CRITIQUE OF EVERYDAY LIFEHenri Lefebvre

vol.1 Part 2-3

ID 501 Advanced Product Development in Industrial Design

Alev Sönmez

METU Department of Industrial Design

AIM

is to question the way to constitute the knowledge of everyday life, criticizing the methodology that historians and writers have been using for decades which is built on private consciousness.

is to constitude a kowledge of everyday life, by presenting fundamental critiques of Marxism.

1. The Knowledge of Everyday Life

2. Marxism as Critical Knowledge

The Knowledge of Everyday Life

“the only real critique was and remains the critique of the Left…Because it alone is based on knowledge.”

Poets, philosophers and historians critisize everyday life in a mystical and metaphysical way, which results in stucking in the private consciousness.

private consciousness

“Individual and isolated, becoming universal only in its abstract form, thought-deprived of real contact with the real and of any consciousness of its practical and everyday character.”

Old scholl historians introduced detailed ,trivial descriptions of everyday life at a given period such as royal illnesses, love affairs and life in medieval castles.

This has no relation with the idea of developing a “knowledge of everyday life”, that Lefebvre is talking about.

According to Lefebvre this kind of approach to everyday life knowledge, substituting the concrete by an abstraction. These are intellectually stagnant phrases.

Now, there is a shift...

‘significant’ facts

realityappearance

The sum total of everyday events

totalityIndividual elements

“Only this certainity that we are moving from glamorous appearances to the essence saves us from illusory perspectives (...)”

Theatrical performancesThe great scenes of on the stage of history

“Historical scenes have always been cleverly and cunningly ‘staged’ by certain men who were aiming for specific results. They were acts.”

“A keener awareness of everyday life will replace the myths of ‘thought’ and ‘sincerity’-and deliberate proven ‘lies’-with the richer, more complex idea of thought-action.”

Human beings Mystifiers, manage to play a role precisely by exaggerating their own importance

Historical study which examines history without everyday life

NaiveOnlookerNo awarenessNo consciousneesNo weightIllusions

Historical study linking history and knowledge of everyday life

ProfoundDenounce appearancesRealistic

Conslusion

•The genuine reality only can be found in the unmysterious depths of everyday life.

•History, psychology and the science of mankind must become a study of everyday life.

•This conviction is bit by bit drawning in the work of certain historians, geographers and psychologists, but there is not a synthesis yet.

Critique of

•Individuality•Mystifications•Money•Needs•Work•Freedom

Maxisim as a Critical Knowledge

Critique of Individuality

Faith“A rope from which we dangle, unless we use it to hang ourselves with.”

Kierkegaard, inner conflict

Everyday life The life which is actually demanded

Theological faith and metaphysical reason is dead. Now these conflicts are not in realm of thought alone, but in everyday life.

Baudelaire, Dostoevski, rimboud and even Kierkegaard’s works are situated by knowledge and social critisim of men and ideas. ( human problems of the time, character changes)

Marx and Engels

•First to perceive how thought is linked to action•They get to the very roots of ideas and fundamental questions.

A modern proletarian,

is not a ready-made soul of nature with spirituality. He is not produced by questionable influences and theories.NO.

He is proletarian because of he lives a proletairan life; if he is humanized, it is because he has succeded in trascending proletarian life.

Proletarian = oppressed class

deprived of consciousness and culture, wealth, power and happiness.But this deprivation devastates ‘private consciousness’, private life of bougeois.

Proletarian reaching consciousness of proletarian condition, achieve social totality, of creative labour. Makes it through knowledge, then the action is superseeding the condition

Petty bourgeois finds ‘self-consciousness’ but fails to reject the ‘self’. They withdraw into ‘private consciousness’. Has limited access to human. To BEhumanized they must break with themselves.

Man’s consciousness depends upon his real life. The meaning of a life is to be found in that life itself.

Search the link between what men think, desire, say, believe, what they are, what they do.

Ideas to men(Marx & Engels)

Men to Ideas

We must first denounce mystification.

“When a proletarian believes that he is simply a 'citizen' comparableto every other citizen, or that he is destined to work because it is writtenfor all eternity that every man 'must earn his bread with the sweat of hisbrow', he is being mystified.”. personal misfortune

We must first denounce mystification.Scientific study is needed. Marxism.

“To study the proletariat scientifically is to begin tearing away the veilof ideologies by which the bourgeoisie has attempted to explain historyto itself and to explain - to make acceptable - the proletarian situationto the proletariat. These ideologies tend to deprive the proletariat (asindividuals and as a class) of consciousness.”.

“Marxism, as a whole, really is a critical knowledge of everyday life.”

Critique of individuality (private consciousness)

The very things that make a man a social and human being (...) are the things that also limit him and confine him according to the way labour is currently organized.

Division of labour individualization inward looking lives

Private life

When an individual life is shaped by individualistic tendencies.Life split into poles. ( work-rest, public-personal, marvellous-everyday)

“what makes each of us a human being also turns that human being into something inhuman.”

Everyday Contradiction

We must superseed private consciousness.

Critique of mystification (mystified consciousness)

Pproletarian does not escape the dangers of the ‘private consciousness' completely. His work is collective but human contact is outside the work.

Formation of proletarian consciousness is not spontaneous, it is studied. ( theory is coming from intellactuals)

Individualism is not simply a theory, but also a fact and a class weapon. (...) it actually organizes everyday life, leisure, family life, etc., is infinitely more important.(bourgeouis)

Bourgeois want to manupulate the masses by injecting ‘private consciousness’ to create individual masses. In fact bourgeois is also an individual mass.??

Critique of money (fetishism and economic alienation)

Petty bourgeois hates and envies rich people and create concepts which rails against money

Petty bourgeois hates and envies rich people and create concepts which rails against money

“she was poor, but she was honest !” (Moral motifs of everyday life of poor people)

“There will always be rich and there will always be poor.”

Their aim is to consolidate, to crystallize those absurd concepts 'wealth' and'poverty', to present them as opposites, to incarnate them in individuals. (presenting the system as a natural concept)

Rehabilitation of wealth (Marxism)

Marxism perception of wealth is a social wealth. Man and object relation is not man and object possession.It is about rich realtionship with the object.

Myth of wealth being bad should be abandoned.

Under capitalism to have and to exist are identical.

“The man who has nothing is nothing.”

If someone has nothing he believes at least he has his soul. (spirituality)

“Wealth, like power, is part of man's greatness and of the beauty of life. The solution to man's problems is to be found not by sharing out weakness, poverty and mediocrity - but by seeking power and wealth.”

Economic Alienation

it represents all the time devoted not to living but to saving or ‘speculating‘ (in the financial sense of the word) instead.

“Everything which you are unable to do, your money can do for you.”

“The less you are the more you have.”

Money is the man’s alienation essence.

Critique of need (psychological and moral alienation)

“The need for money is the expressions on the needs of money”

“As a result the worker stops feeling the simplest needs, which are also the most difficult needs for workers to satisfy : the need for space, for fresh air and freedom, for solitude or contemplation.”

Losing animal needs while cheasing human needs

Critique of work (alienation of the worker of the man)

In fact worker works for ‘social whole’, but thinks he is working ‘for the boss’, because he provides him with a profit.

Worker is separated from his ownself, his everyday life.He is a human and also a labour power at the same time.( Labour time as a commodity)

“the necessity of 'earning a living', and it is thus that, for the individual, social labour takes on the appearance of a penalty, a mysterious punishment.

The Marxist definition of freedom is concrete and dialectical.

The realm of freedom is established progressively by The development of human powers as an end in itself.

It is won progressively by social man.

“Human needs become degraded…they just keep on working, and their lives are spent just staying alive. This, in a nutshell, has been the philosophy of everyday life—and still is.”

‘ the reduction of the working day is the basic requisite.’ (Marx)

Critique of freedom (man’s power over nature and his own nature)

Discussion

•Why historians choose to critisize everyday life in a mystical way?Is that what we want to learn about history?

•What would be different if historians have adapted a more realistic approach to everyday life? How could it affect today’s everyday life?

•Humanization of proletarian .Discussion of “humanization” in that sense.

•Alienation is a result of private consciousness. Is it a necessity to construct societies and maintain the system?

•Private consciousness? Is there anything that it serves to social relations.

•Why should we adapt totality rather than individuality?