Henri Lefebvre: A Critical Introduction - autonomous learning

H e n r i L e F e b v r e
Modern man, for whom illusions are everywhere, can no more be
simply compared to a man in a boat who believes that the horizon
is moving around his vessel; he is more like a man who sets sail
in a boat he believes will never be shipwrecked and it’s the objects
around him that toss and turn while he himself is fixed firmly on
solid ground.” 25
So many illusory ideas and falsifications, La Conscience
Mystifiée argues, so many mechanisms for upholding a conscience
privée, are rooted in the “obscure zones” of capitalist everyday
life, in actions and thoughts that become routinized and rendered
“normal.” “The kernel of direct, qualitative and relatively authentic
human relations is,” Lefebvre notes, “overwhelmed by diverse
pressures. Instruments of information (TV and radio), as well as
the press, consciously or not, pursue this task of investing in the
sphere of deprived consciousness, exploiting it, rendering what
was already deprived more deprived, bringing an illusory view
of the social whole, one where deprivation has apparently disappeared.
… Herein the ‘socialization’ of the ‘conscience privée’ is
pursued.” 26 The fetishism of the everyday marketplace, Lefebvre
warns, leads to other fetishisms, to other kinds of abstractions.
Minds that are already reified are ill equipped to fend off other reifications
and illusory dogmas: “The reality attributed to an abstract
entity accompanies the reality attributed to the commodity.” 27
* * *
Lefebvre’s Marxist voice was unusual for his generation because
he cared about real individuality, about real individual freedom.
He concurs with Marx’s proclamation from The Communist
Manifesto that the “free development of each is the condition for
the free development of all.” Consequently, it’s possible to read La
Conscience Mystifiée as much as a paean for the individual free
spirit as an endorsement of the revolutionary collective. Lefebvre’s
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