The Politics and Poetics of Everyday Life by Kristin Ross. Verso, 320 pp., $30.
The Commune Form: The Transformation of Everyday Life by Kristin Ross. Verso, 144 pp., $20.
When do you wake up? Do you scroll on your phone, see atrocities and jokes and advertisements all bundled together on the feed? Do you take the subway or the bus to work? Eat the same sad, seventeen-dollar salad for lunch? After logging off, do you go out to the bar with colleagues? Maybe you’re a farmer—do you milk your goats at the same time each day? Are your mower and your tiller the same brand as those of your neighbors? When you finish your day’s work, do you take a shower and doze off to TV? How, in other words, do you prepare your body and mind for the next day, when the process begins again?
This rhythm, this social space, these products: They are all part of what twentieth-century French theorists called “everyday life.” For Henri Lefebvre, whose The Critique of Everyday Life (published in installments beginning in 1947) is synonymous with the subject,…