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July 21, 2009
Henri Lefebvre argued in his Critique of Everyday Life that everyday life constituted the fundamental layer of social existence and, in the contemporary world superceded the economic and political:
… daily life cannot be defined as a “sub-system” within a larger system. On the contrary: it is the “base” from which the mode of production endeavors to constitute itself as a system, by programming this base. Thus, we are not dealing with the self-regulatio of a closed totality. The programming of daily life has powerful means at its disposal: it contains an element of luck, but it also holds the initiative, has the impetus at the ‘base’ that makes the edifice totter. Whatever happens, alterations in daily life will remain the criterion of change.” (Critique, vol. 3, p.41).
For Lefebvre, everyday life is the site of and the crucial condition for the “reproduction of the relations of production.” Lefebvre’s central argument is that state and economy are outcomes of the everyday, and that state and the economy attempt to dominate and to assert their primacy over social life with the massive urbanization and modernization which transformed industries and urban environments. The technological culture and industrial capitalism transformed social life into economic life, everyday life became saturated with commodity logistics, and corporate logos became the semiotics of daily life.
In late modernity exchange value and equivalence come to dominate and constrain the singularity of our everyday lived experience whilst capitalism achieves growth through producing space.
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