Lefebvre argues that in society and at all of its levels and in all its dimensions, we find dialectics of social practices and social structures. There is a dialectic of practices and structures in society. Lefebvre’s theory of society opposes the one-sidedness of both structuralism that fetishises structures and methodological individualism that fetishises individual thought and behaviour. A core aspect of his concept of everyday life that allows him to ground a dialectical theory of society is the dialectic of the lived and the living.
Lefebvre distinguishes between the lived (le vécu) and the living (le vivre) as two levels of everyday life (see Table 5.2). Based on Lefebvre, I have constructed a model of everyday life that adds to Lefebvre’s theory the role of communication in everyday life as the process that mediates between the lived and the living. Figure 5.1 visualises this model.
The lived is the level of practices and individuals. The living is the level of structures and trans-individuality. At the level of lived reality, humans produce social objects through communicative practices. They do so under the conditions of the living, i.e. structural conditions that enable and constrain human practices, production, and communication. The notion of the communicative practice means that to “speak is to
Chapter Five | Communication in Everyday (Digital) Life
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Communication in Everyday Life