Henri Lefebvre: A Critical Introduction - autonomous learning

H e n r i L e F e b v r e
“the scope and orientation of revolutionary truth” (p. 154). (He’d
label it “cultivated spontaneity” in The Survival of Capitalism.) 8
It would center on concrete problems that are both practical and
theoretical and would require at once sobriety and exuberance,
diligent theory and mad raving ideals. It meant, too, an “unceasing
critical analysis of absolute politics and the ideologies elaborated
by specialized political machines” (p. 154). It was neither dogmatism
nor nihilism but something else entirely, something Lefebvre
ironically labels a “Third Way” (pp. 156–57). In no way should we
confuse this with the closet neoliberalism of Giddensian “Third
Wayers.” 9 Instead, Lefebvre’s Marxist Third Way keeps intact the
notion that politics can be romantic, that the future can be different,
that we can still believe in the future. As such, he warned long
ago that the “centralized state is going to take charge of the forces
that reject and, in essence, contest it. It will attempt this while at
the same time forbidding contestation” (p. 52).
Contestation and struggle, transgression and creation are thus
nonnegotiable Lefebvrian pairings. They go together like chalk
and cheese. “Transgression,” he says, “without prior project, pursues
its work. It leaps over boundaries, liberates, wipes out limits”
(p. 118). Perhaps most precious of all, as the state and ruling classes
forbid protest, is that transgression marks “the explosion of unfettered
speech” (p. 119). The transgressions of May 1968, as well as
their new millennium counterparts, took and take “a devastating
revenge on the constraints of written language. Speech manifests
itself as a primary freedom”—we might say almost primal freedom.
“In this verbal delirium, there unfolded a vast psychodrama,
or rather a vast social therapy, an ideological cure for intellectuals
and non-intellectuals, who finally met. All this speech had to be
expressed for the event to exist and leave traces” (p. 119).
When protest is banned, outlawed, silenced, or pilloried in
the press, contestation “will change into agitation and spectacle,
and this spectacle will change into spectacular agitation” (p. 52).
54