Henri Lefebvre: A Critical Introduction - autonomous learning

U r b a n i t y
Still, every time he sees these Le Corbusian “machines for living
in,” he’s terrified, adamant that such a new mode of life is
Cartesian through and through, compartmentalizing different
facets of human activity, zoning things here and there, creating
functional spaces and atomized people who are turned inward,
away from one another, even though they’re often piled on top of
one another.
It is in Mourenx, Lefebvre says (p. 119), where “modernity
opens its pages to me.” There, rational knowledge, technological
ingenuity, and a Logos big-brain fix to pressing human needs
equates to separation—of people and activity—all done in the
name of efficiency and profitability. Lefebvre, as ever, is less
interested in economic machinations than with metaphysical misgivings.
He invokes the young Marx and a left-wing Hegel, both
of whom strove to reconcile the Cartesian partitioning of mind
and matter, of subject and object, rather than reify it in physical
space. For Lefebvre, every New Town, every new suburb—every
Levittown, Middletown, or Our Town emerging out of the rubble—has
hacked up space and simplified life, decanted people,
and flattened experience. At the same time, separation means separation
within the self, a partitioning of consciousness, an inability
to connect organically with what’s around you, to think the whole,
to understand the totality of your life—or to not want to understand
it anymore. As Lefebvre sees it, planners and technocrats,
in cahoots with bankers, constructors, and realtors, have somehow
become new “Grand Inquisitors,” profiting financially and politically
from modernization, promising people bread and security as
long as they can stealthily control their freedom.
The accusation redoubles Lefebvre’s commitment to Marxist
humanism, only now this commitment has a territorial embodiment,
is conceived as a spatialized Marxist humanism. Now, a
more wholesome personhood is predicated on a more wholesome
organization of urban and rural space. In the course of its long
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