Henri Lefebvre: A Critical Introduction - autonomous learning

H e n r i L e F e b v r e
Estrada Courts public housing project, where nearly all the walls
are covered with murals, the most notable being a stark picture of
Che with the admonition ‘We are not a Minority!’ ” 15
Cities attaining the heady status of œuvres nonetheless
remained dearest to Lefebvre’s heart. Venice is adored, a city
reshaped by time and literally receding into the sea, yet living on
as a great work of art, as an architectural and monumental unity,
with its misty, haunting melancholy, sound tracked by Mahler’s
5th Symphony; it’s a city, says Lefebvre, at once “unique, original
and primordial,” despite the tourists, despite its “spectacularization.”
16 Every bit of Venice “is part of a great hymn to diversity in
pleasure and inventiveness in celebration, revelry and sumptuous
ritual.” 17 Is Venice “not a theatrical city, not to say a theater-city—
where actors and the audience are the same in the multiplicity of
their roles and relations? Accordingly, one can imagine the Venice
of Casanova, and Visconti’s Senso [and Death in Venice], as the
Venice of today.” 18
Lefebvre’s favorite city, however, is Florence, beside the Arno,
a “symbolic flower,” immortalized in Lorenzaccio (1834) by one
of his heroes, Alfred de Musset. (“The banks of the Arno are full
of so many goodbyes,” said Musset.) “Florence has ceased recently
to be a mummified city, a museum city,” Lefebvre said in 1980,
“and has found again an activity, thanks to small industries on its
periphery.” 19 “So what I like is Los Angeles for the fascination,
Florence for the pleasure and Paris to live in.” 20
Even as an octogenarian, Lefebvre continued to probe the
city, reached out into seemingly uncharted theoretical territory.
His urban fascination never relented, even though he’d seen it all,
perhaps many times over. He marveled at the everyday rhythms
that ripple and syncopate urban life and, as such, coined a new
theoretical practice: rhythmanalysis, the eponymous title of his
final book, written with wife Catherine Regulier. All of which
heralded, in his own words, “nothing less than a new science,
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