Henri Lefebvre: A Critical Introduction - autonomous learning

H e n r i L e F e b v r e
exploitation and domination, protection and—inseparably—
repression” (POS, p. 366; emphasis in original). Why else would
he insist that everyday life “is the inevitable starting point for the
realization of the possible?” 23 All of which “doesn’t mean that
the ‘micro’ level is any less significant” or necessarily reactive
or reactionary. “Although it may not supply the theater of conflict
or the sphere in which contending forces are deployed, [the local]
does contain both the resources and stakes at issue” (POS, p. 366).
Here place assumes the “form,” if not the “substance,” of grassroots
struggle, which always unfolds willy-nilly within a national
cultural and legal context: Marx emphasized as much.
That the global appears omnipotent in daily life, that its corresponding
ideology insists globalization is somehow inevitable or
natural, is, for Lefebvre, only to reinforce a premise of “dissociation
and separation.” Dissociation and separation “are inevitable
in that they are the outcome of a history, of the history of accumulation;
but they are fatal as soon as they are maintained in this
way, because they keep the moments and elements of social practice
away from one another” (POS, p. 366). What so completely
shatters and submerges the everyday, Lefebvre warns, is the active
subversion—in theory and in practice—of all that constitutes the
everyday: its separation from what is supposedly “non-everyday.”
Abstract space, we might say, is everyday or it’s nothing at
all: absolute space always offers an everyday entry point for confronting
the global sway of abstract space. Lefebvre insists on this
vital fact, without which grassroots leverage would be neither possible
nor permissible. Moreover, recent history seems to endorse
Lefebvre’s line, because absolute qualities of place have actually
prompted progressive defiance within abstract space: they’ve
prized open modest little holes within the global capitalist fabric,
established noteworthy nodes of resistance within the capillaries
of abstract power. In August 1999, for instance, a few months
before the ruling classes got sleepless in Seattle, three hundred
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