Lefebvre, Henri

Everydayness

According to Lefebvre, every historical form of preindustrial society has a daily life but no every-dayness. Preindustrial daily life is structured by natural cycles—day and night, weeks, months, seasons, and lifecycles—and framed by religious meanings and the predominance of use values. For Marx, daily life in early capitalism was the working day organized on the production site.

For Lefebvre, everyday life emerges in the writings of early-twentieth-century novels like James Joyce's Ulysses. The center of daily life shifts from the working day to private life, the household, and urban social space. Everyday life is a modern experience that emerges with two additional relations, the urban and differences that he analyzes in the dialectical triad: the everyday/the urban/differences. Everyday life is lived experience, a potential moment for self-creation (a concept borrowed from Nietzsche). Everyday life is a residuum: a moment of history, what is left over after working activities are extracted, humble actions that are repeated daily and taken for granted, the positive moment, and potential power of daily life.

For Lefebvre, everyday life is the social structure of modernity, a mediator between particulars and the social totality, a level and foundation of the social totality. Like the classical working class, the new working classes reproduce the structure [Page 448]of neocapitalism voluntarily through their daily activities. But humans do not live by work alone; daily life provides meanings for the productive activities of working people, although in its present state, it is an alienated experience. According to Lefebvre, it is only when people can no longer live their everyday lives that the possibilities for change in social forms and social structures become imminent or concrete.

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