Henri Lefebvre: A Critical Introduction - autonomous learning

U r b a n i t y
whole town seems “nothing but traffic lights” (p. 119). Mourenx’s
physiognomy is left naked, robbed of meaning, “totally legible.”
Here, as elsewhere, a “stripping process” has been accomplished.
“Every object,” Lefebvre says, “indicates what its function is, signifying
it, proclaiming it to the neighborhood. It repeats itself endlessly.
When objects are reduced to the basic level of a signifier
they become indistinguishable from things per se. … Surprise?
Possibilities?” (p. 119). What, he asks, are we on the threshold
of? “Are we entering a Brave New World of joy or a world of
irredeemable boredom? As yet I cannot give an answer” (p. 119).
At any rate, one conclusion is immediately evident: Mourenx’s
world—the world of the high-rise New Town and the low-rise suburb—expresses
an ordered, enclosed, and finished world, a world
in which there’s nothing left to do and nobody to pull tongues at,
no romance around any corner. What’s there is simply there.
Enter, by comparison, Navarrenx, barely ten miles from
Mourenx in one sense, yet light-years away in another. In the
fourteenth century, it too was a New Town, built to a fairly regular
ground plan near the Pyrenean River Oloron and rebuilt two
centuries later in an even more geometric design, ringed with
Italianate ramparts. “I know every stone of Navarrenx,” Lefebvre
tells readers (p. 116); in each stone, he reads, like a botanist reads
the age of a tree by the rings on its trunk, centuries of history,
histories entombed in space. But past voices still speak out volubly
to the living. Lefebvre likens Navarrenx’s subtle and instructive
development—the symbiosis between its physical and social
growth—to that of a seashell. A seashell is the product of a living
creature that’s slowly “secreted a structure.” Separate the creature
from the form it’s given itself—relative to the laws of its species—then
you’re left with something soft, slimy, and shapeless.
Thus, the relationship between the animal and the shell is vital—
quite literally—for understanding both the shell and the animal.
Navarrenx’s shell, Lefebvre says, embodies the forms and actions
63