What is everydaylife? What are its central and ambient qualities, properties and dynamics in ?Critique of Everyday Life? of Henri Lefebvre? To response this questions I searched ‘everydayness’ in cultural study traditions of a critical approach to the analysis of everydaylife. The strategy of sociocultural critique through the ‘problematization’ or ‘defamiliarization’ of the habitualized character of everydaylife is one that is well-established in the literature, especially for adherents of various neo-Marxisms. However, in recent years, several prominent critics have taken issue with the concept of defamiliarization, arguing that habit-bounded, ‘distracted’ and routinized character of the everyday cannot be easily contrasted with, or superceded by, the exceptional or the extraordinary. Such a position, it is suggested, both denigrateds the integrity of dailylife and promotes a kind of incipient transcendentalism.
The work of Henri Lefebvre is often taken to be representative in this regard, and various phenomenological-pragmatists are criticized to this position. In this article, I take by analyzing Lefebvre’s writings on such key points as his treatment of routine in everyday life, as well as his concept of totality, dialectics and critique. In summary, despite of many critics, Lefebvre does not promote a dualistic transcendentalism in which daily life is denigrated.
But in his everyday utopianism in which routine and creativity, the trival and the extraordinary, are viewed as productively interwined rather than opposed. As such I seek to defend the notion of ‘critique’ of everyday and totality in Lefebvre’s Thought.