10 Cultural Studies and the Culture of Everyday Life

I want to start this paper from the premise that both academics in cultural and media studies, and left-wing political theorists and activists have found the everyday culture of the people in capitalist societies particularly difficult to study either empirically or theoretically. In this paper I wish, then, to interweave two lines of theoretical inquiry: one into the culture of everyday life within subordinated social formations and the other into our own academic practices involved in such an inquiry. I would like to start with the concept of "distance" in cultural theory. Elsewhere (Fiske, 1989a) I have argued that "distance" is a key marker of difference between high and low culture, between the meanings, practices, and pleasures characteristic of em­ powered and disempowered social formations. Cultural distance is a multidimensional concept. In the culture of the socially advantaged and empowered it may take the form of a distance between the art object and reader/spectator: such distance devalues socially and historically specific reading practices in favor of a transcendent appreciation or aesthetic sensibility with claims to universality. It encourages reverence or respect for the text as an art object endowed with authenticity and requiring preservation. "Dis­ tance" may also function to create a difference between the experience of the art work and everyday life. Such "distance" produces ahistorical meanings of art works and allows the members of its social formation the pleasures of allying themselves with a set of humane values that in the extreme versions of aesthetic theory, are argued to be universal values which transcend their historical conditions. This distance from the historical is also a distance from the bodily sensations, for it is our bodies that finally bind us to our historical and social specificities. As the mundanities of our social conditions are set aside, or distanced, by this view of art, so, too, are the so-called sensuous, cheap, and easy pleasures of the body distanced from the more comtemplative, aesthetic pleasures of the mind. And finally this distance takes the form of distance from economic necessity: the separation of the aesthetic from the social is a practice of the elite who can afford to ignore the constraints of material necessity, and who thus construct an aesthetic which not only refuses to assign any value at all to material conditions, but validates only those art forms which transcend them. This critical and aesthetic distance is thus, finally, a marker of distinction between those able to separate their culture from the social and economic conditions of the everyday and those who cannot. There is no "distancing," however, in the culture of everyday life. Both Bakhtin and Bourdieu show how the culture of the people denies categorical boundaries between art and life: popular art is part of the everyday, not distanced from it. The culture of everyday life works only to the extent that it is imbricated into its immediate historical and social setting. This materiality of popular culture is directly related to the economic