Henri Lefebvre: A Critical Introduction - autonomous learning

H e n r i L e F e b v r e
found themselves fraternizing with the mainstream, becoming the
self-same bureaucrats and technocrats Lefebvre detested, propping
up the institutions of modern power he critiqued—anonymous and
depersonalized, clinical and Kafkaesque sorts of power. (Lefebvre
knew he needed to develop younger friendships, if only to ensure
he wasn’t another sad victim.) And yet, “worldwide,” he acknowledged
on the cusp of revolt, with his finger typically on the pulse,
“avant-gardes are forming again, and making their voices heard. It
is an observable fact. … They are perfectly convinced that we are
all caught up in a gigantic stupidity, a colossal, dreary, pedantic
ugliness, which stands victorious over the corpses of spontaneity,
taste and lucidity.” 2
In May 1968, students and workers at last began to realize,
as they did in 1999, the gigantic stupidity they were caught up in.
And in its taste for spontaneity and lucidity, as well as a desire
to advance action and explain its intent, The Explosion sought
to steer a dialectical path between the rationality of theory and
the irrationality of action. Lefebvre tries to deal with the slippage
between the two, between lucidity and spontaneity, recoupling
thinking and acting within an explicitly political analysis, an analysis
that opens up the horizon of possible alternatives. “Events,” he
insists at the start of the text, “belie forecasts.” 3 Who, for instance,
could have predicted with any certainty the turbulent Maydays in
Paris or those of Seattle in November and December 1999? “To
the extent that events are historic,” he says, “they upset calculations.
They may even overturn strategies that provided for their
possible occurrence. Because of their conjunctural nature, events
upset the structures which made them possible” (p. 7). As such,
events are always original.
Nevertheless, original events always get reabsorbed into a
“general situation,” and their “particularities in no way exclude
analyses, references, repetitions, and fresh starts” (p. 7). Nothing
“is absolutely virginal, not even the violence which considers
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