Henri Lefebvre: A Critical Introduction - autonomous learning

H e n r i L e F e b v r e
“turbo-Prof,” a species of French academic who teaches in the
provinces, who catches the train à grande vitesse (TGV) every
Monday morning and Thursday afternoon, yet keeps a primary
residence in the nation’s capital. (Lefebvre lived at rue Rambuteau
in the 3rd arrondissement, first in an apartment at number 24, and
later at number 30. Both buildings were close to the old Les Halles
market halls, architectural jewels destined to be demolished in
1969 to make way for the RER rapid computer train line—which
would ironically speed to Nanterre. In 1977, the dreaded Pompidou
Centre became Lefebvre’s unwelcome, upscale neighbor. He could
almost spit at it from his front window.) 1
“Around 1960,” Lefebvre reflects in Everyday Life in the
Modern World (1968), “the situation became clearer.” Everyday
life was “no longer the no-man’s land, the poor relation of specialized
activities. In France and elsewhere, neo-capitalist leaders had
become aware of the fact that colonies were more trouble than they
were worth and there was a change of strategy; new vistas opened
out such as investments in national territories and the organization
of home trade.” 2 The net result, Lefebvre thinks, was that “all areas
outside the centers of political decision making and economic concentration
of capital were considered as semi-colonies and exploited
as such; these included the suburbs of cities, the countryside, zones
of agricultural production and all outlying districts inhabited,
needless to say, by employees, technicians and manual laborers;
thus the state of the proletarian became generalized, leading to a
blurring of class distinctions and ideological ‘values.’ ” 3 Work life,
private life, and leisure were “rationally” exploited, cut up, laid
out, and put back together again, timetabled and monitored by the
assorted bureaucracies, corporations, and technocracies.
Massive scientific and technological revolutions became a
perverse inversion of—and substitute for—the social and political
revolution that never materialized. That was like waiting for
Godot. (“We’ll hang ourselves tomorrow. [Pause.] Unless Godot
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