Henri Lefebvre is swimming in the ocean one sunny day. He is alone, and the waves are choppy. He swims far, far out from the shore. Clouds obscure the sun. Anxiety grips him. He turns back. While swimming hard against the rip, a vision unfolds, born of real danger, and of quite a different order to the spectacle of waves and sun. It becomes “a shifting totality, roaring, buffeting, overwhelming: the sea.” He no longer looks at the waves, he is among them, “each new one taking up the terrifying void left by its forerunner.” And yet this ocean of danger is not formless void. “The duration of each wave is strictly determined by its objective logic, which leaves us with an indeterminable wealth of contingencies, accidents, appearances, and—I was about to say—ornaments. Logic and splendor. Before me, around me, I have space-time.”1
Henri Lefebvre (1901–91) was a contemporary of Jacques Lacan (1901–81), but their trajectories could not be more different. In the late twentieth century, Lacan would become the king of secular bourgeois thought, raising the practice of psychoanalysis to a high pitch of Delphic profundity. Meanwhile, Lefebvre would leave the Communist Party by the rarely used leftward exit. Lacan sought to acquire the dignity of the status of philosopher; Lefebvre pushed philosophy out into the streets. And while Lefebvre was at his most influential in the blazing years of the 1960s, Lacan would eclipse him in the long dark decades that followed.
If there is one abiding purpose to psychoanalysis, it is to make bourgeois lives seem fascinating, at least to those who live them. That it is a form of bourgeois thought is attested by the status of the real in Lacanian doctrine. The real is always something terrible, formless, lawless, which the symbolic order tries to shield from awareness, but which keeps slithering in, unbidden. It is a modern version of the serpents that in Jorn’s account Apollonian thought has to slay, again and again. The symbolic preserves for the ruling class, to whom it classically belongs, an order that keeps at bay the self-ornamenting powers of nature and labor, working together, writhing and worming their way into the cracks in Apollonian form.
In Lefebvre the real is the fulcrum of action rather than an apprehension of terror. His vision of it comes to him while swimming against the current, the body acting on raw need to survive. “The real can only be grasped and appreciated via potentiality.”2 It is by attempting to transform everyday life that the contours of the real are encountered. The real is not entirely formless, even if its forms are not an order that reveals itself in the clear light of day. The encounter with the real, because it is active, informs the imaginary. From the struggle in and with the real emerges an imagining of what might be possible. The object of study for both Lacan and Lefebvre is in a sense always everyday life, but in Lefebvre study is a stage in the project of transforming it.
From the Landes department, in the western Pyrenees, Lefebvre joined the Communist Party in 1928. He was active in the Resistance during the war in the countryside near where he was born. An unofficial blacklist kept him from returning to teaching after the liberation, so his friend and contemporary Tristan Tzara found him a job working in radio in Toulouse. It was not until 1961 that he became a professor at Strasbourg, before moving in 1965 to a post at Nanterre, on the outskirts of Paris, a suburb of “misery, shanty towns, excavations … housing projects … a desolate and strange landscape,” which would become one of the flashpoints of May ’68. His was a lively, diverse, but hardly orthodox career.3
He was fifty-six when Debord met him in 1957, via Lefebvre’s girlfriend (and typist) Evelyne Chastel, who knew Michèle Bernstein. Lefebvre was at the time the most talented philosopher of the French Communist Party, if hardly the most trusted. He left the party in 1959, the year he published The Sum and the Remainder, in which he sets out his theory of moments. Lefebvre’s moment is closely related to Debord’s turn towards the situation. Lefebvre starts from the observation that the leading strategists of advanced capitalism recognized the futility of clinging to colonies such as Algeria, and advanced instead a strategy of colonizing everyday life. Formerly outside the sphere of capitalist social relations, everyday life had become a new site of both commodification and its contestation. Out of everyday life, even in its commodified form, crystallizes a series of moments—of work, but also of play, love, rest, justice, contestation—each of which presses towards the absolute realization of a specific possibility. The moment is “the absolute at the heart of the relative.”4
A welder welding and a weaver weaving perform quite different acts, but Marx had shown in elaborate detail how the qualitative particulars of such concrete labors became the quantifiable substance of abstract labor through the imposition of the wage relation, the commodity form and the general equivalent of money. The Situationists wanted to create what one might call the specific non-equivalent, and their name for this was the situation. But the very word resisted becoming a concept. The relationship between Lefebvre and the Situationists would dissolve before they got very far with their parallel investigations and experiments with it. It was, as Lefebvre later said, “a love story that ended badly, very badly.”5
Shortly after his encounter with the Situationist International, Lefebvre published two books which invoke them. The second volume of the Critique of Everyday Life (1961) opens with Debord, and Introduction to Modernity (1962) closes with the Situationist International. The books are as different as day and night. The former is almost a classic of the sociology of culture, as systematic and structured as anything Lefebvre ever wrote. The latter is a wild ride, a romantic medley of genres, mixing memoir, critique, essay, letter, myth and even science fiction. Between them can be found the practical results and problems of the Situationist International raised to the level of method, and comprehended in the long, deep context of the moves and movements that try, in Rimbaud’s words, to change life.
The second volume of the Critique of Everyday Life was a book for which Lefebvre had high hopes. He wrote to his friend Norbert Guterman: “So, the book of all books comes to an end. Since the beginning of December, 1,600 handwritten pages, 800 typed (Evelyne only charged me 12–15 per page) … Now I can see what will hinder this book from being the book of all books, the total book of this era. I can see the errors and the flaws. I now understand what should have been done. Now it is too late. There is no way of stopping the machine now.”6 Introduction to Modernity maps the uncharted coast that the Critique had yet to reach.
Lefebvre the sociologist invents hypotheses and images as much as concepts, and nothing in his writing matches the formal beauty of Lacan the psychoanalyst’s topological knots. The proof or refutation of Lefebvre’s ideas lies not in the elaboration of a coherent discourse, but in transduction, in which the practice of encountering the necessities and contingencies of the real elaborates on it in the direction of the possible. “To know the everyday is to want to transform it.”7 Knowledge is a strategy whose tactics are concepts, forged for discovering the options latent within the everyday. Lefebvre’s work of this period encompasses at least five concepts, around which others cluster, which respond to and inform the Situationist project: the everyday, totality, moment, spectacle and the total semantic field.
Freedom is not the opposite of necessity in Lefebvre. Freedom is born out of need, and the starting point is a theory of needs.8 Without the experience of need, there can be no being. Needs are few; desires are many. There is no desire without a need at its core. Need can be intense: hunger, thirst, lust. Need without desire, without play, artifice, luxury, superfluity, is no longer human. It is human poverty. Desire abstracted from need loses vitality, spontaneity, and ossifies into the mere accumulation of things. It is abstract and alienating, another kind of poverty. Lefebvre’s critique aims to bring together a presentation of needs and a determination of desires to arrive at a theory of situations, as they arise in the everyday.
The everyday overlaps with what Martin Heidegger (1899–1976) calls the ontic. But rather than bracket it off in favor of a more fundamental ontology, Lefebvre takes the trivial and seemingly superficial aspects of the everyday seriously. “Either philosophy is pointless or it is the starting point from which to undertake the transformation of non-philosophical reality, with all its triviality and its triteness.” His project is an overcoming of the internal limitations of both philosophy and the everyday. “The everyday is a philosophical concept and cannot be understood outside philosophy … it is not the product of pure philosophy but comes of philosophical thought directed toward the non-philosophical, and its major achievement is in this self-surpassing.”9 Everyday life might be a concept internal to philosophy, but it directs philosophy to that which it excludes in the interests of a coherence, the achievement of which renders it null and void.
If the everyday is a problem for philosophy, so too is life. Eugene Thacker: “Every ontology of life thinks of life in terms of something other than life.”10 The thing other than life through which life is thought can take one of three forms. One: life is spirit. It is interiority and exteriority. It is an incorporeal essence that remains the same, or immaterial essence common to all forms and moments of life. Two: life is time. It is affirmation and negation, movement and change. It is dynamic and self-organizing. Three: life is form. It is additive and subtractive. It is boundaries and transgressions. For Jorn life is form, for Lefebvre it is time, and for nobody in the Situationist orbit is it spirit.
If the central question for antiquity was being, and for modernity the death of God, then the central question today is life. And yet the metaphysical problem remains of identifying “an animating principle of the world that is not itself reduced to its own attributes.” What Lefebvre’s turn to everyday life, like Jorn’s to the attitude to life, accomplishes, is an opening towards new fields of practice which do not require a retreat to ancient regimes of the care of the self. The fissures within the concept of life yield not just a critique but the seeds for new forms and tempos of living itself, and perhaps also a fourth category of the thing other than life through which life is thought: matter. Life as surplus and scarcity, as need and desire, a way of (thinking about) life not reducible to biology yet completely outside the grasp of theology. Life is praxis.11
The everyday can be a realm for forms and times of life, if it yields situations for a collective praxis. Praxis here might mean a coming-into-being through the encounter with something other, an encounter which necessitates a moment of both transformation and reflection. Labor is a form of praxis, but not a privileged one. Praxis is the struggle to overcome need, but also the game of creating and satisfying desires, of desires collapsing back towards need, and so on. In modern times the free creation of relations between desire and need has come to an end. Lefebvre: “As Guy Debord so energetically put it, everyday life has literally been ‘colonized.’”12 The imposition of the commodity form on one aspect of everyday life after another breaks the tension between desire and need. Those unable to discover a relation between need and desire are cut off from their own being, alienated from an active encounter with the real. Hence the need for negative concepts, for negation, to reveal not just what everyday life is, but what it isn’t. It isn’t all that praxis can be imagined as becoming.
The everyday is a mediating level. It is where people appropriate for themselves, not nature, but a second nature of already manufactured articles. It is where needs confront goods. It is not just a functional sphere of consumption and the reproduction of labor power. Nor is the everyday a prisoner of any pervasive disciplinary power, of cops and social workers, psychologists and sociologists intent on prying into people’s lives. There is always something unformed in the everyday, something that exceeds and escapes both commodity and power. It is a strategic terrain for experimenting with practices and possibilities. “Today,” writes Lefebvre, “what is the aim of utopian investigation? The conquest of everyday life, the recreation of the everyday and the recuperation of the forces which have been alienated in aesthetics, scattered through politics, lost in abstraction, severed from what is possible and what is real.”13
Two kinds of time meet and mingle in the everyday. One is a linear time, the time of credit and investment. The other is a cyclical time, of wages paid and bills due. This is how class makes itself felt in everyday life. Linear temporality is ruling-class time; cyclical temporality is working-class time. The workers spend what they get; the bosses get what they spend. Cyclical time is the time of needs and the struggle to meet them. But it is also the experience of a certain kind of desire, for example in the patient waiting for the festival to return, and with it the gorgeous consumption of goods in the name of desire. Linear time imposes its own distinctive necessities, its booms and recessions, and this is not the least aspect of the colonization of the everyday by the commodity form. It introduces a distinctive kind of desire as well, desire deferred, not until festival time and its potlatch of goods, but in the interests of accumulation.
The everyday also has a third kind of temporality, the time of adventure, which is perhaps a remnant of aristocratic time. A notable characteristic of the Letterist International, which persists in the Situationist International, is a longing for this time of adventure. It is not because they are titled knights and ladies that they expend time freely in search of adventure; it is because they expend time freely that they consider themselves entitled to style themselves with a certain louche nobility. This is not the least aspect of them that would appeal to the Lefebvrian sensibility. “On the horizon of the modern world dawns the black sun of boredom, and the critique of everyday life has a sociology of boredom as part of its agenda.”14 Adventure is nothing if not the practical refutation of boredom.
What could the everyday become? “Could it be some sort of grand game without any precise objective?”15 The colonization of everyday life by the commodity form diminishes the role of collective experience, yet groups persist. Within groups, individuals have tactics and strategies, as the early years of the Situationist International makes abundantly clear. Groups also have tactics and strategies in relation to other groups. The everyday is the level of tactics; history, that of strategy. Whether or not traditional societies were governed by the gift, as Mauss and Bataille thought, Lefebvre thinks modern societies are governed by the challenge. “Challenge is a means of exerting pressure beyond the group, but its actions reverberate within it.”16 The classical bourgeoisie loved a challenge. It overcame feudalism while staving off the challenge of the working class. Postwar technocrats seem challenge-averse. They prefer to manage challenges, rather than confront them. Not the least pleasure of Lefebvre is his sense, won from his own remarkable experience, that history had still more challenges up its sleeve.
Lefebvre sees everyday life as a mix of agôn and aléa, of contest and chance. “In the beginning was action; in the end action is recognized … Every human life is a progress or a process toward a possibility, the opening up or closing down of what is possible, a calculation and an option based upon random events and the intervention of ‘other people.’”17 As with linear and circular time, there is a class basis to the experience of the everyday as contest or chance. Experiencing life as a contest to which to apply strategies is a view far less available to the individual members of the working class. Only through collective action can the proletariat enter history at the level of strategy. In decline, its forces lose their grasp on the game of history. All that remains are the tactics of the everyday.
If there is a distinctive experience of modern life, it is the aleatory. It is rather like pinball, or Gallizio’s industrial painting, a mix of necessity and chance. Confronted by the aleatory, people gamble and gambol with their lives, making moves in a game that may be based on tactics and even strategies, but where the variables are not all known, and the outcomes are far from predictable. Few moves in this game could be considered a rational choice. This is the lesson Lefebvre takes from game theory and other technocratic attempts to annex the everyday to social science. They reduce the experience of the everyday to signals and calculations. They describe what everyday life is not: a rational totality. Rather: “Everything becomes disjointed, yet everything becomes a totality, everything becomes reified, yet everything starts disintegrating. The aleatory is triumphant.”18
Johan Huizinga believed that vigorous civilizations have the capacity to elaborate new forms of play. In decadent ones, play becomes codified into more formal games. Lefebvre differs from Huizinga in that he thinks modernity is a time in which play can flourish. “But it is certainly rather surprising that it should be our era, the era of functionalism and technology, which has discovered homo ludens.”19 Writing at the high watermark of rational and functional social science, Lefebvre thinks history is still capable of objective irony, of confounding order and revealing contingency. History is a game in Lefebvre, the rules of which are never clear and in any case keep changing. It is not a machine or a structure, but neither is it random. It is more like the flocking of starlings. Groups play each other with more or less awareness of the local rules of the game, though not of how their moves swarm together and affect the historical stakes.
Within everyday life, groups challenge one another, and not the least part of the challenge is the tactic of appearances. “The secrets of groups, their opacities, which are what give the illusion of substance, are made up of anxieties or audacity with regard to what is possible, of entrenchments or offensives, of retreats and advances in relation to other groups, of courage or of weakness of will in response to problems.”20 Here Lefebvre and the Situationists are very close, and close also to Huizinga, for whom play always has an element of the secret about it. The game within the group ought not to be apparent to the group’s rivals.
Play is a misunderstood aspect of praxis. Play “uses appearances and illusions which—for one marvelous moment—become more real than the real.”21 Through the concept of play, Lefebvre manages to bypass two of the great theoretical fetishes of his times: structure and sign. Structure is just a reified apprehension of play, its fossilized remains. “Structure itself is nothing more than a precarious and momentary success, a win or a loss in a complex gamble.”22 The sign is just one aspect of play, that which a player brandishes, the better to conceal a secret—and to display that a secret is concealed.
The concept of totality would become the great boo-word of late twentieth-century thought, linked, through a rather casual association, to the totalitarian state of the Soviet Union. Particularly for the so-called new philosophers, totality reeked of the gulag. Some genuine conceptual objections were bent to the service of legitimating the status quo. For Lefebvre, totality has a somewhat different sense. Not totality as an achieved philosophical system, but as an orientation for praxis. “Discourse strives for totality. It must strive for totality, yet it is never more than incomplete.” What Lefebvre calls totalization is praxis revealing itself in terms of its tendency. Every praxis wills its own totalization. “Every totalization which aspires to achieve totality collapses, but only after it has been explicit about what it considers its inherent virtualities to be.” The concept of totality directs research. “If there is no insistence upon totality, theory and practice accept the ‘real’ just as it is, and ‘things’ just as they are: fragmentary, divided and disconnected.”23 Totality is a negative concept, it is the gap between what is possible and what is impossible. The critique of everyday life hinges on thinking certain moments within it as far as they will go.
Groups acting within everyday life pursue their strategies as far as they will go. Praxis is at once repetition and creation. Creation emerges out of repetition. Inventiveness is born from the everyday, through the action not of individual genius but of collective play. “Could not inventiveness—or the seeds of inventiveness—be a product of the limited and daring praxis of small-scale groups: sects, secret societies, political parties, elective groups, laboratories, theatrical troupes, etc?”24 As in Jorn, the sources of creation are popular, but this does not lead to an uncritical celebration of all things popular. The everyday is vital for what it can be, not for what it is.
Praxis has its dangers. What was once a living form of collective self-discovery and self-invention can harden into a thing-like routine. It can, in short, become alienated. Lefebvre differs from much of the Hegelian Marxist writing of the time in thinking of alienation as something less than a total, remorseless, one-dimensional and one-directional descent into a nicely equipped hell. Modern life is not all alienation. Rather, it’s a game in which certain tactics prove dis-alienating for a time, then fall short of their own totalization, cease to work, forcing groups to either come up with new tactics or lose sight of their self-affirming praxis. Praxis can fail both by falling short in its totalization and by exceeding it. “Beyond a certain limit, the negative becomes a fetish, a vision of nothingness; radical critique becomes hypercritique, and nihilism is established as a truth without that truth having been legitimated.”25 It’s a critique that could be applied with some justice to the Situationist International after the exclusion of the artists.
Everyday life is to be transformed according to its own tendencies. When a group discovers a dis-alienating practice in everyday life, it may crystallize into a moment. Possible moments might include love, play, rest, knowledge, although nothing prevents the creation of new moments. Philosophy might be nothing other than making contemplation into a moment. The moment emerges out of the cyclical time of repetition, but creates a time of its own. The moment constitutes its own kind of space, and enables the stabilizing of determinable relations with otherness. A moment is constituted in space and time by a decision which singles it out from ambiguity.
The moment weaves itself into and out of the everyday. The moment tries to achieve the total realization of a specific possibility. It exhausts itself in the act of pursuing its own goal to the very end. “It wishes to perceive the possibilities of everyday life and to give human beings a constitution by constituting their powers, if only as guidelines or suggestions.”26 The moment wants to endure. It wants to gather its own temporality. The moment requires a certain amount of ritual and ceremony. It makes for itself a special time and place. It creates its own specific form of memory.
These forms the moment creates run the risk of repeating themselves, of no longer serving the moment but enclosing it. The moment provokes its own specific alienation. The gamer or the lover becomes obsessed. A Korean man expired in 2005 after playing the game Starcraft in an internet café for fifty hours, with only brief naps and toilet breaks.27 The gamer forgets to eat, to sleep, commits everything to beating a level. The lover spends sleepless nights thinking about the object of affection. At this point alienation is complete, and the moment disappears.
Moments may have different scales. Festival might be the grandest scale to which the moment can aspire, a historical scale. “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.”28 Lefebvre thought of the prewar leftist Popular Front—with its mass demonstrations, equal parts celebration and desperation—as festival. At quite a different scale, he writes movingly of a working-class painter from his hometown whose work was shunned even by the provincial museum, but who was a decisive influence on the young Lefebvre. “There are men who are not artists and not philosophers, but who nevertheless emerge above the everyday, in their own everyday lives, because they experience moments: love, work, play, etc.”29 Just as there is a tomb for the unknown soldier, there could be one for the unknown artist, whose moments are unrecognized and fade clean away.
Situation is a persistent concept in philosophy, if usually a marginal one. From Hegel to Kierkegaard to Sartre it designates a zone in which otherwise different elements confront each other.30 Those elements can be isolated, defined, made into concepts, but the situation within which they meet and mix has a singular quality. Lefebvre’s procedure is in some respects the other way around. “The moment is not exactly the same as a situation. The result of a decision or a choice—of an endeavor—the moment creates situations.” Thinking aloud in a letter, Debord tries to specify the situation in its difference from Lefebvre’s moment: “The difficulty of the ‘situationist’ moment is … marking the exact end (its reversal? And another), its transformation into a different term of this series of situations that (can?) constitute such a Lefebvrian moment.”31
Here, in this hesitating language, Debord gropes towards an understanding of the Situationist practice of creating collective experiences of space and time that have their own singular coherence, but neither collapse back into the dead time of routine, nor ossify into mere artifacts. Unlike the moment, the situation “must unify falsely separated categories (love, play, expression, creative thought). And each of these formations—as conscious and calculated as they can be, that is to say, brought into play with superior chances—inevitably move towards their own reversal, because each one is entirely lived in time along with its negation and permanent supersession.”32 For Debord all of the singular moments, of love, play, work, knowledge, can be combined within a situation.
Between writing Critique of Everyday Life, Volume 2 and Introduction to Modernity, Lefebvre appears to lose faith in the possibilities of the moment.
You used to think that an auto-critique of everyday life through its own transpositions was possible: a critique of the slimy animal by its delicate shell and vice versa—a critique of the everyday by festivals, or of trivial instants by moments, and vice versa—a critique of life by art and of art by life, of the real by its double and its reverse image: dreams, imagination, fiction. The times change. Technology began penetrating everyday life. There were new problems.33
Modern life might not give rise to its own critical agent of transformation—what Lefebvre terms modernity—and praxis might be foreclosed, and with it being, the engagement with the real. “It is not that God is absent, but something worse: modernity is like a shell to hide the absence of praxis …” Modernity is the “ghost of revolution.”34
What forecloses the possibility of praxis is what Lefebvre, citing Debord, calls the spectacle. The spectacle makes totality visible, but only in fragments, and visible only within the space of the private. It does not make the private social as well. The spectacle is a one-way street, the public privatized. “It is the generalization of private life. At one and the same time the mass media have unified and broadcast the everyday; they have disintegrated it by integrating it with ‘world’ current events in a way which is both too real and utterly superficial.”35
Lefebvre calls the spectacle the great pleonasm, the Thing of Things. Thought in terms of its totalizing tendency, “it would be a closed circuit from hell, a perfect circle in which the absence of communication and communication pushed to the point of paroxysm would meet and their identities would merge.” What is real is what is known; what is known is what is real. The illusion of permanent novelty occludes the possibility of surprise. It is a world of incessant redundancy. Everything is always the same, only better. It makes the same special offer to everyone, all the time: “the faked orgasms of art and life.”36
The challenge of the colonization of the everyday by the spectacle calls for a reassessment, not just of tactics but of strategy. Lefebvre takes a step back to the terrain on which the challenge appears, the total semantic field, of which the spectacle is an alienated form. Everyday life takes place not just in the streets, but also in the total semantic field. It has three registers: signals, signs and symbols. Signals form closed systems of redundant messages which appear mostly in the form of commands. A traffic light is a signal. It commands the driver to stop or go. Signs form a region within the semantic field of relatively open networks, a mix of information and redundancy. Symbols cannot command and are not particularly legible. They irrupt into the semantic field as noise. Symbols may have faded and gone into hiding, but they can still be glimpsed through the spectacle. The total semantic field is “complex, differentiated, polarized, alive with the fluxes and tensions which come and go from one pole to the other. Language tries to equal this totality, but is never more than one of its parts.”37
Cybernetic theories totalize the whole of the semantic field as signals, and imagine it can be made self-regulating. Semiotic theories totalize the semantic field as if it were composed entirely of signs and governed by the grammar of their combination. Lefebvre’s strategic move is to counter the spectacle’s growing reduction of communication to the level of signal and sign by moving onto the terrain of the symbol, or rather by treating the whole semantic field as the space of the challenge: signal, sign and symbol together. “Communication in depth implies the totality of the semantic field. The more it incorporates that totality, the more aesthetic it becomes.”38
The legacy on which Lefebvre draws is a certain understanding of romanticism, which might be the memory of a series of practices for crystallizing the total semantic field itself into moments. Lefebvre is sometimes thought of as a Hegelian Marxist, but his understanding of romanticism owes more to Stendhal. From Stendhal’s Racine and Shakespeare (1823), Lefebvre draws out a theory of the romantic as the precursor to a critical modernity, and like it the product of defeated revolutions. Romanticism brings everything into art. Everything classical art excluded is drawn into it, to the point of exhaustion. Romanticism occupies the total semantic field and gravitates particularly to the pole of the symbolic, to stimulate the creation of works of art. The artwork in turn condenses the total semantic field. “Living romanticism reveals a totality.”39
If there are symbols through which the romantic and its antithesis, the classical, might first be approached, they are the knight and the king. The king stands first and last for order, if also for an unknown range of things in between. The knight is the figure of adventure, driven by a certain goal but of uncertain outcome. The knight submits to a vow and lives his life in the name of an ideal, but one which is constantly challenged by circumstances. The knight’s horse raises him above earthly things, but when he falls he comes crashing down into the shit. The knight is a figure of the aleatory, standing for all those who live in an ambiguous or shadowy milieu, which perhaps explains Debord’s taste for Prince Valiant comics.40
The classical assumes a legitimate order, revealed by the light of the sun. God’s in his heaven, the king’s on his throne, all is right with the world. And what goes wrong can be rectified. Like Le Corbusier’s plans, classicism favors the right angle and the straight line. It favors the form of the myth, in which order is destabilized, restored, legitimated. Its privileged medium is architecture. Its method is imitation. Everyone imitates the one above them in the social order, just as the king imitates God, and the whole social order imitates nature. Classical humor, from Molière to Sacha Baron Cohen, ridicules failed attempts at imitation. In Molière’s satirical attack on the Precious movement, provincial ladies shun some noblemen as beneath them, so these retaliate by having their grooms pretend to be Precious sophisticates. Hilarity ensues, but classical humor serves order.
The romantic is a corrosive fluid that attacks the classical on every front. It is a refusal of obedience. It lurks in the dark, in the mist, within the eclipse. Time is out of joint. It favors the wave, the vibration, the curlicue. It mixes forms, detaches symbols from myths, and puts them in play against all that is legitimate. Its medium of greatest affinity is music. Its method is creation, which it claims as a human potential, not a divine attribute. For Lefebvre the romantic intersects with a certain strand of irony. Unlike Jorn he idolizes the achievements of the Greeks, not least Socratic irony, which is the undoing of any order of belief. The subjective irony of Socrates anticipates the objective irony of history, which sweeps order away in its aleatory currents.
Romanticism can be both pre- and post-revolutionary. Lefebvre acknowledges that most notable French romantics sided against the revolution. Its key tension is between the ideal of bourgeois life, and its pallid reality. Romanticism became a bourgeois art in the sense that they were the class that consumed it. This kept romantic artists from pursuing romanticism to its logical conclusion. The romantic lives outside bourgeois society yet within it, “like a maggot in a fruit.”41 Or like the grit within the oyster, forcing it to make the classical pearl. The fate of the romantic gesture is—if not obscurity—to become classical, to calcify into the good form (something Jorn identifies in Max Bill, for example).
From the symbolic pantheon, romanticism draws on figures who rarely occupy central and active roles in classical culture: the knight, the prince, the seer, the child, the witch, the devil, the stranger, not to mention some even more strange, like Tintomara. Those who can’t find their place in the classical world—the marginal, the minor, the delinquent, the weird—might find it here. But while one aspect of romanticism is otherworldly, an escape from this alien planet to one more hospitable, the symbols drawn from the total semantic field can also be brought back to the everyday. They can be lived. And while isolation might be one practice favored by romanticism, it is also an initiation into deviant or secret groups. Although Lefebvre does not use the term, its homeland is bohemia. Romanticism includes a desire for communion in some kind of lived utopia. A desire which, at the limit, feeds into utopian socialism.
Lefebvre: “The best man of action is one who chooses his moment well … His decision simplifies the complex situation and the ambiguity, and by the very act of simplifying them, transforms them.”42 If Guy Debord was not that man, it was certainly what he aspired to be, at a time when even the aspiration was becoming rare. The Situationists were not the only group working over the remains of romanticism in postwar Europe. But if there was a dominant strategy, it was to pursue the romantic exploration of the total semantic field only so far, before turning back and setting up a new classicism in the resulting ruins. This was the trajectory of absurdist theatre, modern jazz, Robbe-Grillet’s nouveau roman, or new wave cinema. What the Situationists acquired from Isou and the Letterists was a commitment to pursuing a certain romantic decomposition to the limit, if not his claim to build a new classicism of entirely new forms on the ruins. What Lefebvre perceives as the open path is to pursue the romantic further, in two directions: further into the semantic field, and further back, not into new art forms like Isou, but into everyday life. “The most brilliant Situationists are exploring and testing out a kind of lived utopianism.”43
The romantic strategy is not without difficulties: “contradictions are thick-skinned, and their bones are even thicker.”44 Lefebvre identifies contradictions between cosmopolitanism and nationalism, between futurism and the middle ages, between religiosity and revolt, and between subjectivity and the outside world. These all pass through the Situationist International. These contradictions are traceable to a central tension between two worldviews: an anthropological nature and a cosmological nature. The roots of anthropological nature lie in the enlightenment philosophies of eighteenth-century France, articulated by Buffon and others. It is optimistic, it stresses human perfectibility and equality. The worldview of cosmological nature is more German than French. Here nature appears as wildly other, as an inaccessible external world. It enters the French semantic field in force relatively late, with surrealism. Can what is real become rational? Can what is rational become real? Such might be the terms of this irresolvable tension. It infuses the entire scope of possibilities for our species-being.
In playing with the devil of romanticism and its symbols, the Situationist International inherited its contradictions, which would play out through the movement in the splits and fissures of the 1960s. The relationship with Lefebvre was also a casualty of the tensions of the times, both personal and political. And yet not only did he provide the Situationists with the concept of everyday life, he also engaged with them in thinking through the two key concepts of the spectacle (or pleonasm) and the situation (or moment). And while it was not a welcome insight, Lefebvre as seer foresaw the necessity for the formation within the everyday of multiple forms of group action. The monolithic party of labor would not have as its counterpart a single party of play, but rather a number of fractious groups, playing off and against one another, challenging one another. In the twenty-first century, when so many intellectuals seem unhealthily obsessed with the ubiquitous thought of an omniscient power, Lefebvre, even in his less ebullient moments, radiates a sense of possibility. He still swims against the current. The following chapters trace the detours and deviations of the most interesting attempts to appropriate from the early versions of Situationist thought and practice, and open up new possibilities, to recall them and not let their moments pass.