Henri Lefebvre: A Critical Introduction - autonomous learning

H e n r i L e F e b v r e
the potential, the possible and the impossible, between “ethical
patience” and “aesthetic irony.” Volume 1, he claims, had hooked
up everyday life with history and politics; now, “we must build a
long-term policy on how to answer demands for a radical transformation
of everyday life.” 6
Since 1947, the world had moved on; the economy was expanding,
despite inherent crises, forever melting things into air, appropriating
both external and internal nature, transforming social
life into economic life, goods into needs, consumer whims into
subliminal desires. Everyday life had been saturated with commodity
logistics; corporate logos were set to become the semiotics
of daily life they are today—a “semantic field” of ideological
colonization. White-collar managers and industrial strategists,
technocrats and bureaucrats began calling the shots, tallying work
and family and social life with paradigms of order and efficiency.
Low-grade alienation flourished through middlebrow affluence;
in desolate suburbs and faraway New Towns, “lonely crowds”
met “one-dimensional men.” Everyday life, says Lefebvre, now
reigned in its “chemically pure state”; social life more and more
shrank into a decaffeinated and deerotized private life. Indeed, a
“reprivatization of life” was in our midst, in tandem with a new
round of capitalist modernity, which is intent on philosophizing
life, converting it into speculative contemplation. “Predictable
and expected,” he writes, “ ‘globalization’ is being achieved by a
mode of withdrawal. In his armchair, the private man—who has
even stopped seeking himself as a citizen—witnesses the universe
without having a hold over it and without really wanting to. He
looks at the world. He becomes globalized, but as an eye, purely
and simply.” 7
Alienation of this sort likewise prompted scholarly reactions
across the Atlantic. Sociologists David Riesman, Nathan Glazer,
and Reuel Denney coined the name “lonely crowd,” bemoaning a
new kind of “other-directed” character, a uniformed mass-person
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