Henri Lefebvre: A Critical Introduction - autonomous learning

M o M e n t s
A week on (February 22, 1960), Debord wrote the same friend a
long, detailed letter, analyzing Lefebvre’s “theory of moments.”
(The correspondence would filter into Debord’s critical article
“Théorie des moments et construction des situations,” which
appeared in Internationale Situationniste, no. 4, 1960.) Debord’s
discussion is very technical and very serious: you sense the political
stakes are high here. He thinks Lefebvre’s moments are more
durable, more precise, more pure than the Situationists’s notion of
situations, yet this might be a defect. Situations are less definitive,
potentially richer, more open to mélange, which is good—except,
says Debord, how can “one characterize a situation”: Where does
it begin, and where does it end? At what point, and where, does it
become a different situation? 35 Could the lack of specificity hamper
effective praxis? Could too much specificity turn a situation
into a moment? What, he asks, is a unique moment (or situation),
and what is an ephemeral one?
The chief fault of Lefebvre, according to Debord, a fault that
perhaps anticipates—or provokes—Lefebvre’s “spatial turn” to
come, is that his moment is “first of all temporal, a zone of temporalization.
The situation (closely articulated to place) … is completely
spatiotemporal.” Situations are much more spatial, Debord
thinks, and much more urban in orientation than the Lefebvrian
moment. “In the end,” Debord told Frankin, “for resuming the
problem of an encounter between the theory of moments and an
operational theory of the construction of situations, we would need
to pose these questions: what mix? What interaction? Lefebvre is
right in at least this: the moment tends toward the absolute, and
devours itself in that absolute. It is, at the same time, a proclamation
of the absolute and a consciousness of its passage.” 36
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