“a concept of everyday life that is specifically modern and that is primarily a category of capitalism, of capitalism’s proliferation of distinct, structured, specialized activities and its intensification, especially after World War II, of the social division of labor. “Everyday life,” properly speaking, first comes into being only at the moment, midway through the nineteenth century, when European cities begin to swell with the arrival of large numbers of newcomers, the moment—and this is crucial— when Marx conceptualized and systematized the “work day” of the wage laborer. When the lived experience of those new urban dwellers became organized, channeled, and codified into a set of repetitive and hence visible patterns, when markets became common between the provinces and the capital, when everything— work hours, money, miles, calories, minutes— became calculated and calculable, and when objects, people, and the relations between them changed under the onslaught of such quantification, then and only then and only there, in the large Western metropolises, did the world, in Lefebvre’s words, “turn to prose.”” (Kristin Ross, The Politics and Poetics of Everyday Life)
