Henri Lefebvre: A Critical Introduction - autonomous learning

M o M e n t s
thesis follows a deliberately winding path, full of bewildering twists
and turns and shifts of melody and tonality.
In the Situationists he recognizes a new avant-garde generation,
different from the “Lost” or “Beat” generations, angrier and
more realistic than the Surrealists, and less angry and more humorous
than Lefebvre’s generation of communists. “The most brilliant
Situationists,” Lefebvre suggests, “are exploring and testing out a
kind of lived utopianism, by seeking a consciousness and a constructive
activity which will be disalienating, in contradistinction
to the alienated structures and alienating situations which are rife
within ‘modernity.’ ” 39 And yet, he cautions, we mustn’t accredit
too much to the Situationists and their ilk. After all, youth is an
age, not a social class, and thus they cannot fulfill any “historical
mission.” “Yes, because it is an avant-garde, it scours the future. It
marches in the vanguard, scanning and prefiguring the horizon;”
but, no, it cannot change life alone, not without soliciting the help
of an organized working class. Transforming hypothetical exploration
into a political program, into an applicable plan, plainly
requires real participation: real unified practice. 40
Lefebvre’s conclusion to Introduction to Modernity—which
seems to be introducing his notion of a modernity to come—is
simply that there are indications of a “new attitude” drifting in
the breeze: revolts, acts of insubordination, protests, abstentions,
and rebellions are, he says, there to be seen and felt; Stendhal is
a man of the late twentieth century. Stendhal took the pleasure
principle as his opening gambit, and “in 1961,” Lefebvre goads,
“can we bring the pleasure principle back as a foundation, a starting
point, and believe in the creative virtues of pleasure?” 41 —a
question we still need to confront today. What the romantics saw
around them then, and what the “new romantics” see around them
now, is a world no longer governed by constraints: “in the name
of lived experience,” Lefebvre notes (p. 291), they reject scientism
and positivism and find their place in a chaos of contradictory
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