Henri Lefebvre: A Critical Introduction - autonomous learning

H e n r i L e F e b v r e
consciousness is more retrogressive, likely to be impregnated with
a theological ideology, usually with Christianity. 20 In our own
times, this separation manifests itself as a glaring contradiction, as
both a plague on the public realm and a warped, denigrated notion
of individuality—what Lefebvre termed “an individualism against
the individual.” “The person of today,” he says, “understands less
than ever, spontaneously and immediately, their relation with
society and its productive forces; instead of dominating this rapport,
they are dominated by it, are victims of unconscious economic
and social forces. One of the accomplishments of the
dialectic has been precisely to find a theoretical unity between the
private consciousness and the social consciousness.” 21
Private consciousness, for Lefebvre, is a consciousness
deprived. 22 Here he plays on the Latin-rooted French word privé,
with its dual meaning of “private” and “to lack,” “to be deprived
of.” Thus, when people claim property as their own, “as mine,” as
privately controlled, the etymology of the term indicates this once
constituted a loss, an act that deprived a larger public. The act of
individual possession, the shibboleth of bourgeois society, likewise
deprives the self of real selfhood. As Marx wrote in the Economic
and Philosophical Manuscripts, “Private property has made us so
stupid and one-sided that an object is only ours when we have it,
when it exists for us as capital or when we directly possess, eat,
drink, wear, inhabit it. … Therefore all the physical and intellectual
senses have been replaced by the simple estrangement of all
the senses—the sense of having.” 23 The sense of “having,” said
Marx, is the only sense that really matters under capitalism. As a
collective impulse, the desire to have and to possess—to organize a
public consciousness around possession—drove a wedge between
our subjective selves and our objective environment, between our
private consciousness and our social consciousness.
Lefebvre pushes this logic further than Marx. On one hand, he
warns of how public consciousness, the notion of collective will,
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