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Toby Miller and Alec McHoul undertake the task of writing
Popular Culture
and Everyday Life with the intention of effecting an interruption in
cultural studies. They describe recent approaches in this discipline,
which concerns itself with the everyday, as "spectacular" and
"speculative", by which they mean that scholars have focussed on the drama
of "pop stars and their sexuality, politically 'hot' topics, youth
resistance and so on" (ix), while over-stating the social impact of what
are, in fact, unremarkable transgressions. The authors complete their
assessment of the field by adding that cultural artefacts have invariably
been seen to represent wider social forces. While Miller and McHoul are
careful not to negate the value of the insights into macro-level relations
revealed by the scholarship that precedes them, they argue that such
approaches, when discussing the everyday, are not useful for discerning
how people actually live within a network of social relations.
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In order to ascertain how individuals experience their lives, Miller and
McHoul advocate observing people as they go about their daily activities.
After all, they point out, it is not as if the everyday is inaccessible. On
this premise, Miller and McHoul turn to the work of ethnomethodologists
Harvey Sacks and Harold Garfinkel to propose Ethnomethodologically
Inspired Cultural Studies (EMICS). EMICS takes the mundane observation of
specific situations that characterises ethnomethodology and proposes to
marry it with questions that have traditionally been asked by cultural
studies scholars. The authors apply EMICS to observe routine activities
like ordering fast food, viewing sporting competitions, reading self-help
books or doing a cross-word puzzle, and consider the processes at play in
these local instances of the everyday in view of broader public, yet
specifically historical discourses around these particular activities. The
point of conducting such observations is not to make a seamless connection
between how people live and the state of various macro-level relations,
but to approach perceived cultural problems with the evidence of lived
experience. The major claim of this text book is that "practices in the
everyday can only be analysed from a perspective that finds them mere
components of a politics that takes place elsewhere" (27).
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Scholars who agree that cultural studies is distinguished from sociology
by way of the reading of texts may not be entirely convinced that Miller
and McHoul's study is anything but a continuation of the escalation of
influences that has seen schools of cultural studies relocated from
English departments into those of sociology. The authors are aware of
this possible interpretation of their work, but they remain unconcerned
"whether this is still 'cultural studies' for it is an approach to the
study of culture". It is an approach to the study of culture that
critiques the methodology of cultural studies, however it is not one that
contributes substantially to any resolution of the traditional questions
raised by the field. If you accept the argument that politics always
happens elsewhere, beyond the everyday, then it would seem necessary to
conclude that for the authors' cultural studies can say little about race,
gender or class. The authors do not offer any examples of combining the
observation of specific instances of the everyday with a study of
circulating discourses around macro-level relations; it only becomes
possible to address concerns about the political economy by abandoning
cultural studies altogether and moving to the Government Department.
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Popular Culture and Everyday Life is an engaging read. The everyday is
endlessly fascinating because it is possible to identify with the specific
examples observed by Miller and McHoul. The book is aimed mainly at
students of cultural studies, so comprehension of the diverse disciplines
that this work draws upon to further its argument is assisted by the
inclusion of a glossary of terms. The connections between the case
studies presented, and the documentation of historical and current
knowledges that circulate around these everyday activities are clearly
drawn. For example, the authors observe that standing in line and
ordering a meal at McDonald's has a preordained sequence of events that
the customer moves easily through, and there are mechanisms built in by
the fast food operator to accommodate more complex variations of the mode
of sale. It is noted that the procedure followed at McDonald's is
different from the less regimented, more sociable negotiations of service
observed at independent fast food outlets (in this case an outlet named
Avocados). These shared movements are viewed as a manifestation of
prevalent cultural meanings around food: "health and smallness go with
conviviality, while fun and big-time go with the routinization and the
predictability of pleasure" (53-4).
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The irony of the authors' proposed EMICS methodology is that it is fraught
with the same pitfalls of speculation and assumption with which they
charge the history of cultural studies. In the case of observing
McDonald's, any conclusions drawn are circumscribed by the EMICS scholar's
assumption that this everyday activity is experienced by those who are
observed, solely within the discourses the scholar nominates, in this
instance those around food. This approach to the study of culture relies
on a peculiar negation of the intersection between political, social,
economic and cultural spheres in any given situation. It ignores the way
the McDonald's employee's experience might be mediated by an awareness of
her gender, which deems she is on front counter serving customers, rather
than out the back cooking burgers. The EMICS methodology cannot take into
account the person who decides to walk past McDonald's because they have
visited the anti-McDonald's website, McSpotlight. The substance of the shared cultural
knowledges, that the authors acknowledge create a culture,
seems not to involve much more than a rather mechanistic set of
how-to instructions: whether to step left or right to avoid the next
customer at the McDonald's counter. The inadmissibility of pursuing any
conclusions about macro-level relations denies the way cultural texts are
produced in the first instance by people who participate in the culture at
many levels, and also the way representations mediate the public
discourses on macro-level relations which contribute further to the
complexity of people's everyday experiences.
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Details
Toby Miller and Alec McHoul. Popular Culture and Everyday Life. London: Sage, 1998.
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Citation reference for this article
MLA style:
Kirsty Leishman. "Politics is Elsewhere: 'Popular Culture and Everyday Life'." M/C Reviews 8 June 1999.
[your date of access] <http://www.uq.edu.au/mc/reviews/words/popcult.html>.
Chicago style:
Kirsty Leishman, "Politics is Elsewhere: 'Popular Culture and Everyday Life'," M/C Reviews 8 June 1999,
<http://www.uq.edu.au/mc/reviews/words/popcult.html> ([your date of access]).
APA style:
Kirsty Leishman. (1999) Politics is Elsewhere: 'Popular Culture and Everyday Life'. M/C Reviews 8 June 1999.
<http://www.uq.edu.au/mc/reviews/words/popcult.html> ([your date of access]).
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