them into something else.

99

The word ‘routine’ is actually the diminutive of route, the making of small paths in everyday lives, and this metaphor can be useful to remember. When is a chosen route repeated enough to become a trail, and how are trails redirected, narrowed or broadened in ways that slowly may change them? One important aspect of comparing routines with paths is that once the path is established the moment of conscious choice is diminished. Most routines are likewise usually performed without second thoughts. But if you stop people and ask why and how they walk a certain trail or perform their mundane tasks, they are ready to answer you in detail.

There is a striking vagueness in the terminology surrounding the spaces between choice and ingrained habit. The classic discussions of routines and habituation in the works of scholars like Gregory Bateson (1973), Pierre Bourdieu (1977), Michel de Certeau (1984) and Norbert Elias (1978 [1939]) may be contrasted with some more recent studies of the field undertaken by Jean-Claude Kaufmann (1997), Elizabeth Shove (2003; Shove et al. 2007) and Ben Highmore (2004), who all try to develop a more nuanced understanding of how routines work in our daily lives.

The concepts of routine and habit have a specific Western history. The old world was seen as a system where ‘custom was king’, keeping people in the grip of unchangeable traditions. Habits belonged to the reform project of modernity. Bad ones should be exchanged for better ones, new routines should reorganize and discipline the everyday clutter of activities (see, for example, the discussion in Ehn and Löfgren 2007 and Highmore 2004). There are still moral or value charges in these concepts. Just think about the differences between sexual routines, which sound rather dull and mechanic, sexual habits, which may contain whatever one can imagine, and sexual rituals, which point to something more symbolically coded than a simple question of lust and desire.

For most people routines are linked to order, predictability and control, or, as Richard Sennett has put it: ‘To imagine a life of momentary impulses, of short-term action, devoid of sustainable routines, a life without habits, is to imagine indeed a mindless existence’ (1998: 44). They can be seen as tools for organizing the flow of time, and in this process create temporal rhythms and patterns, by sequencing and synchronization. They can also be seen as manuals for what has to be done in everyday life or as maps of our lives where some activities are charted in detail. As economizing devices they may help us to avoid making a myriad choices or reflect about alternatives in recurring situations, something that otherwise may drive us crazy.

Routines are of course much more than a survival technique; they constitute a cultural field full of tensions and paradoxes. What kinds of meanings and values are hidden in daily routines, and how are they related to questions of power, control or freedom? Routines can often provoke conflicts, but again their invisibility or takenfor-grantedness often makes such conflicts difficult to grasp and handle.

100

Billy Ehn and Orvar Löfgren

Polarities

We would like to start our discussion by exploring some of these polarities. The first one is the juxtaposition of routines as either constraining straitjackets or supportive corsets. There are routines described as (self-made) prisons of ingrained and inflexible habits that constrain actors or prevent people from changing their life, and then there is the opposite view of routines as a comforting and helpful supportive structure that offers security and predictability as well as making it possible to combine many tasks with other activities – from daydreaming to other kinds of multi-tasking. Routines thus may work as a liberating force, providing energy for other things.

Another polarity takes the degree of conscious reflection as a starting point. There is a continuum from mechanical – reflex-like – routines over to emotionally charged habits, collective traditions and symbolically elaborated rituals. Mundane activities can change both ways: rituals can turn into mindless reflexes, and even the most trivial routines may be transformed into more conscious acts, something people experience as reassuring, and comforting or give some symbolic meaning.

The third polarity has to do with ideas of routines as collective patterns as opposed to intensely personal ones. Habits may be described as sets of shared practices that make society possible – as something we are forced to do. Then there is the kind of routines that are described as intensely personal – a secret or mystical world that people create on their own and that become a central part of their self-definition.

Our point is that polarities like the ones above may hide the constant possibilities of transformation found in routines. We are interested in the ways in which an unnoticed routine may become an everyday ritual, or how a routine can be transformed from a feeling of security to one of constraint. How may an unproblematic habit develop into a heatedly contested practice, and how may routines that are seen as intensely personal also show some striking collective, cultural patterns?

Questions like these call for an analysis of situations of transformation, crisis or confrontation, and our approach is to focus on at two major kinds of change: routines made or un-made.

Integrating and absorbing new tasks, skills, objects and ideas into the patterns of everyday affairs is a basic process in individual and social life. By repetition these novelties turn into effortless activities, slowly sinking into the unconscious – but how?

One way of approaching this question would be to develop detailed ethnographies. By observing and describing routines in detail, we ought to find out how they are put together and coordinated, how they are synchronized with other tasks and become part of a daily rhythm. From such ethnography we could move on to explore how they have been learned, perfected or changed.

Routines – Made and Unmade

101

How is a routine born? As the path we earlier mentioned, one step followed by the next, and the next . . ., as a practical solution to a specific problem, or as a way of ordering the rhythms of the day, week, year, life? Every new choice or willed action may be the starting point for creating a new habit that sooner or later will turn the task into something taken for granted, as Colin Campbell (1996) has pointed out.

By turning the viewpoint and instead studying situations in which self-evident routines become visible and problematic, we may learn more about the hidden meanings of seemingly inconspicuous everyday behaviour. In situations of crisis the routines of the ordinary day are lost and may be strongly missed. In extreme situations of war and catastrophe people try to reconstruct whatever they can of normal life, but they may also discover how important some of these seemingly trivial routines were in their former lives.

Morning Routines

If you ask people about their routines, they often start with their morning habits, and this is not only because it feels like a natural start. Morning routines are about staggering from sleep to awakening, to get body and mind ready for a new day. Mornings are vulnerable times.

‘What is so loaded about morning routines?’, the sociologist Christina Nippert-Eng asked in her interview study of how Americans organize their lives between home and work. If we are preparing ourselves for a new working day, routines may work as a warming-up, she says. They ease the daily shifts between home and work. The mindless activities prepare us for the mindful ones (Nippert-Eng 1996: 113ff.). For some people this passage is always demanding, and calls for small tricks of mental reframing. Already before they have left the breakfast table the rest of the family may feel that they are long gone – mentally they are already out of the house.

One of the informants, June, needs to vacuum the kitchen floor before leaving, others keep checking their tie knot or shine their shoes in anticipation of the raid into public life. When Nippert-Eng listens to these morning stories she thinks of the anthropologist Evans-Pritchard’s classic study of the ways the Nuer used ceremonial spears that many men carried with them, not as weapons but as mental supports. Where do we find such ceremonial spears in American life, she asks, and decides on the coffee mug carried in a firm grip on the journey to work.

One could, however, have chosen other examples. Let us take up one of them: the morning routine of putting on make-up. This is a practice with complex meanings that calls for a lot of learning before it can be turned into a mechanical routine. It is also a habit charged with different content, from the daily minutes in front of the mirror, to situations where this routine becomes a very conscious and well-planned ritual, as when you are preparing for a new exciting date or an important public appearance.

102

Billy Ehn and Orvar Löfgren

This is how one woman describes her daily make-up, which usually takes 10–15 minutes of work every morning and maybe later some extra moments with the compact during the rest of the day. For those who are part of the same routine this is a well-known territory, for others it may seem more exotic. In the interview this woman was struck by how little she usually reflected over her morning session and all its complexity, the many elements that have to be organized into a detailed order and rhythm: cleaning the face, putting on foundation, shadows for the eye-lids, a brush for the eye-lashes, mascara pen for the eye-brows, and finally lipstick and rouge, to name a few of the basic details. The hands move fast and confident in the heap of tools, containers and other props in the make-up bag, searching for the right ingredients, colours and mixes. ‘Even if I have done this a thousand times, the woman said, ‘it still calls for concentration and a steady hand.’ But this does not prevent her mind from wandering. Putting on make-up is for her a moment of daydreaming and planning.

This is a morning situation where both the body and the mind are prepared for the coming day and the raid out into public life. It is a routine that calls for certain choices, about colours and clothes, improvisation or perfection. Do you have to put on make-up for days at home or during vacations? ‘It happens that I forget to put on make-up’, the woman continues, ‘but never if it is a day for work or a party. When I was younger make-up could feel like a must, something my social environment demanded of me, but as an adult I can feel OK without make-up.’

Many women remember strongly how they learned to master this routine, starting out with make-up experiments on dolls or having secret sessions with friends. This particular woman started as an 11-year-old, being taught by her older sister. She remembers the excitement because it felt like a rebellion against the teachers, who had forbidden make-up in school. Make-up has always been surrounded by many unwritten rules, moral judgements and taboos. What level is too much, thus vulgar or just right? What constitutes discreet make-up, and who decides the rules? Should women use make-up at all? You just have to enter the internet to follow the intense discussions about right and wrong, a very complex moral and even ideological universe, linking the private routine both to the multinational cosmetics industry and to debates over gender struggles.

Back to our informant – why does she put on make-up? ‘It’s a way of feeling good’, she answers, ‘you wake up feeling pale and greyish, but afterwards you suddenly look alert and nice, with rouge and all that other stuff.’ Your skin also grows accustomed to this daily treatment, she says, and you become dependent on moisturizing creams.

Make-up is thus a double act of organizing time by using cosmetics: directed outwards, something done, with the help of more or less expensive goods, to look better and get the appreciation of others, but also a more inward-directed, private and meditative activity where you may be pondering about existential questions of meaning, identity and beauty. In this morning routine the personal and the cultural aspects are intertwined in a number of acquired skills of repetition, the self is strengthened and is at the same time connected to millions of other women.

Routines – Made and Unmade

103

When we asked a few hundred female students, mainly between 20 and 40, to write down their morning make-up habits, we got very diverse answers. For many of the students this act is very important for their appearance and self-esteem, ‘the most important 10 minutes of the day’, while others think it is a waste of time and money; for them it is better to look ‘natural’. Some women reported that they love to put on make-up, it is a cherished moment of stillness and self-absorption, while others said that they hate it as a stressing and demanding time-thief. They complained that they were usually hardly awake and that they should be running for the bus or subway. In some cases the stress got worse by small children, teenagers or a partner competing for the bathroom space. While some women felt that they were painting their face in order to emphasize their ‘true self’, others said that they painted a mask to hide themselves.

This routine can be intensely private and solitary, but also a collective act, going to make-up parties, a beauty salon or engaged in together with one’s best friend. Make-up also provides a popular topic for conversation between women, trading tips of new brands or techniques, commenting on the looks of others.

A detailed ethnography of make-up teaches us much about how routines are made and changed, according to the context. It also focuses on the ways in which a routine may move on a continuum from an insignificant mundane activity to an act with strong symbolic charges. On the one hand it can be experienced as a banal activity, on the other as a cultural practice full of meanings and evaluations concerning gender, body, power, control and the politics of beauty.

Even less striking routines, for example brushing your teeth, have a similar complexity, and are transformed by time and context. Just the same old routine, day after day, year after year – but yet not. The technology may change; you might experiment with a new toothpaste. At the same time many people look in the mirror at a person constantly changing, a face that some mornings seem very familiar and other days rather unfamiliar. Some people even feel that they are losing control of their life when they do not brush their teeth or have forgotten their brush. An act of personal hygiene is transformed into a kind of moral rearmament. And what about the feelings that are aroused when your partner never learns to put back the cap on the toothpaste tube?

My Routines, Your Bad Habits

Our interest is directed to situations where routines all of a sudden become visible. Changes in the life cycle may bring them up to the surface in different ways. One such transformation is couple making. Two individuals with each their own set of ingrained habits have to negotiate a shared household or everyday life. My normal routines are confronted with your strange habits.

104

Billy Ehn and Orvar Löfgren

The French sociologist Jean-Claude Kaufmann (2002) has analysed the first step in this process in an interview study about ‘the first morning’ of a new relationship. People are remembering how it felt to wake up in a new setting in what may be the start of a life-long relationship or just a temporary love affair. As two strangers start to share a morning together they often find themselves manoeuvring in a mine-field, where the tiniest routine may become endearing or provocative. For some of the interviewed couples the magic of new romance makes anything acceptable, while others start looking at the new partner’s morning routines in order to find out if this is a kind of person they are ready to share their life with.

Colombine remembers that first morning like this: ‘In the beginning this was an unknown house, with strange drawers and food you normally wouldn’t eat – it was a journey of discovery, a total discovery.’ With eyes wide open she enters the bathroom, checks the fridge and secretly glances at the photos on the desk. As a guest in this new morning universe she is cautious and lets her new partner get the breakfast things and give the morning its shape and rhythm.

Anna wakes up surrounded by her new partner’s family. In spite of the friendly atmosphere, she is trying to make herself as invisible as possible, all the time afraid she will lose her face. Every gadget or task seems like a potential trap.

It was not until the third day that Vincent realized he had committed a deadly sin by using the wash basin to the left in the bathroom. It was strictly reserved for the father in the house and the rest of the family had to use the one on the right. ‘I thought this was comical, I just couldn’t get it,’ he remembers.

The new couple watches each other’s behaviour, adapts or feels provoked. Many feel petty in their judgements of the other person’s habits; even the smallest detail gathers great importance. Is it important to shower before breakfast? Can one blow one’s nose on a piece of toilet paper? What is seen as cute and what seems awkward or perhaps even revolting?

As morning follows morning a de- or reroutinization takes place. What kinds of morning routines are you ready to compromise about? As the first intense passion fades away, the tolerance for what is seen as strange behaviour diminishes. You no longer want to live as a guest.

When Isa visited Tristan she felt like a different woman who accepted the strangest habits, like having spaghetti and cheese for breakfast, or going along with the very slow rhythm of her new boyfriend’s morning routines. But the day she decided to move in with him, she started to see his habits with new eyes: ‘As I opened my suitcase I felt like changing everything according to my own needs.’ Others tell that it was through confrontations like these they realized how obsessed they were with their own routines. Why were they so immensely important?

Routines – Made and Unmade

105

A Cultural Battleground

As new couples try to build up routines together, they synchronize interests and habits. When they create a shared choreography of working together in the kitchen, and keeping a certain order in the bathroom, another aspect of routines comes into the foreground: their potential as a battleground.

The derogatory dimension of a word like routine or habit (see the discussion in Highmore 2002) can be used to ignore or devalue the activities of others. ‘It’s only a habit’ can be stated with a shrug of the shoulders, ‘nothing to fight about’. On the contrary it is the taken-for-grantedness of routines and the ways in which they are anchored in our bodies that make them important. ‘They are just a part of me!’ If they are challenged or questioned, as often happens in a new domestic partnership, this is no little thing.

In her study of couple making Sarah Holst Kjær (2009) discusses the ways in which everyday routines easily are transformed into my good habits and your bad ones. She follows young couples from the kitchen sink to the TV-sofa and the bathroom and shows how important it is for them to synchronize their individual habits into common routines. They try to find a shared rhythm and get into a lot of discussions about what kinds of everyday behaviour they find ‘immensely irritating’.

At the same time stereotypes of male and female are reproduced and often used as argument for what is important or not. Who takes the role of the expert of how things should be done in the kitchen and what kinds of arguments about right or wrong are used? In this early manoeuvring, life-long divisions of labour or hierarchies of the importance of routines may be established. (For other discussions of such domestic conflicts, see Kaufmann 2006 and Pink 2004.) Again, we may follow how certain routines are seen as crucial or central to people’s ideas about what kind of person they really are.

As households and families develop steady routines, there are still challenges that can make even the tiniest difference irritating. You can hear who is coming or going by just listening to the way the door is closed, and there might be endless negotiations about what doors should be kept open or closed. In a study of conjugal conflicts there was the couple who waged a constant battle about the door to the kitchen (Lindvall 1983). As sure as the husband kept it open, the wife closed it with an irritating slam. Their different routines turned out to have to do with their class background. He had grown up in a working-class family where the kitchen was the centre of the home, where everybody congregated and all kinds of activities occurred. In her upper-class childhood the kitchen was a territory strictly reserved for cooking and the smell of food seeping in through the rest of the flat was a sign of vulgarity. Everything must have its own place and time!

Sarah Holst Kjær recounts another situation. She is visiting an older woman whose husband has just died. The woman is sitting at the kitchen table with bruises on her forehead and tells Sarah that it is only now she realizes that her husband silently went around and closed all the kitchen cabinet doors that she used to leave wide open.

106

Billy Ehn and Orvar Löfgren