In the mid to late 1920s the Communist International entered a stage of provisional stabilization. At this time, many young intellectuals were drawn to Marxism and they brought to Party politics a renewed interest in theoretical analysis. Henri Lefebvre joined the Parti Communiste Français (PCF) at the same time as did his fellow Philosophes – a group of French intellectuals named after the short-lived journal they produced and forerunners of existentialist philosophy – and shortly following the adherence of the Surrealists. As with many Western Marxists, art was central to Lefebvre's conception of historical materialism.[1]
Indeed, Lefebvre's biographer, Rémi Hess, asserts that Lefebvre's lifelong preoccupation was with the possibility of living one's life lucidly as a work of art.[2] Of the Dada artist Tzara, Lefebvre said: "From the beginning, what I liked most about Tristan Tzara was that he could do without writing. His work was his life and his life was his work, that is, a certain way of living."[3] Lefebvre's approach to culture, art and social transformation was always at the heart of his Marxism. As he wrote in 1959:
"I became a Marxist in the name of a revolutionary romanticism that comprises a radical and total refusal of things as they are. I did not enter the party to make politics, but because Marxism announced the end of politics."[4]
He wrote later that he joined the PCF in part because of his interest in Eisenstein, Mayakovsky, Yessenin and others.[5] Lefebvre's concern with aesthetics is thus embedded within a broad conception of Marxism which does not conceive of art as a mere epiphenomenal concern; aesthetics is not separate from revolutionary politics. Correspondingly, Lefebvre wrote a number of works specifically on art and culture, the most prominent of which are Rabelais et l'émergence du capitalisme (written 1949-53, published 1955), Contribution à l'esthétique (1953), Musset (1955), Pignon (1956), Trois textes pour le théâtre (1972) and La Présence et l'absence (1980). Beyond these specific works, many of his other writings consider cultural theory as a fundamental aspect of his critical theory. This essay will argue that aesthetics holds a prominent place in Lefebvre's work, and that his interest in the field is fundamental to understanding the works by him that have been influential in cultural theory in recent years, such as La Critique de la vie quotidienne (1947), La Vie quotidienne dans le monde moderne (1968), La Révolution urbaine (1970), and La Production de l'espace (1974). The failure to recognize this continuity in his thought has been caused by a failure to undertake a Marxist interpretation of his postwar writings on culture. Central to Lefebvre's work, and consistent throughout, is a critical theory of cultural activity in relation to capitalist commodification. Through the theory of 'moments,' Lefebvre developed a concept of art that is related to historical process and economic alienation, but which also, in its dependence on the material basis of everyday life and its difference from other registers of social life, represents a disalienation of the familiar through the fulfilment of species being, that is, through the creative transformation of the everyday.
Excepting the Work on Art and Culture
Despite Lefebvre's evident involvement with questions of aesthetics, no significant scholarly attention has been given to his cultural theory within the history of Marxist art criticism or elsewhere. On the basis of the reception of his work, it is evident that the 'cultural' works – the literary portraits and the Contribution à l'esthétique – have been retrospectively interpreted in the light of their historical location as the product of an embattled PCF intellectual and also as the product of a man needing to earn a living in the decade after the Second World War. After Lefebvre's break with the PCF in 1958, his cultural and aesthetic writings turned towards a revolutionary romanticism that was not as cramped by Party guidelines as were his writings from the 1940s and 1950s. His break with and subsequent expulsion from the PCF were marked by two publications, Problèmes actuels du marxisme (1958) and his then well-received autobiography, La Somme et le reste (1959), texts that examined problems that could not be openly addressed while still a Party member. Given his attempt to understand his personal situation in relation to historical conjunctures, his autobiography could also be considered one of his literary portraits. Lefebvre's ideas on art are still of interest today in that they provide an approach to aesthetics which is materialist but non-reductive, and which is able to account for specificities of time, place and subjectivity within cultural production. If Lefebvre's contribution to aesthetic theory has been overshadowed by the importance that is generally given to his focus on alienation and everyday life, it is appropriate to consider the context in which his work was produced so that text and context may together reinscribe the untimeliness that cast his work into the obscurity they were written to illuminate.
Lefebvre's principal aesthetic writings were produced within the last decade of his involvement with the PCF and bear the scars of his compliance with Party discipline. Given the fact these works attempted to finesse a critical theory within the terms of Socialist Realism, they have not since received critical attention. Furthermore, few have discerned that his work was Socialist Realist in name only, since it bore little resemblance to official Soviet cultural policy, but with its dissident emphasis on Hegelian and humanist Marxism was more in keeping with avant-garde modernism. One marked characteristic of his writing at this time is its popular character – the works were produced as accessible Marxist studies of famous French figures. The accessible character of the cultural writings, their context as works produced during Lefebvre's strained relation to the Party, the concurrence of other theoretical contributions and the notoriety of his role in the student movement of the late 1960s have together allowed scholars to gloss over the question of culture in his postwar writings.
These various factors have made it difficult to determine the significance of Lefebvre's contribution to aesthetics in the immediate postwar period and the relation of these writings to materialist cultural theory. The slight influence they have had on Marxist aesthetic theory does not require that we resurrect a forgotten Lefebvre, but, by considering the context in which he wrote, we can begin to understand the discursive parameters within which his work could be produced and why it is that it has not received more critical attention.
Mark Poster provides an early example of the historical reception of Lefebvre's aesthetic writing, arguing that "a glance at his long publication list reveals that Lefebvre retreated to the relatively uncontroversial sphere of literary criticism (a tactic also used by Lukács in a time of political orthodoxy) from the years of his auto-critique until his break with the CP in 1956."[6]
Poster's estimation that the aesthetic works were uncontroversial ignores the fact that PCF officials withheld his Contribution à l'esthétique for three years before allowing it to be published and subsequently translated into as many as twenty languages.[7] For him, the significance of writings like the Contribution is not their content, but their status as part of Lefebvre's strategy within Party politics. In other words, one is left to speculate that had he not stayed in the PCF as long as he did, had he left sooner, along with other intellectuals like Sartre, the cultural works would not have been written.
In his book on French Marxism, Michael Kelly also dismisses Lefebvre's aesthetic theory, suggesting that it was something like a displaced activity at a time when Party discipline prevented him from addressing more serious concerns:
"Lefebvre realized that fundamental divergences remained between his position and that of his Party comrades. His 'clarification' on the materialist dialectic [from the autocritique of 1949] contained only the bare minimum acknowledgement of them. For the following half dozen years he avoided any major work on the question, preferring to direct his attention rather to sociology and aesthetics than philosophy as such."[8]
Kelly misses the point that Lefebvre never concerned himself with "mere" sociology and aesthetics. By underestimating the theoretical position of the aesthetic works within PCF politics and attributing them to a postwar patriotism, Kelly avoids any serious considerations of the role of art within Lefebvre's Marxist theory.[9] The dismissal of the category of art is also evident in Michel Trebitsch's comment: "Between 1948 and 1957 he did not publish a single work of Marxist theory, unless one takes the view that his 'literary studies' on Diderot, Pascal, Musset and Rabelais were in fact indirect reflections on the dialectic of nature, alienation and the individual."[10]
The more recent monograph on Lefebvre by Rob Shields displays a comparable lack of interest in these works and offers only a passing mention of their relation to broader themes in Lefebvre's writings. In contrast to Poster and others, however, Shields perceptively attributes the cultural works to a "radicalized romanticism," but describes these as "mere interpretations" and adds no further comment, least of all about their relation to Party politics.[11] It is to this latter context that we can look for some indications of Lefebvre's motivations at the time.
Mired in the Struggle
In the period between 1939 and 1956, the fortunes of French Communism went through various ups and downs: the PCF was declared illegal in 1939; its literature was banned by the Vichy government in 1942; Resistance members and Communists were celebrated in 1945; in 1947, PCF officials were expelled from government and Marxists were barred from the Sorbonne; in 1956 they regained prestige with their opposition to colonial conflict in Algeria and Egypt. Because of his involvement with the Party, Lefebvre experienced these events in a very direct way. His career as a Party intellectual was at its height in the short period between 1945 and 1947, but was troubled thereafter. In 1947, at the onset of the Cold War, the PCF adopted Soviet Zhdanovism along with a number of related official theoretical positions. Zhdanov's Report of 1947, a rejoinder to Truman's Marshall Plan, divided the world into 'two camps' and pitted the Soviet Union against the United States. Operating within the 'imperialist camp,' the PCF was to spearhead the struggle against the American domination of Europe. In order to combat internal deviationism, the PCF leadership became especially dogmatic in matters of political ideology. If many of Lefebvre's writings in cultural theory have not outlived their moment, it is largely due to their function as intellectual counterpoints to Soviet policy in matters of Marxist philosophy at this time.
Zhdanovism describes bourgeois aesthetic forms as mechanistically determined superstructural reflections of bourgeois political economy. In relation to this, a revolutionary art (such as Socialist Realism in the Soviet Union) becomes a prescriptive doctrine that determines art forms in terms of accessible and politically exemplary content. One of the doctrines that followed cultural Zhdanovism was Lyssenkoism – a dogmatic theory which held to an absolute difference between 'bourgeois' and 'proletarian' science. The science debate revolved around the figure of Lyssenko, who rejected new developments in hybrid wheat (developed in the United States) as undialectical. As an article of Lyssenkoist dogma, hybrid wheat could not contribute to communist society because it was a product of American science, and American science, according to the doctrine of 'two camps' could only be bourgeois science. For Lefebvre, as for many dissenters, the rejection of chromosomal science reduced species to static forms and as such denied heredity as a dialectical process.
Involved with agricultural communities and rural sociology at that time, Lefebvre dreaded the rejection of new methods that could improve the lives of whole populations and made efforts to denounce Lyssenkoism as non-dialectical.[12] The 'two sciences' debate carried on into the early 1950s and was reinforced by the Party's uncritical acceptance of Stalin's writings on dialectical materialism and linguistics. One of the positions adopted by the PCF was that the social sciences were not, or rather, should be made scientifically objective by eliminating their class character and making them properly proletarian.[13] For Lefebvre, the question became instead whether or not art-as-superstructure was distinct from other forms of knowledge, and he made some efforts to address this problem in the Contribution. His overall position was that the separation between the two sciences had become accepted without critical examination. The literary studies and works on aesthetics were his contributions to the active struggle with Zhdanovism and Lyssenkoism within the French Communist Party.[14]
Lefebvre's first effort in this direction was his book on Descartes, published in 1947. The project, as he stated, was to sweeten a complex theoretical programme through accessible writing. Accessible works, a Zhdanovist principle, were required by the Party at the time. What Lefebvre added to this, however, was a twist in the orthodoxy of class position through Lenin's notion that the idealist philosophers (Spinoza, Leibniz) approached materialism through their idealist sides.[15] Lefebvre's cultural works, then, starting with the book on Descartes, addressed the contributions of bourgeois idealist thought to the development of materialism. In taking this approach, Lefebvre confounded expectations of class representativity.[16] The subsequent work on Diderot (1949) contained a related programme: to show how Diderot's thought exceeds a mechanistic form of materialism and contains elements of dialectics. Without doubt, this approach had some bearings on Lefebvre's defense of Hegelian dialectics, which PCF members believed was no longer relevant since the question of Hegel had been settled with Marx's inversion of the dialectic. The orthodox Stalinist view on dialectical materialism was that Marx had prefigured the historical inevitability of the dictatorship of the proletariat, and all that the Party needed to do was to work towards this end. By contrast, Lefebvre never adopted the static model of dialectical materialism, but believed that events could change the direction of theory and that levels of alienation would continue to exist even in a socialist society.
While Lefebvre insisted on remaining with the PCF during this period, he did so in a prolonged effort to contribute to its theoretical and political developement. In the opening epigraphs to the Contribution à l'esthétique, Lefebvre cites Zhdanov on Socialist Realism and Marx on art in general. The line attributed to Marx, "Art is the greatest joy man gives himself," was invented by Lefebvre as a token of his non-adherence to Stalinism.[17] The quote from Zhdanov was necessary as part of a strategy to save the book from censorship.[18] One of the pointed ironies of this juxtaposition was its attack on the moralistic outlook of Zhdanovism, which generally refused sexual themes as well as the possibility of sensuous pleasure being derived from art and also judged it by its putative contribution to a model of human progress that culminated in the Soviet state.
The cultural works were thus microcosms of broader but not more significant philosophical differences between Lefebvre and Party officials. As Lefebvre wrote:
"Art and the forms of art break with life and return to it, after a series of ascending and descending spirals in the prestigious sky of forms... Philosophically formulated, this intuition foresees or announces that the 'reversal' of philosophy effectuated by Marx in relation to the Hegelian system will spread to all of the so-called superior activities. The problem of 'reversal' does not limit itself to philosophy. At any given time, psychology and the aesthetic encounter it."[19]
This statement expresses his belief that Marx had not superseded philosophy in favour of economic and political theory. Rather, the emphasis on the Hegelian notion of Aufhebung – both to surpass and to preserve at a higher level – means that philosophy is preserved and surpassed in the method of dialectical materialism. Lefebvre's polemic was aimed at an undialectical reductionism. His theory held that the proletariat is a critical negation of the existing conditions of capitalism and not an empirically fixed guarantor of revolutionary progress.
From Critique to Contribution
With his work on aesthetic theory, Lefebvre attempted to bring philosophical considerations to bear on the reductive version of dialectical materialism that was common with Party officials and subordinate intellectuals in the postwar period. Lefebvre's Contribution à l'esthétique was written at the same time as the Critique de la vie quotidienne and also in the same period as Mikhail Lifshits' 500-page publication on Marxist aesthetics, Marx-Engels über Kunst und Literatur (1949). Lefebvre developed his most significant contribution to Marxist thinking, the materialist conception of everyday life, at the same time as his more popular writings on art and literature. The Contribution and the Critique should therefore be thought of as related but not analogous texts.
In The Critique of Everyday Life, Lefebvre outlined not only a critical theory of capitalist society, but also a number of important reflections on the art of the twentieth century which cannot be found in the Contribution. Perhaps most controversial is his polemic against Surrealist practices, which he criticized for repudiating everyday life and humanity itself rather than transforming the world. In a reference to Marx's critique of Eugène Sue's novels, Lefebvre stated that the Surrealists "promised a new world, but they delivered 'mysteries of Paris'."[20] He contrasted this with Brecht's work, which went beyond transparency and attempted a more serious project of clarifying contradictions and struggling against alienation. Lefebvre's innovation with the Critique was to argue that the everyday was not necessarily known. Although conceptions of the everyday could be found in the work of Nietzsche, Simmel, the Surrealists, Lukács and Heidegger, Lefebvre sought to align it with the notion of alienation rather than the banal or the trivial. The everyday in this sense becomes dialectically bound up with the potential for disalienation, for an opening onto new possibilities. Lefebvre wished to elevate the category of the lived or the concrete to a theoretical level without at the same time overestimating it, as phenomenology had done.[21] As early as the mid-1930s, Lefebvre explored the reasons why the working class was not conscious of the mechanisms of its own exploitation. In La Conscience mystifiée (1936), as well as Le Matérialisme dialectique (1939), he developed the theme of alienation, which alone could explain capitalist social relations and which drew from Marx's early philosophical works. In rejecting the Surrealists' poetic solutions to alienation, Lefebvre attempted to develop some theoretical tools for a new approach to art theory and production.[22] While his work on aesthetics coincides with the PCF's adoption of Zhdanovist reductionism, he nevertheless sought to engage with the debates on Socialist Realism, which he distinguished himself from by using the term 'new realism.' In the next few lines, I focus on a number of key aspects of the Contribution and follow this with some remarks on Lukács. The Critique, nevertheless, remains an important companion in the writing of Lefebvre's aesthetic theory.
Addressing the notion of the specificity of art, Lefebvre cautiously considers art's connection with knowledge. The theory of knowledge, he argues, is merely logical and abstract if it does not engage with living thought and with the concrete world. As such, the theory of knowledge should elucidate and orient practice. A reciprocal movement exists between concrete knowledge of the world and the theory of knowlede. In a similar manner, philosophical thought moves between living art and the theory of art. There is therefore for Lefebvre a theory of art that corresponds to dialectical materialism. In contrast to some of his contemporaries, Lefebvre argued that there can be no Marxist art as such, but that there is a Marxist theory of art. In presenting this similarity between art and knowledge, he suggests modeling the Marxist history of art on the materialist history of philosophy. He writes:
"The history of philosophy ... establishes in a materialist and dialectical manner, will demonstrate how certain philosophical ideas (those of the dominant class, or ascendant, or declining) have acted on writers and artists; they have always folded themselves in with the ideological content of works of art. And this, however, without allowing us to define art as the incarnation of ideology, as the conception of the social world of a social class, which confuses art with ideology and its history with the history of knowledge."[23]
He breaks therefore with the division between a philosophy of aesthetics and aesthetic practice.
Lefebvre's method at this time was sociological and historical. Inasmuch as his work addressed social structure, he gave priority to the contingent, the conjunctural, and the possible, over any notion of fixed determinant forms operating as inflexible laws. For Lefebvre, structure is provisional and variable, and ephemeral moment that tends towards freedom, involves personal reflection and is sensed as lived bodily experience. In the end, it is not so much the beauty of theory that is important. As Rob Shields puts it, for Lefebvre "it is what happens that counts, not the temporal qualities of our experience of events."[24] In relation to art, the practice of the new realism contains philosophical reflection within itself and opens onto the consciousness of its own practical activity; it becomes scientific in a Marxist sense. As such, it tends towards a consideration of all developments in theory and practice, as does science. Lefebvre warns that knowledge, however, weighs heavily on the practice of contemporary art and risks interrupting experimentation. As a materialist practice, the new realism throws a retroactive light on the art of the past and discovers in art a struggle between aspects of idealism and materialism, form and content. This historico-practical understanding replaces previous attempts by philosophy to provide a systematic theory of aesthetics.
We begin to discern what practical activity means for Lefebvre when we examine his concept of the 'total man'. Against economic and historical determinism, the concept of total man incorporates the sum of all aspects of life, including the physical, physiological, psychological, historical, economic and social. Alienation in any of these areas of life is not necessarily produced by alienation at the level of production (the economic base), but each is related to "the movement of historical totality."[25] As can be gathered from the title of his authobiography, 'the sum and the remainder,' Lefebvre never argued that the perspective of totality is ever achieved.
Lefebvre's aesthetic theory is invested in the work of the early Marx and in its emphasis on the human foundation of nature. In the theory of alienation, Marx advanced a critique of what had remained hidden in political economy. Estranged labour estranges nature from humanity, humanity from itself, and humanity from life species. For Lefebvre, Marx's humanism is a profoundly romantic humanism that reclaims rest, leisure, sensuality, creativity and spontaneity; aspects of life that are compromised by capitalist relations. Humanity is at once natural, historical, biological, social, psychological and cultural. Its essence is material as well as practical, creating and transforming itself (its nature) through social practice. Work not only produces objects, but, in a dialectical process, produces humans.
In these terms, art is the product of a specific kind of work that characteristically struggles against the division of labour in an attempt to grasp the 'total' content of life and of social activity. This same struggle marks the relations of production, and the conditions of aesthetic production, as the site of alienation. Just as art's autonomy developed as a consequence of the commodification of cultural production, revolutionary art is the consciousness of this specialization and separation of the artist from the general social activity of the age. Art is a specialized activity that resists specialization. The artist struggles to overcome the impoverishing aspects of alienation in the process of participating in social life, and by adapting elements of play and fantasy to the elaboration of the language of art. He or she shows a need to create a sense-object. Disalienation is a property of the activity of the artist, not of the object. As Lefebvre argues in the Contribution,
"The creative activity of art is not and cannot be an ideal theoretical activity, nor an isolated activity, sui generis. It is a particular kind of work and is highly specialized, resting on the totality of human work, on the work of the masses who transform nature. The work of art is a product (unique, exceptional) of labour in the making of which its creator has vanquished, with technical means and instruents, a natural material."[26]
Related to this understanding of the production of the work of art is a theory of aesthetic sensation. The senses are imbricated with practical activity and consciousness. Through everyday life, the senses are humanized and transfomed. Lefebvre gives examples of this by discussing how the organ of the eye becomes adequate to its use and is developed as a human power:
"In a painting, the human eye has found the appropriate object; the human eye has formed and transformed itself through practical and then through aesthetic activity, and by knowledge: it has become something other than a mere organ; for the painter at least ... truly prefiguring the realm of freedom, and producing the work of art."[27]
Through a historical and social process, the eye becomes human and overcomes its elementary nature. In contrast to a priori and phenomenal determinations that understand the senses as given properties of human subjects, Lefebvre follows Marx in arguing that the senses become means of social existence through practical, concrete activity. For Lefebvre, this answers many problems in aesthetic theory:
"Marx therefore answers the fundamental question left in suspense by aestheticians: where do the diverse forms of art emerge from? They do not emerge from the diverse ways of achieving Beauty, or from the diverse categories of the judgement of taste ... nor from the diverse incarnations of the Concept. They emerge from the senses. This seems obvious. In fact, it required Marx and the radical critique of idealism to arrive at this simple truth."[28]
Subjective taste, then, corresponds to an object, which it finds or creates. The artist, furthermore, attempts to surpass the limits of private activity and to incorporate into the work of art the multiplicity of manifestations of life.
[this isn't the new realism Lefebvre had in mind but anyway, that's maybe not so terrible after all]
The concepts of form and content are described at great length by Lefebvre and appear as the theoretical keywords of the Contribution. He is cautious though in insisting that the separation of form and content is a common problem in ideological and idealist mystification. The ability to grasp content as such is a pretense of philosophy. There is no form without content and no content without form. This counter-paradox is derived in part from his distinction between formal and dialectical logic. The dialectical combination of theory and practice in material praxis, according to Lefebvre, consists of imposing a form on a content:
"Since there is no content that is not mediated by form, form has a decisive importance in all fields. In aesthetics and in artistic creation, content without form represents an abstraction equal to pure formalism, if not worse, since this abstraction is disavowed.[29]
Lefebvre sought to overcome this opposition by dividing content into a number of subcategories. The biological content, he argued, relates to the sexual or libidinal impulses, to sensuality and to one's entire being. This relates to aesthetic sense as described above. The emotional or affective content is also something that takes shape and is transformed. Like the senses, it is related to a social content. The relation of art to social practice also expresses a practical content. With this last subcategory, Lefebvre addresses questions of social demand (whether economic, ideological, or taste oriented) as a material support of aesthetic activity. The practical content involves questions of labour, technique, materials, utility, mode of production – the means by which the artist appropriates the object (nature) and transforms it.
Finally, there is the more difficult question of aesthetic content. Unlike other forms of ideology and other superstructures, art for Lefebvre addresses itself directly to sensibility and not to reason; art is different from knowledge. This does not prevent art from containing elements relating to ideology, the intentions of the artist, class struggle, historical determinations and so on. The aesthetic content opens onto the history of social and cultural formations. For Lefebvre, only dialectical materialism can determine how 'great works' often express through their form a rich conception of the world. In this regard, he takes issue with reflectionist accounts of class belonging. He describes the various aspects of the work of Diderot, for example, as representing a number of class positions, from the ascendant bourgeoisie, to feudal property interests, the petty bourgeoisie and the populace. Nor is the question of class in Lefebvre and either/or proposition, as the doctrine of 'two camps' had attempted to make it.
On the question of the universality of great works, Lefebvre considers what it is that makes Diderot's novel Le Neveu de Rameau a much better work than Le Pére de Famille. In the latter, Diderot expresses the moralizing aspect of his class, a feature that Lefebvre refers to as the illusory character of his class ideology. It is a mediocre work in comparison to Le Neveu de Rameau, which happens to be critical of the values of an aristocratic society in the process of decomposition. The more successful work of art contains a critical content, a realism that enhances the form of the work. This elaboration of the form derives from a research into the relation of form and content. Lefebvre writes,
"Realism is not achieved strictly through content by opposing content to form, the object to elaboration, the concrete to the abstract. It is achieved by surpassing this opposition, that is to say, by conceiving anew, but enriched in relation to classical art, the internal dialectic of all art and each work of art; the difference and unity of the content and of the form, with the primacy of the content."[30]
Historically speaking, the question of realism is central to Marxist aesthetics, and despite Lefebvre's involvement with a number of avant-garde movements that accentuated negative dialectics and techniques of defamiliarization (such as Dada, Surrealism, and Situationism), he always privileged an approach that could in some way represent the world, though without ever believing in transparency or an unmediated reflection. In the Contribution, Lefebvre struggles with the demands of classical Marxist realism that were inherited from Engels, and those of his own day. The basis of this realism means that the artist participates in social life and through his or her work represents characters and situations that are 'typical' and that are capable of grasping the basic 'tendencies' of living reality, without at the same time diminishing the artist's subjective involvement with these questions. Among the references to Engels' work, Lefebvre cites in particular his letter to Minna Kautsky (1885) which emphasizes the conscious grasping of realistic tendencies by the author.
The question of typicality within Marxist aesthetics is of course attributed to Georg Lukács. In the essay "Narrate or Describe?," Lukács contrasted two tendencies in nineteenth-century literature with different approaches to realism.[31] According to Lukács, Balzac, for example, participates in the struggles of his day through an "experiencing narration" that is achieved because of his lived relation to social change. Zola, on the other hand, renounces social activity in favour of an "observing description" or "naturalistic documentation" that is particular to writers of the Second Empire, a transitional period of capitalist society. While Balzac sympathizes with the interests of a waning aristocracy, he is, according to Lukács, better able to represent the objective laws of social and historical development.[32] Balzac participates in the struggles of his times, even though his political affiliations are with the declining social class.
While Lefebvre shares with Lukács an emphasis on the problematic of alienation, his concern with art production leads him to reject some aspects of Lukács' pessimism. Lukács' view of the Balzac attitude, while correct as historical analysis, is unhelpful as an aesthetic method for the present day, in particular because Lukács' analysis of aesthetic creation stays on the level of an authorial unconscious. Despite the enduring qualities of Balzac's work, Balzac himself was not and could not have been conscious of the reasons for which his work has had a lasting value. For Lefebvre, as for Brecht, maintaining a dichotomy between an objective realism (historical materialism) and a partisan realism (tendency literature) would be disastrous for a contemporary artist. The contradictions and ambiguity of an artist like Balzac and the emphasis on the productive unconscious is no longer useful to the new exigencies of art, that is, the conscious reflection of the world through the aesthetic content of the work. Though Lefebvre acknowledges the inevitability of traces or transitions of unconsciousness in artistic production, he posits theory as an attempt to reduce delays in consciousness. These delays are defined not in terms of historical necessity, but in relation to the need to respond to emergent historical exigencies.[33] Lefebvre's criticism does not entail a rejection of the achievements of previous writers such as Balzac, nor does it imply a denial of Lukács' contributions. He instead puts forward a position on the new realism that takes issue with the reductive character of official Party policy on aesthetic production. As such, his position is partly bound as a theory to the problem of Party literature.[34]
In his autobiography of 1959, Lefebvre is much more frank about his disappointment with the results of Socialist Realism under the restrictions of Party guidelines. The temptation of a simple theoretical programme resulted in a stultifying neglect of historical and individual psychic complexity. The results, he lamented, had been:
"An extraordinary number of folk ensembles, peasant dancers and singers. A few spectacles and traditional ballets. No plays for the theatre. Some films, some uneven and often mediocre novels, because these people associate themselves with the modern conditions of production. They have spoken to us a great deal about 'socialist realism' and they have force-fed us folklore..."[35]
For Lefebvre, the new realism witnessed a Pyrrhic victory that was premised on abstraction and an interest in outmoded forms. In the Contribution, he attempted to propose a schema for new directions. The 'new sensibility,' he argued, locks its novel consciousness of practical content within antiquated forms. It should be allowed to experiment, and to take into consideration new achievements in aesthetic practice. Aided by the knowledge of dialectical materialism, he argued, the artist can freely and humanly become conscious of the new means and the new exigencies of the times, advancing art with a grasp of content through formal elaboration. Socialist Realism is taken by Lefebvre as a fact of historical and global dimension.[36] Artists and critics must begin with this world situation. Among the numerous guidelines Lefebvre proposed is an emphasis on class consciousness:
"We must modestly analyze works in which the proletariat, as the ascending class, the leader and destroyer of class society, discovers itself, recognizes itself, brings forth a new content, troubles and renews traditional forms. We must also criticize them lucidly in the name of the scientific knowledge of art, of aesthetics."[37]
With aesthetic activity having become conscious, Lefebvre argued, Lukácsian art criticism is no longer helful to artists working in the present day. While both focused on the concept of alienation, and both linked the development of aesthetic philosophy with the condition of the working class, Lefebvre understood romanticism to be progressive and not merely the culture of a declining bourgeoisie.[38]
With the Critique de la vie quotidienne, Lefebvre changed many of his previous positions on the historical role of the working class. Beginning with La Conscience mystifiée, he questioned the theory that the working class would inevitably become the bearer of a revolutionary ideology. The proletariat's social practice was highly embedded in practical realities. In contrast to Lukács, Lefebvre avoided any fixed definitions of the proletariat and sought instead to look to its changing circumstances, which, by the 1960s, Lefebvre felt had outpaced any ability to achieve revolutionary aims. With the Critique, he made a first attempt at a cultural analysis of the position of the working class within consumer society. A Marxist cultural project, he concluded, needed to be reinvented. Though there are determinations to any future developments, the future is open to the possible and the contingent. "To live," he wrote, "is to solve these problems, by exiting all vicious circles before they become magic circles."[39] A critcism sometimes made of Lefebvre is that he separated Marxist theory from proletarian politics.[40] For others, this separation represents Lefebvre's refusal to essentialize the position of the working class and to ignore its living relation to the world. Individual subjects are different from one another and have particular belongings. Moreover, subjects are polyvalent and desiring, elaborated across disciplines and in a transversal, mediated relation to the world.[41] Lefebvre's concept of 'everyday life' contrasts with Lukács' pessimistic view of the banality of life under capitalism, what he called Alltäglichkeit, or the 'trivial life.' Lefebvre's concept of the 'total man,' premised on the philosophical work of Marx, emphasized instead the subject of praxis and becoming, the subject who is capable of producing his or her own life as a work of art. He writes:
"The proletarian qua proletarian can become a new man. If he does so, it is not through the intervention of some unspecified freedom which would permit him to liberate himself from his condition... It is through knowledge that the proletarian liberates himself and begins actively superseding his conditions. We should understand men in a human way, even if they are incomplete; conditions are not confined within precise, geometrically defined boundaries, but are the result of a multitude of obstinate and ever-repeated (everyday) causes.[42]
Consciousness proceeds from the subject; it is a subjectivization of the world through social, practical and creative activity. Like Lukács, Lefebvre believed that class consciousness was largely mystified and that an effort must be made to grasp the conditions of life. Where he most clearly departed from Lukács is perhaps on the question of totality.
Lefebvre's approach to dialectical materialism shares with a number of Western Marxist intellectuals (Lukács, Gramsci, Korsch) a focus on the concept of concrete totality, and functions, as Martin Jay argues, as an antidote to the "abstract determinations of political economy."[43] Jay notes that Lefebvre's dialectical approach to totality as incorporating a concept of the infinite (becoming) and the infinite (structure) in nature. Lefebvre's distinction between open and closed totalities is perhaps best summarized in his theory of moments, which appeared in La Somme et le reste as an afterthought to his works on aesthetics. We might consider Lefebvre's philosophical theory of moments as anti-formalist. Whereas his view of totality involves the numerous strata of history, nature, consciousness, knowledge and ideology, the theory of moments adds to this the modalities of contemplation, action, struggle, love, play, rest, death, celebration, poetry, repression, work and so on. Lefebvre's approach to totality views difference as a creative force of becoming and understands this specifically in terms of social critique. His sources include Hegel, Marx and Nietzsche. As an element of humanist Marxism, Lefebvre orients this view of becoming in relation to the individual who transcends cultural and economic social arrangements but who nevertheless is realized within the everyday. Creative moments of overcoming open onto the possible. Inspired by the reading of Proust, moments are Lefebvre's theoretical reconciliation with the concept of duration. Within every individual or social consciousness, moments are formed which involve lived time, which is both historically broad and contingent. Moments are substantial though indefinable and comprise a partial power within an open totality. This becoming involves a process of structuration that is intelligible and practical and is without complete discontinutities; becoming involves recollection. The theory of moments is an effort at de-ontologization and emphasizes the field of possibilities and virtualities. Lefebvre describes his theory of moments in relation to art:
"Would not the creative activity of art (of works) be such a 'moment,' searching through time, from epoch to epoch, historically and within each artist, to contain itself, to maintain in itself the totality of its own becoming and its conditions, and surpassing these in the very action of maintaining and containing them? Seeking therefore to create the stable and profound 'work' in which this movement defines itself, and closes and opens itself onto the totality of the world? Such a moment would be the moment of the beautiful, or rather, of the beautiful work."[44]
A moment tends towards the absolute but never achieves it. In his aesthetic theory, Lefebvre was concerned that in the attempt to characterize the 'typical' or the essential, the importance of what was both lived and conceived might be lost. A satisfactory mode of expression, a new realism, would communicate the uncertainty of lived reality by basing it not on the determination of class but on the relative degrees of freedom and the struggle against alienation.[45] This freedom is expressed in the uncertainty of the lived, the failure of will and of liberty, and the certitude of the real, and therefore also, on what is possible, the possible-impossible.
Conclusions – Travels with Lefebvre
Lefebvre's work in aesthetic and cultural theory consisted of a number of theoretical departures from the official aesthetics of the communist movement. These texts did more than simply counter the debates within the PCF concerning the distinction between the social sciences and the natural sciences, and the possibility of a proletarian science. As we have seen, Lefebvre's answer to these debates was that aesthetics and the social sciences, like the natural sciences, are related to humanity's appropriation of nature, including its own nature, in an effort towards freeing itself from want. Aesthetics could not be reduced to various determinations in the Contribution and the texts written for a general readership were far more grounded in a serious Marxist project than the reception of these works has led us to believe.
Lefebvre's cultural works are relevant to the exploration of the relationship of individual artists to their historical conditions as well as to their class position. Since working on La Conscience mystifiée, Lefebvre and co-author Norbert Guterman had begun a polemic challenging some of the tenets of vulgar Marxism-Leninism. Their attention to the problem of alienation and mystification meant that consciousness could not simply be reduced to a notion of transparent reflection and to a doctrinaire emphasis on the "truth of class."[46] For Lefebvre, neither the concept of expression nor that of reflection exhausts the movement of consciousness. As he demonstrated in the Critque, consciousness can be illusory. This relates to his theory of moments, of possibility and becoming, and to the notion of open and closed totalities. For instance, on the subject of praxis, he wrote:
"Praxis cannot close itself and cannot consider itself closed. Reality and concepts remain open and this opening has many dimensions: nature, the past, human possibilities. It is not enough to say that the notion of praxis attempts to grasp or can grasp the complexity of human phenomena. We must add that it grasps their growing complexity. Open to all sides, praxis (reality and concepts) does not, however, stray into indeterminacy. Only a certain kind of thinking, traditional analytic thought, confuses closure with determination, open-endedness with indetermination."[47]
With the studies of Descartes, Pascal, Diderot, Rabelais, Musset and Pignon, Lefebvre developed a materialist method that would demonstrate the complexity of bourgeois thought, as Rémi Hess says, by showing how any given consciousness is more than what a thinker could have physically grasped.[48] Aspects of consciousness remain hidden, some are barely perceptible, and some go beyond the individual's lived experience. Lefebvre never systematized his method.[49] He did, nevertheless, borrow from Capital and the Grundrisse a 'regressive-progressive method' that begins with the present conjuncture and reads into the past as a way of elucidating both temporalities.
One of Lefebvre's main points of contention at this time was the structuralism of his colleague Lucien Goldmann. Goldmann understood aesthetic works as the products of individuals who were members of specific social groups. The world views of these groups structurally mediate the consciousness of the individual artist. Lefebvre chose to illustrate the difference between his and Goldmann's theory with the image of the travel diary. The structuralist method begins with the map of all that could have been seen by the traveler and therefore with the completed journey; it may even collect a number of travel journals in order to create a complete picture into which it then inserts individual subjects. Lefebvre contrasts to this a dialectical method that gives relative priority to the contingent, or conjunctural, over the structural. Structure exists, but only as a moment of becoming, as he says, "because it designates the elements common to a series of successive instants that constitute a moment (it is the ensemble of elements which are graspable through concepts)."[50] Structure is variable and provisional. Lefebvre does not seek to eliminate structure, but to explain it and not give it priority over diachrony, content, history, or transversality. As such, his method offered a critique of social history's emphasis on context as well as structuralism's reliance on historical rupture as a mode of explanation. The artist does not passively reflect his life, but attempts to resolve conflicts and proposes a solution through the use of poetic representations; these are aesthetic and not purely ideological representations.[51] In contrast to Goldmann's 'world view,' which is premised on the "complex of ideas, aspirations and feelings which link together the members of a social group (a group which in most cases, assumes the existence of a social class)," Lefebvre disengages the ideological from the aesthetic and proposes, as in his study of Alfred de Musset, and artistic world view.[52] He argues, moreover, that it is the receivers of the work who discover the work through their own understanding. With the works on Musset and Rabelias in particular, he sought to complicate Goldmann's "ideologization of Marxism" and his emphasis on a reductive conception of class consciousness which unduly formalized the analysis of specific individuals.[53]
Later in life, Lefebvre expressed his exhaustion at having to continuously account for the role of economic conditions in the production of art. He observed that while it is true that Goethe had to eat every day as a condition to his writing Faust, one cannot dwell on this fact alone in order to appreciate the work.[54] The elements that are involved in the production of art include the grasping and failures of consciousness, knowledge, incomplete knowledge, social practices, forms of representation, technique, language, realities of nationality, conceptions of nature, dominant ideologies, popular beliefs and types of subjectivity. In reflecting on the question of base and superstructure, Lefebvre insisted that Marx himself never reduced culture to a mere effect of the class struggle. The dialectical method eschews a simplified scheme of analysis and requires that class be studied in relation to society and culture. He drew from Marx's Contribution to the Critique of Political Economy (1859) a concern with the question of uneven development between form and content, in other words, the fact that we may still consider beautiful works of art that were products of earlier economic and social conditions to which we cannot return. What interested Lefebvre on this subject was Marx's attention to the role of mediations between base and superstructure; this he called the 'domain of sociology.' The work of art comes into being within historically determined conditions and in relation to a given level of the development of the productive forces. It has a material basis. However, the movement between base and superstructure is dialectical and the work of art in turn can affect the nature of the economic base and its related social conditions. The artist thus attempts to give form to representations of the world that make sense within class society. His or her activity is a form of practical knowledge that is distinct from other forms of knowledge and that functions at a level of autonomy with regard to material production and other superstructural strata.
In retrospect, Lefebvre was not completely satisfied with his aesthetic theory, for it failed, as he stated, to resolve the question of the universality of art, which since Plekhanov had remained merely relativized according to historical and geographical particularities. In La Somme et le reste, he wrote that the Contribution had relied too heavily on the question of form and content. It did contain, he added, some directions that he felt were of continuing significance, namely: the work of art possessing an internal dialectical movement as an appropriation of nature; the production of art and the work of art as a struggle against alienation from within alienation; and, thirdly, the distinction of the artwork from other kinds of human production, though it nevertheless enters social practice and everyday life.
While it may seem that Lefebvre's aesthetic writings are far removed from today's concerns, this can only be attributed to a failure of memory. In developing his theory of moments and in reworking the concept of everyday life, Lefebvre proposed an interdisciplinary understanding of artistic production. If he later dedicated himself to the question of social space, it was because he saw in urban restructuring an economic phenomenon of global dimension and that was poorly understood. The same could be said for the merging in the 1960s of cultural avant-gardism with the affirmative strategies of the culture industries, and the further estrangement of cultural difference and cultural production from the critique of consumer capitalism. Because they consider the interrelationship of all aspects of life, and because they acknowledge different kinds of alienation, Lefebvre's writings on art and culture deserve to be examined alongside his writings on space and everyday life. Concomitantly, the latter have begun and will likely continue to be significant to contemporary cultural and social theory.
This essay was first published in Andrew Hemingway, ed. Marxism and the History of Art: From William Morris to the New Left (London: Pluto Press, 2006) 143-160.
Notes
1. Anderson remarks that the most prominent Western Marxists in the inter-war period were concerned with 'superstructural' questions of culture. See Perry Anderson, Considerations on Western Marxism (London: New Left Books, 1976) 75-7.
2. Rémi Hess, Henri Lefebvre et l'aventure du siècle (Paris: A.M. Métailé, 1988) 37.
3. Henri Lefebvre, Le Temps des méprises (Paris: Editions Stock, 1975) 45. Note: all citations from French language texts have been translated by the author.
4. Henri Lefebvre, L Somme et le reste, vol. 2 (Paris: Editions NEF, 1959) 671.
5. Lefebvre, Le Temps des méprises, 63-4.
6. Mark Poster, Existential Marxism in Postwar France: From Sartre to Althusser (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1975) 238. Lefebvre was a member of the oppositional wing within the PCF. He was suspended in 1956 and subsequently quit the Party. He was officially expelled in 1958.
7. Hess, Henri Lefebvre, 328.
8. Michael Kelly, Modern French Marxism (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1982) 75.
9. Kelly's evaluation is in fact often in accordance with the concerns of PCF philosophers during the Stalinist period. See also Michael Kelly, Hegel in France (Birmingham: Birmingham Modern Languages Publications, 1992). Kelly's emphasis on patriotism has some credence inasmuch as Lefebvre's wartime mishaps with the Communist International and the Resistance added to his view that Moscow authorities had little or no interest in initiatives coming from French Marxism. Kelly's thesis, nevertheless, requires more nuance, as Lefebvre was in fact opposed to the abstract nationalism of the PCF in the 1940s.
10. Michel Trebitsch, "Introduction," in Henri Lefebvre, Critique of Everyday Life, vol. 1 (London: Verso, 1991) xiv.
11. Rob Shields, Lefebvre, Love and Struggle: Spatial Dialectics (London: Routledge, 1998) 73.
12. Hess, Henri Lefebvre, 135.
13. See, for instance, David Joravsky, The Lyssenko Affair (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1970), and Dominique Lecourt, Proletarian Science? The Case of Lyssenko (London: New Left Books, 1977). For an example of the Lyssenko line, see Jean Desanti, "La science, forme de conscience sociale," Cahiers du communisme no. 10 (October 1951) 1188-1204.
14. Henri Lefebvre, "Art et connaissance," Cahiers rationalistes no. 136 (January/February 1954) 12-15.
15. Hess, Henri Lefebvre, 146.
16. Lefebvre, La Somme et le reste, 503-7.
17. Lefebvre, La Somme et le reste, 538.
18. Lefebvre, La Somme et le reste, 538. The fabricated quote from Marx is the opening epigraph of Contribution à l'esthétique.
19. Lefebvre, La Somme et le reste, 606.
20. Lefebvre, Critique, vol. 1, 114.
21. Hess, Henri Lefebvre, 301.
22. Lefebvre's conception of the subject at this time was dialectical materialist and existentialist. While André Breton introduced Lefebvre to the writings of Hegel and welcomed the Philosophes into his group – a joint publication, La Révolution d'abord et toujours appeared in 1925 – Lefebvre was so repelled by Breton's authoritarian personality that he soon rejected the Surrealists' paratactical methods, with regard to both the social and the psychic. Lefebvre's readings of and translations of Marx that same year led him to a critique of Surrealism through the focus on everyday life and a Marxist understanding of modern consciousness. His readings of Marx's 1844 Manuscripts in the late 1920s would reinforce his materialist criticism of the everyday and the condition of alienation within capitalist society. On the links between Surrealism and the Philosophes, see Centre National de la Recherche Scientifique (CNRS), Tracts surréalistes et déclarations collectives 1922-1939 (Paris: Le terrain vague, 1980), and Bud Burkhard, French Marxism Between the Wars: Henri Lefebvre and the 'Philosophies' (Amherst: Humanity Books, 2000). See also Alan Rose, Surrealism and Communism in the Early Years (New York: Peter Lang, 1991).
23. Lefebvre, Contribution à l'esthétique (Paris: Editions Sociales, 1953) 34.
24. Shields, Lefebvre, Love and Struggle, 60.
25. Shields, Lefebvre, Love and Struggle, 49.
26. Lefebvre, Contribution, 40.
27. Lefebvre, Critique, vol. 1, 174. See also Lefebvre, Contribution, 44-5.
28. Lefebvre, Contribution, 47.
29. Lefebvre, La Somme et le reste, vol. 2, 584.
30. Lefebvre, Contribution, 145.
31. Georg Lukács, "Narrate or Describe," in Writer and Critic, and Other Essays (London: Merlin Press, 1970) 110-47.
32. In his evaluation of Balzac, Lukács follows some of the ideas expressed by Engels in a letter to Margaret Harkness (1888). The letters to Kautsky and Harkness are printed in Karl Marx and Frederick Engels, On Literature and Art, ed. Lee Baxandall and Stefan Morawski (New York: International General, 1973) 113-17.
33. Lefebvre, Contribution, 155-56.
34. Lefebvre met Lukács in 1947 and again in 1950. Their relationship was sympathetic, perhaps because both had struggled against and had come under the control of Party censorship. C. Vaughan James attributes the emphasis within Socialist Realism on the requirement of identification with Communist Party policy to Lenin's 1905 article, "Party Organization and Party Literature," reprinted in C. Vaughan James, ed. Soviet Socialist Realism: Origins and Theory (London: Macmillan, 1973).
35. Lefebvre, La Somme et le reste, vol. 2, 68.
36. Lefebvre, Contribution, 9.
37. Lefebvre, Contribution, 96.
38. The term 'new realism' has competing uses and definitions in the postwar period. Among the new realists that Lefebvre championed was the painter Edouard Pignon, an artist whose work had affinities with French informalism. He also supported the writings of novelist and playwright Roger Vailland and the socialist realist poet Federico Garcia Lorca.
39. Lefebvre, La Somme et le reste, 209.
40. Anderson, Considerations, 43.
41. Hess, Henri Lefebvre, 236.
42. Lefebvre, Critique, vol. 1, 144.
43. Martin Jay, "Henri Lefebvre, the Surrealists and the Reception of Hegelian Marxism in France," in Marxism and Totality: The Adventures of a Concept (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1984) 295.
44. Lefebvre, La Somme et le reste, vol. 2, 237.
45. Lefebvre, La Somme et le reste, vol. 2, 274.
46. Patricia Latour and Francis Combes, Conversation avec Henri Lefebvre (Paris: Messidor, 1991) 55-6.
47. Cited in Hess, Henri Lefebvre, 186.
48. Hess, Henri Lefebvre, 144. The choice of words suggests Lefebvre's divergence from phenomenology's emphasis on direct perception.
49. Jean-Paul Sartre is the figure who is most indebted to Lefebvre's method. Sartre acknowledges this in his introduction to the Critique of Dialectical Realism (Questions of Method). On this subject, see for instance Mark Poster, Existential Marxism, 266-9. As he began to take issue with certain aspects of existentialism and structuralism, Lefebvre wrote two essays that clarified his method: "Perspectives de la sociologie rurale," Cahiers Internationaux de Sociologie, vol. 14 (1953), 124-40, and "La notion de totalité dans les sciences sociales," Cahiers Internationaux de Sociologie, vol. 18 (1955), 55-77.
50. Lefebvre, La Somme et le reste, vol. 2, 560.
51. Henri Lefebvre, Alfred de Musset: Dramaturge (Paris: L'Arche, 1955) 37.
52. Lucien Goldmann, The Hidden God: A Study of Tragic Vision in the 'Pensées' of Pascal and the Tragedies of Racine (London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1964) 17.
53. For a consideration of the limits of Goldmann's theory of art as ideology, see Janet Wolff, The Social Production of Art, 2nd edition (New York: New York University Press, 1993).
54. Gallia Burgel, Guy Burgel and M.G. Dezes, "An Interview with Henri Lefebvre," Environment and Planning D: Society and Space, no. 5 (1987) 27-38.
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