Henri Lefebvre: A Critical Introduction - autonomous learning
Henri Lefebvre: A Critical Introduction - autonomous learning Henri Lefebvre: A Critical Introduction - autonomous learning
e v e r y d a y L i F e Marxist dialectician confront the everyday, that they begin and end analysis in the quotidian. For Lefebvre, everyday life became a bit like quantum theory: by going small, by delving into the atomic structure of life as it is really lived, you can understand the whole structure of the human universe. A politics that isn’t everyday, Lefebvre says, is a politics without a constituency. Therein lay the problems of party Marxism, with its preoccupation with building an abstract economy rather than reinventing a real life. On the other hand, an everyday life without historical memory, without any broader notion of its dialectical presentness, is forever prey to mystification. “When the new man has finally killed magic off,” Lefebvre says in Volume 1 of Critique of Everyday Life, with trademark rhetorical flush, “and buried the rotting corpses of the old ‘myths’—when he is on the way towards a coherent unity and consciousness, when he can begin the conquest of his own life, rediscovering or creating greatness in everyday life—and when he can begin knowing it and speaking it, then and only then will we be in a new era.” 9 * * * Much in Critique of Everyday Life seemed like light relief, like Lefebvre’s romp through cherished books and sunny, open meadows. He seems deliberately to want to put those war years aside, out of sight and out of mind. His debut volume is discursive, free flowing, and formless—a welter of ideas and muses, allusions and alliterations, spiced up with playful doses of polemicism. At times, we have to work hard to keep up. He gives us a recapitulation of “some well-trodden ground,” reconsidering questions about alienation and surrealism: André Breton’s clarion call, Lefebvre jokes, is “Snobs of the World Unite!” Once again, he tussles with the party, defending humanism and “Marxism as Critical Knowledge of Everyday Life.” A lot unfolds like a stream of consciousness, 5
H e n r i L e F e b v r e as Lefebvre breezes through the “French countryside on a Sunday afternoon,” demystifying the “strange power” of a village church— a church that could exist anywhere today: “O Church, O Church, when I finally managed to escape from your control I asked myself where your power came from. Now I can see through your sordid secrets. … Now I can see the fearful depths, the fearful reality of human alienation! O holy Church, for centuries you have tapped and accumulated every illusion, every fiction, every vain hope, every frustration.” 10 Elsewhere, Lefebvre juggles with this concept he labels “everyday life,” typically weary of laying it down solid. Literature and art, he says, as opposed to politics and philosophy, have better grappled with understanding the everyday. 11 Brecht’s “epic drama” gives us a theater of the everyday, where all the action is stripped of ostentation and where all truth, as Brecht liked to say, citing Hegel, “is concrete.” “Epic theater,” Lefebvre quotes Brecht preaching, “wants to establish its basic model at the street corner.” Brecht has his great hero of knowledge, Galileo, begin by a process of “de-heroization”: “GALILEO (washing the upper part of his body, puffing, and good-humored): Put the milk on the table.” 12 The films of Charlie Chaplin, meanwhile, whose image of the tramp strike as both “Other” and universal in “modern times,” reveals bundles about everyday alienation, and, just like life itself, its drama is a slapstick that makes us laugh and cry, sometimes at the same time. (In the 1950s, Chaplin and Brecht both felt the heat from Senator Joseph McCarthy’s “red” witch hunts. Their power to disgruntle and critically inform was thereby acknowledged.) Chaplin, according to Lefebvre, “captures our own attitude towards these trivial things, and before our very eyes.” He comes as a stranger into the familiar world, he wends his way through it, not without wreaking joyful damage. Suddenly he disorientates us, but only to show us what we are when faced with objects; and these objects become suddenly alien, the 6
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H e n r i L e F e b v r e<br />
as <strong>Lefebvre</strong> breezes through the “French countryside on a Sunday<br />
afternoon,” demystifying the “strange power” of a village church—<br />
a church that could exist anywhere today: “O Church, O Church,<br />
when I finally managed to escape from your control I asked myself<br />
where your power came from. Now I can see through your sordid<br />
secrets. … Now I can see the fearful depths, the fearful reality of<br />
human alienation! O holy Church, for centuries you have tapped<br />
and accumulated every illusion, every fiction, every vain hope,<br />
every frustration.” 10<br />
Elsewhere, <strong>Lefebvre</strong> juggles with this concept he labels<br />
“everyday life,” typically weary of laying it down solid. Literature<br />
and art, he says, as opposed to politics and philosophy, have better<br />
grappled with understanding the everyday. 11 Brecht’s “epic drama”<br />
gives us a theater of the everyday, where all the action is stripped of<br />
ostentation and where all truth, as Brecht liked to say, citing Hegel,<br />
“is concrete.” “Epic theater,” <strong>Lefebvre</strong> quotes Brecht preaching,<br />
“wants to establish its basic model at the street corner.” Brecht<br />
has his great hero of knowledge, Galileo, begin by a process of<br />
“de-heroization”: “GALILEO (washing the upper part of his body,<br />
puffing, and good-humored): Put the milk on the table.” 12<br />
The films of Charlie Chaplin, meanwhile, whose image of the<br />
tramp strike as both “Other” and universal in “modern times,”<br />
reveals bundles about everyday alienation, and, just like life itself,<br />
its drama is a slapstick that makes us laugh and cry, sometimes<br />
at the same time. (In the 1950s, Chaplin and Brecht both felt the<br />
heat from Senator Joseph McCarthy’s “red” witch hunts. Their<br />
power to disgruntle and critically inform was thereby acknowledged.)<br />
Chaplin, according to <strong>Lefebvre</strong>, “captures our own attitude<br />
towards these trivial things, and before our very eyes.”<br />
He comes as a stranger into the familiar world, he wends his<br />
way through it, not without wreaking joyful damage. Suddenly<br />
he disorientates us, but only to show us what we are when faced<br />
with objects; and these objects become suddenly alien, the<br />
6
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