Henri Lefebvre: A Critical Introduction - autonomous learning

H e n r i L e F e b v r e
or collapse on failing to emerge, it is a caricature or a tragedy, a
successful festival or a dubious ceremony.” 23
The spirit of past revolutions, replete with all their successes
and failings, seems nearby: of 1789 and 1830; of 1848 and the 1871
Paris Commune; of 1917, 1949, and 1959; of the 1968 “Student
Commune” (though Lefebvre wouldn’t know it yet). Moments
don’t crop up anywhere, or at any time, at whim or by magic. The
moment may be a marvel of the everyday, Lefebvre says, but it
isn’t a miracle. Indeed, the moment has its motives, and without
those motives it wouldn’t intervene in “the sad hinterland of
everyday dullness” (p. 356). It is everyday life where possibility
becomes apparent in “all its brute spontaneity and ambiguity. It is
in the everyday that the inaugural decision is made by which the
moment begins and opens out; this decision perceives a possibility,
chooses it from among other possibilities, takes it in charge and
becomes committed to it unreservedly” (p. 351). Everyday life,
consequently, “is the native soil in which the moment germinates
and takes root” (p. 357).
* * *
The Lefebvrian moment bore an uncanny resemblance to “the situation”
of Guy Debord, the intense, bespectacled, freelance revolutionary
whom Lefebvre befriended in 1957. Debord was thirty
years Lefebvre’s junior, a brilliant theorist and ruthless organizer,
a poet and experimental filmmaker, the brainchild behind a militant
crew of artists, poets, and students who hailed from France,
Britain, Italy, Denmark, Belgium, and Holland. They’d banded
together in a remote Italian village in July 1957, “in a state of semidrunkenness,”
to establish the so-called Situationist International
(SI), an amalgam of hitherto disparate avant-garde organizations.
The SI, which endured until 1972, was highly politicized in its
intent to renew art—or, better, to “abolish” art, much as Marx
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