Henri Lefebvre: A Critical Introduction - autonomous learning

M o M e n t s
who now slavishly follow the tyranny of majority, replacing centuries
of American pioneering individualism and entrepreneurial
“inner-directed” character traits. 8 Meanwhile, William H. Whyte
highlighted how values of the corporate boardroom seeped into
nonwork life. In exchange for security and high living standards,
Americans voluntarily gave themselves over to “organization
men,” internalizing the latter’s conformist principles, helping
convert a business ethic into a general social ethic. 9 The product
becomes self-fulfilling, Whyte suggested, a form of self-censoring
and “togetherness” that’s difficult to dislodge.
This line was also reiterated by Lefebvre’s nearest radical
peer over the ocean, the German émigré Herbert Marcuse, whose
Hegelian–Freudian–Marxist One Dimensional Man saw a sinister
high-tech “Total Administration” possessing the body and
minds of everyday people, pacifying dissent, and instilling in
them a delusional “happy consciousness.” 10 For Marcuse, the Total
Administration permeated all reality: it existed (exists?) in defense
laboratories, in executive offices, in governments, in machines, in
timekeepers and managers, in efficiency experts, in mass communications,
in publicity agencies, in schools and universities.
Through these consenting means, all opposition was thereby liquidated
or else absorbed; all potential for sublimation, for converting
sexual energies into political energies (and vice versa) was
repressed and desublimated. The Reality Principle vanquished
over the Pleasure Principle, convincing people that Reality was
the only principle. Society had thus reclaimed even the space of
imagination and dream.
“I met Marcuse several times,” Lefebvre remarks in
Conversation avec Henri Lefebvre. “We had some points of agreement
on the critique of bourgeois society and one-dimensional
man … but I didn’t agree with him on the fact that one could
change society by aesthetics. … According to Marcuse, industrial
society, by its mode of social control, provokes a reductionism of
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