Henri Lefebvre’s Dialectics Of Everyday Life by Ben Highmore

Henri Lefebvre’s Dialectics Of Everyday LifeEveryday Life And Cultural Theories

Mert Kulaksız03.04.2014

Where Goes The DailyID 501 Advanced Project Development in Industrial DesignMiddle East Technical University, Department of Industrial Design

Ben Highmore

“The everyday that grips Henri Lefebvre’s voluminous writingson the subject is one orchestrated by the logic of the commodity,where life is lived according to the rhythm of capital.”

Marxist approach

“Yet for Lefebvre, what he sees as the postwar extensionof capitalism, ‘thoroughly penetrating the details of daily life’, is an inescapable fact for everyone.”

Post-war time in France

“Yet, as we shall see, however bleak Lefebvre’s view of modern everyday life became, the everyday always held out the possibility of its own transformation.”

Main Argument of the project

“As France ‘reconstructed’ in the wake of the war, modernizationbecame synonymous with consumer culture.” Blue jeans, electric cookers, fridges, washing machines, Coca-Cola, television and so on became so many instances of the ‘American temptation’.”

American Temptation

Overall Review

Henri Lefebvre’s Dialectics Of Everyday Life, Everyday Life And Cultural Theories, Ben Highmore

Dialectic Approach of Lefebvre

Dialectic:-The art or practice of arriving at the truth by the exchange of logical arguments.

-The process especially associated with Hegel of arriving at the truth by stating a thesis, developing a contradictory antithesis, and combining and resolving them into a coherent synthesis.

-The Marxian process of change through the conflict of opposing forces, whereby a given contradiction is characterized by a primary and a secondary aspect, the secondary succumbing to the primary, which is then transformed into an aspect of a new contradiction.


www.thefreedictionary.com

Dialectic Approach of Lefebvre


“As a Marxist, he saw contemporary everyday life as exploitative, oppressive and relentlessly controlled and ‘the bureaucratic society of controlled consumption’.”

“As a romantic he sought energies within the everyday that could be used to transform it.”

Moments


“For Lefebvre, ‘moments’ are those instances of intense experience in everyday life that provide an immanent critique of the everyday.”

“…provide a promise of the possibility of a different daily life,while at the same time puncturing the continuum of the present.”

“There is no empirical reality that can simply be encounteredso that it will reveal the forces that produced it. Nor is there a world of thought that can tell us essential truths. As Lefebvre writes, ‘The limitations of philosophy – truth without reality – always and ever counterbalance the limitations of everyday life – reality without truth’.”

“‘A revolution cannot just change the political personnel or institutions; it must change la vie quotidienne, which has already been literally colonized by capitalism’.”

Foundations

Lefebvre’s Work


French Hegelian Marxism “…the avant-garde movements…” “…philosophical work of Hegel and

its materialist reshaping in the early worksof Marx…”Total Man“human kind no longer alienated”

End of The History “the telos of history having reached”

La Fête (Festival)“…as a moment ‘other’ to the capitalist everyday and enacting a critique of the separation of the aesthetic from the social (or of art from life)…”Rural vs Urban“…continual study of rural France.”

Dada and Surrealism

Foundations


Foundations


La Fête Explored

“Festival holds an equivocal position in the everyday: it is part of popular everyday life but it is also a radical reconfiguring of daily life that is anything but ‘everyday’.”

“During the feasts there was much merry-making: dancing, masquerades in which boys and girls changed clothes or dressed up in animal skins or masks – simultaneous marriages for an entire new generation – races and other sports, beauty contests, mock tournaments . . . It is the day of excess. Anything goes. This exuberance, this enormous orgy of eating and drinking – with no limits, no rules . . .”

“The act of coupling Hegelian Marxism with la fête produces a philosophy of internal contradictions that provides the basis for its own critique and dissolution.”


La Fête Explored


the combination of these positions allows Lefebvreto make two related moves:

to privilege creativity for the transformation ofdaily life (‘let everyday life become a work of art’to argue for the decline of centrally organized society.

For Lefebvre, capitalist modernity can be characterized by contradictory tendencies that increase homogeneity in everyday life (a standardization in work and objectsthrough a general commodification) at the same time as social differences are extended and deepened (the intensification of hierarchical differences of class, ‘race’, gender, age, etc.). By placing la fête at the ‘end of history’, Lefebvre suggests (and desires) a historical telos of non-hierarchical play (creativity) and the radical democratic ‘right to difference’.

That Which Repeat Itself Constantly

“La vie quotidienne (everyday life) suggests the ordinary, the banal, but more importantly, for Lefebvre, it connotes continual recurrence, insistent repetition. It is repetition that is crucial to Lefebvre’s meaning of the term ‘everyday life’: the daily chores as well as those routinized pleasures that are meant to compensate for the drudgery.

“‘In as much as a camping holiday is a compensation for work, a temporary amelioration of its conditions of exhaustion as well as necessary for its efficient continuation, then it bears the stigmata of alienation (‘alienation in leisure just as in work’)”


Hypermodernization

“It is in attending to such social transformations that the critique of everyday life as it continued during the postwar period gradually turned away from the emphasis on some of the philosophical themes developed before the war (though never entirely abandoning them) and increasingly concerned itselfwith a Marxist sociology of everyday life, which takes as its subject matter modernity and the spatial forms it generates.

Latest developments of the urban fabric

New time-space relations,with a focus onsuburban forms

“Rather than focusing on the glamour of new forms of travel, Lefebvre insists on the new time and space relationships that result from the urban process of suburbanization and the needfor commuting.”

Shifting focus/emphasisfrom philosophicalto Marxist sociologyof Lefebvre’s everyday life


Hypermodernization

“…the project of Marxism must continually renew its conceptual framework if it is to have relevance for modern everyday life.”

Hypermodernization refers to French social and cultural transformation in the late 1950s and early 1960s

Massively accelerated modernization andindustrialization

Colonial relations between a ‘traditional France’

Decolonization of French colonies

A general but not evenAmericanization

Increasing exploitation of ‘immigrant’ workers

Banlieus


May 1968, Urbanism and Situationist

“As students took control of their institutions and as workers formed strike committees and workers’ councils (autogestion) it seemed, for a while, as if a permanent cultural revolution might result from what was appearing to be the re-emergence of the festival within the urban everyday.”“Here a form of revolutionary urbanism was transforming everyday life, turning it into carnival.”

“‘Proletarian revolutions will be festivals or nothing, for festivity is the very keynote of the life they announce. Play is the ultimate principle of this festival, and the only rules it can recognize are to live without dead time and to enjoy without restraints’.” Situationist International 1966: 37


May 1968, Urbanism and Situationist

One strong aspect of the Paris Commune (1871) is the strength of the return towards the urban centre of workers pushed out towards the outskirts and peripheries, their reconquest of the city, this belonging among other belongings, this value, this oeuvre which had been torn from them. (Lefebvre 1996: 76)“This analysis leads both Lefebvre and the SI to focus on the possibilities of the urban fabric to restore la fête to the city and to transform everyday life.”

“The kind of politics of the everyday that Lefebvre favoured always allowed for gradual and reformist revolution. It allowed Lefebvre to have a much more amenable relationship with government agencies and institutions. For the Situationists such ‘recuperation’ was unthinkable. Theirs was a revolutionary agenda that demanded the total and immediate overthrow of the present.”


An Unfinishable Project

The privileging of creativity and play as the basis for a social life stripped of boredom and routine places Lefebvre in a much more utopian tradition than we have seen so far. But in as much as this revolutionary energy is always within the everyday (howeveralienated) his utopianism is tied to the possibilities present within contemporary life. In this way a dialectical foregrounding of everyday life, which recognizes the alienation in everyday life at the same time as it attempts to grasp the utopian element that alienation tries to hide, is an act of bringing to consciousness (theoretically and practically) a non-conscious and non-apparenteveryday.