Henri Lefebvre: A Critical Introduction - autonomous learning

H e n r i L e F e b v r e
self-consciously, making us special, gifted animals, different from
seashells—smarter, right? We’re beings who should know what’s
good for us. Marx tried to redouble the point long ago: “A spider
conducts operations which resemble those of the weaver, and a bee
would put many a human architect to shame by the construction
of its honeycomb cells. But what distinguishes the worst architect
from the best of bees is that the architect builds the cell in his
mind before he constructs it in wax.” 8
Our uniqueness means we have two distinctive ways of creating
and producing—of secreting our structure. Hitherto, Lefebvre
says, they’ve rarely coincided: a spontaneous-organic method and
an abstract, a priori approach of planning for rainy days ahead.
So the dilemma: How to cultivate spontaneity? How to create a
spontaneous life-form out of an abstraction? How can we create
an urban culture based around both lived practice and conceived
premeditation, learning from the past while experimenting with
the future? Before technology penetrated everyday life, before
capitalist industrialization used it to begat a bastardized form of
urbanism, everyday life “was alive. The slimy creature secreted
a beautiful shell” (p. 123). “It is impossible,” he reflects (p. 122),
when stood atop a small hillock above Mourenx, surveying the
modern works down below (like Faust in Part II of Goethe’s great
fable), “looking ridiculous” as only a Left intellectual can, “not to
be reminded of what Marx wrote [in The German Ideology] when
he was still a young man: ‘Big industry … took from the division
of labor the last semblance of its natural character. It destroyed
natural growth in general … and resolved all natural relationships
into money relationships. In place of naturally grown towns it created
the modern, large industrial cities which have sprung up overnight.’
” Can spontaneity ever be revitalized in Mourenx? Lefebvre
asks. Can a community be created—can it create itself? How can
we humans, in a new millennium, having gone to the moon and
cloned ourselves, reconcile organicism with prefigurative ideals?
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