unwilling to see alienation “soiled by the confrontation with actual human reality, with everyday life.” The eternally humanist HL wants to connect alienation to everyday life and to anchor them in the materiality everyday life: to renew the critique of everyday life as a “base” that matters. Lefebvre successfully drew attention to the alienation of everyday life, and the techno-urban dream of modern of urban life.
In one of the more telling passages, Lefebvre, uploads the following quotation from L’Express of June 8 1956:
“Kitchens are becoming less like kitchens and more like works of art... The latest technique is the electronic oven... The intercom (a system of loudspeakers linking every room) is becoming a standard piece of equipment in the home, while everyone is talking about a personalized little television network which will enable the lady of the house to attend to her chores while keeping an eye on the children playing in another room or in the garden... The remarkable ubiquity of ‘do it itself,’ the latest craze for the American husband... includes all the household gadgets that go with it...”
These new found gadgets were in K. Ross’ (1996: 192) words, “an assemblage of standardized, interconnected components” of newly created “totality of use-values... adapted to capitalist mass production through the development of “design” : a functionalist aesthetic that would render the components uniform, or compatible, the stove-sink-refrigerator flowing together in a seamless, white-chrome unit...”
Lefebvre extended Marx into the every-day by connecting "alienation" with the everyday using the poets of contradictory modern life: Brecht and Chaplin.
Just as HL confronts actual human reality using the power of illusion to uveil his critique of everyday life (a critique in action), I want use these passages and this poetic inspiration to jump into a discussion of everyday life as portrayed in two films set close together, but produced decades apart: Jacques Tati’s Mon Oncle and the recent film Nuit Noire, 17 Octobre 1961.
First, Mon Oncle. In the earlier passage, HL could be describing one of the ridiculous scenes in which the Jacques Tati’s clown-like Mr. Hulot witnesses complete household automation with much surprise in various scenes of his 1958 spectacle of subdued hilarity. In the film, Hulot, played by Tati himself, makes several visits to the suburban home of his relatives, where every aspect of domestic life has been automated: the kitchen, the fountain, the garage door, the cooking, the watering, and even the childhood games. All is clean, modern, sparkling and automated. With his usual flair for the ridiculous, Tati plays hubris with this convenience of modern domestic life. The romantic and residual, Hulot - who continues to ride his bike and smoke his pipe - exposes the all too silly nature of automated domestic life. The juxtaposition of his simple life with that of this ultra-modern relatives provides opens up questions about the utter insanity of post-war consumption and materialist aspirations.
Hulot’s relatives are the model of the new French middle class and “the construction of the new French urban techno-couple” awash in the dream of the American Life. Tati pokes ridicule at the continued division of labour upon which this new habitus rests. Not only is home life industrialized, segregated but, as we find out, the husband/bread winner is engaged in an equally regimented and segmented quotidien. He is the “new man” of the modern bureaucratic capitalist modernization, running an efficient modern plant (in some hilarious scenes Hulot is a series of jobs in the factory but is completely unable to adapt to the assembly line). At home, his wife runs the efficient household. Together this “new couple” is the micro-level of technological society. They are manifestations of the urban revolution, and testaments of modern convenience and technical brilliance, but also of the hidden contradictions of this urban life. As Lefebvre notes in another passage of Critique (1991: 8)
“Manifestations of the brilliant advances in the ‘ideal home’ constitute sociological facts of the first importance, but they must not be allowed to conceal the contradictory character of the real social process beneath and accumulation of technological detail. These advances, along with their consequences, are provoking new structural conflicts within the concrete life of society. The same period which has witnessed a breathtaking development in the application of techniques of everyday life has also witnessed the no-less breathtaking degradation of everyday life for large masses of human beings. All around us, in France, in Paris itself, there are hundreds of thousands of children of youngsters, students, young couples, single people, families, living in conditions of undreamed-of by anyone who does not bring the sociologist’s interest to bear: furnished rooms (increasingly expensive and squalid), slums, overcrowded flats, attic rooms etc.”
What Lefebvre draws attention to here is the contradiction of the ideal suburban home of the upper cadres of French society. A well-run and quality domestic environment has a major influence on the “physique and health of the nation.” As K. Ross (1996) has argued, much of this process of “washing the nation” and cleansing the French nation from its history of colonialism was a central component the domestication of political economy that is part of the consolidation of the new national (French) middle-class to absorb the dangerous classes and to provide a new (domestic) market for capitalist expansion.
While the utopian habits of bourgeois spatial segregation portrayed in Mon Oncle are taking root, becoming the dream-image (model) of French society, an other suburbanization being forged remains silent and forgotten. Workers and labourers from le magreb are being solicited to migrate as the labour-power behind the massive expansion of post-war production and consumption: the very urban fabric which has become the ideal to the “new couple” is unaccommodating to the Algerian, Moroccan and Tunisian workers who can barely afford decent housing and continue to face racialized repression and segregation.
The alter-reality of this inner colonization, and violent repression has recently come to life in the film Nuit Noire: 17 Octobre 1961. The film recalls the events of the night known only a October 17, 1961, and the censored history of the "dead bodies the newspapers didn't mention, that we weren't supposed to know about." (KR, 2002) That night, the FLN organized its first protest to protest a curfew which prohibet Algerians from being on Parisian streets after 8:30pm. Recalling the brutal and forgotten repression of a peaceful pro-FLN march, the film shows in chilling detail how the between peaceful march of between 30-40 thousand men, woman and children was met with fierce violence, and fired upon almost immediately. More than a simple reaction of incompetance, the violence was planed with cold calculation. In the weeks proceeding the march, ex-parachustiste has visited Paris's commissariats and virtually given carte-blanche the police. Papon had told his troops to "Settle your afairs with the Algerians yourselves. Whatever happens, you're covered. For one blow, give ten back... Even if the Algerians are not armed you should think of them always as armed." (KR) The violence was sickening: urnarmed marches in their Sunday bests were shot, matraqué, tossed into the river. How many? To this day, the corpses remain uncounted.
This film has revisited not only the state-perpetrated violent event, but also has shown glimpses into the everyday life of the dangerous classes that are to be absorbed or excluded from the national ideal of mass consumerism. In several scenes, FLN organizers walk through les bidonvilles to attend to organizing meetings and in the process show glimpses of the everyday life in the working districts. It is a stark contrast with the clean, modern totality of the modern home portrayed in Mon Oncle. These fleeting images offer a significant contradiction not only for socio-economic reasons, but also as since they exposes the moment of inner colonization. They are counter-images which expose how - as Kristen Ross has brilliantly noted - France continues to hold “its colonial past to be an “exterior” experience.” A “France” she concludes which has “closed that chapter and moved on to bigger autoroutes, all-electric Kitchens, and the European Economic Community.” When les flics en masse are deployed to stop the march with not so ambiguous instructions the scene is set for a evocation of the urbacidle moment of the urban revolution. Empowered by the brutal French Interior minister, and the right-wing Gaullist government, les flics conduct their brutal repression in subsequent scenes. On that black night remembered on our screen with the relentless violence of our modern state: the willingness of authorities to exert maximum force, the momentum of massive police deployment; the almost inevitable scene of mast arrests and bloodshed; and the impeding quiet aftermath.
The question as always is what do we do with the silence?
Listen... carefully... the silence of state violence is here, today, everywhere, and especially, today, in Montebello... Remember.
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