“The philosophers
have only interpreted the world, in various ways; the point,
however, is to change it” (Karl
Marx, emphasis by author in Theses on Feurbach 1845, 1978:145).
Lefebvre’s Critique of Everyday Life is a neo-Marxist
interpretation of what society had become in the 1940s.
He is particularly influenced by Marx’s notion of
false consciousness and the liberation of the individual
(or creation of man) through a ‘practical connection’
with the world (Marx, 1978: 163). According to Lefebvre,
“we are caught in a hybrid compromise between knowledge
and the aesthetic,” where reality is framed for the
masses on a stage (Lefebvre, 2000:132). His critique is
based on the premise that the consciousness of 1940’s
society is largely based on the practice of everyday life
of the powerful. Thus the common man perceives the world
under the spell of spectacle of big men (136). The interests
and practices of the powerful are mediated to the masses
through events, festivals, radio and consumption -- falling
under the heading of spectacle. The masses then dwell in
the reality of those in power, under a false conscious with
a false perception of themselves. To avoid this false consciousness,
Lefebvre says consciousness should depend on the human’s
real everyday life where “the meaning of life is not
to be found in anything other than that life itself”
(144). It is in the realm of this everyday life where knowledge
exists and where genuine change can occur (137). Because
the realm of everyday life is also the realm of change for
Lefebvre; he stresses it is also the domain on which social
theory and history should focus (2000: 137).
“All
we need do is simply to open our eyes, to leave the dark
world of metaphysics and the false depths of the ‘inner
life’ behind, and we will discover the immense human
wealth that the humblest facts of everyday life contain”
(132).
According to Lefebvre, “myths of thought” are
replaced with a richer and more complex idea of “thought-action”
through the conscious practice of everyday life (2000:135).
He illustrates this point by describing that it is labor
that slowly over time has physically transformed the landscape
through ‘humble gestures’ (134). Gestures and
words produce direct results either physically or through
persuasion. Hence, he, argues such gestures and words need
to be paired not with mythical consciousness but instead
with consciousness that is directed towards specific goals
through movement or action (135). He describes Marx and
Engles as the first great thinkers to perceive how thought
is linked to action (143).
Following their lead, Lefebvre proposes that “the
historian or the man of action can proceed from ideas to
men, from consciousness to being – i.e. towards practical,
everyday reality – bringing the two into confrontation
and thereby achieving criticism of ideas by action and realities”
(emphasis by Lefebvre: 2000, 145). For Lefebvre the dehumanization
of the human qualities of life is one of the major contradictions
of the modern era. This contradiction
exists primarily because of the capitalist regime, where
“having” and “being” have become
intertwined, convoluting the human spirit and alienating
individuals from themselves. Following this logic,
to exist means to have and having nothing means being nothing
(155). This distinction then separates men from each other,
guiding actions away from ‘being’ and towards
‘having’, resulting with the human alienated
from him or herself. To overcome this alienation, one must
achieve a “fulfillment of human reality” that
is based on an objective reality dictated by senses, instincts,
feelings and human reason (163). Man must be connected to
his actions in order to be ‘human’. According
to Lefebvre, it is through everyday life that humans can
overcome the spectacle’s domination and each can discover
his or her own human self (163). It is through the critique
of the human contradiction and through the critique of everyday
life where the individual, and eventually, society can become
empowered.
It is in this notion of the spectacle, and the practice
of everyday life that lies at the root of the writings of
the Situationists International throughout the 1950s and
1960s. Writings of the Situationists International closely
resemble the framework laid by Lefebvre. This framework
focuses on alienation through spectacle and liberation of
the human through the practice of everyday life.
“There are more truths in twenty-four hours of a man's
life than in all the philosophies”
(Raoul Vaneigem The Revolution of Everyday Life, 1967 Chapter
2).
In 1967 Guy Debord published Society of the Spectacle and
Raoul Vaneigem published The Revolution of Everyday Life.
Both of these works build upon the ideas presented in Lefevbre’s
Critique of Everyday Lifeˆ (1947). The spectacle for
Debord is based on the idea that the consumer society is
alienated or detached from every aspect of life, where spectacle
is a “concrete inversion of life and an autonomous
movement of non-life” (Society of the Spectacle 1991:
2). This idea is akin to Lefebvre’s notion that in
consumer societies “having” becomes “being”
(Lefebvre 2000:155).
However, at the time of Lefevbre’s publication (1947),
spectacle was disseminated primarily through advertising,
and in media not as heavily dominated by images as prominent
media were during the late 1960s. In the twenty years between
the publication of the two works, consumer society was bombarded
by an influx of images through advertising broadcast on
television and printed on glossy paged color magazine layouts.
Technological innovation had lowered the cost of quality
printed reproductions, which were circulated to mass audiences.
Also, televisions had become much more common household
items, resulting in the constant dissemination of advertising
into the living rooms of the population. This change in
form of how images were disseminated and mediated is reflected
in Debord’s explanation of the spectacle. He defines
spectacle not as a collection of images, but instead as
“a social relationship between people that is mediated
by images” (12). The spectacle is not just the advertisement,
but instead is consumer society that makes its consumption
choices based on the mediation of images within that society.
However, the spectacle described by both Debord and Lefevbre
is still based on power relations where big men warp the
consciousness of the masses to fit the realities of those
in power (Lefevbre, 200: 133, 154; Debord 1991:16). The
medium through which the message was conveyed is what had
fundamentally changed, not power relations.
Also, some of the ideas of the Situationists in the late
1960s were disseminated in more popular media in Europe.
Pamphlets in many ways popularized practice-based, revolutionary
ideas -- particularly on French university campuses. The
majority of the writings of the Situationists International
were published in journals or in the form of books. However,
several Situationist pamphlets that were widely accessible,
drove several streams of thought that provoked the student
protests in Paris during May of 1968. The Poverty of Student
Life (1966), one of the more famous pamphlets distributed
on university campuses in France was published by members
of the Situationsits International and Students of Strasbourg.
This pamphlet was originally published at the University
of Strasbourg by students elected to the student union,
who made 10,000 copies with university funds (Dark Star:
2001, 9). This pamphlet is a revolutionary cry for change
through practice that seeks theory as a guide (SI and Students
of Strasbourg, 2001:14).The theory relayed in this pamphlet
is largely based on practice theory. It also has a heavy
flavor of anarchistic tendencies. It ends with a call for
direct action through the practice of everyday life:
The real revolution begins at home:
in the desperation of consumer production, in the continuing
struggle of the unofficial working class. … The only
real subversion is in a new consciousness and a new alliance—the
location of the struggle in the banalities of everyday life,
in the supermarket and the beatclub as well as on the shop
floor
(SI and Students of Strasbourg: 1966: 27).
The ideas of the ‘society of the spectacle’
and transformation through the practice of everyday life
did not become popular amongst the masses, but they did
become popular amongst revolutionary sub-cultures, and were
actualized on Parisian city streets in May of 1968. Student
protests eventually flowed out of the Latin Quarter and
became riots merging with labor union struggles. In June
of 1968, a group known as ‘Solidarity’ published
a pamphlet titled Paris: 1968. This article was written
as an “eye-witness account of what one person saw,
heard or discovered” during the two week time of protests
in Paris (Solidarity, 2001: 67). The following paragraph
is an interesting interpretation of the causes and reason
behind the student uprising, from a source sympathetic to
the protesters: “The driving force
of their revolt is their own alienation, the meaningless
of life under modern bureaucratic capitalism. … It
is no accident that the ‘revolution’ started
in Nanterre faculties of Sociology and Psychology. The students
saw that the sociology they were being taught was a means
of controlling and manipulating society, not a means of
understanding it in order to change it. In the process they
discovered revolutionary sociology. They rejected the niche
allocated to them in the great bureaucratic pyramid, that
of experts in the service of technocratic Establishment,
specialists of the ‘human factor’ in the modern
industrial equation. In the process they discovered the
importance of the working class. The amazing thing is that,
at least among the active layers of the students, these
‘sectarians’ suddenly seem to have become the
majority: surely the best definition of a revolution”
(68).
On the streets of Paris in 1968, the theory of the practice
of everyday life, and protest came together explicitly and
this theory was symbolically actualized in a mass spectacle
of its own character. The protest revolved around propaganda
slogans shouted by participants, graffitied on walls and
displayed on signs and banners. The Solidarity article describes
the novelty and liberatory medium of protest that ‘propaganda
murals’ display. “The walls
of the Latin Quarter are the depository of a new rationality,
no longer confined to books, but democratically displayed
at the street level and made available to all. The trivial
and the profound, the traditional and the esoteric all rub
shoulders in this new fraternity, rapidly breaking down
barriers and compartments in people’s minds
(Solidarity, 65).
The direct action revolt in Paris in 1968 was an historical
event that inverted the spectacle it critiques. Protesters
used tactics of spectacle to promote revolutionary ideas
including the ideas of the practice of everyday life. The
protests were a compressed presentation of ideology in action.
Critical Mass does the same. However, the
action the movement promotes is not symbolic in the demonstration.
Critical Mass uses the means they are promoting to spread
its pro-bike message by parading bicycles through the city
streets.
