Henri Lefebvre

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Biography

Henri Lefebvre (16 June 1901 – 29 June 1991) was a French Marxist philosopher and sociologist, and the most important twentieth-century theorist of space and of everyday life. He was among the earliest French readers of Marx's 1844 Manuscripts and of Hegel, joined the French Communist Party in 1928 and was expelled in 1958, fought in the Resistance, and held professorships at Strasbourg and at Nanterre, where his teaching was one of the intellectual sources of the May 1968 uprising. He published more than sixty books.

Key Ideas

• The critique of everyday life. Lefebvre's lifelong project, begun in 1947 and continued across three volumes to 1981. His argument is that daily life — the residue left after all the specialised activities are accounted for — is precisely where capitalism reproduces itself, and therefore where it must be analysed and contested. This was a substantial break with a Marxism that looked only at the factory.
• The production of space. The claim of his 1974 book La production de l'espace (English 1991), and the one that reorganised urban studies, geography and architecture. Space is not a neutral container in which social life happens; it is produced by social relations and in turn produces them. Every society generates its own space, and the space is not incidental to the society but constitutive of it.
• The spatial triad. Lefebvre's analytic apparatus, three moments that are always simultaneously in play. Spatial practice (perceived space) is the material, routine production and use of space — the commute, the layout, the flows. Representations of space (conceived space) is the space of planners, architects, engineers and technocrats: mapped, coded, dominant. Representational space (lived space) is space as inhabited and imagined by its users, charged with symbol and memory, the space of resistance and appropriation. The characteristic conflict of modernity, for Lefebvre, is conceived space colonising lived space.
• The right to the city. From the 1968 book of that title: a claim not to be consulted about the city but to participate in producing it, and to appropriate urban space for use rather than for exchange. The phrase has since been taken up widely by housing and urban movements.
• Rhythmanalysis. His final work, published posthumously in 1992, proposes analysing places through their rhythms — the cyclical rhythms of body and nature against the linear rhythms of the clock and the machine — and treats the mismatch between them as a diagnosable condition of modern life.

Selected Works

• Critique of Everyday Life, 3 vols. (1947, 1961, 1981)
• Le droit à la ville / The Right to the City (1968)
• The Production of Space (1974; English 1991)
• Rhythmanalysis: Space, Time and Everyday Life (1992; English 2004)

Relevance to Cyborg Anthropology

The spatial triad transfers to networked and interface space more cleanly than almost any other theoretical apparatus. A platform's conceived space is the schema, the specification and the affordance model held by its designers; its perceived space is the routine practice of using it; its lived space is what users actually make of it — the appropriations, the workarounds, the meanings the designers did not plan. Nearly every interesting conflict on a platform is a conflict between the second and third against the first.

Rhythmanalysis is equally applicable: the mismatch between a body's cycles and a notification schedule is exactly the kind of arrhythmia Lefebvre proposed to study.

Related Reading

• Guy Debord
• The Social Logic of Space
• Yi-Fu Tuan
• Time and Space
• Space Syntax Laboratory