Histories and Context - A Taste for Gardening: Classed and Gendered Practices - page 35

as well as a positive counter to the Marxist tradition of writers who theorise the
everyday as a sphere of alienation (Lefebvre 1984). Felski gives the ordinary a
temporal dimension through 'repetition'; she grounds it by suggesting ordinariness
is staged at 'home'; and she catches at the rhythms of ordinariness by examining
'habit'. And for Felski, ordinariness is fastened to the backdrop of everyday life:
we are all somehow anchored to routine, to a place called home and to the sheer
mundanity of daily habit. In this way, Felski takes a phenomenological stance on
ordinariness and the everyday. She charts both as modes of experience which belong
to everyone's lives, as opposed to theorising them as the authentic preserve of
particular groups, such as women or the working-class. 'Everyday life', Felski argues,
'is not simply interchangeable with the popular: it is not the exclusive property of a
particular class or grouping, Bismarck had an everyday life and so does Madonna'
(2000, 16). In this way, by separating everyday life from issues of class and gender,
Felski's discussion prevents ordinariness from being idealised as the authentic locus
of class heroism or demonised as a dehumanising sphere where women are enslaved;
rather her approach allows one to take seriously everyone's lived experience of the
micro-spheres of ordinariness. This is not to argue that mundane practices, such as
garden-making or watching television, float-free of class and gender: gardening is a
symbolic practice which is drenched with classed and gendered meanings. However,
I argue that ordinary practices - doing everyday things in ordinary settings - are
shared by everybody and they are located in class and gender terms. For example,
both working- and middle-class people garden in repetitive cycles, they may plant
at particular times within the larger repetitive seasonal cycles and this constitutes
a shared ordinary practice, but what they plant to generate symbolic meaning is
inflected by their class location. In similar vein, while both men and women reside in
a taken-for-granted, ordinary place called 'home', gender impacts on how the home
and garden are staged. In these ways, ordinariness is a shared ground, inflected, as
I explore in chapters 6 and 7, by the subjective locations of class and gender. What
this topic sets out to do is to lay the shared ground of ordinariness bare, to expose
its aspects of intrigue and to argue that there is something interesting and valuable
about ordinary enthusiasms like gardening.
I want to draw on Felski's argument in relation to the creative potential of the
ordinariness of everyday life. Felski argues against critics who regard everyday
life as problematic or alienating. For example, Lefebvre's thesis is that everyday
life is at odds with the dynamic potential of modernity. The structural repetition of
everyday life, for Lefebvre (1987), is problematic because its cycles are antithetical
to modern accumulation and progress. Lefebvre (1961) makes a distinction between
linear and cyclical time: linear time, the temporal system of modern industrial
society, propels forward; conversely, everyday life, unchanged by centuries, has
natural, diurnal rhythms. According to Lefebvre, daily cycles drag against progress:
everyday life detains the momentum of the historical progress implied by modernity.
Another critic of repetition, but on behalf of women in relation to everyday life, is de
Beauvoir (1988). For her repetition is symbolic of women's captivity within the dull
compulsion of the ordinary. Beset by routine, everyday life can never offer women a
space for newness or creativity. Forever trapped within the rhythms of the mundane,
the future merely re-presents the past, acting to stunt women's inventive capabilities.