Everyday Life in the Modern World

Author: Henri Lefebvre
Year: 1971 (Harper Torchbooks; orig. 1968)
Source type: book
Raw file: raw/books/lefebvre-1971-everyday-life-modern-world.md

Summary

Lefebvre's Everyday Life in the Modern World critiques everyday life under what he calls the "bureaucratic society of controlled consumption." It opens with Joyce's Ulysses as "a symbol of 'universal everyday life,'" and proceeds through an inquiry into the everyday, its linguistic phenomena, and the "terrorism" of the everyday — the colonization of daily life by consumption, bureaucracy, and a perverted, commercialized language — toward the possibility of a "permanent cultural revolution" and the recuperation of the festival/moment.

Key Claims

• Everyday life as a discovery: the "momentous eruption of everyday life into literature" (Joyce, Balzac, Flaubert, Zola) made readers "suddenly aware of everyday life"; the quotidian is that which is "elusive in its finitude and its infinity," reflecting "the spirit of the age."
• The bureaucratic society of controlled consumption: modernity reduces everyday life to a sphere managed by bureaucracy and, above all, by a mode of consumption that controls daily living — needs are manufactured and managed, and "the everyday" becomes a target of administration rather than a site of free practice.
• The everyday as alienation and terror: everyday life under this regime is dominated by a "terrorism" of the quotidian — pervasive, invisible constraints on daily thought and action; language itself is emptied and manipulated by publicity/advertising ("linguistic phenomena"), so that meaning is colonized.
• Critique and renewal: against this domination, Lefebvre's critique points toward "a permanent cultural revolution" — the transformation of everyday life through the "critique of daily life," the theory of moments, and the recuperation of a festive, celebratory dimension ("the festival") that resists the reduction of daily life to managed consumption.

Connections

Concepts: Everyday Life · Everyday Architecture · Consumerism · Dwelling
Authors: Henri Lefebvre
Debates: (theory of the everyday)
Related source notes: The Politics and Potential of Everyday Life (Colebrook) · The Invention of Everyday Life (Felski)

Direct Quotes

"[T]he quotidian steals the show." (on Ulysses)

"The bureaucratic society of controlled consumption." (chapter title — the book's key concept)

"[T]here is practically nothing [in the news] ... as to the manner in which ordinary men and women spent that day." (the everyday's invisibility)

Open Questions

• Does Lefebvre's "bureaucratic society of controlled consumption" give a robust account of how architecture/urbanism are drawn into the controlled everyday — and can the "moment"/festival offer a real counterweight to the spectacular city?