1	An Inquiry, and Some Discoveries

In the past fifty years …

Imagine that you have before you a complete set of calendars dating from 1900, of which you select one at random that happens to represent a year towards the beginning of the century. Pencil poised, you then close your eyes and make a cross beside a day in this year; you open your eyes and you find that it is the sixteenth of June you have marked. Now you try to discover what took place on this particular day among so many others in a relatively peaceful and prosperous year – for this continent and country at least. You go to the public library and consult the national press for this date; you are confronted with news items, accidents, the sayings of contemporary personalities, a clutter of dusty reports and stale information and some unconvincing revelations concerning the wars and upheavals of the time; but there is practically nothing that might enable you to foretell (or to suppose that a reasonably perceptive person living in those days could have foretold) any of the events about to take place, those occurrences that must have been silently developing in the hidden depths of time; on the other hand, neither will you find much information as to the manner in which ordinary men and women spent that day, their occupations, preoccupations, labours or leisure. Publicity (still in its infancy), news items and a few marginal reports are all that is now available to reconstruct the everyday life of those twenty-four hours.

Having perused papers and periodicals from this not-so-distant past – noting the familiarity of headlines and the out-of-date typography – you can now give rein to your fancy: might not something have happened on that sixteenth of June which the press has omitted to report? You are indeed free to imagine that it is precisely then that a certain Mr Einstein – of whom nobody at the time had ever heard – had his first perception of relativity in the Zurich room where he inspected patents and toed the narrow lonely path between reason and delirium. Nor can anyone prove that you are wrong if you choose to believe it was that day and no other that an imperceptible but irreversible action (the apparently insignificant decision of a bank manager or a Cabinet minister) accelerated the passage from competitive capitalism to a different form of capitalism thus initiating the first cycle of world wars and revolutions. You might further select this early summer’s day with the sun in its solstice, dominated by the sign of Gemini, for the birth in some quiet village or town of children who, for no obvious reason, would grow up gifted with an exceptional awareness of the times and events.

Thus it is by chance and not by chance that this particular day – a sixteenth of June at the beginning of the twentieth century – was significant in the lives of a certain Bloom, his wife Molly and his friend Stephen Dedalus, and as such was narrated in every detail to become, according to Hermann Broch, a symbol of ‘universal everyday life’, a life elusive in its finitude and its infinity and one that reflects the spirit of the age, its ‘already almost inconceivable physiognomy’, as Joyce’s narrative rescues, one after the other, each facet of the quotidian from anonymity.*

The momentous eruption of everyday life into literature should not be overlooked. It might, however, be more exact to say that readers were suddenly made aware of everyday life through the medium of literature or the written word. But was this revelation as sensational then as it seems now, so many years after the author’s death, the book’s publication and those twenty-four hours that were its subject matter? And was it not foreshadowed already in Balzac, Flaubert, Zola and perhaps others?

The answers to these questions may contain a lot that is unexpected, but before attempting them we would like to point out some of the main features of one of the most controversial and enigmatic works of its time. Ulysses is diametrically opposed both to novels presenting stereotyped protagonists and to the traditional novel recounting the story of the hero’s progress, the rise and fall of a dynasty or the fate of some social group. Here, with all the trappings of an epic – masks, costumes, scenery – the quotidian steals the show. In his endeavour to portray the wealth and poverty of everyday life Joyce exploited language to the farthest limits of its resources, including its purely musical potentialities. Enigmatic powers preside. Bloom’s overwhelming triviality is encompassed by the City (Dublin), the metaphysical speculations of ‘amazed’ man (Stephen Dedalus), and the spontaneity of instinctive impulses (Molly); here is the world, history, man; here are the imaginary, the symbolic and the prophetic. But in making use of all the potentialities of speech a twofold disruption of language, both literary and general, was inevitable; the inventory of everyday life implies the negation of everyday life through dreams, images and symbols even if such a negation presupposes a certain amount of irony towards symbol and imagery; the classical object and subject of philosophy are found here in concrete form; that is to say, things and people in the narrative are conceived in terms of the object and subject of classical philosophy. But they are not static, they change, expand, contract; the seemingly simple object before us dissolves when subjected to the influence of acts and events from a totally different order; objects are super-objects, Dublin, the City, becomes all Cities, the River stands for all rivers and waters, including the fluids of womanhood; as to the truly protean subject, it is a complex of metamorphoses, of substitutions, it has discarded the substantial immanence–transcendance of the philosophers, the ‘I think that I think that I think …’ and unfurls through the medium of interior monologue. During these epic twenty-four hours in the history of Ulysses (Odysseus, Otis-Zeus, man-God, essential common man, the anonymous and the divine made one) the I merges with Man and Man is engulfed in mediocrity.

This subjectivity which unfurls is time in its dual aspect of man and divinity, the everyday and the cosmic, here and elsewhere; or in the triple form of the man, the woman and the other, waking, sleeping and dreaming, the trivial, the heroic and the divine, the quotidian, the historical and the cosmic. Sometimes ‘they’ are four: four wayfarers who are also the four Old Men, the four Evangelists, the four Corners of the Earth, the four Horsemen of the Apocalypse. Time is the time of change – not localized or particular change but the change of transition and the transitory, of conflict, of dialectics and of tragedy; the River is the symbol in which reality and dream are one and which is without form. The writing captures the world of desire and the narrative is dreamlike in its matter-of-factness (precisely in its matter-of-factness); in no way contrived, it reproduces the flowing image of a cosmic day, leading the reader into the turmoil of a linguistic carnival, a festival of language, a delirium of words.

Time – the time of the narrative, flowing, uninterrupted, slow, full of surprises and sighs, strife and silence, rich, monotonous and varied, tedious and fascinating – is the Heraclitean flux, engulfing and uniting the cosmic (objective) and the subjective in its continuity. The history of a single day includes the history of the world and of civilization; time, its source unrevealed, is symbolized over and over again in womanhood and in the river; Anna Livia Plurabelle, the flowing Liffey, Molly and her impetuous dream-desires in the boundless, unpunctuated realm between sleeping and waking, merge, converge and mingle.

Before pursuing our investigation let us summarize the preceding observations:

a)  This narrative has a referential or ‘place’, a complex that is topical, toponymical and topographical: Dublin, the city with its river and its bay – not merely a distinctive setting, the scene of action, but a mystical presence, material city and image of the City, Heaven, Hell, Ithaca, Atlantis, dream and reality ceaselessly merging but with reality giving the tone; a city cut to the size of the citizens: the people of Dublin have moulded their surroundings which mould them in turn. Drifting through the streets of Dublin the wanderer gathers together the scattered fragments of this reciprocal assimilation.

b)  Meanings proliferate, literal, proper and figurative, analogical, symbolical, mythic or mystic, not to mention the ultimate unfathomable meaning (related perhaps to enigmas of wandering, death, absence), as well as the different levels of meaning familiar, historical, kindred, foreign and so forth. And these meanings coexist. Joyce excels in the art of weaving them together, composing fugues with his themes; his linguistic resources seem truly inexhaustible. It has been suggested that one could write out the meanings on musical staves, superimposed as in an orchestral score. Joyce works on a substance, the written word, and in his hands it acquires polyphony, gathering and receiving speech till the reader hears the subject’s voice emerge from the page with all the connotations of subjectivity. Musicality always prevails over the purely literal; melodic line and harmonic progression determine the phrasing with necessary transitions (recurrence of the key-note, which may be a symbol or simply a specific sound). The writing tries to capture the enigmatic depth, the inherent musicality of language – or rather of speech – the polyphony pertaining normally only to orchestral music. Connotations play the part of harmonics; though he works in his own medium, the writer does not hesitate to borrow polyrhythmics, polyvalence, polyphony from the musician so that we find here writing, language and speech organically merged and redefined by the methods of musical composition.

c)  Yet duration is not entirely structureless. There is in Joyce – and not only in Ulysses – a symbolic system with coherent crossreferences (though it must be admitted that in the glare of linguistic fireworks the coherence is not always self-evident). Where for others the relation signifier-signified is purely formal, for Joyce it is essentially dialectical; the signifier becomes signified and vice versa; the accent is continually being displaced, here the one predominates, there the other. Thus womanhood is signified by fluidity, rivers and waters but when two washerwomen at dusk evoke the legend of the river, from being signifier it becomes signified; all the rivers of the world are its tributaries. We find symbolical systems of womanhood, of the city, of metaphysical thought (the maze), of ordinary objects (a lighted cigar in the dark recalls the Cyclops’ eye). It would be interesting to construct a science of everyday life starting from these symbols, though such a ‘science’ belongs to another age than our own, an age where symbolism was in its prime; with Joyce at the beginning of the century each group of symbols was thematically related, distinct but undistinguished, and man could be represented by the prophetic bird: ‘Be my guide, dear bird; what birds have done in the past men will do tomorrow, fly, sing and agree in their little nests.’ Alas, an optimistic symbolism reflecting a youthful century!

d)  For Joyce – after Vico and perhaps Nietzsche – cyclical time underlies all quotidian and cosmic duration. Everyday life is composed of cycles within wider cycles; beginnings are recapitulations and rebirths. The great river of Heraclitean becoming has many a surprise in store: it is linear; symbols, words and their repetitions reveal ontological correspondences that are fused with Being; hours, days, months, years, epochs and centuries intermingle; repetition, recollection, resurrection are categories of magic and of the imaginary but also of reality concealed within the visible; Ulysses is Bloom, and Bloom re-enacts Ulysses and the Odyssey; quotidian and epic merge like Same and Other in the vision of Perpetual Recurrence. As the mystic or the metaphysician – and because he is a poet – Joyce challenges the incidental; with everyday life as mediator he passes from the relative to the absolute.

‘Why must you go and choose an author whose work meanders through an impenetrable atmosphere of supreme boredom? There are others besides his Molly who are reduced to drowsiness by those endless pages.… And how can you have the cheek to quote an untranslatable author into the bargain? All you say is completely meaningless to those who are not well versed in the English language. Furthermore Joyce is dated, as dated as nineteenthcentury music in an epoch of atonality, concrete music and random constructions. He made writing unpredictable by the incessant intervention of a hero who is always just ahead or trailing behind the narrative. The works of Joyce and his contemporaries elude the strictures of dimension by subjecting words to musicality and thus making them indeterminate. The dichotomy “word–writing” (reminiscent of those other dichotomies “melody-harmony” and “ harmony-rhythm ”, from which it is none the less distinct) was fully exploited by Joyce; there is not a subterfuge, trick or contrivance that he spares us: hints (with a wink and a nudge), puns, trompe-l’oreille, every gap in coherent speech is filled with something; yes, but with what? What? The language of Zarathustra, however, truly soars on the wings of harmony instead of being reduced and limited by syntactical strictures, so that Nietzsche is always present while Joyce recedes …’

Maybe; yet are not intelligibility and ‘translatability’ insured by Joyce’s symbolical constructions carried as they are on the tide of Heraclitean time? Coherent groups of symbols are easily transferred from one language to another and from one ‘culture’ to another (in so far as ‘cultures’ exist …); such groups play the part of ‘universals’. Is there not clearly perceptible in Joyce’s writing a sort of tonal system conveyed precisely by its fluidity, continuity and transitoriness? Clear phrasing, return to the keynote, tension followed by the resolution of a cadence, startings and endings, punctuation in depth …; are none of these still intelligible? Could Beethoven be lapsing into folk-lore? Or Wagner? What neo-dogmatism! Nietzsche? How the times have changed! A little, a lot, vastly, not at all? We shall see. Joyce’s Ulysses is everyday life transfigured not by a blaze of supernatural light and song but by the words of man, or perhaps simply by literature. If the authorized questioner who has just intervened is right, all the more reason to define what has changed in half a century, whether it is everyday life or the art of representing it through metamorphosis, or both, and what the consequences are.

What has changed after roughly half a century? That the subject has become blurred is news to no one; it has lost its outline, it doesn’t well up or flow any longer, and with it the characters, roles, persons have slid into the background. Now it is the object that plays the lead, not in its objectivity (which had meaning only in relation to the subject) but as a thing, almost a pure form. If I want to write today – that is write fiction – I will start from an ordinary object, a mug, an orange, a fly of which I shall attempt a detailed description; never departing from the perceptible – presented as the concrete – I shall proceed to make inventories and catalogues. And why should I not choose that raindrop sliding down the windowpane? I could write a whole page, ten pages, on that raindrop; for me it will become the symbol of everyday life whilst avoiding everyday life; it will stand for time and space, or space within time; it will be the world and still only a vanishing raindrop.

There are many ways of interpreting what is still known as the ‘new novel’ (apart from considerations of success, failure, tediousness or interest). It can be seen as a methodical attempt to create a rational style that deliberately avoids tragedy, lyricism, confusion and controversy, aiming instead at a pure transparency of language that might almost be called spatial. This ‘objective’ clarity could be seen as a sort of projector isolating the object on a stage if one were to overlook the fact that objects must first be created; it is a product neither of the subject as creator nor of the object as creation, but only of language imitating ‘reality’. Can one even say that a story is being told? A story is no longer a story when words are reduced to bare necessities. Time is cancelled out in the process of exploring it, when the quest for a perfect recurrence, a coming and going in time, is achieved by means of pure prose, of writing reduced to its essence. The simultaneity of past, present and future merges time with space and is more easily realized in a film than in literature, where ‘novelistic’ implications are always present. Moreover it is not every subject that can be submitted to such a formal elaboration: things, people, gestures, words. And can anyone be sure that time will not intervene and disrupt such permanence? Is everyday life’s changelessness a guarantee? Films and literature use everyday life as their frame of reference but they conceal the fact, and only expose its ‘objective’ or spectacular aspects. Writing can only show an everyday life inscribed and prescribed; words are elusive and only that which is stipulated remains.

Let us take an example. Shall we select for our particular example of ‘objective’ writing, the writing of strict form, a distinguished scholar or a novelist? If a novelist, who shall it be? We have made the arbitrary choice of Claude Simon in his book Flanders Road,* because there is a certain affinity between this book and Ulysses notwithstanding the differences that distinguish them; an affinity that makes comparison possible while enabling us to note the contrasts. In both works short periods of time expand, dream and remembrance recreate a universal everyday life; in both we find the eternal triangle, wife, husband and lover; symbols and word-play abound. In Claude Simon there is a Blum, in Joyce a Bloom, a coincidence that suggests a connection perhaps not wholly unintentional on the part of the later author.

‘Oh yes!…’ Blum said (now we were lying in the darkness in other words intertwined overlapping huddled together until we couldn’t move an arm or a leg without touching or shifting another arm or leg, stifling, the sweat streaming over our chests gasping for breath like stranded fish, the wagon stopping once again in the dark and no sound audible except for the noise of breathing the lungs desperately sucking in that thick clamminess that stench of bodies mingled as if we were already deader than the dead since we were capable of realizing it as if the darkness the night… . And Blum: ‘Bought drinks?’, and I: ‘Yes. It was … Listen: it was like one of those posters for some brand of English beer, you know? The courtyard of the old inn with the dark-red brick walls and the light-coloured mortar, and the leaded windows, the sashes painted white, and the girl carrying the copper mugs …

Fine. Now let us compare this to what we had noted in Ulysses.

a)  Here we find no acknowledged, pre-established referential; the place is a place of desolation, a landscape laid waste by war and rain where corpses rot in the mud and slime, a sinister collaboration of civilization and nature. The symbolism is spatial, the place being the only stable thing there is. We are never sure in what moment of time the story is situated, nor in which tense is the narrative; and we do not need to know. Memories are centred around the place, symbolized and actualized by it as they flow from the remote past. In the course of the narrative, which proceeds in cycles, men are the playthings of fate; they circle around the place and their circling leads to death or captivity at the hands of the enemy.

b)  Man’s fate is not enacted here against a backdrop of normal everyday life; we are in time of war. And yet it is the quotidian that is conjured up. The past, before tragedy took over, was controlled by logic and order, or so it seemed; in reality logic and order, and meaning too, were only paving the way to tragedy (eroticism, passion and love), with its sequel of disillusions. The extraordinary in everyday life was everyday life at last revealed: deception, disappointment…. Passionate love turned out to be terribly similar to love without passion, the passion only accentuating the void and the hunger it was supposed to satisfy but from which it really stemmed. Could this be the cool style unambiguously replacing the hot style of the preceding period? In a cold passionless voice the author tells of passion, its illusion and its disappointments; the quotidian is unavoidable, and even those who believe they have eluded it are its victims; married couples and lovers are alike frustrated and betrayed, the first in everyday life, the others in the life of tragedy. The cycle of betrayals and frustrations spirals down from remembered time, in fact through a century and a half as the narrative passes from generation to generation; remembrance negates temporality.

c)  Language becomes the only referential, as the ‘real’ referential is abolished by truth; the author has fashioned a reality from speech where the sentence conveys similarities, disparities, the order and disorder of impressions, emotions, sensations, dialogues (that are not really dialogues), solitude, in fact everything that serves to build up a ‘character’. The writing imitates speech in an attempt to purify or perhaps to exorcize it. The critic J. Ricardou calls it the ‘verso of writing’, but if he is right then this verso corresponds exactly to the recto. It is indeed the very essence of writing, a literature passed through the crucible of literalness and aiming at total precision. Though it simulates speech, speech has disappeared, the writing is a linear trajectory; and meaning too has vanished, whether proper, figurative, analogical or hermetic; everything is made explicit; signs are distinct in their difference and the difference is entirely revealed in the significance. A voice or voices? A toneless voice, a writing that is precise and pure as musical intervals fixed by pitch. Connotations? Harmonics? Yes, adjusted by pitch and thus eliminating fluidity, extensions of sound and boundlessness. Time is divided into similarities and disparities before it dissolves into memory and fate, which are almost identical. Even the word-play is exposed, stated and explained. This pure writing has attained freezing point in so far as this point is pure transparency. A comparison with atonality will perhaps make this clearer; there is no determining note (referential), therefore no repose; there are interruptions but no beginnings or endings; there are intermissions but nothing that really corresponds to an act or an event, only memories and sentences; the semantic theme has changed, it has lost the alternate tensions and easings corresponding to beginnings and endings, actions and happenings, situations that emerge and conclude. Significance, translated into an elaborate verbal form, replaces expression; the theme disintegrates and is recomposed around the literal, without ambiguity or polyphony (or polyrhythm or polyvalence). The writing aims at saying everything that can be written; the writer’s ear is attuned to depth and he rejects all that is not perfectly clear; he does not attempt to entrap depth, it is there.

At one end of this skyline dominated by important works we observed the emergence of everyday life, the revelation of its hidden possibilities; at the opposite end everyday life reappears but in a different perspective. Now the writer unmasks, discovers, unveils; everyday life becomes less and less bearable, less and less interesting; yet the author manages to create an interest in this intolerable tediousness simply by telling it, by writing, by literature. Our investigation has thus exposed a definite change both in the things written about and in the way of writing. We are not concerned here with further ramifications such as the contemporary theatre (Ionesco, Beckett), poetry (Ponge), films (Resnais, Godard), etc.; nor with any attempt at generalization. We only wish to underline the metaphysical function of contemporary literature. We shall come across these problems again and again under different aspects. The ‘world’ is divided into the world of everyday life (real, empirical, practical) and the world of metaphor; metaphorical writing, or the metaphorical world of writing tends either towards artificial oppositions and illusory contradictions or towards self-destruction in the comedy of insanity (existentialism, Artaud); but this is not the place to analyse these sub-divisions.

Philosophy and everyday life

We shall now tackle everyday life from the new angle of philosophy. In the nineteenth century the axis of thought was redirected from speculation towards empirical practical realism, with the works of Karl Marx and the budding social sciences forming landmarks on the line of displacement. In the social framework of freely competitive capitalism Marx concentrated mainly on the everyday existence of the working classes from the dual viewpoint of productive power and illusions to overcome. Notwithstanding the assaults of positivism and pragmatism, philosophy still directs such inquiries and is alone capable of connecting fragmentary ideologies and specialized sciences; moreover it cannot be dispensed with if we want to understand the essence and existence, the real or imaginary responsibilities, the potentialities and limitations of mankind; and there is no method to equal it in linking and assessing disconnected material. This is because philosophy, through the wide range of its interests, projects the image of a ‘complete human being ’, free, accomplished, fully realized, rational yet real. This image – implicit already in Socrates’ maieutic – has, for approximately twenty centuries, been refined, revised, opposed, developed and adorned with superfluities and hyperboles.

Everyday life is non-philosophical in relation to philosophy and represents reality in relation to ideality. Secluded, abstract and detached, the philosophical life is considered superior to everyday life, but when it attempts to solve the riddles of reality it only succeeds in proving the unreality, which is, indeed, implicit in its nature. It requires a realism it cannot achieve and aspires to transcend itself qua philosophical reality. Philosophical man and ordinary everyday man cannot coexist; from the philosopher’s point of view, because for him ‘all’, the world and man, must be thought and then realized; from everyday man’s point of view, because philosophy would endow him with a positive conscience and proof and act as censor, both superficial and basic, to everyday life.

The philosopher who sees himself qua philosopher as complete wisdom is living in the world of the imagination, and his weakness becomes evident when he tries to achieve what is humanly possible through his philosophy. Philosophy is self-contradictory and self-destructive when it claims its independence from the non-philosophical, and that it could be entirely self-sufficient.

Should philosophy be isolated for ever from the contamination of everyday life and detached from everyday contingencies? Is the quotidian an obstacle to the revelation of truth, an unavoidable triviality, the reverse of existence and the perversion of truth, and, as such, another facet of existence and of truth? Either philosophy is pointless or it is the starting point from which to undertake the transformation of non-philosophical reality, with all its triviality and its triteness.

The solution is then to attempt a philosophical inventory and analysis of everyday life that will expose its ambiguities – its baseness and exuberance, its poverty and fruitfulness – and by these unorthodox means release the creative energies that are an integral part of it.

We must try to overcome simultaneously the shortcomings of the philosopher and those of the non-philosopher (his lack of ideological clarity, his fumbling myopia and constricted outlook), borrowing for this purpose the terminology of philosophy and its more elaborate concepts, isolated here from speculative systematizations and directed towards the study of everyday life. The Quotidian is a philosophical concept that cannot be understood outside philosophy; it designates for and by philosophy the non-philosophical and is unthinkable in another context; it is a concept that neither belongs to nor reflects everyday life, but rather expresses its possible transfiguration in philosophical terms. Furthermore it is not the product of pure philosophy but comes of philosophical thought directed towards the non-philosophical, and its major achievement is in this self-surpassing.

Is it possible that everyday life is no more than a primitive stage in the development of thinking and living where such modes of experience are still undifferentiated, where all that is perceptible seems to be part of the universe and where the world is seen as the sum of all that is? Could it be only a rather low-brow interpretation of experience where ‘world’ or ‘universe’ appear to contain and enclose the only truth there is? Is it perhaps but a collection of trivia not worthy of being associated with the ‘serious’ preoccupations of modern philosophy such as Nature, Divinity, Humanity?

It is impossible to overstress our objection to this kind of philosophical traditionalism. Philosophy should not serve as a barrier nor should it oppose attempts at improving the world and perpetuate distinctions between triviality and seriousness by isolating on the one hand notions of Being, Depth and Substance and on the other events, appearances and manifestations.

As a compendium of seemingly unimportant activities and of products and exhibits other than natural, everyday life is more than something that eludes natural, divine and human myths. Could it represent a lower sphere of meaning, a place where creative energy is stored in readiness for new creations? A place that can be reduced neither to philosophical subjective definitions nor to objective representations of classified objects such as clothing, nourishment, furnishings, etc. because it is more and other than these? It is not a chasm, a barrier, or a buffer but a field and a halfway house, a halting place and a springboard, a moment made of moments (desires, labours, pleasures – products and achievements – passivity and creativity – means and ends – etc.), the dialectical interaction that is the inevitable starting point for the realization of the possible.

I address the philosopher in his own terms. The question is how far can a compendium of compulsions and determinisms (desires – specialized labour – fragments of understanding – biological, geographical and historical compulsions) assume the appearance of a freely created world, projection of something greater than freedom? Philosophers may ignore these compulsions and determinisms when laying down their laws, but in so doing they will not have solved the problem. The limitations of philosophy – truth without reality – always and ever counterbalance the limitations of everyday life – reality without truth.

Continuing our address to the philosopher, we formulate the problem in the clearest possible terms: we are faced with a dilemma, either to go beyond Hegel in identifying (philosophical) reason with (social) reality (in realizing philosophy), to refute the distinctions between philosophical and non-philosophical, superior and inferior, spiritual and material, theoretical and practical, culture and ignorance, and to undertake a radical transformation not only of the state and politics, economics, jurisdiction and sociology but also of everyday life; or to revert to metaphysics, Kierkegaardian anxiety and despair and the liberalism Nietzsche strove to overthrow, and to put our faith in mythologies with philosophy as the greatest cosmogonic and theological myth of all.

Is our attitude an answer to classical philosophy? Is it possible to use philosophy as a frame of reference for the study of what it terms non-philosophical – the definitions ‘philosophical’ and ‘non-philosophical’ indicating mutual recognition, reciprocal and simultaneous control? Does such a revolutionary attitude allow for the inherent rationality of history, society and all forms of specialized activity and labour? Where does it come from, this rationality explicated by philosophy and implicit in everyday life? Hegel’s reply is unambiguous: rationality comes from Reason, the Idea and the Soul. Marx and the Marxists are still clear enough: rationality is the outcome of action, of labour and the organization of labour, of production and of the thought involved in all creative activity. But does the fact of giving a meaning (this meaning) to history and society not imply their responsibility in meaninglessness, violence, absurdities, deadlocks? Responsibility involves guilt, and who is to be held responsible? It would seem that to be innocent existence must lack meaning and direction. We cannot eliminate a priori the Nietzschean theory of nihilism as a rung in the ladder of progress. If we adopt the Hegelian and Marxist trend, that is, the realization of the rational through philosophy, a critical theory of everyday life must ensue; if we adopt the Nietzschean theory of values, of alignments and of a pre-established meaning behind the meaninglessness of events, a constructive theory of everyday life emerges. This is the first step.

But there are more dilemmas to come; either we exert all our energy (such energy as every individual qua social individual possesses) in consolidating existing institutions and ideologies – State, Church, philosophical systems or political organizations – whilst attempting to consolidate the quotidian on which these ‘superstructures’ are established and maintained; or we reduce these entities (state, church, culture, etc.) to their true proportions, we refuse to see them as the substance and hidden being of human reality, we devalue them and we revalue the mere residuum upon which they are built – everyday life; either we elect to serve ‘causes’ or we support the humble cause of everyday life.

We are not submitting here for the reader’s approval or his scepticism an interpretation of Marx and Marxist thought; we are interpreting the history of philosophy, the philosophical and theoretical situation in the mid nineteenth century. The theory whereby philosophy is not content to philosophize, contemplation to contemplate and speculation to attain total abstraction, this theory of the realization of philosophy is to be found in Hegel; for him the coincidence (identity) of reality and the rational is neither accomplished, over and done with, nor ideal, indeterminate and yet to be; he intercepts history at the point where it brings about this union, seizes it in its dual and single character, rational and real, philosophical and political, theoretical and practical. But the theory, in fact, goes back much further and its beginnings can be traced to Cartesian rationalism. For Hegel philosophical reason was not a theory of pre-existing reality but was being realized in the state founded under his own eyes and with his own assistance. The politico-philosophical system puts an end to history as it discloses its meaning, which is not only a philosophical system but the practical (political) organization of Right and the State.

The writings of Marx on the realization of philosophy expand Hegel’s theory while directing it against itself. If philosophy can be realized, why should Hegel’s and not the whole of philosophy from Plato on be freed at last from accidents and redundancies? Why should his theories be restricted to a state governed by a constitutional monarchy, and the subject of such theories be only the middle classes and state bureaucracy? Are the working classes not involved in the continuation of history?

Such passages throw a certain light on the fate of Hegelianism and are themselves clear only in this context.* But they should not be confused with those where Marx attributes to the proletariat at one and the same time the refusal and the capacity to make a fresh start from a fundamental break in history. These only add a few superficial assertions to the first.

We have now reached a junction, a kind of crossroads, and we could do worse than to examine the lie of the land before we proceed any further. Behind us, as we stand at their point of intersection, are the way of philosophy and the road of everyday life. They are divided by a mountain range, but the path of philosophy keeps to the heights, thus overlooking that of everyday life; ahead the track winds, barely visible, through thickets, thornbushes and swamps.

We have, then, asserted that everyday life is the object of philosophy precisely because it is non-philosophical. Thus we direct the course of philosophy away from its traditional objectives. Confronted with these objectives we retain a certain philosophical outlook that is foreign to everyday man, who, in such a predicament, finds himself completely bewildered, though he is capable, when required, of taking risks; the certainty that is the philosopher’s quest has nothing to do with everyday man’s search for security, and philosophical adventures are free from any but spiritual dangers. The philosopher tries unsuccessfully to dwell in the seclusion of his speculations, while everyday man, circumscribed by his possessions and his needs, often regrets his limitations; the latter is, or seems, closer to nature; and this applies more specifically to the female of the species; she is more easily moved to anger, joy, passion and action, more given to emotivity and sensuality, less estranged from the mysteries of birth and death and all forms of elemental spontaneous generosity.

In this sense the philosopher who has learnt and adopted the attitudes of philosophy (contemplation and speculation) sees everyday life as the repository of mysteries and wonders that elude his discipline; it surprises him more than anything else in nature, and he cannot forget that the first professional philosopher, Socrates, who never wrote his own philosophy, used only everyday objects to illustrate his dialogues: pots with the potter, shoes with the cobbler.

Would it be possible for philosophy to rediscover the innocent wonder of revelation while dealing with everyday life? Whatever the outcome of such a confrontation philosophy will always vacillate between scorn and admiration for what is non-philosophical.

Though we try to direct the course of philosophy and establish ourselves firmly in metaphilosophy we have no intention of doing away with our philosophical heritage. We are not setting positivism against speculation; we only wish to extend philosophy so as to realize philosophical reason and determine the unity of reality and reason. We may borrow for this purpose the philosopher’s directions for the use of concepts, but we reserve all rights to change the rules and to introduce new concepts. We must not forget that we are practising a sort of maieutic in assisting the birth of everyday life’s potential plenitude. Yet the situation has considerably changed since Socrates; a new man must now be produced and the notion of maieutic will have to stand up to that of change and revolution.

We will resist the temptation to use such resolutions as a cover for more unquiet if not more disquieting intentions; thus we assert our decision to explore recurrence. Everyday life is made of recurrences: gestures of labour and leisure, mechanical movements both human and properly mechanic, hours, days, weeks, months, years, linear and cyclical repetitions, natural and rational time, etc.; the study of creative activity (of production, in its widest sense) leads to the study of re-production or the conditions in which actions producing objects and labour are re-produced, re-commenced, and re-assume their component proportions or, on the contrary, undergo gradual or sudden modifications.

The riddle of recurrence intercepts the theory of becoming. Could a fundamental recurrence be concealed within Heraclitean time flowing through the cosmos, history, social and individual life, exhaustless temporality glimpsed only by some of the greatest philosophers? Images, imagination and the imaginary would seem to be involved in this temporal flow and to extend it; and yet is not the fabric of the imaginary woven from threads of remembrance and therefore of recurrence? Images would thus be akin to memories and imagination to memory as well as to cognition; which last philosophers have always associated with reminiscence and recognition (of the subject in reflection, of the object in conception and of being in truth). Could images, memory and knowledge thus recapture a fragmented unity, a lost convergence? It is common knowledge that psychoanalysis stresses the morbid effects of traumatic repetitions as well as the therapeutic effects obtained from an elucidation of these. What then of repetition? Is everyday life one aspect or the meeting place of all repetitions? Does it answer one of the questions inherited from philosophy by meta-philosophy: how to collate Heraclitean, Hegelian and Marxist notions of becoming with the crucial fact of recurrence? How to conciliate the Heraclitean theory of perpetual Otherness – where recurrence is a stumbling-block – and Parmenides’ theory of immutable identity and sameness, which universal motion invalidates? Would it be possible to establish a dialogue between the followers of Heraclitus, Hegel, Marx and those of that Eastern philosophy which culminated in Nietzsche and includes Heraclitus as well? Could everyday life be the occasion for such a confrontation and does it possess the key to the mystery or a clue to some higher truth?

Modern scholarship shows a particular interest in language, an interest that is a legacy from the age-old preoccupation with the Logos (connected to the nature of the Logos). The study of language, and of related activities such as reading and writing, has distracted the attention of scholars from a subject that was in the earliest days of philosophy a major preoccupation: music, whose understanding was a matter for reflection long before that of language. Music is movement, flow, time, and yet it is based on recurrence; all transmissible themes are potentially recurrent – the more so when transcribed; all music included in the sound continuum is repeatable; all melodies tend towards an end (cadence) that may start a repeat – as the key-note at the end of an octave divided into intervals (a scale) marks the beginning of another octave. There can be recurrence of motif, of theme and of combined intervals in a melody. Emotions and feelings from the past are re-evoked and moments recalled by and through music (and by the imagination and art in general). The recurrence of octaves in a sequence of given sounds, unity in difference, the relation of number and quality are inherent to harmony; and harmony has become an art and a discipline through the theory of chords, their repetition and inversion and the recurrence of intervals and of series; such a discipline contributes a logic both specific and general, affording a syntax and controlling and containing becoming – until the source runs dry of classical and non-classical harmony, the tonal system and its dissolution, atonality.

If there is a relation between music on the one hand and, on the other, philosophy, art and language, is there not a certain connection between music and everyday life as well? Does music express the secret nature of everyday life, or compensate, on the contrary, for its triviality and superficiality? Does it serve as a link between ‘inner’ and ‘outer’ life, and, once such a link has been established, can it be forceful and meaningful, given the ever-increasing split – now practically ‘structural’ – dividing the quotidian and the nonquotidian, the growing pettiness of everyday life? Could the same questions be asked in connection with a number of other ‘subjects’, such as architecture, painting, dancing, poetry or games?

Since man first speculated on music and thought – indeed since Pythagoras – he has known that both comprised two facets or sides (such words have so completely lost their freshness, their depth of connotation that not even philosophical rhetoric can restore it): number and tragedy. The musician here could enlighten the philosopher, for music is nothing else but number and proportion (intervals, rhythm, timbres) and it is at the same time nothing else but lyricism, profusion and dream. It is all vitality, exuberance and sensuality and all analysis, precision and permanence; but only the greatest composers know how to reconcile the two facets. Number: everything is calculated and measured; are there limits to enumeration, boundaries to calculation, barriers to mathematics? No, there are none or they are expandable, fluctuating: set up a wall and the mathematician will scale it. But then tragedy? Number is confronted with something it cannot grasp, which it encircles but fails to reduce: the residuum; it is always there though it recedes, seems to be nothing much, nothing, ‘nothingness’; but look again: it has grown infinite beside your finitude, ocean by a strip of sand. What have science and the scientist to say? ‘It is nothing’; a polder reclaimed from the sea by dams, canals, ships and dredgers, all the paraphernalia for overcoming and mastering the tides; then comes the tidal wave…. Obstinately myopic, the scientist refuses to see anything in this residuum; yet it is the object of his conquest, the wisdom of the future; if it is not infinite and infinitely valuable what is to become of him? His fate and that of the poet are one, though he ignores it. Tragedy: all is tragedy: life, death, failure and victory. I can count the dying, time their agony, but the nature of non-existence and of suffering still eludes me. The residuum is where conquest and creation take place. The characteristic error of traditional philosophy and metaphysics is to deny the value of numbers and of science, but to assert that the residuum cannot be reduced and that the realm of word and of song is the prerogative of civilization and gives it meaning.

And what of everyday life? Everything here is calculated because everything is numbered: money, minutes, metres, kilogrammes, calories …; and not only objects but also living thinking creatures, for there exists a demography of animals and of people as well as of things. Yet people are born, live and die. They live well or ill; but they live in everyday life, where they make or fail to make a living either in the wider sense of surviving or not surviving, or just surviving or living their lives to the full. It is in everyday life that they rejoice and suffer; here and now.

At this point our objector will break in with a load of accumulated arguments (of which he will certainly find no shortage): ‘Non-philosophical reality? Real life? And with what else have the so-called humanities and social sciences been dealing for the past century or so? Political economy, psychology, sociology, history, these specialized sciences have shared between them the part of reality that eludes philosophy; reality is their particular province, and thanks to them reality and the rational will regain their unity. What entitles you to set everyday life thus in the limelight? What is it after all? Whether economic, psychological or sociological it is the subject and the specific province of corresponding methods and disciplines. Everyday life is sustenance, clothing, furnishing, homes, neighbourhoods, environment…. Call it material culture if you like, but do not confuse the issue. Your demographies and inventories are only one chapter of a much wider science; a thing’s obsolescence and its chances of survival are only one stage in the process of ageing; however methodically you may study the meanings of these things you will not avoid the dramatic attitude and the lyrical tone because you choose to dispense with the assistance of competent scholars and sciences.’

Our objector’s arguments are serious; they are the arguments of positivism and science. We shall therefore make a serious reply: ‘Why indeed should not one or other of the specialized sciences (history or political economy) contribute to the study of everyday life? And why should not such a study become the province of a provisionally selected science, such as sociology for instance? Now, you appear to belong to the school of thought that denies scientific relativism and sees science as absolute; but you cannot, we believe, have overlooked the danger such an attitude presents for the specialized sciences you are defending. What is their status? It has never been clear whether they carve their subjects and provinces from a whole too vast to be encompassed by their specialities, or whether they project their individual light-rays on to global reality. As a consequence of scientificness you will be forced to deny this quality to certain specialities in favour of others; thus on behalf of linguistics, seen as a model for scientific precision, you must withdraw this advantage from psychology, history and sociology. You seem to forget that these so-called disciplines have only a relative existence, related as they are on the one hand to practical activities and on the other to ideologies – which last it is their task either to consolidate or eliminate. These sciences came into being when man – or “the mind” – attempted and hoped to overcome fate, master nature and control its laws; such rational ambitions are not entirely vain, as the specialized sciences aim at operativeness – and in this they succeed. Indeed, they have methods, concepts, objectives, fields and provinces. But how are these determined? We must not forget that man or “the mind” could not cover the distance from blind subjection to freedom at a single leap; with the Industrial Revolution social existence in the nineteenth century slowly emerged from millenary conditions of want and subjection to unpredictable natural powers; and such circumstances required a long period of transition before attaining the conditions to which reason aspired. Want cannot be overcome all at once; some products answering basic requirements may become available in certain industrial areas, but others, more precious, continue to be rare, and furthermore, unforeseen shortages arise: shortages of space, time, necessities and the necessary. Are the sciences of which you think so highly not responsible among other things for the maintenance of existing conditions and for the unequal – and often unfair – assessment, in the name of necessity, determinism, law, rationality and civilization, of goods in short supply? Is this inequality, formerly imputed to legislation, not the result today of science, rationality and the knowledge of facts? Let it be understood that short supply is not for us an illuminating feature of history, still less a theory of economics, but a phenomenon that accounts for behaviour. Are the objectives of these sciences entirely unselfish and are they as impartial as the experts would have us believe? Are the assertions of these experts absolutely reliable? The endeavours of the so-called humanities cannot easily be rid of their ideological coefficient, for they are compounded of ideologies. Thus for the sociologist Durkheim compulsion was identified with social reality, while he saw himself as an upholder of freedom. It is by means of such contradictions that the specialized sciences seek a greater rationality, though they cannot avoid the occasional clash with the restricted rationality of existing societies or with legalized and institutionalized absurdities. The study of everyday life affords a meeting place for specialized sciences and something more besides; it exposes the possibilities of conflict between the rational and the irrational in our society and our time, thus permitting the formulation of concrete problems of production (in its widest sense): how the social existence of human beings is produced, its transition from want to affluence and from appreciation to depreciation. Such a critical analysis corresponds to a study of compulsions and partial determinisms; it aims at a reversal of the upside-down world where determinism and compulsion are considered rational even though reason has always attempted to control determinism. If the potentialities of everyday life could be realized it would be possible for people to adapt to their existence once again-such a possibility being one of the requirements of creative activity, by which the products of nature and necessity are turned into creations and assets, into a form of human freedom. Rational understanding has always been directed towards existing conditions – though not in order to accept them and bow before their scientificness. The attitude which puts a value on compulsion involves an ideology disguised as rationalism and science which it is our intention to refute. And we conclude our exposition with two connected, correlated phenomena that are neither absolutes nor entities: everyday life and modernity, the one crowning and concealing the other, revealing and veiling it. Everyday life, a compound of insignificances united in this concept, responds and corresponds to modernity, a compound of signs by which our society expresses and justifies itself and which forms part of its ideology. Will you deny modernity in favour of scientificness? You would rather annex it and pass off your science as an incarnation of the modern. Our argument against such a pretension is the simultaneous appearance of these two inter-dependent “ realities”, the Quotidian and the Modern, both as forceful as they were unselfconscious before they were adopted by language and thought. For their definition and connection facts will have to be examined, including people and what they say. Are these realities essential, are they systems of implicit or explicit meaning, or are they compendia of facts specifically meaningless before their appropriation by language and thought? The main point is to stress here and now their simultaneity and their connection. The quotidian is what is humble and solid, what is taken for granted and that of which all the parts follow each other in such a regular, unvarying succession that those concerned have no call to question their sequence; thus it is undated and (apparently) insignificant; though it occupies and preoccupies it is practically untellable, and it is the ethics underlying routine and the aesthetics of familiar settings. At this point it encounters the modern. This word stands for what is novel, brilliant, paradoxical and bears the imprint of technicality and worldliness; it is (apparently) daring and transitory, proclaims its initiative and is acclaimed for it; it is art and aestheticism – not readily discernible in so-called modern spectacles or in the spectacle the modern world makes of itself to itself. The quotidian and the modern mark and mask, legitimate and counterbalance each other. Today the universal quotidian, according to Hermann Broch, is the verso of modernity, the spirit of our time. Its various aspects are as momentous in our opinion as the atomic threat or the conquest of space – with which they are surely interdependent. But are they? This question will be dealt with later. Here are the two sides of a reality more amazing than fiction: the society of which we are members. It is impossible to state once and for all which of the two is the signifier and which the signified; both sides signify each other reciprocally; each one in turn becomes signifier or signified according to the slant of the inquiry, and up to the moment of the inquiry there is nothing but aimless signifiers and disconnected signifieds. In this world you just do not know where you stand; you are led astray by mirages when you try to connect a signifier to a signified – declamation, declaration or propaganda by which what you should believe or be is signified. If you allow the swarms of signs to flow over you from television and radio sets, from films and newspapers and ratify the commentaries that determine their meanings, you will become a passive victim of the situation; but insert a distinction or two – for instance everyday life and modernity – and the situation is changed: you are now the active interpreter of signs.

‘Reader, this is not a newfangled guide to a maze of moments, facts, dreams and satisfactions; it is not a treatise on the correct use of modernity and everyday life; nor is it a manual of instructions on the art of falling on one’s feet. All these might well be written, but they are not our concern, especially as we are really more interested in transforming everyday life than in setting it out rationally. It would indeed be surprising if we were restricted to the diptych modernity and the quotidian, for already a third phenomenon is peeping over the horizon: the rational or the reasonable. What can reason have to do with everyday life and modernity? What connection can there be between the rational and the irrational? We are already familiar with such questions; they will lead to a further examination of the function and place of the imagination; and on the way we shall consider some new terms such as the City, for instance. (We purposely avoid the terms “urban” and “urbanism” for fear of multiplying words that qualify concepts but surreptitiously tend towards entities and essences.)’

All that remains now to end this introduction is to beg the reader’s indulgence for its shortcomings. Our study centres mainly – and only too obviously – on everyday life in France and we can but ask if it is the same elsewhere or if here it is singular and typical. But are not present-day Frenchmen trying as best they can to emulate the Americans? What are the signs of insularity and specificity? Is there a world-scale tendency towards homogeneity in everyday life and ‘modernism’, or on the contrary towards their differentiation? These questions necessarily concern our problem and we shall try to answer them as pertinently as possible, though these answers cannot be entirely satisfactory; a comparative study would require a wide knowledge of different countries and languages if it is not to become a superficial race-psychology; but it is not unpleasant to scan the horizon even while knowing that it is out of reach. The important thing is to keep going and to discover what we can on the way.

First stage*

We are about to undertake a fairly important inquiry into facts that philosophy has hitherto overlooked and the social sciences have arbitrarily divided and distributed. Indeed the experts of specialized sciences tend to isolate facts to their own conveniences, classifying them according to categories that are both empirical and distinct and filing them away under such headings as family sociology, consumption-psychology, anthropology or ethnology of contemporary communities, or the study of costumes and behaviour; while the task of extricating some kind of pattern from this jigsaw puzzle devolves to the practitioner (advertiser or town planner). Or they ignore everyday facts such as furniture, objects and the world of objects, time-tables, news items and advertisements and join the philosopher in his scorn for the quotidian.

In the initial stage of our inquiry we shall try to understand these apparently meaningless facts and organize them systematically according to a pattern and a method. The advancement of learning is often sparked off by ‘salvages’ (from and by reflection) of previously neglected or misinterpreted facts which are then appreciated according to certain ‘values’ – or debatable ideologies – such as labour for Marx and sex for Freud. Undertakings of this order give a meaning to apparent meaninglessness and insignificance – and what could be more meaningless than everyday life?

Such a project requires a critical attitude. If we accept the quotidian passively we cannot apprehend it qua quotidian; we have to step back and get it into perspective. Critical distancing, debating and collating go together; if there were a system (social, political or metaphysical) that we could accept, if the truth was a question of ‘all or nothing’, if the system though real and true forbade critical distancing, we would not be able even to grasp it; we would be completely involved, essence and existence, reason and language; neither awareness of it nor any awareness at all would then be possible; either from the beginning of knowledge we would know all there was to know or it would be beyond our reach for ever. Everyday life – as distinct from art, science and philosophy – is indeed the living proof that such a system does not exist, for either the system includes everyday life and there is no more to be said, or it does not and everything is still to be said. On the other hand if there is no such complete and perfect system it will not be easy to sift knowledge from ideology; a critical analysis of everyday life will discover ideologies and the understanding of everyday life must include an ideological analysis and, especially, an incessant self-analysis.

We do not believe that our undertaking should distinguish knowledge and analysis; it must be both polemical and theoretical. In addition theses and hypotheses concerning society as a whole must be part of our inquiry in so far as it is the analysis of a portion of the reality of social experience and holds this portion for significant. This applies to all theoretical inquiries; sooner or later they merge with a general conception of society, of ‘man’ or of the ‘world’, and if we do not start from the whole – which seems the correct method – we will get to it in the end, short of remaining entrenched arbitrarily in the particular and in theoretically disconnected facts and ideas. Thus the analysis of everyday life will involve conceptions and appreciations on the scale of social experience in general. That is where it leads; it cannot avoid connections with strategical variables or the strategy of knowledge and action. This does not mean, however, that such theoretical and practical inquiries will take no account of individualities; the author assumes full personal responsibility in this series of operations and implicates no other person in any of its risks – not even in the risk of error – but he cannot undertake to avoid humour and irony and to maintain throughout the gravity proper to all forms of scholarship. By challenging the position of others – their gravity or lack of gravity – he challenges his own.

A method that aims at a comprehensive view of society is naturally opposed to empiricism and the collation of endless facts or would-be facts. Social and human facts are no more distinct (conceptually, ideologically and theoretically) than are social communities related by certain affinities to form a whole. If we wish to define everyday life we must first define the society where it is lived, where the quotidian and modernity take root; we must define its changes and perspectives, distinguishing from an assortment of apparently insignificant phenomena those that are essential and co-ordinating them. The quotidian is not only a concept but one that may be used as a guide-line for an understanding of ‘society’; this is done by inserting the quotidian into the general: state, technics and technicalities, culture (or what is left of it).* This seems the best way of tackling the problem, and the most rational procedure for understanding society and defining it in depth. It is surely to be preferred to those long, circuitous meanderings of which the most remarkable and at the same time the most popular is ethnology, which would have us believe that, in order to understand the modern world, it is essential to know all about the Bororos or the Dogons and that we will discover the meaning of culture and civilization through studying the habits of these populations; though we are well aware of the interest and utility of such inquiries we cannot but question the probability of their leading to a better understanding of our own society; the long way round is sometimes only an excuse for escape. Nietzsche at least was more thorough than these ethnological romanticists when he went right back to the earliest sources of civilization beyond Judeo-Christianity to pre-Socratic Greece and the East with Zarathustra.

The present inquiry should not be confused with those forming part of a popular series: Everyday life in different ages and civilizations. Some of the volumes of this series are remarkable, in that they illustrate the total absence of everyday life in a given community at a given time. With the Incas, the Aztecs, in Greece or in Rome, every detail (gestures, words, tools, utensils, costumes, etc.) bears the imprint of a style; nothing had as yet become prosaic, not even the quotidian; the prose and the poetry of life were still identical. Our own everyday life is typical for its yearning and quest for a style that obstinately eludes it; today there is no style, notwithstanding the attempts to achieve one by resurrecting former styles or by settling among their ruins and memories – so much so that style and culture can now be distinguished and opposed. The series consecrated to the study of everyday life gives only a muddled and confused idea of it, and does not succeed in isolating what was specifically quotidian after trade and monetary economy had become generalized with the establishment of capitalism in the nineteenth century. From then on the prose of the world spread, until now it invades everything – literature, art and objects – and all the poetry of existence has been evicted.

Thus the difference between our inquiry and others on material life and culture stands out from the start. For the historian who is not content with dating events it is essential to know how people were clothed and in what sort of dwellings they lived in various communities, classes, countries and periods. Histories of furniture and of costumes are of the greatest interest,* but we are concerned with the fact that peasant cupboards had a certain style (where peasants had cupboards) or with the fact that household utensils – pots, pans, bowls – varied from one place or one class to another; in other words our inquiry bears upon an understanding of the interdependence and simultaneous distinctness of the forms, functions and structures of such things. Though they were subject to a possibly endless number of variations, which it may be extremely rewarding to catalogue, they maintained a certain unity of form, function and structure which constituted their style. If we want to understand former societies – or our own – we should neither dissociate dwellings, furniture, costumes or food by filing them into systems of differing significance, nor consider them as a single general concept – such as culture, for instance. Furthermore, when markets became common between the capital and the provinces everything (objects, people, relations) changed under the influence of this predominant feature that turned the world to prose.

Written shortly after the Liberation in 1946 the Introduction à la critique de la vie quotidienne^† bears the mark of the prevailing circumstances. In France at that time economic and social existence were in the process of reconstruction and many people believed that they were building a new society, when all they were really doing was to re-establish the old social order in a slightly modified form. The book contains an interpretation of Marxist thought which is relevant to the present inquiry; it challenges both philosophism and economism, refusing to admit that Marx’s legacy can be reduced to a philosophical system (dialectical materialism) or to a theory of political economy. The term production acquires a more forceful and a wider significance, when interpreted according to Marx’s early works (though still bearing Das Kapital in mind); production is not merely the making of products: the term signifies on the one hand ‘spiritual’ production, that is to say creations (including social time and space), and on the other material production or the making of things; it also signifies the self-production of a ‘human being’ in the process of historical self-development, which involves the production of social relations. Finally, taken in its fullest sense, the term embraces re-production, not only biological (which is the province of demography), but the material reproduction of the tools of production, of technical instruments and of social relations into the bargain; until they are shattered by de-structuralism, a society’s social relations remain constant, their reproduction being the outcome of a complex impulse rather than that of inertia or passivity; this impulse, this many-faceted phenomenon that affects objects and beings, which controls nature and adapts it to humanity by humanity, this praxis andpoiesis does not take place in the higher spheres of a society (state, scholarship, ‘culture’) but in everyday life. Such is the basic assertion or theoretical postulate of the Introduction. In other words a society, according to Marxist theories, is 1) an economical basis: labour, producing material objects and wealth, and the division and organization of labour; 2) a structure: social relations, both structured and structural, determined by the basis and determining relations of ownership; 3) a superstructure: jurisdiction (acts and laws), institutions (amongst others the state) and ideologies. Such is the main outline; however popular interpretation reduced the superstructures to a mere shadow of the basis; the operation was then given the philosophical name of materialism, used dogmatically (and very un-dialectically). This outline became inapplicable as a consequence of its drastic simplification; it only produced an endless series of controversies on the utility of superstructures.

The Introduction à la critique de la vie quotidienne took part in these controversies. Scholarship pertains to the superstructures in connection with ideologies, and it is effective since science plays an essential part in material production. Ideologies are made of understanding and interpretations (religious or philosophical) of the world and knowledge plus a certain amount of illusion, and might bear the name of ‘culture’. A culture is also a praxis or a means of distributing supplies in a society and thus directing the flow of production; it is in the widest sense a means of production, a source of ideologically motivated actions and activities. This active role of ideologies had to be reinstated in the Marxist plan in order to prevent its degenerating into philosophism and economism; the notion of production then acquires its full significance as production by a human being of his own existence. Further-more, consumption thus re-enters the plan as dependent upon production and with the specific mediation of ideology, culture, institutions and organizations. In this revised form there is a feedback (temporary balance) within determined production relations (capitalism) between production and consumption, structures and superstructures, scholarship and ideology. This implies first that culture is not useless, a mere exuberance, but a specific activity inherent in a mode of existence; and second that class interests (structurally connected to production and property relations) cannot ensure the totality of a society’s operative existence unaided. Everyday life emerges as the sociological point of feed-back; this crucial yet much disparaged point has a dual character; it is the residuum (of all the possible specific and specialized activities outside social experience) and the product of society in general; it is the point of delicate balance and that where imbalance threatens. A revolution takes place when and only when, in such a society, people can no longer lead their everyday lives; so long as they can live their ordinary lives relations are constantly re-established.

Such a ‘revisionist’ or ‘rightist’ conception of dogmatic theories gave rise, in fact, to an extremist (leftist) political attitude. Rather than rebuild French society during the crisis and try to secure the leadership in this reconstruction, would it not be better to make the crisis an occasion for a ‘change of life’?

Notwithstanding its lofty though short-lived aims the Introduction à la critique de la vie quotidienne is dated. At that moment of history (1946), in France at any rate, there was still a general belief in the possibility of man’s self-realization through productive and creative activities. Different forms of activity might, it is true, be stressed according to different class ideologies; some, owing to their upper-class prejudices, had a rather condescending attitude to work of any kind and manual labour in particular; others, imbued with religious fervour, preached the spiritual value of work considered as effort and mortification; certain social groups praised all intellectual activities (in 1946 the term ‘cultural’ was not yet in use). But notwithstanding such controversies on the nature and essence of ‘creativity’, one fact emerged: work was endowed with an ethical as well as a practical value; people still hoped to ‘express’ themselves through a profession or a trade; among workers and labourers, among ‘labourites’, not a few saw a true dignity in manual labour and found vindication for their class-consciousness in such views. These views coincided with a political plan, elaborated by competent organizers, whereby society would be reconstituted according to principles of labour and the labourer; in this ideal society production would play an important part and social rationality would assume the dual aspect of an extensive social promotion of the working classes and a general replanning of the economy. From a sociological point of view the French nation, just after the Liberation, still formed a socio-economico-politico-ideological whole, notwithstanding – or perhaps because of – desperate struggles, controversies and political clashes. This whole appeared (or re-appeared) virtually complete; the second Liberation – the social change that was to follow shortly in the footsteps of the political Liberation (victory over the oppressor) – would consolidate this unity; project and expectation would coincide in an historical moment. But this moment was not to be; it faded away and was soon almost completely forgotten. At this turning point of history, with such prospects ahead, alienation assumed a new and deeper significance; it deprived everyday life of its power, disregarding its productive and creative potentialities, completely devaluing it and smothering it under the spurious glamour of ideologies. A specific alienation turned material poverty into spiritual poverty, as it put an end to the fruitful relations arising from the direct contact of creative workers with their material or with nature. Social alienation turned creative awareness – and the basic ‘reality’ of art – into a passive awareness of disaster and gloom.

This was the time when writers and poets were also trying to discover or rediscover true values. Their quest led them towards nature and towards imagination, into the realm of make-believe or that of basic primordial reality. Surrealism, naturalism, existentialism, each in its way put the stress on social ‘reality’ endowing it with the inherent potentialities of reality. This critical exploration of a familiar, misunderstood reality – everyday life – was thus related to humanism, and its claim to rejuvenate the former liberal humanism or to replace it by a new revolutionary form owed something perhaps to the post-Liberation climate. The new humanism did not aspire to enlist rhetoric and ideology in the cause of a reform of superstructures (constitutions, State, government) but to ‘alter existence’.

Certain observations made at the time have become, after twenty years, sociological and journalistic commonplaces. In 1946, as today, the discrepancies in everyday life from one social class to another resulted more from the type of income received (wages, salary, fees, unearned income) and the manner in which it was administered and distributed, than from its size. A high standard of rationality was attained by the middle classes where the head of the household, husband or father, held the purse strings; he gave the woman, wife or daughter, a household allowance and put aside the remainder in the form of savings; if he did not economize and save but chose to enjoy the present rather than invest in the future he went counter to his conscience, his family and society. A typical middle-class family saved and invested at the least possible risk for the best possible income; the good father founded the family fortune or increased it, and it was transmitted by legacy, even though experience had proved that middle-class fortunes were dispersed by the third generation and that the only way to avoid this was to raise one’s financial standard. Consumption was the wife’s province – and the importance of her function is still increasing – though in 1946 it was still relatively limited.

In those days the peasantry still practised a natural or closed economy; their means were extremely restricted; administration was divided equally between the woman, who was in charge of the house and out-houses (garden, chicken-run, etc.) and the man who took care of the cultivation of the land. Savings were in kind seeds, preserved fruit, etc. – and were usually squandered at festivals. As for the working classes, they led a hand-to-mouth existence having neither the possibility nor the inclination to save; the husband’s pay was handed over to the wife, usually untouched, and she allotted a small sum to her mate for his personal expenses, if he was a good husband and she a good housewife. Such women spent without bargaining, paying what was asked for reasons of pride as much as of humility. The labourers did not stint; they had inherited from their peasant ancestry a taste for good food, good wine and a certain degree of comfort; a taste that had been eradicated from the lower and middle classes.

Such is the sociological content of the Introduction d la critique de la vie quotidienne; but the book goes further, attempting to capture a panoramic view, rather than to dwell too much on minutiae and on purely practical distinctions between communities and classes.

The result is a sort of contrasting diptych, where the first panel represents the misery of everyday life, its tedious tasks, humiliations reflected in the lives of the working classes and especially of women, upon whom the conditions of everyday life bear heaviest child-bearing and child-rearing, basic preoccupations with bare necessities, money, tradesmen, provisions, the realm of numbers, a sort of intimate knowledge of things outside the sphere of material reality: health, desire, spontaneity, vitality; recurrence, the survival of poverty and the endlessness of want, a climate of economy, abstinence, hardship, repressed desires, meanness and avarice. The second panel portrays the power of everyday life, its continuity, the permanence of life rooted in the soil, the adaptation of the body, time, space, desire; environment and the home; the unpredictable and unmeasurable tragedy forever lurking in everyday life; the power of woman, crushed and overwhelmed, ‘object’ of history and society but also the inevitable ‘subject’ and foundation; creation from recurrent gestures of a world of sensory experience; the coincidence of need with satisfaction and, more rarely, with pleasure; work and works of art; the ability to create in terms of everyday life from its solids and its spaces – to make something lasting for the individual, the community, the class; the re-production of essential relations, the feed-back already mentioned between culture and productivity, understanding and ideologies, which is at the bottom of all the contradictions among these terms, the battlefield where wars are waged between the sexes, generations, communities, ideologies; the struggle between the adapted and the non-adapted, the shapelessness of subjective experience and the chaos of nature; mediations between these terms and their aftermath of emptiness, where antagonisms are bred that break out in the ‘higher’ spheres (institutions, superstructures).

An important problem now emerges from this context: the problem of the Festival, of which play and games are only one aspect. The Introduction à la critique de la vie quotidienne stressed its peasant origin and the simultaneous decline of Style and the Festival in a society dominated by the quotidian. Style has degenerated into culture – subdivided into everyday culture for the masses and higher culture, a split that led to specialization and decay. Art can replace neither style nor the Festival, and is an increasingly specialized activity that parodies the Festival, an ornament adorning everyday life but failing to transform it. However, the Festival has not completely disappeared and, though it only survives in meetings, parties and funfairs that are a poor substitute and fall short of the required glamour, these are none the less pleasant enough imitations on a reduced scale. A project to resurrect the Festival would thus appear to be justified in a society whose characteristics are an absence of poverty and the growth of urbanism; and a revolution, whether violent or non-violent, consequently acquires the new significance of a liberation from the quotidian and the resurrection of the Festival. The revolutions of the past were, indeed, festivals – cruel, yes, but then is there not always something cruel, wild and violent in festivals? The revolution of the future will put an end to the quotidian, it will usher in prodigality and lavishness and break our fetters, violently or peaceably as the case may be. This revolution will not be restricted to the spheres of economy, politics and ideology; its specific objective will be to annihilate everyday life; and the period of transition will also take on a new meaning, oppose everyday life and reorganize it until it is as good as new, its spurious rationality and authority unmasked and the antithesis between the quotidian and the Festival – whether of labour or of leisure – will no longer be a basis of society.

After twenty years we may summarize and clarify the intentions of this book; but the time perspective that makes them clearer does little to disguise their artlessness. We should not, however, overlook the fact that when it was written we were just emerging from the two festivals so generously organized by the Popular Front and the Liberation and that the disruption of everyday life was then an integral part of revolutionary activity and of revolutionary romanticism in particular. But the revolution betrayed our hopes and became part of everyday life, an institution, a bureaucracy, an economic control and a rationalization of production in the narrowest sense of the term, so that, confronted with this state of affairs, we were left wondering if the word ‘revolution’ meant anything any more.

Only when considering the life of the working classes – and by redeeming and extolling their creative ability – did it become clear that there was a power concealed in everyday life’s apparent banality, a depth beneath its triviality, something extraordinary in its very ordinariness. This was less clear and more questionable if we considered urban rather than country or village life, and more questionable still in relation to family life, notwithstanding the hardships women so bravely bore and which endowed them with a certain dignity. Where exactly did our artlessness lie? Perhaps the theory of everyday life had become contaminated by a form of populism, magnifying the life of the proletariat, of the man in the street – of people who knew how to enjoy themselves, how to get involved, take risks, talk about what they felt and did. It implied both an obsession with the working classes (values of trade and labour and the comradeships of labour) and a philosophical obsession with the genuineness concealed within the ambiguity of experience and within artificiality and spuriousness.

Are such assertions, petitions and projects irredeemably outdated, should we give them up for good and all, or can they be reformulated more artfully? This question will be answered later. None the less our critical analysis of everyday life involves, in retrospect, a particular view of history and the historicity of everyday life can only be compiled by exposing its emergence in the past. Undoubtedly people have always had to be fed, clothed, housed and have had to produce and then re-produce that which has been consumed; but until the nineteenth century, until the advent of competitive capitalism and the expansion of the world of trade the quotidian as such did not exist, and the point we are making here is crucial, it is indeed one of the major paradoxes of history. In the heart of poverty and (direct) oppression there was style; in former times labours of skill were produced, whereas today we have (commercialized) products and exploitation has replaced violent oppression. Style gave significance to the slightest object, to actions and activities, to gestures; it was a concrete significance, not an abstraction taken piecemeal from a system of symbols. There was a style of cruelty, a style of power, a style of wisdom; cruelty and power (the Aztecs, Rome) produced great styles and great civilizations, but so did the aristocratic wisdom of Egypt or of India. With the rise of the masses (who were none the less still exploited) and with democracy (the masses still being exploited) great styles, symbols and myths have disappeared together with collective works such as cathedrals, monuments and festivals. Modern man (the man who praises modernity) is the man of transition, standing between the death of style and its rebirth. That is why we must contrast style and culture, to show up the latter’s fragmentary character, its lack of unity, and why we are justified in formulating a revolutionary plan to recreate a style, resurrect the Festival and gather together culture’s scattered fragments for a transfiguration of everyday life.

Second stage

This summary of theories formulated in an earlier work is given here for a specific reason. The sequel to the Introduction, the Critique de la vie quotidienne itself, was to have developed and clarified these theories and elaborated the assertions; thus the main section of the work would have dealt with the historical evolution of everyday life showing:

a)  the gradual dissociation of quotidian and non-quotidian (art, religion, philosophy) and the consequent dissociation of economics and direct returns, work and production, private and public affairs;

b)  the decay of style that ceases to influence objects, actions and gestures and is replaced by culture, art and aestheticism or ‘art for art’s sake’;

c)  man’s estrangement from nature, accompanied by a sense of loss (of nature and the past) and an absence of rhythm; the dwindling of tragedy and temporality;

d)  the substitution of signs – and later signals – for symbols and symbolism;

e)  the dispersal of communities and the rise of individualism (not to be confused with self-realization);

f)  the profane displacing but not replacing the sacred and the accursed;

g)  the division of labour stressed to the point of specialization and the subsequent loss of unity compensated by ideology;

h)  anguish arising from a general sense of meaninglessness, the proliferation of signs and signifieds failing to make up for the general lack of significance.

The Critique de la vie quotidienne was to have related these facts to the bourgeoisie as a consequence of their ideologies (rationalism based on a narrow-minded interpretation of laws and contracts), of their disproportionate sense of private property and of the excessive importance attributed to economics. The projected work would also have shown that all attempts to save the situation were doomed to failure, since capitalism had to be preserved; that art could neither re-assemble the disjointed fragments, transform that which eludes ‘culture’, replace style nor infuse the quotidian with non-quotidianness; that ideologies (aesthetics, ethics, metaphysics, positivism or a more or less subtle form of rationalism) were equally inadequate for such a task and only serve to enhance the commonplace. Everyday life is the vital element in which the working classes thrive, and they could – or might – challenge and change it; but it is the bourgeoisie who control the quotidian, and they try, without much success, thanks to their higher incomes, to make it into one long holiday so as to avoid its drudgery. In the past this might still be done; the Dutch bourgeoisie in the seventeenth century did just this, when they wanted to enjoy the fruits of their labour: the leading citizens, comfortably established in their era and their homes, found it a stimulating experience to see their opulence reflected in the works of contemporary painters, where they were also able to admire their numerous conquests over the unruly ocean, over distant countries and over their oppressors; in those days art was a link between fidelity and freedom, adventure and stability, insignificance and significance, new perceptions and lively feelings, or, in a word, between style and culture; but such times cannot be restored. The modern bourgeoisie banks on the absurd illusion of replacing art by aestheticism.

This section of the projected work was to have been the first of a triptych, the other two panels of which were an analysis of ideologies and a theory of the individual (with a complementary theory of individualism) called respectively ‘Mystified Conscience’ and ‘Frustrated Conscience’.

Though written in part, this work was never completed or published, because the author soon realized that the momentous changes taking place in society at the time had transformed his ‘subject’ to the point of making it unrecognizable or virtually nonexistent. However, the exposition of our present inquiry can only benefit from references to this ‘history’ of recent times that reveals a number of significant facts.

Between 1950 and 1960 the social conscience, and the ideology stemming from production, creation and the humanist notion of work, lost their clarity of outline – slowly, in terms of days and weeks, very fast in the perspective of history. Social liberation had miscarried; the working classes – who increased, as it were, both in quantity and in quality – were losing ground socially and politically; the workers were being dispossessed of their conscience, and attempts to build a new society based on this conscience had not succeeded. Furthermore the model for such a society, the U S S R, had fallen into disrepute, as the failure of the Liberation in Western Europe was echoed by the failure (or near failure, which is in some respects worse) of Stalinist socialism; the notion of a revolution and the entire socialist ideology were depreciated and were losing their radicalism – their ambition to reach the very roots of humanity and of society.

After ten years it is hard to say what exactly happened; yet there is little doubt that the way to historical truth had been blazed and many a half-truth had been uncovered. Basically capitalism (somewhat modified but structurally identical) and the bourgeoisie (outside and above its many national and international components) had regained the initiative. But had they ever lost it? Possibly between the years 1917 and 1933; but from 1950 on the situation was reversed. Militarily over-run and reduced to impotence, fascism had served its purpose: as a strategic episode in the battle of the international bourgeoisie it had its after-effects, for the bourgeoisie as an international class had succeeded in absorbing or neutralizing Marxism and deflecting the practical implications of Marxist thought, by assimilating rational planning while perverting the society from which this philosophically superior rationality originated. The dialectic trend of history had been turned – momentarily – against itself and had been annihilated; dialectic thought had lost its roots. Thus an attitude of mind and conscience that had seemed to be deep and lasting was universally deprived of significance. The role and the ideologies of the working classes were losing their distinctness; and a new mystification was being launched: the middle classes would only retain a minimum of power and wealth; perhaps …; but none the less it was they who were still in the limelight and directing the play, because their ‘principles’ and their ‘culture’ were ‘superior’ to those of the working classes.

Clearly such a process is extremely complex. To begin with, it is a process. Here the questioner intervenes asking, ‘What? How? Do you really mean to say that there was a vast conspiracy to expropriate the working classes, that an invisible conductor directed the operations from behind the scenes?’ The question is allowable, but it concerns once again history and the historian. Evidently there was never a fully conscious ‘cause’, a theoretically defined ‘situation’ or a carefully planned ‘class strategy’. And yet class strategy, situation and design existed. A class cannot be considered as a philosophical ‘subject’ any more than can a society; but they possess unity, wholeness, totality, in a word ‘system’. Let us reformulate the question thus: ‘Who was responsible?’ It is an important question, but its importance is secondary because the main point is to understand what the consequences were of the tremendous amount of personal initiative, social tragedy, ideological undertakings and of activities of all kinds during this crucial period.

The ‘process’ passed over the heads of most people like a tidal wave over bathers by the sea; those who managed to keep their heads above water had their share of ducking and buffeting, but they survived by swimming with the tide. This process assumed different aspects:

a)  the introduction of neo-capitalism, which was an institutionally modified version of former capitalism (competitive, then monopolistic) with production relations unchanged;

b)  the redirecting of creative activities with revolutionary tendencies, by blurring and, where possible, eradicating productive conscience in so far as it was creative;

c)  the simultaneous liquidation of the past and of historical influences challenged by the temporarily successful strategy.

At the time of the Liberation, France was still suffering from the after-effects of the years immediately preceding the Second World War: stagnation, birth control and the money-mindedness of the ruling classes under the Third Republic. This was undeniably an old country and predominantly agrarian, its institutions based on a compromise between industry and agriculture and between the city and the country, and such characteristics naturally involved a certain amount of sterile illusions, nostalgias and increasingly outdated traditions. The Marxists had claimed that they alone were capable of injecting new energy into the nation, and had not succeeded in so doing. Now the renewal was taking place without and therefore against them. But was it a genuine renewal? A revolution that miscarries always bears the mark of failure; though it may appear to be successful and may be described by its well-wishers as a ‘silent’ or ‘invisible’ revolution, it is in fact no better than a parody.

What were these traditions that had survived from an age of peasants and artisans and of competitive capitalism? What ideologies and ‘values’, what half-significant systems vanished unobtrusively at that time, decayed or discarded? It would be as difficult as it would be tedious to relate; furthermore such questions are not our concern but that of the historian of ideologies and institutions. To put it in a nutshell: this was the end of a form of rationalism whereby reason is an individual attitude and rationalism an opinion (profane, lay, anti-religious or even anti-clerical). Outside philosophical scholarship, rationalism had been associated for a long time with science and technology on the one hand, and with the state on the other. During the period in question, the positive or effective aspects of rationalism predominated; social planning (a world-scale distortion and integration by the bourgeoisie of a Marxist notion) and organization (first at business level only but later generalized) were its province. The concept of rationalism underwent a change; now it was state-concerned and political (though officially state-concerned organizations were apolitical). The concept of organization (isolated from transitional organicism) merged into that of institution in neo-capitalist social practice (which may, up to a point, be thus defined, so long as the relation between these concepts is made clear and the boundaries of a now ‘operative’ rationality are specified).

Together with the decline of rational thought (and the liberal theory of thought as the province and embodiment of freedom) there was a tendency to ignore individual ethical notions of the quality of execution and of labour and of self-realization in one’s craft. Such ethics – which were an ideological representation mediating between product and labour or between trade value and ‘value’ in the philosophical sense – as well as the placing of a value on creative activity, had once been universally acknowledged, but were now restricted to the members of a few more or less ‘liberal’ (or so-called) professions (medicine, law, architecture, engineering, etc.), where they served as a cover for the fact that they were combining into organized bodies which formed the social and institutional backbone of the new France. Faith in the dignity of work and the worker had been drained from the working classes and was replaced by rhetoric and nihilism.

Where man still depended on nature, where he was still inspired by the monuments of the past, fear reigned invisible – fear of want, of disease, of the unknown, of woman, of the child, of sexuality, of death and the dead. This fear gave rise to defence and protection mechanisms, incantations and magic. One of the objectives of the Critique de la vie quotidienne was an analysis of superstitions involving words and gestures and their function in displacing and negating this deep-rooted fear. In the period we are studying the predominance of rationalism was incompatible with such fears, and indeed they seemed to recede; but they were merely displaced, not eradicated. Terror now replaced fear, terror of impending atomic warfare and the threat of an economic crisis; not any longer the terror of nature but, notwithstanding the change to ideological and practical rationality, the terror of society. Such terror did not do away with the former fears either, but was simply added to them. As a consequence the minor superstitions of everyday life, far from being expelled, became ‘over-specialized’ ideological constructs such as horoscopes and exotic beliefs that fostered, rather than overcame, the need for security, moralism and moral order, and were, in fact, the reverse of rationalism. Security was becoming institutionalized.

The former superstitions that used to pervade everyday life and give irrational value to objects (a crust of bread, a piece of string, an old candle-end) now receded before a greater and more deep-rooted irrationality that was an extension of official rationality; tragedy was dying out because it had merged with terror and was repressed by rationality; nature was receding too, for even the manual labourer had lost contact with his material in the concatenation of actions and gestures. Yet a sort of general naturalization of thoughts, reflections and social contacts still transpired that was like the verso of rationalism, the meeting-place of irrationalism and rationality. According to Marx, objects reflect abstract forms that seem to belong to them, to be part of their nature as trade value is reflected in wares: social and moral forms appear as given in a society, and so do forms of art, aesthetics and aestheticism, and the ritualized forms of social relations. The rational is considered normal according to the norms of a society sufficiently self-conscious and organized for the misunderstanding (or metonyme) to take root; and the normal becomes customary and the customary is taken for natural, which in turn is identified with the rational, thus establishing a circuit or blocking. The consequence of such apparent (and contrived) logic – naturalism understudying as rationalism – is that all contradictions are abolished, reality is rational, reality is ideality, knowledge is ideology.

It now becomes necessary to ask two questions, or two series of questions. First, this society was changing face; change and an ideology of change, particularly in France, had replaced the stagnation of an earlier period when the ideologies were those of a well-to-do bourgeoisie unconsciously accepting its self-annihilation through the widespread practice of birth control. To what extent had this society changed? Could such terms as capitalism, bourgeois society, liberal economy, etc., still apply to France or to any other country? If not, what could such a society be called? Should it have a name, or ought one to be content with an inconclusive study of change or simply with suggestions for a pattern of change?

Such questions are of a general interest and might be asked by the scientifically minded in general, though each specialized science will have its own specific methods of inquiry – and foremost among these will be sociology; but the second series of questions has a more restricted scope. Does the quotidian still have any significance in this society and, if this society’s basic preoccupations are rationality, organization and planning, is it still possible to distinguish a level or dimension that can be called everyday life? Either the quotidian in such a society is taken to stand for what is organized and rational, and it is everything – or it is nothing. Surely this concept must disappear at the same time as the singularities, survivals and extensions from an age of peasants and craftsmen or from that of the bourgeoisie of competitive capitalism.

Let us consider to begin with the first series of questions.

What should the new society be called?

Until the first rather confused formulation of this question between 1950 and 1960 (gradually made more explicit thanks to sociology) it was customary to speak of ‘society’ without further qualification, thus making of social reality an entity, a ‘social nature’ opposed to the individual or superimposed on the community; or to speak with polemical intent of ‘capitalist’ or ‘bourgeois’ societies – designations that, without actually disappearing, have lost today much of their impact and authority.

Later, sociologists borrowing from Saint-Simon launched the term ‘industrial society’. It was indeed clear that, for the great modern nations at any rate, industrial production, involving the increasingly important role of state and organized rationality, was acquiring an unprecedented magnitude. Industry was not a complement of agriculture; the two did not happily co-exist, but the first absorbed the latter so that agriculture, in fact, became industrialized. On the other hand the real distinctions between ‘capitalism’ and ‘socialism’ were not those exposed in their respective ideologies. There were, moreover, a number of common elements in these two political régimes which claimed to be radically and systematically contradictory; foremost among these was the rationality devolving from the industrial society’s organization of productive labour and business concerns. Could it be that they were only two variants of one species?

The term ‘industrial society’, though supported by theories, provoked a great deal of controversy. Here, in brief, are the arguments of the opposition. Is there one industrial society or are there many, and does each nation find (or fail to find) its specific course in and by industrialization? Can socialism be defined simply as a method of rapidly industrializing underdeveloped countries, or does it lead by new methods to a specific form of society and civilization? Can it be asserted, even if the substitution of socialism for capitalism no longer appears inevitable, that the world-scale expansion of industry and the industrialization of the world are conducive to homogeneity, to identical (because rational) structures in all countries? Will the discrepancies increase, or will they gradually vanish? The suggested term would appear to imply a premature solution to such problems.

Furthermore to accept such a term we must ignore the fact that agricultural production has only been totally superseded in certain areas and that ‘world agriculture’ persists. However, an ‘agricultural society’ completely independent of industrialization is now inconceivable, and this fact gives rise to violent antagonisms. The suggested term with its attendant concepts and theories does not allow for the formulation of questions, and in addition stresses economic expansion. Sociology might, indeed, take different aspects of social reality into consideration, but if it tends to favour economics it must inevitably over-emphasize development at the expense of quality (the greater or lesser complexity of social relations, their fruitfulness or sterility) for economic rationality; and there is the further risk of its overlooking other determining factors. Is industrialization possible without urbanization? Would the main feature of a so-called ‘industrial society’ not be (apart from a quantitative increase in material production) the expansion of cities, or rather of an urban society? Would not the logical procedure for a ‘social science’ then be to start from this double – or double-faceted – proposition: industrialization and urbanization? For the operation cannot fail to be scientifically questionable if the two aspects are dissociated, the one being set above the other and taken to a scientific extreme.

In other words, the term ‘industrial society’ is exact in a different sense from that given to it by its promoters. Industry or the economic capacity for material production has not been rationally mastered; the theory is still incomplete, even where socialism is concerned; industrial expansion is only meaningful (acquires orientation and significance) when understood as this double process and through it. Industrial theory has given rise to techniques (organization and planning), but it was only with Marx that these were in any way significant; since Marx, and more especially since the working classes were dispossessed of the ‘values’ of production, we have fallen short of the meaning instead of elucidating and realizing it. Urban existence gives significance to industrialization, which in turn contains it as a second aspect of the process. From a certain critical angle (at which we may place ourselves) it is possible to see urbanization and its problems as dominating the industrial process. What scope has an ‘industrial society’ if it fails to produce a fruitful urban life? None, unless it be to produce for the sake of producing. A class can produce for profit, vide the bourgeoisie. But a society, even when the bourgeoisie or a portion of the bourgeoisie are in power, cannot readily produce for the sake of producing, and if it seems to do so it is really producing for power and domination, that is for war; otherwise every trace of ideology, culture, rationality and significance disappears. Does the one necessarily rule out the other?

In brief, only a portion of the facts to be set forth and explained are condensed in the suggested term; it comes up against a number of problems that cannot be elucidated – let alone formulated and solved – through its categories. This theory is an ideology, a form of modernized rationalism, and its extrapolations and additions are contrived by a skilful dissimulation of the tragic element; it tends towards a mythology of industrialization. Its theoretical exposition reflects (rather than signifies) a lack of meaning and the way such a society replaces absence by illusion; it reflects the mistaken identification of the rational with the real, the exact identification of absurdity and rationality (limited and ratifying its limitations).

Certain theoreticians, rightly impressed by the important role of technicality in the so-called industrial society, have suggested the name of technological society. They maintain that the image of a ‘technological environment’ is more specifically characteristic of such a society than that of a ‘natural environment’.

This proposition includes a number of indisputable facts from which it draws a definition, a concept and a theory.

It is a fact that in our society technology has become a determining factor, not only by revolutionizing productive conditions and involving science directly in its technical achievements. Indeed theory and appreciation go much further, and it is, unfortunately, only too true that technology – unmediated by a controlling mind or a significant culture – gives rise to a particular form of social and industrial conscience. Technology is reflected in the social and individual conscience by means of images and objects and their related words. For instance a photograph obtained with a maximum of technological means and a minimum of ‘subjective’ intervention becomes part of remembrance and daydreaming in the family album, in the periodical or on the television screen. The technical object with its dual functional and structural character, perfectly analysable and ‘transparent’, is given no definite status; it completely invades social experience: a town may become a technical object; sound-packets obtained through highly perfected techniques provide musical components; a sequence of images technically noteworthy – by the quality of the photography, the continuity and the montage – becomes part of a film; a barely modified car or bicycle is offered to the public as a piece of sculpture; three or four pieces of technical objects are exhibited as ‘plastic space ’; with Op and Pop art aestheticism is added to the technicistic trend. The glance that is cast upon a technical object – passive, concerned only with the way it works, with its structure, how it can be taken apart and put together, fascinated by this backgroundless display all in transparent surface – this glance is the prototype of a social act; therein lies the effectiveness of television. The real message, says McLuhan, is the medium or machine; no; the message is pure reflection: the eye on the image infinitely reproduced in the form of social relations, a cold eye and, as such, possessing feed-back, balance, coherence and perpetuation; images change, the eye remains; noises, sounds, words are auxiliary and subsidiary, symbols of impermanence.

What has become of Hegel’s theory of art as a partial system, a compendium of significances bestowed on selected objects serving as active mediations between the other systems and sub-systems that constitute a society (material requirements, ethics, law, politics, philosophy)? According to this theory the partial system is only a mediation, but one with a pregnant actuality that confers cohesion on society. Now the reflection of our relation to a technical object, the ‘medium’ (screen, set, etc.), reflection of a reflection, replaces art as ‘mediation’. Culture is a decaying myth, an ideology superimposed on technology.

To the intensive consumption of technological tokens we may now add the highly consumable commodity: aestheticism, or words describing art and aesthetics. Technicality decked with aestheticism and lacking any specific artistic mediation or culture is one of the more obvious justifications for the term technological society.

We shall now give our reasons for rejecting this term. It may be asked if such a society is still a society precisely in so far as it is technological; it claims to be a technical object and sees itself as such; it tends to eliminate all the mediations that gave social experience its complexity and connected material production to ideologies, principles and the often contending groups of signs and significances that enlivened social existence. Furthermore the expression ‘technological environment’ is questionable, for it would be more apt and exact to say urban environment since technology only produces an ‘environment’ in the city and by the city; outside the city technology produces isolated objects: a rocket, a radar station.

In so far as the term ‘technological society’ is correct, we may assume a transformation of technicality – that was formerly limited and repressed by the effects of birth control – into an autonomous economically and socially determining factor. Such a factor is operative only by means of a social ‘layer’ tending to become a caste or class: the technocracy. Our definition undergoes a metamorphosis, and it now seems more befitting to say ‘technocratic society’. However, technocratic influences are active only in organizational and institutional spheres, their rationality directed towards specific ends and means, so that we should really say ‘technocratico-bureaucratic society’ and thus deprive the term of its authority.

And not only its authority, for this proposition exposes its inaccuracy as well. Indeed, what strikes the critical observer in the present society is a deficiency of technicality. The first and foremost of the technocracy’s shortcomings is that it does not exist, that it is a legend and an ideology and that the alleged reign of technology is, in fact, a cover for the obverse. All the vast achievements of technology, such as the conquest of space, rockets or missiles, have a strategic value; they spell power and political prestige, but they have no social purpose, no current utility that might influence everyday life and improve it; everyday experience benefits only from ‘technical fall-outs’. As to gadgets, they only simulate technicity, and under our critical scrutiny technicality and technicity prove to be substitutes, the application of technology to everyday life a substitute for technocracy which is itself a substitute for the true leaders of economy and politics. While our society appears to be pacifically evolving towards a superior rationality, to be changing under our eyes into a scientific society where great scholarship is rationally applied to the understanding of matter and of human reality, this scientificness only serves to justify bureaucratic rationality and to prove (illusively) the competence of the technocracy; technicity and ‘scientificness’ metamorphosed into autonomous entities re-echo each other, justify each other, and act as substitutes for each other. A system of substitutions emerges, where every compendium of meanings – apparently independent and self-sufficient – re-echoes another in endless rotation. Is this what is hidden behind rationality and our society’s rational behaviour?

Is this situation final? While dispensing with historicity and with the historical as method, might it be the outcome of history? It would seem on the contrary to be the product of a specific predicament, the challenge of political régimes and systems, a new form of world-scale competitiveness with all the consequences this implies. In this predicament – arms race, rapid depreciation of military and technical equipment, obsolescence of technological objectives – technicity becomes revolutionary; its role is that of an unfulfilled revolution (though it claims the status of an independent factor), weighing on the whole of social experience while breaking away from it – that is the paradox – to provoke stratospheric incidents in political as well as in cosmic space. Such a predicament threatens moreover to become structural. The future alone contains the answer to such problems.

In short the designation ‘technological society’ is also only partly appropriate, and that in other ways than those suggested by its promoters. If this relative truth is seen as absolute it becomes an error, an ideological illusion and a myth to justify a situation, to conceal the fact that it is unbearable and to promote its historical novelty at the cost of history and historicity.

What of the term affluent society? Our society’s rapid promotion to affluence could well be seen as a characteristic feature by which to define it. Indeed, industrial production and ‘technology’ could lead to an unlimited productivity by way of the total automation of production. Unfortunately for the definition (borrowed from the American ideologists Galbraith, Rostow, etc.) automation is accompanied by a number of restraining effects that might well be more serious than most theoreticians believe; total automation and affluence could lead to a total depreciation of certain commodities produced in excess, and thus undermine the very foundations of trade value. Is it this prospect, rather than the threat of unemployment to the working classes, that restrains automation?

This is not the place to dwell on such problems. In the so-called affluent or even lavish societies, in the United States and the highly industrialized countries of Europe, nuclei of poverty and material want still subsist. Furthermore, a new form of want is being generated everywhere: though basic needs are now catered for (at what cost?), productive societies show no concern for the more refined or ‘cultural’ needs of the individual nor, on the other hand, for basic needs that might be termed ‘social’; this new poverty takes root and spreads, proletarianizing new social strata (clerks, sales-assistants, certain technicians, members of the ‘liberal’ professions, etc.).

Furthermore, new shortages crop up in the so-called affluent society. In our countries we suffered formerly from shortages of bread but never from a lack of space; corn is now plentiful (bread remaining scarce in some parts of the world), but space is in short supply. The overcrowding of highly industrialized countries is especially pronounced in the larger towns and cities. Time is also becoming scarce, and desire. We saw how the distribution of commodities in short supply became a ‘science’ trying to prove its basic ‘scientificness’. Last and not least of our objections is that affluence has no value and significance if it fails to recreate the Festival and if festivals are not its objective. Thus we can reject this definition like the previous ones on the grounds that it is only exact in part and extrapolates these half-truths to become absolute.

Society of leisure perhaps? Indeed, the most remarkable aspect of the transition we are living through is not so much the passage from want to affluence as the passage from labour to leisure. We are undergoing the uneasy mutation of our major ‘values’, the mutation of an epoch.

Who can deny that leisure is acquiring an ever increasing importance in France and in all so-called industrial societies? The stress of ‘modern life’ makes amusements, distractions and relaxation a necessity, as the theoreticians of leisure with their following of journalists and popularizers never tire of repeating. A new universal social phenomenon, the holiday, has displaced anxiety and is becoming its focal point.

This term, like those that preceded it, is based on facts; but other facts exist that make it unacceptable. Time-tables, when comparatively analysed, reveal new phenomena: if the hours of days, weeks, months and years are classed in three categories, pledged time (professional work), free time (leisure) and compulsive time (the various demands other than work such as transport, official formalities, etc.), it will become apparent that compulsive time increases at a greater rate than leisure time. Compulsive time is part of everyday life and tends to define it by the sum of its compulsions. Modernity is therefore not self-evidently included in the age of leisure. It is true that the ‘values’ that were formerly attached to work, trade and quality in creative activity are disintegrating and those attached to leisure are in the process of coming into being; but if people think of their holidays all the year round, this does not imply that the situation has created a ‘style’ giving a new significance to leisure; people may be looking for such a style in the atmosphere of holiday resorts, but there is little evidence of their having found it…. Leisure contains the future, it is the new horizon, but the transition promises to be long and dangerous. Only the total automation of production could make a society of leisure possible; but a couple of generations would have to be sacrificed in the venture, so great would be the investment of capital required for its realization. The prospect then is one of unremitting labour to bequeath to future generations a chance of founding a society of leisure that will overcome the demands and compulsions of productive labour so that time may be devoted to creative activities or simply to pleasure and happiness. In the meanwhile labour and its drastic division of productive operations continues to dominate social experience. In automated industry there is no longer any contact with the material or even with the machine itself, but this non-labour (control, supervision) is none the less daily work. Careers replace trades everywhere, without alleviating – indeed, more likely, aggravating – the worker’s compulsion. Today leisure is first of all and for (nearly) all a temporary break with everyday life. We are undergoing a painful and premature revision of all our old ‘values’; leisure is no longer a festival, the reward of labour, and it is not yet a freely chosen activity pursued for itself, it is a generalized display: television, cinema, tourism.

The term consumer society has increased in popularity since the period under consideration (1950–60). It has been proved by convincing statistics that in highly industrialized countries the consumption of material and cultural goods is on the increase and that so-called ‘durable’ goods (cars, television sets, etc.) are acquiring a new and ever greater significance. These observations are correct but trivial. The theoreticians of the ‘consumer society’ mean or imply something more by this term; they assert that once upon a time in the pre-history of modern society, when capitalist economy and industrial production were still in their infancy, production was not controlled by demand, and that contractors were ignorant of market and consumer alike and their haphazard production was launched to await the expected and desired consumer. Nowadays, we are told, the organizers of production are aware of the market, not only of solvent demands but of the desires and needs of the consumer; thus consumer activity would have made its momentous debut in organized rationality; everyday life, in so far as it exists, would be taken into consideration and (integrated as such with scientific rationality) embodied in the experience of a highly organized society; there would no longer be any reason to consider it as a level of reality.

Our answer is first that in France we have not noticed any serious attempts at social and cultural ‘market research’ but only at research into specific needs, and therefore into solvent demands. It would indeed be too easy to show how badly and belatedly the social needs peculiar to urban existence have been studied.

Moreover, even specific needs are not submitted to unbiased research; the manner of the inquiry reacts on the needs and becomes a part of social practice that freezes them. There exist, besides, other more powerful methods of directing needs than market and motivation research. What, for instance, is the role of advertising? Is the advertiser the magician of modern times working out spells to entrap and subjugate desire, or is he merely a modest, honest intermediary investigating public requirements and broadcasting the discovery of new, exciting products to be launched shortly on the market in answer to such requirements? No doubt the truth lies between these two extremes. Does advertising create the need, does it, in the pay of capitalist producers, shape desire? Be this as it may, advertising is unquestionably a powerful instrument; is it not the first of consumer goods and does it not provide consumption with all its paraphernalia of signs, images and patter? Is it not the rhetoric of our society, permeating social language, literature and imagination with its ceaseless intrusions upon our daily experience and our more intimate aspirations? Is it not on the way to becoming the main ideology of our time, and is not this fact confirmed by the importance and efficiency of propaganda modelled on advertising methods? Has not institutionalized advertising replaced former modes of communication, including art, and is it not in fact the sole and vital mediator between producer and consumer, theory and practice, social existence and political power? But what does this ideology disguise and shape, if not that specific level of social reality we call everyday life, with all its ‘objects’ – clothing, food, furnishing?

The term we have just examined is not entirely satisfactory. The transition from penury to affluence is a fact; in this society of a modified capitalism we have seen the transition from a state of inadequate production to one of boundless, sometimes even prodigal, consumption (waste, luxury, ostentation, etc.), from privation to possession, from the man of few and modest needs to the man whose needs are many and fertile (in potential energy and enjoyment); but like all transitions it is not easily accomplished, dominated as it is by inexplicable compulsions and trailing shreds of a past age in its wake. It is the transition from a culture based on the curbing of desires, thriftiness and the necessity of eking out goods in short supply to a new culture resulting from production and consumption at their highest ebb, but against a background of general crisis. Such is the predicament in which the ideology of production and the significance of creative activity have become an ideology of consumption, an ideology that has bereft the working classes of their former ideals and values while maintaining the status and the initiative of the bourgeoisie. It has substituted for the image of active man that of the consumer as the possessor of happiness and of perfect rationality, as the ideal become reality (‘me’, the individual, living, active subject become ‘objective’). Not the consumer nor even that which is consumed is important in this image, but the vision of consumer and consuming as art of consumption. In this process of ideological substitutions and displacements man’s awareness of his own alienation is repressed, or even suppressed, by the addition of a new alienation to the old.

We have already discussed the all-pervasive presence of an extraordinary phenomenon, the enormous amount of signifiers liberated or insufficiently connected to their corresponding signifieds (words, gestures, images and signs), and thus made available to advertising and propaganda: a smile as the symbol of everyday happiness, that of the informed consumer for instance, or ‘purity’ signified in the whiter-than-white of a detergent; as to the discarded signifieds (styles, the historical, etc.) they are left to get on as best they can, occasionally reinstated as advanced learning – the prerogative of the élite – or retrieved to be turned into consumer goods (furniture, houses, jewellery, inspired from works of art or antiques) and thus occupy a level of social reality.

Since the beginning of all these changes and the birth of modernity, sociologists, economists and politicians have frequently stressed the significant role of the state. As a reaction to Marx and often in open protest against him, they reject the most remarkable of his theories, that of the state’s decay. In most cases they seem oblivious to the fact that they are reverting to Hegelian theories, opposing Hegel to Marx, and that today we are still experiencing such an opposition. Will this age witness the triumph of Hegelianism and of the totalitarian state rather than achieve the philosophy of a human totality? The state has certainly acquired in all countries more authority since the war than it ever possessed before, even in the countries of the ‘Third World’, in ‘socialist’ countries and in the Anglo-Saxon countries that had, until recently, avoided the demands of state control, economic programming and organized rationality; Yugoslavia alone perhaps is still free from its grip. The powers of decision are exerted from on high, strategies and strategical variables are elaborated and opposed above our heads. But on what are these powers exerted, what foundations support them and whom do they implicate? What, if not everyday life, bears the weight of institutions? They subdivide it and distribute it between themselves according to compulsions representing and realizing the requirements of the state and its strategies. Such questions may seem pointless, like all protests against state control, but it would be more pointless still to accept the situation without a murmur or to elaborate theories in support of the state and to whitewash it. Moreover the structure is already showing signs of decay in France and elsewhere and both ‘public’ and ‘private’ relations have their own problems to face.

Though technology has achieved a remarkable degree of perfection it is always at state level – space and nuclear research, arms and strategy – that results are obtained. We saw the discrepancy between these and the technical trivialities of everyday life, between the importance of real technical constructs and the petty gadgets with their ideological wrappings. Thus after an internal split culture too is decaying; secluded in their ivory towers we have subtle intellectuality, complex literary word-play and a certain amateurism in styles and history; down below sprawl the vulgarizations, puns in poor taste, rough and bawdy games, the culture of the masses.

Thus what commands our attention is a difference of levels and not the rational equality of demands, consumption and communication; a difference that is programmed and organized so that the pyramidal structure of modern society rests on the broad base of everyday life which is the lowest level.

In Western neo-capitalist countries there has been no overt programming of production, no total rationalization of industry; yet kind of programming, a sort of total organization has sneaked in unobtrusively; offices, public organizations and subsidiary institutions operate on this basis, and though the structure lacks coherence, grates and jolts, none the less it works, its shortcomings hidden behind an obsessive coherence and its incapacity for creative integration disguised as participation and communality. And what do these organizations organize, if not everyday life?

Around 1960 the situation became clearer, everyday life was no longer the no-man’s-land, the poor relation of specialized activities. In France and elsewhere neo-capitalist leaders had become aware of the fact that colonies were more trouble than they were worth and there was a change of strategy; new vistas opened out such as investments in national territories and the organization of home trade (which did not exclude the exploitation of ‘underdeveloped countries’ for manpower and raw material and as sites for investments – only they were no longer the main preoccupation). What did the leaders do? All areas outside the centres of political decision and economic concentration of capital were considered as semi-colonies and exploited as such; these included the suburbs of cities, the countryside, zones of agricultural production and all outlying districts inhabited, needless to say, by employees, technicians and manual labourers; thus the status of the proletarian became generalized, leading to a blurring of class distinctions and of ideological ‘values’. This well-organized exploitation of society involved consumption and was no longer restricted to the productive classes only; capitalism, while requiring that people ‘adapt’ to modern circumstances, had adapted too. Formerly the leaders of industry produced haphazardly for a problematic market; limited family business concerns predominated adding their bourgeois treble to the chorus praising the wonders of trade, of quality, of dearly beloved labour. In Europe after the war a few gifted and intelligent men (who they were is not our concern) saw the possibility of exploiting consumption to organize everyday life. Everyday life was cut up and laid out on the site to be put together again like the pieces of a puzzle, each piece depending on a number of organizations and institutions, each one – working life, private life, leisure – rationally exploited (including the latest commercial and semi-programmed organization of leisure). The new town was the typical, significant phenomenon in which and on which this organization could be read because it was there that it was written. What, apart from such features as the negation of traditional towns, segregation and intense police supervision, was inscribed in this social text to be deciphered by those who knew the code, what was projected on this screen? Everyday life – organized, neatly subdivided and programmed to fit a controlled, exact time-table. Whatever the size of his income or the class to which he belonged (employee, clerk, minor technician), the inhabitant of the new town acquired the generalized status of proletarian; furthermore the new towns (Sarcelles, Moureux, etc.) were strangely reminiscent of colonial or semi-colonial towns, with their straight roads crisscrossing at right angles and their frequent police patrols*; but these were more forbidding and austere, perhaps on account of there being no cafés and pleasure-grounds: the colonizers of the metropolis do not encourage levity …

The following inferences may be drawn from what precedes:

a)  In France as in other neo-capitalist countries the changes in social practice had not eliminated the notion of everyday life; we were not confronted with a choice between modernity and everyday life. But the concept of the quotidian had undergone a metamorphosis by which it acquired a greater not a lesser significance; it had lost some of its implications, the striking contrast between want and affluence, between the ordinary and the extraordinary, for instance, but otherwise it was unchanged, even consolidated.^† In the modern world everyday life had ceased to be a ‘subject’ rich in potential subjectivity; it had become an ‘object’ of social organization. Far from disappearing as subject of reflection, however (which it could not have failed to do if the revolutionary movement had prevailed), it was more firmly entrenched than ever.

b)  All the suggested definitions of our society have proved unacceptable. How can the distinctive features that have emerged during this inquiry be summarized and formulated? We propose the following term: Bureaucratic Society of Controlled Consumption whereby this society’s rational character is defined as well as the limits set to its rationality (bureaucratic), the object of its organization (consumption instead of production) and the level at which it operates and upon which it is based: everyday life. This definition has the advantage of being scientific and more precisely formulated than any of the others*; moreover it owes nothing either to literature or to a ‘social philosophy’ extraneous to social reality.

What happened in France between 1950 and 1960?

We are now in a position to answer this question in greater detail though we wish to make it quite clear that our concern is neither with matters of State and administration, with strictly urban problems, nor with the (incomplete) control that trade has achieved by influencing the consumer; it is better to leave such matters to the economist, though we refute economism by a radical analysis.

a)  There is a contrast, almost a contradiction, between cyclic and linear (rational) time and more specifically, between cumulative (social) and non-cumulative processes. Marx’s theory of accumulation must be brought up to date, for in Das Kapital and connected works it is based on the history of England and Western Europe alone, whereas in the past century new facts have come to light. Thus there are other things besides capital that are subject to accumulation: for instance knowledge, techniques and even, to a certain extent, populations, though here opposing tendencies check or arrest the process; memory is a typical process of accumulation and therefore an essential component of mechanisms that materialize and technicalize such a process. But everyday life is not cumulative. In a society, physical habits alter from one generation to another, gestural conventions change, intentional physical expressions (serving as a means of communication) such as mimicry, gestures, grimaces, are modified, but the structure of bodies does not change. Physiological and biological needs and their corresponding achievements are shaped by styles, civilizations and cultures; means of satisfying and frustrating such needs evolve and, in so far as they are physiological and biological, these deficiencies and activities show a certain stability that might suggest the presence of a ‘human nature’ and a progressive continuity. Emotions and feelings change but they are not stored up; neither are aspirations. The number of calories required by an American millionaire and a Hong Kong coolie is identical, the coolie if anything requiring more than the millionaire. Physical performances, erotic achievements, the time required for growing up or growing old and natural fertility oscillate on a relatively limited scale. The number of objects that a person can actually use in a lifetime cannot increase indefinitely. In short the effects of accumulation on everyday life are superficial though they cannot be completely eliminated. Everyday life, when it changes, evolves according to a rhythm that does not coincide with the time of accumulation and in a space that cannot be identified with that of cumulative processes. Thus an illusion is created of the unbroken continuity of houses, buildings and cities from the oriental town of proto-history down to the present day …

However, a society loses all cohesion if it cannot re-establish its unity; that is why modern society tries to control the changes that take place in everyday life. The depreciation of goods and ‘fashions’ is accelerated by the process of accumulation; mental fatigue sets in at shorter and shorter intervals till it overtakes that of machines, technical appliances, etc.; our society seems to be heading for disaster and self-destruction while war maintains peace here and there by various methods.* Everyday life is preserved in mediocrity or it must perish (violently or otherwise, but always under compulsion).

Thus the conflict between accumulation and non-accumulation is resolved in the methodical subordination of the latter and its organized destruction by a rationality bordering on the absurd but excelling in the manipulation of people and things.

b)  Remarkable changes have taken place in the semantic field considered as a whole (that is, the whole of society as the theatre where meaning is enacted in various specific contexts). Symbols had been prominent in this field for many centuries, symbols derived from nature but containing definite social implications. However, in the early stages of our civilization there was a perceptible shift from symbols to signs as the authority of the written word increased, and especially after the invention of the printing press. Today a further shift, from signs to signals, is taking place, if it has not already happened. Though the signal figures in the semantic field together with the symbol and the sign, it differs from these in that its only significance is conventional, assigned to it by mutual agreement; in this respect it can be compared to certain signs such as letters that compose articulated units (words and monomials) but that are otherwise meaningless. The signal commands, controls behaviour and consists of contrasts chosen precisely for their contradiction (such as, for instance, red and green); furthermore, signals can be grouped in codes (the highway code is a simple and familiar example), thus forming systems of compulsion.

This shift to signals in the semantic field involves the subjection of the senses to compulsions and a general conditioning of everyday life, reduced now to a single dimension (re-assembled fragments) by the elimination of all other dimensions of language and meaning such as symbols and significant contrasts. Signals and codes provide practical systems for the manipulation of people and things, though they do not exclude other more subtle means. If we try to figure out how the ‘new man’ uses his memory, we shall see that he must register once and for all each action, gesture and word of ‘another’ as though these were signals. What a terrifying vision of future humanity this image conjures up!

c)  The redirecting of creative energy from works of art to shows and displays of reality (the cinema, television) has notable implications. ‘Displays of reality’ have become a display trade and a display of trade offering a perfect example of a pleonasm, though such redundancy is seen as a satisfactory stability (feed-back) by the rationalists of organization. The result, however, is a fairly vivid awareness of creative impotence and of the deceptive nature of a form of consumption that takes no account of styles and of the achievements of the past. The natural outcome of this situation was an attempt to compensate ideologically for these shortcomings; whence the theory of ‘participation’ followed by the theory of ‘creativity’. Former certainties fail that were related to a content (real or apparent). Form without content is deceptive, though it is accepted as ‘pure’ form and thus assumes the role of structure; but none the less the sense of a loss of substance prevails, a tragic sense more pregnant than the ‘disenchantment’ with rationality that Max Weber (who still had faith in rationality) analysed. Where did the sense of substantiality of former ages come from? Was it from nature or from the apparent uniqueness of so many things and the consequent value attached to them? From tragedy and death, or from style and the ethics of art as the substantial mediator of form? We may well ask!

d)  Before the Second World War there were still traces of an older society surviving in France and elsewhere in Europe. Industrial production had not yet swamped and absorbed the remains of peasant production and crafts; villages still thrived and the countryside surrounded the town even in industrial countries; the legacies of pre-capitalism had not yet been set aside as folk-lore (nor exhibited as such for tourist consumption); industrial products co-existed with the products of rural crafts. Such objects possessed a symbolic value that was already outdated, and contradictory into the bargain; some stood for what was rare and valuable (jewels, ornaments, etc.); others represented riches and profusion in the midst of penury: thus the massive cupboard or sideboard, the cumbersome double-bed, the long looking-glass or the grandfather clock reflected an almost mythological past and became status symbols for the aristocracy and the middle classes alike; and the same could be said of buildings. These superimposed strata of variously dated objects lost their sentimental value in the period we are discussing through the intervention of a form of capitalism that organized and controlled consumption and the distribution of so-called durable consumer goods. In other words trade economy, stimulated by neo-capitalism, invaded what is sometimes known as ‘material culture’, eliminating the residue of these strata. The apparent exceptions were works of art and styles of high or low periods; objects bearing the mark of creation were reserved for the ‘élite’, a special market and a specific branch of production (copies and imitations of original works) taking charge.*

Third stage: after 1960

To subdivide and organize everyday life was not enough; now it had to be programmed. The Bureaucratic Society of Controlled Consumption, assured of its ability and proud of its success, is attaining its goal and its half-conscious intentions are coming to light: to cybernetize society by the indirect agency of everyday life.^†

Everyday life in France is organized according to a concerted programme; the so-called superior activities (applied sciences, etc.) are not only increasingly aware of the quotidian, it has become their special province. Daily life is the screen on which our society projects its light and its shadow, its hollows and its planes, its power and its weakness; political and social activities converge to consolidate, structure and functionalize it. The other levels of society (with the exception of the state, which operates on a much more exalted plane) only exist in relation to everyday life and the utility and significance of constructs is estimated in direct proportion to their structural effect on it.

If tragedy still exists it is out of sight; the ‘cool’ prevails. Everything is ostensibly de-dramatized; instead of tragedy there are objects, certainties, ‘values’, roles, satisfactions, jobs, situations and functions. Yet there are powers, colossal and despicable, that swoop down on everyday life and pursue their prey in its evasions and departures, dreams and fantasies to crush it in their relentless grip.

The great event of the last few years is that the effects of industrialization on a superficially modified capitalist society of production and property have produced their results: a programmed everyday life in its appropriate urban setting. Such a process was favoured by the disintegration of the traditional town and the expansion of urbanism. Cybernetization threatens society through the allotment of land, the widescale institution of efficient apparatus and an urban expansion adapted to specific ends (directing offices, the control of circulation and of information).

Thus the dividing process that can still be seen in the new towns is finished and is being replaced by the practical reconstruction of a kind of unity, a tendency officially called ‘urbanism’. The problem of synthesis returns to the fore; the ‘man of synthesis’ is very much in demand, and there are many candidates among philosophers, economists, sociologists, architects, town planners, demographers and other technicians; nearly all of them bank inconspicuously on a certain ‘robotization’ shaped on their own synthetic model which they would programme; the more intelligent among them hope to achieve this by a spontaneous, or democratic, rather than an autocratic, method.*

Our theories are more or less in agreement with those of American critical sociology; but though this sociology has elucidated a number of important facts it has neglected the essential concepts of everyday life and modernity, urbanization and urbanism; lacking a general theory of society, of ideologies and of economics (theory of expansion) it has left the last word to the economists. Unlike Riesman, we do not contrast an ‘outer-directed’ with an ‘inner-directed’ man; moreover we would prove that though man is directed, even prefabricated, by outer circumstances (compulsions, stereotypes, functions, patterns, ideologies, etc.) he sees himself none the less as more than ever self-sufficient and dependent only on his own spontaneous conscience even under robotization. But we would also try to prove the failure of such tendencies through ‘irreducibles’, contradictions that resist repression and transposition. Can terrorist pressures and repression reinforce individual self-repression to the point of closing all the issues? Against Marcuse we continue to assert that they cannot.*

American critical sociology – notwithstanding the weight of orthodox industry-sponsored ‘research’ – has raised a number of important questions, amongst which is that of the social function of business concerns. We are now aware, through published works corroborating practical experience, that the big ‘modern’ business concern is not content with the status of economic unit (or group of units) nor with political influence, but tends to invade social experience and to set itself up as a model of organization and administration for society in general. It usurps the role of the city and takes over functions that are the city’s by right and that should, in the future, be those of an urban society: housing, education, promotion, leisure, etc.; furthermore it constricts and alienates privacy by housing its dependants in hierarchized dwellings. Its control is sometimes overpowering and, in its own way, the business concern tends to level out society, subordinating social existence to its totalitarian demands and leading to ‘synthesis’.

Cybernetization appeared to operate through the police (Orwell) or through bureaucracy; however conditioning, seeping through the channels of a highly organized everyday life, succeeds mainly on the level of woman or ‘femininity’. Yet femininity also suggests feminism, rebellion and assertiveness. The robot and the computer are, we repeat, production apparatus; to by-pass this appropriation involving a rational world-scale programming, consumption is organized on the pattern of production; only desires happen to figure among the irreducibles, and the consumer, especially the female of the species, does not submit to cybernetic processes; while the robot – for the time being – has neither desires nor appetites; his memory alone is unimpeachable. As a result, not the consumer, but consumer-information is treated to conditioning – which may perhaps restrict cybernetic rationality and the programming of everyday life …

We have just added a ticklish problem to our theory, a poisonous flower to a pretty posy: could the organization of everyday life (with its ‘brilliance’, scintillation and ‘modernism’) be the French high-road to americanization? We return to a question formulated earlier on: are we heading for a world-scale homogeneity that would foster or reveal a single absolute system, or, on the contrary, for a state where discrepancies and resistances must inevitably bring about the disruption of the whole structure? Do economically developed nations provide a model, both theoretical and practical, for the relatively underdeveloped, and does expansion feed on development to the point of integration? Will ideology and technology – or the expansion of productivist ideology – prevail in Europe and in France? Is the americanization of France heading straight for success, under cover of an anti-American policy and using for its ends a social group, the technocrats, at first reactionary but finally submitting in the hope of satisfying a thirst for power? The answers to these questions will have to be deferred.

Notes

*  Hermann Broch, Dichten und Erkennen, Zurich, 1955, pp. 183-210, 237.

*  Claude Simon, Flanders Road, London, 1962.

*  Cf. Marx philosophie, Paris, 1964.

*  The following section is a summary of the first three volumes of the Critique de la vie quotidienne (Paris). The first, published in 1946, was reissued in 1959 and it is an introduction; the second was published in 1963. The present work is a ‘digest’ of the third volume that is still in progress; that is to say, it contains the main themes while discarding a number of facts, analyses and arguments.

*  The critical theory of everyday life is thus radically distinct from the study of interpersonal relations from which arise psycho-sociological theories that claim to identify the ‘specifically social’ (Cf. L’Homme et la société, III, 1967, p. 63).

*  Cf. F. Braudel: La Civilisation matérielle, Paris, 1967.

†  Vol. I, first edition, Paris, 1946; second edition, Paris, 1959.

*  These were not the only significant features and should not be singled out from the others; thus we should not underestimate the role of semi-programming, National Accounts and preoccupations with consumer-research in France; mortgages and hire-purchase must also be considered among these features.

†  The author admits that he hesitated for some years before reaching such conclusions. More than once between 1950 and 1960 he considered abandoning both concept and inquiry, and this explains the time-lapse between the first volume (Introduction à la critique de la vie quotidienne, 1946) and the second (1962).

*  This definition is not incompatible with certain others such as ‘monopolistic capitalism of State’, for instance; but in our opinion it allows for a more thorough analysis of the society’s functions and structure and it goes further into actualities and potentialities than the latter, which appears to stress the economic aspect and denotes a certain partiality’ for economism, ideology and ‘values’ in the society it defines.

*  We shall come across the notion of obsolescence again further on.

*  The Critique de la vie quotidienne in its projected design was to have formed a triptych with ‘Mystified Conscience’ and ‘Frustrated Conscience’. Conscience has not ceased to be frustrated, but today we can add to the theory of individualism (of contacts and communication) a new claim: the right to solitude, to privacy and to escape from contemporary terrorisms. As to the mystification, it has spread; furthermore the term has permeated even journalism; and lastly, ideologists, now over-selfconscious, present ideology as non-ideological and as a safeguard against mystifications (‘pure’ science, advanced culture, etc.); which accounts for our discarding the project.

†  Cf. the next chapter and, in due course, vol. III of Critique de la vie quotidienne of which this section is a summary.

*  It may not be amiss to repeat here that we have no regrets or nostalgias for former times; we do not incriminate the ‘machine’ whether electronic or otherwise; on the contrary. A programmed non-automation of the productive apparatus leads to a programmatizing of the consumer, whereas automation would (perhaps) free creative energies and make them available for works of art. The Bureaucratic Society of Controlled Consumption is heading for fresh contradictions, as only industrial production can be automated and the consumer is elusive and must be tracked down. By displacing basic problems such a society collapses; it is a failure where social life is concerned as the liquidation of humanism proves.

*  Marcuse, One Dimensional Man, London, 1968.