Henri Lefebvre: A Critical Introduction - autonomous learning
Henri Lefebvre: A Critical Introduction - autonomous learning Henri Lefebvre: A Critical Introduction - autonomous learning
F o r e w o r d because my writing “isn’t about architecture, of course.” The last two words carried the burden of Johnson’s meaning. The subject was closed to discussion. Architecture was the moving and shaping of geometric forms in two and three dimensions. All else was sociology, a waste of time. Nice work if you can get it. And there had been a time when formalism was a radical position, and to take it was to embrace a broad set of progressive causes. And it is still available both as an analytic tool and as an episode in the history of taste. I take to heart Roland Barthes’s warning that the enemies of formalism are “our enemies,” they are the people who claim the authority to enforce a strict correspondence between signs and meanings. Unfortunately, by the 1960s, the enemies had become very shrewd in manipulating forms to cleanse the images of toxic enterprises. The Life of Forms in Art had become the Death of Art in Logos. We are workers, producing our own factory just by walking down the street: that’s one way to summarize what I took away from Lefebvre’s The Production of Space. And I say this as a former window dresser, who once had the good fortune to work inside one of those precious glass-enclosed storefront stages. Store display was the only form of design I ever worked in, and I loved it: the commercialism as well as the aesthetics (the store, which no longer exists, specialized in Good Design objects) and the effect that the fusion of commerce and appearances can have on the life of the street. It was like being a sidewalk painter, and if people believed that buying the objects on display enabled them to acquire the image I had set up for their viewing pleasure—if the window got enough of them to cross the threshold into the shop—that was good enough reason to ask for a raise. But a sidewalk painter isn’t only or even mainly working for paying customers, and neither was I. I was working for passers-by, for the wonderful ladies who get all dressed up to go out window-shopping, almost as if they were going to the opera, and for xiii
F o r e w o r d couples staggering romantically around the city after midnight, and for gentlemen out cruising (with or without dogs), and for everyone who appreciates the seductive pleasure of seeing their reflections in the glass and in the temptations behind it. Try seeing things from a window-dresser’s point of view. For us, the sidewalk is the stage, the people walking along it are the players, and we are the audience for a live version of that wonderful Twilight Zone episode where each of the mannequins in a department store gets to live for a day among the world of shoppers. Remember? And how one of the mannequins forgot that she wasn’t human and had to go back in the window at the end of her special day? The solitary flâneur is also a spectacle—not just the beholder of them. To a Mahayana Buddhist, the fusion of city and self is more than a poetic metaphor. It illustrates a concept called esho funi, roughly translated as the oneness of life and its environment. Literally “two but not two,” they are different aspects of the same entity, like the heads and tails of a coin. In his depiction of urban space, Lefebvre has taken what strikes me as a Western route toward a similar concept. It is not mystical, but then, to a Mahayana Buddhist, neither is esho funi. “Two but not two” is a construction that represents things as they are. And the goal of Buddhist practice is to bring one’s subjective perception into closer alignment with things as they are. That is what Enlightenment means. Lefebvre’s arguments against subjectivism are thus enlightened in both the Eastern and Western senses of the term. * * * I hope that Andy won’t be offended if I propose him for honorary membership in the illustrious guild of window-dressers. Arguments about the contemporary city are his wares: the ideas and the thinkers who articulated them have already inspired xiv
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- Page 5 and 6: Published in 2006 by Routledge Tayl
- Page 7 and 8: Over the future, everybody deludes
- Page 9 and 10: 7 Globalization and the State 121 8
- Page 11 and 12: F o r e w o r d Manhattan, meanwhil
- Page 13: F o r e w o r d He dramatizes this
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F o r e w o r d<br />
couples staggering romantically around the city after midnight,<br />
and for gentlemen out cruising (with or without dogs), and for<br />
everyone who appreciates the seductive pleasure of seeing their<br />
reflections in the glass and in the temptations behind it.<br />
Try seeing things from a window-dresser’s point of view. For<br />
us, the sidewalk is the stage, the people walking along it are the<br />
players, and we are the audience for a live version of that wonderful<br />
Twilight Zone episode where each of the mannequins in a<br />
department store gets to live for a day among the world of shoppers.<br />
Remember? And how one of the mannequins forgot that she<br />
wasn’t human and had to go back in the window at the end of her<br />
special day? The solitary flâneur is also a spectacle—not just the<br />
beholder of them.<br />
To a Mahayana Buddhist, the fusion of city and self is more<br />
than a poetic metaphor. It illustrates a concept called esho funi,<br />
roughly translated as the oneness of life and its environment.<br />
Literally “two but not two,” they are different aspects of the same<br />
entity, like the heads and tails of a coin. In his depiction of urban<br />
space, <strong>Lefebvre</strong> has taken what strikes me as a Western route<br />
toward a similar concept. It is not mystical, but then, to a Mahayana<br />
Buddhist, neither is esho funi. “Two but not two” is a construction<br />
that represents things as they are. And the goal of Buddhist<br />
practice is to bring one’s subjective perception into closer alignment<br />
with things as they are. That is what Enlightenment means.<br />
<strong>Lefebvre</strong>’s arguments against subjectivism are thus enlightened in<br />
both the Eastern and Western senses of the term.<br />
* * *<br />
I hope that Andy won’t be offended if I propose him for honorary<br />
membership in the illustrious guild of window-dressers.<br />
Arguments about the contemporary city are his wares: the ideas<br />
and the thinkers who articulated them have already inspired<br />
xiv
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