Henri Lefebvre: A Critical Introduction - autonomous learning

H e n r i L e F e b v r e
home, family life could be private without being deprived; when
people flocked onto the street and into cafés, went to a town meeting
or a community event, their everyday day was participatory,
socialized. The two realms coexisted within a unity where money
relations were a conditioner rather than a determinant. Yet with
the dissolution between work and leisure, and with the expansion
of exchange value into the “totality of daily life,” this fragile unity
was severed, and both flanks suffered. Now, either at home or at
work, in the private or the public realm, commodities and money,
gadgets and multimedia, reign supreme.
Now, lived experience is both colonized economically and
usurped ideologically: it rocked to the beat of a conscience privée,
wallowed in mystification, reveled in its own deprived consciousness.
Lefebvre’s old thesis from La Conscience Mystifiée
(1936) returns to expose not modern fascism but modern capitalism—in
its everyday, trivial guise. The stakes are intensified once
machines and technological knowledge burst on to the scene. But
what’s going on is more than the application of technology at the
workplace. As Marx pointed out, technology “reveals the active
relation of man to nature, the direct process of the production of
his life, and thereby it also lays bare the process of the production
of the social relations of his life, and of the mental conceptions
that flow from those relations.” 26
Changes in the means of production transform our mode of
life and, in turn, transform the ideas we have about our world and
ourselves. Think about how the human brain invented the steam
engine, Fordist mass production, space travel, biotechnology, email,
and the Internet. But think about how these have equally
invented us, successively shaped the way we look at ourselves. For
Marx and Lefebvre alike, these instruments of man only betoken
man the instrument. In effect, machines lessen the burden.
In reality, they become an “alien power,” more frantically setting
in motion labor power, transforming people into mere appendages
12