Lefebvre emphasized the value of criticism at the level of the 'everyday' and essential for the revolutionary project and saw the practice of critique as itself emancipatory and something we might all engage in. How exactly this is to be accomplished is another question, however, an ambiguity developed in fits and starts over a long career. I'm working on a more thorough review of these ideas, but one of the most interesting yet at the same time frustratingly elusive concepts is that of the "moment," something that reveals the “breadth and magnificence of the possibilities” inherent in the existential ennui of daily life (1947 [2008], p 229).
Built out of the ideas of Leibniz, Hegel, and Marx (see note below),“moments” are strenuously intangible when variously described by Lefebvre, but the important components can be drawn out. The concept first turns up in a somewhat overly-nostalgic discussion of ancient and peasant cultures that Lefebvre idealizes as having been extant prior to alienation (which was to his mind a sort of historically progressing process tied to modernity, capitalism, and the commodity form). “Mystics and metaphysicians,” he argues, “used to acknowledge that everything in life revolved around exceptional moments… These moments were festivals: festivals of the mind or the heart, public or intimate festivals” (p 250).
Moments are first discussed at length in Lefebvre's 1959 autobiographical work La Somme et le reste (from which I've recently translated a seemingly-important untranslated chapter), mostly as a concept that he admits he had long struggled to define and finally described unsatisfactorily through examples of what he calls “partial totalities”: love, play, struggle, creative activity (1959 [1989], pp 235, 237).
Two years later, Lefebvre offered a “theory of moments” in which the moment is defined as “the attempt to achieve the total realization of a possibility” (1961 [2008], p 348), and is again exemplified as love and play, and as festival. Lefebvre adds years later that some moments “are seeking to shatter the everydayness trapped in generalized exchange,” and seek to “transform daily life through poetry” (1981 [2008], pp 57, 172). A somewhat clearer summary of the idea is offered by Merrifield (2006, p 29): “Just as alienation reflected an absence, a dead moment empty of critical content, the Lefebvrian moment signified a presence, a fullness, alive and connected.” While sloppily defined by Lefebvre, the idea of the moment is important to his theory, a shared, imprecise-but-mutually recognizable meme of experience that serves as a potentially liberating exception to the everyday that is nonetheless born of the everyday.
Still, the search for the possible via the festival or the moment are not ‘revolutionary’ in themselves for Lefebvre. As others have pointed out (Trebitsch, 2002 [2008]; Merrifield, 2006; 2008) the Lefebvrian moment can be seen as somewhat analogous to (and even inspirational of) “the situation” of Guy Debord and the Situationists, yet Lefebvre disputed the idea that simply subverting the everyday will lead to consciousness of ‘real life.’ Lefebvre even seems sometimes unsure of the chances for success even through his own philosophy of praxis, turning away from the emancipatory potential of his quotidien critique at times to a more skeptical tone and language suggesting the unlikelihood of the necessary revolutionary preconditions. The possibilities for clarity and critique (and thus transformation) are always present in Lefebvre’s theory, but his optimism for them is inconsistent. Particularly in his earlier work, they are fleeting, tentative, beyond the reach of most of us most of the time, confined to “certain privileged moments of lucidity” while “most people remain imprisoned within narrow, out-of-date frames of reference” (2008a, p 247).
Furthermore, Lefebvre argues that “Consciousness must be gained over and over again through action and struggle as well as through organizations whose role is to penetrate everyday life” (p 151). Through the critique of everyday life, the individual can learn “certain infinitely delicate but efficacious techniques which will give him active power over himself qua content” (p 248), but “the problem remains: how can the ‘masses’ – whether masses of moments of masses of human beings – ‘participate’ in a total vision” (p 250). Lefebvre thus explains and essentially accommodates for the lack of socialist revolutionary transformation at once, putting the ideal ‘total moment’ on “a distant horizon beyond our present vision” (2008d, p 66) and emphasizing the value of seemingly minor, personal moments whereby the transformation of everyday life might still be slowly affected.
*Note: Merrifield (2006, p 29) succinctly describes the significance of “moments” for Hegel and Marx: “All dialectical movement progressed through different moments: moments of skeptical, negative consciousness defined history for Hegel; moments of contradictory unity defined and structured capitalism for Marx. All reality for both thinkers was momentary, transient, in motion, in fluid state, whether as an idea or as material reality.”
Works cited:
Lefebvre, Henri. 1947 (2008). Critique of Everyday Life Vol. I: Introduction, 2nd Ed., trans. J. Moore. London and New York: Verso.
Lefebvre, Henri. 1957 (2008). “Foreword to the Second Edition” in H. Lefebvre, The Critique of Everyday Life Vol. I: Introduction, 2nd Ed., trans. J. Moore. London and New York: Verso.
Lefebvre, Henri. 1961 (2008). Critique of Everyday Life Vol. II: Foundations for a Sociology of the Everyday, trans. J. Moore. London and New York: Verso.
Lefebvre, Henri. 1981 (2008). Critique of Everyday Life Vol. III: From Modernity to Modernism, trans. G. Elliot. London and New York: Verso.
Merrifield, Andy. 2006. Henri Lefebvre: A Critical Introduction. New York and London: Routledge.
Merrifield, Andy. 2008. “Lefebvre and Debord: A Faustian Fusion,” in K. Goonewardena, et al. eds., Space, Difference, Everyday Life: Reading Henri Lefebvre. New York and London: Routledge.
Trebitsch, Michel. 2002 (2008). “Preface: The Moment of Radical Critique,” in H. Lefebvre, Critique of Everyday Life Vol. II: Foundations for a Sociology of the Everyday, trans. G. Elliot. London and New York: Verso.
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