Initial thoughts on choice: Ben Highmore, Michel De Certeau, Henri Lefebvre, Rita Felski, Eran Dorfman - the repetition, meditation, excitement, quotidian, the city, the invisible, class. Subjects that stimulate me mentally in to producing the repetitive fractured work I feel pushed to make.The Text:Felski, Rita. Doing Time : Feminist Theory and Postmodern Culture, NYU Press, 2000. ProQuest Ebook Central, http://ebookcentral.proquest.com/lib/warw/detail.action?docID=865460.Accessed here: https://www2.warwick.ac.uk/fac/arts/english/currentstudents/undergraduate/modules/literaturetheoryandtime/ltt-felski.pdfThe Invention of Everyday Life - Felski, R. p81-82Repetition:Everyday life is above all a temporal term. As such, it conveys the fact of repetition; it refers not to the singular or unique but to that which happens “day after day.” The activities of sleeping, eating, and working conform to regular diurnal rhythms that are in turn embedded within larger cycles of repetition: the weekend, the annual holiday, the start of a new semester. For Lefebvre, this cyclical structure of everyday life is its quintessential feature, a source of both fascination and puzzlement. “In the study of the everyday,” he writes, “we discover the great problem of repetition, one of the most difficult problems facing us.”10 Repetition is a problem, or as he says elsewhere, a riddle, because it is fundamentally at odds with the modern drive toward progress and accumulation.Lefebvre returns repeatedly to this apparent contradiction between linear and cyclical time. Linear time is the forward-moving, abstract time of modern industrial society; everyday life, on the other hand, is characterized by natural circadian rhythms, which, according to Lefebvre, have changed little over the centuries.11 These daily rhythms complicate the self-understanding of modernity as permanent progress. If everyday life is not completely outside history, it nevertheless serves as a retardation device, slowing down the dynamic of historical change. Lefebvre resorts at several points to the concept of uneven development as a way of explaining this lack of synchronicity. Because of its reliance on cyclical time, everyday life is belated; it lags behind the historical possibilities of modernity.Time, writes Johannes Fabian, “is a carrier of significance, a form through which we define the content of relations between the Self and the Other.” 12 In other words, time is not just a measurement but a metaphor, dense in cultural meanings. Conventionally, the distinction between “time’s arrow” and “time’s cycle” is also a distinction between masculine and feminine. Indeed, all models of historical transformation—whether linear or cataclysmic, evolutionary or revolutionary—have been conventionally coded as masculine. Conversely, woman’s affinity with repetition and cyclical time is noted by numerous writers; Simone de Beauvoir, for example, claims that “woman clings to routine; time has for her no element of novelty, it is not a creative flow; because she is doomed to repetition, she sees in the future only a duplication of the past.”13 Here, repetition is a sign of woman’s enslavement in the ordinary, her association with immanence rather than transcendence. Unable to create or invent, she remains imprisoned within the remorseless routine of cyclical time. Lefebvre’s perspective is less censorious: women’s association with recurrence is also a sign of their connection to nature, emotion, and sensuality, their lesser degree of estrangement from biological and cosmic rhythms. As I have already noted, Julia Kristeva concurs with this view in seeing repetition as the key to women’s experience of extrasubjective time, cosmic time, jouissance.14
- Henri Lefebvre, “The Everyday and Everydayness,” Yale French Studies, no. 73 (1987): 10.
- Henri Lefebvre, Critique de la vie quotidienne, vol. 2 (Paris: L’Arche, 1961), 54.
- Johannes Fabian, Time and the Other: How Anthropology Makes Its Object (New York: Columbia University Press, 1983), ix.
- Simone de Beauvoir, The Second Sex (London: Picador, 1988), 610.
- Lefebvre, Everyday Life in the Modern World, 17; Julia Kristeva, “Women’s Time,” in Feminist Theory: A Critique of Ideology, ed. Nannerl O. Keohane, Michelle Z. Rosaldo, and Barbara C. Gelpi (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1982). See also Frieda Johles Forman, ed., Taking Our Time: Feminist Perspectives on Temporality (Oxford: Pergamon, 1989) for similar arguments.
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ReflectionsThat although we are all influenced differently there are similarities that can be drawn from the texts. Aspects that may not be relevant to those actually sharing but are to others, texts that may not have been accessed by all or things that may have been 'out of radar' so to speak. There is also the elements of interpretations.In response to Paula's text from Touching The Void: accepting where you are and allowing you to move on - better decisions - links to art, the struggle, and consuming nature. Often faced with difficult decisions that we can't go back on. The idea of not looking and taking risks.Art to justify existence, the reason we are here, give purpose. getting over our fear - make the comparison.