On his book The History of Missed Opportunities: British Romanticism and the Emergence of the Everyday
Cover Interview of June 27, 2017
The wide angle
A brief look at the Oxford English Dictionary
indicates that the “everyday” (as opposed to the “ordinary” which was primarily
a class designation) developed into a necessary descriptor sometime in the
mid-eighteenth century, eventually achieving a conceptual apotheosis in the
notion of “everydayness” in the 1840s. Thus it is the development toward
conceptualization, especially in the new century, that interests me. This is not
only because the emergence of the everyday as a parallel, indeed
possible, world––in contrast to the one that Hume and insurance companies came to
rely on––is diametrically opposed to the withering probabilism that “everydayness”
would eventually signify as an urban, postindustrial phenomenon. It is also
because this emergence is a transit (back) to the future in formulating a “theory
of the everyday” that has gained considerable traction in the twentieth and
twenty-first centuries, beginning with Heidegger and continuing in the social
theories of Henri Lefebvre and Michel de Certeau, the philosophy of Stanley
Cavell, and most recently the political theory of Jane Bennett and Thomas Dumm.
To political theorists especially, an appreciation of (and
submission to) ordinary actuality holds what may well be the last promise for
democracy and solidarity, not just between people, but between humans and the
environment. Dumm speaks of a politics of resignation, where anonymity and
commonality join in an unprecedented sense of belonging. Bennett goes even further,
viewing the ordinary as a site of enchantment, which she defines as a state of
openness to the “disturbing-captivating elements in everyday experience.” Heidegger
is the seminal figure here, postulating an impersonality that he calls being or
being-in-the-world (Dasein), and naming “everydayness” (as he terms it) ––in,
for example, the things/tools ready-to-hand that we take for granted and are
paradoxically possessed by––as the “mode” in which being “operates…preeminently.”
In general, what recent theories of the everyday stress over and over––and what
Romantic-period writers discovered to their surprise––is “the extraordinary,”
as Bennett, Cavell, and Lefebvre all frame it, “that lives amid the familiar.”
We see this in the double takes by which a poet like
Wordsworth disencumbers history of memory in demonstrating what a self-involved
engagement with the world forgets. We see it also in Jane Austen––the subject
of my last book (The Historical Austen) and a germ for this one––whose
practice of revision, especially of narratives drafted at least a decade earlier,
enables a return to a world and a milieu that time and progress have erased and
that reemerges, thanks to previous documentation, as something different and
valuable. And we witness it most dramatically in Lord Byron, thanks to the “history”
to which he consigned marriage before it even happened, creating a nostalgia
for something not-yet realized and destined to fail (as he saw it) that was the
more exotic as a result. Domesticity gains prestige and a certain palpability not
because it was missed or overlooked at the time; it comes into focus for Byron because
there was no such time––no memory but only a history of missed opportunities.
The dominant premise in evolution and economics is that a person is being loyal to natural law if he or she attends to self’s interest and welfare before being concerned with the needs and demands of family or community. The public does not realize that this statement is not an established scientific principle but an ethical preference. Nonetheless, this belief has created a moral confusion among North Americans and Europeans because the evolution of our species was accompanied by the disposition to worry about kin and the collectives to which one belongs.Jerome Kagan, Interview of September 17, 2009
[T]he Holocaust transformed our whole way of thinking about war and heroism. War is no longer a proving ground for heroism in the same way it used to be. Instead, war now is something that we must avoid at all costs—because genocides often take place under the cover of war. We are no longer all potential soldiers (though we are that too), but we are all potential victims of the traumas war creates. This, at least, is one important development in the way Western populations envision war, even if it does not always predominate in the thinking of our political leaders.Carolyn J. Dean, Interview of February 01, 2011
The wide angle
A brief look at the Oxford English Dictionary indicates that the “everyday” (as opposed to the “ordinary” which was primarily a class designation) developed into a necessary descriptor sometime in the mid-eighteenth century, eventually achieving a conceptual apotheosis in the notion of “everydayness” in the 1840s. Thus it is the development toward conceptualization, especially in the new century, that interests me. This is not only because the emergence of the everyday as a parallel, indeed possible, world––in contrast to the one that Hume and insurance companies came to rely on––is diametrically opposed to the withering probabilism that “everydayness” would eventually signify as an urban, postindustrial phenomenon. It is also because this emergence is a transit (back) to the future in formulating a “theory of the everyday” that has gained considerable traction in the twentieth and twenty-first centuries, beginning with Heidegger and continuing in the social theories of Henri Lefebvre and Michel de Certeau, the philosophy of Stanley Cavell, and most recently the political theory of Jane Bennett and Thomas Dumm.
To political theorists especially, an appreciation of (and submission to) ordinary actuality holds what may well be the last promise for democracy and solidarity, not just between people, but between humans and the environment. Dumm speaks of a politics of resignation, where anonymity and commonality join in an unprecedented sense of belonging. Bennett goes even further, viewing the ordinary as a site of enchantment, which she defines as a state of openness to the “disturbing-captivating elements in everyday experience.” Heidegger is the seminal figure here, postulating an impersonality that he calls being or being-in-the-world (Dasein), and naming “everydayness” (as he terms it) ––in, for example, the things/tools ready-to-hand that we take for granted and are paradoxically possessed by––as the “mode” in which being “operates…preeminently.” In general, what recent theories of the everyday stress over and over––and what Romantic-period writers discovered to their surprise––is “the extraordinary,” as Bennett, Cavell, and Lefebvre all frame it, “that lives amid the familiar.”
We see this in the double takes by which a poet like Wordsworth disencumbers history of memory in demonstrating what a self-involved engagement with the world forgets. We see it also in Jane Austen––the subject of my last book (The Historical Austen) and a germ for this one––whose practice of revision, especially of narratives drafted at least a decade earlier, enables a return to a world and a milieu that time and progress have erased and that reemerges, thanks to previous documentation, as something different and valuable. And we witness it most dramatically in Lord Byron, thanks to the “history” to which he consigned marriage before it even happened, creating a nostalgia for something not-yet realized and destined to fail (as he saw it) that was the more exotic as a result. Domesticity gains prestige and a certain palpability not because it was missed or overlooked at the time; it comes into focus for Byron because there was no such time––no memory but only a history of missed opportunities.