Henri Lefebvre: A Critical Introduction - autonomous learning

F o r e w o r d
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Merrifield booed me once. I didn’t mind too much. When smart
people boo, you should take it as an invitation to call them right
up and say, “Hi, there!” Merrifield had taken offense at a reference
I made to Guy Debord in a story about Times Square. I seem to
recall his saying something mild, like “Debord would have hated
Muschamp and everything he stands for.” Setting aside the rhetorical
propriety of airing one’s sentiments through the mouths of dead
people, I nonetheless decided to interpret the boo as an instance
of what Buddhists call “negative attachment.” The attachment is
the main thing. The negativity is the attachment’s shadow. And it
doesn’t pay to get too caught up with shadows. Often, they’re just
there to be enjoyed, like any play of light on the wall. Sometimes
they boo. Sometimes they act scarier and say “Boo!” But the
smarter breed just wants to come in and play.
The city that we hate is also the city that we love. It strikes
me that Henri Lefevbre’s work and Andy Merrifield’s both spring
from this variation on what Melanie Klein called the depressive
position. It is the business of a city to offer something for everyone
to hate, even to present itself as completely hateful to some people
most of the time. But even Frank Lloyd Wright, who devoted
endless energy to denouncing the city as “the Moloch that knows
no god but More,” couldn’t resist being swallowed up by New
York from time to time. And the intensity of his attachment was
even more evident in the passion of his attacks. I share with Sybil
Maholy-Nagy the view that the city is the matrix of man, whatever
our feelings might be toward it. And try as you may you simply
cannot keep Mother down in the fruit cellar forever. She will not
stay there.
Henri Lefebvre introduced a stance of radical ambivalence
toward the city in his book The Urban Revolution, first published
in France in 1970 but not issued in English translation until 2003.
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