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 of mechanical devices, crippling true subjectivity, and ushering in the “real subsumption” of everyday life under the domain of capital. The workweek continues to grow longer and longer in the technologically most advanced nation in the world, the United States, despite—or because of—time-saving ingenuity. Who’d be surprised, given that cellular phones, e-mail, laptops, and various handheld electronic devices permit many people to work while they’re traveling to work and to work at home, at their leisure. For the lucky ones who can labor at home or on the beach, in hotels or at airports—as the unlucky ones toil at multiple jobs to keep daily life afloat—it’s hard to know whether these changes represent absolute worker empowerment or total enslavement. Is this high-tech, liberated labor force a new industrial aristocracy, or has capitalism, as Marx pointed out in the Manifesto, “stripped of its halo every occupation hitherto honored and looked up to with reverent awe? It has converted the physician, the lawyer, the priest, the poet, the man of science, into its paid-laborers.” 27 Either way, the gadget has permeated new millennium daily life, filled in the unproductive pores of the working day, created human personalities permanently online, addictively tuned in, programmed to perform, and terrified to log off. A tiny Nokia object, stuck in somebody’s ear, now represents a curious alien power, a heady narcotic that underwrites the rhythms and texturing of people’s everyday life. Every civic space, every street or café, assumes the quality of a surrogate living room—or an open-planned office, a postmodern relay system. * * * For Lefebvre, the contradictions of everyday life inevitably find their solutions in everyday life. How could they otherwise? Grappling for answers, he journeys a little closer to home, looks over his shoulder, and remembers his roots. Since childhood he’d 13
H e n r i L e F e b v r e known a tradition that is the veritable nemesis of insurgent forms of modern alienation: the rural festival. The drama usually ended in rowdy scuffles and raving orgies; festival days were rough and tumble and full of vitality, and Lefebvre loved them and romanticized them in adulthood. (Pieter Brueghel’s painting Battle of Carnival and Lent magnificently portrays this raucous medieval lifeworld.) Festivals seeped into Lefebvre’s Marxist conscience, activated involuntary memory, and aroused primordial visions of infant paradise, tasting a little like a Proustian madeleine dipped in tea; the sensation recreated the past, only to unlock the Pandora’s box of the future. Lefebvre’s philosophical homesickness locates itself in the future, and the past becomes a platform for pushing forward, partying onward, toward a higher plane of critical thinking and practice. He saw in festivals paradigms of an authentic everyday life, a realm where the shackles of enslavement had been loosened. Indeed, festivals “tightened social links,” he says, “and at the same time gave rein to all the desires which had been pent up by collective discipline and the necessities of everyday work. In celebrating, each member of the community went beyond themselves, so to speak, and in one fell swoop drew all that was energetic, pleasurable and possible from nature, food, social life and their own body and mind.” 28 Lefebvre invokes the festival during the 1940s and 1950s as a jarring antithesis of bureaucratic domination and systematized ordering. Like Faust, he fraternizes with the demonic and gives himself over to Dionysius, to excess and unproductivity, to Eros rather than Logos, to desire rather than depression. Festivals were like everyday life, only more intense, more graphic, more raw. During festivals, people dropped their veils and stopped performing, ignored authority and let rip. They broke out of everyday life by affirming what was already dormant in everyday life—and dormant in themselves. Festivals “differed from everyday life,” sometimes “contrasted violently with 14
- Page 2: Henri Lefebvre
- 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 and 14: F o r e w o r d He dramatizes this
- Page 15 and 16: F o r e w o r d couples staggering
- Page 18: Acknowledgments I’d like to thank
- Page 21 and 22: p r e F a c e rumpled brown tweed j
- Page 23 and 24: p r e F a c e always inquisitive, h
- Page 25 and 26: p r e F a c e * * * Lefebvre may ha
- Page 27 and 28: p r e F a c e if, in fact, he was r
- Page 29 and 30: p r e F a c e culture and tradition
- Page 31 and 32: p r e F a c e collaborator Norbert
- Page 33 and 34: p r e F a c e his frank concern for
- Page 36 and 37: 1 Everyday Life One finds all one w
- Page 38 and 39: e v e r y d a y L i F e warmth, bri
- Page 40 and 41: e v e r y d a y L i F e Marxist dia
- Page 42 and 43: e v e r y d a y L i F e familiar is
- Page 44 and 45: e v e r y d a y L i F e This is the
- Page 46 and 47: e v e r y d a y L i F e idealized v
- Page 50 and 51: e v e r y d a y L i F e everyday li
- Page 52 and 53: e v e r y d a y L i F e wrote “ea
- Page 54: e v e r y d a y L i F e my green ca
- Page 57 and 58: H e n r i L e F e b v r e “turbo-
- Page 59 and 60: H e n r i L e F e b v r e the poten
- Page 61 and 62: H e n r i L e F e b v r e possibili
- Page 63 and 64: H e n r i L e F e b v r e contempt,
- Page 65 and 66: H e n r i L e F e b v r e or collap
- Page 67 and 68: H e n r i L e F e b v r e the Frenc
- Page 69 and 70: H e n r i L e F e b v r e periphera
- Page 71 and 72: H e n r i L e F e b v r e Lefebvre
- Page 73 and 74: H e n r i L e F e b v r e feelings
- Page 75 and 76: H e n r i L e F e b v r e Lefebvre
- Page 77 and 78: H e n r i L e F e b v r e the Hotel
- Page 79 and 80: H e n r i L e F e b v r e found the
- Page 81 and 82: H e n r i L e F e b v r e thought i
- Page 83 and 84: H e n r i L e F e b v r e examinati
- Page 85 and 86: H e n r i L e F e b v r e with cohe
- Page 87 and 88: H e n r i L e F e b v r e in Quebec
- Page 89 and 90: H e n r i L e F e b v r e “the sc
- Page 91 and 92: H e n r i L e F e b v r e into a si
- Page 93 and 94: H e n r i L e F e b v r e common fo
- Page 95 and 96: H e n r i L e F e b v r e alienatio
- Page 97 and 98: H e n r i L e F e b v r e history,
e v e r y d a y L i F e<br />
of mechanical devices, crippling true subjectivity, and ushering<br />
in the “real subsumption” of everyday life under the domain of<br />
capital. The workweek continues to grow longer and longer in the<br />
technologically most advanced nation in the world, the United<br />
States, despite—or because of—time-saving ingenuity.<br />
Who’d be surprised, given that cellular phones, e-mail, laptops,<br />
and various handheld electronic devices permit many people to<br />
work while they’re traveling to work and to work at home, at their<br />
leisure. For the lucky ones who can labor at home or on the beach,<br />
in hotels or at airports—as the unlucky ones toil at multiple jobs<br />
to keep daily life afloat—it’s hard to know whether these changes<br />
represent absolute worker empowerment or total enslavement. Is<br />
this high-tech, liberated labor force a new industrial aristocracy,<br />
or has capitalism, as Marx pointed out in the Manifesto, “stripped<br />
of its halo every occupation hitherto honored and looked up to<br />
with reverent awe? It has converted the physician, the lawyer, the<br />
priest, the poet, the man of science, into its paid-laborers.” 27 Either<br />
way, the gadget has permeated new millennium daily life, filled<br />
in the unproductive pores of the working day, created human personalities<br />
permanently online, addictively tuned in, programmed<br />
to perform, and terrified to log off. A tiny Nokia object, stuck in<br />
somebody’s ear, now represents a curious alien power, a heady<br />
narcotic that underwrites the rhythms and texturing of people’s<br />
everyday life. Every civic space, every street or café, assumes the<br />
quality of a surrogate living room—or an open-planned office, a<br />
postmodern relay system.<br />
* * *<br />
For <strong>Lefebvre</strong>, the contradictions of everyday life inevitably<br />
find their solutions in everyday life. How could they otherwise?<br />
Grappling for answers, he journeys a little closer to home, looks<br />
over his shoulder, and remembers his roots. Since childhood he’d<br />
13