Henri Lefebvre: A Critical Introduction - autonomous learning

H e n r i L e F e b v r e
possibilities for individuals and an integration (or disintegration)
of the working class. The attack on the system can only come from
an encounter between critical theory and a marginal substratum
of outcasts and outsiders. But in May 1968 this attack took the
form of a formidable working class general strike.” 11 For Lefebvre,
Marcuse’s vision is tainted with closure and a pessimism that
isn’t so much reductive as restrictive, something wrenched out
of everyday life. All revolt, in Marcuse’s eyes, would come from
those outside of the everyday: society’s rejects and fugitives. As
Lefebvre states in The Explosion (1968), “Marcuse’s theory carries
the thesis of ‘reification’ to its extreme conclusion and extends
it from consciousness to the whole of reality. There is no question
of refuting it. … Any movement within it is but illusion. The horizons
are closed off. Only the desperate may attempt an assault.
Herbert Marcuse makes refutation impossible. Irrefutable!” 12
* * *
But no throw of the dice, for Lefebvre, can ever abolish chance,
even if the game is rigged. No system of control can ever be total,
Lefebvre maintains, can ever be without possibility, contingency,
inconspicuous cracks, holes in the net, little shafts of light, and
pockets of air. Lefebvre could never comprehend modern capitalism
as seamless; his mind reveled in openness not closure; he was
a butterfly not an inchworm. 13 Commodification and domination
are real enough, he knew, yet they hadn’t overwhelmed everything,
not quite. There is always leakiness to culture and society,
unforeseen circumstances buried within the everyday, immanent
“moments” of prospective subversion. In this vein, the moment
became his key revolutionary motif, signifying that all was not
lost, that all could never be lost. Thus, in the final chapter of the
Critique of Everyday Life—Volume 2, Lefebvre presents again
his “Theory of Moments,” first unveiled a few years prior in La
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