Henri Lefebvre: A Critical Introduction - autonomous learning

H e n r i L e F e b v r e
history, from the ancient Greeks to the Middle Ages, the city,
Lefebvre points out, was once an inspiring organic unity, intimately
bonded with the countryside; the two realms coexisted in a
delicate but real symbiosis. Now, this symbiosis, this organic unity
has been undone, dismembered, dislocated. 3 Both the city and the
countryside are victims of the inexorable drive to accumulate capital,
a drive orchestrated by assorted agents and agencies of the
capitalist state. Everyday life had become at once colonized, fragmented,
and politicized. Once, in Greek times, with its dynamic
public-square agoras, the polis epitomized the very essence of civil
society in harmony with the state. “The state coincided with the
city and civil society,” Lefebvre says, “to form a polycentric whole,
and private life was subservient to it.” 4 It wasn’t until the “modern
world,” as the young Marx highlighted, that the abstraction of the
state and the abstraction of private life were born. 5 Marx used the
term modern to periodize the rise of the bourgeoisie, the development
of industrial growth, and the “real subsumption” of modern
capitalist production. Between 1840 and 1845, Marx pinpointed, in
effect, the birth of modern modernity. The type of the state Marx
defined, Lefebvre explains, “is one which separates everyday life
(private life) from social life and political life. … As a result, private
life and the state—that is, political life—fall simultaneously
into identical but conflicting abstractions” (p. 170).
For Lefebvre, Mourenx demonstrates how fragmentation and
conflicting abstractions materialize themselves in bricks and mortar—and
in plastic. In modern everyday life, streets and highways
are more and more necessary to physically connect people, “but
their incessant unchanging, ever-repeated traffic is turning [human
space] into wastelands” (p. 121). Everything seems topsy-turvy:
“Retail is becoming more important than production, exchange
more important than activity, intermediaries more important than
makers, means more important than ends” (p. 121). Strangely,
there aren’t many traffic lights in Mourenx, even though the
62