L'homme sera quotidien ou ne sera pas (Lefebvre, 1959, p. 266)
“Au commencement fut l'action” – in the beginning, there was action. This biblical allusion shows the centrality of action in Lefebvre's anthropology. Through action, man becomes human and creates himself. For Lefebvre, action – and not work, as for Marx – is the “essential category of existence” (Schmid, 2010, p. 80). Practice, understood as repeated action, is therefore Lefebvre's focal point of analysis. As Schmid puts it, Lefebvre's conviction is that “practice must be the point of departure and the aim of all theory-building efforts, which themselves, must open out into practice” (Schmid, 2010, p. 78). Lefebvre embellishes on Marx's statement that “all social life is essentially practical. All mysteries (...) find their rational solution in human practice and in the comprehension of this practice” (Charnock, 2010, p. 1293); and develops this statement in order to accommodate it to everyday life. It is therefore the everyday practice, and not practice in general, which is most important to Lefebvre11. He is not alone in this stance
among social scientists, but still outstanding in regard to the place which he ascribes to the everyday in his works. His writings attest to this preoccupation: over the course of his lifetime he devoted three tomes to a Critique of the Everyday Life, published in 1947, 1961 and 1981 respectively.
He argues, “the everyday life is the rational core, the real centre of practice” (Lefebvre, 1968, p. 64). The everyday is the place where “precise problems of production-at-large are being expressed”. Therefore, the “societal existence of man” is being produced in the everyday (Lefebvre, 1968, p. 50). And, likewise, the everyday is the site of the production of space. Lefebvre argues that both the state and economy are outcomes of the everyday and not vice versa. Both dominate the “appearance of social relations” (Aronowitz, 2007, pp. 135–136), but
11 Though, Lefebvre might have been influenced by Nietzsche, whose attentive reader he was. Nietzsche is credited with having introduced theeveryday as a “legitimate object of philosophical reflection” (Aronowitz, 2007, p. 141.)
not the essence of social relations which is the everyday practice.
If political and economic systems have changed, but the everyday has not, then a real change did not take place. In this regard, Lefebvre did not see that state socialism after the Bolshevik revolution had brought about real change in people's lives, as everyday practices largely remained the same as before. In the same vein he would argue that the changing faces of capitalist modernity, globalisation and internet economy do not constitute real change unless they precipitate a new set of everyday practices. If a revolution is to take place, it must be a revolution of the everyday: while Marx argued that the city was “the site of the revolution, the focus and laboratory for the progression of history”(Alexander, Buchli, & Humphrey, 2007, p. 7), for Lefebvre it was undoubtedly the everyday practice.
The everyday life is the site of struggles and conflicts, and also the site of everyday alienation: a critique of everyday life was for Lefebvre therefore before all a critique of capitalism and modernity. Striving for rationality, capitalism “colonises” the everyday and subdues it to its needs, which is the key to capitalism's survival (Aronowitz, 2007, p. 135). The rhythms of everyday life have been subjugated by capitalism – for instance through the transformation of biological “cyclical” time into “linear” time measured by clocks, which have become instruments of domination (Aronowitz, 2007, p. 142). Within the struggle against domination, Lefebvre argues in favour of art, music and dance which would re-introduce rhythmicity into an otherwise linear, colonised time. Lefebvre explicitly encouraged subversive artistic uses of space – which has contributed to Lefebvre's popularity within current debates on urban resistance to gentrification, for instance.
The analysis of rhythms developed into Lefebvre's central preoccupation during the latter part of his career. His last major work called Rhythmanalysis was meant to propose a general theory which would incorporate his previous research into the everyday life and the production of space. An analysis of rhythms, he argued, would propose a framework to analyse the interlocking of spatial and temporal phenomena – “the relationships between different forms of movement and spatial arrangement, between durations and moments” (Highmore, 2005, p. 9). The outcome would be “a (Marxian) meta-theory of the urban process”, as Harvey called it (Harvey, 1989, pp. 2–3).
To Lefebvre, “the everyday is the humble and the solid (…), which has no date. It is (apparently) insignificant; it engages and it troubles and yet it does not have to be said” (Lefebvre, 1968, pp. 51–52). Unconscious action has therefore an astonishing potential as a source of knowledge about society and the individual. This echoes Bourdieu's argument that “it is because subjects
do not, strictly speaking, know what they are doing that what they do has more meaning that they know” (Harvey, 1989, p. 241). In this vein, it is crucial to draw attention to the seemingly insignificant everyday life – to those “sociological trivialities with wide-ranging implications” (Schmid, 2010, p. 127) – which Lefebvre saw neglected by his scholarly colleagues. His project of “lived experience taken up and raised to critical thinking” sounds to me as an argument for social sciences which must necessarily be anthropologically informed. Here, he is echoed by Hann who argues that for a study of post-socialist transformations, “it is essential to integrate the analysis of practices, what people actually do, and to explore how this is shaped by the beliefs they hold and the social relationships they maintain” (Hann, 2002, p. 29). Bearing that in mind, the present work will devote a great deal of attention to everyday life practices in Khujand on various levels; and address the issue of rhythms of everyday life.