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Culture Documents
Ryan Moore
W
hile Henri Lefebvre languished for several decades as the ignored
philosopher and social theorist1, his significance within critical
social theory is now rising rapidly. Lefebvre has been the most
influential intellectual in the spatial turn in neo-Marxist social theory and
political economy: scholars have utilized Lefebvre to illuminate the uneven
geographical development of global capitalism, the shifting scale of state
spaces and city governance, and the challenges for justice presented by urban
social movements.2 However, Lefebvres work on space has made a larger
impact than his other ideas, with Anglo-American scholars typically utilizing
his spatial theory in abstraction from his complete oeuvre. There is a second
field of scholarship which recognizes the significance of Lefebvres Critique
of Everyday Life for a method of cultural analysis that draws from Simmel,
Benjamin, Barthes, and de Certeau, as well as the Dadaist, Surrealist, and
Situationist movements.3 Those who have appropriated Lefebvres theory
of space for their critiques of political economy typically overlook these
enduring concerns with culture, temporality, and everyday life. Contrary to
his own dialectical approach, the emerging body of social theory inspired
by Lefebvre is divided between critiques of space and time, corresponding
with the longstanding intellectual boundary between the base of political
economy and the superstructure of everyday life.
1
Stanley Aronowitz, The ignored philosopher and social theorist: On the work of Henri Lefebvre.
Situations, vol. 2 (2007): 133-155.
2
Lefebvre has had a decisive influence on radical geographers and critical theorists of social space,
especially David Harvey, Edward Soja, Kristin Ross, Neil Smith, Doreen Masssey, and Neil Brenner.
3
See Michael Gardiner, Critiques of Everyday Life (New York: Routledge, 2000); Ben Highmore,
Everyday Life and Cultural Theory: An Introduction (New York: Routledge, 2002); and Michael
Sheringham, Everyday Life: Theories from Surrealism to the Present (New York: Oxford University
Press, 2006). Lefebvre was also an important influence in the pioneering work of Greil Marcus on
music, art, and modernity in Lipstick Traces: A Secret History of the Twentieth Century (Cambridge:
Harvard University Press, 1989).
that can illuminate the dialectics of power and resistance that transpire in
urban settings, particularly in the interrelations between music, the body,
and urban life. Rhythmanalysis must be understood in relation to Lefebvres
core concepts, particularly everyday life, alienation, and moments, as well as
the significance of festival. I will briefly describe the development of these
ideas in the context of Lefebvres fascinating biography.
Lefebvres intellectual roots were formed between the two world wars, as he
mixed a Hegelian form of Marxism with the insights of Dada and Surrealism.
The interwar avant-gardes explored how art, performance, and spontaneous
action could disorient the dominant culture in which social conventions
appear as natural and inevitable. Andr Breton famously sought to synthesize
poet Arthur Rimbauds call to change life with Marxs summons to change
4
Among his intellectual biographies, Rob Shields Lefebvre, Love, and Struggle (New York:
Routledge, 1999) and Stuart Eldens Understanding Henri Lefebvre (New York: Continuum, 2004)
offer the best explanations of Lefebvres writings on space, while Andy Merrifields Henri Lefebvre:
A Critical Introduction (New York: Routledge, 2006) presents a more general portrait of his various
works as they developed in the course of events in twentieth century France. More recent works on
Lefebvre have explored his significance for particular aspects of social theory: the focus is on issues
of urbanization, the right to the city, and globalization in Goonewardena et al., Space, Difference,
Everyday Life: Reading Henri Lefebvre (New York: Routledge, 2008); architecture in Stanek, Henri
Lefebvre on Space: Architecture, Urban Research, and the Production of Theory (Minneapolis: University
of Minnesota Press, 2011); and the relation between space and the state in Brenner and Elden,
Lefebvre: Space, State, World (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2009).
the world. Lefebvre drew inspiration from the Surrealist experiments with
new ways of living and perception, but from the beginning he was also
fiercely critical of the avant-garde. In 1924, he criticized the nihilism of Dada
as solely the spirit-that-says-no and ephemeral pseudo-sorcery, vainly
proclaiming the sovereignty of the instant.5 Later, in his first volume of
Critique of Everyday Life, Lefebvre denounced the bourgeois elitism of
Surrealists who maintained an opposition between extraordinary moments
and everyday life. He insisted that socialism would be realized only once this
opposition has been overcome: Is it not in everyday life that man should
fulfill his life as a man? The theory of superhuman moments is inhuman. . .
Man must be everyday, or he will not be at all.6
At the same time Lefebvre was beginning to engage the Surrealists in the
1920s, he was also closely connected to a group of philosophers who were
drawn to Hegel and published a periodical called Philosophies. Andr Breton
passed along a copy of Hegels Logic to the young Lefebvre in 1925, and
he joined the French Communist Party along with Breton and many of the
other Surrealists in 1928. Lefebvres Marxism therefore took shape through
a unique engagement with Surrealism and Hegelian philosophy. In the
1930s, he and Norbert Guterman began to utilize the concepts of alienation
and fetishism in a critique of fascism and what they called the mystified
consciousness. In 1939, Lefebvre published Dialectical Materialism, which
presented a Hegelian interpretation of Marx with an emphasis on totality
and a vision of the total man who has been dis-alienated. Dialectical
Materialism represented an alternative reading of Marx which contradicted
the official version that had congealed under Stalin, yet Lefebvre (unlike
Lukcs) managed to escape the Partys censure.7
5
As quoted in Marcus, Lipstick Traces, p. 191.
6
Henri Lefebvre, Critique of Everyday Life, Vol. 1 (New York: Verso, 1991), p. 127.
7
As Martin Jay explains, Lefebvre implicitly came into conflict with the Stalinist version of
Dialectical Materialism then dominant in the PCF. However, at a time when the Party was willing to
tolerate certain deviations from its official line, if the deviants were prestigious enough intellectuals,
the work caused Lefebvre little official trouble. Jay, Marxism and Totality (Berkeley and Los Angeles:
University of California Press, 1984), p. 292.
alienation in leisure just as in work... So we work to earn our leisure, and leisure
has only one meaning: to get away from work.8 Marx himself had described
the experience of total alienation in capitalist society: man (the worker)
no longer feels himself to be freely active in any but his animal functions
eating, drinking, procreating, or at most in his dwelling and in dressing-up,
etc.; and in his human functions he no longer feels himself to be anything
but an animal.9 Witnessing the extraordinary expansion of consumption
after World War II, Lefebvre added, We must therefore imagine a work-
leisure unity, for this unity exists, and everyone tries to programme the
amount of time at his disposal according to what his work isand what
it is not.10 Many years later, on the centenary of Marxs death, Lefebvre
argued that the social changes in years immediately after World War II were
decisive in the shift toward a new stage in the colonization of everyday life
by the commodity form: The extension of capitalism goes all the way to the
slightest details of ordinary life.11
Lefebvre developed his ideal of the festival in the first volume of Critique of
Everyday Life, thus identifying a basis for conflict and contradiction in the
emerging consumer culture that would eventually detonate two decades later,
in the rebellion of May 1968. In a chapter titled Notes Written One Sunday
in the French Countryside, Lefebvre reflected on the festivals and rituals
of rural life in relation to the everyday. In the festival, people momentarily
realize the possibilities of liberation, and thus Lefebvre celebrated these
ancient practices as indications of the present and future opportunities to
recreate dis-alienated social relations that could reunite people with their
bodies, nature, and each other. Lefebvre presented the festival in a dialectical
relation with everyday lifethe festive and the everyday are linked as a unity
of opposites. He wrote,
8
Lefebvre, Critique of Everyday Life, vol. I, p. 40.
9
Karl Marx, The Economic and Philosophic Manuscripts of 1844, in Robert Tucker (ed.), The
Marx-Engels Reader (New York: Vintage, 1978), p. 74.
10
Lefebvre, Critique of Everyday Life, vol. I, p. 30.
11
Lefebvre, Toward a Leftist Cultural Politics: Remarks Occasioned by the Centenary of Marxs
Death, in Nelson and Grossberg (eds.), Marxism and the Interpretation of Culture (Urbana:
University of Illinois Press, 1988), p. 79.
12
Lefebvre, Critique of Everyday Life, vol. I, p. 207.
Festivals offered a reprieve from work and disciplinary power, and they
strengthened the social bonds within a community while temporarily
inverting the hierarchies of the class system. Originally, rural communities
organized their festivals as tributes to nature and an expression of humanitys
dependence on natural forces, which took the form of a celebration of
natures bounty and a sacrifice of surplus in an atmosphere of collective joy.
The recurring time of natures seasons structured the timing of these festivals,
and the cycles of life and death became the basis for a symbolic order that
bonded humanity to its ancestors and the non-human natural world.
Lefebvre argues that this culture of festivity was not merely repressed but also
usurped by religion. Modern societies inherit the alienated residue of these
festivals of collective joy in the form of abstract symbols and standardized
rituals. Religion supplants the magic and mystery of country life, with the
Church seizing control of the rituals and symbols that constitute the culture
of a community. Church authorities violently repressed the traditions of
festivity that gathered people in celebration through music, dance, costume,
and numerous forms of bodily pleasure; in place of these festivals, they
superimposed a hierarchical symbolic order that suppressed the human body
and collective joy. The festivals that were once organized cooperatively and
experienced directly are reduced to symbolic gestures and myths, and their
significance is increasingly irrelevant to the rhythms of social life.
For Lefebvre, religion and the Church are nothing more than mans
alienation, the self torn asunder, a magic spell.13 In his critique, however,
Lefebvre also suggests that religion has preserved, albeit in alienated form,
collective memories of a more unified and gratifying experience of social life.
As the notes chronicle his visit to a country church, Lefebvre cries out: O
Holy Church, for centuries you have tapped every illusion, every fiction, every
vain hope, every frustration.14 In religion, we find the fossils of humanitys
utopian longings transmogrified into mystical powers and supernatural
deities. Helplessness in the face of social crisis increases the appeal of
religion, while in turn religion ensures the incapacity and unwillingness
of people to change society. Religion contains the power to colonize every
dimension of human life, but herein lies the source of its vulnerability as
well, for religion can never deliver on its promises. It is here that Lefebvre
summons Nietzsches critique of religion and identifies an opportunity for
13
Ibid, p. 217.
14
Ibid, p. 216.
After reviewing Marxs writings on alienation and needs in the Economic and
Philosophic Manuscripts of 1844, Lefebvre returns to his concept of the total
man. The ideal of the total man marks a point of reference for social critique,
particularly by identifying the discrepancy between the possibilities and the
15
Ibid, pp. 226-27.
16
Kristin Ross, Fast Cars, Clean Bodies: Decolonization and the Reordering of French Culture
(Cambridge: MIT Press, 1995).
17
Lefebvre, Critique of Everyday Life, vol. I, p. 40.
18
Ibid, p. 58.
19
Ibid, p. 66.
20
While Lefebvre escaped official censure from the PCF after publishing Dialectical Materialism, he
was not so fortunate when the first volume of his Critique appeared in 1947. As Stanley Aronowitz
explains, within months of its publication, Lefebvre was to suffer their criticisms: the work was
non-marxist because it seemed to slight the importance of class and class struggle; did not insist
on the primacy of the economic infrastructure in the constitution of social relations (in fact, the
book pointed in an entirely different direction); and veered dangerously close to the thinking of the
existentialists, notably Satre and Merleau-Ponty. Aronowitz, The Ignored Philosopher and Social
Theorist, p. 141.
21
Lefebvre, Critique of Everyday Life, vol. I, p. 48.
22
See Andy Merrifield, Lefebvre and Debord: A Faustian Fusion, in Goonewardena et al. (eds.),
Space, Difference, Everyday Life, pp. 176-189.
23
Lefebvre, Critique of Everyday Life, vol. II (New York: Verso, 2002), p. 49, italics in original.
24
E.P. Thompson, Time, Work-Discipline, and Industrial Capitalism, Past and Present, vol. 38
(1967), pp. 56-97.
25
Lefebvre, Critique of Everyday Life, vol. II, p. 48.
26
Ibid, p. 232.
27
See Kurt Mayer, Rhythms. Streets. Cities, in Goonewardena et al. Space, difference, everyday life:
Reading Henri Lefebvre, pp. 147-160.
that rhythmanalysis can provide the ethnographic framework for the analysis
of different social groups in relation to everyday life: each group has its
tempo, which is relatively fast or slow, and which varies between work and
everyday life outside work.28
28
Lefebvre, Critique of Everyday Life, vol. II, p. 232.
29
Ibid, p. 348, italics in original.
30
Lefebvre, The Inventory, in Stuart Elden (ed.), Henri Lefebvre: Key Writings (New York:
Continuum, 2003), p. 174.
31
Lefebvre, Critique of Everyday Life, vol. II, p. 348.
32
Ibid, p. 352.
What was it? A basic will to change the world and life as it is, and
things as they are, a spontaneity conveying the highest thought, a
total revolutionary project. A general and delirious all or nothing.
A vital and absolute wager on the possible and the impossible.34
In the early 1960s, Lefebvre was beginning to propose that young people
might represent a source for social change in the years to come. Lefebvre
acknowledged that the category of youth was itself a product of advances in
capitalism, which now required longer periods of education and training. As
a result, the youth and young people of today constitute a more clearly
defined and distinct social group than they did a century ago, and this group
has its own specific problems and preoccupations.35 The contradictions of
capitalism, between the growing needs resulting from the development of
productive forces and the limits imposed by social relationships of inequality
and exploitation, were becoming manifest in what Lefebvre saw as an
emerging youth culture. As a lucrative consumer market, young people are
always being advertised the newest commodities of modernity, and so the
alienation, frustration, and boredom resulting from the disparity between
what capital promises and delivers is especially evident in youth.
33
Debord, Kotanyi, and Vangheim, Theses on the Paris Commune (1962).
34
Lefebvre, The Style of the Commune, in Elden (ed.) Henri Lefebvre: Key Writings, p. 189.
35
Lefebvre, Introduction to Modernity (New York: Verso, 1995), p. 340.
The campus occupations and revolts in the streets of Paris, Prague, Chicago,
Mexico City, Rome, and so many other cities in 1968 made a massive impact
on an emerging generation of intellectuals, and they also provoked the most
significant shift in Lefebvres work. Lefebvre had written periodically about
cities and space prior to 1968, but afterwards they moved to the center of his
analysis. He followed The Right to the City by publishing The Urban Revolution
in 1970, but then his focus expanded from cities and urban life to the totality
of space, culminating in his 1974 masterpiece, The Production of Space. From
philosophy to sociology, among Marxists and non-Marxists alike, space had
been ignored or taken for granted as a neutral, empty container that was
determined but not determining. By 1970, Lefebvre (2009, pp. 170-71) had
begun to develop a spatialized social theory in opposition to an uncritical,
reified acceptance of space as given:
Lefebvres later work addresses, among a great many other topics, the
construction and position of human bodies within their spatial environs.
For this task, he returns to his idea for rhythmanalysis, which in The
Production of Space he ambitiously imagines might eventually even displace
psychoanalysis, as being more concrete, more effective, and closer to
a pedagogy of appropriation (the appropriation of the body, as of spatial
practice).37 The body is the critical nexus for social struggles over space
and time, and although abstract space and linear time are dominant in
modern society, they never completely eliminate their concrete and cyclical
counterparts, so the role of rhythmanalysis would be to illuminate those
conflicts in the fight for revolutionary change. As he was writing in the period
after 1968 and through the early 1970s, Lefebvre had witnessed a succession of
international movements and revolts that made the body a locus of struggle.
36
Lefebvre, Reflections on the Politics of Space, in Brenner and Elden, Lefebvre: Space, State,
World, pp. 170-71.
37
Lefebvre, The Production of Space (Cambridge: Blackwell, 1991), p. 205.
Lefebvre completed the third and final volume of his Critique of Everyday Life
in 1981, at a time when the political and cultural challenges from the Left
were losing momentum and a reactionary movement of neoliberalism was
becoming hegemonic. The movements of the 1960s and 70s issued major
challenges to social systems based on bureaucracy, conformity, hierarchy,
and repression of the body. At roughly the same time, the international
capitalist economy plunged into a state of crisis and prolonged stagnation,
signaling the exhaustion of Keynesianism and the liberal consensus that had
been in place since the end of World War II. Nonetheless, capital did not
simply survive but grew stronger from the crisis as a result of what Lefebvre
calls recuperation. The movements for freedom and against authority
were co-opted, in other words, and redirected toward support for free trade,
deregulation, and privatization. As an anti-authoritarian culture evolved in
the 1960s and 70s, Lefebvre wrote, neoliberalism, an official mystification,
benefited from this mindset: a Western model, whose contours were very
vague, was revalorized and identified with Freedom, while the standing of
the socialist model, hypothetically identified with Soviet reality, fell.39
38
Ibid, p. 201.
39
Lefebvre, Critique of Everyday Life, vol. III (New York: Verso, 2005), p. 100.
40
Ibid, p. 105.
Lefebvre continues to identify the tension between linear and cyclical forms
of temporality in everyday life as a vital source of conflict to be illuminated
by rhythmanalysis. Linear time, which is quantified and homogenized
into standardized units, is increasingly dominant in capitalist societies,
because the time spent in abstract labor is the measure of exchange value;
time is money. The closer productive activity approximates to industrial
production using machines, Lefebvre writes, the more linear repetition
becomes, losing its rhythmical character.42 The linear time of capitalist
modernity promises novelty and progress, but it delivers monotony and
tedium. In this regard, Lefebvre maintains a crucial distinction between
rhythm and repetition. Rhythms preserve difference and change within their
recurring patterns, Lefebvre argues: Although they are repetitive, rhythms
and cycles always have an appearance of novelty: the dawn always seems
to be the first one. Rhythm does not prevent the desire for, and pleasure of,
discovery: hunger and thirst always seem novel. Linear time, on the other
hand, annihilates these differences in the process of rendering all moments
equivalent and interchangeable: the formal and material identity of each
stroke is recognized, generating lassitude, boredom, and fatigue.43
41
Ibid, p. 106.
42
Ibid, p. 129.
43
Ibid.
44
Ibid, p. 130.
45
Ibid, p. 131
46
Ferdinand Braudel, The Mediterranean and the Mediterranean World in the Age of Phillip II (New
York: Harper & Row, 1972).
47
Lefebvre, Rhythmanalysis (New York: Continuum, 2004), p. 98.
48
Ibid, pp. 27-37.
The totality of Lefebvres thought contains many ideas that have not been
fully explored, and that no one striving to create radical social change
can afford to ignore. The notion of rhythmanalysis, for instance, opens
numerous methodological possibilities, although at the time of his death
Lefebvres thoughts on the matter were still incomplete and tentative. His
method suggests that there is a significant connection between urbanization
and music, a relationship which is mediated by the tempo of everyday life
and the disciplinary construction of human bodies. Lefebvre never wrote
about rhythm in relation to African or African-American culture and music,
but rhythmanalysis could illuminate the dynamics and conflicts of urban
society that have been audible in black music, which has evolved into the
foundation for popular music worldwide.
49
See John M. Chernoff, African Rhythm and African Sensibility (Chicago: University of Chicago
Press, 1979).
50
Lefebvre, Rhythmanalysis, ch. 7.
51
Albert Murray, Stomping the Blues (New York: McGraw-Hill, 1976).
Meanwhile, as rap and hip hop have been primarily produced by black
youths born into Americas abandoned ghettos, the music and its subculture
have facilitated a new system of signs for simulating authenticity to more
affluent white youth, great numbers of whom are reversing previous patterns
of white flight in the process of gentrification. The new beats of the city
are created under conditions of poverty, racism, and state repression, yet
in a manner anticipated by Lefebvres notion of recuperation, their ability
to signify authenticity is constantly generating some of the most valuable
commodities in the consumer culture.52
52
See Tricia Rose, Black Noise: Rap Music and Black Cultural Politics (Hanover: Wesleyan University
Press, 1994); Nelson George, Hip Hop America (New York: Penguin, 1998); and Jeff Chang, Cant
Stop, Wont Stop: A History of the Hip Hop Generation (New York: St. Martins, 2005).