Henri Lefebvre: A Critical Introduction - autonomous learning

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
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