Perspectives on Everyday Life

Perspectives on Everyday Life A Cross Disciplinary Cultural Analysis

Arthur Asa Berger

Perspectives on Everyday Life

Arthur Asa Berger

Perspectives on Everyday Life A Cross Disciplinary Cultural Analysis

Arthur Asa Berger Department of Broadcast and Electronic Communication Arts San Francisco State University San Francisco, CA, USA

ISBN 978-3-319-99794-0    ISBN 978-3-319-99795-7 (eBook) https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-99795-7 Library of Congress Control Number: 2018958629 © The Editor(s) (if applicable) and The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG, part of Springer Nature 2018 This work is subject to copyright. All rights are solely and exclusively licensed by the Publisher, whether the whole or part of the material is concerned, specifically the rights of translation, reprinting, reuse of illustrations, recitation, broadcasting, reproduction on microfilms or in any other physical way, and transmission or information storage and retrieval, electronic adaptation, computer software, or by similar or dissimilar methodology now known or hereafter developed. The use of general descriptive names, registered names, trademarks, service marks, etc. in this publication does not imply, even in the absence of a specific statement, that such names are exempt from the relevant protective laws and regulations and therefore free for general use. The publisher, the authors and the editors are safe to assume that the advice and information in this book are believed to be true and accurate at the date of publication. Neither the publisher nor the authors or the editors give a warranty, express or implied, with respect to the material contained herein or for any errors or omissions that may have been made. The publisher remains neutral with regard to jurisdictional claims in published maps and institutional affiliations. Cover Pattern © Melisa Hasan This Palgrave Pivot imprint is published by the registered company Springer Nature Switzerland AG The registered company address is: Gewerbestrasse 11, 6330 Cham, Switzerland

In memory of David Noble, mentor and friend

Acknowledgments

I’d like to thank all the writers who have had interesting things to say about various aspects of everyday life and whose ideas have informed this book. This applies not only to the authors who have written books on everyday life, who are discussed in the first part of my book, but also to the writers who have dealt with the topics I discuss in the second part of the book, on “Everyday Life in America.” I offer a number of quotations from authors of all kinds in the book to give my readers a sense of their style, in addition to the information they have provided—that is, how they said what they have had to say. I also want to thank my senior editor, Shaun Vigil, and my assistant editor, Glenn Ramirez, for their help in publishing this book, and my copy editors and everyone else involved in publishing the book.

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Contents

Part I Perspectives on Everyday Life   1 1 Introduction   3 2 Perspectives on Everyday Life   7 3 Henri Lefebvre on Terror in Everyday Life  17 4 Michel de Certeau and Resistance to Domination  25 5 Fernand Braudel and the Structures in Everyday Life  33 6 Sigmund Freud on Psychopathology in Everyday Life  39 7 Milton Sapirstein on the Paradoxes of Everyday Life  45 8 Myth and Everyday Life  51 9 The Body and Everyday Life  59

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Contents

Part II Everyday Life in America  73 10 Alarm Clocks  75 11 The Amazon Echo  79 12 Chandeliers at the 2017 Grammy Awards  83 13 The Starbucks Coffee Shop Logo  87 14 Teeth Whitening Agents  91 15 Pacifiers  95 16 Toilets  99 17 Milk 103 18 Electronic Pressure Cookers 107 19 Diet Products 111 20 Hair Styles 115 21 College Rejection Letters 121 22 Air Jordans 127 23 High-Tech French Fries 133 24 Backpacks 139 25 Mattresses 143 26 Women’s Shoes 147

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27 Madonna’s “Like a Prayer” 151 28 Suitcases 157 29 Superglue 163 30 Calendars 167 31 Coda 171

About the Author

Fig. 1  Secret agent

Fig. 2  Author with hat

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ABOUT THE AUTHOR

Fig. 3  The author

Fig. 4  Decoder man

Arthur  Asa  Berger  is Professor Emeritus of Broadcast and Electronic Communication Arts at San Francisco State University, where he taught between 1965 and 2003. He graduated in 1954 from the University of Massachusetts, where he majored in literature and philosophy. He received an MA degree in Journalism and Creative Writing from the University of Iowa in 1956. He was drafted shortly after graduating from Iowa and served in the US Army in the Military District of Washington in Washington, DC, where he was a feature writer and speech writer in the District’s Public Information Office. He also wrote about high school sports for The Washington Post on weekend evenings while in the army.

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Berger spent a year touring Europe after he got out of the Army and then went to the University of Minnesota, where he received a PhD in American Studies in 1965. He wrote his dissertation on the comic strip Li’l Abner. In 1963-64, he had a Fulbright to Italy and taught at the University of Milan. He spent a year as a visiting professor at the Annenberg School for Communication and Journalism, University of Southern California, Los Angeles, in 1984, and two months in the Fall of 2007 as a visiting professor at the School of Hotel and Tourism, Hong Kong Polytechnic University. He spent a month lecturing at Jinan University in Guangzhou and ten days lecturing at Tsinghua University in Beijing in the Spring of 2009. He spent a month in 2012 as a Fulbright Senior Specialist in Argentina, lecturing on semiotics and cultural criticism, a month in Minsk in 2014 lecturing on media criticism and three weeks lecturing on semiotics and media in Iran in 2015. He is author of more than one hundred articles and more than seventy books on media, popular culture, humor and tourism. His books have been translated into nine languages. A selected list of these books follows. Li’l Abner, 1970 The Evangelical Hamburger, 1970 Pop Culture, 1973 About Man, 1974 The Comic Stripped American, 1974 The TV-Guided American, 1975 Language in Thought and Action, 1974, 1978 (in collaboration with S.I. Hayakawa) Film in Society, 1978 Television As an Instrument of Terror, 1978 Media Analysis Techniques, 1982; 6th edition, 2018 Signs in Contemporary Culture, 1984; 2nd edition, 1998 Television in Society, l986 Semiotics of Advertising, 1987 Media USA, 1988; 2nd edition, 1991 Seeing is Believing: An Introduction to Visual Communication, 1989 Political Culture and Public Opinion, 1989 Agitpop: Political Culture and Communication Theory, 1989 Scripts: Writing for Radio and Television, 1990 Media Research Techniques, 1991; 2nd edition, 1998 Reading Matter, 1992

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About the Author

Popular Culture Genres, 1992 An Anatomy of Humor, 1993 Improving Writing Skills, 1993 Blind Men and Elephants: Perspectives on Humor, 1995 Cultural Criticism: A Primer of Key Concepts, 1995 Essentials of Mass Communication Theory, 1995 Manufacturing Desire: Media, Popular Culture and Everyday Life, 1996 Narratives in Popular Culture, Media and Everyday Life, 1997 The Genius of the Jewish Joke, 1997 Bloom’s Morning, 1997 The Art of Comedy Writing, 1997 Postmortem for a Postmodernist, 1997 The Postmodern Presence, 1998 Media and Communication Research Methods, 2000 Ads, Fads and Consumer Culture, 2000 Jewish Jesters, 2001 The Mass Comm Murders: Five Media Theorists Self-Destruct, 2002 The Agent in the Agency, 2003 The Portable Postmodernist, 2003 Durkheim is Dead: Sherlock Holmes is Introduced to Social Theory, 2003 Media and Society, 2003 Ocean Travel and Cruising, 2004 Deconstructing Travel: A Cultural Perspective, 2004 Making Sense of Media: Key Texts in Media and Cultural Studies, 2004 Shop Till You Drop: Perspectives on American Consumer Culture, 2004 Vietnam Tourism, 2005 Mistake in Identity: A Cultural Studies Murder Mystery, 2005 50Ways to Understand Communication, 2006 Thailand Tourism, 2008 The Golden Triangle, 2008 The Academic Writer’s Toolkit: A User’s Manual, 2008 What Objects Mean: An Introduction to Material Culture, 2009 Tourism in Japan: An Ethno-Semiotic Analysis, 2010 The Cultural Theorist’s Book of Quotations, 2010 The Objects of Affection: Semiotics and Consumer Culture, 2010 (Palgrave Macmillan) Understanding American Icons: An Introduction to Semiotics, 2012 Media, Myth and Society, 2012 (Palgrave Macmillan) Theorizing Tourism, 2012

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Bali Tourism, 2013 Dictionary of Advertising and Marketing Concepts, 2013 Messages: An Introduction to Communication, 2015 Gizmos, or The Electronic Imperative, 2015 (Palgrave Macmillan) Applied Discourse Analysis, 2016 (Palgrave Macmillan) Marketing and American Consumer Culture, 2016 (Palgrave Macmillan) Cultural Perspectives on Millennials, 2018 (Palgrave Macmillan)

List of Figures

Fig. 1 Fig. 2 Fig. 3 Fig. 4 Fig. 1.1 Fig. 2.1 Fig. 2.2 Fig. 2.3 Fig. 2.4 Fig. 2.5 Fig. 2.6 Fig. 3.1 Fig. 3.2 Fig. 3.3 Fig. 4.1 Fig. 4.2 Fig. 4.3 Fig. 5.1 Fig. 8.1 Fig. 8.2 Fig. 8.3 Fig. 8.4 Fig. 9.1 Fig. 9.2

Secret agent xiii Author with hat xiii The author xiv Decoder man xiv Robert Musil 6 Cover of Sigmund Freud, Psychopathology of Everyday Life8 Bronislaw Malinowski 9 Sigmund Freud 11 Iceberg and the psyche 12 James Joyce 13 Clotaire Rapaille 15 Henri Lefebvre 18 Cover of Lefebvre’s Everyday Life in the Modern World19 Mikhail Bakhtin 22 Michel de Certeau 26 Roman Jakobson 27 Jakobson chart on the communication process 28 Fernand Braudel 34 Page from “Secret Agent” article 53 Mircea Eliade 54 Chart: myth model applied to Adam and Eve and to Oedipus 56 Chart: myth model applied to Sisyphus 57 Judith Butler 65 Marjorie Garber 67

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PART I

Perspectives on Everyday Life

CHAPTER 1

Introduction

Abstract  This chapter introduces the subject of everyday life and offers a quotation from Robert Musil’s classic work, The Man Without Qualities. Musil suggests that by the middle of our lives, we become caught, like flies, in what we might call the flypaper of life, and we only have the slightest resemblance to “our original shape.” This chapter asks whether Musil is a realist or a pessimist. Keywords  Everyday life • Routines • Rituals • Habits • Data At this moment he wished to be a man without qualities. But this is probably not so different from what other people sometimes feel too. After all, by the time they have reached the middle of their life’s journey few people remember how they have managed to arrive at themselves, at their amusements, their point of view, their wife, character, occupation and successes, but they cannot help feeling that not much is likely to change any more. It might even be asserted that they have been cheated, for one can nowhere discover any sufficient reason for everything’s having come about as it has. It might just as well have turned out differently. The events of people’s lives have, after all, only to the least degree originated in them, having generally depended on all sorts of circumstances such as the moods, the life or death of quite different people, and have, as it were, only at the given point of time come hurrying towards them…. Something has had its way with them like a flypaper with a fly; it has caught them fast, here catching a little hair, there

© The Author(s) 2018 A. A. Berger, Perspectives on Everyday Life, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-99795-7_1

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hampering their movements, and has gradually enveloped them, until they lie, buried under a thick coating that has only the remotest resemblance to their original shape. (Robert Musil, The Man Without Qualities)

If you live to the age of 85, you will have been alive for 31,025 days. One day has 1440 minutes, so if you multiply 1440 times 31,025 days you get 44,676,000 minutes of life. If you drink two cups of coffee (starting at the age of 20), you will drink around 48,000 cups of coffee. If you start your day with a bowl of oatmeal at age 20, you will consume more than 24,000 bowls of oatmeal. I read a statistic on the Internet recently, on eMarketer. retail, which claimed the average consumer in America eats dinner out 2.1 times a week. That adds up to 109 times a year. In a year, if you multiply 365 days times 3 meals (breakfast, lunch, and dinner) you get 1095 meals, which means we dine out for one out of every ten dinners we eat. Who, me? You ask. We don’t think about how many cups of coffee we will consume during our lifetimes because we become immersed in this and that activity in our daily lives and don’t notice how repetitious many of our everyday rituals are and don’t think about what they add up to. Of course, even oatmeal lovers sometimes have a different cereal or no cereal to start their day, but even if you subtract 10 percent of time not having oatmeal for breakfast from these figures you find that you have consumed an enormous amount of oatmeal and many thousands of cups of coffee (or tea, or whatever it is that you prefer). These figures offer us a statistical view of everyday life to which we are blind because we are such creatures of habit and because we tend to be immersed in the moment. I have a friend who told me that he has had a bowl of oatmeal every day for the past 50 years. That made me think about how many bowls of oatmeal a typical person might consume in a lifetime. In recent years, I noticed that my wife and I generally start off our days with oatmeal. It is supposed to be very good for you, it is delicious (at least we think so) and it is not expensive. We generally live day to day and focusing our attention on problems we face each day we seldom think about our lives from a long range statistical perspective. We know that eventually we will die but while we live, unless we come down with a serious disease, we don’t think about our lives in terms of how much this or that I’ll consume in my lifetime or how many times I’ll drive down this street to get to work. I don’t think about my life in terms of the thousands of bowls of oatmeal I’ve had or tens of t­housands

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of cups of coffee I’ve drunk. My use of statistics is a reaction to a comment the dean of the Annenberg School of Communication made (where I was visiting professor for a year in 1983) about one of my books, Media Analysis Techniques. He described it as “data free.” So this introduction is a response to that comment. What you’ve read, to this point, has some data but does it mean anything? Do all the statistics I’ve offered about eating oatmeal have any significance other than being curious and perhaps interesting in that it shines a different light on one trivial aspect of our everyday lives? I think statistics do tell us a great deal, though I don’t rely on them too often. The subject of this book is everyday life—our habits, routines, and rituals that shape our lives from day to day. Because we are all so immersed in our everyday lives, we seldom think very much about them. There are also endless distractions. And so the days disappear from us and are lost, even though some days may have momentous experiences—we ask someone to marry us, we get a job, we are fired from a job, we are hit by a car. We find a way to deal with these events and then, the next day, we are back to our routines: a bowl of oatmeal, a cup of coffee or tea, toast or a bagel or an English muffin or whatever. Maybe bacon and eggs? There are many variables that play a role in the kind of lives we lead. I am talking about things like how old we are, where we were born and grew up, our gender, our sexual preferences, our race, our religion, the socio-economic status of our parents, our personalities, our educational attainments (or lack of education), our politics, and so on. The Musil quote in the epigraph deals with the realization that people sometimes have, generally in mid-life, that not much is likely to change for them, and his notion that many, or possibly all, of us have been caught like flies on flypaper and our lives have turned out to be quite different from what we thought they would be. It is a very powerful metaphor. We might say that Musil is a European pessimist and his description of what happens to people doesn’t apply to Americans. We believe we can recreate ourselves endlessly and our lives are full of possibilities at all times. This was the notion behind the American Dream, but in recent years we’ve concluded that the American Dream is just that—a dream, and not real. Relatively few Americans who are born into poverty are able to escape to the middle classes. This is not the case in most other advanced countries such as Canada, Great Britain, and France. Poverty in America we might say is “sticky” (Fig. 1.1).

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Fig. 1.1  Robert Musil

I would suggest that Musil is a realist, who understands the human condition, and his book, The Man Without Qualities, is a literary ­masterpiece (though a bewildering read in some respects) and is a testimonial to the sense of futility we sometimes feel when we consider our futures. There are, we must recognize, many different kinds of everyday lives and that everyday life in the United States is different from everyday life in Europe or Asia or Africa. And everyday life in the American South is different from everyday life in the American Midwest or Northwest or East. But what if Musil is right? What if, regardless of where we were born and grew up, we all end up, when we are middle aged, with lives that don’t have the promise of major changes in the future and we find ourselves stuck on flypaper that covers us all over and we only have the faintest or remotest resemblance to who were in our younger days and to who we thought we would become.

CHAPTER 2

Perspectives on Everyday Life

Abstract  In this chapter we focus on different perspectives of social scientists and others on everyday life. The Polish anthropologist Bronislaw Malinowski, who suggested that the “imponderabilia of actual life” is basic to studying everyday life, is cited. His work suggests that people may be involved in institutions of great scope but not realize it. This is followed by a discussion of the psychoanalytic approach to everyday life and the work of Sigmund Freud, Clotaire Rapaille, and others. This chapter also discusses James Joyce’s novel, Ulysses, which is a classic study of everyday life—in this case, one day in the life of Leopold Bloom and other characters. Keywords  Everyday life • Kula • Psychoanalysis • Unconscious • Ulysses Everyday life is a key concept in cultural studies and is a specialized subject in the field of sociology. Some argue that, motivated by capitalism and industrialism‘s degrading effects on human existence and perception, writers and artists of the nineteenth century turned more toward personal reflection and the portrayal of everyday life represented in their writings and art to a noticeably greater degree than in past works, for example Renaissance literature‘s interest in hagiography and politics. Other theorists dispute this argument based on a long history of writings about daily life which can be seen in

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works from Ancient Greece, Medieval Christianity, and the Catholic Enlightenment. In the study of everyday life gender has been an important factor in its conceptions. Some theorists regard women as the quintessential representatives and victims of everyday life. It is the non-negotiable reality that exists amongst all social groupings without discrimination and is an unavoidable basis for which all human endeavor exists. Much of everyday life is automatic in that it is driven by current environmental features as mediated by automatic cognitive processing of those features, and without any mediation by conscious choice, according to social psychologist John A.  Bargh. Daily life is also studied by sociologists to investigate how it is organized and given meaning. A sociological journal called the Journal of Mundane Behavior, published 2000–2004, studied these everyday actions. (Wikipedia)

There are many writers and scholars who have written about everyday life or various aspects of the subject. There are 127,000,000 results on Google. com (accessed July 13, 2017) for everyday life and more than 18,000 books on the subject listed on Amazon.com. So there is a substantial amount of interest in the subject and the numbers on Google are so large because there are so many different ways of looking at the subject.

Fig. 2.1  Cover of Sigmund Freud, Psychopathology of Everyday Life

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Sigmund Freud wrote a book on the Psychopathology of Everyday Life, to be discussed later in the book, and countless other psychologists, ­sociologists, anthropologists, novelists, and poets have written about it (Fig. 2.1). One of the most remarkable studies of everyday life is found in James Joyce’s Ulysses, which is a very long avant-garde novel about one day in the life of his protagonist Leopold Bloom. It is considered to be one of the greatest novels of the twentieth century. I was influenced by that novel to write a semiotic-sociological book, Bloom’s Morning, which deals with one morning in the life of a typical American everyman figure, also named Bloom. It deals with material culture, rituals and other aspects of a typical American’s morning. It has chapters on king sized beds, comforters, clock radios, toasters, electric toothbrushes and other parts of American everyday life. Originally I had hoped to do an entire day and call my book Ulysses Sociological America, but it was too difficult to so, so I settled for my hero’s morning (Fig. 2.2). Fig. 2.2  Bronislaw Malinowski

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The great Polish anthropologist, Bronislaw Malinowski, offered some insights into the topics one might investigate in dealing with everyday life. He writes, in his classic study Argonauts of the Western Pacific (1961: 18–19): There is a series of phenomena of great importance which cannot possibly be recorded by questioning or computing documents, but have to be observed in their full actuality. Let us call them the imponderabilia of actual life. Here belong such things as the routine of a man’s working day, the details of his care of the body, of the manner of taking food and preparing it; the tone of conversational and social life around the village fires, the existence of strong friendships or hostilities…All these facts can and ought to be scientifically formulated and recorded, but it is necessary that this be done, not by a superficial registration of details, as is usually done by untrained observers, but with an effort at penetrating the mental attitude expressed in them.

What we must do, Malinowski suggested, is move beyond merely describing things we have and routines we follow and find the “mental attitudes” expressed in them. That is, we must search for the unconscious imperatives behind them, the unrecognized cultural codes that are generating them, and how they affect any individuals involved in a given activity but the society and culture in which these activities take place. We have to assume that people, generally speaking, are not aware of the full significance, on both the individual and cultural level, of many things they do. Malinowski, for example, found that Trobriand natives were involved in a gigantic scheme of gift exchanging, which he called the Kula. The natives didn’t realize what they were involved with, and only thought about their duties to swap necklaces for bracelets, or vice versa, depending upon the circumstances. Individuals seldom understand the full significance of their activities and behavior. Sigmund Freud, the father of psychoanalytic theory, argues that our psyches have three parts: consciousness (what we are aware of), preconsciousness (what we are dimly aware of ) and an unconscious (whose contents we cannot access and are completely unaware of ) (Fig. 2.3). As Freud explained in his essay “Psychoanalysis,” in Freud: Character and Culture (in Philip Rieff, ed. Character and Culture (1963)): It was a triumph for the interpretative art of psychoanalysis when it ­succeeded in demonstrating that certain common mental acts of normal people, for which no one had hitherto attempted to put forward a psychological explanation, were to be regarded in the same light as the symptoms of neurotics:

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Fig. 2.3  Sigmund Freud

that is to say they had a meaning, which was unknown to the subject but which could easily be discovered by analytic means…. A class of material was brought to light which is calculated better than any other to stimulate a belief in the existence of unconscious mental acts even in people to whom the hypothesis of something at once mental and unconscious seems strange and even absurd. (pp. 235–236)

So we are not aware of everything that is going on in our minds. Actually, we are aware of relatively little that is going on in our minds—only a small portion of our mental lives is accessible to us (Fig. 2.4). Our minds are like icebergs. The part of the iceberg that we can see above water is consciousness. Just below the water, for five or six feet, we can dimly make out the iceberg and that is our subconscious or preconscious. And buried in the darkness is the rest of the iceberg, about 85 percent of it, and that is our unconscious. We can only access it with the help of psychologists, psychoanalysts, and psychiatrists, and even with their help, it is not always possible to discover the contents of the unconscious. What is important to recognize is that imperatives from our unconscious shapes much of our thinking and behavior. Marketers are also interested in the unconscious because they believe that they can influence our decision making by finding a way to place material they want us to have in our unconscious, often without our being aware of what has happened. They do this through music, through images

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Fig. 2.4  Iceberg and the psyche

and a host of other ways. A marketing professor, Gerald Zaltman, at the Harvard University business school, offers his view of the human psyche. He writes in his book How Customers Think: Essential Insights into the Mind of the Market (2003: 40): According to most estimates, about 95 percent of thought, emotion, and learning occur in the unconscious mind—that is, without our awareness. As important as it is, consciousness is the end result of a system of neurons processing information in largely unconscious ways.

He adds, later, that (2003: 50) “At least 95 percent of all cognition occurs below the level of awareness in the shadows of the mind while, at most 5 percent occurs in higher-order consciousness.” So there is reason to suggest that much of our behavior is shaped by what Zaltman calls the “shadows of the mind” or the unconscious elements in our psyches. Sociologists, political scientists, anthropologists, economists, historians, and scholars in many other disciplines are also interested in everyday life, so this book will have a multi-disciplinary perspective. Novelists, as I pointed out earlier with my discussion of Ulysses, are also interested in everyday life. So is just about everyone, because at some points in our lives, sometimes when we are young and wondering about the future but more generally when we are in midlife, we turn our attention away from our activities and start to wonder about our lives and what has happened to us (Fig. 2.5). James Joyce’s Ulysses, considered one of the greatest novels of the twentieth century, deals with 24 hours in the life of its hero Leopold Bloom and

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Fig. 2.5  James Joyce

his wife Molly. It can be seen as a micro-analysis of the everyday life of its hero, Bloom, though it also is an amazing study of what it is to be a human being. Wikipedia offers an assessment of the importance of this novel: Ulysses is a modernist novel by Irish writer James Joyce. It was first serialized in parts in the American journal The Little Review from March 1918 to December 1920 and then published in its entirety in Paris by Sylvia Beach on 2 February 1922, Joyce’s 40th birthday. It is considered to be one of the most important works of modernist literature and has been called “a demonstration and summation of the entire movement.” According to Declan Kiberd, “Before Joyce, no writer of fiction had so foregrounded the process of thinking.” Ulysses chronicles the peripatetic appointments and encounters of Leopold Bloom in Dublin in the course of an ordinary day, 16 June 1904. Ulysses is the Latinized name of Odysseus, the hero of Homer’s epic poem Odyssey, and the novel establishes a series of parallels between the poem and the novel, with structural correspondences between the characters and experiences of Leopold Bloom and Odysseus, Molly Bloom and Penelope, and Stephen Daedalus and Telemachus, in addition to events and themes of the early 20th-century context of modernism, Dublin, and Ireland’s relationship to Britain. The novel is highly allusive and also imitates the styles of different periods of English literature. Since publication, the book has attracted controversy and scrutiny, ranging from the 1921 obscenity trial in

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America to protracted textual “Joyce Wars”. Ulysses’ stream-of-­consciousness technique, careful structuring, and experimental prose—full of puns, parodies, and allusions—as well as its rich characterization and broad humour, have led it to be regarded as one of the greatest literary works in history. Joyce fans worldwide now celebrate 16 June as Bloomsday.

To my mind, Ulysses, aside from being a great novel, and a difficult one for people to read, is a classic study in everyday life. One day in the life of Leopold Bloom but the book speaks to everyone.

Topics to Investigate in Studying Everyday Life There are an almost infinite number of topics one might deal with in writing about everyday life and, as one might imagine, in any book it is not possible to deal with all of them, though I try to deal with a number of them in this book: • Accidents and chance events and everyday life • Age differences and everyday life • Cultural codes and everyday life • Fashion and everyday life • Food and drink and everyday life • Gender and everyday life • Health and everyday life • Leisure and everyday life • Lifestyles and everyday life • Material culture and everyday life • Media use and Everyday life • Place of birth and everyday life • Place one is raised and everyday life • Politics and everyday life • Popular culture and everyday life • Religion and everyday life • Rituals and everyday life • Routines and Habits and everyday life • Sexual practices and everyday life. • Socio-economic status and everyday life • Time budgeting and everyday life • Work and everyday life

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Fig. 2.6  Clotaire Rapaille

This list offers a small sampling of the countless topics one might deal with in studying everyday life, all of which shed a light on our lives and the cultures and subcultures to which we belong. The kinds of foods we eat, the way we talk, the body language we use, the religions we follow, the clothes we wear—all of these things are learned from growing up in a given family in a given town or city in a certain region of a country (Fig. 2.6). A French psychoanalyst and marketing consultant, Clotaire Rapaille, argues that children between the age of birth and seven are “imprinted” with their country’s culture, beliefs, values, and practices. In his book The Culture Code, he explains how nations all imprint different codes into children, which shape their behavior in their adult lives. As he explains (2006): Most of us imprint the meanings of the things most central to our lives by the age of seven. This is because emotion is the central force for children under the age of seven. (p. 21)

Different countries (and parts of countries) “imprint” their children differently and, of course, some children, when they grow up, try to modify their original imprinting or reject some or all of it and make major changes in their lives. Whether they can succeed is open to question.

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His book, The Culture Code, shows how people in different countries lead very different everyday lives and suggests that for marketers to succeed in selling products and services in different countries, the marketers have to understand the cultural codes that shape people’s thinking and behavior. I begin this book with work on everyday life by three thinkers—all of them, by chance, French: Henri Lefebvre (sociologist), Michel de Certeau (communication theorist), and Fernand Braudel (historian). Each of them offers a different disciplinary perspective on the subject and together they provide valuable insights into the nature of everyday life and how it should be studied. Next, I will deal with the ideas of two other authors: Sigmund Freud and Milton Sapirstein, who approach everyday life from a psychoanalytic perspective. Then I will consider everyday life and the body (dealing with age, gender, and race), myth and everyday life, and other factors affecting everyday life. The second part of the book offers psycho-semiotic analyses of material culture and other significant aspects of everyday life in America: clocks, calendars, Echo DOT devices, electronic pressure cookers, and so on. I conclude the book with a Coda, expressing my conclusions about the nature of everyday life and problems writing the book. I have changed the paragraphing in most of the quoted material, to make them easier to read, but not changed the content.

CHAPTER 3

Henri Lefebvre on Terror in Everyday Life

Abstract  In this chapter we deal with the ideas of Henri Lefebvre, a French Marxist, whose book Everyday Life in the Modern World is an important contribution to the study of everyday life. Lefebvre is interested in the matter of recurrence, which is a basic element of everyday life, and of the role of advertising in shaping our lives and our ideological perspectives on things. He discusses Joyce’s Ulysses which is recognized as a universal study of everyday life. He also discusses what he describes as terror that pervades our everyday lives because the split between the wealthy and the poor inevitably leads to repression. Keywords  Recurrence • Ulysses • Advertising • Ideology • Repression • Festival O that awful deepdown torrent O and the sea the sea crimson sometimes like fire and the glorious sunsets and the figtrees in the Alameda gardens yes and all the queer little streets and pink and blue and yellow houses and the rosegardens and the Jessamine and geraniums and cactuses and Gibraltar as a girl where I was a Flower of the mountain yes when I put the rose in my hair like the Andalusian girls used or shall I wear a red yes and how he kissed me under the Moorish wall and I thought well as well him as another and then I asked him with my eyes to ask again yes and then he asked me would I say yes to say yes my mountain flower and first I put my arms around him yes and drew

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him down to me so he could feel my breasts all perfume yes and his hear was going like made and yes I said yes I will Yes. (James Joyce, Ulysses)

Henri Lefebvre, a French Marxist, offers some important insights into everyday life in modern societies. This chapter discusses some of his ideas and what light he sheds on our everyday lives in his book Everyday Life in the Modern World, first published in France in 1968 and translated into English by Sacha Rabinovitch and published in 1971. On the cover of the edition published in America, we see a table set with a bottle of milk and a bowl of cereal. In the window, we see an atomic bomb being detonated. Thus, we have a combination of the banal and ordinary and the earth-­ shaking at the same time. Lefebvre begins by suggesting that if you want to find out what happened on June 16th, a day chosen by chance, and go to the library to investigate that day, you will find the typical news items about accidents, what various personalities have had to say about this and that, but won’t find very much about the everyday lives of ordinary men and women (Fig. 3.1). But June 16th happens to be the day in which the events of James Joyce’s characters in his great novel, Ulysses, took place and deals with the activities of his hero Leopold Bloom, Bloom’s wife Molly, and his friend Fig. 3.1  Henri Lefebvre

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Stephen Daedalus, among others during that day. Lefebvre mentions that this day has been seen by a writer, Herman Broch, as a classic study of “universal everyday life.” As Lefebvre explains (1971: 3): Here, with all the trappings of an epic…the quotidian steals the show. In his endeavor to portray the wealth and poverty to everyday life Joyce exploited language to the farthest limits of its resources.

Ulysses must be seen, then, a an epic study of everyday life: a huge novel that takes place during June 16th that, in a sense, is the history of the world and one which has mythic aspects to it, since it based on the Odyssey (Fig. 3.2). Shortly after his discussion of the universality of Joyce’s novel, Lefebvre explains that his intention is to (1971: 18): explore recurrence. Everyday life is made of recurrences: gestures of labour and leisure, mechanical movements both human and properly mechanic, hours, days, weeks, months, years, linear and cyclical repetitions, natural and rational time, etc.

It is this recurrence, the fact that we repeat so many actions so many times during our lives, which forms the background against which we lead our Fig. 3.2  Cover of Lefebvre’s Everyday Life in the Modern World

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everyday lives, though there are events that happen, from time to time, that are not covered by recurrence. He mentions in passing Freud’s notions about the (1971: 19) “morbid effects of traumatic repetitions as well as the therapeutic effects obtained from the elucidation of these” by psychoanalysis. We may ask whether repetitions, of all kinds, can have morbid or, at the least, psychologically damaging qualities? He describes everyday life, or the quotidian, as that which is “humble,” “solid,” and “taken for granted,” and that in our everyday lives, events follow one another in “regular, unvarying succession.” Except, that is, when unexpected things happen or we do things to interrupt the seemingly endless cycles of recurrences in our lives. If we insert a distinction like modernity into our examination of everyday life, everything changes and we must now become, Lefebvre insists, an “active interpreter of signs,” or, in other words, semioticians of everyday life. And we must maintain a focus on particulars and now just assign everything to “culture.” Lefebvre believes that there is a need to discover a culture’s hidden ideological aspects, which implies, ultimately, an investigation of the role media and, in particular, advertising plays in people’s lives. Advertising, he suggests, is now becoming (or has become) the main ideology on contemporary times, and its ideology is that which posits men and women as primarily consumers, instead of what people formerly believed, which is that they were active beings who played a role in shaping society. Advertising substitutes consumption for what we might describe as production and turns their awareness of their alienation into a lust for consumption. As Lefebvre explains, advertising (1971: 56): has substituted for the image of active man that of the consumer as the possessor of happiness and of perfect rationality, as the ideal become reality…. In this process of ideological substitutions and displacements man’s awareness of his alienation is repressed, or even suppressed, by the addition of a new alienation to the old.

Eventually, leading figures in society figured out how to use consumption to organize everyday life for the masses. This leads to what Lefebvre describes as the “bureaucratic society of controlled consumption,” one in which there are certain ironies, such as that in which we find ourselves now, where compulsion is the basis of the social order but the ideology of “Liberty” is offered as a face-saver. In these societies, there is a widespread sense of unrest, which is revealed in literature and the arts. It is what he calls “publicity” and we call advertising that plays a major role in consumer societies.

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His discussion of the changing role of advertising is very perceptive. He writes (1971: 105): in the second half of the twentieth century in Europe, or at any rate in France, there is nothing whether object, individual or social group—that is valued apart from its double, the image that advertises and sanctifies it.

These images promise people the “happiness of being a consumer” by salvaging and reconditioning myths such as the “Smile myth” which is about the joy of being a consumer and the “Display myth” which is to show the world that you possess things of value—what we would call “conspicuous consumption.” This leads to an analysis of “Linguistic Phenomena” that is rather technical and I will skip it. It is about the role language and speech play in social life. Instead, I will move to a critical chapter in the book, his discussion of “Terrorism and Everyday Life.” He begins by suggesting that in any society where we find poverty and a privileged class, you must expect repression. The never-ending conflict between evasion and repression and compulsion and adaptation is, for Lefebvre, the history of everyday life. A second point he makes is that over-repressive societies mask the powers they have and direct people’s attention from the state to their private words: their homes, their families, and their friends and repression is entrusted to families and other institutions, such as the church. He offers, as an example, the role of Protestantism and its historical link with capitalism, a topic dealt in considerable and persuasive detail by the great German sociologist Max Weber. Lefebvre’s conclusion is that repressive societies always end up as terrorist societies. He describes this situation as follows (1971: 147): A terrorist society is the logical and structural outcome of an over-repressive society compulsion and the illusion of freedom converge; unacknowledged compulsions besiege the lives of communities (and of their individual members) and organize them according to a general strategy….In a terrorist society terror is diffuse, violence is always latent, pressure is exerted from all sides on its members who can only avoid it and shift its weight by a super-human effort;

The problem is that these terrorist societies cannot control people endlessly and they all contain the seeds of their own destruction. People can only be restrained (even, if by themselves) for so long and eventually they see through the ideologies that have been clouding their minds and

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e­ventually a cultural revolution—a concept implicit in Marx, Lefebvre believes—takes place. His notion of culture is that not so much a set of institutions as a style of living, one in which cities transform themselves, in which everyday life becomes “a work of art,” and in which, there occurs a sexual revolution, and urban revolution, and a rediscovery of Festival. He writes, on the final page of his book (1971: 206): The Festival rediscovered and magnified by overcoming the conflict between everyday life and festivity and enabling those terms to harmonize in and through urban society, such is the final clause of the revolutionary plan.

This concept of the “festival” brings to mind the work of the Russian theorist M. M. Bakhtin, who wrote about the way people in the middle ages used festivities, as manifested in carnivals, to escape from the oppressive nature of everyday life. Lefebvre may be a bit utopian in believing that everyday life can be restructured and turned into an endless kind of festival, but his use of the term festival suggests an image of a different kind of society—one in which people have escaped from the terror that has dominated them in their everyday lives before the revolution in culture that enabled them to escape from being dominated by elite classes and the repression found in certain institutions in most societies. Festival, as Mikhail Bakhtin saw it, was a momentary escape from medieval everyday life and its repressive nature: from the royalty, the aristocracy, the church, and other institutions. If life is always a festival, then the concept of festival becomes meaningless (Fig. 3.3). Fig. 3.3  Mikhail Bakhtin

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Lefebvre’s book plays a major role in alerting us to the “terror” that pervades most of our lives—a terror we are only subliminally aware of since we are continually misled by the ideology of personal “freedom” that masks the terror being exerted on us by the ruling classes and the institutions they control. The idea that people in America can be living in a state of terror might seem ridiculous, and yet if you think of the argument that Lefebvre makes, about the way class-based societies use repression and persuasion to shape our thinking and behavior, the idea that we are all continually terrorized does not seem so far-fetched.

CHAPTER 4

Michel de Certeau and Resistance to Domination

Abstract  Michel de Certeau argues in the Practice of Everyday Life that people are not always dominated by the media and that they develop ways to subvert the messages found in media for their own purposes. In this chapter we discuss the work of Roman Jakobson, whose model of the communication process is one of great importance. We see that communication is a complicated process and that the traditional distinction between senders and receivers of mass media has been changed due to the Internet. De Certeau deals with different methods of subversion in his book and concludes with the notion that the mass media do not have as much power to shape people’s beliefs as we might imagine. Keywords  Subversion • Roman Jakobson • Communication • Mass media • Domination The limited effects notions are conceptualizations of the past. Very few, if any, theoreticians cling to those ideas. In the first place, the notion of null, or limited, effects originated from a very narrow line of research—the impact of political campaigns, studies in the late 1940s and early 1950s. Not much later it was recognized effects are not only in the realm of behavior but also in the area of cognition: awareness, knowledge, opinions, etc. With this recognition, which paralleled the development of the concept of attitudes by

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social psychologists, came the recognition that the mass media do have an impact—indeed different types of impact—in specific areas of people’s thoughts, information processing and life in general. Some mass communication scholars focus on the uses audiences make of media and the gratifications they get from them, not on the effects the media have on people. (Chaim Eyal, Personal Communication)

We have just seen how Henri Lefebvre spelled out how all class-structured societies (which means all modern societies) have elites which dominate the masses and use force and persuasion to maintain their status. He argues that these societies are inherently unstable, and posits some kind of cultural revolution that changes thing around and leads, ultimately, to societies characterized by permanent festivals. He is clear about how societies repress people but not about how the revolution in culture takes place and how it maintains itself (Fig. 4.1). Michel de Certeau, another French cultural theorist, published his book The Practice of Everyday Life in France in 1974. It was translated into English by Steven Rendall in 1984, when it was published by the University of California Press. My focus here will be on de Certeau’s ideas about the ways in which ordinary people subvert the messages that the elites, who dominate the media, send to them. Fig. 4.1  Michel de Certeau

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In his “General Introduction” he starts off by saying that he will investigate the ways users of media operate and suggests that ordinary people in their everyday lives, who he calls the “dominated,” or in everyday speech “consumers,” poach upon or manipulate the messages they receive to their own advantage. Instead of just focusing on alleged effects of media upon people, de Certeau believes we should also investigate what people do with the messages from the media they consume. We are not far, here, from uses and gratifications theories of the media.

Roman Jakobson’s Model of the Communication Process At this point, it will be useful to say something about an influential model of the communication process made by the linguist Roman Jakobson (Fig. 4.2). In his article, “Linguistics and Poetics” (in David Lodge, ed. Modern Criticism and Theory: A Reader. New York: Longman. 1988: 34) he writes (Fig. 4.3): Language must be investigated in all the variety of its functions…An outline of these functions demands a concise survey of the constitutive factors in any speech event, in any act of verbal communication. The ADDRESSER sends a MESSAGE to the ADDRESSEE. To be operative the message requires a CONTEXT referred to (“referent” in another, somewhat ambiguous nomenclature), seizable by the addressee, and either verbal or capable of Fig. 4.2  Roman Jakobson

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Context Message Sender/Addresser ------------------------------------ Receiver/Addressee Contact (Medium) Code

Fig. 4.3  Jakobson chart on the communication process being verbalized; a CODE fully, or at least partially, common to the addresser and addressee (or in other words, to the encoder and decoder of the message); and finally, a CONTACT, a physical channel and psychological connection between the addresser and addressee, enabling both of them to enter and stay in communication. All these factors inalienably involved in verbal communication may be schematized as follows:

The message is affected by the context in which it is sent (we speak differently in bars and university seminars), the medium used (such as speech or television) and the code (such as the French or English language). We also know that words are not the only way of sending messages. A high percentage of the information in the messages we send and receive comes from nonverbal communication. I am talking about things like gestures, facial expression and body language and by other matters such as our hair style, hair color, style of clothing, objects we carry (I call them props) and that kind of thing. Jakobson’s model is explained by Robert Sholes in book Structuralism in Literature: An Introduction. He writes (1974, 24): Whether we are considering ordinary conversation, a public speech, a letter, or a poem, we always find a message which proceeds from a sender to a receiver. These are the most obvious aspects of communication. But a successful communication depends on three other aspects of the event as well: the messages must be delivered through a contact, physical and/or psychological; it must be framed in a code; and it must refer to a context. in the area of context, we find what a message is about. But to get there we must understand the code in which the message is framed--as in the present case, my messages reach you through the medium of an academic/literary subcode of the English language. And even if we have the code, we understand nothing

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until we make contact with the utterance; in the present case, until you see the printed words on this page (or hear them read aloud) they do not exist as a message for you. The message itself, uniting sender and receiver, in the quintessentially human act of communication, is simply a verbal form, which depends on all the other elements of a speech event to convey its meaning. The message is not the meaning. Meaning lies at the end of the speech event, which gives the verbal formula its life and color.

Sholes shows how complicated the process of communication is; it is not to be equated with simply sending a message to someone or some group of people. Messages for Jakobson have a number of functions. The most common is the referential function, which relates to the surroundings in which the speaker finds himself or herself. But there are also other functions, such as emotive functions, expressing feelings by the sender, and poetic functions, which involve using literary devices, such as metaphors, similes, and word choice, used to give a message its tone and distinctive qualities (or voice). Until the development of the Internet, the mass media, controlled by elites, would be the senders, the masses would be the receivers, and radio and television would be the contacts or media. With the development of social media, this situation has changed considerably, and now billions of people are able to send messages (words, images, videos) on Facebook and other social media. Media scholars disagree on the impact of the media on people. Some see the media as very powerful with long lasting effects and other see the media as not powerful at all, with temporary or short lasting effects.

Methods of Subversion We would have to place de Certeau with those who believe the media aren’t as powerful as they seem to be, because he argues that the masses that are exposed to the media have ways of subverting the messages found in the media. He offers what he describes as a polemological study of culture and writes (1984: xvii): Like law (one of its models), culture articulates conflicts and alternatively legitimizes, displaces, or controls the superior force. It develops in an ­atmosphere of tensions, and often of violence, for which it provides symbolic balances, of compatibility and compromises, all more or less temporary. The tactics of consumption, the ingenious ways in which the weak make us of the strong, thus lend a political dimension to everyday practices.

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He then discusses two means by which the “weak” are able to “make us of the strong.” His first method is what he calls a “strategy” and it is based on isolating some powerful entity from the environment in which it is flourishing. It then becomes liable to attack from its competitors and enemies of one kind or another. The second method by which the “weak” triumph over the “strong” he calls “tactics,” which involve people seizing opportunities when they develop. This means they are time based and rely on chance events. Tactics, then, are momentary triumphs. As he explains (1984: xix): Many everyday practices (talking, reading, moving about, shopping, cooking, etc.) are tactical in character. And so are, more generally, many “ways of operating”: victories of the “weak” over the he “strong” (whether the strength be that of powerful people or the violence of things or of an imposed order, etc.) clever tricks, knowing how to get away with things, “hunter’s cunning,” maneuvers, polymorphic simulations, joyful discoveries poetic as well as warlike.

These tactics are possible because, de Certeau writes, local communities are losing their stability, thereby providing an opening for people to subvert the messages coming to them from the ruling classes and the media, which the ruling classes control. What he says about local communities can be extended to society as a whole. Later in the book, in his discussion of reading as poaching, he returns to his discussion of the way ordinary people deal with the media. He writes (1984: 166): Protests against the vulgarization/vulgarity of the media often depend on an analogous pedagogical claim; inclined to believe that its own cultural models are necessary for the people in order to educate their minds and elevate their hearts, the elite upset about the “low level” or journalism or television always assumes that the public is moulded by the products imposed on it. To assume that is to misunderstand the act of “consumption.” This misunderstanding assumes that “assimilating” necessarily means “becoming similar to” what one absorbs and not “making something similar” to what one is, making it one’s own, appropriating or reappropriating kit.

For de Certeau, then, the media do not have the power to dominate people’s thinking and shape their behavior the way some media theorists believe they do. At one time, there was a theory called “the hypodermic

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theory” of the media which suggested that everyone exposed to media texts got the same message. This theory has been discredited as simplistic. It also doesn’t take into account the matter of aberrant decoding, which refers to the fact that people often decode messages in ways different from the way the senders of those messages expect them to. Later, discussing books, he argues that literary texts only have meaning through their readers and the same thing can be said of television and other mass media. People are not like sponges who soak up whatever media to which they are exposed or like fish who swallow whole whatever media they find. People are complicated and are shaped in large measure by the groups to which they belong, their socio-economic status, their education, their personalities and countless other factors that get between the senders and receivers of messages of all kinds. The Italian semiotician Umberto Eco described this phenomenon as the “aberrant decoding” of mass media messages.

CHAPTER 5

Fernand Braudel and the Structures in Everyday Life

Abstract  In his book, Fernand Braudel turns our attention, as historians, from kings, conquerors, and other “great men,” and diplomacy to the everyday lives of ordinary people and such things as their bread consumption and eating habits. That is, he is interested in the “little things one hardly notices” that play such an important, but generally neglected (by historians), role in history. The passage by Hedrick Smith on the role of vodka is used as an example of how seemingly unimportant topics can reveal a great deal about Russian everyday life, character, and culture. Keywords  Everyday life • Material culture • Vodka Those who have not been exposed to Russian drinking do not appreciate how hard Russians drink but travelers to Russia, astonished by it, have remarked about it for centuries. In 1639, Adam Orleans, who represented the Duke of Hostein’s court in Moscow, observed that Russians “are more addicted to drunkenness than any other nation in the world.” In 1839, the Marquis de Custine, a French nobleman, picked up the Russian aphorism that “drinking is the joy of Russia.” It still is, but this does not mean Russians are relaxed social imbibers. They know no moderation. Once the vodka bottle is uncorked, it must be finished…. Periodically, the press and political leadership inveigh against the national disaster of alcoholism. High officials have disclosed that intoxication is the major factor in the majority of crimes (90 percent of murders), accounts for more than half of all traffic accidents,

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is a major cause in 40 percent of all divorce cases, figures in 63 percent of all accidental drownings, one third of all ambulance calls in Moscow. (Hedrick Smith, The Russians)

The French edition of Fernand Braudel’s book, The Structures of Everyday Life: The Limits of the Possible was published in 1979 and the English translation was published in 1981. The French title is a bit different from the English one. Braudel called his book Les Structures du Quotidien: Le Possible et L’Impossible, whose subtitle translates, obviously, to “the Possible and the Impossible.” This is a bit different from “The Limits of the Possible.” It is the first volume in a three volume set of books he wrote on “Civilization and Capitalism, 15th–18th Centuries” (Fig. 5.1). It is instructive to examine some of the topics he considers in this huge book of 623 pages with hundreds of illustrations: • Guessing the world’s population • The many against the few • Wheat, rice, maize • Eating habits • Luxury and the foods of the masses • Drinks, stimulants, and drugs • Superfluity and sufficiency Fig. 5.1  Fernand Braudel

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• Houses throughout the world • Interiors • Costume and fashion • The key problem: sources of energy • Iron: a poor relation • Three great technological innovations • Transport • Technology and agriculture • Money • Imperfect currencies and economies • Outside Europe • Urbanization and modern man • Rules of the currency game We can see that Braudel’s range of interests was enormous and that he believed it was important to examine topics that might seem trivial and irrelevant, like bread and people’s eating habits. In his introduction, he explains his methods. After discussing the different classes, what he calls the “upper and lower levels” he writes (1981: 29): It remains for me to justify one last choice: that of introducing everyday life, no more no less, into the domain of history. Was this useful? Or necessary? Everyday life consists of the little things one hardly notices in time and space. The more we reduce the focus of vision, the more likely we are to fine ourselves in the environment of material life: the broad sweep usually corresponds to History with a capital letter, to distant trade routes, and the networks of national or urban economies. If we reduce the length of time observed, we either have the event or the everyday happening. The event is, or is taken to be, unique; the everyday happening is repeated, and the more often it is repeated, the more likely it is to become a generality or rather a structure. It pervades society at all levels and characterizes ways of being and behaving which are perpetuated through endless ages….Is the passion for fashion a peculiarly European thing? Is it insignificant? Through little details, travelers’ notes, at the different levels of society, are never a matter of indifference. And these snapshots can also point out contrasts and disparities between one society and another which are not all superficial.

Braudel’s books revolutionized the study of history, and as a result of his writings, historians started paying more attention to everyday life and material culture.

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Braudel points out, in his introduction, that he became interested in a zone of economic activity existing everywhere, in what he describes as a “fantastic” volume of economic behavior underneath the market economy, a zone he calls “material life” or “material civilization.” The statistics we have about economic activity in the period between the fifteenth and eighteenth centuries come from the market economy, but beneath this economy is an enormous kind of underground economy, perhaps involving as much as 30 or 40 percent of the gross national product, involving barter, exchanging services, moonlighting, doing odd jobs and that kind of thing. This period, he suggests, represents a kind of transitional phase, between the ancient societies that were disintegrating and the new capitalistic societies that were being formed. Everyday life, he suggests, yields insights into history that we have not recognized before, due to our concentration on important figures and significant events: on kings, parliaments, wars and that kind of thing. Thus, the second chapter of his book, “Daily Bread,” deals with the role played by wheat and other grains in Europe and other countries and gives us a very different perspective on things than we get from conventional historical studies. It is this notion that has directed my attention to objects we use in our everyday lives, our so-called material culture, and to our daily routines, rituals and habits. The passage from Hedrick Smith’s The Russians in the epilogue offers us an insight into how something common, such as vodka, can help us understand a society—in this case, Russian society and culture. Braudel has countless discussions of similar phenomena. His discussion of bread is particularly instructive, because it provides a perspective on the everyday lives of people that is somewhat surprising. He writes in the long (almost 80 pages) second chapter of his book, “Daily Bread,” about the role bread played in the daily lives of people in the small towns and villages in France (1981: 132–133): In general there is no doubt whatsoever that bread was consumed on a substantial scale in the country, much more than in the town, amongst the lowest levels of the working classes. According to Le Grand d’Aussy in 1782, a working man or a peasant in France ate two to three pounds of bread a day, “But people who have anything else to eat do not consumer this quantity.”….The triumph of bread arose of course because grain…was the least expensive foodstuff in relation to its calorific content. In about 1780, it costs eleven times less than meat, sixty-five times less that fresh sea fish, nine times less than fresh-water fish, six times less than eggs, three times less than butter and oil.

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We can see, then, why working people and peasants ate so much bread. The consumption of bread becomes a signifier of the desperate situation of people in the working and lower classes, who earned very little for their work and for whom bread, and whatever else they were able to buy with their low wages, sustained them. It is most unlikely that they ate very little meat and ocean fish.

CHAPTER 6

Sigmund Freud on Psychopathology in Everyday Life

Abstract  Sigmund Freud’s book on the psychopathology of everyday life deals with seemingly trivial things like slips of the tongue, forgetting people’s names, and mistakes in speech. He offers an example from his own experience, forgetting someone’s name, and explains why things like that happen. The topics he deals with are all connected to our psychic lives, material stored in our unconscious, and unconscious imperatives that shape our behavior. The work of Charles Brenner is cited to explain, in some detail, the psychoanalytic approach to forgetting people’s names. Keywords  Psychopathology • Unconscious • Everyday life It was while tracing back the abnormal to the normal state that Professor Freud found how faint the line of demarcation was between the normal and the neurotic person, and that the psychopathologic mechanisms so glaringly observed in the psychoneuroses and psychoses could usually be demonstrated in a lesser degree in normal persons. This led to a study of the faulty actions of everyday life and later to the publication of the Psychopathology of Everyday Life, a book which passed through four editions in German and is considered the author’s most popular work. With great ingenuity and penetration the author throws much light on the complex problems of human behavior and clearly demonstrates that this hitherto considered impassable gap between normal and abnormal mental states is more apparent than real. (A.A. Brill, Introduction to Psychopathology of Everyday Life)

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In his book, Freud deals with a dozen minor problems people face in their everyday lives, such as forgetting people’s proper names, and explains the psychological origin of these problems. The chapters in his book are: 1. Forgetting of Proper Names 2. Forgetting of Foreign Words 3. Forgetting of Names and Order of Words 4. Childhood and Concealing Memories 5. Mistakes in Speech 6. Mistakes in Reading and Writing 7. Forgetting of Impressions and Resolutions 8. Erroneously Carried Out Actions 9. Symptomatic and Chance Actions 10. Eros 11. Combined Faulty Acts 12. Determination, Chances and Superstitious Beliefs Freud does not offer an introduction explaining his theories but incorporates them, here and there, into the chapters themselves. His book is very anecdotal, so you learn a good deal about Freud’s observations of the behaviors of others as well as his ideas and experiences as you read the book. But you don’t learn very much about Freud’s theories that explain the behavior he describes—at least not in a sustained manner. His book was very popular because he dealt with experiences—such as forgetting names—common to many people. He offers an example from his own experience of forgetting a name—in this case, the painter of Last Judgment frescoes in a dome in Orvieto. Freud was trying to remember the name of the artist, Signorelli, who painted the frescoes, but came up with the names of two other artists, Botticelli and Boltraffio, which he writes, “obtruded themselves” and which he recognized were incorrect but found very difficult to eliminate from his thoughts. Freud writes that he repressed something and forgot one name, Signorelli, against his will and tried, intentionally, to forget the other names, Botticelli and Boltraffio. Freud suggests that name forgetting is often connected with substitute name formation. Freud ends his discussion of forgetting proper names writing (1901: 12) “besides the simple forgetting of proper names there is another forgetting which is motivated by repression.”

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Repression is considered the most important defense m ­ echanism; they are devices used by the ego to ward off anxieties and maintain psychological equilibrium. In his book An Elementary Textbook of Psychoanalysis Charles Brenner defines repression (1974: 80–81): Repression consists of an activity of the ego which bars from consciousness the unwanted id impulse or any of its derivatives, whether memories, emotions, desires or wish-fulfilling fantasies. All are as if they did not exist as far as the individual’s conscious life is concerned. A repressed memory is a forgotten one from the subjective point of view of the individual in whom repression has taken place. Indeed, we may remark parenthetically that we don’t know for sure whether there is any type of forgetting other than repression.

So when Freud wrote that he forgot Signorelli’s name, and it was motivated by repression, he was calling our attention to the fact that much if not all of forgetting is based on repression, and this repression serves the ego and helps it maintain stability between the forces of the id, such as desire and lust, and the forces of the superego, such as guilt and fear. The first three chapters involve some form of forgetting and Freud’s discussions of his problems, and those of others who he writes about, with forgetting foreign words and the order of words, are highly entertaining. He also has a chapter about forgetting impressions and resolutions, so a third of the book deals with forgetting. Four of the chapters deal with mistakes and errors and four deal with a variety of topics. His topics are those that people experience in their everyday lives, but they are all connected to our psychic lives and material each of has stored in our unconscious. Our unconscious, as Brenner points out, can bar from our consciousness certain kinds of material, generally from the id, that it fears will cause problems. Since something like 80 or 90 percent of our psyches is devoted to the unconscious, we cannot underestimate the power it has over our lives. At the end of the book, in his chapter on “Determination, Chances and Superstitious Beliefs,” Freud does discuss his theories. He points out that faulty and chance actions have similarities to dreams and understanding how dreams work, in which we find condensation and displacement may help us understand more about the mechanisms at work in chance actions and faulty actions. Later he adds (1901: 159):

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There is still another special interest for us ion considering the faulty, chance, and symptomatic actions in light of this last analogy. If we compare them to the function of the psychoneuroses and the neurotic symptoms, two frequently recurring statements gain in sense and support—namely, that the borderline between the nervous, normal, and abnormal states is indistinct, and that we are all slightly nervous….The common character of the mildest as well as the severest cases, to which the faulty and chance actions contribute, lies in the ability to refer the phenomena to unwelcome, repressed, psychic material, which, though pushed away from consciousness, is nevertheless not robbed of all capacity to express itself.

There is a good reason, then, why Freud called his book Psychopathology of Everyday Life, because, in the final analysis, all of the topics he writes about are connected and shaped by unconscious imperatives that manage to express themselves, even though we are unaware of them. All of Freud’s topics, if pushed to extremes, lead to neurotic behavior. We may repress material in our unconscious, but that doesn’t mean it does not have the power to “express” itself in various ways. In the first chapter of Charles Brenner’s An Elementary Textbook of Psychoanalysis, we find a discussion of one of the topics Freud wrote about in his book on everyday life: forgetting names. Brenner writes (1974: 8): Let us start with the principle of psychic determinism. The sense of this principle is that in the mind, as in physical nature about us, nothing happens by chance, or in a random way. Each psychic event is determined by the ones which preceded it. Events in our mental lives may seem to be random and unrelated to what went on before or only apparently so….The understanding and application of this principle is essential for a proper orientation in the study of human psychology as well in its normal as in its pathological aspects. If we do understand and apply it correctly, we shall never dismiss any psychic phenomenon as meaningless or accidental….An example of this approach to psychic phenomena is the following. It is a common experience of everyday life to forget or mislay something. The usual view of such an occurrence is that it is an “accident,” that it “just happened.” Yet, a thorough investigation of many such “accidents” during the past seventy-five years by psychoanalysts, beginning with the study by Freud himself, has shown that they are by no means as accidental as popular judgement considers them to be. On the contrary, each such “accident” can be shown to have been caused by a wish or intent of the person involved, in strict conformity with the principle of mental functioning which we have been discussing.

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So all the accidents and mistakes that we make in our everyday lives are like little red lights that indicate that there’s more to our forgetting names and words, and all the other topics that Freud writes about, than we might imagine. In most cases, these mistakes are not indicators of serious psychological problems, but in some cases, when dealing with borderline people, troubled people and neurotics, they may be the keys that help unlock the puzzle that is their problems. We are not aware that we are not aware of much that is going on in our psyches.

CHAPTER 7

Milton Sapirstein on the Paradoxes of Everyday Life

Abstract  The focus in Sapirstein’s book is on a psychoanalytic approach to paradoxical aspects of everyday life—topics such as decorating a home, reading a marriage manual, and screaming mothers that would seem unimportant and trivial but, in truth, are very problematic. The writings of a scholar of religion, Mircea Eliade, are referenced in terms of the difference between the sacred and the profane and the importance of a house in religious thought. Sapirstein explains that women equate a house to their bodies and thus decorating a house calls forth hidden resentments women have about their mothers and all manner of suppressed anxieties and fears. Keywords  Paradox • Unconscious • Sacred • Profane It was a triumph for the interpretative art of psychoanalysis when it succeeded in demonstrating that certain common mental acts of normal people, for which no one had hitherto attempted to put forward a psychological explanation, were to be regarded in the same light as the symptoms of neurotics: that is to say they had a meaning, which was unknown to the subject but which could easily be discovered by analytic means. … A class of material was brought to light which is calculated better than any other to stimulate a belief in the existence of unconscious mental acts even in people

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to whom the hypothesis of something at once mental and unconscious seems strange and even absurd. (Sigmund Freud, “Psychoanalysis,” in Philip Rieff, Freud: Character and Culture 1963, pp. 235–236)

Sapirstein is a psychiatrist and psychoanalyst who published his book Paradoxes of Everyday Life in 1955; so the book is more than 60 years old, yet the light it sheds on the curious behavior of many people in their everyday lives still seems relevant. That is because people are still driven by the same psychological forces that have shaped their behavior for thousands of years, if Freud is right. He begins his book, in the preface, with a definition of paradox (1955: ix): A statement of proposition seemingly self-contradictory or absurd, and yet explicable as expressing a truth. (The American College Dictionary)

Then he describes what the book is about (1955: ix): This is a book of paradoxes—especially those of ordinary daily experience— studied from a psychoanalytic point of view. Analysis has always been concerned with paradoxes. What, in fact, was more paradoxical than neurosis until Freud discovered the power of man’s unconscious? Much of Freud’s original impact was based on his understanding of the psychopathology of everyday life. Perhaps, in our interest in the profoundly complex aspects of human behavior, we have missed the significance of familiar situations and actions so frequent that they escape observation; so seemingly trivial at times that they do not command thoughtful attention. Yet they too may lead us back to the primary sources of man’s difficulties.

We have moved, in my chapter on Freud and in this chapter, from society and political forces to a focus on the human psyche. But like our previous authors, Sapirstein recognizes the importance of things that seem so commonplace that they aren’t worth thinking about. The book has eight chapters, each with a paradoxical aspect that Sapirstein explores: 1. Outcasts from Eden The Paradox of the Marriage Manual 2. Enigma within a Paradox The Neurotic Child from a “Happy” Home

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3. The Screaming Mother The Paradox of Emotional Control 4. Great Expectations The Paradox of the Beautiful Woman 5. More Stately Mansions The Paradox of Decorating a Home 6. Taboo The Paradox of Masturbation 7. The Roving Eye The Paradox of Male Infidelity 8. The Outer Limits The Paradox of the Search for Freedom You can see that Sapirstein’s range of interest is very broad. Since my focus in this book is on everyday life, society, culture, and material culture, I will only deal with the chapter on decorating a home which is of particular significance. The other chapters are based on behavioral problems and are tangential to my interests. We have to recognize that buying a house and settling into is connected to ancient religious beliefs and is not as simple as it might seem. For Mircea Eliade, a scholar of religion, houses have a cosmic significance that most homeowners do not recognize. He explains this in his book The Sacred and the Profane: The Nature of Religion (1951: 56–57): The house in not an object, a “machine to live in;” it is the universe that man constructs for himself by imitating the paradigmatic creation of the gods, the cosmogony. Every construction and every inauguration of a new dwelling are in some measure equivalent to a new beginning, a new life. And every beginning repeats the primordial beginning when the universe first saw the light of day.

He adds, later (1951: 58) “that all symbols and rituals having to do with temples cities, and houses are finally derived from the primary experience of sacred space.” Thus, though moving into a house might seem like a mundane experience, it is connected to the notion, found in many religions: that there is something we can call sacred space, which is different from and the opposite of profane space. Think, for example, of cathedrals. When you enter a cathedral you

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move from profane space (outside the cathedral) to sacred space (inside the cathedral). The same applies to religious buildings of all kinds and to our homes. These spaces become, existentially speaking, the “centers” of the universe. Building a house also becomes, from Eliade’s perspective, an imitation of the gods who created the universe and thus has a religious significance, even though we may not be aware of it. As Eliade explains (1951: 204–205): The modern man who feels and claims he is nonreligious still retains a large stock of camouflaged myths and degenerated rituals. As we remarked earlier, the festivities that go on with the New Year or with taking up residence in a new house, although laicized, still exhibit the structure of a ritual of renewal.

Much of what we do, Eliade argues, has a religious or sacred dimension to it, though we may not recognize that this is the case. What he calls “profane man” is, he argues (1961: 209), “the descendent of homo religiosus and he cannot wipe out his own history—that is, the behavior of his religious ancestors which has made him what he is today.” This argument is similar to ones made by psychoanalytic theorists such as Freud, who suggested, let us remember, that the human psyche has three parts: consciousness, pre-consciousness, and the unconscious; most of the psyche is made up of the unconscious. We cannot access the unconscious parts of our psyches, but imperatives from our unconscious shapes our behavior much of the time. Sapirstein discusses the paradoxical nature of decorating and explains that just as a car can be seen as a symbol of masculinity, a house is a symbol of femininity, and a woman feels that her home is like a larger body in which her deepest self is implicated in everything from the texture of its draperies, the dimension of her beds, to the shape of her tables and chairs. Her choices in furnishing the house are shapes by an unconscious image of what she is or what she is afraid of becoming. So the way she furnishes a house reflects the degree to which accepts or does not accept herself as a woman. He explains that decorating a house brings forth hidden resentments women feel about their mothers and anxieties they feel about becoming independent from their mothers and establishing a new home. He writes, at the beginning of his chapter, that (1955: 93): Observations I have made in recent years lead me to believe that there is no time at which a woman is more apt to go to pieces than when she is engaged in decorating her home.”

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Decorating a new home also often generates relationship problems between a woman and her husband. As Saperstein explains (1955: 106): Just as decorating her own home often causes a resurgence in the woman of unresolved problems connected with her mother, so may it bring to a head underlying tensions between husband and wife. Because the strain on the wife is so great, it is frequently a time of great martial turmoil. That, in turn, accentuates difficulties hitherto unacknowledged.

In part this is because the home is not only a symbol of femininity but, more particularly, of exposed femininity, which means in their unconscious, women fear both exposing their taste, but even more important, their inner most selves. Thus, what would seem to be a happy matter— decorating one’s house—becomes, we find, a source of great tension and anxiety and what he calls “deep wounds” felt by both husband and wife. There are also problems women face in dealing with decorators and people in the building trades. When it comes to commercial relationships, he writes (1955: 109) “there is probably none which compares, in sheer malignancy, with that which exists between the woman who is decorating her house and the people who supply the advice and materials she requires.” He points out that in women who have latent paranoid tendencies, decorating a house can often “tip the scales” and lead to a breakdown. What Sapirstein teaches us is that something that seems as simple as decorating a new house is actually very stressful and anxiety provoking for men and, particularly, for women. This is because the process of decorating a house is connected to unconscious resentments women have about their mothers, to unconscious needs women have to deal with, and the difficulties in dealing with decorators (fraught with danger) and people in the building trades. We should not minimize the difficulties people face in decorating their apartments. They are not trivial. On the face of it, deciding on what kind of material for drapes or what color they should buy would seem insignificant, but these decisions are tied to forces in the unconscious of men and women that are extremely powerful and sometimes very disruptive. Ironically, purchasing a home and furnishing it, which are generally understood to be signs that one is settling down, can be very upsetting.

CHAPTER 8

Myth and Everyday Life

Abstract  This chapter deals with myth and its role in our everyday lives. It defines myth and offers a “myth model” which suggests how myth informs many different aspects of our lives, even though we are not aware that this is the case. It discusses the work of Mircea Eliade on myth and takes two myths—the myth of Adam and Eve in the Garden of Eden and of Oedipus—and shows how they are reflected in psychoanalytic theory, history, elite art forms, popular culture, and everyday life. It suggests that Sisyphus is the paradigmatic mythic hero of everyday life. Keywords  Myth • Myth model • Mircea Eliade • Sisyphus As Barthes argued [in Mythologies], the themes of humanities earliest stories, known as myths, continue to permeate and inform pop culture’s story-­ telling efforts. As in the myths of Prometheus, Hercules, and other ancient heroes, Superman’s exploits revolve around a universal mythic theme—the struggle of Good and Evil. This is what makes Superman, or any action hero for that matter, so intuitively appealing to modern audiences….The word “myth” derives from the Greek mythos: “word,” “speech,” “tale of the gods.” It can be defined as a narrative in which the characters are gods, heroes, and mystical beings, in which the plot is about the origin of things or about metaphysical events in human life, and in which the setting is a metaphysical world juxtaposed against the real world. In the beginning stages of human cultures, myths functioned as genuine “narrative theories”

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of the world. That is why all cultures have created them to explain their origins….The use of mythic themes and elements in media representations has become so widespread that it is hardly noticed any longer, despite Barthes’ cogent warnings in the late 1950s. Implicit myths about the struggle for Good, of the need for heroes to lead us forward, and so on and so forth, constitute the narrative underpinnings of TV programmes, blockbuster movies, advertisements and commercials, and virtually anything that gets “media air time.” (Marcel Danesi, Media Semiotics, 2002: 47–48)

In 1974 I wrote an article titled “The Secret Agent” for The Journal of Communication. I had been asked to write something on my work analyzing popular culture and when the article appeared, I did a drawing of myself as a “secret agent” and included a drawing dealing with what I called the “Onion of Culture” (Fig. 8.1). You can see that in the center of the onion in myth and other layers of this onion include historical acts, high or “elite” culture, popular culture, and everyday life. Forty years later, I developed what I called “The Myth Model” of culture and added a new category, psychoanalytic theory. And I wrote a book, Media, Myth, and Society, in which I showed how this model can be used to deal with and understand better many different aspects of culture and society.

Defining Myth In Raphael Patai’s Myth and Modern Man, we find a useful definition of myth that helps explain its contemporary significance 1972: 2): Myth…is a traditional religious charter, which operates by validating laws, customs, rites, institutions and beliefs, or explaining socio-cultural situations and natural phenomena, and taking the form of stories, believed to be true, about divine beings and heroes…Myths are dramatic stories that form a sacred charter either authorizing the continuance of ancient institutions, customs, rites and beliefs in the area where they are current, or approving alterations.

Patai adds that myths play an important role in shaping social life and explains that “myth not only validates or authorizes customs, rites, institutions, beliefs, and so forth, but frequently is directly responsible for creating them” (1972: 2).

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Fig. 8.1  Page from “Secret Agent” article

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My myth model, with psychoanalytic theory added to my “onion” metaphor for culture, follows: a myth, defined as a sacred narrative that validates cultural beliefs and practices psychoanalytic reflections of the myth (when we can find them) historical manifestations of that myth (when we can find them) the myth in elite culture (operas, theatre, ballet, symphonies, serious novels, etc.) the myth in mass-mediated or popular culture (songs, advertisements, TV shows) the myth in everyday life (when we can recognize it)

I offer, now, two examples of important myths in Western culture. The first is from the Bible and is about the way the myth of Adam and Eve in the Garden of Eden has played a role in American culture and many other cultures. The second, the Oedipus myth, if Freud is correct about the universality of the Oedipus Complex, plays a role in every society and is part of everyone’s life (Fig. 8.2). I was influenced in developing my model by the work of Eliade. He argues in The Sacred and the Profane that many aspects of contemporary life can be recognized as camouflaged or modernized versions of ancient myths and legends. As he writes (1961: 204–205): Fig. 8.2  Mircea Eliade

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The modern man who feels and claims that he is nonreligious still retains a large stock of camouflaged myths and degenerated rituals. As we remarked earlier, the festivities that go with the New Year or with taking up residence in a new house, though laicized, still exhibit the structure of a ritual of renewal. The same phenomenon is observable in the merrymaking that accompanies a marriage or a social advancement, and so on. A whole volume could well be written on the myths of modern man, on the mythologies camouflaged in the plays that he enjoys, in the books that he reads. The cinema, that “dream factory,” takes over and employs countless mythological motifs—the fight between hero and monster, initiatory combats and ordeals, paradigmatic figures (the maiden, the hero, the paradisal landscape, hell, and so on). Even reading includes a mythological function, not only because it replaces the recitation of myths in archaic societies and the oral literature that still lives in the rural communities of Europe, but particularly because, through reading, the modern man succeeds in obtaining an “escape from time” comparable to the “emergence from time” effected by myths.

Eliade defines myth, I should add, as the recitation of a sacred history, “a primordial event that took place at the beginning of time” (1961: 95). When I taught courses on media criticism, I developed a game in which I gave my students (in groups of three) a list of myths and asked them to choose a myth and run it through my model. They were able to do so and were often surprised to discover that many of the things they did had a mythic content to them or could be identified as having a connection to certain myths—one that my students were unaware of until the played the game. Some of the more common myths they used were: David and Goliath, Adam and Eve, Medusa and Narcissus. With these insights in mind, I offer two examples of the myth model (Fig. 8.3). There is a problem with the myth model. In it, I have separate categories for Psychoanalytic Theory, Historical Experience, Elite Culture, and Popular Culture but it can be argued that they are all actually part of everyday life. In the course of a day, a typical person might attend a symphony concert in the afternoon and then watch television at night. Aren’t these activities actually everyday experiences? I would say they are, because in the broadest sense everything is part of our everyday lives but it makes sense to consider them all separately since by doing that we can see the way myths inform different parts of our culture and our social activities. It is from our cultures that we learn, by osmosis, the many codes that our cultures develop to teach us how to live and behave in many different

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Myth/Sacred Story

Adam in the Garden of Eden. Theme of natural innocence.

Psychoanalytic manifestation.

Repression? Suppression?

Historical Experience

Puritans come to USA to escape corrupt European civilization

Revolutions: American, French, Arab awakenings

Elite Culture

American Adam figure in American novels. Henry James’ The American

Sophocles, Oedipus Rex Shakespeare, Hamlet

Popular Culture

Westerns…restore natural innocence to Virgin Land. Shane.

Jack the Giant Killer James Bond stories, King Kong

Oedipus Myth. Theme of son unknowingly killing father and marrying mother. Oedipus Complex. Love of child for parent of opposite gender.

Fig. 8.3  Chart: myth model applied to Adam and Eve and to Oedipus

realms. I quoted the French psychoanalyst Clotaire Rapaille earlier about the way children, up to the age of seven, are “imprinted” by the cultures in which they are being raised. As he writes in The Culture Code (2006: 10–11): All of the different codes for all of the different imprints, when put together, create a reference system that people living in these cultures use without being aware of it. These reference systems guide different cultures in different ways.

He adds that his study of codes has demonstrated to him that (2006: 11) “despite our common humanity, people around the world really are different. The Culture Code offers a way to understand how.” Just as we are unaware of the role our unconscious plays in shaping our thinking and behaving, so we are unaware of the role that myths that we all learn when growing up in a society help shape many aspects of that t culture. Different cultures have different myths that lead to their distinctive codes of behavior that shape most aspects of their everyday lives. Unless something unusual happens, a child raised in France will eat differ-

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ently, for the rest of his life, than a child raised in America, and a child raised in Boston will eat differently than a child raised in Houston, Texas, especially if the children end up living where they were raised.

Sisyphus: The Paradigmatic Hero for Students of Everyday Life Let me offer this brief outline of the myth of Sisyphus. Sisyphus was condemned, for eternity, to roll a large boulder up a hill and just before he reached the top, it rolled down to the bottom of the hill and Sisyphus had to roll it up again. The theme to his story is endless recurrence and it is seemingly endless recurrence that is a fundamental characteristic of everyday life for most people in most countries. Sisyphus is paradigmatic in that his story is known to large numbers of people who can recognize, perhaps faintly, that his story might have something to do with their lives—with the routines they follow with remarkable dedication over the years, with the codes that shape their taste and their lifestyles. Perhaps dimly, in the cultural preconscious, we are aware of Sisyphus and other mythic heroes whose stories have meaning to us. Now I offer a myth model, taken from my book Media, Myth, and Society, involving Sisyphus (Fig. 8.4). Myth/Sacred Story

Sisyphus

Psychoanalytic Manifestation. Historical Experience

Repetition Compulsion, Obsessive Compulsive Behavior Torah reading in Synagogues

Elite Culture

Camus, The Myth of Sisyphus.

Popular Culture

Video Game Rock of Ages

Everyday Life

Housework: cooking, cleaning, shopping

Fig. 8.4  Chart: myth model applied to Sisyphus

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I could have expanded the section on everyday life in the chart endlessly but its list of tasks performed by housewives and house husbands gives us the idea. Because there are so many necessities involved in following the Sisyphus myth, we can understand why the burden of everyday life falls hardest on women—who often find themselves with two jobs: one at work and one in the house.

CHAPTER 9

The Body and Everyday Life

Abstract  In this chapter we investigate the role of the body in everyday life and the role that age, gender, and race play in our relationships with others. We consider the importance of generations in our lives since an individual’s age is a predictor of our attitudes and behavior. In recent years, gender has been in focus because of concern regarding stereotyping and the fact that now gender has become a matter of choice. Finally, we discuss the role race plays in our lives and new attitudes people have about race, which like gender is now socially constructed. Keywords  Age • Generations • Gender • Race Race is not culture, although many people use the terms interchangeably. The problem with race is that there is considerable controversy surrounding what it is … Many contemporary scholars suggest that there are three major races—Caucasoid, Mongoloid, and Negroid—but past studies of the origins of race have proposed as many as 37 different races … Although laypersons typically use skin color, hair, and other physical characteristics to define race, most physical anthropologists use population gene frequencies. Regardless of which biological of physical characteristics one uses to define race, the concept of race is much less clear-cut than previously believed … Some authors have suggested that the distinctions among races are arbitrary and dubious at best … Race, therefore, is a social construction. (David Matsumoto and Hyi

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Sung Hwang, “Cultural Influences on Nonverbal Behavior” in D. Matsumoto, Mark G. Frank and Hyi Sung Hwamg, Nonverbal Communication: Science and Applications)

When we talk about everyday life and the common man and woman, known in America until recently as John Q. Public and Jane Public, we usually think of them as middle aged, middle class, probably living in the Midwest and part of the so-called middle America. But it is more accurate and useful to think about our everyday lives in terms of all the variables that affect us, such as our age, our gender, our race, our body shapes, our hair colors, our religions, our socio-economic class, our nationality, our politics, and so on. It is quite obvious the everyday life of a 30-year-old male raised and living in Paris, France, is different, in important ways, from an 18-year-old male raised and living in Duluth, Minnesota and from an 80-year-old male living in Beijing. So these variables are important and play a significant role in determining what our everyday lives will be like. I will deal with three topics relating to the human body in this chapter: age, gender, and race.

Age and Everyday Life Let’s recall that a young child, if Rapaille is correct, up to the age of seven is being “imprinted” with his national culture by his parents and other people with whom he or she interacts: grand parents, school teachers, friends, characters in books and on television shows, ad infinitum. As children develop, we find they develop behavior characteristics shaped by their age and their generation. In the United States, we have labels for these generations, which sometimes vary a bit from one list to another. Here is one list of the generations taken from the National Chamber Foundation: Generation

Dates born

GI Generation Silent Generation Baby Boom Generation Generation X Millennial Generation Generation Z

1901–1924 1925–1946 1946–1964 1965–1979 1980–1999 Today’s generation 2000

Source: https://www.uschamberfoundation.org/reports/millennial-generation-research-review

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There are many other lists of generations with different names from some of the generations but they all more or less agree that anyone born between 1980 and around 2000 should be called a Millennial, so in 2017, Millennials are between 18 and 37 years old. They were the largest generation in the United States until mid-2017, when Generation Z overtook them. The Pew Report offers some insights into why generations are so important to cultural analysts: An individual’s age is one of the most common predictors of differences in attitudes and behaviors. On issues ranging from foreign affairs to social policy, age differences in attitudes can be some of the widest and most illuminating. Age denotes two important characteristics about an individual: their place in the life cycle  – whether a young adult, middle-aged parent or retiree – and their membership in a cohort of individuals who were born at a similar time. The nature of age as a variable allows researchers to employ an approach known as cohort analysis to track a group of people over the course of their lives. Age cohorts give researchers a tool to analyze changes in views over time; they can provide a way to understand how different formative experiences interact with the life-cycle and aging process to shape people’s view of the world. While younger and older adults may differ in their views at a given moment, age cohorts allow researchers to go further and examine how today’s older adults felt about a given issue when they themselves were young, as well as to describe how the trajectory of views might differ across age cohorts. (www.people-press.org/.../03/the-whysand-hows-of-generations-research)

So our age plays an all-important role in generating attitudes about a wide variety of topics and we can study attitudes as they evolve over time. Even among Millennials there are differences, as you might expect, between a 19-year-old Millennial and a 35-year-old Millennial, but the important thing is that there are similarities among 19-year-old Millennials just as there are similarities among 35-year-old Millennials. There are around 80 million Millennials in the United States and researchers have suggested that Millennials are distinctive and are different from other generations in many ways. They are of great interest to marketers who spent a small fortune researching them in an effort to find out how marketers can attract their attention and interest them in purchasing various products and services.

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The US Census Bureau has a list of the generations that is different from most of the lists I’ve come across in doing research on the subject of generations. Their list follows: Generation name

Age (in 2017)

Recession iGeneration Millennials Generation X Baby boomers Older

0–6 7–21 22–39 40–51 52–70 71–

I am a member of the Older generation, called the Silent Generation in some lists. We make these lists in order to find a way to classify people, recognizing that the way we classify people affects the way we see them and, to some degree, the way they see themselves. Freud said that the child is the father to the man; maybe that’s what Rapaille meant when he talked about “imprinting” children, since those imprints shape much of their thinking and behavior for the rest of their lives. Many people look at their everyday lives in terms of decades: what their lives were like in their twenties, in their thirties, in their forties, and on and on until they reach whatever decade they are living in when they think about their lives. Except for two years in the Army (I was drafted in 1956) I spent most of my life, until the age of 32, in universities. So I had the stress of studying for examinations in regular courses, of taking exams for my Ph.D. (written and the oral), and writing an acceptable dissertation. I received my Ph.D. in 1965. That was followed by the stress of becoming a member of a university department, of preparing for my classes, and doing what I could to get tenure and get promoted. To this we must add the stress of being married and raising a family. When I was promoted to full professor and when my children left home to go to college, the level of stress abated considerably. So we face different kinds of problems at all periods of our lives and certain decades tend to have certain kinds of problems and other decades other kinds of problems. Obviously, the everyday lives of people vary enormously with their age. The passions and preoccupations of 20-year-old men and women are different from those of 85-year-old men and women.

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Erik Erikson, a psychoanalyst, writes that at every stage in our lives we face crises that we have to resolve. In his chapter “The Eight Ages of Man” in Childhood and Society, he discusses these crises. I offer them in a table that I have constructed to show the crises, which take the form of choices a person has to make at each stage. Stage

Crisis

Infancy 1 Infancy 2 Childhood School Adolescence Young adult Adult Maturity

Basic trust/mistrust Autonomy/shame and doubt Initiative/guilt Industry/inferiority Identity/role confusion Intimacy/isolation Generativity/stagnation Ego integration/despair

Erikson’s point is that as we age, at certain stages we all face developmental crises that we must resolve if we are to mature in a good way, without being plagued by neurotic symptoms of one kind or another. So, our everyday lives are different for each stage in our development and the problems we face are different as well and the means we use to deal with them are varied. A child growing up in 2017, when we have smart phones, video games, and all kinds of other electronic devices, is in a different world than a child growing up only 20 years earlier. There is also the matter of whether Millennials in France or the Congo are similar in some respects but different in many other respects, relative to the national character and cultural codes in their countries.

Gender and Everyday Life Let me start off with two quotations that are of interest to us in our study of gender. The first one deals with gender stereotyping of women and speaks to the problems women face because of gender discrimination. The second, on transvestism in American films, is of interest to us because it relates to the matter, to be discussed shortly, of changes in our attitudes toward gender and the fact that gender now is seen as a matter of choice. This passage comes from Conversation.com:

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“I’m not bossy, I’m the boss.” So proclaims Beyoncé in a video in support of the #banbossy campaign. The campaign highlights how when little boys take charge, they’re often praised for being a “leader.” But when little girls do, they’re more likely to be scolded for being too “bossy.” And it matters for grownups, too. Research and media stories abound with examples of how gender stereotypes disadvantage women leaders. A woman manager is less likely to be taken seriously by the people who work for her. When men direct others, they’re often assumed to be assertive and competent. But when women direct others, they’re often disliked and labeled abrasive or bossy. Our new study puts a twist on this narrative. Gender bias doesn’t merely disadvantage women, it also can disadvantage men. The reason? We don’t just stereotype men and women. We stereotype jobs. (http://theconversation.com/how-a-job-acquires-a-genderand-less-authority-if-its-female….)

The second quotation, from Charles Winick’s The New People: Desexualization in American Life, deals with transvestism and suggests that certain subliminally received “feminine” attributes of various entertainment figures played a role in their success. Winick’s book was published in 1968, but his thesis, that women are becoming more powerful and dominant in many areas, still seems accurate. He writes: Transvestism on the part of men figures increasingly in plays and movies. Ray Bolger, Jose Ferrer, and Jack Benny have played in a version of Charlie’s Aunt in the not-too-distant past. One reason for Mr. Benny’s enduring popularity is the signature of his vaguely feminine walk and clothes. Cary Grant wore drag in I Was a Male War Bride. In Psycho, Anthony Perkins played both a young man and his mother. Jack Lemmon and Tony Curtis in women’s clothes were largely responsible for the great success of Some Like It Hot.

He adds, later in the book, his thesis about the dislocation of sexual identity in America as the most important development of our time and writes: Archaeologists of the future may regard a radical dislocation of sexual identity as the single most important event of our time. Ethology, the science concerned with animal behavior and interaction with environment, has repeatedly hinted in recent years that radical changes in sex roles may lead to extermination of whole species. This does not mean that we, the New People, will fail to survive or that we are unable to create a viable substitute for rejected lifestyles. It does suggest that the new tone of life, a bitter, metallic existence, may simply be not worth the price of enduring it.

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One way to make sense of gender is to think about it as the way we choose to present ourselves to the world, as male or female, and not to think about it as the gender we were born with, since our gender is now seen as something we can determine. We now realize that some people want to choose a different gender from the one they were born with. In recent years people who wish to change their genders have become more open about their decision and the growth of Lesbian, Gay, Bisexual, Transsexual, Queer (LGBTQ) groups has alerted us to those members of society with different gender and other orientations than the typical American (Fig. 9.1). Judith Butler, a well-known feminist thinker, offers some thought about the nature of gender in her book Gender Trouble: Feminism and the Subversion of Identity (1999: 11–12): Is there “a” gender which people are said to have or is it an essential attribute that a person is said to be, as implied in the question “What gender are you?” When feminist theorists claim that gender is the cultural interpretation of sex or that gender is culturally constructed, what is the manner or mechanism of this construction? If gender is constructed, could it be constructed differently, or does its construction imply some form of social determinism, foreclosing the possibility of agency and transformation? Does “construction” suggest that certain laws generate gender differences along universal axes of sexual differences? How and where does the construction of gender take place? What sense can we make of a construction that does Fig. 9.1  Judith Butler

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not assume a human constructor prior to that construction? On some accounts, the notion that gender is constructed suggests a certain determinism of gender meanings inscribed on anatomically differentiated bodies, where those bodies are understood as passive recipients of an inexorable cultural law. When the relevant “culture” that “constructs” gender is understood in terms of such a law or set of laws, then it seems that gender is as determined and fixed as it was under the biology-is-destiny formulation. In such a case, not biology but culture, becomes destiny. On the other hand, Simone de Beauvoir suggests in The Second Sex that “one is not born a woman, but, rather, becomes one.” For Beauvoir, gender is “constructed,” but implied in her formulation is an agent, a cogito, who somehow takes on or appropriates that gender and could, in principle, take on some other gender….There is nothing in her account that guarantees that the “one” who becomes a woman is necessarily female.

A British media and cultural theorist, David Gauntlett, discusses Butler’s work as follows and offers the following insights into her work: Butler argues that we all put on a gender performance, whether traditional or not, anyway, and so it is not a question of whether to do a gender performance, but what form that performance will take. By choosing to be different about it, we might work to change gender norms and the binary understanding of masculinity and femininity. This idea of identity as free-­ floating, as not connected to an ‘essence’, but instead a performance, is one of the key ideas in queer theory. Seen in this way, our identities, gendered and otherwise, do not express some authentic inner “core” self but are the dramatic effect (rather than the cause) of our performances. (http://www. theory.org.uk/ctr-butl.htm)

If gender is a performance, we must think about gender differently than the way we’ve done in the past. Gender, if Butler is correct, is not something we are born with and must live with for the rest of our lives but something that we adopt, for one reason or another, to suit our purposes. Her thinking about gender also involves a rejection of binary oppositions as the way to make sense of gender. Binary thinking works as follows: if male, not female and if female, not male. But if gender is a performance, binary oppositions no longer make sense (Fig. 9.2). Marjorie Garber deals with the inadequacies of the binary opposition between male and female in her book Vested Interests: Cross-Dressing & Cultural Anxiety (1992: 10–11):

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Fig. 9.2  Marjorie Garber

For me…one of the most important aspects of cross-dressing is the way in which it offers a challenge to easy notions of binarity, putting into question the categories of “female” and “male,” whether they are considered essential or constructed, biological or cultural. The current popularity of cross-­ dressing as a theme in art and criticism represents, I think, an undertheorized recognition of the necessary critique of binary thinking, whether particularized as male and female, black and white, yes and no, Republican and Democrat, self and other, or in any other way.

Garber’s book deals with cross-dressing or transvestism and with some famous singers and performers who were cross dressers—think of Marlene Dietrich and Madonna—and with literary and theatrical texts, as well. Garber’s discussion of Dietrich is worth considering. She writes (1992: 337): There is, in fact, more than a little appropriateness to the fact that Marlene Dietrich’s signature costume of top hat and tails that signifies cross-dressing not only for her, in her own subsequent films and performances, but also for the legions of female impersonators who have since “done Dietrich” in drag, made its first appearance in a film called Morocco. Why cross-dressing in Morocco? Because the one was already, in European as in North American eyes, the figure for the other. Araby was the site of Transvestism as escape and rupture.

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Later in the film she kisses a woman in the audience on her lips and then, shortly afterwards, appears as a woman in a bathing suit—generating confusion as to her “real” gender identity. We even find cross-dressing in fairy tales such as Little Red Riding Hood, Garber points out, where the wolf, having eaten Little Red Riding Hood’s grandmother, puts on her clothes to fool Little Red Riding hood. So cross-dressing keeps popping up here and there in our popular culture and the arts, though in many cases we don’t pay much attention to it or even recognize it for what it is. At a very early age, in Little Red Riding Hood, children are exposed to cross-dressing. What impact this exposure has on them is hard to fathom. In recent years, attitudes have changed and things like homosexuality, gay marriage, and transvestism no longer seem to be as repugnant to the common man and woman the way they used to be. We now find that there are numbers of married men who dress like women at times and married women who dress like men at times. And it no longer is shocking. This may be because there has been a cultural shift of major proportions and people now recognize that gender is socially constructed, is more fluid than we had imagined, and not an eternal given that cannot be changed.

Race and Everyday Life If gender is now problematic and anxiety provoking, for reasons spelled out above, race is even more difficult to deal with. In part, because we now also see race as a kind of performance and recognize that our old assumptions about race were too simplistic. In earlier times, race was defined as a term that dealt with people with a common genetic heritage and three broad classification terms were used: Negroid, Mongoloid, and Caucasoid. This classification system was terribly inadequate and neglected large numbers of people. In recent years, DNA testing has evolved and there are a number of companies that can trace one’s ethnic and racial background and personal heritage in considerable detail based on a sample of saliva. Ancestry, one of the DNA testing services, describes itself as follows on its web site: From discovering their ethnicity to connecting with distant relatives, the largest DNA network in the world is helping more people find the singular story in their DNA. Yours is just as unique, revealing traces of your family history—who your ancestors were and where they came from.

The fee for using Ancestry was $79 when I accessed it on April 5, 2018.

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Problems with Defining People According to Race A passage in ThoughtCo, a web site devoted to sociological concerns, offers a different and more up-to-date view on race and discusses how it relates to ethnicity: Most readers have an understanding of what race is and means in U.S. society. Race refers to how we categorize people by skin color and phenotype-certain physical facial features that are shared to a certain degree by a given group. Common racial categories that most people would recognize in the U.S. include Black, white, Asian, Latino, and American Indian. But the tricky bit is that there is absolutely no biological determinant of race. Instead, sociologists recognize that our idea of race and racial categories are social constructs that are unstable and shifting, and that can be seen to have changed over time in relation to historical and political events. We also recognize race as defined in large part by context. “Black” means something different in the U.S. versus Brazil versus India, for example, and this difference in meaning manifests in real differences in social experience. Ethnicity is likely a bit more difficult to explain for most people. Unlike race, which is primarily seen and understood on the basis of skin color and phenotype, ethnicity does not necessarily provide visual cues. Instead, it is based on a shared common culture, including elements like language, religion, art, music, and literature, and norms, customs, practices, and history. An ethnic group does not exist simply because of the common national or cultural origins of the group, however. They develop because of their unique historical and social experiences, which become the basis for the group’s ethnic identity. (https://www.thoughtco.com/sociology-of-race-and-ethnicity-3026285)

So race, like gender, is socially constructed which means it is not a biological construct but a social one, and as society changes, so do people’s ideas about race. What complicates matters is that due to intermarriage, many people are now of mixed races and the old lines that defined the different races have become blurred. Brazil is a good example of a country where races are all mixed together and many Brazilians are of mixed races.

Intermarriage in America The Pew Report offers some interesting statistics on intermarriage, which has grown considerably in recent years in the United States. More broadly, one-in-ten married people in 2015  – not just those who recently married – had a spouse of a different race or ethnicity. This translates

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into 11 million people who were intermarried. The growth in intermarriage has coincided with shifting societal norms as Americans have become more accepting of marriages involving spouses of different races and ethnicities, even within their own families. The most dramatic increases in intermarriage have occurred among black newlyweds. Since 1980, the share who married someone of a different race or ethnicity has more than tripled from 5% to 18%. White newlyweds, too, have experienced a rapid increase in intermarriage, with rates rising from 4% to 11%. However, despite this increase, they remain the least likely of all major racial or ethnic groups to marry someone of a different race or ethnicity. Asian and Hispanic newlyweds are by far the most likely to intermarry in the U.S. About three-in-ten Asian newlyweds3 (29%) did so in 2015, and the share was 27% among recently married Hispanics. For these groups, intermarriage is even more prevalent among the U.S. born: 39% of U.S.-born Hispanic newlyweds and almost half (46%) of U.S.-born Asian newlyweds have a spouse of a different race or ethnicity.

We see that the race and in some cases gender play an important role in marriages in the United States and the rates of intermarriage vary considerably between Asians, Hispanics, Blacks, and Whites. A rather large percentage of Asian women marry men from a different race. These figures suggest that Americans are more accepting of intermarriage, but they do not imply that racism is dead in American society. Black Americans (or African Americans, as many now call themselves) still suffer from racism, which, along with poverty, affects their life-chances. Americans fought a bloody Civil War over slavery and the wounds from that battle still have not healed for many Americans, black and white. And the images of black people in the media only makes matters worse. As bell hooks (Gloria Watkins) writes in her book Black Looks: Race and Representation: If we compare the relative progress African Americans have made in education and employment to the struggle to gain control over how we are represented, particularly in the mass media, we see that there has been little change in the area of representation. Opening a magazine or book, turning on the television set, watching a film, or looking at photographs in public spaces, we are most likely to see the images of black people that reinforce and reinscribe white supremacy. Those images may be constructed by white people who have not divested of racism or by people of color/black people who may see the world through the lens of white supremacy—internalized racism.

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In our everyday lives, statistics show that people of different races and ethnicities tend to stick together, to live together—sometime because they have no choice and sometimes because there are benefits to be gained from living with people of the same race and, in some cases, ethnicity. “Birds of a feather,” as the saying goes “flock together.” And so, because of economic segregation and other factors, Americans now tend to live near people who are similar to them racially, economically, and even politically. As Gwen Sharp writes in an article dated August 6, 2012, in Sociological Images on “Economic Segregation in U.S. Neighborhoods”: When we talk about residential segregation, we’re generally focusing on race, and for good reason — many cities in the U.S. still have incredibly high rates of racial segregation. However, a recent Pew Research Center report looks at economic segregation, which is increasing in U.S. neighborhoods. Economic segregation refers to the degree to which people in different social classes live mostly among other people of their class. In 2010, the majority (76%) of people in the U.S. lived in middle-class or mixed-income neighborhoods. But economic segregation has increased in the last few decades. More of both lower-income and upper-income households live in Census tracts made up of households primarily like themselves: https:// thesocietypages.org/socimages/2012/08/06/economic-segregation-inu-s-neighborhoods/

What will happen when more mixed raced Americans become integrated into American society and culture remains to be seen.

PART II

Everyday Life in America

CHAPTER 10

Alarm Clocks

Abstract  In this chapter we investigate the power of clocks, in many different forms, over our lives. We have wind-up clocks, digital clocks (the most popular form), and clock radios that tell us what the time is and have alarms to alert us when a certain time, that is important to use for one reason or another, is reached. The alarm clock is a signifier of the way clocks control the lives of people who live in modern, complex societies. Keywords  Clocks • Alarm clocks • Control • Complex societies • Time I chose to start with alarm clocks because it is with these objects that most of us begin our day. Amazon.com has around 100,000 items under “alarm clocks.” It has old-fashioned mechanical wind-up alarm clocks but most of the clocks it sells are digital alarms that must be plugged into a wall socket. And it has an astounding number of digital clocks. Just as the mechanical analog wind-up alarm clock has been supplanted by the electronic digital alarm clock, so has the digital alarm clock been superseded by the digital clock-radio, a combination of an alarm clock and a radio. Alarm clocks, of any kinds, are signifiers of our need to be at work or at certain places at certain times and thus are indicators of the role time plays in our lives.

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Many Millennials and younger generations do not rely on alarm clocks, but use the alarm clock function in the cell phones or tablets to wake them. They do not wear wristwatches, as well, unless they wear fitness devices which often also tell the time. Millennials, in general, are not obsessed about time the way older generations are.

Wikipedia on Clocks Wikipedia offers a history of the development of clocks. The first mechanical clocks, employing the verge escapement mechanism with a foliot or balance wheel timekeeper, were invented in Europe at around the start of the 14th century, and became the standard timekeeping device until the pendulum clock was invented in 1656. The invention of the mainspring in the early 15th century allowed portable clocks to be built, evolving into the first pocket watches by the 17th century, but these were not very accurate until the balance spring was added to the balance wheel in the mid-17th century. The pendulum clock remained the most accurate timekeeper until the 1930s, when quartz oscillators were invented, followed by atomic clocks after World War 2. Although initially limited to laboratories, the development of microelectronics in the 1960s made quartz clocks both compact and cheap to produce, and by the 1980s they became the world’s dominant timekeeping technology in both clocks and wristwatches. Atomic clocks are far more accurate than any previous timekeeping device, and are used to calibrate other clocks and to calculate the International Atomic Time; a standardized civil system, Coordinated Universal Time, is based on atomic time.

So we’ve had clocks with us for a long time and these clocks play an important role in our lives since in modern life, we have many obligations that are based on time: being at our jobs at a certain time, meeting classes at a certain time, meeting a date at a certain time, picking up our children from school at a certain time, and so on.

Clocks in My Life We have six clock-radios in our house and we used to have seven. We used to have a clock radio in our kitchen but it has been displaced by an Amazon Echo Dot. We have clocks built into our microwave and our stove so telling the time in the kitchen is not a problem. What the Echo Dot does is

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function as a radio for us as well as doing many other things, such as answering certain kinds of questions and playing music. It also tells the time when you ask Alexa and serves as a timer. We also have a Google Home Mini that tells us the time when we ask, and can also function as an alarm clock. Aside from our kitchen, there is no room in our house that does not have a clock radio, which means we are always aware of the time, even on the weekends when we may not have to go anywhere or have to worry about being anyplace “on time.”

Alarm Clocks and the Power of Time The alarm clock, in whatever form, is a signifier of the way time orders and often controls our lives, of the many obligations people have in complex societies where time plays such an important role. We start the day with an alarm clock waking us up and spend the rest of the day, often with clocks of one kind or another in sight, with time on our minds and shaping our behavior. For many people, the alarm clock has been replaced by the alarms on their smartphones and in the past few years, by alarms from Amazon Echo devices, which we can set by voice. The Echo Dot and other competitors such as the Google Home also can serve as a timer. I have used my Echo Dot as an alarm clock and timer and it is very functional.

What Is Time? Philosophers and deep thinkers are not sure what time is. Is time the eternal present in which we live or is it a brief moment between the endlessly receding past and the future? Whatever time may be, philosophically, modern men and women are obsessed with it and find it necessary to keep track of it as best they can, which explains why we own so many alarm clocks, clock radios, smartphones, watches, and other devices that help us deal with the way we spend our time.

CHAPTER 11

The Amazon Echo

Abstract  Smart speakers such as the Amazon Echo Dot and the Google Home Mini are the most important new product category of recent years and are having a major impact on American culture and society. This is because they are very functional (they can do so many different things) and because they rely on the power of speech, which makes them easy to use. There is a question of privacy involved with these devices, but millions of people who use smart speakers seem to feel that the benefits of smart speakers are more important than privacy concerns. Keywords  Amazon Echo • Google Home Mini • Smart speakers • Privacy The smart speaker is the most important new genre (or product category) of electronic devices since the smartphone and its offshoot, the tablet. Like the smartphone, the smart speaker is a multi-functional device, except that instead of using “apps” it continually is taught new things—what it calls “skills” that it can do. The Echo smart speaker was invented by Amazon.com, which is now a major technology company as well as a retailing giant. Other companies, most notably Google with its Home speakers, are now competing with Amazon in the smart speaker business. By 2022, it is estimated by Forrester research that more than

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66 million American households, or approximately 172 million people, will have these devices. One in six Americans now has a smart speaker (as of June, 2018).

Functionality of the Echo Dot and Smart Speakers We don’t know how many new things the Dot or its competitors such as the Google Home Mini will eventually be able to do, but the Echo Dot’s list of skills is considerable…and growing every week as programmers figure out how to teach Alexa to do new things. Currently it has around 15,000 “skills” but there’s no knowing how many it will eventually have. Alexa can play the sound of waves to soothe us, can help us meditate, can provide us with the news whenever we want it, and can wake us up in the morning with a loud alarm. I have two Echo Dots: one is in the kitchen, where it replaced the clock-radio that we had before we got the Echo Dot, and one in my study, where I use it to play music, answer questions, give weather reports, and so on. I also us it as a timer in the kitchen when I’m cooking, or in my study when I want to meditate. It has a meditation skill that I’ve just learned how to use. Every week I get an email from Amazon about new things that Alexa has learned. You can use Alexa to order things from Amazon.com, to turn the lights on or off (if you have the right kind of lights and appliances), to get the news, and do many different things. It is learning (so we are told) all the time. All of the smart speakers, as these devices are known, can do many things. The device has been very popular and Amazon sold around 6 million of them in 2016. The Echo Dot and its competitor, Google’s Home, are expected to sell almost 30 million devices in the next year or two. Amazon Echo devices have around 70 percent of the market now. The Echo Dot sells for $50 and the Google Home (which has a speaker attached to it) sells for $130, giving the Dot a large price advantage. The prices of these devices are flexible and you often see them on sale. The Google Home is meant to compete with the $180 Amazon Echo, which has a speaker attached to it, unlike the Dot, which looks like a hockey puck and has small speakers, which are adequate for most tasks. You can buy a decent Bluetooth speaker for $20 and up to use with the Dot if you want to listen to music. Google has recently introduced the Google Home Mini which also sells for $50 but is often available for much less. I bought one on Black Friday and it only cost $29 and you can buy them many places for that price.

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The Power of Speech What is basic to all these devices is that they are based on speech to control then—on the enabling power of our words to do certain things. We can use our speech to interact with people, and with dogs and other animals, but we’ve never been able to use speech to control electronic devices and interact with them so easily. I’ve read stories about elderly people living alone who have found ways to interact with smart speakers such as the Echo Dot or the Google Home Mini, and assuage their loneliness. At the unconscious level, our ability to command Alexa and the nameless speaker on the Google Home Mini provides us with a sense of agency and power. The fact that Alexa speaks with a woman’s voice may, at the unconscious level, give males a sense of power over a woman, even if that “woman” is just a chip in an electronic gizmo. Most smart speaker devices use a woman’s voice because people seem to find women’s voices coming from these devices less threatening than a man’s voice. Google’s voice is also that of a female, but the fact that she doesn’t have a woman’s name means the Home Mini doesn’t offer the psychic rewards men may get from commanding Alexa. Google Home now allows owners to change the voices and there are now male voices on the Home, which allows women to obtain, at the unconscious level, power over men—on in this case, a chip that speaks with a male voice. Now Alexa has been given medical information and if you empower Alexa’s medical skill, she will serve as a medical first responder and answer questions you might have about any conditions that may worry you. It would seem that her abilities are almost limitless, as programmers develop new skills for her all the time. Every week I get an email with information about Alexa’s new skills, so she become more valuable the longer you have her. At the back of our minds we must wonder how much Alexa—that is Amazon.com—knows about us and how it can monetize this information. When Alexa starts asking us questions and tells us to “stop,” I’ll start getting worried about the relationship between human beings and their electronic devices, and artificial intelligence that makes them work. There is talk now of these devices eventually being programmed to record our messages all the time—that is, before we wake them by saying “Alexa” or “Okay, Google.” Many people consider this an ominous possibility, but if it does happen, there will, no doubt, we ways to work around this imposition on our privacy.

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Our Daughter’s Passion for Smart Speakers Our daughter, her husband, and her youngest daughter, who live in Los Angeles, came to visit us recently. Our daughter gave me an Echo for my birthday but she didn’t know anything about them. She was so taken with the device that when she returned to Los Angeles, she bought three Echos—one for everyone in the family. Then she bought another one for her car, so she can remember things that come to mind and have Alexa place them on her to-do list. And recently she purchased a Google Home. “We’ve gone Smart Speaker crazy,” our daughter told us the last time we talked with him. And so, it seems, have millions of other Americans. It is estimated that in the relatively near future, just about every family in the United States will have some variety of smart speakers or voice assistants as they are now called.

CHAPTER 12

Chandeliers at the 2017 Grammy Awards

Abstract  This chapter explores the 2017 Grammy Awards use of chandeliers and suggests they were meant to be signifiers of status and of the “high class” nature of the show. Chandeliers are traditionally seen as symbols of status and wealth. Grammy Awards, like all award shows, want to suggest their high status and use elaborate sets, and in this case chandeliers, to affirm their status. The awards given at the 2017 Grammy Awards were very controversial, but that is often the case in award shows. Keywords  Grammy Awards • Chandeliers • Status • Award shows • High class I noticed the set at the 2017 Grammy Awards had a number of chandeliers. Why? I believe it is because most people in America see chandeliers as signifiers of something being “high class.” As Travis Bond explains in his article “Chandeliers as a Symbol of Status and Wealth”: Not surprisingly we have created many items that symbolize our mastery of our world. The main one is wealth itself. After that comes all the symbols of wealth. It seems that virtually anything expensive and/or hard to get can be made to show the world how capable one is. Boats. Cars. Jewelry. Clothing items. Houses. And this brings us to one that has served as a symbol of wealth and status for centuries now… the chandelier. It seems that from its birth it © The Author(s) 2018 A. A. Berger, Perspectives on Everyday Life, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-99795-7_12

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was meant to play a role in distinguishing between the rich and the poor. Centuries ago the materials involved in night-time lighting were expensive enough to alienate all but the rich in society. As a result chandelier lighting became the providence of the wealthy and this association has stuck in people’s heads for centuries. Chandeliers adorn the halls of Buckingham Palace, the White House, and Celebrity Mansions. (Source: http://EzineArticles. com/5298452)

Award Shows and the Quest for Status Just as a brand of car is a status symbol, so is a chandelier and the set designers of the Grammy Awards used chandeliers to suggest that the show was, somehow important and “classy.” The spatiality of the set and its various decorations all were made in an attempt to generate a feeling that the Grammy Awards—an award show in which musicians celebrate one another and prizes are given for the best song, best record and so on—are, somehow, culturally significant. All the award shows attempt to suggest to their audiences that they are important cultural or pop cultural media events. They are very important for the singers who are up for awards, because winning a “best” anything in the Grammy Awards is usually worth a great deal of money in increased sales. The set for the show was a combination of over-the-top and tacky; there were huge spaces, which is another signifier of status. Rich and wealthy people live in large homes with a great deal of space. Ironically, everyone in the hall where the show was broadcast was sitting on folding chairs.

Politics and Choices at the Grammy Awards The elephant in the room involved politics and the choices made for certain awards. As Mike Wass wrote in “Grammy Awards 2017: The Good, The Bad & The Beyoncé” (Feb. 13, 2017): Accusations of racial bias were unavoidable when 25 was named Album Of The Year at the expense of Lemonade—a state of affairs that prompted a well-intentioned, but clumsy outburst from the winner….Only three black women have ever won the award—the last being Lauryn Hill way back in 1999. To paraphrase Frank Ocean, it boggles the mind that Taylor Swift can win the award for a generic pop album like 1989, while Beyoncé was denied Self-Titled (an album that literally changed the way music is disseminated)

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and Lemonade—a visual masterpiece that started an important conversation about race for some and served as an instrument of healing for others. (http://www.idolator.com/7657445/grammy-awards-2017-reviewbeyonce-snub)

So what didn’t happen at the Grammy Awards was more important, in certain respects, than what did happen. Watching the Grammy Awards awards ceremony was, I found, an ordeal. It seemed to go on forever, and I’m not the only one who felt that way about the show. But for the musicians who performed on the show, it was a lucrative blast and for popular music lovers and fans of various singers, it was, no doubt, worth the effort and the expenditure (critics would say “waste”) of time.

CHAPTER 13

The Starbucks Coffee Shop Logo

Abstract  In this chapter we deal with the evolution of the Starbucks logo and the role of Starbucks in American culture and society. It defines logos and offers a historical portrait of how the logo originated and evolved over the years. In addition, it shows how the myth model helps explain the popularity of Starbucks and deals, also, with the popularity of Starbucks. Keywords  Starbucks • Logos • Psyche • Myth model • Attachment Let me say something about logos. What are logos? Defining them is actually a bit more complicated than you might imagine.

Defining Logos We find a useful definition of logos in Marcel Danesi’s book Understanding Media Semiotics (2002: 187): Logos (an abbreviation of logogriphs) are the pictorial counterparts of brand names. They are designed to generate the same kind of connotative signification systems for a product through the visual modality. Consider the Apple logo adopted by the Apple Computer Company. It is clearly an iconic sign suffused with latent religious connotations suggesting, above all else, the story of Adam and Eve in the Western Bible, which revolves around the eating of an apple that was supposed to contain forbidden knowledge. © The Author(s) 2018 A. A. Berger, Perspectives on Everyday Life, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-99795-7_13

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That is, a logo is an image that calls to mind certain associations we have with these images and all that we have learned about a brand through its positioning and though the narratives it uses (in commercials and print advertisements) to spread its message. Brands sell themselves by providing stories about themselves for us that we carry around in our heads and the logos are reminders of those messages. Those messages generally offer various supports and gratifications to us and help us reaffirm our identities. In the case of the Starbucks logo, there is also a mythical mystique to the image.

The Origin of the Starbucks Logo In a September 29, 2014, article in Adweek, Robert Klara explains “How a Topless Mermaid Made the Starbucks Cup an Icon.” He writes: In 1971, Starbucks…was looking for a logo, something that would embody the seafaring history of its home city. The three founders hired a consultant named Terry Heckler. According to CEO Howard Schultz, Heckler “pored over old marine books until he came up with a logo based on an old 16th-­ century Norse woodcut: a two-tailed mermaid.” …The mermaid was exotic. She was also topless. At first, and despite some complaints, Starbucks just rolled with it. As Schultz later explained, “Bare breasted and Rubenesque, [the mermaid] was supposed to be as seductive as the coffee itself.”

The modern version of the icon, with the mermaid’s hair covering her breasts, is a simplified and modernized version of the original logo. It has less copy on it and is highly stylized. The two tails are still there but they don’t mean very much and most people who purchase coffee at one of the 20,000 Starbucks probably don’t recognize what they are (her two tails) and see them as decorations of some kind. The logo of the mermaid with the breasts has an “old-fashioned” look to it and isn’t as visually exciting and the more modern one. Many Starbucks icons now only have the mermaid with no writing on it since the mermaid icon is so powerful now.

Logos and the Psyche Semiotically speaking, a logo is a visual image that is used to signify a particular brand and to distinguish that brand from other competing brands for the same product. We must recognize that brands play a large role in

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people’s identities and with some products, such as eye-glasses and sun-­ glasses, purses, and automobiles, companies use logos—generally prominently displayed—to show their sense of style, their taste, and their economic status. Brands and their logos are connected to narratives we carry around in our heads as a result of watching television commercials and reading print advertisements. Brand name products compete with generic products, which may be a store brand of food or of some clothing. Generic products don’t usually have logos since logos obtain their power from being advertised and kept in the public consciousness to the extent possible. But generic or store-brands have one advantage over brand name products: generic products are usually less expensive. Logos also are connected to our human propensity to do certain things habitually. When we see the Starbucks logo, we remind ourselves that this is the brand of coffee we like and the logo may even stimulate a desire to have a cup of coffee. The Starbucks logo is a signifier for Starbucks, which is a progressive corporation that treats its employees well and does what it can to minimize pollution, so every cup of coffee in Starbucks is a vote for the corporation’s positive values.

Our Attachment to Starbucks Our attachment to Starbucks is an interesting topic. It has been explored by a marketing strategist, David Forbes, in his book The Science of Why. Forbes explains why so many people often find themselves in a Starbucks coffee house (2015: 8–9): Many of those customers are there with you because the Starbucks’ coffee experience has become a part of who they are. Not only does it figure into how they want to see themselves in the world, but it also—and this is just as important—contributes to how they would like to be seen by others In that way, the ritual of that Starbucks coffee purchase fulfills the emotional needs of its customers. Perhaps it’s important to one customer that he can count on how that experience will unfold every time he visits (the security motive), or maybe it supports another’s self-image as a discriminating coffee consumer (the mastery motive), for still others, the appeal may lie in the way the Starbucks staff treats them (the esteem motive)….Founder and CEO Howard Schultz famously sums up his company’s success, in part, this way. “We are not in the coffee business selling to people,” he says. “We are in the people business, selling coffee.”

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We can see, then, the there is a lot more to understand about the Starbucks logo that meets the eye and that selling coffee is a much more complicated matter than we might have imagined. Many of our foods are connected, in our unconscious, to certain fairy tales, legends and myths to which we have been exposed, as we grew up which provide products with certain personalities and auras that we find useful.

Starbucks and the Myth Model Let me apply here my “myth model,” discussed earlier in the book, to going to Starbucks. Let us recall that it suggests that much of what we do in our everyday lives can be connected to ancient myths that still shape our behavior. The Greek word “mythos” means story. In my model, let us recall, I take a myth and suggests that this myth informs certain aspects of psychoanalytic theory, that the myth can be found in history, elite culture, popular or mass-mediated culture and everyday life. I take as my myth, which explains our passion for Starbucks, that of another beverage, Nectar. It was the drink of Olympian gods that bestowed immortality on those who drank it. MYTH

Nectar—drink of Olympian gods in Greek mythology

PSYCHOANALYTIC THEORY HISTORY ELITE CULTURE POPULAR CULTURE EVERYDAY LIFE

Repetition compulsion Drinking coffee in Yemeni monasteries Bach’s Coffee Cantata Starbucks print ads and commercials Go to Starbucks for a cup of coffee

We can see, then, that there’s a complicated relationship between the Starbucks logo, coffee, and the act of going into a Starbucks for a cup of coffee. When we visit a Starbucks, we are, even if we don’t recognize it, acting mythically and our actions are based on unconscious imperatives in the myths that shape our lives in so many different ways. Nectar was supposed to confer long life on those who drank it. Curiously, scientists have now shown that drinking coffee is very beneficial and may actually prolong our lives.

CHAPTER 14

Teeth Whitening Agents

Abstract  In this chapter we consider our “need” for perfect teeth and the role teeth whitening agents play in our thinking about our teeth. We consider the ideas of a cosmetic dentist about the need for perfect teeth if one is to succeed in the business world—because people “read” teeth as signifiers of one’s status. We also consider the matter of the natural color of teeth, which are described in some advertisements as “stained.” There is also a kind of narcissism involved in desiring gleaming white teeth. Keywords  Whiteness • Teeth as signs • Narcissism Teeth whiteners have not been on the market for very long. It was when dentists started asking their patients if they wanted their teeth to be whitened that entrepreneurs started developing products that people could use in their homes and save a good deal of money by doing so. The question we must ask it why, all of a sudden, did people feel the need to have whiter teeth than they ordinarily had.

The Need for “Perfect” Teeth It may be that as cosmetic dentistry evolved, the notion that not only should our teeth be made more uniform and better to look at became popular and with it, the idea that teeth should be whiter than natural was also considered important. On June 16, 1982, there was an article on the © The Author(s) 2018 A. A. Berger, Perspectives on Everyday Life, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-99795-7_14

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first page of The Wall Street Journal about a cosmetic dentist who argues that people who didn’t have straight and perfect teeth might lose out when it came to getting jobs or promotions. The article “Your Suit is Pressed, Hair Neat, but What do Your Molars Say?” by Marilyn Chase treats teeth as signs. She writes: A dental practice here (in San Francisco) is luring patients with a warning that people consciously or unconsciously “read” one another’s teeth for clues to character.

Her article deals with a cosmetic dentist located in San Francisco, Jeff Morley, who explains: Buck teeth imply people are dumb. Large canines imply aggressiveness. Weak chins imply passivity while strong chins imply a macho, studly personality. I don’t know who made these up, but the fact is they’re cultural standards.

To this list we must add ordinary “yellow teeth” that suggest people aren’t caring for themselves and don’t realize how damaging their teeth are to their careers and relationships. The color white suggests purity and there may be unconscious meanings to having sparkling white teeth that motivate people to whiten their teeth. The brightness of white teeth plays a role in directing people with whom one is talking from other facial features to the mouth so there may be additional payoff in having white teeth and teeth that are regular, without gaps or other negative signifiers.

The Crest Advertisement Consider the copy in this advertisement for Crest’s Dental Whitening Kit ($48 for two ounces): Get a healthy, sparkling white smile with Crest Dental Whitening Kit. With the advanced seal technology, these no-slip grip strips mold to the shape of your teeth. Use once a day for 30 minutes to get desired professional-level teeth whitening. Uses the same enamel safe whitening ingredients as dentists. Twenty whitening treatments per kit. One upper and one lower strip included with each treatment.

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Features & Benefits: Removes 14 years of teeth stains Delivers professional-level teeth whitening Advanced seal technology’s no slip grip The strip molds to the shape of your teeth Use once a day for 30 minutes A 3D White smile stops people in their tracks. It’s alluring and magnetic, and best of all, it’s easily within your reach. All Crest 3D White strips products use the same enamel-safe teeth whitening ingredient that dentists do, reaching below the tooth enamel surface to remove stains. Find the White strips product that’s right for you and get a whiter, more brilliantly dimensional smile. Removes 14 Years of Teeth Stains for a Brilliantly Whiter Smile Crest 3D White Luxe White strips Professional Effects are like an eraser for your teeth. Remove your teeth stains from the last 14  years in just 30 minutes a day. Their no slip grip means the strips stay put until you take them off, allowing you to talk and even drink water while whitening your teeth. You’ll see a whiter smile after 3  days, and full results in 20  days. Achieve professional-level teeth whitening results without the professional price tag.

Teeth whitening is a multi-million dollar a year segment of the dental products industry and there is a great deal of competition among makers of teeth whitening products, some of whose products do not work very well or at all, and may have ingredients that are dangerous to our health.

The Problem of “Stained” Teeth The Crest 3D ad posits everyone as naturally having “stained” teeth and suggests it can erase these “stains” for much less than it costs to have one’s teeth whitened by a dentist. And it promises a smile that will “stop people in their tracks.” This product and other teeth whiteners claim to both clean our teeth and “erase” years of stains on our teeth and make our teeth whiter and by doing so make us more attractive. It is almost like a baptism experience for teeth as they are reborn and cleansed of years of stains. People with good dental plans see their dental hygienists twice a year, which means that they don’t have “stained” teeth that have to be miraculously redeemed, though their teeth may not be a brilliantly white as those who worry about white teeth want. The Alta White shows teeth “before’ being treated with Alta White and “after” having used it, so we can see what

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the difference is between normal stained and slightly yellowish teeth and the brilliant white teeth that Alta White promises. There probably is an element of healthy narcissism to the desire for brilliantly white teeth, but it is relatively harmless, even if most likely it is a waste of money. And very white teeth also pose a problem to us—for if your teeth are not regular and your canines are too threatening, having brilliantly white teeth only draws attention to the imperfections in your teeth and may prevent you from getting the job you wanted, the promotion you wanted, or a date with someone with whom you wanted to go out. We see brilliantly white teeth in news show anchors, in movie stars, celebrities, and in people whose lifestyles we might describe as enviable. If we can’t have the lifestyles of the rich, well-born and able, and brilliantly white toothed, we can at least emulate the whiteness of their teeth.

CHAPTER 15

Pacifiers

Abstract  In this investigation of the hidden meaning of pacifiers, we make use of two linguistic devices, metaphor and metonymy, to understand the significance of these objects. The term “pacifier” suggests something that tames babies, who are thus, at the unconscious level, seen as wild animals. The chapter also considers psychoanalytic approaches to sexuality and the relation between stages in sexual development and material culture—that is, objects that relate to children’s needs as they develop sexually. Keywords  Pacifier • Metaphor • Metonymy • Psychoanalytic theory • Material culture What does it mean that we call those rubber and plastic devices that resemble nipples, which we stick in babies’ mouths, “pacifiers.” The verb “pacify” means to quell anger, agitation and excitement, so the term “pacifier” suggests that the babies to whom we give pacifiers are agitated, maybe even angry, and need something to comfort them, such as an artificial mother reduced to her all-important feature, as far as tiny babies are concerned, her nipple. Babies seem to derive pleasure from sucking on pacifiers, even though they are not getting any nourishment—which they would get from their mother’s breast or a bottle with milk or something else in it. The pleasure comes from the sucking and perhaps from ­memories of the pleasure they got when they were at their mothers’ breasts or from the bottles of milk they were given. © The Author(s) 2018 A. A. Berger, Perspectives on Everyday Life, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-99795-7_15

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Metaphor and Metonymy and Mothers Let me say something here about two important semiotic terms relative to our understanding of pacifiers: metaphor and metonymy. Metaphor is based on analogy. It uses the verb “is,” as in “my love is a rose.” A weak form of metaphor is called simile. It uses the phrase “is like” as in “my love is like a rose.” Metonymy is based on association. We learn to associate huge mansions with wealth. A weak form of metonymy is called synecdoche, in which a part stands for a whole. For example, the Pentagon stands for the American military establishment. For the infant, from a metonymic point of view, using a synecdoche, the pacifier is the mother. We can see the difference between similes and synecdoche in the following statements: Form

Process

Example

Simile Synecdoche

Something is like something else Part stands for whole

A pacifier is like a mother A pacifier is a mother

This is conceivable when you recognize that, according to psychoanalyst Joan Riviere, very young babies think they are the entire world and that their mothers are part of them. It is only as they get a bit older that they recognize that other people exist and that there is a world outside of their consciousness and their cribs.

Sigmund Freud on Sexual Development Sigmund Freud, the father of psychoanalytic theory, postulated that human beings pass through four stages as they evolve sexually. These stages are: the oral, the anal, the phallic, and the genital. Age

Stage

Infancy Two+ Childhood Adolescence

Oral Anal (or anal-sadistic) Phallic Genital

In L.  Eidelberg’s The Encyclopedia of Psychoanalysis these stages are described as follows (1968:210–211):

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The mouth represents an erotogenic zone for the infant. Sucking and later eating represent the gratification of oral needs. The fact that the infant often sucks a pacifier indicates that he is not only concerned with the incorporation of calories. When the infant begins to have teeth, the need to bite expresses his sadistic desires. The second stage of development is usually referred to as the sadistic-anal, and is characterized by the infant’s interest in excreting or retaining his stools. Finally, the third stage is referred to as the phallic, in which the boy is interested in his penis and the girl in her clitoris. The boy’s interest in his penis appears to be responsible for his positive Oedipus complex, which is finally dissolved by the fear of castration. The girl reacts with penis envy, if she considers her clitoris to be an inferior organ to the penis.

These stages are not always clear-cut, and the fourth stage, the genital phase, is achieved only with puberty, when everyone’s rich but dissociated sexual development becomes focused. So when babies suck on their pacifiers, they are obtaining sexual pleasure, strange as that might seem to those not familiar with psychoanalytic thought.

Stages of Sexual Development and Material Culture We can use Freud’s notions about the stages of sexual development to gain some insights into the way many of the objects we use in our daily lives might be connected to the different stages in our sexual development. All of this, of course, is unrecognized and operates at the unconscious level. Oral

Anal

Phallic

Genital

Pacifier Toothpicks

Potty Enema

Condom Joysticks

Birth control pills Vibrators

Babies As Wild Animals The fact that we call these rubber and plastic objects “pacifiers” suggests that, in our unconscious, we see babies as essentially wild animals that need to be controlled or “pacified” somehow. Maybe even “tamed?” By the time children are at the Potty level, the stage is set for a power struggle of incredible proportions and it may be that this struggle actually shapes or affects the psyches of children through their adulthood, when many of them will have their own “wild” babies to look after and will purchase “pacifiers” for them.

CHAPTER 16

Toilets

Abstract  This chapter considers the role of toilets in different cultures, with particular attention to Japanese toilets, such as the Toto 700H toilet, which sells for $4700. The Japanese passion for cleanliness and the role of clean toilets and tourism is also considered. Keywords  Toilets • Cleanliness • Tourism Toilets, like the Toto 700H, and toilets of all kinds, play an important role in our everyday lives. There isn’t a day when we don’t use a toilet to urinate or defecate, but we don’t pay any attention to toilets until they cause some kind of a problem in our homes: they leak or they are blocked. In modern societies, there is a vast system of underground pipes that exist to enable toilets to function the way they do and when they are working— which is most of the time. It is a matter of “out of sight and out of mind,” until there is a problem.

Approaches to Toilets in Different Countries There are different approaches to toilets in different countries that are of interest. In some third world countries, toilets are little more than holes in the ground while in some countries, notably Japan, the toilet has become a really high-tech product. In the United States, you can purchase a good © The Author(s) 2018 A. A. Berger, Perspectives on Everyday Life, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-99795-7_16

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toilet for less than $100 at Home Depot though you can spend many hundreds of dollars there for more upscale brands of toilets. On Google I found a Toto toilet for $10,000 and many less expensive versions of that toilet for $4000. The most expensive Toto toilets have a remote to monitor the way they function. The Toto 700H sells for $4700 at Amazon.com and has a heated seat, automatic flush, and an aerated water spray to save users the need to wipe themselves after defecating in a Toto 700H toilet. The fact that the Toto toilet, with a spray cleaning device (relieving us of the need to wipe our assholes), was invented in Japan raises interesting question. Do the Japanese, who are famous for being clean, have some kind of a fear of contamination from excrement that led them to invent a way to avoid having to wipe themselves after defecating? Is the Japanese passion for cleanliness what causes their fear of excrement or is their fear of excrement that has generated the Japanese passion for cleanliness? Whatever the case, the Japanese have refined the toilet to an extraordinary degree and with some advanced Japanese toilets you no longer need toilet paper to wipe up after defecating. Your rear is cleansed with jets of water.

Japanese Obsession with Cleanliness An article in the July 31st online issue of The Economist, with the title “The Japanese are a super-clean lot. Obsessively so?” discusses the Japanese attitude toward cleanliness: The Japanese are just as fastidious at home as at play. Cleanliness matters. Most have at least one bath a day; rare is the young woman who does not have at least two. Washing does not involve a superficial flick of the flannel, but a vigorous all-over scrub, often with an extremely rough nylon towel. And this before a person gets into the bath. The tub is for soaking in; heaven forbid that anybody takes a bath in scummy, soapy bath water. The Japanese, in short, have a horror of filth. (http://www.economist.com/node/153179)

Given this situation, it is reasonable to suggest that it is the Japanese passion for cleanliness and “horror of filth” (especially in the form of feces) that led to the creation of Toto toilets, and others like them. Different countries deal with toilets in different ways. We find a description of this matter in Harvey Moloch’s Where Stuff Comes From: How Toasters, Toilets, Cars, Computers, and Many Other Things Come to Be As They Are in his discussion of toilets (2003:103–104):

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Across industrial Europe, toilets keep their idiosyncratic liabilities and benefits (for those who can handle it)….There are indeed some superior features that might serve global needs if there was a way for them to travel. A Swedish toilet separates urine and feces in the plumbing system. Relatively harmless urine becomes immediately useful as fertilizer (merely diluted 10:1 with water before application). Some Swedish toilets use dry systems to deal with feces. Certain Japanese toilets…are, in effect, combination sink toilets….Other Japanese toilets (Italian ones, too) have separate controls to unleash a heavier wash for solid excrement than for urine. Some have heated seats or upward sprays that rinse body parts. But none of these advantages can readily move beyond national borders.

In the years since Moloch’s book was published, toilets in first world countries have evolved and it is now possible to purchase “exotic” Japanese toilets in America and advanced toilets that do remarkable things in Sweden and now other countries. There is, it seems, a correlation between a country’s economic status and the sophistication of its toilets.

Toilets and Tourism Many tourists think about the countries they are planning to visit in terms of the cleanliness of their toilets and the nature of their bathrooms. It is not the cuisine, the architecture, the landscapes, and the cultural treasures of the countries they are visiting that interests them as much as the cleanliness of the room in which they will be pooping and the quality of the toilets they will be using. There is even an app that shows the best toilets in Paris for those to whom a super-clean toilet is important or maybe even all-important.

CHAPTER 17

Milk

Abstract  This chapter considers the question of what milk is, and whether other milks such as soy milk and almond milk, which are called “impostor milks,” are really milk. It also deals with the question of whether people are addicted to milk and the assertion by a doctor that people consume too much milk, generally in the form of cheese. Keywords  Milk • Impostor milks • Addiction It wasn’t so long ago that we all knew what milk was. Or we thought we knew. But in recent years, we find many products that call themselves milks that do not come from a cow’s udders. We find soy milks, almond nut milks, rice milks, and many other kinds of imitation milks. This had led the dairy industry to request Congress to pass a law preventing any product that does not come from a cow from calling itself milk. Milk is also interesting because determining what milk is and isn’t raises the question of how we define things. Let me offer an example. A recent article in The Wall Street Journal dealt with the problems statisticians had in counting the number of Jews in the United States. It all depends on how you define Jews. Do you count people who were born Jewish (technically, of a Jewish mother) but don’t practice Judaism as Jewish? Do you practice people who identify with being Jewish but are not, technically speaking, Jews. Are cultural Jews who don’t belong to © The Author(s) 2018 A. A. Berger, Perspectives on Everyday Life, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-99795-7_17

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synagogues Jews? Are Jews who do not keep Kosher really Jews? Defining Jews is so difficult that it is almost impossible to determine how many Americans are Jewish. One matter, related to both milk and Judaism, is that observant Jews do not mix meat and milk, because Jews were commanded in the Torah to avoid doing so. This discussion of the problems caused by defining things leads to our next topic: impostor milks.

Impostor Milks A congressman from Vermont, a dairy state, has asked the government’s Food and Drug Administration to do something about the so-called impostor milks. An Internet article deals with this matter: BURLINGTON, Vt. — A Vermont congressman is mounting a new campaign against the words soy milk, almond milk and rice milk. Impostors, he says. Rep. Peter Welch, D-Vt., is asking the Food and Drug Administration to enforce the definition of “milk”  — as in, a beverage that comes from cows — and require non-dairy drinks that currently market themselves as “milk” to find another name. (USA Today, http://www.usatoday.com/ story/news/nation-now/2016/12/16/dont-call-soy-milk-vermont-congressman-says/95540638/)

But producers of nut milks point out that the term is used in many products that do not come from cows or other lactating animals. For example, we have something called “Milk of Magnesium” that is not really milk, but everyone recognizes that this is the case and the same applies to the various nut milk products available. One reason for this attention to defining milk properly is that the dairy industry is suffering from lower demand by Americans, who drink much less milk (from cows) than they used to. Some drink these new milks, from nuts and rice and soybeans, for health reasons, since milk can cause digestive and other problems for many people. A number of people are “lactose intolerant” and so avoid “real” milk.

Are We Addicted to Milk? A doctor, Neal Barnard, has just written a book suggesting that it is best to avoid drinking as much milk as we’re used to consuming. He argues, also, that milk is addictive. His book is called The Cheese Trap. An article on NPR Internet’s site, by Barbara J. King, discusses this matter and the

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fact that much of the milk we consume is found in cheese. Barnard explains that Americans, on average, eat 33 pounds of cheese a year, which is a problem because cheese is fattening. Barnard writes about cheese in strong terms: “Loaded with calories, high in sodium, packing more cholesterol than steak, and sprinkled with hormones — if cheese were any worse, it would be Vaseline….Some foods are fattening. Others are addictive. Cheese is both — fattening and addictive.”

One reason why cheese is such a health problem is that cheese slows down the activation of Vitamin D, which helps prevent cancer. So, if Barnard is correct, milk is no longer a healthy drink but is, in fact, a kind of drug, and drinking milk and consuming it in the form of cheese is a “surprising” addiction that is dangerous for our health. And drinking soy milks, almond milks, rice milks and other kinds of “impostor” milks, strange as it might seem, might be better for many of us than drinking “real” milk.

CHAPTER 18

Electronic Pressure Cookers

Abstract  Pressure cookers are connected to our attitudes toward time and our desire to be able to prepare some foods more quickly as compared with when using other means of cooking. The Instapot Electronic Pressure Cooker and other electronic pressure cookers are a new development in the design of pressure cookers, and are meant to help people deal with the stresses of time and preparing meals, since they free cooks from having to be in attendance when these pressure cookers are used. The chapter concludes with a discussion of the notion that food is seen as fuel in America rather than something to be enjoyed and a source of great pleasure. Keywords  Pressure cooker • Electronic • Fuel Amazon.com lists more than 1300 items under the “pressure cooker” category—including replacement rubber rings needed to seal pressure cookers and other things needed for these devices as well.

Pressure Cookers and the Problem of Time Pressure cookers, along with microwaves, represent an attempt to cook food quickly and yet obtain some measure of the taste and vitamins in the foods being prepared. The antithesis of the pressure cooker is the slow cooker. Slow cookers tell us that you don’t have to be there while the food © The Author(s) 2018 A. A. Berger, Perspectives on Everyday Life, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-99795-7_18

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is being cooked. You just put the desired ingredients into the slow cooker and many hours later the food is waiting for you. The electronic pressure cooker also frees you—or so it claims. Both the slow cooker and the pressure cooker say that they enable you to have more time for other pursuits and they both are testimonials to the time pressure under which so many people now live. All kitchen devices are constantly evolving. Thus there are now mini-­ slow cookers that you can bring to work and plug in. When lunch time comes, you’ll have a hot, home-cooked meal waiting for you. And now the stainless steel or aluminum pressure cooker, which you use with heat from your gas or electric stove, has been replaced by the electric pressure cooker. It is like the slow cooker in that it is electronic and it relieves people using it from having to look after it as it cooks. With regular pressure cookers you have to worry about making sure the fire isn’t too strong and have to worry about the cooker exploding or leaking. The electric pressure cooker relieves you of these problems, though these devices also have their drawbacks. Electric pressure cookers tend to be slower than top of the stove aluminum or steel pressure cookers and they cost more to operate. You have to wait 15 minutes or so for them to heat up. What they do offer users is the ability to control various functions of the cooker—though having electronic components means they are vulnerable to problems with them. That explains why many people purchase insurance policies to cover electronic breakdowns.

Electronic Pressure Cookers and the Dream of the Perfect Pot Roast The dream of the person using an electronic pressure cooker, to cook a pot roast, for example, is to end up with a pot roast that looks like the pot roast you get when you’ve roasted the meat and vegetables in an oven for three or four hours. The reality is a pot roast cooked in an electronic pressure cooker may be tolerably good but people then tell me you don’t have the flavors you get from cooking a pot roast the old-fashioned way, in an oven. I’ve made pot roast many times over the years—in a six quart Le Creuset pot that I purchased in France 50 years ago. It actually doesn’t take me that long to prepare everything. You have to brown the meat after you’ve floured and salted it and you later have to add onions, potatoes, carrots

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(and other vegetables), and spices. But once you’ve browned the meat and added a liquid for it to cook in, you pop the pot in an oven and cook it for as many hours as it takes—depending on how much meat you are cooking. So the preparation time is a bit longer when cooking a pot roast in the oven, and it takes longer to cook the pot roast, but in terms of attention-­ time needed for the meal, it isn’t that great.

Time Stresses and Electronic Pressure Cookers The electronic pressure cooker is a testimonial to the fact that many people now are terribly time-stressed. That explains why so many people eat in restaurants or buy take-out food to eat at home. Or purchase meals in kits that are delivered to them at home or they can purchase at supermarkets. The pressure in the pressure cooker mirrors the pressure under which so many of us live and what you end up with, alas, is generally tolerable or maybe even good (if we’re lucky) food and exhausted and unhappy individuals. If we spent some of the time we spend gazing at our smart phones in our kitchens, while cooking, life would be much more pleasant. I watched a long television infomercial about a brand of electric pressure cooker and was appalled at the way the “expert” on food made pot roast. He plopped the pot roast into the pressure cooker and then poured in cream of mushroom soup and a can of another soup. He screwed the top on the device and turned it on. What came out was, to my mind, a pretty pathetic imitation of a classic pot roast.

Food As Fuel in American Culture One reason devices like the microwave and the pressure cooker are so popular in America—and the electronic pressure cooker is enormously successful—is that many Americans regard food, at the subconscious level, as fuel. That explains why Americans tend to say, after dinner, “I’m full,” while French people generally say “that was delicious.” For the French, and people in many other countries, food is seen as an important source of pleasure. That notion is growing in popularity in the United States, where we now have “foodies,” people who are obsessed with having great meals in fine restaurants and can afford to do so. People who have traveled to countries with great cuisines generally return with a different sense of food’s possibilities. For most Americans, alas, and for their children, the electronic pressure cooker awaits them.

CHAPTER 19

Diet Products

Abstract  This chapter begins with a discussion of a major social problem in the United States—obesity. It then offers some statistics about the size of the diet industry—dieting being an attempt made by many obese and overweight people to lose weight. This is followed by a discussion of dieting and some psychological afflictions relating to food, which concludes with a suggestion that Sisyphus is the model for dieters, who are generally condemned to lose weight and then gain it back again over and over again. Keywords  Obesity • Dieting • Psychological afflictions • Sisyphus Mary K. Engle of the United States Bureau of Consumer Protection reported in testimony to the United States Senate on June 17, 2014, (in hearings which dealt with “Protecting Consumers from False and Deceptive Advertising of Weight-Loss Products) that: As has been reported for years, the United States is facing an obesity epidemic. More than one-third of U.S. adults (34.9%) are obese. Combined with those who are overweight, the percentage skyrockets to nearly 70%. Excess weight and obesity are major contributors to chronic diseases and present a serious public health challenge – the medical costs of obesity reached a staggering $147 billion in 2008, and the estimated annual medical costs of obese persons are nearly $1,500 higher than for those of normal weight.

© The Author(s) 2018 A. A. Berger, Perspectives on Everyday Life, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-99795-7_19

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Obese people generally end up suffering from serious illnesses like diabetes and heart trouble, which costs an enormous amount of money to treat ($147 billion in the United States), so obesity is not just an individual problem but also a medical and societal problem. Many people who have problems with their weight attempt to lose weight on diet programs, none of which work in that they lead to long term and sustained reductions in a dieter’s weight.

Statistics on Dieting and Diet Plans The statistics on the amount of money we spend on dieting, advertising for diet plans, having surgery due to obesity and related concerns are astonishing. Let me offer two lists with information about dieting. The first comes from a site called Fooducate. I have slightly adapted these lists to make them easier to read: Americans spend over $60,000,000,000 to lose weight, every year! That’s sixty billion dollars. 75 million Americans are actively trying to lose weight, that’s $800 per person per year! About 3 billion dollars are spent on weight loss chains such as Weight Watchers. Diet pills and meal replacement solutions are a $3 billion market. Home delivery services for diet food, such as NutriSystem, are a $1 billion business. The bulk of the money is spent on foods advertised as “diet” (for example diet cola). 80 percent of dieters undertake the mission on their own. 20 percent join a paid weight loss group or see a health professional. The typical dieter makes four attempts per year to try and lose weight. At least 3 diets fail. Fads are part and parcel of diet industry:” the Dukan Diet, the banana diet, and the 17-Day Diet.

Contributing to the problem of obesity in America are the $300 billion fast food industry and the $100 billion junk food industry. We get another set of facts of interest from ABC News. It offers the following statistics. 85 Billion: The annual revenue of U.S. weight-loss industry (diet books, diet drugs and weight loss surgeries. 80 Million. The number of people on diets in the United States. Dieters typically make four to five attempts per year. 85 Percent. The percentage of customers consuming weight-loss products who are female. Hour: The amount of time spent on daily exercise by people who lost and kept off at least 30 pounds of excess weight for five years.

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20,000. The number of people with morbid obesity in the United States who had bariatric surgery in 2009. $11,500 to $26,000. The average cost of bariatric surgery, which reduces the size of the stomach. $500,000 to $3 Million. The average salaries paid to celebrity endorses of major weight-loss programs. $33,000. The amount of money celebrity endorsers, on average, earn per pound lost. (Sources: John LaRosa of MarketData; National Weight Control Registry; American Society for Metabolic and Bariatric Surgery; Jo Piazza, author of “Celebrity Inc.: How Famous People Make Money.” http://abcnews.go.com/Health/100-million-dieters-20-billion-weightloss-industry/story?id=16297197)

Dieting and Psychological Afflictions What these figures reveal is that dieting is an enormous industry and that there are a number of reasons why it is so—including, as I mentioned above, our love of fast food and junk food. Many overweight and obese Americans try to lose weight, using various diet plans and products, but almost all of these attempts fail. If they didn’t fail, we wouldn’t have the overweight and obesity problem we have. We must recognize that problems people have with food—overeating and in some cases, more extreme problems such as binge eating and bulimia—are reflections of psychological problems they face and are connected to their upbringing, relationships with others and similar matters. In her book, Food for Thought: Perspectives on Eating Disorders, Nina Savelle-Rocklin, a Los Angeles-based psychoanalyst, explains that in her practice she doesn’t treat eating disorders, but treats people with these disorders. As she explains (2017: xv): My clinical practice comprises adult women and men who struggle with various forms of disordered eating. They arrive at my door in the seemingly inexorable grip of anorexia, bulimia, or binge eating, reporting a preoccupation with food, weight, and/or body image, usually with corresponding deficits in their relationship to themselves and others. They often suffer with co-occurring problems such as depression, anxiety, obsessive-compulsive disorders and self-harm. Due to the extremely specialized nature of my work, colleagues and new acquaintances often ask what it’s like to treat eating disorders. “I don’t treat eating disorders,” I say. “I treat people.” Each individual develops a pattern of symptoms due to his or her unique history and personality.

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What we learn from this passage is that eating problems are generally connected to psychological problems that overweight and obese people have, and diets, which attempt to curtail the amount of calories that people consume, provide, at best, only temporary symptomatic relief. Later in the book she offers some interesting statistics on dieting. She points out that (2017: 11) “the average woman in the United Kingdom has tried sixty-­one diets before the age of forty-five” and that “108 million people in the United States are on a diet at any given time.” Since the population of the United States is around 325 million people, approximately one out of every three Americans is on a diet, of one sort or another. Savelle-Rocklin deals with people with very serious eating disorders, who need help to deal with their problems, but we can say that the average overweight and obese American also needs help—often now in the form of bariatric surgery, since dieting is so ineffective. Dieting, we can say, represents the triumph of hope over experience, and for many people, who are not seriously overweight or obese, it represents an attempt to better their sense of themselves and their body image. Dieting generally does not lead to serious eating disorders and so, for most people, dieting can be seen as a relatively harmless—but expensive—way for men and women to deal with concerns they have about their body images.

Dieting and the Myth of Sisyphus The fact that so many people on diets lose weight for a period of time and then gain it back, which then leads to them dieting again and losing weight again and then gaining it back calls to my mind the myth of Sisyphus, who I discussed earlier. He was doomed to roll a large rock up a mountain, and just before he reached the top, the rock would roll down to the bottom of the hill, and Sisyphus would then start rolling it back up again. And this would happen endlessly and Sisyphus would spend an eternity rolling the rock up the mountain. Dieters are like Sisyphus, condemned (unless saved by an intervention of some kind) to spend eternity taking off weight and then gaining it back again. The fact that people keep going on diets that are unsuccessful reflects the triumph of hope and fantasy and magical thinking over experience. It was Einstein, I believe, who said that a fool is a person who does the same thing over and over again and expects different results. This leads me to suggest that dieters are generally spending a lot of money trying to fool themselves, and generally, with little to show for it.

CHAPTER 20

Hair Styles

Abstract  In this chapter we examine different styles of hair and speculate about where they come from, discuss President Donald J. Trump’s hair style, which has been described in different ways, and consider hair styles and age. This leads to a consideration of the semiotics of hair—what different styles of hair signify about people who wear them, aberrant decoding of the messages from hair, and finally the matter of hair color and our attitudes towards blonde hair. Keywords  Hair styles • Semiotics • Aberrant decoding • Blondes While watching the basketball games during March Madness of 2017, I was struck by the hairstyles of one of the players, an African American. Upon investigating this hairstyle, I discovered it is called a “high top fade.” Generally, a person with a “high top fade” has his hair clean shaven or very short (the fade), except at the top when they have a flat mop of two or three inches of hair (the high top). Then, when visiting a dollar store, I noticed the clerk there had a very elaborate hair style and a small beard. His hair was also clean shaven, except at the top where it was long and slicked back. I know that he used gel on it because he was discussing the brand of gel he used with the customer before me. “Is this gel from the Dollar Store any good?” she asked. “It’s okay, but I use a different brand,” he replied. “It comes in a blue bottle.” © The Author(s) 2018 A. A. Berger, Perspectives on Everyday Life, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-99795-7_20

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The Origin of Hair Styles in Contemporary America I looked for this hair style on the Internet and believe it is called an “undercut with slick back and beard” but it might be “undercut with edge” or “short sides, long top.” What these two haircuts made me notice is that some men’s haircuts are now much more complicated than they used to be. And then I recalled getting a haircut in Mexico. In the barber’s shop there were photographs of 30 or 40 different hair styles for men. All you had to do is point to the style you wanted and the barber would accommodate you. The days in which you said to your barber “long,” “short,” or “medium” are long gone. Now, the Mohawk is just one of many different modern, contemporary, and sometimes radical men’s hairstyles. I suspect that many of the hair styles come from what we call soccer players (football players in the rest of the world) in Europe and other countries, and athletes in other sports, rock musicians and various kinds of popular culture celebrities and stars.

Donald Trump’s Hairstyle Even President Donald J.  Trump has a radical haircut, for which he is famous and which is his defining feature. His hair is combed over his forehead for an inch or two and he has a “duck’s ass” hairstyle on the sides of his head. It is Trump’s hairstyle which is used by cartoonists when they want to draw a cartoon about him since it is a distinctive signifier. Trump’s hairstyle has been called a “comb-over” that extends beyond his forehead. Others have describe it as a “comb-back” which has extremely long hair in the front that enables him to push it forward in front of his forehead and then comb it to the back of his head, to avoid showing that he is bald. He needs hair spray to cement it into place. It takes a good deal of time to arrange one’s hair this way and there were rumors that he would change his hairstyle once he got elected. It is rather long and he always looks like he could use a trim or even a haircut. The “duck’s ass” style on the sides of his head is something from the forties and fifties, when his preferences about hair were probably formed. His hair is his most distinctive feature and the delight of cartoonists and the comedians who imitate him or ridicule him.

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Hair Styles and Age Men also become concerned with their hairstyles when they start getting bald. In the gym that I attend, many bald men have adopted the “no hair” look, which is found among professional basketball players and other athletes. Having no hair is actually more flattering, they believe, then having some hair but bald spots, because with a baldie “no hair” look there are no bald spots, though you can generally see where there would be bald spots if the person with the bald spot had hair. Hair is one of the most easily managed part of our bodies; we can dye it, change its style, cut it all off, let it go long, and so on, at relatively little expense or, in some cases, at considerable expense. So it is a subject of great concern with people who are interested in presenting themselves in a certain way to others and to society at large. The fact that males are now interested in wearing elaborate hairstyles suggests, to some culture critics, that American men have been feminized, and have adopted the same passion about their hair that women have for their hairstyles and hair colors. As we read in an Encyclopedia.com article on hairstyles: The ways that human beings wear their hair can have many meanings. Beyond conforming to the fashion of the day, a hairdo can be an expression of personal style as well as an expression of religious, cultural, and political beliefs. Because of this, society often has strict rules about how hair should be worn. Those who rebel against society often begin with what are considered outlandish hairstyles. It is no accident that institutions like armies and prisons often initiate new members by cutting off their hair, thus removing this means of individual self-expression and encouraging conformity. (http://www.encyclopedia.com/history/culture-magazines/hairstyles)

The article also discusses that fact that men have been preoccupied with their hair for hundreds of years.

The Semiotics of Hair From a semiotic perspective, we must recognize that every hairstyle is a message. These messages are about personal identity—who people with a given hairstyle think they are, and also about their social identity (groups

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they may belong to), their age, their status, their socio-economic class, their religion (Orthodox Jews have pais, long side curls), their gender orientation, and countless other things. Many years ago there was a survey of 200 hair stylists in the San Francisco Bay Area and they came up with what they thought were the five worst hair styles for men. Five worst hair styles for men Hair style/signifier

Signified

Crew cut Hair parted to hide baldness Shoulder length hair Greased hair Grown-out permanent

Backward, sluggish thought processes Phoniness, self-consciousness Anti-establishment values Too slick, untrustworthy Sloppiness and disinterest

The author of this survey, Laura Quigley, explained that “many executives are unaware of the negative messages they’re sending out to their bosses by wearing their hair the wrong way.” So our hair styles and hair colors can be seen as messages we are sending out to other about ourselves and because it is so easy to change one’s hairstyle, our hair becomes the medium through which we broadcast changes in our identities. An article on www.colorcombos.com points out that men tend to prefer brunettes rather than blondes—perhaps because the image of blondes in popular culture is rather negative lately (think of all the dumb blonde jokes there are), though blondes are also perceived to be “more fun.” While black is the most-common natural hair-color, chestnut brown is currently the most popular. Not only are brunettes seen as more stable, intelligent and competent, but surveys repeatedly show that men find brown-haired women more attractive. Since women still tend to believe that “blondes have more fun,” this perception raises an interesting contradiction. Blondes tend to be perceived as flighty, scatter-brained and irresponsible, especially in American society. Could it be that many men would rather date a blonde but marry a brunette? Natural blondes represent less than two percent of the population. (http://www.colorcombos.com/popular-hair-colors-for-women-then-andnow-article.html)

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Most of the blondes we see in everyday life and in the media have dyed their hair blonde, since only 2 percent of the population in the United States are natural blondes. Many older women, and some older men, dye their hair when it turns grey so they will have a younger look. In a youth-­ obsessed country like America, looking young (or younger) is very ­important. The same holds true in other countries as well. When you see photographs of important political figures in China, who may be in their seventies and eighties, they all have dark black hair. It is also interesting to note that men go to barbershops—at least they used to when I was growing up—and women go to beauty salons. We can see here that beautiful hair is equated with beauty, in general. The difference in cost between the two kinds of places to get your hair cut and dyed can be astronomical.

Aberrant Decodings of the Messages from Hair We have to hope that people who notice our hair may be getting the messages about us that we want them to get, but that is not always the case because the relation that exists between a signifier (our hair style and hair color) and a signified (sexy, attractive, young) is not natural but is based on conventions we learn as we grow up and conventions change over the years. The world is full of aberrant decoders—people who don’t interpret messages the way those who send them want them to interpret them—so it is often the case that a person’s hair style and hair color is not decoded correctly and people make mistakes when trying to decide what a given hair style “means” and reflects about that person. “Many a blonde dyes by her own hands,” as the saying goes. And some of those beautiful blonde women we see are, it turns out, men.

CHAPTER 21

College Rejection Letters

Abstract  In this analysis, we consider the matter of college rejection letters and the fact that for some young people, being rejected at an elite university is the first time they have been disappointed in a major way. That is because the number of people applying to elite universities is enormous and institutions such as Stanford and Harvard accept only a small number of applicants. Being accepted at an elite university confers lifelong benefits on young people in terms of their sense of achievement and of accomplishment. Keywords  Rejection • Elite universities • Benefits T. S. Eliot wrote, in one of his poems, that April is the “cruelest month.” It certainly is for many high school students who have applied to elite universities such as Stanford, Harvard, Yale, Columbia, Barnard, and Wellesley. It is usually around the end of March or beginning of April when these students hear from the admissions offices of the schools to which they have applied. It is the thin letter from the admissions office that is usually a signifier that one’s application has been rejected. The students recognize this immediately, so even before they open the envelope they are traumatized. (In some cases, the thin rejection letter has been replaced by the rejection email messages.) © The Author(s) 2018 A. A. Berger, Perspectives on Everyday Life, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-99795-7_21

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Being Rejected for the First Time This rejection is one of the most painful experiences many young people have. In some cases, it is the first time they have been denied something they really wanted and it takes them a long time to get over their failure to get their own way with something. They may have had disappointments with relationships with girlfriends and boyfriends, and other problems with interpersonal relationships, but for those who desperately want to get into an elite college, as a means of validating their sense of their worth and shaping their future, it is a crushing blow. Years ago I wrote a comic poem about students applying to elite colleges. Many try Harvard And many fail. Who then try their luck At Princeton or Yale. While those with a brain The size of a pea. Have a hell of a time At USC.

I was a visiting professor for a year at USC in 1984 and since then it has greatly improved the quality of its undergraduate student body. Its graduate schools were always good. If you think about it, students who apply to an elite university like Stanford or Harvard have the odds stacked against them. Consider Stanford University. Here are the statistics for the class of 2020 for Stanford University: 43,998 2063 4.69

Applications Acceptances Acceptance rate

What this means is that 95 out of every 100 applications will be rejected. Harvard University has a similar rejection rate. 39,041 2037 5%+ or −

Applications Acceptances Acceptance rate

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Many “top” students who apply to elite schools also apply to a state university or other school as a backup measure, realizing that the odds are stacked against them.

Competition to Get Accepted in Elite Universities There is fierce competition among the top 50,000 students in the United States for admission to our elite institutions. Not all admissions decisions are based on academic considerations. If you are a six-foot ten-inch basketball player, a world-class swimmer, a virtuoso violinist, or play an instrument the marching band needs, you have a better chance of getting admitted than someone with “merely” a 4.0+ grade average. A number of years ago I heard an interview with the dean of admissions at Stanford. At that time, Stanford was getting around 16,000 applications. The dean said that at least half of those 16,000 students could do well at Stanford. So the problem the Stanford admissions office faced was winnowing that 8000 students number down to 1500 students or whatever the number of students it was that Stanford was admitting then. The people who work in admissions are used to getting resumes from students that cover all the bases—helping poor people in some remote African country, being a member of five or ten high school clubs, helping in political campaigns, and so on. Young people in America, who aspire to attending an elite university, develop resumes that are generally quite similar in terms of all the things they have done. The 50,000 high school students who apply to Ivy League and other elite schools are all in competition with one another to create the “best” resumes. And the college admissions people who see these resumes over and over again.

Psychological Benefits of Acceptance in Elite Schools And what is the prize for getting into one of these elite schools? A sense of accomplishment and achievement that will last these students for the rest of their lives. People I know who have graduated from elite schools always find ways to let you know, one way or another, where they went to school and use their having studied in one of these schools as a signifier of their worthiness and of their triumph over the odds. There is almost a sacred quality to having been accepted into one of these schools. Going to these

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elite schools becomes a dominating feature in their personalities; they were one of the few that were chosen, so they have a tremendous sense of achievement. Being accepted at any school you want to attend is, psychologically speaking, always better than being rejected. Those who have been rejected can take comfort in knowing that countless others were rejected. They can then rationalize their rejection, once the bitterness and sense of tragic defeat wears off and convince themselves that going to Stanford or Yale might have been a “wrong fit,” and not have been the best thing for them, in the long run. We must remember that what I am talking about involves around 50,000 high school students who want to attend elite and very selective universities. Most other students don’t face such daunting odds, though getting into the best state universities also can be difficult. The University of California at Los Angeles gets more applications than any other university in America and getting into other branches of the University of California and many other state universities is also difficult. But it is not as difficult as getting into Harvard or Yale or the other Ivy League schools or certain other elite schools like the California Institute of Technology.

Retaining Students in Non-elite Colleges Many students find college life different from what they expected and the number of students who transfer to other schools after their freshman year is considerable. An article by Paul Fain dated July 8, 2015, from a website Inside Higher Ed, points out: New data from the National Student Clearinghouse Research Center show that 37.2 percent of college students transfer at least once within six years. The research is based on the center’s virtually comprehensive database of American college students. It tracked first-time students who enrolled in college in 2008. Students often cross state lines (which means they don’t necessarily show up in state databases of students or graduates). The clearinghouse said nearly a quarter of transfers from four-year institutions left the state. And community college was the top destination for transfer students from four-year institutions, with 53.7 moving to a two-year community college. (https://www.insidehighered.com/quicktakes/2015/07/08/morethird-college-students-transfer)

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One reason for the change is that community colleges are much less expensive than regular colleges and many students who are unhappy with studying at a four-year institution decide to move to a community college with the idea of eventually moving back to a four-year college. Holding on to new students is one of the biggest problems non-elite colleges and universities face. The retention rates at the elite universities are much higher, well over 90 percent. A CBS News offers the following statistics: Private colleges and universities with the best graduation rates. Harvard University, 97.4 percent. Yale University, 96.3 percent. University of Notre Dame 96 percent. Princeton University, 95.7 percent. Brown University, 95.6 percent. University of Pennsylvania, 95.5 percent. Dartmouth College, 95.4 percent. (http://www.cbsnews.com/news/50-private-colleges-withbest-worst-grad-rates/)

It makes sense that if you’ve spent years creating a resume and studying hard so you can get into an elite college that you wouldn’t want to transfer from it unless there was a really compelling reason. Being a “Harvard man” or a “Stanford woman” is, as I pointed out above, something you can cherish for 60 or 70 years and it is not something you give up easily. I am talking about being an undergraduate at these schools. Going to them as graduate students isn’t quite the same thing. Somehow about 60 percent of high school students manage to get into some kind of higher education institution, whether it is a community college, a state university, a state college, a non-elite private college or an elite institution. And though students may move around from one institution to another, many of them eventually—and it might take them six years to graduate—find a school that they like and actually manage to get a decent and, in some cases, an excellent education.

CHAPTER 22

Air Jordans

Abstract  Air Jordans are objects of considerable cultural significance. This chapter explores their meaning for people and can be seen as an exploration of material culture, a subject of considerable interest to social scientists of all kinds. Keywords  Air Jordans • Fashion • Identity • Mimetic desire How do people obtain their identities? That’s a question that social scientists, writers, philosophers, and others have pondered over the millennia. For many people, identity is constructed of a combination involving race, religion, gender, body type, educational attainments, personality, and occupation. All of these considerations involve being a member of some group, some culture, or subculture. When we ask ourselves “who am I?” the subtext of what we are asking is, many social scientists suggest, “to what group do I belong?” And when we know this, and locate ourselves in some group, we then know what rules we are to obey. Our identities affect our behavior, because social roles are connected to our belonging to some group, to our status in the group, and to expectations people have of us due to our membership in the group. As we grow, we sometimes change our group affiliation, and this affects our identities and conduct.

© The Author(s) 2018 A. A. Berger, Perspectives on Everyday Life, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-99795-7_22

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Fashion and Identity One way people try to signify their identities are by the clothes they wear. In Western consumer cultures, thanks to all the advertising to which we are exposed, we learn what various fashion accessories cost and often judge people by their clothes. “The clothes often make the man,” we say, but it is more correct to say that most of the time clothes present a public image of a man or woman that they want us to have. They help confer identity. But sometimes they confer an identity that is not warranted. Some aspects of fashion, such as sports shoes, not only help confer an identity on their wearers but for a variety of reasons generate remarkably strong passions in those who purchase them. Roland Barthes, the distinguished French semiotician, discussed the importance of clothes and other objects in his book The Semiotic Challenge. He writes (1988: 147): A garment, an automobile, a dish of cooked food, a gesture, a film, a piece of music, an advertising image, a piece of furniture, a newspaper headline— these indeed appear to be heterogeneous objects. What might they have in common? This at least: all are signs. When I walk through the streets—or through life—and encounter these objects, I apply to all of them, if need be without realizing it, one and the same activity, which is that of a certain reading: modern man, urban man, spends his time reading. He reads, first of all and above all, images, gestures, behaviors: this car tells me the social status of its owner, this garment tells me quite precisely the degree of its wearer’s conformism or eccentricity….

What Barthes is saying is that we are always, even when we are not conscious of doing so, “reading” or interpreting the messages sent by the things others say, do, and own; we are always interpreting messages sent by others, and they are interpreting the messages we send. Sometimes, of course, people “lie” with signs and drive cars or wear clothes that are above their socio-economic level and pretend to have a status that they do not deserve. Barthes alerts us to the importance of deciphering social and cultural messages found in fashion and just about everything else we have and do. Some of these messages are global in nature. Let me offer an example. A number of years ago I happened to be on a lecture tour in the Scandinavian countries. I had the chance to meet the family of the professor who arranged the tour. He lived near Copenhagen, and when I started chatting with his young son, I discovered that he was an ardent follower of

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professional basketball in the United States and knew a great deal about many of the stars in the National Basketball Association (NBA) and about the gear they wore. At the recent Olympics in Beijing, the stars from the NBA were very popular and the object of enormous attention and affection. Perhaps hero worship is a more accurate term to describe the way fans reacted to Kobe Bryant and some of the other stars in the American “Redeem Team.” Basketball stars play an important role in consumer culture and, in particular, in the marketing of basketball shoes and other sports equipment.

Michael Jordan’s Cultural Importance In her book Point of Purchase: How Shopping Changed American Culture (New York: Routledge), Sharon Zukin discusses the role Michael Jordan played in the rise of the Nike sports shoe empire. She writes (2005: 165–166): In the eighties, Nike found a great African American rookie player—Michael Jordan—on the Chicago Bulls, and made a deal with him for an exclusive endorsement. Thinking of Jordan as a marketing concept before they even had a product in mind, Nike decided to “take him out of the realm of colored sneakers and into style.” They would “make Michael Jordan a label. Take him into the realm of Ralph Lauren.” The company signed Michael Jordan for $2.5 million in 1984. Signing Jordan helped Nike, as marketing gurus say, to expand the “franchise” of the brand. Literally, however, their franchise benefited from the franchise of Jordan’s nationally televised basketball team, the Bulls. This relationship set a precedent for the mutually beneficial cross-marketing of sport, media, and fashion. While Nike used Jordan as a walking logo on the court and in commercials, the National Basketball Association used television to establish a bigger presence in American homes….

This “reach” may explain why professional basketball players like Michael Jordan earned many millions of dollars in endorsements, making commercials and appearing in print advertisements for a variety of products. Now the hunger by manufacturers for endorsements by athletes has spread beyond the NBA. Tiger Woods, the greatest golfer of his era, made millions of dollars for endorsing various products, and a Russian tennis player, Maria Sharapova, made something like 20 million dollars in 2006 for her endorsements for watches and other products. Zukin offers a brief history of the development of the Nike campaign and of the rise of sports heroes as endorsers of sporting goods:

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Air Jordans pushed Nike ahead of its competitors, to the unanimous praise of the business press. “Nike Catches Up with the Trendy Front Runner,” trumpeted Business Week in 1988, dismissing Reeboks as a “fad.” In fact, Nike specialized in getting the endorsements of black athletes while Reeboks were endorsed by musicians regardless of race. Aside from Michael Jordan, 265 of the 320 NBA players wore Nikes. Mick Jagger, Bruce Springsteen, and Lionel Richie wore Reeboks…When Michael Jordan retired from the NBA, Nike’s stock price momentarily fell, but the company pressed on to buy endorsements from athletes in other sports—including the phenomenal, mixed-race golfer Tiger Woods, and the $90 million high school basketball player LeBron James, whose name would help Nike battle Reebok for a sweet distribution agreement with Foot Locker—formerly part of Woolworth—stores.

Why do companies pay so much to athletes for these endorsements? Why do young men and women want to buy basketball shoes or any other kind of sports equipment, or other products as well, simply because a famous basketball player or tennis player endorses them?

René Girard’s Theory of Mimetic Desire There is an interesting theory proposed by a French literary critic, René Girard, which might explain how endorsements work. He explains his theory in his book A Theater of Envy: William Shakespeare. To understand Girard’s theory, it is useful to know something about Aristotle’s theory of art. Works of art, Aristotle suggested, are mimetic—that is, they imitate life. (Mimesis means imitation.) Girard’s contribution is to suggest that there is what he calls “mimetic desire,” which involves the way people imitate the desire of others. He uses it to explain the motivations of characters in Shakespeare’s plays but adds that it also is part of everyday life. He discusses, as an example, Helen of Troy and the Trojan War. He writes (1991: 123) The only reason the Greeks want her back is because the Trojans want to keep her. The only reason the Trojans want to keep her is because the Greeks want her back.

This need to imitate the desire of others—especially celebrities and heroes of one sort or another—is very powerful. Applying Girard’s theory we can suggest that young people want Air Jordans because, though they aren’t aware of what they are doing, they are imitating Michael Jordan’s “desire”

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for these basketball shoes, as manifested in his wearing these shoes and endorsing them. We desire what our heroes and heroines desire or, more precisely, what they say they desire. When you wear a pair of Air Jordans, you also obtain Jordan’s “aura,” the ethereal and positive beliefs and values connected with him.

Superstars Help Sell Sporting Goods In their book Sign Wars: The Cluttered Landscape of Advertising, sociologists Robert Goldman and Stephen Papson offer some insights into the role of superstars in advertising for sporting goods. They write (1996: 38): The advertising contests between Nike, Reebok, L.A. Gear, British Knights, Converse, Avia, and Asics have been dubbed the “sneaker wars.” We call it a sign war because it is a battle joined in terms of the meanings associated with images. No industry affords a better example of sign wars than the athletic shoe industry. Two factors have focused the competition in the industry: shoe design and advertising style. For over a decade, sneaker advertising has been based on trying to extract sign value from sports and entertainment celebrities. In the celebrity sweepstakes, the rule of thumb has generally been that the bigger the celebrity, the more handsome the sign value. But with the emergence of Michael Jordan and Bo Jackson as advertising superstars, being a celebrity endorser was no longer enough; now the celebrity had to exude an attitude and personality.

Goldman and Papson are sociologists, but they use semiotic theory in their analysis of the advertising industry, as we can see in their discussion of the importance of signs. Their suggestions that personality and attitude are important attributes of objects has relevance to theories that link our possessions to our identities. When you purchase Air Jordans, we can infer that not only do you buy a sneaker, you also purchase an attitude and maybe even an identity to go along with it. This also applies to other sports heroes and heroines and other celebrities and stars. If we cannot imitate their activities in the athletic world stage or wherever, we can, at least, imitate their desires and purchase the goods they supposedly desire. Of course what they “desire” is dictated by their endorsement fees, but that is not of interest to those who feel the need to wear the same basketball shoes Michael Jordan wears or drive the same car that (fill in the blank) drives. The passion of the young, and some not-so-young, to have products that enable them to imitate sports figures is awesome.

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Not only are sports heroes endorsers of sports shoes, but so are designers of these shoes. In an article dated September 6, 2006, in The Wall Street Journal titled “Bottom Lines”, Stephanie Kang writes about the designers of sports shoes who are now becoming celebrities. She mentions Tinker Hatfield, who designed Air Jordans III through XV and XX, who tried to design shoes that reflected the personalities of the sports stars for whom the shoes were designed. In the case of the Air Jordan, Michael Jordan had wanted the new shoe to have a lower cut, a clean line around the toe box and had selected the fake elephant material used in the shoe. Hatfield said that Jordan’s power as a “validator” and “trendsetter” helped get the shoe into the store, and once it was there, people who purchased it were, in a sense, purchasing some of Michael Jordan’s charisma. As Ms. Kang explains, “Pushed by a mix of Mr. Jordan’s professional accomplishments on court and his flamboyant, funny commercials, the Air Jordan franchise became the best-selling sneaker line ever—and a model for sports-shoe companies.”

Identity and Identifying with Sports Stars One way we develop a personal identity is to identify with others we respect or idolize. When it comes to our functioning as consumers, we often imitate their desire, as reflected in the advertisements they make. Identification, and imitation in the form of mimetic desire of the desire (as represented by various products) of various sports stars, are the forces behind the sales of millions of basketball shoes, running shoes, and other products and services. There is a problem that the manufacturers of basketball shoes face when it comes to advertising. It turns out that there are so many advertisements featuring basketball superstars that people who see these ads often get confused about who has endorsed which shoes. That is, they get confused by the clutter. But the authors conclude, and remember we are talking about the sign wars 20 years ago (1996: 40), “When it comes to selling basketball shoes, authenticity remains the key and Nike remains the king of authenticity.” Michael Jordan has retired and been replaced by other NBA superstars, but the sneaker wars continue. And those interested in obtaining Air Jordans—for all that they signify about those who own them—now can purchase Air Jordans for as little as $56 and as much as $1659 (figures are from Amazon.com, accessed on April 4, 2017), suggesting that these objects can also be seen as works of art. And like many works of art, they are expensive, but they have Jordan’s “aura,” and that is what counts most to the people who buy them.

CHAPTER 23

High-Tech French Fries

Abstract  French fries are the most popular cooked food sold in the United States and play an important role in the obesity epidemic there and in other countries as well. Statistics show the average American eats close to 30 pounds of French fries a year—about a half a pound a week. In this chapter, the semiotician Roland Barthes is quoted on the cultural significance of “frites” to French culture and the psychoanalyst and marketing expert Clotaire Rapaille is quoted on how food preferences are imprinted on children as they grow up in a particular country. Keywords  French fries • Diet • Obesity • Cultural meaning • Imprints French fries are the most commonly eaten and widely sold cooked food in the United States and play a considerable role in the overweight and obesity epidemic here and in many other countries as well.

French Fries Are Unhealthy An article in Wikipedia offers the following information about the unhealthy nature of French fries:

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David Katz, MD states that “French fries are often the super-fatty side dish to a burger—and both are often used as vehicles for things like sugar-laced ketchup and fatty mayo.” Frying French fries in beef tallow, lard, or other animal fats adds saturated fat to the diet. Replacing animal fats with tropical vegetable oils, such as palm oil, simply substitutes one saturated fat for another. Replacing animal fats with partially hydrogenated oil reduces cholesterol but adds trans fat, which has been shown to both raise LDL cholesterol and lower HDL cholesterol. Canola/Rapeseed oil, or sunflower-seed oil are also used, as are mixes of vegetable oils, but beef tallow is generally more popular, especially amongst fast food outlets that use communal oil baths. Accordingly, many restaurants now advertise their use of unsaturated oils; for example, both Five Guys and Chick-fil-A advertise that their fries are prepared with peanut oil. French fries contain some of the highest levels of acrylamides of any foodstuff, and concerns have been raised about the impact of acrylamides on human health. According to the American Cancer Society, it is not clear as of 2013 whether acrylamide consumption affects people’s risk of getting cancer.

French fries are now the most widely sold cooked food in the United States. Something like 90 percent of French fries are purchased in fast food restaurants like McDonald’s and Burger King. Many restaurants now cook French fries in oil with no trans fats, but French fries, under the best of conditions, are an unhealthy food product. Eaten in moderation French fries are not a problem. Most foods, if eaten in moderation, are not a problem. Unfortunately, people in the United States and elsewhere eat too many servings of French fries for their own good. We read in Wikipedia: French fries primarily contain carbohydrates from the potato (mostly in the form of starch) and fat absorbed during the deep-frying process, as well as sodium depending upon the seasoning. For example, a large serving of French fries at McDonald’s in the United States is 154 grams. Nearly all of the 500 calories per serving come from the 63 g of carbohydrates and the 25 g of fat, but a serving also contains 6 g of protein and 350 mg of sodium. Expert testimonials: According to Jonathan Bonnet, MD, in a TIME magazine article, “fries are nutritionally unrecognizable from a spud” as they “involve frying, salting, and removing one of the healthiest parts of the potato: the skin, where many of the nutrients and fiber are found.” Kristin Kirkpatrick, RD, calls French fries “…an extremely starchy vegetable dipped in a fryer that then loads on the unhealthy fat, and what you have left is a food that has no nutritional redeeming value in it at all.” (Wikipedia)

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Statistics of Food Consumption in the United States Statistics on food consumption in the United States show that there have been major changes in what we eat and how much we eat, which had led to our problems with being overweight and obese. The following statistics were taken from Solutiondown.com: The average person eats 29 pounds of French fries per year. The typical person consumes 195.2 pounds of meat per year, or a little more than the weight of the average adult male. This is 50 pounds more than the average person consumed on an annual basis just fifty years ago. People now annually consume 48 pints of ice cream. These 48 pints of ice cream collectively weigh around 24 pounds. The average American now consumes 52 gallons of carbonated sodas per year, which equates to over 550 cans of soda. Accounting for sales of diet and non-diet soda, soda contributes a full 7 percent of the typical person’s caloric intake. On average, Americans are eating the just under 6 pounds of potato chips per year. The nation consumes more than 1.5 billion pounds of potato chips per year. The average American now consumes approximately 2700 calories per day. Forty years ago, the average American consumed 2200 calories, which is almost 25 percent less than contemporary figures. Around fifty years ago, the average female weighed 140.2 pounds. The average weight of women is now 164.3 pounds. Also, fifty years ago, the average male weighted around 166.3 pounds. Today, the average man’s weight is 191 pounds. Not surprisingly, over 34 percent of adult men and women are now overweight. An additional 40 percent of adult men and women are obese. (https://solutiondown. com/2012/02/10/food-facts-we-really-dont-eat-29-pounds-of-frenchfries-per-year-do-we/)

Given the unhealthy nature of the American diet, we can understand why so many Americans are overweight and obese. The medical costs of dealing with illnesses caused by being overweight and obese are enormous. We all pay for their poor eating habits because they suffer from many serious illnesses, common to people with weight problems, such as diabetes. There is some question about where French fries were invented. Both Belgium and France argue that they were the first to serve them. In France, steak and “frites” is a very common dish. This dish has a “psychic” hold on the French (and is an “iconic” American food as well). It is part of their culture, in the same way that hamburgers and French fries are part of American food culture and food culture is an important part of culture. The foods that we grow up become part of our lives and stay with us as long as we live.

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Roland Barthes on “Frites” Roland Barthes, a French semiotician, has a chapter in his classic book Mythologies titled “Steak and Chips” in which he discusses the first meal a famous French general, who had been imprisoned by the Vietnamese for many years, ordered—steak and chips (a translation for what we call French fries). As Barthes writes (1972: 63): Commonly associated with chips, steak communicates its national glamour to them: chips are nostalgic and patriotic like steak. Match told us that after the armistice in Indo-China, “General de Castries, for his first meal, asked for chips.” And the President of the Indo-China Veterans, later commenting on this information added: “The gesture of General de Castries asking chips for his first meal has not always been understood. What we were meant to understand is that the General’s request was certainly not a vulgar materialistic reflex, but an episode in the ritual of appropriating the regained French community. The General understood well our national symbolism; he knew that la frite, chips, are an elementary sign of Frenchness.

What steak and frites are to the French, a Big Mac or some other brand of hamburger and French fries are to Americans—a signifier of our American-ness.

Rapaille on Imprinting Food Preferences We pick up our food preferences when we are very young. A French psychoanalyst and marketer, Clotaire Rapaille, who I’ve discussed earlier in this book, argues that between the age of one and seven, children learn to be French or American or Italian or Chinese or members of any nation. As he explains in his book The Culture Code (2006: 21) nations all imprint their particular codes to children which that their behavior for the rest of their lives. He writes, “Most of us imprint the meanings of the things most central to our lives by the age of seven. This is because emotion is the central force for children under the age of seven.” He claims there are three kinds of unconscious that shape our behavior: a Freudian individual unconscious, a Jungian collective unconscious, and a cultural or national unconscious, which represents the codes imprinted on us that shape our behavior.

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He explains the relationship that exists between codes as imprints: An imprint and its Code are like a lock and its combination. If you have all the right numbers in the right sequence, you can open the lock. Doing so over a vast array of imprints has profound implications. It brings to us the answer to one of our most fundamental questions: why do we act the way we do? Understanding the Culture Code provides us with a remarkable new tool—a new set of glasses, if you will, with which to view ourselves and our behaviors. It changes the way we see everything around us. What’s more, it confirms what we have always suspected is t rue—that, despite our common humanity, people around the world really are different. The Culture Code offers a way to understand how.

His book discusses differences between Americans and people in other cultures in a variety of ways. Central to our interests here is the way people in different countries like different kinds of foods. I am 84 years old and I can still remember certain dishes my mother used to make for me when I was a young child. She made excellent French fries, along with all kinds of Jewish dishes. I would imagine the same applies to people everywhere, though as we get older and see more of the world, we add to our repertoire of foods we like and appreciate the differences between national cuisines. But underneath the appreciation for different cuisines—and I love Chinese food, Vietnamese food, Italian food, French food, and many other foods and dishes—lingering in my gastronomic unconscious there are the foods I ate when I was a child and my love of them still is strong.

High-Tech French Fries A company called Frylow now has a device that you can put into a fryer that extends the life of the cooking oil used to make French fries and also uses much less oil. The Frylow device is about the size of a business ­envelope and around an inch thick. The technology was developed in Japan where tempura and other deep fried foods are very popular and where savings in the cost of cooking oil are of considerable importance. The devices are meant for restaurants and not for home use. What they promise is savings in cooking oil and, at the same time, healthier French fries. They are currently being used on Carnival cruise ships and in a number of restaurant chains such as Applebee’s. So the next time you purchase French fries, it is possible that you will be eating “high-tech” French fries.

CHAPTER 24

Backpacks

Abstract  The origins of the backpack are discussed in a Wikipedia article which leads to a discussion of the variety of backpacks available and the different materials from which they are made—generally polyester or nylon. They are used for many purposes and are now signifiers of travel and self-sufficiency, commonly worn by people in airports who take them on planes along with their suitcases. Speculations are offered on the number of backpacks a typical family owns. Keywords  Backpack • Travel • Popularity Did you ever wonder how we decided to call backpacks? An article in Wikipedia offers an explanation. The word backpack was coined in the United States in the 1910s. Moneybag and packsack were used prior, and now occur mainly as regionalisms. The word rucksack is a German loanword mainly used in the UK and in Western military forces. In German, Rücken means “back” and Sack means “bag”. The name rucksack is cognate with the Danish rygsæk, Norwegian ryggsekk, Dutch rugzak, Afrikaans rugsak and Swedish ryggsäck. The word knapsack was the usual name for a rucksack or backpack up until the middle of the 20th century. Alternative names include haversack (which more properly describes a small cloth bag on a strap worn over one shoulder to carry ­havercakes or oatcakes), Kraxe (a German rucksack with a rigid framework), © The Author(s) 2018 A. A. Berger, Perspectives on Everyday Life, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-99795-7_24

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and bergen (a large load-carrying rucksack, from a design issued by the British Army during the Second World War). In fact, Britons used to call Alpine-­style backpacks “Bergen rucksacks”, maybe from the name of their creator, Norwegian Ole F.  Bergan, combined with the name of the Norwegian city of Bergen. Backpacks can often simply be referred to as “packs”, especially in outdoors contexts; though sometimes ambiguous compared to other bags such as saddlebags and duffel bags, context is generally sufficient for identification. They are also used in recreational activities, and have long since been used to carry sports equipment and other materials.

When I travel, and have to spend an hour or two in airports waiting to board a plane, I notice that many, if not most, of my fellow passengers have backpacks. When I see all these backpacks, and they are ubiquitous in airports, I cannot help but wonder how many backpacks there are in the world. Let’s assume there are around seven billion people in the world. How many of these people have one or more backpacks? My wife and I have around a dozen backpacks, including travel backpacks that you can carry around in regular backpacks. Are we different from other families or are we the norm? If a typical family has half a dozen backpacks, that means there are tens of billions of backpacks used all over the world. Backpacks enable people to carry things around with them with their hands free.

Varieties of Backpacks As we might expect, from any popular consumer product, there are an enormous number of different brands and kinds of backpacks. Here are some of the genres of backpacks available now: School, Hiking, Work, Adventure, and Travel. There is also the matter of backpack design, the material backpacks are made of, all of which affects the price of backpacks. You can get a decent backpack now for $15 and up. I paid $20 at Ross for a High Sierra backpack, that has four compartments, which I bring with me on all our trips. I also have an Eddie Bauer “Stowaway 20L Backpack,” which folds into one of its pockets, that I use as a day backpack when I travel, because it is awkward using my large High Sierra backpack when wandering around cities. I paid $15 for it. It is made of polyester, holds 1220 cubic inches, and weighs 11 ounces. My wife also has a regular size carry-on backpack

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and a small travel backpack made by Rick Steves. Travel backpacks don’t have thickly padded shoulder straps so they don’t take up as much space as regular backpacks and they don’t weigh very much. They often fold into one of their pockets. My daypack folds into a packet that is roughly eight inches square and an inch and a half thick. Backpacks are generally made of either pack-cloth polyester (for the least expensive ones), Cordura nylon, pack-cloth nylon, or rip-stop nylon. A small number are made of leather. Generally these nylon fabrics are water resistant or waterproofed, to enhance their ability to prevent rain from soaking things carried in the backpack. Some backpacks have a number of different fabrics in them. The best ones are made of Rip-stop nylon. Usually, travelers use “carry on” backpacks in addition to suitcases, though there are some large backpacks with frames that people—mostly young people—use instead of suitcases. They prefer these backpacks because they are going hiking and cannot roll a suitcase with themselves. If you want a “high style” high cost backpack, you can purchase a Tumi one on eBags for $375 and a leather one, on the same site, for $595. So backpacks range in price from $15 to $595 and probably more at some high fashion houses.

On the Functionality and Diversity of Backpacks The reason backpacks are popular is because they are so functional. It is much easier to carry books, clothes, toiletries, whatever, on one’s back than carrying them in a bag by hand. When I went to high school in the late 1940s in Boston, people didn’t use backpacks. We carried our books around in green cloth bags with a drawstring on top. That was in 1947. According to Time magazine, the backpack was invented in 1967: Gerry Outdoors claims to have created the very first “modern nylon backpack in existence” in 1967 (the same year JanSport opened up shop). The smaller and lighter backpack caught on among other gear brands, and became immensely popular among outdoor enthusiasts. (http://time. com/4477959/a-brief-history-of-the-modern-backpack/)

So the backpack is a relatively recent invention that has been repurposed and now is used for many different things, from carrying books and school supplies to carrying clothing, food and odds and ends of things that ­travelers need. There are aqua backpacks that you can carry a liter or two

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of water and a tube to drink it in if you don’t want to carry bottles of water in the mesh pockets made for water bottles in many backpacks. What’s interesting about the backpack phenomenon is how an object with a simple function—carrying things—has become so diversified, with many different styles, fabrics and uses. Originally designed for hikers, to carry their gear, the backpack now is used by hundreds of millions of students, at all ages, to help them carry their books and by women to make a fashion statement and by some men to carry papers and laptops (and smart phones) instead of a briefcase. When middle-aged businessmen wear or, in some cases, carry backpacks, it may also symbolize a desire to appear younger and, perhaps, a bit “collegiate.” It may signify an unconscious regression to earlier times in their lives when they were more carefree, when they had adventures, and their lives were more exciting. There may also be an unconscious feeling of anxiety that people feel about life in general and the ability to dump important items into a backpack and quickly escape from danger (fires, floods, whatever) may also account for our purchasing them. This is an example of the “fight or flight” dilemma that we all harbor in our unconscious. A backpack makes quick flight more possible.

Backpacks As Signifiers of Travel and Self-Sufficiency For me and my wife, when we start putting things into our carry-on backpacks, it is a sign—along with our packed suitcases—that we will be taking a trip somewhere and armed with our carry-on backpacks and our day backpacks, we feel prepared for the exigencies of travel. Over the course of our travels, there have been a number of times when we had long delays at airports or found ourselves stranded somewhere “in the middle of nowhere” with no transportation available and no restaurants nearby for an extended period time. The food and drink we carried in our backpacks (and I always carry food in my backpack when we travel) helped us deal with the problems we faced in those situations. So backpacks can also suggest a sense of self-sufficiency and even wellbeing that comes from having them when faced with travel problems.

CHAPTER 25

Mattresses

Abstract  The historical origins of the mattress are discussed followed by a discussion of the agony of choice involved in choosing a particular mattress from the seemingly countless number of companies making mattresses and the different models available. Two kinds of customers are discussed: maximizers, who want only the best at the best price, and satisfizers, who are not terribly particular about their choice of a mattress or any other product. Mattresses connote sleep and rest but choosing mattresses is one of the most agonizing and anxiety-ridden purchases people make, since mattresses last for many years. So if one purchases the wrong mattress, one has to live with that bad choice for a long time. Keywords  Mattress • Maximizer • Satisfizer • Agony of choice A blog on the Internet by “Mattresses for Less” provides some interesting information about the history and the evolution of mattresses: It wasn’t until the Roman empire that we see actual stuffed luxury mattresses. Still owned exclusively by the upper echelons of society, these mattresses were stuffed with cotton, feathers, and reeds and usually sat upon beds of precious metal. Some scholars believe that the water bed was also created by the Romans, although there is still some debate on the matter.… (http://blog.mattressesforless.net/2013/06/the-evolution-of-the-mattress/) © The Author(s) 2018 A. A. Berger, Perspectives on Everyday Life, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-99795-7_25

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The blog adds that modern mattresses stem from the 1930s when the innerspring mattress was invented. In the 1950s foam mattresses made their appearance, to be followed by water beds in the 1960s and memory foam mattresses, first developed by NASA in the 1960s, which became commercially popular in the 1990s.

Mattresses and the Agony of Choice Choosing a mattress is one of the most anxiety provoking purchases we make. This is because there are so many different technologies found in mattresses and because there are so many brands, each of which has models at different price points. On Amazon.com (accessed April 21, 2017) we find 2881 different mattresses it sells and 5915 mattress and box spring sets, offering consumers choices between twin, twin extra-long, full, full extra-long, and queen king (and there’s also California King) size mattresses. These mattresses are film, firm plus, plush, medium, and extra firm and are made of Gel Foam, Hybrid, Latex, and Memory foam mattresses that are under 6 inches thick, 6 to 7 inches thick, between 8 and 11 inches thick, and 12 inches and up in thickness. The number of possible choices is staggering. In the chart the follows I list the various choices we can make when we purchase a mattress based on material on the Amazon.com website. Mattress choices Size

Firmness

Material

Twin (39×75) Twin extra-long (39×80) Full (54×75) Full extra-long (54×80) Queen (60×80) King (76×880) California king (72×84)

Firm Extra plush Plush Medium Extra firm

Gel foam Hybrid Inner spring Latex Memory foam

The number of possible choices, we see, is very great and bewildering. If you purchase a very thick mattress, you need special sheets to fit them, which adds to the expense. How people decide on which brand and kind of mattress to get, assuming they have a certain amount of money, can be bewildering.

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Barry Schwartz, a psychologist, wrote about a similar problem he faced when he went into a Gap store to buy a pair of jeans. He writes, in an article titled “When It’s All Too Much” (2004: 4): One day I went into the Gap to buy a pair of jeans. A salesperson asked if she could help. I want a pair of jeans—32-28,” I said. “Do you want them slim fit, relaxed fit, baggy or extra baggy?” she replied. “Do you want them stone-washed, acid-washed, or distressed? Do you want them button fly or zipper fly? Do you want them faded or regular?”

On the basis of this experience, he speculated that the increased choices available to us in buying blue jeans, and it probably is worse when you come to mattresses, cause problems. They generate a certain amount of anxiety and decrease our sense of wellbeing which comes from our belief that we can make rational choices.

Two Kinds of Customers: Maximizers and Satisfizers He went on to write a book titled The Paradox of Choice in which he suggests that there are two kinds of consumers: maximizers, who have very high expectations and feel they must have the best. They experience a great deal of anxiety over whether they are getting “the best” quality of whatever it is they are purchasing and the best deal as far as prices are concerned. The other kind of consumer is just the opposite. Schwartz called them satisfizers, who think good enough is fine, have modest or low expectations about what they are buying, and are at ease. Maximizers torment themselves by wondering whether, if they had looked elsewhere, they could have got a better deal. What’s troubling is that Schwartz believes most people are maximizers, so choosing the “right” kind of mattress generates a great deal of anxiety. Since we spend around a third of our lives on mattresses, getting the best mattresses becomes a monumentally important task for all maximizers, and Schwartz suggests, that means most of us. The price range between mattresses is also considerable. You can purchase foam mattresses at Walmart stores for little more than $100 (and up) and you can buy a TEMPUR cloud for $8398. There is also the matter of how long one should keep a mattress. In commercials, mattress companies suggest people change their mattresses every seven years, but that represents wishful thinking on the part of the mattress manufacturers.

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Consumer Reports suggests that mattresses can easily last ten years, and in many cases, much longer. Things are different for the satisfizers. They make a quick decision about what mattress to get, based on the size of their beds and how much money they want to spend, and don’t think twice about the mattress they get. Whether one can be a satisfizer when it comes to mattress choice is another matter. On something this important for us—or for many of us— the maximizer comes out and shapes our thinking. The mattress is a product that is connected in our minds with rest, relaxation, and sleep (what a mattress connotes), but purchasing a mattress is one of the most anxiety-ridden things we can do. Many people have trouble falling asleep or having restful sleep, so the right mattress holds promise of wonderful things. But we all know that if we don’t make a good choice, and get the wrong mattress—for us, that is—we won’t sleep as well as we could have had we purchased the “right” mattress and also we will have seven (or more) years of buyer’s remorse with which we will have to deal.

CHAPTER 26

Women’s Shoes

Abstract  The chapter begins with a discussion of “shoe obsession” in women. An image is described that shows a woman in a shoe store with dozens of different shoes on the floor, suggesting she is having difficulty in finding a shoe she likes and reflecting the anxiety women often feel when it comes to purchasing shoes. This is followed by a discussion of the erotic nature of the foot and of the shoe and of the role shoes play in folklore. In the story of Cinderella, it is the size of her foot, which fits into her glass slipper that the prince has (which she left at a ball), that is of crucial importance. Keywords  Obsession • Erotic • Cinderella In Alyssa Siegel’s “Shoe Obsession: Women and Their Shoes” published in Psychology Tomorrow (March 7, 2013), we learn something about way women relate to their shoes: Flats, heels, boots, ballets, sandals, clogs, platforms, wedges, strappy, buckled, lace-ups, peep-toes, I love shoes, desire and lust after them. I feel my heart race when I look at shoes I am considering buying, feel a jolt of joy when I wear them the first time. I know that I need to have shoes like I know that I need to eat and breathe. Perhaps I wouldn’t die if I had to wear the same drab pair of shoes for the rest of my life but some part of me would

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wilt and fade. Sometimes when I think about the things I would scramble to grab if my house were on fire, I think about my shoes. I feel pretty confident that I would make sure my dog and cat were safely out of harm’s way first, but after that I would grab my shoes.

We discover that shoes play an important role in the psyches of women and Siegel describes how her heart races when she looks at shoes she’s thinking of purchasing. Consider the advertisement for Trump Tower which shows a woman, in a shoe store, with dozens of shoes scattered all around here. It would seem she couldn’t find a shoe she liked. The copy reads, in part, “Some decisions are hard to make.” And that is the point. Women generally have a difficult time finding shoes they like. (This scene takes place in Trump Tower and is actually an advertisement for the hotel, and not for shoes.) The image suggests that there is a kind of obsession in women about shoes operating at the subconscious level. This matter is discussed in some detail by Alyssa Siegel in her article “Shoe Obsession: Women and Their Shoes,” where she points out that the average woman owns 20 pairs of shoes at any given time, so the shoe business is an enormous one.

On the Erotic Significance of Shoes Men may have problems selecting shoes but I don’t think the problem is as serious for men—in part because the styles of men’s shoes generally are not that different from one another. Men don’t have to decide whether to wear flats, four inch heels or six inch heels. There are, of course, different kinds of men’s shoes, but for the typical businessman, except for the quality of the shoe and branding, one shoe is very much like another. There’s more variety in casual shoes and boots, but not as much as in women’s dress shoes. If you look at the advertisement mentioned earlier, you see there are dozens of shoes, with different kinds of heels, that the woman might choose from, which complicates decision making. One reason choosing shoes for women is that, at the unconscious level, shoes have an erotic significance.

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Cinderella and the Sexual Dimensions of Women’s Shoes We see this in the fairy tale about Cinderella. She goes to a prince’s ball, and he is taken with her, but she must leave by midnight. In her haste to leave, she leaves a shoe behind. The prince, in love with her, goes searching for her, taking the shoe and the only woman whose foot fits in that shoe is Cinderella. They get married and live happily ever after. What this story suggests is that women’s feet have a sexual dimension to them that may not be obvious. Women choose their shoes to look good, to help them be more attractive, but how much attention do men pay to the shoes women are wearing? Not as much attention as other women pay to the shoes a woman is wearing. William A. Rossi explains, in his book The Sex Life of the Foot and Shoe, that the Cinderella story is all about sexuality (1976: 160): The best known version is the one written by the Frenchman Charles Perrault, in 1697. His original version contained clear erotic inferences. Many of these were lost by faulty translation, and the rest were expurgated— which is how it evolved into a child’s fairy tale. In those days manuscripts were handwritten by authors. In Perrault’s original story his phrase for the slipper was pantoufle en vair (slipper of fur) but the scribe or translator read it as pantoufle en verre (slipper of glass). And so it has remained ever since. Perrault was fully aware of the age-old eroticism associated with the foot inserted into a fur or fur-trimmed slipper or shoe, and its phallic-yoni symbolism. The “perfect fit” of the slipper indicated the perfect sexual mating, resulting in the ideal marriage. The romantic union of the prince and Cinderella was sexually symbolized by the suggestive union of the virginal phallic foot and the furry yoni shoe. But the sexual overtones have persisted. The Cinderella fable has served not only to romanticize further the small-­ foot image, but to dramatize the degree of deformation and mutilation that women will submit to for this pedic ideal of sex attraction.

Rossi adds that in some versions of the story, Cinderella’s stepmother cuts off the toe of one of her daughters and has her other daughter slice off her heel in a vain attempt to have one of her daughters’ feet fit into the slipper the prince is using to find the beautiful woman he danced with at his ball. Bruno Bettelheim, a child psychologist, argues that Perrault didn’t make a mistake but wanted the slipper to be made of glass. He writes in his The Uses of Enchantment: the Meaning and Importance of Fairy Tales (1976: 250–251):

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Being an author of great skill and taste, he invented details and changed others to make the story conform to his aesthetic concepts. It was, for example, his invention of that the fateful slipper was made of glass, which is in no other versions but those derive from his. There is quite a controversy about this detail since in French the word vair (which means variegated fur) and verre (glass) are sometimes pronounced similarly. It was assumed that Perrault, on having heard the story, mistakenly substituted verre for vair and thus changed a fur slipper into one made of glass. Although this explanation was often repeated, there seems to be no doubt that the glass slipper was Perrault’s deliberate invention.

Bettelheim then discusses versions of the story in which the stepsisters mutilated their feet in an attempt to get them to fit into the fur slipper. Had the slipper been glass, the mutilations would have been obvious. Glass is important for two reasons. One is that it suggests purity, and in Cinderella’s case, her virginity. The second is that it does not stretch, so the fit of the foot into the slipper has to be perfect. Bettelheim adds that (1976: 265): A tiny receptacle into which some part of the body can slip and fit tightly can be seen as a symbol of the vagina. Something that is brittle and must not be stretched because it would break reminds us of the hymen; and something that is easily lost at the end of a ball when one’s love tried to keep hold of his beloved seems an appropriate image for virginity…Cinderella’s running away from this situation can be seen as her effort to protect her virginity.

The moral of the Cinderella story, one of the most popular fairy tales, is that shoes have a powerful sexual significance, which explains why the choice of shoes for women is so problematic, and why having as small a size shoe as possible is so critical, even though, at the conscious level, women may not recognize how important the choice of a shoe is. Cinderella is a story about sibling rivalry, Oedipal problems, and a girl who is assertive and rises from a situation in which she is living in ashes (cinders) to marrying a prince. And the key to it all, which enables the prince to find her, is her slipper and the size of her feet.

CHAPTER 27

Madonna’s “Like a Prayer”

Abstract  This chapter deals with Madonna’s background and cultural importance, with a focus on her controversial video classic “Like a Prayer.” We explore the importance of her Italian Catholic background and Italian-­ American identity and the role of race in the video. The chapter concludes with a discussion of Madonna as a postmodernist artist who has no regard for narrative continuity and who blends Italian-American and African-­ American musical forms and traditions. Keywords  Madonna • “Like a Prayer” • Italian-American identity • Postmodernism Wikipedia offers a useful overview of Madonna’s background and cultural significance and her amazing capacity for “reinventing” herself: Madonna Louise Ciccone (born August 16, 1958) is an American singer, songwriter, actress, and businesswoman. A leading presence during the emergence of MTV in the 1980s, Madonna is known for pushing the boundaries of lyrical content in mainstream popular music, as well as visual imagery in music videos and live performances. She has also frequently reinvented both her music and image while maintaining autonomy within the recording industry. Her diverse musical productions have been acclaimed by music critics and often generated controversy in media and public. Referred to as the “Queen of Pop”, Madonna is widely cited as an influence by other artists. © The Author(s) 2018 A. A. Berger, Perspectives on Everyday Life, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-99795-7_27

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Born and raised in Michigan, Madonna moved to New York City in 1977, to pursue a career in modern dance. After performing as a drummer, guitarist and vocalist in the music groups Breakfast Club and Emmy, Madonna signed with Sire Records in 1982 and released her eponymous debut album the next year. She followed it with a series of successful albums, including the global bestsellers, Like a Virgin (1984) and True Blue (1986), as well as the Grammy Awards winners, Ray of Light (1998) and Confessions on a Dance Floor (2005). Throughout her career, Madonna has written and produced most of her songs, with many of them reaching number one on the record charts, including “Like a Virgin”, “Papa Don’t Preach”, “Like a Prayer”, “Vogue”, “Take a Bow”, “Frozen”, “Music”, “Hung Up”, and “4 Minutes.” (Wikipedia)

On Madonna’s Classic “Like a Prayer” Madonna, the ageless and seemingly indestructible rock star, created a bestselling and controversial video “Like a Prayer” and released it on March 3, 1989. It is hard to describe the plot, since it is such a complicated text, but a brief summary follows. It involves a woman, Madonna, who sees a young girl being assaulted. Madonna is timid and does nothing. A black man sees what is going on and tries to help the woman but is arrested mistakenly by the police. One of the gang members who assaulted the girl gives Madonna a scary look. She runs into a church and sees a saint in a cage who resembles the black man. She says a prayer to the black saint to help her decide what to do. She then experiences a surrealistic and dream-like series of events, including finding herself in a church with a choir, and eventually goes to the police and tells them what happened. Then the black man is freed. Unsurprisingly, the video’s comingling of sex, race, and religion (to say nothing of shots in which Madonna sings in front of a field of burning crosses) caused extreme controversy. Coming hot on the heels of The Last Temptation of Christ, a film that similarly brought sex into religion (portraying a romance between Jesus and Mary Magdalene) to the outrage of religious conservatives, the “Like a Prayer” video was apparently provocative enough to cause the Pepsi corporation to walk away from its contract with Madonna for a series of television commercials. People, who possibly did not actually watch the video, created most of the controversy. While we are all entitled to our own sense of shock, with the benefit of 20 years of hindsight, the outrage caused by the video was

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not warranted. (Maybe we’ve just become numbed by the even more shocking pop cultural memes of recent years.) What might be more fruitful than speculating about the outrage over the video would involve attempting to understand where the video’s imagery, themes, and narrative come from—that is, what the video might actually mean, if anything at all, and how it serves its purpose as an entertainment and, at the same time, an advertisement for Madonna.

Madonna and Italian-American Catholicism and Cultural Identity Because Madonna herself has said that “Like a Prayer” is emotionally honest and autobiographical in some ways, we have to consider her heritage and cultural upbringing carefully when watching the video. Much of the autobiographical material appears in the form of religious imagery. As a second-generation Italian American, Madonna (born Madonna Louise Veronica Ciccone) reflects certain themes in her video that are tied to Italian-American cultural identity. The Roman Catholic aspect of that cultural identity is likely the source of some of the discomfort Madonna caused for conservative, tradition-minded Americans; there was, for a long time, a very significant cultural (and ethnic) gap between the Catholics of Southern European descent and traditional Protestant Americans. In his book The Madonna of 115th Street: Faith and Community in Italian Harlem, 1880–1950 Robert Orsi identifies the “popular religion” of Italians that many American “churchmen have denigrated” for the most part: When used to describe popular Catholic religiosity, the term conjures up images of shrouds, bloody hearts, bilocationing monks, talking Madonnas, weeping statues, boiling vials of blood—all the symbols which the masses of Catholic Europe have found to be so powerful over the centuries…

Madonna’s experiences in the video—the stigmata, the bleeding statue, and her physical encounter with the black saint, Saint Martin de Porres— all fall into this cultural phenomenon of popular religion. What popular religion generates within the Italian Catholic community is a powerful sense of connectedness to the faith. The kind of demystification of Christianity that results from physical encounters with religion makes many uncomfortable. Madonna is well suited to play upon such ­discomfort

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with “popular religion”—her name itself suggests it, “Madonna” being a title for the Virgin Mary. With the video for “Like a Prayer,” Madonna establishes that (dreamed) physical connection between the saint and herself to be a vital source of inspiration to act upon witnessing the black man unjustly imprisoned.

Race in “Like a Prayer” The music video as the tale of a young white woman finding power in interracial harmony and the African-American community has its own historical setting. Within Madonna’s personal history, she has said that she wanted to be black when she was a kid, and that she mostly interacted with black children. In New  York and other urban centers, Italian-American immigrants and African Americans shared a history living next to each other in the tenements, sometimes in competition and sometimes in cooperation with each other. In the sense of the prejudice experienced by both communities, there is a shared sense of being in exile, of being somewhat disowned and disenfranchised. In the process of the video, Madonna conflates and mixes the two cultures as she attempts to play upon (marketable) themes involving the power of religion (and sex!) to aid in defeating prejudice and personal fears. The blending of these two cultures is apparent in several ways. Visually speaking, the Italian-American Madonna and the African-American choir blend together in the red and brown color scheme of the video. The combination of the “popular religion” of Roman Catholicism with the black gospel choir is an obvious cultural meshing, but one you’re not likely to see too often in real life; the black church is typically a Protestant institution. In the video we see the saint-worship and the imagery of the gospel choir coming from two distinct religious groups. But Catholicism and the African-American church do share a certain emotional forthrightness. Madonna uses the mystique of emotional authenticity in black religion to demonstrate the power of faith to awaken an emotional conviction within her to go to the police, despite the danger in accusing the dangerous and threatening white men of rape. Self-sacrifice brings the narrative full circle, back to Roman Catholicism. But, just as the images of the music video are confused, the “morals” and the resolution are equally ambiguous. On one hand, the idea of self-­ sacrifice is noble and helps the viewer identify with Madonna not as a singer but as a concerned woman with wholesome values and a ­commitment

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to justice. On the other hand, self-sacrifice treads very closely to what we might consider to be “self-aggrandizement,” as Madonna is the focal point of the video. In a sense she becomes like the virgin, but for entirely different reasons. With that in mind, the black gospel choir does more than demonstrate the power of religion. Madonna, celebrated by the dancing choir and surrounded in children (playing up the Madonna-Virgin Mary connection perhaps), becomes a savior of sorts. A heroine. You probably shouldn’t think about that too much, if only because the narrative of the story becomes largely trivial at the end of the music video when the curtain rolls down and the words “The End” appear in corny 50s script.

Madonna As a Postmodern Artist In discussing Madonna, as was popular in some academic circles in the 1990s, much has been said of her “postmodernism.” A simple way of thinking about postmodernism is as the way in which our contemporary artists and culture produce art that resists definite interpretation. Where modern poets like T. S. Eliot produced art that tried to mean something, postmodernist art has become about confusing the meaning of images, cribbing artistic styles, opposing them, and reveling in meaninglessness, expressing only what French philosopher Jean Baudrillard called the ecstasy of communication. Postmodern texts tend to be pastiches, mixing many different threads. How does “Like a Prayer” demonstrate some of these ideas? First, Madonna’s video, wrapped its dated conception of itself as a play, resists the idea of being taken seriously. The blending of Italian-American and African-American traditions and cultures should also be considered a postmodern choice. It resists interpretation. Where a critic might try to understand the video as an endorsement of Catholicism, the blending of Catholicism with the African Methodist Episcopal choir Madonna meets in her dream prevents such a simple interpretation. The video is neither here nor there on particular religions, only communicating the power of some force of faith to empower her. The most significant part of the video—the sexual scene between the saint-come-to-life and Madonna—fits into this argument as well. The combination of sex and religion, two things seemingly distant in many minds, is the most obvious postmodern turn in the video. Academic Steven E. Young wrote about “Like a Prayer” in his essay “Like A Critique:

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A Postmodern Essay on Madonna’s Postmodern Video ‘Like A Prayer.’” Young notes that the sex/religion coupling “gives way to a deeper [pairing], multiple/single.” He observes that we desire the singular in both sex and religion, and conversely fear the multiple in sex and religion. He says: If the Madonna video shows an almost seamless blending of the various apparently oppositional [pairings], black vs. white, sex vs. religion, multiple vs. single, into ambiguities, which reveal the lack of one … meaning, then as viewers, we may take that first step, even if only tentative, toward the freedom to choose for ourselves. (http://www.tandfonline.com/doi/abs/10.1 080/03007769108591423?journalCode=rpms20&)

So, in Young’s mind, the sex/religion merger and other postmodernisms of the video that confuse any definite “meaning” invite speculation and the possibility of several, equally plausible, reactions to the work—freeing us in the process. That might be a little generous of Young, but Madonna herself states that the conception of the music video as a play is meant to suggest that we are all part of the story unfolding. That invitation of freedom of interpretation that Madonna supposedly creates is also an invitation to see Madonna as a visionary feminist—as in the narrative of the video itself—which invites its own sense of celebrity, role-modeling, and marketing into the mix. And the controversy itself— which she had to know was sure to erupt after she filmed herself making out with a black saint inside a church—only helped sell videos and records. “Like a Prayer” has sold more than 11 million copies worldwide.

CHAPTER 28

Suitcases

Abstract  The growth of the travel and tourism industry, now the largest industry in the world, means that suitcases—of one kind or another—are now of great importance, since we rely on them to transport our clothes and other things needed for travel. We discuss the size of the suitcase industry and how the design of suitcases has evolved over the years. There are so many different brands and kinds of suitcases that consumers have to deal with that choosing a suitcase generates anxiety in people purchasing them. The problem suitcase manufacturers face is how to make a suitcase that is light and strong, that will protect what we put in it, that is not too expensive, and will last a long time. Keywords  Suitcase • Choice • Protection • Styles Suitcases mean travel, but they also mean trouble. The suitcase is a signifier of travel and tourism. Some scholars make a distinction between the two, but in most cases it is reasonable to suggest that travel and tourism are really the same thing. A business traveler may visit tourist sites and thus also becomes, for a while, a tourist.

© The Author(s) 2018 A. A. Berger, Perspectives on Everyday Life, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-99795-7_28

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The Size of the Tourism Industry Every year around a billion people leave their homes and travel to foreign countries and most of them do so with suitcases or some other form of luggage that functions like a suitcase. Some tourist travel is to places that are not far away from their homes but many people travel is to distant destinations, often requiring long flights on airplanes. A research report from AARP (American Association of Retired Persons) reports that: Practically all Baby Boomers (99%) anticipate traveling for leisure in 2016, with approximately 4 or 5 trips in the works. Many are planning both domestic and international trips (45%), with 5% planning international travel exclusively. The desire to travel (aka vacation) comes down to three primary motivators: To spend time with family and friends To relax and rejuvenate To get away from normal everyday life

All of these travelers, with few exceptions, take suitcases of one kind or another with them. Luggage is a $30 billion a year industry in America. It is interesting to see how suitcases have evolved over the years. An article on “Baggage” in Wikipedia explains: Rolling suitcases were invented in 1970, when Bernard D. Sadow applied for a patent that was granted in 1972 as United States patent 3,653,474 for “Rolling Luggage”. The patent application cited the increase in air travel, and “baggage handling [having] become perhaps the single biggest difficulty encountered by an air passenger”, as background of the invention. Sadow’s four-wheeled suitcases, pulled using a loose strap, were later surpassed in popularity by rollaboards, suitcases that feature two wheels and are pulled in an upright position using a long handle, and were invented in 1987 by US pilot Robert Plath. Sadow attributes the late invention of luggage on wheels to a “macho thing” where “men would not accept suitcases with wheels”. Others attribute the late invention to “the abundance of luggage porters with carts in the 1960s, the ease of curbside drop-offs at much smaller airports and the heavy iron casters then available.”

What we seldom think about is that suitcases generate anxieties in travelers in many different ways.

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Suitcases Mean Trouble and Anxiety Albert Camus, a famous French writer, explained that what makes travel valuable to us is fear. We take pleasure in confronting our fears and triumphing over them when we visit foreign lands. As he wrote in his Notebooks (13, 14): What gives value to travel is fear. It is the fact that, at a certain moment, when we are so far from our own country…we are seized by a vague fear, and this instinctive desire to go back to the protection of old habits. This is the most obvious benefit of travel. At that moment we are feverish but also porous, so that the slightest touch makes us quiver to the depths of our being….This is why we should not say that we travel for pleasure. There is no pleasure in travelling, and I look upon it as an occasion for spiritual testing. Pleasure takes us away from ourselves the same way that distraction, as in Pascal’s use of the world, takes us away from God. Travel, which is like a greater and grave science, brings us back to ourselves. (pp. 13, 14)

Travel allows us to test ourselves in different ways and, generally speaking, triumph over them. I’m talking about everything from wandering through strange cities, finding good restaurants, and packing our suitcases.

Suitcases and the Problem of Choice One “test” or problem all travelers have to confront involves choosing which suitcase to purchase—a source of considerable anxiety, since there are so many choices we have to make. Will we make the correct choice? Will the suitcase last? There are hundreds of brands and models available. So choosing the best suitcase for our needs can be daunting. Another source of anxiety involves packing our suitcases. We face two problems here: first, we have to decide what clothes and other things we want to bring with us and second, we have to figure out how to fit everything we want into our suitcases. Because airlines (with rare exceptions) only allow us one free take-on suitcase, we have to find ways to bring everything we want in one, along with a backpack or a small bag. That is a common combination. We know that there is widespread anxiety about packing suitcases because there are so many videos on YouTube and articles in newspapers and magazines about what to take with us when we travel and how to pack our suitcases. Many of the videos and articles tell people concerned about having enough room in their suitcases to take fewer clothes and other

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things than they were planning to take, but that advice is difficult to follow because travelers want to make sure they have enough clothes and other things for their needs. Experts in the field say travelers take around a third more clothes and other things than they really need.

Suitcases and Air Travel Suitcases are also a source of problems for airlines since so many passengers take their suitcases with them onto the planes and spend time placing them in the overhead bins. The International Air Transportation Association, working with Boeing and Airbus now suggests the ideal size for carry-on suitcases (to be taken on a plane) should be 42 inches in circumference. This size suitcase is a few inches smaller than the maximum most airlines set for carry-on luggage. It is not a very large suitcase and that is the source of the problem many travelers face. Everyone who purchases a suitcase is interested in is getting one that will be light, so it can easily be taken on board airplanes, and tough, so it can stand up to the abuse suitcases undergo in airports by those who handle suitcases. That, too, is a source of anxiety for travelers. They want tough suitcases to protect their clothes and other things they pack in suitcases and they want their suitcases to last for many years. To deal with this problem, suitcase manufacturers now use advanced fabrics like rip-stop nylon in their suitcases. The advertisement for Delsey suitcases makes two points: their suitcases are light but they are also strong and, in addition, Delsey claims, these suitcases will survive the rough handling they get in airports. The advertisement also has a visually interesting image: a man carrying many suitcases to an airplane which is only possible because they are so light. “Travel Light” is the headline for this advertisement, which also points out that Delsey bags are also very durable. Now that most airlines charge for transporting suitcases, many airline passengers take carry-on suitcases on their flights. This means it takes longer to fill an airplane with passengers (who are all trying to place their suitcases in overhead bins) and the longer this takes, the longer the airplane is on the ground. The longer airplanes are on the ground, the more money airlines lose. In recent years, airlines have started changing the design of the bins so the suitcases can be stacked vertically. This means the bins are somewhat larger but they can accommodate many more suitcases than the conventional bins, in which suitcases are placed on their sides.

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The Evolution of the Suitcase The suitcase has evolved over the years. Originally, they had no wheels. You carried your suitcase or attached it to an external device with wheels. Next, suitcase manufacturers added two wheels to suitcases so you could drag the suitcase behind you when you walked with one. The two-wheeled suitcases are still popular but they have been supplanted by the latest trend, spinner suitcases. They have four wheels and you don’t drag them behind you but push them beside you or ahead of you, reducing strain on your back. Some travelers put decals from places they have visited on their suitcases, signifying that they have been to many interesting places, but this not a common practice. Amazon.com sells decals of the more important tourist destinations for tourist who want to decorate their suitcases. The brands of suitcases people have are also signifiers of their socio-economic class. Generally speaking, the lighter the suitcase, the more expensive it is. Tourists want light suitcases because their suitcases are weighed by the airlines and airlines charge extra for suitcases that weigh more than the limits the airlines set. Companies that manufacture suitcases sell them at highly inflated prices, which are always marked down by retailers of suitcases. Thus, for example, Mosaic suitcases sells a carry-on ballistic nylon suitcase that is extremely light, only 6.8 pounds, for $400 but it is usually on sale at Internet luggage sites for half that price. Researchers have discovered that many tourists find preparing for their trip is more enjoyable than the trip itself. Preparing for a trip involves tourists packing their suitcases, booking flights, booking tours, booking hotels, and making most other arrangements, now that the travel agency business has been devastated by Internet sites. Being a tourist is actually hard work and can be very strenuous. So being at home and imagining the trip and preparing for it in a leisurely manner is a source of pleasure and relatively easy. Actually taking the trip is a different matter since there is often a considerable amount of stress and anxiety involved in travel. Most people find airports very unpleasant, for a variety of reasons. There are crowds and there is the ordeal of passing through security checks. Some of the stress for long haul travelers comes from having to wheel their suitcases through airports, having them checked by security people, and tipping porters, cab drivers and hotel bell hops who dealing with them. One of the reasons the cruise industry has been so successful is

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because cruises minimize stress. As they advertise, “you only have to unpack once.” One other source of anxiety connected with suitcases involves unpacking them and the having to pack them again at each new hotel. On cruises you unpack once and don’t have to pack again until the cruise is ending.

On the Psychic Rewards of Tourism Tourism is now the largest industry in the world, having supplanted the oil industry a number of years ago. People travel to have new experiences, to see new places, to explore different cities and countries, to be exposed to different cultures. They want to refresh themselves, renew themselves. They always bring with them their suitcases (or suitcase substitutes such as backpacks) which they need to carry their clothes and other necessities. These suitcases signify to the travelers who own them that they have been to interesting places and have had life-enhancing adventures. The essential function of the suitcase for travelers is protection—of their clothes and the other things they pack in their suitcases. A suitcase is a signifier of travel and of different things about the owners of the suitcase such as their sense of adventure, their socio-economic status, and their taste. Suitcases hold clothes and other things, but what is equally important for travelers, they also hold memories.

CHAPTER 29

Superglue

Abstract  Superglues have the distinctive quality of bonding immediately on contact. This chapter deals with the history and invention of superglues and with their functionality. They were used by surgeons in the Vietnam War with good effect. The chapter also offers a psychoanalytic analysis of the superglue phenomenon and suggests they are seen, in the unconscious, as a means of rescuing the world from entropy by “saving” things that have broken apart from being thrown out and thus keeping the world more orderly. Keywords  Superglue • Functionality • Psychoanalytic significance What is superglue? The technical components of superglue and some of its many functions are described as follows: The principle component of commercial CAs (SuperGlue, Krazy Glue, Loctite) is either methy-2-cyanoacrylate or ethyl-2-cyanoacrylate, the original forms of CA developed in 1942 by Kodak Laboratories. (The discovery was made whilst investigating potential, high clarity, acrylics for the use in gun sights. Whilst not suitable for this application CA was quickly identified as a fast acting, low shear strength adhesive.) During the Vietnam War it was used in field surgery with good effect, however, despite the promising results it was not approved by the Unites States Food and Drug Administration due to the unknown toxicity and two significant side effects during the polymerization process. (http://www.realfirstaid.co.uk/superglue/) © The Author(s) 2018 A. A. Berger, Perspectives on Everyday Life, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-99795-7_29

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There are a number of products being sold now which describe themselves as “super.” They are alleged to have special characteristics that lift them above the ordinary, and not only above the ordinary but above the superior. The term “super” implies a hierarchy of products, from ordinary to superior and then, above superior, “super.” We now hear about other super products, such as super foods, like watermelon and Kefir, that are supposed to be very good for us.

Qualities of Superglues One of the most interesting of these “super” products is superglue. What’s most important about superglue is that it works so quickly, that it bonds instantly, not that it is so strong, though it is also, so its makers claim, strong. Superglues are based upon a chemical called Cyanoacrylate. Dr. Harry Coover, inventor of superglue, was honored in a ceremony at the White House in 2009 as a National Medal of Technology and Innovation Laureate. So superglue has made a considerable impact on the world, in general, and on the adhesives industry, in particular. There are a dozen brands of superglue available on Amazon.com, all of which describe themselves as a superglue, so the term—while used by the superglue corporation—now is used to describe any glue with the qualities of the original “superglue.” And, as one might expect, there is also a superglue remover and cleaner, for those who have ben unfortunate enough to get superglue on their fingers or hands. These glues also do not last very long, once opened, which helps explain why they are generally sold in small packages, often no more than 20 grams. One company sells tiny tubes of superglue, good for one use.

On Superglue’s Functionality: A Case History I made use of superglue on a cruise recently when a hand brace that my wife uses broke. I went down to the desk and got some superglue from one of the clerks and glued the pieces of it back together. Her hand brace is still together. One thing we learn from the many ways people use superglue is that inventions often have unintended consequences and u ­ nforeseen uses. Who could have imagined that doctors would use it to suture wounds in the Vietnam war.

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Superglue and the Unconscious What we have to recognize is that superglue is connected with two unconscious psychological phenomena: our desire for power and our belief in the magical. The power to put things together that had broken apart is something we all like because it is connected to the matter of making sure that there is “salvation” for things that have broken apart. Superglue is one way we can counter the forces of entropy, which we can define as a gradual decline to disorder in the world. Accidents can be rectified and the world order, in minor ways, can be maintained. Saving a broken pot is one small step that is connected to saving the world. There is also the element of the magical and in that this product works so quickly—instantaneously—that it seems like magic. Magic involves using supernatural forces to influence things. The Merriam-Webster dictionary defines magic as follows (https://www.merriam-webster.com/ dictionary/magic): the use of means (such as charms or spells) believed to have supernatural power over natural forces: magic rites or incantations…. an extraordinary power or influence seemingly from a supernatural source.

So superglue is magical in that it seems to have power over natural forces, which can lead, for example, to a plate breaking when it falls on the floor, and seems to have extraordinary power from what we might imagine to be a supernatural force. In this case, we are talking about a chemical product with remarkable qualities. When we fix a broken plate or vase or anything using superglue we are, for a moment, magicians using the power of superglue to perform our magical feats. If we wish to look upon our rescuing a broken plate or whatever from oblivion in religious terms, we can describe this act as what Mircea Eliade would call a hierophany, which he uses to describe when something sacred manifests itself to us. He writes that it involves (1961: 11) “a manifestation of something of a wholly different order, a reality that does not belong to our world, in objects that are an integral part of our natural ‘profane’ world.” If we take the religious out of this description of hierophany, we get something that is essentially magical and remarkable that manifests itself to us—something powerful that, in this case, was made possible by chemistry. It is yet another example of “better life through chemistry,” which has, with various products, including medicines, transformed the world. And you can get this powerful agent for a dollar at dollar stores.

CHAPTER 30

Calendars

Abstract  This chapter starts by discussing the different kinds of calendars by which religious groups organize their time. Thus, September 1, 1995, is the year 5755 for Orthodox Jews and the year 1446 for Muslims. It then explores the role calendars play in our everyday lives and offers examples of the kind of calendars the author uses: yearly calendars and monthly calendars, in addition to his daily calendar. It concludes with a discussion of calendars and religious and national holidays, with a section on the symbolic significance of an American holiday, Memorial Day. Keywords  Calendars • Religions • Kinds of calendars • National holidays Calendars pose many problems for us, because different religions have different calendars—as the following passage makes clear: The Gregorian Calendar, with the new year starting on January 1 with 12 months varying in length from 28–31 days, is the most familiar calendar to most of us. It reflects a universal agreement about how major components of time will be defined and allows for interaction and communication across every religious, cultural, political, and geographical boundary. ­ (http:// www.edchange.org/multicultural/papers/richpaper.html)

© The Author(s) 2018 A. A. Berger, Perspectives on Everyday Life, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-99795-7_30

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Calendars play a role in our interactions with others and a calendar that everyone accepts, such as the Gregorian calendar, enables the different groups in society to function as one community. But it is not the only calendar and different ethnic, cultural and religious groups have their own calendars, which can greatly complicate things. That is because we use calendars to determine how components of time are to be defined and when important occasions are to be celebrated. For example, September 1, 1995, is the year 5755 for Jews and the year 1446 for Muslims, and the new year, 1995, for Muslims starts on May 18. Asian countries that use the Chinese lunar calendar start their new year not on January 1 but on February 19 and for them, the new year isn’t 1995 but 4694.

Calendars and Our Everyday Lives Calendars are the way we record our everyday lives. On our calendars we record our meetings, our appointments, things we want to do and all the other imponderabilia of everyday life. A calendar is a kind of journal—one that only has headlines and no analyses or speculations about things we do in our everyday lives. At the end of the year, if you go over your daily calendar, you have a kind of portrait of your life. I have many different kinds of calendars that I use. I have small monthly calendars that I put into the first pages of my journals: two months per page. I have large monthly calendars that I tack onto my bulletin board. And I have a yearly calendar with the 12 months all on one page. I note all our trips and important events on it. My monthly calendars, in my journals, allow me to note down appointments, record birthdays, note when manuscripts are due at publishers, and indicate when I’ll be on my travels, among other things. It introduces redundancy into my scheduling. And then, on a huge bulletin board in my study, I have large monthly calendars that have more details in them than my calendars in my journals. Since I write in my journals every day, I can look at my monthly calendars and see what I’ve got scheduled for the immediate and distant future. These calendars represent an attempt to make my life more orderly, to seize control of the passing days and make sure I do not forget to take care of obligations. If you’re going to be a writer you have to be organized and disciplined and calendars are the way that I control, as best I can, my time.

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A number of years ago I was at a meeting in London. We decided we needed another meeting to continue our deliberations. When we made that decision, everyone in the room whipped out their daily calendars to see when they were free. We tend to develop a dependency on our calendars since they contain information about our meetings and obligations. For many middle class people, a full calendar is an indication of leading the good life—the good life being a busy life, one in which a person is, so to speak, “fully booked.” Personally speaking, I avoid being fully booked because that means I don’t have time to write, so the emptier my calendar is, the better I feel about things.

Calendars and Religious and National Holidays We also have to think about calendars in terms of our religious and national holidays, which play an important part in our lives. Thus, every year in the United States we celebrate: New Year’s Day President’s Day Independence Day (July 4th) Martin Luther King Day Memorial Day Labor Day Veteran’s Day Thanksgiving Christians celebrate holy days such as Christmas, Good Friday, and Easter Sunday; Muslims celebrate holy days such as Ramadan and Eid al Fitr; and Jews celebrate holy days such as Passover, Rosh Hashanah, and Yom Kippur. The Jewish calendar is different from the secular calendar so the days Jews celebrate their holy days vary from year to year. These holidays play an important role in our national and religious lives. In the first chapter of W. Lloyd Warner’s classic study American Life: Dream and Reality he discusses an American sacred ceremony, Memorial Day. The chapter is called “An American Sacred Ceremony: Memorial Day and Symbolic Behavior.” Warner points out that all societies have what he calls “ceremonial calendars,” that is, days given over to religious or political celebration, which have for their function, the integration of social life. As he explains in American Life: Dream and Reality (1953: 2), calendars are important:

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This calendar functions to draw all people together to emphasize their similarities and common heritage; to minimize their differences; and to contribute to their thinking, feeling, and acting alike.

This is not an easy thing to do in complex societies in which there are different religions, each of which claims great authority and each of which possesses its own sacred symbols. What Memorial Day does is to provide a unifying ceremony—beyond the reach of any given religion. What it indicated, though Warner doesn’t mention this, is that there is what might be called a “political religion,” Americanism, that has a higher status now for many Americans than the traditional theological religions do.

CHAPTER 31

Coda

Abstract  In this final chapter, I consider the role my interest in popular culture or mass-mediated culture has played in my career as a professor and a writer. I explain that I always thought of myself as a writer who happened to teach rather than a teacher who happened to write. And though I have written a great deal on popular culture, much of what I’ve written can be understood to be about everyday life. Most of what I’ve written has come out of speculations and notes in my journals, where I devote pages to brainstorming on various topics related to my interests and the book I am working on at any given time. Keywords  Everyday life • Popular culture • Media • Journal writing I have often wondered whether my “subject” was not the media or popular culture but really everyday life, whatever it may be. I first used the topic in the subtitle of my book Manufacturing Desire: Media, Popular Culture and Everyday Life which was published in 1996. I used it next in my book Narratives in Popular Culture, Media and Everyday Life in 1997. Most recently I used in in my book Applied Discourse Analysis: Popular Culture, Media, and Everyday Life. So everyday life has played a part in a number of my books. I developed what I called a “myth model,” that distinguished between elite culture, popular culture and everyday life, the latter being non-­ © The Author(s) 2018 A. A. Berger, Perspectives on Everyday Life, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-99795-7_31

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mediated aspects of our lives. But in reality, watching television and going to symphony concerts can be considered part of everyday life, if we use the term in its most expansive manner. Seen broadly, everyday life covers everything we do from the time we go to bed in the evening, get up in the morning, spend our days working, studying, playing tennis or golf, or doing whatever, eating three meals a day (if not more), watching four or five hours of television, and going to bed again. There are what me might describe as “escape attempts,” in which we take a break from our routines, and everyday life is based on recurrence, and take vacations or go to family events like weddings, birthday parties, or funerals. Interestingly enough, Americans take fewer holidays that people in countries like France, where workers generally have a six week holiday. Psychologists tell us that it is important to take vacations and recharge our batteries. But many Americans don’t take all the vacation time allotted to them, for fear that they might be fired or that the work will pile up when they are gone and they will have a very difficult time getting through it all. The Puritan ethic may also help explain the reluctance of many American workers to take vacations or take all the vacation time to which they are entitled. If you think about everyday life broadly, it covers everything so I didn’t have to put media and popular culture in my subtitles. Everyday life would have been enough. On the other hand, media (sometimes known as mass mediated culture) and popular culture may have enough significance and there is enough to talk about each of them so it was reasonable to grant them a place on my subtitles. Scholars have debated whether there is a difference between media and popular culture, and what popular culture is and isn’t, for many years. I don’t bother with these debates but write about the media and popular culture, assuming they are different. Some scholars suggest that the media broadcast popular culture, and what isn’t broadcast or mass-mediated is “folk” culture. Whatever the case, there are all kinds of interesting popular culture texts to analyze and I have spent more than 50 years doing so—starting with my Ph.D. dissertation on the comic strip Li’l Abner; the strip was part of some 200 million peoples’ everyday life. I describe myself as a writer who was also a professor, by which I meant that I was primarily a writer, but also taught because I liked teaching and interacting with students and because it relieved me of the stress of trying to make a living as a writer. I also liked being at universities and having access to wonderful libraries. My everyday life has always involved writing.

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I started keeping a journal in 1954 and have been keeping a journal since then, writing in it almost every day. Generally, I write in my journal for 10 or 15 minutes a day, but when you start writing journals in 1954, you can fill many journals. I often used ideas I played around with in my journals in writing my articles and books. On most days, I write at the computer for two or three hours, at the most. I find that if I write too much on one day, I’m too tired the next day, so it is counterproductive. I also write steadily. Let’s suppose I write 1000 words a day, most days. If I keep at it, which I do, in two months you have a 50,000 plus words book. The secret is working continually and not slacking off. So you need to be disciplined to be a writer—or the kind of writer that I am. I write as fast as I can and then when I have a rough draft, I spend a good deal of time polishing and enhancing what I’ve written in my draft. I reward myself for my work by traveling and, with my wife, have been to more than 50 countries over the past 50 years. I lived in Paris for six months before I got married and when I was married we lived for a year in Milan and a year in London. When you live for an extended period of time in a foreign country, you get some insights about everyday life in the countries. I also write about our travels and have written a number of books that deal with the cultures of the countries we have visited. I’ve written books on Vietnam, Thailand, India, Bali, and Japan, plus a number of short books on cruises we’ve taken. My everyday life is rather simple: one wife (I got married in 1961), one house, in a beautiful town called Mill Valley (I bought it in 1970), and one job (I taught at San Francisco State University from 1965 to 2003), but two children. And one breakfast—oatmeal, coffee, and toast most days. In this book I thought it would be interesting to write about some books on everyday life, with the words “Everyday Life” in their titles, by important scholars and thinkers, and so the first part of the book is devoted to dealing with their ideas about everyday life. They write about the importance of studying common objects and routines. It set the stage for the second part of the book which contains psycho-social-semiotic analyses I’ve made of different aspects of American everyday life. It is my hope that reading this book will provide new insights into the meaning of everyday life and will help you think about your everyday life and everyday life in America (or wherever you live) in different and more profound ways.