Establishing And Exploring The Way Of Cirtique Of Everyday Life In The Modern World

In this dissertation the researcher mainly studies critique of everyday life, a concept first put forward by Henri Lefebvre (1901-1991), a modern French philosopher and the founder of Western Marxism. Lefebvre claims that there are fundamental differences between"daily life"(la vie quotidienne),"everyday life"(la vie quotidian), and"everydayness"(la quotidiennete). In his early years, he chiefly studies the valuable and mysterious daily life, always existing with its own unique style. Later on he turns to criticize the alienated everyday life and the uniform, repetitive everydayness as well. The researcher in the dissertation states that the core of Lefebvre's achievements lies in the fact that he establishes the concept of Critique of Everyday Life.However, Lefebvre adopts distinctly different attitudes and approaches in his early and later studies. At beginning, he holds a relatively philosophical and optimistic ground. His main ideals at this time include a) that the alienated world of our everyday life is composed of both the oppressed and liberated factors; b) that everyday life is the most fundamental juncture between various kinds of social activities and society's institutional structure. Meanwhile it is the mutual foundation of all cultural phenomena and origin of revolution of totality. Furthermore he regards the ultimate goal of socialist revolution as to fulfill the task of liberating everyday life.However, his views and understandings on everyday life in his later years turn to be more micro-sociological compared with his views in his early years. Thus he is relatively pessimistic during this period. According to him, everyday life in the modern world has been completely incorporated into the whole link of production and consumption. The modern society has become a bureaucratic society of controlled consumption instead of either a leisure society or an affluence society full of free choices for people. A cultural revolution based on everyday life, in his opinion, is the only solution to save the life of modernity. Lefebvre is considered both as the founder of Western Marxism and as an unconscious promoter of the so-called"post-Marxian philosophical thought"since the 70's in the 20th Century. For one reason, he originally sheds light on Marxian philosophy with the ontology of Poiesis, hence the concept of material production practice is made impractical. For another, he attempts to refute Marx's basic narrating logic in the priority of material production, and to raise a notion of the bureaucratic society of controlled consumption. He even tries to transform the sociological historical dialectics into the ontology of spatialisation,...