Henri Lefebvre: A Critical Introduction - autonomous learning

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Spontaneity
Bestir yourself!—Ah, for us science doesn’t go fast enough!
—Arthur Rimbaud, Une saison en enfer
Not too long after the dramatic irruptive moments on the streets
of Seattle, protesting the World Trade Organization’s summit,
I taught a class on Marxist urbanism at a Massachusetts liberal
arts college. One of the key texts I’d chosen was Lefebvre’s The
Explosion, written only months after the even more dramatic student
uprisings of May 1968. The images of street fighting and
police heavy-handedness, circa fin de millénaire, surprised many
pundits—radicals and conservatives alike—and I remember having
little inkling of what Lefebvre’s text, dictated almost as cars
blazed in central Paris, could tell us as smoke still smouldered in
downtown Seattle.
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