1. Work and Leisure in Everyday Life
Henri Lefebvre
Edited by
METU Faculty of Architecture Department of Industrial Design
ID501 Advanced Project Development in Industrial Design
Nur Yıldırım

2. Notes on Lebebvre’s Approach
• In his writings he follows dialectical approach based in Marxism
• Stresses that everyday hold the potential for transformation
• His critiques include both an analytic diagnosis and a recovery pf
critical potential
• Perceives everyday as the critical totality of social life, a time-
space with various rhythms.

3. Keywords
transformation, work, leisure, private life,
alienation, mystification,
Aim and Scope
• relationship between work, leisure, family and private life
• work as necessity and leisure as freedom, co-existing circle
• need for leisure as a break from everyday, characteristics of leisure

4. Elements of Everyday Life
Private Life
Everyday united
contradictory
Work Leisure
cannot be separated
historically contradictory

5. until advent of bourgeois society, individuality or personality develop outside of
productive labor
separation of manual and intellectual work,
before bourgeois, productive labour was merged with everyday life: workplace is
all around the house and family, peasant life. way of living belonged to not
individual, but a group
after bourgeois, work, leisure and private life differentiated, separated but
constituted a unified whole
individual consciousness split into two(private and social), man and working
man. Family life and leisure separated from productive activity.

6. Obscurity in everyday life: Where it is to be found? Where does the living
contact between the concrete individual man and other human beings operate?
In fragmented labour? In family life? In leisure?
Elements of everyday: work, family and private life, leisure activities, their
interrelation; discreteness of this elements brings alienation and differentation.

7. Characteristics of Leisure
Leisure is a social need, spontaneous, passive and active(cultivated) activities
our civilization(modern industrial civilization) creates techniques to satisfy them:
leisure machines, radio, tv
Differentiated needs according to age, sex and group. Individual and collective
needs. (sports, ind. and team)
Leisure is a break, distraction from everyday. Liberation from worries,
necessities; liberation and pleasure

8. Mystifying world of Leisure
Clear images of the everyday that can make the ugly beautiful, the empty full.
Sexuality in the domain of the image: provide the sense of a break which people
look for in leisure.
Criticize modern eroticism for its lack of genuine sensuality. Break without
leaving everyday, artificial, dissatisfactory.
Reverse image: illusion of a false world: it is not a world, mimics real life to
replace the real by its opposite. replacing real unhappiness by fictions of
happiness.
exploitation of sex, sentimentality, crime and sports.
Concept of alienation is essential.

9. Leisure and Work
leisure: freedom
work: necessity
changing social relations of production
would work become need?
work is the foundation of personal development, link between individual and
social system
work and leisure is related and exist with each other, leisure with no work
would be inadequate
fragmentation of individual labour and socialization productive labour
human relations or public relations: mystification of capitalism for the social need
stemming from the socialization of labour

10. We work to earn our leisure, and leisure has only one meaning: to get away from
work, a vicious circle
Thus is established a complex of activities and passivities, of forms of sociability
and communication
they contain critique of everyday life in themselves

11. Examples
Cafe
Funfair
Shopping Malls
Radio, Tv

12. Conclusions
work, leisure, family life and private life make up a whole we can call global
structure or totality, transitory nature
Concern is to look to many sided interactions and extract what it positive -
needs- from negative -alienation-

13. Perspectives For Conscious Alterations In
Everyday Life
Guy Debord

14. Notes on Debord’s Approach
• Worked with Lefebvre
• Situationist Practice: showing alienation of modern everyday life
by intensifying the conditions
• Revolutionary; render daily life ‘unnatural’ by experimentally
altering forms of its practice

15. Altering everyday life in order to experimentally bring the object of study
into clear view
Debord records his voice and plays it from a tape during an academic
conference in order to stress that it would be artificial, not a free dialogue

16. Everyday Life as a sociological research branch
Debates on everyday life as a study field; trivial repeated actions
Refers to Lefebvre’s description of everyday life: ‘Whatever remains
after one has eliminated all specialized activities.
Workers as guinea pigs who have been infected and have only
everyday life to live with having no access to specialized activities

17. ‘We have to place everyday life at the center of everything’
‘Measure of all things, fulfillment or nonfulfillment of human
relations, of the use of lived time, of artistic experimentation ..’
Criticizing everyday life for a supersession in culture and politics,
‘intervention’

18. Everyday life is organized within the limits of poverty
Scarcity of free time and scarcity of possible uses of this free time
Poverty of conscious organization and creativity in everyday life
expresses the necessity for unconsciousness and mystification in a
society of alienation.

19. Use of technology in everyday life; radio, tv, these elements are
anarchical by chance,
It is a political issue, class domination maintaining a totalitarian
organization of life.
Life deprives of itself, communication and self-realization.
Revolution of everyday life to where present dominates past and
creative aspects of life predominate over repetitive.