Colonization of Everyday Life
Colonization of Everyday Life
Definition
The colonization of everyday life names the process by which everyday life is increasingly penetrated, managed, and attenuated by external forces — bureaucratic administration, commodification, work imperatives, and the "programmed character of contemporary life." Lefebvre diagnosed this as the "bureaucratic society of controlled consumption." Maycroft (2007) empirically grounds this thesis, showing how infrastructure changes (train service removal) force everyday life to be "framed a little more by the imperatives of work" — commuters pay more, waste time, endure overcrowding, and must "work more in order to be able to pay more to get to work." Heller offers the structuralist version of the same diagnosis without the term: "political ideology sets itself the task of conserving, of nurturing particularity" — deterring the dissatisfied "from trying to change their lives, or indeed from imagining that their lives are worth changing" (p. 98) — and, later in the book, identifies 'scientific-technological' manipulation as having "taken over all the negative functions of religion, without its compensating positive aspects" (p. 106). Unlike Lefebvre, Heller insists colonization is never total: "Man has always shown himself capable of finding adequate ways of rebelling against any given form of alienation" (p. 106).
Key Thinkers
- Henri Lefebvre — the "bureaucratic society of controlled consumption"; everyday life as the target of colonization.
- Neil Maycroft — empirical grounding of colonization thesis; everyday life as "respite from non-everyday life pressures."
- Agnes Heller — political ideology and 'scientific-technological' manipulation as the agents that "nurture particularity"; colonization refused as total.
Related Concepts
- Everyday Life
- Nycthemeral — the colonized day in plan form: the architect's timetable as the apartment's script.
- Theories of the Everyday
- Work/Leisure Distinction
- Consumerism
- Particularity and Individuality — what colonization conserves and fattens: particularity.
Source Support
Sources in the wiki that discuss this concept:
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Everyday Life (Heller 1970) — political ideology (p. 98), mass communication "never addressed to the 'person'" (p. 187), and scientific-technological manipulation (p. 106) as the mechanisms; the anti-totality rejoinder.
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The Apartment (Perec 1974/2006) — the colonization thesis in plan form, the everyday as architect's script: the apartment's "ideal dividing-up" runs "in accordance with a procedure that is unequivocal, sequential and nycthemeral" — each slice of the 07.00–22.00 day assigned to one room — and the timetable is "both fictional and problematic, though I'm convinced of its elementary rightness (no one lives exactly like that, of course, but it is nevertheless like that, and not otherwise, that architects and town planners see us as living or want us to live)" (pp. 260, 262). Colonization here is not consumption-administration but plan-administration: the day prescribed by the design professions before it is lived, the household's schedule installed in the rooms. Perec's counter-moves (the reception en suite, the sensory apartment, the heptadian weekday-rooms, the themed rooms) are the colonized everyday's counter-layouts — play against prescription. See nycthemeral, everyday-life, theory-of-the-everyday.
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Decorating Culture (Tang 1998/2006) — the colonization thesis's legitimization engine, named: "needs are necessarily constructed to provide the alibi or self-evident rationale for any given stage of 'consummative mobilization,' which proves to be a central legitimizing process of the late capitalist mode of production" (p. 331) — colonization not as imposition on the resistant everyday but as the manufacture of the wanting subject; the 1990s Chinese decoration craze as the process's compressed demonstration (the nation "consumed by a craze" in real estate and construction, 1992), with interior design as the administering instrument (see consummative-mobilization, interiorisation, everyday-life).
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The History of Everyday Life (Lüdtke ed. 1995) — the colonization thesis's German historiographical critique: Lüdtke finds Habermas's "colonization of the life world" "more subtle but also [neglecting] the fundamental ambivalences of historical social praxis" — the life-world is not simply dissolved by functional "imperatives"; rather there is "a 'mediatization of the life world in and with the structures of the life world,'" and the dominated develop "styles of behavior which establish and screen off spheres of their own" (pp. 16–17). The critique converts colonization from a one-way imposition into an ambivalent process, and supplies the wiki's alternative vocabulary of Eigensinn and complaisance.
Open Questions
- What are the mechanisms of colonization in contemporary everyday life (digital platforms, gig economy, financialization)?
- Is colonization total, or are there spaces of everyday life that remain uncolonized?
- Maycroft suggests "resistance to everyday life" rather than resistance from it — what would this look like?
