Henri Lefebvre: A Critical Introduction - autonomous learning

M y s t i F i e d c o n s c i o U s n e s s
existence … by becoming conscious of the immanent meanings
of these contradictions for the total development … only then
will the proletariat become the identical subject-object of history
whose praxis will change reality.” 16
For Lefebvre, mystification stems from reification and is
related to fetishism, but it is something qualitatively different as
well, a realm deeper and more complex than reductionist economics
and Marxist philosophy posited as a “mirror of knowledge.” With
mystification, the veil that’s thrown over economic life is thrown
over politics and psychology, over voting patterns and the totality
of daily life. Lefebvre didn’t buy Lukács’s notion that the proletariat
is “the identical subject-object of history,” and he didn’t
see Marxism and dialectics as “universal.” 17 Instead, Lefebvre’s
Marxist line asked, Given proletarian foibles and mystification,
how can “a true and revolutionary consciousness be created”? 18
Dialectical thought and analysis can help, though only with an
openness, flexibility, and honesty about “actual forms of alienation.”
19 Mystification is so much more difficult to access when
there appears no more to be mystification.
* * *
In La Conscience Mystifiée, Lefebvre flags out two forms of
consciousness: la conscience du forum and la conscience privée.
The first is a public consciousness, something social and collective;
the second is individual and more bourgeois. Since the
French Revolution of 1789, and the birth of modern capitalism,
these two realms have increasingly split apart; modern Western
philosophy has perpetuated the separation between society and
the self, between the collective and the individual, between public
life and private life. For Lefebvre, public consciousness tends
to be progressive, pushes toward a higher abstraction, toward a
reason potentially more liberating, more socialist. Individual
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