ABSTRACT
103The terrain of the everyday doesn’t lend itself, initially, to an analysis of the possibilities of dissent, literary or otherwise. Writing in 1983 on the occasion of the centenary of Marx’s death, Henri Lefebvre, who did more than anyone to theorise and promote the concept, concludes that
the word everyday [le quotiden] designates the entry of […] daily life into modernity: the everyday as an object of a programming […] whose unfolding is imposed by the market, by the system of equivalences, by marketing and by advertisements. As to the concept of ‘everydayness’, it stresses the homogeneous, the repetitive, the fragmentary in everyday life.
(Lefebvre 1988, 87) Market-driven, homogeneous, repetitive, fragmentary. We are here a long way from the Lefebvre of 1945, the moment of the first volume of his career-long study of la vie quotidienne, with its robust defence of ‘the elementary splendour of everyday life’ (Lefebvre 2008a, 210) as counter to the extremes of capitalist and fascist modernization. In either case, though, ‘the everyday’, like the notion of ‘tradition’, itself must be read as an artefact of modernity – born in the split between workplace and home, public and private spheres, system and lifeworld. 1 In a 1965 encyclopaedia article, Lefebvre notes that the sectors of social life given over to the serial requirements of dailyness – commuting, working, shopping, cooking, cleaning, providing routine care and maintenance – while each distinct in their operations, share an underlying structure that unites them in their fragmentation: ‘organized passivity’ (Lefebvre 1987, 10). From such ground radical dissent seems unlikely to arise.