Outline and analyse Rita Felski’s argument in ‘The invention of everyday life’

Rita Felski, currently a professor for Comparative Literature, Feminist Theory, & Cultural Studies at the Department of English at the University of Virginia, argues in ‘The invention and everyday life’ about the cyclical and linear structure of everyday life, women’s association with repetition and spatial dimensions of everyday life.
By selecting and summarising the major components, utilising and explaining relevant concepts and terminology I will outline and analyse Rita Felski’s argument and draw a conclusion.

In our concept of linear, forward moving time the theory of everyday life is based on a cyclical, repetitive motion within. A regular daily rhythm of activities such as eating, working and sleeping, or, on a larger scale, the weekend, the new semester or the annual holiday repeated in known intervals.
At the beginning of Felski’s essay stands Lefebvre’s fascination with repetition as the quintessential feature of everyday life in opposition to the contemporary drive towards progress and accumulation. In Lefebvre’s eyes, repetition is a contradiction to the self-understanding of modernity as a permanent progress and an obstruction to it. In other words: linear, forward-moving, abstract time of modern society as opposed by natural, circadian rhythms of everyday life.
Felski links the linear and the cyclical dimension to the historical gender coding where masculinity stands for historical models of transformation e.g. cataclysmic, evolutionary and revolutionary, and the feminine for repetition and cyclical time. Her view of why women are associated with recurrence differs from most other writers like e.g. Simone de Bauvoir who claims that women are doomed to repetition and enslavement in the ordinary (1988, p.610), but is more in the line of Lefebvre who sees women as embodied subjects and closer to nature due to their more visual bio rhythmical cycles like menstruation and pregnancy. The fact that women are still primarily responsible for the repetitive tasks of the domestic sphere like housework and child rearing and the Marxist view of women being identified with repetition via consumption, imprisoned by acts of mass consumption no matter what, are all components which add to that association of feminism with repetition and cataclysm.
Against the understanding of Lefebvre, Simone de Bauvoir and others, which see everyday life because of its reliance upon repetition as lagging behind the historical possibilities of modernity, and interestingly enough, even though paid work is equally repetitive, only the domestic sphere is deemed to exist outside the dynamic of history and change, Rita Felski argues that due to repetition e.g. understood as ritual, we are able to transcend our historically limited existence by connecting to our ancestry and tradition. She argues further that continuity and routine are crucial in early child development and adult life to develop our individuality and is simply one of the ways in which we organize the world. Thus, repetition is not opposed to transcendence but an important factor of it. Opposing factors such as cyclical and linear, the everyday and modern, the feminine and masculine are not contradicting but necessary components by which we progress and make sense of our past. For Felski, the linear as modern and progressive component presented by Lefebvre as positive and desirable is often imposed on individuals against their will and accompanied by insecurity, stress and pressure where as continuity and repetition often serves as source of security, autonomy and dignity in contemporary life.
Home, one of the different special dimensions of everyday life is seen as a fixed point in space and is associated with familiarity, protection and warmth by many philosophers.
Lefebvre argues that for bourgeois individuals home is a transformation of the world they reasonably live in.
For Felski, Lefebvre’s ‘being at home in the world’ is quite a contrast to the general feeling of insecurity, decay of known structures and values of contemporary society. Also the celebration of mobility, the demand for flexibility and the communication hype, in short, our restlessness and the need of constant activity is rather anti home than fitting the views of home as a space of familiarity, security and warmth.
Home is still wildly regarded as a highly gendered space and familiarity but also dullness and stasis. Recent attempts by feminists tried to demystify home as the ideal of heaven and personification of women by promoting more freedom and agency through movement. Also the assumption that contemporary society is less in need of a home because of a high degree of mobility, points to a lesser importance of home.
For Felski home needs to be viewed from a different angle. To her, familiarity and routine are not dull and lagging. They are actively produces over time as are reality and ideology of home. The vision of home is shaped by contemporary society with its currents, struggles and penetrable boundaries and is highly individual. Home is not only about origin but is changing along as we grow older by gained impressions, experiences and circumstances. Home fulfils both, affective needs e.g. by collected objects attached to memories and dreams, and pragmatic needs like e.g. simply to retreat from the hectic and noisy world of today.

Felski shows us in her essay that complex circumstances can’t be explained only by theory. Lefebvre’s explanation of everyday life is focusing on cyclical and linear time, repetition and forward moving and thus, by opposition, labelling one as being prejudicial and the other as modern and progressive.
With the dimension and complexity of gender and space added, the phenomenon of everyday life gets even more complex and needs a more diverse approach as Felski rightly insists. Repetition is not opposed to transcendence and thus to progress and modernity. Likewise modernity is not desirable at any costs and has its downsides. Continuity and routine are key factors to bringing order to our world and forming our identities.
Likewise the stereotypical illustration of the classic housewife, derived from theories of repetition, and the feminine affinity to cyclical time do not meet the complexity and variety of home nor do the feminist reactions against it. Felski correctly argues that neither can capture home for what it is, whether a specific materialisation of the body nor the self anchoring identity in a physical space that creates certain continuities between the past and the present.
(1044 words)

References
Felski, R. (1999 - 2000) ‘The invention of everyday life’, New Formations, no. 39, pp. 15 – 31.

The Open University (2002), DD201, Understanding Everyday Life, Milton Keynes, The Open University