Henri Lefebvre: A Critical Introduction - autonomous learning
Henri Lefebvre: A Critical Introduction - autonomous learning Henri Lefebvre: A Critical Introduction - autonomous learning
3 Spontaneity Bestir yourself!—Ah, for us science doesn’t go fast enough! —Arthur Rimbaud, Une saison en enfer Not too long after the dramatic irruptive moments on the streets of Seattle, protesting the World Trade Organization’s summit, I taught a class on Marxist urbanism at a Massachusetts liberal arts college. One of the key texts I’d chosen was Lefebvre’s The Explosion, written only months after the even more dramatic student uprisings of May 1968. The images of street fighting and police heavy-handedness, circa fin de millénaire, surprised many pundits—radicals and conservatives alike—and I remember having little inkling of what Lefebvre’s text, dictated almost as cars blazed in central Paris, could tell us as smoke still smouldered in downtown Seattle. 39
H e n r i L e F e b v r e Lefebvre’s window on the events of 1968 was particularly fascinating, given he’d had a foot in each camp: the ex-communist, expelled from the party for “ideological deviations,” nonetheless remained a socialist true believer and a maverick fellow traveler; meanwhile, a lot of active participants in the demos and occupations, like Nanterre sociology major and Rouge et Noir militant Daniel Cohn-Bendit, had read and listened to Lefebvre and were somehow putting his lectures into practice. “Oh, he was a wonderful lecturer,” Cohn-Bendit told me, recently. “He would seduce everybody, just talk, telling anecdotes; he loved to talk and everybody loved his classes.” A twenty-one-year-old Cohn-Bendit, a prominent student agitator and spokesperson, was among the twothousand-odd students who followed Lefebvre’s class on modernity and everyday life in Amphithéâtre B at Nanterre, 1966–67. “I didn’t really know him personally,” admitted Cohn-Bendit. “I was only one of many students in the audience. But his ideas on cultural-revolution in everyday life, and on offering a different version of Marxism, influenced the ‘Movement of March 22nd.’ ” 1 On that notorious March day, assorted Situationists, young communists, Trotskyists, anarchists, and Maoists invaded Nanterre’s administration building and began occupying it. Posters went up and slogans were scribbled on the walls of Nanterre in peripheral west Paris and soon at the Sorbonne in the Latin Quarter: “TAKE YOUR DESIRES FOR REALITY,” “NEVER WORK,” “BOREDOM IS COUNTERREVOLUTIONARY,” “TRADE UNIONS ARE BROTHELS,” “PROFESSORS, YOU MAKE US GROW OLD,” “IF YOU RUN INTO A COP, SMASH HIS FACE IN.” In early May, “the March 22 Movement” met with UNEF (the French National Student Union) at the Sorbonne. The authorities tried to break up the meeting but instead only unleashed its latent power. On May 6 and 7, a huge student demonstration took over the Boulevard Saint Michel and thoroughfares near rue Gay- Lussac; protesters overturned cars and set them alight, dispatched 40
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3<br />
Spontaneity<br />
Bestir yourself!—Ah, for us science doesn’t go fast enough!<br />
—Arthur Rimbaud, Une saison en enfer<br />
Not too long after the dramatic irruptive moments on the streets<br />
of Seattle, protesting the World Trade Organization’s summit,<br />
I taught a class on Marxist urbanism at a Massachusetts liberal<br />
arts college. One of the key texts I’d chosen was <strong>Lefebvre</strong>’s The<br />
Explosion, written only months after the even more dramatic student<br />
uprisings of May 1968. The images of street fighting and<br />
police heavy-handedness, circa fin de millénaire, surprised many<br />
pundits—radicals and conservatives alike—and I remember having<br />
little inkling of what <strong>Lefebvre</strong>’s text, dictated almost as cars<br />
blazed in central Paris, could tell us as smoke still smouldered in<br />
downtown Seattle.<br />
39
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