Henri Lefebvre: A Critical Introduction - autonomous learning

F o r e w o r d
couples staggering romantically around the city after midnight,
and for gentlemen out cruising (with or without dogs), and for
everyone who appreciates the seductive pleasure of seeing their
reflections in the glass and in the temptations behind it.
Try seeing things from a window-dresser’s point of view. For
us, the sidewalk is the stage, the people walking along it are the
players, and we are the audience for a live version of that wonderful
Twilight Zone episode where each of the mannequins in a
department store gets to live for a day among the world of shoppers.
Remember? And how one of the mannequins forgot that she
wasn’t human and had to go back in the window at the end of her
special day? The solitary flâneur is also a spectacle—not just the
beholder of them.
To a Mahayana Buddhist, the fusion of city and self is more
than a poetic metaphor. It illustrates a concept called esho funi,
roughly translated as the oneness of life and its environment.
Literally “two but not two,” they are different aspects of the same
entity, like the heads and tails of a coin. In his depiction of urban
space, Lefebvre has taken what strikes me as a Western route
toward a similar concept. It is not mystical, but then, to a Mahayana
Buddhist, neither is esho funi. “Two but not two” is a construction
that represents things as they are. And the goal of Buddhist
practice is to bring one’s subjective perception into closer alignment
with things as they are. That is what Enlightenment means.
Lefebvre’s arguments against subjectivism are thus enlightened in
both the Eastern and Western senses of the term.
* * *
I hope that Andy won’t be offended if I propose him for honorary
membership in the illustrious guild of window-dressers.
Arguments about the contemporary city are his wares: the ideas
and the thinkers who articulated them have already inspired
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