Time, Consumption and Everyday Life Practice, Materiality and Culture

Secondly, the hobby is itself a routinized practice: ‘preoccupations with which I had become mindlessly infatuated merely in order to kill time’ versus ‘reading with all my attention’. Listening to music as a hobby ‘would make a mockery’ of music as ‘part and parcel of my life’ not simply because of the resulting endorsement of modern structural features (work/leisure, public/private), but also because the hobbyist frame routinizes practice. ‘Hobbies’ are located in leisure ‘free time’ but are nonetheless structured, organized, bounded and pursued with seriousness and (purposeless) purposiveness. Any practice can be structured in the form of a hobby. Pretty much any object can be given a collectible value, for example; any activity can be given a competitive form (there are international associations for soap box racing enthusiasts, paper plane fliers, etc.) or accredited expertise (there is voluminous help for those pursuing hobbies like ant-farming, photography, etc.). By the same token, any practice can be commodified and hence sold as a hobby; conversely, the sale of many commodities requires the routine structuring of practices into a recognizable hobby. Any or all of these can be combined into a thing called ‘a hobby’ with definitions of approved/included and marginal/excluded variants of the activity or interest, and with organizations, specialist media, gatherings, hierarchies, archives, lobbyists, and so on.

The stabilization of practices in such forms is interesting enough, but it is the ethical framing that concerns us here. If you simply want to pursue or support an interest collectively, then these forms of routinization make complete sense – people organize themselves, and this involves complex and interesting forms of negotiation. However, notions like ‘hobby’ are not neutral descriptions of a social form; they are labels that accord a social status and cast social judgements on particular ways of doing the social. The word ‘hobby’ is never far from a battery of pejoratives like nerd, geek, anorak, twitcher, bubble-heads (an Australian label for scuba-diving enthusiasts), and so on.

These pejoratives have a long modern history that is entirely caught up in the romantic critique of everyday life that I sketched in terms of critical theory traditions.

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I can only gesture at some key moments in that history. For example, the idea of a hobby first emerges as a popular label in the late nineteenth century from the English ‘riding your hobby horse’ – a persistent, almost uncontrollable, focus on a private obsession. Bicycle riding and snapshot photography in the 1890s and 1900s were structured, private activities that could attract obsessive involvement, and a worklike level of seriousness and commitment to what was – after all – a merely private and leisure enjoyment. In the 1930s, hobbies were prescribed for unemployed men to give structure and purpose to a life without public significance and pay. The hobby was both approved as socially responsible (an extension of nineteenth-century espousals of ‘rational recreation’ to both improve and control working-class men in the interest of public order) and at the same time seen to demean: to be involved in a hobby is to treat as serious and consequential what is really only a replication or simulation of ‘real work’, while at the same time the hobby structures and routinizes private, leisure time, and emasculates the working-class man. This latter theme continues strongly into the 1950s and 1960s, in which the hobby is seen as part of the feminization and domestication of the rising new middle-class men, as intrinsic to suburbanization: men are to return from the public world of work directly to their ideal home (and not by way of the pub); the hobby is designed to structure their time and activities in a home in which they have no pursposive activity under the prevailing gender division of labour. Indeed, hobbies were routinely discussed in terms of therapy (office workers and junior managers need hobbies to unwind after work so they don’t get ulcers) and in terms of keeping the man from getting in the way/under the feet of the home-making woman. The phenomenon of Playboy magazine in the late 50s and 60s is interesting in defining a new version of male consumerism that was libidinal rather than domestic, and not subordinated to the logic of suburban home-making routines (Ehrenreich 1983).

‘Hobby’ was therefore a judgement upon those who believed themselves to have found a self-defined sphere of free and purposeful activity contained within a freely chosen sociality: in fact their activities are densely and obsessively structured, and in ways that replicate the world of work but without its reality and consequentiality. Hobbies are rather silly ‘escape attempts’ by people who believe themselves to be doing something serious and free but are in fact constrained by much larger structures (unemployment, suburban domesticity). The very framing of practices as hobbies is – within critical thought – a judgement on the inconsequentially routinized nature of everyday life.

Routine as Technique

In critical thought, the figure of the hobby brings out the intrinsic silliness of routine as a potential site of meaning, agency, consciousness or rupture. Adorno’s pride in ‘reading with all my attention’ inherently requires and asserts his rejection of the work/leisure dichotomy: to regard his own reading as a ‘hobby’ would routinize it as a stable practice within a stabilized diremption of the modern world. Even to frame his reading as routine – let alone to practise it as one – is a fatal surrender of critical consciousness.

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Now for something completely different: Western Buddhist meditation and Tai Chi (which might themselves be treated, unkindly, as hobbies) methodically treat routine as the very ground of consciousness and as a technical means to maintain an alert and reflexive orientation to the world. Tai Chi is literally a routine. Students will take several years to learn a sequence of movements – a ‘form’ – that may comprise anything from 24 to over 100 individual moves. The practice of Tai Chi is simply the daily repetition of this routine over many years, and – more than this – constant and alert attention to the most microscopic nuances of each movement on each repetition. The essentials of progress are consistent and banal: you start by learning mechanical movements – this arm goes there, shift your weight onto the left leg, twist to the north now, and so on. Repeat several times a day with unwavering attention to the slightest shifts in breath, centre of gravity, balance, weight, intentionality. Over time and repetition, the movements are said to become increasingly ‘internal’ – you no longer move bits of your body; rather you move your waist (specifically your Dan Tien, a point just below the navel) and the rest of you will follow correctly and flowingly.

Daily repetition of Tai Chi is akin to an actor doing seven evening performances plus two matinees a week of the same show, or a musician rehearsing the same few pieces: how to infuse routine with life, how to treat each performance in an endless sequence as if it were the only one; and, of course, how to remain alert and alive doing what should, by rights, be numbingly boring. Tai Chi must be performed – over and over again – with total concentration (when it lapses, you might actually fall over). Moreover it is simultaneously a ‘moving meditation’ (accomplishment is partly defined by consistent clarity of focus on an object, as in any meditation); a mode of relaxation (but not rest – it can be very strenuous across the form, but each move must be performed without apparent effort); and a martial art (it must be performed as if your life depended on the proper focusing of energy in each repetitive move).

At the same time there is something wonderfully banal about Tai Chi. As I was informed in one class: when the master says, ‘put your arm there’, he simply means, ‘put your arm there’ – don’t look for any deeper meaning. This gives an inkling of the deep seriousness of routine in Tai Chi: one does not think about routine, one enters into it entirely, so that one literally flows through the movements, and the movements (of your balance, centre of gravity, Dan Tien) move you. This is akin to the Western reception of Zen and the art of archery, motorcycle maintenance, guitar, flower arranging, calligraphy, whatever – any flow of events can serve as the vehicle for the same kind of immersion, the point being the merging of self (body and mind) into the flow. One is often told that you can do Tai Chi standing still, without moving, as long as you stand there in ‘a Tai Chi way’. Routine is a way into what phenomenologists might call (here literally) a flow mentality; it stabilizes the very idea of movement into a structured form so that one can foreground and experience the notion of flow in itself.

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Hence Tai Chi invokes very different relationships between routine and consciousness, and between routine and structure, than in the case of Western critical theory. The Tai Chi form is itself a technique, and its repetitive performance should inculcate an immersion that is in fact acutely and persistently conscious. It’s a tricky dialectic: there can be no mastery without routine repetition; but each repetition is a unique event. The experience of Tai Chi over time is of an increasingly microscopic attention to the finest differences in movement. Each of the zillion repetitions is different, and awareness of that uniqueness, that now-ness, is integral to knowing that you are doing Tai Chi.

Discourses on Tai Chi rather pride themselves on being unable to express very much – ‘Don’t ask me about the Chi, just make sure your knee is positioned directly over your toes.’ Western Buddhism, by contrast, is vociferous. As taught by the UK-based FWBO (Friends of the Western Buddhist Order), meditation starts with the learning of two routines that are to be repeated every day, forever: mindfulness of breathing and the metta bhavana (loving-kindness meditation). Mindfulness of breathing is just that: sit and focus on the flow of your breath, aided by a few techniques (count the in-breaths, then the out-breaths, then focus on the breath entering and leaving the tip of your nose). The central skill – as in Tai Chi – is staying alert, awake and interested throughout what is ostensibly extraordinarily, crushingly boring: following your breath for 30–45 minutes a day. There is constant joking about falling asleep during meditation, and snoring in the meditation room. Training conventionally starts by asking students to walk around the room and find something, anything, to be interested in, then to cultivate that interest – the corner of that cushion is blue with frayed tassels; is the material warm or cool?; who made it? Meditation normally starts with a body scan: focus on your toes, then legs, bottom, etc., in each case developing an interest and awareness in any aspect of your experience of those body parts – the feeling of gravity and weight, of temperature, the feel of your clothing, any discomfort, and so on. The point of this is to inculcate a clear and alert concentration on whatever counts as experience in the present moment. The body scan prepares you for the state of mind you are to bring to your breathing: an active interest in whatever is within the current fold of experience. This interest is ideally non-judgemental: its intention is not to do things better or criticize what you are doing or experiencing, but simply to monitor experience in order to be inside its flow, to be here, now. Similarly, in the constant discussion of how to bring meditation into one’s everyday life, the ethical stance to be cultivated is one of disinterested interest: as you wash the dishes, think to yourself, ‘I am washing the dishes’, and bring this same ethically neutral, observational reflexivity to every move you make.

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This routine alertness derives its point, and its difficulty, by contrast with routine distraction. We normally are not aware of ourselves washing dishes, and don’t even want to be aware: we crave distraction, and we rely on habitual flows that do not require mental presence. A favourite example is driving: I can drive a considerable distance and get out of my car at the other end with no memory of anything along the way. Despite having accomplished something technically complex, dangerous and requiring an enormous coordination of skills, I seem to have been asleep.

Meditation replicates this yet asks you to stay awake and alert – mindful – throughout the drive, or in this case the fundamental act of breathing. It is therefore formally defined by a routine of concentration on a mundane focus, something that would otherwise – in the flow of routine experience – fall below the radar of consciousness. However, the core of mindfulness meditation is actually the experience of distraction and diversion from this flow. The teacher will constantly assure you that your mind will wander, that this is normal and that sometimes you will wander off for long periods of time, because you are worried about something, or extremely bored, or tired, or – in a lovely and often repeated phrase – because this is simply what minds do, they wander distractedly. Meditation is really about being able to see when you have drifted off, and then to calmly and gently bring your attention back to your breath, along with a brief, non-analytic acknowledgement of where it drifted off to. A ‘good’ meditation is not one in which you have maintained intense concentration on your breath for 45 minutes; it is not a virtuoso feat of mental discipline; to the contrary, it is a meditation in which your mind has constantly wandered off from the breath but you have just as persistently brought it back. It is in these moments that both consciousness and routine flow are entirely brought into view and you are entirely living in your present experience. Indeed both the wandering and the alertness are equally part of the experience that is to be experienced; the frame is part of the picture.

So what is the point of this for a Friend of the Western Buddhist Order? The routine of meditation offers a dialectic of awareness and distraction, boredom and interest that replicates everyday routines, and any everyday routine could – and ultimately should – be the occasion for cultivating the same kind of interested, alert awareness. Meditation offers a particular technique – or even laboratory – for dealing differently with the mundane flow of the everyday. For Western Buddhists, the aim of meditation as an ethical technique of the self is to achieve a ‘skilful mind’. This is not about being good or moral, but rather about being capable of not harming self or other. This skilfulness essentially resides in the ability to remain alert in the flow of events, to retain a critical distance so as not to be caught up by the flow of action and emotion. And this flow is largely conceptualized not in terms of structures, drives or constraints but rather in terms of habit: the routinization of mechanical responses to events. In recognizing the moment of distraction within meditation we become aware of how our mind habitually works, and, rather than following the normal course of response, we can look at what we are doing, pause and perhaps find more creative or beneficial ways of doing things. ‘Skilfulness’ describes the inculcation of this moment of pause and reflection, the construction of a conscious opening in the flow of events, which allows us to respond to them differently rather than be overwhelmed and unconscious.

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Like Tai Chi, then, meditation can be considered as a complex dialectic of routine and awareness, in which routine, and persistent alertness within a routine, is treated as the medium for exploring and inculcating different forms of awareness. Routine and awareness are not opposites but rather part of one developing experience of flow. Moreover, the logic of both Tai Chi and mindfulness meditation involves recognizing rather than denying structure. Meditation does not envisage a ruptural world without structure (or a world comprising nothing but meditation) but rather a technical distancing from structure in order to deal with it differently. Similarly, in Tai Chi it is only by passing through the mechanics of routine that one can develop more powerful responses to what the world (in the form of an opponent) throws at you. How, then, could we characterize this ethical framing of routine? Routine is the ground both of our awareness and of our unconsciousness; meditation is a formal technique to make its practitioners experience and develop this dialectic; and the formal technique presents itself as a prefiguration of the transformation of all routine into the same object of persistent awareness of skill and habit. Whereas in critical theory one can only awake from the routinization of leisure by rejecting it and the structures that constitute it, Tai Chi and meditation propose that routine must and can be the very grounds of our awakening, and of the cultivation of the strength to carry this wakening from the mat into everyday life.

Routine as Normativity

In our first two examples, routine is clearly unthinking; the issue is simply whether it can be a technology for deepening (hobbies) or transforming (meditation) an unreflexive state. In our last example, unthinking habit is not only valued but regarded as a mark of (Western) superiority.

In studying the internet and mobile phones in Ghana, I used the idea of ‘communicative assemblages’ to think about how people bodged together the resources at hand into stable ‘media’ that could be used routinely by skilled communicators: for example, the flow of people and cassava to a district capital on market day involved the coordination of kin, roads, buses, market prices and much more. The presence of communicative routines testified to highly skilled, reflexive, determined and rational social construction by human agents who knew what they were doing.

Official ICT policies, by contrast, assumed black-boxed technologies – ‘the internet’, ‘the computer’ – which had a double connection to the idea of routine. Firstly, these technologies were expected to generate their own normative routines, and automatically. This is what we conventionally describe as ‘technological determinism’, and takes a very practical policy form: the expectation that placing well-specified kit in an air-conditioned room will generate appropriate practices among the ‘beneficiaries’; and simultaneously the expectation that it will displace all existing routines, such as the communicative assemblages that were already maintained locally. Framed in this way, new technologies generate precisely the opposite view of routine from that which informed my ethnography: for most development practitioners, to develop Ghana into an information society literally meant entering into the routines dictated by the new technologies.

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Secondly, the new technologies were obviously black-boxed via very complex processes of production and transmission through global circulations and framings by organizations from Microsoft to the World Bank and the US government. But the very idea of routine itself played a part: the supposed superiority of the official version of new technology over local media definitions was often demonstrated by the fact that it represented uses of the technology that were ‘routine’ in the North or amongst the educated elite. Idealized uses – e.g. the locally odd media-use model of one computer per person that structured the space of internet cafés – were legitimated precisely on the grounds that they were unthinking everyday technology use in the North. The communicative assemblages of local people, by contrast, were not considered to be ‘routines’, but rather the senseless, retrograde and obstructive chaos of village life. ‘Routine’ thus marked out a classic denial of the rationality of the other.

Hence, in my rural research I worked alongside a computer centre that was set up in the district capital, using UNDP (United Nations Development Programme) money, HIPC (Heavily Indebted Poor Countries) money and Ghanaian government money, and under the aegis of a quite visionary chief executive officer of the district. This was a high-spec internet centre, run by a very bright and innovative young man, but entirely defined within official discourses of ICT and development: it was a centre to which people were meant to come in order to become computer literate and to use the internet for ‘information access’. All these terms were black-boxed – computer, internet, information – in that they were treated as given, complete and stable objects with already known and universal properties; these properties were expected to unfold automatically, anywhere, if implemented properly. The centre was almost always empty, largely because it did not connect to any of the surrounding communicative assemblages: no larger assemblages were formed.

I interviewed the regional director of the education department in her office, a computer proudly displayed on her desk surrounded by piles of bureaucratic rationality in paper form and by subordinates assembled around her to perform hierarchy. The first half hour of the ‘interview’ comprised her amusing anecdotes about the stupidity and backwardness of villagers and village life. In judging village life, forms of action could only be perceived by her either as irrational (literally, these people are ignorant and stupid) or as stabilized in traditional forms that were intrinsically retrograde (rational in my terms, but not in hers).

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Routine played an interesting role in this discussion, and there were milder forms throughout this fieldwork: on the one hand, the internet and computers are seen as spectacular emergences, the latest revolution from the North, as yet another historical rupture, this time ushering in information society and globalized economies – notions that present new challenges that the South must meet from a position of backwardness. At the same time, ICTs as dramatic disruption sit alongside ICTs as a new routinization. It is considered obvious that mundane and unthinking use of these techno-marvels must be routine in every Northerner’s life, as in that of the governmental and business elites in Ghana. Indeed, imaginations of what these routines might look like in London or New York, as well as experiences of everyday Northern technological life brought back from educational, business or government postings abroad, play a significant role in how people understand and frame these objects as they enter into their world. People like the education director make full use of this imagination of routine in order to align themselves – by way of education, class, urbanity, and so on – with perceived global transformation into a new kind of elite everyday life.

The notion of ICTs as routine in the North testified to the North’s continued superiority: we backward Southerners marvel at what the Northerners already take for granted; we have to learn what the Northerner can do without thinking. Official ICT discourse and practice in Ghana was strongly based in a top-down flow of work habits from North to local elite to general population. But those outside the elites take a similar view. There is a phrase in Twi – kwame obranyi – which can be loosely translated as ‘lucky or fortunate white guy’, and which – in popular culture – is specifically linked to technological differentials. Kwame is the name for someone who is born on a Sunday, and is therefore blessed; obranyi is a white person, but often applied to Indians and Japanese, in so far as they are seen to come from technologically more advanced places. It is a phrase used in everyday life, but also in popular culture – there was a hit song by that name a few years ago, and it stated the conventional meaning: the kwame obranyi is able to create and appropriate new technical wonders that can do real good for people, and both the creation and appropriation are part of their normal way of being; whereas here in Africa either we don’t have these things or we use them very badly, not for good.

Routine consumption of new technologies is treated both as demonstration of Northern or elite superiority, and as normative for the technology. The very aim of development policy is technology use that is mundane, unthinking, taken-for-granted, boring: that is the index of current Northern advancement and defines the goal of Ghanaian transformation. At the same time, this sense of routine (‘naturalized’, ‘black-boxed’) use is a form of denial of the existence or rationality of local routines, of the complex communicative assemblages that I found ethnographically.

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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.

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References

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