Henri Lefebvre: A Critical Introduction - autonomous learning

H e n r i L e F e b v r e
peripherally, into suburbs, like what happened in Paris and all
sorts of places.” 31
As with the Lefebvrian moment, “situations” were slippery,
playful inventions and interventions, as much metaphorical as
material. They were meant to be fleeting happenings, moving
representations, the “sum of possibilities.” 32 They’d be something
lived but also “lived-beyond,” full of immanent possibilities.
Debord and the Situationists wanted to construct new situations,
new life “concretely and deliberately constructed by the collective
organization of a unitary ambience and a game of events.” “New
beauty,” Debord proclaimed, “will be the beauty of situation.” 33
Situations would be practical and active, designed to transform
context by adding to the context, assaulting or parodying context,
especially one where the status quo prevailed. What would emerge
was a “unitary ensemble of behavior in time.”
A vital trope here was détournement, or reversal and hijacking,
which would scupper accepted bourgeois behavior and received
ideas about places and people. Squatting, and building and street
occupations are classic examples of détournement, as are graffiti
and “free associative” expressionist art. All these actions would
exaggerate, provoke, and contest. They’d turn things around, lampoon,
plagiarize and parody, deconstruct and reconstruct ambience,
unleash revolts inside one’s head as well as out on the street with
others. They’d force people to think and rethink what they once
thought; often you’d not know whether to laugh or to cry. Either
way, détournement couldn’t be ignored: it was an instrument of
propaganda, agitprop, an arousal of indignation, action that stimulated
more action. They were a “negation and prelude,” inspired by
Lautréamont’s Poésis, one of Debord’s favorite works.
Debord meticulously studied Lefebvre’s theory of moments.
“At present,” he told his friend André Frankin, in a letter dated
February 14, 1960, “I am reading La Somme et le Reste. It is very
interesting, and close to us—here I mean: the theory of moments.” 34
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