4.0 out of 5 stars
Practical and Insightful, August 1, 2011
This review is from: Reading the Everyday (Paperback)
Everyday life as a topic of study fascinates me, but I'm hardly an expert on the subject. Part of the reason why is my own failing as a reader--I don't do well with heavily theoretical texts that don't lend themselves readily to practical application. I think that within the topic of everyday life, this problem is exacerbated because of everyday life's own apparent status as all practice and no theory.
Writers like Michel de Certeau and Henri Lefebvre, who write about the political theory of everyday life, always leave me with a yearning for a book that is actually about everyday life itself: bus stops, billboards, supermarkets, intersections, housing developments, etc. And in many ways, Joe Moran's book Reading the Everyday is just what I was looking for: a book that uses these theories to discuss how public and private life are structured in modern Britain. Moran's introduction is an extended meditation on modern bus stops and the social meaning of riding the bus. He then moves on to discuss office spaces and business parks, urban traffic and parking, non-places like rest stops, and housing developments from the outside. He makes the conscious decision not to discuss life inside the home, the traditional site of thinking about everyday life, in order to focus on the public and semi-public places where we spend much (if not most) of our time, although not by choice.
Moran's analysis describes these places as they actually exist, since he realizes the importance of the appearance and public profile of bus stops, parking garages, traffic lights, and developments of identical houses. He also discusses how these things are seen in the media--the movie Office Space and TV show The Office form the backbone of his chapter on work space, and he goes through an extensive literature review of Right-wing newspapers' spin on the London congestion charge in his chapter on traffic. Along the way, he uses theories of everyday life to tease out the significance of these things. Throughout the book, Moran comes across as being both deeply erudite and deeply sensitive to the environment and the media surrounding him.
That being said, I wonder about the final outcome. I finished the book thinking that Moran teaches us something we already implicitly know: the everyday is political. In America, people have always been suspicious of developers' box stores and cheap, ugly mass housing developments, even as we continue to shop and live there. We gripe about parking fees and fines that seem both arbitrary and mean-spirited, and wonder about the policy decisions that installed them. We're not sure of the details behind the installation of advertisements and fast-food chains in rest-stops and public school cafeterias, but we know it had to do with a cash-strapped government and a group of men with MBAs. Moran's own analyses of popular media show that things are no different in Britain. He unequivocally links Britain's modern landscape with neo-liberal economics and the free market, and I'm inclined to agree with him. At the end of the book, he claims that its purpose his to challenge the "apparent inevitability" (169) of these developments, to make people see that cheap, uniform housing, miserable commutes, and the non-stop advertising blitz are due in large part to the neo-liberal ideology of corporations and politicians.
But what to do about it? Even if I read the political significance of the everyday correctly and recognize the causes of the ugly and user-unfriendly urban landscape, how am I going to change it for the better? How would my life improve if all ads were removed from bus stops? And what would be the financial consequences of doing so? Perhaps it's unfair to ask these questions of Moran's book. They are, in fact, beyond its scope. And perhaps my frustration is Moran's point. Nevertheless, in the end I found the book to be a pleasant (if depressing) read, a fascinating window into life in modern Britain, and a good model for thinking about life in America. But, as always, I found that my question "What do we DO about this mess?" still unanswered.
I recommend reading this book, but, like most books for the academic market, it's overpriced. It's accessible to a much wider audience than the academy, though, so I would consider asking your public library to order a copy.
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