Henri Lefebvre's Critical Theory of Space [1st ed.] 9783030523664, 9783030523671

Table of contents :
Front Matter ....Pages i-xxii
A Critical Reflection Beyond the Academic Disciplines (Francesco Biagi)....Pages 1-60
The Lefebvrian Lexicon (Francesco Biagi)....Pages 61-120
Philosophy and Sociology of Space (Francesco Biagi)....Pages 121-184
Understanding the Present with Henri Lefebvre (Francesco Biagi)....Pages 185-228
Conclusion (Francesco Biagi)....Pages 229-235

Citation preview

MARX, ENGELS, AND MARXISMS

Henri Lefebvre’s Critical Theory of Space

Francesco Biagi

Marx, Engels, and Marxisms

Series Editors Marcello Musto York University Toronto, ON, Canada Terrell Carver University of Bristol Bristol, UK

The Marx renaissance is underway on a global scale. Wherever the critique of capitalism re-emerges, there is an intellectual and political demand for new, critical engagements with Marxism. The peer-reviewed series Marx, Engels and Marxisms (edited by Marcello Musto & Terrell Carver, with Babak Amini, Francesca Antonini, Paula Rauhala & Kohei Saito as Assistant Editors) publishes monographs, edited volumes, critical editions, reprints of old texts, as well as translations of books already published in other languages. Our volumes come from a wide range of political perspectives, subject matters, academic disciplines and geographical areas, producing an eclectic and informative collection that appeals to a diverse and international audience. Our main areas of focus include: the oeuvre of Marx and Engels, Marxist authors and traditions of the 19th and 20th centuries, labour and social movements, Marxist analyses of contemporary issues, and reception of Marxism in the world.

More information about this series at http://www.palgrave.com/gp/series/14812

Francesco Biagi

Henri Lefebvre’s Critical Theory of Space

Francesco Biagi Department of Political Science University of Pisa Pisa, Italy

ISSN 2524-7123 ISSN 2524-7131 (electronic) Marx, Engels, and Marxisms ISBN 978-3-030-52366-4 ISBN 978-3-030-52367-1 (eBook) https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-52367-1 Translation from Italian language edition by Laura Moniz © 2020 First Italian edition: Henri Lefebvre, Una teoria critica dello spazio © 2019 Jaca Book First English edition: © 2020 Palgrave Macmillan London-New York © The Editor(s) (if applicable) and The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2020 This work is subject to copyright. All rights are solely and exclusively licensed by the Publisher, whether the whole or part of the material is concerned, specifically the rights of translation, reprinting, reuse of illustrations, recitation, broadcasting, reproduction on microfilms or in any other physical way, and transmission or information storage and retrieval, electronic adaptation, computer software, or by similar or dissimilar methodology now known or hereafter developed. The use of general descriptive names, registered names, trademarks, service marks, etc. in this publication does not imply, even in the absence of a specific statement, that such names are exempt from the relevant protective laws and regulations and therefore free for general use. The publisher, the authors and the editors are safe to assume that the advice and information in this book are believed to be true and accurate at the date of publication. Neither the publisher nor the authors or the editors give a warranty, expressed or implied, with respect to the material contained herein or for any errors or omissions that may have been made. The publisher remains neutral with regard to jurisdictional claims in published maps and institutional affiliations. Cover image: © Tithi Luadthong/Alamy Stock Photo This Palgrave Macmillan imprint is published by the registered company Springer Nature Switzerland AG The registered company address is: Gewerbestrasse 11, 6330 Cham, Switzerland

Dedicated to the memory of Italian antifascist partisans.

Titles Published

1. Terrell Carver & Daniel Blank, A Political History of the Editions of Marx and Engels’s “German Ideology” Manuscripts, 2014. 2. Terrell Carver & Daniel Blank, Marx and Engels’s “German Ideology” Manuscripts: Presentation and Analysis of the “Feuerbach chapter,” 2014. 3. Alfonso Maurizio Iacono, The History and Theory of Fetishism, 2015. 4. Paresh Chattopadhyay, Marx’s Associated Mode of Production: A Critique of Marxism, 2016. 5. Domenico Losurdo, Class Struggle: A Political and Philosophical History, 2016. 6. Frederick Harry Pitts, Critiquing Capitalism Today: New Ways to Read Marx, 2017. 7. Ranabir Samaddar, Karl Marx and the Postcolonial Age, 2017. 8. George Comninel, Alienation and Emancipation in the Work of Karl Marx, 2018. 9. Jean-Numa Ducange & Razmig Keucheyan (Eds.), The End of the Democratic State: Nicos Poulantzas, a Marxism for the 21st Century, 2018. 10. Robert X. Ware, Marx on Emancipation and Socialist Goals: Retrieving Marx for the Future, 2018. 11. Xavier LaFrance & Charles Post (Eds.), Case Studies in the Origins of Capitalism, 2018.

vii

viii

TITLES PUBLISHED

12. John Gregson, Marxism, Ethics, and Politics: The Work of Alasdair MacIntyre, 2018. 13. Vladimir Puzone & Luis Felipe Miguel (Eds.), The Brazilian Left in the 21st Century: Conflict and Conciliation in Peripheral Capitalism, 2019. 14. James Muldoon & Gaard Kets (Eds.), The German Revolution and Political Theory, 2019. 15. Michael Brie, Rediscovering Lenin: Dialectics of Revolution and Metaphysics of Domination, 2019. 16. August H. Nimtz, Marxism versus Liberalism: Comparative RealTime Political Analysis, 2019. 17. Gustavo Moura de Cavalcanti Mello and Mauricio de Souza Sabadini (Eds.), Financial Speculation and Fictitious Profits: A Marxist Analysis, 2019. 18. Shaibal Gupta, Marcello Musto & Babak Amini (Eds), Karl Marx’s Life, Ideas, and Influences: A Critical Examination on the Bicentenary, 2019. 19. Igor Shoikhedbrod, Revisiting Marx’s Critique of Liberalism: Rethinking Justice, Legality, and Rights, 2019. 20. Juan Pablo Rodríguez, Resisting Neoliberal Capitalism in Chile: The Possibility of Social Critique, 2019. 21. Kaan Kangal, Friedrich Engels and the Dialectics of Nature, 2020. 22. Victor Wallis, Socialist Practice: Histories and Theories, 2020. 23. Alfonso Maurizio Iacono, The Bourgeois and the Savage: A Marxian Critique of the Image of the Isolated Individual in Defoe, Turgot and Smith, 2020. 24. Terrell Carver, Engels before Marx, 2020. 25. Jean-Numa Ducange, Jules Guesde: The Birth of Socialism and Marxism in France, 2020.

Titles Forthcoming

Antonio Oliva, Ivan Novara & Angel Oliva (Eds.), Marx and Contemporary Critical Theory: The Philosophy of Real Abstraction Giuseppe Vacca, Alternative Modernities: Antonio Gramsci’s Twentieth Century Terrell Carver, The Life and Thought of Friedrich Engels, 30 th Anniversary Edition Kevin B. Anderson, Kieran Durkin & Heather Brown (Eds.), Raya Dunayevskaya’s Intersectional Marxism: Race, Gender, and the Dialectics of Liberation Paresh Chattopadhyay, Socialism in Marx’s Capital: Towards a Dealienated World Gianfranco Ragona & Monica Quirico, Frontier Socialism: Selforganisation and Anti-capitalism Stefano Petrucciani, The Ideas of Karl Marx: A Critical Introduction Vesa Oittinen, Marx’s Russian Moment Kohei Saito (Ed.), Reexamining Engels’s Legacy in the 21st Century Kolja Lindner, Marx, Marxism and the Question of Eurocentrism Ryuji Sasaki, A New Introduction to Karl Marx: New Materialism, Critique of Political Economy, and the Concept of Metabolism Jean-Numa Ducange & Elisa Marcobelli (Eds.), Selected Writings of Jean Jaures: On Socialism, Pacifism and Marxism Adriana Petra, Intellectuals and Communist Culture: Itineraries, Problems and Debates in Post-war Argentina Marco Di Maggio, The Rise and Fall of Communist Parties in France and Italy ix

x

TITLES FORTHCOMING

George C. Comninel, The Feudal Foundations of Modern Europe James Steinhoff, Critiquing the New Autonomy of Immaterial Labour: A Marxist Study of Work in the Artificial Intelligence Industry Spencer A. Leonard, Marx, the India Question, and the Crisis of Cosmopolitanism Joe Collins, Applying Marx’s Capital to the 21st century Levy del Aguila Marchena, Communism, Political Power and Personal Freedom in Marx Jeong Seongjin, Korean Capitalism in the 21st Century: Marxist Analysis and Alternatives Marcello Mustè, Marxism and Philosophy of Praxis: An Italian Perspective from Labriola to Gramsci Satoshi Matsui, Normative Theories of Liberalism and Socialism: Marxist Analysis of Values Shannon Brincat, Dialectical Dialogues in Contemporary World Politics: A Meeting of Traditions in Global Comparative Philosophy Stefano Petrucciani, Theodor W. Adorno’s Philosophy, Society, and Aesthetics Francesca Antonini, Reassessing Marx’s Eighteenth Brumaire: Dictatorship, State, and Revolution Thomas Kemple, Capital after Classical Sociology: The Faustian Lives of Social Theory Tsuyoshi Yuki, Socialism, Markets and the Critique of Money: The Theory of “Labour Note” V Geetha, Bhimrao Ramji Ambedkar and the Question of Socialism in India Xavier Vigna, A Political History of Factories in France: The Workers’ Insubordination of 1968 Atila Melegh, Anti-Migrant Populism in Eastern Europe and Hungary: A Marxist Analysis Marie-Cecile Bouju, A Political History of the Publishing Houses of the French Communist Party Gustavo Moura de Cavalcanti Mello & Henrique Pereira Braga (Eds.), Wealth and Poverty in Contemporary Brazilian Capitalism Peter McMylor, Graeme Kirkpatrick & Simin Fadaee (Eds.), Marxism, Religion, and Emancipatory Politics Mauro Buccheri, Radical Humanism for the Left: The Quest for Meaning in Late Capitalism Rémy Herrera, Confronting Mainstream Economics to Overcome Capitalism

Henri Lefebvre: A Critical Theory of Space [Preface for the English Edition]

This book started as my doctoral thesis, and next took the shape of a monography that could be useful to introduce Henri Lefebvre’s thought and the state of the art of the contemporary international debate to Italian readers. Despite the existence of a few translations of Lefebvre’s most important writings in the Sixties and Eighties, my work filled a void that on Lefebvrian studies in Italian. It actually is the first monography that draws a complete depiction of Lefebvre’s writings. However, I haven’t just focused on this intent and I believe that this fact might attract the interest of Anglophone readers. In fact, my reflection presents, above all, a trait that is that of questioning some interpretations that are widespread within the global debate and, secondly, considering Lefebvre’s urban and spatial studies in light of his entire political path during the twentieth century. My book examines an utterly complex author whose production ranges an arch of time of more than half a century: I will always insist on the fact that Henri Lefebvre was about eighteen years of age at the outburst of the Russian Revolution and would pass away in 1991, following the fall of the Berlin Wall and the end of the Warsaw Pact. His interests comprised extremely vast and diversified topics and refer numerous disciplinary domains. Lefebvre was a prolific writer: philosopher, sociologist, promoter, and disseminator of culture, pamphlet writer, and passionate polemist. Despite the concrete difficulties that derive from moving inside

xi

xii

HENRI LEFEBVRE: A CRITICAL THEORY OF SPACE …

a corpus of such vastness, this work tries to accomplish an effectual depiction of Lefebvre’s intellectual and political activity that is put into context in the various historical phases in which it was produced. I have strongly committed myself to establish a dialogue between Lefebvre’s writings and the most important authors of his time. Despite the main focus being the spatial question, the emergence of Lefebvre’s interest on the city and the “urban” is shown within its development along an intellectual path that isn’t definitely linear, in which the main references of the French philosopher are theoreticians seemingly distant such as Hegel, Marx, Nietzsche, and Heidegger. Firstly, conversely to the main writings that are available today within the frame of what we could call an actual Lefebvre-Renaissance of international breath—that stick to taking into consideration only the writings that pertain to space, and that were published by the author from the end of the Sixties and the Eighties (among the few exceptions we can refer Andy Merrifield and Rob Shields’ work and the volumes that were abridged by Stuart Elden)–, in this volume Lefebvre’s “spatialist” period is reconsidered in light of his more general intellectual production, considerably widening the horizon of discussion (also by resorting to secondary bibliography in French, that might not be known by the Anglophone readers). This way, we shed new light on aspects of his apparently minor works or not directly connected to his writings on the city. An example that stands out is the polemics with the structuralists, particularly with Louis Althusser, destined not to be limited to the philosophical sphere, but to produce unexpected consequences for a whole season of the reflection on the concept of city in France, which for a long time was split between Althusserian orthodoxy and Lefebvrian fascination, as Manuel Castells’ first writings demonstrate very well. Secondly, I considered it might be useful to dedicate my work to the analysis of the writings that immediately precede the famous text on the “right to the city,” starting with the earliest rural studies at the core of the anti-fascist Resistance, up to the book Lefebvre wrote in 1965 on the Paris Commune, that would next trigger to not only crucial components of his future production, but also offer inspiration to the Sixtyeight Parisian movements. In reassembling the matter of the Commune as original experience of urban self-management and as collective feast destined to end tragically, Lefebvre gives us a glimpse the ambivalence of the European city and the weight of its tradition, suspended between

HENRI LEFEBVRE: A CRITICAL THEORY OF SPACE …

xiii

the claims for radical liberation, direct management of the res publica and the load of the economical-political rule focused on the hierarchization and subordination of the lower layers. Consequently, the return to the philosophical-political foundations of the concept of “right to the city” allows a more precise understanding of the guidelines of Lefebvrian sociological studies and of the actual meaning of the proposal of “spatial justice.” This proposal was born as a critique of the social contradictions of Fordism, but today it is still valid if we look at the neoliberal urban model. In fact, the relevance of this perspective is evident when we compare the Lefebvrian categories with the contemporary debate on the city. Thirdly, against the so-called “French Lefebvre Theory,”1 with this volume the goal I set is to offer the hypothesis that is might be more correct to read Lefebvre’s work as “critical theory of space and of the urban” in continuity with the method of the “kritik” that was proposed by Karl Marx and then resumed by the Frankfurt School. Lefebvre, in fact, fills a void in the critical thought of the second half of the Twentieth Century: he is one of the first theoreticians who understand the great importance the “urban question” acquired regarding the fate of human kind development and of the entire planet. In fourth place, I present the idea of how fundamental it is to reread the author’s urban studies starting with is earliest rural studies. My work demonstrates how urban studies are a must that arises following the social inquiries that were conducted from the “rural question”: the radical changes in nature and in the peasant world operated by capitalism will be lead Lefebvre to the epochal problem of the urban question. In the Anglophone debate the only exception is the Antipode journal that translated one of Lefebvre’s articles on the topic of ground rent; however that gap is much more evident due to the lack of a translation in English of the Lefebvrian volume on rural studies. I am strongly convinced that Lefebvre’s studies on space should be understood within a more broadened debate on his writings prior to the Seventies, and it is precisely from this discovery that I set the foundations for a new reading of the maturation of his thought and of the debate that his book triggered in France and worldwide. For instance, rural studies unveil new meanings for the polemics with Sartre, while the interest developed about urban studies represents 1 See: A. Merrifield, “Review essay. The whole and the rest: Remi Hess and les lefebriens

français ”, in Environment and Planning D: Society and Space, Volume 27, 2009, pp. 936– 949.

xiv

HENRI LEFEBVRE: A CRITICAL THEORY OF SPACE …

an example of the controversy with Althusser and the French Marxist sphere. In this context, the approach to the avant-garde and the situationist movement, between the two World Wars, shows the reason why Lefebvre rethinks the city by comparing it to an “work of art,” collectively produced by its inhabitants. In fifth place, I retrace in Lefebvre’s studies the attempt to supplying urban studies with sociological categories and a method of social research. Lefebvre understands the fact that the philosophical tool may not be the only in face of the “urban question” and he gathers and uses all the knowledge available to give new life to the new discipline of “urban sociology.” As we shall see, to Lefebvre the point of view assumed by those who wish to study the city and its foundation is of the utmost importance: the unveiling of the social contradictions of the city necessarily starts from assuming the peripheries’ perspective. The authentic urban sociologist is one who undertakes his own research on the urban space based on the situation in which human life unfolds at the outskirts of the cities: the “right to the city” was written under an emancipating imprint to the oppressed and those who daily undergo spatial discrimination by the society in which they live. Lefebvre conceives urban sociology as that domain that produces (“performs”) a critical philosophy, and, on Marx and Engels’ footsteps, he invites us to study the urban layout by unmasking the asymmetric relations of power. In other words, we could say that the degree of civilization of a given epoch is measured from its peripheries and by the way it produces urban marginality: that is the perspective to be used by the “urban studies” researcher. Finally, the reader may notice the way I strongly emphasize in the Lefebvrian meaning of “right to the city” the connection, on one hand, of the social conflict and the democratic question in the city and, on the other, the idea that the city and urban space should be places that are imagined, designed, and built inside the being-with-in-a-shared-world of all of its inhabitants (the city can truly be a work of art produced by human action only and if it is authentically collective work of all men, none excluded). The social conflict deriving from spatial injustice doesn’t solely pertain to the extemporaneous insurgence or rebellion, but is the source of a new revolutionary political proposal that questions the whole economical-political layout of power. The emancipation fight enclosed in the claim for the “right to the city” carries a new civilization, a novel social and economical organization for all men. The so called urban revolution

HENRI LEFEBVRE: A CRITICAL THEORY OF SPACE …

xv

doesn’t only comprise the changes operated by the capitalist design, but it pertains, first of all, to the emancipating political action that we’ll all be able to operate in the years to come. Pisa, Italy

Francesco Biagi

Acknowledgments I am grateful to Marcello Musto, for his encouragement to publish this work in the Marx, Engels, and Marxisms series. I am also grateful to Manuele and Arianna Masini for being so helpful in technical and editorial matters. Finally, I am grateful to my father, Lorenzo Biagi, who financially supported the translation and has always helped me in this neoliberal times of precarious work.

Introduction

In her preface to Between Past and Future Hannah Arendt states that thought, as such, arises from the experiences of our everyday life and should remain connected to them as if they were the only reference points on which one should rely on1 “Thought” and “event,” according to Arendt, are closely connected, although she recognizes that both hold different status. Thinking isn’t acting.2 When one thinks one needs to withdraw slightly from the world in order to find an observation point that allows understanding. The demand to understand space, city, and the “urban” starting from Henri Lefebvre’s legacy was that which guided me along the writing of this monography. And it is my belief as Lefebvre would have understood—as did Arendt–that the theme of our “thought” is the experience, the event, the everyday life of men and the arena of the world that hosts human kind. Our cities are currently living “dark times”: in fact, they are squashed between the “Scilla” of the economic crisis and the “Cariddi” of speculative dynamics that constantly overstep the place that was rightfully meant for all of their dwellers. Niccolò Machiavelli, quoted by Lefebvre in Le droit à la ville, maintains that the city is the stage of a social and political conflict that is never solved: the “Big 1 See: H. Arendt, Between Past and Future, Penguin, New York, 2006 (1961), pp. 14–

15. 2 See: H. Arendt, “On Hannah Arendt”, in M. A. Hill (edited by), Hannah Arendt:

the Recovery of the Public World, St. Martin’s Press, New York, 1979, pp. 301–339.

xvii

xviii

INTRODUCTION

[People],” the “Fat People” will always try to oppress and command the “Small People.” Such a clash has endured for centuries and the fight concerns urban space and its organization. The radical interrogative on which Lefebvre reflections focus is: who decides on the urban planning of space? Who decides how men should live and dwell? In other words, deciding “on the city” is deciding “on politics.” Political action, with Lefebvre, acquires a new meaning, since it is deeply rooted on the praxis of man’s everyday life. The minute dimension of the practical and concrete study never deviates from the whole system. Particularly it never denies the need to base itself on a “strong thought” that delineates the frame of analysis of the world in which it intervenes, and subsequently in the human action. The “strong thought” finds a method in Karl Marx’s Critique. Therefore, Lefebvre’s Marxism is never dogmatic: throughout his entire intellectual parable he vigorously fought the reduction of the Marxian thought as “science” or “system”. In fact if the Critique is to be coherent to the Triers philosopher it should always be part of a concrete vision on the world. And it is precisely this “perspective on the world” that turns Lefebvre into an anomalous philosopher who is never abiding to the strict definition of domains. Lefebvre is a philosopher who will discuss the Marxist legacy with Jean-Paul Sartre, Louis Althusser and Guy Debord in France and will undertake important debates with urban planners and architects, causing a crisis in the model of the functionalist city that had been taking shape since the Fifties. He is a militant theoretician who in the Thirties travels through Germany staying in hostels studying in what way the German proletarian movement was corrupted by adhering to Nazism; later in the Forties, on one side he is a communist partisan and on the other he doesn’t hesitate in questioning the spreading Stalinism inside the French Communist Party. To Lefebvre the theoretical study stands for a polar star used for reflection upon the political action. Later on, as he grows older, in Paris, during the May ‘68 movement, he doesn’t hesitate to put himself at the service of the students’ uprisings and he widens its university lectures to seminars and group studies on the “everyday life” where his strong friendship with Guy Debord will start. Afterwards the students will claim that it would be precisely the volume on the Paris Commune of 1965 that inspired their political action. Due to his intellectual poliedricity some didn’t hesitate in defining him as a “Don Giovanni of knowledge” who, coherent to the Marxian method moves about “ingenious and stirring with desire [within]

INTRODUCTION

xix

the intrigues of understanding.”3 Furthermore, Lefebvre is born in the year 1901, by about the time he was eighteen he watches from France the Russian Revolution, and he passes away in June 1991, a couple of months before the Soviet Union’s implosion. The “brief century,” according to the well-known image by Eric Hobsbawm, coincides with Lefebvre’s existence. He deals with Philosophy, sociology, Linguistics, Arts and Cinema: he writes around a hundred of books and a profusion of many other articles for numerous journals. The author, therefore, cannot be excluded from the “story” of the nineteen hundreds: he reflects upon on and questions within the twentieth century and against it. Because of the ample range of Lefebvre’s intellectual production, in this book I was forced to a choice. That examination was undertaken with the purpose to add to the Italian debate the French philosopher’s legacy. I believed that the glance on the “urban” and the “Critical theory of space” might be the precise first step toward a full rediscovery. Lefebvre, in fact, is mostly known in the Italian sphere through David Harvey’s, a widely translated Marxist geographer, interpretation. Moreover, one should keep in mind how is famed formula “right to the city” seduced most part of the theoretical and political weight of the social movements of the entire Italic Peninsula. As a result, the aim of this study is to shed some light about an author who is often quoted, but seldom read and accurately deepened and linked to the texts. The method chosen is rigor in going back to his works and the context within which Lefebvre produced them. Across all of the manuscript, firstly and above all, I attempt to demonstrate how his thought is above all a critique to the whole of the capitalist modernity. Secondly, I highlight the fact that Lefebvre is mainly a ferocious critic of the capitalist nature of modernity, although, without believing in the anti-modern and nostalgic praises of a pre-modernity or precapitalist past. Modernity comprehends simultaneously the damaging consequences of the development of the capital and as well the utopic possibilities to overlap its course. Such ambivalence is the mark inside which Lefebvre’s thought is to be received since it merges political theory and social praxis. Finally, the third purpose of this work is to demonstrate in what way Lefebvre a superior interpreter of a Marx who was much too obscured by more seductive philosophical schools such as the Althusserian

3 This image is also reappropriated by Michel Trebitsch in the foreword to: H. Lefebvre, Critique of everyday life. Vol. I , Verso, London, 1991, pp. IX–XXVIII.

xx

INTRODUCTION

structuralism. It seems to me that the author paid a heavy price for not having created his own tradition of studies. Such is the piercing strength of his “Marxism” into human reality, as it equally is its chief weakness, since his heritage was lost: on one hand by the sectioning of the domain, on the other hand, by the lack of an adequate assessment concerning the legacy he bestowed. The fil rouge of his philosophical meditation, in fact, is more Marxian than Marxist. His theoretical contribution does not hypostatize the reality, but it is rather at its service to produce an adequate understanding of reality itself.

Contents

1

2

A Critical Reflection Beyond the Academic Disciplines Introduction Henri Lefebvre Between Philosophy and Sociology: A Thinker Who Defies Categorization Young Lefebvre: Philosophy as Shared Critical Thought Marx Against Marxism: Henri Lefebvre’s Critical Political Philosophy The Specter of Lefebvre’s Literary Production on the Second Half of the Twentieth Century Henri Lefebvre and Guy Debord: A Controversial Intellectual Friendship Henri Lefebvre and Jean Paul Sartre: From the Polemic on the Theoretical Foundations of Existentialism to Anti-Stalinist Action Within the French Communist Party Henri Lefebvre and Louis Althusser: Against Structuralism Henri Lefebvre and the Birth of French Urban Sociology Conclusion: The Urban Critical Theory. Reading Henri Lefebvre Between the Twentieth and the Twenty-First Century Conclusion The Lefebvrian Lexicon Introduction Rural

1 1 2 3 16 20 33

37 41 46 57 60 61 61 62 xxi

xxii

CONTENTS

Rural Sociology’s First Studies The “Progressive-Regressive” Method The Theory of Ground Rent as an Application of the Progressive-Regressive Method Urban In Praise of the Fringe: Henri Lefebvre and Our (Mis)understanding of the Suburbs What Is (the New) Urban Society? From the City as a Form to Urbanization as a Process The Asymmetrical Relation Between the Urban and the Rural Habitat, Dwelling and the Housing Question in Lefebvre’s Thought A Critique of Le Corbusier’s Functionalist Urbanism Conclusion 3

4

5

62 68 71 75 75 81 94 100 111 120

Philosophy and Sociology of Space Introduction The Political Theory of Space Project The Production of Space Historical Phenomenology of Space The Paris Commune and the Destiny of the City: Insurgence for Space On the Concept of “Urban Utopia” “Changer la vie”: The Critique of Everyday Life and the Lefebvrian Roots of the Situationist Thought Conclusion

121 121 122 127 136

Understanding the Present with Henri Lefebvre Introduction The “Right to the City”: A Lefebvrian Genealogy Power’s “Passive Revolution”: The “Right to the City” as Governance from Above What Is the “Right to the City” Now? Taking Back Space and Time Conclusion

185 185 186

Conclusion

229

145 157 164 184

197 215 228

CHAPTER 1

A Critical Reflection Beyond the Academic Disciplines

Introduction Who was Henri Lefebvre? Was he a philosopher, a sociologist, or an urban planner? A philosopher whose path turned to themes that truly didn’t belong to him? It is hard to define with accuracy an author who along his whole life dedicated himself and his intellectual action to question the present. Lefebvre deeply embodies the Socratic ideal of search for the truth based on the radical discussion of the society that stood before his eyes. He interlaces with active politics several intellectual interests, among which literature, language, history, philosophy, and urban planning. In order to set his intellectual biography one must above all keep in mind that one stands before a theoretician who questioned his present reality constantly on various plans of research. Besides, at the core of such a modus operandi, he decided to take part on attempts of subversion. “Theory” and “praxis” with Lefebvre very often result into a noble alliance: the fertility of his writing immediately connects to a remarkable social and political commitment. Equipped with an irreverent and provocative character he always defined himself as “political writer”1 and he never concealed the need to substantiate his studies into everyday life.

1 H. Lefebvre, Le temps des méprises, Stock, Paris, 1975, p. 10.

© The Author(s) 2020 F. Biagi, Henri Lefebvre’s Critical Theory of Space, Marx, Engels, and Marxisms, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-52367-1_1

1

2

F. BIAGI

Henri Lefebvre Between Philosophy and Sociology: A Thinker Who Defies Categorization It is no mistake to think that moving to the field of urban studies and sociology was produced by the political assumption that was required by his philosophy: As he beheld the explosion of the city caused by Fordism and by advanced capitalism systems, Lefebvre considered it necessary to turn into a novel direction. “Later on, I started to analyze space, that is the city and the urban problematic. Architecture, urban planning, spatial planning, with neo-capitalism, have become political problems. Certainly, the change of goals and stakes has caused a scattering of thought. But, as far as I am concerned, this dispersion is more illusory than real. I know well that I have been criticized because of it, but all I can do is to protest against this disapproval. I have never developed any system. What it is expected of a theoretician is the development of a system. How many are there already on the market? I refuse to add yet another one to their very long list. I refuse the system, following a acute experience that ranges from Hegelism to Stalinism. This refusal doesn’t however either include incoherence nor dispersion”.2 To Lefebvre therefore there isn’t incongruency in taking up urban studies after having dedicated himself for a while to Heidegger’s, Nietzsche’s and, mainly, Marx’s philosophy. Studies on space are a consequential and immediate passage concerning political problems derived from the Fordist capitalism of the second half of the nineteenth century. In other words, along the sociological studies, Lefebvre faces new problems produced by the present that he beholds; sociology is the tool that allows him to substantiate and to politicize philosophical studies. Studies on space and on the city consecrate his intellectual path in the arena of social and political discussion.3 We are thus standing before a poliedric author who has already become a classic in textbooks, as in Theory and experience by Simon Parker, in which he is

2 Ibidem, pp. 19–20. 3 See: A. Merrifield, Metromarxism: A Marxist Tale of the City, Routledge, London,

2002, pp. 5, 71; Id., “Henri Lefebvre: A Socialist in Space”, in M. Crang, N. Thrift (edited by), Thinking Space, Routledge, London, 2000, p. 168.

1

A CRITICAL REFLECTION BEYOND THE ACADEMIC DISCIPLINES

3

recognized for having provided the “most important link between ‘classical urban theory’ and the new urban studies that have developed in recent decades.”4 The connections that stand between Lefebvre’s thought and Walter Benjamin—another philosopher that enquired on the changes of the city and the urban from an innovative reinterpretation of the Marxian legacy—are unique, although not entirely out of place. The fact that the German philosopher quotes La conscience mystifiée 5 —published in 1936 by Lefebvre and Guterman—in his essay Eduard Fusch, Collector and Historian, is clear evidence that Benjamin had come across the reflections of the French author.6 La conscience mystifiée is a pamphlet in which Lefebvre and his friend Guterman convey their opinion on the ascension of Nazi totalitarianism by means of the Marxian concept of “alienation” and describe its social dynamics of mystifying legitimization regarding the working class and the poorest population. This is Lefebvre’s only text that is explicitly quoted, but we can most probably assume that Benjamin while collecting his notes from the Passages was aware of the theory regarding everyday life, merchandize and the consumption society perceived by young Lefebvre. Both have lived the cultural Parisian atmosphere and thus the debate surrounding surrealism and Dadaism, both currents that concerned the city, the urban and Marx’s thought, from a novel and extremely heterodox perspective.

Young Lefebvre: Philosophy as Shared Critical Thought Henri Lefebvre was born on June 16, 1901 in Hagetmau, a small village in the Landes, in Aquitaine. He’ll experience the shock of the First World War that will sign throughout his entire life the intellectual attitude of his philosophical and sociological reflection. Since his childhood and teenage 4 S. Parker, Urban Theory and the Urban Experience: Encountering the City, Routledge, London, 2004, p. 9. 5 H. Lefebvre, N. Guterman, La conscience mystifiée, Syllepse, Paris, 1999 (1936). 6 See: W. Benjamin, “Eduard Fusch, Collector and Historian”, in The Work of Art in

the Age of Its Technological Reproducibility, and Other Writings on Media, Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, Cambridge (MA), 2008, p. 154. See also: A. Merrifield, Metromarxism: A Marxist Tale of the City, p. 71; P. Anderson, Consideration on Western Marxism, Verso, London, 1976, p. 37.

4

F. BIAGI

years in fact he will live the horror of man’s everyday life and experience when facing atrocities. It is precisely starting from the grip of the Great War that paralyzes everybody’s life in Europe that Lefebvre dreams of an overturning, of a concrete transformation of life, of a getaway from a state of powerlessness, minority, and oppression. Therefore Lefebvre’s literature will take charge of the historical events of the twentieth century. His philosophical proposal is a continuous weighing of thought and the actual life experience of men. In 1921 he gets to Paris. Previously—when he was fifteen—he had discovered philosophy through juvenile versions of Nietzsche and Spinoza. Through these authors he will reflect upon the dialectics between “thinking” and “living.” Due to Maurice Blondel, a renowned catholic teacher from Aix-en-Provence, whose fame is due to his heterodox reading of the Christian tradition, from which Lefebvre will however distance himself.7 Lefebvre doesn’t straightaway approach philosophy, since he first prepares for a career in the navy that is to be interrupted very early due to lung disease, and it will be precisely this condition that will lead to the opportunity of embracing philosophical studies. In the French Capital, at the Sorbonne Victor-Cuisin Library he meets Pierre Morhange, Norbert Guterman, Georges Politzer, and Georges Friedmann, with whom, initially competing with the surrealist group and by antithesis against the positivist or Bergsonian philosophy that dominated the time, he will in 1924 form the group “Philosophies.”8 These young philosophers of the first postwar were educated against the dominant ideologies in the philosophical domain, profoundly affected by the “Dreyfus case” and by the first worldwide conflict; they tried to create new paths from a theoretical and political-practical point of view. The postulate they had committed themselves to was that of endeavoring a search for knowledge and politics fields completely unheard-of; thus against Bergson and against the positivism the “young philosophers” propose a radical renovation of philosophy: philosophy should be possibility of thinking the impossible, dream and simultaneously performative action, an authentic intellectual turn over that finds its reason to exist in the everyday thinking and living. The radical antagonism regarding the more respected philosophy theories will bring the “Philosophies” group

7 See: H. Lefebvre, Le temps des méprises, pp. 20–21. 8 See: Ibidem, pp. 36–37.

1

A CRITICAL REFLECTION BEYOND THE ACADEMIC DISCIPLINES

5

to approach the Surrealists, although both groups recognized each other as rivals. An enduring friendship will be born following Lefebvre’s article on the Dada movement, published by the homonymous journal of the “Philosophies” cultural circle.9 Within this frame the intuition to realize everyday life and urban space into the work of art metaphor will arise. To Lefebvre, Dada is the substantiation of a pungent critique of the existing, and he is seduced by the radical critique to the society of that period. It is paramount to highlight how Lefebvre’s activity belongs to a cultural effervescence that encounters numerous young French theoreticians; in the range of a few years various journals and political circles will be born and will die, between the two wars France will host prolific movements that will be beheaded with the Second World War.10 Lefebvre is part of the disquiet11 of a generation who wishes to enact the social change, live it in a performative way in the everyday life and intellectually finds that philosophical currents such as Bergsonism and positivism lack answers. Philosophy can survive and keep on possessing a meaning only if it succeeds in listening to man’s experience, underlining its contradictions in order to raise them to the status of object of study and henceforth of genuine transformation. This transformative conatus associated to philosophy surely derives from Spinoza readings. However, as we have a while back hinted, its places its foundations in the trauma of the Great War, that brought with it destructive savageries and an anthropologic and social void that leaves a mark in the European postwar period. According to the “young philosophers” philosophy should face this reality otherwise it will risk its own survival. Inside this framework Lefebvre breaks the borders of the Humanities: there is neither philosophy, nor sociology, nor anthropology, and so on, as closed academic domains, but—as we shall see—a

9 See: Ibidem, p. 38. 10 See: M. Trebitsch, “Les mésaventures du groupe Philosophies (1924–1933)”, in La

Revue des revues, n. 3, printemps 1987; Id., “Le groupe Philosophies et les Surréalistes (1924–1925)”, in Mélusine, n. XI, 1990, pp. 63–75; Id., “Le groupe Philosophies, de Max Jacob aux Surréalistes”, in Jean-François Sirinelli (edited by), Générations intellectuelles, Cahiers de l’IHTP, n. 6, November 1987, pp. 29–38. 11 See: H. Lefebvre, La somme et le reste, Anthropos, Paris, 2009 (1959), p. 408.

6

F. BIAGI

domain that stands against any division of the fields of knowledge, which is “metaphilosophy.”12 In Paris young Lefebvre will find a lively academic atmosphere that aspires at being political and intellectual protagonist. The example of the revolutionary Russia is an indisputable presage of a possible materialization of an alternative society to the capitalist one. The conflicts and their excommunications cannot be understood but as events sprouting from inside the humus of a concrete option of transformation of men’s social life. However, such a fertile cultural universe won’t be understood by the Stalinization of the French Communist Party. The latter will produce an inflexible opposition that stands between orthodoxy and heresy, splitting and smothering several theoreticians among whom one can find Lefebvre. It is within this context that young Lefebvre feels the need to reflect, from a philosophical and sociological point of view, upon everyday life and the alienation produced by totalitarian capitalist model. At that moment the city and the urban are not yet a part of his main interests. At the same time Lefebvre will meet Tristan Tzara, the founder of the Dadaist movement and afterward with André Breton and the group of surrealist that was born in 1924.13 Within the surrealist circle he befriends Marxist poet and writer Louis Aragon. Thanks to such connections Lefebvre sets the basis of his reflections onto “everyday life,” dissatisfied as he was by the surrealist motto of “changing life”.14 Lefebvre was very critical on the surrealist theory of literature as life changing tool; to this he didn’t tout-court oppose “politics”; on the contrary he maintained that “Poetry, image and symbol do not liberate; they only but offer an appearance hint of liberty. With this one should not concede absolute trust to politics, or if you prefer, make of politics an absolute to achieve liberty. Political alienation doesn’t replace with any advantage literary alienation.”15 For now it suffices to understand the fertile field from which the need to reflect on everyday life and the city was born in Lefebvre; that is, the space of human experience, human action, on 12 See: H. Lefebvre, Métaphilosophie, Syllepse, Paris, 2000 (1965). And also: U. MüllerSch˝ oll, Le systeme er le reste. La théorie critique de Henri Lefebvre, Anthropos, Paris, 2006. 13 See: T. Tzara, Lampisteries précédées des Sept manifestes Dada, Jean-Jacques Pauvert, Paris, 1963; G. Hugnet, L’aventure Dada (1916–1922), Seghers, Paris, 1971. 14 See: H. Lefebvre, Le temps des méprises, pp. 44–45. 15 Ibidem, p. 51.

1

A CRITICAL REFLECTION BEYOND THE ACADEMIC DISCIPLINES

7

one hand in order to free it from individualist delusion of escape, and on the other to liberate it from the totalitarianism of certain conceptions of politics. Bud Burkhard accurately recalls the first contacts between the young philosophers and the surrealists, specifying their first disagreements: in 1926 Morhange, director of the “Philosophies” journal, prints a famous editorial entitled Petite note sur le Surrealisme in which he harshly criticizes Breton’s movement.16 It won’t take long for Breton’s answer to be issued he sends a threatening letter to Morhange in which he menaces violently the director of “Philosophies” should further critiques appear.17 However rivalry will go on: Guterman feeds the conflict with further articles, and Lefebvre instead will write enthusiastically a recension to the Dadaist Manifest by Tristan Tzara, advising for a straight distancing from usurpers of the Dadaist legacy such as Breton.18 It is important to recall theses anecdotes in order to enable a better understanding of the intense debate that crossed all of the artistic and philosophical revolutionary avant-gardes of the twenties in Paris. The refusal of the intellectualism of the young philosophers emerges in theses harsh debates with other cultural currents; in fact the most obvious intention of the “Philosophies” is to dispute and fight with the philosophical tools the reality of social life. Philosophy should leave the universities—where it has been locked by Bergsonism and French positivism and crosses the streets of everyday life, mingle with what is taking place at the present and dig out of this present starting points for a critical reflection. The group of young philosophers stimulates the philosophical message by placing it at the service of social life and its possible change. “Philosophies,” starting with the earliest issues of the journal, will cause a lot of distress among the ranks of French Communist Party, that through their party journal, “Clarté,” charge the anarchic group with a little coherence concerning the Marxist orthodoxy and a lack of systematic planning. Even the “cream” of Gallimard, that is, the editorial staff of the “Nouvelle Revue Française,” one of the most important literary journals of the time, coldly welcomes the young philosophers since it

16 B. Burkhard, French Marxism Between the Wars: Henri Lefebvre and the “Philosophies ”, Humanity Books, New York, 2000, pp. 42–43. 17 See: P. Morhange, “Billet: où l’on donne le ‘la’”, in Philosophies, n. 3, 1924. 18 See: H. Lefebvre, “7 Manifestes Dada”, in Philosophies, n. 4, 1924.

8

F. BIAGI

wasn’t convinced of the project to break the borders between literature, poetry and philosophical reflection; nevertheless, later on it will recognize its worth.19 Because of this, during the War of Morocco, from the 1920s to the 1930s, all three journals, together with the Surrealist group, will unite forces in a joint political campaign against the colonial war: La Rèvolution d’abord et toujours is the programmatic text that gathers all the French avant-gardes, including the Belgian surrealists, to the French Communist Party.20 The general strike of October 12, 1925 will become a success, but the governmental repression will be equally hard. Without any more common principles, the alliance shatters and the project to unite the forces in a joint journal vanishes in the air. The “Philosophies” and Lefebvre himself set to reading Hegel and Marx due to the suggestions and long and brotherly discussions with Breton: the first reflections on a theory of alienation derive in fact in the relation with the Surrealists, convinced of the literary potential in the subversion of social alienation produced by the capitalist society. Moreover, in the thirties in Paris, Alexandre Kojève and Jean Hippolite’s studies are spreading; Andy Merrifield recalls Lefebvre and Kojève’s meeting highlighting the high esteem of the former concerning the latter’s interpretation of the philosopher of Jena.21 Lefebvre and Guterman, as we shall see, will add to the literary revolt the political contribution of philosophy. The overcoming of the first disagreements between the surrealists and the young philosophers appears around the reflection on “everyday life.”22 Lefebvre’s inventiveness and his own group originality is that of stating how the true revolution resides in the changing of everyday life, an ideal that is altogether theoretical and 19 See: G. Michel, “Les revues ‘Philosophies’”, in Clarté, n. 56, 1924, pp. 171–172.

A. Desson, A. Harlaire, “Revues: Philosophies”, in Accords, n. 1, 1924, p. 18. 20 See: B. Burkhard, French Marxism Between the Wars: Henri Lefebvre and the “Philosophies ”, p. 50; M. Trebitsch, Le renouveau philosophique avorté des années trente. Entretien avec Henri Lefebvre, “Europe”, n. 663, 1986, pp. 28–40. 21 See: A. Merrifield, Metromarxism. A Marxist Tale of a City, p. 74 and S. Elden, Understanding Henri Lefebvre, Continuum, London and New York, 2004, p. 68; H. Lefebvre, Le temps des méprises, p. 198. 22 See: “In order to attack capitalism, and to examine the State, to describe the instrumental space of modern capitalism or the new division of productive labor on a global scale, I have no need to free significations from signifiers, but to refine the concepts and introduce new ones” (H. Lefebvre, Le temps des méprises, p. 19). See also: R. Hess, Henri Lefebvre et l’aventure du siècle, Métailié, Paris, 1991, p. 52.

1

A CRITICAL REFLECTION BEYOND THE ACADEMIC DISCIPLINES

9

practical and that will accompany our author along the entire range of is reflections. The “Philosophies” group has given life to several journals: from 1924 until 1925 five issues of “Philosophies” were printed; from 1926 until 1927 the turn to “Esprit” with two issues, followed by the “Marxian turn” with nine issues of the “Revue Marxiste” in 1929 and, finally, the three issues of “Avant-Poste” in 1933. “Philosophies” was born thanks to Max Jacob’s great aid: he spread it all over France, involving writers and intellectuals, and consequently offers a fundamental possibility of diffusion for the young philosophers. “Philosophies” was strongly interdisciplinary, it ranged from literature to philosophy and human sciences,23 it suffices to mention how “Philosophies” was one of those few journals that noticed writers such as Rainer Maria Rilke and James Joyce, presenting to the French audience paramount authors and avant-garde themes.24 The experience of “Philosophies” still embodies an idea of intellectual radically different than the one established in our times, in the midst of industrialization and commodification of literature and writing.25 The main issue of a journal that aimed to introduce a new thought and a new way of practicing critique, was materialized in diverse interests and tools such as literature, social sciences, philosophy, art, cinema. The journal of Lefebvre’s group didn’t accept any separation among disciplines, and did not want to limit itself to a specific area of Humanities. What underlying purpose resided in translating Joyce and Rilke, in the context of the cultural controversy against Bergsonism, conservative neo-Thomism and social science determinism? What reason existed

23 The utterly vast and confused schedule of the journal proclaims: “[the journal will focus on the field] of poetry, analysis and renascence of philosophy” (“Manifest of Philosophies ”, n. 1, 1924, in M. Trebitsch, “Les mésaventures du groupe Philosophies [1924–1933]”, in La Revue des revues, n. 3, Printemps 1987, p. 6). 24 See: M. Trebitsch, Le groupe Philosophies, de Max Jacob aux Surréalistes, p. 31. 25 In this regard I redirect the reader to the reflections of Danilo Soscia on the relation

between literary industry and public, and on the “populism” of the contemporary literary industry that generates ad hoc a public of its on and its own way of producing literature. See: D. Soscia, “Chi ha inventato il pubblico? Domande e brevi postille a ‘Scrittori e massa’ di Alberto Asor Rosa”, in F. Biagi, G. Ferraro (edited by), Populismo, democrazia, insorgenze. Forme contemporanee del politico, Il Ponte, n. 8–9, agosto–settembre 2016, pp. 127–132; M. Horkheimer, T. Adorno, “The Culture Industry: Enlightenment as Mass Deception”, in Id. Dialectic of Enlightenment, Stanford University Press, Stanford, 2002.

10

F. BIAGI

to associate literature with the philosophical debate? The figure of the philosopher was that of someone who looked at the world with critical eyes, in the midst of the intellectual battle against the “masters” who controlled the reins of the Academy. A small group of students, aided by an intellectual such as Max Jacob, was able to get all the tools necessary to create a journal, to found a thought and undermine the philosophical speculation more widespread at that time. Despite the absence of an university accessible to a wider public, which only spread after the Second World War, the French academic environment was prone to being shaken by a journal that sprouted between the cultural avant-gardes and the Academy itself. The University was open to the debate with the avantgarde of the society it mirrored, and also to the cultural production of that society. The journal was a genuine laboratory of the thought, a space of experimentation capable of issuing its own opinion and enacting a cultural hegemony into the society; such hegemony was always questioned and at the mercy of the contestation, but at the same time it had the ability to intervene within the public intellectual debate. While the Surrealists proposed a “surrealist revolution” the “Philosophies” had in mind a “philosophical revolution.” The detachment from Max Jacob’s collaboration signs the beginning of the new close cooperation with Breton and the surrealists. The “Esprit” is a project in which surrealist influences can already be glimpsed, and that is well shown by the contrast to the dominating rationalism, neo-Kantian idealism and neo-Thomist rationalism. The “Philosophies” desire is to build a “new mysticism”, one that is profane and more politically directed.26 The mysticism referred to has no connection whatsoever with the religious tradition, considering that to the “young philosophers” it is nothing more but the yearning of social change, a desire of performative dream; philosophy is immersion in the world and becomes a regulating ideal of the new possibilities of changing the world, it is a request addressed to Heaven asking that Earth should change: “What we called metaphorically and linguistically abusively as mysticism was in fact the non-intellectualism, non-cerebralism and, confusedly, the call to the body through an ontology and cosmology that we barely succeeded in defining. It was not a call for the rational, but above all a call for the

26 See: H. Lefebvre, Le temps des méprises, pp. 28–29.

1

A CRITICAL REFLECTION BEYOND THE ACADEMIC DISCIPLINES

11

super-rational.”27 “Esprit” represents one of the “Philosophies”’s phase that Michel Trebitsch defined as “pre-Existantialist,” pointing out how this experience foreshadowed several topics that were later increased by Sartre and his school.28 In fact, those who will not proceed to join the “Revue Marxiste” will subscribe to the existentialist current.29 The cultural references of the “Esprit” phase are represented by Schelling’s German idealism and by the study of Hegel’s30 thought, and, on the other side, of German phenomenology, particularly focused on Husserl.31 The philosophical and political positions that Lefebvre and the “Philosophies” group assumed, anticipate both Heidegger (Being and Time will not be published until 1927) and Sartre’s existentialism, of which Lefebvre will amended in 1946, distancing himself and circumscribing that intellectual phase to a youthful period—not yet exactly mature.32 In this regard, he accuses Sartre, in L’existentialisme, of having returned to the reflections of the “young philosophers” of L’Esprit, and of having proposed, one hundred and fifty years later, the same ideas that Schelling had introduced (he addresses this same critique to Heidegger). However, what is unacceptable to Lefebvre is the humanist metaphysics of existentialism, which makes abstract and idealizes humanism, condemning the everyday life to a lack of authenticity and to triviality. This operation comprises an upturn of the Marxian thought which is more aware of the praxis and the actual deployment of men’s life. This is the reason why the author will criticize Sartre about the possibility of conciliating the Marxist theories with the existentialist thought.33 27 Ibidem, pp. 37–38. 28 Ibidem, p. 24. 29 See: M. Trebitsch, “Les mésaventures du groupe Philosophies (1924–1933)”, in La Revue des revues, n. 3, Printemps 1987, p. 6. 30 See: B. Burkhard, French Marxism Between the Wars: Henri Lefebvre and the “Philosophies”, pp. 70–72. R. Hess, Henri Lefebvre et l’aventure du siècle, pp. 59–66. 31 See: R. Hess, “Henri Lefebvre ‘Philosophe’”, foreword to the II edition of: H. Lefebvre, L’Existentialisme, Anthropos, Paris, 2001 (1946), p. XIX. 32 See: H. Lefebvre, L’Existentialisme, pp. 25–34; Id., La Somme et le reste, pp. 407– 409; B. Burkhard, French Marxism Between the Wars: Henri Lefebvre and the “Philosophies”, p. 69. 33 See: H. Lefebvre, La somme et le reste, pp. 510–512; and the foreword to Georges Politzer’s translation: Id., “Le même et l’autre”, in F. Schelling (edited by), Recherches philosophiques sur l’essence de la libertè humaine et sur le problèmes qui s’y rattachent, Rieder, Paris, 1926, pp. 7–64; S. Elden, Understanding Henri Lefebvre, p. 20.

12

F. BIAGI

It is paramount to remember that in the second issue of “Esprit” some letters by Engels were translated despite them referring to petty polemics among the socialist of his time.34 By studying Hegel, the “Philosophies” approached to Karl Marx: as we well know in France, in those years, the “Hegelian Renaissance” started again thanks to the work of Alexandre Kojéve and Jean Hyppolite. However, the approach to the Marxian analysis doesn’t include some contemporary authors active between the twenties and thirties, such as György Lukács, Karl Korsch and Antonio Gramsci. The “Philosophies” in fact will try this research without using secondary bibliography about Marx, mostly motivated by the will of a direct study, but also because of the inability to access other contemporary researches.35 In his first biography Lefebvre recalls that period as “cosmologic and anthropologic romanticism” drawing a fil rouge between the “sense of the Absolute and the sense of man, the sense of the universe and the sense of the action, the metaphysical sentiment of the body and that of the willpower.”36 Once the radical upturn of the Marxian studies took place, the “Revue Marxiste” is born. Pierre Morhange, Norbert Guterman and Henri Lefebvre will be the only ones who will pursue this project,37 and together with other surrealist companions will join the French Communist Party in 34 B. Burkhard, French Marxism Between the Wars: Henri Lefebvre and the “Philosophies”, p. 70. 35 Ibidem, p. 72. 36 H. Lefebvre, La somme et le reste, p. 409. 37 His joining the Party and the foundation of the “Revue Marxiste” divides the

“Philosophies” group; during that time (1926–1928) Lefebvre very seldom collaborates in the journal because of his mandatory military service, a period in which he will endure great suffering due to the arid and hierarchic atmosphere that leads him to express his opinion against the French colonialism, and because of this he will become victim of various acts of derision. This experience is an occasion that allows him to understand, on one side, how philosophy should be at the service of the quotidian in order to subvert it, and, on the other side, he develops a passion for military strategy, by the study of Clausewitz’ works (See: H. Lefebvre, La somme et le reste, pp. 83–87. R. Hess, Henri Lefebvre et l’aventure du siècle, pp. 67–70). After his return from the military service he works as taxi driver for a few years in Paris, since he needs money to get by, until he gets the philosophy chair. He recalls this experience with great joy despite the miserable life that he lead, since by means of this job he could talk to people and evaluate the society of that time through this dialogue (See: R. Hess, Henri Lefebvre et l’aventure du siècle, pp. 71–72). He also tries to work at a libertarian center, l’Île de la Sagesse, proposing it as purpose for the left-wing European dissidents. However, this project won’t succeed because of an incomprehensible depletion of economic resources, and because, at the same

1

A CRITICAL REFLECTION BEYOND THE ACADEMIC DISCIPLINES

13

1928, with the desire to start a new course of active militancy that would not include the theoretical study and the creation of cultural circles only. As Lefebvre recalls in the autobiographic interview Le temp des méprises, at that time the Communist Party was still a libertarian social movement, open to confrontation, and pluralist in its components. The goal resided in becoming an emancipation tool for the most oppressed working classes.38 Lefebvre takes that decision based on an anti-authoritarian and strongly anti-statalist reading of Marx. In Marx Lefebvre discovers an adversary of State socialism. His partaking in the Party was above all a consequence of the studies he conducted on Marx’s works: he was convinced and fascinated by the forms of direct democracy that the working class movement had tried to produce right from the experience of the Paris Commune. For this reason Lefebvre was one of the very first translators from German of Marx’s works—together with his friend Guterman—in the “Revue Marxiste” and “Avant-Poste” journals. The new “Revue Marxiste” journal includes also the collaboration of Paul Nizan and George Politzer,39 but the Moscow delegates in Paris will impose its suppression, unable to bear the existence of a journal that wasn’t directly controlled by the leading organs of the Party. Because of this Lefebvre and Guterman, isolated by the Stalinization of the French Communist Party, will found the “Avant-Poste.” The fact that Marxian members of “Philosophies” and many surrealists joined the Party is a choice that was assumed as a means of converging into a single platform. Both groups of intellectuals make this choice due to a need to link their cultural and political action, since, after all, the French Communist Party allowed a full awareness of their intellectual and militant course. This was their way of feeling that they belonged to the working class movement, that they belonged to that subject that was able to organize the weak classes of a capitalist society characterized by acute inequalities. The creation of the “Revue Marxiste” is a pedagogical and political choice, device for reflections that would serve the Party, the working class, the laborers and the analphabet peasants, and, last but not least, that would

time, the “Revue Marxiste” had to be started (See: H. Lefebvre, La somme et le reste, pp. 419–428). 38 See: H. Lefebvre, Le temps des méprises, p. 63. 39 See: Ibidem, pp. 66–67.

14

F. BIAGI

have disseminate the Marxian thought inside of the French university. The first translations of Marx that appeared by hand of Lefebvre and his group were planned in the context of this perspective. Lefebvre and his companions are triggered by the wish to exercise a form of “pedagogy of the oppressed”: the study of Marx was as an act of liberation for the collective conscience. In fact, the journal centers the reflection on the concepts of “conscience” and “alienation,” examining in depth not only the capitalist way of life, but also the Nazi totalitarianism. The autonomous actions that the “Revue Marxiste” initiated were not tolerated at all by Moscow, resulting in the total suppression of the journal in 1929. Therefore, the Party was starting to isolate one of the most prominent researcher and translator of Karl Marx’s and Engels’s works in France, with the complicity of Paul Nizan and Louis Aragon, who originally approached the same group of intellectuals, before joining the Party. Moscow and the French Communist Party could barely stand the inquiries that the journal carried out and, especially, could tolerate neither any translation nor any Marxian readings that weren’t mediated by the Soviet line.40 If we dig deeper, we find out that the staff of the journal, prior to the banishment by the Party, was divided among those who promoted an autonomous Marxian thought detached from the Party’s logic (Lefebvre being among this group), and those who respected the monopolizing will of the Party leaders and the imposed Marxian economicism (Politzer and Nizan were among the most renowned).41 The shutting down of La Revue publishing house and the following disappearance of the “Revue Marxiste” created quite an appeal in Paris, since that affaire was part of an exemplary anecdote somewhat blurry and also very much discussed. The Hagetmau philosopher recollects42 that Georges Friedmann had inherited from his family a large fortune and wanted to put it at the service of the Party. It isn’t clear whether the sum was to be handed directly to La Revue or to the Party; however, Morhange was approached by someone that is believed to be a Soviet spy and, after having gained his trust, convinced him to gamble the money so that he would win even more and further increase the Party’s economic

40 See: Ibidem, pp. 67–77. R. Hess, Henri Lefebvre et l’aventure du siècle, p. 78. 41 See: M. Trebitsch, “Les mésaventures du groupe Philosophies (1924–1933)”, p. 8. 42 See: H. Lefebvre, Le temps des méprises, pp. 67–7.

1

A CRITICAL REFLECTION BEYOND THE ACADEMIC DISCIPLINES

15

resources. Unfortunately, at that moment the philosophers lost everything and the suspect disappeared. Morhange and Friedman will find themselves strongly attacked regarding their political morals by several leading members of the Party and Moscow delegates. Paul Nizan and Georges Politzer will also take part in this deceit and will feed the insinuation under Party orders; meanwhile Lefebvre and Guterman will find out that Nizan was feeding detailed information to the leading members about the debates of the “Revue Marxiste,” actually putting himself at the service of an above attempt to control the editorial project. To this André Breton derision is added—in the Second Manifeste du surréalisme (1930)43 : he will accuse Lefebvre’s group of wasting the money allocated to political action, confirming the maddening version of the leaders of the French Communist Party; this becomes the reason that will estrange Lefebvre from the Surrealist group. Despite the fraud, the money was actually wasted at the gambling roulette in Monte Carlo; however, Friedman was waiting the family inheritance that he had wished to put at the service of political militancy: the scandal was fed ad hoc to hit the editing house and the journal since the amount in question didn’t regard the financial reports of the French Communist Party. Lefebvre adds further another detail: the Russian presence in Paris was considerable, because of the Conference of the Third International, and the leadership of French Communist Party could not fail to obey Moscow, or negatively impress the Soviets, feeding the suspicion—within the Third International—of not being able to control its own political structure. As a consequence, we may agree with Lefebvre that, due to the start of the Stalinization process of the European communist parties, an autonomous path of Marxian inspiration ended already from the beginning, to ensure that the hierarchy of politics and the legacy of Marx and Engels coincided in a single party structure. From these facts emerges the inability of the French Communist Party to valorize the most brilliant minds of the political movement. The partyform clashes against the research freedom and, little by little, the French Communist Party will change, from being a genuine emancipation movement that was open to society, into a rigid bureaucratic structure. As Lefebvre writes down in Le somme et le reste: “The political purpose?

43 See: A. Breton, Manifestes du surréalisme, Gallimard, Paris, 1967.

16

F. BIAGI

Burn down an attempt of Marxist thinking that was independent, scientific, and able to study with objectivity economical, social and political question, without passively obeying external and propaganda orders. The party in 1928–1929 was reorganizing itself. It was bolshevizing itself, that is, stalinizing itself.”44 Lefebvre, at the early thirties, leaves Paris and moves firstly to Privas and after, in 1932, to Montargis, where he had obtained the philosophy chair. After he closed the publishing house of the “Revue Marxiste,” “Avant-Poste” is the last attempt (with three issues in 1933) to carry on those purposes, notwithstanding the extreme isolation into which were Lefebvre, Morhange, and Guterman (Henriette Valette, Lefebvre’s first wife, will take on the role of secretary).

Marx Against Marxism: Henri Lefebvre’s Critical Political Philosophy Following the affaire of “Revue Marxiste” the Party censorship will find the texts that Lefebvre published with Guterman, and that aimed at introducing the Marxian thought into the French academic and political context. Among the several works I recall: the Introduction aux morceaux choisis de Karl Marx (1934),45 La conscience mystifiée (1936),46 the Morceux choisis de Hegel (1938)47 and the Cahiers de Lénine sur la dialectique de Hegel (1938).48 Lefebvre will be victim of ostracism, being ignored in the philosophical and political debate; the consequence will cause a lack of recensions of such works.

44 H. Lefebvre, La somme et le reste, p. 427. 45 H. Lefebvre, N. Guterman, Introduction aux morceaux choisis de Karl Marx,

Gallimard, Paris, 1934. 46 H. Lefebvre, N. Guterman, La conscience mystifiée, Syllepse, Paris, 1999 (1936). From 1933 until 1935 Lefebvre will visit New York, where, together with his friend Guterman, he will share several reflections that he will develop the following years. The correspondence between both of them is today preserved at Columbia University, and it constitutes proof of Guterman’s great contribution to the development of Lefebvre’s several thesis. 47 H. Lefebvre, N. Guterman, Morceaux choisis de Hegel, Gallimard, Paris, 1938. 48 H. Lefebvre, N. Guterman, Cahiers de Lénine sur la dialectique de Hegel, Gallimard,

Paris, 1938.

1

A CRITICAL REFLECTION BEYOND THE ACADEMIC DISCIPLINES

17

Simultaneously to these texts, written in partnership, Lefebvre will devote himself to the book that he will publish in 1940 under the title Le materialisme dialectique,49 in which he defends the thesis of a philosophical dimension of Karl Marx’s thought against the economic reductionism promoted by Moscow, and consequently against the French section of the Communist Party. A first draft of this text will be rejected and the Party censorship will make it disappear; due to this, Lefebvre will have to resume several times the works he conducted since 1934. A bitter lesson to him, by which he realizes that he is not to submit anymore his intellectual work to the ruling organs; he will remain member of the Party until 1958: however, these will be years in which he felt the decline of his real possibilities of an internal political participation in the French Communist Party. Ever since his earliest readings of Marx, Lefebvre is determined to oppose the ruling Marxist determinism of that time, as conveyed by the orthodox version promoted by Moscow. This is the time in which appears the “Avant-Poste” journal, a last attempt by the “young philosophers” to arm themselves with a shared reflection tool against the French Communist Party. The existential parable of “Philosophies” definitively ends with “Avant-Poste.” The journal will proceed to publish the French translations of unpublished texts by Marx and Engels and the first part of the book written in partnership by both Lefebvre and Guterman (La conscience mystifièe). The argument that both authors maintain regards an investigation on the manipulation and corruption of individual and collective awareness of the people carried on by the capitalist government devices, which allowed Fascism and Nazism to take prolific roots. In this framework Fascism will present itself as the concrete substantiation of the socialist ideals that upsets the perception of reality of subaltern classes, entitling itself as the only savior related to the ongoing social crisis atmosphere of last century thirties. The two editors of “Avant-Poste” maintain therefore the argument that the fascist and Nazi totalitarian phenomenon is a mystification and an incidence of falsified awareness of 49 H. Lefebvre, Le materialisme dialectique, Alcan, Paris, 1940 (edition that was ostracized, destroyed and then republished from 1947 by the “Presses Universitaires de France”, and which last edition was printed in 1990). See also Alfred Schmidt’s important foreword to the German edition (Der dialektische Materialismus, Suhrkamp, Frankfurt, 1976): A. Schmidt, “Henri Lefebvre and Contemporary Interpretations of Marxism”, in D. Howard, K. E. Klare (edited by), The Unknown Dimension: European Marxism Since Lenin, Basic Books, New York and London, 1972, pp. 322–341.

18

F. BIAGI

the socialist values. They propose an analysis, among the ranks of the left wing, of how such political degeneration might have occurred. The authors actually develop their reflection by criticizing the political action as practiced by the European and Russian communist movement. In a ideological way, they don’t accept the defeat of the historical mission assigned to the working class.50 Going even deeper, the determinism with which social and political events are read is questioned: in fact the thesis argued by the French Communist Party is to ascribe the full blame of the fascist ascending in Europe to the errors of the social-democracies; moreover the Party abstractly idealizes the revolutionary protagonism of the working class: “We showed that the working class is not separated from society, holding the privilege of the truth […], [on the contrary] it can be captured […] by the ideology.”51 On the other hand, the French Communist Party, through Politzer, accused the “Avant-Poste” of conveying excuses for the fascist ideology, also discrediting the new nietzschean studies by Lefebvre. The Party, in fact, aims at imposing Lukács thesis of a Nietzsche theoretician of German nazism.52 In the thirties, Lefebvre really feels the Soviet ideology and its asphyxiating and sterile ideologic propaganda. In 1932 he travels to Germany where he will know closely the Stalinist and administrative change of the German Communist Party that had completely abandoned its original and revolutionary propelling stamina born into the Spartacist League of Rosa Luxemburg and Karl Liebknecht.53 According to Lefebvre the German Party is incapable of understanding the wide consensus enjoyed by Hitler’s national-socialist movement and of highlighting the decisive role of the class awareness processes which do not occur mechanically as conversely the orthodox determinist vulgata affirmed. The Hagetmau philosopher, with full lucidity, would have wished that the European leftwing organizations critically interrogated themselves on the disaffection of the most oppressed classes in relation to the socialist revolutionary ideal.

50 The third and final issue of “Avant-Poste” focuses on the passive revolution that far-right totalitarianisms have made of the concept of “revolution”, separating it from the action generated by the class conflict. 51 H. Lefebvre, Le temps des méprises, p. 74. 52 Ibidem, pp. 75–76. 53 See: H. Lefebvre, La somme et le reste, pp. 444–454.

1

A CRITICAL REFLECTION BEYOND THE ACADEMIC DISCIPLINES

19

“Avant-Poste” was born not only as attempt to proceed with the project that was originated in the “Revue Marxiste,” but also as antifascist reflection device. Lefebvre will be very much shocked by his trip to Germany; the dawn of Nazism offered to him an opportunity to test the Marxian categories as antagonist to the totalitarian option, and in the first issue of “Avant-Poste” he will write: “This journal holds a triple task 1. Philosophical: analyzing the current ideas and their social role, according to the dialectic materialism. 2. Literary: denouncing the oppression, the anguish and the anger of the oppressed; denouncing the discomfort of malaise caused by the capitalist society; singing the desire for a new world; assisting in the transformation of the forces of sensibility into revolutionary forces. 3. Polemic: against the manifestations of a culture the ultimate purpose of which is, at the moment, to disguise the real problems.”54 However, one of his first articles on these topics is written to the Nouvelle Revue Française upon a request by Denis de Rougemont who was preparing the edition of a collection of writings by dissident theoreticians, while in the Cahiers de revendications he will print Du culte de l’Esprit au materialisme dialectique.55 The intellectual character of Lefebvre will be solidly shaped by these events. On one hand he is firmly connected to the Marxian thought and to the philosophical thinking understood as critical exercise of the intellect. On the other hand a bitter refusal of dogmatism and politicism of the party-form and, more generally, the repulsion against the acritical and servile submission to ideas or arguments produced in a standard way by the so-called auctoritas such as the Party and its leadership. For all these reasons, Lefebvre is duly recognized as one of the most heterodox and anti-authoritarian theoreticians of the French heretic Marxism. The historian Michel Trebisch points out the debate on totalitarianism that was born inside “Avant-Poste,” highlighting above all how much these theoretical and political reflections were innovative when referred to the time in which they were formulated. In fact the mentioned authors cannot still forecast the extent of the entire totalitarian politics, but only the very first viruses that were leaking in the European societies; secondly he notices the way in which several concepts proposed by the editors

54 H. Lefebvre, “Le fascisme en France”, in Avant-Poste, n. 1, 1933. 55 See: H. Lefebvre, “Du culte de l’Esprit au materialisme dialectique”, in Cahiers de

revendicatons. Onze témoignages. Nouvelle Revue Française, n. 232, Décembre 1932.

20

F. BIAGI

of “Avant-Poste” were later on developed by famous analysts of the totalitarian power technologies, such as Hannah Arendt.56 In the 1930s France—so Lefebvre tells us—none had information of Stalin’s totalitarian project, but later, as a consequence of that project, the leadership of the French Communist Party, closed in its inflexible orthodoxy, began to criticize with the first Marxian studies by Lefebvre, although these books had already become object of political formation into the Party circles. “In 1928 my friends and I let ourselves be fooled by Stalinism, but we had no clue what it was, for the simple reason that it still didn’t exist. Certainly, in Russia it existed virtually as institutional and organizational core […] We came to realize this long after, and very slowly,” and then he goes on: “the militant action, shortly after the foundation of the Communist Party, since I am among those who literally founded it, was a fraternal activity. We didn’t do politics in the strict meaning of the term, that is, in the technical and bureaucratic sense. I insist: the Party worked as a sort of counter-society.”57 The book La conscience mystifiée triggered the inquisitorial wrath of the Party: this refused to believe Lefebvre’s thesis on the rise of Nazism. However, from the right wing, even the Nazi angrily attacked the text, avoiding its circulation. In France a reprint will only be appear in 1979.58

The Specter of Lefebvre’s Literary Production on the Second Half of the Twentieth Century Lefebvre will dedicate two further studies to the topic of the totalitarianism that paralyzes in the grip Europe, during the early years of the twentieth century: Le nationalisme contre les nations (1937)59 and Hitler au pouvoir (1938).60 The author is horrified by the power of the Hitlerian movement that is enacted on the people, and—based on the German situation—he questions the European present of the 1930s and 1940s. The 56 See: M. Trebitsch, “Les mésaventures du groupe Philosophies (1924–1933)”, p. 8. 57 H. Lefebvre, Le temps des méprises, pp. 65–66, 78. 58 See: R. Hess, G. Weigand, “Henri Lefebvre et son œuvre”, 2006, online: http:// www.barbier-rd.nom.fr/H.%20Lefebvre.pdf. 59 H. Lefebvre, Le nationalisme contre le nations, Méridiens Klincksieck, Paris, 1988 (1937). 60 H. Lefebvre, Hitler au pouvoir, bilan de cinq années de fascisme en Allemagne, Bureau d’éditions, Paris, 1938.

1

A CRITICAL REFLECTION BEYOND THE ACADEMIC DISCIPLINES

21

peculiarity of the Lefebvrian analysis is the attempt to relate the status of the German totalitarianism to the defeat of the emancipating ideals and the political practice of the German left-wing faction. At the same time, the author develops other philosophical studies that will be concluded with the publication of Nietzsche (1939)61 and L’Existentialisme (1946).62 With these two books he seems to have closed a phase of his studies so that he can open new trails of research. Nietszche’s study is paramount to Lefebvre’s formation, because on one hand it uncovers the distorted uses of his thought produced by the Nazi ideology, and, on the other hand, because it focuses on the crisis of the European civilization; an opportunity that our author will use to increase the analysis of the “life experience” of the human being. Nietzsche is the bridge for the reflections on everyday life and consequently on the city. Conversely, in the text he wrote on existentialism Lefebvre draws an assessment of his own youthful proto-existentialist tendencies and detaches himself from Sartre and from his philosophical proposal. During the Second World War Lefebvre actively partakes in the French partisan Resistance. In fact, in December 1940 he will move from Montargis to become a teacher in a Saint-Étienne high school until March 11, 1941. That will be the date in which Vichy’s collaborationist government revokes his right to teach due to his involvement with the communist movement. He will live clandestinely and participate in the Resistance until the end of the conflict, assisting an organized group between Marseille and Aix-en-Provence, the passage way for many exiled who fled to the United States. The café Au Brûleur de loup in Marseille and the Café Mirabeau in Aix-En-Provence, in fact, are the asylum for many theoreticians who have chosen to support the Resistance by trying to continue, notwithstanding the Nazi occupation, their intellectual and political work. In Marseille, Lefebvre not only meets his travel companions of the Parisian artistic avant-gardes, but also Simone Weil. In 1942 Vichy’s Army arrives and in 1943 Lefebvre leaves to the Pyrenees with his first wife and his first two sons, following some personal conflicts with one of the partisan leaders (who was accused by his wife of having molested

61 H. Lefebvre, Nietzsche, Syllepse, Paris, 2002 (1939). 62 H. Lefebvre, L’Existentialisme.

22

F. BIAGI

her).63 Once in the Pyrenees he will settle in the Vallée de Campan where he starts collecting information on the history of rural sociology that he will later on use for his doctoral dissertation. The Resistance will allow him to contact directly with the peasant population and in this way he will be in the conditions to carry out a study that today we could define “participant observation.” Here he will befriend the director of the Popular Art and Tradition Museum, Georges Henri Rivière, who, in addition to being a great anti-nazi spy, will propose that Lefebvre undertake a rural history enquiry of the area. In 1944 Lefebvre moves to the Spanish border to assist the Resistance organization. What he had learned during his military national service, is now useful from a strategic point of view; in fact one of his partisan chiefs is an old friend he had met at the time of the Conscription. Together they will organize the partisan cell that will operate in the French Pyrenees.64 At the end of the war he runs the Radiodiffusion Française in Toulouse, and in 1947 he is officially reinstated to the university teaching, obtaining the philosophy chair in the same city. Despite being recognized as one of the sharpest theoreticians of the Party, he will be removed from the radio because of his refusal to feed the Stalinist propaganda. Therefore his postwar enthusiasm disappears and several doubts start to arise: is it possible to be a Marxian philosopher inside the blind Stalinist boundaries? Is it possible to have an autonomous critical thought also by joining the French Communist Party? These doubts will assail him till the moment the Party expels him.65 Between 1948 and 1956 Lefebvre will publish several pamphlets: Diderot (1948),66 Pascal (vol. I, 1948),67 Contribution à l’esthétique

63 See: R. Hess, Henri Lefebvre et l’aventure du siècle, pp. 110–113. A. Merrifield, Henri Lefebvre: A Critical Introduction, Routledge, New York-London, 2006, pp. 3–4. Regarding Lefebvre’s family life see: S. Elden, Understanding Henri Lefebvre, p. 4. 64 Ibidem, pp. 114–116. 65 Ibidem, pp. 117–118. 66 H. Lefebvre, Diderot ou les affirmations fondamentales du matérialisme, L’Arche, Paris, 1983 (1948). 67 H. Lefebvre, Pascal, vol. I, Nagel, Paris, 1948.

1

A CRITICAL REFLECTION BEYOND THE ACADEMIC DISCIPLINES

23

(1953),68 Pascal (vol. II, 1954),69 Musset (1955),70 Rabelais (1955)71 and Pignon (1956).72 These literary critique texts, as Stuart Elden73 points out, are published by Lefebvre due to his not standing the Soviet banalization of the European literary production. In fact, during those years Zhdanov was in charge of the cultural censorship and, obeying Stalin’s command, he had the obligation to create obstacles to the European cultural influence on the Russian culture. Thus fighting the Soviet crusades against the continental literature and the French emissaries of this operation, such as Louis Aragon, Lefebvre dedicates his reflections to several authors whose feature is the fact that their intellectual biography underwent many censures and that they personally suffered constraints to their own freedom of thinking and expression. On one side Lefebvre finds affinity in such authors, since he was himself a theoretician who faced censorship from the institutions of his time; on the other side he highlights the double refusal of their legacy they were subjected to, during their lifetime as well as after their death. Between 1949 and 1961 Lefebvre becomes a researcher at the Centre National de la Recherche Scientifique in Paris. From 1947 he starts to write compulsively: the first volume of Critique de la vie quotidienne (1947),74 Logique formelle logique dialettique (1947)75 and Marx et la liberté (1947).76 Michel Trebitsch, in the foreword to the English edition of the first volume of the Critique de la vie quotidienne, recalls how the journal “La Pensée” praised him as “today’s most aware promoter of the living philosophy.”77 His fame increased with the publication of

68 H. Lefebvre, Contribution à l’esthétique, Anthropos, Paris, 2001 (1953). 69 H. Lefebvre, Pascal, vol. II, Nagel, Paris, 1954. 70 H. Lefebvre, Musset, L’Arche, Paris, 1955 (1970). 71 H. Lefebvre, Rabelais, Anthropos, Paris, 2001 (1955). 72 H. Lefebvre, Pignon, Le Musée de poche, Paris, 1970 (1956). 73 S. Elden, Understanding Henri Lefebvre, pp. 85–94. 74 H. Lefebvre, Critique of Everyday Life. Vol. I , Verso, London, 2008. 75 H. Lefebvre, Logique formelle et logique dialectique, Messidor-Éditions sociales, Paris, 1982 (1947). 76 New edition: H. Lefebvre, Karl Marx: metaphilosophie de la liberté, org. by Remi Hess, Presses Universitaires de Sainte Gemme, Paris, 2012 (1947). 77 See: Michel Trebitsch, “Preface”, in H. Lefebvre, Critique of Everyday Life. Vol. I .

24

F. BIAGI

Le marxisme (1948),78 published into a collection on political concepts that was very popular at the time (“Que sais-je?”), and Pour connaître la pensée de Karl Marx (1948).79 However, because of his studies being considered much too heterodox, Lefebvre could never be in good relation with the Party. His reading of Marx, devoid of any ideologic spirit, and his libertarian, democratic and radical political tendencies cost him the banishment from the French Communist Party in 1958. In reality, Lefebvre declared that he had been suspended, and that he took advantage of the situation to permanently leave a political community to which he didn’t feel he belonged, since the Party was strongly linked to the Stalinist ideology and unable to practice a critical judgment.80 For thirty years he fomented the internal struggle in the French Communist Party that he hoped to democratize and to drive back to the modalities of fraternal and emancipatory origins from which it had emerged. Instead, the French Communist Party lost Lefebvre as it was more committed in fighting the internal anti-Stalinist opposition then the authoritarian tendencies of De Gaulle. A huge breach between Lefebvre and the Party was the Algerian question, regarding which the French theoretician had always demanded greater clearness concerning the support given to the anti-colonial struggle. Just for curiosity sake we can recall an anecdote that Lefebvre himself mentions in Le temps des méprises. In 1956, when Kruscev had made up his mind to publicly condemn Stalin’s crimes, Lefebvre was in East-Berlin to take part of a convention. All of a sudden, right after the Congress that endorsed the official denouncement, he was sent to hold conferences on Marx’s works in several Berliner circles. The diffusion of the denouncement of Stalin’s crimes had filled East Germany with a new air: reading Marx through the party’s lens was no longer mandatory, and in this way the anti-authoritarian analysis were rehabilitated. Upon his return to France he told what had happened, but several companions from French Communist Party, who had labeled Lefebvre as traitor, didn’t believe him.81 Based on his personal knowledge of the Stalinism inside

78 H. Lefebvre, Le marxisme, PUF, Paris, 2003. 79 H. Lefebvre, Pour connaître la pensée de Karl Marx, Bordas, Paris, 1948 (several

re-prints until 1956, with a new preface). 80 See H. Lefebvre, Le temp des méprises, pp. 89–103. 81 Ibidem, pp. 96–97.

1

A CRITICAL REFLECTION BEYOND THE ACADEMIC DISCIPLINES

25

the French Party, he began his first reflections on the State82 that a decade later, from 1976 till 1978, will lead to a systematic study in four tomes. His theoretical and political production includes new texts regarding the Marxist thought: Pour connaître la pensée de Lénine (1957),83 Problémes actuels du marxisme (1958),84 the paramount political and cultural autobiography La Somme et le reste (1959),85 Introduction à la modernité (1962),86 Marx (1964).87 Then, between 1963 and 1964, he will publish with the aid of Norbert Guterman two anthologies of Marx’s writings,88 the famous text Métaphilosophie (1965)89 in which he will explain his relation with philosophy and the social sciences, and, finally, Position: contre les technocrates (1967).90 During the years that followed his expulsion from the French Communist Party, Lefebvre established a brotherly friendship with Guy Debord and the situationist movement that had been strongly influenced by the Critique de la vie quotidienne, (a topic that was referred to in several volumes)91 and by Lefebvre’s own seminars at the Nanterre University, after he abandoned the French National Centre for Scientific Research. Somewhere along those years Lefebvre introduced Raul Vaneigem to Guy Debord.92 His university career will begin much later: only in 1961 he

82 See: Ibidem, p. 100, “Stalinism means consolidation of the State and the State apparatus, while Marx, Engels and Lenin foresaw the weakening of the State and political apparatus. The question of the State remains the central question.” 83 H. Lefebvre, Pour connaître la pensée de Lénine, Bordas, Paris, 1957. 84 H. Lefebvre, Problémes actuels du marxisme, PUF, Paris, 1958. 85 H. Lefebvre, La somme et le reste, Anthropos, Paris, 2009 (1959). 86 H. Lefebvre, Introduction à la modernité, Minuit, Paris, 1962. 87 H. Lefebvre, Marx, PUF, Paris, 1964. 88 See: K. Marx, Karl Marx, Œuvres choisies, vol. II, Gallimard, Paris, 1964. 89 H. Lefebvre, Métaphilosophie. 90 H. Lefebvre, Position: contre les technocrates, Gonthier, Paris, 1967 (re-published with the title Vers le cybernanthrope, contre les technocrates, Denoël-Gonthier, Paris, 1971). 91 H. Lefebvre, Critique of Everyday Life. Vol. I . Id., Critique of Everyday Life. Vol. II , Verso, London, 2002 (1962). In 1968 Lefebvre will publish The Everyday Life in the Modern World (The Penguin Press, New York, 1971) that can be considered a synthesis but also an addition to the two preceding tomes on the concept of everyday life. 92 See: H. Lefebvre, Le temp des méprises, pp. 109–110. In our monograph, we will analyze with more details Lefebvre’s intellectual and personal relationship with the situationist movement.

26

F. BIAGI

will be summoned to the Sociology chair, firstly at the Strasbourg University, where he will remain until 1965, and afterwards, until 1968, at the Paris-Nanterre University. Finally, he will end his career at the Institut d’Urbanisme in Paris. Remi Hess and Gabriele Weigand astoundingly admit to the fact that “seldom an university teacher had as much influence over his students.”93 The insurgence of the French May in 1968 encourages Lefebvre to actively participate in the movement94 ; the book La proclamation de la Commune (1965)95 examines the Paris Commune of 1871, as we shall see, not only on a historical and political perspective, but particularly from the urban and spatial point of view; later he will publish Le droit à la ville (1968)96 that, together with the work on the Commune, strongly inspired the political debate of those years: “Some students of Nanterre tell me: ‘it is your book on the Commune that gave us this idea …’. In fact, in this book, I tried to show that the Paris laborers, expelled from the city center by Hausmann, wanted to recover their space, the space from which they had been driven away.”97 In 1966 he will carry out a reflection on the relation between language and society (Le Langage et la société)98 and a new book on Karl Marx’s thought (Sociologie de Marx).99 In Position: contre les technocrates (1967) the author will highlight the gradual process of expropriation carried out by technical progress and condemns—prophetically foreseeing the political and economical leading role that technocrats exert on nowadays society—the advance of 93 R. Hess, G. Weigand, “Henri Lefebvre et son œuvre”. 94 See: H. Lefebvre, Le temp des méprises, pp. 107–108. On this point Andy Merrifield is

more skeptic, and says that Lefebvre only supported the students’ claims at the beginning, without an active role in the revolt (A. Merrifield, Metromarxism: A Marxist Tale of the City, pp. 86–87). Moreover, Lefebvre does not concretely explain the intensity and the level of participation he had, limiting himself to express satisfaction and enthusiasm for the role of critical intellectual that the students (but not only) recognized to him. As we shall see, Lefebvre was interested in the scholar’s critical intellectual work: this was his mission with respect to the contradictions of society and the universe of the French left wing. 95 H. Lefebvre, La proclamation de la Commune, Gallimard, Paris, 1965. 96 H. Lefebvre, “The Right to the City”, in Writings on cities, Wiley-Blackwell, London,

1995 (1968). 97 H. Lefebvre, Le temp des méprises, p. 120. 98 Henri Lefebvre, Le Langage et la société, Gallimard, Paris, 1966. 99 H. Lefebvre, Sociologie de Marx, PUF, Paris, 1966.

1

A CRITICAL REFLECTION BEYOND THE ACADEMIC DISCIPLINES

27

an ideology: “Now it’s […] the time to denounce a misunderstanding. The image of the technocrat has become popular. One either accepts it or refuses it. The technocrat, the man of technical knowledge, holds the power or should hold it, according to some; to others, instead, he should refuse it. […] Nobody seems to question the existence of the technocrat. It is irrefutable: some groups, using this modern image, and animated by the ideology of technical rationalism, become influential and try to conquer political and decision-making power, without the possibility of objection. […] People qualified as technocrats are considered able to assume important attitudes and capable of efficacy.”100 From 1968 until the mid-seventies Lefebvre produces his most important works on the space and on the city: Le droit à la ville (1968), L’irruption de Nanterre au sommet (1968),101 Du rural à l’urbain, (1970)—texts that were collected by his student Spanish sociologist Mario Gaviria102 —La Révolution urbaine (1970),103 La pensée marxiste et la ville (1972),104 Espace et politique. Le droit à la ville II (1973),105 La survie du capitalisme (1973)106 and finally the huge study of La production de l’espace, (1974).107 Prior to these studies he had approached these topics through the study of the rural world: La Vallée de Campan, études de sociologie rurale (1963)108 and the travel guide Pyrénées (1965).109 La vie quotidienne dans le monde moderne 110 is simultaneous to Le droit à la ville and L’irruption de Nanterre au sommet, and it is the development of the “everyday life” inquiry that he had launched

100 H. Lefebvre, Position: contre les technocrates, p. 16. 101 H. Lefebvre, L’irruption de Nanterre au sommet, Syllepse, Paris, 1998 (1968). 102 H. Lefebvre, Du rural à l’urbain, Anthropos, Paris, 1970. 103 H. Lefebvre, The Urban Revolution, University of Minnesota Press, Minneapolis, 2003 (1970). 104 H. Lefebvre, The Marxist Thought and the City, University of Minnesota Press, Minneapolis, 2016 (1972). 105 H. Lefebvre, Espace et politique. Le droit à la ville II , Anthropos, Paris, 1972. 106 H. Lefebvre, La survie du capitalisme. La reproduction des rapports de production,

Anthropos, Paris, 2002 (1973). 107 H. Lefebvre, The Production of Space, Blackwell, London, 1991 (1974). 108 H. Lefebvre, La vallée de Campan: Étude de sociologie rurale, PUF, Paris, 1963. 109 H. Lefebvre, Pyrénées, Cairn, Paris 2000 (1965). 110 H. Lefebvre, The Everyday Life in the Modern World.

28

F. BIAGI

in 1947, reviewed in 1958 and expanded with a second volume in 1962. In 1968, apart from printing the famous text on the “right to the city,” Lefebvre realizes the need to immediately popularize his new reflections on this topic. Actually the volume is only a taste of the third part that will be printed later in 1981. It is my belief that it’s very important to ponder these publications trying to read them simultaneously, as if we had these three texts open together on our hands. It doesn’t seem to me that it is a coincidence that next to Le droit à la ville there is also the “everyday life” study: I think that the reflection on everyday life is part of the reflections on the “urban” and that both directions are examined on the praxis of what philosophy had, up to that point, only delineated on a theoretical plan. It is as if Lefebvre had the need to test in the present his masters from the past: Marx and Nietzsche. Because of this, in 1975 he declares the passage from philosophical studies to urban and spatial studies: “It is precisely like this that I reached the problematics of space. […] –the current situation […] doesn’t only determine the production of objects but also of what contains these objects, that is: space. I believe I remain faithful not only to myself but also to the Marxian thought the moment I face the spatial questions. In these writings, some believe that you can find geography, others sociology and others, still, history. But […] they regard contemporarily sociology, history and even philosophy. […] Some scholars, within the complexity of the modern world, use the guideline of other concepts, such as the act of writing, the unconscious, or language. I instead use the concept of space”111 We may undoubtedly notice in what way Lefebvre is a poliedric theoretician, moved by his love for research beyond the respect for boundaries preset by the knowledge domains. The ultimate aim of his analysis is that of representing the “bad conscience” of the society he inhabits, pointing out its contradictions by means of a refreshed reading of the Marxian thought. In a interview dating back to 1978, as he recalls the publication of the 1965 Métaphilosophie he states that: “I consider myself a metaphilosopher: this does not mean […] [building] a simple decoding, a metalanguage of philosophy. This means that I attribute a great importance to philosophy as a whole, from the pre-Socratics to the present days, but that the problems of the modern world overcome philosophy. To face them we need philosophical concepts […] but [I also believe] that

111 H. Lefebvre, Le temp des méprises, pp. 217–219.

1

A CRITICAL REFLECTION BEYOND THE ACADEMIC DISCIPLINES

29

the problems caused by global strategies, for example, cannot be studied starting from classical […] concepts (only).”112 From the seventies onwards Henri Lefebvre will publish profusely in order to offer more detailed information on the thought and theoretical analysis he proposes of society. As many critics have stated Lefebvre may seem chaotic at first sight or conversely may seem occasionally conceited because of his desire to intervene on so numerous topics; I nevertheless believe that he is guided by an uncontrollable spirit of critical analysis that turns him into a complete and universal theoretician more than capable of a global glance onto philosophical and sociological questions. In 1970, with the Le manifeste différentialiste 113 he creates the concept of “difference” and delineates some hypothesis in order to escape the homologation and homogenization produced by the consumption society. In that same year he discusses and criticizes the historicism in La fin de l’histoire.114 The following year he gathers in Au-delà du structuralisme 115 every essay he wrote during the controversy with Louis Althusser and his interpretation of the Marxian thought. In Althusser Lefebvre saw the emblem of the theoretician who serves the Party and its imposed guideline. The main critique he addresses to the Althusserian thought (hence the reason for Lefebvre and Althusser remaining bitter enemies throughout life) was that of ideologically hypostacizing Marx’s legacy within the Marxist ideology. Beyond the polemics between both theoreticians, we may say that Lefebvre has always longed to be a researcher exempt from any dogma or ideologic frame. He suffered bitterly for being removed from the Party due to his anti-dogmatic ideas, and recognized Althusser as the one who had made a radically opposed choice, and who harmed strongly his philosophical freedom. It should suffice to point out the libertarian drive that Lefebvre has always expressed toward the philosophical and sociological research. Hess and Weigand recall passionately the fact that he was the kind of teacher who allowed his students maximum freedom: “Lefebvre will allow his students the freedom to

112 H. Lefebvre, La révolution n’est plus ce qu’elle était, Éditions Libres-Hallier, Paris,

1978. 113 H. Lefebvre, Le manifeste différentialiste, Gallimard, Paris, 1970. 114 H. Lefebvre, La fin de l’histoire, Anthropos, Paris 2001 (1970). 115 H. Lefebvre, Au-delà du structuralisme, Anthropos, Paris, 1971.

30

F. BIAGI

develop their own research, their own thinking. It was a kind of practice that wasn’t at all common before May 1968, when the student was nothing but the propagator of his master’s ideas.”116 He will devote the years 1976 till 1978 to the publication of the four tomes of De l’État in which he widely explains his powerful critique to the forms of statal government, hypothesizing in the third volume— simultaneously to the capitalist device—a “state mode of production”117 ; the reflection starts with the modern age, crosses the nineteenth century and the twentieth-century totalitarianism to reach the forms of statal and capitalistic government of the second half of the twentieth century. Since 1973 he retires from college teaching to dedicate himself entirely to seminars and conferences all over the world; he goes back to writing about the “masters” of the philosophical domain with Hegel, Marx, Nietzsche ou le royaume des ombres (1975)118 and to fight against Louis Althusser with the re-printing of some essays in L’Ideologie structuraliste (1975).119 During the eighties he will continue to develop his philosophical interests with La présence et l’absence (1980),120 Abandonner Marx? (1983),121 Le retour de la dialectique. Douze mots-clefs pour le monde (1986),122 Lukács 1955 (1986)123 and Qu’est-ce penser? (1985).124 However, he goes back to urban and sociological themes in 116 R. Hess, G. Weigand, “Henri Lefebvre et son œuvre”. 117 I choose the translation “state mode of production” (mode de production étatique),

because it is used in the English selected essays on Lefebvrian State question. See: H. Lefebvre, State Space World: Selected Essays, edited by N. Brenner and S. Elden, University of Minnesota Press, Minneapolis, 2009. [Author’s note] See also: H. Lefebvre, De l’État I. L’État dans le monde moderne, Union Générale d’Éditions, Paris, 1976; Id., De l’État II. Théorie marxiste de l’État de Hegel à Mao, Union Général d’Editions, Paris, 1976; Id., De l’État III. Le mode de production étatique, Union Général d’Editions, Paris, 1977; Id., De l’État IV. Les contradictions de l’État moderne, Union Générale d’Éditions, Paris, 1978. 118 Henri Lefebvre, Hegel Marx Nietzsche ou le royaume des ombres, Casterman, Paris,

1975. 119 H. Lefebvre, L’Ideologie structuraliste, Seul, Paris, 1975. 120 H. Lefebvre, La présence et l’absence, Casterman, Paris, 1980. 121 H. Lefebvre, Une pensée devenue monde, Fayard, Paris, 1980. 122 H. Lefebvre, Le retour de la dialectique. Douze mots-clefs pour le monde, MessidorÉditions sociales, Paris, 1986. 123 H. Lefebvre, Lukács 1955, Aubier-Montaigne, Paris, 1986. 124 H. Lefebvre, Qu’est-ce penser?, Publisud, Paris, 1985.

1

A CRITICAL REFLECTION BEYOND THE ACADEMIC DISCIPLINES

31

1981 with the third volume of Critique de la vie quotidienne; instead, Du contrat de citoyenneté (1991),125 Éléments de rythmanalyse and Introduction à la connaissance des rythmes (1992) will be published posthumously. In this book he digs deeper onto the relation between the rhythms of urban spaces and the lifestyles of the Mediterranean city dwellers126 ; as we shall see, the last volume may be considered the fourth tome of Critique de la vie quotidienne. Lefebvre lives intensely the “short twentieth century”: when he was sixteen the Russian Revolution starts, and he passes away only two years after the fall of the Berlin Wall (and a few months before the implosion of the Soviet Union). His long life covers almost entirely the span of the twentieth century, and allows him to take part of the debates and the most important questions that featured it, committed as he was to make an assessment of the communist experience that “very often [was] generator of boredom, uncapable of interpreting a utopia and to carry out the everyday life critique.”127 In 1978 Paolo Jedlowski regretted the fact that “a complete valuation of Lefebvre’s work is outrageously absent in Italy.”128 This statement is still correct despite some attempts that were made to introduce the Hagetmau author in Italy. Among these attempts we remind the review, undertaken by Gianfranco Bettin, of the most renowned urban sociologists, which comprises a whole Chapter on the “urban upturn” of Lefebvrian studies129 ; Guido Borelli’s contribution, mainly concentrated in the production of textbooks130 ; the pages that Simon Parker dedicates to Lefebvre131 ; the interpretation, carried out by Luigi Mazza, which essentially focuses on the universalist question and that comprises a single 125 H. Lefebvre, Du contrat de citoyenneté, Syllepse, Paris, 1991. 126 H. Lefebvre, Éléments de rythmanalyse. Introduction à la connaissance des rythmes,

Syllepse, Paris, 1992. 127 R. Hess, G. Weigand, “Henri Lefebvre et son œuvre”. 128 P. Jedlowski, “Henri Lefebvre e la critica della vita quotidiana”, introduction to: H.

Lefebvre, La vita quotidiana nel mondo moderno. 129 G. Bettin, I sociologi della città, Il Mulino, Bologna, 1979, pp. 215–244. 130 See: G. Borelli, “Henri Lefebvre: la città come opera”, in G. Nuvolati (a cura di),

Lezioni di sociologia urbana, Il Mulino, Bologna, 2011, pp. 149–177. Id., “La città come opera”, in Immagini di città. Processi spaziali e interpretazioni sociologiche, Mondadori, Milano, 2012, pp. 61–92. 131 S. Parker, Urban Theory and the Urban Experience: Encountering the City.

32

F. BIAGI

chapter that is much too narrow considering the topics he proposed to examine in his book132 ; and the recent edition by Attilio Belli that reads the latest migrating processes on light of Lefebvre’s reflections on the concept of “difference.”133 The research aims at examining Lefebvre’s works and obtaining an assessment particularly trying to highlight the worth of Lefebvre’s reflections on what concerns the central topic of such undertaking: the urban question and the politics regarding the transformation of the city, of the living and of the dwelling of men. Paying attention to Lefebvre’s style of writing is a due. In fact his graphomania is perceivable in the overflowing river of the propositions that follow one after the other in his books; in his introduction to La production de l’espace Leonardo Ricci states that “getting in or going forward in Lefebvre’s book is a bit like getting into and walking through the Labyrinth. One who does not hold the thread is doomed.”134 As for Harvey Molotch opinion: “Lefebvre writes with density, with free digressions and mentioning theoreticians that he doesn’t quote. His style is rich of mysterious sentences […] Lefebvre’s way of writing is terrible.”135 The thread of this labyrinthic quest is therefore the transformation and evolution of the city and of the spatial institution of the society that the men have built. I believe that times have reached enough maturity to allow a renaissance of Lefebvre’s thought, but the vastness of his intellectual production forces us to split it, so that one can better focus upon such a production. For this reason I have decided to question Lefebvre starting with the most pressing topics of the early twentieth century; I think that the urban studies perspective is the most adequate to achieve a faithful interpretation. However, I shall leave the task of examining his most strictly theoretical or philosophical works for future researches, in order to thoroughly dig into the radical upturn that Lefebvre imprinted in his inquiries by means of the urban studies. This choice doesn’t preclude such a needed dialogue with his philosophical works. The analysis on the author will be full despite our preference regarding the urban turn. 132 L. Mazza, Spazio e cittadinanza. Politica e governo del territorio, Donzelli Editore, Roma, 2015. 133 See: A. Belli, Spazio, differenza e ospitalità. La città oltre Henri Lefebvre, Carocci, Roma, 2013. 134 L. Ricci, “Prefazione”, in H. Lefebvre, La produzione dello spazio, p. 14. 135 H. Molotch, “The space of Lefebvre”, in Theory and Society, Volume 22, n. 6,

1993, p. 893.

1

A CRITICAL REFLECTION BEYOND THE ACADEMIC DISCIPLINES

33

However, before approaching the urban studies area in itself, so that the author’s complexity and the prolificity of his thought can be fully reestablished, our wish is to deepen historically the connection he established with three theoreticians of his time: Guy Debord, Jean Paul Sartre e Louis Althusser. The concepts will be gradually discussed in the next chapters.

Henri Lefebvre and Guy Debord: A Controversial Intellectual Friendship The human and intellectual relationship between Henri Lefebvre and the Situationist movement, and especially with Guy Debord, is recalled by the philosopher as “a love story that didn’t end well.”136 Lefebvre compares his friendly relation with Debord to a passionate love, later degenerated: effectively the exchanges and insights that were developed in close partnership along five years were very productive, despite the bitter and unavoidable “divorce” that will lead Lefebvre to defining Debord as “a dogmatic just like André Breton,”137 and that will cause Debord himself and his group to relegate Lefebvre’s thought “into the rubbish of history.”138 Their friendship had been born around 1957, following Lefebvre’s publication of the Vers un romantisme révolutionnaire.139 However, Guy Debord and the French situationists were aware of the studies that the author had been undertaking since the forties concerning the everyday life and the city. On his side, Lefebvre had already gotten acquainted, since 1950, with the first situationist cells through architect Constant 136 H. Lefebvre, Le temp des méprises, pp. 109–110. The author reports the same comment in the interview with Kristin Ross, held at the University of California (in the year 1983), in Santa Cruz (See: K. Ross, “Lefebvre on the Situationists: An Interview”, in October, n. 79, Winter 1997, pp. 69–84). About the Lefebvre-Debord relationship is also essential the reconstruction carried out by Gianfranco Marelli in his political-intellectual biography of the situationist movement. See: G. Marelli, L’amara vittoria del situazionismo. Storia critica dell’Internationale Situationniste 1957 –1972, Mimesis, Milano-Udine, 2017, pp. 134–227. 137 K. Ross, “Lefebvre on the Situationists: An Interview”, p. 76. 138 Conseil Central de l’International Situationniste, “Aux poubelles de l’histoire”,

in Internationale Situationniste, n. 8, Janvier 1963. See all the issues of the journal in: https://www.larevuedesressources.org/internationale-situationniste-integraledes-12-numeros-de-la-revue-parus-entre-1958-et,2548.html. 139 H. Lefebvre, Vers un romantisme révolutionnaire, Lignes, Paris, 2011 (1957).

34

F. BIAGI

Nieuwenhuys and painter Asger Jorn, members of the Co.Br.A. Group in Amsterdam, who had read the first tome of Critique de la vie quotidienne and were fascinated by it. In 1953, Constant publishes For an Architecture of Situation, a text that will inspire the meaning of “moment” that will afterwards be deepened by Lefebvre. The political attitude of the Situationist Movement owes much to Lefebvre. At the same time, based on the “theory of moments” as explained in La somme et le reste the foresight on the concept of “built situation” and many reflections on the “everyday life” were born within the research group at the Centre d’études sociologiques founded by Lefebvre at the French National Centre for Scientific Research, where Debord himself would hold several seminars. Lefebvre declares that since 1961 he had already experienced some disagreements with Debord: the reasons pertained to the final conclusion of the studies on urban space following the acknowledgement of the ideologic form that urban planning had undertaken.140 To Lefebvre the demonstration of such a drift by urban planning should in itself be a conclusion that could open a new field of research for a new critical thought that would have used sociology as research tool. Afterwards, between 1962 and 1963, the intellectual alliance between Lefebvre and the situationist environment ends drastically. In fact, Lefebvre publishes an article entitled La signification de la Commune 141 in the journal Arguments,142 a preparatory text to the wider book La proclamation de la Commune he was working on. Here he will resume many ideas he had discussed with Guy Debord and his partner Michèlle Bernstein during a holiday that will take them to wander through France before reaching his birth home in Hagetmau. In this trip they work unceasingly on a document pertaining to the historical and political role of the Paris Commune. From these debates comes the background idea of the insurgency of the Communards as “revolutionary festival” that can subvert an everyday life

140 K. Ross, “Lefebvre on the Situationists: An Interview”, p. 77. 141 H. Lefebvre, “La signification de la Commune”, in Arguments, n. 27–28, 1962,

pp. 11–19. 142 About the historical framework of the journal and the group Arguments and its relationship with Lefebvre see: M. Poster, Existential Marxism in Postwar France, from Sartre to Althusser, Princeton University Press, Princeton, 1976, pp. 209–263; R. Shields, Lefebvre. Love and Struggle, Routledge, London, 1998, pp. 134–135.

1

A CRITICAL REFLECTION BEYOND THE ACADEMIC DISCIPLINES

35

marked by social oppression.143 This text, initially a manuscript, will be typed by Debord and Bernstein and then handed out to Lefebvre who will much later publish the article on Arguments. He publicly declares that he is working on a book pertaining to the 1871 Commune. This fact will irritate Debord and the Situationist group since they feel betrayed by Lefebvre who doesn’t quote the source of those ideas on the Commune, and doesn’t inform them on the upcoming publication. The Central Committee of the Situationist International will answer the article in the journal Arguments with an irreverent article, Aux poubelles de l’histoire! against professor Lefebvre.144 We can objectively agree on the fact that Lefebvre’s behavior was incorrect toward the circle of friends and theoreticians that he met so frequently at the time; he should have quoted them or he should have informed of his editorial projects the closest partners, with whom he had produced these ideas. However, the situationists were not less severe: they attacked violently Lefebvre for quite some time. After that, another clash helped to make the relationship between Debord and Lefebvre irreconcilable. The journal Arguments loses the central role it had assumed in the political debate between 1962 and 1963. In fact Lefebvre considers that editorial project to be dead and leaves the group. The author had never directly partaken at the Arguments project, even if the friendship that linked him to Kostas Axelos and Edgar Morin made him support the journal and offer his contribution to the debate that was proposed. The editorial staff was entirely composed by theoreticians exiled from the orthodoxy of the French Communist Party, and Arguments was a strategy to open a new reflection space in 1956: the rebellion against the Party’s orthodoxy inaugurated a reflection on communism exempt of the dogma and prejudice of Soviet imprint.145 143 See: K. Ross, “Lefebvre on the Situationists: An Interview”, pp. 79–80; H. Lefebvre, Le temp des méprises, p. 159. 144 See: G. Debord, A. Kotanyi, R. Vaneigem, “Sur la Comune”, in Internationale Situationniste, n. 12, Paris, Septembre 1969; Conseil Central de l’International Situationniste, “Aux poubelles de l’histoire”, in Internationale Situationniste, n. 8, Janvier 1963. 145 Michel Trebitsch recalls that Arguments, together with Socialisme ou Barbarie (1949–1967), was one of the few spaces of anti-stalinist political reflection that succeeded in deepening a critical and anti-bureaucratic thought, opening new libertary research paths to the French Marxism. Arguments and Socialisme ou Barbarie are among the very first to counterpose to the burocratic and statual form the communist traditions of councilism, inspired by Antonio Gramsci and his Ordine Nuovo and by the communalist forms that were born at the core of the labor movement, from the Paris Commune to the early

36

F. BIAGI

Expecting the conclusion of the experience of Arguments, Lefebvre willingly accepts Debord’s proposal that is to found a new journal that can occupy the political space and debate that Arguments promoted. Therefore Debord assigns Lefebvre the task of establishing contacts with publishers, in order to start the journal of the Internationale Situationniste. Due to a misunderstanding, Lefebvre misplaces his contacts with the publisher, more precisely his address and phone number, and even if he takes all of his efforts to recover them he still won’t succeed in solving the problem. Because of this Debord accuses him of treason, of having done all he could to sabotage the publishing project of the Internationale Situationniste. From then on the relation will become irrecoverable. Nevertheless Lefebvre offers two slightly different versions about this event. In Le temp des méprises 146 he accuses the Situationists of willing to practice a genuine hegemony, typical of the radical left-wing sectors fighting each other, on the ashes of Arguments, while in the interview he gave to Kristin Ross147 he tells the whole story that includes the misunderstandings with the publisher and his intuition of following an anti-authoritarian reflection on communism, more integrated into the reality of everyday life, by means of the creation of a new journal that could take the role of reference point for the situationist current. The author held several disagreements with many students in Strasbourg who declared to be followers of the Situationists148 ; he will accuse their extremism in the political practice, often very little inclined to face the reality of the balance of power. Therefore, he gives due credit to the French situationist movement for giving some insights for a serious reflection on the “urban” and on everyday life (when one doesn’t consider the polemics around the thesis on the Commune), however he still remains somewhat unsatisfied regarding the sectarism and the rush in the political

Soviets of the Russian Revolution and the German Spartacist insurgencies. With foresight, yet before the Situationist Movement, they will produce a deeper reflection, also criticizing the myth of Mao’s experience in China. (See: M. Trebitsch, “Voyages autour de la révolution. Les circulations de la pensée critique de 1956 à 1968”, in G. Dreyfus-Armand, R. Frank, M.-F. Lévy, M. Zancarini-Fournel (edited by), Les Années 68. Le temps de la contestation, IHTP-CNRS/Complexe, coll. “Histoire du temps present”, Paris-Bruxelles, 2000, pp. 69–87). 146 See: H. Lefebvre, Le temp des méprises, p. 160. 147 See: K. Ross, “Lefebvre on the Situationists: An Interview”, pp. 78–79. 148 See: Ibidem, p. 74.

1

A CRITICAL REFLECTION BEYOND THE ACADEMIC DISCIPLINES

37

action, that often, according to Lefebvre, led the movement to forsake the critical and reflexive study in the name of a fetishism for rebellion. To Lefebvre, in fact, philosophical and sociological reflection walk hand in hand with political action, whereas the situationist movement often fell into the need of action, abandoning in certain moments the critical reflection. I believe that the historical reconstruction of this dense intellectual activity helps in understanding the plot from which certain topics and demands for reflection appear. The interest of our research, as we shall see in the following chapters, starts from the genealogy of the intellectual legacy of Lefebvre, Debord and the whole situationist group, regarding some topics that are paramount to our present. The personal relationship of these authors are also pertinent to our study as they offer a picture of the effervescence of the debate in the sixties in France, times in which political debate crossed simultaneously political forces, squares, streets and the academic environment. Very often journals were spaces of elaboration and questioning the present that assumed high academic value, which however benefited from its direct connection with society. The discussion proposed by Lefebvre and Debord is nowadays still forgotten and obscured by other more seductive currents of thought concerning the social problems that both authors pointed out, as we shall see.

Henri Lefebvre and Jean Paul Sartre: From the Polemic on the Theoretical Foundations of Existentialism to Anti-Stalinist Action Within the French Communist Party The relationship between Lefebvre and Sartre regarded mainly the role of both theoreticians within the Party and Lefebvre’s refusal to recognize existentialism as the only philosophical theory of Marxian matrix.149

149 Michael Kelly, despite the careful historical and thematic reconstruction of the Lefebvre-Sartre relationship, tends to level the harshest debates to enhance the shared ground of the two philosophers. See: M. Kelly, “Towards a Heuristic Method: Sartre and Lefebvre”, in Sartre Studies International, Volume 5, n. 1, 1999, pp. 1–15. Instead, in a more acute way, Ulrich Müller-Schöll identifies a common ground between the two authors, beyond their conflicts, comparing the two points of view and outlining new connections, starting from the concept of “praxis”. See: U. Müller-Schöll, Le systeme et le reste. La théorie critique de Henri Lefebvre, Anthropos, Paris, 2007, pp. 235–278. On the

38

F. BIAGI

The Hagetmau philosopher recognizes that on what concerns Sartre there has always been a lot of mistrust on both sides.150 Has we have seen, Lefebvre sees in existentialism a re-elaboration of Schelling that lacks originality, and accuses Sartre of having reappropriated the reflection made by the “Philosophies” group, when they were publishing the journal L’Esprit. In fact, Lefebvre criticizes the existentialist thought for not having given an adequate philosophical status to men’s everyday life, and of having put it aside on the sphere of non-authenticity. Clearly, as we shall see, Lefebvre cannot digest Marxist trends that have chosen idealistic theoretical paths, disregarding the analysis of everyday life; and it is precisely this “original sin,” much too idealist, that will induce Lefebvre to not considering the existentialist movement as part of the group of theories that have followed Marx’s lineage.151 In this regard one brings to mind that the first Chapter of L’existentialisme is entitled “Porquoi je fus existentialiste et comment je suis devenu marxiste”,152 aiming at pointing out the radical upturn of moving to new Marxian studies, conceiving therefore existentialism as a transformation and deviation from Marx’s legacy.153 Furthermore, Lefebvre condemns Sartre for his little knowledge of Marx, from the moment that the Parisian philosopher, in Critique de la raison dialectique,154 ascribes to him the “progressive-regressive” method of analysis; thanking him for having enlightened the French Marxism by means of this intuition; in fact, Lefebvre states that he had not created a new historical method for social sciences, since he had reappropriated it from Marx (in Contribution to the Critique of Political Economy) so

concept of “praxis” in Lefebvre and Sartre see also: P. Lantz, “Praxis et nature vivante: Henri Lefebvre et Jean-Paul Sartre”, in La somme et le reste, n. 7, juin 2006, pp. 9–17. 150 See: H. Lefebvre, Le temp des méprises, pp. 148–149. 151 Ibidem, p. 143. 152 H. Lefebvre, L’existentialisme, pp. 3–83. 153 For a careful study of the Lefebvre-Sartre relationship, around the debate on “Exis-

tentialism and Marxism”, see: A. Dall’Ara, “L’existentialisme et le marxisme – Les parcours divers de Jean-Paul Sartre et Henri Lefebvre”, in La somme et le reste, n. 4, juin 2005, pp. 9–15. 154 “However, in my opinion, it was a Marxist, Henri Lefebvre, who provided a simple and irreproachable method for integrating sociology with history from the perspective of materialist dialectics” (J.-P. Sartre, Critique de la raison dialectique. Tome 1: Théorie des ensembles pratiques, Gallimard, Paris, 1985, p. 41).

1

A CRITICAL REFLECTION BEYOND THE ACADEMIC DISCIPLINES

39

he could apply it to rural and urban sociology.155 However, Remi Hess recalls that Sartre is one of the very few to value Lefebvre and his Marxian method; in fact many contemporary authors, such as Louis Althusser, Guy Berger, and Lucien Febvre, attacked his thought precisely due to his “progressive-regressive” method that, as we shall see, substantiates the Marxian thought into praxis, by joining the historical analysis with the sociological one.156 Secondly, Lefebvre radically questions the role played by Sartre concerning his contemporary partaking in the Communist Party. The author condemns him for having set in motion a personal anti-Stalinist battle against the leadership of the Party, choosing therefore to weave an auto-referential dialectic instead of supporting the internal left-wing minority and thus searching actual allies in Lefebvre himself and in the dissatisfaction of the social base. The Hagetmau philosopher harshly criticizes Sartre’s leading role and his fame (still acknowledging his altruism), and accuses him of considering the Party to be exclusively a monolithic structure, incapable of articulating different visions, and hence choosing to debate solely with the most prominent leaders, destituting and weakening the actions that aimed at overturning the balance of power within the leadership of the French Communist Party.157 Lefebvre maintains that he has chosen to publish some articles in the journal Les Temps Modernes,158 a reference point to the existentialist movement, in order to start a dialogue with Sartre on the problematic of the opposition to the Stalinian majority of the French Communist Party. Nevertheless he became disappointed by the indifference of Sartre. Adding to this, he regrets that the redaction of Les Temps Modernes failed to publish an article entitled La querelle de l’aliénation, in which he discussed the problematics of man’s alienation in modern life compared it to existentialist theory and, more generally, to the philosophical domain, sustaining the

155 See: R. Hess, Henri Lefebvre et l’aventure du siècle, pp. 181–187. As we will see in the second chapter, Sartre uses Lefebvre’s sociological investigation method exposed in H. Lefebvre, “Perspective de la Sociologie Rurale”, in Du rural a l’urbain, Anthropos, Paris, 2001, pp. 63–78. 156 See: R. Hess, Henri Lefebvre et l’aventure du siècle, p. 185. 157 See: H. Lefebvre, Le temp des méprises, pp. 144–146, 152. 158 For a historical reconstruction of the journal’s position in the French and European debate (despite the superficiality with which he speaks of Henri Lefebvre) see: A. Boschetti, L’impresa intellettuale. Sartre e “Les temps Modernes”, Dedalo, Bari, 1986.

40

F. BIAGI

hypothesis that the existentialist universe had willed to elude some questions since it didn’t know how to look for or find an answer.159 Lefebvre’s opinion is that existentialism wasn’t able to fully face the nihilism of the capitalist society, limiting itself to slogans, as for instance the famous saying by Sartre “Hell is other people.”160 The author, in fact, maintains that the only possible idea about nihilism is that of fighting it, and to undertake that kind of duel it is paramount to choose the field of critique of the everyday life and of the capitalist government devices.161 Despite the strong opposition he faced in his first autobiography La somme et le reste—more than ten years later—Lefebvre undertakes a selfcritique162 regarding the violent tone of the pamphlet L’existentialisme (1946), maintaining that the book could have had, as subtitle, “the art of making enemies,”163 so that the exaggerated impetuosity with which he attacked Sartre could be highlighted. The attitude with which recalls those 1958 events is completely changed: although underlining the differences of thought, Lefebvre expresses his wish to reopen a dialogue with his ex-comrade, and, after contextualizing the boiling atmosphere of debate in the forties, excuses himself.164 Besides, it should be recalled that Les Temps Modernes published the article in which Lefebvre answered the Party regarding his banishment, with the desire to help the author to overcome the invisibility that the French Communist Party had imposed upon him.165 A choice that wasn’t predictable despite the fact that the 159 See: H. Lefebvre, Le temp des méprises, p. 146. On the concept of alienation between

Lefebvre and Sartre see: L. Husson, “Sartre et Lefebvre: Alienation et quotidienneté”, in E. Barot, Sartre et le Marxisme, La Dispute, Paris, 2011, pp. 217–239, 226. 160 J.-P. Sartre, Huis Clos, suivi de Les Mouches, Folio, Paris, 2000. 161 H. Lefebvre, Le temp des méprises, pp. 151–152. 162 H. Lefebvre, La somme et le reste, p. 504. 163 Ibidem, p. 501. 164 See the preface to the second edition of L’existentialisme of Remi Hess, where he carefully reconstructs the entire debate around the book (R. Hess, “Henri Lefebvre ‘philosophe’”, pp. XXV–XXXV). 165 Lefebvre speaks of his expulsion from the French Communist Party as if it had been a release from a heavy burden in the text “L’exclu s’inclut” (in Les temps modernes, n. 149, juillet, 1958, pp. 226–237) and he will divulge an unpublished excerpt of La somme et le Reste just before the printing (“Le soleil crucifié”, in Les temps modernes, n. 155, 1959, pp. 1016–1029); these articles are useful to understand that, despite the contrasts, Les temps modernes was the first container (together with Socialisme ou Barbarie) of anti-Stalinist Marxian critical thought.

1

A CRITICAL REFLECTION BEYOND THE ACADEMIC DISCIPLINES

41

journal had been born against the Party lines. Beyond the debates and disagreements between Lefebvre and Sartre, the Parisian philosopher allowed Lefebvre not being further emarginated. In fact, between the fifties and the sixties, Les Temps Modernes was one of the most important journals, together with Socialisme ou Barbarie, of the anti-Stalinian Marxian galaxy that openly challenged the Party.

Henri Lefebvre and Louis Althusser: Against Structuralism Structuralism is a polychromous theoretical frame that can multiply in time its colors. Therefore offering a unitarian synthesis to it is a complex endeavor.166 Since the dawn of the seventies, in France, it becomes the most seductive idea to the point it will conquer—within and outside the European borders—almost entirely the French theoretical debate. In fact that method will be applied to several domains: linguistics (Ferdinand de Saussure) anthropology (Claude Lévi-Strauss), onto psychanalysis (Jacques Lacan) until it reaches social sciences and philosophy (Louis Althusser). As is widely known, Henri Lefebvre remained at the margins of the philosophical, sociological and political debate precisely for not giving to this fascination, to the point that he became one of its most prominent opposers. As it is, Lefebvre’s work and legacy remained in the dark for a long time for two main reasons: the opposition to the fame of the structuralist school that we have just referred and the lack of will from Lefebvre himself of setting up a school of thought that would enable the systematization of his theoretical contribution. For these reasons we wish to deepen the harsh anti-structuralist dialectics of Lefebvre, limiting however our enquiry to the divergence with Louis Althusser.167 The

166 For a complete summary of the fertility of the structuralist school see: F. Dosse, Histoire du structuralisme, 2 vols., Dècouverte, Paris, 2012. 167 To describe the philosophical “demon” who animated his intellectual parable, Louis Althusser recalls—in his autobiography—Lefebvre and his course: “C’est ce que je fis, dans la grande ligne de toute l’histoire de la philosophie, prenant à mon compte la prétention classique et sans cesse répétée qui veut, de puis Platon jusqu’à Heidegger même (en ses formules de théologien négatif) en passant par Descartes et Kant et Hegel, que la philosophie soit celle qui embrasse tout d’un seul coup d’oeil (Platon: sunoptikos), qui pense le tout, ou les conditions de possibilité ou d’impossibilité du tout (Kant), qu’elle se rapporte à Dieu ou au sujet humain, donc qu’elle maîtrise ‘La Somme et le Reste’

42

F. BIAGI

sharp debate against the École Normale philosopher is the most emblematic, although Lefebvre didn’t avoid the confrontation on the domain of structuralist linguistics with Logique formelle logique dialettique and Le langage et la société. Since it is almost impossible to attain a reductio ad unum of the structuralist school we now wish to resume the thread of debate between Lefebvre and the father of structuralist Marxism, that is, Althusser. Due to Althusser in fact structuralism is used as method of interpretation of the legacy of Marx, separating his intellectual biography in two parts and introducing the concept of “epistemological break” into the Marxian reflection: on one side young Marx’s thought still influenced by master Hegel and humanism, on the other side the thought of a more mature Marx, represented by the Capital and by an improved scientific systematization of the knowledge luggage piled up, by means of “structural” study of capitalism.168 At the moment Althusser operates this upturn and discusses Young Marx, he attacks Lefebvre and the collection of Marxian texts that was published and translated together with Guterman in 1934, maintaining that both authors had neglected to put the texts into context.169 On his side, Althusser founds a theory of the study of Marxian works that can be defined as “scientific.” The feature of his approach is his will to inaugurate a theory that is itself an exact science of the political economy critique, which can be used to demystify the ideologic semblances that characterize the structure of the society subjected to capitalism. To Althusser, the class struggle operates first of all on the theoretical analysis level. The so called scientificity necessarily offers theory the leading role. On can therefore deduct two consequences that mark

(formule d’Henri Lefebvre)” (L. Althusser, L’avenir dure longtemps suivi de Les faits, Paris, Stock-IMEC, 1994 [1992], p. 197). 168 Among others, we refer to the main texts of Althusser discussed by Lefebvre. See: L. Althusser, Pour Marx, La Découverte, Paris, 2005 (1965). Lire le Capital had several editions. We quote the complete one, which contains all the essays and also Althusser’s seminars at the École Normale Supérieure: L. Althusser, Lire Le Capital, Puf, Paris, 2014 (1965). 169 See: L. Althusser, “À propos du marxisme”, in Revue de l’enseignement philosophique, III année, n. 4, avril-juin 1953, pp. 15–19; Id., “Note sur le matérialisme dialectique”, in Revue de l’enseignement philosophique, IV année, n. 1–2, octobre–novembre 1953, pp. 11–17.

1

A CRITICAL REFLECTION BEYOND THE ACADEMIC DISCIPLINES

43

Althusser’s method: Marxism—understood as study, comment and interpretation of Marx’s works—should follow the more mature Marx and try to build a theory that can be defined as exact as other sciences; the Marxist theory must examine the structure of the capitalist way of production, looking at the structure of the model produced by political economy in order to defeat the system that it criticizes and of which it denounces the contradictions. In this way it will be possible to recognize in the economic structure itself the crucial and superior point from which the other contradictions inevitably derive. The economics, therefore, defines from above the others layers of analysis offering the structural skeleton in which the modern society, which is shaped by the Capital, unfolds. Thus, the “theoretical practice” rules over the political praxis, schedules the times, making it impossible the birth of a Marxist politics outside a demystifying intellectual work. In other words, Althusser proclaims the autonomy of theory over the empiric tangibility, and from such autonomy derives the antagonist politics and the inauguration of a new Marxist scholasticism that chooses to highlight the Capital “structure,” understood as key concept that is able to fully reveal the Marxian corpus. Moreover it is right to recall that Althusser, according to Lefebvre, embodied the role of the strict and orthodox Party theoretician; if on one hand he diverged from the French Communist Party on what pertained to some interpretations of Marx, on the other hand he politically featured himself as the theoretician who would be incapable of denying the “great father”: the Party.170 The dissidences from the Party were limited to the field of philosophical dispute: politically, he never contradicted it nor assumed opposing stands; if, in light of the facts, the misreading was

170 Althusser’s most famous controversy against the Party concerns Marx’s humanism. Althusser advocated an anti-humanist interpretation of Marx, on one hand considering as a dominant ideology the rhetoric on human rights and the concept of equality and freedom that derives from it; on the other accusing the writings of Young Marx as still immature and excessively influenced by liberal ideas. The Party, however, limited itself to spreading the Moscow interpretation popularized by Roger Garaudy. Against Althusser and against the Party, Lefebvre was neither humanist nor anti-humanist (as he says in Le temp des méprises ); however he proposed an idea of “man” integrated in the concrete reality of everyday life, continuing to use the concept of “man”, but without abstracting it from history (as formal liberal logic does). Hence the double controversy with Althusser and with the leadership of the French Communist Party. Althusser’s controversy about anti-humanism will also be contested by Jacques Rancière starting from his work in the archives of the French labor movement of the nineteenth century.

44

F. BIAGI

obvious, the practice of self-critique acquitted the individual and the organization. In 1968 the Althusser School experiences a period of profound crisis that coincides with the debate surrounding Maoism and the internal divisions in the “Cahiers marxistes-leninistes,” the main tool of theoretical development of the Althusser School of the sixties.171 Contrarily to Lefebvre, the philosopher of Rue d’Ulm will have great difficulty to understand the May 68 movement, labeling the student rebellion as “petite bourgeois” and consequently attracting the antipathy of the movement itself. The French 1968 will also cause the first diaspora of his students to the point that Jacques Rancière breaks up with his “teacher” Althusser and the structuralist method and initiates new philosophical paths.172 After limiting ourselves to delineating Althusser’s parable, circumscribing his domain to the intersections with Lefebvre’s thought, we go back now to Lefebvre’s objections in order to highlight the conflictive relations that both philosophers always entertained. Above all, to Lefebvre there isn’t a corpus of study called Marxism, nor is it conceivable to him the identification with a pretense “scientificity.”173 Shortly, Marxism doesn’t exist and there is no Marxism science: in fact, the study of his thought is the “movement of the revolutionary and subversive action developed in the language, in the concept, in the theory”.174 Lefebvre, as we shall see, highlights the primacy of praxis over theory, of the “living” over the “thinking.” The primordial origin of his interpretation of Marx— and as a consequence even of his concept on politics—starts in men’s everyday life, and not in the theory of the capitalist structures of oppression. Therefore, there are many and various Marxisms, an “extraordinarily rich range”175 that cannot be hypostatized in a single organic theory that is “scientific.” One could say that as far as Lefebvre is concerned Marxism 171 On the importance of the Cahiers marxistes-leninistes within the development and then the decline of Althusser’s influence, see: F. Chateigner, “D’Althusser à Mao. Les Cahiers marxistes-leninistes”, in Pro chinois et maoisme en France (et dans les espaces francophones), Dissidences, n. 8, 2010. 172 On the intellectual course of Jacques Rancière see: G. Campailla, “Dalla Struttura alle Scene. Qualche riflessione sull’itinerario teorico e politico di Jacques Rancière”, in Consecutio Temporum. Rivista critica della postmodernità, n. 5, Ottobre 2013 (online). 173 H. Lefebvre, Le temp des méprises, pp. 182–194. 174 Ibidem, p. 183. 175 Ibidem.

1

A CRITICAL REFLECTION BEYOND THE ACADEMIC DISCIPLINES

45

could be compared to a byzantine mosaic, clear, well-defined, with very precise borders: the expression of a certain alternative and radical image of world, but composed of so many tiny tiles of various colors often distant from each other, despite belonging to a single totality. Althusser wants to build an infallible theory of critique of the Capital from the Marxian legacy so that there can finally be the right tool box to organize political action; instead Lefebvre reinterprets the Marxian legacy in fieri, into the immanence of the anti-capitalist rebellion praxis and the dialectic experiencing of human oppression and emancipation. He is not interested in creating a science and a Marxist system, but rather uses those intuitions, that he believes they might be more useful to understanding and to intervening in the quotidian. Lefebvre observes reality and then reads Marx, also correcting and updating him. Conversely, Althusser starts by reading Marx and then watches and intervenes in reality. Lefebvre reads the Marxists, and therefore also reads Althusser, starting from the two categories of “thinking” and of “living”: the working class lives the capitalist exploitation, it doesn’t think about it. The approach Althusser proposes, according to Lefebvre— who defines it in light of the “directed spontaneity” thesis—,176 refers to the foundation of a science and of a “master”—the Party—that can finally politically confer awareness to excluded subjects. Contrarily, in Lefebvre’s thought we find an engine that is constantly in motion between both spheres of theory and praxis, of thinking and experiencing, allowing clearer priority to the “lived”, so that the risk of producing a theory incapable of grasping a new dynamics of performative emancipation is removed. In the Althusserian orientation Lefebvre perceives above all the degeneration of Leninism, that is the idea of the supremacy of the theory of the science of a master—the Marxist philosopher or the Party—whose mission is that of liberating the masses, otherwise prey of their own anti-strategic and badly organized spontaneity, as if he (it) were their only genuine guide. As we’ll be able to understand later on, Lefebvre cannot conceive the intervention of an avant-garde, be it political or philosophical, as he perceives the “living” as a wide force-field where all men intervene collectively, growing in the pedagogic exchange simultaneously to their being-in-common; some offering their contribution with theoretical critique tools, others with their everyday life experience.

176 Ibidem, p. 188.

46

F. BIAGI

In second place, he sees in the parable of Althusser the contraposition of another ideology to the ruling one, revealing therefore the so called “Althusser’s paradox.”177 According to Lefebvre the ruling ideology contradicts the reality of facts, the actual and tangible praxis, and not—as Althusser conversely maintains—the scientific theory. From this reasoning he deducts that Althusser considers ideology as rooted into the structure of the ruling power axis: it plays a role in society beyond the awareness of its usage by the oppressors. Instead, according to Lefebvre, the production of the ruling ideology is a conscious counter-revolutionary praxis, enacted by the status quo 178 holders. Finally, it is possible to deduce that—contrary to Althusser, who is majorly linked to a vertical idea of the Party and of intellectual commitment—the experience of anti-fascist Resistance led our author to believe he was part of the whole communist movement. The philosophical and sociological study is only one of the tools to share, and to use to understanding critically the world, however it is not a valid reason to consider oneself to be superior.

Henri Lefebvre and the Birth of French Urban Sociology Until now we have wished to refer to the poliedricity of Lefebvrian thought highlighting the main connections and debates he exchanged with the philosophic universe of authors contemporary to him. Now, we wish to consider the author in the sociological domain, in order to understand the jump between two disciplines hardly separable that however hold some degree of autonomy of inquiry. We do not want to separate Lefebvre, the philosopher, from Lefebvre, the sociologist: it would be an impossible enterprise and inadequate to his teachings, on the contrary, we want to examine in depth how the author acted within the ongoing debate during the birth of urban sociology in France.179

177 See: H. Lefebvre, “Les paradoxes d’Althusser”, in L’Idéologie structuraliste. 178 H. Lefebvre, The Sociology of Marx, Chapter III, Columbia University Press, New

York, 1982, pp. 59–88. 179 In this regard, see the monographic dossier organized by J.-Y. Authier, A. Bourdin, M.-P. Lefeuvre, “Actualité de la sociologie urbaine dans des pays francophones et non anglophones”, in Sociologies, 15 novembre 2012 (online); see also the monographic dossier

1

A CRITICAL REFLECTION BEYOND THE ACADEMIC DISCIPLINES

47

Above all it should be pointed out that between the sixties and the seventies a process of politicization of the urban question takes place in social sciences, simultaneously with their institutionalization as academic disciplines: Grégory Busquet defines it as radicalization from the sociological point of view by means of new readings on Karl Marx’s works.180 Both processes, that is that of politicization and of institutionalization of the discipline, find their roots way back in 1951, when the Centre d’études sociologiques of the Paris CNRS puts Georges Friedmann—a sociologist of work— in charge of organizing a permanent seminar entitled Villes et campagnes 181 so that studying the urbanization produced by the reconstruction of the transalpine country following the Second World War can be initiated.182 Henri Lefebvre, his future colleague in Nanterre Alain Touraine and the anthropologist Paul-Henry Chombart de Lauwe183 will also take part in these seminars. Besides, these seminars witness a wide interdisciplinary participation with the presence of historians such as Fernand Braudel and Georges Lefebvre, geographers, economists, ethnographers, demographers, and psychologists.184 The first steps of the discipline are still confused; the preferred vision is historical with nostalgic traits regarding the rural world, taking use—as Lefebvre notices—of a certain Marxism that holds some prejudice against the urban

edited by: A. Collet, P. Simay, “Y a-t-il des urban studies à la française?”, in Metropolitiques, 3 luglio 2013 (online). 180 See: G. Busquet, Idéologie urbaine et pensée politique dans la France de la période 1958–1981, doctoral thesis discussed on 7 December 2007 at Paris XII University – Val de Marne, Institut d’Urbanisme de Paris, p. 99 sqq. 181 G. Friedmann (edited by), Villes et campagnes. Civilisation urbaine et civilisation rurale en France, second sociological week organized by the Center for Sociological Studies (CNRS) in 1951, Centre d’études sociologiques Paris, Librairie Armand Colin, 1953. 182 See: H. Raymond, “Urbanisation et changement social”, in H. Mendras, M. Verret (edited by), Les Champs de la sociologie française, Armand Colin, Paris, 1988, pp. 63–73. 183 See: P.-H. Chombart de Lauwe, Un Anthropologue dans le siècle. Entretiens avec Thierry Paquot, Descartes&Cie, Paris, 1996. As is known, in several respects Chombart de Lauwe was Lefebvre’s most seductive competitor in the formation of urban studies as an academic discipline. About the contrast between Chombart de Lauwe and Lefebvre see: L. Costes, Lire Henri Lefebvre, Le droit à la ville. Vers la sociologie de l’urbain, Ellipses, Paris, 2009, pp. 19–24. 184 See: G. Busquet, Idéologie urbaine et pensée politique dans la France de la période 1958–1981, p. 101.

48

F. BIAGI

world.185 In fact the relations between city and rural space by means of large mass migrations of peasants are highlighted, as are also the internal migrations across France, comparing the rural civilization to the urban one.186 Thus, French urban sociology comes immediately to light as interdisciplinary domain, emerging from the affluency of several contributions and perspectives. In the fifties, Lefebvre was renowned not only for his philosophic studies and inquiries on the everyday life but also—as we shall see—for his early studies on rural sociology, and in these seminars he offers his contribution within this trail. An additional factor that will allow a clear recognition of the domain by the French Academy will be the Royaumont Convention in 1968, under the name Urbanisme et sociologie.187 The Convention aims at gathering all of the theoreticians of the city and the urban question in France, allowing on one side the dialogue with public institutions, and on the other side achieving an assessment of the early years of this teaching.188 Lefebvre’s influence is already vast, it is enough to think of the presence of many of his students such as Hubert Tonka, Henri Raymond, and Nicole Haumont. Manuel Castells stands out amidst the participants of the 1968 Convention; precisely in that year he publishes an article entitled Y’a t’il une sociologie urbaine? 189 in which he questions the foundations of the discipline, arguing that the institution of urban sociology is exclusively a product of the interests of the Academy and of the French State. Digging deeper, young Castells believes the sectorialization of sociological disciplines to be inappropriate and misleading, and denies that there can be a 185 H. Lefebvre, “Hors du centre, point de salut?”, in Espaces Temps, n. 33, 1986, pp. 17–19. 186 See: G. Busquet, Idéologie urbaine et pensée politique dans la France de la période 1958–1981, pp. 103–105. 187 Fondation Royaumont pour le progrès des sciences de l’homme, Sociologie et urbanisme. Colloque des 1, 2 et 3 mai 1968 organisé sous l’égide du ministère de l’équipement et du logement, Editions de l’Epi, Paris, 1970. Among the most famous authors participating in the conference we can remember Paul-Henry Chombart de Lauwe, Alain Touraine, Manuel Castells, Françoise Choay, Humbert Tonka and Henri Lefebvre himself. 188 See: G. Busquet, Idéologie urbaine et pensée politique dans la France de la période 1958–1981, pp. 123–124. 189 M. Castells, “Y’a t’il une sociologie urbaine?”, in Sociologie du travail, dixième année, Paris, Seuil, janvier-mars 1968, pp. 72–90. See also: Id., “Theorie et ideologie en sociologie urbaine”, in Sociologie et Societes, n. 2, 1969, pp. 171–191.

1

A CRITICAL REFLECTION BEYOND THE ACADEMIC DISCIPLINES

49

discipline such as urban sociology, denouncing that such didactic standing was created ad hoc to mask the real contradictions of society that derive from the conflict between Capital and work. Castells will question the urban and spatial point of view that is spreading as privileged observatory of the sociological field. In other words, to the young sociologist, the concept of “urban society” is an ideologic label of the ruling class: he doesn’t deny the urbanization process and the following changes, but he believes that giving the primacy to this point of view is an unwise choice for those who instead propose to analyze the capitalist universe. The “urban problem” and the so called “urban question,” that arises with the dawn of Fordism in the second half of the 1900s, are ascribable to the ideology, when they aren’t connected to the supremacy of the development of the Capital productive forces and the exploitation they exert. From 1966 till 1969 Castells will be banished from France due to political reasons and he emigrates to the United States of America. He’ll become the colleague of Lefebvre’s in Nanterre, and he was one of the most ferocious critics of his hypothesis: despite acquiring his knowledge from several Lefebvre Marxian texts as a young student at the University of Barcelona,190 he doesn’t share the utopic vision that Lefebvre’s thought confers to the city and urban reality191 ; in fact, as we shall see, the advent of urban society includes simultaneously, according to Lefebvre, the degeneration produced by capitalist devices and many other new possibilities of liberation from these devices. Besides, he doesn’t share the assignment of a privileged point of view to spatial and urban thought in order to examine the twentieth century capitalism. Castells, at that time, was a faithful follower of the Althusserian interpretation

190 See: M. Castells, Bob Catterall, “Citizen Movements, Information and Analysis.

Interview with Manuel Castells”, in City, Volume 2, n. 7, 1997, pp. 140–155; T. Paquot, M. Castells, “Entretien avec Manuel Castells”, in Urbanisme, n. 302, séptembre–octobre 1998, pp. 6-12. 191 See: M. Castells, The Urban Question: A Marxist Approach, MIT Press, Cambridge, 1979 (1972). In this text the author harshly criticizes the functionalist approach, and he doesn’t spare either Marx and Engles, even if he undertakes the Althusserian method. Thierry Paquot maintains that thanks to this text by Castells, and therefore paradoxically thanks to his critique, Lefebvre’s work crosses the Atlantic and reaches the U.S.A. and latin America. See: T. Paquot, “Henri Lefebvre, penseur de l’urbain”, in T. Paquot, C. Younès (sous la direction de), Le territoire des Philosophes. Lieu et espace dans la pensée au XX siècle, La Découverte, Paris, 2009, pp. 237–254.

50

F. BIAGI

of Marx.192 He is the assistant of Alain Touraine (one of the sharpest observers of the social movement of the time)193 at the chair of Sociology of Labor in Nanterre. Therefore, despite his interest on the urban question, he assigned a certain primacy to the economics and he developed his studies on urban social movements, understood in the classic framework of class warfare, starting from the essential point of the capitalist structure.194 In other words, Castells denies the existence of the discipline, denies the concept of culture and urban society (considered as “ideology”) to open his thinking to the critique of urban planning, resulting from the way of capitalist production and from the State. The difference regarding Lefebvre is henceforth present in the pointing out urban planning as one of the aspects of class oppression. To the Spanish sociologist Lefebvre has urbanized Marxism instead of using Marx to understand the whole society structure. His analysis focuses on urban social movements precisely to highlight this oppressive feature of the “urban” as a particle of the mosaic of a bigger supremacy project: in fact, Castells studies the urban contradictions in order to search for the contradictions of class in the backstage. Lefebvre conversely carries out his analysis based upon the life experience of men into space, upon their quotidian, and not based on

192 The author, in his interview with Thierry Paquot, specifies a partial adhesion to the althusserian current; in fact he professes himself to be politically anarchist, for a while “maoist” sympathizer, however Althusser’s point of view—that he knew through the works of Nicos Poulantzas—is assumed only sociologically, as method of analysis on social reality. Castells points out that his political practice has nothing to do with Althusser’s teachings. See: T. Paquot, M. Castells, “Entretien avec Manuel Castells”. 193 Manuel Castells starts his academic researches in 1965 with a study on the Asturian miners’ strikes, under the supervision of Alain Touraine of whom he will become the main assistant. He is swarded his doctorate with a dissertation entitled La politique d’implantation industrielle des entreprises dans la région parisienne. He is presented to urban sociology studies by Touraine himself, with whom he will have a disagreement regarding the validity of the discipline; however, he chooses to put aside his doubts and to conclude his doctorate, supporting professor Touraine’s research projects. See: T. Paquot, M. Castells, “Entretien avec Manuel Castells”. 194 In his following works Castells goes back to the structuralist approach accepting the critique and taking due distance from those who turned La question urbaine into a cult book of the Marxist urban thought. See: T. Paquot, M. Castells, “Entretien avec Manuel Castells”; M. Castells, Luttes Urbaines, Maspero, Paris, 1973; Id., Crise du logement et mouvements sociaux urbains. Enquete sur la region Parísienne, Mouton, Paris, 1978; Id., City, Class, and Power, Mac Millan-St Martin’s Press, London-New York, 1978; Id., The City and the Grassroots: A Cross-Cultural Theory of Urban Social Movements, University of California Press, Berkeley, 1983.

1

A CRITICAL REFLECTION BEYOND THE ACADEMIC DISCIPLINES

51

a structural analysis of social relations. In Castells we can recognize the effect of a certain theoretical anti-humanism and an economical determinism of structuralist imprint that limits his sociological enquiries.195 In Monopolville he denounces, by means of an investigation on Dunkerque (port city at the far north end of France), the role of multinational companies regarding the spatial changes and the subjection of labor force, due to the subservient role of the State: he convinces himself of the dependency of the “urban” on economical factors.196 In other interviews,197 Castells confirms his high regard toward his colleague Lefebvre of whom he points out his being the greater theoretician of the urban phenomenon and of its changes. However he considers him to be just a “philosopher” of the city, accusing him not having supported his theories with corresponding field studies. To Castells, Lefebvre is the most important researcher of the city, but he only produced a well sustained theoretical foresight on it. Regarding this critique, as we shall see, I agree with Thierrt Paquot’s opinion and disagree with the Catalan sociologist; Lefebvre, on the course of his parable of studies on the city, undertook several empiric researches although he remained focused on the building of a theoretical analysis living up to his times. Thus the accusation of lack of scientificity and lack of closeness to reality in Lefebvrian studies is somewhat odd if we think that Castells himself assumes Althusser’s theoretical (anti-humanist) point of view (despite his anarchism), relegating the urban and the spatial perspective to mere superstructure. Furthermore, Castells said that he had conflictual relations with Lefebvre due to his collaboration with Touraine, maintaining that the Hagetmau philosopher was overly limited by the dissention among the various sociological schools in Nanterre, not succeeding in overcoming the doctrinal prejudices with the young sociologist. Despite such a situation the crucial node that weakens the relation

195 In those years, in Nanterre, Francis Godard, Dominique Mehl and Eddy Cherki support Castells in the social movements research. See: M. Castells, E. Cherki, F. Godard, Sociologie des mouvements sociaux urbains, 2 vols., Centre d’études des mouvements sociaux, EHESS, Paris, 1974. E. Cherki, D. Mehl (sous la dir. de), Contre-pouvoirs dans la ville: enjeux politiques des luttes urbaines, “Autrement”, n. 6, Paris, septembre 1976. 196 See: M. Castells, F. Godard, Monopolville. L’entreprise, l’Etat, l’urbain, Paris-La Haye, Mouton, 1974. 197 See: M. Castells, B. Catterall, “Citizen Movements, Information and Analysis. Interview with Manuel Castells”. T. Paquot, M. Castells, “Entretien avec Manuel Castells”.

52

F. BIAGI

between both theoreticians of the city is their approach to the empiric research method: Castells never accepted to consider Lefebvre (and his school) as capable of conducting solid researches on the field. Contrarily to Manuel Castells, Henri Lefebvre, in 1961, as he gets the Sociology chair in Strasbourg,198 assumes the discipline with determination, defining the social field as the preferred space of the radical critical theory among all social sciences. Urban sociology199 is thus the research field for a critical theory of the city and, more generally, the Sociology of the sixties becomes the most subversive of academic disciplines. Against that particular vision that identifies tout court philosophy in metaphysical and abstract thinking, sociology is the perfect occasion to substantiate the philosophical research in the concreteness of men’s life. Therefore, we should be able to read the disciplines we referred not only by a mere specialistic and formal distinction (as it happens currently), but at the core of the academic debate of that time. Lefebvre—in a conference held in Madrid in November 1968—shows that he is aware of the problematic raised by Manuel Castells, though assuming equally the discipline within that “metodological pluralism” able to guarantee a constant openness of the discipline: “it cannot exist any fragmentary or fragmented science that is not accompanied by its critique and its continuous self-critique. Sociology requires the critique of sociology. There is no sociology without permanent critique of sociology.”200 Therefore, sociology—it is enough to think of the Frankfurt School—is the foundation from which to build the edifice of a philosophy that lives directly the confrontation with the analysis of reality. In this regard we would like to recall two journals that really were a workshop of this interdisciplinary meeting, the laboratory of

198 Regarding Lefebvre’s stay in Strasbourg see: M. Jolé, “La sociologie urbaine à Strasbourg avec Henri Lefebvre”, in Revue des Sciences Sociales, n. 40, 2008, pp. 134–141; Id., “Henri Lefebvre à Strasbourg”, in Urbanisme, n. 319, juillet-août 2001, pp. 40–43; M. Clavel, “La ville comme oeuvre”, in Urbanisme, n. 319, juillet-août 2001, pp. 37– 40; N. Beaurain, T. Paquot, “Rencontre avec Nicole Beaurain”, in Urbanisme, n. 319, juillet–août 2001, pp. 42–43. 199 See the monographic issue of Urbanisme entirely dedicated to “urban sociology”: “Sociologie urbaine”, special issue of Urbanisme, n. 93, 1966. 200 H. Lefebvre, “Intervention au séminaire de sociologie de Madrid”, in Du rural a l’urbain, Anthropos, Paris, 2001, p. 240. He confirms the same concept in another article, see: H. Lefebvre, “À propos de la recherche interdisciplinaire en sociologie urbaine et en urbanisme”, in Du rural a l’urbain, Anthropos, Paris, 2001, p. 248. See also Id., The Urban Revolution, pp. 135–136.

1

A CRITICAL REFLECTION BEYOND THE ACADEMIC DISCIPLINES

53

substantiating of philosophy: Utopie (1967–1973) and Espaces et Sociétés (1970–1978). Utopie 201 is a journal that is partially contemporary to the journal Internationale Situationniste (1958–1969) with which it exchanged intense relations from the political point of view. It was founded by the most brilliants students of Henri Lefebvre: Hubert Tonka (assistant and friend of Lefebvre, urban planner, editor and publisher), Jean Baudrillard, René Lourau (both of them sociologists and Lefebvre’s assistants), Catherine Cot, Isabelle Auricoste (the urban planners), Jean Aubert, Jean-Paul Jungmann, and Antoine Stico (the three architects) with whom the Nanterre professor assiduously collaborated.202 Besides, young philosopher Miguel Abensour will also approach the group. He was at that time still Claude Lefort’s student and assistant and he will afterward dedicate several work to the utopia topic, recovering this concept also from the Marxist tradition.203 Utopie’s intent is to give voice to the urban planning and functionalist architecture critique, pointing out above all the diffusion of capitalist and statal alienation into the consumer devices that take over the city.204 The idea that stands at the foundation of the publishing project is to fight against the production of a fordist urban space, concretely counterposing to it a different idea of city, and discovering new possible paths for the inhabiting of men. In this regard, it is paramount to understand a famous thought of Lefebvre’s: “The roads of utopian thinking are confuse. Utopia has also had its contradictions […] I draw a distinction between abstract utopias and concrete utopias, between positive utopias and negative utopias, between technological utopias and social utopias. 201 For a full reconstruction of the intellectual parable of the Utopie group see: G.

Busquet, Idéologie urbaine et pensée politique dans la France de la période 1958–1981, pp. 167–184; Id., “Lefebvre, l’I.S. et la revue Utopie”, in Urbanisme, n. 336, mai–juin 2004, pp. 55–58; T. Paquot-H. Tonka, “Utopie, la parole donnée (Entretien avec H. Tonka)”, in Urbanisme, n. 300, mai-juin 1998, pp. 49–52. 202 Lefebvre will later say, in a 1975 interview, that he distanced himself from the Utopie group. He defines the journal’s subsequent studies as “negative utopia” (See: H. Lefebvre, Le temp des méprises, pp. 245–246.). 203 See: M. Abensour, La Communauté politique des “tous uns”. Entretien avec Michel Enaudeau, Le Belles Lettres, Paris, 2014, pp. 18–20. 204 In this chapter we only allow a glimpse on these various concepts such as functionalist urban planning and the alternative that is counterposed to it, that will further on be deepened, at the core of the debate of Henri Lefebvre’s contribution.

54

F. BIAGI

I also draw a distinction between utopistes and utopiens. The former are abstract dreamers, while the latter conceive concrete projects.”205 The distinction between “utopist” and “utopian” enables us to grasp the goals of the journal. Utopie is the journal of those who conceive themselves to be utopiens, in other words, those who by imagining an alternative and revolutionary urban planning wish to enact a performative reflection on reality, without getting trapped by the abstractness of the utopic world of ideas.206 Utopia opens new horizons of reflection and concrete possibilities of building other cities and other neighborhoods, outside the logic of the Fordist industry and of the market. Hubert Tonka confirms that the group feels to be witness of an intellectual mission that should point a novel course of urban development by means of a critical action, and introducing an original interpretation of the concept of urban utopia as North Star of social change.207 Thierry Paquot, in this regard, recalls that the utopia emerges simultaneously as a contestation of social order and as a feasible alternative.208 Espaces et Société, contrarily to Utopie, is still being published nowadays and its birth dates to 1970 as international architecture and urban planning journal; it will be directed by two of its founders, Henri Lefebvre and Anatole Kopp, until 1978, for the publishing house Anthropos.209 Kopp is an architect: therefore the journal has a double guide, and it is a bridge that links the architecture domain and the new urban sociology.210

205 H. Lefebvre, Le temp des méprises, p. 242. 206 In this regard Francesco Careri delineates the links between the Situationists

urban thought, and of some architects such as Constant Nieuwenhuys, with Lefebvre’s literary production See F. Careri, Constant. New Baylon, una città nomade, Ed. Testo & Immagine, Torino, 2001; Id., Walkscapes. Camminare come pratica estetica, Torino, Einaudi, 2006. 207 T. Paquot, H. Tonka, “Utopie, la parole donnée (Entretien avec H. Tonka)”. 208 T. Paquot, L’utopie ou l’idéal piégé, Ed. Hatier, collection “Optiques philosophie”,

Paris, 1996, p. 75. 209 The journal is fully available online at: http://www.espacesetsocietes.msh-paris.fr/ archives/. 210 Anatole Kopp (1915–1990), French architect and urban planner, a theoretician of

Russian Constructivism, stands among the supporters of the Marxist planners movement (from 1960 till 1970). Among his main publications we recall: A. Kopp, Changer la vie, changer la ville. De la vie nouvelle aux problèmes urbains. URSS 1917 –1932, Union générale d’éditions, Paris, 1975 (Thèse de Doctorat d’Etat, sous la direction de Jean Auger Duvignaud, Université Rabelais – Tours, Faculté des lettres, UER des sciences

1

A CRITICAL REFLECTION BEYOND THE ACADEMIC DISCIPLINES

55

During the seventies it will always stand as growing vital guideline for problems related to territorial organization, to the city and to everything pertaining to the space where men live in, inquiring this space through multiple economic, geographic, anthropologic and political interrelations. Espaces et Sociétè will meet great reception also in Italy, due to the foundation, in 1975, of a parallel journal, Spazio e società, that initially presents itself as the translated version of the French journal. From 1978, under Giancarlo de Carlo’s management, the journal will acquire autonomous identity by publishing original contents.211 The earliest editions of the Italian version will be organized by Riccardo Mariani, florentine architect, who was one of the main editors of Lefebvre’s works in the sixties, at the publishing house Moizzi Editore; afterward the legacy will be passed on to the publishing house Mazzotta (Milan) that will maintain fruitful relations with the new editor De Carlo. The editorial staff of Espaces et Société, as affirms Rémi Hess, gathers sociologists, architects, urban planners, philosophers focused on the critical urban studies, who identified themselves in Lefebvre’s pamphlet, Le droit à la ville (1968)212 ; these included Manuel Castells, Bernard Archer, Michel Coquery, Jean-Luis Destandau, Colette Durand, Serge Jonas, Bernard Kayser, Raymond Ledrut (who will be the editor from 1979 on), Alain Medam, Jean Pronteau, Henri Provisor, and Pierre Riboulet. It is paramount to remember that since the first issue of the journal the research line is strongly guided by Lefebvre: the issue’s opening article is Lefebvre’s text entitled Réflexions sur la politique de l’espace that had previously been read at a seminar held at the Institut d’urbanisme de Paris

de l’homme, Avril 1973); Id., Ville et Révolution. Architecture et urbanisme soviétiques des années vingt, Anthropos, Paris, 1978.; Id., L’Architecture de la période stalinienne, Grenoble, Presses Universitaires de Grenoble-École Nationale Supérieure des Beaux-Arts, 1978. 211 Giancarlo de Carlo (1919–2005) was an Italian architect, famous for having carried out a severe critique to Le Corbusier’s functionalism, through the international architecture movement “Team 10”. A partisan of libertarian inspiration, he joined his political faith with the urban project of a concrete alternative to the capitalist urban model. See Isabella Daidone’s doctoral dissertation, dedicated to the history of the French journal and its Italian version: I. Daidone, Spazio e società. Giancarlo De Carlo e il tema della base sociale dell’architettura, doctoral dissertation discussed on January 14, 2012 at the Faculty of Architecture of Palermo. 212 See: R. Hess, Henri Lefebvre et l’aventure du siècle, pp. 276–277.

56

F. BIAGI

on January 13, 1970.213 In this text the author draws an assessment of the first twenty years of the urban studies existence and explicitly identifies the limits of the ideology of functionalist urbanism, reiterating how space is a political question on which to reflect “philosophically” and “sociologically.” In other words, the aim is to highlight social problems of the production of the space of the Fordist city model: for this reason the journal intends to confer scientific legitimacy to the urban studies approach. Espaces et Société is the highest point of the institution of the French critical urban sociology. Gregory Busquet recalls how, following the diffusion of Espaces et Société, urban sociology also spreads in other journals, ranging from those of general sociology to those more specialized and sectorial.214 From 1970, we can find in the journal the alliance of the French urban critical theory—Lefebvre’s school—with ethnographical studies on the state of urban conflicts in the world—Castells method— problematizing the global order of urbanism. The article by English historian Eric Hobsbawm,215 La ville et l’insurrection, published in the first issue of the journal, is also famous. Therefore in Espaces et Sociétés two different approaches coexisted: such contributions gathered into a shared project allowed the discipline a productive growth. Lefebvre is not only one of the most renowned authors, but also the one who promotes moments of intellectual production, he is the one who made this field of study prolific, so that a scientific imprint could be given to the urban theory, beyond the boundaries of the sociological schools (it is enough to think of the impressive presence of Manuel Castells, despite his youth).

213 H. Lefebvre, “Réflexions sur la politique de l’espace”, in Espaces et Société, n. 1, 1970, pp. 3–12. 214 See: G. Busquet, Idéologie urbaine et pensée politique dans la France de la période 1958–1981, p. 163. 215 E. Hobsbawn, “La ville et l’insurrection”, in Espaces et Sociétés, n. 1, 1970, pp. 137–

148.

1

A CRITICAL REFLECTION BEYOND THE ACADEMIC DISCIPLINES

57

Conclusion: The Urban Critical Theory. Reading Henri Lefebvre Between the Twentieth and the Twenty-First Century In the last twenty years a vivid interest has again enlightened Henri Lefebvre’s critical parable. As we have seen, the French sociologist’s thought was for a long time obscured by the seductive attraction developed by the French structuralism and post-structuralist current. At the same time, the new problematic and challenges that cross the city and the “urban” have been a very fertile field for a Lefebvrian renaissance. Large merit must be conferred to the Anglophone debate, to the so called “third wave” of Lefebvrian studies216 ; in France, instead, Lefebvre has survived as a hidden river due just about mostly to the contribution of his students and collaborators,217 apart from Laurence Costes and Grégory Busquet who however belong to a further (and contemporary) wave of Lefebvrian studies. Among the first heirs of the transalpine Lefebvrian thought, we can remember Rémi Hess, Hugues Lethierry, Thierry Paquot, Laurente Devisme, Michel Lussault, Jean-Yves Martin, Ulrich Müller-Schöll, Hubert Tonka, Michael Löwy, and Daniel Bensaïd.218 All over the world he is often quoted—and most probably only known—for the concept of “right to the city.” The renowned “formula” that has exemplified a reading key of the accumulation and expropriation processes typical of private property (and financial income) in societies that are shaped by more mature capitalism. We can thus easily rebuild the phases that highlight the restarting of Lefebvrian studies. Andy Merrifield distinguishes only two waves, mainly due to temporal reasons: after recalling the oblivion his thought was condemned to in France, Merrifield acknowledges the first phase of introduction of Lefebvre’s thought

216 See: L. Stanek, Henri Lefebvre on Space: Architeture, Urban Research and the

Production Theory, University of Minnesota Press, Minneapolis, 2011, pp. XIV–XV; K. Goonewardena, S. Kipfer, R. Milgrom, C. Schmid, Space, Difference, Everyday Life: Reading Henri Lefebvre, Routledge, London and New York, 2008, pp. 1–16. 217 See: A. Merrifield, Henri Lefebvre: A Critical Introduction, pp. 100–101. 218 See: H. Lethierry, Agir avec Henri Lefebvre. Altermarxiste? Géographe radical?,

Chronique Sociale, Lyon, 2015, pp. 21–23; Id. (edited by), Sauve qui peut la ville. Études lefebvriennes, L’Harmattan, Paris, 2011; A. Ajzenberg, H. Lethierry, L. Bazinek, Maintenant Henri Lefebvre. Renaissance de la pensée critique, L’Harmattan, Paris, 2011.

58

F. BIAGI

mainly through David Harvey, Edward Soja, Fredric Jameson, Mark Gottdiener, Kristin Ross, Eleonore Kofman, and Elizabeth Lebas, authors that have created the premises for the translation of Lefebvre’s works in English. The second wave instead is recognized in Rob Shields, Stuart Elden, Stefan Kipfer, and Neil Brenner’s most recent interpretations.219 The limit of the distinction proposed by Merrifield resides in the fact that he doesn’t succeed in going deeper and in overcoming the mere description of the historical-chronological development of the AngloSaxon Lefebvrian literature. A more interesting distinction that helps us to highlight the concepts of Lefebvre’s lexicon is the one we come across in Lukasz Stanek’s Henri Lefebvre on Space,220 as well as in Space, difference and everyday life organized by Kanishka Goonewardena, Stefan Kipfer, Richard Milgrom, and Christian Schmid.221 These authors hypothesize three waves of interpretation and restart of Henri Lefebvre’s thought. In first place, there is the current of urban “political-economical” critiques, meaning those who see Lefebvre as an author that is to be used as sharp interpreter of the geographical-economical changes of the “urban.” A clear example is David Harvey’s perspective.222 What matters to Harvey on what concerns Lefebvre is the political economy of urban geography, the political economy of space. The English author in fact uses Lefebvre essentially to conduct a critique of the political economy of the “urban”; on the sociological and political front he only takes interest in La révolution urbaine, in Le droit à la ville and in the concrete utopia of urban common. In second place, there are postmodern geographical interpretations, and the theory that Edward Soja223 developed is emblematic of this; through Lefebvre the American author undertakes an Ontology of space

219 See: Ibidem, pp. 102–103. 220 L. Stanek, Henri Lefebvre on Space: Architeture, Urban Research and the Production

Theory, pp. XIV–XV. 221 K. Goonewardena, S. Kipfer, R. Milgrom, C. Schmid, Space, Difference, Everyday

Life: Reading Henri Lefebvre, pp. 1–16. 222 See: D. Harvey, Social Justice and the City, University of Georgia Press, Athens (GA), 2009 (1973). See also the most recent texts collected in: D. Harvey, Rebel Cities, Verso, London, 2012. 223 See: E. Soja, Postmodern Geographies: The Reassertion of Space in Critical Social Theory, Verso, London-New York, 1989.

1

A CRITICAL REFLECTION BEYOND THE ACADEMIC DISCIPLINES

59

and considers Lefebvre as a pioneer of postmodernism, comparing him to the reflections on heterotopia by Michel Foucault in Thirdspace.224 Thirdly, there are theoreticians such as Kristin Ross225 and Andy Merrifield226 who have deepened Lefebvre’s entire works, putting into context, on one side, the debate that Lefebvre caused among Marx’s interpreters, and on the other side, trying not to fragment his thought and his concepts, but reviving them synchronically. For instance, the reflections on the “urban” have not clashed or overpowered the reflections that pertain to everyday life. This third constellation of authors tries to seriously substantiate the “metaphilosophical” world of Lefebvre that is that multidisciplinary and interdisciplinary effort that allows a better reading of the pace of society. In fact, they prove to put a strong focus on the historical and political contextualization of Lefebvre and their critical orientation indeed looks at Lefebvre’s work through interdisciplinary tools. Finally, they show the purpose of highlighting the various features of his intellectual contribution, especially the less studied parts about the urban topic, connecting, as if they were the reagents of a laboratory, the reflections on the city, the production of space and the everyday life sociology. The authors of Space, difference and everyday life are inspired by this third wave of rereading of the Lefebvrian inheritance and—in their foreword—they propose to pour new lymph into these researches, offering new and more coherent and systematic paths thanks of Lefebvre legacy.

224 See: E. Soja, Thirdspace: Journeys to Los Angeles and Other Real-and-Imagined Places, Blackwell, Oxford (MS), 1996. 225 See: K. Ross, Fast Cars, Clean Bodies: Decolonization and the Reordering of French Culture, The MIT Press, Cambridge, 1995, pp. 157–196; Id., The Emergence of Social Space: Rimbaud and the Paris Commune, University of Minnesota Press, Minneapolis, 1988. 226 See: A. Merrifield, Henri Lefebvre: A Critical Introduction. Id., Metromarxism: A Marxist Tale of the City. Id., “Henri Lefebvre: A Socialist in Space”, in M. Crang, N. Thrift (edited by), Thinking Space.

60

F. BIAGI

Conclusion The idea from which I start is neither that of hypostasizing a Lefebvrian orthodoxy, nor to propose a French Lefebvre Theory 227 as the AngloSaxon academies erroneously are so keen on doing, but it is to show the heretic path of Henri Lefebvre according to his metaphilosophical proposal, without inhibitions of any sort. In the next chapters we’ll try to understand how today—using Walter Benjamin’s formula—there seems to be a new “hour of readability” of Lefebvre’s work. As the subtitle of Ulrich Müller-Schöll228 book says, we’ll try to highlight Henri Lefebvre’s “critical theory” and particularly his urban critical theory. Neil Brenner discovers the roots of a “Urban critical theory,” based on the interpretation of the Frankfurt School method, in the field of the studies on space and the city, particularly considering the original usage that Herbert Marcuse made of it when compared to other theoreticians of those research center.229 It is a choice in perfect Lefebvrian style, in fact the author was one of the first professors (first in Strasbourg and then in Nanterre) to introduce Marcuse’s studies in the environment of French University and to teach “sociology,” understood as “critical theory of the society.”230 As is widely known, according to Brenner, the “urban critical theory” is a fil rouge that would have its beginning with the reflections on Paris by Walter Benjamin, that afterward was relegated to a subterranean existence in the Frankfurt School—where the city and the spatial dimension are not fully examined, despite some common issues—, and finally it would fully meet its founders with Henri Lefebvre and Manuel Castells. The sociology department of Nanterre becomes the laboratory in which critical Theory moves to urban and spatial studies. Brenner’s point of view is useful to understand the groove in which current urban studies have reacquired new dynamism, by being inscribed into a tradition that still has a lot to say, even if in a neoliberal epoch. Henri Lefebvre is for all these reasons one of the major references of the Urban Studies.

227 About this kind of reading of Lefebvre’s global legacy, see: A. Merrifield, “Review Essay. The Whole and the Rest: Remi Hess and les lefebriens français”, in Environment and Planning D: Society and Space, Volume 27, 2009, pp. 936–949. 228 See: U. Müller-Schöll, Le systeme et le reste. La théorie critique de Henri Lefebvre. 229 See: N. Brenner, “What is Critical Urban Theory?”, in City, June 2009, Volume

13, n. 2, pp. 198–207. 230 See: H. Lefebvre, Le temp des méprises, pp. 111–112, 122–123.

CHAPTER 2

The Lefebvrian Lexicon

Introduction At this moment we are about to enter the core of Henri Lefebvre researches. We do it deeply immersing in his philosophical and sociological literature shedding light, little by little, on the reflection that the author developed, outside and against any widespread stereotypes developed around his thought. Effectively the fact that until now many of the reflections produced on Lefebvre are defective, as they focus exclusively on the urban question, disregarding his studies on rural sociology and—being that extremely serious—not connecting the latter with the reasoning he developed around the city. One of the purposes of this work, in fact, is not only rediscovering parts of thought buried by an approximate vulgate, but also to connect those pieces, rediscovering their connections, in order to rebuild the full puzzle of his intellectual production. The inquiry we undertake is archeological; however we can by no means forget the philosophical and sociological expertise of the “critic” of whom we propose an exegesis as coherent as possible with the intentions of Lefebvre and it is only from that kind of textual loyalty that his production and heritage can be discussed. Lefebvre is very often remembered (and only rightly) for his studies on the city and the urban space, however, he starts his researches from rural sociological studies. As we have previously seen, the study of Lefebvre’s thought in Italy is very limited, and the very few existing contributions © The Author(s) 2020 F. Biagi, Henri Lefebvre’s Critical Theory of Space, Marx, Engels, and Marxisms, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-52367-1_2

61

62

F. BIAGI

never refer his early studies on rural sociology.1 In this regard, we should keep in mind the work that was recently conducted the Independent Social Research Foundation in London, that through Stuart Elden and Adam David Morton, in cooperation with the journal Antipode. A Radical Journal of Geography, set a research group on Lefebvre’s rural sociology studies, connecting them with the reflections on the agrarian universe and ground rent Antonio Gramsci e José Carlos Mariategui.2

Rural Rural Sociology’s First Studies Lefebvre’s earliest studies go back to the forties, more precisely from 1943 till 1946, at the time he undertakes an ethnographic inquiry on the Pyrenees—his birth region—due to the task he had been assigned by the Musée national des art et traditions populaires in Paris founded in 1937 by the “Popular Front” impulse, where Georges-Henri Rivière—the museum director—had designed a wide inquiry on the French rural communities that hadn’t yet undergone phagocytosis by wild urbanization.3 Here, Lefebvre shares the ethnographic research with young Albert Soboul, who will later become one of the most eminent historians of the French revolution; besides the research is ordered to delegitimize the nationalist and identity prejudices surrounding the transalpine cultural roots, mainly due

1 In the Anglophone debate the only exception is Elden (see Understanding Henri Lefebvre: Theory and Possible, Continuum, London, 2004, pp. 127–168) and the journal Antipode (S. Elden, A. D. Morton, “Thinking Past Henri Lefebvre: Introducing The Theory of Ground Rent and Rural Sociology”, in Antipode. A Radical Journal of Geography, Volume 48, n. 1, January 2016, pp. 57–66). The only study in Italy that refers relevantly Lefebvre’s inquiries on the rural world belongs to Simona De Simoni in her PHD dissertation (see: Id., Filosofia politica dello spazio: Il programma di ricerca di Henri Lefebvre e le sue conseguenze teoriche, PHD Thesis, University of Torino and Université Paris Ouest-Nanterre La Défense, 11 aprile 2016, pp. 20–26). 2 See the introduction and the opening foreword to these studies: S. Elden, A. D. Morton, “Thinking Past Henri Lefebvre: Introducing The Theory of Ground Rent and Rural Sociology”, pp. 57–66. 3 Regarding Lefebvre’s relation with his birth region, see: P. Ganas, Henri Lefebvre. Philosophe mondialement connu, Pyrénéen ignoré, Cercle Historique de l’Arribère, Navarrenx, 2005. Besides, Remi Hess recalls that Lefebvre declares he had misplaced a rural sociology research manuscript entitled Traité de sociologie rurale. On this event, see: Id., Henri Lefebvre et l’aventure du siècle, métailié, Paris, 1991, p. 169.

2

THE LEFEBVRIAN LEXICON

63

to the fascist manipulation of the latter in the thirties.4 The inquiry on the Pyrenees will later become a doctoral dissertation discussed at Sorbonne in 1954 under Georges Gurvitch’s surveillance.5 From 1953 following Gurvitch’s invitation Lefebvre started to work at the Centre National de la Recherche Scientifique (C.N.R.S.) where he will assume a position at the recently born Centre d’études sociologique (C.E.S.) until 1961.6 His meeting rural sociology will shape young Lefebvre and crystallize in him on one side the idea that the marxian theory should be used as reference to interpret reality into its actual development and therefore in this regard ethnographic technique is paramount; on the other side that Marx’s legacy itself should drink its vital lymph in everyday life, that it should be proved and demonstrated in the real unfolding of the capitalist exploitation dynamics. The most valuable confirmation can be found in the articles that were published in 1949 and 1969 in several journals (as for precision the interest toward the rural world, in terms of bibliographic production, is concluded in 1956), collected by Mario Gaviria in Du Rural à l’Urbain to which the author only adds a foreword.7 In this last text Lefebvre declares explicitly the need to move his layer of

4 Ł. Stanek, Henri Lefebvre on Space: Architecture, Urban Research and the Production of Theory, University of Minnesota Press, Minneapolis, 2011, p. 5. 5 See: H. Lefebvre, Les communautés paysannes pyrénéennes (origine, développement,

déclin). Étude de sociologie historique, PHD dissertation defended at the Université de Paris-Sorbonne. Une république pastorale: La vallée du Campan: Organisation, vie et histoire d’une communauté pyrénéenne: Texte et documents accompagnés de commentaires et d’une Étude de sociologie historique, PHD dissertation, vol. I e II, Université de Paris Sorbonne 1954. This PHD thesis will afterwards be re-structured and published, see: H. Lefebvre, La vallée de Campan: Étude de sociologie rurale, PUF, Paris, 1963. And, finally, the illustrated guide organized by Lefebvre: Id., Pyrénées, Cairn, Paris, 2000 (1965). 6 Trebitsch points out how Lefebvre, at the CES, surrounds himself with the most prominent theoreticians of rural sociology studies; see the English preface to the second volume of Everyday life critique: M. Trebitsch, “The Moment of the Radical Critique (Preface)”, in H. Lefebvre, Critique of Everyday Life. Vol. II , Verso, London, 2002, pp. IX–XXV. 7 Mario Gaviria (1938) is a Spanish sociologist who graduated Paris with Henri Lefebvre.

He taught at the University of Zaragoza and Navarra. He introduced to the Spanish Academy the rural and urban sociology by translating Lefebvre’s works. Online you can find one of the latest video interviews by Stanek to Gaviria on Lefebvre’s intellectual production entitled “Henri Lefebvre: Toward an Architecture of Enjoyment” (February 2, 2013, online).

64

F. BIAGI

analysis from philosophy to sociology, always specifying the radical refusal regarding specialism and differentiation between domains of study. Now, despite it seeming most probably much too didactic, we shall deeply analyze every one of the articles of the first section of the volume organized by Gaviria aiming at fully unfolding the origin of the sociological path that Lefebvre undertook since the forties. In the text that opens the collection, entitled Problèmes de sociologie rurale. La communauté paysanne et ses problems (1949), Lefebvre offers the perspective with which he inserts his research in the debate on the rural question: it is necessary to make use of rural sociology on the condition you do not renounce the historical perspective. One more time we can notice his not standing the divisions between disciplines: “this way the sociological theory may cooperate with History and with political economy to unveil the general law of the process […] without overlooking the extreme complexity of the facts.”8 The analysis of the rural world starts with the eighteenth century, in other words, when the way of life that was inherent to the countryside undergoes a vertiginous change by means of the first industrial tools and, as a consequence, becomes object of economical study by the Physiocrats. Here, Lefebvre is most ingenious in highlighting the ideological and instrumental point of view of the earliest studies on the countryside: the research is directly subjected to the need of structuring the capitalist organization of the rural universe in order to increase the profits. The peasant community becomes an object of study by the Physiocrats solely for the purpose of understanding how to capitalize its “non-topicality” in a way that conversely is focused on the great market. This “right-wing critique” as Lefebvre writes is followed instead by a “left-wing critique” devoid of any instrumental vision.9 Secondly, the aim is to highlight the historical-genealogical origin of the village rural community since antiquity in order to infer its precise definition. Lefebvre will make use of Émile Durkheim’s classical categories, that is, the concepts of “mechanic solidarity” and “organic solidarity,” with the intention of providing a cross section of the internal

8 H. Lefebvre, “Problèmes de sociologie rurale. La communauté paysanne et ses problems”, in Du Rural à l’Urbain, Anthropos, Paris, 2001, p. 37. 9 Ibidem, p. 25. Id., The Urban Revolution, University of Minnesota Press, Minneapolis, 2003, p. 6.

2

THE LEFEBVRIAN LEXICON

65

economy to the rural world founded on the forms of ownership relations.10 The author traverses the transalpine agrarian history and registers two guidelines, that can succeed in introducing a new way of life, a rudimental draft of the nowadays ownership individualism: the first guideline concerns the introduction of the juridical status of private property that produces the dissolution of the ancient village forms in France; the second comprises the birth and development of capitalism. Nonetheless, the Lefebvrian analysis doesn’t accept the romantic nostalgia of the ancient precapitalist world: in fact, the author points out the contradictions of the rural community, as for instance the patriarchal structure, and maintains that the most radical change regarding the ancient peasant society had been conducted by market economy and by the State’s repressive action.11 Massive urbanization therefore goes through the “Caudine Forks” of the privatizing expropriation, of men’s withdrawal from the land by means of a spatial reorganization that increasingly weakens the status of the rural community which is featured for being “a form of social regrouping, that organizes according to modalities historically determined a gathering of people settled in a territory. These elementary groups possess on one hand a series of collective or undivided possessions, on the other hand ‘private’ possessions, according to varied relations that are always historically determined. These groups are bonded by a series of collective disciplines they designate—as long as the community keeps a life of its own—some members who are in charge of managing the execution of these duties of general interest.”12 The genealogy of Lefebvre’s historical sociology is thus applied to the rural community in order to show its progressive loss of autonomy and the novel dissolution that was decreed with the urbanization dawn; Lefebvre writes: “What are our rural communities today when one puts aside the more recent trends? Communities in full dissolution.”13 By means of this definition we understand in what way

10 H. Lefebvre, “Problèmes de sociologie rurale. La communauté paysanne et ses problems”, in Du Rural à l’Urbain, Anthropos, Paris, 2001, pp. 29–30. However, later on, the author asserts his full acceptance of Durkheim but he doesn’t recognize the “obligationsanction” device that determines organic solidarity, preferring instead to define that social relation under the form of discipline since it pertains to the natural unfolding of events that are not collective obligations (Ibidem, p. 33). 11 Ibidem, p. 38. 12 Ibidem, p. 34. 13 Ibidem, p. 40.

66

F. BIAGI

the author defines the rural atmosphere and the social dynamics that are inherent to it, identifying its ideal type on which to reflect upon “against the simplifying evolutionism” that is distancing himself from those who read history linearly, by means of an alleged evolution of the historical progressive development that moves forward replacing and eliminating previous ways of life.14 The rural community as clarifying theoretical ideal type is a concept that produces a common denominator in several phases of history and in many other ways of production. It is as if Lefebvre was telling us that in order to find a rural universe we should keep in mind the actual presence of this ideal type that by this means decrypted. The following article entitled Les classes sociales dans les campagnes. La Toscane et la “mezzadria classica” (1950) highlights the sharecropping status through a case-study that refers precisely to the region of Tuscany. Lefebvre chooses that region of central Italy because he perceives a crystallization of the form of the sharecropping along the arch of several centuries, mainly due to the revolution of markets that occurred with the geographic explorations after 1492. As is widely known, after Christopher Columbus, the markets expand reaching other shores across the Atlantic; the Mediterranean loses its strategic function and as a consequence Tuscany becomes all of a sudden increasingly marginal, preventing its own agrarian structure to evolve for many centuries, conversely to other territories. Therefore, in the fifties, the period in which Lefebvre writes, Tuscany is a privileged observatory to study the sharecropping system of the rural universe. As is widely known the sharecrop farmer15 is a permanent and hereditary concessionary peasant in charge of the soil management, hence his concrete personal interest in increasing its productivity, however most of the crop and sections of his private and working life are under strict control by the land owner, who embodies the urban aristocracy and the tight supremacy of the great land ownership.16 As written by Lefebvre:

14 Ibidem, pp. 35–36. 15 I translate as “sharecrop farmer” what Lefebvre means by the poor peasant who

hasn’t land, and as “tenant farmer” the farmer who takes advantage of the land’s lease and becomes a “large capitalist farmer” in the Fordist context. Lefebvre highlights this particular exploitative nature of the tenant towards the sharecrop farmer, with reference to the old landowner who has an agrarian property of feudal origin [author’s footnote]. 16 See: H. Lefebvre, “Les classes sociales dans les campagnes. La Toscane et la mezzadria classica”, in Du Rural à l’Urbain, pp. 41–45.

2

THE LEFEBVRIAN LEXICON

67

“the dominance of the large latifundia is stronger in the surroundings of big cities […] and is rapidly increasing descending from North to South. Tuscany stands for the transitional region between northern Italy ([that has been] ‘modernized’ by mercantile and industrial economy, by capitalism and bourgeoisie) and the south that remains semi-medieval.”17 Lefebvre conveys an accurate analysis of social class stratification and the manner the relations that occur between less favored rural groups and land owners evolve following the introduction of legislation by the Republic. The research is applied on the field demonstrating his wide ability on moving across the villages of the Tuscan countryside. From this inquiry a curious cartography emerges: the peasants’ committees— who succeeded in creating an alliance between farmhands and sharecrop farmers—undergo social and economic oppression by hand of the great estate owner latifundia class due to the latter’s hostility in applying the new ongoing rules—these rules being more aware of the workers’ syndical conditions. The latifundia ownership power becomes subversive due to the nostalgia of the fascist and monarchic order. Conversely, farmhands and sharecrop farmers conduct political struggle in order to enact the new majorly democratic rules. Lefebvre points out how forms of conflict such as “strike in reverse” conducted across the unfarmed countryside, where there was actually a particular interest in abandoning some fields among the land owners and their interest in creating constant unemployment, claim autonomy in private life choices—as for instance the land owner not mixing up in their children marriage—with a will to subvert the latifundia “patriarchy” within the personal and public sphere. We also find out that in the fifties the great land owner rulers found it outrageous that there should be an eight hour working day and the piecework payment. Secondly, Lefebvre highlights the peasant committees’ determination in attaining a freer social system that can also comprise direct self-management of the lands, given the substantially parasitic role of the landowner class. It is of the utmost importance to underline that in the sharecropping there is a subordination device that will mark the French sociologist following reflections: the land owner aristocracy in Tuscany is characterized for being an urban entity that subjects the surrounding countryside, that exploits it and squeezes it devoid of any wish to innovate from the labor, syndical and environmental perspective.

17 Ibidem, p. 45.

68

F. BIAGI

The “Progressive-Regressive” Method The penultimate article of the first section dedicated to the rural question chosen by Mario Gaviria is entitled Perspectives de la sociologie rurale (1953) and it resumes the reflections that were drafted in the first 1949 text in the Cahiers Internationaux de Sociologie. “The moment has come to highlight the perspectives of the whole of this line of research of sociology,” he writes, “introducing and putting under discussion a project for a Handbook or Treaty.”18 His purpose is therefore that of offering a general theoretical framework within which “rural sociology” can act and achieve research dignity. Although Lefebvre has no interest in creating yet another academic discipline he rather wishes to point out parts of the social experience that were disregarded, fields of life on which no one has ever thoroughly inquired and, in order to confer dignity to such an investigation, he adds some general lines of research on the sociological debate of his time. For completeness sake we should add that Perspectives de la sociologie rurale is the well-known article that Jean-Paul Sartre recaptured: in which the existentialist philosopher praises the “progressive-regressive” method that was created by Lefebvre, however—as we have seen in the First Chapter—Lefebvre on his side refuses such recognition and he dates back the paternity of this heuristic tool to Marx’s introduction of A Contribution to the Critique of Political Economy. Lefebvre argues with Sartre to distance himself from the existentialist theory and to emphasize that, from his perspective, there cannot be existentialist Marxism.19 Sartre’s praise is not appreciated; however, there is no doubt that Lefebvre is Marx’s talented interpreter and—equally—there is no doubt that the “progressive-regressive” method is a useful foresight to update Marx’s historical method against the Marxist historicism. The following method is here theorized for the exam of the peasant world, but will be also resumed as we shall see for the analysis of urban reality. In the contribution developed by Lefebvre on the celebration of the Triers’ philosopher death centenary he clearly reveals his position regarding Marx’s works: “In order to understand the modem world, it is necessary not only to retain some of Marx’s essential concepts but

18 H. Lefebvre, “Perspectives de la sociologie rurale”, in Du Rural à l’Urbain, p. 63. 19 See: H. Lefebvre, “Introduction”, in Du Rural à l’Urbain, pp. 18–19.

2

THE LEFEBVRIAN LEXICON

69

also to add new ones: the everyday, the urban, social time and space, the tendency toward a state-oriented mode of production.”20 Above all, Lefebvre—against the interpretative categories of Marc Bloch, a theorist of the “agrarian regime” and “agrarian civilization,” and of the Geographical Possibilism’s School by Paul Vidal De La Blanche, a theorist of the “way of life”—postulates a new method that intersects two layers of complexity.21 The first being defined “horizontal complexity” refers to the essential differences that feature different agrarian regimes in the same historical period. The example recalled by the author pertains to the capitalism introduced in the countryside areas of the United States versus the transoceanic agrarian collectivism of the Soviet Union. To the transoceanic rural universe the author doesn’t hesitate in also referring Erskine Caldwell’s and John Steinbeck’s22 literary and novelistic material. The Soviet model and also the American way of production are paired in an attempt to mechanize agricultural work by means of technique, so that land productivity is increased as far as possible; however they differ in their social structure (liberal capitalism versus capitalism mediated by the State’s strong collectivizing role). In the middle layer that stands between these two antithetic poles Lefebvre places instead other kinds of agricultural production such as Emilia-Romagna cooperative model, the French model of the C.U.M.A. (Cooperatives pour l’Utilization en Commun de Matériele Agricole studied by Chombart de Lauwe) and the model of the “popular democracies” of Chinese imprint. Secondly, he mentions the “vertical complexity” in order to understand the phenomenon derived from the coexistence of rural organizations and structures that differ in age and level of development, but that are still able to coexist in the same period of time despite some forms being clearly surpassed by others. As way of example Lefebvre refers the nomad economies of Northern Africa that coexist simultaneously with more modern production technologies of European colonialism. In this instance we hypothesize there could be a meeting point of the concept of “contemporaneity of the non-contemporaneous” by Ernst Bloch with the “vertical complexity” by

20 See: H. Lefebvre, “Toward a Leftist Cultural Politics: Remarks Occasioned by Centenary of Marx’s Death”, in C. Nelson, L. Grossberg (edited by), Marxism and the Interpretation of Culture, Mcmillan, London, 1988, p. 77. 21 H. Lefebvre, “Perspectives de la sociologie rurale”, in Du Rural à l’Urbain, p. 69. 22 See: Ibidem, p. 64.

70

F. BIAGI

Lefebvre.23 It seems to us that both authors point out in what way history offers copious occasions of a “past” that somehow lives in some forms of the “present.” This is a co-presence of alterities accumulated throughout the historical time and space. Another example that we can offer on the Lefebvrian trail is that of the great capitalist industries that coexist together with the attempt of not losing agricultural work traditions that were passed on over centuries, since they were more aware of the true needs of nature, possibilities in which the indigenous Latin-American world firmly believes in.24 The “horizontal complexity” and the “vertical complexity” point to the need—as in what concerns rural sociology—to hold together in the same constellation of meaning the geographic and socio-historical dimension of human processes with a precise genealogy of the same economiccultural structures. Therefore, it is from both these axis of research that Lefebvre produces the so-called “progressive-regressive method” that comprises three different “moments”: the descriptive moment, the analytical-regressive moment and finally the historical-genetic moment.25 The first moment that characterizes sociological research due to its capability to examine the phenomenon at hand through the collection of data on the field, having in mind the theoretical concepts acquired (classical sociological research); the second step regards the understanding of historical reality, the capability to place it in time and space according to 23 See: E. Bloch, “Differenzierungen im Begriff Fortschritt”, in T¨ ubinger Einleitung in die Philosophie, Werkausgabe Band 13, Suhrkamp, Frankfurt, 1970, pp. 118–146; Id., Heritage of Our Times, Polity Press, Cambridge, 1991. 24 As way of example see the Research Center of “Proyecto Andino de Tecnologías Campesinas – PRATEC” in Peru. See: Proyecto de Tecnologías Campesinas, Tecnologías Campesinas de los Andes. Primer Seminario Internacional de Rescate y Sistematización de Tecnologías Campesinas Andinas, Horizonte, Lima, 1988. S. Pérez-Vitoria, E. Sevilla Guzman (edited by), “Dossier: l’agroécologie, la résistance des paysans”, in L’Ecologiste, n. 14, 2004. S. Pérez-Vitoria, Les paysans sont de retour, Actes Sud, Arles, 2005. Id., La riposte des paysans, Actes Sud, Arles, 2010. Id., Manifeste pour un XXI e siècle paysan, Actes Sud, Arles, 2015. E. Sevilla Guzman, Introducción a la Agroecología como desarrollo rural sostenible, Icaria Editorial, Barcelona, 2006. Id., De la sociología rural a la agroecología, Icaria Editorial, Barcelona, 2006. Id., Sobre los orígenes de la agroecología en el pensamiento marxista y libertario, Agruco-plural-CDE-NCCR, La Paz, 2011. E. Sevilla Guzman, G. Woodgate, “Agroecology: Foundations in Agrarian Social Thought and Sociological Theory”, in Agroecology and Sustainable Food Systems, Volume 37, n. 1, 2013, pp. 32–44. 25 H. Lefebvre, “Perspectives de la sociologie rurale”, in Du Rural à l’Urbain, pp. 73–

74.

2

THE LEFEBVRIAN LEXICON

71

its peculiarities; finally, the third moment pertains to the understanding of the genesis inside a given general diagnostic constellation that is capable of retracing its evolution, the analogies and the differences within a comparative frame, that through hypothesis explains and justifies the phenomenon under exam. Going back to the triad “description-dating-explanation” is the methodological perimeter that Lefebvre assigns to rural sociology. Any research should highlight the contours of the rural world, identifying its connections with the various ways of production and levels of development registered by History. The aim is thus majorly to identify the ultimate of the idea of world itself proposed by the capitalist project. By resourcing to the three levels of analysis, sociological research’s duty (rural or not) is actually the one capable of highlighting the features of the communities, identifying the connections with the changes that were introduced by the valuation of the capitalist way of production, valuing the technical and technological changes according to the models of society. Lefebvre applies this method to all of his inquiries: to study the city and urbanization he in fact goes back to the countryside, to the first origin of the research object. Reweaving the historical-political conceptual threads means focusing on the changes the territory underwent and— next—analyzing the object of study of the present, having a clear picture of its evolutionary frame. The so-called “rural question” is a fundamental piece of the wider mosaic featured by urbanization and industrialization. The Theory of Ground Rent as an Application of the Progressive-Regressive Method On occasion of the International Congress of Sociology held in Amsterdam in August 1956 Lefebvre presents an essay entitled Théorie de la rente foncière et sociologie rurale 26 ; he opens his speech by saying: “On the domain of sociology the smallest contact with facts may effectively destroy an opinion that was currently accepted. Over time agriculture

26 I highlight that in English there is an excellent translation of this Lefebvre’s article

by Matthew Dennis (and edited by Stuart Elden and Adam David Morton) published in a issue of “Antipode” journal (H. Lefebvre, “The Theory of Ground Rent and Rural Sociology”, translated by Matthew Dennis and edited by Stuart Elden and Adam David Morton, in Antipode, Volume 48, n. 1, 2016, pp. 67–73), but I quoted the original version.

72

F. BIAGI

preceded industry; over space, still today, an ocean of agricultural production surrounds some continents and some islands of urban life and industrial production. One generally imagines therefore that rural life and the agrarian structure are simpler than the cities and factories’ ‘modern’ life. In fact, rural sociology pertains to realities of extreme complexity.”27 Against any simplification and banalization of rural topics, Lefebvre starts his argument in defense of a research field to which he desires to supply solid, critic and demystifying foundations. The compass that guides our brave sociologist is the facts and the ability of owning adequate interpretative grids. The foundation that he relies on is the ground rent theory,28 a perspective through which he reads the historical-social evolution of the peasant world. In light of the situation of the French countryside areas in the Fifties, Lefebvre focuses his reflection on the various abilities of creating profit in the agrarian world, and in order to differentiate the phenomena he refers Lenin29 who as he encloses the reflections contained in the Third Book of the Capital 30 —identifies three issues: the profit attained by property; the profit attained by exploitation; and finally, the profit attained by the capacity of capitalist valuation.31 In the mature capitalist regime in fact value extraction typical to the large estate form (meaning simple land ownership) loses its prominence, defined by Marx as “absolute rent.”32 Instead, increasingly new forms of valuation detached from soil ownership continue to spread. The example referred by Lefebvre is a new typology that proliferates in France (mainly in the North and in

27 Ibidem, p. 79. 28 See also: H. Lefebvre, “Capital and Land Ownership”, in Marxist Thought and the

City, University of Minnesota Press, Minneapolis, 2016, pp. 134–143. 29 V. I. Lenin, “Capitalism in Agriculture” (1899), in Lenin Collected Works, Vol. 4, Progress Publishers, Moscow, 1960. Id., “The Agrarian Question and the Critics of Marx” (1901), in Lenin Collected Works, Vol. 5. Id., “The Development of Capitalism in Russia” (1896–1899), in Lenin Collected Works, Vol. 3. Id., “New Data on the Laws Governing the Development of Capitalism in Agriculture” (1915), in Lenin Collected Works, Vol. 22. 30 See: K. Marx, “Capital” (1894), in Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels Collected Works, Vol. 37, Lawrence and Wishart, London, 1998, pp. 608–800, book III chapters 37–47. 31 H. Lefebvre, “Théorie de la rente foncière et sociologie rurale”, in Du Rural à l’Urbain, pp. 82–84. 32 K. Marx, “Capital” (1894), in Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels Collected Works, Vol. 37, pp. 734–758, book III chapter 45.

2

THE LEFEBVRIAN LEXICON

73

the East) in the fifties, that is the so-called “large capitalist farmer.”33 At that time in fact the practice of confiding in small and average unfarmed lands to certain people was spreading. On one hand the small and average owners had no interest in working the land nor really caring for it, on the other hand, there were actual entrepreneurs who conducted the task of tenant farmers. Just to set a comparison we could probably think of some sort of “agency” on which the small and average owner relies on to extract some profit from soil he has no wish to care for. These lands will next be assigned to tenant farmer in order to be farmed by installing strongly industrialized agricultural technologies, defined by the author as authentic “wheat factories,” able to greatly exceed “the concentration of property” by means of the intensification of the “exploitation concentration.”34 This means that the great estate owner who is better off and owns more land than his pairs couldn’t reach—with his properties—equal levels of profit that were instead obtained by the tenant farmers, who— even with smaller portions of soil—due to the maximum exploitation of the land capacity and of the manpower, accumulated huge profit. What were the social and spatial consequences of such a market practice? What caused the introduction of the tenant farmer in the French countryside? Lefebvre tells of deserted villages that disappeared and were added to the farmable area; of the replacement of the ancient peasant population by a migrant and underpaid working class of farm workers that lives under dilapidated conditions; of the creation of a “new élite” on the back of the farm workers, that is in charge of the ore specialized tasks in the sector of mechanization agricultural work. The expansion of this new market created a new professional figure who lives of revenues: the tenant farmer. Until now we have shown the application of the ground rent theory to a novel socio-economic phenomenon that multiplies the forms of rent extraction. We have as well underlined the role of the sociologist that Lefebvre conceives: that is one that organizes, interprets and understands social phenomena in light of a general tendency that is theoretically decipherable. Lefebvre’s contribution—shaped in the Marxian ways—regarding the land revenues and the relevance of undertaking sociological research on

33 H. Lefebvre, “Théorie de la rente foncière et sociologie rurale”, in Du Rural à l’Urbain, p. 84. 34 Ibidem, p. 85.

74

F. BIAGI

the rural domain is more than ever present (the most relevant difference that can be mentioned is the financial capital major role and the coercive role of the international institutions by means of the States). It is enough to think, as pointed out by Mike Davis, of the Structural Adjustment Programmes (SAPs) prescribed to developing countries by international actors such as the World Bank, the IMF International Monetary Fund, and the World Trade Organization.35 We are referring for instance to the imposition of intensive GMO farming in territories such as Brazil or Argentina, where forests are cleared to grow soy and sugar cane on large scale; to the landgrabbing phenomenon and to the environmental migrants; all of these are processes that very often force masses of population to abandon their own home and country because of the arrival of mega development projects by international corporations. Several Latin-American theoreticians in fact agree on the concept of “extractive capitalism.”36 Moreover, the conflict for alimentary sovereignty pertains to many social and environmental conflicts that place their stakes on land ownership in southern countries; we are referring to, among various and diversified situations, the secular claim for an agrarian reform in Brazil that was conducted by the Landless Workers Movement.

35 See specifically the third and fifth chapter of Mike Davis’ The Planet of Slums, Verso, London, 2005. From another perspective and with different literature, see: S. De Simoni, Filosofia politica dello spazio: il programma di ricerca di Henri Lefebvre e le sue conseguenze teoriche, p. 26. 36 See: A. Acosta, “Extractivism and Neo-extractism: Two Sides of the Same Curse”,

in M. Lang and D. Mokrani (edited by), Beyond Development Alternative Visions from Latin America, Transnational Institute - Rosa Luxemburg Foundation, Amsterdam, 2013, pp. 61–87. P. Dàvalos, “No podemos ser mendigos sentados en un saco de oro: las falacias del discurso extractivista”, in El correismo desnudo, Montecristi Vive Editor, Quito, 2013. H. Burchardt, K. Dietz, “(Neo)-extractivism: A New Challenge for Development Theory from Latin America”, in Third World Quarterly, Volume 24, n. 3, 2014, pp. 468–86. H. Veltmeyer, J. Petras (edited by), The New Extractivism: A Post-neoliberal Development Model or Imperialism of the Twenty-First Century?, Zed Books, London, 2014. N. Fabricant, B. Gustafson, “Moving Beyond the Extractivism Debate, Imagining New Social Economies”, in NACLA Report on the Americas, Volume 47, n. 4, 2015, pp. 40–45. E. Lopez, F. Vertiz, “Extractivism, Transnational Capital and Subaltern Struggles in Latin America”, Latin American Perspectives, Vol. 42, n. 204, 2015, pp. 152–68. V. Gago, S. Mezzadra, “A Critique of the Extractive Operations of Capital: Toward an Expanded Concept of Extractivism”, in Rethinking Marxism, Volume 29, n. 4, 2017, pp. 574– 91. S. Mezzadra, B. Neilson, “On the Multiple Frontiers of Extraction: Excavating Contemporary Capitalism”, in Cultural Studies, Volume 31, n. 2–3, 2017, pp. 185–204.

2

THE LEFEBVRIAN LEXICON

75

Stuart Elden highlights how there is an early draft of reflection on the study on the production of rural space by means of the everyday social practices that were operated in the 1950s France; a reflection that will next originate more theoretical and general studies on the production of space. This is the moment in which the concept of “production of space” will take shape in Lefebvre’s mind, and the fact that it should necessarily be deepened through interdisciplinary pathways. On one side, the philosophical theory, on the other side, the sociological tool as research work, of concrete demonstration of the theoretical and global dynamics realization. Lefebvre, actually analyzes the rural universe as a specific part of a given social system and of its relations within the capitalist economic system evolution.

Urban In Praise of the Fringe: Henri Lefebvre and Our (Mis)understanding of the Suburbs As we have mentioned in the first chapter, the studies on the rural world go back to the times of the anti-fascist resistance and proceed with the research assignment at the Paris CNRS, until 1961. In simultaneous, Lefebvre undertakes the inquiries on the everyday life, and the attempt to free Karl Marx’ heritage from the supposed dogmatic teachings, and updates the Trier’s Moor thought. We should insist that we mustn’t conceive the author’s topics of interest as non-communicating instances, although it might be more complex than this, we must try to move further in digging deeper into his intellectual legacy by retracing his own steps. In 1961 Lefebvre transfers to the Strasbourg Sociology Department, where rural studies are evolving toward urban studies due to the problematization of everyday life under the regime of the consumption society such as was that of France and Europe in the sixties. However, such a regime establishes itself in the advanced capitalism societies as the protagonist of Robert Louis Stevenson’s The Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde, that is, the well-being provided by the abundance of merchandize and consumption is solely on of two masks. The other mask actually grows by feeding on the stabilization—at an endemic level—of a certain degree of misery, poverty, exploitation, and social marginality. It is the fate doomed to the weaker groups, to the immigrating Maghrebis from

76

F. BIAGI

the colonies in the French Capital. This scenario strongly affects Lefebvre as he is summoned in 1964 to teach at the Nanterre campus in Paris. The college edifice had been recently built based on the model of Le Corbusier’s functionalist architecture and back in those years great part of the quarter was an immense shantytown, living place assigned to the migrant proletariat. The settlement of this new athenaeum should firstly welcome the numerous French students hence clearing the universities of the Parisian center, and would secondly instate the requalification of that urban fabric that was at the time peripheral and that gathered the Maghreb immigrants. It was on one hand stigmatized as “rebellious spectrum,”37 and on the other hand regarded as cheap manpower always available for whatever sort of task. The sociologist from Navarrenx examines the changes that arose with the postwar development; his chosen perspective is that of the banlieue, in other words, the border between the latter and the architectonical functionalism of Nanterre, devised to serve the French white middle class students. We may deduct therefore that Lefebvre’s thought develops from the margins, from the threshold that splits and shatters the urban space separates the wealthiest from the weaker groups.38 The margin becomes the privileged watching place as it is the unfolding point of the city’s narrative. Taking up Stevenson’s metaphor, Mr. Hyde is the personality that reveals the truth about Dr. Jekyll, as equally the subaltern and invisible situation of the peripheries tears apart the “Maya veil” of the dominant urban planning ideology. Therefore to the reflections on the rural world another wedge is added to the mosaic that composes the idea surrounding the possibility to start composing a thorough critique on the “urban.”

37 I refer to the derogatory term that was used to refer to the Algerian resistance

militants against French colonialism; See: S. Bromberger, Les rebelles algériens, Plon, Paris, 1958. See also: M. Rigouste, L’ennemi intérieur. La généalogie coloniale et militaire de l’ordre sécuritaire dans la France contemporaine, La Découverte, Paris, 2009. Therefore, see Monique Hervo’s research on the interchange of relations between the Nanterre slum and the Algerian War: Id., Nanterre en Guerre d’Algérie: Chroniques du bidonville 1959–1962, Seuil, Paris, 2001. 38 I share this interpretation with De Simoni but my approach to the author is somehow different: I do not effectively share the more general insertion of Lefebvre in the PostFordist and Post-Workerism debate (see: Id., Filosofia politica dello spazio: Il programma di ricerca di Henri Lefebvre e le sue conseguenze teoriche, pp. 91–94; Id., “Le droit à la ville. Note (d)ai margini”, in Euronomade, 3/05/2015).

2

THE LEFEBVRIAN LEXICON

77

According to Laurence Costes testimony, the Nanterre professor urged his students to watch Paris from the perspective of the urban marginality produced by Fordism: urban sociology therefore became that critique domain that unmasks the functionalist ideology.39 The reality of the bidonville near the railway stop of La Folie, between the Saint-Lazaire station and the university building, tells us about a different Paris excluded from the consumerist well-being: an entire neighborhood populated and jam-packed by around ten thousand destitute inhabitants.40 The most precise researches on the Nanterre slum of the sixties were conducted by Monique Hervo and Marie-Ange Charras in Bindovilles, l’enlisement and by Abelmalek Sayad in Un Nanterre algérien, terre de bindovilles: there we can find a detailed inquiry that is most useful to confirm Lefebvre’s hypothesis.41 As a matter of fact, several testimonies of the marginality regime that the Algerian, Moroccan, Tunisian, and, in a smaller amount, Portuguese migrants endured come up. It is emblematic how the lodging problem is obsessively repeated and many times it is declared that the La Folie inhabitants’ greatest wish is that as soon as they possibly can they will flee those quarters that lack water, electricity and proper sewerage and sanitary systems. Whatever the color of the Municipality or Parisian Town Council the situation for the migrant workers remains “swamped” (literally enlisement means swamping and this term also comprised the idea of “sinking”) inside a lodging situation typical to the English peripheries of the end of the nineteenth century as narrated by Jack London in his novel The People of the Abyss. Furthermore, the reading of the following sociological inquiries highlights that condition of radical expatriation that anthropologist Ernesto De Martino defined as “the crisis of the presence”: that is, the fact that a given subject is incapable neither of decrypting nor understanding by means 39 See: L. Costes, Lire Henri Lefebvre. Le droit à la ville. Vers la sociologie de l’urbain, Ellipses, Paris, 2009, p. 42. 40 In Italy, similar researches on the peripheries were undertaken by Danilo Montaldi, see: Id., Milano Corea. Inchiesta sugli immigrati, Donzelli, Roma, 2010. Montaldi had engaged a strong bind with the members of Socialisme ou Barbarie. We may hypothesize that Lefebvre and Montaldi, despite the lack of evidence on them knowing each other, actually reached a mutual debate. 41 M. Hervo, M. A. Charras, Bindovilles, l’enlisement, Maspero, Paris, 1971; see also Y. Gastaut, “Les bidonvilles, lieux d’exclusion et de marginalité en France durant les trente glorieuses”, in Cahiers de la Méditerranée, n. 69, 2004; A. Sayad (avec É. Dupuy), Un Nanterre algérien, terre de bindovilles, Éditions Autrement, Paris, 1995.

78

F. BIAGI

of one’s own interpretative code one’s own life experience.42 It is the radical loss of a symbolic order that justifies the human existence. Therefore, the French society for an immigrant is as shocking as that “abyss of nothingness” that freezes the process of transcending one’s everyday life.43 Similarly Sayad talks about “double absence” as being the structural condition of the migrant: colonized and subaltern in his home of origin he endeavors a journey to reach the promised land of liberté— egalité—fraternité, only to find in France a social milieu that denies his being and renders him invisible, doubly invisible: he is simultaneously “missing” from his birth land, “uprooted” from his own world of origin and he is an authentic stateless and pariah in Nanterre’s La Folie.44 It would be useful in this instance to mention Rachid Bouchareb’s 2010 film Outside the Law (Hors-La-Loi, 2010) in which the French director of Algerian descent stages the dramatic situation of extreme poverty that the Algerian in Nanterre endure and how such a condition of injustice feeds the anti-colonial rebellion actions of the Algerian National Liberation Front in the urban space of Paris.45 In fact the Algerian migrant also struggles in the French capital because he finds again—under different assumptions—the gnaw of oppression he had already been subjected to in his homeland. Thus he is denied the democratic regime of equality and liberty even if he is expatriating to the land of Mother-France that can but offer underpaid jobs and wretched shacks for the inhumane survival of all the migrant workers. The Hagetmau sociologist goes even further and traces the character of “new inner colonialism” that is fed by the division

42 See: E. De Martino, La fine del mondo, Einaudi, Torino, 2002. For a re-elaboration of De Martino’s categories within the current context also see: M. Pezzella, La memoria del possibile, Jaca Book, Milano, 2009, pp. 239–271. 43 E. De Martino, La fine del mondo, p. 203. 44 A. Sayad, La double absence. Des illusions de l’émigré aux souffrances de l’immigré,

Seul, Paris, 1999. 45 The film shocked France at the Cannes Festival in 2010 opening a strong debate to

the point that the film was labeled as anti-French for having mentioned historical events of the colonialist era that had been willingly excluded from the transalpine collective conscience. A real resentment against the film director took place for having conducted such a backward journey into the colonial past, especially for having evoked tortures and massacres carried out in the motherland and in the colonies.

2

THE LEFEBVRIAN LEXICON

79

that separates hyper-developed areas and areas that are instead abandoned to misery and under-development.46 What’s more, in foreseeing the broadened sociological literature on the form-camp and the debate on the forms of containment and urban concentration of specific social groups,47 he notices how the social status in the “concentration camp” as adopted by Nazism is the extreme case of an institution that is declensioned in various contexts and in different ways, managing nevertheless to keep a basilar common meaning on what refers to the capitalist way of governing: “Fascism represents the most extreme form of capitalism, the concentration camp is the most extreme and paroxysmal form of a modern housing estate, or of an industrial town. There are many intermediary stages between our towns and the concentration camps: miners’ villages, temporary housing on construction sites, villages for immigrant workers… Nevertheless, the link is clear.”48 In order to avoid misunderstandings Lefebvre doesn’t maintain that the deriving ghettoization in a given periphery would be equivalent to the Nazi lager; on the contrary he stresses the common traits that materialize by means of different shades; he actually talks about “mediations” and of a “relation” between the form-camp and the model of city that has been spreading since the 1950s. In other words we could say that the concentration camp is like a primary color used by a painter and the color’s major or minor dilution defines a corresponding number of shades within the urban frame. In this regard we can be sure of the fact that Lefebvre adopts urban marginality as elected perspective, by the sociologist, to unveil the authentic social reality, beyond and against the dream image promoted by the spectacular and hedonistic devices of the city shaped by Fordism. The author comes up with the hypothesis of a sociological epistemology of marginality: it is the staying put and watching from the threshold point of view that allows us to take up a more accurate glimpse on the complexity of the social situations that we behold. It is the particular point of view of those oppressed and weaker, of those who lives at the margins, as waste that offers us an intellectually attainable insight on the actual state of health of the urban 46 H. Lefebvre, “Le bourgeoisie et l’espace”, in Espace et politique. Le droit à la ville II , p. 143. 47 The debate is much too wide however it suffices to think of the form-camp studies by Giorgio Agamben and Michel Agier. 48 H. Lefebvre, The Critique of Everyday Life. Volume I , London, Verso, 2008, pp. 245–

246.

80

F. BIAGI

life in the city. In other words, the life of the “people of the abyss” of the urban peripheries, that more than any other circumstances, has anything to say to an effective urban sociologist. Therefore the topicality of Lefebvre’s thought is also tested when facing these scenarios—be these big or small—of our planet that still haven’t abandoned the city as, for instance, Mike Davis duly explained in Planet of Slums. The concept of “periphery” does neither pertain to spatial motion nor to measuring the distance or proximity to a spot defined as “center” but is mostly a point of view that radically redefines the gaze over the remaining urban space. In the preface in The Right to the City Lefebvre states that the urban problems are not fully acknowledged as having a status of their own since they still haven’t assumed proper philosophical and political importance, this meaning that the observation of the city from the perspective of the marginality it produces is a sociological reflection that unveils the real position on which the urban unfolds. As he faces a model of city that is obviously in crisis Lefebvre’s intention is to delineate new possible emancipating opportunities based on the concrete subalternity of spatial discrimination. Therefore, Lefebvre’s sociology is always a critical intellectual action, premise of the attempt to subvert the present of (spatial) class inequalities. The hypertrophic synoecism of the urban fabric, that us, the fact that the territory doesn’t configure itself anymore solely as “city” nor as “countryside,” but precisely as “urban fabric” more or less organized, more or less designed with minimum dignified habitable standards, leads to the increase of the congestion of the spatial situation of the outcasts. Those who live in the shantytown, those who “cram” at the threshold around the city center, acquire a fundamental status in Lefebvre’s thought: they are simultaneously privileged point of view and reflection object aiming at overturning such state of things. As we shall see rereading the concept of right to the city from this perspective will be an innovating gesture, outside stereotypes and abuses, shedding light over a socio-political formula that is anything but easily understandable. Because of this, it would be useful to draw the connection that correlates the analysis of the fordist periphery of the 1960s with the contemporary periphery as examined by Loic Wacquant in Urban Outcasts.49 Despite

49 L. Wacquant, Urban Outcasts. A Comparative Sociology of Advanced Marginality, Polity Press, Cambridge, 2007.

2

THE LEFEBVRIAN LEXICON

81

the different contexts—in fact the current neoliberal city is not overlappable with the model of city of the 1900s based on the Keynesian pact—there are common traits that progressively aggravate, that is that regime of “advanced urban marginality” that Wacquant identifies as the future scenario of the current production processes of space in the twentyfirst century. Further evidence is Agostino Petrillo’s thesis as maintained in The new periphery (La periferia nuova) in which he associates to the precise denouncement of the failure of the current urban project, by means of a reading of the “Lefebvre of the peripheries,” novel hidden possibilities of overturning and healing the state of health of the city: these can be detected in the actions of the right to city as conducted in the crevices of marginality and urban confinement.50 What Is (the New) Urban Society? From the City as a Form to Urbanization as a Process Now we ought to necessarily dig deeper. In view of rebuilding, step by step, the Lefebvrian perspective it is necessary to keep discussing his sociological lexicon, in order to understand what the author means by “city,” “urban” and “new urban society,” that is to say the constitutive jump that the metropolis would take following the changes that resulted from the Fordist capitalism. So, what is the city to Lefebvre? And in what way does it differ from the concept of “urban space”? But above all: what type of city is he facing when he refers to these concepts? It would be useful to recall how the so-called “progressive-regressive” method, even if it isn’t always explicit, remains the analysis grid of Lefebvre’s sociological studies aiming at capturing the “specificity of the city.”51 The intuition that emerged to supply rural sociology with a method multiplies therefore on what pertains to every social fact, including the “urban,” as shown as way of example more clearly in the first section of the volume on the Paris Commune under the title Style et métode [Style

50 A. Petrillo, La periferia nuova. Disuguaglianza, spazi, città, Franco Angeli, Milano, 2018. I debated many of the reflections expressed in this paragraph with Agostino Petrillo at the conference “The Right to the City” that was held in Rome, on the 24–25 November 2016, at the Faculty of Architecture (Sapienza University) organized by the “Fondazione per la Critica Sociale” and by the journal “Il Ponte”. 51 H. Lefebvre, “The Right to the City”, in Writings on Cities, Wiley-Blackwell, London, 1996, p. 100.

82

F. BIAGI

and Method],52 but also, despite it not being so obvious, in the historicalsociological reconstruction of the city proposed in his various texts on the “urban”: “Without the progressive and regressive operations (in time and space) of the analysis, it is impossible to conceive the urban phenomenon science.”53 We can locate another example in the second chapter of The Urban Revolution where the author maintains that—within an hypothesis of historical-sociological reconstruction of the city’s development—the forms of previous urban societies can only be understood on what pertains to the birth and the development of their explosion.54 Most of all, the French author considers the city to be a metaphor, or better almost a synecdoche of the concept of “society.” In fact the city is defined as a projection of the society over the territory: “the city is a whole; […] the city casts on the soil a society in its fullness, a social totality or a society retained as totality, including its culture, its institutions, its ethics, its values, soon its superstructures, including its economical basis and the social relations that form its actual structure.”55 The city is the society in its spatial declensioning, it is the “projection of society over the territory”56 ; however, this element is analyzed throughout time, on one hand as “crystallized past” and on the other as “mutation of the present.”57 As a result, the city is a “space-time” and by means of such a dimension we can—with Lefebvre—shape an “ideal-type” as sociological tool for analysis of the real.58 The totality highlighted by Lefebvre should not though stray away from the urban inquiry; it is specified that this inquest is proportionally divided into sections, and that every section should keep its own sociological autonomy even in the reticular correlation that, for instance, a neighborhood holds with the remaining metropolitan space.59 The method used to understand the

52 H. Lefebvre, La proclamation de la Commune, Gallimard, Paris, 1965, p. 31. 53 H. Lefebvre, “A propos de la recherche interdisciplinaire en sociologie urbaine et en

urbanisme”, in Du rural à l’urbain, p. 269. 54 H. Lefebvre, The Urban Revolution, University of Minnesota Press, Minneapolis, 2003, p. 14. 55 H. Lefebvre, “La vie sociale dans la ville”, in Du rural à l’urbain, p. 159. 56 H. Lefebvre, “The Right to the City”, in Writings on Cities, pp. 107–112. 57 H. Lefebvre, “La vie sociale dans la ville”, in Du rural à l’urbain, p. 160. 58 Ibidem. 59 Ibidem, pp. 160–161.

2

THE LEFEBVRIAN LEXICON

83

totality, including all of its parts, is Hegel and Marx’s dialectic perspective.60 To summarize: the accomplished sociologist is one that seizes this theoretical archetype, merging simultaneously in his studies the general dimension with its parts along the arch of temporal development of the city. It is in the form of city that society is constituted as such and in the production of urban space that it allows itself to achieve full organization. Lefebvre sets as research purpose the examination of the organization of space and the government of men, locating in the spatial dimension the area where more than ever the capitalist economy shapes the social. Lefebvre chooses to inquire the spatial order of man and therefore the city and the organization of the “urban.” Thus a real and genuine embodiment of the society in the spatial dimension occurs; it isn’t simply “taking shape” in space, but an actual performative substantiation of the human “works” in monuments and buildings. It is a symbolic materialization of the social order, therefore of its asymmetric class relations. The original contribution by Lefebvre is as follows: seeing in the city and in the production of space a human work that re-projects the social into the spatial dimension. The city and the “urban” are thus a coherent portray of a precise typology of society. In other words, we may say that Lefebvre assumes the spatial point of view understanding how crucial a perspective it is to understand the human universe contemporary to him. In this regard he identifies two levels of mediation on which the city constitutes itself: “the near order” of the relations between individuals or groups more or less broadened and organized; “the far order” that is the organizational dimension of the society by means of political institutions and cultural coordinates.61 The city is therefore the frame within which the mediation between mediations, where the production and ownership relations and reproduction of the ruling speech are carved. In order to describe the role of social, political, and cultural mediator of the city, Lefebvre proposes the comparison with language or with a book.62 The essence of the city as “object” produced by human action is perceived in the role of mediator between such levels. Thus the city assumes a particular “objectivity”: it is predetermined (on the remote order) but also

60 Ibidem, p. 161. 61 H. Lefebvre, “The Right to the City”, in Writings on Cities, p. 113. 62 Ibidem, p. 115.

84

F. BIAGI

prone to being re-codified on different basis (in fact the remote order doesn’t entirely bind the close order). In the dimension of the close order the practical declension of status quo carves itself simultaneously, but also the possibility of being upturned and rebuilt by the inhabitants in the unpredictability of emancipating political action. It is the “dialectic process” of “the continuity and of the discontinuity” between different forms that innervate in space. A useful example is Lefebvre’s reading of the planning of the shopping mall by the urban planners contemporary to him as an attempt to devoid and delegitimize the medieval city of its intrinsic riches. The medieval city, notwithstanding its being crossed by the will to profit, still remains almost entirely a space of use value to its inhabitants. Once this function is banned the entire space becoming exclusively exchange value, the foundations of medieval die in order to allow space solely to the expansion of the economic exchange structure: the shopping mall. Therefore, every urban epoch reutilizes the debris and fragments of past times with its own new goals.63 I’d like to mention an example where we can see clearly the “progressive-regressive method,” characteristic of Lefebvre’s historical sociology, at work. The model of European city possesses its own autonomous history regarding the dawn of capitalism. Clearly, as described in the first Chapter of The Right to the City under the title Industrialization and Urbanization, capitalism changed—or better, has disrupted—the city, but the evolution of the model of city we have seen in Europe doesn’t match the capitalist imprint.64 They meet at some point, nevertheless it doesn’t coincide. On the contrary, Lefebvre detects in the model of American city a form “without history” “devoid of history” since it was born and brought up in the “technique.”65 The history of the American city has no other plot but the expansion of capitalist technique, in fact it is born out of the expansion of markets and “globalization”

63 See: Ibidem, p. 107. 64 Ibidem., pp. 65–66, 68–70. 65 H. Lefebvre, “La vie sociale dans la ville”, in Du rural à l’urbain, p. 161. It should

be recalled how the concept of “technique” directs to the various studies on this same concept conducted by Heidegger, by the Frankfurt School, by the Situationists, etc. The author, as he uses this term is fully aware of the debate around the connections between the idea of “technique” and the expansion of capitalism, despite the fact that he avoids placing quotes and footnotes in his texts.

2

THE LEFEBVRIAN LEXICON

85

occurred by means of geographic discoveries. In the old continent therefore, the raising industry—during the second half of the Eighteenth century—tends to settle outside the city, often in the vicinity of energy sources and raw materials (we’re considering water ways, forests, minerals, and coal), means of transportation (rivers or railways) and manpower stock. It’s enough to bring to mind, as the author recalls, the great French metallurgy born in the Valley of Moselle, between the city of Nancy and Metz; this industrial region in fact only has these two urban centers, eroding almost totality the territory that surrounds them. The ancient cities, initially, represent to the industry market centers and sources of financial banking funding, apart from being centers of manpower stock. We can then deduct the indispensable nature of the city to the industry’s taking off. The urban nodes have accompanied the capital concentrations and the expansion of the urban fabric until they underwent genuine deterioration in detriment of the medieval form of city. What’s more, as we can see in the expansion of urban agglomerates as Le Creusot or St. Etienne in France and the Ruhr region in Germany, industry was the real protagonist of urban development, destroying the idea of city as known prior to industrialization. In this regard Lefebvre maintains that “industry can do without the old city (preindustrial, precapitalist) but does so by constituting agglomerations in which urban features are deteriorating,”66 as demonstrated in the birth and development of American cities. Industry assaults the cities, subjects them, and batters them submitting them to their own market aims. And it is within a similar temporal conjuncture that the first shanty towns are born at the vicinities of industrial cities. In Europe, according to Lefebvre, such an attack carried out by industry within the city, can be illustrated by the development of ancient cities such as Venice and Athens. In the 1950s and 60s it starts a process of exodus of the inhabitants in favor of the industrial pole of Mestre and Porto Marghera in Italy. This exodus threatens Venice, until it becomes, in the most recent years, only a center of touristic attraction.67 The Greek capital, as well, has nothing more to do with the ancient polis, and is featured by a thick peripheral layer that uprooted and disorganized many

66 H. Lefebvre, “The Right to the City”, in Writings on Cities, p. 69. 67 See: S. Settis, Perché Venezia muore, Einaudi, Torino, 2014.

86

F. BIAGI

human beings coming from the countryside areas looking for an occupation. The classical city, in fact, is exclusively “are only places of tourist consumption and aesthetic pilgrimage.”68 Lefebvre realizes that a new ongoing process is at work in the fifties and sixties of the twentieth century: industrialization is no longer creating urbanization and determining the development of cities as it happened in the 1800s known to Marx and Engels, on the contrary, it is the production of the urban space itself that determines the industrial production, the consumption and the economic flows of the capitalism ascension as typical economic form of the western society.69 With the settling of capitalist economy and industrialization processes the city also becomes object of profit and exchange; it constitutes itself in the image and ability to attract capital, tourists and investors, lifestyles that tend to homogenize through standardized consumerism and the everyday life of the human being is completely capitalized. Aiming at shedding some light in these matters, Lefebvre inverts the relation between industrialization and urbanization maintaining that it isn’t correct to define the advanced capitalism of the second half of the twentieth century as “industrial society,” instead he proposes to define it as “urban society on ongoing formation” since the “inductive process” is industrialization and the “induced effect” is instead the progressive urbanization of the entire world society.70 However, it should be specified that the industrialization and urbanization process of society should be accurately sectioned by means of a dialectic method that is able to simultaneously photograph the “unity of both aspects” and “the conflict between them.”71 As we can already implicitly deduce, Lefebvre surpasses the Chicago school analysis and abandons the classical criteria of “dimension,” “density,” “homogeneity” as proposed by Louis Wirth, that are only useful to photograph the “urban” up to the moment it remained inside the city boundaries.72

68 H. Lefebvre, “The Right to the City”, in Writings on Cities, p. 70. 69 H. Lefebvre, “Intervention au séminaire de sociologie de Madrid”, in Du rural à

l’urbain., pp. 258–259. 70 H. Lefebvre, “The Right to the City”, in Writings on Cities, p. 17; Id., The Urban Revolution, p. 5. 71 Ibidem, p. 68. 72 See: L. Wirth, Urbanism as a Way of Life, Chicago University Press, Chicago, 1964.

2

THE LEFEBVRIAN LEXICON

87

The arising of urbanization according to Lefebvre is so epochal that it can be compared to the puzzlement caused on those who started to study industry between the 700s and the 1800s. As they still were in no possession of any adequate interpretative tools of the industrial phenomenon, the great Londoner factories narrated by Charles Dickens’s novels among which we recall Oliver Twist and Hard Times,73 seemed to be a monstrous and undecipherable phenomenon: “And aren’t we, faced with the urban phenomenon, in a situation comparable to the one faced a century ago by those who had to accommodate the growth of industrial phenomena? Those who hadn’t read Marx-which is to say, nearly everyone-saw only chaos, unrelated facts. […] society was being atomized, dissociating into individuals and fragments.”74 The process of uprooting and destruction of the city by urbanization is strongly highlighted by the author. Urbanization becomes the new socialization matrix for the twentieth and twenty-first centuries.75 As he analyzes the urban problematic the Hagetmau sociologist also argues with the dogmatic Marxism that has always perceived the city and the “urban” as “superstructure,” mere consequence of the economic relations instituted by capitalism.76 In order to clarify this hypothesis it is paramount to eviscerate the differences between the sociological categories of “city” and “urban space.” Both concepts aren’t synonyms. Lefebvre, so as to help us understand the differences, but also the links between both concepts, will use a metaphor extrapolated from Physics: the dark hole. If urban space “embraces a cosmic sense,”77 the city turns out to be that node where all the flows of matter disseminated across the universe concentrate. Following the same metaphor, the urban space thus presents itself as the universe for the matter, at some points it agglomerates and in other points it shatters and disperses. The city is as a consequence a space-time center that agglomerates over itself consistent portions of the “urban,” but does 73 Lewis Mumford also considers the analysis of the city of Coketown as imagined by Dickens in Hard Times. See: L. Mumford, The City in History, MJF Books, New York, 1997 (1961). 74 H. Lefebvre, The Urban Revolution, pp. 184–185. 75 H. Lefebvre, “The Right to the City”, in Writings on Cities, pp. 130–131. 76 H. Lefebvre, The Urban Revolution, pp. 139, 162–164. 77 Ibidem, p. 123. See as well the polemic with young Manuel Castells and the Althusserian structuralism.

88

F. BIAGI

not coincide with it. It is an agglutination more or less organized of it. Besides, in the city time projects itself, that is, the historical arch of the life experience of a determined place: this temporal projection develops in space a co-presence of heterogeneity of epochs, of cultural symbols. It is the space, in fact, that determines its performative declension, giving life—during the course of time—to urban society. The industrialization of society, and hence of space, gives life to urbanization, a concept that can only be conceived in its becoming, as horizon of the implosion and explosion of all the urban forms of the city.78 Lefebvre is a theoretician of the “crisis” of the city, intending with this concept the meaning assumed by Massimiliano Tomba that helps understand the ambivalence of the concept of city that Lefebvre proposes: “The crisis is not a disease that should be distinguished from a supposed normal course. It is instead, according to the medical habit of the XIV century, the rapid mutation of the conditions of an illness. The krisis demands separation, choice and judgment. […] The crisis is the moment of danger, it is not to put the train back into the trails, but to interrupt that particular course and take a different road.”79 So, Lefebvre envisages in the city a kind of tension: on one side the “death” of the city, its genuine ruin by hand of capitalist industrialization, on the other hand instead new opportunities to change the direction of the “urban” course of the entire society. Urban spatiality in Lefebvre always assumes that kind of dialectic tension: collapse versus chance of salvation. The French author, so as to highlight the “urban” and its contradictions, borrows a metaphor from nuclear physics: “the implosion” of the city pertains to the huge concentration of people, activities and habitations within the urban fabric and—simultaneously—its “explosion” comprises multiplication and ramification over the entire surrounding territory, of a scattered urban form, made of peripheries, suburbs, satellite cities, hinterland, precarious residences that erode the entire space that until that moment wasn’t city, but rural and natural space more or less unfarmed. In this regard Neil Brenner recaptured the image of a concatenation of matter that implodes and explodes inside the frame of a world that is almost completely urbanized in his organization of one of

78 See: H. Lefebvre, The Urban Revolution, p. 14. 79 M. Tomba, Strati di tempo. Karl Marx materialista storico, Jaca Book, Milano, 2011,

p. 9.

2

THE LEFEBVRIAN LEXICON

89

his last books entitled Implosions/Explosions: Toward a Study of Planetary Urbanization.80 The industrial city, as we continue Lefebvre’s historical sociology, starts up the urban society, leading the city’s structure to a critical point, to a crisis.81 The city as it was known before the industrialization and capitalist process has actually ceased to exist as such; the urban fabric took the primacy over its essence.82 Taking up and trying to identify a historical sociology of the city, Lefebvre isolates three periods that characterize the dialectic relation between urbanization and industrialization.83 The first period regards the industrialization has destructive power of the urban reality, aiming to realize itself against the city (from the mid 700s with the First Industrial Revolution). The second period comprises the generalization of the urban society, its progressive extension (along the whole of the 1800s and the early 1900s). The third and last period is counterdistinguished by its capacity to reinvent urban reality (the second half of the 1900s). A double reinvention: on one side there is the capitalist urban planning that reorganizes, according to the market demands, space; on the other side, as antagonist movement, there is the hope and the potential possibility to overturn the fates and lead the urban revolution toward a fairer situation for the more destitute inhabitants and the natural environment. Inside this critical node of the urbanization the city is torn between the “Scylla” and the “Charybdis” of its explosion of the urban fabric, and Lefebvre foresees the emersion of a necessary conflict situation: “This means that there is nothing harmonious about the urban as form and reality […] What is more, it can only be conceptualized in opposition to segregation. […] We could therefore define the urban as a place where conflicts are expressed.”84 The capitalist productive processes that turn the work into serial product, mere merchandize, and transfer to the urban space of the city,

80 N. Brenner (edited by), Implosions/Explosions: Towards a Study of Planetary Urbanization, Ed. Jovis, Berlin, 2014. 81 See: H. Lefebvre, “The Right to the City”, in Writings on Cities, p. 74. 82 See: Ibidem, p. 79. 83 See: Ibidem, p. 81. In The Urban Revolution he also delineates the three periods, however using different terminology. See: Id., The Urban Revolution, pp. 28–44. 84 H. Lefebvre, The Urban Revolution, p. 175.

90

F. BIAGI

and even the city becomes object of exchange and profit.85 The urban space is subjected thus to processes of merchandizing based on the action that is described by Henri Lefebvre as “urban-planning of developers,”86 as “sales promoters,” in which therefore the economic logics of market prevail, turning the city into a seductive and desirable product for the capitals and great financial groups. At the core of this process the exchange value of the space imposes itself authoritatively over the use value of citizenship that is radically excluded from any decisional process. Nowadays, for instance, the speculative valorization of many abandoned or closed spaces due to the economic crisis adopt precisely this matrix: not the needs of the citizens, no shared urban planning, but the imposition of places that allow economic profit disregarding their usefulness and reasonability. The implosion/explosion metaphor of the city resumed in 1970 in The Urban Revolution 87 had however been anticipated in 1968 with the drafting of The right to the City.88 Lefebvre notices a trend of progressive urbanization of the entire world. In this regard, in parallel to the concept of “urban society,” the meaning of “urban fabric” comes forward, that is, a closed space where some bigger nodes, entangled over themselves can be found and spaces that are instead sparser.89 In order to shed further clarity on this matter: Lefebvre places the great problem of the disappearance of the city and thus of the dichotomy between countryside and city at the center. The urban fabric is that economic-cultural process of subjection of the countryside and the rural world that simultaneously erodes the peasant lifestyles turning them into folklore, and does the same to the natural environment turning it into a space that is no longer rural and is moving toward the course of development of the urbanizing action: “This was accompanied by the loss of rural areas, primarily through the industrialization of agricultural production and the disappearance of the peasantry (and therefore, the village), and the devastation of the land and

85 See: H. Lefebvre, “The Right to the City”, in Writings on Cities, pp. 67–68. 86 See: Ibidem, p. 84. 87 H. Lefebvre, The Urban Revolution, p. 14. 88 H. Lefebvre, “The Right to the City”, in Writings on Cities, p. 71. 89 Ibidem, p. 71–72.

2

THE LEFEBVRIAN LEXICON

91

the destruction of nature.”90 The urban fabric is the spatial projection of the “Trojan horse” introduced by the industrialization that causes urbanization, and vice versa. To Lefebvre it indicates not only the spatial erosion but also the economic-cultural submission of the countryside and of the village economy. It is the process of “de-peasantation” of the hamlets spread across the countryside that lose their survival economy in favor of a touristification or subalternity to the more attractive metropolitan poles, thus becoming quieter dormitories for those who, despite leading their life in the urban milieu, do not nevertheless wish to dwell there. That extinction causes the centralization of spaces that implode and the peripheralization of other spaces that are created as satellites of the explosion—that as so far occurred—of the city. The urbanization is not only the producer of increasingly crammed centers entangled over themselves, but is also system and process that feeds the subalternity of some spaces over others; consequently, being the city, as we have seen, a projection of the social dimension over space, we detect a “specific division of work” between the urban centers as such, between city and city, between city and surrounding rural space; following this interpretative line, the State can be understood as a particular type of centralized power of a city that prevails over other cities.91 Urbanization produces centralization and peripheralization, in a simultaneous and dialectic game between the both poles that achieve it. Urbanization is a hierarchical construction of spatial relations that take shape in time, so much as to isolate a cardinal point between an epoch that precedes the shape of the city and the epoch that follows it, after it murdered the former. That explosion can be conceived as a bomb that explodes and triggers a process of progressive parceling, which fragments spread producing an authentic “urban hell.”92 A whole world becomes urban and urbanized fabric that recalibrates the balance of the borders on new basis: “To the old centralities, to the composition of centres, it substitutes the centre of decision-making.”93 Lefebvre offers a lucid anticipation of the tendencies that characterize today the socioeconomic processes that cross the cities of our planet: “The ideal city, the

90 H. Lefebvre, “Capital and Land Ownership”, in Marxist Thought and the City, p. 121. 91 H. Lefebvre, “The Right to the City”, in Writings on Cities, p. 67. 92 Ibidem, p. 142. 93 Ibidem, p. 81.

92

F. BIAGI

New Athens, is already there to be seen in the image which Paris and New York and some other cities project. The centre of decision-making and the centre of consumption meet. Their alliance on the ground based on a strategic convergence creates an inordinate centrality. […] Coercion and persuasion converge with the power of decision-making and the capacity to consume. Strongly occupied and inhabited by these new Masters, this centre is held by them. Without necessarily owning it all, they possess this privileged space, axis of a strict spatial policy.”94 Contrarily to other visions of the Greek polis, Lefebvre highlights the inequalities and the limits of the ancient Athens, describes the reorganization of the new urban processes of power and, next, makes use of this metaphor to highlight the urban processes produced by the Fordist functionalism. As Cuppini and De Simoni also noticed we are in fact standing before a conceptualization ante litteram of the “global city.”95 What is the “New Athens” but the shape of a “global city” that redefines the economic-political relations of power in the current economy? Between Lefebvre’s lines we can glimpse the first germs of the city as center of economic-financial command: the New York of the Stock Market or the Frankfurt and Brussels, strategic centers of the European free market, authentic thrones of the financial royalty and rule. Urban places that are inaccessible to most, but reserved to a small elite, vector of the actual economic-political power. Urban places that concentrate the power, the market and the luxury, dispersing, shattering and marginalizing the remaining parts of the city: “Who can ignore that the Olympians of the new bourgeois aristocracy no longer dwell. They go from grand hotel to grand hotel, or from castle to castle, commanding a fleet or a country from a yacht. They are everywhere and nowhere. That is how they fascinate people immersed into everyday life. They transcend everyday life, possess nature and leave it up to the

94 Ibidem, p. 161. 95 I refer to Niccolò Cuppini and Simona De Simoni recensions to the Italian re-print

of the Right to the City: N. Cuppini, “Il diritto alla città un capitolo mancante ancora da scrivere?”, in infoaut, 4/03/2015 (online). S. De Simoni, “Le droit à la ville. Note (d)ai margini”. For the debate on global cities see: J. Borja, M. Castells, Local and Global: The Management of Cities in the Information Age, Routledge, London, 1997. S. Sassen, The Global City: New York, London, Tokyo, Princeton University Press, Princeton, 1991. Id., “Introduire le concept de ville globale”, in Raisons Politiques, Volume 15, n. 3, 2004, pp. 9–23. Id., Expulsions: Brutality and Complexity in the Global Economy, Belknap Press, Cambridge (MA), 2014. Id., “The Global City: Enabling Economic Intermediation and Bearing Its Costs”, in City & Community, Volume 15, n. 2, 2016, pp. 97–108.

2

THE LEFEBVRIAN LEXICON

93

cops to contrive culture.”96 In this regard Sassen points out in what way in global cities one can find a strong asymmetry between highly qualified jobs and an ample demand of precarious, non-qualified very often underpaid labor, causing spatial consequences on the areas where these workers live. The polarization of profit and work opportunities necessarily produces periphery, habitation precariousness and urban marginality.97 Lefebvre perceives this new urban framework and highlights how the metropolis begins to appear “as exchange value in its pure state.”98 Space is the new stake of the ruling power, and even power as such has been turned into merchandize; as for space turned into mere “merchandize” is reproduced in a standardized and homogeneous way reducing the “places of simultaneity and encounters” as “places where exchange would […] go through exchange value, commerce and profit.”99 In Lefebvre’s insistence on the flattening and homologation enacted by the consumption society, a process that the French sociologist defines under the term of “colonization of the urban space,”100 we can foresee those processes of subtraction of sense from the spatial dimension that anthropologist Marc Augé defined as “non-places.”101 Lefebvre although he wasn’t beholding the current extremes of the neoliberal city, prefigured those spatial processes that nowadays have broadly become obvious. Finally, the damaging effects of urbanization such as the marginalization of peripheries, the proliferation of a precarious living and dwelling at the margins of the consumerist market and, particularly, in light of what occurred in those days in the Parisian periphery of Nanterre under Lefebvre’s eyes, we can state with certainty that it turned also into the precursor of the analysis of American sociologist Mike Davis as included in The Planet of Slums. Lefebvre writes the following in 1968: “the crisis of the city is world-wide. […] everywhere the city explodes. […] In a number of poor countries, shanty towns are a characteristic phenomenon, 96 H. Lefebvre, “The Right to the City”, in Writings on Cities, pp. 158–159. 97 See: S. Sassen, “Global Cities and Survival Circuits”, in B. Ehrenreich, A. Russell

Hochschild (edited by), Global Woman: Nannies, Maids, and Sex Workers in the New Economy, Henry Holt and Company, New York, 2002, pp. 254–274. 98 H. Lefebvre, “The Right to the City”, in Writings on Cities, p. 115. 99 Ibidem, p. 148. 100 H. Lefebvre, The Urban Revolution, p. 21. 101 See: M. Augé, Non-places: An Introduction to Anthropology of Supermodernity, Verso,

London, 1995 (1992).

94

F. BIAGI

while in highly industrialized countries, the proliferation of the city into ‘urban fabric,’ suburbs, residential areas, and its relation with urban life is what causes the problem.”102 The industrial urbanization, or in other words, the capitalist urban revolution produces simultaneously centers of political-financial command and urban precariousness. The social and spatial inequalities walk hand in hand with the capitalist development. Marginality and discrimination are a product and consequence of the “global cities,” and as a result the “planet of slums” is legitimate child of the global city. The Asymmetrical Relation Between the Urban and the Rural As we have seen so far, Henri Lefebvre digs deeper on the questions pertaining to the city starting from the process of urbanization that is increasingly involving men’s entire space of living. The “progressiveregressive” method will direct him to deepen in first place the rural world and the dynamics of social and spatial exploitation that declension; and then, it will lead him to continue the analysis of the peripheries and shantytowns where the crammed destitute immigrant workers live; and finally the progressive-regressive method causes him to return to the city and the production of urban space in order to understand how they evolved, or better said, how the capitalist political economy shaped, defined, and molded them. This is the reason why the concepts or “rural” and “urban” are increasingly blended in the urbanization of every part of the environment. Lefebvre is beholding the French countryside of the second half of the twentieth century, a countryside that is becoming more and more urbanized, turning into the metropolis minion. The country side undergoes a process of urbanization that becomes simultaneously submission to the city. The city grows due to the subtraction of resources from the countryside and achieves centrality subjecting the rural to its economicsocial organization. In other words, the obesity of the city’s urbanization is the cause of the anorectic loss of weight of the rural space, growingly exploited and capitalized by the interests of the capitalist economy.103 So, the dialectic and conflictive process between city and countryside fades 102 H. Lefebvre, “The Right to the City”, in Writings on Cities, pp. 124–125. 103 H. Lefebvre, “Besoins profonds, besoins nouveaux de la civilisation urbaine”, in Du

rural à l’urbain, pp. 204–205. See also: Id., “The Right to the City”, in Writings on Cities, pp. 118–121.

2

THE LEFEBVRIAN LEXICON

95

away at the pace of the motion itself of unfolding of a space reorganized in the urbanization. Most striking is the fact that the asymmetric relation city–countryside is substantially characterized for being shaped by the rule of capitalism that succeeds in creating development exclusively aiming at getting profit. A proof is the everyday life of the French peasants in the Pyrenees: “in France, in the Pyrenees, just a stone’s throw from dams and powerful ultra-modern hydro-electric installations, there are many hamlets, thousands of houses where peasants live almost as ‘primitive’ […]. They have no electric light either. Elsewhere, more or less everywhere, in town and country alike, electric light illuminates the peeling plaster of slums and the sordid walls of hovels. Although even in Paris there are still houses and flats without modern lighting.”104 This is precisely the formation of the so-called “urban fabric.” This is precisely the formation of the so-called “urban fabric.” However, for precision sake, even the dialectics between industrialization and urbanization produces a new particular kind of ruralization: it is the result of the vacating of the countryside areas and of the entire space outside the metropolitan centrality. With Lefebvre, we maintain that this kind of process is a new type of ruralization,105 since this sort of dynamic results from the abandonment of the peasant world, of the small towns, hamlets and villages in favor of the cramming of the peripheral rings of the cities that became attractive poles for manpower. This new kind of ruralization is featured in the 1950s and 1960s for being a synonym of misery, poverty, and survival economy, outside and away from the consumption circuits. Nevertheless, as we have already pointed out, such a mass uprooting from peasant life creates mainly two novel techniques of capitalist valuation of the unfarmed space. The first pertains to the industrialization of farming, that is, the fact that numerous plots of land become soil to be farmed with new technologic tools and new farming manpower. The countryside becomes the main resource to be exploited in order to face the markets and the need for food in the metropolis, and what’s more, like a vampire that takes hold of it to suck it to the most. The type of cultivation is redefined by the markets, from the moment the world market takes down the French and all of Europe’s peasants due to the agricultural exploitation of

104 H. Lefebvre, The Critique of Everyday Life. Volume I , p. 230. 105 See: H. Lefebvre, Conférence à la cite universitaire d’Antony, in Du rural à l’urbain,

pp. 231.

96

F. BIAGI

the colonies and many southern countries. The small peasant or sharecrop farmer abandons the countryside, preferring to search another occupation in the city, particularly because he is unable to face the competition of resource exploitation in other parts of the world. The mass production of the industrial model is transferred to the agricultural space and this dynamics will lead to similar consequences in the internal and external production relations of a country such as France.106 We should add, for precision sake, that the flight from the countryside areas is a phenomenon that also characterizes the southern countries that passively undergo an exodus that results in the housing form of the bidonville, at the vicinity of the few dominant metropolitan centers. The rationalized and industrial organization of the urban space, unable to completely absorb the old peasant inhabitants into the manpower, provokes continuous banishments of the more destitute social groups: “To sum up, a world-wide crisis in agriculture and tradition a peasant life accompanies, underlies and aggravates a world-wide crisis of the traditional city. This is a change on a planetary scale.”107 The second device of capitalist valuation of the ancient peasant world is the tourism set at the countryside and the turning of a past lifestyle into folklore.108 This can be seen as a sort of profanation of the countryside operated by the metropolitan universe that is looking for ways to escape its intrinsic limits. The processes of valuation of the countryside that we have examined so far show how the extension of the “urban,” or better said, the diffusion of the “urban fabric” disregarding the rigid dichotomy between the rural world and the urban world is a novel “original accumulation” that was triggered by industrialization but that now has taken full autonomy. The author proposes a historical succession of city models that should not be read from a linear perspective, since pauses and deviations occur along the way or for instance the co-presence of one or more models inside a more advanced situation.109 The first level pertains to the political city that subject the countryside regulating it from the point of view of the sovereign power (we have in mind for instance Athens and its relation 106 See: H. Lefebvre, “The Right to the City”, in Writings on Cities, p. 71. 107 Ibidem, p. 126. 108 See: H. Lefebvre, “Besoins profonds, besoins nouveaux de la civilisation urbaine”, in Du rural à l’urbain, p. 205. 109 See: H. Lefebvre, The Urban Revolution, p. 15; Id., “The Right to the City”, in Writings on Cities, p. 123.

2

THE LEFEBVRIAN LEXICON

97

with the rural territories)110 ; the second phase comprises the commercial city that operated previously based on the medieval imprint and next its modern evolution until the 1700s111 ; the third level is the industrial city that emerges from the first Industrial Revolution along the entire nineteenth century and part of the twentieth century112 ; the last conjuncture pertains to the so-called “critical point of the city,” it is the era of the urbanization that starts at the second half of the twentieth century and that nowadays is still ongoing and evolving. The unbalance starts between the “commercial city” and the “industrial city” disregarding the rural world; while between the “industrial city” and its critical point the dialectics is enacted between “implosion and explosion” of the urban form, a problematic situation in which the agricultural world is most definitely subaltern to the metropolitan world. As is well known Henri Lefebvre’s historical sociology is clearly indebted to Marx and Engels intellectual legacy. The studies on the genesis and development of the connection between city and countryside proceed the insights contained in The German Ideology in which the evolution between rural world and urban world are analyzed as for what concerns the passage from feudalism to the modern capitalist world as such.113 For both authors, in fact, the mercantile city is the crucial reading key that announces the bourgeois age as social, cultural and economic model. It is precisely the organization of the mercantile city that sets the beginning of the rule over the countryside by means of two devices: on one side the valuation of the agricultural space; on the other side the possibility of turning the countryside inhabitants into a rich basin of low cost manpower for the urban economy. Lefebvre is very clear in this 110 See: H. Lefebvre, “The City and the Division of Labour”, in Marxist Thought and

the City, p. 29. 111 See: Ibidem, pp. 31–32. 112 See: Ibidem, pp. 37–38. Here we are obviously referring to the passage from

commercial-feudal city to industrial city in which the conflict city-countryside is more than ever strong. Lefebvre, will next innovate that urban-rural dialectic, explaining how the agricultural world is also industrialized and partakes in that “intellectual work” understood as technical and instrumental reason applied to the maximization of productive forces to the subsequent maximization of profits (See: H. Lefebvre, “Capital and Land Ownership”, in Marxist Thought and the City, p. 120). 113 See: K. Marx, F. Engels, “The German Ideology” (1846), in Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels Collected Works, Vol. 5, Lawrence and Wishart, London, 1976, pp. 32–36, 64–65.

98

F. BIAGI

instance: “for Marx, the dissolution of the feudal mode of production and the transition to capitalism was attributed to and associated with a subject: the city.”114 In The Communist Manifesto both authors are even blunter: “The bourgeoisie has subjected the country to the rule of the towns. It has created enormous cities, has greatly increased the urban population as compared with the rural, and has thus rescued a considerable part of the population from the idiocy of rural life. Just as it has made the country dependent on the towns, so it has made barbarian and semi-barbarian countries dependent on the civilised ones, nations of peasants on nations of bourgeois.”115 Marx and Engels call attention to the frame of social class relations between the rural world and the urban one: the process of urbanization of huge masses comprises the uprooting of their originary social space (the countryside) and the subsequent massive urbanization in the peripheral rings of the industrial metropolis (the city). In this regard Engels can assert that the small peasant land owner is a future proletarian.116 Thus, with Lefebvre and on the path also partially strode by Marx and Engels it is possible to state that the birth and development of capitalism clearly coincides with the dismantlement of the agricultural world with the rural inhabitants estrangement from the soil and their following relocation at the margins of the “urban.” Given our intention of retrace the theoretical and practical foundations of Lefebvre’s urban sociology we cannot but mention a 1972 volume entitled Marxist Thought and the City. The author’s aim is that of collecting all the reflections on the city and its urban problems as contained in the works of Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels. Therefore, this is about a thematic reading of both authors’ legacy, to which he adds an exegesis. It is also true that in 1972 the Hagetmau sociologist’s thought is already consolidated, however it can be a useful tool to understand the theoretic origins of the research lines he undertakes. This can be said differently with a metaphor: the testimony of the reflection on the rural and urban worlds is transferred from the hands of both Marx and Engels to those of Lefebvre who will demonstrate how both theoreticians had reflected 114 H. Lefebvre, “Critique of Political Economy”, in Marxist Thought and the City, p. 60. 115 K. Marx, F. Engels, “The Communist Manifesto” (1848), in Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels Collected Works, Vol. 6, p. 488. 116 F. Engels, “The Peasant Question in France and Germany” (1894), in Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels Collected Works, Vol. 27, p. 486.

2

THE LEFEBVRIAN LEXICON

99

ante litteram on the urban problematic that stand now at the center of his concerns. What else would Lefebvre do but proceed Engels’s reflections on the industrial and proletarian Manchester, industrial city par excellence, Mother of the modern capitalist metropolis? Now, we wish to reflect particularly on the first part of the Lefebvrian volume dedicated exclusively to Friedrich Engels. As a scholar, among the many other things, in fact, Lefebvre re-ennobles the figure of the German author, often regarded as “the man who plays second fiddle” of so-called Marxist thought next to Marx, and he reveals to us how already before 1845—the year when The Condition of the Working Class in England is published and he meets and befriends Marx, first in Paris and next in Brussels—he had to deal with the social problem of massive urbanization that resulted from the industrial revolution.117 From Engels he learns how the “urban” and the urban revolution are constantly ambivalent and are intrinsically fueled by a dialectic: on one side there are the damaging traits of that kind of life organization; on the other side the emancipating opportunities that it contains, providing a chance of “turning the table” prepared according to the will of the industrial bourgeoisie. The great industrial city is a place where “splendor and ugliness” coexist.118 On one hand, for instance, the “Londoners have been forced to sacrifice the best qualities of their human nature, to bring to pass all the marvels of civilisation which crowd their city”119 and “the social war, the war of each against all, is here openly declared”120 in the free market system where an authentic “social warfare” is ruling121 due to the conditions of marginality that the workers that are crammed in the peripheries endure; on the other hand Engels foresees emancipation sparks hoping to improve the laborers social conditions and to operate a radical upturn on the urban era that

117 See: H. Lefebvre, “The Situation of the Working Class in England”, in Marxist Thought and the City, pp. 3–18. 118 Ibidem, p. 7. 119 F. Engels, “The Condition of the Working Class in England” (1845), in Collected

Works of Karl Marx and Frederick Engels, Volume 4, p. 329. 120 Ibidem. 121 Ibidem, p. 330.

100

F. BIAGI

has just began.122 Lefebvre recalls that Engels talks of “hypocritical attitude” on urban planning,123 since Manchester “is less built according to a plan, after officials regulations, is more an outgrowth of accident than any other city,”124 “the industrial epoch alone enables the owners of these cattlesheds to rent them for high prices to human beings,”125 therefore the liberal claims against the misery and the working class’ bad habits do not mean anything unless anyone seriously addresses the ongoing relation between the emerging organization of labor and its urban consequences. The repressive sectors that are aware of the merciful requests toward misery and social marginality that infect the 1800s English cities hold no practical, rational, and sociological logic; and the will to fully face the new order that is imposed by the industrial bourgeoisie is lacking. Habitat, Dwelling and the Housing Question in Lefebvre’s Thought Above all, it is necessary to examine the gap between the concept of “habitat” and that of dwelling in the Lefebvrian thought.126 By “habitat” the author means to indicate the production of a standardized massive on large scale milieu that is a simplified conception of the practice of human settling that comprises exclusively a logistic organization of the life needs. In the habitat thus the architectonic and urban functionalism typical of the Fordist era materializes. Lefebvre sees in the habitat the dominant housing model that is characteristic of the second postwar period and sees in Le Corbusier—constant polemic aim of our author—its most refined theoretician. The habitat is the spatial translation of the rational and standardized organization as developed by the industrial model, an “analytical reasoning pushed to its extreme consequences.”127 Conversely the concept of “dwelling” comprises an utterly complex relational practice between the human being and the world. In other

122 H. Lefebvre, “The Situation of the Working Class in England”, in Marxist Thought and the City, p. 18. 123 Ibidem, p. 11. See: F. Engels, “The Condition of the Working Class in England” (1845), in Collected Works of Karl Marx and Frederick Engels, Volume 4, p. 349. 124 Ibidem. 125 Ibidem, p. 355. 126 H. Lefebvre, The Urban Revolution, p. 81. 127 H. Lefebvre, “The Right to the City”, in Writings on Cities, p. 82.

2

THE LEFEBVRIAN LEXICON

101

words the framework of meaning inside which man develops the various practices of life. The dwelling has to do with the millennial practice of man on what concerns his ubiquity in the world: “‘to inhabit’ meant to take part in a social life, a community, village or city.”128 The reference studies of Lefebvre’s on the concept of “dwelling” denote the influence of Martin Heidegger who defines the relation between the being and the “dwelling” under the perspective of the “preserving”129 by means of the etymologic study that he conducts on the origin of the German meaning of the concepts of “to build” and “to dwell.”130 The meaning of “building” and “dwelling” in the German language emerge from the same root: bauen/buan. Initially the semantic constellation of the action of “building” was closely connected to the “dwelling.” The essence of the “dwelling” is thus enclosed in the building, that is, in the act of giving shape to one’s own being in the world, in the staying in the world; so much that the root of the verb “to be”—in German bin (ich bin, I am)— finds its roots in the link between the concept of building and dwelling (bauen/buan): “man is insofar as he dwells” sustains Heidegger.131 In reality, we only build because somehow we already dwell that space. Space, at the same time it is built, takes on its own guidelines and becomes place. Because of this, the human being, in building his home becomes the point of harmony and balance between earth and heaven, between finitude and transcendence. The human action of dwelling is therefore defining act of a unifying frame between two opposing poles that subject the being to tension. The German philosopher uses the example of the peasant house typical to the Black Forest as performative praxis of a housing technique that is adequate for the life in the world. Such a statement doesn’t mean that we should go back to build our homes or our urban spaces as the Black Forest peasant, nevertheless it conveys the example of how man as strayed away from a certain modality of conceiving his role in the world and consequently the entire practical frame of his dwelling. The modern world, according to Heidegger, has separated man from his space, that is, from the possibility of shaping it and turning it

128 Ibidem, p. 76. 129 M. Heidegger, “Building Dwelling Thinking”, in Poetry, Language, Thought, Harper

Colophon Books, New York, 1971, p. 149. 130 See: Ibidem, pp. 148–150. 131 Ibidem, p. 147.

102

F. BIAGI

into a “place”; it has imposed a relation “means-ends” that requires a “first” and an “afterward,” a “project” (building a house) and an “end” (dwelling it). From the theorization of this kind of balance between man and the world that defines himself in the practice of dwelling, Heidegger defines “the uprooting” produced by modernity as subtraction of that harmony. The question therefore is re-proposed in the modernity of technique.132 I recall briefly in what way the topic of the dwelling is crucial in the German philosopher’s thought, acquiring an existential role: the “technical” building of the world leaves the subject without reference points, and this is directly related to individual death.133 This question that represents a key topic to understand Heidegger’s position regarding nihilism is already introduced in Being and Time: the topic of the dwelling is the moment of re-activation of a relation with the world.134 For instance, we have been “dwelling” our language forever but we do not know its horizon of expressivity: we dwell it, but at the same time we are not aware of doing it. “Re-dwelling” language means thus to eliminate the metaphysical conditions that lead us to be estranged from ourselves, from what we actually are. From here, Heidegger reflects on the fact that the entire history of the western metaphysics is a progressive distancing from the direct relation with the being that is as a matter of fact expressed in language. The crisis of dwelling therefore isn’t as much, or not solely, a crisis to accede the right to lodging, a shortage of buildings linked to a factor of housing economy, as it is a crisis that is essentially caused by the instability of the contemporary who dwells the house, the city, the metropolis, having no roots anymore. Heidegger suggests that one should reflect on such a condition of uprooting of the being, if we wish to go back to dwelling in the originary sense of the term. It is needed though to highlight how the German philosopher is a critic of the modern “technique,” but not a critic of the modern “capitalist” technique. This is the difference with Lefebvre and, more generally, with the Marxian thought.

132 Ibidem, p. 161. 133 On the “technique” issue see also: M. Heidegger, “The Question Concerning Tech-

nology”, in The Question Concerning Technology and Other Essays, Harper and Row, New York, 1977, pp. 3–35. This topic is resumed and developed also in Ernesto de Martino’s writings (La fine del mondo). See also: M. Pezzella, La memoria del possibile, pp. 69–102. 134 M. Heidegger, Being and Time, SUNY Press, Albany (New York), 1996.

2

THE LEFEBVRIAN LEXICON

103

In that regard, Heidegger’s philosophy is prone to reactionary slippages, as it is unable to properly problematize the role of capitalism.135 With Lefebvre, one can ask: What is capitalist modernity but an incapability to grasp the reality in the possibilities of the human since every element is submitted to an end such as profit? What sense has the power of technique if unable to respond to the authenticity of human needs? And what’s more: what sense has technique as social engineering if it is a circuit that is subjected to capitalist valuation? And finally: what is left of the practical action of the dwelling after the capitalist modernity? The habitat is the direct result of the modern uprooting within the domestic range of everyday life; Lefebvre resumes Heidegger’s insight in order to examine the modern disorientation between habitat and dwelling and re-proposes it in the practice of urban changes. The technique and rational building of places alienates the inhabitant who is risking the death of meaning of the everyday life in the house. The estrangement that Heidegger refers to is the direct consequence of the inability of “knowing to dwell.” Such inability was lost in the millenary wisdom of man and finds in the Fordist modernity of the twentieth century the peak of its development. An apogee emblematically represented by Le Corbusier’s perspective, the true prophet and theoretician that designs the dwelling as the complete submission to the Fordist matrix: “our dwelling today is harassed by work, made insecure by the hunt for gain and success, bewitched by the entertainment and recreation industry.”136 There is no real dwelling in the habitat and this loss of its intrinsic meaning has concrete consequences on men’s practical life. The alienation of modernity highlighted by Heidegger is embodied in the spatial alienation denounced by Lefebvre. The French author demonstrates by

135 It should be underlined something that Lefebvre couldn’t have known clearly that

in Black Notebooks Heidegger accuses the Jews of being a people that is unable to “dwell” and, for this, condemned to exile. However, such exile—as Heidegger argues— is a disaster to Germany and to Europe (the critique has often talked of “metaphysical anti-Semitism”). Despite Heidegger’s being a great philosopher, his critique of technique doesn’t adequately understand the capitalist way of production and remains, actually, exclusively a critique of modern life. The critique on technique is not the same of the critique of Capital, that is, of the political economy of modernity. In secondary literature see: D. Di Cesare, Heidegger e gli ebrei. I quaderni neri, Bollati Boringhieri, Torino, 2016. 136 M. Heidegger, “…Poetically man dwells…”, in Poetry, Language, Thought, Harper Colophon Books, New York, 1971, p. 213.

104

F. BIAGI

mean of a sociological study how the conceptual dynamics of Heidegger materialize into reality. In the Lefebvrian constellation, next to Heidegger, interpreter of Hölderlin’s poem “Poetically man dwells,”137 Gaston Bachelard appears,138 the surrealist and situationist heritage in drawing an alternative way of life that consist precisely in the dwelling “like a poet”: that is, the infinite possibilities of instauration of a real philia with space,139 for it is defined and produced in first hand by those who dwell it and according to the needs that are closest to the intimate and daily life: “Poetry is what first brings man onto the earth, making him belong to it, and thus brings him into dwelling.”140 The esthetical dimension meets therefore its deepest anthropologic roots in the act of creating poetry as lifestyle antithetical to the Fordism modernity.141 Poetically dwelling is a gesture that tries to solve the problem of uprooting, disclosing new possible paths for the human life outside of technique. The essence of the act of producing poetry is contained in the understanding of the immensity that exists between earth and heaven, so, the poet is one who understands the tension of being thrown in the world, his aspiration beyond the instrumentality of the relation means-ends. Man may thus discern in the act of dwelling not a means to achieve an end, but another kind of mediation that holds inside the end: that life of being capable of giving meaning to his own action in the world. In other words, it is the poet’s attempt to rediscover human essence itself beyond and against modernity and technique. Heidegger’s poetry writing finds more accuracy in Bachelard’s insight: in the fact that the imagination of the human projecting on its own a home is a crucial element. Bachelard asks himself: “the imagination functions in this direction whenever the human being has found the slightest

137 Ibidem, p. 211. 138 G. Bachelard, The Poetics of Space, Beacon Press, Boston, 1994. 139 Bachelard expressively mentions «topophilia» . See: (Ibidem, pp. XXXV–XXXV). 140 M. Heidegger, “…Poetically man dwells…”, in Poetry, Language, Thought, p. 218. 141 In this regard, Lefebvre recalls as way of example the oriental housing practices that still haven’t forgotten the importance of the poetic and aesthetic element. See: H. Lefebvre, The Urban Revolution, p. 83.

2

THE LEFEBVRIAN LEXICON

105

shelter”?142 The house, in fact is “is one of the greatest powers of integration for the thoughts, memories and dreams of mankind. […] It maintains him through the storms of the heavens and through those of life. It is body and soul. It is the human being’s first world”143 and what’s more, it is “a body of images that give mankind proofs or illusions of stability,”144 because of this he proposes to examine the housing fantasy developed by poets and novelists, as the adequate framework that can define the human aspirations that are contained in the action of dwelling. So, it is understandable how urban functionalism painfully cuts off such an experiential reality. The mention to Bachelard and Heidegger—consequently—allows Lefebvre to unfold the constellation within which to enact more effectively the critique on Le Corbusier’s economy and architecture. However: how can these reflections be translated into the commonness of everyday life? In what manner does the habitat perpetuate the incapability situation of living and dwelling poetically? In what manner does the habitat subtract the poetic act from everyday life? Lefebvre writes: “The human being cannot build and dwell, that is to say, possess a dwelling in which he lives, without also possessing something more (or less) than himself: his relation to the possible and the imaginary.”145 We understand therefore how the question of the dwelling pertains to a wide interdisciplinary horizon, more precisely, “metaphilosophical,” according to the Lefebvrian vocabulary. That horizon of reflection is clearly not reducible to the capitalist mechanics and logistics; in fact our author’s reflection develops in demonstrating how the production of the space enacted by capitalism is substantially against the nature and spontaneity of human life that is instead capable of containing infinite possibilities. The habitat reduces the dwelling practice—particularly on what destitute groups are concerned—into “dormitory-neighbourhoods” and “rabbit-hutches,”146 even if Lefebvre’s more accomplished phrase is the dwelling idea of the habitat expressed in Le Corbusier’s concept of

142 G. Bachelard, The Poetics of Space, p. 5. 143 Ibidem, pp. 6–7. 144 Ibidem, p. 17. 145 H. Lefebvre, The Urban Revolution, p. 82. 146 H. Lefebvre, “Les nouveaux ensembles urbains”, in Du rural à l’urbain, p. 111.

106

F. BIAGI

machines à habiter.147 The “machines for habiting-in” are the new frontier of the postwar capitalism and—next to industry—they qualify as those emblematic urban designs of the ongoing urbanization process, that are able to separate the inhabitants, distance them from the city turning them into small owners of a house.148 Lefebvre’s original insight is therefore the ability to defy the capitalist housing by means of a full re-evaluation of the significant practice of the dwelling, of the symbolic needs and their concrete results on everyday life. To this I add how the imaginary of poetry in housing and urban question is not exclusive to philosophers who examine reality, but also of Swiss urban planner Le Corbusier himself. In fact, contrarily to Lefebvre (and Heidegger and Bachelard) he will fully undertake the concept delineating the poetic realization in urban planning by means of technique: “the poet is reborn! For the poet is one who loves perfection and wants to make man into God”149 because “serial work leads to perfection and purity.”150 It is possible therefore to deduct that there is a theoretical battle that stakes “the poetically dwelling”: on one hand the philosophical and the critical thought that uses this meaning to legitimate a harsh critique on the technique; on the other hand, instead, a theory of the modern (urban planning) thought that tries to legitimate the inhuman and the inorganic as ultimate accomplishment of man’s existence. One of the first inquiries by Lefebvre pertains to the new urban neighborhoods of two small towns settled not far from each other in the French Pyrenees: Lacq and Mourenx. Both are so called villes nouvelles and stuck between them—between the fifties and the sixties—a broad industrial complex is emerging.151 The inquiry on the hamlets of Lacq and Mourenx is object of a comparative study with the urban development that is ongoing in Aix-en-Provence. Both hamlets in the transalpine Pyrenees are progressively turning from rural space into urban agglomerates, and this is why Lefebvre considers them to be a “particularly interesting

147 H. Lefebvre, The Urban Revolution, p. 81. 148 H. Lefebvre, “The Right to the City”, in Writings on Cities, p. 77–78. 149 Le Corbusier, Costruire in serie, in Scritti, Einaudi, Torino, 2003, p. 87. 150 Ibidem, p. 90. 151 See: H. Lefebvre, “Introduction”, in Du rural à l’urbain, p. 13. See also: Id.,

“Notes on New Town”, in Introduction to Modernity, Verso, London, 1995 (1962), pp. 116–126.

2

THE LEFEBVRIAN LEXICON

107

limit-case” and typical of the urban planning designed from above, by the central organs of the State, aiming to give life to new poles of industrial growth.152 Instead, Aix-en-Provence is situated at the opposing pole: it is an ancient city that underwent various changes at the external ring of the historical center. The author therefore places before his eyes a radically new model of city, built on the foundations of the Fordist functionalism, and another older model on which capitalist restructuring is ongoing. The common traits pertain to the segmentation and segregation according to the labor division, however with different shades.153 Aix-en-Provence has very poor neighborhoods; lacking services, where the sub-proletariat that lives on expedients blends with the most destitute workers, and other neighborhoods where instead the proletariat is majorly mixed with the middle-high classes, substantially due to the possibility— for a certain sector of laborers who work in the construction sector—of building new houses in their free time. This form of independent work has allowed large popular and destitute sectors to life above their possibilities and above all to dwell areas that they would have not have acceded with the salary they got for their work. House building derived from the free time and self-exploitation of the construction workers is thus capitalized afterwards by the same workers-builders either by selling the infrastructures (and as a consequence larger profits are achieved and next reinvested in better habitations) or by renting during the holiday periods. Popular sectors that haven’t instead invested so hardly in work permitted during the free time remain relegated in the passiveness of their meager aid programs. The expansion of Aix-en-Provence is thus characterized by the absence of an urban planning project that spontaneously spreads from the historical city. The urban condensation born between Lacq and Mourenx pertains instead to the specific character of the expansion of a “new working class,” target of the expanding changes of the market. Here is born the typical ville nouvelle that grows as genuine projection on the soil of the industrial relations planned nationwide. In the testimonies collected by the author154 we notice how the absence of history and roots among

152 H. Lefebvre, “Les nouveaux ensembles urbains”, in Du rural à l’urbain, p. 116. 153 See: H. Lefebvre, “The Right to the City”, in Writings on Cities, p. 139. 154 H. Lefebvre, “Les nouveaux ensembles urbains”, in Du rural à l’urbain, p. 119–

124.

108

F. BIAGI

the inhabitants emerges, and their feeling of being thrown into a spatial dimension that is authentic depersonalizing tabula rasa. One thing that catches the eye, for instance, is how the absence of a cemetery is perceived; its causes among the inhabitants a bitter realization of not owning a city tradition to celebrate and—in fact—a disappointment that crosses the entirety of quotidian life since the first months of living there as if they had been deceived by a promise that was later broken. The gap between the case of Aix-en-Provence and Lacq–Mourenx stands out in the attempt of political self-organization of citizenship. In fact, in the Provence city the passivity of domain over subalterns reigns, conversely, in the hamlets of the Pyrenees Lefebvre highlights how, in the experience of setting a civic list at the town hall domain, many social demands and concrete claims of the needs of the inhabitants converge. A draft of “urban democracy”155 appears expressed in the autonomous politics of the citizens who by means of neighborhood assemblies organize the collective needs and turn them into political process that will take them to the city’s government. Against many expectations, the “new working class”—crammed in the grands ensembles tamed by the discipline of work and consumerism—upturns the city’s destiny and takes charge on its own of a production of space that is more adequate to its own demands. To the analysis of the villes nouvelles and the grands ensembles Lefebvre adds his study of the habitat pavillonnaire, that is the suburban individual house in residential neighborhoods. The occasion he takes advantage of to convey his reflections is the publication in 1966 of a broadened inquiry conducted by the Institut de sociologie urbaine in 1964–1965; in fact the authors ask Lefebvre to draw the foreword.156 Their sociological study proposes to dig deeper into the genesis, the development and the ideological consequences of the “mythical” achievement resulting from the pavillon (the independent cottage), specifically from those social groups that cannot afford to access them. Lefebvre accepts the request

155 Ibidem, pp. 125–128. 156 H. Raymond, N. Haumont, M. G. Dezes, A. Haumont, L’habitat pavillonaire,

Harmattan, Paris, 2001 (1965).

2

THE LEFEBVRIAN LEXICON

109

and delivers a genuine paper, very thick, that surpasses its mere introductive intention.157 The incipit comes into form in the critique of the concept of habitat that targets directly Le Corbusier’s teachings, guilty of superficiality for having reduced the urban question to the technicalscientific field due to indifference toward philosophical speculation. It is in isolating social problems and in the impossibility of a global interpretation that the author—on the way partly stridden by Heidegger and Bachelard—locates the main theoretical limitations of functionalism: “a lodging built according to economic or technologic prescriptions is as far away from inhabiting as the language of machines is distanced from poetry.”158 Lefebvre poses a question to himself: “What is the relation between the new sciences of society and the ancient philosophical tradition?”159 And once more, he highlights the limits of sectorial studies and specialism condemning the arrogance of the functionalist school. The inquiry on the single-family housing of 1966 is inspired by a previous study dating back to 1947 in which the ministerial institutions denoted a strong preference toward the independent house as shown by the massive state investments granted to the public constructions of the grands ensembles.160 The new study renewed the intentions nearly twenty years later, but added a new particular socio-political interest regarding the consequences of the results. Above all, the realization is that, substantially, that preference hasn’t changed and is higher amid the less well-off layers of population. What is the sociological meaning that can be ascribed to the permanence of the single-family house myth? What explanation can be offered to the permanence of a housing model of so traditional an imprint when facing the urban changes that were occurring in the 1960s?161

157 The text that can be found in the volume regarding the survey was also inserted in: H. Lefebvre, “Introduction à l’etude de l’habitat pavillonnaire”, in Du rural à l’urbain, pp. 159–182. 158 Ibidem, p. 161. 159 Ibidem, p. 162. 160 See: A. Girard, Désirs des français en matière d’habitation urbaine, “Travaux et Documentes”, I.N.E.D, n. 3, PUF, Paris, 1947; Id., Enquête sur la population des grands ensembles d’habitation collective, I.N.E.D, 1965. 161 In the last and fourth edition of the volume a further study dated back to 1999 confirming the previous inquiries and demonstrating how the myth of the single-family house isn’t challenged.

110

F. BIAGI

Lefebvre answers by drawing two spheres that are different but communicating. The first pertains to the recording of an information: individualism ownership was successful with the single-family housing model, often conveyed by the needs induced by the dominant media apparatus.162 In this regard, Lefebvre lists market studies that preceded the project of that urban planning that afterwards converged into a propaganda apparatus. There is no doubt then on the fact that consumption society perceives individuals as separate and closed in their own houses, full of comforts that are easily at hand particularly for their free times (consider for instance the massive diffusion of television). The second sphere pertains instead to the deeply human need to shape one’s own dwelling space and develops around two economies: on the linguistic layer a semantics of domestic space is created, and it recognizes and “gives a name to things”163 ; on the material plan instead a semiology of domestic space is born and, in it, places take the shape in the action of caring for and subjectively appropriating space.164 Lefebvre verifies that a healthy and genuine desire was destroyed by the massive urbanization of the grands ensembles of the villes nouvelles, nonetheless that instance is manipulated by the ownership ideology. The wishful myth for the independent house represents thus the attempt to stray away from the depersonalization of the metropolitan accommodations, from the urban chaos of the great cities and from the lack of green areas, but instead of coming across a political answer that defies the status quo of the production of space, he finds an individual response, individualized, often directed by leaders such as the capitalist market. In Lefebvre’s opinion, underlining this paradox pertains to the serious problem of the “space appropriation.”165 The Hagetmau sociologist resumes the counter-opposition between the concept of “appropriation” and that of “possession”166 discussed by Marx in the Economic and Philosophic Manuscripts of 1844: appropriation comprises a non-alienated relation

162 H. Lefebvre, “Introduction à l’etude de l’habitat pavillonnaire”, in Du rural à l’urbain, pp. 179–180. 163 Ibidem, p. 165. 164 Ibidem, pp. 166–167. 165 Ibidem, pp. 172–175. 166 H. Lefebvre, “Besoins profonds, besoins nouveaux de la civilisation urbaine”, in Du

rural à l’urbain, pp. 200–201.

2

THE LEFEBVRIAN LEXICON

111

with the object as it expresses a process of “re-appropriation of oneself in the object,” while the possession is a device that still pertains to the capitalist forms of relation.167 The question is crucial, consequently, has to do with the capability to politically guide such instances through a path of collective awareness of the urban complexity. The radical revaluation of the private housing space by Lefebvre helps us understand the pervasiveness of the power technologies of capitalism, that operated a real “passive revolution” of the most genuine human instances, unveiling themselves—consequently—in the chameleonic ability to supply an answer to the social consequences of the urban problems they had created. Lefebvre clearly talks of a process of “integration through the market” or of an “ideology of the hierarchized integration.”168 In other words, escaping the city and its nuisances is capitalized with the implementation of the habitat pavillonaire, and those who live in a great residential complex cannot but wish for a mono-familiar sector.169 A Critique of Le Corbusier’s Functionalist Urbanism Until now we have only superficially referred to Lefebvre’s critique of Le Corbusier’s thought, occasionally throwing some objections that followed the author’s thematic analysis. Now the moment has come to depict a more systematic analysis. The functionalist conception of architecture and urban planning is elaborated by Le Corbusier between the 1930s and the 1940s and it draws a theoretical–practical framework within which the urban projects of the transalpine country developed in the postwar period.170 The Le Corbusier’s theory hegemonizes completely the French urban planning knowledge and definitely determines the metropolitan development. As recalled by Bruno Settis, Le Corbusier is the one who inserts the Fordist

167 K. Marx, “Economic and Philosophic Manuscripts of 1844”, in Marx & Engels Collected Works, Vol. 3, pp. 293–305. 168 H. Lefebvre, “The Right to the City”, in Writings on Cities, p. 144; Id., “Utopie expérimentale: pour un nouvel urbanisme”, in Du rural à l’urbain, pp. 135–136. 169 H. Lefebvre, “The Right to the City”, in Writings on Cities, pp. 78–80. 170 On Le Corbusier’s theoretical education see: P. V. Turner, The Education of Le

Corbusier, Garland, New York, 1977.

112

F. BIAGI

method in architecture transferring it from the industrial world171 ; as way of example, one can bring to mind the pamphlets with emblematic titles: Towards The Paris of the Machine Era [Vers le Paris de l’époque machiniste] and To Build: Standardize and Taylorize [Pour bâtir: standardiser et tayloriser].172 Besides, since 1918 with the manifesto After Cubism [Après le Cubisme]173 he maintained that he had found a clear correspondence between the Taylorism aesthetical lines and the principles of his architectural proposal. Or also, still, in Lesson of the machine [La leçon de la machine].174 Even more eloquent instead is the aphorism with which he concludes a 1923 pamphlet overtly conditioned by the fear of diffusion of the workers’ rebellion set by the Bolshevik in Russia: “Architecture or revolution. Revolution can be avoided,”175 to which the motto “Things are not revolutionized by making revolutions. The real Revolution lies in the solution of existing problems”176 is added. The mythical faith in technique is the tool to be used to operate that apparent leap beyond political ideologies, or better, against the possible insurrections of the masses approaching

171 See: B. Settis, Fordismi. Storia politica della produzione di massa, Il Mulino, Bologna, 2016, pp. 170–171. 172 Le Corbusier, Vers le Paris de l’époque machiniste, supplément to the Bulletin of the Redressement Français, 15 February 1928, 14 pp.; Id., Pour bâtir: standardiser et tayloriser, 1 May 1928, 8 pp. (quoted in: M. McLeod, “Architecture or Revolution: Taylorism, Technocracy and Social Change”, in Art Journal, Volume 43, n. 2, 1983, pp. 132–147). It is paramount to mention Le Corbusier’s partaking, from 1925 until 1935, at the anti-political movement Le Redressement Français founded by Marshall Ferdinand Foch and industrialist Ernest Mercier, electricity and oil tycoon (who owned the famous company Total ) that diffused nationalist political ideas very close to the extreme-right, however the movement’s intentions were those of promoting a technocratic industrial modernization in France insisting on the connection between production and mass consumerism. For precision – notwithstanding the debate around Le Corbusier’s fascist sympathies it is fundamental to highlight the adhesion to technocratic ideology and the political tension in re-proposing man’s salvation and prosperity in the mass production and scientific organization of work and human life. 173 Le Corbusier, Après le Cubisme, Altamira, Paris, 1999 (1918). 174 Le Corbusier, “La leçon de la machine”, in L’Esprit Nouveau, n. 25, juillet 1924. 175 Le Corbusier, Towards a New Architecture, Architectural Press, Oxford, 2000

(1923), p. 289. See also: M. McLeod, “Architecture or Revolution: Taylorism, Tecnocracy and Social Change”. 176 Le Corbusier, The City of Tomorrow, MIT Press, Cambridge (MA), 1971 (1926), p. 301.

2

THE LEFEBVRIAN LEXICON

113

political life in the early years of the twentieth century. Technique in this aspect acquires populist proportions. Faith in capitalist modernity is here conceived in the radical depoliticization, dismissing the problem as “technical factor,” as if technique as such did not belong to a precise vision of the world. In this regard the merit of the Lefebvrian plan of discussion emerges: the ability to join Heidegger and Bachelard’s insights to the Marxian interpretation framework. That concept is also confirmed by historian and art critic Jacques Lucan, who mentions the statements of architect Raymond Lopez when he confesses his actual “plan to reconquer Paris” in the industrial production of the habitat.177 It is in this line of inquiry that we can find Lefebvre’s reasons for considering Le Corbusier as authentic heir of Haussmann’s politics.178 Architecture should govern men and above all satisfy the claims of the most destitute social classes, in order to prevent the contagion of uprising chaos in the urban space of the city. The Hagetmau sociologist underlines in what way functionalism thinks the city on the perspective of dominion and repression of the emancipating claims. There is no real democratic will in the functionalist project, but solely a minimum level of regulating poverty so that it will not spread to insubordination. In 1929 Le Corbusier will declare in a conference: “I intend to evoke those fatalities of the current time that still haven’t knocked at the heart of architecture: standardization, industrialization, taylorism; three resulting phenomena that […] are not in themselves neither cruel nor heinous, whereas instead they lead to order, perfection, liberation.”179 The segment we’ve just quoted is very clear regarding the redemptive role assigned to Fordism: it should ensure new oxygen flow to the pulsating heart of architecture, lest some disease should spread across the city and infect it, as well as infect the State and the entire modern theoretical urban planning development device. 177 See: J. Lucan, “Généalogie du regard sur Paris”, in Paris Projet, n. 32–33, 1998

(online); Id., Le Corbusier: une encyclopédie, Centre Georges Pompidou, Paris, 1987. To confirm this thesis see also: P. V. Aureli, “Il ritorno della fabbrica. Appunti su territorio, architettura, operai e capitale”, in Opera Viva Magazine, 31/12/2016 (online). 178 H. Lefebvre, “The Right to the City”, in Writings on Cities, pp. 74–76. 179 Le Corbusier, Precisions on the Present State of Architecture and City Planning, MIT

Press, Cambridge (MA), 1991 (1930), pp. 49–51.

114

F. BIAGI

In 1925, at the “International Exhibit of Modern Decorative and Industrial Arts” in Paris, Le Corbusier displays inside the Esprit Nouveau 180 pavilion a proposal for the renovation of the transalpine capital urban planning, known as Plan Voisin (in order to ensure funding from the industry it was named after). In this plan he will overlap to the existing urban fabric a system of long straight roads as he predicts the demolition of a vast area of the rive droit of the Seine; this being a symmetric system of cross-shaped skyscrapers that is composed of linear buildings à redents, ensuring as well that few significant historical monuments are preserved.181 In order to emphasize, in Le Corbusier’s reasoning, the strong theoretical relation between the “machine” and the “dwelling” of the human being, I believe it most useful to recall an anecdote.182 In the preliminary stage of planning the Esprit Nouveau pavilion the Swiss urban planner had spoken to the three major French automobile industries: the Peugeot, the Citroën, and the Voisin. However, the Peugeot by fear of entering an inadequate market declined the proposal; the Citroën declared it had no competence in urban planning, and could see no connection to automobile production; conversely, the Voisin company accepted enthusiastically with no hesitation. We can therefore deduct how the automobile era had fascinated Le Corbusier, so much as to force him to a concrete application of the urban planning theory that he had been conceiving in the 1920s. The challenge of uniting urban planning with industrial technique was thus solved and was increasingly materializing. The example of the Voisin Company is emblematic: an artist, architect, and urban planner such as Le Corbusier, was delivering the “keys” to the fate of the city to the ideology of technique and industrialism. The artistic imagination, the oeuvre d’art was thus becoming the minion of the serial production by means of the artist himself who longed to perform a “tabula rasa of a past that can no longer be.”183

180 See: Le Corbusier, “Il padiglione dell’Esprit Nouveau”, in Scritti, pp. 155–164. 181 Le Corbusier, Precisions on the Present State of Architecture and City Planning,

pp. 267–270. 182 Rosa Tamborrino brings this to mind in a footnote for the Einaudi anthology, see: Le Corbusier, “Il centro di Parigi”, in Scritti, p. 118. 183 Le Corbusier, “Costruire in serie”, in Scritti, p. 90.

2

THE LEFEBVRIAN LEXICON

115

The project is conceived to enter the peripheries and to reorganize them nationwide on a functional base, proportionally to the ramification of the city center. As a result, we can clearly talk of a modern re-declensioning of Haussmann’s project,184 precisely because the Swiss urban planner sees in the old city an obstacle to the liberation of the productive forces of the modern metropolis, the ultimate “city of businesses in the heart itself of the capital”185 vehemently attacks the “protectors of the old Paris” defining them as “fanatics.”186 Moreover, he adds how urban planning can well be an occasion of economic valuation and immodestly admits: “We want to try to see how a State that wishes so can earn millions, or better how it can get millions? And how, once the millions are earned by means of an urban planning initiative, these can be used to improve those productive companies that enable the country to gain vital means of work […] I am about to demonstrate that the machinery era that triggered the birth of big cities and the jamming in their center created at the same time a diamond mine in the center of the cities […] Urbanizing means to ‘confer value’.”187 Shortly after he goes one: “the machinery evolution that altered the concept of time and imposed rapidity, demands the creation of cities of business.”188 Besides, it’s paradigmatic how to the project of a city organized in the name of the Fordist plan and at the service of capitalist valuation, the hypothesis of the Ville Radieuse is added, that is, the metropolis of three billion inhabitants, whose labor is dedicated “to the Authority,”189 in its quality of 184 See: Le Corbusier, The City of Tomorrow, MIT Press, Cambridge (MA), 1971 (1926), pp. 239–290. 185 Le Corbusier, Precisions on the Present State of Architecture and City Planning, p. 194. 186 Ibidem, p. 196. 187 Ibidem, pp. 198–199. 188 Ibidem, p. 201. 189 Le Corbusier, La

ville radieuse: éléments d’une doctrine d’urbanisme pour l’équipement de la civilisation machiniste, Freal, Paris, 1964 (1935). I believe it is necessary to specify an issue regarding the debate on Le Corbusier sympathy toward fascism. As serious as it is I am nevertheless convinced that it is neither paramount to understand his degree of collaborationism with the Petain government, nor to measure his sympathy toward the eversive Right-wing. We’ll leave that task to historians. In fact it suffices to highlight his joining the modern project of the capitalist technique to understand the concrete harmfulness of Le Corbusier’s theoretical framework. In other words it is enough to understand his idea of city: functionalism is characterized by such mystical and mythical

116

F. BIAGI

ordering political principle, authentic sovereign of the fate of the polis. The Ville Radieuse in fact is the framework within which Le Corbusier conceives the urban changes in Paris, despite it being a project designed to replace—from scratch—the modern city and therefore incapable of fully materializing in the French capital. Secondly, in Méditation sur Ford 190 the French architect writes about his trip to the United States in October 1935 in which his fascination toward the Fordist factories promptly appeared, as they were the actual synthesis of a maximized life in the name of efficiency, organization, rapidity and human collaboration (even if unequal). Le Corbusier perceives in the Fordist “modern times” the splendour of applied science and the accomplished realization of the mythical reconciliation of personal liberty with collective power. In face of this scenario architectonic functionalism becomes authentic urban politics and the machine à habiter 191 the winning suggestion of the capitalist production and accumulation process in the spatial projection. Le Corbusier writes: “The house has two purposes. It is above all a machine for living in, that is a machine destined to supply efficient aid in terms of velocity and exactitude at work, an industrious and careful machine to satisfy the demands of the body: comfort.”192 We have thus ascertained that the habitat space is an alienated space where the “positivist conception,” or better “zoo-technical” conception of the man that unfolds on the soil”193 meets its most consonant realization. In this fascination towards the capitalist industrial technique and such a program can be declensionable in the authoritarian optics of totalitarism as well in the “democratic” optics of the liberal post second war democratic regimes. 190 Le Corbusier, “Méditation sur Ford” (later also in Quand les cathédrales étaient blanches, 1937), in M. Bill (edited by), Œuvre Complète, Volume 3, Éditions d’Architecture, Zürich, 1964, pp. 16–17. Besides, among many anecdotes I wish to recall that Le Corbusier was also mesmerized by the building of the “Lingotto” in Turin by the Agnelli family in the two trips he took before 1920 and later in 1934 (see: Le Corbusier, Towards a New Architecture). 191 “The house is a machine for living in” (Le Corbusier, Towards a New Architecture, p. 107). On what concerns further elaboration on Le Corbusier’s categorization of the house as “machine for living in”. See chapters III and VI in: Le Corbusier, Looking at city planning, Grossman Publishers, New York, 1971 (1946). And see also: Id., “L’abitazione, speranza della civiltà macchinista”, in Scritti, pp. 324–330. 192 Le Corbusier, “L’esprit nouveau en architecture” (1924), in Almanach d’une architecture moderne, Éditions Crès, Paris, 1925, p. 29. 193 H. Lefebvre, “Les nouveaux ensembles urbains”, in Du rural à l’urbain, p. 114.

2

THE LEFEBVRIAN LEXICON

117

regard, Lefebvre points out how Le Corbusier has forgotten meeting places and urban social spaces potentially rich of novel casual situations and lacking prefabricated ties, where human beings interact socially in life’s unpredictability, as for example: “In the street, a form of spontaneous theater, I become spectacle and spectator, and sometimes an actor. The street is where movement takes place, the interaction without which urban life would not exist, leaving only separation, a forced and fixed segregation.”194 There is an obvious risk highlighted by the author: “the extinction of life, the reduction of the city to a dormitory, the aberrant functionalization of existence.”195 For this reason the “ludic function of space”—the theater of new possibilities, and non alienated space and arena for non ownership use—is lost.196 Functionalism is intrinsically obsessive and compulsive, thrives in the repetition of the rational failing to understand that it dooms human life to sterility. To the functionalist school the IV I.C.M.A. (International Congress of Modern Architecture) is fundamental, as it is the setting where the Athens Charter [Charte d’Athènes 1933] was drafted.197 The event was held between Marseilles and Athens; in the summer of 1933 the ship that sets sail carries the “élite of architects and urban planners of the whole world”198 who are working on the organization of the project of functional city, however ten years will have to pass until the group, under Le Corbusier charismatic guidance comes up with a 194 H. Lefebvre, The Urban Revolution, p. 18. 195 Ibidem. See also: Id., “Le Bistrot-Club”, in Du rural à l’urbain, pp. 141–144. 196 H. Lefebvre, “La vie sociale dans la ville”, in Du rural à l’urbain, pp. 150–152. 197 In order to refer to the Athens Charter we chose to quote the last edition available in Italian (Le Corbusier, La Carta di Atene. Manifesto e frammento dell’urbanistica moderna, edited by P. Di Biagi, Officina Edizioni, Roma, 1998), since it includes a rich repertoire of the versions that followed and were discussed in the preparatory documents, which is since 1931 (two years prior to the C.I.A.M IV Congress) until 1943, the year in which Le Corbusier decided to anonymously publish a text that could be considered as “Manifest” to modern urban planning. The 1957 French edition of the Les Éditions de Minuit will follow carrying more appropriately the name of the French urban planner. For the English edition of “The Athens Charter” see: Le Corbusier, The Athens Charter, Grossman Publishers, New York, 1973 (with an introduction by Jean Giraudoux and with a new foreword by Josep Lluis Sert). For a historical reconstruction of the C.I.A.M. Group and the theoretical development that was produced see: E. Mumford, The CIAM Discourse of Urbanism, MIT Press, Cambridge (MA), 2002. 198 The phrase belongs to Le Corbusier in: Conversazione con gli studenti delle scuole di architettura, in Scritti, p. 388.

118

F. BIAGI

shared mediation. We should therefore see the Athens Charter as the Manifest of Fordist urban planning; it had endured a prolonged gestation phase, to which one of the most seductive members puts an end with the first anonymous print in 1943; and only later, in 1957, the Charter will be associated to Le Corbusier’s writing. The Swiss urban planner is the most prestigious theoretician; however a fiery discussion surrounds him, despite being a one-way debate, within the functionalist approach that carries it—the mythical dream of applying the Fordist housing method to the universe of the human being. The Athens Charter, therefore, is configured as authentic Fordist “gospel” in architecture and urban planning, most useful to preach all over the globe the functionalist “word” that theorizes the “new biology of building,”199 in order to set—once and for all—the principles of building most adequate to the modern city. A further example consists of the paragraphs 77, 78, and 79 in which the functionalist project of everyday life emerges as precise and punctilious organization of every phase of human time.200 Existence is hence reduced solely to dwelling, working, amusement during free time and the opportunity to move and go round with new means and technologies made for man. It is clear how the demands of capitalist economy are the background on which the Athens Charter was envisaged. Furthermore, we have to point out that in the second part of the Charter entitled The prevailing condition of the Cities. Critical examination and remedial measures there is a mention to, on one hand, the damages the metropolis underwent due to technique, and on the other side, the centrality of the housing problem and the misery at the peripheries of industrial cities; nevertheless the functionalist perspective takes an organizing role of the industrial chaos that has reached the city without submitting to any critique the structure of the Fordist production. In consequence, functionalism proposes itself as the ideology that organizes and rationalizes, at a higher level, the organizing foundations of the new industrial society. In other words, we could say that functionalism enacts the Fordist industrial project, rationalizing it once more. 199 Le Corbusier, “Towards a synthesis”, in W. Boesiger (edited by) Œuvre complete. Volume 4: 1938–1946, Éditions d’Architechture, Zürich, 1964, p. 71. 200 Here the human needs are standardized in the services that domestic tools allow. See: Le Corbusier, La Carta di Atene. Manifesto e frammento dell’urbanistica moderna, pp. 478–479. See also: Le Corbusier, L’art decoratif d’aujourd’hui, Flammarion, Paris, 2009, pp. 71–81. Id., “Bisogni-tipo mobili-tipo”, in Scritti, pp. 139–144.

2

THE LEFEBVRIAN LEXICON

119

Thirdly, through the Athens Charter we can deduct that Le Corbusier and the functionalist urban planners depict a desolate picture for everyday life at the time of capitalist modernity201 : the nightmare of the capitalist economic project over human life rises in all its strength carrying with the horrific plot of Aldous Huxley’s novel Brave New World. As widely known the British writer identifies in Henri Ford and his organization method a dangerous menace to the survival of mankind.202 The dystopia written in 1932 in fact sets the time of the events of the “new world” as starting in 1932, the year in which the first Ford automobile “T” model is produced in Detroit, Piquette Avenue, and the time is paced by a rigid social and genetic engineering, architected to ensure maximum efficiency in mass production and the widest social appeasement. Society itself is organized within the limits of a strict hierarchy amid social classes; from the lower layers of automat-men “Epsilon,” authentic Charlot of Modern Times, useful only for repetitive tasks, to the “Alfa” rulers, real technocrats and social engineers of all of the human gender. Idolatrizing Henry Ford is the only denomination allowed, so much as—just like Christmas—the great “Ford Day” is celebrated, and instead of the sign of the cross the inhabitants of the New World mimic a “T” over their chest and the famous neologism “His Fordship” is the regal title with which to address a member of the authority of the constituted power. Huxley imagines a New World that is not that far from the materiality of everyday life at the time of its Fordist organization, to the point—beyond the Channel—in the sixties even the Situationists will understand it. By means of the proverbial ironic and deriding critique they will define the Le Corbusier’s metropolis as “valley of tears with air conditioning” and they will also condemn, unforgivingly, the “blackmail of utility” underlying to the functionalist housing project.203 There’s a need to add, finally, how the Hagetmau sociologist perceives sociology as such practical theory,

201 See: H. Lefebvre, The Urban Revolution, pp. 151–164. 202 See: A. Huxley, Brave New World, Harper Collins Publishers, New York, 2000. T.

Adorno, Aldous Huxley and utopia, in Prisms, MIT Press, Cambridge (MA), 1981. 203 Situationist International, “Geopolitic of Hibernation” (n. 7, 1962), in K. Knabb

(edited by), Situationist International Anthology, Bureau of Public Secrets, Berkeley (CA), 2006, pp. 100–107. See also: G. Debord, “Introduction to a Critique of Urban Geography” (Les Lèvres Nues, n. 6, 1955), in Situationist International Anthology, pp. 8–11. A. Kotányi, R. Vaneigem, “Basic Program of the Bureau of Unitary Urbanism” (n. 6, 1961), in Situationist International Anthology, pp. 86–89.

120

F. BIAGI

as opposed to Le Corbusier’s urban planning204 that is most useful to upturn the functionalist project in the rehabilitation of a utopian tradition than is capable of trying new forms of urban life.205

Conclusion In facing this Fordist scenario in Lefebvre other research clues will grow side by side: the need of a more thorough analysis of the questions pertaining to the production of space, the critique of everyday life and the need to articulate a social antagonism that upturns the functionalist dystopia by treading the path of a novel “urban democracy” that succeeds preparing the ground in favor of a “right to the city” politics. As I have often recalled, to Lefebvre the city is protagonist in an ambivalent arena: on one side lies the nightmare of a life under the banner of the capital, on the other, the possibility to become a sole authentic theatre of innovative emancipating options.

204 H. Lefebvre, “La vie sociale dans la ville”. in Du rural à l’urbain, p. 146. 205 H. Lefebvre, “Proposition pour un nouvel urbanisme”, in Du rural à l’urbain,

pp. 193–195.

CHAPTER 3

Philosophy and Sociology of Space

Introduction The political theory of space, as has been seen, finds its full expression since the studies on rural sociology began in the nineteen-forties; a passion born while Lefebvre escaped the Vichy fascist police, finding shelter in a barn in the French Pyrenees where he could accede, as sole chance of reading, the municipal agrarian archives.1 Lefebvre stands as one of the most original authors of his time for he didn’t limit himself to record the fall of the peasant universe, as conversely Edgar Morin’s researches on Plodémet testify.2 Actually, Lefebvre considers the hypothesis of systematizing the research on the “urban” that will be fully accomplished in his “unitary theory of space” project.3 The attempt to define a “structure” that can solidly support its own interpretative grid, that is: reading the complexity of the modern world through the lens of space.4

1 The anecdote is remembered in: L. Costes, Henri Lefebvre. Le droit à la ville. Vers la sociologie de l’urbain, Ellipses, Paris, 2009, p. 5. 2 E. Morin, Commune en France. La métamorphose de Plodémet, Fayard, Paris, 1967. 3 H. Lefebvre, The Production of Space, Blackwell, London, 1991, p. 20. 4 See: Ibidem, pp. 26–27.

© The Author(s) 2020 F. Biagi, Henri Lefebvre’s Critical Theory of Space, Marx, Engels, and Marxisms, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-52367-1_3

121

122

F. BIAGI

The Political Theory of Space Project The basis for a unifying theory of space comprises a definition of the meaning of “social space” starting with an indispensable element that I have broadly described on Chapter 2, it being the cultural hegemony operated by the capitalist technique in the production of the social groups subjected to the cycle of work and consumerism during the second half of the twentieth century.5 According to Lefebvre there is in fact an unwise use of the “space” concept, not only in its common sense, but also within the scientific debate, to the point he undermines Michel Foucault as one of the culprits of such theoretical imprecision.6 With this intent, the Hagetmau philosopher designs the project of a unifying theory of space as opposed to the modern philosophy of Descartes,7 so as to resume the philosophical tradition born at the womb of the Greek polis.8 Philosophy—as for what Lefebvre is concerned—is born in close relation with space, particularly with the real space of the everyday life of the Greek city. Philosophy and city feed each other, should one only bring to mind the Socratic philosophical practice; what’s more, the act of producing philosophy meets its purest dimension in the life experience of the city space of Athens, Lefebvre points out how that bond has cut itself to “bring about the schism” right after in the elaboration of “abstract (metaphysical) representations of space.”9 This is the reason why he proposes to take hold of a new method that possesses the capability of resuming the fil rouge of the lost tradition: “What is called for, therefore, is a thoroughgoing exposition of these concepts, and of their relations, on the one hand with the extreme formal abstraction […], and on the other hand with the practico-sensory realm of social space.”10 The

5 Lefebvre’s mention is explicitly addressed to Gramsci. See: Ibidem, p. 10. 6 See: M. Foucault, “Des espaces autres”, in Architecture, Mouvement, Continuité, n.

5, octobre 1984, pp. 46–49, now in D. Defert, F. Ewald (edited by), Dits et écrits, Gallimard, Paris, 1994, Vol. IV, pp. 752–762 (it was a conference held at the Cercle d’étude architectuales, Tunisi, March 14, 1967). See: H. Lefebvre, The Production of Space, p. 4. 7 See particularly Discourse on the Method and Metaphysical Meditations. Lefebvre’s position is antithetic to the Cartesian space dualism between res extensa and res cogitans. 8 H. Lefebvre, The Production of Space, p. 14. 9 Ibidem, p. 14. 10 Ibidem, p. 15.

3

PHILOSOPHY AND SOCIOLOGY OF SPACE

123

spatial problematization therefore finds its roots in the Greek world, and then continues solely as an underlying river to surface with Nietzsche, an author to whom Lefebvre—as we shall see—often returns, and to whom he dedicates a monography.11 What is Lefebvre looking for in the relation between ancient philosophy and the polis ? What emerges in the connections between philosophical practice and the city of the ancient Greek world? And still: what has modern philosophy broken and forgotten after Descartes? With these interrogations one can cross the gate to gain access to Lefebvre’s political theory of space. The author, in fact, highlights the concept of “social space,” emphasizing that there is never a “empty” space; the physical space of the human world is never “empty” space, since its essence is found in it being formed as the space where men’s action and work unfold. Physical space is thus simultaneously “social space”: between both concepts Lefebvre underlines a joint ontological origin. Physical space is social space because it reveals itself as the frame within which the human being acts, operates, and thinks. There is no antithesis, but an actual analogy between the space of the world and the unfolding of men’s beingin-with-a-shared-world.12 The separation of the ontological dimension of the sociality from “physical space” belongs to the ideology that is characteristic of modern philosophy. Space, consequently, is a very particular “product”: it is the cause and the tool of men’s meeting, but as well the everlasting engine of the socialization possibilities. Therefore, to Lefebvre, space as such concretely realizes itself in human sociality: it either is in fact “social,” or there is no other meaning. “Social space” is therefore formed as arena for the coexistence and simultaneity of human relations, due to the indelible quality that characterizes various choices and works of the human societies.13 Space, in fact, is “social product,” resulting from an ambivalent action: on one side it is produced by the domination structures, on the other side, instead, it is produced by the less well-off social groups that live the space and in the experienced dimension, necessarily change it.14 In this regard, “social

11 See: H. Lefebvre, Nietzsche, Syllepse, Paris, 2003. Id., Hegel, Marx, Nietzsche, Casteman, Paris, 1975. 12 H. Lefebvre, The Production of Space, p. 190. 13 Ibidem, p. 73. 14 Ibidem, pp. 26–27.

124

F. BIAGI

space” presents itself as an ownership relation and Lefebvre demonstrates its power ambivalence.15 It is possible thus to draw a “social morphology”16 by means of the study of space that results in the layout of a society historically determined. It seems to me that Lefebvre is trying successfully to insert Karl Marx’s historical materialism into the spatial dimension, so he can read human action—and therefore history—from the perspective of the spatial organization in which a society is ordered. In fact, space is “at once work and product,”17 “social practice”18 made by the being. The ideological objectifying and abstract prejudice of modern blueprint is consequently denied in name of a procedural dynamic that is ontologically born and developed in the human practice. Space, to Lefebvre, is a category to be analyzed in its theoreticalphilosophical and historical-philosophical processing. The renewing of the Marxian thought is proved precisely by the perception of space as notion that represents a “concrete abstraction.” That is, space can be examined, on one hand as concrete social produce of human realizations, and on the other hand as theoretical manifestation of an ideal type connected to a determined way of production. Urban functionalism in fact imposes an “abstract” model (the one professed by the Athens Charter and Le Corbusier), which has “tangible” direct repercussions in the production of space in post-war France. In other words, space not only causes real repercussions in everyday life, but also priori previous forms that repeat themselves like a matrix in the capitalist way of production. As Stefan Kipfer pointed out, in the habitat pavillionaire or in the machine à habiter presented by urban functionalism it is possible to trace the phenomena referred by the author: Lefebvre in fact underlines a “tension as a disjuncture of perceived, conceived, and lived aspects of abstract space: a schism between the bungalow as mode of practical appropriation (of urban space by private property), ideology (the nuclear, privatized

15 Ibidem, p. 85. 16 Ibidem, p. 94. 17 Ibidem, pp. 101–102. 18 Ibidem, p. 137.

3

PHILOSOPHY AND SOCIOLOGY OF SPACE

125

family), and utopian hope for harmony with nature embodied in the symbolism of built form.”19 Secondly, the dialectic method is helpful to shed light on the interpretative logic that is at the base of the concrete abstraction that is characteristic of the spatial perspective. Excluding categorically any deductive method that moves from an universal to a specific level, we must use the concrete from a subversive perspective, against the abstract matrix. In the “form” of social space that is specific of modernity, there is a ongoing conflict: the dialectic clash between dominating will that abstractly organizes space, and the rebellious vitalism of the experiences actually lived, that always exceed the layer of aseptic projecting. The abstract space of functionalism, the formalism that lacks quality of modernity do not solely determine the idea that is at the basis of spatial practice, but also the process that is generated with steadiness in the progressive elimination of every alternative that exceeds the predisposed form. Conversely, the theoretical insight that allows the adequate understanding of this process isn’t a mere philosophical metaphysical gesture, for the dialectic method finds its full realization in the progressive-regressive inquiry. Lefebvre’s attitude is resolutely anchored in the history of man; his theoretical hermeneutics is profoundly “historical.” In other words the difference between the position of Lefebvre and that of Althusser is developed within this specific intellectual adventure. Although Lefebvre endeavors new paths are aware of the Marxian heritage, he consciously moves across various domains of knowledge, from rural sociology to urban sociology, from an analysis of the quotidian in the Fordist era to the completion of a unitarian system of studies on space. Thirdly, the form of the social space typical of modern technique manifests the moment the association between the logics of industrial production and the logics of spatial productions occurs. The unifying process of these logics originates the capitalist form of social space and finds its completion in the architecture school of the Bauhaus: in that context, the conception of space is actually subordinate to technological development. Lefebvre points out how in the nineteen-twenties the Bauhaus found “a link which had already been dealt with on the practical plane but which had not yet been rationally articulated: that between 19 S. Kipfer, “How Lefebvre urbanized Gramsci: hegemony, everyday life, and difference”, in K. Goonewardena, S. Kipfer, R. Milgrom, C. Schmid (edited by), Space Difference Everyday Life: Reading Henri Lefebvre, Routledge, London, 2008, p. 203.

126

F. BIAGI

industrialization and urbanization, between workplaces and dwellingplaces.”20 The Bauhaus artists re-think Art radically by basing themselves on the productive forces and means of technique with the intent of introducing that novel method in the spatial relations between men. Modern rationality thinks Art no longer as original and unique produce of the human action, but re-configures it in the serial production of spatial agglomerates that are done according to the immediacy of reproduction of the abstract matrix. In Lefebvre’s opinion the Bauhaus performs one of Karl Marx’s hypothesis: the fact that “that industry has the power to open before our eyes the book of the creative capacities of ‘man’ (i.e., of social being).”21 Social space is thus the object of a unifying program by hand of modernity: spatial production of working places is joined to the spatial production of the everyday life places. The theory of space that affirms itself with the artistic avant-garde of the Bauhaus is anything but revolutionary: it mirrors the need for dominance of modern technique. It’s the precise antithesis of a democratic, shared, and collective production of space. In taking that course the production of space is inscribed in the capitalist praxis. The progressive intention to solve the social question with technique is of no use: however, technique is the subject that phagocytes the entire human existence, blocking human and still unexpressed innovative possibilities. Finally, we can emphasize how at the inside of the production of social space we can see the presence of the “uncovered nerves” of the dialectic between the totalizing tendency of the capitalist form and the resistance’s place of that process. What’s more, every concrete space produced, whatever it may be, will be examined in relation to the totality of other typologies of spatial production. Concrete space, that has “become” already “exchange value” is quantifiable solely based on the economical–political logics expressed by Fordist modernity.22 Therefore, with

20 H. Lefebvre, The Production of Space, p. 124. 21 Ibidem, p. 125. 22 From the wide secondary literature available, I took my inspiration on the interpretation offered by Stanek. See: Ł. Stanek, “Space as Concrete Abstraction. Hegel, Marx, and Modern Urbanism in Henri Lefebvre”, in S. Kipfer, K. Goonewardena, C. Schmid, R. Milgrom (edited by), Space, Difference, Everyday Life, pp. 62–79. Within the Italian debate, even De Simoni highlights the Lefebvrian critique of the Bauhaus. See: Id.,

3

PHILOSOPHY AND SOCIOLOGY OF SPACE

127

Lefebvre, we prepare to cross another threshold of the general theory of space; that is, the epistemological frame of the “production of space.”

The Production of Space As is widely known, the concept of “production” in the Lefebvrian constellation is to be interpreted within the Marxian vocabulary; however the author theorizes the concept of “production of space” not only exclusively on Marx’s trail; in fact, that idea of his surpasses the domain of production tout-court to reach and include man’s entire social action is inherent to the spatial dimension. According to Lefebvre, every human activity produces and bounds the space within it is performed; it is about understanding to what extent there is an indissoluble connection between human action and space creation. For the time being it is paramount to understand in what way the spatial dimension isn’t merely a perspective of Lefebvre’s materialist phenomenology, but also an actual object that created, shaped, and reproduced by man. Space thus pertains to human action to the extent that acting in itself is the protagonist of that creation. In defining the “production of space” the author makes use of the dialectic method, and he re-elaborates it—innovatively—in a tridimensional perspective. Christian Schmid, who stands amid the sharpest contemporary readers of the Lefebvrian theory, expressly talks of “tridimensional dialectic.”23 I believe that this tridimensionality of the dialects of space is to be interpreted in the perspective of different “layers” of space that interact with each other, sometimes in a conflictive manner, other times instead on the trail of equal and proportional pushes between them. The dialectic stratification of space as imagined by Lefebvre should thus be decrypted from the perspective that is most consonant to three different levels that nevertheless hold equal intensity of friction production. Now, we are to differentiate two constellations of dialectic triads for a better understanding of the production of space the facets of the production of space. The choice of splitting both triads in this reflection is not Lefebvre’s but mine. Lefebvre actually very often overlaps Filosofia politica dello spazio: il programma di ricerca di Henri Lefebvre e le sue conseguenze teoriche, pp. 132–134. 23 See: C. Schmid, “Henri Lefebvre’s Theory of the Production of Space: Towards a Three-Dimensional Dialectic”, in S. Kipfer, K. Goonewardena, C. Schmid, R. Milgrom (edited by), Space, Difference, Everyday Life, pp. 27–45.

128

F. BIAGI

them and uses them in the same way. However, so as to better understand the categories that the Hagetmau philosopher came up with and to develop more briefly the origins of the latter in the heritage of philosophical thinking, I chose to perform this division in an argumentative manner. The first triad that is useful to understand the complex architecture of the “production of space” concept pertains to a first layer defined as “spatial practice,” the second layer is named “representations of space” and the last is referred to as “spaces of representation.”24 That triad took its inspiration from the reflections on the theory of language that were already conveyed in 1966 in Le langage et la société 25 ; Here Lefebvre proposes the draft of a “tridimensional code” that can enable the analysis of the role of language within the intricate social dimension of men. In short: the “spatial practice” “spatial practice” is equivalent to the “syntagmatic level” (in other words, the level in which language can be analyzed from of the articulation and nodes it creates between syntactic units, that are precisely called “sintagms”); the “representations of space” pertains to the “paradigmatic level” (meaning the level in which language presents itself as means to actually develop paradigms, theoretical frameworks, that inter-relate in dialectic modalities); and finally, the “spaces of representation” is connected to the “symbolic level” (meaning the level in which language contributes to trigger signification processes and to build a determined idea to which we next match a word or a meaning). As for what “social practice” is concerned Lefebvre’s intent is to understand the “specific places” of the production of space of a specific society: the villes nouvelles or the Habitation à Loyer Modéré (H.L.M.) are a concrete example of the spatial praxis of French Fordism in the second half of the twentieth century. “Spatial practice” is therefore the concrete action of spatial projects that are theorized by the second concept that we are now to examine: “the representations of space.” Secondly, the concept of “representations of space” can be defined as the complex weight of knowledge and power that includes the 24 H. Lefebvre, The Production of Space, p. 33. In his English translation Donald Nicholson-Smith chose these three translations: “spatial practice” [pratique spatiale], “representations of space” [représentation de l’espace] and “representational spaces” [espaces de représentation]. Other scholars—see Space, Difference, Everyday Life, edited by S. Kipfer, K. Goonewardena, C. Schmid, R. Milgrom—prefer to translate with “spatial practice,” “representations of space” and “spaces of representation.” I personally chose this second version, which I consider most commonly used. [author’s note] 25 H. Lefebvre, Le langage et la société, p. 191.

3

PHILOSOPHY AND SOCIOLOGY OF SPACE

129

image and the dominant project of the capitalist production of space.26 Lefebvre mentions the architecture and urban planning domains as ruling paradigms that operate as devisers of a specific production of space of their own to Fordist society. The representations of space therefore pertains to the ideology27 conveyed by the knowledges and places of power that rule the social. Every era, every way of production defines its own modality of ideating space and planning it. With the term representations of space the author identifies the masters who serve the planning determined by the ruling power. A clear example is the Le Corbusier’s functionalist school that succeeded in translating and applying to space the demands of the birth and development of the Fordist industrialism. One more perfect example is Baron Haussmann’s intellectual education who destroys the Parisian neighborhoods, in response to the political demands of Napoleon III and his fears of further popular movements. Haussmann’s representations of space are conceiving and performing a urban planning that will serve the power balance on what concerns the order of his time. Finally, as for what concerns the order of our time, we can consider the current processes of neoliberal gentrification and transformation of the twenty-first century as yet another concrete example of that Lefebvrian category. The “representations of space” in the twenty-first century has to do with the idea that urban spaces are better organized and managed in the haven of public politics to favor—instead—the free market and private entrepreneurship. Thirdly, the concept of “spaces of representation” comprises the “clandestine or underground aspects” of social life,28 that is the possible attempts of subverting the space that is ruled by the “representations of space.”29 With this third dimension of the spatial theory Lefebvre defines concrete alternatives—that could be developed in everyday life— of spaces designed in sharing and in the democratic self-management of inhabitants and users. The idea of “brushing history against the grain” produces a political action that shatters the domination of the capitalist space through concrete moments, in which the formation and development of spatiality derives from the democratic organization of society

26 H. Lefebvre, The Production of Space, p. 33. 27 Ibidem, p. 44. 28 Ibidem, p. 33. 29 Ibidem, pp. 38–39.

130

F. BIAGI

and from man’s needs and desires, that are no longer subjected to the logics of the capital political economy. The “spaces of representation” is for instance the category we’ll use to read the Paris Commune event and with which we’ll interpret the resulting insurgent actions to subvert the capitalist spatiality. With Lefebvre this concept meets two plan of development. The first plan is theoretical and comprises the counter-knowledges or alternative awareness that read in modernity and urban planning not only “a condemnation,” but also a viable opportunity to develop under foundations that are radically different from those of the ruling power devices. The second one pertains to praxis: thus, not only the projects and utopian perspectives of an “anti-capitalist living” of space, but also the events and the fissures of urban revolution that expressed throughout history, breaking the geometry that commanded the pace of the capitalist spatial project. In other words, we a referring to the innovative possibility of producing a radically alternative spatiality against functionalism and all the domains that, as demiurges sculpt space in the name of the “commandments” of the capitalist structure (today we could say neoliberal). If the “representations of space” is the interpretative grid of the urban and spatial project of the instances of power, the “spaces of representation” is its most radical antithesis and resistance spot. In this sense space is not only an hostage of the market logics, but becomes possibility of projection of the virtues and of the needs of citizens; it becomes a transforming event, revolutionary event. It is the space where we can foresee the concealed opportunities that urban society can offer. As we all know Lefebvre is not a critic of modernity tout-court, he doesn’t reject in toto its advent, but he is rather a critic of the modernity produced by the capital. Therefore, the Hagetmau philosopher is utterly harsh on what concerns to the fate of the city, nevertheless he is—equally—a critical observer of the urban processes caused by industrialization, and consequently his theoretical model doesn’t remain captive of the single pars destruens. Despite the hegemony of the capital over space, a counterhegemony should be opposed to it to liberate the city and the urban from the market restraint. Finally, Lefebvre introduces the concept of “political economy of space”30 to identify the economical–political logics that are the foundations of the dominant ideology defined by means of the “representations

30 Ibidem, p. 350.

3

PHILOSOPHY AND SOCIOLOGY OF SPACE

131

of space” category. The idea is only referred to briefly and, as we shall next see in the paragraph that addresses the political issues discussed in the joint work with the Situationists, Lefebvre resumes Marx’s reflections on the concept of “commodity fetishism,”31 so that he can transfer to the spatial plan the process of merchandizing, from the use value to the exchange value. If the first dialectic trio is used by Lefebvre to underline the social dynamics of “production of space,” the second—as we shall see—pertains to the point of view of man’s action. When examining the three levels, we need to fully immerse in the concrete experience that the human being lives in connection to space. In fact, the second trio is influenced by the phenomenological theory, particularly by the philosophical reflections of Maurice Merleau-Ponty.32 In this regard, I agree with Christian Schmid as he noticed in Lefebvre a “materialist phenomenological theory”33 since the author combines both the philosophical point of view of phenomenology and Marx’s dialectic materialism method. The Hagetmau philosopher in fact believes phenomenology is still much too attached to idealism, and since the initial pages of The Production of Space 34 he affirms both his proximity and distance from Husserl’s thought, specifying in what way Merleau-Ponty and French phenomenology have taken a correct course of action but in need of being revised in light of a greater interest toward the concrete dimension of the praxis.35 Particularly such phenomenological influence is evident in the crucial role assigned to the “perception” question and to the “lived” dimension within the Lefebvrian conception of space. Furthermore, the second dialectic trio—as we shall see—is an original revisiting of the Marxian categories of Merleau-Ponty, who differentiates “physical space” (perception), the “geometrical space” (conceptually comprehended) and the “lived space” (espace vécu).36 The 31 See: K. Marx, “The Capital” (1887), in Collected Works of Marx & Engels, Vol. 35, p. 81 (Sect. 4 “The Fetishism of Commodities”). 32 See specifically the second part (above all the paragraph on the concept of “space”): M. Merleau-Ponty, Phenomenology of Perception, Humanities Press, New York, 1962. 33 C. Schmid, “Henri Lefebvre’s Theory of the Production of Space: Towards a ThreeDimensional Dialectic”, in S. Kipfer, K. Goonewardena, C. Schmid, R. Milgrom (edited by), Space, Difference, Everyday Life, p. 39. 34 H. Lefebvre, The Production of Space, pp. 4–5, 21, 61. 35 Ibidem, pp. 182–184, 296–300. 36 See: M. Merleau-Ponty, Phenomenology of Perception, pp. 243–244, 291.

132

F. BIAGI

dimension of the lived as we have already referred is continued under the Marxian perspective and the two remaining concepts are partly refused due to the Cartesian and idealist influence. Nevertheless, we detect in both concepts the counter-opposition to the spatial experience mediated by science, from the moment it represents to Lefebvre the knowledge and power luggage that differentiates the “representations of space.” Man’s phenomenological entrance into the spatial dimension comprises, as first analysis layer, the “perceived space,” next the “conceived space” and finally the “lived space.”37 This dialectic trio, as is well-known, corresponds—in its order—to the first trio discussed in the previous pages. “Perceived space” focuses on the human facet of the perception offered by the senses. This perception comprises therefore fully the spatial understanding of the human places and establishes a close connection, materially, the five senses of the human being with the elements that characterize a given space. Secondly, the category of “conceived space” pertains to the theoretical matrixes of thought by means of which the human being reads and interprets the sensitive dimension of space. This interpretative layer encloses thus the theoretical luggage of the entire urban and architectonic thought, of philosophy and sociology applied to the spatial problematic. However, Lefebvre, despite his understanding of the whole spatial theoretical field, most of the times, mentions that concept only to refer to the knowledge resulting from the ruling power (over space). This utilization is understandable for the author conceives his theory in radical antithesis to the one conveyed by the ruling power, and, mostly, his contribution is always connected to the roots of the lived. The “conceived space” is hence interpreted as a knowledge that is born in man’s thought often disregarding the practical perspective. It is an abstract knowledge, a device of knowledge-power, and consequently the theories it carries out are also unable to understand the theories produced by Lefebvre or other critic theoreticians on the Fordist functionalism. Finally, the concept of “lived space” comprises the spatial experience lived by the human being. It is the range of everyday life, the universe of the practices of human action. Such category doesn’t end neither in the experiencing nor in the deception of the raw empiricism, but pertains to

37 H. Lefebvre, The Production of Space, pp. 38–40.

3

PHILOSOPHY AND SOCIOLOGY OF SPACE

133

the praxis, to the human activities that are developed as opposing trend to the “conceived space.” Moreover, in the “lived space” Lefebvre also foresees the unexpressed possibilities of spatial practices alternative to the capitalist device. Everyday life if the field in which the opportunities to subvert the constituted spatial order innervate, therefore the “lived space” is either transformation practice as it also is the frame within which we can isolate the opportunities for a spatial revolution against the dominant order. I believe it paramount to highlight the utopian tension of everyday life because the author—as I have often recalled—ascribes to the lived dimension the dialects between oppression and potential opportunities, in nuce, of overturning the present. As was pointed out by Christian Schmid,38 ternary dimension of Lefebvre’ spatial dialectic is re-elaborated under the aegis of the three philosophers that were crucial for Lefebvre’s intellectual instruction: Marx, Hegel e Nietzsche. Marx is present in the elaboration of the concepts of “social practice/perceived space” in the name of a philosophy that would adhere to the praxis of everyday life; Hegel is present in the abstract and dialectic dimension of “representations of space” and, finally, Nietzsche inspires the theorization of the “spaces of representation” as a philosopher who is able to emphasize the importance of human creativity through the primacy of Art over abstract conscience. The originality of Lefebvre’s “trinity” does not consist in a sort of Harlequin dress, in which several colored pieces are randomly stitched together. Indeed, we have to describe it thinking about the three authors and the three moments of a dialectic, as if the author mixed, contaminated, and combined three chemical reagents to develop his own conception of a dialectic even more coherent with the concrete reality of spatial mutation.39

38 C. Schmid, “Henri Lefebvre’s Theory of the Production of Space: Towards a Three-

Dimensional Dialectic”, in S. Kipfer, K. Goonewardena, C. Schmid, R. Milgrom (edited by), Space, Difference, Everyday Life, p. 33. 39 This intuition appears already in 1939, with the publication of Dialectical Materialism, and is and is further developed in 1947 with Logique formelle, logique dialectique. In this text the author proposes the concept of dépassement, whose meaning refers both to the idea of Überwinden of Nietzsche, and to the Aufhebung of Hegel. In this regard Lefebvre uses Marx’s point of view of a philosophy tangibly rooted in the fluxus of reality. At the same time, and in a heterodox way, it also accepts Nietzsche’s contribution, to underline the coherence of theory with respect to human experience. That experience can be enriched through Art and Poetry (according to the Promethean metaphor of living as a “work of art”), offering new and unexplored possibilities. In my opinion the best

134

F. BIAGI

Until now I have exposed the forms of dialectic that are at the base of the spatial-political theory presented by Lefebvre according mostly to the reading offered by Christian Schmid, who emerges in the interpretative landscape of urban studies as the author who can majorly understand follow Lefebvre’s texts. For instance, there are other authors—very different among them—such as David Harvey and Edward Soja who express skepticism about that theory. In first place, Harvey proposes to read Lefebvre’s triads not from a dialectic perspective, but from the point of view of the causal concatenation that is developed between the three levels.40 That kind of choice, in my opinion, is adopted by the geographer, on one hand, due to his limited knowledge of the author, and on the other hand, because Harvey prefers to dig deeper into the concept (only briefly referred to by Lefebvre) of “political economy of space,” using Lefebvre’s contribution to propel a Marxian analysis of the capitalist modernity crisis. As way of example, I find Harvey’s studies dedicated to the expansion of the real estate market within the current regime of economic crisis caused by the speculative bubble of the subprime 41 loans to be remarkable. Secondly, Edward Soja reinterprets the Lefebvrian triadic dialectic in the postmodern debate of political geography, going far beyond Harvey’s skepticism. Just for clearness sake, on the path of Thierry Paquot, I think book to highlight this Lefebvrian dialectic triad is Hegel Marx Nietzsche ou le royaume des ombres (1975). 40 D. Harvey, The Condition of Postmodernity: An Enquiry into the Origins of Cultural Change, Blackwell, Oxford, 1989, p. 219. 41 See: D. Harvey, The Enigma of Capital and the Crises of Capitalism, Profile Books, London, 2010. Id., Seventeen Contradictions and the End of Capitalism, Profile Books, London, 2014. In this regard, Guido Borelli on Chapter IV of his volume reduces the Lefebvrian theory of space substantially to the so called “secondary circuit of capital” that indicates the economic valuation of the housing and real-estate market. Despite the fact that Lefebvre elaborated further on the Marxian tradition, allowing it the access to spatial studies, I don’t think that the theory of space of the Hagetmau philosopher can be reduced to the correction of the Marxian theories on the Capital, realized through their application to the real-estate political economy. Surely, that insight is an important piece in the Lefebvrian thought, however it is solely a portion of a more ample constellation of the urban and spatial studies conducted by Lefebvre. If Harvey remembers Lefebvre mainly for the question connected to the right to the city, to the urban revolution and to the translation of Karl Marx’s thought into the spatial dimension, Borelli sticks to resuming a part of the third problem, more precisely, the “secondary circuit of capital,” a term that besides isn’t used by Lefebvre (see: G. Borelli, Immagini di città. Processi spaziali e interpretazioni sociologiche, Mondadori, Milano, 2012, pp. 61–88).

3

PHILOSOPHY AND SOCIOLOGY OF SPACE

135

Soja’s point of view is biased from the very start: Lefebvre has never been a theoretician that could be ascribed to the field of post-modernity, and any reinterpretation within that kind of course of ideas is forced to the point it will disnature its real height.42 As one can deduce from the direction we have taken so far Lefebvre’s legacy is radically opposed to the modern perspective: should one only think of the anti-historicist theory of history (with many converging points with Benjamin), of his point of view against structuralism and post-structuralism—and particularly— of the posture of the Lefebvrian thought that is featured by thrusting a “strong” thought onto the metaphilosophical totality, solidly anchored on the trail of the critique of the capitalist modernity.43 As I have highlighted so many times, Lefebvre has always refused to build a system of thought (that is, for instance, one of the features that differentiate him from Althusser), however, he never renounced to indicate his own cardinal points, inside a total metaphilosophical theory, within which one could move to interpret the present. As we have shed light on the original bias of the hermeneutics of the American geographer, it is now possible to also highlight the limits of his reading on the dialectic triad theorized by Lefebvre. Soja reads the three levels of the dialectic as independent dimensions from each other and often consequential, if used to rebuild and trace the several approaches that occurred during the course of the sociological history of spatial studies.44 The Californian geographer in fact postulates the three levels of the dialectic as spaces that possess an autonomous existence and, particularly, he focuses on the so-called “third space,” a concept that gives the title to one of

42 E. Soja, Postmodern Geographies: The Reassertion of Space in Critical Social Theory, Verso, London, 1989. For a brief recognition of Soja’s point of view see: S. Elden, “Politics, Philosophy, Geography: Henri Lefebvre in Recent Anglo-American Scholarship”, in Antipodes, Volume 33, n. 5, 2001, pp. 809–825. Thierry Paquot instead argues his disagreement on post-modern interpretations: “Henri Lefebvre penseur de l’urbain”, in T. Paquot, C. Younès, Le territoire des philosophes. Lieu et espace dans la pensée au XX siècle, La Decouverte, Paris, 2009, p. 237. 43 For instance, in the secondary literature Fredric Jameson recognizes in Lefebvre a resistance pole to post-modernism. See: F. Jameson, Postmodernism or the Cultural Logic of Late Capitalism, Duke University Press, Durham (NC), 1991. 44 E. Soja, Postmetropolis: Critical Studies of Cities and Regions, Blackwell, Oxford, 2000.

136

F. BIAGI

his most famous books.45 The “third space” is according to Soja the “lived space” (consequently the first space comprises the whole of the perceived space and the second the conceived space) and that concept is adopted, on one side, to inaugurate a new perspective of studies on space that radically places itself in antithesis against the other two, both of them representing old methods of spatial studies; on the other hand, it is the expedient to be used to identify the utopian dimension of the lived with Foucault’s concept of “heterotopy.”46 I believe that it is a mistake such identification with Foucault, because in The Urban Revolution Lefebvre differentiates his own theory on urban utopia from the meaning of heterotopy.47 Therefore, one thing that stands out immediately is, firstly, the disarticulation that Soja operates over the dialectic principle that characterizes the Lefebvrian triad and, secondly, the inadequate parallelism with Foucault’s thought. Although I do not share the same theoretical roots, I believe that such a re-elaboration is legitimate even if Soja should have been more aware not to state his own divergences with the original Lefebvrian theory. Finally, it is mandatory to bring to mind how Soja’s re-elaboration of the dialectic influenced other Anglo-Saxon theoreticians such Rob Shields e Stuart Elden48 ; however, as is well-known, he didn’t convince Harvey, who although he was an active participant on the Anglo-Saxon debate, he was never seduced by the postmodern school, to which conversely he condemns the lack of a well defined political planning pertaining to the capitalist modernity.

Historical Phenomenology of Space In the items drawer of La production de l’éspace Lefebvre, after addressing the topics concerning dialectic and the definition of the concept of production of the social space, introduces the idea that every historical epoch has produced its own organization of space: “What we are concerned with, then, is the long history of space, even though 45 E. Soja, Thirdspace: Journeys to Los Angeles and Other Real-and-Imagined Places, Blackwell, Oxford, 1996. 46 M. Foucault, “Des espaces autres”, in Dits et écrits, Vol. IV, pp. 752–762. 47 H. Lefebvre, The Urban Revolution, University of Minnesota Press, Minneapolis,

2003, pp. 38, 128–131. 48 See: R. Shields, Lefebvre: Love and Struggle, Routledge, London, 1999, p. 120. S. Elden, Understanding Henri Lefebvre, Continuum, London, 2004, p. 37.

3

PHILOSOPHY AND SOCIOLOGY OF SPACE

137

space is neither a ‘subject’ nor an ‘object’ but rather a social reality— that is to say, a set of relations and forms. […] The history of space thus has its place between anthropology and political economy. […] A history of space would explain the development, and hence the temporal conditions,” of those realities which some geographers call ‘networks’ and which are subordinated to the frameworks of politics.”49 “Anthropology,” “political-economy”: Lefebvre never avoids the interdisciplinary confrontation and play the philosophical instrument always piercing their boundaries, turning them porous. The intuition that to a given historical epoch there is a corresponding and equivalent typical production of space, according to some observers, has been elected as one of the most important foundations of the so-called New Urban Sociology.50 Among the numerous examples referred by Lefebvre so as to give a more precise idea of what it means to build a history of space I believe it to be most useful to mention the confrontation between the agora of Ancient Greece and the Roman forum.51 The Greek agora is a empty space in as it is designed as location to gather several villages, families, and tribes—the many demos —that inhabit the surroundings of the site that will later become the center of Athens.52 The agora is a empty space because it is at the service of the political meetings among pairs of men, it is—in Hannah Arendt words—that place by excellence where men live and practice their being-with-in-a-shared-world typical of the democratic form of the Greek antiquity.53 The vacuity of the Greek square represents—as for my opinion—the fact that the space of democratic exercise cannot be previously occupied, that is, cannot be pre-determined nor super-determined. There isn’t a subject, a body, or a person that shares it 49 H. Lefebvre, The Production of Space, pp. 116–117. 50 M. Gottdiener, “A Marx for Our Time: Henri Lefebvre and The Production of

Space”, in Sociological Theory, Volume 11, n. 1, 1993, pp. 129–134. M. Gottdiener, R. Hutchinson, The New Urban Sociology, Westview Press, Boulder, 2006. S. Zukin, “A Decade of the New Urban Research”, in Theory & Society, n. 9, 1980, pp. 575–601. J. Walton, “Urban Sociology: The Contribution and Limits of Political Economy”, in Annual Review of Sociology, Volume 19, 1993, pp. 301–320. 51 See paragraphs 3, 4 and 5 of Chapter IV: H. Lefebvre, The Production of Space, pp. 241–250. 52 Ibidem, p. 247. 53 See: H. Arendt, Was ist Politik? Fragmente aus dem Nachlass, Piper, Munchen, 2003,

partly translated in English: J. Kohn (edited by), The Promise of Politics, Knopf Doubleday Publishing Group, New York, 2009.

138

F. BIAGI

and organizes it. It is empty and the organization of that space is eventual, it occurs from time to time in different ways. The base of the space is thus temporarily linked to the event and to the situation, is susceptible to changes, every time, by means of reorganization.54 The forum of the ancient Rome, conversely, is a place contaminated by the practices of ruling power, being in its nature a space that is full of objects and preventively organized, according to a precise geometric order. That order in society is materialized in the Roman Law. The Romans conceive the forum in modalities that radically diverge from the Greek, in fact, the urbs is “imago mundi,”55 image of the world and the ancient city of Rome projects itself on the world as dominating metropolis that—in nuce— culturally and socially embraces the whole globe. Therefore, roman space is designed as power epicenter, a center that is to be ordered and organized through the law device. This historical confrontation, starting with the conception of space of two different societies, offers an opportunity to examine the social and political organization of the Greek and Roman reality. On one hand, the primacy of politics understood as meeting and discussion between pairs, on the other hand, the primacy of rule and law, even if on the same political conception expressed by the Greek tradition. As we have been able to demonstrate, joining the ancient conception of space of the city of Athens with the city of Rome allows an accurate analysis of the forms of society that developed on the course of human history. In this regard Lefebvre proposes a historical analysis of space that I will define—more precisely—as the inauguration of a novel perspective of research: the historical phenomenology of space. “If space is produced,

54 These perceptions of the democratic space as empty place were also developed during the Sixties and Seventies by Claude Lefort, founding member of the Socialisme ou Barbarie journal, a group the actively participated in the Parisian political life and that collaborated with the Situationists; the group Arguments and the French radical gauche, an atmosphere that Lefebvre also experienced (see: C. Lefort, “The Image of the Body Totalitarianism”, in The Political Forms of Modern Society: Bureaucracy, Democracy, Totalitarianism, MIT Press, Cambridge (MA), 1896). This is the course that guides the historical-political analysis of the French Revolution by Paolo Viola that re-appropriates the ancient image to describe the end of absolute monarchy in France (see: P. Viola, Il Trono vuoto. La transizione della sovranità nella Rivoluzione Francese, Einaudi, Torino, 1988). Por a systematic analysis of Lefort’s entire intellectual production regarding the node between “empty place” and “democracy.” See: M. Abensour, Democracy Against the State: Marx and the Machiavellian Moment, Polity Press, Cambridge, 2011. 55 H. Lefebvre, The Production of Space, p. 243.

3

PHILOSOPHY AND SOCIOLOGY OF SPACE

139

if there is a productive process, then we are dealing with history”56 states Lefebvre. With the intent to produce a general theory of space, Lefebvre introduces the historical question in the spatial studies with a new dialectic triad: the “absolute space,” the “abstract space”57 and the “differential space.”58 This dialectic tri-partition aims to read and interpret capitalist modernity; it is an amplifying lens that Lefebvre will use for a full diagnosis of modernity from the perspective of its productive and reproductive role of spatiality. The dialectic triad underlines substantially the periodization pertaining to different ways of production identified by Marx, however Lefebvre explains how “other elements and the mental reduction to the economical sphere would be a disastrous mistake that several Marxists continue to perpetrete.”59 This warning is crucial to understand the fact that all three levels overlap each other, and slowly advance one over the other. This isn’t about applying a rigid matrix; it would not be coherent with the concrete praxis that happens in the historical reality of man. On the contrary, the Hagetmau philosopher is fascinated precisely with the middle periods, and because of this, he rejects the raw historical determinism. We are now entering the Lefebvrian epistemology of the historical dialectic of space. Firstly, the “absolute space” emerges, meaning that historical problematics in which rules the pure natural element projected in the symbol of the ritual, of the supernatural: “Typically, architecture picked a site in nature and transferred it to the political realm by means of a symbolic mediation; […] At once civil and religious, absolute space thus preserved and incorporated bloodlines, family, unmediated relationships—but it transposed them to the city, to the political state founded on the town.”60 The space of the physical world is lived and explained as being divine product of a superior order. Following Marx’s vocabulary we could speak of —on a productive level—the pre-capitalist societies in which the ruling political power is one that derives from religious power or in total identification between both devices. That space

56 Ibidem, p. 46. 57 See Chapter IV: Ibidem, pp. 229–291. 58 See Chapter VI: Ibidem, pp. 352–400. 59 H. Lefebvre, “Introduction à l’espace urbain”, in Metropolis. Urbanisme planification

régionale environnement, n. 22, October 1976, p. 30 (pp. 24–31). 60 H. Lefebvre, The Production of Space, p. 48.

140

F. BIAGI

is the community-space of blood where political forces that occupy the “absolute space” govern, administrating it, the production of those who physically build the space. The example given by Lefebvre pertains to the religious authorities, the princes, the kings, and the warriors who exert sovereignty over the erected space instead of it being exerted by the workers, artisans, and peasants’ sweat. I believe it is possible to think, among many other examples, of the situation of the Egyptian society: the pharaoh’s power and the subdivided chastes under his authority is a production device of “absolute space,” that is although ruled from above and materially produced by the politically weaker and poorer groups. The main subject of this problematics is the historical western city that in its evenemential historicity gives life to a subset of “absolute space,” the “relativized space”61 of the city-state and of the empires. Secondly, Lefebvre theorizes the planning of “abstract space” registering, on the trail of Marx and Engels, the changes in the organization of work. The “abstract space” is the space produced by the radical upturn caused in the human society by the capitalist way of production. The social classes experience the space and produce it within a widely unequal matrix. Space use by the ruling classes is considered, on one hand, as place to dismember, divide, and shatter and annihilate the claim of unity coming from the most destitute and oppressed groups; on the other hand, as place to regulate, at the technocratic level, the economic flows of the modern city. “Abstract space” is also the tool, to a certain measure, that ensures the reproduction of the capitalist production relations by means of the scientific organization of labor.62 That moment of the dialectic operates, on one hand, negatively, since it erases the past, denying it, through an operation of tabula rasa that introduces a new social structure; on the other hand, it—conversely—operates, positively, as it produces a knowledge-power and an ideology that—as is well-known—Lefebvre calls “representations of space.”63 This particular typology of historical spatial dimension is adopted by Lefebvre in the constitutive panel of a “phallic, visual, geometric”64 space, that is, “abstract space” crossed by a sovereign symbology that decides the height and length as expression of its own

61 Ibidem. 62 See: Ibidem, p. 358. 63 See: Ibidem, p. 50. 64 Ibidem, p. 290 (in addition see also the complete paragraph XIV: pp. 285–291).

3

PHILOSOPHY AND SOCIOLOGY OF SPACE

141

power centers: high towers, high palaces, high monuments; it suffices to bring to mind, for instance, the Vendôme Column, expression of Napoleon The third III’s regal power that was demolished by the insurrection of the communards in March 1871. The second instance denotes the influence of Guy Debord’s reflections on the Society of Spectacle and indicates the passivification of the citizen-consumerist in the context of an “abstract space” regime: he ends being locked up in the cage of the mere visual dimension of the merchandize ostentation. The consumer is dissociated from his own desires and needs, undergoing the induction of consumption as sole perspective of socialization. Finally, the “geometric” feature leads directly to the critique of the binary and rationalist conception of the Cartesian space. The emergence of such spatial relation, according to Lefebvre, is also directly connected to the political form of the modern state, to the corresponding sovereignty principle by Hobbes: “Sovereignty implies ‘space’, and what is more it implies a space against which violence, whether latent or overt, is directed—a space established and constituted by violence.”65 In short, “abstract space,” is crossed by a simultaneous condition of homogeneity and fragmentation.66 It is homogeneous to the extent it abolishes the differences and imposes the fetishist perspective of merchandize. it is shattered—at the same time—according to the demands of labor division and the human needs that are established according to the Fordist system, “unmoved mover” of urban functionalism. Thirdly, the so-called “differential space” emerges from the dialectic contradictions of the “preceding levels”: “The reproduction of the social relations of production within this [abstract] space inevitably obeys two tendencies: the dissolution of old relations on the one hand and the generation of new relations on the other. Thus, despite—or rather because of —its negativity, abstract space carries within itself the seeds of a new kind of space. I shall call that new space ‘differential space’, because, inasmuch as abstract space tends toward homogeneity, toward the elimination of existing differences or peculiarities, a new space cannot be born

65 Ibidem, p. 280. The question of the state sovereignty is later deepened by Lefebvre in the four volumes De l’Etat. 66 Ibidem, pp. 355–356.

142

F. BIAGI

(produced) unless it accentuates differences.”67 The meaning of “differential space” is to be read in the approach of Pruduction of Space of the 1970 volume entitled Le manifeste différentialiste. The “differentialist” hypothesis by Lefebvre has nothing in common—conversely to what Soja wants to persuade us of and a wide portion of the third wave of Anglo-Saxon Lefebvrian studies wants us to believe—with the upturn derived from the studies of the so-called “Philosophy of Difference.” In fact, Lefebvre’s philosophical-political proposal is counter-distinguished for being on one side a “strong” thought.68 Consequently, the return to the categories of the “difference” of the so-called “weak thought,” and a certain left-wing Heideggerism, could be considered an outrageous error, while Lefebvreian thought materializes itself as a tension for the definition of an horizon of totality: what is more “total,” and therefore enemy of differentiation and fragmentation of the so-called French Theory, of a “Meta-philosophy” project?69

67 Ibidem, p. 52. 68 Contrary to the postmodern notion of “weak thought.” See: G. Vattimo, P. A.

Rovatti (edited by), Weak Thought, SUNY Press, Albany (NY), 2013. 69 With the expression French Theory I refer to the interpretation, developed in the United States, of the idea of postmodernism of some French authors. This concept is the product of American universities which attribute it to some philosophers who, while showing points of convergence with American scholars, maintain a substantial autonomy of thought that cannot be reduced to that type of marketing operation (see: F. Cusset, French Theory: How Foucault, Derrida, Deleuze, & Co: Transformed the Intellectual Life of the United States, University of Minnesota Press, Minneapolis, 2008). To highlight the contact between American hermeneutics and French philosophy, I am therefore forced to use the definition French Theory, despite my radical refusal from a theoretical point of view. Other critics use the same idea, in spite of many doubts (see the philosophical school that derives from the thought of Roberto Esposito who, in recent years, has constantly followed this course, mitigating his doubts and even assuming the existence of an Italian school). This vulgar reductionism, beyond the limits indicated by Cusset, redefines the philosophical and political debate through the principle of a nationalist idea, and it is the product of the impositions of the cultural industry, in which even “Philosophy” becomes “merchandize” for the public. Finally, as we will see in the last chapter, I demarcate myself not only from the political geographer Soja, within the debate of the United States, but also from the philosophical current of “post-workerism” which refers to the thought of Antonio Negri. This current interprets Lefebvre through post-structuralist categories, starting from the biopolitical instance, then considering the analysis of the metropolis produced by Negri himself, and finally approaching the category of “significant voids” of Laclau: it is through this course that this current proposes its reading of “right to the city.”

3

PHILOSOPHY AND SOCIOLOGY OF SPACE

143

Most of all, the “differential space” presents itself as the timid blossoming of a germ in the homogeneous and well-finished garden of the “abstract space” of capitalism. It is a tendency to be developed that shows up in the interstices that the ruling power hasn’t leveled well. The concept of “differential space” and of “difference” should therefore be read from a utopian perspective: that perspective of subversion of everyday life that is born—in nuce—agamid the contradictions of the oppressive instance. Against the homogenization process of the Fordist capitalism, Lefebvre ideates a revolutionary role assigned to those moments of everyday life that exist in opposition to the constituted order. The Manifeste Différentialiste, on one hand, is not a generic call—simultaneously liberal and liberating—to the expression of individual differences, nor can it, on the other hand, be understood by identifying it with the writings—contemporary to Lefebvre—of Gilles Deleuze,70 Jacques Derrida71 or Michel Foucault,72 but it is closely connected to the aphorism of the Changer la vie! shared, as we shall see, with the situationist movement. It is an attempt to configure the logic of difference as a spark of emancipation, which may shine in the dark uniformity of capitalist society: “fight acquires different meanings and aims on the course of obscure paths: changing everyday life, blocking the compressing roller ball of homogenization, that is, differing.”73 Those “differences” are the utopian and revolutionary fissures that can stop the locomotive of the capitalist progress, in order to establish moments and situations of a new and different (spatial) organization of the being-in-a-shared-world. The development of the differentialist dimension is the attempt to chose a model of development alternative to capitalism, that holds the knowledge to upturn the capitalist modernity, and take the course of another kind of modernity: “development, returned to its full, implies enrichment, and non reduced 70 Deleuze, as he inscribes his thought on Bergson’s trail (see the last paragraph of this chapter), is not compatible with the concept of “difference” as theorized by Lefebvre. 71 See: J. Deridda, Writing and Difference, University of Chicago Press, Chicago, 1978. Id., Politics of Friendship, Verso, London, 1997. 72 Foucault theoretically elaborates the concept of “difference” by identifying it on the subjects and identities at the margins of society. Similar multiple subjectivities and inscribed in the interstices that are, precisely, “marginal,” would create heterotopian dimensions of life, that is, alternative forms of life to society that co-exist at the borders of the dominating governmental apparatus. Obviously, such a point of view is not compatible with the concept of difference imagined by Lefebvre. 73 H. Lefebvre, Le manifeste différentialiste, Gallimard, Paris, 1970, p. 60.

144

F. BIAGI

complexification of social relations. It is (one can’t say that) qualitative, as it involves creation of social life forms, “values,” ideas, ways of life, style. In a word, differences.”74 The centripetal power of the “difference” resides in the struggles for emancipation of the oppressed: “its is the substance of humiliation, the reason for rebellion and violence: one risks death to diverge.”75 The echo of the tragic end of the revolutionary event of the Paris Commune, as well as the claims for freedom of the 1960 and 1970 (from the European squares to the anti-colonial struggles), resonate in Lefebvre’s thoughts: “The ‘right to difference’ is a formal designation for something that may be achieved through practical action, through effective struggle—namely, concrete differences. The right to difference implies no entitlements that do not have to be bitterly fought for. This is a ‘right’ whose only justification lies in its content.”76 In other words, a “titanic” dialectic is played between the “abstract space” and the “differential space.” We must add, for precision sake, that the Hagetmau philosopher doesn’t propose any “exodus” from the capitalist society that can represent refuge, metaphor for some “Indian Reservation” of alternative spatial experiences. The differential alterity against the capitalist modernity is always played in its subversion, not in the creation of “liberated spaces” that co-exist on the edges of the project of the Capital. A remark of the Hagetmau philosopher helps us to better understand Lefebvre’s inclination: “The working class did not expect miracles from the Commune. […] They know that in order to work out their own emancipation, and along with it that higher form to which present society is irresistably tending by its own economical agencies, they will have to pass through long struggles, through a series of historical processes, transforming circumstances and men. They have no ideals to realize, but to set free the elements of the new society with which old collapsing bourgeois society itself is pregnant.”77 Thus, the “differences” Lefebvre recollects should be interpreted on the trail of some principles imprisoned inside of the established power, by that same

74 Ibidem, p. 23. 75 Ibidem, p. 103. 76 H. Lefebvre, The Production of Space, p. 396. 77 K. Marx, “The Civil War in France” (1871), in Collected Work of Marx & Engels,

Vol. 22, p. 335.

3

PHILOSOPHY AND SOCIOLOGY OF SPACE

145

structure that we would like to subvert. That fissure can materialize in the quotidian only if it is able to value the difference in the panel of a utopian-revolutionary tension. According to Lefebvre, in fact, “Space is becoming the principal stake of goal-directed actions and struggles.”78 Now we’ll see how it succeeds in becoming that since the appearance of its original archetype: the spatial insurgence of the Parisian Commune of 1871.

The Paris Commune and the Destiny of the City: Insurgence for Space “The Commune stands for until our days the only attempt of revolutionary urban-planning, […] underlining the original sources of sociality (in the moment of the neighborhood), recognizing social space in political terms and without believing that a monument can be innocent (the demolition of the Vendôme Column, the occupation of churches by clubs, etc),”79 declares Lefebvre in 1965, three years before the 1968 revolts. Has I have already explained in Chapter 1, La proclamation de la Commune becomes a real and authentic “Gospel” on which the French students instruct themselves. The Hagetmau philosopher not only becomes one of the intellectual reference points for the social movements of the sixties and Seventies but also—by means of the studies on the theory of space and on the Commune—a sharp interpreter of Karl Marx heritage, reviving its fundamental roots. Lefebvre’s studies on the Parisian commune of 1871 are a crystal light example of how the author developed the historical-political guidelines of the general theory of space.80 In fact, we’ll read the historical event of the Commune from the core of a theoretical constellation that simultaneously comprises The Production of Space and The Urban Revolution. The Commune will be examined as archetype—living and concrete archetype of the praxis—of an urban planning that is radically antithetical 78 H. Lefebvre, The Production of Space, p. 410. 79 H. Lefebvre, La proclamation de la Commune, Gallimard, Paris, 1965, p. 394. 80 Despite Lefebvre’s not subtracting from historiography I believe it useful to also

refer to these volumes: I. Cervelli, Le Origini della Comune di Parigi. Una cronaca (31 ottobre 1870–18 marzo 1871), Viella, Roma, 2015. P. O. Lissagaray, History of the Paris Commune of 1871, Red and Black Publishers, St Petersburg (FL), 2007. Id., Huit journées de mai derrière les barricades, Gallimard, Paris, 1968.

146

F. BIAGI

to Le Corbusier’s functionalism.81 If, until now, in our careful analysis of Lefebre’s legacy we have pointed out the pars destruens, with the Commune we start—little by little—by delineating the pars costruens, the alternative that is founded in everyday life that the author opposes to the target of his critique. The “case-study” of the Commune allows to underline how that event unfolds a novel relation with the urban space and—contemporaneously—also unveils new connections with the temporality of history.82 The Commune is in fact interpreted by Lefebvre as a “festival” that irrupts in the linear historical time of the Capital to inaugurate an act that severs the sequence of human events: “[The Commune] was a festival, the greatest of the century and of modern times. Even the coldest analysis finds in it the impressive insurgents’ will of becoming patrons of their own life and of their own story, not only regarding political decisions, but on the plan of everydayness.”83 The concept of “festival” is hence to be interpreted as “epiphany,” that is, as concrete manifestation of the possibilities to establish a different political, social, temporal, and spatial order. Lefebvre in fact, resumes the metaphor of a river overflowing in the urban spatiality of Paris.84 The philosophicalpolitical concept of “festival” elaborated by Lefebvre meets a common terrain in the studies that Furio Jesi conducts at the same period in Italy; effectively the Italian germanist uses this meaning to define “the moment of an interrupted battle” that suddenly reveals the oppressive modalities

81 I partially take some distance from De Simoni, who is very mush influenced by the reading of the metropolis as proposed by the contemporaneous post-workerism, that interprets the analysis of the Commune by Lefebvre as an attempt to elaborate an “archetype” of the political conflict of the urban riot. Despite the fact that her aesthetical-political interpretation of the urban riot from the Eighteen-hundreds until now is sharp and well argued, I think that it reduces the potentialities of that event only to “destitutioning power,” removing the “constituent power” that, conversely I here wish to highlight. See: S. De Simoni, “La Comune di Parigi come archetipo della rivoluzione urbana”, in F. Biagi, M. Cappitti, M. Pezzella, Il tempo del possibile. L’attualità della Comune di Parigi, monographic supplement to n. 3/2018 of “Il Ponte”, Firenze, pp. 101–110. 82 In the first part of the book entitled Style et méthode, Lefebvre re-introduced the progressive-regressive method to the study of the communard insurrection. See: Ibidem, p. 31. 83 Ibidem, pp. 389–390. 84 See: Ibidem, p. 21.

3

PHILOSOPHY AND SOCIOLOGY OF SPACE

147

of the established power.85 The political-conceptual category of “festival” seemed therefore useful to understand the suspension of the ruling historical time operated by a concerted human action. To Jesi such a dimension is profoundly realized in the urban space dimension, particularly between the protagonist subject—in this instance the insurgent population in Paris—and the social space that he occupies, redefining it at its foundations. We should also take time to read a part of the reflections by the germanist: “You can love a city, you can recognize its houses and its streets in your remotest or dearest memories; but only in the hour of revolt is the city really felt as your own city—your own, because it belongs to the I but at the same time to the ‘others’; your own because it is a battlefield that you have chosen and the collectivity too has chosen; your own because it is a circumscribed space in which historical time is suspended and in which every act is valuable in and of itself, in its absolutely immediate consequences. One appropriates a city by fleeing or advancing, charging and being charged […]. In the hour of revolt, one is no longer alone in the city.”86 It is of common knowledge that not only the anarchic and libertarian currents but also the Marxian-Engelsian tradition have discovered in the political experience of the Commune the political and social archetype on which to inspire their owns praxis toward a new model of government alternative to the Capitalist society. Despite the political and personal divergences Bakunin,87 Marx and Engels read in the Commune the attempt to establish—for every woman and every man—a new democratic, deferral and self-organized regime.88 Thus, Lefebvre’s perspective is inspired by this debate, but this perspective, as we shall see, exceeds the limits known, reflecting on the communard insurrection as being spatial insurgence, that is, a conflict for space. The author’s originality offers an

85 F. Jesi, Spartakus. Simbologia della rivolta, Bollati Boringhieri, Torino, 2000, p. 69. Besides see also: Id., “Lettura del Bateau ivre di Rimbaud”, in Il tempo della festa, Nottetempo, Roma, 2014, p. 47. 86 Ibidem, pp. 45–46. 87 M. Bakunin, “La Commune de Paris et la notion d’État”, in De la guerre à la

Commune, Anthropos, Paris, 1972. 88 In this regard I refer to the study by Léonard, who retraces with historical detail the debate around the Commune within the “First International” and its most famous militant theoreticians. See: M. Léonard, L’émancipation des travailleurs, une histoire de la Première Internationale, La Fabrique, Paris, 2011.

148

F. BIAGI

innovative contribution to the interpretation of history by using Benjamin’s method: to brush history against the grain. Lefebvre shows how the spatial point of view is more than ever present. In this regard, I would like to shed some light on the difference of the Lefebvrian innovation that looks at the insurgence for space as interpretative category of a political action by hand of the oppressed masses, this point of view being understood, as moment of shared creation of the process of production of an alternative spatiality, and at the same time one that denies the ruling one. In the Paris Commune, space becomes the ultimate goal par excellence, in Lefebvre’s words: “The Paris Commune can be interpreted in light of the contradictions of space and not solely from the contradictions of historical time […] It was a popular response to Haussmann strategy. The workers who had been banished to the peripheral neighborhoods and, reappropriated the space from which bonapartism and the political power strategy had excluded them. They tried to take back the possession in an atmosphere of feast (warrior but radiant).”89 The book on the Commune is born from three instances that inspire Lefebvre to undertake those researches. Most of all, the first reason is based in his friendship with Debord (as recalled in Chapter 1); then, it is possible to hypothesize that the author, already in the Sixties, was planning the study of a general theory of space, and only found a sense of completion for the publication, as we all know, only at the dawn of the Sixties; finally, from the acknowledgments at the introduction of the volume it is possible to deduct that the merit is addressed to the advices offered by historian Gérard Walter.90 As we tread Lefebvre’s trail, the legendary Marxist image of the “the self-government of the producers”91 exceeds the most diffused rhetoric, in order to materialize in the praxis of the management of the city and urban space. This long section is to be read carefully: “Spontaneity played in this instance a prime role, a role of joyful spontaneity. Civil war, fighting for life or for death. Festivities that only separated during the course of events. Besides and above all it was about the first urban revolution. The workers and the Parisian people didn’t only fight in the city but for 89 H. Lefebvre, “La classe ouvrière et l’espace”, in Espace et politique. Le droit à la ville II , p. 168. 90 H. Lefebvre, La proclamation de la Commune, p. 11. 91 K. Marx, “The Civil War in France” (1871), in Collected Work of Marx & Engels,

Vol. 22, p. 332.

3

PHILOSOPHY AND SOCIOLOGY OF SPACE

149

the city. Paris wasn’t solely theatre of history, passive location of history, passive site of action. The conflict aimed at the City and its center, the Hôtel de Ville. The Paris Commune wasn’t solely a political means, a tool, but more and better: the sense of the conflict. Dispossessed of their city and banished from the center by Haussmann, the workers and the people came back in force, the 18th of March 1871, and re-conquered what belonged to them […] They courageously succeed in pinning down, from the retaken city center, the problems of decentralizing and decentralization. This time […] went far beyond the historical moment, bound to the possible through the impossible. The Commune put forward the early forms of self-management, forms that once were production units and territorial units (urban communes).”92 The innovative interpretation presented by Lefebvre clearly indicates how the Commune is an insurgence enacted in the name of the re-appropriation of social space that was subtracted be the authoritarian urban project by Haussmann. Moreover, the blind imperial rule of Napoleon III had erected the Vendôme Column as symbol of their dominance, a farce in the name of the Second Empire that the Parisian proletariat couldn’t stand and chooses to demolish to show the end of a specific spatial regime (Haussmann representations of space) and the beginning of a new spatial dimension (the spaces of representation) agreed collectively by the communard political form. The three months of the Commune clearly didn’t succeed in changing the haussmannian infra-structures, however from the first day of insubordination there is already an organization of the city that contrasts radically the choices operated by the Empire. Lefebvre points out how the communard insurrection had a precise goal of material re-appropriation of urban space that had been estranged from the lower layers of the population by hand of the haussmannian intervention.93 It should be underlined how such spatial estrangement against the population isn’t really accomplished: “The military Paris and the official Paris (State and government) with their palaces, monuments and streets, projection on the ground of the social and political structure, superimpose each other without suffocating 92 H. Lefebvre, La fin de l’histoire, Editions de Minuit, Paris, 1970, pp. 236–237. 93 For these reflections I am grateful to the debate held in Rome with Mario Pezzella,

during the Conference “Il Diritto alla Città” (24–25 November 2016, Dipartimento di Architettura dell’Università di Roma), organized by the “Fondazione per la Critica Sociale” and the journal “Il Ponte.” See also: F. Biagi, M. Cappitti, M. Pezzella, Il tempo del possibile. L’attualità della Comune di Parigi.

150

F. BIAGI

the popular Paris.”94 The storming of Paris by the communard insurgence assumes mythical traits regarding the facc that it triggeres the crisis of the french and europenan geo-political balance, so much that Lefebvre states: “the people have sanctified the modern Babylon. The city of kings and emperors became the holly city “standing at West” (Rimbaud), Jerusalem and Rome of the modern World.”95 To resume a concept that is characteristic of the situationist political tradition, we could say that the Commune performs a counter-movement of critique against the separation of places as imposed by the Capital, trying a unitary re-proposal of life and of human practices, and therefore, opposing the overlapping of the state’s central power with the federal and self-managed dimension of the popular Paris. To the merchandizing of spaces the Commune opposes the free and reciprocate recognition of social space among pairs; on this point Lefebvre agrees with the Situationists ideating a draft of “revolutionary urban planning” as shown in the incipit of the paragraph.96 Wih this intent, monumentos of the “phallic, visual, geometric” dominance aren’t neutral and they will be demolished not in the name of nihilist aspirations, but, instead, to affirm a new course to the spatialtemporal history of Paris: “Those who interpret these acts as nihilism and barbarism should instead confess that they are willing to maintain everything they consider as ‘positive,’ that is to say all the accomplishments of history, all the works of the ruling society, all the traditions, all that was already taken for granted, including all that is dead and stiffened.”97 In the Programme elementaire du Bureau d’urbanisme unitaire Debord, Vaneigem, and Kotanyi have expressed similar meanings to the Lefebvrian reflection, inserted as moment that produced the birth and “resurrection” of an actual social space the concept—most paradoxal— of “empty”: “The entire space is already taken by the enemy […] The moment real urban planning appears will consist in creating, in specific areas, the emptiness from this occupation. What we call construction

94 H. Lefebvre, La proclamation de la Commune, p. 134. 95 Ibidem. 96 It must be added that Lefebvre doesn’t mention his friend Guy Debord and that decision will become one of the reasons for the mutual resentment that will put an end to the relation of the author with the situationist movement (see supra in Chapter 1 the paragraph dedicated to the relation between Debord and Lefebvre). 97 H. Lefebvre, La proclamation de la Commune, p. 394.

3

PHILOSOPHY AND SOCIOLOGY OF SPACE

151

starts there. It can be understood with the help of the concept of positive hole fashioned by modern physics.”98 The revolutionary unitary urbanism, was—according to Debord—the most ardent attempt by the Commune, that he himself tried to articulate and develop in the political practices of the social movements that were formed during the French May of sixty-eight. We are to read now the passage that Lefebvre quoted above, that is also at the origin of a quarrel with the situationist authors: “The Commune represents the only implementation of a revolutionary urbanism to date—attacking on the spot the petrified signs of the dominant organization of life, understanding social space in political terms, refusing to accept the innocence of any monument. Anyone who disparages this attack as some ‘lumpenproletarian nihilism,’ some ‘irresponsibility of the pétroleuses,’ should specify what he believes to be of positive value in the present society and worth preserving (it will turn out to be almost everything).”99 In his preparatory notes to Passagenwerk, Benjamin defined the relation between symbolic forms and the capitalist way of production using the word “expression.” In this perspective he considered the connection between the nineteenth-century architecture of the passages and the forms of social life characteristic of the Second Empire in France. A similar method is used by Kristin Ross to study the articulation of space and time during the Paris Commune of 1871.100 In this regard, Ross, in her book The Emergence of Social Space, underlines the Lefebvrian insight that draws a connection between the everyday life of the Commune and the spatial dimension.101 The Commune is in fact a rebellion against the class spatial matrix imposed by the Empire and inaugurates the attempt 98 G. Debord, R. Vaneigem, K. Kotanyi, “Programme elementaire du Bureau d’urban-

isme unitaire”, in Internationale Situationniste, n. 6, Août 1961. 99 See: G. Debord, A. Kotanyi, R. Vaneigem, “Sur la Comune”, in Internationale Situationniste, n. 12, Septembre 1969. Conseil Central de l’International Situationniste, “Aux poubelles de l’histoire”, in Internationale Situationniste, n. 8, Janvier 1963. 100 The reflections that are here displayed find inspiration and roots in the studies on the Paris Commune conducted by Kristin Ross that confirm Lefebvre’s inquiries, see: K. Ross, The Emergence of Social Space: Rimbaud and the Paris Commune, Verso, London, 2008. (In the French edition there is a more recent and valuable foreword by the author available online at the site of the Parisian publishers, see: id., Rimbaud, la Commune de Paris et l’invention de l’histoire spatiale, Les Prairies ordinaires, Paris, 2013.) See also: Id., Communal Luxury: The Political Imaginary of the Paris Commune, Verso, London, 2015. 101 K. Ross, The Emergence of Social Space: Rimbaud and the Paris Commune, pp. 8–9.

152

F. BIAGI

to re-inscribe insurgence into the urban social dimension; Ross interprets it in the happy marriage of the file rouge linking the space (of the Commune) and (Rimbaud’s) poetry. The Parisian population, in re-occupying the roads and the squares, splits the preceding spatial hierarchy, reaches the center-city and conquers the Hôtel de Ville, turning the decisional-oppressive place into social space that is shared by every man and woman. The space of the Hôtel de Ville—that embodies par excellence the instituted power—becomes, instead, the place where a new horizontal and democratic spatiality is realized as more adequate field to favor a new course for the “right to the city” of all of the oppressed: “The workers who occupied the Hôtel de Ville or who tore down the Vendôme Column were not ‘at home’ in the center of Paris; they were occupying enemy territory, the circumscribed proper place of the dominant social order. Such an occupation, however brief, provides an example of what the Situationists have called a détournement.”102 The practice of the détournement doesn’t pertain to the creation of a “an-Other way” (thinking of Soja we could say “third space”),103 but to the dialect upturn of spatiality, in the construction of its radical antithesis and counter-part. The meaning of alterity in Lefebvre doesn’t ever solely describe a single alternative dimension, but more precisely a dialectic relation. Using a metaphor, it is possible to maintain that the Lefebvrian alterity pointed out by Ross holds more resemblance to a straight line that crashes against another straight line and through that shock destroys the entire axial plan creating a new one. Conversely, Soja’s Thirdspace idea is more similar to a parallel straight line that opens to a new dimension, but that doesn’t necessarily predict a frontal meeting-crash with the ongoing spatial reality. Alterity, or in other words, the differential dimension, as theorized by Lefebvre lives in the conflict of the dialectic praxis and, by means of such crash, establishes a new spatial-temporal perspective. Moreover, I believe that from, on one hand, the emblematic demolition of imperial monuments, and on the other hand, the failure to expropriate the French Bank assets, the challenge that emerges will decide the unfavorable fates in which the Commune ends. In fact, the Bank of France secretly transfers funding to the vaults of Thiers to help reorganize the repression of Versailles; and the eventual occupation of buildings

102 Ibidem, p. 42. 103 E. W. Soja, Thirdspace, p. 57.

3

PHILOSOPHY AND SOCIOLOGY OF SPACE

153

and the expropriation of money would have certainly granted greater possibilities of military organization to the Commune, subtracting them instead from the repression of Thiers. We can consider the hypothesis that Thiers would have had anyway the German support by Bismarck, but without the help from the Paris Bank it would have been forced to a greater submission before the Prussian ex-enemy facing a better-equipped communard popular militia.104 We now carry on the analysis of the reading that finds in the Commune the possibility to suspend the spatial-temporal dimension of the Capital opening a novel insurgent fissure. That discontinuity is actually part of the Lefebvrian idea of “utopia,” and is highlighted by the author in the spatial-temporal, and precisely, utopian idea, that is capable of breaking the cycle of the ruling regime and opening a new one. The author in fact maintains the idea that “every revolution holds something of prophetic in it,”105 meaning that revolutions trigger an innovative utopian spatial-temporal dimension. As we shall see in the following pages, Lefebvre resumes the concept of “utopia” to refer the suspension of the space-time of the Capital and the beginning of a new course to the being with-in-a-shared-world among equals. The prophetic element anticipates and tries to enact a political regime that is authentically democratic, despite the tragic fates that will consecrate the end of the Commune, the massacre and the exile of all of its most active participants: “This utopia, this pretense myth, was for a few days part of the facts and of life. In this sense, the Commune intermingles with the idea of revolution itself, seen not as abstract reality but as solid idea of freedom.”106 The feast of the Commune carves in the historical memory of the oppressed the option of an everyday life that differs from that imposed by the logics of the Capital. The Parisian people, as they foresee the end of Paris as they face the Thiers counter-attack, decide to “dying with what that for him means much more than ornament and a frame: their city, their body.”107 Just as the artist that maintains a strong bond with his oeuvre, the urban proletariat also feels connected to the polis: it is its product par excellence par excellence, either from the material point of view as from

104 On this hypothesis see: H. Lefebvre, La proclamation de la Commune, p. 300. 105 Ibidem, p. 38. 106 Ibidem, p. 390. 107 Ibidem, p. 22.

154

F. BIAGI

the symbolic. This comparing the city to oeuvre d’art, is not only evaluated, as we shall see, from the reflections on the meaning of “city as oeuvre” (anther converging point between the situationist authors and Lefebvre), but is coherent with the analysis that Kristin Ross proposes in her book Communal Luxury: The Political Imaginary of the Paris Commune. In fact the author as she goes back to the Federation of Artists Manifesto,108 interprets the communard event in the dimension of the birth of a “magnificent/splendid” common politics.109 The political imagery of the Commune is strongly influenced by the movements of artists that fund in Gustave Coubert the representative who will stand for them at the Communal Revolutionary Committee. Moreover, Coubert is one of those accused by the repressive forces of having destroyed the Vendôme Column e for this he will afterwards take refuge in Switzerland, in the political communion of the insurrection one of the most profound and creative acts is the taking over the “social space” of Paris and organizing it radically on horizontal and federated foundations. With the term “artistic magnificence/artistic splendor” of the Commune we should mean the creative, vitalistic and Dionysian element, to use Lefebvre’s recapture of Nietzsche, that shows by means of the poiesis practiced by the Communards in the new spatial dimension that is to be established. The city becomes center and symbol of resistance against the progressive formation of a capitalist-state system that until then had turned space into man’s enemy. It is in this regard that Lefebvre writes: “the Parisian insurrection of 1871 was the great and ultimate attempt of the city to stand according to the measure and the code of human reality.”110 In the political experience of the Commune there is a reunification of the political with the other spheres of the living. A different spatiality and historical temporality appears, and it isn’t anymore about evolution of a space and of a time flattened and monotonous, always equal in themselves and victim of consequentiality deprived of originality. The city, the polis,

108 It is as follows: “We will work cooperatively toward our regeneration, the birth of

communal luxury, future splendors and the Universal Republic” (“Federation of Artists Manifesto”, April 1871, in Communal Luxury. The Political Imaginary of the Paris Commune, p. 39). 109 In French the significant is “luxe communal ”, in English, Ross chooses “communal luxury.” 110 H. Lefebvre, La proclamation de la Commune, p. 32.

3

PHILOSOPHY AND SOCIOLOGY OF SPACE

155

is hence assumed as ideal spatial model to the realization of the democratic exercise, against the state and imperial form; Lefebvre particularly, following Marx’s trail, retraces the seeds of a radical critique on the state form and politics in itself.111 The Commune event is “trans-historical” and “ontological”112 in the measure that it realizes concretely and performatively an ideal condemned to extra-historical inefficacy, projecting ideals into the praxis of a possible future, authentically performable: “Past becomes or re-becomes present, according to the realization of the possibles objectively included in the past. Past unveils and updates itself with them.”113 In fact, the defeat of the Commune is due to the military measuring force against the Thiers army supported by Bismarck’s German power; nevertheless its socialpolitical organization that took place in the spatial dimension of the city of Paris—according to Lefebvre—is still valid. The violence of the repression exterminated that spatial-political project, but not the praxis of everyday life in which the Parisian popular forces recognized themselves; the Hagetmau philosopher in fact will develop a theory on the

111 As is widely known, Lefebvre follows Marx’s analysis, who foresees in the Commune the most successful example of the overcoming and abolition of the state form (see particularly: H. Lefebvre, La proclamation de la Commune, pp. 390–391). Such concepts however deserve some clarification. The power of the State is already “superseded,” Marx writes after having defined the Commune as “local municipal liberty” (K. Marx, “The Civil War in France” (1871), in Collected Work of Marx & Engels, Vol. 22, p. 334). In German, Marx uses the verb absschaffen [abolish]—used to express for instance the death penalty or torture per decreto—to define the anarchic perspective on the problem of authority (represented in those years mainly by Proudhon and Bakunin). The other terms Marx uses in his Commune’s writings instead underline mostly a processual movement regarding a decision imposed by law and the terms are: the verbs absterben (to perish), auflösen e verschwinden (dissolve, disappear), fallen (fall by oneself) or einschlafen (fall asleep on one’s own, that is, “extinguish” in a figurated sense) often used in official documents as synonym of “dying.” Other formulas are “become superfluous, useless, deprive oneself of one’s own function.” Marx thus means to underline the process of erosion and extinction of the State political form through the practical acts and concrete decisions adopted by the Paris Commune such as: drastic reduction of the labor day, the change that occurs in the ownership relations and the radical socio-political change of work and human activities (also the question of the political institutions). In this regard see the precise argumentation by Daniel Bensaïd in: “Politiques de Marx,” foreword of K. Marx, F. Engels, Inventer l’inconnu, textes et correspondances autour de la Commune, La Fabrique, Paris, 2008. 112 See: H. Lefebvre, La proclamation de la Commune, p. 32. 113 Ibidem, p. 36.

156

F. BIAGI

clash of both political principles, authority against liberty.114 For a better understning of the Lefebvrian point of view, we find in the categories of “agoraphilie” and “agoraphobie” presented in Francis Dupuis-Déri theories, an interpretative key that sheds new light on the relation between the practice of power and the spatiality in which it realize itself. The agoraphilie is the philosophical paradigm that weaves a genuine political passion referring to the autonomous and self-organized decision of the urban community gathered in the assembly of pairs in the agorà; conversely, the agoraphobie embodies the fear and class hatred toward the people united in assembly, as protagonist of its own self-government and quotidian political life. If the agoraphilie stands for the “joint power with the others,” the agoraphobie affirms instead the device of “power over others.”115 Has we have said, La proclamation de la Commune interprets the 1871 Commune from the urban and spatial point of view. The Right to the City together with the book on the Commune strongly inspires the political debates of those years and particularly the practices of the students’ movement. In the long interview entitled Le Temps des Méprises Lefebvre recalls the Sixty-eight relating the events in Paris with the facts in Prague. The author pinpoints both events as those that can mostly serve as example to the understanding of the “contestation” within the European dimension: in Paris “state capitalism” is contested while in Prague the contestation pertains to the “state socialism.”116 In sixty-eight Lefebvre foresees the attempt to exert the “critique” of the modernity promoted and debated in college courses. Between 1965 and 1968 he teaches “urban sociology” in Nanterre, one of the epicenters of the French May. Moreover, since 1961 in Strasbourg, he organized the seminars on the critique of everyday life to which Guy Debord and the situationist group had been invited; Jean Baudrillard was one of his assistants and Daniel Cohn-Bendit, the leader of the students’ movements, one of his most brilliant students. L’irruption de Nanterre au sommet is the volume in which the author draws an evaluation of the course of the events that crossed France and 114 Ibidem, p. 150. 115 See: F. Dupuis-Déri, Qui a peur du peuple? Le débat entre l’agoraphobie et

l’agoraphilie politique”, Variations. Revue Internationale de théorie critique”, Éditions Burozoiques, n. 15, 2011. Id., La peur du peuple: Agoraphobie et agoraphilie politiques, Lux Éditeur, Montréal (QC), 2016. 116 H. Lefebvre, Le Temps des Méprises, Stock, Paris, 1975, p. 107.

3

PHILOSOPHY AND SOCIOLOGY OF SPACE

157

Paris in 1968. It is a pamphlet where he collects his reflections on the students’ rebellions and the contestation against the consumption society. The central thesis proposed by Lefebvre draws an analogy between March 1871 and May 1968. In fact he draws a correspondence between the “Storming of the City Centre” by the Paris Commune and the unfolding of the phenomenology of the urban action exerted by the students. Lefebvre notices how the students’ movements converge to the “city center” with the intent to rebel against the ghettoization of the university campus, as the Nanterre one, projected outside the city by the functionalist model of lecorbusian inspiration. The new urban planning project had therefore banished the students to the borders of the city, should one only think that the Nanterre campus emerged next to one of the biggest banlieues in Paris. The exemplarity of the communard destiny will repeat itself one century after in the Fordist fates of the French Capital: there is a dialectic interaction between the social subjects pushed to the margins of the polis and the urban centrality domination by the logics of profit and the progressive dispossession of the space to inhabitants and citizens.

On the Concept of “Urban Utopia” For a better understanding of the spatial inquiry on the Paris Commune event it is necessary now to shed some light on the concept of “utopia” in Lefebvre, and next, also of “urban utopia.” We should above all, refer the interview in which the Hagetmau philosopher offers a clear definition of what he means precisely by “utopia”: “The roads of the utopian thought are confused. Utopia has also had its contradictions […] I draw a distinction between concrete and abstract utopias, between positive and negative utopias, between technological and social utopias. I also draw a distinction between utopistés and utopiens. The first abstract dreamers, while the second conceive concrete projects.”117 The distinction between “utopistes” (utopists) and “utopiens” (utopians) allows us to grasp the radical difference with those who conceive the utopian imagination as abstraction from the universe of the quotidian experience, as ideation of projects of society born without a performative connection with the social reality where we live. The “utopien” is the one who simultaneously, on one hand, imagines a future theoretical prospective and, on the other hand,

117 H. Lefebvre, Le temps des méprises, p. 242.

158

F. BIAGI

looks at such a utopian landscape in the light of the historical dialectic contradictions. The abstractness of the utopian world of ideas does not convince Lefebvre. Conversely the author imagines a utopian moment for the thought that necessarily is also a performative way of action to transform the current state of things. In this regard, Thierry Paquot, recalls that the utopia affirms itself simultaneously as contestation of the social order and as alternative way that can be trailed.118 Therefore, I think it is correct to explain the Lefebvrian meaning of “utopia” as “suspension of historical time.”119 This interpretation is confirmed by the previously mentioned concept of “festival” and, as we will see in the next paragraph, by the so-called “theory of moments” which guides from the beginning the Situationist movement, when it outlines the idea of “construction of situations.” Once again, the main reference for these issues is Furio Jesi. But before we can also refer to the theoretical constellation of On The Concept of History by Walter Benjamin.120 If the “utopien” is someone who inserts the utopian idea into reality to unlock the latent possibilities, the utopian imaginary, in other words, the utopian intervention of Man in the world is characterized by the praxis: firstly, by interrupting the linear and unidirectional time of the capitalist clock; secondly, because of its ability to open a breach that deviates the course of History and that pushes it—by means of a radical rejection—to pursue a diverse space-time plan. An anecdote evoked by Benjamin reaches us in order to help us understand the concept of “suspension” of the ruling temporality. During the revolutionary riots of July 1830 the French revolutionaries—as recalled by Benjamin in his fifteenth thesis On the concept of History—as night fell down started shooting all the clock towers in Paris. What was compelling them to pursue such an action? Why had the clock become a target? Benjamin perceives in that action the symbolic value of the clock which in that moment stood for the time of oppression. The clock towers stood as symbol of repetitive and unvarying time of progress, ruled by the rhythms of the capitalist economy. The rebel workers shot the image of that system that had assured their subjection, excluding the entire Parisian population

118 T. Paquot, L’utopie ou l’idéal piégé, Ed. Hatier, Paris, 1996, p. 75. 119 See: F. Jesi, Spartakus. Simbologia della rivolta, pp. 18–33. 120 See: M. Tomba, Attraverso la piccola porta. Quattro studi su Walter Benjamin, Mimesis, Milano, 2017.

3

PHILOSOPHY AND SOCIOLOGY OF SPACE

159

from a dignified existence. Destroying the clocks meant creating a fracture in the only time that had been possible until then, opening new temporal dimensions for everyday life. One can imagine, thus, how the concerted political action was indeed a miracle 121 to those laborers who until then had been divided and who had bent their heads enduring so many aggravations from their bosses. Therefore, such is in Lefebvre the historical declension of utopia; a meaning that recaptures partially the trails strolled by Benjamin, Jesi and more radical readings by Arendt.122 The utopia to Lefebvre is concurrently a braking device to the capitalist progress and a new beginning for an alternative political project. This utopia declensions itself in the concreteness of the praxis, avoiding any risk of abstractness, as follows: “[…] for reflection necessarily involves a form of utopia if it is not content to reflect and ratify compulsions, blindly accept authority and acknowledge circumstances; it implies an attempt to interfere with existing conditions and an awareness of other policies than those in force. Utopia? Yes indeed; we are all utopians.”123 The philosophical-political thought that reflects on the present of the social praxis is, as a result, the theoretical frame in which the author founds the concept of utopia. Thought and action are strongly connected, tied by a common node that opens history to a new path. In Lefebvre’s perspective social change can’t be detached from a process of utopian expansion of its premises. In one of his last interviews prior to his death, in January 1991, he declares: “Thinking the change in this day and age forces you to reason utopically, that is, it means to envisage a lot of fates for possible futures and to choose among them. Utopia has been discredited, it should be rehabilitated. […] This is the function

121 I explicitly refer to Hannah Arendt’s political thought who understands the concerted action in public space as an act similar to a miracle, to the point she ends up referring to revolutions and to the political forms of the Consiliarist tradition as a “lost treasure.” See: H. Arendt, On Revolution, Penguin, New York, 1990. Id., Was ist Politik? Fragmente aus dem Nachlass, Piper, Muenchen, 2003, partly translated in English: J. Kohn (edited by), The Promise of Politics, Knopf Doubleday Publishing Group, New York, 2009. 122 M. Abensour, Hannah Arendt contre la philosophie politique?, Sens & Tonka, Paris,

2006. 123 H. Lefebvre, “The Bureaucratic Society of Controlled Consumption”, in Everyday Life in the Modern World, The Penguin Press, New York, 1971, pp. 74–75.

160

F. BIAGI

of Marxism in the contemporary thought.”124 Such utopian function developed simultaneously in the thought and in the concrete praxis is one of the responsibilities that Lefebvre leaves in legacy to Marxism at the time of the neoliberal counter-revolution. Thus the utopia configures itself as a pole of resistant thought that in times of historical trouble, notwithstanding the pervasiveness of the dominant ideology, allows new emancipation fissures to shimmer.125 For such purpose, in Engels et l’utopie Lefebvre highlights how Marx’s faithful friend based his thesis upon The Housing Question and Anti-Dühring by recapturing Fourier’s intellectual legacy. Lefebvre will demonstrate, by reviewing both texts step by step, how Engels fought the “abstract utopia” and the orthodox systematization of a given theory because his scope was to anchor the philosophical analyzes in the practical reality.126 Lefebvre maintains that on one hand Düring is an ante-litteram 127 structuralist and Engels is fighting an intellectual battle against the obsession to systematize a thought within a predefined theoretical matrix. On the other hand Engels fights the “utopists” systems created in the abstractness of an idea which is disconnected from everyday life, but not the utopia itself. To Fourier he concedes the merit of having been one of the first theoreticians to have brought to light the effects of industrial labor division and the need to overcome the antithesis between city and countryside. In Lefebvre’s perspective, Engels re-elaborates the socialist utopianism driving it into becoming a revolutionary utopia, in other words, a “concrete utopia.”128 The latent possibilities in the present aren’t thus predefined in determinism, and it isn’t licit to build a society 124 P. Latour, F. Combes, H. Lefebvre, Conversation avec Henri Lefebvre, Messidor, Paris, 1991, p. 18–19. 125 I would like to highlight the connections between Lefebvre and Benjamin by means of the emblematic title that Tomba (2017) used for his last work on Benjamin. Benjamin’s “The Small Door” (La piccola porta) is a concept similar to the cracks, inside which the “breach of the utopia” as imagined by Lefebvre penetrates the linear time of progress. See: M. Tomba, Attraverso la piccola porta. Quattro studi su Walter Benjamin. 126 H. Lefebvre, “Engels et l’utopie”, in Espace et politique. Le droit à la ville II ,

Anthropos, Paris, 2000, p. 90. There is an English version, but I prefer use the original volume. See: “Engels and Utopia”, in Marxist Thought and the City, University of Minnesota Press, Minneapolis, 2016. 127 Ibidem, p. 87. 128 Ibidem, p. 96. See also: E. Bloch, The Spirit of Utopia, Stanford University Press,

Stanford, 2000.

3

PHILOSOPHY AND SOCIOLOGY OF SPACE

161

system to be enacted ex-ante based on them; on the contrary, they should be considered as “trends” and all probabilities should be submitted to theoretical examination. According to Lefebvre “concrete utopia is grounded on the motion of a reality of which the utopia unveils the possibilities.”129 The utopia that Engels fights against is in fact an “abstract utopia” of one who “prescribe the form in which this or any other of the antitheses of present-day society is to be solved.”130 Engels’s target is the prescriptive act, performed exante of certain utopias; however the German philosopher, in order to fight against Proudhon, doesn’t hesitate in recalling Fourier since praising the “power and charm” of his woks.131 This original interpretation of Engels’s urban studies allows Lefebvre to place the utopia at the core of the revolutionary trail drawn by Marx and Engels. Since we’ve already clarified the background on which the Lefebvrian utopia is highlighted we are now to pursue our next step: the definition of the meaning of “urban utopia.” In Utopie expérimentale: pour un nouvel urbanisme Lefebvre draws a distinction between the “abstract utopia” that is built ex-ante and the “experimental utopia” that is the kind of urban studies that establish as prime goal the “exploration of the human possibility, helped by the imaginary” that is accompanied by a “a continuous critique and by a continuous reference to the problematic of the relationship between real and reality.”132 Along the way the author hypothesizes the creation of a “polycentric model of city”133 based on the example of the ancient Greek city that organized the urban time and space around diverse nodes of activity: from the agora to the stadium, from the temple or from the acropolis to the theater. A city, therefore, that develops common social spaces grounded on everyday practice and on human needs, and not one made from an urban model submitted to economic laws. It is precisely in this reflection that Lefebvre—keeping close track of Debord and the 129 H. Lefebvre, “Engels et l’utopie”, in Espace et politique. Le droit à la ville II , p. 90. 130 F. Engels, “The Housing Question” (1872), in Collected Works of Marx & Engels,

Vol. 23, p. 385. 131 F. Engels, “Anti-Dühring. Herr Eugen Dühring’s Revolution in Science” (1877), in Collected Works of Marx & Engels, Vol. 25, p. 248. 132 H. Lefebvre, “Utopie expérimentale: pour un nouvel urbanisme”, in Du rural à l’urbain, Anthropos, Paris, 2001, p. 131. 133 Ibidem, p. 137.

162

F. BIAGI

Situationist movement—recaptures the concepts of “playing” and “ludic leisure” as theorized by Fourier. With such a concept the French sociologist wishes to point to the ludic practice as alternative to the “free time” of the consumerist society. In fact the imaginary of “free time” comprises the fact that there is a “non-free time” subjected to the Fordist productive labor. The concept of “playing,” as being “multiform and multiple,”134 would instead overturn the “time of labor” and “free time” dichotomy eliminating the debris of instrumental reason in favor of a harmonic dimension not just of the times of labor but as well of the moments of leisure and rest. Lefebvre suggests the “transduction” method as a means to avoid the risk of falling into the “abstract utopia.” The transduction is a method that “cannot be reduced to deduction and induction, that builds a virtual project from gathered information on the reality of a preset problem. […] The experimental utopia goes beyond the customary usage of the hypothesis on the social sciences domain.”135 However we rediscover a definition of “transduction,” that is more understandable regarding the relation that it has with the notion of “utopia,” in The Right to the City: “Transduction elaborates and constructs a theoretical object, a possible object from information related to reality and a problematic posed by this reality. Transduction assumes an incessant feedback between the conceptual framework used and empirical observations. Its theory (methodology), gives shape to certain spontaneous mental operations of the planner, the architect, the sociologist, the politician and the philosopher. It introduces rigour in invention and knowledge in utopia.”136 Therefore the transduction offers a method to the utopian thought so that it doesn’t run ashore in the universe of abstract dimension, outside the reality of urban life. Adding to this no particular knowledge holds more merit than any other within the study of the space and of the city anymore; and all the intellectual power arises from the metaphilosophical method that is a knowledge that goes way beyond philosophy and that breaks the disciplinary boundaries in order to perform it in the coherent analysis of practical life. The “urban utopia” in its “experimental” form 134 Ibidem, p. 138. 135 Ibidem, pp. 130–131. 136 H. Lefebvre, “The Right to the City”, in Writings on Cities, Wiley-Blackwell, London, 1996, p. 151. See also: Id., “Humanisme et urbanisme. Quelque propositions”, in Du rural à l’urbain, pp. 153–158.

3

PHILOSOPHY AND SOCIOLOGY OF SPACE

163

invests in fact “in the appropriation of time, space, physiological life and desire.”137 The utopian foresight is also the tool that allows a way-out of the stingy urban functionalism of the Le Corbusier’s Fordism.138 Instead of the functionalist “strength jacket” Lefebvre suggests a radical break and a radical libration for the urban life fates: “the utopic in this sense has nothing in common with an abstract imaginary. It is real.”139 Such is the open sea to be crossed with the compass of metaphilosophical transduction toward the polar star of the utopian thought. In The Urban Revolution Lefebvre expresses a divergence with Foucault, in fact the utopia “reunites the near order and the far order,” the heterotopy instead is solely a distant alterity, sometimes from the real praxis, other times, even in the embodiment of the praxis, it only expresses the dialectic between two places.140 For instance, the development of urbanization was, on what concerns the rural world, and heterotopy, that is, a place that counter-opposed the peasant world denying it.141 Even on what pertains to this instance we should pay attention in interpreting Lefebvre through the dialectic triad, that is: isotopy, heterotopy and utopia.142 Isotopy is the close order of places, it indicates a specific place. On an ulterior stage, heterotopy is the denial of the isotopy that occurs in the difference of alterity. Utopia instead is the final level, in which a possible latent future realizes itself, and that can develop the order performed in the concreteness of the praxis.

137 H. Lefebvre, “The Right to the City”, in Writings on Cities, p. 155. 138 See: H. Lefebvre, “Propositions pour un nouvel urbanisme”, in Du rural à l’urbain,

p. 193. 139 H. Lefebvre, The Urban Revolution, p. 38. 140 Ibidem, pp. 128–130. 141 Ibidem, pp. 128–129. 142 In addition to the references contained in The Urban Revolution, see: H. Lefebvre,

“La ville et l’urbain”, in Espace et politique. Le droit à la ville II , pp. 79–80.

164

F. BIAGI

“Changer la vie”: The Critique of Everyday Life and the Lefebvrian Roots of the Situationist Thought The unceasing reference to the “possibles” is the essential framework within which Lefebvre develops his critique of everyday life.143 The “possibles” are featured for being temporal rhythms that split, on one hand, the consumerist and spectacular physiognomies of the everyday, and on the other, the exploitation and social subalternity situations produced by ways of life that are inherent to the capitalist way of production.144 This appeal contains a novel idea of history, antithetical to historicism and to the universalizing intents of progress: they are fissures that produce a novum in man’s history, fissures that sever the monotony of the linearity of the time of the Capital. It is needed here to highlight how the concept of “alienation” in Lefebvre is profiled inside a vast spectrum of conditions that cooperate to imprison the human action. The theorectical challenge of the author, simultaneously sociological and philosophical, is aiming at the subversion of an everyday life that has been forsaken to the grayness of capitalist mass production. That massification is declensioned, on one side, and regarding the “spare time,” by the implementation of a dream image of merchandizes and desires, and on the other side, regarding “time of labor,” by the Fordist rhythms. The technical and economical progress promised by capitalism is actually submitted to the demands for profit and rarely intersects the concrete social needs of men. The Lefebvrian spatial analysis, has we have seen in the preceding chapter, outlines the modalities in which the magnificence of the buildings allows space for the shacks in the peripheries and a mere urban 143 See: R. Hess, Henri Lefebvre et la pensée du possibile. Théorie des moments et construction de la personne, Anthropos, Paris, 2008. I summarize in this paragraph the theses of critique of everyday life on the spatial and urban studies of Lefebvre, however for a broader analysis see: C. Stenghel, Per una filosofia del quotidiano. Pensare il cambiamento a partire dalla riflessione di Henri Lefebvre, Phd Thesis, 24 April 2018, University of Padova (Italy). 144 Lefebvre offers two concepts about the everyday life [la vie quotidienne] issue. “The everyday” [le quotidien]—that some scholars defined “the quotidian”—is different from “the everydayness” [la quotidienneté]. “The everydayness” represents “the modality of capital’s administration of atomization and repetition”, while “the everyday” represents “the modality of social transformation and class resistance.” See: H. Lefebvre, “The Everyday and Everydayness”, in Yale French Studies, n. 73, 1987, pp. 7–11. [author’s footnote]

3

PHILOSOPHY AND SOCIOLOGY OF SPACE

165

planning project—subaltern to the market interests—abandons the countryside areas, that are deprived of lighting, not far from dams, the power stations and “great construction projects” that—concretely—become urban fabric: not countryside anymore, but not city yet.145 The supposedly capitalist progress, therefore, acts clumsily badly changing the places solely in terms of economic revenue. More than spreading riches, thus, capitalism does nothing other than feed the conditions that favor the “that life is lagging behind what is possible,”146 demanding a growing estrangement from everyday life, from the creative power of human action. In the Lefebvrian reading, the city, no matter how crossed it is by prevailing individualism and isolated separation of men, puts in nuce the latent conditions of subverting the spatial-temporal forms of the Fordist capitalism. The commitment of the workers world and youthful countercultures, in the battle to build a different civilization and a novel idea of world, allow Lefebvre to register the beginnings of quotidian resistance to the way of life of Fordist matrix. The critique of everyday life has to highlight these conflicts. In order to do so, it should concretely go through the entrance of peripheral life, rid itself of any individualistic abstraction so as to analyze the infinite practical manifestations of everydayness, fluttering between the two shores: alienation and exploitation on one side, and spectacular well-being, on the other. Registering this movement of the everyday life demands thus a radical separation from the unfounded idea of the banality of life. Such “banality,” if it is true, is a product of the Fordist lifestyle, however—according to Lefebvre—it can be examined in all of its facets. The theoretical problem of everyday life cannot be put aside because it presents itself as fertile ground where the main consumerist factors of the modern capitalism show grow. With the intent to explain the concept of the transposition of the strength of man’s everyday life outside it Lefebvre draws a line of continuity between the concentration camp147 of urban functionalism and the Kafkan universe.

145 H. Lefebvre, The Critique of Everyday Life. Vol. I , Verso, London, 2008, p. 230. 146 Ibidem. 147 It is necessary to precise that Lefebvre resumes the concentration camp’s heritage

born with totalitarism in order to read it along the course of development of the capitalist forms of life. Paradoxically the darkest moment in European history, would unveil, thus, showing the degeneration of its possibilities, the essence itself of everyday life inherent to the modern foundation: “ if Fascism represents the most extreme form of capitalism, the concentration camp is the most extreme and paroxysmal form of a modern housing

166

F. BIAGI

In the Kafka’s novel The Castle Lefebvre finds the essence in itself of the everyday life of the capitalist modernity and it shows an absurd ordinariness, in fact as is well-known, the bureaucratic power encloses the life of K, the protagonist, whose quotidian utterly atrocious, hidden and inescapable would offer an exhaustive and most lucid example of the modern. Just as K in The Castle, the existence of the common man who crams the factories of industrial cities is determined by a multiplicity of unsolved contradictions, “against everything human,”148 so affirms Lefebvre. The difficulty in understanding the erosion of the quotidian caused by modernity, is due to a lack of dialectic method that induces one to passively accepted the present state of things, without realizing the innovative possibilities of insubordination.149 From this perspective, the project of Critica della vita quotidiana, that will be conducted in the arch of more than thirty years (from 1947 until 1981) tries to anticipate the latent possibilities in the human, looking at the future from the present. In fact, it is about drawing its qualitative essential virtuality directing man to a new attitude toward himself, an attitude that can fill the contrast between the real and the plural dimensions of the possible. Modern man should have placed his own wisdom and power outside life, he withdraws in the intimacy of a private politically disengaged from the public sphere. The project of the Critique thus, is addressed against the individual and individualism, man receives a call to undress his private garments that would make “will stop being a fiction, a myth of the bourgeois democracies—an empty, negative form—a pleasant illusion for each human grain of sand.”150 The Critique replaces the private individual with the social one: a growing objectification would in fact correspond to a growing subjectification. As a result, the more the human being becomes social, the more he refines is own awareness. Living the change, however, requires a new vision of the world, some new theoretical tools. In this

estate, or of an industrial town. There are many intermediary stages between our towns and the concentration camps: miners’ villages, temporary housing on construction sites, villages for immigrant workers… Nevertheless, the link is clear” (Ibidem, pp. 245–246). 148 Ibidem, p. 232. 149 For an update on the research guidelines on everyday life in Lefebvre see: S.

Aronowitz, “Henri Lefebvre: The Ignored Philosopher and Social Theorist”, in Against Orthodoxy: Political Philosophy and Public Purpose, Palgrave Macmillan, New York, 2015. 150 Ibidem, p. 248.

3

PHILOSOPHY AND SOCIOLOGY OF SPACE

167

regard philosophy must necessarily undress its own speculative dimension, finding a new impulse “to denounce alienation”151 and “to indict dishumanization,”152 raising in the quotidian context the question of the man in his entirety. In the scenery of everyday life, Lefebvre registers a permanent dialectic between flatness and extraordinariness of existence. There would be therefore in human life a surplus that operates against the capitalist mass production; that surplus is never fully incorporated but finds its expression in some “moments” of life practices such as art, love and play. In Lefebvre in fact the mention to the poiesis of the quotidian is determining for the utopian assumption of a aesthetical dimension characterized by a profoundly revolutionary feature that is untamable by the capitalism; it concerns the hypothesis of an “art of living” that aims to consolidate itself not only as means but also as purposes.153 The surrealist and situationist influence is clear, but those forms of surplus inside and against the society of spectacle, are only briefly referred in the first volume of the Critique; later, they will be systematized in the second volume that, combined with Everyday Life in the Modern World (1968), offers a more detailed analysis. On one side, the author clarifies the idea of the quotidian as possible surplus among the activities of the consumerist society; on the other side, he describes the hypothesis of an unbreakable bind between the capitalist modernity and everyday life. Therefore, the capitalist modernity is an immanent process that changes the life of men, that manipulates it imposing a new organization, but such awareness is not enough to refuse radically modernity, aiming to go back to the bucolic past (a trait as we have seen most characteristic of Heidegger). In the year following the publication of the second volume of the Critique, Lefebvre publishes Introduction to modernity, confirming the genesis tale specifically modern genesis of everyday life.154 While the first volume of the Critique shows that Lefebvre is committed to rehabilitating everyday life on what pertains to speculative

151 Ibidem, p. 249. 152 Ibidem. 153 Man should consider is own life “not just as a means but as an end” (Ibidem, p. 199). 154 See Introduction to Modernity and Everyday Life in the Modern World.

168

F. BIAGI

philosophy, the second volume will signal a further step, and is structured around the notion of “real concrete man,” deep-rooted in his own existence and carrying a multitude of needs that the conceptual tool created in the Sixties intends to inquire. The development of a critical theory of everyday life, in his first writings is thus understood as place for the mediation between nature, man and his being in the world where the proportion of social interactions and self-production of man in the contradictions of society, ideated by Lefebvre together with Debord, is painted with increasingly darker shades, resulting in the theorization of a genuine colonization of everyday life, in which the colonizing subject is the induced desire, and a desire that manipulates the actual desires of men.155 The scenery that emerges from the researches and writings of the Sixties, and particularly in Everyday Life in the Modern World, lists several traits in common with the pages written by Adorno and Horkheimer on the mass society,156 however, Lefebvre, contrarily to the Frankfurt school exiled in the United States, will always remain anchored to an unlimited trust regarding the surplus of the human action concerning the un-reducibility of the everyday in the standardized processes. The problem is therefore connected to the attempt to understand the political, economical, social, and cultural changes that cross the post-war Fordist society. The Lefebvrian Critique, by means of a global approach to the Marxian legacy—from a philosophy renewed as critic awareness of everyday life—allows to investigate the contradictions of the capitalist modernity. Actually, the question is not to isolate dogmatically the various aspects of life in order to privilege the economic sphere (this point of view is to Lefebvre attributable to the structuralist), because in this way we would not have the possibility to understand and transform the world. Instead it is necessary to watch the quotidian so as to understand the concrete dynamics of the capitalist society. Lefebvre states: “An significant aspect of marxism has now come back to light, what its officialization and its trasformation into philosopic system and State ideology had completely eliminated. The research is now undertaken not only at the social practice 155 See H. Lefebvre, The Critique of Everyday Life. Vol. II , Verso, London, 2008, pp. 10–11. On the relation between the everyday and colonization see also A. Raulin, La vie quotidienne entre colonisation et émancipation, in Henri Lefebvre. Une pensée devenue monde?, Paris, L’Harmattan, 2012. 156 See: T. Adorno, M. Horkheimer, Dialectic of Enlightenment, Stanford University Press, Stanford, 2002.

3

PHILOSOPHY AND SOCIOLOGY OF SPACE

169

level with its inner contradictions, as well as on the Capital level.”157 Lefebvre himself recognizes that “the critic of everyday life comprises and develops the critic of political economy in the Marxian sense and tries to reach the social man who bases himself on the economic activity and surpasses him.”158 The analytical categories of the Trier’s philosopher are here channeled to a critical awareness of the entire society; therefore the hope for a return to the social practice is placed inside the attempt to deepen the Marxian analysis majorly around society in its whole, inserting it and re-updating it in light of the fact that “a single man lives and acts inside these various sectors: professional activity, direct relations (familiar and social ones), pleasure and culture. One has repercussions over the other.”159 There are interpreters such as Jedlowski or Vigorelli that criticize Lefebvre for partly “sacrifices” the dimension of the factory,160 however, in my opinion, it is an undeserved remark and out of place, for the intent of the Hagetmau philosopher is that of leading the Marxian analysis to new fronts, where the critique still hasn’t adequately inquired. Actually, I am convinced that Lefebvre partly leaves aside the sociology of work believing that on that problematic much had been said during the Sixties and Seventies in France. It’s incorrect to also demand of Lefebvre a precise and detailed problematization of the Fordist work, since it doesn’t belong in his research. The originality and the difference of Lefebvre’s thought with his time has to do with the directing the Marxian tools to the analysis of space and everyday life, registering that they spheres of social life that haven’t yet been duly examined as the working-class question as such. It isn’t correct to maintain that Lefebvre is a theoretician who undervalues the work problematic, since the author maintains that deriving from the issue of the organization of labor there are many other spheres that, together with the labor one, help to define the framework of social oppression. In Lefebvre, as there isn’t supremacy of the economic, there isn’t either accordingly supremacy of the working 157 H. Lefebvre, La somme et le reste, Anthropos, Paris, 2008, p. 596. 158 Ibidem, p. 597. 159 Ibidem. 160 See the two introductions to the Italian edition of Everyday Life in the Modern World: P. Jedlowski, “Henri Lefebvre e la critica della vita quotidiana”, in H. Lefebvre, La vita quotidiana nel mondo moderno, Il Saggiatore, Milano, 1979, pp. 7–31. A. Vigorelli, “Vita quotidiana e riproduzione dei rapporti di produzione”, in H. Lefebvre, La vita quotidiana nel mondo moderno, pp. 32–55.

170

F. BIAGI

universe over the remaining spheres of the quotidian, but there is rather a co-presence of technologies of alienation and exploitation that reverberate in the spatial dimension of the quotidian. On such trail of research, the project of Critique de la vie quotidienne allows the Hagetmau philosopher to point out the plot weaved between the production relations (the spaces of the Fordist factory) and the reproduction relations (the spaces of the quotidian) q): that is to say that the dimensions of social space that became subaltern to the capitalist command is the occasion to imagine a new theory of the revolutionary subject, that transcends the most orthodox figures of Marxism, starting from the utopian moments and from the insurgent fissures to which the political action of man gives life. In Lefebvre it is crucial to understand how politics is allowed to exert the art that holds back the capitalist progress, deviating it to novel revolutionary dimensions: “Would everyday life be merely the humble and sordid side of life in general, and of social practice? To repeat the answer we have already given: yes and no. Yes, it is the humble and sordid side, but not only that. Simultaneously it is also the time and the place where the human either fulfils itself or fails, since it is a place and a time which fragmented, specialized and divided activity cannot completely grasp, no matter how great and worthy that activity may be.”161 In this instance Lefebvre distances himself from Heidegger. The ordinary life when compared to the arrogance of a certain abstract philosophy of the universe seems futile. As is known, everyday life is defined in the framework of the Heideggerian place of the inauthentic; the French philosopher describes the speculative act as follows: “this is precisely what the philosopher must avoid if he is to unveil the authentic and to reveal the truth of being.”162 Conversely, Lefebvre is convinced that philosophical thought, without a total deep-rooting in the quotidian, would risk to abort its own mission. This obsession is coherently developed under the Marxian method, in the reciprocal circularity between “political theory” and “social praxis”: “For Marx, to transform the world was also and above all to transform the human world: everyday life. When they interpreted the world, philosophies brought plans for its transformation. Were we to fulfil philosophy,

161 H. Lefebvre, Critique of Everyday Life. Vol. II , p. 19. 162 Ibidem, p. 22.

3

PHILOSOPHY AND SOCIOLOGY OF SPACE

171

were we to change the process of the philosophical becoming of the world into the process of the world-becoming of philosophy, would that not be to metamorphose everyday life? We will therefore go so far as to argue that critique of everyday life—radical critique aimed at attaining the radical metamorphosis of everyday life—is alone in taking up the authentic Marxist project again and in continuing it: to supersede philosophy and to fulfil it.”163 The Critique of everyday life isn’t a new academic discipline, nor is it a simple branch of sociology; instead it establishes itself as critical philosophy of totality.164 In this regard, one of the first keys of inquiry concern the human dialect between real needs and induced desires, created in the spectacular dimension of merchandize fascination. The more affluent social classes share with the working class the same society: that system doesn’t favor the emancipation of the “small people,” but their progressive inclusion into the consumerist society. The detailed analysis of men’s social needs is most useful to understand in what way capitalist modernity estimates a relevant continuity between the different social classes. According to Lefebvre the needs are strongly connected with the development of the productive forces, therefore, in the society of spectacle social classes tend to stratify according to the various degrees of enjoyment and riches inside a matrix of subjectivisation that is profoundly individualistic and hedonist.165 The Hagetmau philosopher develops the interprets of the Marxian works within the framework of the concrete transformation of the quotidian. The subversion of the theater of everyday life is to be understood in the realization of a total revolutionary practice. Firstly, the la Critique is developed on the ethical plan: to Lefebvre, it’s crucial to pinpoint the plot in the connections, on one side, between the recognition of the (social and individual) needs and on the other side, the seductive production of induced desires. The social universe is thus progressively enlightened in the subtraction of the ideological layer that that represents all men as free and equal in the “public” sphere of the market. Secondly, Lefebvre identifies the potentially subversive tools within the frame of the aesthetical-political order. Above all, he finds the rediscovery

163 Ibidem, p. 23. 164 See: Ibidem, p. 27. 165 Ibidem, p. 32.

172

F. BIAGI

of art as creative activity that is not subjected to the instrumental logic of the capitalist technique. Next, he doesn’t forget to highlight the attempts to humiliate the aesthetical sphere of man in the devices of merchandizing and consumption: the Fordist society, in fact, reduces the creative sphere to exceptional situations, external to the monotonous quotidian routine of the cycle that occurs between work and free time. Art is elected as social action “non-instrumental” par excellence: its realization predicts a progressive coincidence with a new dimension in everyday life, now finally un-alienated. The meeting between art and everyday life uncloses, thus, the creative element of the human action in the concreteness of its praxis: a genuine metamorphosis “by its fusion with what had hitherto been kept external to it.”166 In this regard, Lefebvre valorizes the factors that are characteristic of the spontaneity of the human action exerted in the collective sphere: every man and every woman can “perceive the world through the eyes of an artist, enjoy the sensuous through the eyes of a painter, the ears of a musician and the language of a poet.”167 Within this interpretative frame there is thus simultaneously, on one side, a way-out of the quotidian subaltern to the modern logics of the capital, and on the other, a real return to ordinary and everyday life no longer alienated. The creative dimension of man, undressed by the instrumental reason, is finally free in the emancipating union of the artistic action and the quotidian. This alliance between art and everyday life transforms and transcends both human spheres, opening, as we have pointed out in the Commune months, a new course for the shared life of human beings. Lefebvre overturns the assumptions of the transformation of space of capitalism in a social economy of pleasure that, pushed to the extreme, reaches the totalitarian organization of the everyday life of modern man in the Fordist era. It concerns a mystifying form of the pleasure that is ruled by a multiplicity of needs and desires that are partly fictitious and partly unsatisfied. The “bureaucratic society of controlled consumption”168 implies a everyday life capable of feeding itself solely by means of the 166 Ibidem, p. 37. 167 Ibidem. 168 H. Lefebvre, Everyday Life in the Modern World, p. 68. That definition allow, in Lefebvre’s opinion, to hightight: on the rational character of society and on its limits (bureaucracy), on the object that regulates (consumption) and on the plan he refers to in its attempt to dominate it (the everyday).

3

PHILOSOPHY AND SOCIOLOGY OF SPACE

173

bureaucratic rationality and consumption. Lefebvre agrees with Debord: the creating and transforming activity of the human action is subordinated to the persistent process of spectacularization of the social sphere as it is “consumption of spectacle and spectacle of consumption.”169 The interpretative grid of the Fordist neo-capitalism develops along articulations that are in constant effort; Lefebvre defines that activity of the Spectacle through the concept “reproduction of the relations of production.” The Hagetmau philosopher deepens such dynamics of the spectacular action in La reproduction des rapports de production, an article that was published in 1971 in the L’homme et la societé journal, that was later included in the volume The Survival of Capitalism: Reproduction of the Relations of Production.170 The relations of “reproduction” is part of a constellation that we could define as “anti-economicist”: there would be in fact a bond between the “production of the relations of production” and the “reproduction of the relations of production,” isolating the connection between the phases of economic growth and the phases of material growth of men. The Hagetmau philosopher, by “means of production”—in the course that was partly trailed Marx—means, on one side, the workers understood in their corporeity and as power that is subjected to the factory command (from physical sustenance to education); on the other side, the work tools and the direct spatial consequences of industrial organization characteristic of Fordism. The economical-social dynamics of this fictitious plot of relations is, to Lefebvre, the crucial node of the permanence of capitalism and, in this regard, it is understood in the “bureaucratic society of controlled consumption” sense. Lefebvre tries to detach from the ruling economics of Althusserian point of view, in favor of a critical-global

169 The English translation is: “Displays of reality have become a display trade and a display of trade” (Ibidem, p. 63). However this version does not correctly translate the Lefebvrian sociological idiolect: “Le ‘spectacle du monde’ devient consommation de spectacle and spectacle de consommation” (La vie quotidienne dans le monde moderne, Gallimard, Paris, 1968, p. 122). 170 H. Lefebvre, “La re-production des rapports de production”, in L’Homme et la société, n. 22, 1971, pp. 3–23; later in: La survie du capitalisme: la reproduction des rapports de production, Anthropos, Paris, 1973, pp. 57–126; English trans.: “Reproduction of the Relations of Production”, in The Survival of Capitalism: Reproduction of the Relations of Production, S. Martin’s Press, New York, 1973, pp. 42–91.

174

F. BIAGI

theory of society.171 The “reproduction of the relations of production” affects everyday life and space in their totality. Space, homogeneized and sectorialized, centralizes itself or particularizes itself according to the state’s demands since “Colonisation, which like industrial production and consumption was formerly localised, is made general. Around the centers there are nothing but subjected exploited and dependent spaces: neo-colonial spaces.”172 Lefebvre’s originality in the re-reading of a dialectic Marxism alive in the social practice is to have pointed out, on one side, the tension between the domination devices of everyday life understood as alienating place of the capitalist organization and, on the other hand, the everyday life as possibility for a utopian fissure that overturns the oppression through the creative action of man. The action unfolds, besides, in two specific dimensions of life: Lefebvre differentiates in fact “tactics” and “strategies.” Strategy is characteristic of the great revolutionary moments such as the 1789 July or the 1917 October. While tactics has a underlying life in the human everyday life: it is a moment that is bursting of insurgent possibilities that haven’t yet been expressed, between the triviality of the Spectacle command and the decision that can overturn it (precisely the “strategy”): “In so far as the everyday is a reality which must be metamorphosed, challenged and made challengeable by critique, it can be observed on the level of tactics, of forces and their relations, and of stratagems and suspicions. Its transformation takes place on the level of events, strategies, and historical moments.”173 Therefore, the author argues that the “revolution must be reinvented,”174 and it should be rethinked in the quotidian deep-rooting, from the possibles that are virtually realized by means of the political action, throwing away the tight garments of the ideology and returning to the real, in order to know it and change it. Most significantly, Lefebvre argues that “today we must build a longterm policy on how to answer the demands for a radical transformation of

171 H. Lefebvre, “Reproduction of the Relations of Production”, in The Survival of Capitalism: Reproduction of the Relations of Production, p. 46. 172 Ibidem, p. 85. 173 H. Lefebvre, Critique of Everyday Life. Vol. II , p. 135. 174 Ibidem, p. 40.

3

PHILOSOPHY AND SOCIOLOGY OF SPACE

175

everyday life,”175 since the political intervention on the historical present decides the outcome of the utopian realization of the possible. Secondly, the aesthetical-political dimension of Critique of Everyday Life, is clarified in the semantic constellation of the so-called “theory of moments.” The philosophical-political tendency of “art of living” and of “festival” as a new appropriation of the authenticity of the everyday life, in an horizon where the human being is no longer subjugated by alienation, is recurrent in several books, among which we list La présence et l’absence, La somme et le reste and Qu’est-ce que penser? In the decade of 1950 and 1960, the “theory of moments” is therefore explained, on one side, simultaneously to the falling out with the French Communist Party and, on the other, in the progressive vicinity to the situationist movement. The theory of moments is above all delineated in La somme et le reste: a crucial volume for the communion of interests born between Lefebvre and situationist author. Next, the Hagetmau philosopher examines, in more detail, the political question of the “moment” in the second tome of the Critique, in which, in the last chapter, he explains the unsurmountable divergence with the Bergsonian philosophy: “The theory of moments comes initially from an effort to give language significance and value, in the fa ce of its critics (such as Bergson), and in spite of the undermining and disintegration of language which we are currently witnessing. It is the product of a violent protest against Bergsonism and the formless psychological continuum advocated by Bergsonian philosophy.”176 Henri Bergson conceives a theory of time with a linear duration (durée pure): the everyday life of man would be defined by a series of separate instants, in the frame of a straight, uniform and progressive future.177 Conversely, Lefebvre develops a conception of “moment,” as distancing from the immediateness of the instant imprisoned in the transitory dimension. It should be highlighted that both authors have antithetical positions regarding the early twentieth century positivism,

175 Ibidem. 176 Ibidem, p. 342. On the “theory of the moments,” Lefebvre’s references are, firstly, the pamphlet by Politzer (La fin d’une parade philosophique, le bergsonisme, 1929), secondly, Leibniz’s thought (see: Ibidem, p. 370 footnote 2). 177 See: H. Bergson, Durée et simultanéité, à propos de la théorie d’Einstein (1922), PUF, Paris, 1998. Id., Essais sur les données immédiates de la conscience (1889), PUF, Paris, 2007.

176

F. BIAGI

notwithstanding they will both follow diametrically opposed philosophical courses. To Lefebvre, Bergson’s philosophy stresses too much on “continuism” of instants that are separated from each other.178 Instead, the “moment” aspires to an emersion of the discontinuous in the spacetime perspective of the everyday life, oblivious to any exclusively ideal meaning. The “moment” severs the durée pure of the philosopher of the École Normale Supérieure, leading the rhythm of temporality toward a novel dimension able to unfold new conceptions, that are no longer linear and e progressive, of history. In fact, the spatial-temporal constellation of the Critique re-organizes the everyday life “according to its own tendencies and laws.”179 In this instance, it concerns trying to highlights the various latent possibilities of the human action so that they can get up the alienated factors. The Lefebvrian “moment,” comprises a distinct conception of the experience of time: that is variable, and different for every life experience.180 The meaning of “moment” in Lefebvre pertains to the dialectic praxis of the human work in the theater of the world: the practical-political action has in this sense the assignment of stopping and deviating to other tracks the locomotive of the modern progress of the Capital. The Lefebvrian theory of moments pertains to “a higher form of repetition, renewal, and reappearance.”181 The author draws his idea of the instant as potentially subversive within which and against the capitalist production standards, by recapturing the Dadaist and surrealist motto “Changer vie!” that in Lefebre’s opinion is linked to an elitist aesthetical dimension that hasn’t done anything but distancing art and poetry from the politicization of the living. The Hagetmau philosopher, in consonance with Debord, re-declensions the concept of “moment” in the “possible-impossible” dialectic. The idea of Dadaist foundation of “life as an art of work,” in Lefebvre develops as

178 H. Lefebvre, Critique of Everyday Life. Vol. II , p. 342. 179 Ibidem, p. 343. 180 “In day-to-day language, the word ‘moment’ and the word ‘instant’ are almost interchangeable. However, there is a distinction between them. When we say ‘It was an enjoyable moment…’, for example, it implies a certain length of time, a value, a nostalgia and the hope of reliving that moment or preserving it as a privileged lapse of time, embalmed in memory. It is not just any old instant, nor a simple ephemeral and transitory one” (Ibidem, p. 343). 181 Ibidem, p. 344. I highlight again the difference between Lefebvre and Deleuze, in fact, Deleuze follows the Bergson’s point of view.

3

PHILOSOPHY AND SOCIOLOGY OF SPACE

177

proposal for the return of the creative ability of the human action in the concrete life, and is at the same time critique and a call for action. I believe that from this perspective the theory of the moments can be interpreted as an attempt to restitute to the dadaist project the lost political strength, offering the concept of art a solid political foundation. That is also the project of the situationist movement of Debord. The grid of the capitalism temporality is severed from the moment it opens new and unexplored possibilities facing an unknown future which “seeds” are retraceable in the unrefined field of everyday life.182 The Lefebvrian “moment” affirms a presence and fullness that cannot be reduced to the capitalist repetition, by nature it is a anti-alienating temporal form: “We will call ‘moment’ the attempt to achieve the total realization of a possibility.”183 The moment emerges from the hell of the trivial contradictions of the everyday, operating in this conjuncture, and subsequently illuminates its possibilities, with the purpose that everyday life is redeemed in the “Festival”184 Here the common ground of reflections seems obvious with Walter Benjamin’s thesis on concept of history. In the Jetzeit and in the moment in fact history ceases to move according to a progressive schedule to behold a new spectrum of possibilities that in a continual motion of developments and feedbacks, accelerations and halts, is always prone to change.185 The moment is the attempt “to situate” the political action locally, in Debord’s words in the “costruction of situations,” and it thrives on the pure vitalistic dynamism (Nietzsche) and in the dialectics (Marx) never repressed between the linearity of progress and the attempt to break it to start, with the courage of human (political) action, a new utopian fissure: “The moment is born of the everyday and witLin the everyday. From here it draws its nourishment and its substance; and this is the only way it can deny the everyday. It is in the everyday that a possibility becomes apparent 182 H. Lefebvre, La somme et le reste, p. 242. 183 H. Lefebvre, Critique of Everyday Life. Vol. II , p. 348. 184 “[the moment] conceives of a kind of twofold critical and totalizing experience, and

of a ’programmatic’ which would not be reduced to a dogmatism or a pure problematic: the uniting of the Moment and the everyday, of poetry and all that is prosaic in the world, in short, of Festival and ordinary life” (Ibidem, p. 349). “Festival only makes sense when its brilliance lights up the sad hinterland of everyday dullness, and when it uses up, in one single moment, all it has patiently and soberly accumulated” (Ibidem, p. 356). See also: R. Hess, Henri Lefebvre et la pensée du possibile, pp. 195–200. 185 See: M. Pezzella, La memoria del possibile, Jaca Book, Milano, 2009, pp. 281–336; M. Tomba, Attraverso la piccola porta. Quattro studi su Walter Benjamin, pp. 77–114.

178

F. BIAGI

(be it play, work or love, etc.) in all its brute spontaneity and ambiguity. It is equally in the everyday that the inaugural decision is made by which the moment begins and opens out; this decision perceives a possibility, chooses it from among other possibilities, takes it in charge and becomes committed to it unreservedly.”186 As for what pertains to the obvious proximity between the “theory of moments” and the “costruction of situations,” Debord pinpoints that: “The “moment” is mainly temporal, […] the situation is completely spatio-temporal.”187 However, the difference from the situationist author is only confirmed if one is to refer to the volume La somme et le reste; both authors will afterwards converge to a peculiar and simultaneous space-time meaning. In the epigraph of the article The Theory of Moments and Construction of Situations, Debord quotes a reference taken from La somme et le reste: “At the level of everyday life, this intervention would be translated as a better allocation of its elements and its instants as “moments,” so as to intensify the vital productivity of everydayness, its capacity for communication, for information, and also and above all for pleasure in natural and social life. The theory of moments, then, is not situated outside of everydayness, but would be articulated along with it, by uniting with critique to introduce therein what its richness lacks. It would thus tend, at the core of pleasure linked to the totality, to go beyond the old oppositions of lightness and heaviness, of seriousness and the lack of seriousness.”188 In 1960 Debord had read La somme et le reste published in 1959 by La Nef de Paris Éditions and at that time his friendship with Lefebvre, in Strasbourg, grows closer, during the seminaries of the Critique of everyday life that the Hagetmau philosopher held in his department, opening the doors to a vast audience. As recalled in Chapter 1, Debord in that occasion meets Raul Vaneigem, through Lefebvre. The cultural atmosphere in Strasbourg is the crib of the growth of the couple Lefebvre-Debord who, as we shall see in a while, produced reflections that can be considered symmetrical.

186 H. Lefebvre, Critique of Everyday Life. Vol. II , p. 351. 187 G. Debord, “Théorie des moments et construction des situations”, in Internationale

Situationniste, n. 4, June 1960. 188 See Lefebvre’s reference by Debord: Ibidem.

3

PHILOSOPHY AND SOCIOLOGY OF SPACE

179

Debord envisages with Lefebvre the overturning of the Society of Spectacle in the theorization of the concept of “costruction of situations.” In his words: “The construction of situations begins beyond the ruins of the modern spectacle. It is easy to see how much the very principle of the spectacle—non-intervention—is linked to the alienation of the old world. Conversely, the most pertinent revolutionary experiments in culture have sought to break the spectators’ psychological identification with the hero so as to draw them into activity by provoking their capacities to revolutionize their own lives. The situation is thus designed to be lived by its constructors.”189 Together with the concept of “constructed situations” in the analysis of the urban presented by the author, the concept of “psychogeography” is also placed.190 This term is introduced to consider, in the praxis, a space-time dimension willing to create an endless atmosphere of possible meetings among pairs, to try in the polis, on the horizontal dimension of men’s being-in-with-a-shared-world, opposed to the alienated life organized by the lecorbusian functionalist architecture. The “constructed situations” of free and liberated play—the “jeu harmonien” (harmonian play) in the sense meant by Fourier191 — demands the edification of a concrete spatiality that would serve that purpose, in which architecture and organization of spaces consider, since the project, the psychic effect of the inhabitants.192 Planning an harmonic

189 G. Debord, “Rapport sur la construction des situations” (1957), in Oeuvres, p. 325. See also: Id., “Problèmes préliminaires à la construction d’une situation”, in Internationale Situationniste, n. 1, June 1958. 190 For these reflections I am still grateful to Mario Pezzella for the dialogue we had in Rome during the conference “Il Diritto alla Città” (24–25 November 2016, Dipartimento di Architettura dell’Università di Roma). See: M. Pezzella, La Comune di Parigi. Un urbanesimo rivoluzionario, online: https://www.fondazionecriticasociale.org/ 2017/06/12/la-comune-parigi-un-urbanesimo-rivoluzionario/. 191 W. Benjamin, “L’oeuvre d’art à l’époque de sa reproduction mécanisé” (1936), in Opere complete, Vol. VI, Einaudi, Torino, 2004, footnote 1, p. 532. This is the first French draft of the essay, at least in the numbering followed by the Italian edition, in accordance with the French version, the only one published in Benjamin’s life. See also: M. Löwy, Fire Alarm: Reading Walter Benjamin’s on the Concept of History, London, Verso, 2005, p. 76. G. Debord, “Contribution a une definition situationniste du jeu”, in Internationale Situationniste, n. 1, June 1958. Id., “Le retour de Charles Fourier”, in Internationale Situationniste, n. 12, 1969. 192 See: M. Pezzella, La memoria del possibile, pp. 52–53. For a contextualization of the urban studies by the Situationists, see: T. Paquot (edited by), Les situationistes en

180

F. BIAGI

relation between mind and space is the main assignment of psychogeography as theorized by the situationist movement: “Psychogeography sets for itself the study of the precise laws and specific effects of the geographical environment, whether consciously organized or not, on the emotions and behavior of individuals”193 ; as a consequence “the elements of the urban setting, in close relation with the sensations they provoke” have to be examined194 ; the determinant weaves of psychogeography are the “subconscious realities that emerge in urban planning itself.”195 On the trail of French phenomenology that ideates an alliance between space and poetry, Debord proposes an urban planning and an architecture that are also “poetic” so that those places become genuine nests of concrete utopian practices. In this sense, to Debord a definition of beauty is possible, a beauty that in its poetical and artistic genesis will be mirrored in the socio-political dimension, that is to say, in the built situations: “I am not, of course, talking about mere physical beauty—the new beauty can only be a beauty of situation—but simply about the particularly moving presentation […] of a sum of possibilities.”196 The meaning of “constructed situations,” together with the Lefebvrian “moments” is used in its literal sense within the scenery of human action that unfolds on the urban space. The “constructed situations” accomplishes its full meaning in the theater of a metropolitan atmosphere radically modified and in strong antithesis with the Le Corbusier’s Fordist urban planning. For instance, the situationist author in Critique de l’urbanisme harshly condemns the great lecorbusian complexes by Lacq-Mourenx that were subjected to a social inquiry, as highlighted in the second chapter by

ville, Infolio, Gollion, 2015. Finally a broadened and detailed account of the artisticarchitectonic foundations of the situationist thought was edited by Gianfranco Marelli (see particularly the Chapters I and II): Id., L’amara vittoria del situazionismo. Storia critica dell’ Internationale Situationniste 1957 –1972, Mimesis, Milano, 2017. Id., Una bibita mescolata alla sete, BFS Edizioni, Pisa, 2015. 193 G. Debord, “Critique de la géographie urbaine” (1955), in Oeuvres, p. 204. 194 Ibidem, p. 207. 195 G. Debord, “Écologie, psycogéographie et transformation du milieu humain” (1959), in Oeuvres, p. 460. See also: A. Khatib, “Essai de description psichogéographique des Halles”, in Internationale Situationniste, n. 2, 1958. 196 G. Debord, “Critique de la géographie urbaine” (1955), in Oeuvres, p. 208.

3

PHILOSOPHY AND SOCIOLOGY OF SPACE

181

Lefebvre.197 Debord and the situationist group explicitly dream of a city architectonically revolutionized in an urban experience that is finally re-humanized. Psychogeography is nothing other than the theoreticalpractical attempt to re-harmonize urban space with the personal and collective psychic balance of those who inhabit and live it. On these premises, Debord establishes a difference between the concept of “ecology” and “unitary urbanism.”198 However, it is mandatory to highlight the specific meanings of Debord’s lexicon. By “ecology” the situationist author means the urban planning functionalist theories that study the habitat. The term “ecology” is used to show the failed attempt to reestablish unity within the urban space from the functionalist separation from the metropolis. “Ecology” to Debord fights against windmills and will never accomplish its goals, since it is founded on the determinations of the dominant urban planning. “Unitary urbanism” is instead the theoretical proposed presented by Debord and by the situationist movement. This theory deals with the loisirs, that is combining the “play” and the “festival” with the urban atmosphere, reorganizing the urban spatiality on “ludic” foundations (in the sense used by Fourier).199 Ecology reasons rigidly, “from the point of view of the population that is settled in its neighborhood” while “psychogeography studies the attraction relations between milieus.”200 Psychogeography is, in fact, the practical realization of the “constructed situations” from 197 G. Debord, “Critique de l’urbanisme”, in Internationale Situationniste, n. 6, August 1961 (there are several references to Lefebvre in this article). 198 G. Debord, “Écologie, psycogéographie et transformation du milieu humain” (1959), in Oeuvres. See also: Id., “Urbanisme unitaire à la fin des années 50”, in Internationale Situationniste, n. 3, December 1959. Constant, “Une autre ville pour une autre vie”, in Internationale Situationniste,, n. 3, December 1959. G. Debord, “Résolution sur le Bureau d’urbanisme unitaire”, in Internationale Situationniste, n. 5, December 1960. A. Kotanyi, R. Vaneigem, “Programme élémentaire du bureau d’urbanisme unitaire”, in Internationale Situationniste, n. 6, August 1961. R. Vaneigem, “Commentaires contre l’urbanisme”, in Internationale Situationniste, n. 6, August 1961. G. Debord, “L’urbanisme comme volonté et comme représentation”, in Internationale Situationniste, n. 8, August 1963. 199 On the “Ludic city,” see: F. Careri, Walkscapes. Camminare come pratica estetica, pp. 74–76. And the volume dedicated to Constant’s thought: Id., Constant. New Babylon, una città nomande. For a recognition of the anti-functionalist artistic avant-gardes see: L. Lippolis, La rivoluzione delle avanguardie, in P.P. Poggio (edited by), L’Altro Novecento. Comunismo eretico e pensiero critico, Vol. 1, Jaca Book, Milano, 2010, pp. 97–112. 200 G. Debord, “Critique de la géographie urbaine” (1955), in Oeuvres, p. 459.

182

F. BIAGI

the wider “unitary urbanism” theory; it concerns the temporary and variability of the situation, is predisposed to the utopian duration of the possible instants: “the future to come will belong to the overturning of the arts-spectacle separated and enduring, to the benefit of unitarian and ephemeral intervention techniques.”201 Debord’s language is often cryptic, however, this brief incursion in the situationist urban theory allows us to understand in what way Lefebvre’s thought is closely connected to the situationist author. Particularly we verify that there is common ground in the opportunities to create concrete alternatives to the functionalist urban planning. Conferring “unity” to an alternative urban planning draft is a project that Debord solidly defends to the point that it ends up to take shape as “unitary urbanism” in order to undo the destruction, separation, and dismemberment provoked by functionalism, and antithetical to the psycho-geographic project.202 In Lefebvre, instead, anti-functionalist urban planning doesn’t undergo a clear conceptualization by means of a precise significant, however, it is expressed, as we have seen until now, on one side, from the privileged perspective of the vision of the city from the marginality its produces and, on the other, at the exemplary moment of the revolutionary urban planning of the Paris Commune. Along the course of the Sixties both philosophers have, very often, reflected together on the same problems that the social and urban reality produced, to the point that they reach unanimity on the concept of “critique of everyday life.” As is widely known, Debord attends Lefebvre’s seminars in Strasbourg and here he will intervene many times and will start his warm friendship with the Hagetmau author. The “change life” by Arthur Rimbaud203 had strongly crossed artistic avantgarde of the International Letterist, the movement that precedes the foundation of Situationism. In 1946, with the draft of the first volume of the Critique, Lefebvre writes that “Marxism considered as a critique

201 G. Debord, “Constant et la voie de l’urbanisme unitaire” (1959), in Oeuvres, p. 448. 202 About the relationship between situationist thought and architectural debate, see

the anthology edited by Leonardo Lippolis, Urbanismo unitario. Antologia situazionista, Edizioni Testo & Immagine, Torino, 2002, especially its foreword. 203 A. Rimbaud, “Delirium I, Foolish Vergin, Hellish Bridegroom”, in A Season in Hell and Illuminations, BOA Editions, Brockport (NY), 1991, p. 23.

3

PHILOSOPHY AND SOCIOLOGY OF SPACE

183

of everyday life,”204 as a conequence twenty years later the situationists spread a détourné cartoon in which they use the painting The Death of Sardanapalus by Delacroix with the insertion of these words: “Yes, Marx’s thought is truly a critique of everyday life.”205 Moreover, we should mention Debord’s conference held on the 17th of May 1961 under the title Perspectives for Conscious Changes in Everyday Life,206 at the seminary of the research group on everyday life gathered by Lefebvre at the Center of Sociological Studies of the CNRS; this conference in some points matches several passages of the second volume of Lefebvre’s Critique.207 Debord’s intervention is referred by the Hagetmau philosopher in the second volume of the Critique when he introduces the concept of an everydayness completely “colonized” by Fordist capitalism. The metaphor is used by Debord as, in accordance with Lefebvre, it shows how the protagonism of the consumption society blocks and limits the genuine possibilities of everyday life like a colonizing western country that squeezes, exploits, and profits at the expense of the colonized Country. The everyday life at the time of Fordist capitalism, thus, would be experiencing a particular configuration of “underdevelopment,” tends to “reduce people’s independence and creativity,” leaving the modern citizen “within the limits of a scandalous poverty.”208 In this instance, Debord agrees with Lefebvre when he declares that the “the political question posed by the poverty of everyday life means repressing the most profound demands bearing on the possible richness of this life—demands that can lead to nothing less than a reinvention of revolution.”209 Modern

204 H. Lefebvre, Critique of Everyday Life. Vol. I , p. 148. Id., Critique of Everyday Life. Vol. II , p. 41. 205 R. Vienet, “Les situationnistes et les nouvelles formes d’action contre la politique et l’art”, in Internationale Situationniste, n. 11, 1967. 206 G. Debord, “Perspectives de modification consciente de la vie quotidienne”, in Internationale Situationniste, n. 6, August 1961. 207 I agree with Anselm Jappe’s thesis, but Jappe underlines majorly the conflict

between Lefebvre and Debord, explicitly defending the situationist author and unjustly involving Lefebvre in the French Communist Party dogmatism. See: A. Jappe, Guy Debord, Manifestolibri, Roma, 1999, p. 92. 208 G. Debord, “Perspectives de modification consciente de la vie quotidienne”, in Internationale Situationniste, n. 6, August 1961. 209 Ibidem.

184

F. BIAGI

man is de-politicized by the capitalist society, and lives a condition of “private life [vie privée],” that “represents not so much a return to privacy, [but also] a flight from “historical responsibility,”210 within such a dark frame that leads Debord to realize that the circumstance is one in which there is “the reinforcement of the modern slavery.”211 However, despite the assessment of the Society of Spectacle being lugubrious and dark, the situationist theoretician and the Hagetmau philosopher never renounced to highlighting the latent utopian opportunities to build moments and situations that can shatter the dominant oppressive rule.212

Conclusion Finally, both authors, as we shall see in the next chapter, left us as legacy the idea that urban space should be considered as a “work of art,” genuine poiesis of those who inhabit and live the city. The reciprocal influences of the couple Lefebvre—Debord and the radical politicization of the contributions offered by the artistic avant-gardes of the early years of the twentieth century allow the Hagetmau philosopher to theorize the conceptual constellation of the “right to the city,” in the virtuous alliance between the studies on everydayness and the reflections of the spatial theory.

210 Ibidem. 211 Ibidem. 212 Anselm Jappe underlines the differences between Lefebvre and Debord, referring the situationist critique to his “theory of the possibles.” Lefebvre is criticized for being too imprecise and for not having concretely founded the “change” in life practices (see: Id., Guy Debord, p. 96). However, I would like to highlight the common points of view of the two authors: if we don’t limit our reading to the two volumes of the Critique, a global vision of Lefebvre’s thought allows us to affirm that he accepted Debord’s critique as presented in Thèses sur la révolution culturelle. Moreover, in the early sixties the critiques between Debord and Lefebvre were neither accusatory nor ironic, as instead will happen after their rift; indeed, during the first phase, it was a very prolific theoretical debate (see: G. Debord, “Thèses sur la révolution culturelle”, in Internationale Situationniste, n. 1, June 1958).

CHAPTER 4

Understanding the Present with Henri Lefebvre

Introduction The “right to the city” is probably the most famous Lefebvrian notion but also, as we shall see, the most misused. Until now I have developed two lines of research to arrive at the problematization of the concept: on one hand, the genealogical reconstruction of urban studies and spatial philosophy by Lefebvre, both rooted in the early studies of rural sociology of the Forties; on the other hand, the idea that the meaning of le droit à la ville directly originates on the 1965 book La proclamation de la Commune. Le droit à la ville is a decisive junction, however, that 1968 pamphlet cannot be read, as often happens, isolated from the remaining intellectual production of the author. I strongly believe that such a pamphlet ought to be interpreted within the textual constellation, and on the trail of a research that was developed along the course of time: if, above all, the origin of Le droit à la ville can be located in the long volume on the Commune (1965), its development, in consequence, is part of the indissoluble tetralogy composed of The Urban Revolution (1970), Espace et politique. Le droit à la ville II (1972) and finally The Production of Space (1974). This is the central thesis that I shall develop along with this chapter, trying to demonstrate the inadequacy of other points of view that are much too connected to an inconsistent rhetoric use of the term and that often operates real manipulations on Lefebvre’s theoretical positions. © The Author(s) 2020 F. Biagi, Henri Lefebvre’s Critical Theory of Space, Marx, Engels, and Marxisms, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-52367-1_4

185

186

F. BIAGI

The “Right to the City”: A Lefebvrian Genealogy The international literature on the concept of “right to the city” is already very wide, however, the reprise of the concept in the most recent years identifies two limits: the first is that of the little loyalty to Lefebvrian writings by numerous interpreters; the second is the lack of criteria for a proper hermeneutic, particularly in Italy, where concomitantly to a scarce availability of Lefebvrian literature there is an unclear reception of the foreign debate. Therefore, my goal is also about setting interpretative coordinates that can serve as essential point of observation for the current Italian debate. One now needs to understand, firstly, the meaning “right to the city” originally assumes in the political theory of space conceived by Lefebvre; secondly, on what course of ideas is it possible to think of an update for the twentieth-first century, that doesn’t renounce to being faithful to the Lefebvrian framework. The genealogical course, as we retrace the original meaning of the droit à la ville, starts on the second volume dedicated to the topic “right to the city,” entitled Space and Politics. Lefebvre, in fact, four years after presenting the topics he had started to inquire from the very first 1968 volume will clarify his course of ideas and explicitly state to whom his work was addressed: “This expansion of the city is accompanied by a degradation of the architecture of the urban frame. People are forced to scatter, above all the workers, away from the urban centers. What has commanded the cities expansion process is the economical, social, cultural segregation. […] The urbanization of society is accompanied by the deterioration of urban life […] It is with these peripheral inhabitants, their segregation, their isolation, in my mind that I speak to on a book of right to the city.”1 It is possible, thus, to notice how the “right to the city” places itself on a line of continuity with the Marxist legacy. Lefebvre remains coherent to the purpose of testing Marx’s categories with the urban analysis, so that he can renew and update Marxism itself. The right to the city is conceived within the framework of the Lefebvrian political philosophy as analytical category of an emancipation process. The author’s original insight stands on the discussion and reflection of the Marxist “proletariat” as social subject (clearly connected to the situation 1 H. Lefebvre, “Le bourgeoisie et l’espace”, in Espace et politique. Le droit à la ville II , Anthropos, Paris, 2000, pp. 144–145.

4

UNDERSTANDING THE PRESENT WITH HENRI LEFEBVRE

187

of the nineteenth-century working class), beholding all of those periphery workers and inhabitants who concretely live the social segregation from those big buildings planned from the functionalist model in the Fordist reorganization of the banlieue.2 There are interpreters, as for instance De Simoni in the review to the Italian re-edition of The Right to the City, who defend the Lefebvrian renovation of the Marxian socio-political subjectivity thesis in the metropolitan scenario, in my opinion, however, that reading excessively overlaps Lefebvre’s thought to the metropolis analysis proposed by Antonio Negri and the so-called post-workerism current. In that perspective the “belligerent scenario” of the riot is strongly enhanced, the French periphery in the Sixties and Seventies is considered as “already postfordist: the banlieue of migrant work, of the future cognitariat” and, finally, “in this scenario, the ‘working class’ is nothing other but the inadequate name used by an emergent and monstrous” social force (in a non classifiable sense, precisely as the monstrous entities that Foucault identifies in Borges taxonomy) to define itself.”3 My reading shares the idea that Lefebvre renews the Marxian categories, but from a different perspective. In fact, the author in declensioning the concept “working class” reelaborates Engels’s studies on the English proletariat. Engels, more than Marx, operates the reciprocal convergence between the socio-economical analysis of the large industry and the spatial consequences in the worker’s everydayness. Therefore, Lefebvre recaptures one of Engels ideas, one that was mostly neglected by Marxism, that consists of the importance of class contradictions that develop on the spatial dimension, instead of adhering to the idea of “multitudinary” e “monstrous” subjectivity. In my opinion the French philosopher is not looking at an “already post-fordist metropolis” (but rather as a “prophet” who announces some “signs of the times”), nor does he join Antonio Negri’s analysis that is very incorrect on what pertains to the importance of cognitive work. Moreover, Lefebvre, despite not disdaining the hardness that sometimes social conflict assumes, in his writings highlights mainly the idea of a shared and collective construction of the city (the city as oeuvre d’art ) by hands of 2 The compendium of the Marxist critical thought in which there is a chapter dedicated to Lefebvre might be useful: S. Kouvelakis, “Henri Lefebvre, Thinker of Urban Modernity”, in J. Bidet, S. Kouvelakis (edited by), Critical Companion to Contemporary Marxism, Brill, Leiden and Boston, 2008, pp. 711–728. 3 S. De Simoni, “Le droit à la ville. Note (d)ai margini”, in Euronomade, 3 May 2015.

188

F. BIAGI

the oppressed; in reference to the emphasis De Simoni put on the urban riot, in a reverse reading of the urban riots ranging from the Nineties until the 1871 Commune.4 In short, I believe Lefebvre’s “spatializes” the Marxian political subjectivity and that he strongly locates it in the imperfections of the consumption society operated by Fordist modernity. What is the “working-class,” “proletariat” to Lefebvre? It is substantially the nineteenth-century coherent evolution of that social subject that Engels referred to? As a way of example: if Engels were standing before the protagonist worker of the film The Organizer (I compagni) by Mario Monicelli or Dickens’ novels, Lefebvre mainly deepens the contradictions lived by Ludovico Massa (Gian Maria Volontè) in the Elio Petri’s film The Working Class Go to Heaven (La classe operaia va in paradiso). Nevertheless, after this brief digression, the scenario that delineates the subjectivity Lefebvre is addressing isn’t yet complete. Consequently, upon reflecting over the “right to city” in an urban context produced by the Fordist capitalism spatial policies he succeeds in including in the emancipation theory contained in the Le droit à la ville all social subjects who live a precarious condition on the outskirts of market and consumption: particularly, as we have seen, in light of what happened in what was then the Nanterre Parisian periphery congested by the precarious dwelling of immigrant workers. The Hagetmau philosopher creates that notion as he realizes the damaging effects of urbanization which, on one hand, is substantiated on the lecorbusian’s conception of the machine à habiter, on the other hand, produces forms of social marginalization and pockets of urban poverty that is visible in the neglect of the shantytowns of the multitude of migrants who came from the French colonies. In addition, it is crucial to draw attention to the meaning of “right.” As Lefebvre writes: “It is not ‘right’ in the lawful sense of the term […] these rights are never literally put in practice, but they are continually mentioned in order to define the society situation.”5 The French philosopher has no intention of adding a new right to the long list of the new “human rights,” instead he wants to point toward a new struggle and social conflict path, concrete and performative. The “right to the city” in fact “is announced 4 See: S. De Simoni, La Comune di Parigi come archetipo della rivoluzione urbana, in F. Biagi, M. Cappitti, M. Pezzella, Il tempo del possibile. L’attualità della Comune di Parigi, monographic supplement to n. 3/2018 of “Il Ponte”, Firenze, pp. 107–110. 5 H. Lefebvre, “Le bourgeoisie et l’espace”, in Espace et politique. Le droit à la ville II , p. 144.

4

UNDERSTANDING THE PRESENT WITH HENRI LEFEBVRE

189

as a plea, as a—social and political—demand”6 ; without a radical critic of the capitalist system there is no space for its real materialization. We are not, therefore, beholding a legal issue, but we are instead facing a philosophical-political one. With the concept of “right to the city” Lefebvre imagines a political theory of emancipation in the spatial context, which propelling force clashes, however, with the predatory will of the economic–politic logics of capitalism. As a result, the city is interpreted as the scenario within which social conflicts are expressed and, in this regard, Lefebvre brings back Niccolò Machiavelli’s conflict theory: “In the urban context […] Political confrontations between the ‘popolo minuto’ [small people] the ‘popolo grasso’ [fat people], the aristocracy and the oligarchy, have the city as their battleground, their stake. These groups are rivals in their love of the city. As for the rich and powerful, they always feel threatened. They justify their privilege in the community by sumptuously spending their fortune: buildings, foundations, palaces, embellishments, festivities.”7 As well known, the “small people” and the “fat people” that fight each other over the political fate of the polis evoke the Machiavellian political philosophy, that republican and libertarian Machiavelli—rediscovered by Claude Lefort—, who pretended to give lessons to monarchs, and instead gave them to oppressed people.8 The space of the city is the playing field of a rivalry among those who can be visible and have a voice and those who instead must remain invisible and without any possibility of uttering a word. Identity, social, and political recognition is determined in democratizing and emancipating the space that is lived by

6 H. Lefebvre, “The Right to the City”, in Writing on Cities, Wiley-Blackwell, London, 1996, p. 158. 7 Ibidem, p. 67. 8 “The disunion of the people and the roman senate helped the Republic be free and

powerful.” The Machiavelli of the Discorsi sopra la prima deca di Tito Livio attacks the cult of civic concord, maintaining the one of the strengths of Rome (and not weaknesses as the tradition of that time sustained) resided precisely on the riots. Instead, Machiavelli maintains that the popular upheavals had the great merit of preventing the “Fat People” (the “Great”) went against the collective liberties of the “Small People.” See: C. Lefort, Le travail de l’œuvre. Machiavel, Gallimard, Paris, 1972; M. Abensour, Democracy Against the State: Marx and the Machiavellian Moment, Polity Press, Cambridge, 2011. For a broadened discussion of these categories I refer my introductive essay of the Machiavelli’s anthology that I have recently abridged for the collection of classics of the political thought of Il Ponte: F. Biagi, org. by, L’insorgenza repubblicana, Il Ponte Editore, Firenze, 2016, pp. 11–71.

190

F. BIAGI

subaltern groups. The politician status, in its spatial dimension, is necessarily crossed by partition, by the disagreement of those who are excluded and those who exclude: “the urban presents itself—thus to Lefebvre—as a place of conflict.”9 For this reason, I believe that one can talk about a conflictive notion of the “right to the city.” Is it possible then to read Lefebvre as a philosopher and sociologist of conflict and, particularly, of the conflict that occurs in the spatial dimension of urban life. The “right to the city” materializes itself essentially through political deed, through political action which purpose is to attain authentic democracy, even in what pertains to managing and organizing space. It is the overturning of the city as “merchandize” by those excluded and oppressed, and the dialectic reconstruction of an actual state of being-with in a shared world in the context of the polis as “work” of those who reside in it. The definition of the concept “right to the city” remains accordingly an open field to the happening. Lefebvre doesn’t hypostatize a meaning or a system, but offers some clues that should be followed to formulate a theory that always derives from action and from what happens in society. The city to Lefebvre is not solely place and product of capitalist valuation, but also a solid opportunity to regenerate the social space by the active participation of the dwellers who live it and cross it. The city is thus the site of the possibility to take hold again of space and time based on the demands and needs of those who live it, particularly those who are most frail. The urban society, from this perspective, becomes “as an oeuvre, as an end, as place of free enjoyment, as domain of use value”10 in which the dwellers can initiate a path toward emancipation and liberation from the yoke of precariousness and poverty. A real “urban revolution” will take place when the social space becomes action, planning, project of those who dwell in it and who stride on it; when there is the possibility of free production of space, shared, plural, democratic, and no more subjected to interests and private profit. To transform one’s own space of living, to make it useful to the needs of everyone is the authentic path to practice that utopian—practical ideal—that Lefebvre named “right to the city.” The city as “product,” as “merchandize” is thus overturned in favor of a city perceived as a genuine work of art, at the service of those who inhabit

9 H. Lefebvre, The Urban Revolution, University of Minnesota Press, Minneapolis, 2003, p. 175. 10 H. Lefebvre, “The Right to the City”, in Writing on Cities, p. 126.

4

UNDERSTANDING THE PRESENT WITH HENRI LEFEBVRE

191

it: “the right to the city legitimates the refusal to let oneself be excluded from the urban reality by a discriminating and segregating organization. […] the right to the city means then the foundation or the reconstruction of a space-time unity […] instead of disintegration.”11 The space as melting pot of differences, exchange of knowledge is the antechamber of an emancipating spiral of change of men’s daily life. The “right to the city” is therefore the right to participation and fruition of collective goods and services against the ownership and privatizing logic of capitalism: “The right to the city manifests itself as a superior form of rights: right to freedom, to individualization in socialization, to habitat and to inhabit. The right to the oeuvre, to participation and appropriation (clearly distinct from the right to property), are implied in the right to the city.”12 The city, then, should be much more similar to “the work of art” than to merchandize.13 Lefebvre thinks the urban space as a place to recapture an alternative way of life, for its own use and its own collective production: “the right to the city thus formulated implies and applies knowledge of a precise production, the production of the space.”14 The city as work of art is nothing else but a performative metaphor to describe the possibility to institute a new relationship with the space, subtracted from the market and from profit in the name of its own mutual and shared use. It’s the common use—the common exercise—of the space that stands at the center of Lefebvre’s reflection: “the city is an oeuvre, closer to a work of art than to a simple material product. […] The city […] is the work of a history, that is, of clearly defined people and groups who accomplish this oeuvre, in historical conditions.”15 Shortly after this last statement the author goes on: “If one considers the city as oeuvre of

11 H. Lefebvre, “Introduction”, in Espace et politique. Le droit à la ville II , p. 22. 12 H. Lefebvre, “The Right to the City”, in Writing on Cities, pp. 173–174. 13 “The city is an oeuvre, perceived as a work of art. Space is not only organized and

instituted, but is also shaped, appropriated by one or another social group, according to its demands, its ethics and aesthetics, that is, its ideology. Monumentality is a critical feature of the city as oeuvre, the use of time by all members of the urban collectivity isn’t a less critical feature. The city as oeuvre should be studied under this double feature” (H. Lefebvre, “La ville et l’urbain”, in Espace et politique. Le droit à la ville II , pp. 74–75). 14 H. Lefebvre, “Introduction”, in Espace et politique. Le droit à la ville II , p. 23. 15 H. Lefebvre, “The Right to the City”, in Writing on Cities, p. 101.

192

F. BIAGI

certain historical and social ‘agents’, the action and the result, the group (or groups) and their ‘product’.”16 However, more questions need to be asked: What are the philosophical-political results of the metaphor of the city “as oeuvre d’art”? Why does the author use this comparison beyond the clichés of artistic historicity crystallized in archeological remnants? It would be reductive to stick to referring the influence of the artistic avant-gardes on Lefebvre’s thought, although that argumentation is partially true. That reflection is part of the philosophy project that with the Situationists had been defined in the formula Changer la vie! And it re-proposes, on the spatial plan, the relation between the work of art and the spectator as subject who enjoys its beauty.17 That spectator is however protagonist of the definition of the signifiers of the oeuvre itself: “Once upon a time, works of art were significant constructs presented to the senses […] ‘viewers’ and ‘listeners’ […] were not entirely passive, contributed the signified to the signifier […] the message was ‘freely’ re-assembled, yet its interpretation was based on a familiar code depending on a given referential; monuments, cathedrals, Greek temples and eighteenth-century palaces—all stylized works, in fact—were perceived in this way.”18 The city therefore, thus, is configured as appropriated and appropriable space by all of its inhabitants and such appropriation occurs within the harmony of a common code of reciprocal sharing. Therefore, the metaphor of urban space as work of art hypothesizes the building of a different kind of urban space that would be experienced and produced within the path of collective concord: “oeuvre” that is established as “ends” that is already present in its “means” to realize,19 as a place of genuine enjoyment,

16 Ibidem, p. 103. 17 “Change life! Change society! These precepts mean nothing without the production

of an appropriate space. A lesson to be learned from the Soviet constructivists of 1920-30, and from their failure, is that new social relationships call for a new space, and vice versa” (H. Lefebvre, The Production of Space, Blackwell, London, 1991, p. 59). 18 H. Lefebvre, Everyday Life in the Modern World, Penguin Press, New York, 1971, p. 119. 19 I refer the debate “means-ends” that Walter Benjamin formulates in Critique of Violence. In my opinion these reflections on the German philosopher’s politics can be reinterpreted in the political praxis that opposes the concepts of “use value” and thus of “oeuvre” used by Lefebvre. See: W. Benjamin, “Critique of Violence”, in Reflections:

4

UNDERSTANDING THE PRESENT WITH HENRI LEFEBVRE

193

as field of use value in antithetical dialectic with the exchange value characteristic of the merchandizing process.20 In the concept of “oeuvre” and “oeuvre d’art” it is possible to identify analogies between Lefebvre and Hannah Arendt’s thought. The German philosopher, in fact, in The Human Condition differentiates the meaning of “labour,” “oeuvre,” and “action.”21 Labor typical of industrial modernity has removed the remaining spheres from human condition; this meaning the “oeuvre” and the “action.” The status of “labour” in the capitalist modernity, according to Lefebvre and Arendt, introduced the instrumentalism of technique, a device that destroyed the creativity of the “oeuvre” and of the human “action.” Modernity installed instrumentalism and compulsive consumerism in the duration of human art-making acting. The “oeuvre” no longer exists while the human “labour” process is subjected to logics of exchange that transcend its real design. Although the Lefebvrian theory doesn’t shoulder with the Arendtian triad, it surely recognizes that it shares common points with the German philosopher from the moment it locates in the instrumentalism of exchange value and in the merchandizing processes of everyday life the devices that conferred aridness to the terrain where political action and producing art outside of the fordist school would have grown. Lefebvre writes the following: “a work has something irreplaceable and unique about it, a product can be reproduced exactly, and is in fact the result of repetitive acts and gestures.”22 In instrumentalism Arendt identifies the ephemeral, the lack of adequate time-span for the possibility of assembling a practical action to build sense in the world: thus, both authors set a radical breach between creation and production. Such concept is conveyed by Lefebvre, for instance, in the critic to space Essays, Aphorisms, Autobiographical Writings, Schocken Books, New York, 1978, pp. 277– 300; M. Tomba, “Another Kind of Gewalt: Beyond Law Re-reading Walter Benjamin”, in Historical Materialism, Volume 17, n. 1, 2009, pp. 126–144. 20 See: H. Lefebvre, “The Right to the City,” in Writing on Cities, pp. 173–174. 21 See: H. Arendt, The Human Condition (1958), University of Chicago Press, Chicago,

2013 (see particularly the third, fourth and fifth parts). See also the conference on German philosophy held in 1964 at the Chicago University: H. Arendt, “Labor, Work, Action” (1964), in S. J. J. W. Bernauer (edited by), Amor Mundi, Boston College Studies in Philosophy, vol. 26, Springer, Dordrecht, 1987. For an update on Hannah Arendt’s categories in the working world of the XXI Century see: I. Possenti, Flessibilità. Retoriche politiche di una condizione contemporanea, Ombre Corte, Verona, 2012. 22 H. Lefebvre, The Production of Space, p. 70.

194

F. BIAGI

standardization designed by fordist functionalism and by the “society of consumption” itself. The critic highlighted in the three volumes Critique of Everyday Life is the same social situation depicted by Arendt in her critic of capitalism that she starts from the rediscovery of the Greek polis. The Greek model is used by Arendt, as recalled by Alessandro dal Lago in the foreword to The Human Condition, to underline the neutralization of the political action enacted by capitalist modernity; the simplifying of politics as mere technique, as instrumental calculus of the ruling classes. The process of political inhibition is also expropriation of life (Lefebvre would have added everyday life). Because of Arendt the classical distinction between praxis and poiesis reemerges in the philosophical debate of the last century. Its updating actually allows German philosophy to unveil the logics of the modern political thinking. Life is praxis, not poiesis, so says Aristotle in Politics. Both concepts—praxis and poiesis —are to the Stagirite the models of action that characterize the forms of life of human activities. Poiesis own goal is the production of an object that, once it starts to exist, it is something other and extraneous to the activities that have produced it. Praxis, instead, according to Aristotle, is the action that finds its own end in itself, that is accomplished by occurring. Arendt re-elaborates the Aristotelian categories in a novel way, theorizing the difference between “labour,” “oeuvre,” and “action.” I believe it imperious in this instance to point out, beyond the meanings used by Aristotle, Arendt and Lefebvre, how Lefebvre’s insights reside in an old philosophical problem that occupied the interrogations of the Greek thought. The Greek world still didn’t know the capitalist way of production, as everybody knows; however, it had already developed foundations to understand the difference between human activity submitted to instrumental ends and, conversely, other kind of human activity that comprised in itself simultaneously means and ends, eliminating the principle of instrumental technical reason. Secondly, Arendt, just as Lefebvre, foresees in the “oeuvre d’art” and in the artistic form of “poetry” two human activities that in their nature are incompatible with the instrumental logics of capitalist modernity.23 If to Lefebvre the reference constellation is ascribable to a novel political reinterpretation of the artistic avant-gardes that was conceived and agreed with Debord and the situationist group, instead, to Arendt, the 23 See above all, in The Human Condition, the last paragraph of the Part IV, entitled: The Permanence of the World and the Work of Art.

4

UNDERSTANDING THE PRESENT WITH HENRI LEFEBVRE

195

“oeuvre d’art” and the poetic form authenticity are immortal dimensions of human life re-elaborated since the Greek antiquity. In consequence, a further meeting point between both authors is, in Arendt’s case, the theorization of the concept of “shared political action” and, in Lefebvre’s case, the ability to think the spatial dimension as a result of a human exercise that finds novel veracity in the democratic self-management of the inhabitants, as the city’s real protagonists. Lefebvre, in consonance with the revolutionary political action of the Consiliarism form and Libertarian Republicanism, described by Arendt in On Revolution, elaborates his conception of the city as shared “oeuvre” in a new definition of the concept of revolution: “Revolution was long defined either in terms of a political change at the level of the state or else in terms of the collective or state ownership of the means of production as such […]. Under either of these definitions, revolution was understood to imply the rational organization of production and the equally rationalized management of society as a whole. In fact, however, both the theory and the project involved here have degenerated into an ideology of growth which, if it is not actually aligned with bourgeois ideology […]. The transformation of society presupposes a collective ownership and management of space founded on the permanent participation of the ‘interested parties’, with their multiple, varied and even contradictory interests. It thus also presupposes confrontation.”24 The production of social space in Lefebvre is a collective oeuvre that keeps the taste of artistic creation, a clear example of a human activity that was subtracted from the logics of profit. Equally, Arendt reflection focus on how to originate a public space outside the capitalist modernity that had contaminated the political action to the point it disappeared.25 That change in the everydayness and social space, to Lefebvre, and the practical path of going back to the ancient political action that vanished in the modern world, to Arendt, are accomplished in the opening of a utopian fissure that Abensour—in his reflections on German philosophy—defined as “conception of political heroism.”26 The political action assumes “heroic” traits to the extent it is embodied by free men who are able to rediscover the stupor and 24 H. Lefebvre, The Production of Space, p. 422. 25 For a re-reading, inspired in Hannah Arendt, of the current problematics that cross

the “urban,” see the fourth chapter of: A. Petrillo, La periferia nuova, pp. 121–138. 26 M. Abensour, Hannah Arendt contre la philosophie politique? Sens & Tonka, Paris, 2006, pp. 151–169.

196

F. BIAGI

the miracle of realizing all that had been defeated: the political form of the polis, the communalist and committee form of the Paris Commune. This kind of “heroism,” that goes way back into the crevices of history, is defined by Arendt as “lost treasure” of the revolution: in fact, wherever there is shared political action, another chance to attack is offered (as Ulysses among his pairs, the high walls of Troy, metaphor of social oppression).27 The hero is one that through concerted action is able to interrupt a process, and allow another unpredictable one to occur. It’s the heroism of the oppressed who succeed in overturning the dominance situations: should one only bring to mind Homer’s Ulysses who due to his astuteness capsizes the unfavorable moment of the Achaeans. Even German philosophy examines the Paris Commune and the committee forms that occurred in the nineteenth century to refer to the kind of institution that is created and that recreates in its democratic agitations in free debate and unfolding of the conflict as space par excellence of action. The state would never be so neutral as is often considered, and in its specific formalism and bureaucracy would impose men a domination and expropriation relation of everyone’s right to politic acting and reasoning.28 Because of this, and with Hannah Arendt, we can share the Lefebvrian idea that emancipation doesn’t demand taking the power from the State-apparatus, but to smash its intrinsic arrogance. It’s about returning to the original acting politically in the world. The hero is perceived as protagonist that takes charge of a shared task in history: one who by word and action saves the dimension of natality, shapes it into

27 “The hero the story discloses needs no heroic qualities; the word ‘hero’ originally, that is, in Homer, was no more than a name given each free man who participated in the Trojan enterprise and about whom a story could be told” (H. Arendt, The Human Condition, p. 186). 28 See: M. Abensour, Democracy against the State: Marx and the Machiavellian Moment.

4

UNDERSTANDING THE PRESENT WITH HENRI LEFEBVRE

197

form declensioning novel possibilities to human history.29 The Arendtian hero is “free” because he declensions political action together with his pairs, and he is “heroic” solely to the extent he can utopically open breaches against the linearity of the historical process. Being a hero is being an agent in its most sublime assertion, belonging to the group of andres epiphaneis, that is, men who fully reveal themselves.30 For instance aren’t the communards, who resisted on the barricades against the repression they were condemned to, maybe heroic subjects? Isn’t their “right to the city,” that attempted, until the last breath, to keep the small door of some utopian fissure open against the time of subjection, heroic? The “right to the city” manifests in its utopian dimension, so maintains the Hagetmau philosopher, and the challenge is to rebuild its space-time dimension in opposition to the social and spatial fragmentation of the capitalist modernity.31 I have thus demonstrated the original meaning of the droit à la ville and what is the context of the debate defined by Lefebvre. Now, instead, I will analyze the attempts to manipulate this concept by the dominant forms of power, as governments, constitutions or international structures that, by means of the de-politicizing device of rights have produced, in their concrete practice, forms of “passive revolution” of the propelling force of the “right to the city.”

Power’s “Passive Revolution”: The “Right to the City” as Governance from Above In the Eighties, the concept of “right to the city,” acquired a life of its own regarding Lefebvre’s analysis. Despite the roosts of the Lefebvrian research fil rouge being very clear, the meaning turned into a new empty label, “filled”—every time—by various senses. In the third volume of 29 “To leave the household, originally in order to embark upon some adventure and glorious enterprise and later simply to devote one’s life to the affairs of the city, demanded courage because only in the household was one primarily concerned with one’s own life and survival. Whoever entered the political realm had first to be ready to risk his life, and too great a love for life obstructed freedom, was a sure sign of slavishness. Courage therefore became the political virtue par excellence, and only those men who possessed it could be admitted to a fellowship that was political in content and purpose and thereby transcended the mere togetherness imposed on all - slaves, barbarians, and Greeks alike through the urgencies of life” (H. Arendt, The Human Condition, p. 36). 30 H. Arendt, The Life of the Mind, Harvest-Harcourt Inc., San Diego, 1978, p. 72. 31 H. Lefebvre, “Introduction”, in Espace et politique. Le droit à la ville II , p. 24.

198

F. BIAGI

Critique della vie quotidienne the author points out how capitalist modernity can neutralize subversive political concepts, bending them passively to its own purposes of dominance. The Hagetmau philosopher, therefore, theorizes in the term récupération the operations of “washing” and “pillage” and “reconquest” that the order of speech performs, extracting some ideas from the “items drawer” of critic political philosophy so as to reuse them, devoid of their original content, in language itself.32 I verify that there is a common ground between the Lefebvrian concept of récupération and that of “passive revolution” theorized by Antonio Gramsci.33 The Italian philosopher, in fact, in his Prison Notebooks adopts the concept “passive revolution” to mean the forms and limits of national Risorgimento. Gramsci highlights, recalling Vincenzo Cuoco, how the action of ruling classes in history is a hegemonic activity developed on the cultural plan, able to come retrieve critical and revolutionary elements, in disorganic expropriation of their original theoretical and practical content. The meaning of “passive revolution” (also called known as “revolutionrestoration,” according to Edgar Quinet’s phrase) thus gets closer to the idea of récupération developed by Lefebvre, and between the opérations récupératrices it is possible to enumerate also the misrepresentation of

32 H. Lefebvre, Critique of Everyday Life. Volume III: From Modernity to Modernism, Verso, London, 2005 (1981), pp. 104–109. This insight is part of the debate that Lefebvre and Guy Debord elaborated along the course of many years. Debord, in many of his writings by means of the concept of detournement maintains the same hypothesis as Lefebvre. However a difference arises: the situationist detournement is an operation that, if enacted from the point of view of the critique radicale, reveals the false awareness that is present in the structures of power; conversely, if assumed by power itself, is part of an instrumental acting that make languages of critical thought harmless. Debord in The Society of Spectacle writes, capsizing Hegel, that “The true is a moment of the false” (G. Debord, The Society of Spectacle, Bureau of Public Secrets, Berkeley, p. 4). The dialectics between both forms of détournement is very similar to the relation that Benjamin points out between dream image and dialectical image. On the concept of détournement in the situationist literature, see: M. Pezzella, La memoria del possibile, Jaca Book, Milano, 2009, pp. 53–57. Finally, I should highlight that Lefebvre does neither mention Debord nor the documents of the International Situationist; most probably his close friendship with Debord ended with a harsh conflict, influenced the entire intellectual parable, leading to an endless reciprocal disinterest for each other’s works, until reciprocal estrangement. 33 See: A. Gramsci, Quaderni del carcere, a cura di V. Gerratana, Einaudi, Torino,   2001, Q. I, 44, p. 41 – Q. VIII, 25, p. 957 (English trans. by Joseph A. Buttigieg with Antonio Callari: Prison Notebooks, 3 Volumes, Columbia University Press, New York, 2011). In addition see: P. Voza, Rivoluzione passiva, in F. Frosini, G. Liguori, Le parole di Gramsci. Per un lessico dei Quaderni del carcere, Carocci, Roma, 2004, pp. 189–207.

4

UNDERSTANDING THE PRESENT WITH HENRI LEFEBVRE

199

the concept of “right to the city.”34 Such misrepresentation, in addition, presents itself as récupèration or “passive revolution” only in becoming a neutralizing political project of the revolutionary demands and of the critic theory. Lefebvre writes the following: “There is no lack of subjects for recuperation: the urban question, difference, self-management, have been recuperated or are in the process of being recuperated. What does the process of recuperation consist in? In this: an idea or a project regarded as irredeemably revolutionary or subversive—that is to say, on the point of introducing a discontinuity—is normalized, reintegrated into the existing order, and even revives it. Shaken for a brief moment, the social relations of production and reproduction—that is to say, domination—are reinforced.”35 Both concrete examples presented by the author comprise, on one hand, the concept of Changer la vie, and on the other, the idea of the “rights of man.”36 In first place, Lefebvre highlight how the practical ideal of a radical transformation of everyday life has been reduced, by hand of the cultural hegemony of the promotional show, into individualistic “care of the self” and by “quality of life” solipsistic of one’s own. The Hagetmau philosopher states the evolution of an evolution process that, from positions belonging to the marxian critic theory, developed toward a condition of “enjoyment” and “unrefined” caring for one’s personality. That slip can be metaphorically represented as a sort of onanistic fallback by means of the extravagant consumerist ideology. The communal and shared pleasure of the Changer la vie in turned into a constant search for fulfillment of desires and needs induced by the market. If to the artistic avantgardes, to the Situationists and to Lefebvre the motto “change life!”

34 I share this point of view with Stenghel (“Diritto alla città, vita quotidiana, differenza: pensare il cambiamento a partire dalla riflessione di Henri Lefebvre”, in Il Ponte, n. 2, Febbraio 2017, pp. 35–45) and De Simoni (Filosofia politica dello spazio: Il programma di ricerca di Henri Lefebvre e le sue conseguenze teoriche, pp. 111–125). Some examples of récupération of the concept of “right to the city” follow instead the research clues presented by Lukasz Stanek‘s book (See: Id., Henri Lefebvre on Space. Architecture, Urban Research and the Production of Theory, University of Minnesota Press, Minneapolis, 2001, pp. 74–79), from Laurence Costes’ book (See: Id., Henri Lefebvre. Le droit à la ville, vers la sociologie de l’urbain, Ellipses, Paris, 2009, pp. 115–128). 35 H. Lefebvre, Critique of Everyday Life. Volume III: From Modernity to Modernism, p. 105. 36 Ibidem, p. 108.

200

F. BIAGI

meant the attempt to theorize and practice the revolution in the concreteness of the everydayness off all, within social forms of communal sharing; the récupération, conversely has mutilated that word, reducing it to the desiring search continually unsatisfied of a “quality of life” dictated by the consumption standards imposed by the degree of development of the capitalist modernity. Lefebvre sustains that “in lieu of changing life, the image of life was changed!.”37 Secondly, the author recalls how “the rights of man,” from radical and revolutionary claim—first with the 1789 French Revolution and next with the proletarian masses’ strikes and protests of the nineteenth and twentieth century38 —, have become an imperialist juridical device that succeeds in justifying the false conscience of the liberal humanist ideology: “demands, aspirations, intentions are diverted and turned against the initial design.”39 However, Lefebvre doesn’t surrender in face of that scenery. Sustaining that it was an error to give away these semantic fields to the enemy; and consequently he proposes to follow new political courses that can lead to the core of the social conflict: “we must understand the expression ‘arena and stake of the struggle’ in its strongest sense.”40 With Jacques Rancière’s philosophical-political vocabulary it is possible to sustains that human rights, such as the “right to the city,” to Lefebvre, are “polemic” questions that lead to “disagreement” in the political arena and shatter the veil of hypocrisy of the equality form of the so-called “democratic regimes.”41 The moment the democracy status

37 Ibidem. 38 A similar reading concerning the political fights of the French proletariat during the XIX Century is confirmed from the studies in the workers’ files of Jacques Rancière, see: Proletarian Nights. The Workers’ Dream in Nineteenth-Century France, Verso, London, 2012. 39 H. Lefebvre, Critique of Everyday Life. Volume III: From Modernity to Modernism, p. 108. 40 Ibidem. 41 J. Rancière, Disagreement: Politics and Philosophy, MIT Press, Minneapolis, 1999 (1995). On secondary literature, see: M. Pezzella, “La democrazia dei senza parte”, in Democrazia Km Zero, 14 November 2011, online. I allow myself to develop this connection with Rancière due to the fact that the author of Disagreement, starting as Althusser’s pupil ended up braking up with him irreparably. As highlighted in Chapter I, the conflict between Lefebvre and Althusser is crucial to understand the two perspectives that in France clash on the Marxian legacy. Although it is always limited to retrace the authors

4

UNDERSTANDING THE PRESENT WITH HENRI LEFEBVRE

201

self-represents as equality authentically realized it commits a “wrong doing,” since, on the background, substantial societal inequality remains, between the ruling class and the huge mass of subalterns that Rancière names “the part of those who have no part.” The latter are not recognized fully within the social framework, as equals to those who instead pull the threads of political organization. However, the substantial reality of such a “fundamental wrong” doesn’t make it vain to talk about “democracy” or of “rights of man,” but it constitutes the political essence of the action: in fact, the “the part of those who have no part’s” task is to demonstrate the scandal of inequality and the contradictions of formal democracy. To Rancière, democracy is not a state performed just once and for all, nor can it be identified with the existing state-apparatus; instead, it is a political process of subjectification because of which the “the part of those who have no part” acquire awareness of themselves as collectivity and set the goal of capsizing the submission relation they endure. Finally, Stanek reminds us how that “revolution from above” of words of order and ideals of the radical critic of the last century can be interpreted within the grid of Luc Boltanski and Ève Chiapello’s sociological study entitled The New Spirit of Capitalism.42 Both French authors, In fact, interrogate in what way neoliberal capitalism changed and created new forms of exploitation from the détournement of the libertarian values of the sixty-eight. The query around which their reasoning unravels is the distinction between “social critique” and “artistic critique.” As the “social critique” of the sixty-eight didn’t find expression in the forms of traditional left-wing (deaf to the movements’ claims) it was supplanted by an individualistic reading of the “artistic critic” promoted by the dominant society. In the eyes of many militants the latter offered, instead, the occasion of realization of the liberty and creativity claims expressed in their youth. The inquiry undertaken by both sociologists is based on an accurate analysis of the class stratification of the political militants

to their originary school of thought, or to the identification of their teachers; it would be however incorrect to seek common links between Lefebvre and the philosophical school against which he expressed himself, and from which he took distance. On Rancière’s intellectual parable, see: G. Campailla, Jacques Ranciere. Dalla rottura con Althusser alle scene dell’emancipazione, Malatempora/Golena Edizioni, Roma, 2014. 42 See: L. Stanek, Henri Lefebvre on Space: Architecture, Urban Research and the Production of Theory, pp. 74–75; L. Boltanski, È. Chiapello, The New Spirit of Capitalism, Verso, London, 2017 (1999).

202

F. BIAGI

and—as an example of such récupération of the sixty-eight values— refers several management handbooks diffused since the beginning of the neoliberal overturn of the eighties. In fact, the capitalist undertaking and the cultural hegemony operated by the diffusion of consumerism gain new basis, and abandon the old patriarchal organization of power and assume—in a perspective of an “individual freedom” and “expression of one’s own creativity”—the critical claims of social movements, valuing them capitalistically inside the restructuration of the labor market. A clear example is the neoliberal ideology of self-entrepreneurship and work autonomy: demands, such as the liberation from the submission of the work with salary, were retaken and reinterpreted within the ruling speech to parcel the syndical and political organizations, create precarious jobs and deteriorate supportive bonds of collective rights. Therefore, neoliberal post-modernity seems to be the authentic realization of the workers and juvenile upheavals of last century, as it empties the content typical of those ideals that once operated as critical perspective on the world. Debord would also with this instance because, as is well known to use Hegel’s idea, it defines the Society of the Spectacle as a capsized world. Besides, the thesis by Boltanski and Chiapello is confirmed by the Richard Florida’s “creative class” category, by mean of which the American sociologist maintains in the new century the company should adjust to the demands and values of the workers and not the other way round.43 The heterogeneity and gender differences, ethnicity, culture, and instruction paths should represent a problem to businesses but the opportunity to value personal ability in name of economical “shared” goals of the company. Finally, managers, no longer able to assume the authority they once enjoyed, have adjusted internal organization with solutions much more reticular and horizontal in personnel management. Florida’s perspective is clearly arbitrary and culpable of many imperfections: in fact, his analysis focuses exclusively on the American “creative middle class,” new educated white collars who inhabit “global cities” and live in the cosmopolitan webs of neoliberal order. Florida’s depiction is limited to inhabitants of neighborhoods that underwent gentrification processes, forgetting the production of advanced urban marginality 43 R. Florida, The Rise of the Creative Class: And How It’s Transforming Work, Leisure and Everyday Life, Basic Books, New York, 2002; The Flight of the Creative Class: The New Global Competition for Talent, Harper Collins, New York, 2005; Cities and the Creative Class, Routledge, London, 2005.

4

UNDERSTANDING THE PRESENT WITH HENRI LEFEBVRE

203

that emerged from the economical restructuring of the city between the twentieth and the twentieth-first centuries. In fact, recently, the American author has thoroughly revised his thesis in The New Urban Crisis: Gentrification, Housing Bubbles, Growing Inequality, and What We Can Do About It.44 Here he rethinks his hypothesis, admitting that the more “creative” cities are also more unequal, even though he doesn’t explicitly mention the real estate economy dynamics that are emphasized by renowned theoreticians of the “urban” such as Mike Davis, David Harvey or Saskia Sassen. After having drawn the file rouge of the concept of “right to the city” on the original trail of Lefebvre’s thought, I now prepare to discuss the recognition of the various attempts to define such notion in French, European and international jurisprudence. Therefor, I display the uses of “right to the city” that certain projects of passive revolution and récupération from above, by the ruling classes, produce. But in truth, as we have understood so far, the notion of “right to the city” was originally conceived by Lefebvre precisely against this kind of projects. Most of all, we’ll see how it was reinterpreted in France between the end of the Seventies until the Nineties, to broaden the look over the European and international landscape. The transalpine universe is presented as rich, but not always coherent, in the reception of the meaning of “right to the city.” Lorent Costes recalls how in 1975 the droit à la ville became a short film of about twenty-six minutes that gives Lefebvre the prime role.45 Film director Jean Georges Bertucelli hence invites the author for helping in the writing of the text, so that he can catch in nuce his reflections on the development of urban space in Paris. Following this, such “script” will be published as article in the Espaces et sociétés journal under the title Les autres Paris.46 This film documents thus the “gentrification” ante litteram of the quarters in Paris that uproots the specificities of neighborhoods and of the “others Paris”: for instance, Lefebvre shows how the old French bistrot 44 R. Florida, The New Urban Crisis: Gentrification, Housing Bubbles, Growing

Inequality, and What We Can Do About It, Palgrave Macmillan, London, 2017. 45 See: L. Costes, Henri Lefebvre. Le droit à la ville, vers la sociologie de l’urbain, p. 115; J.-P. Jeancolas, “Autour d’Henri Lefebvre,” dossier “L’homme, la ville et la démocratie,” in Le Monde Diplomatique, n. 6, Juin 1976 (online). 46 H. Lefebvre, “Les autres Paris”, in Espaces et Sociétés, n. 13–14, Octobre-Janvier, 1974–1975, pp. 185–192.

204

F. BIAGI

growingly becomes a standardized snack-bar by hand of the functionalist model. Tis cinematographic reception is the only Lefebvre allowed because if confirms—with critical vision—his thesis and supplies a succinct informative compendium. Conversely, the various assimilations that I am to illustrate won’t be equally faithful. In first place, in the Seventies, the government of primeminister Jacques Chaban-Delmas who represented the wing of Gaullist reformism—at that time toward the presidency of Georges Pompidou— addresses the imaginary of the building of a nouvelle société confirmed in Albin Chalandon’s speech, minister of public works and housing from 1968 to 1972, who uses some interpretative lines of Lefebvre to formulate his own housing and urban policies: “there’s a need to prepare for an intellectual revolution and for the policies to free urbanization from industrialization and promote the primacy of urbanization over industrialization. This is the how I interpret the great overturn of urban planning policies.”47 Thus Chalandon’s call, within the Lefebvrian trail, is to fight spatial segregation in the peripheral neighborhoods, and promising an inversion of direction by means of the reformist political program of is ministry. His motto is “free urbanization.” Next, his direct successor to the ministry, Olivier Guichard, in 1973, in a speech before the Mational Assembly, will use without any doubts Lefebvre’s legacy quoting two key-concepts (the “right to the city” and the transformation of everyday life): “more than the right to dwelling, it is the right of the city that we would like to ensure, that is, the right to a lively and rich milieu which service, or the pleasure it offers, is not introduced by any administrative or syndical accounting office, but subtly, with strength, changing life!.”48 The récupération of the French State proceeds with the government of Valéry Giscard d’Estaing (1974-1981), republican presidency that will adopt the motto “quality of living environment” for his program of 47 Albin Chalandon’s speech was held during the XXI World Urbanisme Day on October 2, 1970 and is referred in: J. P. Garnier, D. Goldschmidt, La comédie urbaine ou la cité sans classe, Maspero, Paris, 1978, p. 25. Garnier and Goldschmidt book results in the recognition of the recapture of the lefebvrian legacy by the French State political planning lines of that time; however, as pointed out by Lurente Devisme—both authors fail for their “hypercriticism” by accusing Lefebvre himself of some responsibility on that récupération (see: L. Devisme, Actualité de la pensée d’Henri Lefebvre à propos de l’urbain. La question de la centralité, Maison des sciences de la ville Tours, 1998, pp. 42–43). 48 J. P. Garnier, D. Goldschmidt, La comédie urbaine ou la cité sans classe, p. 25.

4

UNDERSTANDING THE PRESENT WITH HENRI LEFEBVRE

205

nouvelle politique urbaine. The French law adopts therefore some keyconcepts of the lefebvrian speech, again, talking of “the reclassification of meeting spaces,” of “reaffirmation of historical centers as privileged spaces of identification to the inhabitants,” of “fight against the segregation and mono-functionalism” of the urban spaces until it reaches a genuine and actual “revival of local democracy.”49 These declarations by the transalpine ruling class allow us to deduct that Lefebvre’s thought was known, how his teachings operated strong cultural hegemony within the political debate around French urban planning. Briefly abandoning the inefficacy of the practical result, it’s possible to notice that the Hagetmau philosopher was a theoretician who owned very radical stances, but he wasn’t in no way limited to the exclusive room of the academic debate. On the other hand, we can affirm that Lefebvre was so influential in the political controversies to the point he even forced the French Right to legitimize its action with language. That is, in my opinion, a further consequence of the récupération. If on one side, the French state—and particularly the republican Right until the beginning of the socialist government in 1981—manipulates and devoid of content the Lefebvrian theory, on the other, Lefebvrian theory itself is forced to assume the terrain of the récupération lest it would have to admit the failure of the savage urbanization produced by the Fordism of the Gaullist urban project. In third place, a further attempt to appropriate the Lefebvrian theory is the requalification of the city of Créteil, capital of the county of Valde-Marne, in the Île-de-France Region. In 1983, some urban planners will re-design the historical center explicitly based on Le droit à la ville and La production de l’Espace. However, Lefebvre, as he is informed of what’s happening, will take distance from the project and notices how local banks and businesses were inclined to the model of some American urban projects that proposed the building of shopping centers as new places that were explicitly antithetical to the Greek ideal of the agorà. That same year in a interview he reiterates, thus, how more insurmountable trenches are increasingly being excavated on what pertains to his thought.50

49 Ibidem, p. 30. 50 The interview I refer is the following: G. Burgel, H. Lefebvre, “Entretien avec Henri

Lefebvre: Henri Lefebvre répond à Villes en parrallèle”, in Villes en parrallèle, n. 7,

206

F. BIAGI

The process of récupération of the French socialist Left-wing requires, in this moment, a particular view. François Mitterrand wins the elections in May 1981 and identifies French socialism a “civilization of the cities” and most of his political speech will use the spatial categories of the Hagetmau philosopher; in fact, he declares right after he is elected: “the problem of the city rules over all other problems.”51 This element is confirmed by the institution of a novel “Ministry of the city” (Ministre d’État à la ville) in 1990 and by the fact that, as remembered by Jean-Pierre Garnier, Michel Delebarre—the first minister to assume the position—during an interview displayed Le Droit à la ville on the table of his office.52 We now go back to the Eighties, after Mitterrand’s victory. The Gauche, through progressive architect Roland Castro, promotes the program Mission Banlieues 89 inspired on the cultural skidding of Le droit à la ville.53 The Mission Banlieues 89 consists of a administrative initiative created in 1983 by the French Presidency to redefine the public housing building around Paris and change the banlieues with the same care that was used on the requalification of the city center. Rastro, as Costes underlines, is an architect who studied at the École des beaux-arts and was very active in the students’ upheavals of sixty-eight; also founder of a juvenile counter-culture newspaper entitled Ce que nuos voulons: tout.54 In an interview in 1985 Lefebvre states that the banlieues are “the specter of the city,”55 almost as if he was indicating a constant “erasure” for the existence of the metropolis. That affirmation, in fact, ends 1983, pp. 51–63, English translation: E. Kofman, “An Interview with Henri Lefebvre”, in Environment and Planning, n. 5, 1987, p. 35. 51 F. Mitterand, Entretien radio-télévisé du 9 decembre 1981, in J.-P. Garnier, “La vision urbaine de Henri Lefebvre: des prévisions aux revisions,” dossier “Actualités de Henri Lefebvre,” in Espaces et sociétés, n. 76, 1994, pp. 123–145. 52 Ibidem, p. 131. 53 See: P. Guillot, “A propos de Banlieues 89: entretien avec l’architecte Roland Castro”,

in Cahiers d’histoire, 109, pp. 95–97 (online); M. Roberts, “Banlieues 89: Urban Design and the Urban Question”, in Journal of Urban Design, Volume 5, n. 1, 2000, pp. 19–40. 54 See: L. Costes, Henri Lefebvre. Le droit à la ville, vers la sociologie de l’urbain, p. 119. See also the podcast of the program La Fabrique de l’Histoire directed by Emmanuel Laurentin of France Culture that was issued the 21 novembre 2012 where he interviews architect Soline Nivet and historian Thibault Tellier (online). 55 H. Lefebvre, “Entretien avec Henri Lefebvre: de l’urbain à la ville”, in Revue Techniques et Architecture, n. 359, avril - mai, 1985, pp. 112–113.

4

UNDERSTANDING THE PRESENT WITH HENRI LEFEBVRE

207

up being prophetic is we bring to mind, as Loïc Wacquant recalls, the confused and sociologically feebly founded conception that promotes.56 The architect doesn’t fear in affirming, on one hand, the unfounded comparison between the American ghetto and the French banlieue, on the other hand, he confirms the stereotype that the transalpine outskirts in the eighties are on the verge of “declaring civil war” to the motherland.57 Castro is directly chosen by Mitterand as head of Mission Banlieues 89 and in this regard he declares his intentions: “We shouldn’t only perform the right to dwelling; we should enact the right to the city, the right to the urban.”58 What is not convincing about the execution of the Banlieues 89 project is the delimitation of the so-called “sensitive neighborhoods.” In fact, that division not only opposes the recomposing idea of unitarian urban planning as proposed by Lefebvre, but also has exacerbated in practice the creation of “free zones” where the weaker social layers converge and in this way reproduces a new spatial discrimination.59 Costes recalls the flaws in the project that however continued to convince the socialist administration with further initiatives such as the il Développement social des quartiers (DSQ) and the Développement social urbain (DSU).60 Finally, I believe that we ought to mention yet further evidence that Castro in his rhetoric proposes a reuse of Lefebvre’s heritage, but in the facts, when he had the chance, he aided to discrediting the author to whom he swears he drove his inspiration from. The journal Lumières de la ville founded by Castro in 1990 included a piece entitled From the Right to the City to the Right to Beauty, in which the architect reaffirms his Lefebvrian instruction and hopes that such space of reflection on the

56 L. Wacquant, Urban Outcasts, Polity Press, Cambridge, 2008, p. 144. The background thesis of this book is the demonstration of the specificity if the American ghetto and of the French banlieue contrasting the sociological and public law theories that instead overlapped their destiny. Because of this, Castro’s thought is among the most criticized by the student of Bourdieu, thus demonstrating how the architect uses very arbitrary sociological data that aren’t scientifically grounded. 57 You can find Castro’s interview in the reportage entitled: “Racisme: enquète sur la ségrégation en France”, in Le Nouvel Observateur, n. 22, 8 March 1990. 58 R. Castro, “Nous vous l’avions bien dit”, in Lumières de la ville, n. 3, février 1991. 59 To know more about the French debate on the program Banlieue 89 and its contro-

versial consequences see the file of: “Urbanisme: De banlieues 89 à Jean-Louis Borloo,” dossier spécial, in Urbanisme, n. 332, septembre - octobre 2003. 60 See: L. Costes, Henri Lefebvre. Le droit à la ville, vers la sociologie de l’urbain, p. 121.

208

F. BIAGI

urban becomes the main debate tool for a new democratic urban planning so as to oppose the “separated urban planning.” Adding to this, Castro affirms that “the city has become space of perpetual democratic invention.”61 The last stage of the la récupération pertains to the Loi d’orientation pour la ville, approved by the National Assembly in 1991. In fact, the first paragraph of the law, that dictates the general principles, is dedicated to the “right to the city” and the purposes of its concrete enactment. It reads as follows: “In order to put into practice the right to the city, other territorial collectivities and their regions, the State and its public institutions ensure that all inhabitants of the cities life and habitat conditions that can favor social cohesion so as to avoid or lead to the disappearance of segregation occurrences. Those policies should allow the insertion of any neighborhood of the city and give guarantees every cluster the co-existence of the various social categories. With this intent, the Sate and other public collectivities, according to their competence, should take all the measure required to diversify in every agglomerate, municipality or neighborhood the types of housing, of facilities and necessary services: to maintain and develop commerce and other economic activities of proximity; to maintain and develop a collective way on the educational, social, sanitary, sportive, cultural and recreational domains; to maintain and develop means of transport; to maintain and develop safety of goods and people.”62 The law is also known in the beyond the Alps country as the juridical device conceived to fight spatial segregation, and in this regard the government organizes an in-depth seminar, and invites various experts. The person in charge of the publication of the meeting papers, Véronique de Rudder, states that that event is “an homage to Henri Lefebvre.”63 Among the several contributions one that stands out is Étienne Balibar’s, who, based on the theory of the égaliberté, emphasizes the limits of the attempt to turn the “right to the city” into another right to add to the long list of laws and juridical declaration of human 61 See: R. Castro, “Du droit à la ville au droit à la beauté”, in Lumières de la ville, n.

1, 1990. 62 Paragrapgh n. 1 of the Loi n° 91-662 du 13 juillet 1991 d’orientation pour la ville, online. 63 V. de Rudder, G. Garin-Ferraz, B. Haquin (sous la direction de), Loi d’orientation pour la ville: séminaire chercheurs décideurs, in “Recherches 20,” Ministère de l’équipement, des transports e du logement, Paris, 1991, p. 36.

4

UNDERSTANDING THE PRESENT WITH HENRI LEFEBVRE

209

rights.64 In a very specific way, Balibar underlines the short circuit that would be created between the right to the city and the access to citizenship. So he explains the conflict between, on one side, the will to juridically include the droit à la ville in a law that wishes to dictate the general lines of transalpine urban politics and, on the other side, the lack of concrete solutions as for what concerns the juridical illegality of the sans-papiers. This social situation of the migrant population in France is fueled, therefore, by the same institutional subject that promotes, rhetorically, a disposition that demands the Lefebvrian fatherhood. In other words: what kind of “right to the city” is enjoyable for those who cannot access citizenship rights?65 Althusser’s student examines, on one hand, the possible correspondences between the social phenomenon of segregation and inequality, and, on the other hand, between eventual anti-segregation directives that can reinforce social cohesion within the urban space. In this regard he suggests to distinguish the category of “arithmetic equality” (that is, liberal equality, equal distribution of a given service or good to the entire collectivity) from the category of “qualified or proportional equality” (this being take care of the various discriminations among people, with the aim to solve the concrete inequalities among the most destitute and the richest) so has to point out in what way the Loi d’orientation pour la ville mixes up such a difference of meaning with the formal generic notion of mixité.66 It should be added that, despite Balibar effectively disagrees with the récupération of Lefebvre’s ideas, in another volume that is purposefully 64 The concept of égaliberté in Balibar takes up the conflictive connection between “rights of man” and “rights of the citizen” born from the French Revolution, this meaning between the universalist instance and its practical recognition within the political community of a given State. The égaliberté is presented as the theoretical attempt to name the political practice of equality and liberty that verifies the social-political recognition of men. For instance, Balibar comes across contradictions on the declarations of human rights, the French Constitution (or in this case the Loi d’orientation pour la ville) and their practical denial. The social conflict that the excluded start to expand those rights is named by Balibar as, precisely, egaliberté (See: E. Balibar, La proposition de l’égaliberté, PUF, Paris, 2010). Moreover, Balibar discusses thel droit à la ville in relation to the Loi d’orientation pour la ville in parallel with the debate surrounding the discriminatory situation of the sans papiers and thus pertaining to the problems resulting from the status of citizenship, see: E. Balibar, “Exclusion ou lutte des classes?”, in Les frontières de la démocratie, La Découverte, Paris, 1992. 65 E. Balibar in Loi d’orientation pour la ville: séminaire chercheurs décideurs, pp. 65–68. 66 Ibidem, p. 66.

210

F. BIAGI

dedicated to the question of the sans-papiers, he avoids referring to Lefebvre and formulates, instead of the droit à la ville, the droit de cité.67 As is well known, in french ville and cité have two different meanings,68 and Balibar uses the expression droit de cité to point out political citizenship that, with Aristotle, we could define as politeia. Lefebvre, instead, uses the term ville to refer to the city in its material conception, in its spatial dimension. Despite those differences, Balibar, as he is asked in 1991 about the Loi d’orientation pour la ville will express himself regarding the droit à la ville as if he were speaking about the droit a la citè. There is no doubt that the Lefebvrain concept of droit à la ville comprises also a political dimension that eradicates the concept of citizenship from the nationalist principle, as theorized by Balibar (and the other way round); however—according to the dialectic materialism of the praxis—it should be highlighted that the Lefebvrian notion is originated from a concrete and material conception of urban space and that, only in a second moment he ends up questioning the citizenship status (in a broadened sense). Moreover, it could be interesting to trail the line of research the leads the droit à la ville in the theoretical questions pertaining to race and the relation between migration topics and citizenship: one should not make the error of mixing up two plans of meaning (a mistake that was made instead by the third wave of AngloSaxon Lefebvrian studies.69 In my opinion Balibar didn’t make use of ill-faith by not mentioning Lefebvre’s notion (that precedes in time the

67 E. Balibar, Droit de cité. Culture et politique en démocratie, PUF, Paris, 2002; Id., “Droit de citè ou apatheid?”, in E. Balibar, M. Chemillier-Gendreau, J. Costa-Lasoux, E. Terray, Sans-papiers: l’archaïsme fatal, La Decouverte, Paris, 1999, pp. 89–116. 68 We address here the difference of meaning theorized by J.-J. Rousseau in The Social Contract in which cité means the city in its political-administrative sense, and ville is the urban space in its material assertion. The citadins are the inhabitants of the ville while the concept of cytoiens is associated to the cité. This distinction seems useful to point out that Lefebvre uses ville referring to the concrete-city, in its concrete spatial dimension and not referring the idea of bourgeois citizenship that emerges with the French Revolution. See: J.-J. Rousseau, The Social Contract and the First and Second Discourses, Yale University Press, New Haven, 2002 (1762), p. 164. 69 The difference between droit à la ville and droit à la cité is not underlined by the

secondary literature that often mixes both notions, despite mentioning Balibar’s writings that I have used here. Even Liette Gilbert and Mustafa Dikeç commit that error in the book that stands out the most from the third wave of Anglo-Saxon Lefebvrian studies (L. Gilbert, M. Dikeç, “Right to the City: Politics of Citizenship”, in K. Goonewardena, S. Kipfer, R. Milgrom, C. Schmid (edited by), Space Difference Everyday Life: Reading Henri

4

UNDERSTANDING THE PRESENT WITH HENRI LEFEBVRE

211

droit de cité that e formulated). Instead, as Althusser’s favorite pupil, it’s most probable that he remained confined to the field of Marxist structuralism, unable to fully grasp the Lefebvrian specificity that was more inclined to highlight the dialectic and praxis materiality. Proceeding on my identification of the moments of the lefebvrian récupération pertaining to the droit de cité, it is important to mention the The European Charter for the Safeguarding of Human Rights in the City signed on the May 18, 2000 in Saint-Denis (Parigi). Ninety-six cities of the European Community, on the trail of communitarian legislation on human rights, translate that jurisprudence locally by means of a chart of intents, not juridically binding, but that poses the goal of recognizing the new role exercised by the cities on the dawn of the twentieth-first century. The metropolis is recognized as the space par excellence of the practice of citizenship rights and the first paragraph, on the general dispositions is entitled “right to the city.” And it reads a follows: “The city is a collective space belonging to all who live in it. These have the right to conditions which allow their own political, social, and ecological development but at the same time accepting a commitment to solidarity. The municipal authorities encourage, by all available means, respect for the dignity of all and quality of life of the inhabitants.”70 In short, as follows, in the twentyeight paragraphs of the Charter several rights of man are listed starting from their specific connection to the local dimension of the citizens’ life. Among others, they enumerate the recognition of equality and liberty of linguistic and religious choice; the protection of the most vulnerable groups is ensured and the rights of minorities; the principle of social solidarity and subsidiarity is referred to bring the citizens closer to political and administrative institutions; moreover, the right to instruction, work, dignified habitation, health, and a salubrious milieu are also present, as well as paragraph nineteen that guarantees “the right to harmonious city development.” It reads as follows: “The citizens have a right to an ordered town planning development which guarantees a harmonious relationship between residential areas, public services and amenities, and green areas. The municipal authorities, with citizen participation, deliver a system of town planning and administration which sustains a balance between Lefebvre, Routledge, London, 2008, pp. 250–263) and Stanek as well (Henri Lefebvre on Space. Architecture, Urban Research and the Production of Theory, p. 78). 70 The European Charter for the Safeguarding of Human Rights in the City (ECSHRC), Saint-Denis (Paris), 18 May 2000, online.

212

F. BIAGI

urban development and the environment. In this context they pledge to respect the natural, historical, architectural, cultural and artistic heritage of the cities by actively seeking the restoration and reuse of existing buildings.”71 As we proceed, the 21st paragraph ensures the “right to free time,” and the 22nd paragraph refers to the “consumers’ rights,” and the 23rd paragraph wishes to recognize “the efficacy of public services,” hoping that cities oversee those rights. This brief presentation of the Charter allows the emphasis of the consistence of those juridical principles in face of, for instance, the serious (urban) economical crisis situation that is crossing the whole globe, squeezed between the realestate market financial speculation, austerity policies, and huge cuts on the public and welfare system.72 Moreover, even institutions such as the United Nations welcomed the “right to the city” within the frame of universalistic generic aspirations. An example of this is The United Nations Conference on Housing and Sustainable Urban Development “Habitat III,” held in Quito, Ecuador, from October 17 to October 20, 2016, a moment in which the U.N.O. debated the directives of the urban agenda so that, worldwide, City Mayors and local administrators had guidelines in the politics that should be adopted.73 The third Urban Agenda of 2016 (the first had been drafted in 1976) discussed on the course of the conference, in its preamble refers the motto of “right to the city and the city for all.”74 Ilaria Boniburini, urban planning teacher and consulter of the preparatory documents to the Conference in Quito states how that conference—the guides global urban policies of the States for the next twenty years—is full

71 Ibidem, art. 19. 72 See: M. B. Aalbers, (edited by), Subprime Cities. The Political Economy of Mortgage

Markets, Wiley-Blackwell, Malden (MA), 2012. 73 Se the so called policy papers of the Conference, online. 74 “We share a vision of cities for all, referring to the equal use and enjoyment of cities

and human settlements, seeking to promote inclusivity and ensure that all inhabitants, of present and future generations, without discrimination of any kind, are able to inhabit and produce just, safe, healthy, accessible, affordable, resilient and sustainable cities and human settlements to foster prosperity and quality of life for all. We note the efforts of some national and local governments to enshrine this vision, referred to as ‘right to the city,’ in their legislation, political declarations and charters” (Habitat III, New Urban Agenda, 20 October 2016 [published in 2017], Quito [Equador], p. 5, online).

4

UNDERSTANDING THE PRESENT WITH HENRI LEFEBVRE

213

of good purposes, while the contents conveyed lack a radical reformulation of the current model of urban development.75 Therefore, there’s no reference whatsoever to the “expulsions” underlined by Saskia Sassen, or the dynamics of the real estate market pointed out by David Harvey nor to the sociological studies on the urban outskirts conducted by, among others, Mike Davis and Loïc Wacquant. The urban agenda of the United Nations seem to be deaf to the critical sociology that has many times demonstrated how the current model of urban development worsens the spatial dynamics inquired by Lefebvre. Of the Hagetmau philosopher all that is left is a generic reference that confirms his predictions concerning the “passive” tendencies of the concept of the “right to the city.” Finally, two Latin-American Countries, Brazil and Colombia, introduced in their national legislation the droit à la ville: However, after circa three decades, they are nations that still present a strong urban polarization and haven’t followed up coherently the concrete meaning of the right to the city. In first place, in Brazil, in 2001, Lula’s government approves, through a “federal law” device the so-called Status of the City, that plans the creation of two institutions: the Ministry of the Cities (active since 2003) and the National Counsel of the Cities that from 2004 has had a consultative role in matters of urban planning policies.76 In second place, through the act n. 388 of July 1997, the Colombian State, although not explicitly referring the “right to the city,” draws the indications to reorganizing the country’s urban development and the political debate that followed the approval of considers that juridical device as frame within which recognize such meaning.77 The legislation lacks coherency 75 See: I. Bonibuorini, “L’Agenda urbana dell’ONU. ‘Urbanizzazione’ per quale ‘sviluppo’?,” in Eddymburg, 25 October 2016, online. I also refer you to Cuppini’s reflections: “Una questione politica: l’epoca urbana che sta venendo”, in Scienza&Politica, XXVIII, 55/2016, pp. 233–239, online. 76 See: G. Marconi, M. Pioletti, “Agenda di riforma urbana in Brasile: il ruolo politico delle città”, Working paper of “Urban@it”, n. 1, October 2015; F. Edesio, “The City Statute in Brazil”, in International Public Debate Urban Policies and the Right to the City, UNESCI, Paris, 2006; Id., “Constructing the Right to the City in Brazil”, in Social & Legal Studies, Volume 16, n. 201, 2007, pp. 201–219; C. Butler, Henri Lefebvre: Spatial Politics, Everyday Life, and the Right to the City, Routledge, London, 2012, pp. 147–148. For the Brazialian academic debate on Lefebvre, see: J. De Souza Martins, Henri Lefebvre e o retourno à dialética, Hucitec, Sao Paulo, 1996. 77 See: L. C. Montoya, “Algunas reflexiones y posibilidades del Derecho a la Ciudad en Colombia: Los retos de la igualdad, la participación y el goce de los derechos humanos en los contextos urbanos”, in Revista Juridica de la Facultad de Palermo (Centro de

214

F. BIAGI

in its parts: in fact if, on one hand, it promotes instances of democratic partaking, on the other, it re-proposes a model of urban development of functionalist foundation. In this regard Uruguayan sociologist Raúl Zibechi has demonstrated in several writings the practical inconsistency of these political initiatives introduced by the progressive Latin-American ruling classes that use such devices to “govern” poverty and tame the most radical social movements.78 It suffices to bring to mind the strong protest movement born in 2013 and that reached the international press with the name “Passe Livre Movement” that placed at the center of the protests the problem of free public transport and the problem resulting from the congestion of the means of private transportation in Brazilian cities. A passage of the manifest drafted by the social organization to set a strategic goal was “the transformation of the current notion of urban collective transportation, refusing the merchandizing conception of transports and starting a fight for free public transportation of quality for the entire society, and outside private initiative.”79 Those social forces, despite the long cycle of progressive governments of the Labor Party (first with Lula, and next with Dilma), mobilized against the gentrification of several neighborhoods of the most important Brazilian metropolis, on the course of the World Football Cup in 2014 and the Olympic Games in 2016, events that heightened the spatial polarization: on one hand, the forced evictions of the favelas’ inhabitants and on the other, the growing capitalist valuation or the “modernized” neighborhoods.80

Estudios en Derecho y Política Ambiental Facultad de Derecho, Universidad de Palermo, Buenos Aires), n. 1, 11, October 2010, online; the law 388 of July 1997 is available online. 78 See: R. Zibechi, Territories in Resistance: A Cartography of Latin American Social Movements, AK Press, Baltimore, 2012 (2008) (see especially chapters III–IV). In addition, on Brasil see: R. Zibechi, The New Brazil: Regional Imperialism and the New Democracy, AK Press, Oakland, 2014 (2012). 79 The Manifesto of Brazilian urban social movement “Passe Livre,” see: R. Zibechi, Descolonizar el pensamiento crítico y las prácticas emancipatorias, Ediciones desde Abajo, Bogotà, 2014, p. 94. 80 See the unvaluable inquiry on urban social movements in Latin America by Zibechi

entitled Descolonizar el pensamiento crítico y las prácticas emancipatorias, especially the chapter on Brazil. See also James Holston’s anaylis in which the author, based on the social conflict cnducted by the urban movements in Brazil rereads the droit à la ville through the category of “insurgent citizenship”: Id., Insurgent Citizenship: Disjunctions of Democracy and Modernity in Brazil, Princeton University Press, Princeton, 2008.

4

UNDERSTANDING THE PRESENT WITH HENRI LEFEBVRE

215

As I end the brief identification of the récupération devices of the Lefebvrian heritage, I now prepare to examine the frame of the current debate around the “right to the city” trying, finally, to delineate my original reinterpretation of Lefebvre’s formula.

What Is the “Right to the City” Now? Taking Back Space and Time In the last twenty years we have witnessed a real and concrete rebirth of Lefebvre’s thought. As I have tried to demonstrate on the course of the entire parable of this thesis, it seems that—to quote Walter Benjamin—a new “moment of readability” has come to Lefebvre’s works: creating new lines of research to the “Urban Critical Theory” in face of the neoliberal gnaw in which the city is squeezed, it represents a crucial reading key to understand contemporaneity. Therefore, there’s a need to identify the current most important interpretations of the meaning of “right to the city,” with the intent to examine accurately that domain of studies starting from the coherence that such thesis may (or not) share with the original Lefebvrian foundation. In other words, within this framework, its seems to be most urgent to clarify it inside the Italian scenery, so as to offer some elements that allow a better understanding to what extent the French author was understood in the most recent theoretical discussions. We should hence understand that within the philosophical and sociological debate some form of récupération occurred or, conversely, original updates on his legacy have emerged. Before all, it’s necessary to examine the interpretation of Marxist geographer David Harvey, since his writings are often translated to Italian and have enjoyed favorable reception across the entire country. As is widely known, in Italy, the British geographer is the most renowned Lefebvrian interpreter and we owe it to him, more than anybody else, the Lefebvre renaissance across both shores of the Atlantic.81 Harvey’s Lefebvrian reading is focused in updating the Hagetmau philosopher’s thought, mainly in face of the urban changes produced with the neoliberal economical–political restructuration. His attempt to renew the urban studies of marxian foundation by means of the original Lefebvrian contribution is remarkable: in fact, Harvey’s “Lefebvre” is mainly a critic of

81 See: D. Harvey, Rebel Cities, Verso, London, 2012.

216

F. BIAGI

the political economy of space (as we have underlined on the third part of this volume). For instance, the British author examines the real estate crisis of 2007 through the amplifying lens of Lefebvre. It is most appropriate, thus, to sustain that, to Harvey, Lefebvre’s work is a solid pretext to re-introduce Karl Marx’s thought, firstly, in the economical–political debate of urban geography and, next, in the debate surrounding capitalist modernity. As he formulates a solid marxian thought on the domain of urban economy, Harvey doesn’t miss the opportunity to add to his theory some remarks on the resistance nets that sprawled against the neoliberal model of city. Therefore, the geographer goes back to Lefebvre’s The Urban Revolution: the fil rouge is the rediscovery of the urban and spatial dimension of men’s everydayness and thus a creative reading of the social conflict marxian theory that identifies in the “working class” the “urban workers.”82 Who are the urban workers? In the twenty-first century, as Harvey maintains, they are all the men and women that are condemned to live in the blackmail of precarious work and lack of welfare institutional support networks. In most of the western world, the British author specifies that factory work has been decimated, de-localized to southern countries and, little by little, metropolis has become places, on one side, of industrial archeology, and on the other, economic-social spaces where the employment has become apprentice to urban economy. The Fordist factory didn’t disappear, but was re-located in other “free task zones” where to majorly value the labor-power, whereas, instead, the in the northern countries work as adopted new slavery forms in new economical sectors, as for instance, the expansion logistics underwent.83 In face of this scenario the “right to the city” in Harvey acquires renewed centrality as for what pertains conflict instances that it can intercept: the question of labor, the lack of proper welfare and the speculative organization of space exerted by the neoliberal capitalism. Housing, income, health, transports, green spaces, and the 82 D. Harvey, “Preface: Henri Lefebvre’s Vision”, in Rebel Cities, pp. XIII–XIV. 83 For instance, I don’t share the insistence on “cognitive capitalism” of some authors,

such as Antonio Negri. In fact on risks to exaggerate the Western capitalist development, instead of focusing on a global analysis of productive processes that, conversely, should understand, thoroughly, even the exploitation of factory handwork and natural resources that occur across the entire globe. This is an opinion that I share with Mario Pezzella (Insorgenze, Jaca Book, Milano, 2014, pp. 135–139). As for the debate between “modern” and “post-modern,” see: R. Finelli, Tra moderno e postmoderno. Saggi di filosofia sociale e di etica del riconoscimento, Pensa Multimedia, Lecce, 2006.

4

UNDERSTANDING THE PRESENT WITH HENRI LEFEBVRE

217

list could go on as for what concerns the social problems that is nowadays endured by the “urban” on the inhabitants flesh. Thus, “right to the city” becomes the frame within which to give a “political” name to numerous social facets that are expressed in the quotidian. So far it is possible to agree with Harvey. But conversely it is only right to express disagreement the moment the British geographer defines the “right to the city” as an “empty signifier.”84 The notion of “empty signifier,” during the course of the last years, is recurrent in the philosophical-political debate introduced by Ernesto Laclau. Harvey interprets some of Laclau’s theories on the trail of the postmodern linguistic turn, to theorize the existence of a political concept devoid of specific meaning. Thus, that content could be manipulated—or better said, can be filled—every time at the heart of the struggle for cultural hegemony between the various social subjects. To Laclau the empty signifier is “a place, within the system of signification, which is constitutively irrepresentable; in that sense it remains empty, but this is an emptiness which I can signify, because we are dealing with a void within signification.”85 In other words, it is possible to imagine a concept or a political speech that is formally “neutral,” that—in the development of the social conflict—takes form and thus acquires meaning. The “empty signifier” theory is the foundation of the populist political tool: the populist reason in fact acquires new concepts and gives them, in the contingency of the real, the most opportune meaning. As is well known, Laclau in The Populist Reason theorizes political tools that allow the take of state power in a regime of democratic crisis in the representative system. The Argentinean author, however, is more inclined to a “left-wing populism” that is capable of welding a chain of empty signifiers, filling them with progressive contents so as to build a new social logic of politics. The cunning communicative game of the “empty signifiers” is the fundamental keystone to reading the “arrangement” of social reality, succeeding in represent it politically. There no way of telling if Harvey is aware of the heated debate around Laclau’s philosophical-political categories: for instance, none of his writings refers the theoretician of populism. However, using that category 84 D. Harvey, “Preface: Henri Lefebvre’s Vision”, in Rebel Cities, p. XV. 85 E. Laclau, On Populist Reason, Verso, London, 2005, p. 105. I have discussed

with other authors, in secondary literature, Laclau’s categories in the edition with Gianfranco Ferraro of Populismo, democrazia, insorgenze. Forme contemporanee del politico (monographic issue of “Il Ponte”, n. 8–9 agosto-settembre 2016).

218

F. BIAGI

as if it was his own becomes utterly problematic within the economy of the Lefebvrian speech. Harvey writes the following: “to claim the right to the city is, in effect, to claim a right to something that no longer exists (if it ever truly did). Furthermore, the right to the city is an empty signifier. Everything depends on who gets to fill it with meaning. The financiers and developers can claim it, and have every right to do so. But then, so can the homeless and the sans-papiers. […] So is pursuit of the right to the city the pursuit of a chimera? In purely physical terms this is certainly so.”86 In another passage, shortly after, the british geographer maintains that “the definition of the right is in itself an object of fight,” referring explicitly to the marxian idea—in the bourgeois world of formal liberties—between equal right the decisive result is shaped by the social strength relations. I believe that Harvey mixes the conflictive dimension of the struggle for tights (thus the conflict theory by Jacques Rancière) with Laclau’s postmodern linguistic overturn. Sustaining the marxian theory of social conflict doesn’t mean, as a consequence, to accept the populist principles of the “empty signifier,” and as result to affirm the droit à la ville is “something that doesn’t exist” concretely. The entire democratic history of western modernity is a cyclical struggle for rights and political recognition: the institution of a “wrong doing” from the “scandal of inequality,” resuming that problematics through Rancière’s political alphabet. But, this perspective of emancipation cannot be confused with the “populist reason” of Laclau. Firstly, following Rancière’s formulation, the theory of Marx’s social conflict is, indeed, a conflict that also pertains to the political status of language; however, the arena of the struggle predisposes the confrontation between opposing political positions, with “full.” ideological meanings. For instance, in Mario Monicelli’s film The Organizer (I compagni 1963), the capability to pronounce the injustice by the workers before their boss proves the existence as such of that injustice. Giving a name to an experience of oppression is at the same time the occasion to make it visible in the political panorama. Secondly, along the course of this manuscript, we have demonstrated how the meaning of droit à la ville is theorized by Lefebvre from specific social situations and following a crystal clear definition. There is no need to “fill” every time the concept of droit à la ville, because Lefebvre handed us in legacy a term that is born on the roads and

86 D. Harvey, “Preface: Henri Lefebvre’s Vision”, in Rebel Cities, pp. XV–XVI.

4

UNDERSTANDING THE PRESENT WITH HENRI LEFEBVRE

219

squares of the Paris Commune: this term finds new breath in the Parisian 1968 and proceeds as critical analysis tool of the urban scenery, from the perspective of spatial marginality (that nowadays with Wacquant we define as “advanced”). The “right to the city” names the scandal of the failure of formal equality typical of the consumerist society of the second post-war period and offers an interpretative key to the insurgences that readjust in the theater of the quotidian spatial dimension. It’s imperative to specify that our intent is not that of destroying Harvey’s point of view on Laclau, it’s precisely the opposite: that parallelism is developed to highlight the limits of such an interpretation. In fact, the goal is to warn about the dangers that one could come across when valuing that thesis. Even in taking distance from the idea of “right to the city” as “empty signifier,” I believe it is useful to point out the strength points in Harvey’s interpretation. The Marxist geographer in fact, in the update of The Urban Revolution—recognizes Lefebvre’s great merit: that he updated the debate on political organization.87 This insight by Lefebvre, according to Harvey, is a real and concrete change within the Marxist framework: to place at the center the political questions of city and urban means to find a credible solution to the traditional debate, on the left, on the role of Unions and Parties. Before Lefebvre, another interpreter of Marx, according to the British geographer, had followed that intuition: Antonio Gramsci. The theoretician from Sardegna places the democratic ideal as such in the Consiliarism forms and in the insurgent democracy of the factory committees.88 Harvey recalls that Gramsci exhorted his party to stimulate a solidly grounded democracy not only in working places, but also in urban neighborhoods, in the metropolitan space of the city.89 In this regard, the spatial point of view presents itself as genuine “Copernican revolution.” The urban scenery allows for a severance of orthodox categories and, consequently, to revive Marx’s heritage within the practical reality. Thus, Harvey builds political continuity between the communalism of the communard insurgence of 1871 and the workers Consiliarism of the early years of the nineteen-hundreds,

87 See: Ibidem. 88 A. Gramsci, “Workers’ Democracy”, in L’Ordine Nuovo, 21 June 1919, online in

marxists.org. 89 See: D. Harvey, Rebel Cities, Urban Resistance and Capitalism, Interview with Emanuele Vince, in “Zeta Net”, 7 February 2017, online.

220

F. BIAGI

intent to feed new oxygen to the marxian theory and the political praxis of the twenty-first century.90 Lefebvre e Gramsci are, in the British geographer opinion, the main resistance poles against capitalism that in the economic crisis of 2007 used the real estate market as expedient to expand again and give life to a new “primitive accumulation of capital.”91 Therefore, in our century, the “place of surplus value” is searched in the production of urban space and not only exclusively in the Fordist factory.92 From this perspective, Harvey re-declensions the Lefebvrian and situationist intuition of the “city as oeuvre d’art” in the meaning of “urban commons,” crossing the debate around the so-called “commons good” with the spatial question.93 Against the new neoliberal politics of “accumulation by dispossession” of the space (understood as urban commons ), Harvey foresees new insurgent dynamics ascribable to the quotidian revolution of the Changer la vie. In the British geographer’s opinion the debate surrounding the commons, inside the spatial perspective, may be an occasion to update the conceptual constellation of the lefebvrian theory. The so-called “urban commons” are nothing else but the idea of a democratic spatial production, self-managed and shared: the “space of representation” to use the lefebvrian terminology or the “psycogeography” according to Debord’s perspective. Successively, among Harvey’s pupils, one that has stood out, within the Anglo-Saxon debate, is Marxist geographer Andy Merrifield, for being one of the sharpest interpreters and translators of the Marxian legacy within the frame of the Urban Critical Studies. To Lefebvre, in 2006, Merrifield dedicated an important monography entitled Henri Lefebvre: A Critical Introduction. However, he manages to discuss systematically the concept “right to the city” only in another volume dating from 2013, entitled The Politics of the Encounter: Urban Theory and Protest under

90 D. Harvey, “Reclaiming the City for Anti-capitalist Struggle”, in Rebel Cities, pp. 115–154. 91 D. Harvey, The Enigma of Capital and the Crises of Capitalism, Profile Books,

London, 2010; Id., “The Art of Rent”, in Rebel Cities, pp. 89–114; Id., “The Urban Roots of Capitalist Crises,” in Rebel Cities, pp. 27–66. 92 D. Harvey, “Reclaiming the City for Anti-Capitalist Struggle”, in Rebel Cities, pp. 129–130. 93 See: D. Harvey, “The Creation of the Urban Commons”, in Rebel Cities, pp. 67–88. Also see: E. Salzano, La città bene comune, Ed. Baiesi, Bologna, 2009.

4

UNDERSTANDING THE PRESENT WITH HENRI LEFEBVRE

221

Planetary Urbanization. In short, the British author maintains that the lefebvrain meaning of “right to the city” is, on one hand, much too vague and abstract to be able to understand urban movements that on this day are mobilized in the twenty-first-century neoliberal city; on the other hand, that it is far too reductive to those who think a political intervention that aims at a higher level, wider on what concerns to the metropolis scenery.94 Merrifield sustains the city today is turned into a pervasive element to the point it causes the “planetary urbanization” phenomenon. This thesis recaptures the lines of research contained in The Urban Revolution and shows how cities exert a form of hegemony in the elaboration of policies of capitalist development and, as a result, their pervasiveness has remodeled the entire globe. The English author counter-opposes, firstly, The Urban Revolution to the texts written before 1968; those being La Proclamation de la Commune and The Right to the City, maintaining that in The Urban Revolution a novelty that wasn’t present in the preceding texts emerges: the pervasiveness of urbanization, that is, that phenomenon that, next, materialized in the predatory will of the “urban” over the “rural.” Merrifield points out how the fundamental point of The Urban Revolution is precisely the totalitarian tendency of urbanization: in this sense Lefebvre, in 1970, would try to replace the subject “city” with the protoganism of urbanism and new urban society.95 Secondly, he considers the concept of “right to the city” to be an idea that has already been surpassed due precisely to the death of the city and the gestation of a novel urban society. The droit à la ville would therefore be only useful to understand the insurgent instances characteristic of the fordist problematics.96 In fact, the insurgent meaning of “right

94 A. Merrifield, The Politics of the Encounter: Urban Theory and Protest Under Planetary Urbanization, University of Georgia Press, Athens, 2013, p. XIV. 95 Ibidem, pp. 22, 27. 96 Ibidem, p. 26. In this regard, Merrifield shares Antonio Negri’s point of view. The

Italian philosopher as for the concept of “right to the city” expresses himself in an ambiguous manner: in an interview that was published in April 2004 on “Euronomade” he actually declares his disinterest for the droit à la ville relegatind it to a political category that has been out of use and pertains to the Fordist period: “Actually, I believe that the ‘right to the city’ is rather qualified in historical terms […] The right to the city is the concept that is connected to the urban restructurations of the fordist period. This was Lefebvre’s city that still doesn’t understand that production mechanism of common that to me seems to be the central element. Harvey’s thesis insist too much on the metropolitan division of the proletariat, and I propose a pessimistic and negative vision

222

F. BIAGI

to the city” would no longer pertain to the new urban society, but “the policies of encounter.”97 The term “encounter” is ascribable to Louis Althusser: in fact, the structuralist philosopher formulates a concept of materialism that he defines as “aleatory materialism” or “materialism of the encounter.”98 Soon, to Althusser, the “materialism of the encounter” won’t only be a new notion of the “materialism,” but an ontology that supplies materialism a solid theoretical foundation in the concreteness of men’s life. The concrete foundation is rediscovered by Althusser as he goes over the reflections that Greek philosopher Epicurus formulated on the “encounter of the atoms.” As is widely known, Epicureism highlights how the atom in itself doesn’t have a real and visible manifestation; in fact, it emerges and exists as he “meets” other atoms. The impact of the encounter gives life to a new subjectivity that had previously been relegated to inexistence and invisibility. The atom, thus, manifests in the collective aggregation that builds new subjectivities. That “materialism of the encounter” is also named “aleatory,” since it is strongly linked to the immanence of the contingency and randomness of the encounter and of the deviations of atoms. The aleatory essence describes thus, on regarding the ability of association, of internal reorganization, and of insurrection – that capability that the urban workers started to show in the post-fordist society. Harvey’s reflection still doesn’t understand the autonomous movements and the new politicization that, for instance, the new subjects of cognitive work show” (Id., “La Comune della cooperazione sociale. Intervista a Antonio Negri sulla metropoli”, in Euronomade, 25 April 2014, online). This opinion is confirmed the following year in another interview (Id., “L’abitazione del General Intellect. Dialogo con Antonio Negri sull’abitare nella metropoli contemporanea”, in Euronomade, 16 July 2015, online). One year earlier, instead, Negri identified the droit à la ville with basic income and absorbed the concept in the citizenship question (as in Balibar). In his words: “the multitudinary action, aimed at defending, rebuilding and taking control of the welfare, is anchored on the rediscovery of active subjectivities, of those singularities that compose the multitude – this is why it expresses on the right to citizenship – that politically is “the right to the city.” Right, that is, guarantee of enjoyment of the city, of work in the city. The question of the basic income to every citizen becomes thus an element that belongs to this construction of the political. […] Basic income and right to the city are a unique political goal” (Id., “Per la costruzione di coalizioni multitudinarie in Europa”, in Euronomade, 30 August 2013, online). 97 A. Merrifield, The Politics of the Encounter: Urban Theory and Protest Under Planetary Urbanization, pp. 33–35; and next the entire chapter entitled The Politics of the Encounter (pp. 54–72). 98 L. Althusser, Écrits philosophiques et politiques, 2 vol., Stock-Imec, Paris, 1994–1995; Id., Du matérialisme aléatoire, “Multitudes”, 21, été 2005, pp. 179–194; Sur la philosophie, Gallimard, Paris, 1994; Id., Philosophy of the Encounter: Later Writings, 1978–1987, Verso, London, 2006.

4

UNDERSTANDING THE PRESENT WITH HENRI LEFEBVRE

223

one hand, the rare manifestations of that contingency, and on the other, offers an explanation of the underlying dynamics of the construction of a given political subjectivity. So, the collective impact of the atoms is the metaphor by which we can interpret that accidental encounter—and the profoundly hidden and immanent formation—of the antagonistic political subjectivities in the twenty-first-century. Merrifield reads within this trail the political forms of the urban social movements that were born in the new century, recognizing a novel crucial role to the centrality of the square and of the roads (and their occupation). From this perspective, the British geographer elects a new spatial dimension of the “politics of the encounter,” that is, the infinite possibilities that the social actors who occupy the political scene of the conflictive theater of the “urban” have of emerging from invisibility. To Merrifield, thus, it is more useful to underline the Althusserian vision of the encounter of multiple subjectivities that were previously deaf and doomed to obscurity, regarding the conceptual constellation that instead the “right to the city” offers. In other words, Harvey’s pupil believes it to be more correct, as reading key of the urban society of the twenty-first century, to abandon the Lefebvrian “items drawer” in favor of the Althusserian theoretical framework. That is to say, he updates Lefebvre’s urban Marxism through its most ferocious enemy: Althusser’s structuralism.99 Moreover, Merrifield, shares the idea that the “right to the city” is an “empty signifier” and proposes to “filled” with new ingredients that measure up to the challenge of our contemporaneity. That updating, although it is can be shared, is organized from the illegitimate use of Lefebvre’s category of récupération. However, the Liverpool geographer completely ignores the third volume of the Critique of Everyday Life which is precisely the book where the Hagetmau philosopher points out— among various questions—the problem of the passive revolution that his own theoretical constellation is being subjected to.100 I am fully convinced that Merrifield is not up to the task he proposed to undertake: the reflections about the updating of the concept of “right to 99 See particularly the Preface of: A. Merrifield, The Politics of the Encounter: Urban Theory and Protest Under Planetary Urbanization, pp. 135–136, footnote 9. 100 Merrifield mentions the incorrect use by the United Nations and the World Bank (see the Urban Agenda that I have above referred to) but without offering further explanations (see: A. Merrifield, The Politics of the Encounter: Urban Theory and Protest Under Planetary Urbanization, p. 26).

224

F. BIAGI

the city” cannot be solved by abandoning the Lefebvrian categories and to conversely embrace the ones conceived by Althusser’s structuralism. We could sustain that it is utterly incorrect, as we consider the harsh conflict between both philosophers during the course of the second half to the twentieth century, to update the Lefebvrian categories by means of an antithetical philosophical perspective, since it doesn’t coherently present the terrain where the concepts were born and formulated. The creative recapturing of a philosophical-political concept in our days, in my opinion, should respect the logical coherence with the origin that resulted into that constellation of meaning. We should ultimately ask: would Lefebvre have updated his own theoretical categories by means of the conceptual tools of Althusser? The answer, the clearest of all, seems to be no. In this regard I would like to underline once more the “original sin” of considering the “right to the city” an empty signifier: that choice has taken Merrifield very far from the Lefebvrian orbit. To clarify this instance I should add that the interpretation by the Marxist geographer is legitimate, but takes a course that no longer pertains to Lefebvre’s domain. Secondly, one needs to point out how the semantic constellation of “right to the city” doesn’t exclude the dimension of the encounter, of the being-with-in-a-shared-space—profoundly political—of men. I have clearly demonstrated it as I delineated the fil rouge between Lefebvre, the ancient Greece thought and Hannah Arendt’s political theory. The “encounter,” understood as philosophical-political category is not strange to Lefebvre’s theory: the shared moment of the “festival”—for instance— is very clear evidence of this. This is why I don’t understand the need to pursue a field that is contrary to Lefebvre: structuralism. If the history of political philosophy has left us the fracture between Lefebvre and Althusser it is imperative to keep that in mind, even in face of new research paths from which the concepts derive. Finally, it’s beyond my comprehension that Merrifield should read The Urban Revolution against the texts from the Sixties (the volume on the Commune and on the “right to the city”) feeding an insurmountable dichotomy between “city” and “urban society.” As I have shown in Chapter II, the constellations of meanings of both concepts gravitate the same orbit and the “city” doesn’t disappear into the “urban society,” but finds in it a further dialectic change. The city, to Lefebvre, is certainly corrupted by the capitalist urbanization, however “city” and “urbanization” are two social processes that constantly live in ambivalence between the subjection of the Capital and latent sceneries of salvation.

4

UNDERSTANDING THE PRESENT WITH HENRI LEFEBVRE

225

I prefer Thierry Paquot’s reading to the interpretation of “urban society” by Merrifield. Paquot, as Lefebvre’s pupil and original follower of the situationist studies theorizes, on the trail of psycogeography, the “sensorial eco-urbanism” opposed to the devastating action of neoliberal urbanization.101 With this term Paquot overturns the Lecorbusian ideal of “machine to habit-in” in the rediscovery of the senses and the natural relation between man and environment. In other words, he tries to imagine an urban planning that is as harmonic as possible to nature and man, abandoning the run-up of the capitalist valuation of the productive forces mediated by capitalist technique. Functionalism, in fact, according to Paquot’s hypothesis, would remain in the neoliberal project as further postmodern development of the Fordist phase. Conversely to Merrifield (and partly even to Harvey), within the Anglo-Saxon debate, Chris Butler doesn’t give into the seductive temptation of conceiving the “right to the city” as empty signifier and also offers us a coherent depiction mentioning the role of the utopian dimension of the theory of moments.102 What is harder to share is the assimilation of Lefebvre into the juridical debate of public space formulated by Jürgen Habermas. In fact, in Lefebvre, the theory if conflict seems to be more coherent to Jacques Rancière’s interpretative grid, rather than to the liberal approaches of the Habermas’ communicative action.103 However, that choice by the Australian author is understandable, since his intent is to introduce Lefebvre to the internal debate of the critical philosophy of law?104 One can refer to Peter Marcuse’s interpretation of the “right to the city” as empty signifier as Marcuse inscribes the Lefebvrian legacy—like

101 T. Paquot, “Urbanizzazione planetaria ed eco-urbanismo sensoriale”, in L’esplosione urbana, monographic issue of “Millepiani-Urban”, n. 1, 2009, Edizioni Eterotopia, Milano, pp. 37–53; S. Chapelle, “Vers un urbanisme sensoriel. Entretien avec Thierry Paquot”, in Mouvements des idées et des luttes, 3 avril 2009, online; Id., L’urbanisme c’est notre affaire!, L’Atalante, Nantes, 2010; Id., Repenser l’urbanisme (sous la direction de), Infolio, Paris, 2013; Id., Désastres urbains. Les villes meurent aussi, La Découverte, Paris, 2015. For a better understanding of the Anglo-Saxon debate, see: N. Brenner, “What is critical urban theory?”, in City, June 2009, Volume 13, n. 2, pp. 198–207. 102 C. Butler, Henri Lefebvre: Spatial Politics, Everyday Life, and the Right to the City, pp. 143–146. On the utopia see: Ibidem, pp. 133–140. 103 Ibidem, p. 145. 104 Ibidem, p. 1.

226

F. BIAGI

Neil Brenner—on the trail of the Urban Critical Theory.105 The American urban planner, in fact, critically attacks on one hand, the concept of “right” and on the other hand that of “city” based on the following interrogations: What kind of “right” is the “right to the city”? What kind of “city” does the “right to the city” refer to”? He answers the first question rebuilding the intellectual foundations of the concept of “right to the city,” that—as we have seen—are grounded on Lefebvre’s reflection of the Sixties, in the well-succeeded attempt to subtract that debate from the exclusive filed of jurisprudence. Marcus, thus, recomposes the pieces of the complex mosaic of the concept of “right to the city” showing how Lefebvre had already drawn a strong content with solid foundations on the critical theory of marxian base. Next, he replies to the second interrogation by recomposing the debate surrounding the industrial problematic of the cities formulated by Engels; actually, he highlights the Lefebvrian reflections regarding the history of the city in the “dark” times of capitalist modernity, and then he proceeds along the course of analysis formulated by Lefebvre, until he reaches an interpretative grid that can photograph the model of the neoliberal city, in continuity with the economical–political restructurings that have occurred so far. It seems to us that most probably Marcuse accomplished the interpretative parable that Merrifield didn’t properly complete. Following Marcuse’s tracks, Christian Schmid opposes the “right to the city” to the current economical–political rhetoric of restructuration and urban valuation. Schmidt’s “right to the city” in fact, becomes a tool of “concrete utopia” that guides the political praxis of all those political subjects who fight the circuits of speculative valuation.106 A similar reference to the profoundly revolutionary and conflictive nature of the “right to the city” is given by Mark Purcell, who denounces the appropriation on the liberal-democratic point of view. In Possible worlds: Henri Lefebvre and the right to the city Purcell underlines the impossibility of separating the “right to the city” from selfmanagement and re-appropriation principles from the bottom of social 105 P. Marcuse, “Whose Right(s) to What City?”, in N. Brenner, P. Marcuse, M. Mayer (edited by), Cities for People, Not for Profit: Critical Urban Theory and the Right to the City, Routledge, London, 2012, pp. 24–41. 106 C. Schmid, “Henri Lefebvre, the Right to the City, and the New Metropolitan Mainstream”, in N. Brenner, P. Marcuse, M. Mayer (edited by), Cities for People, Not for Profit: Critical Urban Theory and the Right to the City, pp. 42–62.

4

UNDERSTANDING THE PRESENT WITH HENRI LEFEBVRE

227

space.107 Purcell’s distancing comprises not only the legislation international processes through the speech of inter-governmental institutions as the United Nations, but also the liberal conception of rights inspired, according to the author, on the idea of sovereignty by John Locke. Purcell, thus, finds in Locke the progenitor of a vision of thought that limits the rights to the exclusive domain of juridical action, denying any space to social conflict the English philosopher is, therefore, representative of a pole that depoliticizes the equalitarian emancipation in the refusal of an insatiable verification of the exercise of rights (as the right to the city) given by shared political action. The American urban planner in fact traces the Lefebvrian critic to the concept of “right,” in favor of a more dynamic conception on philosophical-political grounds, in texts written by young Karl Marx such as On the Jewish Question and Critique of Hegel’s Philosophy of Right. After having re-proposed an identification of the discussion regarding the concept of “right to the city” among the most important interpreters of the international debate, I would like to approach the debate in Italy, despite it still being very scarce and presenting many failures. In our scenery, as I have already mentioned, David Harvey’s secondary literature is copious, despite the fact that Lefebvre’s writings find it more difficult to be published. In fact, the Italian debate, on one hand, faces the same limitations of the British geographer’s proposal, and on the other hand, represents the constant association to generic universalizing opinions. Thus, it is opportune to take some distance from interpretations that refer the “right to the city” concept—almost exclusively—within the juridical domain or within theories of “territorial governance.” There are who think—as is the case of Luigi Mazza—that the “right to the city” is an attempt to expand the social rights in order to “imagine a kind of universal right.”108 A judgment that we can consider the result of a misinterpretation. Lefebvre’s intention isn’t that of adding yet another “right” to a long list of human “rights”; instead, he shows a performative and concrete course of struggle. The “right to the city” in fact “is announced as a plea, as a—social and political—demand”109 ; without a 107 M. Purcell, “Possible Worlds: Henri Lefebvre and the Right to the City”, in Journal of Urban Affairs, Volume 32, n. 1, 2013, pp. 141–154. 108 L. Mazza, Spazio e cittadinanza. Politica e governo del territorio, Donzelli, Roma, 2015, p. 159. 109 H. Lefebvre, “The Right to the City”, in Writing on Cities, p. 158.

228

F. BIAGI

radical critic of the capitalist system there is no space for its real materialization. We are not, therefore, beholding a legal issue, but we are instead facing a philosophical-political one. In other words, the plan of discussion proposed by the “right to the city” is the “Theory of conflicts.” I agree with Mazza when he declares that “the right to the city consists in reappropriating the city and particularly its centrality.” However, the urban planner places the discussion of Lefebvre’s legacy on the perspective of the governance plan of the territory, risking to confirm—in the actual facts— the récupération from above by institutions, in a growing self-destructive vortex that is the profound imprint of the current democratic crisis.110

Conclusion I finally reached the end of the discussion on the “right to the city.” I believe that the vast range of shades of meaning stands out, and how the concept of “right to the city” greatly surpassed the width of Lefebvre’s notions. Finally, I believe it is paramount to point out how, today more than ever, the real overturn on the Lefebvrian studies should be a coherent, aware and precise return to the author’s sources. I believe this is this kind of urgency: allow Lefebvre to speak by rediscovering his texts. The “jungle of the city,” to mention a famous expression by Bertolt Brecht, seems to be mirrored on Lefebvre’s theoretical field, between récupération and interpretations that are still lacking coherence with the philosophical-political intent of the author.

110 L. Mazza, Spazio e cittadinanza. Politica e governo del territorio, p. 161.

CHAPTER 5

Conclusion

Berthold Brecht composed the famous theatrical play In the Jungle of Cities 1 between 1921 and 1923. The first staging took place in 1923 in Monaco. The plot develops in the 1912 Chicago, an emblematic choice since the United States, in the early years of the twentieth century, stood out as hope for the new future that grew mistily and found its way into the dreams of billions of European migrants. Brecht’s city seems to acquire savage tones, as easily inferred from the title, and is easily ascribable to the fact that the metropolis already concentrates various traps, as well as a tropical forest populated by ferocious animals. In this dimension of “nature state” the paradoxes of capitalist development emerge in their full harshness. The city, or better, the figure, in nuce, of the industrial development par excellence between the eighteen-hundreds and the nineteenhundreds, paradoxally acquires primitive facets that will take it back to an actual and concrete Hobbesian state of Nature. In fact, with Brecht, we can affirm that the maximum spatial development of capitalist technique produces scenery of archaism and dark shades, such as the pre-historical violence of man. Therefore, the urban consequences of capitalist progress end up creating a decisively catastrophic scenery. A similar situation of 1 B. Bre cht, “In the Jungle of Cities” (1923), in Collected Plays. Volume One, Methuen, London, 1970, pp. 117–178.

© The Author(s) 2020 F. Biagi, Henri Lefebvre’s Critical Theory of Space, Marx, Engels, and Marxisms, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-52367-1_5

229

230

F. BIAGI

crisis is pinpointed by Lefebvre in the last article he dedicated to the urban question that was published in 1989 under the title Dissolving City, Planetary Metamorphosis.2 As known, the author will pass away on the 29th of June 1991, just a few months before the implosion of the Soviet Union. In this article the city seemingly lives a situation of crisis that resembles the Kampflinie (“line of combat”) of the Kafkian protagonist of the famed tale-parable that is part of the fragments entitled He: “He has two antagonists: the first presses him from behind, from the origin. The second blocks the road ahead. He gives battle to both.” The city is thus in imbalance, according to Lefebvre, and the linear time of capitalist progress is leading it to the abyss: “serious dangers weigh upon the city in general and upon each city in particular. These dangers are aggravated daily. Cities are made doubly dependent upon technocracy and bureaucracy in a word, upon institutions.”3 The subjects that cause the catastrophic situation are obvious: the technocracy of architects and urban planners and the bureaucracy of state institutions. The Hagetmau author notices that the discipline of “urban sociology” hasn’t developed an actual critical point of view: as a result, it turned into urban planning science that ended up becoming exclusively “a kind of gospel for technocrats.”4 The city, therefore, ruled by the technocratic power, becomes institutionalized and turns into a mere reflection of the central state administrative paper work, “the customs of management and domination associated with the State’s bureaucratic hierarchy.”5 Urban planning development consequently continues to be imposed from above from a “functionalist” perspective and subaltern to the market demands. Lefebvre anticipates the neoliberal overturn of the spatial organization of the city and, somewhat pessimistically, on one hand, urges the

2 H. Lefebvre, “Quand la ville se perd dans une métamorphose planétaire”, in Le Monde diplomatique, May 1989, pp. 16–17. Republished in Manière de voir n. 114, special issue of Le Monde diplomatique, December 2010–January 2011, pp. 20–23. English trans. by Laurent Corroyer, Marianne Potvin, Neil Brenner: H. Lefebvre, “Dissolving City, Planetary Metamorphosis”, in Environment and Planning D: Society and Space, Volume, 32, n. 2, 2014, pp. 203–205. 3 H. Lefebvre, “Dissolving City, Planetary Metamorphosis”, p. 204. 4 Ibidem, p. 204. 5 Ibidem.

5

CONCLUSION

231

continuation of the urban critical path and of the everyday life critique;6 on the other hand he point out that urban planning is deteriorating men’s social life: and it perseveres in the conservation of “relations of dependence, domination, exclusion, and exploitation.”7 He highlights the “ecologic question” that rises to the level of genuine political urgency, with much more strength than in his whole intellectual production.8 However, Lefebvre doesn’t problematize it comprehensively. If a limit on Lefebvre’s thought was to be pointed out it would be precisely that of only mentioning environmental problems as he highlighted the erosion of the rural world operated by the capitalist urbanization. What is most enlightening, instead, to the economical-political axis following his death is the reflection that connects technological development and the changes of the working world and urban spatiality.9 Shortly after, Lefebvre sticks to refer briefly the spatial changes that are emerging. He isolates two of them: “the gentrification (embourgeoisement ) of city centers” and the resulting process of economic valuation of historical centers emptied of inhabitants so as to become “places of leisure, of empty and unscheduled time […] in the process of deteriorating and perhaps disappearing.”10 The banishment process of popular classes from historical centers started with Haussmann, and went on until the end of the “Short Century,” “exporting—or more accurately deporting—to the suburbs” the more destitute social groups and next built the axis of their “return” “as tourists to the center from which they had been dispossessed and expropriated.”11 Urban space, as a result, in order to be valued by capitalism should undergo a process of drainage of meaning: no longer a place to live or inhabiting, but fetish of merchandizes, so as to use Karl Marx’s lexicon, from which to take advantage through the spectacularization of its historical roots.12 These dynamics will produce a

6 Ibidem., p. 203. 7 Ibidem. 8 Ibidem, p. 205. 9 See: Ibidem, pp. 203–204. 10 Ibidem. 11 Ibidem. 12 The reference to Debord is obvious. In 1988 the situationist author published the Comments on the Society of the Spectacle, in which he updates his thesis theorizing the

232

F. BIAGI

distrustful speech on what pertains to the actual possibilities of still overturning the power relations of space production: “The urban, conceived and lived as a social practice, is in the process of deteriorating and perhaps disappearing.”13 Lefebvre, despite the dark shades by the end of the text makes an appeal: “Several well-known but somewhat neglected forms— such as associative life or grassroots democracy (autogestion)—must be reinstated as key priorities; they assume new meanings when applied to the ‘urban.’ The question then is to know if social and political action can be formulated and rearticulated in relation to specific problems that, even if they are concrete, concern all dimensions of everyday life.”14 In my opinion, these few lines enfold his challenge to the neoliberal city that he leaves as legacy to posterity, and this heritage, despite the melancholic tones of his analysis, doesn’t renounce to insist on the revolutionary political practices that are characteristic of the “right to the city.” It is a mistake, I think, to depict a surrender of Lefebvre’s critical stance in face of the worsening of the planetary urban set up. On the contrary, there’s a need to problematize, from the political point of view, the melancholy and the emerging pessimism. And it should be made clear that in Lefebvre there is no nostalgia regarding the Fordist city.15 More than all, Lefebvre’s condemnation of the grands ensembles of urban functionalism is developed precisely because of the loss of urban centrality that the more destitute groups have been subjected to. Unfortunately, centrality almost never belonged to the workers except in rare cases, as for instance the communard insurgence months; in fact, the Fordist city already holds in itself the will to expropriate social space from the inhabitants and the

concept of “Integrated Spectacle” to define the new totalitarian capitalist regime produced by the victory of the consumerist society. 13 H. Lefebvre, “Dissolving City, Planetary Metamorphosis”, p. 204. In this passage, Niccolò Cuppini, in his long introduction to the Italian translation of the Lefebvrian text, foresees a point of weakness in the author’s intellectual framework, and highlights Lefebvre’s pessimism not only in his theoretical analysis, but also in the concrete antagonistic social practices of the urbanization processes. See: Id., “Una città-pianeta? Introduzione alla traduzione di: ‘Quand la ville se perd dans la métamorphose planétaire’”, in Scienza&Politica, Volume XXIV, n. 56, 2017, p. 232. 14 H. Lefebvre, “Dissolving City, Planetary Metamorphosis”, p. 205. 15 I point out the opposing interpretation to mine by Cuppini who refers a Lefebvre

that is nostalgic of the Fordist city and of the proletarian world of that time. See: N. Cuppini, “Una città-pianeta? Introduzione alla traduzione di: ‘Quand la ville se perd dans la métamorphose planétaire’”, p. 226, footnote 8.

5

CONCLUSION

233

popular classes that inhabit the metropolis. The author has no doubts about this: fordist functionalism (and thus the fordist city) is one of the hugest attempts to subtract spatiality from those who, on the contrary, the autonomous and democratic management of the “city as oeuvre” should be assigned. The gentrification, suburbanization, and industrialization processes are the corresponding dialectic evolution of the antagonist attempts that developed with the fordist city. The dark scenery depicted by Lefebvre is the reactionary response to the resistance pole to which the author had conferred political dignity in the meaning of “right to the city.” In other words, is one wishes to mention “melancholy” and “pessimism” in Lefebvre, it is necessary to register that phase limiting it to this article, that is, to his three last years of life. His theoretical production is still strongly optimistic: the “revolutionary romanticism” inherited by the artistic avant-gardes and Nietzsche’s “heroic vitalism” in fact depict the background inside which the author places the theater of the resistance conflict to the form of the capitalist city. The utopian appeal to build new possible situations carries on firmly, as we have read above, in the article of Le Monde. We’ve drawn the boundaries of that “melancholic” phase within the awareness of a new phenomenon of urban restructuration, ongoing in the Eighties, and now we can determine in what kind of posture pessimism occurs. Above all, it emerges on the vortex of urban functionalism “counter-revolution.” The paradigm of Fordist modernity turned “urban sociology” into “urban planning” (that is, into a science that is no longer mainly “critical” and “political”) and found new means to value capitalistically the urban space and insist on the processes of récupération of space. The increase of exploitation, the changes produced on the working world by technological development, the processes of touristification of the city center, the deterioration of social relations within the urban sphere and finally, the banishment of the more destitute to peripheral marginalization are the devices that Lefebvre defines as the enactment of the Fordist and functionalist project into a new economical–political scenery that, because of his age, he won’t be able to grasp. Here, there is no sort of nostalgia for an idyllic past; his realizing a defeat doesn’t translate as a position of mistrust in the fate of the “urban,” however, his posture is not yet at all one of humiliation. Lefebvre’s “melancholy” seems to be similar to formulation Enzo Traverso offers: its meaning expresses an

234

F. BIAGI

actual “tragic age of wrecked revolutions and defeated utopias, remembering the vanquished of its lost battles.”16 So, it’s about “the aesthetic dimension of a work of mourning that affects the culture of the left”17 at the end of last century. Likewise, the Hagetmau philosopher notices that the perspective of spatial studies is experiencing that “crisis of the absence” that nowadays is part of the entire cultural and political expertise of critical thinking. The “melancholy” pointed out by Traverso in its political and anthropological status can be, instead the adequate starting point to understand into what direction the moment—always opened to new utopian temporalities— of social subversion of the dominant spatial stand is blowing. His “melancholy” isn’t renounce, but a means to include into the philosophical thought the moment of crisis that concrete reality is undergoing. That is the fil rouge presented by Lefebvre by means of an appeal to give new breath, through the tools of action to the communal life of self-management: like Hannah Arendt, we could say “to the beingwith-in-a-shared-world of men” that take back, in antithesis to the “dark times,” the “lost treasure” of (urban) revolution. Again, it is the political action that is assigned to the way-out of capitalist progress. It is the beginning of the concrete utopian moment that shatters the linear rule of merchandized time. Lefebvre puts his trust on the common action to reassemble the dissociation between “the citizen (citoyen) and the city dweller (citadin).”18 To finalize, in this regard Lefebvre succeeds in expanding the spatial meaning of the “Right to the city” into “a revolutionary concept of citizenship.”19 Both levels intersect and complete, one after the other,

16 E. Traverso, Left-Wing Melancholia: Marxism, History and Memory, Columbia University Press, New York, 2017, p. 117. 17 Ibidem. 18 H. Lefebvre, “Dissolving City, Planetary Metamorphosis”, p. 205. 19 Ibidem. Conversely, Cuppini maintains that the Hagetmau philosopher would have

placed “the right to the city no longer in spatial terms but in a mostly political domain.” It is somewhat mistaken to affirm that the “mostly political” plan is (solely) that of citizenship. In fact, it would seem that the spatial dimension is not that “political” as the citizenship sphere is. Resuming the confrontation with Balibar that I developed in the fourth chapter, according to Cuppini Lefebvre’s droit à la ville would solve itself in Balibar’s droit de cité (Id., “Una città-pianeta? Introduzione alla traduzione di: ‘Quand la ville se perd dans la métamorphose planétaire’”, p. 226, footnote 8). Nevertheless it is the droit à la ville that through its performative action in everyday life, leads the social conflict to a higher leveluntil reaching a definition of the droit de citè. To get a more

5

CONCLUSION

235

however, it is the social conflict on the organization of space that reactivates the spiral of political fight for citizenship and not the other way round. We may, or we may not share the primacy of Lefebvre’s spatial analysis—for instance, Manuel Castells in The Urban Question strongly criticizes the Hagetmau theoretician—, nevertheless its it still is, to the core, the eminently political scenery, par excellence. Lefebvre’s original contribution to the internal debate of the Marxist and urban studies domain stands out particularly for having emphasized the paramount importance of the spatial dimension in the modernity of the “short century.” To Lefebvre, space is the fundamental key to reading and interpreting political economy, in antithesis to the superficial rhetoric that was developed around the “right to the city” and the “quality of life.” This is to me the innovative leap of the Lefebvrian theory that is to be faced, on one hand, within the boundaries of the urban studies, and on the other hand, within the recent internal debate of the so-called Marx renaissance.

comprehensive notion of the «citizenship» concept in Lefebvre it would be useful to refer to the collective work he conducted with the group of studies in Navarrenx. During those seminars of reflection that were later published on the volume Du contrat de citoyenneté Lefebvre tries to imagine new social institutions: from an integral idea of the concrete man that holds rights a new possible social contract is designed, one that is no longer based on the abstract foundations of liberalism, but on the constant reference to everyday life experience. Finally a concept of “right” that isn’t satisfied on the juridical hypostatization, since its meaning is expanded to the political action of men in constant reference to the critique of an abstract idea of citizenship formulated by Marx. See: H. Lefebvre et le Groupe de Navarrenx, Du contrat de citoyenneté, Syllepse, Paris, 1990.