The Reinvention of Everyday Life: Culture in the twenty-first century. Edited by Howard McNaughton and Adam Lam (2006). Christchurch NZ: Canterbury University Press. 264 pp. ISBN 1-877257-48-6
Reviewed by Niamh Hennessy, York University
This is an interesting and provocative collection of stories, commentaries and reviews that offer a series of meditations on the transformations of everyday life in the new century. The perspectives are drawn from a range of cultural contexts even as these particularities strike a universal chord in the themes that link them together. The tones of the various articles continually shift; even the emphasis on nostalgia in Bell’s subtle inquiry on the Garbage Museum in Curitiba, Brazil is coupled with a certain joy in the discovery of lost objects made meaningful by the social relationships embodied or projected in their display. The female workers at the museum sort objects by hand as they move along a conveyor belt. Not well paid, but with relatively good benefits and conditions, the workers are situated in relation to the poor who collect and deliver garbage to the museum in exchange for food. All of this takes place in context the active promotional campaign the city of Curitiba launches during the 80s and 90s as the eco capital of the world.
The complexities of the social relationships examined by Bell are followed by Quentin Stevens’ eerie account of the American Murdo Station as the hub of scientific conquest of Antarctica. US interests in Antarctica date back to post World War II and the Cold War, and come to reflect contradictory impulses of modernity in the design of metropolitan and frontier spaces at Murdo. In detailing the ‘architecture’ of its colonial ideology, Stevens seems to mimic the mono-tonal hum and monochromatic images of the military’s regulation of landscape and social relationships. If these lead essays offer contrasts in tone and centre-periphery dynamics, other essays on cultural production and display invert and subvert the public/private dimensions of reality television, the construction of nation and the inward/outward glances in the reporting of community tragedies.
Susan Hedges’ article on Schlemmer’s ‘The Triadic Ballet’ points to how machine technology came to be incorporated in the movement of human bodies on stage, suggesting a more futuristic vision that is simultaneously an architecture of theatre space and a repetition. The theme of nation and performance returns in Richards’ account of the increasingly urbanized Maori alongside Susan Ballard’s account of the corporeal in installation settings in which digital codes intersect with material forms. The emphasis on performance over production is troubled by Kirsten Hudson’s efforts to link the former with the production of everyday life.
The hybridity of global media and advertising that depend equally on the expansion and segmentation of new markets of consumers suggest new definitions of the diaspora in Grixti’s essay, while other essays discuss how previously untapped markets, for example senior citizens, bring the periphery to the centre of advertising strategies and formats. Kate Greenwood theorizes how films like Metropolis (1926) and The Matrix (1999) fall short of representing contemporary experiences of subjects even with their recognition of the simulated of character motivation and action. Surprisingly absent from Redshaw’s essay on speed and the car is any mention of Taylorism or scientific management in its genesis, but the essays on new technologies and forms like email evoke these themes by detailing the collapse of time and space that figures in any account of postmodern subjectivities, whether singular or collective. Accordingly, the cyborg requires new rethinking and redefinition for its original instantiation as ‘half-man’ and ‘half-machine’ is superseded by the idea of a ‘self-regulating machine’ that Wiener, for one, likens to the activity of human intelligence. In that sense, we are cyborgs because we are, at least minimally incorporated in the feedback loops of machine technology whose functions are only most recently perfected or exploited by digital forms of communication. In short, this collection of essays from Canterbury University Press in New Zealand is worth a read not only for the resonances that cross culturally, but also for its distinctive character in voice and perspective.