Henri Lefebvre - Everyday Life in the Modern World

Everyday Life in the Modern World

Classics in Communication and Mass Culture Series

Arthur Asa Berger, Series Editor

Agit-Pop, Arthur Asa Berger

The Astonished Muse, Reuel Denney

Beyond Words, Kurt W. Back

Blind Men and Elephants, Arthur Asa Berger

Communication and Social Order, Hugh Dalziel Duncan

Desexualization in American Life, Charles Winick

Everyday Life in the Modern World, Henri Lefebvre

The Flow of Information, Melvin DeFleur and Otto N. Larson

The Hollywood TV Producer, Muriel G. Cantor

Humor and Laughter, Antony Chapman and Hugh Foot

Jewish Humor, Avner Ziv

Life Studies of Comedy Writers, William F. Fry and Melanie Allen

Mass Media in Modern Society, Norman Jacobs

The Play Theory of Mass Communication, William Stephenson

Political Culture and Public Opinion, Arthur Asa Berger

Political Persuaders, Dan Nimmo

Polls and the Awareness of Public Opinion, Leo Bogart

The Public Arts, Gilbert Seldes

Television as an Instrument of Terror, Arthur Asa Berger

Television in Society, Arthur Asa Berger

T.V.: The Most Popular Art, Horace Newcomb

The Uses of Literacy, Richard Hoggart

You Dont Say, Benjamin DeMott

Everyday Life in the Modern World

Henri Lefebvre

Translated by Sacha Rabinovitch

With a New Introduction by

Philip Wander

First published 1984 by Transaction Publishers

Published 2017 by Routledge

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New material this edition 1984 by Taylor & Francis.

Original edition copyright 1971 by Sacha Rabinovitch.

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Library of Congress Catalog Number: 83-9142

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication

Du Bois, W.E.B. (William Edward Burghardt), 1868-1963.

Dusk of dawn.

(Black classics of social science)

Reprint. Originally published: Schocken Books, 1968.

Includes index.

ISBN 0-7658-0576-6 (alk. paper)

1. Du Bois, W.E.B. (William Edward Burghardt), 1868-1963. 2. Afro-AmericansSocial conditions. 3. United StatesRace relations. 4. Afro-AmericansBiography. I. Title. II. Series.

ISBN: 0-87855-917-5 (pbk.)

ISBN 13: 978-0-87855-972-5 (pbk)

Contents

Philip Wander

Everyday life is a crust of earth over the tunnels and caves of the unconscious and against a skyline of uncertainty and illusion that we call Modernity, while overhead stretch the Heavens of Permanence; among the greater planets are Scientificness, clear, cold and somewhat shadowy, and the twin planets Virility and Femininity; there are stars, constellations and nebulae; high over the polar horizon we have Technology and elsewhere Youthfulness; there are novae such as reliability, frozen, extinct stars like Beauty and the strange signs of Eroticism; among the fixed stars of the first magnitude we might place Urbanism and Urbanization (so long as we do not omit Naturalness, Rationality and a few others); and then the sub-lunar planets, Fashion (or fashionability) locatable in the vicinity of Femininity, and Sportiveness, etc.

Henri Lefebvre

The question underlying Everyday Life in the Modern World is what gives a society devoted to the all-consuming transitory, and to accelerated change, the illusion of stability. It is a profound question, leading to a radical reassessment of ourselves as products of this world and of our society which, along with other modern societies, is now poised on the brink of unredeemable catastrophe. It is odd to associate all this with everyday life, but this is crucial if we are to follow Lefebvres critique. Everyday life refers to dull routine, the ongoing go-to-work, pay-the-bills, homeward trudge of daily existence. It indicates a sense of being in the world beyond philosophy, virtually beyond the capacity of language to desribe, that we know simply as the grey reality enveloping all we do. In this sphere of nonwork relations we live out our lives with our acquisitions, compulsions, and fears. The way time and space are made up in the urban areas which during the nineteenth and twentieth centuries have grown up around the great factories to house the workersand what this means for the individual is the focus of Lefebvres work and the meaning of what he calls the quotidian.

The modern world refers to the products of industrialization and the controls necessary to socialize workers and regulate consumption. It is a society whose rational character is defined through and has its limits set by highly organized groups (bureaucracies) operating through the state and/or the corporate state; whose purpose lies less in production than in consumption; whose level of operation takes place on and is aimed at influencing everyday life. In this way Lefebvre joins together technological, consumer, affluent, and leisure societies emphasized by other social theorists, into what he calls a society of bureaucratically controlled consumption. Its poetry is found in advertising; its persona is the consumer; and its mechanism for insuring individual conformity lies in the communication of fear fear of being out of fashion, of not being young and attractive, being odd, out of it, the subtle terrors through which advertising motivates.

The intellectual significance of Lefebvres critique is that it identifies an undeniable body of experienceour own in relation to the society in which we liveand challenges its naturalness. Neither nature nor fate, science, or technology determines what is. The shape and content of our lives is the product of a number of decisions in which we do not participate and about which we may or may not be aware. The building in which I live is the product of negotiations between builders, environmentalists, and bankers: its cost, which is a product of interest rates, a depressed construction industry, and the efforts made by unions to preserve jobs, as well as its shapethe kind of building materials used, where it sits on the lot, its relation to the sun at mid-day. The nature surrounding me? Every shrub is planned, its selection influenced by what is planted on the freeways and in front of office buildings (this establishes a fashion and lowers the cost of the plants involved). The sky, the azure blue of romantic poems, is laced with wires the telephone company, electric utilities, and lumber interests did not wish to bury. The sunset, the fiery orb dropping through dark clouds, is a product of automobile and industrial emissions and the efforts of ecology groups to establishing smog controls. The water, the crystal springs gushing forth, its clarity and taste are the result of a struggle between petro-chemical corporations, high-tech industries (that use chemical baths to sterilize the microchips), and groups seeking to improve public health and to promote clean water.