Nadal

Henri Lefebvre's Spatial Corrections:
The Event as a Non-Philosophical Totality

The limitations of philosophy-truth without reality are always and ever
counterbalance the limitations of everyday life-reality without truth

      Henri Lefebvre, Everyday Life in the Modern World


This paper will focus on Henri Lefebvre's theorization of the
"everyday" and his disavowal, and defetishization, of the surrealist
tradition, to which he originally adhered.  Lefebvre's disavowal, I
will suggest, is put into practice by the Situationists (who, for a
while, became the praxis of Lefebvrian theory), in their rarely
acknowledged resistance to the surreal contemplation of the city as a
Bretonian collection of fetishized sites and their recovery of the
city as a temporal site for a Lukcsean totality.  This totality, as I
will try to demonstrate, is often assimilated into the Lefebvrian
coding of "everydaylife--" two utopian concepts that are key for an
understanding of the realist project.  Thus "Social Time and the
Invention of the Everyday," will work on the following hypothesis:
whether Lefebvre takes a utopian or a materialist-empiricist turn, a
philosophical or a sociological one in his theorization of the
"everyday," the temporality of realism and its dialectic nature become
an inescapable re ferent.  The fact that Lefebvre refused to specify
what kind of "work of art," "oeuvre," is enacted in the city and the
everyday as the focus of a political praxis can be accounted for by
considering the violent attacks realism suffered in France after the
advent of the nouveau roman (notably in Robbe-Grillet's manifesto).
Realism may have been out of the question as literary style.
Nevertheless, I will suggest, Lefebvre's project depends on a realist
epistemology (which includes and goes beyond realism as a style) for
its articulation.  One cannot help but ask the question:  If the city
is a work of art, what kind of work of art is it?  Could it be a
realist oeuvre?  My claim in this chapter will be that if the everyday
as a philosophical concept, in Lefebvre's words, designates "for and
by philosophy the non-philosophical" it does so in a realist fashion.
For only realism sustains a claim to truth, akin to philosophy's,
while remaining empiricist and materialist (almost sociological) in
its pursuits.  The eve ryday is, for Lefebvre, neither philosophical
nor non-philosophical but rather the outcome of a dialectical tension
between the two.  Likewise realism is neither real nor unreal but
rather the product of realism's dialectical tension with its object
and referent, the reality of the everyday.  This parallelism
underlines the empiricist and utopian nature of the realist project
and its genealogy within Marxist theory.