living philosophy (1)
After reading Trebitsch’ preface to Critique of Everyday Life, I’m left asking myself exactly what I will get from embarking on this exercise… it’s going to be a dense read!
I started with the intention of finding a place to locate a critique on how we “watch” – how we view and imbibe the visual. For one.
I’m also interested in how the dominant culture (or, Adorno’s culture industry) uses “knowledge” to manipulate our understanding of how we absorb the world around us – and more specifically how we make sense of how we absorb visual representations of the world around us.
It ascribes a value to what we see… including everyday life, work, time, people, the movement of people, etc. Narratives and specifically visual narratives on beauty, desire, trespassers or terrorists; these are manufactured notions. They’ve become everyday, where the “everyday” is a construct that is not revolutionary; where it is reactionary, assumed.
And so I guess I’m wanting to find the revolutionary potential within the everyday that moves against its numbing grain. Festivals do it. Carnivale does it. “Festival, like revolution, marks both a break in everyday life and a rehabilitation of the everyday” – this idea according to Trebitsch stems directly from Critique of Everyday Life (xxviii).
I started with Adorno to find a place for all this – and I should have stayed there perhaps. I will get back there maybe. This is an unguided, unled excursion into an intellectual quagmire I fear I’m wholly unequipped to navigate. But then I don’t trust the “institution” entrusted with guiding me. So what to do!
Just be lost for now. Try to read with understanding where I can. Take what is useful for what I’m trying to do? And get through it as quickly as possible! Be guided by my own ineptitude for now and see where I end up.
Why Lefebvre? Because I’m interested in the theme of “revolution as the revolution of everyday life” (xxvii) and the call for “revolution in individual everyday life” (xxviii) – which lies at the heart of what the situationist movement was about.
Lefebvre broke with the situationists in 1961/1962/1963 – each accused the other of plagiarising the other’s writings but of course the frissures ran deeper than this:
…it’s a delicate subject, one I care deeply about. It touches me in some ways very intimately because I knew them very well. I was close friends with them. The friendship lasted from 1957 to 1961 or ‘62, which is to say about five years.
And then we had a quarrel that got worse and worse in conditions I don’t understand too well myself, but which I could describe to you.
In the end, it was a love story that ended badly, very badly. There are love stories that begin well and end badly. And this was one of them.
Critique was pre- the break-up and his other text that I am more interested in getting to – The Production of Space – was published post- the break-up with the situationists. Here I’m keen to get to his ideas on re-appropriating time, work, space for ‘other’ purposes as well as his ideas on spectacle.
Finally, I’m keen to explore what Trebitsch says about his persistance in defining a “living philosophy”:
I find Henri Lefebvre’s originality, not to say marginality, lies in an unshakeable determination not only to reconcile Marxism and philosophy and to endow Marxism with philosophical status, but also to establish Marxism as critical theory, i.e. as both philosophy and supercession of philosophy (xiv-xv).
