Digital Capitalism

Chapter Five

Communication in Everyday (Digital) Life. A Reading of Henri Lefebvre’s Critique of Everyday Life in the Age of Digital Capitalism

5.1 Introduction

5.2 Lefebvre’s Concept of Society

5.3 Communication in Everyday Life

5.4 Everyday Life and Communication in Capitalism

5.5 The Communication of Ideology

5.6 Conclusion

References

5.1 Introduction

Henri Lefebvre (1901–1991) was one of the most influential French Marxist intellectuals of the 20th century. He was a Marxist-humanist theorist who was not just a major critical of capitalism, but also a critic of structuralism and Stalinism. He was an interdisciplinary critical theorist who focused on topics social as everyday life, social space, the city, alienation, ideology, dialectical philosophy, society, nationalism, fascism, Karl Marx, Lenin, social movements, the state, modernity, language, the Paris Commune, globalisation, aesthetics, rural life, existentialism etc. Lefebvre published more than 70 books.

The Production of Space (La production de l’espace) is Lefebvre’s (1974/1991) most widely read and cited book (for a discussion of this book’s relevance for a critical theory of communication see). Critique of Everyday Life (Critique de la vie quotidienne,CEL) is a three-volume book in which Lefebvre outlines a critical theory of society and everyday life in capitalism (Lefebvre 1991, 2002, 2008, 2014). Lefebvre saw CEL as “his principal contribution to Marxism” (Elden 2004, 110). Lefebvre “is the quintessential critical theorist of everyday life” (Gardiner 2000, 71). CEL is a “nonstatist Marxism that concretely addresses problems of human existence” (Shields 1999, 17). The first volume (CEL1) was published in French in 1947, the second one (CEL2) in 1961, the third one (CEL3) in 1981. Everyday Life in the Modern World is an accompanying volume published in 1968 in French (Lefebvre 1971). Although less read than Production of Space, CEL is a very rich dialectical, Marxist and humanist work and a major contribution to 20th-century social theory.

DOI: 10.4324/9781003222149-5

This chapter asks: How can Henri Lefebvre’s Critique of Everyday Life inform a critical theory of communication? How can it inform a critique of digital capitalism?

Section 5.2 focuses on Lefebvre’s concept of society. Section 5.3 discusses the role of communication in everyday life. Section 5.4 analyses the role of communication in capitalism. Section 5.5 draws the reader’s attention to the communication of ideology. Conclusions are drawn in section 5.6.

5.2 Lefebvre’s Concept of Society

5.2.1 Practices and Structures

Lefebvre outlines a dialectical concept of structure. Structures are “(relative) stabilities, defined and relatively constant contours, regularities, form which are born and survive, which produce and which reproduce, at the heart of innumerable interactions” (CEL2, 162). Structures exist everywhere. They enable and constrain and are the result of the interactions of moments and elements. In society, such interactions are communication flows between humans who stand in social relations to each other.

Lefebvre was a critical of structuralism and structuralists such as Lévi-Strauss, Saussure, Barthes, Althusser, and so forth. The problem of structuralism is that it “proceeds by privileging structure absolutely” and substantifying structure (CEL2, 176). It “totalizes structure” (186). Structures’ plasticity, negations, and their inner contradictions are marginalised (176). Structuralism “loses touch with historicity”, dialectical development, and processes (177). It “reifies actions” and is therefore a form of reification and alienation (177).

Lefebvre sees totality as a dialectical aspect of structure. Immanent in every totality and every process of totalisation is the potential for negation, the “breaking of totality” (CEL2, 183). He sees dialectical negation as more fundamental than totality (186). Lefebvre argues that a totality is made up by the dialectical interaction of need, work, and pleasure (189–193). Work satisfies and transforms human needs. The human being is a human of need, a human at work, and a human of pleasure (192). Humans have biological and social needs, transform the world and satisfy their needs through practices, and are beings that strive towards satisfaction and enjoyment so that they lead a pleasurable life.

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Lefebvre characterises functionalism as a version of structuralism that reduces everything to a function and cannot think of anything as not having a function. Functionalism “eliminates critical thought” and is a “technocratic ideology” (199). Functionalism is an extreme form of what Horkheimer (1947/2004) characterises as instrumental reason. It is a mode of thinking that suggests that everything is an instrument of something else. Functionalism is an extreme form of what Lukács (1971) terms reified consciousness. It reduces the world to the status of things and instruments. Lefebvre (CEL2) writes that everyday life has no function (199), which is why functionalism cannot explain it. Functionalism is an ideology of control that has no place for the unforeseen and the marginal (202). Lefebvre’s critique implies that functionalism is an intellectual form of totalitarianism.

Lefebvre (CEL2, 232–244) stresses the importance of practices in everyday life and society. He distinguishes between ideological practices, specific practices related to professions and skills, inventive/creative practices, repetitive practices, political practices, knowledge practices, partial revolutionary practices, and total revolutionary practices. Lefebvre stresses that practices are not just economic production but extend into all realms of society, including politics, culture, and technology. For Lefebvre, practices constitute totality. He therefore says that praxis is the “total field” (276).

5.2.2 Base/Superstructure, Material/Non-Material, Economic/Non-Economic

There are formulations in Critique of Everyday Life that make it appear like Lefebvre like orthodox Marxism assumes that that the economy forms the material base and politics and culture the non-material superstructure. He speaks of “the economic base (the productive forces) and the apex (the ideological and political superstructures)” (CEL2, 34). The everyday is “totality in action, it encompasses the base and the superstructure, as well as the interactions between them” (45).

Lefebvre speaks of “material production” and “non-material” production (236), “economic (material) production” (237). “Praxis encompasses both material production and ‘spiritual’ production” (237). He also writes that services are “non-material” forms of production in realms such as advertising, distribution, education, health, leisure, training, or transportation (236).

But it is also evident that Lefebvre is critical of the base/superstructure-model. He speaks of “the simplified scheme: ‘economic base – political superstructure’” as “impoverished” thought that “characterizes the Stalinist interpretation of Marxism” (CEL1, 52). This is also why Lefebvre speaks of “so-called” base and superstructure and often refers to both terms with quotation marks. For example, Lefebvre argues that “symbols, culture, representations and ideologies” are “so-called ‘superstructural’ elements” that “react on the ‘base’” (CEL2, 237). He speaks of “ideologies and ‘superstructures’” (236), “’base’ or ‘foundation’” (10).

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For Lefebvre, social practices are the decisive aspect of society and everyday life. Social practices extend into all realms of society. The “superstructures are linked to society as a whole, to social practice as a whole” (CEL1, 57). The logical implication is that the physical production is not simply a base to which culture and politics can be reduced. Culture and politics are material and economic because they are produced and reproduced. There are political, cultural, ideological, intellectual, and so forth workers. In Volume 3, Lefebvre argues that the importance of bureaucracy, information production and information technology explodes the Stalinist distinction between base and superstructure:

The traditional Marxist thesis makes the relations of production and productive forces the “base” of the ideological and political superstructures. Today – that is to say, now that the state ensures the administration of society, as opposed to letting social relations, the market and blind forces take their course – this thesis is reductionist and inadequate. (CEL3, 123)

Information is produced. It is consumed. Information technology confirms the outmoded character of the classical Marxist contrast between base and superstructure. Information is not – or not merely – a superstructure, since it is an – exchangeable – product of certain relations of production. What was regarded as superstructural, like space and time, forms part of production, because it is a product that is bought and sold. (CEL3, 144)

Lefebvre advances several important arguments why the orthodox separation of the economy and culture is untenable:

• Computing as convergence technology: Networked computer technologies are convergent means of production, distribution, and consumption of information. Computing transcends the traditional separation between production as economic and consumption as cultural.

• Knowledge work: Information technology is characteristic of the knowledge age, where knowledge work that produces information has become an important feature in the economy. Knowledge work transcends the boundary between the economy and culture. It produces cultural products within the economy.

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• The culture industry: In the culture industry, culture is produced as commodity. Examples are music, films, entertainment, live performances, advertising, sports events, video games, software, magazines, branding, etc. The cultural commodity means the economisation and commodification of culture so that no boundary can be drawn between the economy and culture.

Lefebvre questions the separation of economy/culture and base/superstructure. The economy operates as the production of ideas in culture. Culture operates as knowledge goods and knowledge work in the economy. Culture is material, economic, and noneconomic (Williams 1977, Fuchs 2020). For Lefebvre, human beings’ practices that constitute everyday life “are the soil” (CEL3, 123) of society. Everyday life is society’s foundation¹. In the book Dialectical Materialism, Lefebvre (2009, 73) argues that humans’ “practical relations” are their “concrete conditions of existence”. Human practices are social and societal and form society’s foundation.

Lefebvre, however, assumes that information is “an immaterial product” (CEL3, 56). The separation of intangible products of mental work from matter is part of the orthodox dualism that Lefebvre questions. If the mind and its products and the products of mental work are immaterial, then there must be two substances in the world, matter and spirit. The question what the world is fundamentally made of can be based on a dualist ontology with two substances not be adequately explained. The assumption that there are two substances – the material and the immaterial – cannot explain what the world’s ground is and opens up philosophy to spiritualism and esotericism that assume that the world is determined by spiritual forces.

The next section discusses the role of communication in everyday life.

5.3 Communication in Everyday Life

The critique of everyday life analyses how humans live, “how badly they live, or bow they do not live at all” (CEL2, 18). It aims at informing the transformation of society and people’s lives. It is a praxis that wants to contribute to the establishment of “a decentralized socialism” (130). The critique of everyday life “attacks alienation in all its forms, in culture, ideology, the moral sphere, and in human life beyond culture, beyond ideology, beyond the moral sphere” (63). Lefebvre argues that in phases of fundamental societal change, “everyday life is suspended, shattered or changed” (109). For example, as a result of a general strike against government measures that degrade working conditions, the practices of everyday life such as commuting, shopping, and working come to a halt and alternative messages that are normally not being heard in everyday life are publicly communicated through demonstrations, public gatherings, media presence, and so forth. Everyday life is the “vital element in which the working classes” are active and that is controlled by the bourgeoisie (1971, 39).

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1 Shmuely (2008) points out the parallels between the works of Raymond Williams and Henri Lefebvre, including the cultural materialist interpretation of society that transcends the orthodox-Marxist base/superstructuremodel.

Everyday life refers to social practices within the totality of society (CEL2, 31), humans “lived experience” (CEL1, 49), everyday relations between humans. The focus on experience and class experience is a parallel between the approaches of Lefebvre and E. P. Thompson (1978). Thompson points out that lived experience involves affects, beliefs, consciousness culture, feelings, ideas, ideology, interests, instincts, law, morals, myth, needs, norms, obligations, science, thought, and values (see Fuchs 2019). Everyday life is an “intermediate and mediating level” of society (CEL2, 45). It mediates society’s dialectics, such as the dialectic of repetition and monotony/creativity, banality/profoundness, need/desire, pleasure/pain, satisfaction/privation, fulfilment/emptiness, work/non-work, possible/impossible, random/certain, achieved/potential, cyclic time/linear time, alienation/disalienation, society/ individual, private life/public life, etc. The critique of everyday life studies the “differences, dualities, oppositions and conflicts” that humans face (47).

Lefebvre argues for a multidimensional theory of society that operates with a variety of levels. He identifies three dimensions of everyday life: natural forms of necessity, the economic realm of the appropriation of objects and goods, and the realm of culture (CEL2, 62). So Lefebvre sees nature, the economy, and culture as three important realms of everyday life. What is missing is the realm of politics, where humans take collective decisions that are binding for all and take on the forms of rules.

Inspired by Lefebvre, we can identify three levels of society (see Table 5.1): the microlevel of individuals and groups, the meso-level of organisations, and the macro-level of the subsystems of society. Each of these levels has economic, political, and cultural dimensions. The economic, the political, and the cultural are distinct, interacting dimensions of society. Table 5.1 outlines what type of structures we find at society’s various levels.

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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

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act” (CEL2, 282). Practices are communicative and communication is a human practice.
When we communicate, we influence ourselves and others.

The level of living life consists of an interaction of social structures, organisations, and the subsystems of society. All structures, groups, organisations, institutions, systems, and subsystems have economic, political, and cultural dimensions. In many social systems, one of these dimensions is dominant so that we can differentiate between economic, political and cultural structures/organisations/subsystems of society (compare Table 5.1). At the level of lived life, humans relate to each other through communicative practices. These communicative practices are the foundations of the production, reproduction, and differentiation of economic, political, and cultural structures/organisations/subsystems that condition human practices. There is a dialectic of the living and the lived in any society. This is a dialectic of human subjects and social objects.

Lefebvre stresses that in communication there are two subjects but that there is always the presence of the third (CEL2, 150–156). We talk about others and communication takes place in social contexts where others shape our everyday life and everyday communication. Communication also has the potential to change social structures which impacts the everyday life of others. There are parallels between

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Lefebvre’s focus on the tridimensionality of everyday life and communication and Jean-Paul Sartre’s (1960/2004) argument that a human relation is a “ternary relation” (374) where the “unity of a dyad can be realised only within a totalisation performed from outside by a third party” (115), by a “human mediator” (106) (see also Fuchs 2021a for an analysis of Sartre’s contribution to critical communication theory).

Language is dialectically related to communications. Whereas communication is a process and human practice, language is a structure and means. There is dialectic of means of communication and communicative practices. Lefebvre stresses that language is a “means of action and communication” (CEL2, 165), that it mediates the lived/living-dialectic (166), and that it is a social fact that “plays a part in all social facts” (170). Language is “the active element of every social phenomenon. It helps to bring it into being and to fix it” (170). Although language helps to fix the social and society, it is itself not a static, fixed structure but evolves because it is made and changed by humans. “Language is a work, the work of a society” (257). What Lefebvre expresses by saying that language is a work is that it is the historical result of humans’ communicative practices and social relations. Humans work in society and thereby also collectively work on the development of language.

There are different forms of language such as written language, spoken language, visual language, abstract/formal languages, and so forth. Language is often a very structural concept devoid of its connection to communication and therefore to human practices and the human being. In contrast, the notion of the means of communication stresses the mediation of structures (“means”) and practices (“communication”). Table 5.3 gives an overview of five types of the means of production.

The means of communication are structures that operate at the level of the living. Communicative practices are a dimension of the lived. Seen from the point of view of information and communication, the dialectic of the lived and the living is a dialectic of the means of communication and communicative practices. Communication is a dialectic of means and practices of communication. It involves a double dialectic: Communication’s internal dialectic is a dialectic of communicative practices and means of communication. Communication’s external dialectic means that communication has a mediating role in society. It mediates the dialectic of society and the individual, the dialectic of structures and individual practices, the dialectic of society’s objects and subjects.

In volume two of Critique of Dialectical Reason, Lefebvre (CEL2, 276–314) introduces the notion of the semantic field. My own interpretation and understanding are that semantic field is the space where the dialectic of communicative practices and means of communication takes place. The semantic field has to do with (individual and social) consciousness (296), experience, knowledge, practices (299). It involves signals, signs (representations) such morphemes and the word (verbal and visual sign), language consisting of signs and syntactic and grammatical rules, symbols such as religious symbols (e.g. the cross) that operate at the level of affects, spontaneity and emotions; images, signification, expression, sense. All communication uses images. “The deepest communication of all is achieved through images” (289)

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