The Completion of Old Work: Walter Benjamin and the Everyday

Habit! that skilful but slow-moving arranger who begins by letting our minds suffer for weeks on end in temporary quarters, but whom our minds are none the less only too happy to discover at last, for without it, reduced to their own devices, they would be powerless to make any room seem habitable.

—Marcel Proust, In Search of Lost Time

In her recent essay, "The Invention of the Everyday," Rita Felski seeks to reground the everyday in the ordinariness of existence, rejecting the disdain she finds for everyday life in both cultural studies and modernist literature. It is a disdain she finds typified by Samuel Beckett's description of habit as "the ballast that chains the dog to his vomit." "Modern literature," she writes, "has exposed these congealed patterns of daily life and questioned the sleep-walking demeanour inspired by the tyranny of habit. Its relationship to the everyday is often paradoxical, seeking to both preserve and negate it." ¹ Modernism, Felski argues, negates the everyday because it tries to transcend "the very dailiness it seeks to depict," thus losing "the casual inattentiveness marking the everyday experience of everyday life" (26). She accepts that a certain distance from the "taken-for-granted" is a vital part of ideology critique: "the work of theory is to break the spell of the habitual and the everyday" (27). But, drawing on phenomenological studies of everyday life, she argues for a recognition of habit as what is rather than the "enemy of authentic life" (28): "Everyday life simply is the routine act of conducting one's day-to-day existence without making it an object of conscious attention." Following Agnes Heller, she suggests that taking some things for granted is "the necessary precondition for impulse and innovation" (27); but Felski herself remains untempted by what she calls the "lure of the exotic" (28). While not denying that every life includes "epiphanic moments ... religious ecstasy, sexual passion, drug-taking, childbirth, encounters with death" (29), her concern is to emphasize our "common grounding in the mundane" (28). Once recognized as "an indispensable aspect of all human lives ... the everyday is robbed of much of its portentous symbolic meaning." It is time, she contends, "to make peace with the ordinariness of daily life" (31).

It is tempting to excoriate (to borrow Felski's own verb for theory's contempt for the everyday) such peace as appeasement: a kind of acceptance of contemporary daily life in all its gray banality, commodified sensation, and inhumane, bureaucratic efficiency. But that would be to miss the point. Felski's peace is not passivity, but a radical attempt to resituate an accurate view of the habitual everyday at the heart of critical concerns. She is asking us to revalue ordinariness, rather than see it as something else. One might take issue with the generality of her accusations. Theory, cultural studies, and modern literature (for which read modernist literature) are all tarred with the same brush. Marxist critique and Judith Butler's theory of performativity both get the same treatment. But the essay bears the hallmarks of an opening shot in a longer piece of work (just as the first chapter of her excellent The Gender of Modernity was published ahead of the book itself). It is to be hoped that each of these theoretical approaches will, in time, get a lengthier discussion in order to isolate the real target of the article: postmodern restlessness, "the denunciation of any form of fixity in favour of permanent flux" (28).

All the same (and pending that longer treatment) it seems fair to ask if the binaries Felski sets up are really so fixed. Are false consciousness or postmodern nomadism the only alternatives to describing everyday life as unconscious habit? Is it possible to accept the everyday for what it is and yet still offer the possibility that it might be something else? Is it actually possible for phenomenological studies of everyday life to describe...