Henri Lefebvre: A Critical Introduction - autonomous learning

H e n r i L e F e b v r e
wherewithal to reappropriate the city, to be the “bearer” of a new
“virtual action” (p. 179), a new urban praxis in “the general interests
of civilization.” Yet the working class hasn’t hitherto discovered
a spontaneous sense of the city as œuvre; its conscious has
dimmed, has almost disappeared with artisan and craft workers.
From where can it summon up this collective spontaneous sense,
reclaiming its œuvre really not virtually? How can the working
class become the bearer of this higher consciousness, using “its
productive intelligence and its practical dialectical reason”? Can
we demand of the working class the possible and impossible, a
concrete as well as an experimental utopia? So many questions: a
typical Lefebvrian mode of argumentation. As for responses, was
it not Marx, he queries, who once said humanity poses only problems
it knows it can resolve? Sometimes, the solutions are already
there, not faraway, waiting for questions yet to be asked.
* * *
Much of Lefebvre’s urban theory was based on firsthand experience,
gleaned from prodigious travel and lecturing schedules.
After his “retirement” from Nanterre in 1973, this was tantamount
to a round-the-world tour, an epic global dérive. (The
Guterman Archive preserves the glossy, bright-colored postcards
from Lefebvre’s roving travel chest.) While Lefebvre loved to
think big and make grand, sweeping abstractions, he was intimately
acquainted with the world’s great cities. He never tired
of discovering new places; his geographical curiosity abated not,
even as an old man. In younger days, he’d sojourned in London
and Amsterdam, in Barcelona and Berlin; with the party, he’d
toured the old Eastern Bloc, explored Poland and Bulgaria and
Yugoslavia, Rumania, and Hungary, knew its capitals Warsaw
and Sofia and Belgrade, Bucharest, and Budapest. (The heretic
humanist never made it the USSR, though, never visited Moscow.
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