Everyday Life in the Modern World

Henri Lefebvre

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2017
• Print ISBN: 9781138523159
• eBook ISBN: 9781351318266
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Social Sciences
• Subtopic: Sociology
• Index: Social Sciences

When Lefebvre's book first appeared in the 1960s it was considered a manifesto for a social movement that focused on the quality of life experi-enced by the individual--by the com-mon man and woman. His emphasis on the quality of life will have even more appeal to those currently living with the problems of inflation, unem-ployment, and dwindling natural re-sources. Basing his discussions on everyday life in France, Lefebvre shows the de-gree to which our lived-in world and our sense of it are shaped by decisions about which we know little and in which we do not participate. He evaluates the achievements and shortcomings of applying variousphilosophical perspectives such as Marxism and Structuralism to daily life, studies the impact of con-sumerism on society, and looks at ef-fects on society of linguistic phenom-ena and various kinds of terrorism communicated through mass media. In his new introduction to this edi-tion, Philip Wander evaluates Lefebvre's ideas by relating many of them to current contexts. He discusses the political and economic aspects of daily life in the 1980s, the work envi-ronment, communications, and the world of science and technology.

1	An Inquiry, and Some Discoveries

In the past fifty years …

Imagine that you have before you a complete set of calendars dating from 1900, of which you select one at random that happens to represent a year towards the beginning of the century. Pencil poised, you then close your eyes and make a cross beside a day in this year; you open your eyes and you find that it is the sixteenth of June you have marked. Now you try to discover what took place on this particular day among so many others in a relatively peaceful and prosperous year – for this continent and country at least. You go to the public library and consult the national press for this date; you are confronted with news items, accidents, the sayings of contemporary personalities, a clutter of dusty reports and stale information and some unconvincing revelations concerning the wars and upheavals of the time; but there is practically nothing that might enable you to foretell (or to suppose that a reasonably perceptive person living in those days could have foretold) any of the events about to take place, those occurrences that must have been silently developing in the hidden depths of time; on the other hand, neither will you find much information as to the manner in which ordinary men and women spent that day, their occupations, preoccupations, labours or leisure. Publicity (still in its infancy), news items and a few marginal reports are all that is now available to reconstruct the everyday life of those twenty-four hours.

Having perused papers and periodicals from this not-so-distant past – noting the familiarity of headlines and the out-of-date typography – you can now give rein to your fancy: might not something have happened on that sixteenth of June which the press has omitted to report? You are indeed free to imagine that it is precisely then that a certain Mr Einstein – of whom nobody at the time had ever heard – had his first perception of relativity in the Zurich room where he inspected patents and toed the narrow lonely path between reason and delirium. Nor can anyone prove that you are wrong if you choose to believe it was that day and no other that an imperceptible but irreversible action (the apparently insignificant decision of a bank manager or a Cabinet minister) accelerated the passage from competitive capitalism to a different form of capitalism thus initiating the first cycle of world wars and revolutions. You might further select this early summer’s day with the sun in its solstice, dominated by the sign of Gemini, for the birth in some quiet village or town of children who, for no obvious reason, would grow up gifted with an exceptional awareness of the times and events.

Thus it is by chance and not by chance that this particular day – a sixteenth of June at the beginning of the twentieth century – was significant in the lives of a certain Bloom, his wife Molly and his friend Stephen Dedalus, and as such was narrated in every detail to become, according to Hermann Broch, a symbol of ‘universal everyday life’, a life elusive in its finitude and its infinity and one that reflects the spirit of the age, its ‘already almost inconceivable physiognomy’, as Joyce’s narrative rescues, one after the other, each facet of the quotidian from anonymity.*

The momentous eruption of everyday life into literature should not be overlooked. It might, however, be more exact to say that readers were suddenly made aware of everyday life through the medium of literature or the written word. But was this revelation as sensational then as it seems now, so many years after the author’s death, the book’s publication and those twenty-four hours that were its subject matter? And was it not foreshadowed already in Balzac, Flaubert, Zola and perhaps others?

The answers to these questions may contain a lot that is unexpected, but before attempting them we would like to point out some of the main features of one of the most controversial and enigmatic works of its time. Ulysses is diametrically opposed both to novels presenting stereotyped protagonists and to the traditional novel recounting the story of the hero’s progress, the rise and fall of a dynasty or the fate of some social group. Here, with all the trappings of an epic – masks, costumes, scenery – the quotidian steals the show. In his endeavour to portray the wealth and poverty of everyday life Joyce exploited language to the farthest limits of its resources, including its purely musical potentialities. Enigmatic powers preside. Bloom’s overwhelming triviality is encompassed by the City (Dublin), the metaphysical speculations of ‘amazed’ man (Stephen Dedalus), and the spontaneity of instinctive impulses (Molly); here is the world, history, man; here are the imaginary, the symbolic and the prophetic. But in making use of all the potentialities of speech a twofold disruption of language, both literary and general, was inevitable; the inventory of everyday life implies the negation of everyday life through dreams, images and symbols even if such a negation presupposes a certain amount of irony towards symbol and imagery; the classical object and subject of philosophy are found here in concrete form; that is to say, things and people in the narrative are conceived in terms of the object and subject of classical philosophy. But they are not static, they change, expand, contract; the seemingly simple object before us dissolves when subjected to the influence of acts and events from a totally different order; objects are super-objects, Dublin, the City, becomes all Cities, the River stands for all rivers and waters, including the fluids of womanhood; as to the truly protean subject, it is a complex of metamorphoses, of substitutions, it has discarded the substantial immanence–transcendance of the philosophers, the ‘I think that I think that I think …’ and unfurls through the medium of interior monologue. During these epic twenty-four hours in the history of Ulysses (Odysseus, Otis-Zeus, man-God, essential common man, the anonymous and the divine made one) the I merges with Man and Man is engulfed in mediocrity.

This subjectivity which unfurls is time in its dual aspect of man and divinity, the everyday and the cosmic, here and elsewhere; or in the triple form of the man, the woman and the other, waking, sleeping and dreaming, the trivial, the heroic and the divine, the quotidian, the historical and the cosmic. Sometimes ‘they’ are four: four wayfarers who are also the four Old Men, the four Evangelists, the four Corners of the Earth, the four Horsemen of the Apocalypse. Time is the time of change – not localized or particular change but the change of transition and the transitory, of conflict, of dialectics and of tragedy; the River is the symbol in which reality and dream are one and which is without form. The writing captures the world of desire and the narrative is dreamlike in its matter-of-factness (precisely in its matter-of-factness); in no way contrived, it reproduces the flowing image of a cosmic day, leading the reader into the turmoil of a linguistic carnival, a festival of language, a delirium of words.

Time – the time of the narrative, flowing, uninterrupted, slow, full of surprises and sighs, strife and silence, rich, monotonous and varied, tedious and fascinating – is the Heraclitean flux, engulfing and uniting the cosmic (objective) and the subjective in its continuity. The history of a single day includes the history of the world and of civilization; time, its source unrevealed, is symbolized over and over again in womanhood and in the river; Anna Livia Plurabelle, the flowing Liffey, Molly and her impetuous dream-desires in the boundless, unpunctuated realm between sleeping and waking, merge, converge and mingle.

Before pursuing our investigation let us summarize the preceding observations:

a) This narrative has a referential or ‘place’, a complex that is topical, toponymical and topographical: Dublin, the city with its river and its bay – not merely a distinctive setting, the scene of action, but a mystical presence, material city and image of the City, Heaven, Hell, Ithaca, Atlantis, dream and reality ceaselessly merging but with reality giving the tone; a city cut to the size of the citizens: the people of Dublin have moulded their surroundings which mould them in turn. Drifting through the streets of Dublin the wanderer gathers together the scattered fragments of this reciprocal assimilation.

b) Meanings proliferate, literal, proper and figurative, analogical, symbolical, mythic or mystic, not to mention the ultimate unfathomable meaning (related perhaps to enigmas of wandering, death, absence), as well as the different levels of meaning familiar, historical, kindred, foreign and so forth. And these meanings coexist. Joyce excels in the art of weaving them together, composing fugues with his themes; his linguistic resources seem truly inexhaustible. It has been suggested that one could write out the meanings on musical staves, superimposed as in an orchestral score. Joyce works on a substance, the written word, and in his hands it acquires polyphony, gathering and receiving speech till the reader hears the subject’s voice emerge from the page with all the connotations of subjectivity. Musicality always prevails over the purely literal; melodic line and harmonic progression determine the phrasing with necessary transitions (recurrence of the key-note, which may be a symbol or simply a specific sound). The writing tries to capture the enigmatic depth, the inherent musicality of language – or rather of speech – the polyphony pertaining normally only to orchestral music. Connotations play the part of harmonics; though he works in his own medium, the writer does not hesitate to borrow polyrhythmics, polyvalence, polyphony from the musician so that we find here writing, language and speech organically merged and redefined by the methods of musical composition.

c) Yet duration is not entirely structureless. There is in Joyce – and not only in Ulysses – a symbolic system with coherent crossreferences (though it must be admitted that in the glare of linguistic fireworks the coherence is not always self-evident). Where for others the relation signifier-signified is purely formal, for Joyce it is essentially dialectical; the signifier becomes signified and vice versa; the accent is continually being displaced, here the one predominates, there the other. Thus womanhood is signified by fluidity, rivers and waters but when two washerwomen at dusk evoke the legend of the river, from being signifier it becomes signified; all the rivers of the world are its tributaries. We find symbolical systems of womanhood, of the city, of metaphysical thought (the maze), of ordinary objects (a lighted cigar in the dark recalls the Cyclops’ eye). It would be interesting to construct a science of everyday life starting from these symbols, though such a ‘science’ belongs to another age than our own, an age where symbolism was in its prime; with Joyce at the beginning of the century each group of symbols was thematically related, distinct but undistinguished, and man could be represented by the prophetic bird: ‘Be my guide, dear bird; what birds have done in the past men will do tomorrow, fly, sing and agree in their little nests.’ Alas, an optimistic symbolism reflecting a youthful century!

d) For Joyce – after Vico and perhaps Nietzsche – cyclical time underlies all quotidian and cosmic duration. Everyday life is composed of cycles within wider cycles; beginnings are recapitulations and rebirths. The great river of Heraclitean becoming has many a surprise in store: it is linear; symbols, words and their repetitions reveal ontological correspondences that are fused with Being; hours, days, months, years, epochs and centuries intermingle; repetition, recollection, resurrection are categories of magic and of the imaginary but also of reality concealed within the visible; Ulysses is Bloom, and Bloom re-enacts Ulysses and the Odyssey; quotidian and epic merge like Same and Other in the vision of Perpetual Recurrence. As the mystic or the metaphysician – and because he is a poet – Joyce challenges the incidental; with everyday life as mediator he passes from the relative to the absolute.

‘Why must you go and choose an author whose work meanders through an impenetrable atmosphere of supreme boredom? There are others besides his Molly who are reduced to drowsiness by those endless pages.… And how can you have the cheek to quote an untranslatable author into the bargain? All you say is completely meaningless to those who are not well versed in the English language. Furthermore Joyce is dated, as dated as nineteenthcentury music in an epoch of atonality, concrete music and random constructions. He made writing unpredictable by the incessant intervention of a hero who is always just ahead or trailing behind the narrative. The works of Joyce and his contemporaries elude the strictures of dimension by subjecting words to musicality and thus making them indeterminate. The dichotomy “word–writing” (reminiscent of those other dichotomies “melody-harmony” and “ harmony-rhythm ”, from which it is none the less distinct) was fully exploited by Joyce; there is not a subterfuge, trick or contrivance that he spares us: hints (with a wink and a nudge), puns, trompe-l’oreille, every gap in coherent speech is filled with something; yes, but with what? What? The language of Zarathustra, however, truly soars on the wings of harmony instead of being reduced and limited by syntactical strictures, so that Nietzsche is always present while Joyce recedes …’

Maybe; yet are not intelligibility and ‘translatability’ insured by Joyce’s symbolical constructions carried as they are on the tide of Heraclitean time? Coherent groups of symbols are easily transferred from one language to another and from one ‘culture’ to another (in so far as ‘cultures’ exist …); such groups play the part of ‘universals’. Is there not clearly perceptible in Joyce’s writing a sort of tonal system conveyed precisely by its fluidity, continuity and transitoriness? Clear phrasing, return to the keynote, tension followed by the resolution of a cadence, startings and endings, punctuation in depth …; are none of these still intelligible? Could Beethoven be lapsing into folk-lore? Or Wagner? What neo-dogmatism! Nietzsche? How the times have changed! A little, a lot, vastly, not at all? We shall see. Joyce’s Ulysses is everyday life transfigured not by a blaze of supernatural light and song but by the words of man, or perhaps simply by literature. If the authorized questioner who has just intervened is right, all the more reason to define what has changed in half a century, whether it is everyday life or the art of representing it through metamorphosis, or both, and what the consequences are.

What has changed after roughly half a century? That the subject has become blurred is news to no one; it has lost its outline, it doesn’t well up or flow any longer, and with it the characters, roles, persons have slid into the background. Now it is the object that plays the lead, not in its objectivity (which had meaning only in relation to the subject) but as a thing, almost a pure form. If I want to write today – that is write fiction – I will start from an ordinary object, a mug, an orange, a fly of which I shall attempt a detailed description; never departing from the perceptible – presented as the concrete – I shall proceed to make inventories and catalogues. And why should I not choose that raindrop sliding down the windowpane? I could write a whole page, ten pages, on that raindrop; for me it will become the symbol of everyday life whilst avoiding everyday life; it will stand for time and space, or space within time; it will be the world and still only a vanishing raindrop.

There are many ways of interpreting what is still known as the ‘new novel’ (apart from considerations of success, failure, tediousness or interest). It can be seen as a methodical attempt to create a rational style that deliberately avoids tragedy, lyricism, confusion and controversy, aiming instead at a pure transparency of language that might almost be called spatial. This ‘objective’ clarity could be seen as a sort of projector isolating the object on a stage if one were to overlook the fact that objects must first be created; it is a product neither of the subject as creator nor of the object as creation, but only of language imitating ‘reality’. Can one even say that a story is being told? A story is no longer a story when words are reduced to bare necessities. Time is cancelled out in the process of exploring it, when the quest for a perfect recurrence, a coming and going in time, is achieved by means of pure prose, of writing reduced to its essence. The simultaneity of past, present and future merges time with space and is more easily realized in a film than in literature, where ‘novelistic’ implications are always present. Moreover it is not every subject that can be submitted to such a formal elaboration: things, people, gestures, words. And can anyone be sure that time will not intervene and disrupt such permanence? Is everyday life’s changelessness a guarantee? Films and literature use everyday life as their frame of reference but they conceal the fact, and only expose its ‘objective’ or spectacular aspects. Writing can only show an everyday life inscribed and prescribed; words are elusive and only that which is stipulated remains.

Let us take an example. Shall we select for our particular example of ‘objective’ writing, the writing of strict form, a distinguished scholar or a novelist? If a novelist, who shall it be? We have made the arbitrary choice of Claude Simon in his book Flanders Road,* because there is a certain affinity between this book and Ulysses notwithstanding the differences that distinguish them; an affinity that makes comparison possible while enabling us to note the contrasts. In both works short periods of time expand, dream and remembrance recreate a universal everyday life; in both we find the eternal triangle, wife, husband and lover; symbols and word-play abound. In Claude Simon there is a Blum, in Joyce a Bloom, a coincidence that suggests a connection perhaps not wholly unintentional on the part of the later author.

‘Oh yes!…’ Blum said (now we were lying in the darkness in other words intertwined overlapping huddled together until we couldn’t move an arm or a leg without touching or shifting another arm or leg, stifling, the sweat streaming over our chests gasping for breath like stranded fish, the wagon stopping once again in the dark and no sound audible except for the noise of breathing the lungs desperately sucking in that thick clamminess that stench of bodies mingled as if we were already deader than the dead since we were capable of realizing it as if the darkness the night… . And Blum: ‘Bought drinks?’, and I: ‘Yes. It was … Listen: it was like one of those posters for some brand of English beer, you know? The courtyard of the old inn with the dark-red brick walls and the light-coloured mortar, and the leaded windows, the sashes painted white, and the girl carrying the copper mugs …

Fine. Now let us compare this to what we had noted in Ulysses.

a) Here we find no acknowledged, pre-established referential; the place is a place of desolation, a landscape laid waste by war and rain where corpses rot in the mud and slime, a sinister collaboration of civilization and nature. The symbolism is spatial, the place being the only stable thing there is. We are never sure in what moment of time the story is situated, nor in which tense is the narrative; and we do not need to know. Memories are centred around the place, symbolized and actualized by it as they flow from the remote past. In the course of the narrative, which proceeds in cycles, men are the playthings of fate; they circle around the place and their circling leads to death or captivity at the hands of the enemy.

b) Man’s fate is not enacted here against a backdrop of normal everyday life; we are in time of war. And yet it is the quotidian that is conjured up. The past, before tragedy took over, was controlled by logic and order, or so it seemed; in reality logic and order, and meaning too, were only paving the way to tragedy (eroticism, passion and love), with its sequel of disillusions. The extraordinary in everyday life was everyday lif...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Table of Contents
• Introduction to the Transaction Edition
• 1 An Inquiry, and Some Discoveries
• 2 The Bureaucratic Society of Controlled Consumption
• 3 Linguistic Phenomena
• 4 Terrorism and Everyday Life
• 5 Towards a Permanent Cultural Revolution