Henri Lefebvre 

Henri Lefebvre
Western Philosophy
20th century philosophy
Full name Henri Lefebvre
Birth June 16, 1901(1901-06-16)
Flag of France Hagetmau, France
Death June 29, 1991 (aged 90)
Flag of France Navarrenx, France
School/tradition Neo-Marxism
Main interests Everyday Life · Dialectics · Alienation · Mystification · Social space · Urbanity · Rurality · Modernity
Notable ideas Critique of Everyday Life · Theory of Moments · Rhythmanalysis
Influenced by
Influenced

Henri Lefebvre (16 June 1901 – 29 June 1991) was a French sociologist, intellectual and philosopher who was generally considered a Neo-Marxist1.

Contents

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 and others in the Philosophies group seeking a "philosophical revolution" 2. This brought them into contact with the Surrealists and other groups, before they moved towards the French Communist Party (PCF). Lefebvre joined the PCF in 1928 and later published attacks on opponents of its line such as Nizan 3.

From 1930 to 1940, Lefebvre was a professor of philosophy; in 1940 he joined the French resistance. From 1944 to 1949, he was the director of Radiodiffusion Française, a French radio broadcaster in Toulouse.

His criticism of everyday life, first published in 1947, was among the major intellectual motives behind the founding of COBRA and, eventually, of the Situationist International.4 He later commented that

"The book is an "allusive" one - allusive to culture, "leisure" and urban reality... Its ambiguity enabled conflicting interpretations to be made, both extremist ones (the revolution in and through everyday life, everything all at once) and reformist ones (improve the status of the everyday, the "quality of life")." 5

In 1958 Lefebvre was expelled from the PCF. During the following years he was involved in the editorial group of Arguments, a New Left magazine whose

"chief merit lay in having enabled the French public to become familiar with the experiments in revisionism carried out in Central Europe in the twenties and thirties" 6

In 1961, Lefebvre became professor of sociology at the University of Strasbourg, before joining the faculty at the new university at Nanterre in 1965. 7
He was one of the most respected professors, and he had influenced and analysed the May 1968 students revolt.8

He wrote in French, English, and German.

Lefebvre died in 1991. In his obituary, Radical Philosophy magazine wrote:

"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." 9

The (social) production of space

Lefebvre has 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 and Edward Soja. 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, amongst other aspects, with the deep transformation of "the city" into "the urban" which culminated in its omni-presence (the "complete urbanization of society").

In his book The Urban Question (translated into English very early, in contrast with Lefebvre's works), Manuel Castells heavily criticizes Lefebvre's theoretical arguments contained in the books published in the 1960s about the contemporary city from a Marxist standpoint. Castells' criticisms of Lefebvre's subjective approach to Marxism echoed the Structuralist school of Louis Althusser, of which Lefebvre was an early 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.

In The Production of Space, Lefebvre contends that there are different levels of space, from very crude, natural space ('absolute space') to more complex spatialities whose significance is socially produced ('social space').10

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. As a Marxist philosopher (but highly critical of the economicist 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. Therefore, the notion of hegemony as proposed by Antonio Gramsci is used as a reference to show how the social production of space is commanded by a hegemonic class as a tool to reproduce its dominance.

"Social space is a social product - the space produced in a certain manner serves as a tool of thought and action. It is not only a means of production but also a means of control, and hence of domination/power."

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."

Partial Bibliography

References

  1. ^ Friedmann, John (1987). Planning in the public domain: from knowledge to action. Princeton. 
  2. ^ Michel Trebitsch: Introduction to Critique of Everyday Life Vol 1
  3. ^ Radical Philosophy obituary, 1991
  4. ^ October magazine interview with Lefebvre, 1983
  5. ^ Lefebvre, Henri (1973). The Survival of Capitalism: Reproduction of the Relations of Production. Allison & Busby. ISBN 0-85031-173X. , p58
  6. ^ Gombin, Richard (1971). The Origins of Modern Leftism. Penguin. ISBN 0-1402-1846-7. , p40
  7. ^ Michel Trebitsch: preface to Critique of Everyday Life Vol 3, 1981
  8. ^ Vincent Cespedes, May 68, Philosophy is in the Street! (Larousse, Paris, 2008).
  9. ^ Radical Philosophy obituary, 1991
  10. ^ "Place, A Short Introduction", Tim Cresswell

External links