Critweet_of_Everyday_Life

Hand-picked quotes from Henri Lefebvre's 3 volume Critique of Everyday Life

Bracketed text are my own words and not Lefebvre's

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There are men who are not artists and not philosophers, but who nevertheless emerge above the everyday, in their own everyday lives, because they experience moments: love, work, play, etc.

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Already witches and magicians existed, with spells, rituals and gestures which were intended precisely to console weak humanity with the illusion of having direct power over nature – nature so familiar and yet so terrifying.

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In ways that are poorly understood, the everyday is thus closely related to the modes of organization and existence of a (particular) society, which imposes relations between forms of work, leisure, ‘private life’, transport, public life.

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In the shops we come across innumerable works devoted to everyday acts: housework, cookery, dressing, sleep, sexuality, and so on.

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Acceptance of daily life as it is (as it develops in and through its changes); or refusal of it, a refusal that can be either heroic and ascetic, or hedonistic and sensual, or revolutionary, or anarchistic – in other words, neo-Romantic, hence aesthetic?

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... American novelists have shown us the contradictions of that illustrious America and the poverty and slavery her real greatness implies

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It is the day of excess. Anything goes. This exuberance, this enormous orgy of eating and drinking – with no limits, no rules – is not without a deep sense of foreboding.
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Towns show us the history of power and of human possibilities which, while becoming increasingly broad, have at the same time been increasingly taken over and controlled, until that point of total control, set up entirely above life and community, which is bourgeois control

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In this day and age, everyday life is lit by false suns: morality, the state, ideology. They bathe it in a phoney light, and even worse, they lower it to depths where possibilities cannot be perceived, and keep it there.

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In the light, or the half-light of the everyday, the constellation of moments cannot be seen.

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The moment is passion and the inexorable destruction and self-destruction of that passion

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Whoever wants knowledge sacrifices everything which is not knowledge in the pursuit of knowledge: everything becomes an object of knowledge and a means of knowing the object it is pursuing.

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This would no longer be the existential isolation of the old individualism, but a solitude all the more profound for being overwhelmed by messages.

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Computerized daily life risks assuming a form that certain ideologues find interesting and seductive: the individual atom or family molecule inside a bubble where the messages sent and received intersect.

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Users, who have lost the dignity of citizens now that they figure socially only as parties to services, would thus lose the social itself, and sociability.

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The 'process' capitalism brings, like its 'generosity', is just a means to an end: profit.

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...if the revolution only changes representations, these masses seek refuge in an everyday which is an extension of the previous one: private life, scant public or political life, family life, based upon the close relations of neighbourhood and friendships.

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The masses come together to make revolution because they are no longer willing to live as hitherto

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By transporting it, fiction and half-sleep, half-waking dreams will make an intolerable life livable by offering it meanings which will support it and deceive it without being deceitful. In this pseudo-world nothing is, and everything signifies.