Merrifield - Henri Lefebvre

2006 by Andy Merrifield

International Standard Book Number-10: 0-415-95207-7 (Hardcover) 0-415-95208-5 (Softcover)

International Standard Book Number-13: 978-0-415-95207-1 (Hardcover) 978-0-415-95208-8 (Softcover)

Library of Congress Card Number 2005024643

No part of this book may be reprinted, reproduced, transmitted, or utilized in any form by any electronic, mechanical, or other means, now known or hereafter invented, including photocopying, microfilming, and recording, or in any information storage or retrieval system, without written permission from the publishers.

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Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Merrifield, Andy.

Henri Lefebvre : a critical introduction / by Andy Merrifield.

p. cm.

Includes bibliographical references and index.

ISBN 0-415-95207-7 (hb) -- ISBN 0-415-95208-5 (pb)

1. Lefebvre, Henri, 1905- 2. Social scientists--Biography. 3. Social sciences--Philosophy. I. Title.

H59.L44M46 2006

300.92--dc22 2005024643

Corinna, avec une jeunesse du cur

Over the future, everybody deludes themselves. We can only be sure of the present moment. Yet is this true? Can we really know the present? Are we capable of judging it? How can somebody who doesnt know the future make any sense of the present? If we dont know towards which future the present leads us, how can we say that this present is good or bad, that it merits our support or our mistrust, or even our hatred?

Milan Kundera, Lignorance

by Herbert Muschamp

The city of psychoanalysis salutes the land where the Children of Marx and Coca-Cola grew up, or in many cases refused to. But Im showing my age. Its been many years since New York could muster up an audience for angst and Woody Allen. And Godards cool Left Bank cocktail of student disaffection and ye-ye nonchalance lost its sparkle long before Brigitte Bardot started flirting with M. Le Pen.

Moreover, relations between these two places have become more strained even as globalization has thrown everyone into everyone elses laps. As I write this, the United States is still in denial that its position in the world is rapidly approaching the shrunken irrelevancy of post-imperial Great Britain. Were just an island, separated from the great land mass of Eurasia, pretending that we own the joint, indulging expensive fantasies about enlightening the world while turning our backs on countries where concepts of Enlightenment took root. Not good.

Manhattan, meanwhile, is an island within an island, imagining itself as a leader of Blue State (liberal, Democratic) sensibilities while the record strongly indicates that it has actually been the reverse. It is New York that has given us Rudolph Giulianis chronic hostility toward the First Amendment; fake pre-modern architecture; news magazines featuring cover stories on assorted mythological religious figures; and other convulsions of Red State backlash against the long-ago 1960s and in general anything that breathes.

Havent they heard Marx is dead?, Giuliani replied when asked about his plans to uproot community gardens to make room for luxury housing. Heave-ho! While The New York Review of Books canceled its subscription to liberal thought by publishing stories that claimed to discredit Freud.

But never mind. So long as Andy Merrifield is living in France and I remain in New York, Marx and Freud are still conversing with one another across the divide of water, ideology, and time. In my perplexed head, Merrifield and I are two halves of a whole. Were one of the last great Surrealists. Our mutual amour fou is the city: the courting ground of crazy love.

Merrifields got his Marx down better than Ill ever get my Freud. Hes become a one-man, year-round, world-wide festival of non-vulgar Marxism. Im just an old-fashioned nut case. But Surrealists are not required to be experts in either field. We define our own field. It is bordered on two sides by history: one border chronicles the outer life, the other one tracks the inner. Mr. M and Mr. F sit like referees atop tall spindly chairs on either line. Out! In!

The remaining sides of the field are left open. One of these trails off into the future, the other drifts backward toward a ground of origin that is unknowable apart from myth. Culture happens in the middle. The forms it takes are not invariably symptoms. But sometimes the symptoms are thrilling also. We set up bleachers. We boo and cheer.

Merrifield booed me once. I didnt mind too much. When smart people boo, you should take it as an invitation to call them right up and say, Hi, there! Merrifield had taken offense at a reference I made to Guy Debord in a story about Times Square. I seem to recall his saying something mild, like Debord would have hated Muschamp and everything he stands for. Setting aside the rhetorical propriety of airing ones sentiments through the mouths of dead people, I nonetheless decided to interpret the boo as an instance of what Buddhists call negative attachment. The attachment is the main thing. The negativity is the attachments shadow. And it doesnt pay to get too caught up with shadows. Often, theyre just there to be enjoyed, like any play of light on the wall. Sometimes they boo. Sometimes they act scarier and say Boo! But the smarter breed just wants to come in and play.

The city that we hate is also the city that we love. It strikes me that Henri Lefevbres work and Andy Merrifields both spring from this variation on what Melanie Klein called the depressive position. It is the business of a city to offer something for everyone to hate, even to present itself as completely hateful to some people most of the time. But even Frank Lloyd Wright, who devoted endless energy to denouncing the city as the Moloch that knows no god but More, couldnt resist being swallowed up by New York from time to time. And the intensity of his attachment was even more evident in the passion of his attacks. I share with Sybil Maholy-Nagy the view that the city is the matrix of man, whatever our feelings might be toward it. And try as you may you simply cannot keep Mother down in the fruit cellar forever. She will not stay there.

Henri Lefebvre introduced a stance of radical ambivalence toward the city in his book The Urban Revolution, first published in France in 1970 but not issued in English translation until 2003. He dramatizes this position in his first chapter, From the City to Urban Society, with a dialectical exchange for and against the concepts of streets and monuments. The likelihood is that most readers can identify with both positions, in whole or in part. Neither is unintelligent, and the recognition that we can and do live with these opposites is tonic. We can defer judgment until were more adept at grasping the dialectic process revealed by the unfolding of urban experience.