Henri Lefebvre: A Critical Introduction - autonomous learning

H e n r i L e F e b v r e
as Lefebvre breezes through the “French countryside on a Sunday
afternoon,” demystifying the “strange power” of a village church—
a church that could exist anywhere today: “O Church, O Church,
when I finally managed to escape from your control I asked myself
where your power came from. Now I can see through your sordid
secrets. … Now I can see the fearful depths, the fearful reality of
human alienation! O holy Church, for centuries you have tapped
and accumulated every illusion, every fiction, every vain hope,
every frustration.” 10
Elsewhere, Lefebvre juggles with this concept he labels
“everyday life,” typically weary of laying it down solid. Literature
and art, he says, as opposed to politics and philosophy, have better
grappled with understanding the everyday. 11 Brecht’s “epic drama”
gives us a theater of the everyday, where all the action is stripped of
ostentation and where all truth, as Brecht liked to say, citing Hegel,
“is concrete.” “Epic theater,” Lefebvre quotes Brecht preaching,
“wants to establish its basic model at the street corner.” Brecht
has his great hero of knowledge, Galileo, begin by a process of
“de-heroization”: “GALILEO (washing the upper part of his body,
puffing, and good-humored): Put the milk on the table.” 12
The films of Charlie Chaplin, meanwhile, whose image of the
tramp strike as both “Other” and universal in “modern times,”
reveals bundles about everyday alienation, and, just like life itself,
its drama is a slapstick that makes us laugh and cry, sometimes
at the same time. (In the 1950s, Chaplin and Brecht both felt the
heat from Senator Joseph McCarthy’s “red” witch hunts. Their
power to disgruntle and critically inform was thereby acknowledged.)
Chaplin, according to Lefebvre, “captures our own attitude
towards these trivial things, and before our very eyes.”
He comes as a stranger into the familiar world, he wends his
way through it, not without wreaking joyful damage. Suddenly
he disorientates us, but only to show us what we are when faced
with objects; and these objects become suddenly alien, the
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