Henri Lefebvre: A Critical Introduction - autonomous learning

H e n r i L e F e b v r e
alienation, and affirmed everyday life; hitherto, he’d posed new
utopian questions and proposed old romantic solutions, indicted
capitalist modernity in the name of a new, more spontaneous
modernity—one with medieval roots. Now, Lefebvre’s concrete
abstraction became the modern city itself, the testing ground for
new Marxist thinking and utopian radical praxis. “The urban”
became at once the dread zone and the nemesis of capitalist
modernity, the cradle of unprecedented commodification as well
as the incubator for new experimental lived moments. Curiously,
raw data had been in front of Lefebvre’s nose for a long while; the
Situationists merely helped him correct his myopia, for he’d seen
it all coming in his own daily life in Navarrenx and nearby in
a town called Mourenx. Henceforth, in the “Seventh Prelude” of
Introduction to Modernity, in “Notes on the New Town,” he began
to tell us what he saw, what was wrong, and what might be right.
* * *
“Whenever I set foot in Mourenx,” Lefebvre says, “I am filled with
dread.” Mourenx is a prototypical species, a French New Town,
which, like other New Towns then sprouting up on the European
(and American) landscape, “has a lot going for it.” 1 He thinks,
The overall plan has a certain attractiveness: the lines of the
tower blocks alternate horizontals and verticals. … The blocks
of flats look well planned and properly built; we know that they
are very inexpensive, and offer their residents bathrooms or
showers, drying rooms, well-lit accommodation where they can
sit with their radios and television sets and contemplate the world
from the comfort of their own homes. … Over here, state capitalism
does things rather well. Our technicists and technocrats
have their hearts in the right place, even if it is what they have in
their minds which is given priority. It is difficult to see where or
how state socialism could do any differently or any better. 2
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