Henri Lefebvre

For the French wrestler, see Henri Lefèbvre (wrestler).
Henri Lefebvre
Born (1901-06-16)16 June 1901
Hagetmau, France
Died 29 June 1991(1991-06-29) (aged 90)
Navarrenx, France
Alma mater University of Paris (MA, 1920;[1] DrE, 1954)[2]
Era 20th-century philosophy
Region Western Philosophy
School Continental philosophy
Western Marxism
Hegelian Marxism
Main interests
 Everyday life · Dialectics · Alienation · Mystification · Social space · Urbanity · Rurality · Modernity · Literature · History
Notable ideas
 Critique of everyday life · Theory of moments · Rhythmanalysis · Right to the city · The production of social space

Henri Lefebvre (French: [ləfɛvʁ]; 16 June 1901 – 29 June 1991) was a French Marxist philosopher and sociologist, best known for pioneering the critique of everyday life, for introducing the concepts of the right to the city and the production of social space, and for his work on dialectics, alienation, and criticism of Stalinism, existentialism, and structuralism. In his prolific career, Lefebvre wrote more than sixty books and three hundred articles.[4]

Biography

Lefebvre was born in Hagetmau, Landes, France. He studied philosophy at the University of Paris (the Sorbonne), graduating in 1920. By 1924 he was working with Paul Nizan, Norbert Guterman, Georges Friedmann, Georges Politzer and Pierre Morhange in the Philosophies group seeking a "philosophical revolution".[5] This brought them into contact with the Surrealists, Dadaists, and other groups, before they moved towards the French Communist Party (PCF).

Lefebvre joined the PCF in 1928 and became one of the most prominent French Marxist Intellectuals during the second quarter of the 20th century, before joining the French resistance.[6] From 1944 to 1949, he was the director of Radiodiffusion Française, a French radio broadcaster in Toulouse. Among his works was a highly influential, anti-Stalinist, text on dialectics called Dialectical Materialism (1940). Seven years later, Lefebvre published his first volume of The Critique of Everyday Life.[7] His early work on method was applauded and borrowed centrally by Sartre in The Critique of Dialectical Reason (1960). During Lefebvre’s thirty-year stint with the PCF, he was chosen to publish critical attacks on opposed theorists, especially existentialists like Sartre and Lefebvre's former colleague Nizan,[8] only to intentionally get himself expelled from the party for his own heterodox theoretical and political opinions in the late 1950s. Ironically, he then went from serving as a primary intellectual for the PCF to becoming one of France’s most important critics of the PCF’s politics (e.g. immediately, the lack of an opinion on Algeria, and more generally, the partial apologism for and continuation of Stalinism) and intellectual thought (i.e. Structuralism, especially the work of Louis Althusser).[9]

In 1961, Lefebvre became professor of sociology at the University of Strasbourg, before joining the faculty at the new university at Nanterre in 1965.[10] He was one of the most respected professors, and he had influenced and analysed the May 1968 student revolt.[11] Lefebvre introduced the concept of the right to the city in his 1968 book Le Droit à la ville[12][13] (the publication of the book predates the May 1968 revolts which took place in many French cities). Following the publication of this book, Lefebvre wrote several influential works on cities, urbanism, and space, including The Production of Space (1974), which became one of the most influential and heavily cited works of urban theory. By the 1970s, Lefebvre had also published some of the first critical statements on the work of post-structuralists, especially Foucault.[14] During the following years he was involved in the editorial group of Arguments, a New Left magazine which largely served to enable the French public to familiarize themselves with Central European revisionism.[15]

Lefebvre died in 1991. In his obituary, Radical Philosophy magazine honored his long and complex career and influence:

"the most prolific of French Marxist intellectuals, died during the night of 28–29 June 1991, less than a fortnight after his ninetieth birthday. During his long career, his work has gone in and out of fashion several times, and has influenced the development not only of philosophy but also of sociology, geography, political science and literary criticism."[16]

The critique of everyday life

One of Lefebvre's most important contributions to social thought is the idea of the "critique of everyday life," which he pioneered in the 1930s. Lefebvre defined everyday life dialectically as the intersection of "illusion and truth, power and helplessness; the intersection of the sector man controls and the sector he does not control",[17] and is where the perpetually transformative conflict occurs between diverse, specific rhythms: the body’s polyrhythmic bundles of natural rhythms, physiological (natural) rhythms, and social rhythms (Lefebvre and Régulier, 1985: 73).[18] The everyday was in short, the space in which all life occurred, and between which all fragmented activities took place. It was the residual.[19] While the theme presented itself in many works, it was most notably outlined in his eponymous 3 volume study, which came out in individual installments, decades apart, in 1947, 1961, and 1981.

Lefebvre argued that everyday life was an underdeveloped sector compared to technology and production, and moreover that in the mid 20th century, capitalism changed such that everyday life was to be colonized—turned into a zone of sheer consumption. In this zone of everydayness (boredom) shared by everyone in society regardless of class or specialty, autocritique of everyday realities of boredom vs. societal promises of free time and leisure, could lead to people understanding and then revolutionizing their everyday lives. This was essential to Lefebvre because everyday life was where he saw capitalism surviving and reproducing itself. Without revolutionizing everyday life, capitalism would continue to diminish the quality of everyday life, and inhibit real self-expression. The critique of everyday life was crucial because it was for him only through the development of the conditions of human life—rather than abstract control of productive forces—that humans could reach a concrete utopian existence.[20]

Lefebvre's work on everyday life was heavily influential in French theory, particularly for the Situationists, as well as in politics (e.g. for the May 1968 student revolts).[21]

The social production of space

Lefebvre dedicated a great deal of his philosophical writings to understanding the importance of (the production of) space in what he called the reproduction of social relations of production. This idea is the central argument in the book The Survival of Capitalism, written as a sort of prelude to La Production de l’espace (1974) (The Production of Space). These works have deeply influenced current urban theory, mainly within human geography, as seen in the current work of authors such as David Harvey, Dolores Hayden, and Edward Soja, and in the contemporary discussions around the notion of Spatial justice. Lefebvre is widely recognized as a Marxist thinker who was responsible for widening considerably the scope of Marxist theory, embracing everyday life and the contemporary meanings and implications of the ever expanding reach of the urban in the western world throughout the 20th century. The generalization of industry, and its relation to cities (which is treated in La Pensée marxiste et la ville), The Right to the City and The Urban Revolution were all themes of Lefebvre's writings in the late 1960s, which was concerned, among other aspects, with the deep transformation of "the city" into "the urban" which culminated in its omni-presence (the "complete urbanization of society").

Lefebvre contends that there are different modes of production of space (i.e. spatialization) from natural space ('absolute space') to more complex spatialities whose significance is socially produced (i.e. social space).[22] Lefebvre analyses each historical mode as a three-part dialectic between everyday practices and perceptions (le perçu), representations or theories of space (le conçu) and the spatial imaginary of the time (le vécu).[23]

Lefebvre's argument in The Production of Space is that space is a social product, or a complex social construction (based on values, and the social production of meanings) which affects spatial practices and perceptions. This argument implies the shift of the research perspective from space to processes of its production; the embrace of the multiplicity of spaces that are socially produced and made productive in social practices; and the focus on the contradictory, conflictual, and, ultimately, political character of the processes of production of space.[24] As a Marxist theorist (but highly critical of the economic structuralism that dominated the academic discourse in his period), Lefebvre argues that this social production of urban space is fundamental to the reproduction of society, hence of capitalism itself. The social production of space is commanded by a hegemonic class as a tool to reproduce its dominance (see Antonio Gramsci).

"(Social) space is a (social) product [...] the space thus produced also serves as a tool of thought and of action [...] in addition to being a means of production it is also a means of control, and hence of domination, of power."[25]

Lefebvre argued that every society - and therefore every mode of production - produces a certain space, its own space. The city of the ancient world cannot be understood as a simple agglomeration of people and things in space - it had its own spatial practice, making its own space (which was suitable for itself - Lefebvre argues that the intellectual climate of the city in the ancient world was very much related to the social production of its spatiality). Then if every society produces its own space, any "social existence" aspiring to be or declaring itself to be real, but not producing its own space, would be a strange entity, a very peculiar abstraction incapable of escaping the ideological or even cultural spheres. Based on this argument, Lefebvre criticized Soviet urban planners on the basis that they failed to produce a socialist space, having just reproduced the modernist model of urban design (interventions on physical space, which were insufficient to grasp social space) and applied it onto that context:

"Change life! Change Society! These ideas lose completely their meaning without producing an appropriate space. A lesson to be learned from soviet constructivists from the 1920s and 30s, and of their failure, is that new social relations demand a new space, and vice-versa."[26]

Criticism to 'The social production of space' and response

In his book The Urban Question, Manuel Castells criticizes Lefebvre's Marxist Humanism and approach to the city influenced by Hegel and Nietzsche. Castells' political criticisms of Lefebvre's approach to Marxism echoed the Structuralist Scientific Marxism school of Louis Althusser of which Lefebvre was an immediate critic. Many responses to Castells are provided in The Survival of Capitalism, and some may argue that the acceptance of those critiques in the academic world would be a motive for Lefebvre's effort in writing the long and theoretically dense The Production of Space.

Bibliography

References

  1. 1 2 Schrift (2006), p. 152.
  2. ↑ Schrift (2006), p. 153.
  3. ↑ Ian H. Birchall, Sartre against Stalinism, Berghahn Books, 2004, p. 176: "Sartre praised highly [Lefebvre's] work on sociological methodology, saying of it: 'It remains regrettable that Lefebvre has not found imitators among other Marxist intellectuals'."
  4. ↑ Shields, Rob (1999). Lefebvre Love and Struggle. Routledge. ISBN 0-415-09370-8.
  5. ↑ Michel Trebitsch: Introduction to Critique of Everyday Life, Vol. 1
  6. ↑ Mark Poster, 1975, Existential Marxism in Postwar France: From Sartre to Althusser, Princeton University Press
  7. ↑ "Lefebvre on the Situationists: AnInterview". Retrieved 17 May 2016.
  8. ↑ Radical Philosophy obituary, Spring 1992
  9. ↑ Henri Lefebvre and Leszek Kołakowski. Evolution or Revolution; F. Elders (ed.), Reflexive Water: The Basic Concerns of Mankind, London: Souvenir. pp. 199–267. ISBN 0-285-64742-3
  10. ↑ "Préface de : Henri Lefebvre, Critique of Everyday Life. Volume III. (1981)". Retrieved 17 May 2016.
  11. ↑ Vincent Cespedes, May 68, Philosophy is in the Street! (Larousse, Paris, 2008).
  12. ↑ Mark Purcell, Excavating Lefebvre: The right to the city and its urban politics of the inhabitant, GeoJournal 58: 99–108, 2002.
  13. ↑ "Right to the City" as a response to the crisis: "Convergence" or divergence of urban social movements?, Knut Unger, Reclaiming Spaces
  14. ↑ Radical Philosophy obituary, 1991
  15. ↑ Gombin, Richard (1971). The Origins of Modern Leftism. Penguin. ISBN 0-14-021846-7., p40
  16. ↑ Radical Philosophy obituary, 1991.
  17. ↑ Lefebvre, Henri (1947). The Critique of Everyday Life. Verso. ISBN 1844671941., p40
  18. ↑ Lefebvre, Henri; Regular, Catherine (2004). Rhythmanalysis. Continuum. ISBN 0826472990.
  19. ↑ "Préface à : Henri Lefebvre, Critique of Everyday Life. Volume I. Introduction". Retrieved 17 May 2016.
  20. ↑ Elden, 2004, pp. 110–126.
  21. ↑ Ross, Kristin (2005). May 68 and its afterlives. University of Chicago. ISBN 0226727998.
  22. ↑ Place, A Short Introduction by Tim Cresswell
  23. ↑ Shields, Rob, Places on the Margin, Routledge, 1991, ISBN 0-415-08022-3, pp. 50–58.
  24. ↑ Stanek, Lukasz, Henri Lefebvre on Space: Architecture, Urban Research, and the Production of Theory, University of Minnesota Press, 2011, p. ix.
  25. ↑ Lefebvre, Henri, The Production of Space, Blackwell, 1991, ISBN 0-631-18177-6. p. 26.
  26. ↑ Lefebvre, Henri The Production of Space, Blackwell, 1991, ISBN 0-631-18177-6. p. 59
  27. ↑ DES stands for diplôme d'études supérieures, roughly equivalent to an MA thesis.
  28. ↑ Elden 2004, p. 96.

Sources

Further reading

This article is issued from Wikipedia - version of the 11/13/2016. The text is available under the Creative Commons Attribution/Share Alike but additional terms may apply for the media files.