The Invention of Everyday Life

Author: Rita Felski
Year: 2000 (Doing Time: Feminist Theory and Postmodern Culture, NYU Press)
Source type: chapter
Raw file: raw/chapters/felski-2000-invention-of-everyday-life.md

Summary

Felski offers a critical reflection on "everyday life" as a concept, arguing it is "the most self-evident, yet the most puzzling of ideas." Against cultural studies' celebration of subversion, mobility, and nomadism, she reconstructs a definition from the phenomenological/sociological tradition (Lefebvre, Heller, Schutz) grounded in three facets — repetition (temporality), home (spatiality), and habit (modality) — and argues a feminist theory of everyday life can affirm these mundane qualities rather than disdain them. She criticizes Lefebvre's association of the everyday/feminine with an inauthentic, backward modernity.

Key Claims

• Everyday life as elusive concept: "the everyday escapes," as Blanchot says; it is synonymous with the habitual, ordinary, mundane yet "resists our understanding." It is "also a secular and democratic concept" — every life contains the ordinary, but women and the working class are "more closely identified with the everyday."
• The everyday as a modern, critical object: following Lefebvre, everyday life emerges as an object of critical reflection in the nineteenth century under capitalism/industrialization (the massing of bodies in cities); modernity makes the mundane visible.
• Three facets: the temporality of the everyday is repetition (Lefebvre's cyclical vs. linear time); its spatial ordering is anchored in home (Heller's "fixed point ... to which we return"); its characteristic mode is habit (the "natural attitude," Schutz).
• Repetition and gender: Lefebvre and others associate women with repetition/cyclical time (de Beauvoir, Kristeva); repetition has been coded feminine, immanence versus transcendence. Felski argues repetition is not simply domination — "repetition can signal resistance as well as enslavement," and "we become who we are through acts of repetition"; it "is not opposed to ... the experience of modernity."
• Home and gender: home is a gendered, metaphysical symbol. Feminism has often used "a rhetoric of leaving home" (home as prison); mobility/nomadism (de Certeau's pedestrian) is a masculinist metaphor (Wolff, Massey). Felski argues home is "an investment of meaning in space," can be positively rethought (bell hooks's "homeplace," Iris Marion Young's home-making), and questions "the assumption that being modern requires an irrevocable severing from home."
• Habit: habit is "the necessary precondition for impulse and innovation" (Heller); contemporary critical theory over-politicizes the everyday as ideology, whereas phenomenology accepts the taken-for-granted natural attitude. "Habit is not something we can ever hope to transcend."
• Making peace with the everyday: against both the hermeneutics of suspicion and the reverential valorization of the everyday, "to recognize that we all inhabit everyday life is not to deny social differences but simply to acknowledge a common grounding in the mundane."

Connections

Concepts: Everyday Life · Everyday Architecture · Dwelling
Authors: Rita Felski
Debates: (theory of the everyday)
Related source notes: The Politics and Potential of Everyday Life (Colebrook) · Everyday Life: Philosophical Roots (Chirinos)

Direct Quotes

"[T]he temporality of the everyday ... is that of repetition, the spatial ordering of the everyday is anchored in a sense of home, and the characteristic mode of experiencing the everyday is that of habit."

"[R]epetition can signal resistance as well as enslavement."

"Habit is the necessary precondition for impulse and innovation."

"Home is, in Roger Silverstone's phrase, 'an investment of meaning in space.'"

"The heroic life is the sphere of danger, violence and the courting of risk whereas everyday life is the sphere of women, reproduction and care." (Mike Featherstone, as quoted)

Open Questions

• Does Felski's "peace with the everyday" forfeit the critical edge of Lefebvre and de Certeau, or does her affirmation of repetition/home/habit offer a more adequate (and gendered) account of resistance and dwelling?