The Completion of Old Work: Walter Benjamin and the Everyday

In her recent essay, The Invention of Everyday, Rita Felski seeks to reground in ordinariness of existence, rejecting disdain she finds for 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 dog to his vomit. Modern literature, she writes, has exposed these congealed patterns of daily and questioned sleep-walking demeanour inspired by tyranny of habit. Its relationship to is often paradoxical, seeking to both preserve and negate it.1 Modernism, Felski argues, negates because it tries to transcend the very dailiness it seeks to depict, thus losing the casual inattentiveness marking experience of life (26). She accepts that a certain distance from taken-forgranted is a vital part of ideology critique: the work of theory is to break spell of habitual and everyday (27). But, drawing on phenomenological studies of life, she argues for a recognition of habit as what is rather than enemy of authentic life (28): Everyday simply is routine act of conducting one's dayto-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 lure