Complicity and Collusion in the Mediation of Everyday Life




Roger Silverstone
Media@lse
The London School of Economics and Political Science


Houghton Street
London WC2A 2AE

+ 44 207 955 6420
R.Silverstone@lse.ac.uk




To be published in New Literary History (Fall 2002)

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Complicity and Collusion in the Mediation of Everyday Life1




On the 2nd we were at the Wenglers in the afternoon. It once again
made an enormous impression on me when they put on the wireless and
leapt from London to Rome, from Rome to Moscow etc. The concepts of
time and space are annihilated. One must become a mystic. For me
radio destroys every form of religion and at the same time gives rise to
religion. Gives rise to it twice over: a) because such a miracle exists, b)
because the human intellect invests, explains, makes use of it. But this
same human intellect puts up with the Hitler government (Victor
Klemperer, The Klemperer Diaries 1933-45, Saturday, 9th November,
1935, 133).

This essay investigates everyday life as a moral and a social space. It
presumes that it is in the everyday, and above all in the detail of the
relationships that are made with others and which constitute everyday life’s
possibility, that our common humanity is created and sustained. It also
presumes that it is through the actions and the interactions that make up the
continuities of daily experience that an ethics of care and responsibility is, or
is not, enabled. I argue that no ethics of, and from, the everyday is
conceivable without communication, and that all communication involves
mediation, mediation as a transformative process in which the
meaningfulness and value of things are constructed.

The modern world has witnessed, and in significant degrees has been defined
by, a progressive technological intrusion into the conduct of everyday life, of
which the most recent and arguably the most significant manifestations have
been our media technologies. These technologies, principally in the twentieth
century broadcast technologies, have become increasingly central to the ways
in which individuals manage their everyday lives: central in their capacity, in
broadcast schedules and the consistencies of genre, to create a framework
for the ordering of the everyday, and central too in their capacity to provide

1 I am extremely grateful to Rita Felski for her trenchant and helpful comments on an earlier
draft.

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the symbolic resources and tools for making sense of the complexities of the
everyday.

These technologically enabled processes of communication and meaning
construction are processes of mediation (Thompson, 1995; Silverstone, in
press). Mediation, in the sense in which I am using the term, describes the
fundamentally, but unevenly, dialectical process in which institutionalised
media of communication (the press, broadcast radio and television, and
increasingly the world wide web) are involved in the general circulation of
symbols in social life. That circulation no longer requires face to face
communication, though it does not exclude it.

Mediation is dialectical because while it is perfectly possible to privilege those
mass media as defining and perhaps even determining social meanings, such
privileging would miss the continuous and often creative engagement that
listeners and viewers have with the products of mass communication. And it
is uneven, precisely because the power to work with, or against, the dominant
or deeply entrenched meanings that the media provide is unevenly distributed
across and within societies.

Mediation, in this sense of the term, is both technological and social. It is also
increasingly pervasive, as social actors become progressively dependent on
the supply of public meanings and accounts of the world in attempting to
make sense of their own. As such, mediation has significant consequences
for the way in which the world appears in and to everyday life, and as such
this mediated appearance in turn provides a framework for the definition and
conduct of our relationships to the other, and especially the distant other, the
other who only appears to us within the media.

I intend to argue that there are profound moral and ethical issues to be
addressed in confronting the mediation of everyday life. I also intend to argue
that insofar as the persisting representational characteristics of contemporary
media, above all in our media’s representation of the other, remain
unchallenged, as for the most part they are, then those who receive and

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accept them are neither mere prisoners of a dominant ideology nor innocents
in a world of false consciousness, but are willing participants, that is complicit,
or even actively engaged, that is collusive, in a mediated culture that fails to
deliver its promises of communication and connection, with enduring, powerful
and largely negative consequences for our status as human beings.

This critique juxtaposes the media and everyday life while at the same time
arguing that the media and everyday life are in significant ways inseparable.
One can no longer conceive of the everyday without acknowledging the
central role that increasingly the electronic media (but also books and the
press) have in defining its ways of seeing, being and acting. My argument
presupposes that the media take as their paramount reality, in terms of their
orientation, the everyday life world of its audiences, readers and users. Of
course neither the media nor everyday life are unitary phenomena, nor do
they have a singular relationship to each other. Notwithstanding these
differences of individual and institutional practice, as well as differential
possibilities for both resistance and transcendence, the media are becoming a
second order paramount reality, fully equivalent of, though not reducible to,
the “world in which the acts of our activity are objectified and the world in
which these acts actually proceed and are actually accomplished once and
only once” (Bakhtin, 1993, 2).

This second order paramount reality, that of the media, does not replace the
world of lived experience, as Jean Baudrillard (1983), imagined with his notion
of the simulacrum it did, but it runs through that experiential world, dialectically
engaged with it, eternally intertwined. The lived and the represented
consequently become the warp and the weft of the everyday, and what is at
stake in any investigation of their inter-relationship is the historical and
sociological specificity of the ensuing fabric, its strengths and its weaknesses,
its coincidences and its contradictions: the touch and the feel of culture – the
ethics and aesthetics of experience.


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From this perspective mediation is already a crucial constituent of everyday
life. One cannot enquire into one without simultaneously enquiring into the
other.

Mediating the everyday
I want to approach this enquiry through a discussion of four dimensions of the
mediated everyday: its ambiguity and paradoxicality, its physicality; its
sociability, and its ethics.

Critical accounts of everyday life (c.f. Gardiner, 2000; Highmore, 2002) have
come to acknowledge and defend, among other things, the essential
paradoxicality of everyday life. Everyday life is seen as a site for the
toleration, indeed celebration, of ambiguity: a site for creativity, and the
transcendence, playful, political or otherwise, of the constraints imposed by an
increasingly dominant and strategic system of technological rationality,
administrative order and capitalist commodification. Everyday life is a site for
the heterological, the unpredictable and the tactical.

These accounts are palpable misreadings. Paradox, like history, is a luxury of
the elite. Ambiguities are threats not comforts in the material struggles of the
everyday. Indeed it is arguably the case that everyday life within modernity,
but also earlier, consists in a continuous battle against uncertainty and for
clarity and confidence in the conduct of daily existence. Everyday life is
tough, for most people, most of the time. Even Bakhtin’s carnival, with its
famous refusal of the singular orderings of dominant culture and its playful
celebration of the disorder of the popular, nevertheless gains its meaning from
its own precise and predictable order. In this sense it can not escape the
ritual frames that are a central dimension of the popular, even more perhaps
than of high, culture. So in so far as paradox and ambiguity persist within the
lived cultures of everyday life, as opposed to the representations or
aestheticisations of everyday life, then it might be suggested that they express
a degree of failure, failure to control the contradictory demands of daily life in
modernity.

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The media are crucially implicated in this refusal of paradox, for in their own
forms of ordering, in narrative and schedule above all, they provide a
framework for the resolution of ambiguity, the reduction of insecurity, and the
creation of a degree of comfort. Thus the predominant genres and modes of
representation (news, chat show, soap opera) meet the needs and the desires
for order of, and in, the everyday, and even in those areas of media
production and consumption where it may be suggested that there is scope
for both resistance and ambiguity (and of course there is evidence for
example in popular music culture, and in some on-line networks and bulletin
boards that this is the case), it could still be argued that what is at stake is not
the embrace of ambiguity and paradox but the search, perhaps the impossible
search, for different kinds of order (Couldry, 2002; Downing, 1999; Moore and
Myerhoff, 1977).

It is an order grounded in the body. Everyday life is bodily life: life that is
gendered and aged; life both enabled and limited by material resources, by
circumstance and fate. Bakhtin’s recovery of the everyday was through the
celebration of the popular, and the popular was Rabelaisian, turning its back
on the ascetic and the refined. The everyday has its own smells, its own
desires, and in its refusals of the antiseptic orderings of high culture, the
everyday also refuses the Cartesian dualism in which bodies and minds are
separated, and where bodies come a distinct second in the creation of social
value. Theories of everyday life, no less than empirical investigations into its
conduct, require getting involved in the nitty-gritty of the physical world. The
body is seen, consequently, as the site for resistance, notwithstanding the
increasingly insistent pressures of a “bureaucratic society of controlled
consumption” (Lefebvre, 1984), for without that resistance the social as well
as the physical body itself would atrophy. The viability as well as the value of
everyday life consists in our physical capacity fully to engage with what the
system throws at us. Indeed the utopianism in the writing on everyday life
privileges the capacity of the individual to construct his or her own reality,
albeit from a position of structural weakness, as she transforms the abstract
structures of language into the vivid discourses of daily speech, or the

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alienating spaces and times of the city into something like home (Certeau,
1984; Certeau et al., 1998).

The world of the everyday is above all a vivid world, and that vividness is
grounded in bodily experience and sensibility. And it is through the vivid face
to face that socially meaningful and robust relations are sustained: in places
and across generations, reproduced through time.

Bodies, however, require comfort and security, both material and symbolic. It
is in the repetitiveness of the everyday, its very familiarity and predictability,
that such securities are sought and sometimes found. Amongst the
disturbances caused during the modern period, are disturbances that have
affected the body mightily. It has been subject to increased and terrifying risk
(Beck, 1992). It has been incorporated into the technological, a cyborg fusion
that many have seen as being transformative of our capacity to act in the
world (Haraway, 1991). The body, finally, has been seen to be the site of the
exercise of power, inscribed, as Nikolas Rose has argued in his work on
governmentality, with the ink of states and nations (Rose, 1990, 1999).

The experience of everyday life, however, is no longer containable within
physical space, even if it ever was. The media have provided an increasingly
available and increasingly insistent alternative, one which provides both
support and through identifications with characters, the seductions of
narrative, obsessional gaming or internet chat, the possibility of bodily
transcendence. Though the media do this, of course, at a price. In the
palpable dematerialization of the body, our own but crucially that of the other,
the media have created a space in which the lack of physical contact destroys
a sense of meaningful difference between bodies. Of course this lack is a
constant in all forms of imaginative and aesthetic experience. But in the
electronic media it is disguised, if not denied, in the constant presence of the
other in the images and voices of mediated representation and interaction.
Many have complained about the homogenising power of the media and the
cultural industries behind them, but here is a particular manifestation of that
homogeneity, one in which representational distancing draws the sting of the

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face to the face, the pain of recognition, and, as I shall argue shortly, the
demands on the person of a grounded ethics.

On the one hand, then, the threat of uniformity: but on the other the threat of
fragmentation and individualisation. What is also at stake in the mediation of
everyday life is the relationship between the individual and the social. Manuel
Castells, in extensive discussions of the revolutionary consequences of the
internet on social life and behaviour, points to a fit between the increasing
individualism of late modernity and the emergence of such a networking
technology. He suggests that while this emergence keeps nodes and
participants separate it also simultaneously links them together in intense
forms of sociability. On the one hand he points to the triumph of the
individual, on the other to the possibility that this triumph will in turn lead, with
technologically enabled mediation, to the creation of a new kind of network
society (Castells, 2001, 133).

The quality of everyday life is often seen to be threatened by modernity, and
above all by the relentless rise of individualism as both ideology and reality.
Capitalism and industrialism, both, have undermined those secondary social
groupings: family, church, community, and the possibility for solidarity and the
sharing of common experience, which they offered. These institutions and
groupings were once seen to have enabled a shared body of common-sense
beliefs and assumptions, unquestioning though they may have been, which in
turn enabled and sustained traditional forms of collective life.

On the other hand modernity is seen to have generated the conditions for a
multiplicity of perspectives and positions which in turn enabled, at least the
opportunity for, a new kind of publicness. As Hannah Arendt notes, comparing
the value of public and private spaces through an observation of the centrality
of difference:
For though the common world is the common meeting ground of all,
those who are present have different locations in it, and the location
of one can no more coincide with the location of another than the
location of two objects. Being seen and being heard by others derive
their significance from the fact that everybody sees and hears from a
different position. This is the meaning of public life, compared to

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which even the richest and most satisfying family life can offer only
the prolongation or multiplication of one’s own position with its
attending aspects and perspectives (Arendt, 1958, 57).

The possibility of public life depends on the mutuality of seeing and hearing,
and seeing and hearing in turn depends on the recognition of both difference
and identity amongst those involved in the interaction. Such is Arendt’s gold
standard for an ethics of public participation and responsibility.

However modernity has another tale to tell. Individualism has promoted
difference without commonness. And technological rationality, an equivalent
condition on the same march of modernity, has promoted commonness
without difference (Heller; 1984; Marcuse, 1964). Manuel Castells implies,
and to a degree he follows Raymond Williams (1974) in the logic of his
argument, that new media technologies arise, and are accepted, in
modernising societies precisely as a way of mediating this contradiction. For
Williams radio, and then television, emerged not only to fulfil capitalism’s
pressing need for efficient and speedy communication, but in order to provide
an inclusive framework for national culture and public participation amongst
geographically and socially mobile populations. Similarly, now, the internet,
only this time on a global scale. The imagined community of print and
broadcasting (Anderson, 1984) is to be replaced by the fragmented network of
the internet, but with what consequences for everyday life?

Again, much has been written on the capacity of networking technologies to
create, or enable, new forms of sociability. There is an increasing amount of
empirical work purporting to show how forms of on-line connectivity, chat and
the sharing of enthusiasms or anxieties, can and do provide meaningful
contact, sufficient for those involved to feel engaged and supported, to make
friends, and even to transfer their virtual mutuality into the real world (Baym,
2000; Jones, 1995; Jones, 1997; Jones, 1998; Porter, 1997, Rheingold,
1994). Some times these new connectivities are seen as providing
compensating alternatives to the weakening infrastructures of everyday life,
patching the thinning ozone layer of sociability in the daily round (Wellman,
1999). On the other hand, such on-line sociability is decried for its limited

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singularity, a monochrome of life-styles and interests, and unsustainable
beyond the narrow confines of mutual identification (Calhoun, 1998; Doheny-
Farina, 1996). On-line relationships consequently are always provisional and
essentially voluntaristic; they can break down under the slightest pressure.

At best, therefore, one can see these networks as involving the privatisation of
sociability: an until further notice, rather than a taken for granted, kind of thing.
The me-centred network (Wellman and Gulia, 1999) survives for only as long
as I do. It has little capacity for reproduction, nor does it have the patience for
the struggle with contradiction. And while bulletin boards and chat-rooms
provide a space for debate, they do so on the narrow terrain of a prior
identification of singular agendas and particular interests. They do not, in
these manifestations, create even a pale imitation of the face-to-faceness of
everyday life, however romantic such a notion is seen to be. What is offered
by such networks, and for the most part gladly accepted, is what can only be
described as an illusion of connection.

And illusions, of course, though they have their costs, can be massively
sustaining. The illusion of connection is grounded in the refusal of otherness.
It is based on the private masquerading as the public, the separate
masquerading as the shared, the different masquerading as the same, the
distant masquerading as the close at hand, the unequal masquerading as the
equal. In these dimensions the masquerade is profound in its ethical
consequences.

Indeed the quality and authenticity of everyday life stands or falls in its
capacity to define and sustain a viable ethics. Numerous social theorists
ground their critical position on the degree to which rationality, the creation of
value, the capacity to make meaningful choices and distinctions, and the
acceptance of responsibility for the other are, or are not, preserved or at least
redeemable in the on-going activities of modern everyday life (Bauman, 1993;
Habermas, 1984; Heller, 1984; Levinas, 1969).


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Document Outline

• Complicity and Collusion in the Mediation of Everyday Life
• Roger Silverstone
• Media@lse
• The London School of Economics and Political Science
• Complicity and Collusion in the Mediation of Everyday Life
  • Mediating the everyday
  • Distance and trust
  • Complicity and collusion
• References

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