Henri Lefebvre: A Critical Introduction - autonomous learning

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of mechanical devices, crippling true subjectivity, and ushering
in the “real subsumption” of everyday life under the domain of
capital. The workweek continues to grow longer and longer in the
technologically most advanced nation in the world, the United
States, despite—or because of—time-saving ingenuity.
Who’d be surprised, given that cellular phones, e-mail, laptops,
and various handheld electronic devices permit many people to
work while they’re traveling to work and to work at home, at their
leisure. For the lucky ones who can labor at home or on the beach,
in hotels or at airports—as the unlucky ones toil at multiple jobs
to keep daily life afloat—it’s hard to know whether these changes
represent absolute worker empowerment or total enslavement. Is
this high-tech, liberated labor force a new industrial aristocracy,
or has capitalism, as Marx pointed out in the Manifesto, “stripped
of its halo every occupation hitherto honored and looked up to
with reverent awe? It has converted the physician, the lawyer, the
priest, the poet, the man of science, into its paid-laborers.” 27 Either
way, the gadget has permeated new millennium daily life, filled
in the unproductive pores of the working day, created human personalities
permanently online, addictively tuned in, programmed
to perform, and terrified to log off. A tiny Nokia object, stuck in
somebody’s ear, now represents a curious alien power, a heady
narcotic that underwrites the rhythms and texturing of people’s
everyday life. Every civic space, every street or café, assumes the
quality of a surrogate living room—or an open-planned office, a
postmodern relay system.
* * *
For Lefebvre, the contradictions of everyday life inevitably
find their solutions in everyday life. How could they otherwise?
Grappling for answers, he journeys a little closer to home, looks
over his shoulder, and remembers his roots. Since childhood he’d
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