Robert E. Sullivan. The Geography of the Everyday: Toward an Understanding of the Given. Athens: University of Georgia Press, 2017. 204 pp. $59.95 (cloth), ISBN 978-0-8203-5168-1.
Reviewed by Andrew J. Kettler (University of Toronto)
Published on H-Socialisms (February, 2019)
Commissioned by Gary Roth (Rutgers University - Newark)
Thinking the Everyday
Robert Sullivan’s Geography of the Everyday: Toward an Understanding of the Given explores social science and humanities theories about daily experience to articulate a new place for geography within studies of the everyday. Sullivan’s discussion is often too brief for the number of theories he employs; nonetheless, the monograph offers many stimulating arguments. It intertwines theories regarding everyday experience that otherwise might appear at odds with one another. He combines these opposed theories to overcome numerous problems associated with analyzing the everyday as an often overly broad conceptual category. Each of the relatively stand-alone chapters is meant to solve these difficulties of scope by combining social theories that have previously been considered divergent.
Despite Sullivan’s merger of many fields of study, the interdisciplinary writing in Geography of the Everyday is often lovely. The monograph frequently provides openings for readers of social theory interested in how to conceptualize the everyday in new ways. Geography of the Everyday especially centralizes the field of geography to locate the spatial confines of everyday behavior. In part, this means limiting the previously broad use of the everyday as a conceptual category, although for Sullivan too, it is difficult to avoid transforming the everyday into something that essentially means everything.
Sullivan begins with the work of Erving Goffman and Michel Foucault. Geography of the Everyday positions Goffman as a scholar of the bottom-up and conversational aspects of the everyday, while positioning Foucault as a scholar of top-down mechanisms of regulation. For Sullivan, Goffman’s analyses are often haunted by an Anglo-American locality which makes his work on the face-to-face interactions of the everyday difficult to apply when analyzing non-Western cultures. To widen Goffman’s analyses of psychological behavior within hospitals, Sullivan adds Foucault’s work on security and biopolitics. This allows Sullivan to expand on how everyday actions occur within specific situations. For Sullivan, these situations involve multiple and simultaneous discourses that define the space between individual agency and institutions of social control.
Chapter 2 explores analysis of geography and time consciousness in the work of Torsten Hägerstrand. The famed scholar of time and geography defined the interrelated relationships of time and space for many cultural scholars working in his wake after the 1960s. For these scholars of time-space, Hägerstrand’s theories implied that individual behaviors are made upon life paths that involve both personal choices and the constraints of physical surroundings. Situating Hägerstrand’s theories within an understanding of time-space constrained by local surroundings, Sullivan adds theories on the social construction of time from Fredric Jameson and Doreen Massey. This addition links a new formulation of time-space into a category of analysis that involves both Hägerstrand’s attention to individual choices and Jameson and Massey’s concerns with economic influences on behavior. Geography of the Everyday then combines this analysis of behavior within the field of time-space with ideas of place to create a novel understanding of the interrelationships that create behavior within Sullivan’s fresh conception of “spacetimeplace” as the field where everyday behaviors occur (p. 5).
The third chapter of the short edition explores the works of Michel de Certeau on the idea of the ruse and Henri Lefebvre on the social construction of space to better understand individual behavior within everyday situations. Looking into different iterations of the idling solider Schweyk in the works of Berthold Brecht and Jaroslav Hasek, Sullivan analyzes the social skills of malingering and the ruse to idealize resistance as another important aspect of everyday behavior. This inquiry into resistance continues through a fascinating reading of Brecht’s conflating testimony before the House Un-American Activities Committee in 1947. For Sullivan’s concept of the everyday, this use of the ruse implies that a constant individual and class struggle exists on the plains of everyday behavior. Sullivan continues to explore the economic influences within the everyday by analyzing concepts of space within the Nigerian oil industry. Lefebvre’s space is determined by social understandings that are often informed by a controlling discourse that emerges out of the hegemonic goals of the bourgeoisie. Sullivan borrows this analysis to focus on the spatial connections that make the oil industry into an assemblage with boundaries that can be traced back to the individual choices of those within the systemic network.
The finest chapter in Geography of the Everyday is the fourth, which highlights the theories of Marxism to define how class relationships are essential for understanding the everyday. This analysis focuses on the creation and maintenance of the reserve army of labor, which can be defined as the large group of unemployed in a capitalist system who are maintained by the bourgeoisie to keep the employed fearful of lower wages. Sullivan identifies this concept to expose class and familial allegiances that often make everyday decisions more structurally determined than individual motivations. Sullivan dissects how the bourgeoisie maintains this reserve army by manipulating economic hierarchies and political discourses. Geography of the Everyday looks at these forms of manipulation through an analysis of the migration of the modern Chinese proletariat from rural to urban spaces, the decline of the American middle class, and the rise of a globalizing elite that continues to overproduce itself and impose the West upon the rest through the circulation of absurd amounts of prosperity.
Chapter 5 adds the body to Sullivan’s conception of the everyday through the inclusion of the phenomenological theories of Maurice Merleau-Ponty and the more recent field of the anthropology of the senses. Although ample efforts are made within this chapter to combine the work of Merleau-Ponty and anthropologist Constance Classen, Sullivan frequently overstates the compatibility of these two theorists of the sensorium.
Phenomenology implies the study of consciousness that involves how humans understand their place in the world, often through the social roles that serve as essential patterning mechanisms for understanding one’s own behavior. Merleau-Ponty defined such personal understanding as emerging primarily from conceptualizing the role of the individual’s body within the world. Classen and other scholars of the anthropology of the senses frequently analyze sensory behaviors as less focused on the individual body and more reliant upon cultural learning in the making of how one understands the hierarchy of the senses within one’s own culture.
There is consequently much divide among sensory scholars who engage disability studies, anthropology, and different non-Western cultural hierarchies of the senses and those scholars who absorb ideas of affect and phenomenological methodologies to describe Western sensoriums. Sullivan’s chapter often glosses over these methodological incompatibilities through a tangential reading of the intersensorial, or the belief that understanding interrelationships between the senses is a better way to comprehend perception than a hierarchy of five separated senses.
Sullivan’s essential element for future analysis of the everyday, geography, arrives in chapter 6 through an examination of Western embodied consciousness and the place of the mind that exists within the world as both an object of analysis and an object that analyzes. Reading Jane Bennet, Sullivan articulates that the structures of the everyday include so many components, subjects, and objects as to frequently become a system that lacks spatial boundaries. Here, the author missed an imperative space to engage the work of theorist Michel Serres, who has consistently analyzed the everyday through similar sensory, temporal, and spatial questions. Nevertheless, Sullivan adeptly concludes his monograph through arguing that inserting geography into the study of the everyday grounds the understanding of everyday behaviors to a greater degree within a set of spatial limits than previous scholarship and the attempts to articulate the everyday from other singular fields.
A synthetic and short work, Geography of the Everyday is also an engaging read. There are moments of deep intellectual commitment with important theories of the everyday that often borrow from many scholars while taking their works on novel and fresh pathways. For those looking for a new totalizing theory of the everyday, this edition often hesitates to come to a superior understanding of everyday behavior by focusing on either individual agency or social controls. Rather than offering such a totalizing theory, this imperious work primes new debates on the everyday by pairing theories and scholars who have rarely been combined. The work should therefore be read by scholars of critical theory, sensory studies, and geography.
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Citation:
Andrew J. Kettler. Review of Sullivan, Robert E., The Geography of the Everyday: Toward an Understanding of the Given.
H-Socialisms, H-Net Reviews.
February, 2019.
URL: http://www.h-net.org/reviews/showrev.php?id=52360
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