Ruth Mcelroy

The (re)making of home on national screens

 This article explores how home is made and re-made on national television screens by reference to new domestic lifestyle genres. Through a comparative analysis of the property TV of English-language broadcasters in the UK and US, as well as the minority-language Welsh broadcaster S4C, this article examines the inter-relationship of domestic scenes of private homes with the formation of national constructions of homelands and national belonging. The aestheticization of everyday home life is tied both to distinct material cultural practices and to the politics of taste in the formation of cultural identities within distinct national locales.

 do-it-yourself, home, identity, lifestyle television, material culture, nation, national screens, property TV, taste

. Frances Bonner's (2005) analysis of the trade in lifestyle formats and Anna Everett's (2004) exploration of the US cable network HGTV are exceptions in that they explore the specificity of local programming, yet neither quite gets under the skin of property TV's relationship not just to local production/reception contexts, but also to the formation of national cultures and identities. This article addresses the national work of lifestyle television and considers how new formats mediate the long-standing intimacy of television's address and its capacity to make the national domestic. It examines how lifestyle might be understood not as the replacement of one mode of belonging by another (for instance, the primacy of class as paid-work by the privatized, aspirational culture of home ownership), but instead as an example of how long-standing units of identity and belonging such as 'nation' are re-cast and re-moulded within the cultures of contemporary consumption.

My analysis of taste on lifestyle television speaks both to the adoption of Pierre [START_REF] Bourdieu | Distinction: A Social Critique of the Judgement of Taste[END_REF] work as a key referent in the analysis of this new televisual form, and to criticisms made by, for example, Celia [START_REF] Lury | Consumer Culture[END_REF] who has noted how Bourdieu's framework underplays the importance of national dispositions and attitudes towards the aesthetic and the diverse 'cultural repertoires' they make available to national subjects. Focussing upon a distinct sub-genre of lifestyle -the property show -this article explores the screening of house, home and belonging in three national broadcast locations. First, I examine British national television, with a focus upon the publicly owned publisher/broadcaster Channel 4; second, an example of minority-language media's airing of lifestyle is assessed in the shape of the Welsh-language fourth channel Sianel Pedwar Cymru (S4C); and finally, the US subscription broadcaster Home and Garden TV (HGTV) is considered as an example of how lifestyle television on the other side of the Atlantic throws into relief the more quotidian elements of such programming as they appear on European, but most especially UK, screens.

My interest is in how property TV brings together aestheticized shapings of home with scenes of national life, and does so imaginatively and educationally on our small screens. Property TV places the acquisition, exhibition, inhabitation or transfer of homes at the centre of lifestyle programming. It makes the idea and material realities of property ownership mundane, common, exhilarating and compelling. It places in the public sphere the narrativization and performance of home-making as an everyday activity. For some, this manoeuvre is indicative of an unhealthy shift (unhealthy, that is, for the body politic) from a public sphere characterized in media terms by hard news, quality drama and documentary, towards one marked by soft news, affective/sensational dramas, and makeover shows. As Charlotte Brunsdon et al. have argued, not only are the gendered dynamics of such critiques under-theorized by those who make them, but in using such 'falsely polarized categories of classification' they 'mask the more complex and interesting issues generated by those shifts' themselves (2001: 33). Houses pose a problem for arguments premised on the logic of public versus private. Joe Moran addresses this when he writes that:

Houses are where we spend most of our quotidian lives … But the mundane everydayness of the house tends to be unacknowledged because, more than any other quotidian space, it has become entangled with a logic of privatized consumption. In modern western societies, the house owes its cultural and emotional power to its capacity to separate itself ideologically from the public spaces of everyday life. (Moran, 2004: 608) My analysis of property TV seeks to traverse the citizen and consumer binary particularly as used in a wider thesis of the privatization of modern life. Robert A. Putnam's Bowling Alone (2000) stands as perhaps the most canonical of social capital analyses of these changing patterns of sociability. As Lewis et al. (2005: 1) argue, 'Putnam presents the reader with a wealth of evidence suggesting that community-based and civic activity … is being replaced by individual or domestic forms of leisure or consumption. In short, rather than engaging with our fellow citizens, we are sitting at home watching TV. ' Watching property TV is a very particular, mediated form of engaging with our fellow citizens. Whilst it rests upon the close relationship of home ownership to citizenship in some national contexts, it also offers a compelling crossing of the domestic threshold. This traversal can be set against the point made by Daniel Miller (2001: 1) that in 'industrialized societies, most of what matters to people is happening behind the closed doors of the private sphere'. Property TV, in making the domestic national, sutures the making of home to the making of the nation, and more broadly to the making and negotiation of national belonging. In tracing how home -as property, place and the site of affective belongings -is articulated within distinct national frameworks, this article suggests that property TV can be read productively as an instance of 'banal nationalism' [START_REF] Billig | Banal Nationalism[END_REF] operating within what Frances [START_REF] Bonner | Ordinary Television: Analyzing Popular TV[END_REF] describes as 'ordinary television'.

Home, taste and property TV

Houses become homes through our material re-shaping of them, yet few of us can conceptualize our homes without relay to the place of their and our location. Home is always embedded in another map of spatialized meaning. As Judy Attfield argues:

The dwelling can be conceptualised as a … space for the transaction of individuality, a starting point and return from the external world … Boundaries are not as impermeable as they might first appear. Just as important are the transitional points -the thresholds, windows, doors, entrances and exits, walls, and facades used to transact, allow, bar or control access to change. (2000: 178) Our homes are always somewhere, linked to others on our street or against those on the other side of town. Such linkages may be played out in terms of class and ethnic distinctions and through the expressivity of style, but also through the imagined perspective of others' judgements. Allison [START_REF] Clarke | The Aesthetics of Social Aspiration[END_REF] ethnography of home decoration on a north London council estate suggests that the boundaries of the home were -contra Attfield -quite fixed, with little visiting happening between residents. Clarke contrasts her findings with Marianne [START_REF] Gullestad | Kitchen Table Society: A Case Study of the Family Life and Friendships of Young Working-Class Mothers in Urban Norway[END_REF] research into Norwegian home decorators, for whom neighbourly visits were more routine and more routinely anticipated: an example of how the domestic rhythms of everyday life may be nationally -as well as regionally and class -varied. Clarke details significant efforts made by the workingclass inhabitants of this state housing to maintain and alter their homes' appearance. In such cases, actual display to or intrusion by outsiders was not the point: it was the imaginative possibility of such events, and their attendant social meanings, that mattered:

[T]his ethnographic example shows how the ideal home, as used to influence the construction of the actual home, becomes an internalised vision of what other people might think of one. Far from being a site of crude emulation, the house itself actually becomes the 'others'. The house objectifies the vision the occupants have of themselves in the eyes of others and … becomes an entity and process to live up to, give time to, show off to. (Clarke, 2001: 42) We can perceive here a powerful history of working-class susceptibility to the external, judging gaze (see [START_REF] Skeggs | Class, Self, Culture[END_REF]. The working class is often positioned as lacking the cultural capital to actualize an aestheticized sense of self and of home, yet Clarke's working-class inhabitants demonstrate the routine and productive imaginative labour undertaken by those who do not own their own homes. This is worth keeping in mind when considering television's address to homeowners.

Since the mid-20th century at least, many men and women have laboured away their leisure time in pursuit of a distinct form of material cultural practice -DIY. In deciding that professionals were not required and that you could do-it-yourself, home improvers helped to transform our economic relationships to home, our rhythms of weekend life, and our susceptibility to and skill in self-fashioning at a time when resourcesboth material and temporal -were rapidly changing (see [START_REF] Goldstein | Do It Yourself: Home Improvement in 20th-Century America[END_REF]. Lynne Segal (1988: 70) situates the rise of DIY in the context of the gendered changes of 1950s Britain, where men had 'returned from battlefield to bungalow with new expectations of the comforts and pleasures of home'. Alan Tomlinson (1990: 64) looks to an earlier period, arguing that in the aftermath of the First World War, we see a 'decreasing inhibition about design: the dwelling was to be an expression of personal taste, a personalized project'. Focussing on the US, Steven [START_REF] Gelber | Do-It-Yourself: Constructing, Repairing and Maintaining Domestic Masculinity[END_REF] sees the emergence of DIY as a masculine cultural domestic practice stretching back to the 1890s and the increase in American home ownership. As I have argued elsewhere [START_REF] Mcelroy | Labouring at Leisure: Aspects of Lifestyle and the Rise of Home Improvement[END_REF], DIY is not a new phenomenon, but within the past decade, the highs and lows of home ownership and home improvement have been transformed from the relatively private stresses of DIY into mass-audience scenes of lifestyle formation. The DIY market, to which property TV is intimately tied, is nationally contingent, with those states where home ownership is most widespread being more likely to have an established and expanding DIY retail sector. The fashioning of house as home has become a public televisual spectacle, enabling us to witness and share in the triumphs and disasters of strangers' home styling, from their laminate flooring and garden decking to their period features and ambient lighting.

For some commentators, including the BBC journalist John Humphrys, in his 2004 McTaggart Lecture delivered to the Edinburgh Television Festival, these programming trends are 'damaging' because they 'erode the distinction between the public and the private, which is a profoundly important aspect of our culture' [START_REF] Humphrys | McTaggart Lecture[END_REF]. However, television itself has transformed the material and social space of the home. As John Corner argues:

Television reworks the meanings of home life in modernity by developing new modes of linkage and separation between world and home, between public and private … Within the new system of culturally formative alignments, home space becomes permeable to the public world and the wider popular culture in ways which effect a radical change in both. (1999: 87) Humphrys was right to highlight the rise of a new form of television, one in which first-hand experience, high emotion and the witness of strangers' intimate human actions play a key role. For Rachel Moseley (2000: 301), makeover television is indicative of changes within public service broadcasting so that it 'now extends to the care of the self, the home and the garden'. In looking at property TV, we can add to this list the care of the nation and of our sense of place. It is possible to argue that property TV fulfils Reithian aims to inform, educate and entertain. Thus it informs the audience of house prices across the regions of the country, it educates them in making money from investing in and improving property, and it entertains in its narrative quest for the best price, the ideal home or the most accomplished interior makeover. The argument that a public service approach does not sit with this programming ignores both the informational and educational elements of such shows and, more importantly, their modes of address to viewers as home owners. Home owners -addressed as citizens and consumers -are also addressed as imaginative agents, their aspiration to change itself providing a route into citizenship via their stylized consumption. As Dorothy Hobson argues, 'Lifestyle programmes are redefining factual television -and to the extent that they address the practical interests and emotional needs of their audiences, executives could describe these programmes as addressing viewers' dreams and aspirations and citizens' rights' [START_REF] Hobson | How the Lifestyle you Watch is Changing[END_REF].

In contrast, [START_REF] Giles | Keeping the Public in Their Place: Audience Participation in Lifestyle Television Programming[END_REF] regards property shows as offering false promises of empowerment and inclusion to the television audience. Instead, he sees a more regulatory mode at work: 'much of the time, lifestyle programming is more about educating the audience in judgements of taste than disseminating skills and knowledge ' (2002: 607). Property TV may be homogenizing, in that fashionable design solutions are endlessly replayed so that, for example, it seems every episode of Property Ladder (Channel 4) or House Doctor (Five) advises us to replace carpet with wooden flooring. However, being educated in matters of taste is no small matter given that taste has itself become an important terrain for working out social difference. Taste is an important audience hook, as John Ellis has argued of the BBC makeover show, Changing Rooms:

The appeal of the programme lies in its address to questions of class and taste, style and appearance. This takes place across a powerful emotional dynamic, involving an insight into the nature of the relationships of the two couples, with their neighbours and even with the professional designers who behave with a degree of pantomime exaggeration. (Ellis, 2000: 174) The ability to negotiate taste has come to be regarded as increasingly important in the formation of social identities and social hierarchies, especially within the context of shifts in other forms of social belonging such as social class and locale. Taste is an engine of contemporary material culture, one that both restricts and energizes creative possibilities for those subjects able economically and culturally to harness its potential. In their analysis of domestic styles and architecture in four upper-and middle-class neighbourhoods in the Danish city of Aarhus, Kirsten Gram-Hanssen and Claus Bech-Danielsen ( 2004) examine how taste operates within a context of cultural displacement and social mobility. Focussing upon 'a self-made man who has worked his way up as a businessman' who moved to a highincome neighbourhood, they explore how he and his family felt excluded by established residents. From the outset, the family felt diminished in the eyes of others because their house was a new build, albeit in an old villa style. The participants detail an extraordinarily vivid scene of polite disdain over everyday matters of domestic taste, one that is reminiscent of property TV's dramas:

Woman: 'We travel once a year with our caravan and everything. It is a bit atypical out here.' Man: 'Yes, the others find that quite funny.'

[…]

Man: 'I just started to high-pressure clean our flagstones in the garden. The neighbours think it is dreadful that we clean the flagstones, as they have enough to do cleaning their floors.' Woman: 'Yes, there we are also a bit different. ' (2004: 22) Taste matters because it can be translated into economic value -for example, through enabling vendors to achieve a higher selling price for their property -and because it can enable some of us to form a sense of identity and commonality which may be eroded by the unsettling shifts of location and class that characterize a post-Fordist society. Taste, and its narrativization through lifestyle, may also offer a way of suturing older forms of belonging with new performances of cultural identity. As my analysis below suggests, property TV offers a space in which to draw upon distinct national forms of taste alongside a self-conscious awareness of newer lifestyles. For instance, in an episode of the Welsh commissioning broadcaster S4C's Pedair Wal ('Four Walls', produced by the independent company Fflic for S4C), we meet a woman who has returned to Wales from London in order to teach in a local school. Her home is a converted primary school in the village of Manafon in Wales' most sparsely populated county, Powys. In an early scene we see the following sequence:

1. Long shot of silhouetted animals on a hillside; 2. Shot of a blue sky with clouds; 3. Mid-shot of a window of the school/house looking through to an old church; 4. Mid-shot of the roof and restored eaves of the school/house; 5. Close-up of a new hook with a rope holding down what we presume is a blind; 6. Mid-shot of an old Celtic cross in a graveyard.

At this point the presenter, Aled Samuel, asks Anne: 'is there comfort in living next to a graveyard?', and we then cut to the interior to see both standing on newly varnished wooden floors in a kitchen comprising an Aga, reclaimed sycamore wooden tops and MDF (medium density fibreboard) cupboards. Visually and discursively, we are invited to witness, and thereby participate in, the negotiation of the modern -signified by the familiar icons of home design, such as wooden flooring and metal hooks -and the historic -signified both through a naturalized landscape and by iconic images of an old Wales, in the form of the cross, the graveyard and the church. Taste here is a matter of selecting the right objects to create the right 'look' and thereby a pleasing lifestyle, but it is also occurring within another narrative -that of the migrant returnee whose sense of place goes beyond faithfulness to architecture and extends instead to a materialized sense of belonging conveyed on screen by the graveyard. An older form of belonging -one that is place-and linguistically based -is operating here alongside a familiar scene of a fashionably designed lifestyle. Whilst some of the actual objects, such as the flooring, are common to programmes in the genre, the chain of signification within which they are cast tells a more complex story of how we produce home. As Frances Bonner (2003: 5) argues, 'television programmes do not remain the same when surrounded by material originating elsewhere and watched by audiences with different cultural backgrounds'. Property TV may be less a radical break away from older forms of public service broadcasting, and more a gradual shift towards a self-conscious, and possibly anxious, concern with how to negotiate different ways of being at home both in one's own house and also within the wider geography and culture of which we are a part.

Making home, making nation

How does property TV function as the making and re-making of nation?

One way to answer this is to consider television's role as a mass medium that mediates nation through the symbolism of home, and does so precisely through its homeliness. David Morley examines how: national broadcasting can … create a sense of unity -and of corresponding boundaries around the nation; it can link the peripheral to the centre; turn previously exclusive social events into mass experiences; and above all, it penetrates the domestic sphere, linking the national public into the private lives of its citizens, through the creation of both sacred and quotidian moments of national communion. Not that this process is always smooth and without tension or resistance. (2000: 107)

Morley's caveat is vital; no nation and no form of belonging is without its exclusions. In the case of television programmes, this may involve a failure to represent all citizens, a failure to represent them in the round or, more ubiquitously, by establishing a sense of normality and everydayness which is itself exclusive. Several studies have pointed to the lack of representation of ethnic minorities on British television, and lifestyle programmes have been especially guilty of this exclusionary mode. As I argue below, however, the whiteness of property TV extends beyond the ethnic identities of participants, and instead operates as the very fabric or script through which ideas of home and nation are voiced.

Whilst nationalism is easier to see in instances of the sacred -say through the Royal Broadcasts from the home of the British monarchit also operates at a low frequency, a repetitive, barely audible cue to belong. Michael Billig's concept of 'banal nationalism' is useful here. Billig defines banal nationalism as 'the ideological habits that enable the established nations of the West to be reproduced'. 'Daily,' he argues, 'the nation is indicated or flagged in the life of the citizenry' (Billig, 1995: 6). Property TV can be read as an instance of banal nationalism precisely because it flags the nation in the life not only of the citizenry, but also of the television audience. This is achieved in a myriad of ways. For example, property TV enables members of the nation to see one another in their own domestic spaces, thereby crossing boundaries which, given geographical and class distances, might never normally be crossed. For some, this journey into others' domestic lives is one of limitations of the property makeover format. Munira [START_REF] Mirza | All the Table's a Stage[END_REF] argues that 'The domestication of the nation's tastes has become so banal … Is a newly decorated room really that exciting? Especially when it is not even our rooms that have been changed, but those belonging to somebody we do not know.' Yet viewing pleasure stems precisely from seeing into other people's homesa transgression of boundaries that makes the private world intimately known and familiar on the national screen. Intimacy and proximity are the modus operandi of much of the camera work of such shows, as they allow us to observe, as no polite guest easily could, the finest of details, from bedding to coving. Such spectatorial omniscience provides the audience with a sense of commonality and knowableness, despite the diversity of participants and homes. This mode is simultaneously voyeuristic and idealistic; it provides an aspirational narrative, both for possession and for proximity, which the nation itself rarely allows.

This linkage of regional, class and stylistic difference can work as a metonymy of nation. The opening sequence of Selling Houses exemplifies how the nation is united via difference in a way that is architecturally rare on public, British streets. The sequence pans along a digitally imaged urban street in which different housing styles sit incongruously next to one another. This fictional terrace sets cottage, villa and detached mock-Tudor home alongside one another. Repeated fade-in and fade-out shots transform the houses as we pan along them, thus a brick-built home is changed to grey stone, whilst a cottage transmogrifies into a 1930s semidetached house. The strange familiarity of this unreal street draws the audience into a shared sense of national architecture, whilst promising proximity and transformation via its technique.

Strikingly, many UK Channel 4 and Five shows also forge this linkage in their pre-title sponsorship sequences. Relatively new to British screens, sponsorship sequences have become an everyday element of ordinary television. Aimed at enhancing the profile of the sponsoring company, they suture the everyday world of consumption to the television programmes they precede. The UK energy company npower sponsors Selling Houses, and its sponsorship sequence takes a rectangular frame with rounded edges through which we see a white man sitting working on a laptop, whilst in the near distance a white woman and two children are seen calling to him. The use of a frame that recalls an older-style television also hinges the domestic private life to broadcasting in a fashion that is both nostalgic and contemporary. The scene recalls DIY magazine images of the 1950s and 1960s, in which the man of the family is pictured using tools (in this case a computer rather than a hammer) whilst being admired by the family. Today, however, this representation of laboured leisure further hinges the patterns of home decoration and acquisition to other forms of home work, in what Lynne Spigel has recently described as 'conspicuous production': 'In the smart home the resident is meant to be seen working all the time' (2005: 415).

The expert presenters of property TV make the search for home into a 'project' that is both laborious and leisured, and by repeatedly situating episodes in place, they operate as conduits for banal nationalism. Presenters often say something like; 'today we are in Liverpool' (a city in northwest England). This 'we' refers not only to the presenters, but also to we the viewers, we the audience, we the people who know Liverpool but perhaps only as an abstraction, a place we may never have been. This 'we' enables the assertion of a collectivity of those who recognize Britain -who see it, know it and are enjoined by that 'we'. As Billig argues, 'the deixis of homeland invokes the national "we" and places "us" within "our" homeland ' (1995: 107). Channel 4's Location, Location, Location is especially notable for its repeated use of a two-shot of the expert presenters, Kirsty Allsop and Phil Spencer, who remind us after each commercial break that 'we' are in a certain town or city. Repeated establishing shots, accompanied by lingering landscape scenes, re-situate the audience and link us to the quest for a new home. Making the place of the house visible helps anchor the narrative to an established -though not necessarily accurate -mental map. However, in lavishing so much time and camera style to shooting scenes of place, these shows are also establishing an ethnoscape, a poetic rendering of place that is imbued with the culture and history of the national collective. In explaining how ethnoscapes emerge and operate, Anthony Smith suggests that 'the terrain in question is felt over time to provide the unique and indispensable setting for the events that shaped the community' (1999: 150). Ethnoscapes pictured in the different nations' shows vary greatly, both in terms of their presentation and operation. I shall begin with the Welsh example, because it is the most overt example of an ethnoscape as Smith defines it.

The Welsh-language channel, Sianel Pedwar Cymru [Channel Four Wales], or S4C, was established in 1981 and broadcasts its own house show, Pedair Wal [Four Walls]. It is quite different in tone from the Englishlanguage property TV shows broadcast by the UK's Channel 4 and Five. Whereas, say, Selling Houses or Location, Location, Location enable us to witness the purchase or sale of houses as they unfold, Pedair Wal works as an in situ interview of what has, for the most part, already been done or is near completion. We do not get to see the daily work of DIY, nor the minutiae of buying or selling. Instead we see the end product and, in a limited way, the beginnings of the project. On the one hand, this variation diminishes the drama of the transformation narrative and decreases the sense of liveness that characterizes these shows. We, the audience, do not get to experience that sense of parallel lives being lived through the time of the project. On the other hand, the programme's tone is more intimate because we are effectively invited in to admire the owner's handywork. Unmediated by a professional designer or property developer, the audience enters the home anticipating achievement; the spectacle is likely to be one of success rather than failure. This is largely achieved via the show's presentational structure. Where Location, Location, Location's Kirstie Allsopp and Phil Spencer, or Selling Houses' Andrew Winters, present as experts, Pedair Wal has a non-specialist broadcaster. In her analysis of garden lifestyle shows, Lisa Taylor suggests that:

The instructional close-up sequence … accompanied by an authoritative voice-over is … an outmoded means of engaging contemporary audiences. Today's more common vocabulary of address is more likely to show the personality-interpreter in mid-shot partnership with his or her clients, assessing and interpreting their needs, or re-framing their garden dreams to fit the transformative remit of a makeover design. (2002: 488) Fronting a programme with a non-expert presenter may circumvent the work necessary in making the expert seem ordinary. It also ensures that a hierarchy of knowledge is not brought into play in the relationship between participant and presenter. This presentational style has as much in common with the chat show interview as with the grammar of lifestyle programming. For example, whilst the mid-shots cited by Taylor are sometimes employed, it is more common for long-shots and shotreverse-shots to be used in constructing face-to-face conversations about home between presenter and owner. There are fewer tracking shots and consequently far less movement. What movement does exist is often under the leadership of the home owner, who guides the presenter/audience through the home, whilst pointing out selected features. Seated conversations repeatedly take place within the home and often the dialogue follows a leading question-and-answer pattern. The look is quite formal, staged and more static than that found in other UK shows. Family history may lead to revelations of personal life stories, but the tone and dialogue is akin to proximate respect than intimacy per se; the home owner's life-story is as valued as the design itself. It is quite common for at least one of the three participants in any episode to be a migrant returnee. Consequently, talk of the physical house as home carries with it a wider understanding of home as a site of belonging, desire and expectation. Whilst the programme's respectful tone seems extraordinary when set alongside the vigour and ascerbic critique of many English-language shows, Pedair Wal demonstrates that the ways of achieving televisual ordinariness differ from one national context to another.

'Ordinary' can appear extraordinary when seen from a different cultural perspective. This is explained partly by the dynamics of Wales as a small nation of approximately 3 million people, of whom approximately 21 percent are Welsh speakers. In a sense, the viewers are already intimate, not only because they constitute a minority within a small linguistic population, but also because they are electing to view S4C regularly. In this context, intimacy may only be part of the point -distance may be required to avoid the ennui of familiarity. Voyeurism, after all, requires distance, and if the chances of knowing the participant, the place, or even the house are relatively high, then this distance may be vital for all concerned.

We can explore this further by looking at the representations of place in Pedair Wal and the national work such representations perform. Whereas shows such as Location, Location, Location, Selling Houses and Grand Designs examine the specificities of places often barely known by the audience, Pedair Wal anticipates the audience's knowledge of the chosen places, often mentioning them only once. This assumption may be wrong and may exclude that segment of the audience that does not possess such knowledge. Nonetheless, because within Welsh cultural life, especially within the Welsh-speaking community, an affiliation for place (bro-garwch) is a banal form of Welsh nationalism, the gaining of this shorthand knowledge is itself a route into the Welsh community. Pedair Wal has been broadcast on S4C Digital, S4C's exclusively Welsh-language channel which broadcasts terrestrially in Wales and is available UK-wide via satellite. Pedair Wal has attracted a significant audience amongst non-Welsh speakers and learners who are able to follow by accessing the subtitling service. What at one level appears staged, laborious talk, may on another be read as educative, not simply of house design but of how to be at home within a linguistic community from which the viewer is either apart or is yet to fully comprehend. Simultaneously, the production of Welshlifestyle programming makes available to the audience the possibility of being contemporary through the medium of Welsh. It enables viewers to feel both at one with the wider UK TV culture and at the same time at home within the distinctiveness of being a Welsh speaker.

In contrast to S4C's broadcasting of home to a linguistically divided small nation, Home and Garden TV (HGTV) is a vast network operating nationally in the US cable television landscape. HGTV broadcasts a range of lifestyle programmes, from those premised on the search for a new home such as House Hunters, to makeover shows such as Design on a Dime, and those with a historical or nostalgic appeal such as Restore America. Distributed into 80 million US homes, HGTV's programmes, like much American TV generally, seem familiar yet alien to the European viewer. A perplexing feature is the frequent absence of place markers, even in a programme such as House Hunters (the nearest equivalent to Channel 4's Location, Location, Location). In an episode broadcast in August 2003, for example, we are welcomed by the presenter Suzanne Whang, and told that tonight's episode focuses upon Alex and Maria Romero and their search for a new home. His employer has transferred Alex to a new city. For the time being, they and their two young sons are living in a rented furnished apartment. Despite a detailed introduction, no mention is made of where they have moved from or where they are house hunting. Like Location, Location, Location, Property Ladder, Grand Design and others, House Hunters follows each commercial break with a synopsis to remind the audience and inform those just joined of the details of tonight's episode. On each occasion, 'new city' or 'a city they don't know' are used instead of place names. What initially seems a slight cultural difference appears increasingly like a deliberate omission. This is felt keenly in an early scene where the couple are screened talking about their feelings about their current home and their sense of loss of their former home. Speaking over a full screen image marked 'Former Home', Maria expresses longing for the space of 'our house in … uh … where we used to live'. The stilted stop at 'in', and awkward phrasing of 'where we used to live', suggest a censoring of place names that is unnatural to the speaker. Later, this is replayed when the family are screened at a children's playground, with Alex saying, 'I told Maria that the area that we are moving to is a lot different from where we came from.' These edits are especially peculiar because the Mexican-American couple are clear in their articulation of unease in their new situation; they confess 'we feel displaced'.

The absence of detailed place markers is perhaps unsurprising in such a vast nation, and one which has a housing stock, at least in some states, which is more of a period and style than that in many British regions and European countries. Given the size and federal composition of the US, it may be less likely that American viewers will feel a geographical affinity with the location of the diverse homes and their owners. Finally, the absence of a very place-based format may make for a more easily exported product. Nonetheless, this does not mean that the ethnoscape is non-existent. Instead, it becomes generic, banal and unremarkable. Rather than becoming national through rapid clueing into place or through being educated in regional difference, US property TV offers ways of being national through the ubiquity of generic American living. In the American property TV ethnoscape, nowhere acts as everywhere.

The ethnoscapes in the English-language UK shows often work to validate the aspirational mobility of participants who want to move to what are implicitly and sometimes explicitly coded as 'better areas'. Class and race are together part of the rhetoric of upward mobility. What constitutes a 'better area' may be expressed in terms of who lives there, the cost and condition of housing in the area and the amenities it offers. Whilst some of these characteristics, especially those of class, are discussed openlythink for instance of the typical voice over of the presenter telling us that there are 'lots of great restaurants serving young professionals' -the articulation of these characteristics in terms of race is more covert. The tendency of some estate agents in multi-ethnic urban areas to direct white house-hunters away from ethnically diverse areas strikes me as one common reality excluded from televisual representations. Race is not absent from the meanings of property TV or from its ethnoscapes; indeed, British social mobility is played out on the geographical scene, and in doing so it normalizes both classed and raced meanings of the nation space.

An episode of Selling Houses broadcast in 2003 exemplifies this process. Andrew Winters introduces us to Clevedon, a seaside town near Bristol, a city in southwest England. He describes Clevedon as 'a place for Clifton émigrés', Clifton being one of Bristol's most affluent areas. Winters is seen strolling through a street filled with arty shops, uniformly white and middle-class, and announces that 'New restaurants and boutiques always spring up when professionals move into an area'. Deeply raced and classed understandings of British space thus appear as mundane, selfevident truths. By going uncontested, they become, to recall Smith's words, 'the indispensable setting for the events of the community' (Smith, 1999: 150).

Property TV marks its boundaries of ordinariness not only through exclusion, but also through partial inclusion. Lifestyle television's potential to democratize and be inclusive in its representations of the everyday is often seductive and sometimes persuasive. Reading the home-makeover format in the US and UK, Anna Everett suggests that:

Whereas soap operas, news sports, dramatic and comedic shows position race, gender, sexual preference and even age as socio-political problems to be overcome or fixed, TTV shows … reflect these issues that speak to contemporary social realities. Successful non-white couples, including blacks, Asians, and Latino/as, are shown not as societal threats, menaces and perils, but as 'everyday people' … normal and helpful suburban neighbours … These 'untraditional' families are not treated as special cases nor bracketed in ghettoized viewing blocs. Rather, they underscore the new 'reality' of American life that most other 'reality' shows fail to engage, or problematically sensationalize. (2004: 175) It is notable how 'successful' operates here to link normality to the ownership of property. Those once deemed 'improper' subjects by the American constitution (notably African-Americans) may, in the 21st century, become proper suburbanites through home ownership, yet the exceptionalism of this non-white middle class goes only so far in eradicating both social inequalities of housing and dominant cultural configurations of proper personhood that are classed, raced and gendered (see [START_REF] Skeggs | Class, Self, Culture[END_REF][START_REF] Wood | Biographical note Ruth McElroy is Senior Lecturer in communication, cultural and media studies at the University of Glamorgan. Her research centres around questions of home and cultural identity, with a focus on imbrications of gender and nationhood. She has published on minority-language media and culture in journals such as Critical Studies in Television and Journal for the Study of British Cultures, and is[END_REF]. Everett also notes a striking difference in the ethnic diversity of participants in US and UK versions of the domestic makeover:

Changing Rooms seems to feature more urban (and even rural) environments with homogenous white homeowners … Trading Spaces, and its spinoff Trading Spaces Family by contrast, are predominantly set in American suburban communities where heterogeneity, in the form of interracial couples and families, is not unusual … Where Trading Spaces appears more inclusive in terms of race and gender, Changing Rooms seems more inclusive where class is concerned. (2004: 172) Class and ethnicity together differentiate patterns of home ownership in the UK. These differences are attributable in part to the history of migration to the UK. For example, the Economic and Social Research Council (ESRC) notes that: 'Ownership varies markedly by ethnic group. In 2001, 80 per cent of Indians and 70 per cent of White British people and those of Pakistani origin were owner-occupiers, compared to only 25 per cent of those of Black African origin' (ESRC, 2007). In a sample episode of Location, Location, Location, for instance, we see a rare instance of a Black couple appearing on the show. They are moving from the ethnically diverse town of Slough, near London, into rural Berkshire, a less ethnically diverse and more affluent part of the county. With lingering shots of Windsor castle, Ascot and boats on the river, the scene epitomizes the ethnoscape of idealized England, whilst the montage tells a story of class mobility, an instance of both Black and middle-class flight from suburbia into the promise of rural England. English ethnoscapes are thus sutured to the personal quest of the house-hunters.

In one sequence, we are told that the presenters are 'trying to find a much bigger house for Anita and Paul'. What we are shown is, first, an old brick farmhouse on the river, then a boat on the river alongside green pasture. The narrative sequence allows the allure of the scenery to stand for a complex social narrative of flight, and in the appealing lighting and shooting of the rural scenes, it legitimises a narrative of desire for an English idyll. This narrative is re-told in a later sequence, when the audience is reminded of 'this week's project'. Opening with the image of a suburban house -named as Anita and Paul's -it cuts to a full screen image of an oak tree, a symbolic embodiment of English nature and tradition. No people are in-screen; the sheer size and age of the tree dominates. Thus, the rural ethnoscape is revealed and the promise of rooted belongings made available. This vision of England is national, but also local. For example, the house search takes the family to Binfield, described by one of the presenters as 'a great village'. The sequence consists of quiet country lanes that, although showing several detached houses, have no traffic or parked cars. Instead, we get lush gardens and a country gate, whilst the editing works to suture this image of quiet affluence to the family themselves. Rapid editing offers movement that contrasts sharply with the Welsh and US shows analysed above, whilst the use of drive-by camera shots connotes an ease of movement through attractive scenes of well-to-do houses. However, this iconography of English village life is undercut by Anita herself when she enters the home that has been so carefully placed to seem appealing. In contrast with the older large brick properties screened, the house presented appears modern and 'inauthentic'. It has new mock-latticed windows, has no front garden and fails to live up to the dream homes previously screened. Phil Spencer invites Anita to say what she thinks of it. She explains -with animated rejection -that 'I can't believe where I am!'. 'Where she is' is not just a reference to the house's location, but to the situation in which she finds herself. Anita is incredulous and frustrated at the realities of the rural housing market she wishes to enter in order to attain the lifestyle of middle-class Berkshire. Given that a repeated regulatory discourse in the show is the need to 'know your market' and be prepared to compromise, the programme itself works to co-opt this resistant position into a sign of personal rather than societal failure. Anita's vocal disappointment (recalling perhaps the Mexican-American couple's claim of 'we feel displaced') suggests that the promise of social mobility cannot be reconciled with her stylistic desires for a superior English rural property. Although the programme itself has visually constructed this idealized ethnoscape, Anita's desires are cast as irrational and ill-founded. For example, Phil draws out Anita's name in exasperation, as if to rebuke her for being so unreasonable. Anita's frustration speaks of a refusal to accept the regulation of classed desires, the 'being realistic' which both presenters push. For Anita, the everyday house is insufficient and she refuses to accept such a limitation on her desires and aspirations. In this sense, she rehearses one of the most striking scripts in these shows -the desire to aspire and be mobile within the nation. However, the programme's narrative sees her exposed as being 'unrealistic' in having such desires. In her negotiation of the stylistic regime of limited house choices, Anita's taste and rejection of what is on offer provide a forceful example of how the ethnoscapes screened in property TV are sites for ordinary and banal exclusion.

Conclusion

Property TV is one example of the globalization of television genres, as the export of the BBC show Changing Places to the USA and its makeover as Trading Spaces demonstrates. However, in emphasizing the dynamism of transnational television production and consumption, we are in danger of neglecting both the differences between national programming and how national differences are put to use (see [START_REF] Waisbord | MCTV: Understanding the Global Popularity of Television Formats[END_REF]. Taste and lifestyle are important arenas for the organization of social difference in post-industrial societies. How such forms of identity and belonging are adopted and intersect with existing social hierarchies and values may differ significantly between national contexts. This is clear in that sub-genre of property TV -the relocation format -which dramatizes middle-class flight from urban to rural locations via idealized landscapes of either the home nation or, as in the case of A Place in the Sun (Channel 4), those in another nation altogether. In reading property TV, we need to understand the place of national broadcasting within consumer cultures where home ownership and residential mobility are relatively high and where the middle classes increasingly invest in property. As a material cultural practice occurring alongside the rise of consumer culture, DIY and its historical development demonstrates how predominantly middle-class home owners have taken up the tools of manual and craft workers in order to realize, with their own hands, the imaginative possibilities of domestic transformation offered by media sources such as magazines, manuals and television programmes. However, to see either DIY literature or property TV strictly as 'how-to manuals' passively adopted by the audience is to underplay their importance as sources for browsing through scenes of national domesticity. Despite the technical and discursive efforts to make homes appear ordinary and everyday, property TV displays considerable selectivity, not only in editing participants and presenters, but also in the ideas of home and taste screened. Such selectivity may be enabling, educative or affirming to the audience's own negotiations of what it means to be at home in the national spaces they occupy. Like all forms of banal nationalism, exclusion is as central to the making of national belonging as is the possibility of cosy inclusion. As Anita's outburst demonstrates, dwelling within post-industrial nations often entails exclusion and thwarted aspirations even when equipped with financial and cultural capital.

59

Property TV offers us one way of seeing how real subjects on national screens negotiate inclusion and exclusion, belonging and the unfulfilled longing to belong.


Andrew Metcalfe

Ann Game

Meetings Gifts without exchange

published or not. The documents may come   L'archive ouverte pluridisciplinaire

Durkheim and congregation

Durkheim's The Elementary Forms of the Religious Life (1976) relies on a theory of meeting. The 'cult' has 'the preponderating role' in religion because it is the regular congregation of participants in ritual that brings to consciousness the social force that people recognize through religious representations:

[W]hoever has really practised a religion knows very well that it is the cult that gives rise to these impressions of joy, of interior peace, of serenity, of enthusiasm which are, for the believer, the experimental proof of his beliefs … This is because society cannot make its influence felt unless it is in action, and it is not in action unless the individuals who compose it are assembled together and act in common. It is by common action that [society] takes consciousness of itself and realizes its position. (1976: 417-18) By meeting and acting together, people are transformed, according to Durkheim. Their senses of time, space and being are altered by the presence of others. They experience an eternal time that suspends chronological time. The objects of veneration for which they had assembled are no longer external and inert, but seem the source of the energy actually generated by assembly itself. People feel stronger, more capable, more alive.

According to Durkheim, this transformation is known through a sense of awe. The regularly repeated experience of awe, bringing awareness of the sacred, reminds people that they are not who they had been thinking they were:

[I]f collective life awakens religious thought on reaching a certain degree of intensity, it is because it brings about a state of effervescence which changes the conditions of psychic activity. Vital energies are over-excited, passions more active, sensations stronger; there are even some which are produced only at this moment. A man does not recognise himself; he feels transformed and consequently he transforms the environment which surrounds him. In order to account for the very particular impressions which he receives, he attributes to the things with which he is in most direct contact properties which they have not, exceptional powers and virtues which the objects of everyday experience do not possess. (1976: 422) This account of the lively power of congregation contains untapped conceptual potential, not consistently recognized by Durkheim himself. Later in the article we draw out its potential within a relational logic, which sees meeting as the creative presence of undefined difference. First, though, we will elaborate on the criticisms of the orthodox reading of his work, which understands meeting in terms of identity logic, as a reassertion of sameness.

Although the term conscience collective is found in Durkheim's early books (see Lukes, 1973: 4-8), it also underlies the identity-based strand of The Elementary Forms of the Religious Life. These passages imply that society is an independent being, capable of expressing its conscience through individuals who are gathered together:

It is in assimilating the ideals elaborated by society that [the individual] has become capable of conceiving the ideal. It is society which, by leading him within its sphere of action, has made him acquire the need of raising himself above the world of experience and has at the same time furnished him with the means of conceiving another. For society has constructed this new world in constructing itself, since it is society which this expresses. (Durkheim, 1976: 423) Seen this way, ritual congregation is the regular realignment of conscience whereby individuals realize their solidarity, their identity as one; meeting is the return to sameness through which society can express the sacred ideals and beliefs that direct its members.

Many have complained of the abstraction and reification that characterizes this strand of thought in Durkheim. Steven Lukes (1973: 314) and Mary Douglas (1990: xii) both offer long lists of critics referring to Durkheim's 'sociological metaphysics'. For some, Durkheim has failed by pitching his theories at a level that could not be 'validated by observation', nor explained in terms of the actions of identifiable individuals (Douglas, 1990: xii). For others, and for us, the problem is that Durkheim substitutes the total for the whole, the thing for the relation, the abstract for the real, the finite and identified society for the never-finished and non-finite social process.

Mauss and gift

Critics have often found the solutions to Durkheim's theoretical problems in the work of Mauss. Claude Lévi-Strauss, for example, sees Durkheim as the demiurge of French intellectual history, whose work gave the tradition both its power and its dangerous, unscientific tendencies (1966b, 1987). It was Mauss who led French sociology to a safe place within sight of the 'promised land' (Lévi-Strauss, 1987: 45), shifting social and cultural theory from a basis in transcendent sacredness and ritual to a more scientific and realistic basis in gift exchange: 'Mauss's mission was to finish and furnish the prodigious edifice sprung from the earth at the passage of the demiurge … and to exorcise some metaphysical phantoms that were still trailing their chains in it' (Lévi-Strauss, 1966b: 113). Mary Douglas tells a similar story:

Mauss … introduced a realistic idea of individuals in the pre-market social system where, according to Durkheim's formulations, one might expect only a community of humans mechanically connected to one another by their unquestioning use of the same ideas … [Mauss] also discovered a mechanism by which individual interests combine to make a social system, without engaging in market exchange … The gift cycle echoes Adam Smith's invisible hand … Like the market, it supplies each individual with personal incentives for collaborating in the pattern of exchanges. (Douglas, 1990: xiii-xiv) Douglas's point is highlighted by the short meeting story that Mauss tells in his conclusion to The Gift:

When two groups of men meet … they may move away or in case of mistrust or defiance they may resort to arms; or else they can come to terms … The people of Kiriwana said to Malinowski: 'The Dobu man is not good as we are. He is fierce, he is a man-eater. When we come to Dobu, we fear him, he might kill us! But see! I spit the charmed ginger root and their mind turns. They lay down their spears, they receive us well.' Nothing better expresses how close together lie festival and warfare. (Mauss, 1970: 79-80) Mauss tells this story to show the victory of reason over emotion: societies have progressed to the extent that their members and groups have been 'able to stabilize their contracts and to give, receive and repay' (Mauss, 1970: 80). Mauss's major claim was that gifts necessarily involve three inseparable actions: giving, receiving and reciprocating. Gift is always exchange: it is the fact that each step in the gift cycle is apparently voluntary and yet also obligatory that ties groups together through time. Because society is arising from the exchange between subjects, it relies on the constant reinforcement of subjecthood. In this way, Mauss derives society from opposition (cf. [START_REF] Simmel | Conflict and the Web of Group Affiliations[END_REF]. Gift exchange allows people 'to oppose one another without slaughter and to give without sacrificing themselves to others ' (1970: 80).

The connection between warfare and gift exchange explains why Mauss chooses the fiercely competitive potlatch as the model for gift giving. The key issue, he says, is the preservation and enhancement of 'face', by which he means identity, rank, dignity and persona. To give is to put the other 'in the shadow of [your] name', to seek self-certainty by 'flattening' the other, but through this agonistic process, Mauss says, groups are tied together (1970: 38). As Sahlins observed, and as Douglas's comment suggests, Mauss moved Durkheimian sociology closer to the individualist assumptions underlying British theories of social contract [START_REF] Hobbes | [END_REF][START_REF] Hobbes | [END_REF][START_REF] Macpherson | The Political Theory of Possessive Individualism[END_REF]Sahlins, 1972: 149ff; see also [START_REF] Pateman | The Sexual Contract[END_REF]. But in France, Mauss's book was to be read through its parallels with Hegel's story of the meeting of self-consciousnesses that produces the master/slave relation (Hegel, 1977: 104ff).

Sartre and reciprocity

Mauss's The Gift was published in 1925, just before French intellectual life was reshaped by Alexandre Kojève's famous lectures on Hegel. As Grosz remarks (1989: 2), these lectures left a lasting impact on a whole generation of French intellectuals, including Sartre, de Beauvoir, Lévi-Strauss, Lacan and Bataille (see Sartre, 1968: 17). This confluence of Maussian and neo-Hegelian traditions refocussed French social thought around the problems of exchange.

To illustrate this confluence of Mauss and Hegel, we will compare the meeting stories of two theorists on Grosz's list. Jean-Paul Sartre and Lévi-Strauss had well-known disagreements (see Lévi-Strauss, 1966a: 245ff;[START_REF] Sartre | Critique of Dialectical Reason[END_REF] 1976: 479ff), but the Hegelian assumptions which Sartre set out in the primal scene in Being and Nothingness [START_REF] Sartre | Being and Nothingness[END_REF] 1966) closely match the explicitly Maussian assumptions underlying the equivalent scene in Lévi-Strauss's The Elementary Structures of Kinship (Lévi-Strauss, [1949[START_REF] Lévi-Strauss | The Elementary Structures of Kinship[END_REF]. Sartre not only praised the 'excellence' of Lévi-Strauss's account [START_REF] Sartre | Critique of Dialectical Reason[END_REF] 1976: 106-7), he built upon its analysis of potlatch when bringing his thought to fruition in Critique of Dialectical Reason.

'Hell is other people,' Sartre famously claimed, and in Being and Nothingness he located hell in a public park. He imagines sitting there, in the park, grass and trees at measurable distances around him. And then the fall -another man enters the park:

[I]nstead of a grouping toward me of the objects, there is now an orientation which flees from me … [T]here is a total space which is grouped around the Other, and this space is made with my space … [T]he very quality of the object, [the grass's] deep, raw green is in direct relation to this man. This green turns toward the Other a face which escapes me. I apprehend the relation of the green to the Other as an objective relation, but I can not apprehend the green as it appears to the Other. Thus suddenly an object has appeared which has stolen the world from me … [I]t appears that the world has a kind of drain hole in the middle of its being and that it is perpetually flowing off through this hole. [START_REF] Sartre | Being and Nothingness[END_REF](Sartre, [ ] 1966: 342-3) : 342-3) In this account, the world is an array of objects set out in an abstract empty homogenous Euclidean space that is centred on the subject. The other is a thief who steals my world by threatening to turn me into an object of his world. In other words, the world is stolen because I cannot be where the other is without losing where I am. The world is his or it is mine: we do not bring the world alive for each other but steal it from one another. I look at him and, rather than the revitalization of communion and congregation, feel life drain from me.

When Sartre imagines the beginning of social life, in a public park, he sees an enactment of Hegel's master/slave story. Although he later came to criticize the individualism of this account [START_REF] Sartre | Search for a Method[END_REF], his subsequent emphasis on liberation, solidarity and revolutionary projects only tied him closer to his Hegelian assumptions. We find, therefore, that the model set out in Critique of Dialectical Reason begins from an assumption of primal scarcity and desire that serializes subjects: they are side-by-side units, unable to be face-to-face because their relation is always mediated by the 'practico-inert' upon which their rivalrous desires are fixed [START_REF] Sartre | Critique of Dialectical Reason[END_REF](Sartre, [ ] 1976: 122ff): 122ff). When Sartre tries to imagine this anti-social hell being overcome, in common revolutionary cause, he turns to the possibility of exchange, and particularly the mediated exchange of such pledges as the Tennis Court Oath. Individuals exchange pledges to a mediating identity in order to guarantee sameness against the difference of time ([1960]1976: 419-20). But although this exchange of pledges produces a unity by remaking identities around a new enemy, it is a solidarity permanently shadowed by Jacobin Terror. The 'brother' who affirms my voluntary servitude to the 'statutory group' must remain my potential enemy because they retain the ability to differ, to betray and oppose the 'us'. The Hegelian life and death struggle for self-certainty remains.

Lévi-Strauss and exchange

Lévi-Strauss must have been aware that, within the structure of his history of French sociology, he was to Mauss as Mauss was to Durkheim (see Godelier, 1999: 18). His stated 'mission' was to complete Mauss's work by removing from The Gift its own residual 'illusions ' and 'mystifications' (Lévi-Strauss, 1987: 47).

Lévi-Strauss asks us to imagine two male peasants, both strangers, who have been forced to sit 'less than a yard apart, face to face on both sides of a table in a cheap restaurant' in the south of France ([1949] 1969: 59). According to Lévi-Strauss, this situation offers 'material for inexhaustible sociological reflection'. It is 'a "total social fact" -on a microscopic scale … an example … of the formation of a group, for which … no ready-made formula of integration exists' ([1949] 1969: 58-9). From this example, Lévi-Strauss will draw out the centrality of the gift exchange, the prohibition of incest, the elementary structures of kinship and the basic exchange logic underlying all social life, whether in the field of kinship, economics, art, science or religion of culture: '[W]e believe that [these] are phenomena of the same type, that they are elements of the same cultural complex, or more exactly of the basic complex of culture' ([1949] 1969: 61) Lévi-Strauss's analysis of the diners' situation begins with the reserve and hostility that implicitly underlie Sartrean seriality:

A conflict exists … [The diners] feel both alone and together, compelled to the usual reserve between strangers, while their respective spatial positions, and their relationships to the objects and utensils of the meal, suggest, and to a certain extent call for, intimacy … An almost imperceptible anxiety is likely to arise in the minds of these table-companions with the prospect of trifling disagreements that the meeting might produce. [START_REF] Lévi-Strauss | The Elementary Structures of Kinship[END_REF]] 1969: 59) When the second diner sat down, the first was as aggrieved as the person whose green grass was stolen in Sartre's story. The otherness of each is a dangerous recalcitrance that threatens self-certainty: if I can treat the other as an object, they can do the same to me, thereby draining my world.

Lévi-Strauss resolves this Hegelian dilemma, as Sartre does in Critique, with an exchange. Each diner has before him a small bottle of wine, holding only one glassful, and one diner pours his bottle into his neighbour's glass. His neighbour immediately makes a corresponding gesture of reciprocity. Lévi-Strauss comments that this exchanging of wine … is an assertion of good grace which does away with mutual uncertainty. It substitutes a social relationship for spatial juxtaposition … Wine offered calls for wine returned, cordiality requires cordiality … In this way a whole range of trivial social ties are established by a series of alternating oscillations, in which offering gives one a right, and receiving makes one obligated, and always beyond what has been given or accepted. ([1949] 1969: 59) We will return later to the concepts of good grace and calling, which we think Lévi-Strauss misunderstands. At the moment we observe that social life is, in this account, the by-product of the actions of desirous subjects acting on a world of objects. If social life is a series of oscillating exchanges, social relationships are not the replacement of juxtaposition, as Lévi-Strauss claims, but only the simple alternation of positions. Relations are simply seen as exchanges of objects by would-be subjects, taking place in Euclidean space and chronological time. Because the other is only a mirror of the self, there is no creative difference in this interchange. This is a long way from Durkheim's emphasis on awe and effervescence, on ontological, spatial and temporal transformation.

Although Lévi-Strauss suggests that exchanges are not always calculated ([1949] 1969: 42), his conclusion to the diners' story suggests that strategy is fundamental to exchange logic. Just as solidarity for Sartre is the organization of terror, the gift exchange is a form of potlatch for Lévi-Strauss, another manifestation of the Hegelian life-and-death struggle for self-certainty. Accordingly, Lévi-Strauss links the meeting of the diners to the meeting in the marketplace of the Chukchee people, who proffer their goods on spear points:

The person beginning the cycle [by pouring the first glass of wine] seizes the initiative, and the greater social ease which he has displayed puts him at an advantage. For the opening always involves a risk, in that the table-companion may respond to the drink offered with a less generous glass, or the contrary risk that he will take the liberty to bid higher, obliging the one who made the first offer (and we must not forget that the bottle is small) either to lose his last trump as his last drop, or to sacrifice another bottle for the sake of prestige … [T]he respective attitudes of the strangers in the restaurant appear to be an infinitely distant projection … of a fundamental situation, that of individuals of primitive bands coming into contact for the first time. [START_REF] Lévi-Strauss | The Elementary Structures of Kinship[END_REF]] 1969: 60;cf. Bataille, 1985) As Lévi-Strauss says, the history of French sociological thought is the triumph of this exchange theory. The exchange assumptions underlying his structuralism became central to anthropology, and, when reworked, to feminist theory (e.g. Irigaray, 1985: 170;[START_REF] Pateman | The Sexual Contract[END_REF][START_REF] Rubin | The Traffic in Women[END_REF], and the Hegelian assumptions that he and others advanced remain fundamental in post-structuralism and deconstruction (see, for example, Schrift, 1997;Wyschogrod et al. 2002). Today, wherever you look in sociology and cultural studies, you see the taken-for-granted language of exchange: the subjects, desires, calculations and objects; the power and counter-power; the temporal sequence between giving, receiving and re-ciprocating; the spatial distance between giver and receiver, affirmed and mediated by the movement of objects. Theorists who might once have criticized the individualism of contract theory think nothing of basing their thought on subjectivity and the possibility of inter-subjectivity (Cixous, 1986: 78ff). Social theorists ostensibly talking of the gift unthinkingly switch to talking of gift exchange, insisting that the free gift is impossible (e.g. Cixous, 1986: 87;Douglas, 1990: vii) or that the gift is impossible (e.g. Derrida, 1994: 12).

To demonstrate the prevalence of exchange assumptions, let us look a little more closely at Derrida's deconstruction of the gift. The gift is impossible, he says, because it is always annulled by the obligation to reciprocate: 'For there to be a gift, there must be no reciprocity, return, exchange, countergift, or debt' (Derrida, 1994: 11-12). The aporetic 'paralysis' of the gift in Derrida's account (1994: 28) derives from his Hegelian assumption that gifts necessarily involve desires and intentions: 'There is no gift without the intention of giving ' (1994: 123); 'some "one" gives some "thing" to some "one other"' (1994: 11-12):

It supposes a subject and a verb, a constituted subject, which can also be a collective … a subject identical to itself and conscious of its identity, indeed seeking through the gesture of the gift to constitute its own unity, and, precisely, to get its own identity recognized so that that identity comes back to it. (1994: 11) While a pure gift, according to Derrida, would elude the world of subjects and objects -'if there is a gift, it cannot take place between two subjects exchanging objects ' (1994: 24) -the Hegelian point of departure makes an alternative ontology impossible. For Derrida, the gift simply must involve desiring subjects, even if this pre-requisite annuls the gift. Thus, he concludes, a 'consistent discourse on the gift becomes impossible ' (1994: 24).

Let us return, then, to Lévi-Strauss's story, for underneath its triumphant tone is an anxiety that points to a different reading of the history of social and cultural theory. By basing his succession on Mauss's break from Durkheim, Lévi-Strauss revealed his fear of the ghosts he had imprisoned there. The account of ritual congregation in The Elementary Forms of the Religious Life offers important insights into the nature of the meeting, and the nature of the gift, which unsettle the exchange theory of The Elementary Structures of Kinship.

To see what is repressed within the triumphant view of the gift and exchange, we will look more carefully at the phenomenon of congregation. There are three elements in the common reading of Durkheim that we will specifically reconsider: first, the conscience collective; second, the sacred; third, moral forces. We will use stories of meetings by Bohm, Levinas and Buber to show that there are ways to read Durkheim that do not involve the metaphysical reification of society. In doing so, we will acknowledge the important issues raised by Durkheim that have been obscured by exchange logic.

Bohm and dialogue

Let us first take the issue of conscience collective and, more generally, the nature of the transformation of consciousness that can occur when people meet. Is it possible to think of this as other than a form of group mind? Must we assume that thinking occurs in either the mind of the individual or the mind of the society (see Buber, 1966: 113)?

Gregory [START_REF] Bateson | Steps to an Ecology of Mind[END_REF] queried the assumption of an identifiable subject of thought when he named his book Steps to an Ecology of Mind. According to Bateson, mind is an ecological quality because 'mental characteristics are inherent or immanent in the ensemble as a whole ' (1972: 315). Open-mindedness is ecological, not an oscillation between the defined positions of subjects but the sense of differences within a non-finite network characterized by feedback. Within such a network, each participation is significant, but there is no way of knowing what causes what (cf. [START_REF] Merleau-Ponty | Phenomenology, Language and Sociology[END_REF]. This is a social mind without the metaphysical qualities that Durkheim often attributed to the conscience collective.

To explore this possibility, we will look at a meeting story offered by the physicist David Bohm, whose interest in the implicated potential of the whole developed into an interest in dialogue. Identity theory is so prevalent that people frequently assume that 'dialogue' refers to two voices, just as monologue refers to one (see [START_REF] Burbules | Theory and Research on Teaching as Dialogue[END_REF]Bruce, 2001: 1106). Instead, as Bohm points out, the 'dia' of dialogue primarily indicates 'through'. It points not to exchange but to a non-finite ontology of meeting and relation that cannot be built up from a base of individual identities. Dialogue implies 'a new kind of mind' according to Bohm: one that carries and is carried by those who meet through it (1985: 175; see also [START_REF] Bohm | Thought as a System[END_REF][START_REF] Bohm | On Dialogue[END_REF][START_REF] Bohm | On Creativity[END_REF]. Dialogue is not located in any or even all of the individual participants, but rather in a whole that is incommensurable with the sum of the finite parts.

Bohm's story concerns a weekend dialogue in which he participated. This began as a finite exchange between subjects and objects, but became a meeting of non-finite ideas that were everyone's and no-one's:

In the beginning, people were expressing fixed positions, which they were tending to defend, but later it became clear that to maintain the feeling of friendship in the group was much more important than to hold any position. Such friendship has an impersonal quality in the sense that its establishment does not depend on a close personal relationship between participants. A new kind of mind thus begins to come into being which is based on the development of a common meaning that is constantly transforming in the process of dialogue … In this development the group has no pre-established purpose, though at each moment a purpose that is free to change may reveal itself. The group thus begins to engage in a new dynamic relationship in which no speaker is excluded, and in which no particular content is excluded. (Bohm, 1985: 175) Initially defending positions and identities, people were changed by the realization that what they were doing together was more important than the protection of the self. At that moment, the thinking process that had been hard and dangerous became easy and safe: what people needed in order to unfold still-implicated ideas was effortlessly supplied, without need for the desire to do so. The creativity of the meeting came not from the gifted contributions of this or that subject, but from the grace, the gift, of the non-finite relation in which all participated. It is important to notice, however, that the thought on this weekend was not uniform or group thought. It was characterized by the infinitude of creative potential, rather than the univocality of the finite one. Whereas the self-conscious society can only exist through its exclusion of the other society, there were no exclusions in this meeting, no ideas that were out of bounds.

It is not simply metaphorical to say that the meeting of dialogue opens new worlds and expands minds: our difference as beings allows us to see the world differently. Whereas people who identify with knowledge see the world and others only for what these say about themselves, people who meet in dialogue are able to hear the differences offered by others, because they are not personally affronted. Through the play of differences, they are making something that they share with others but which is no-one's personal property. We find ourselves through the difference that others allow us to recognize in ourselves! Not limited to meetings between people, dialogue refers to any encounter that respects the world's difference (see [START_REF] Hyde | The Gift[END_REF][START_REF] Murdoch | The Sovereignty of Good[END_REF][START_REF] Steiner | Real Presences[END_REF][START_REF] Weil | Gravity and Grace[END_REF]. It follows that real meeting with the world is an effervescent and transformative learning experience and that there is no learning without this meeting with difference. Moreover, if there is no learning, no sense that one experience significantly differs from another, there is no sense of aliveness. As Martin Buber put it, '[a]ll real living is meeting' (Buber, 1958: 11); without meeting, we are alienated from the flow of difference and trapped in the hell of seriality.

So let us now return to Durkheim's claim that congregation produces a change in consciousness, allowing people to have thoughts not otherwise available to them. Bohm's example of dialogue allows us to conceive of this without assuming the existence of a metaphysical Supersubject. It suggests that different thinking arises from different social relations: as social relations change, thinking in congregational settings can shift between non-finite dialogic consciousness, defensively individualistic exchanges and uniform group thought. Dialogic consciousness, however, cannot be produced through the will of any thinking subject, be it the individual or society. It is a state of mind that emerges, but has no efficient cause. It is a gift, there is grace, but there is no exchange between finite giver and receiver.

Levinas and respect

Durkheim characterizes the sacred as an experience of awesome power not found in profane life. We want to emphasize that the experience of awe comes from the respectful relations between participants in the congregation. Respect brings with it a sense of wonder and power and wholeness, but also a sense of vulnerability and destitution. Rather than a sense of the holy that removes us from the everyday, the sacredness of respect returns us to the previously unrecognized truth of the profane. It is not based, therefore, on a principle of transcendence but on a principle of meeting.

The question of face allows us to raise these questions both of Durkheim and of exchange theory. Within the latter, as we have seen, face is seen as identity and desired as self-certainty; it protects like a shield and attacks like a spear. To have someone affirm the objective face you present to the world is to have them accept your claims to being the subject you desire to be. According to Emmanuel Levinas, however, this Hegelian logic is not the logic of the genuinely face-to-face meeting: meeting is a presence that cannot be described in the finite terms of chronology and Euclidean space. Whereas the other in Sartre's park steals the sight of the grass's greenness, in Levinas' meeting the other gives sight, including insight, and thereby opens up the truth of this world as if it were a new world (cf. Serres, 1995: 107ff):

You turn yourself toward the Other as toward an object when you see a nose, eyes, a forehead, a chin … The relation with the face can surely be dominated by perception, but what is specifically the face is what cannot be reduced to that. … The skin of the face is that which stays most naked, most destitute … there is an essential poverty in the face … The face is exposed, menaced, as if inviting us to an act of violence. At the same time, the face is what forbids us to kill … The face is … signification without context. I mean that the Other, in the rectitude of his face, is not a character within a context … a professor at the Sorbonne, a Supreme Court justice, son of so-and-so … Here, to the contrary, the face is meaning all by itself. You are you. In this sense one can say that the face is not 'seen'. It is what cannot become a content, which your thought would embrace; it is uncontainable, it leads you beyond … But the relation to the face is straightaway ethical. (Levinas and Nemo, 1985: 85-7) This is not the mirroring of the Hegelian relation, for it leads to a sense of wondrous unfolding and implication rather than a self-certain independence. Moreover, rather than a proof that 'I' matter as an autonomous individual, the respect is a sign that this matters, this coming together, this meeting with difference, this sense of belonging together as part of an indefinable whole. What matter are the unique parts we play together in an unfolding social process that no-one controls. Humility and awe are present together (cf. Palmer, 1993: 14ff).

When Levinas says 'you are you', therefore, he is not associating youness with a self-contained identity. The word you is like the words now and here: it indicates a unique presence that can be experienced as a whole but never known as a totality, never defined, contained, represented in absentia. Whereas a 'one' is always comparable, because there is no number one without a number two, 'you' are incomparable. I can only use the word you to you, with you, in the course of a meeting with you. It is a participatory word, emerging from meeting, as part of a relationship.

Within the relation Levinas is discussing, the other is at once different from me and the same as me, and there is a mysterious incapacity to say where the boundaries of this sameness and difference fall (see Godbout, 1998: 221). There is a vision but it has a stillness and wholeness not found in an exchange of looks or perspectives. There are no things to exchange, no things to see. When the relation relies on the logic of the unique or infinite, respect for the other is not respect taken from me but respect for the relation we share. By acknowledging, in wonder, your uniqueness, I find myself accepting my own: you have revealed non-finite potential that was not acknowledged when I thought I knew my identity. By giving you respect, without thought of reward, I have accepted the respect offered by your difference. In so recognizing the face-to-face meeting as an experience of the awesome holiness of the whole, Levinas extends the empirical range of Durkheim's theory of congregation, moving it into the domain misleadingly called interpersonal (cf. Goffman, 1972: 89).

Levinas' discussion of infinitude also allows us to draw out a major inconsistency in Durkheim's account of the sacred. Durkheim often associates the sacred with a sense of unity or totality, a sense of a larger bounded identifiable force; the people in the congregation feel more power because their loyalty to this larger force gives them a new enhanced collective identity. This seems to be his sense when he speaks of religious artefacts as if they are flags representing opposing nations or teams. The renewed strength enjoyed by people is a self-righteousness or self-certainty.

At other times, however, Durkheim refers to the infinite connectedness of a whole, which does not have the boundaries or exclusions of a unity (e.g. Durkheim, 1976: 425-6). In this state, the feelings called out in me by a flag only connect me to the others whose feelings are called out by different flags. Rather than Euclidean positionality or oppositionality, this sense of open connectedness reveals that all differences are present, here and now, as a sense of potential. This is a holiness, then, that does not take us away but leads us back to the ecological reality of the world as it is everyday. While there is a renewed feeling of belonging, of having a unique and vital part to play, the different spatiality and temporality involve a loss of defendable identity and a loss, too, of clearly marked desires and trajectories. In other words, this is the space of infinitude and the time of the eternal present (see Metcalfe andGame, 2002, 2004). This is a whole that makes itself known through presence but which cannot be represented or expressed.

These different senses of society need to be distinguished. The first sits within finite identity and exchange logic. It is the logic of society as a thing. The latter is the infinite logic of relation, the logic of society as the process of sociality. The former makes worshippers feel stronger and more self-certain; the latter makes them feel awed by a simultaneous sense of potential and vulnerability. In the latter form, the sense of holiness comes from a sense of the whole that undoes the spatiality, temporality and ontology on which exchange relies.

If we reconsider Lévi-Strauss's diners in the light of this discussion, we have two possibilities. If they saw each other through the dialectics of subject and object, they were not really face-to-face. They saw a content, a persona, an identity, and their subsequent conduct was, accordingly, of the exchange type that Lévi-Strauss analyses. Alternatively, if they were present to each other, face-to-face, this was a meeting and not an exchange. There was no identification of the other, and no mirroring of self through that other. Wine was poured, but was not offered by a one to another one, from a here to a there, or with a sense of offer now and return later. The person pouring the wine did not do so because of what they had and the other lacked, but because they felt moved by the fundamental vulnerability that all share. They experienced this call as the sacred.

Durkheim emphasizes the moral forces that make themselves known through congregation, assuming that individuals are directed by the moral codes they learn at the religious 'school of collective life ' (1976: 423). Levinas' account of the face-to-face meeting, however, suggests a different understanding of moral response. What does he mean when he says that the vulnerability of the face makes it 'straightaway ethical', forbidding us to kill? What is going on when commandment comes from an encounter with weakness? Could it have been this unmediated ethics that led to Lévi-Strauss's diner to 'straightaway' pour his neighbour a glass of wine?

Buber and calling

To consider the question of unmediated ethics, we will look at Martin Buber's notion of calling and response. [START_REF] Buber | I and Thou[END_REF] calls the face-to-face meeting an I-Thou relation, while describing the subject-object exchange as an I-It relation. There is a sense of lively and even dreadful happening in the I-Thou encounter, but it is not structured like obedience or desire: 'The relation to the Thou is direct. No system of ideas, no foreknowledge, and no fancy intervene between I and Thou … No aim, no lust, and no anticipation intervene between I and Thou ' (1958: 11-12). Responsibility, Buber says, is not a form of masterful control, as the Hegelian tradition assumes, or an obedience, as Durkheim sometimes implies. It is instead the response to the calling heard in the meeting of I and Thou (1966: 20-1). The calling is not, strictly speaking, from the other as an individual: it is from the relation, the whole, the connection. Therefore, while the meeting involves call and response, it is not clear who calls and who responds. The calling that we hear from the needs of the other is the calling that we ourselves find we have needed. By the same token, the authority and commandment in this calling cannot be located in finite terms. It arises from the relation, and therefore from neither of us and both of us.

To help us draw out this point, here is one of Buber's stories of meeting:

When I was eleven years of age … I used … to steal into the stable and gently stroke the neck of my darling, a broad dapple-grey horse. It was not a casual delight but a great, certainly friendly, but also deeply stirring happening. … When I stroked the mighty mane … it was as though the element of vitality itself bordered on my skin, something that was not I, was certainly not akin to me, palpably the other, not just another, really the Other itself; and yet it let me approach, confided itself to me, placed itself elementally in the relation of Thou and Thou with me. The horse … very gently raised his massive head, ears flicking, then snorted quietly, as a conspirator gives a signal meant to be recognizable only by his fellow-conspirator; and I was approved. But once -I do not know what came over the child, at any rate it was childlike enough -it struck me about the stroking, what fun it gave me, and suddenly I became conscious of my hand. The game went on as before, but something had changed … And the next day, after giving him a rich feed, when I stroked my friend's head he did not raise his head. A few years later, when I thought back to the incident, I no longer supposed that the animal had noticed my defection. But at the time I considered myself judged. (Buber, 2002: 26-7) Buber's meeting with the horse was marked by a sense of presence and holiness that contained within it, he later realized, an awareness of dread commandment. He knew that this relation mattered, and was vulnerable. It would be dreadful not to act accordingly. So without self-conscious thought, he knew what he had to do, what his responsibilities were. This sense of straightaway knowing what is good and what has to be done reminds us of Bohm's comment about his weekend dialogue: people unselfconsciously became aware that the free flow of dialogue they could feel between them was more important than the defence of their own identities and positions.

The judgement at the end of Buber's story refers to the irresponsible moment, characterized by the logic of I-It, when Buber became a subject acting on desires, thereby treating the horse as his mirror. In disrespecting the horse's otherness, Buber insulted his own. This is neither a subjective judgement, nor one based on the application of powerful, abstract and external moral laws, but is a relational judgement from what Iris Murdoch calls the 'naked' 'for-nothingness' of 'goodness ' (1970: 92-3).

This understanding of calling, authority, judgement and goodness indicates that Durkheim did not need to hypothesize a metaphysical 'society' to make sense of the commandment that people feel in congregation. It also allows us to see that the sense of obligation associated with the gift is not necessarily taking place within a Hegelian battle to repay debts and save face. What Murdoch says of the relation to good art could be said of any naked for-nothing relation: 'We surrender ourselves to its authority with a love which is unpossessive and unselfish' (Murdoch, 1970: 92-3).

This form of responsibility allows us a new perspective on the emphasis placed by Durkheim on the role of ritual in congregation. Ritual is an ascetic discipline that, by stilling the desirous self and bringing us into the here and now of presence, can allow us to find what is important and good in life. Ritual is important because it is not something I choose to do: it is not for-anything, and I do not perform it to get anything. Instead I give myself up to it, and because I have done so, I am able to receive from it what I did not then know I needed (Godbout, 1998: 219-22).

When someone sits down with me at a restaurant, I am grateful if I have the unselfconscious presence of mind to pour them a glass of wine. The fact that I did not make an arbitrary calculation or choice, or have a purpose in mind, allowed me to be authentically present in this action, and allowed the relation to develop with goodness, grace, depth and vitality. My responsibility is simply to respond. As Buber's story indicates, my faith in this ritual is not an expectation of return but a joy in life and an openness to the difference in the world.

The effervescence of this meeting resembles the experience that Durkheim found in congregation, but it arises from the sociality in the room and not from a metaphysical 'society' outside it. On the other hand, however, this experience of grace and effervescence cannot be reduced to the desires underlying exchanges between subjects. This is gift without subjects and without exchange.


teaching and research institutions in France or abroad, or from public or private research centers.


Othering through genderization in the regional press