To Have and Have Nantes

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, the phrase connoted “what is humble and solid, what is taken for granted and that of which all the parts follow each other in such a regular, unvarying succession that those concerned have no call to question its sequence.” It is the city in which we live, the products we consume, the routines we undertake, well, every day, to the point where we no longer even notice what it is we are doing.

We are simply living, one might argue, but living is never so simple. The everyday, like everything else, is historically contingent. The Critique is structured around the concept of alienation, by which “a dehumanized, brutally objective power holds sway over all social life,” Lefebvre writes. Social life, he goes on to assert, quoting the young Karl Marx, becomes subjugated to the gross social product that always “grow[s] out of our control, thwart[s] our expectations, bring[s] to naught our calculations.”

Thus, however indirectly, we are the makers of our own misery. We tend not to reckon with this fact but rather to naturalize the misery that embeds itself into all aspects of life. This misery becomes deeper the more it becomes everyday and consequently recedes from view. But it is also the everyday, its rhythms and encounters, that provides an occasion for the solidarity that might abolish our discontent.

“Even at its most degraded,” Kristin Ross writes, “the everyday harbors the possibility of its own transformation; it gives rise, in other words, to desires which cannot be satisfied within a weekly cycle of production/consumption.” Ross, a New York University comparative literature professor born two generations after Lefebvre, has authored histories of the Paris Commune and May ’68 that are admirably attuned to the prosodies of living in explosive times. In the past two years she has published consecutive books—The Politics and Poetics of Everyday Life and The Commune Form—that uphold faith in radical social change under less politically propitious conditions.

The critique of everyday life necessarily begins from the outside, from a conscious remove from dailiness. It proceeds from that simplest of operations: taking notice. Just like the quantum observer, the noticing is enough—the noticing itself is already critique. Potentially, much more than that. In a lucid early passage in Politics and Poetics, a collection that covers forty years of scholarly production, Ross offers a summa as clarifying as it is moving:

Lyricism exits the stage with the first of the book’s three sections, devoted to settling scores within the French academy. The Jesuit scholar Michel de Certeau—another prominent and, crucially, non-Marxist exponent of everyday life whose work was, for a time, hegemonic in cultural studies departments—receives a perfunctory dismissal. The pedagogical skirmish staged between Jacques Rancière and his one-time teacher Louis Althusser—Ross prefers the former’s “storytelling” to the latter’s “explication”—feels quaint in light of present crises imperiling higher education. More diverting is a 1983 interview with Lefebvre, in which the young Ross finds the octogenarian philosopher redirecting nearly every question about his time with the Situationist International—whose thought similarly concerned the concept of everyday life—away from theory and toward gossipy anecdotes. (The juiciest story tells of how Guy Debord dispatched a “particularly unbearable” woman named Denise to Lefebvre’s apartment in the Pyrenean town of Navarrenx in a failed attempt to persuade Lefebvre’s partner, pregnant at the time, to have an abortion and leave him. All, it seems, because Debord’s milieu missed hanging out with her in Paris.)

Ross’s analysis gains greater traction when she applies her keen eye to works of film, literature, and painting in the book’s midsection. In a scintillating reflection on the pulp novel that glosses the work of Fredric Jameson (Ross’s other intellectual lodestar), she invests the figure of the detective with dialectical powers. The gumshoe’s purposeful wanderings dredge up a totalizing picture of the development and degradation of the social order, bringing contradictions to light with each new detour. What novelists like Raymond Chandler do is thematize the dynamism of contingency, or what we call history. The urban setting of these books isn’t stable, and Ross shows how the bidonvilles (shantytowns) that feature prominently in Parisian noir fragment the temporality of the city. Because the study of everyday life only emerged with the advent of urbanization, it can give short shrift to the quasi-feudal modes of living that continue to persist within capitalist modernity. For instance, the migrant worker toiling for globalized agribusiness experiences extraeconomic exploitation, though this may not preclude their engagement in certain cooperative and nonaccumulative practices unavailable to their counterparts in the service and manufacturing industries. Ross will go on to make much of this insight.

The final section of Politics and Poetics is devoted to the commune form, a leitmotif found throughout her writings. It is the “rendering public of spaces the state considered private,” but this calls to mind mere arbitration. Solicited by the online collective Autonomies for an expanded definition, Ross offered “direct intervention into the conditions of the present, as well as circumscription to a local situation”—hardly clarifying. At a loftier register, the commune form signifies direct participation in the production of space, in the provisioning of resources—in short, democracy.

In The Commune Form, the outlines become clearer, though here again Ross works by way of addition and slight shifts of frame. Indeed, she stipulates that the “commune form, as a form … does not unfold in the same way everywhere around the world,” thus evading ideological and tactical prescriptions that would attempt to universalize it. After all, the commune is not “something that can be proclaimed: it [has] to be built from the ground up.” Relying on the distinction between “dominated” and “appropriated” space elaborated by Lefebvre in his other great work, 1974’s The Production of Space, Ross explicates the open-ended possibility that inheres in the commune. If dominated space evokes an image of the new violently welded onto unsuspecting sites—the highway that “brutalizes the countryside and the land, slicing through space like a great knife,” to take Lefebvre’s most visceral example—the appropriated space of the commune presents a woolier aspect. The production of appropriated space, in Ross’s sense, is in a continual process of becoming, “non-accumulative,” and “part and parcel of the positive abolition of private property.” Where space is open to evolving need based on use, the hoarding of fallow ground makes no sense.

To concretize the suggestion, Ross cites several case studies in which people from vastly different backgrounds and political temperaments came to (co)constitute a collectivity. In the most engaging section of The Commune Form, she narrates struggles set off by the construction of airports in the 1960s and ’70s, when anxious Western economies attempted to get out ahead of globalization. After state planners in France reclassified a rural area near Nantes in order to build a hub for international air travel, local paysans (“smallholding cultivators,” in Ross’s description) refused to sell up. They practiced a form and rhythm of everyday life accreted over centuries, and suddenly conscious of this fact, they came to perceive Paris’s machinations as domination. Lefebvre and the Situationists might have called it colonization—a rich word in a Frenchman’s mouth, to be sure—but the Lockean logic underpinning the attempted dispossession of the paysans bears striking similarity: They were not sufficiently utilizing the land, not generating sufficient profit, not sufficiently feeding economic growth, and so the land was a kind of terra nullius, meaning it could be expropriated at will. The area was deemed a zone d’aménagement différé (deferred development zone), or ZAD; the argot of bureaucracy is ingenious in its evasions.

The paysans, however, were quick to mobilize, inspiring students, factory workers, environmentalists, and radicals from all over the country to take up their cause. In an act of détournement, the zone d’aménagement différé became the zone á défendre (Zone to Defend). More than détournement, the slogan suggests a tactic. The name is instructive for Ross, who opposes defend to resist, that cri de coeur of American liberals. “Resistance,” she writes in Politics and Poetics and restates in The Commune Form,

Through the act of seizing space, the commune materializes out of, and becomes hostile to, the everyday. It inaugurates rather than concludes a battle—a supposition borne out by the spectacular longevity of the paysans’ struggle, which continues even to this day. (Plans to develop Notre-Dame-des-Landes, the epicenter of the Zone to Defend movement, stalled out after the oil crisis of the 1970s, only to be taken up by a strange alliance between a Socialist Party mayor and agribusiness in 2000. Nine years later, politicized cultivators reassumed the ZAD moniker.) Ross gives the negative example of another airport project in Quebec, where planners confiscated 97,000 acres of rural, mostly agricultural, land to build infrastructure for the 1976 Winter Olympic Games. Dissent cohered slowly, assuming the character of resistance. The state, not recognizing this as a serious challenge, simply carried on with its agenda. “Forests and multigenerational farms were razed, and entire communities and villages demolished,” recounts Ross. For every victory, there are ever more defeats, even when a robust opposition materializes: From Standing Rock to the Stop Cop City movement, politically and tactically advanced occupations were unable to defend their respective zones from a state dead set on waging war against the earth and its poor.

For Ross, the relative autonomy with which the paysans may generate a life in common eludes their urban-dwelling counterparts. The city, being a vast architectural and logistical undertaking, owes its existence to capital in a way the country does not. It is a pointillist creation of dominated spaces, culminating in a portrait of hyperdominated space. What’s more, it acts as a nexus for a smooth global connectedness, one that further extends and refines methods of administration, homogenizing rhythms with and across other cities to better fit the parceled time of capital. Increasingly, this logic has threatened to colonize the countryside as well; as Ross notes, the construction of airports, deterritorializing nonplaces par excellence, has repeatedly been a flash point of rural land struggles. Elsewhere, defensive wars have been waged against the leveling force of remembrement—“a kind of rural ‘redistricting’ designed to facilitate vast, flat, monoculture cultivation,” Ross writes.

I find it curious that she situates the proper site of the commune in the country and more or less dismisses the urban. (In any case, the opposition is rather undialectical. The “country” only comes into existence as such in relation to the city, and both are shaped by that relation with respect to capitalist modernity.) One could draw some gloomy conclusions from this. Inhabitants of cities—increasingly, the majority of the world’s population—thus seem doomed to resistance, while only in the country does there remain anything worth defending.

But the city, fragmented as it is by uneven development and classed policing, still offers a density of social and ethnic diversity that is largely organically missing from the country. The urban remains the site of everyday life’s deepest inhumanity and penetration, but also of its potential undoing. Do movements like Occupy and the Palestine Solidarity Encampments not prefigure, albeit in a limited fashion, the potential eruption of the commune form within the city itself? Ross has elsewhere acknowledged the “lived proximity” afforded by urban life as an instigative condition for political consciousness and action, citing Lefebvre’s reflection that “May ’68 happened because Nanterre students were forced to walk through Algerian bidonvilles to get to their classes.”

The Ross of The Commune Form, to quote the polemical title of its first chapter, is interested in “Nantes, not Nanterre.” Shifting her focus away from the center of French power, she dares her readers to look anew at the capital-E Event we tropify as May ’68. It was in Nantes, not Paris, that the first factory was occupied. It was Nantes, not Paris, that was, for a short time, perhaps the most impressive example of autogestion (self-management) in the postwar West. “Nantes,” Ross writes, “was the only city in France that responded to the generalized collapse of public services during the general strike by organizing a kind of parallel administration for the purpose of satisfying the city’s basic needs.” She observes that the Nantes Commune, as it was dubbed by detractors and supporters alike, was sustained by a mixture of factory and municipal workers as well as paysans in the region. The latter provided food to the former at cost or for free, bypassing middleman grocers, with distribution instead coordinated by the central strike committee, “a kind of popular government in charge of neighborhood operations.” Dairy farmers distributed hundreds of liters of milk a day at the height of the commune, an echo of another experiment in autogestion, the Black Panthers’ People’s Free Food Program. Travailleurs and paysans were together building a new life in common; the utopian union of town and country was, for a very brief moment, being realized.

The Commune Form betrays a bias for rusticated experiments in insurgency, and Ross does somewhat sidestep the persistent specter of political and social conservatism. (Rural French voters, for example, tended to favor Le Pen over both Mélenchon and Macron in the 2022 presidential election.) Like Lefebvre, she has a certain romanticism about le pays, but her romanticism (and, to a lesser degree, his) is not rooted in any mystical sense of humanity’s spiritual and primordial harmony with the earth, or a druidic or animistic conception of the natural world as an agential being. Over the course of The Commune Form, it becomes clear that its author is, first and foremost, an ecologically minded thinker and a compelling advocate for degrowth, though she doesn’t characterize herself as such. Her preferred nomenclature of “subsistence,” indebted to sociologists Maria Mies and Veronika Bennholdt-Thomsen, describes a political economy “distinctly different from that required for commodity production, since it involves working out how—and how much—we want to produce and consume, and organizing collectively toward that end.” Ross finds in the precapitalist rhythms of the paysans the seeds of a postcapitalist ecology, and it is her hope that subsistence shall one day become “a synonym not for scarcity but for abundance,” and that “the people Marx called ‘the class that represents barbarism within civilization’ might well figure the potential for a new political future.”

Ross argues, persuasively I think, that the commune gives concrete form to the abstract injunction to “save the planet,” reterritorializing this demand in local, and thus discretely winnable, struggles. She notes that the struggle of the small cultivators has less to do with property rights—i.e., deed and title—than with a refusal to turn over that land to the dictates of capital. Their opposition begins not from their separation but their integration into the world economy, from their becoming-conscious of themselves as a class within the global production process and resistance to that imposed transformation. It is a nonaccumulative mode of life, not a legal right, that the paysans defend.

It would be a step too far to assert that this struggle, in itself, is revolutionary; Ross merely wants to draw out its revolutionary potential. To my mind, the keenest indicators can be found in struggles against mineral extraction, such as the forestalling of a massive mining project in north Madagascar by farmers and environmentalists. Due to an irony of interdependence, rare earth mineral deposits may emerge as choke points in the global production process. The global pays, the bad conscience of international capital, is increasingly looking like the site of its possible undoing. The question raised, but never satisfactorily answered, is how to link these discrete conflicts to a mass politics capable of delivering the systemic change demanded by anthropogenic climate crisis. Between them lies a yawning gap; bridging it will require more than a shared hostility toward capitalism or mutual affinities for all that is humble and solid and taken for granted.

Here it may be worth recalling Ross’s suggestion that the commune form is, in addition to a tactical measure, a site of communal luxury—a phrase she found buried at the very end of a manifesto written by Eugène Pottier, Gustave Courbet, and other artists during the organization of the Paris Commune. Certainly more beguiling than subsistence (Ross’s nuanced reading notwithstanding), communal luxury isn’t a frivolous or even secondary demand but rather “a call for the reinvention of wealth beyond exchange value.” The makeshift structures built by occupiers of the ZAD defy conventions of luxury, yet their provisional status and ingenious assemblage of rejectamenta, Ross claims, are rooted in something deeper. This she calls “daily public life.” Within the slight difference of this phrase from “everyday life” lies an entire political program: to take this debased everyday—heretofore administered and imposed by the “dehumanized, brutally objective power” of capital, as Lefebvre wrote—and finally direct it for and with a human intelligence. To constitute a public apart from the sphere of consumption and re-create it in the sphere of production—not of commodities but of life itself. Under such circumstances, critique accedes to the prerogatives of living with intent, which is another way of saying “beauty.”