"Modern Dünyada Gündelik Hayat", yayımlandığı tarihten bugüne, mevcut düzene karşı gündelik hayatın kendisinden yola çıkarak muhalefet oluşturmak isteyenlere yol gösterdi. Fransa'da 1968'in hemen öncesinde çıkan kitap, yeni muhalefet hareketlerinin, dünyaya dair yeni bir algılama ve kavrama çabasının habercisi oldu.
Henri Lefebvre, felsefecilerin, sosyologların, antropologların bir dolayım olarak, kendisinden başka bir şeyin işareti ya da bahanesi olarak ele aldıkları gündelik hayatı eleştirel teorinin merkezine koyuyor bu yapıtında. Modern toplumun bütün gerilimlerinin yansıdığı alan olan gündelik hayat bir araştırma nesnesi haline getirilirse, hem baskılama tekniklerine hem de özgürleşme olanaklarına baka bir gözle bakılabilir. Dilin toplumsal baskıyı örtmekteki işlevi, tüketim ideolojisinin yarattığı yanılsamalar, iktidar aygıtları tarafından uygulanan terör ancak gündelik hayat içinden anlaşılabilir; çünkü çeşitli biçimlerde adlandırmaya çalıştığımız, ekonomik terimlerle, statü gruplarının hareketlilikleriyle, kendi çıkarını gözeten birey anlayışıyla incelediğimiz toplum, bu kavramsal araçları yetersiz kılacak denli karmaşıklaşmıştır. Ancak gündelik hayatı ve bu hayatın aldığı çeşitli biçimleri merkezine alan bir tarihsel eleştiri bu zorlu çabanın altından kalkabilir; varlığını sürdüren ama halihazırdaki toplum içinde göze görünmeyen muhalefetleri, direnişleri ve başkaldırı olanaklarını açığa çıkarabilir.
Henri Lefebvre'in kitabı, bugüne değin güncelliğinden hiçbir şey kaybetmedi. "Modern Dünyada Gündelik Hayat"ta geliştirilen teori, onu hayata geçirecek özneler bekliyor hala.
Henri Lefebvre was a French sociologist, Marxist intellectual, and philosopher, best known for pioneering the critique of everyday life, for introducing the concepts of the right to the city and the production of social space, and for his work on dialectics, alienation, and criticism of Stalinism, existentialism, and structuralism.
In his prolific career, Lefebvre wrote more than sixty books and three hundred articles. He founded or took part in the founding of several intellectual and academic journals such as Philosophies, La Revue Marxiste, Arguments, Socialisme et Barbarie, Espaces et Sociétés.
Lefebvre died in 1991. In his obituary, Radical Philosophy magazine honored his long and complex career and influence: the most prolific of French Marxist intellectuals, died during the night of 28–29 June 1991, less than a fortnight after his ninetieth birthday. During his long career, his work has gone in and out of fashion several times, and has influenced the development not only of philosophy but also of sociology, geography, political science and literary criticism.
An excellent distillation of the analyses and theory contained in volumes 1 & 2 of Lefebvre's Critique of Everyday Life, I suggest reading this after reading those and before going on to volume 3.
“There is a zero point of language (everyday speech), of objects (functional objects split up into elements and contrived by arranging and combining these elements), of space (space shown as dis-play, even when it is laid out in lawns and planted with trees, the space taken over by traffic circulation, deserted spaces even in the heart of the city), of need (predictable, predicted, satisfied in advance by imaginary satisfaction), and there is also a zero point of time: time that is programmed, organized according to a preexisting space on which it inscribes nothing, but by which it is prescribed. Zero point is a transparency interrupting communication and relationships just at the moment when everything seems communicable because everything seems both rational and real; and then there is nothing to communicate!”
“Thus we have a society that is obsessed with dialogue, communication, participation, integration and coherence, all the things it lacks, all the things it misses. These are our topics, our problems; we imagine we are solving problems by naming topics, by end-lessly, learnedly, obsessively discussing topics; we dissect lone-liness, lack of communication, discontent. But there is nothing unusual about these subjects; what is unusual is loneliness in the midst of overcrowding, lack of communication in a proliferation of signs of communication; new and unusual also is the fact that the place of communication is always elsewhere, in substitution. Zero point is the lowest point of social experience, a point that can only be approached and never reached, the point of total cold; it is made up of partial zero points - space, time, objects, speech, needs. A kind of intellectual and social asceticism can be discerned at zero point under all the apparent affluence, the squandering and ostentation as well as under their opposites, economic rationality, resistance. Moreover it can be held responsible for the decline of the Festival, of style and works of art; or rather it is the sum of features and properties resulting from their decline. In fact zero in the quotidian.”
“hu the city will be indepen- these differences. Time in the city and by the city will be independent of natural cycles but not submitted to the linear divisions of rationalized duration; it will be the time of unexpectedness, not a time without place but a time that dominates the place in which it occurs and through which it emerges. This will be the place and time of desire, above and beyond need, because in this sense urban life will involve the performance of numerous functions and will still be transfunctional. Though it will be the place of another time than that of formal spatiality, a place where speech prevails over writing and metalanguage, the city will none the less involve structures (spatial, formal); its practical existence will be practically defined (inscription and prescription) but this morphology will project (inscribe, prescribe) on the field relations whose social and intellectual reality will not be reduced to this projection. In the city speech will unify the scattered elements of social reality, functions and structures, disconnected space, compulsive time; the city will have its everyday life, but quotidianness will be banished; and terror, more in evidence here than elsewhere, will be more successfully opposed, either by violence (always latent) or by non-violence and persuasion; for the essence of the city will be a challenge to terror, a manner of counter-terrorism. The city's uninhibited self-expression and creativity (morphology, setting, shaped and moulded sites, adequate space and spaces) will restore adaptation so that it prevails over compulsion and sets a limit to make-believe, restricting the imagination to style and works of art, monuments, festivals, so that play and games will be given their former significance, a chance to realize their possibilities; urban society involves this tendency towards the revival of the Festival, and, paradoxically enough, such a revival leads to a revival of experience values, the experience of place and time, giving them priority over trade value. Urban society is not opposed to mass media, social intercourse, communication, intimations, but only to creative activity being turned into passivity, into the detached, vacant stare, into the consumption of shows and signs; it postulates an intensification of material and non-material exchange where quality is substituted for quantity, and endows the medium of communication with content and substance. Urban society will not turn everyday life into make-believe and will not be content with throwing a different light on quotidianness, but it will transform the quotidian in its own quotidian terms.”
“The state replaces providence; bureau-cracy, with the technical support of computers, supplants and incarnates the Lord; in this form of government where everyday life is totally organized nothing escapes or can escape organization; compulsions are seen as understanding and foresight; adaptation is almost unknown both as concept and as practice (save for an imperceptible residue); if 'humane' bureaucrats were to think of preserving the function of adaptation (which is highly improbable), their way of setting about it could only finish it off. Such is the terrorist society, where each individual trembles lest he ignore the Law but thinks only of turning it to his own advantage by laying the blame on someone else; a society where everyone feels guilty and is guilty - guilty of possessing a narrow margin of freedom and adaptability and of making use of it by stealth in a shallow underground darkness, alas, too easily pierced. The modern state-con-cerned, political bureaucracy rivals the old church in its detailed intervention, and is, in fact, a new church, a church with a new meaning but reaching the same ends: moral discipline and basic immorality, guilt, and duplicity before the law and those who enforce it; the surrounding darkness combated by many lights.”
“Are we discovering the unconscious, the significant desires' concealed beneath the signified? No need to go so far, for we are discussing everyday life.”
“The theory of metalanguage is based on logical, philosophical and linguistic research (and the critique of this research). It is defined as: a message (group of signs) controlling the code of the same or another message. When a person confides to another part of his code, by defining a word or by recapitulating to elucidate a meaning, he is using metalanguage. Thus metalinguistic operations are the normal, current, essential operations of speech (R. Jakobson). Metalanguage, words about words, speech at one remove, is present in ordinary speech, so much so that speech is unthinkable without this preliminary transmission of a code, or without meta-language which is part of the experience of speech. To borrow a metaphysical metaphor, language is enclosed in a casing of meta-language. The function of linguistics is to decipher, decode and organize the above operation; linguistics is metalanguage assuming an epistemological status by setting itself above language. Meta-language both precedes and follows the use of language - that is of speech; it encloses speech, of which it is a condition and a reflection.”
“language cannot be seen as either harmless or innocent! By restoring the dialectical movement - after the linguist’s justified abstraction and formalization - contradictions that the linguist had overlooked will be revealed. We repeat: the linguist is entitled to his methods, but not to proscribe the exposition of such con-tradictions. There is contradiction between referential and meta-linguistic functions, the latter eroding the former and supplanting them; the vaguer the referential the more distinct and significant grows metalanguage. Thus language and speech serve as referen-tials where metalanguage thrives; metalanguage discards and dissolves referentials and works on speech at one remove (or even two); conversely, the disappearance of each successive referential heralds a new extension to metalanguage (or a new specific sector of metalanguage), so that metalanguage becomes a substitute for language by assuming the attributes of referential-endowed lan-guage; the disappearance of each referential liberates a signifier and makes it available, whereupon metalanguage promptly appropriates it, employing it for jobs 'at one remove”
“The argument that emerges from the preceding pages is that a terrorist society, that is, a society of maximum repression, cannot maintain itself for long; it aims at stability, consolidation, at preserving its conditions and at its own survival, but when it reaches its ends it explodes. It is based on the organization of everyday life (which is also its objective) of which terror is the outcome.”
“written matter tends to act as metalanguage, to discard context and referential; prior to written matter there are actions connected to words. As metalanguage writing produces commentaries, exegeses, speech at one or two removes on one subject or another kept and preserved by inscription. Thus metalanguage prevails over speech; that is why scholasticism, byzantinism, talmudism and rhetoric play such an important part in societies based on the Scriptures.“
“Similarly there is no thought without an object, no reflection without content. Yet there exists a general form of thought based on classification, which is Logic. Let us summarize in a few terms the problem of the dialectical movement of form and content, too often overlooked to the advantage of 'pure' form, existing as such, intellectual as well as social. There is no form without content and, inversely, no content without form; reflection separates form from content thus supporting the form's natural inclination to exist as pure essence; and reflection itself constitutes a form that aspires to the status of universal essence (the philosopher's ambition and illusion). 'Pure' form, by its very purity, acquires an intelligible transparency, becomes operant, a medium of classification and action; but as such it cannot exist; as form it is no more than an abstraction, and what is perceived as existing is the unity (con-flicting, dialectical) of form and content. Form isolated from its content (or referentials) is enforced by terrorism. Our radical analysis turns formalism, structuralism and functionalism against themselves, attacks obsessional classification with a classification of forms and exposes their general content, which is everyday life maintained by terror. We observe in a decreasingly abstract pro-gression: a) logical forms. Intellectual: the absolute principle of identity A - A, a meaningless term, a tautology, therefore intelligible, limpid and transparent because it is void of content. Social: the pleonasm (ends taken as means, entity made autonomous and void); * mathematical forms. Intellectual: enumeration and classifica-tion, order and standard, equality in distinction, totality and sub-totalities. Social: ordering, rational organization; * linguistic forms. Intellectual: coherence. Social: cohesion of relations, codifying; * forms of exchange. Intellectual: equivalences, standardizing, comparing (qualities and quantities, activities and products, needs and satisfactions). Social: trade value, consumer goods (whence it acquires logic and language and tends to constitute a 'world' based on its form); * forms of contract. Intellectual: reciprocity. Social: the juridical formalization of relations based on reciprocity, a codification that extends to the elaboration of abstract principles; * forms of practico-sensorial objects. Intellectual: balance perceived or conceived in the object. Social: the symmetry of objects (including hidden relations between things, between each thing and its setting, between the self and the double, etc.); * urban forms. Intellectual: simultaneity. Social: encounters (bringing together neighbouring products and activities) that intensify - by materializing and de-consecrating - the landscape, produced by labour and imposed as form upon nature in a given territory; the form of writing. Intellectual: repetition. Social: accumula-tion. We omit recurrence; conceived by some (ultimately by Nietzsche) as the form of existence. If the form of writing occupies an inferior position to that of th city in this decreasingly abstract hierarchy of forms it is because our classification stipulates neither priority, logic, ontology nor historicity but goes from pure, translucid form to substantial con-tent, a progression that involves a now familiar dialectical relation,that of form and content. Form in its absolute purity (A = A) is absolutely unviable; the greatest paradox of reflection is first that such a form can be formulated and formalized with such precision and then that it should be effective. How and why? Where does this efficiency come from, this working ability of pure form? Without the slightest possible doubt from the fact that it makes analysis possible, that is to say, it allows for the division of reality' along its line of least resistance, its joints and disconnections, its levels and dimensions; we all know that analysis kills, has the fearsome power of death and life that disconnect and re-connect in different combinations the fragments and elements previously disconnected.”
mind blowind. So really this is a little misleading. You can't ( or rather I can't ) read this in one sitting. So I read a little, my mind explodes, I put it down- then pick it up later. i don't really expect it ever to go into the read category. By that same token, I should probably take all of the philosophy books in my list & leave them in 'currently-reading'. It would be much more accurate.
"this everyday being lives a double illusion, that of limpidity and evidence ('that's how it is') and that of substantial reality ('it can't be any different')"