Excessive Living

Abstract

What happens when “much” becomes “too much”? This paper explores ways in which people develop cultural competences and technologies for managing overflow in everyday life. What kinds of abilities, from routinization to multi‐tasking, are necessary in order to be able to consume more, to coordinate many tasks, digest more information? Such skills are often naturalized into invisibility. They tend to become visible in situations of crisis and the paper takes its starting point in experiences of overload and burn‐out. The last part of the paper looks at how discussions of overload and excess often get trapped into ideas of a moral economy. The longing for a less stressful or complex everyday becomes a utopia located in a nostalgic past or a reformed future.

Key words:

• Consumption
• Overflow management
• Multi‐tasking
• Habituation
• Excess

Notes

1. My paper draws on a recently started research project, ‘Home Made: The Cultural Production of the Inconspicuous’, which looks at how people handle all the seemingly mundane and unobtrusive routines and tools necessary for surviving modern everyday life (see ⟨www.etn.lu.se/homemade/⟩) as well as the discussions in the interdisciplinary research network, ‘Managing overflow’. My paper has grown out of the stimulating discussions in these two contexts and benefited from a number of constructive comments from Barbara Czarniawska, Billy Ehn, Jonas Frykman, Tom O'Dell, Anne Pyburn, Richard Wilk, and Robert Willim, as well as from two anonymous reviewers.

2. The in‐depth interviews are being carried out by myself and Anne‐Marie Palm in an ongoing interdisciplinary project on working life stress. So far 20 interviews have been carried out (see Löfgren and Palm, 2005). I have also carried out another interview study with 18 managers in a city administration who all were participants in a stress‐prevention project, which has provided additional background material.

3. See, for example, de Certeau's (1984: 45ff) critique of the passive nature of the concept, Probyn (2005: 250ff) on its tendency to be ‘resistant to any notion of change’, and Billig (1995:2) on the need for a stronger focus on ‘enhabitation’.

4. The discussion is based upon questionnaires where informants narrate their media life histories (see Löfgren, 1990 for a discussion of the material), as well as a number of detailed documentations of contemporary family life carried out by Swedish museums in the 1970s and 1980s, in the SAMDOK project.

5. See, for example, Anderson, 2001.

6. There is a rich literature on the social and cultural history of reading. Some of it is discussed and summarized in Thomas Laqueur (2003); see also Petroski (1992) and Kittler (1999) for two different approaches to the field.

7. For example, J.K. Galbraith's (1958) The Affluent Society, Bertrand Russell's (1960) In Praise of Idleness, David Riesman's (1961) The Lonely Crowd, Erich Fromm's (1963) The Art of Loving and Walter Kerr's (1965) The Decline of Pleasure. This genre of cultural critique and future gazing has its ups and downs. It is striking that the 1960s produced a large number of books. The new affluence that also gave the working class in many Western countries access to the world of goods is probably one of the reasons for this.