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Henri Lefebvre: Introduction: Rob Shields
Henri Lefebvre: Introduction: Rob Shields
Henri Lefebvre: Introduction: Rob Shields
Rob Shields
Henri Lefebvre
• Introduction and Overview
• The City and Social Space
• Critique of Everyday Life
• Modernity and Globalization
Influences
-Surrealism
-Marxism
-Existentialism
-The Situationists
Social Theory and Contributions
-Everyday Life
-Mystification of Consciousness
-Alienation
-‘Moments’ of Enlightenment
-Romanticism, Utopianism
-Dialectical Materialism
-Retrojective method and Existentialism
-Revolutionary Festival and libidinal economies of the city
-The status of the urban
-The state and the production of space
-Three part dialectic
Key Advances and Controversies
-Areas of existence not covered by philosophy of being
-spatialization
-space and social relations
-metaphilosophy and action
-dialectic and alterity
Henri Lefebvre 1901-1991
910
Lycee Louis le Grand (Paris) Schopenauer, will and ‘adventure’
Philosophy, Theology with Blondel (Aix en Provence 1918) Joachim de Flore (life/law/spirit)
Post World War I ‘malaise’ - slow economic reconstruction (industrialization)
French modernization in the 1920s - social reconstruction
920 Philosophy Bergson, Brunschwicq (Sorbonne, Paris 1919-1925) Nietzsche
1924 first publications
‘Adventure and poetic revolution as response to alienation
Surrealism and Dada Philosophies Breton, Tzara, Aragon, Hegel
Proto-existentialism: Nisan, Sartre, Politzer, Gide
Surrealists join Parti Communiste Français 1928 (PCF)
930 Translations of Marx, Hegel 1929
1934 with Norbert Guterman, Morceaux choisis de Karl Marx 1934 Marx, Engels
Spanish Moroccan war
Front Populaire, Fustel de Coulanges, Morhange
Critique of Everyday Life 1935 Heidegger: Everydayness: Alltäglichkeit
Mystification and false consciousness La Conscience mystifiée, 1936
Le nationalisme contre les nations, 1937
World War II
940 Resistance
Logique formelle, logique dialectique 1947
Toulouse Radio
Strasbourg: Institute de sociologie debates with Sartre
950 New Cities and the urbanization of the peasantry
Excluded from PCF 1955
Vallée de Campan: Etude de sociologie rurale 1963 The Situationniste Internationale: Debord
960 La Proclamation de la Commune 1965
Nanterre 1967
Le Droit à la ville 1968
May 68
The Explosion 1968 Cohn-Bendt, Baudrillard and the Nanterre students
970 debates against Structuralism: Althusser
Urban Studies Production de l’espace 1974
Hegel, Marx, Nietzsche, ou le royaume des ombres 1975 debates against Bergsonism Foucault, Lyotard, Deleuze
De L’Etat: Les contradictions de l'Etat moderne, La dialectique de l'Etat 1976 4th of 4 vols.
Spatializing the dialectic: an opening to otherness
980 1983-84 - Sabbatical in California
Action Directe and the Groupe de Navarrenx
‘Rhythmanalysis’
Legacies: Conducting wire; Ironic: ‘I am the last humanist marxist’ - Jean Baudrillard
Legacies
Space is nothing but the inscription of time in the world, spaces are the
realisations, inscriptions in the simultaneity of the external world of a series
of times, the rhythms or the city, the rhythms of the urban population...the
city will only be retought and reconstructed on its current ruins when we
have properly understood that the city is the deployment of time.... of those
who are its inhabitants (1967e:10)
According to Lefebvre, space can only be grasped dialectically because it is a
concrete abstraction - one of Marx's categories, such as exchange value,
which are simultaneously a material, externalised realisation of human labour
and the condensation of social relations of production. The concrete
abstraction is simultaneously a medium of social actions, because it structures
them, and a product of those actions (Gottdiener 1985:128).
Marxist Analysis of the City
• A dialectical analysis
• Relation between development of the
industrial 'base' of capitalism and the
elaboration of urbanised society.
• 'truth' of the capitalist city morphology is
industrialisation, and vice versa.
• transformation of space-as-landscape into
property-as-exchange value
Lefebvre is at the forefront of…
a new image of society as a city - and thus the beginning of a whole new
thematics of inside and outside, of inclusion in, and exclusion from, a
positively-valued modernity. Cities possess a centre and banlieues, with
citizens, those on the interior, deciding who among the insiders should be
expelled and whether or not to open their doors to those on the outside’ (Ross
1996:150).
His schema begins with an originary and Edenic maternal space (the
natural) to which he seems to want to return... Second, his framework
depends upon a heterosexuality that is fixated in a number of rigid,
gendered distinctions...equating the paternal with activity, movement,
agency, force, history, while the maternal is passive, immobile, subject of
force and history. ...Lefebvre’s version of heterosexuality turns on an
active-passive binary. If activity [labour] is that which materially inscribes
the body in history, and only those inscriptions which are coded masculine
are considered, feminine bodies necessarily become invisible...‘feminized’
sociospatial practices and struggles are completely ignored.... structurally
female agency is foreclosed, rendered unrecognizable and made
theoretically impossible; practically such exclusion winds up rejecting
everyday forms of non-masculinist agency (Blum and Nast 1996:577).
The classical cities of antiquity were ‘oeuvres’ (works)
-unity of use and symbolic value
-sites of ritual
-'stages' for the monumental 'boasts' of 'despotic'
rulers.
Capitalist cities convert what remains of the classical
city-oeuvres into a commodified terrain for speculation
-the city ceases to be the central social form and
becomes inserted into a far larger capitalist, global
network (Production de l’espace 1974)
-the monumental and festive aspects are turned into
urban museums: Venice or Florence…
Space is not merely economic, in which all the parts are interchangeable and
have exchange value. Space is not merely a political instrument for
homogenising all parts of society. On the contrary...Space remains a model, a
perpetual prototype of use value resisting the generalisations of exchange
value in the capitalist economy under the authority of a homogenising state.
Space is a use value, [similar to]...time to which is is ultimately linked
because time is our life, our fundamental use value (Lefebvre 1978b:291).
• La vie quotidien
}
Both... I Affirmation and II Negation }
Percu Concu } IV “Synthesis”
___________________________________ }
}
III Negation of the Negation }
Vecu }
(Otherness)
A continuing story…