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November 24, 2007
In this review of Michael E. Gardiner's recent Critiques of Everyday Life at Culture Machine by Liam McNamara we find a section on the work of Henri Lefebvre and the Situationists. McNamara says:
Lefebvre’s main tool of analysis is gained via his critical reading of Marx, and has similarities to the Surrealists and the Situationists. Gardiner points out how Lefebvre rejects a ‘metaphysics of labour’ in favour of a critical praxis that operates through poesis rather than work. However, Lefebvre also criticizes the tendency for Surrealism to strive for an escape from everyday life via the marvellous, rather than enabling its dialectical supersession. Many of these ideas are integrated into a critical theory of leisure, opposing an affective leisure to an instrumental, egocentric variant.
McNamara adds that the theory emerging from Lefebvre’s later career takes a linguistic turn, but the focus remains on everyday life as an unfulfilled realm of human potentialities:
Modernity is categorized as an impoverished realm where the affective powers of the symbol have been substituted by the ‘signal’ (sign) and metalanguage. This process of cybernetization vitiates everyday life, and the technocracy it helps usher in shows a total absence of Utopian vision. The most alarming development is the loss of referential meaning in language; meaning is decontextualized by the split of the signifier and signified, leading to their hasty fusion.
Lefebvre, sees everyday life everyday life as an unfulfilled realm of human potentialities as increasingly detached from science and leisure and understands emancipatory acts to be the sublime rather than the more prosaic activities such as eating and drinking.
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