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Spatial Routines and Everyday Habits
To locate potential sites of political struggle, we must determine the sites at which we enter or engage particular systems of power and discrimination, and for this reason, I have consistently returned to questions of space. Consumer culture is increasingly characterized by its ability to seep into every dimension of our lives so insidiously that the landscape and topography become veritable billboards and potential sites of consumer ‘‘feedback.’’[7] Moreover, topographical questions also take into account the importance of routines and repetition—in mathematical terms, the statistical dimension of profiles.Deleuze, Foucault, and Pierre Bourdieu all give habit (or ‘‘habitus’’) a central place in their work. Bourdieu, like Foucault, has a keen interest in the relationship between systems of classification and social power. For Bourdieu (1984, 170, 172) though, systems of classification are constructed by two simple needs—to differentiate and to account for the practices of taste, as manifested in socioeconomic lifestyles:Life-styles are thus the systematic products of habitus, which, perceived in their mutual relations through the schemes of the habitus, become sign systems that are socially qualified (as ‘‘distinguished,’’ ‘‘vulgar,’’ etc.).
The strength of Bourdieu’s ‘‘habitus,’’ at least as it relates to this book, lies in its linking of habits and the coding of lifestyle and socioeconomic class. What remains unquestioned, however, is the relationship between coding in other spheres beyond consumption—what I posit as a cybernetic-like system of ‘‘reproduction.’’ Indeed, du Gay (du Gay et al. 1997, 100) argues that ‘‘[Bourdieu] . . . has little to say about the prior coding of objects in production.’’Michel de Certeau refines the discussion of habit within the context of space and place in the city—the so-called art of walking in the city (the pastime of Baudelaire’s flaneur). As I previously noted, de Certeau has been a central figure in the political-resistance debates in cultural studies. Ironically, discussions of the popular, micropolitical dimensions of everyday life have been largely devoid of any topographical elements. When space has been inserted into the equation, though, the ‘‘resistive’’ agency of the individual remains a fundamental component. Mark Poster’s (1997, 124) interpretation of de Certeau, for instance, argues that ‘‘The consumer inscribes a pattern into space that was not accounted for in its design.’’ Such moments of resistance, however, are all too often fanciful, individuated, and isolated moments: just as the individual is decentered, so too are the sites of solicitation and feedback. Technologies of solicitation are far more likely to inform and precede the diagramming of space—the designing or mapping of space in response to demographic and psychographic data.[7]For some context to the term ‘‘Consumer Culture,’’ see Featherstone (1991), Keat and Abercrombie (1994), or Lury (1996).
