Henri Lefebvre: A Critical Introduction - autonomous learning

n o t e s
6. Manuel Castells, The Urban Question (Edward Arnold, London 1977),
p. 87. Emphasis in original.
7. In a personal communication, Marshall Berman told me that throughout
the 1970s he tried to talk various publishers into translating Lefebvre.
“Hopeless!” was how Berman described it.
8. Cited in Gailia Burgel et al., “An Interview with Henri Lefebvre,”
Environment and Planning D: Society and Space 5 (1987): 27–38. For more
on Castells’s urbanism and Althusserian inflections, see Metromarxism,
chap. 6.
9. The page references that follow refer to Donald Nicholson-Smith’s English
translation (e.g., Basil Blackwell, Oxford, 1991).
10. Karl Marx, “Critique of Hegel’s Philosophy of Right. Introduction,” in
Karl Marx—Early Writings (Penguin, Harmondsworth, 1974), p. 251.
11. Marx, Capital—Volume 1 (Penguin, Harmondsworth, 1976), chap. 1,
pp. 165–66.
12. Spaces of representation express the realm Lefebvre deemed habiter in la
droit à la ville and La révolution urbaine. Heidegger’s influence is obvious
here, as is The Poetics of Space (1957) of French philosopher Gaston
Bachelard (1884–1962). “With Bachelard’s ‘poetics of space,’ ” Lefebvre
notes, “the contents of the House have an almost ontological dignity:
drawers, chests and cabinets are not far removed from their natural analogues
… namely, the basic figures of nest, shell, corner, roundness. …
The House is as much cosmic as human. … The shell, a secret and directly
experienced space, for Bachelard epitomizes the virtues of human ‘space’ ”
(POS, p. 121).
13. In 1960, Kevin Lynch’s classic The Image of the City (MIT Press,
Cambridge, MA) first expounded how the realm of perception conditions
a person’s spatial practice in the city. Lefebvre hints at the class and social
group applicability of this thesis, hooking it up with broader economic and
political structures of power, those conditioning and affecting individual
behavior and cognitive activity. This constitution and reproduction of daily
life mimics Pierre Bourdieu’s concept of “habitus,” a “generative mechanism”
whereby subjective dispositions tow an unconscious objective line.
“Because,” Bourdieu writes, with characteristic complexity, “habitus has
an endless capacity to engender products—thoughts, perceptions, expressions,
actions—whose limits are set by the historically and socially situated
conditions of its production, the conditioned and conditional freedom
it secures is as remote from a creation of unpredictable novelty as it is a
simple mechanical reproduction of the initial conditionings”; see Pierre
Bourdieu, Outline of a Theory of Practice (Cambridge University Press,
Cambridge, 1977), p. 95. David Harvey has suggested habitus is a “very
striking depiction” of the constraints to the power of the lived over the
conceived; see “Flexible Accumulation through Urbanization,” Antipode
19 (1987): 268.
14. Octavio Paz, Conjunctions and Disjunctions, trans. Helen Lane (Arcade
Publishing, New York, 1990), p. 115.
1 4