Henri Lefebvre: A Critical Introduction - autonomous learning

n o t e s
Capitalism,” Geografiska Annaler 71B (1989): 3–17. Since the mid-1970s,
social democratic managerialism, whose mainstay was an interventionist
state concerned about redistributive justice, has steadily dissolved into a
bullish entrepreneurialism. Therein, “lean” government divests from collective
consumption obligations, public housing, health care, and education,
and enters into so-called public–private partnerships. The corporate
sector has had a jamboree, cashing in on welfare handouts for private speculation.
What was meant to “tickle down” to the urban poor has invariably,
Harvey stresses, flowed out into pockets of the already rich.
11. Lefebvre, Vers le cybernanthrope: contre les technocrates (Denoël, Paris,
1971), p. 194.
12. Vers le cybernanthrope, pp. 196–98. This little gem of a text, which
screams out for close reading and English translation, exhibits some of
Lefebvre’s liveliest prose since La Somme et le Reste.
13. Lefebvre would develop this idea in The Production of Space, published
four years on. There, he’d counterpoise jargon with argot, representations
of space with spaces of representation. Argot’s power is a power of ribald
words, recalling that it is dangerous to speak: sometimes too much,
sometimes too little. For one of the best scholarly treatises on argot, see
Les princes du jargon (Gallimard, Paris, 1994), written by Guy Debord’s
widow Alice Becker-Ho. Of course, the literary giant of argot, of the disorderly
mind the street embodies, is a scribe Lefebvre (and Debord) both
admired: Louis-Ferdinand Céline, especially his 1936 masterpiece Mort à
crédit [Death on Credit].
14. Vers le cybernanthrope, p. 213.
15. Ibid., p. 212.
16. Ibid., p. 213.
17. Lefebvre, La Proclamation de la Commune (Gallimard, Paris, 1965),
pp. 20–21.
18. Ibid., p. 26.
19. Ibid., p. 32.
20. Ibid., p. 39.
21. Ibid., p. 40. Lefebvre’s interpretation of the Commune led to blows with
Guy Debord and the Situationists, who accused their former comrade of
pilfering Situ ideas on 1871. “A certain influence has been attributed to
Lefebvre,” Debord wrote in a pamphlet called “The Beginning of an Era”
(1969), “for the SI’s radical theses that he surreptitiously copied, but he
reserved the truth of that critique for the past, even though it was born
out of the present”; Situationist International Anthology (Bureau of Public
Secrets, Berkeley, 1989), pp. 227–28. Debord reckoned Lefebvre’s take on
the 1871 Paris Commune was lifted from SI’s “Theses on the Commune”
(1962). “This was a delicate subject,” Lefebvre later recalled in a 1987 interview.
“I was close to the Situationists. … And then we had a quarrel that
got worse and worse in conditions I don’t understand too well myself. … I
had this idea about the Commune as a festival, and I threw it into debate,
after consulting an unpublished document about the Commune that is at
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