Ben Highmore | University of Sussex (original) (raw)

Papers by Ben Highmore

unpublished

Guide to Critical and Cultural Theory, but the project never happened, or no one has got in conta... more Guide to Critical and Cultural Theory, but the project never happened, or no one has got in contact about it since I submitted it. So, I thought I'd make it available here just in case it was useful to anyone. I was trying to give an overview of Cultural Studies in under 5,000 words. I'm sure it is as partisan as hell, but hopefully also wide-ranging. If you want to cite it I would write: Highmore, B. (2019) 'Cultural Studies', unpublished.]

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Vestoj, 2023

A short text about all the clothes you don't wear.

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Cultural Studies, 2021

This article pursues two tasks. The first is to clarify the value and productivity of Williams's ... more This article pursues two tasks. The first is to clarify the value and productivity of Williams's Keywords: a vocabulary of culture and society (first edition 1976, second expanded edition 1983a) for the project of Cultural Studies. This clarification is helped, I argue, by reading it alongside Vološinov's Marxism and the philosophy of language (published in Russian in 1929, translated into English in 1973). The second and related task is a speculative development of 'keywording' (or keyword analysis) based on an assessment of the limitations and potential of Williams's broad philological project for today. My argument is that Keywords initially sought to provide a historical map of changing patterns of feeling associated (primarily) with industrialization in England, and that this was sometimes in an uneasy relationship with what he would later name as the project of providing 'resources of hope'. One consequential limitation of the original work is that its historical perspective was built on semantic examples provided by the OED (or to give it its original title, the Oxford new English dictionary on historical principles) and supplemented with Williams's literary studies. My suggestion is that Cultural Studies can develop (and has, to some degree, already developed) Williams's Keywords project without it being centred on literature or beholden to the OED. This would mean treating the project less as an exemplary milestone or methodology and more as an unfinished and unfinishable project whose methodology is critically dynamic: in other words, to move from Keywords to 'keywording' requires altering Williams's methodology. In conclusion I speculate about the ways in which the historical aims of keywording could be expanded to make it more conducive to providing 'useable histories' and semantic counternarratives, while also pursuing the radical contextualism of Vološinov and Bakhtin.

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New Formations, 2020

The planetary scale of climate change challenges forms of conjunctural analyses that are based ar... more The planetary scale of climate change challenges forms of conjunctural analyses that are based around the scale of national politics and culture. Global warming insists on planetary dimensions and invites us to treat humankind as a species that has developed a taste for fossil fuels. Critical Cultural Studies, and the human sciences more generally, seem founded on the principle that culture and society has historically worked to differentiate humans, and that the task of a critical practice is to investigate this process within and across specific geographical locales. How do we reconcile what seems to be an unreconcilable difference between Cultural Studies and climate change? Below I argue that alongside the necessary work of conjunctural analysis we should remember that the critical human sciences have other capacities that are more suited to negotiating the monstrous diversity of scales that global warming and the micro cultures of the everyday articulate. Alongside conjunctural analysis I argue for the relevance of an approach that would posit ‘disjunctive constellations’ as objects for attention. While it might seem counter-intuitive, the disjunctive constellations I have in mind are at once more modest and (potentially) more expansive than a conjuncture. In my understanding, disjunctive constellations are not in opposition to conjunctures; they may well be the critical kernel at the heart of a conjunctural sensitivity.

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Mass-observation online, Adam Matthew Digital

Written for the Mass-Observation online portal to the M-O archives, commissioned by Adam Matthew ... more Written for the Mass-Observation online portal to the M-O archives, commissioned by Adam Matthew Digital. First online in about 2010.

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A Companion to Critical and Cultural Theory, 2017

Theoretical approaches to everyday life, particularly in the work of Henri Lefebvre and Michel de... more Theoretical approaches to everyday life, particularly in the work of Henri Lefebvre and Michel de Certeau, have developed methodologies that refuse to treat social and cultural life as either explained by individualised experience or by overarching social structures. Using this cue the essay looks at the way class and taste are connected in the work of the sociology of taste (for example in the work of Pierre Bourdieu) and suggests that an everyday life approach can help us to recognise the potential of different articulations of the daily. It suggests that the understanding of taste as a form of attachment, offered by Antione Hennion, and Carolyn Steedman's micro-histories of class and gender, provide productive approaches attuned to the conjunction of everyday life, taste and class.

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The University is Now On Air: Broadcasting Modern Architecture, 2018

In December 1961, The Economist ran a speculative feature about the future existence of "televars... more In December 1961, The Economist ran a speculative feature about the future existence of "televarsities"-communities of learners serviced by an educational television channel dedicated to transporting lectures and science demonstrations "into people's own fireside." 1 The article warned that "if an ETV (education television) network does get set up, its worst enemy might well be the conservatism of educationalists themselves. Many of them are likely to be outraged by the prospect of standardised mechanical or electronic teaching." 2 Two years later, Harold Wilson, the leader of the Labour party and soon to be Prime Minister, announced the intention to create a "university of the air" as part of Labour's Plan for Science. In Wilson's words this university was "designed to provide an opportunity for those who, for one reason or another, have not been able to take advantage of higher education." 3 By catering for, what were often called, non-traditional students, and by using mass media formats to disseminate knowledge, the university would enrich the development of scientific and cultural fields and disciplines far beyond the bounds of the classical academy. This university of the air materialized as the Open University, and was ushered in by Wilson's government in the second half of the1960s. It received its charter in 1969 and immediately began to produce course materials for the first intake of students in 1971. Unlike the dedicated ETV imagined by The Economist, the Open University (OU) did not have its own television or radio channel; instead its courses jostled for space in the regular BBC broadcasting schedules, finding pockets of airtime amongst (very) late-night or early-morning programming. These schedules demonstrate the understandable unwillingness of the BBC to 1

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After Effects: Theories and Methodologies in Architecture, 2018

Karl Marx famously declared in 1859 that ‘it is not the consciousness of men [people] that determ... more Karl Marx famously declared in 1859 that ‘it is not the consciousness of men [people] that determines their being, but, on the contrary, their social being that determines their consciousness’ (Marx 1859: 181). His argument was aimed at philosophical idealists who placed conceptual schemas ahead of material existence. It is still a profound and difficult idea to claim that what we think, and perhaps what we dream, is somehow constrained, if not contained, by how the world is already arranged. To put it in more vernacular terms, Marx could be saying something like: ‘we can’t think outside of the box, until we can begin to live outside of the box, until our living somehow breaks that box’. Social being might be constraining but it is not a singular and consistent entity: it has its own fissures and its own wiggle room. We might not be totally outside ‘the box’ but nor is ‘the box’ one single prison cell. Indeed, it would be hard to explain Marx’s own critical consciousness if social being was simply an overarching mono-formation that could be described by the terms ‘the capitalist division of labour’, which consequently determined all consciousness. And Marx’s historical wager speculated that a collective ‘critical’ consciousness would emerge through and against the constraining arrangements of social being. In the nineteenth century, the factory work benches were drawing people together, at the same time as systematically exploiting them. It was physical space (the factory) that allowed a collectivity to come into being, that provided the material circumstances for ‘social being’ and provided the (imperfect) conditions for a new collective and critical consciousness to emerge.

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The Persistence of Taste: Art, Museums and Everyday Life After Bourdieu , 2018

Ubiquitous objects and the historical sensorium Ben Highmore There are a range of objects that ap... more Ubiquitous objects and the historical sensorium Ben Highmore There are a range of objects that appear to be almost ubiquitous in countries in the global North. In households in Britain, for instance, a number of objects that once would have marked you out as socially distinct (as a technological pioneer, for instance, or as someone with enough disposable income to indulge in luxury goods) are now more noticeable by their absence. A household without central-heating is today more remarkable than one with such a system. Socially 'indistinct' groups of objects in over-developed countries might include cars, mobile (and not so mobile) phones, washing machines, denim jeans, refrigerators, radios, computers, TVs, and so on. But, of course, these are also objects that can be, and often are, inflected as socially distinct objects: after all there is a marked difference between a brand new Ferrari, a secondhand 'people carrier', and a souped-up hatchback. What does not mark you out is having a car; what marks you out is having a particular car. Indeed, the world of cars and car advertising is a semiotic field of intense differentiation. As cultural and social historians how should we attend to this field of objects that from one perspective lack distinction? What are the differences that make a difference: the myriad of small differences that inflect the world of car-ownership according to differences of class, gender, age, ethnicity, aspiration, politics, and so on; or the longue durée of human mobility and motility in which generalised private motorised transport is a key component? Is the fact of mass motoring of more or less significance than the way an industry has found sophisticated ways of inducing consumer desire and envy?

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A Companion to Contemporary Design Since 1945, 2019

This chapter is primarily concerned with two aspects of the postwar interior: the interior as a s... more This chapter is primarily concerned with two aspects of the postwar interior: the interior as a space for the construction of identities, and the interior as a space animated and configured through material technologies. The postwar home has been a site of competing forces, of modernization and traditionalism vying for supremacy, and this is often articulated in the field of interior design. The home, as a site for identity, for instance, is often experienced as a form of traditionalism (where a parent generation instils values and practices for the next generation) but can also be the place where tradition is challenged. Similarly, as our homes become more and more technologically sophisticated we use these technologies to maintain our connections to cultural traditions as well as fashion new traditions for the future. In conclusion the chapter is concerned with the global future of the home under conditions of extensive migration and climate change.

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Design Culture: Objects and Approaches, 2018

This chapter is a speculative attempt to position ‘design culture’ at the centre of our descripti... more This chapter is a speculative attempt to position ‘design culture’ at the centre of our descriptions and understandings of the world. In it I argue that ‘design culture’ allows us to see the world as particular sets of qualities, feelings and meanings as well as a purposefully fashioned material environment. But rather than claiming that design is at the centre of the world (a claim that, to my mind, would be no less spurious than any other claim for the centrality of one particular phenomenon) I want to more modestly explore what it would mean to position design at the centre. In other words, my interest is in the generative affordance of inquiries that treat design as somehow foundational to how the world seems to us (the qualia of our being in the world). In some ways this centrality is already assumed by the actual term ‘design culture’, which orients the ambition of investigation about design towards considering the world-forming activity of design. ‘Culture’, as a qualification for the word ‘design’, offers significantly different capacities than the word ‘history’ or ‘social’, for instance. At its most limited ‘design culture’ might suggest a form of attention aimed at investigating the practices and values enacted, say, by a particular design studio, in the same way that anthropologists might want to look at practices and values of a group of Trobriand Islanders. At its most extensive, though, ‘design culture’ might well try to attend to any and every aspect of society where tools, technology, clothing and the fashioning of an environment are central.

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Karina Nimmerfall: Indirect Interviews with Women, 2018

Everything in the world is evidence; it is just sometimes hard to know what it is all evidence of... more Everything in the world is evidence; it is just sometimes hard to know what it is all evidence of. In a world of rocks and dreams, of donkeys and theology, of dandruff and jealousy, it makes little sense to "just stick to the facts, ma'am", as an FBI agent might demand. Of course, the very word "evidence" suggests something being recognised as a causal element, or as proof of some attestable phenomena. "Evidence" seems to fall on the side of rocks, donkeys and dandruff. But what do we do with the evidence that tells us that the world always outruns our attempts to grasp it, or reminds us that there are more things in heaven and earth than are dreamt of in our philosophy? The evidence of the world's unwillingness to surrender all its secrets can make for compelling art; and sometimes that art can be dressed in the garb of the mundane and the humdrum. In 1937, in a bid to turn the tables on a world of politicians, broadcasters and newspaper publishers who felt authorised to speak on behalf of a population, a small group of artist-journalists and amateur social investigators established the project of Mass-Observation. It set out to be a democratic feedback-loop that, rather than telling an audience what a population thought, would instead allow people to speak for themselves. Inexpensive paperback books, radio programmes, and newspaper and magazine articles, would provide space for a myriad of ordinary voices to share their lives and opinions and to act as a counterfoil to the master narrative of a national "common" sense. Through a large volunteer panel charged with responding to regular questionnaires and invitations to keep diary accounts of specific days, and through endless observations and interviews, Mass-Observation immediately began to amass an enormous archive of ordinary life. More than just gathering diverse opinions, Mass-Observation would attend to habits and customs, moods and emotions, gossip and superstition to produce "weather-maps of popular feeling". 1 To find out what a population felt would mean recording its dreams and nightmares, charting its routines, observing it idiosyncrasies. And this, albeit in a relatively piecemeal fashion, is what Mass-Observation did and what, after a substantial hiatus during the 1960s and 70s, it continues to do.

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Routledge Companion to Design Studies, 2016

This chapter looks at design culture, and the tastes that animate it, from the perspective of eve... more This chapter looks at design culture, and the tastes that animate it, from the perspective of everyday life. I argue that an everyday life perspective must work to see taste as ordinary, as a feature of everybody's life, and not the prerogative of a particular social group or a particular aesthetic proclivity. Instead of thinking about "good" taste and "bad" taste, a sociologically sensitive approach to design should look at the way that all people fashion their world through their material culture, and look at the qualities that such fashioning articulates. The chapter also suggests that taste is accentuated by the confidence (or lack of it) with which it is deployed, and that the level of confidence doesn't symmetrically correspond to the hierarchies at work in society.

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Writing Visual Culture , 2017

Foreword: What follows is an initial attempt to locate the emergence of design history within a m... more Foreword: What follows is an initial attempt to locate the emergence of design history within a much larger account of what Immanuel Wallerstein calls, rather grandly, 'world systems analysis'. 1 The point here is that when we move away from an 'internal' account of design history, one that sees it as emerging when specific actors form associations or establish specific design history courses and degrees, then other patterns can emerge. But this also means de-emphasizing the autonomy of design history, and for a marginal discipline this can sometimes seem counter-intuitive. My claim is not that my provisional and sketchy account of design history is more worthwhile than the more familiar accounts that have retold design history's beginnings within the teaching of contextual studies within British art and design education in the late 1960s through to the late 1970s, it is simply that it allows various commonalities to become visible that could, if developed, forge some links and some shared interests across design history, media studies, cultural studies, art and architectural history, film studies and so on. My wager, at this initial stage, is that the partial surrender of an autonomous history could be worth the gain of possible intellectual connections. Of course, in a sector (of higher education institutions), where disciplinary fields are regularly and routinely asked to launch defensive and protective fronts as they compete against each other for scarce resources and jobs, such an intellectual project may seem naïve or even flirting with disaster. My hypothesis is that a new configuration of connoisseurialism (one aimed at popular and mass-produced cultural forms, rather than at unique authorial statements) links the emergence of a series of disciplinary fields, which ironically have connoisseurialism (in a previous configuration) in their sites as antagonists. This hypothesis also suggests that we seek to understand the

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Mass Observation 2.0: Situating the Everyday, 2017

What does it mean to invoke ‘everyday life’ as a productive category for cultural work? What can ... more What does it mean to invoke ‘everyday life’ as a productive category for cultural work? What can this phrase do for us? I think that for many writers in the recent past it has acted as a form of critical realism, and as a way of puncturing the over-reaching abstractions of a strain of social theory. For the French historian Michel de Certeau it was a way of insisting on the importance of the messy actuality of ‘untamed life’: the life of singular bodies that can’t be contained by the docile roles that they have been given by both planners and theorists. The ‘untamed life’ is the excesses of memories, of materiality, of obstinate flesh, of desire, and of doubt that is, and accompanies, our ‘getting on with getting on’. This is the ‘unmanageable remainder’ that social theories (or at least the ones that want to see social life as orchestrated by discipline or greed, by status anxiety or narcissism) can’t quite incorporate. Invoking the everyday doesn’t seek to prove a theory wrong, merely to say that a theory hasn’t shown us what life looks like from the perspective of everyday life. It is a version of Hamlet’s complaint to Horatio: there is more going on here than your philosophy can account for.

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The Afterlives of Georges Perec, 2017

Georges Perec died in 1982 at the age of 45. What is he for us now, 33 years later in the second ... more Georges Perec died in 1982 at the age of 45. What is he for us now, 33 years later in the second decade of the twenty-first century? How do we make him our contemporary? To make Perec's work part of our present-day involves (perhaps counter-intuitively) grasping his project in its historical specificity. It isn't by cherry-picking useable aspects of the work that we will ensure some relevance to its afterlife: rather it will be by recognising his larger project as a response to a particular historical situation. While Perec's situation in the 1960s and 70s in France is not ours, it has its hooks in our world. Perec, I think, becomes our contemporary in the act of seeing those hooks, of seeing how a continuity of feeling and mood percolates through historical ruptures, and how changes in mood and feeling activate historical continuities. There is a simple claim driving this essay, namely that a central aspect of Perec's project was its attempt to register actuality. Which is to say that his project was a form of realism and like many forms of realism it was a quest and a question rather than an answer or solution. And as a question Perec's realism goes something like this: in a situation where there is no specific artistic style that has a privileged access to reality; where scholarly disciplines are all trying to grasp their slice of reality and claim it as the reality; and where the real is saturated by the unreality of the commodity spectacle – how can realism be achieved? Or slightly differently, and now as a quest rather than a question: if the means of grasping reality (from literature to sociology, from religion to politics) are in doubt, and if, because of this, there is a suspicion about what in the world should count as significant, then realism might mean revealing the significance of the insignificant. Perec's work is full of lists of objects and activities, of itemised occurrences and repeated gestures. And it is also a constant puzzling and worrying about what to include as

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Journal of Design History , 2017

Habitat, the furniture and household goods retail chain, has been characterized as showing an ‘ec... more Habitat, the furniture and household goods retail chain, has been characterized as
showing an ‘eclectic’ approach towards design styles and promoting a ‘lifestyle’ attitude towards domestic interiors. In an attempt to fill out these two terms and to explore the elusive (and allusive) content of Habitat’s eclectic lifestyle this article analyses the domestic scenography presented in three arenas of display that can be seen as being authored by Habitat: the shops themselves; the annual catalogues; and the advice books that were published under the authorship of Terence Conran and promoted and sold by Habitat (although also available more widely). I suggest that one way of recognizing the affective content of Habitat’s scenographic imagination is to regard it as constituting a genre that incorporates variety yet also mobilizes a particular set of domestic promises.

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Cultural Studies Review, 2017

This piece of writing is an experiment in digressive and peripatetic cultural studies that follow... more This piece of writing is an experiment in digressive and peripatetic cultural studies that follows a thought path around the city of Birmingham in England. Instead of constructing an argument it tries to perform a mode of enquiry that could be sensitive to the 'simultaneous non-synchroncity' of culture, and could craft a form of writing adequate to history's torn and crumpled state. It doesn't try to claim preferential treatment for such a practice, merely a marginal place for such a practice within cultural studies.

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New Literary History, 2016

This article is premised on two presumptions. The first is, I think, uncontroversial, the second ... more This article is premised on two presumptions. The first is, I think, uncontroversial, the second less so. The first presumption is that today, serious discussions about taste usually start out by rehearsing Pierre Bourdieu’s contribution to our understanding of how taste preferences operate in society. Today Bourdieu is often the starting point for discussing taste, rather than invoked as a critical response to other starting points that might go by the name of Immanuel Kant, or David Hume, or Archibald Alison. The second, more contentious presumptions, is that Bourdieu was not actually interested in taste and rarely addressed its particular qualities in his work. Or to put it differently, Bourdieu was only interested in taste as a function of something else, and that something else was the generation and maintenance of social distinctions. These presumptions beg their own questions: how should we attend to taste if we want to apprehend the various modalities it can engender (indifference as much as vehemence)? How could we find an approach to taste that is flexible enough to apprehend what might be seen as micro-sensitivities as well as those macro-orchestrations that could include such phenomena as the ubiquitous taste for individualised technologies (from cars to smart phones) and the seemingly ubiquitous taste for “convenience”? Tastes, in other words, that might not best accessed by assessing their value as good or bad taste? And could such an approach (if it could be concocted) also apprehend what Freud called “the narcissism of minor differences,” differences that were foundational for Bourdieu’s questionnaires?

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Cultural Studies , 2018

What would it mean to treat Cultural Studies as a project that has had amongst its accomplishment... more What would it mean to treat Cultural Studies as a project that has had amongst its accomplishments the production of new forms and styles of writing, and a generative approach to aesthetics? An initial answer to this question would be that this would recognize how Cultural Studies interceded in an academic environment not only through its concern with supplying ambitious questions and insisting on a broad range of objects of scrutiny, but also by showing how this often entailed reconfiguring the forms through which intellectual inquiry conveyed its cargo. This article doesn’t seek to provide a taxonomy of Cultural Studies’ forms and styles; what it seeks to do is to encourage a selfreflexive attention to aesthetics within Cultural Studies as a form of practice. It suggests that there are two guiding questions that might frame such an attention: how might Cultural Studies generate forms that are adequate to the complexity of the configurations that it seeks to register; and how might Cultural Studies generate forms that could reach the ear of new audiences not attuned to the cadences of scholarly writing? The tension between these two questions should be seen as an invitation to purposeful experimentation within Cultural Studies.

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unpublished

Guide to Critical and Cultural Theory, but the project never happened, or no one has got in conta... more Guide to Critical and Cultural Theory, but the project never happened, or no one has got in contact about it since I submitted it. So, I thought I'd make it available here just in case it was useful to anyone. I was trying to give an overview of Cultural Studies in under 5,000 words. I'm sure it is as partisan as hell, but hopefully also wide-ranging. If you want to cite it I would write: Highmore, B. (2019) 'Cultural Studies', unpublished.]

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Vestoj, 2023

A short text about all the clothes you don't wear.

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Cultural Studies, 2021

This article pursues two tasks. The first is to clarify the value and productivity of Williams's ... more This article pursues two tasks. The first is to clarify the value and productivity of Williams's Keywords: a vocabulary of culture and society (first edition 1976, second expanded edition 1983a) for the project of Cultural Studies. This clarification is helped, I argue, by reading it alongside Vološinov's Marxism and the philosophy of language (published in Russian in 1929, translated into English in 1973). The second and related task is a speculative development of 'keywording' (or keyword analysis) based on an assessment of the limitations and potential of Williams's broad philological project for today. My argument is that Keywords initially sought to provide a historical map of changing patterns of feeling associated (primarily) with industrialization in England, and that this was sometimes in an uneasy relationship with what he would later name as the project of providing 'resources of hope'. One consequential limitation of the original work is that its historical perspective was built on semantic examples provided by the OED (or to give it its original title, the Oxford new English dictionary on historical principles) and supplemented with Williams's literary studies. My suggestion is that Cultural Studies can develop (and has, to some degree, already developed) Williams's Keywords project without it being centred on literature or beholden to the OED. This would mean treating the project less as an exemplary milestone or methodology and more as an unfinished and unfinishable project whose methodology is critically dynamic: in other words, to move from Keywords to 'keywording' requires altering Williams's methodology. In conclusion I speculate about the ways in which the historical aims of keywording could be expanded to make it more conducive to providing 'useable histories' and semantic counternarratives, while also pursuing the radical contextualism of Vološinov and Bakhtin.

Bookmarks Related papers MentionsView impact

New Formations, 2020

The planetary scale of climate change challenges forms of conjunctural analyses that are based ar... more The planetary scale of climate change challenges forms of conjunctural analyses that are based around the scale of national politics and culture. Global warming insists on planetary dimensions and invites us to treat humankind as a species that has developed a taste for fossil fuels. Critical Cultural Studies, and the human sciences more generally, seem founded on the principle that culture and society has historically worked to differentiate humans, and that the task of a critical practice is to investigate this process within and across specific geographical locales. How do we reconcile what seems to be an unreconcilable difference between Cultural Studies and climate change? Below I argue that alongside the necessary work of conjunctural analysis we should remember that the critical human sciences have other capacities that are more suited to negotiating the monstrous diversity of scales that global warming and the micro cultures of the everyday articulate. Alongside conjunctural analysis I argue for the relevance of an approach that would posit ‘disjunctive constellations’ as objects for attention. While it might seem counter-intuitive, the disjunctive constellations I have in mind are at once more modest and (potentially) more expansive than a conjuncture. In my understanding, disjunctive constellations are not in opposition to conjunctures; they may well be the critical kernel at the heart of a conjunctural sensitivity.

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Mass-observation online, Adam Matthew Digital

Written for the Mass-Observation online portal to the M-O archives, commissioned by Adam Matthew ... more Written for the Mass-Observation online portal to the M-O archives, commissioned by Adam Matthew Digital. First online in about 2010.

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A Companion to Critical and Cultural Theory, 2017

Theoretical approaches to everyday life, particularly in the work of Henri Lefebvre and Michel de... more Theoretical approaches to everyday life, particularly in the work of Henri Lefebvre and Michel de Certeau, have developed methodologies that refuse to treat social and cultural life as either explained by individualised experience or by overarching social structures. Using this cue the essay looks at the way class and taste are connected in the work of the sociology of taste (for example in the work of Pierre Bourdieu) and suggests that an everyday life approach can help us to recognise the potential of different articulations of the daily. It suggests that the understanding of taste as a form of attachment, offered by Antione Hennion, and Carolyn Steedman's micro-histories of class and gender, provide productive approaches attuned to the conjunction of everyday life, taste and class.

Bookmarks Related papers MentionsView impact

The University is Now On Air: Broadcasting Modern Architecture, 2018

In December 1961, The Economist ran a speculative feature about the future existence of "televars... more In December 1961, The Economist ran a speculative feature about the future existence of "televarsities"-communities of learners serviced by an educational television channel dedicated to transporting lectures and science demonstrations "into people's own fireside." 1 The article warned that "if an ETV (education television) network does get set up, its worst enemy might well be the conservatism of educationalists themselves. Many of them are likely to be outraged by the prospect of standardised mechanical or electronic teaching." 2 Two years later, Harold Wilson, the leader of the Labour party and soon to be Prime Minister, announced the intention to create a "university of the air" as part of Labour's Plan for Science. In Wilson's words this university was "designed to provide an opportunity for those who, for one reason or another, have not been able to take advantage of higher education." 3 By catering for, what were often called, non-traditional students, and by using mass media formats to disseminate knowledge, the university would enrich the development of scientific and cultural fields and disciplines far beyond the bounds of the classical academy. This university of the air materialized as the Open University, and was ushered in by Wilson's government in the second half of the1960s. It received its charter in 1969 and immediately began to produce course materials for the first intake of students in 1971. Unlike the dedicated ETV imagined by The Economist, the Open University (OU) did not have its own television or radio channel; instead its courses jostled for space in the regular BBC broadcasting schedules, finding pockets of airtime amongst (very) late-night or early-morning programming. These schedules demonstrate the understandable unwillingness of the BBC to 1

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After Effects: Theories and Methodologies in Architecture, 2018

Karl Marx famously declared in 1859 that ‘it is not the consciousness of men [people] that determ... more Karl Marx famously declared in 1859 that ‘it is not the consciousness of men [people] that determines their being, but, on the contrary, their social being that determines their consciousness’ (Marx 1859: 181). His argument was aimed at philosophical idealists who placed conceptual schemas ahead of material existence. It is still a profound and difficult idea to claim that what we think, and perhaps what we dream, is somehow constrained, if not contained, by how the world is already arranged. To put it in more vernacular terms, Marx could be saying something like: ‘we can’t think outside of the box, until we can begin to live outside of the box, until our living somehow breaks that box’. Social being might be constraining but it is not a singular and consistent entity: it has its own fissures and its own wiggle room. We might not be totally outside ‘the box’ but nor is ‘the box’ one single prison cell. Indeed, it would be hard to explain Marx’s own critical consciousness if social being was simply an overarching mono-formation that could be described by the terms ‘the capitalist division of labour’, which consequently determined all consciousness. And Marx’s historical wager speculated that a collective ‘critical’ consciousness would emerge through and against the constraining arrangements of social being. In the nineteenth century, the factory work benches were drawing people together, at the same time as systematically exploiting them. It was physical space (the factory) that allowed a collectivity to come into being, that provided the material circumstances for ‘social being’ and provided the (imperfect) conditions for a new collective and critical consciousness to emerge.

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The Persistence of Taste: Art, Museums and Everyday Life After Bourdieu , 2018

Ubiquitous objects and the historical sensorium Ben Highmore There are a range of objects that ap... more Ubiquitous objects and the historical sensorium Ben Highmore There are a range of objects that appear to be almost ubiquitous in countries in the global North. In households in Britain, for instance, a number of objects that once would have marked you out as socially distinct (as a technological pioneer, for instance, or as someone with enough disposable income to indulge in luxury goods) are now more noticeable by their absence. A household without central-heating is today more remarkable than one with such a system. Socially 'indistinct' groups of objects in over-developed countries might include cars, mobile (and not so mobile) phones, washing machines, denim jeans, refrigerators, radios, computers, TVs, and so on. But, of course, these are also objects that can be, and often are, inflected as socially distinct objects: after all there is a marked difference between a brand new Ferrari, a secondhand 'people carrier', and a souped-up hatchback. What does not mark you out is having a car; what marks you out is having a particular car. Indeed, the world of cars and car advertising is a semiotic field of intense differentiation. As cultural and social historians how should we attend to this field of objects that from one perspective lack distinction? What are the differences that make a difference: the myriad of small differences that inflect the world of car-ownership according to differences of class, gender, age, ethnicity, aspiration, politics, and so on; or the longue durée of human mobility and motility in which generalised private motorised transport is a key component? Is the fact of mass motoring of more or less significance than the way an industry has found sophisticated ways of inducing consumer desire and envy?

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A Companion to Contemporary Design Since 1945, 2019

This chapter is primarily concerned with two aspects of the postwar interior: the interior as a s... more This chapter is primarily concerned with two aspects of the postwar interior: the interior as a space for the construction of identities, and the interior as a space animated and configured through material technologies. The postwar home has been a site of competing forces, of modernization and traditionalism vying for supremacy, and this is often articulated in the field of interior design. The home, as a site for identity, for instance, is often experienced as a form of traditionalism (where a parent generation instils values and practices for the next generation) but can also be the place where tradition is challenged. Similarly, as our homes become more and more technologically sophisticated we use these technologies to maintain our connections to cultural traditions as well as fashion new traditions for the future. In conclusion the chapter is concerned with the global future of the home under conditions of extensive migration and climate change.

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Design Culture: Objects and Approaches, 2018

This chapter is a speculative attempt to position ‘design culture’ at the centre of our descripti... more This chapter is a speculative attempt to position ‘design culture’ at the centre of our descriptions and understandings of the world. In it I argue that ‘design culture’ allows us to see the world as particular sets of qualities, feelings and meanings as well as a purposefully fashioned material environment. But rather than claiming that design is at the centre of the world (a claim that, to my mind, would be no less spurious than any other claim for the centrality of one particular phenomenon) I want to more modestly explore what it would mean to position design at the centre. In other words, my interest is in the generative affordance of inquiries that treat design as somehow foundational to how the world seems to us (the qualia of our being in the world). In some ways this centrality is already assumed by the actual term ‘design culture’, which orients the ambition of investigation about design towards considering the world-forming activity of design. ‘Culture’, as a qualification for the word ‘design’, offers significantly different capacities than the word ‘history’ or ‘social’, for instance. At its most limited ‘design culture’ might suggest a form of attention aimed at investigating the practices and values enacted, say, by a particular design studio, in the same way that anthropologists might want to look at practices and values of a group of Trobriand Islanders. At its most extensive, though, ‘design culture’ might well try to attend to any and every aspect of society where tools, technology, clothing and the fashioning of an environment are central.

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Karina Nimmerfall: Indirect Interviews with Women, 2018

Everything in the world is evidence; it is just sometimes hard to know what it is all evidence of... more Everything in the world is evidence; it is just sometimes hard to know what it is all evidence of. In a world of rocks and dreams, of donkeys and theology, of dandruff and jealousy, it makes little sense to "just stick to the facts, ma'am", as an FBI agent might demand. Of course, the very word "evidence" suggests something being recognised as a causal element, or as proof of some attestable phenomena. "Evidence" seems to fall on the side of rocks, donkeys and dandruff. But what do we do with the evidence that tells us that the world always outruns our attempts to grasp it, or reminds us that there are more things in heaven and earth than are dreamt of in our philosophy? The evidence of the world's unwillingness to surrender all its secrets can make for compelling art; and sometimes that art can be dressed in the garb of the mundane and the humdrum. In 1937, in a bid to turn the tables on a world of politicians, broadcasters and newspaper publishers who felt authorised to speak on behalf of a population, a small group of artist-journalists and amateur social investigators established the project of Mass-Observation. It set out to be a democratic feedback-loop that, rather than telling an audience what a population thought, would instead allow people to speak for themselves. Inexpensive paperback books, radio programmes, and newspaper and magazine articles, would provide space for a myriad of ordinary voices to share their lives and opinions and to act as a counterfoil to the master narrative of a national "common" sense. Through a large volunteer panel charged with responding to regular questionnaires and invitations to keep diary accounts of specific days, and through endless observations and interviews, Mass-Observation immediately began to amass an enormous archive of ordinary life. More than just gathering diverse opinions, Mass-Observation would attend to habits and customs, moods and emotions, gossip and superstition to produce "weather-maps of popular feeling". 1 To find out what a population felt would mean recording its dreams and nightmares, charting its routines, observing it idiosyncrasies. And this, albeit in a relatively piecemeal fashion, is what Mass-Observation did and what, after a substantial hiatus during the 1960s and 70s, it continues to do.

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Routledge Companion to Design Studies, 2016

This chapter looks at design culture, and the tastes that animate it, from the perspective of eve... more This chapter looks at design culture, and the tastes that animate it, from the perspective of everyday life. I argue that an everyday life perspective must work to see taste as ordinary, as a feature of everybody's life, and not the prerogative of a particular social group or a particular aesthetic proclivity. Instead of thinking about "good" taste and "bad" taste, a sociologically sensitive approach to design should look at the way that all people fashion their world through their material culture, and look at the qualities that such fashioning articulates. The chapter also suggests that taste is accentuated by the confidence (or lack of it) with which it is deployed, and that the level of confidence doesn't symmetrically correspond to the hierarchies at work in society.

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Writing Visual Culture , 2017

Foreword: What follows is an initial attempt to locate the emergence of design history within a m... more Foreword: What follows is an initial attempt to locate the emergence of design history within a much larger account of what Immanuel Wallerstein calls, rather grandly, 'world systems analysis'. 1 The point here is that when we move away from an 'internal' account of design history, one that sees it as emerging when specific actors form associations or establish specific design history courses and degrees, then other patterns can emerge. But this also means de-emphasizing the autonomy of design history, and for a marginal discipline this can sometimes seem counter-intuitive. My claim is not that my provisional and sketchy account of design history is more worthwhile than the more familiar accounts that have retold design history's beginnings within the teaching of contextual studies within British art and design education in the late 1960s through to the late 1970s, it is simply that it allows various commonalities to become visible that could, if developed, forge some links and some shared interests across design history, media studies, cultural studies, art and architectural history, film studies and so on. My wager, at this initial stage, is that the partial surrender of an autonomous history could be worth the gain of possible intellectual connections. Of course, in a sector (of higher education institutions), where disciplinary fields are regularly and routinely asked to launch defensive and protective fronts as they compete against each other for scarce resources and jobs, such an intellectual project may seem naïve or even flirting with disaster. My hypothesis is that a new configuration of connoisseurialism (one aimed at popular and mass-produced cultural forms, rather than at unique authorial statements) links the emergence of a series of disciplinary fields, which ironically have connoisseurialism (in a previous configuration) in their sites as antagonists. This hypothesis also suggests that we seek to understand the

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Mass Observation 2.0: Situating the Everyday, 2017

What does it mean to invoke ‘everyday life’ as a productive category for cultural work? What can ... more What does it mean to invoke ‘everyday life’ as a productive category for cultural work? What can this phrase do for us? I think that for many writers in the recent past it has acted as a form of critical realism, and as a way of puncturing the over-reaching abstractions of a strain of social theory. For the French historian Michel de Certeau it was a way of insisting on the importance of the messy actuality of ‘untamed life’: the life of singular bodies that can’t be contained by the docile roles that they have been given by both planners and theorists. The ‘untamed life’ is the excesses of memories, of materiality, of obstinate flesh, of desire, and of doubt that is, and accompanies, our ‘getting on with getting on’. This is the ‘unmanageable remainder’ that social theories (or at least the ones that want to see social life as orchestrated by discipline or greed, by status anxiety or narcissism) can’t quite incorporate. Invoking the everyday doesn’t seek to prove a theory wrong, merely to say that a theory hasn’t shown us what life looks like from the perspective of everyday life. It is a version of Hamlet’s complaint to Horatio: there is more going on here than your philosophy can account for.

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The Afterlives of Georges Perec, 2017

Georges Perec died in 1982 at the age of 45. What is he for us now, 33 years later in the second ... more Georges Perec died in 1982 at the age of 45. What is he for us now, 33 years later in the second decade of the twenty-first century? How do we make him our contemporary? To make Perec's work part of our present-day involves (perhaps counter-intuitively) grasping his project in its historical specificity. It isn't by cherry-picking useable aspects of the work that we will ensure some relevance to its afterlife: rather it will be by recognising his larger project as a response to a particular historical situation. While Perec's situation in the 1960s and 70s in France is not ours, it has its hooks in our world. Perec, I think, becomes our contemporary in the act of seeing those hooks, of seeing how a continuity of feeling and mood percolates through historical ruptures, and how changes in mood and feeling activate historical continuities. There is a simple claim driving this essay, namely that a central aspect of Perec's project was its attempt to register actuality. Which is to say that his project was a form of realism and like many forms of realism it was a quest and a question rather than an answer or solution. And as a question Perec's realism goes something like this: in a situation where there is no specific artistic style that has a privileged access to reality; where scholarly disciplines are all trying to grasp their slice of reality and claim it as the reality; and where the real is saturated by the unreality of the commodity spectacle – how can realism be achieved? Or slightly differently, and now as a quest rather than a question: if the means of grasping reality (from literature to sociology, from religion to politics) are in doubt, and if, because of this, there is a suspicion about what in the world should count as significant, then realism might mean revealing the significance of the insignificant. Perec's work is full of lists of objects and activities, of itemised occurrences and repeated gestures. And it is also a constant puzzling and worrying about what to include as

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Journal of Design History , 2017

Habitat, the furniture and household goods retail chain, has been characterized as showing an ‘ec... more Habitat, the furniture and household goods retail chain, has been characterized as
showing an ‘eclectic’ approach towards design styles and promoting a ‘lifestyle’ attitude towards domestic interiors. In an attempt to fill out these two terms and to explore the elusive (and allusive) content of Habitat’s eclectic lifestyle this article analyses the domestic scenography presented in three arenas of display that can be seen as being authored by Habitat: the shops themselves; the annual catalogues; and the advice books that were published under the authorship of Terence Conran and promoted and sold by Habitat (although also available more widely). I suggest that one way of recognizing the affective content of Habitat’s scenographic imagination is to regard it as constituting a genre that incorporates variety yet also mobilizes a particular set of domestic promises.

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Cultural Studies Review, 2017

This piece of writing is an experiment in digressive and peripatetic cultural studies that follow... more This piece of writing is an experiment in digressive and peripatetic cultural studies that follows a thought path around the city of Birmingham in England. Instead of constructing an argument it tries to perform a mode of enquiry that could be sensitive to the 'simultaneous non-synchroncity' of culture, and could craft a form of writing adequate to history's torn and crumpled state. It doesn't try to claim preferential treatment for such a practice, merely a marginal place for such a practice within cultural studies.

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New Literary History, 2016

This article is premised on two presumptions. The first is, I think, uncontroversial, the second ... more This article is premised on two presumptions. The first is, I think, uncontroversial, the second less so. The first presumption is that today, serious discussions about taste usually start out by rehearsing Pierre Bourdieu’s contribution to our understanding of how taste preferences operate in society. Today Bourdieu is often the starting point for discussing taste, rather than invoked as a critical response to other starting points that might go by the name of Immanuel Kant, or David Hume, or Archibald Alison. The second, more contentious presumptions, is that Bourdieu was not actually interested in taste and rarely addressed its particular qualities in his work. Or to put it differently, Bourdieu was only interested in taste as a function of something else, and that something else was the generation and maintenance of social distinctions. These presumptions beg their own questions: how should we attend to taste if we want to apprehend the various modalities it can engender (indifference as much as vehemence)? How could we find an approach to taste that is flexible enough to apprehend what might be seen as micro-sensitivities as well as those macro-orchestrations that could include such phenomena as the ubiquitous taste for individualised technologies (from cars to smart phones) and the seemingly ubiquitous taste for “convenience”? Tastes, in other words, that might not best accessed by assessing their value as good or bad taste? And could such an approach (if it could be concocted) also apprehend what Freud called “the narcissism of minor differences,” differences that were foundational for Bourdieu’s questionnaires?

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Cultural Studies , 2018

What would it mean to treat Cultural Studies as a project that has had amongst its accomplishment... more What would it mean to treat Cultural Studies as a project that has had amongst its accomplishments the production of new forms and styles of writing, and a generative approach to aesthetics? An initial answer to this question would be that this would recognize how Cultural Studies interceded in an academic environment not only through its concern with supplying ambitious questions and insisting on a broad range of objects of scrutiny, but also by showing how this often entailed reconfiguring the forms through which intellectual inquiry conveyed its cargo. This article doesn’t seek to provide a taxonomy of Cultural Studies’ forms and styles; what it seeks to do is to encourage a selfreflexive attention to aesthetics within Cultural Studies as a form of practice. It suggests that there are two guiding questions that might frame such an attention: how might Cultural Studies generate forms that are adequate to the complexity of the configurations that it seeks to register; and how might Cultural Studies generate forms that could reach the ear of new audiences not attuned to the cadences of scholarly writing? The tension between these two questions should be seen as an invitation to purposeful experimentation within Cultural Studies.

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This is the manuscript to my book on Michel de Certeau. It is just for reference; please consult ... more This is the manuscript to my book on Michel de Certeau. It is just for reference; please consult the published book for citations etc.

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This is the pre-copy edited version of my book Ordinary Lives. For reference. Please refer to the... more This is the pre-copy edited version of my book Ordinary Lives. For reference. Please refer to the published volume for any citations.

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An introduction to Cultural Studies that is attentive to the forces and passions of culture

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New Formations , 2021

Early on in Jenny Diski's memoir of The Sixties she provides an audit of her reading, listening, ... more Early on in Jenny Diski's memoir of The Sixties she provides an audit of her reading, listening, and viewing from the time. She reads Hardy, Dostoevsky, Nabokov, Neruda, the Beats; she watches Hollywood and British B movies, and the New Waves of Godard, Antonioni, Pasolini and others; and she listens to Mingus and Monk, Dylan and Baez, the Stones, Animals and Kinks. This music, she writes, 'all either accompanied me from the beginning of the decade or had emerged by the middle of it and were essential: the rhythm inside my head, the beat of my heart, the tuning of my sentiments'. Even if Diski's scene was not your scene, my guess is that you know exactly what she means: haven't we all had our sentiments tuned by music, by our enthusiasm for a novelist, a filmmaker, a painter, a poet? The sensual stuff of culture gets under our skin, draws us in, expands our world, fashions our consciousness, sets the tone and tempo of our responsiveness to the world around us. The 'tuning of sentiments' is precisely the sort of phenomenal work that Rita Felski's Hooked: Art and Attachment is suggesting that humanities scholars could and should pay attention to. For Felski we get a sense of the sociality of literature, music, television and cinema when we see it as an experiential resource: 'stripped of the sediments of the novels I've read, the films and TV shows I've watched' she writes, 'I would be another person entirely. Fictional beings serve as alter egos, ideal types, negative exempla, moral guides, objects of desire, imaginary friends' (p92). It is this world of the vernacular humanities (to coin a phrase), where books are absorbed as bedtime reading, where music consoles you through a break-up, and where a favourite painting is a postcard stuck on your fridge door with a magnet, that Felski is keen to engage with. And it is this world that seems so far from the world of professional humanities scholarship as it is usually practiced. Felski is one of the leading voices in 'post-critical' humanities. Hooked follows on from previous books (The Uses of Literature 2008 and The Limits of Critique 2015) where, following the lead of writers like Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick, she worried that the critical humanities' reliance on symptomatic reading, or deconstructive strategies, or ideology critique, or what was named more generally as 'the hermeneutics of suspicion', had become a new doxa used to flag professional humanities attributes.

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Oxford Art Journal, 2021

What makes ‘a scene’? Is it a collective attitude, a distinctive argot (‘you dig it?’), a shared ... more What makes ‘a scene’? Is it a collective attitude, a distinctive argot (‘you dig it?’), a shared look, a common drug of-choice? Or is it a physical space? A place to congregate and just to ‘be’? It is hard to imagine the New York punk and New Wave scene of the late 1970s without CBGBs in the Bowery, or to imagine the New York disco scene without Studio 54. But while a specific venue might feel like the centre of a scene, it soon becomes apparent that one site quickly connects to other places and practices: to rehearsal rooms and recording studios, to record shops and cafés, to apartments and boutiques, to lofts and bars. It would be difficult to say where the hard infrastructure of sticky floors and speaker systems ends, and the seemingly immaterial world of feelings and attitudes begin. To see them as interlaced and mutually constituting would seem like an obvious theoretical starting point: the practice of interlacing them, though, is a bit more of a challenge.

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Anyone with half an eye on trends in research and publishing in the theoretically-inclined humani... more Anyone with half an eye on trends in research and publishing in the theoretically-inclined humanities and social sciences might have noticed two particular orientations emerging over the last decade or so. One orientation is concerned with the material world of things, of objects and stuff. The other is attentive to affects, atmospheres and moods. A casual observer might see a degree of conflict or bifurcation in the way that these concerns have emerged simultaneously. On one hand they would be right: a good deal of the writing around affect, for instance, stresses intangible forces and ineffable eruptions of affective energy; most of the writing around 'things' is keen to apprehend a world of solidities on which we can, potentially at least, stub our toes. A less casual observer (or at least an observer who has been doing their observing for a while) might want to notice some similarities and overlaps between the two themes. Both might invoke a form of 'new materialism', both are attentive to bodies (as a scene of affect, as a quasi-object), both draw on a diverse range of historical and disciplinary sources. Seen as part of a non-linear unfolding of theoretical sensitivities since the 1950s we could see this theoretical moment as something like a time of 'post-post-structuralism'. It is an ungainly term, and might not be particularly helpful in capturing the range of enthusiasms and concerns at work across thing-work and affect-work, but it does, I hope, make vivid the fading of one theoretical proclivity and the rise of another. Seen from the perspective of post-post-structuralism, post-structuralism's inordinate interest in theorising subjectivity as radically disjointed, explosively divided and dynamically unfinished, can look like a form of 'wholeness' that is unavailable to the thing theorist or the affect mapper. What would be the point of such an attention towards human subjectivity if it ignored the hordes of creaturely and non

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Review of the film The Stuart Hall Project

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