Writings of Henri Lefebvre and Geographers Understanding of the Modern City - Essay Example

Henri Lefebvre (1901-1991) was a French philosopher once connected with the Parti Communiste Francais who wrote several influential works on the nature of the city and the role of spaces in modern geographical thought. Born in the south of France just after the turn of the century, Lefebvre was witness to the “modernization of French everyday life, the industrialization of the economy and suburbanization of its cities.  In the process, the rural way of life of the traditional peasant was destroyed” (Ross 1996). His many works include The Philosophy of Consciousness (1925), Morceaux choises de Karl Marx (1934), Morceaux choises de Hegel (1938), L’Existentialisme (1946), Knowledge and Social Criticism, Philosophic Thought in France and the USA (1950), Introduction to Modernity: Twelve Preludes (1962), Dialectical Materialism (1968), Evolution or Revolution (1974), Toward a Leftist Cultural Politics: Remarks Occasioned by the Centenary of Marx’s Death (1988), The Critique of Everyday Life (1991) and Writings on Cities published posthumously in 1996. It was through the translation and wide distribution of Dialectical Materialism that he became known worldwide as the father of the dialectic yet has also been hailed as the pioneer of critiques of the city and the ‘spatial turn’ in theory. Following World War II, Lefebvre was greatly impacted by the depression of the people around him who felt alienated from the new forms of work in the newly industrialized nation as well as by the new bureaucratic institutions of civil society. His writings exploring the ideas of Marx and Hegel were burned by the Vichy Regime during World War II and he was persecuted as a Communist sympathizer following the war. It wasn’t until the 1960s that he finally found a position as a professor at a school called Nanterre back in Paris where he was able to continue his work into the study of the cities. “Nanterre provided an environment in which he developed his critique of the alienation of modern city life which was obscured by the mystifications of the consumerism and the mythification of Paris by the heritage and tourism industries.  These critiques of the city were the basis for Lefebvres investigation of the cultural construction of stereotypical notions of cities, of nature and of regions” (Shields, 2002). Within his writings, Lefebvre brought attention to the tendency of academia to place too much emphasis upon the classification of studies as being psychology, sociology, archeology or geography among others, that all had as their end goal a study and understanding of space and other human geography issues. He was also among the first philosophers to use the term ‘globalisation’ as a result of observations made during his international travels. In analyzing city life, Lefebvre argued ‘everydayness’ or banality is a soul-destroying feature of modernity and extended Marxs analysis of this concept by discovering new forms of alienation within the city. According to him, capitalism produces several types of alienation in workers as a result of organizing production in an exploitive manner with the end result being every aspect of life becomes empty of meaning or significance. According to this view, consumption is part of the result of a failure to recognize this alienated state on the part of the modern consumer, which Lefebvre called the ‘mystification’ of consciousness (Shields, 2002).  This early work influenced Walter Benjamins Marxist analysis of culture as well as reflecting Le Bon’s work on crowds and the furtherance of psychogeography. “Psychogeography is one antithetical pole among many which realizes the conflict between our idealized role as citizens and our subjectivity arising from the material conditions of our life” (Psycho geography, 2005). In discussing the affect of the crowd on the individual, Le Bon wrote, “The substitution of the unconscious action of crowds for the conscious activity of individuals is one of the principal characteristics of the present age” (1895). In discussing space, Lefebvre delineated three key components of the urban lifestyle. These components include the perceived space of everyday social life that was predominantly ignored by professional life, the conceived space of cartographers and planners who work to segregate portions of land out to particular private owners within the capitalistic society, and lived space which exists in the imagination of the fully human individual who keeps it alive through accessibility to the arts and humanities. “This third space not only transcends but has the power to refigure the balance of popular perceived space and the conceived space of arrogant professionals and greedy capitalists” (Shields, 2002). This conceptual space, as opposed to material space, is considered by Lefebvre to be of much greater significance to the shaping of the individual as is shown in the comment: “space as directly lived through its associated images and symbols, and hence the space of ‘inhabitants’ and ‘users’...  This is the dominated...space which the imagination seeks to change and appropriate.  It overlays physical space, making symbolic use of its objects.  Thus representational spaces may be said...to tend towards more of less coherent systems of non-verbal symbols and signs” (Lefebvre, 1991). In terms of organized society, Lefebvre indicated this conscious awareness of these representational spaces as illuminated through art and the humanities was the only way in which Utopia could be reached. Within the French society of the interwar period, Lefebvre pointed to the dystopian malaise of his fellow countrymen as they struggled through periods of famine and industrial transition as well as the later society in which the urban landscape changed the rural nature of his homeland to develop his rhythmanalysis. Through this analysis of the ‘everyday’ life of the city, Lefebvre indicates that the increases in speed seen through our advances in technology have quickened the tempo of the ‘everyday’, making it harder to keep up with both the changing rhythms of the city as well as the changing dynamics of the individual within that city. The speed of our communications allows one to ‘be’ a part of an event without actually being in the same physical location, introducing an element of superficiality and dissociation that contributes further to our sense of alienation within the ever-increasing measure. Because of this increase in ‘false’ participation, enlightenment, that state in which the discovery of the natural laws that govern human beings and adherence to them will lead to an orderly, equitable and prosperous society, is not possible because the natural laws are not available through the created mediums used in the modern society. The absence from the ‘real’ prevents the necessary participation required to escape from the rhythm of the collective. This concept of modern concrete spaces and their interrelationship with the conceptual interior spaces that have been defined within the modern context have helped human geographers to further explore these relationships regarding how we see the world around us. Through further study, it becomes increasingly obvious that these spaces serve to define us as individuals and as a society, causing us to often behave in manners that might not have occurred to us otherwise. In addition, changes to the physical spaces in which we conduct business can have profound impact on the way in which we perceive conceptual spaces of time and place. References Le Bon, Gustav. (1895). The Crowd: A Study of the Popular Mind. Retrieved 12 January, 2006 from Lefebvre, Henri. (1991). The Production of Space. Trans. N. Donaldson. Oxford: Basil Blackwell. Psychogeography. (2005). Ross, K. (October, 1996).  Fast Cars, Clean Bodies: Decolonization and the reordering of French Culture. Cambridge Mass.: MIT Press. Shields, Rob. (2002). Henri Lefebvre: Philosopher of Everyday Life. Carleton University. Ottawa, Canada. Retrieved 12 January, 2006 from Read More