Henri Lefebvre: A Critical Introduction - autonomous learning

H e n r i L e F e b v r e
Lefebvre saw in the Situationists the germ of a “new romanticism,” a
brazenly utopian response to the problems of technological culture
and industrial civilization. In them, he spotted a renewal of both
classical and modern romanticism fighting back against the boredom
and rationality of a bourgeois modernity run amok, updating
the project the French novelist Stendhal announced in the 1820s:
“At last,” Stendhal wrote in Racine and Shakespeare (1823), “the
great day will come when the youth of France will awake; this
noble youth will be amazed to realize how long and how seriously
it has been applauding such colossal inanities.” 37 “It requires courage
to be a romantic,” Stendhal claimed, “because one must take
a chance.” Stendhal’s critical text, insists Lefebvre 140 years on,
is of “vital importance,” going far beyond the limits of literary
criticism as such, because it attacked the values of the Restoration
(the moral order, imitation of the rich and powerful, pedantry) and
spearheaded an alternative direction to French social and political
life from 1825 onward. “In 1961,” Lefebvre asks, “are we heading
towards an analogous renewal in literature, and beyond literature?
That is the question we intend to examine—inconclusively, no
doubt—using Stendhal’s book as our starting point, and attempting
to reason, via similarities and differences between his times
and ours.” 38
In the “Twelfth Prelude” of Introduction to Modernity, Lefebvre
revivifies the spirit of Stendhal as the antecedent of Guy Debord,
mocking and jousting with his Situationist friends as they sometimes
mocked and jousted with him. The dense, 150-page dénouement,
which expressed guarded, critical admiration for the Situationists
as “a youth movement,” marked the centerpiece of Lefebvre’s 1962
inquiry into the “more and more brutal, more rapid, more noisy”
march of the modern world. Written as a series of “preludes,” evoking
some mix of playful musical motif—the book’s wish, he says,
is to be understood in “the mind’s ear”—unfinished, fragmentary
explorations, and, perhaps, a testament of what’s to come, Lefebvre’s
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