Toward a Philosophy of the Urban: Henri Lefebvre's Uncomfortable Application of Bergsonism

Abstract

Although Henri Lefebvre (1901–1991) publicly and consistently eschewed the philosophy of Henri Bergson (1859–1941), his writings in effect made great use of the latter's key ideas and method. Like Bergson's philosophy, Lefebvre's urban criticism denounced the spatialization of time and gave priority to lived experience over the abstractions employed by static intellectual or traditionally analytical models of experience. Throughout The Urban Revolution, The Production of Space, The Critique of Everyday Life, Volumes 1–3, and the writings posthumously collected in Rhythmanalysis, Lefebvre's urban philosophical project appropriated the ideas Bergson advanced in his three major works, Time and Free Will, Matter and Memory, and Creative Evolution, through their application to the problems of social life—a de facto collaboration that Bergson never lived to appreciate and that Lefebvre would never recognize. This connection is important not only as a corrective to the scant attention paid to Lefebvre's work by philosophers, but also because it reinforces both thinkers' own emphases on interdisciplinarity and on reconciling theories of knowledge with theories of life. The combined work of the two philosophers suggests a philosophical basis for the current emphasis of theory in both cultural studies and human geography in that it stresses the importance of acknowledging movement, process, and mobilities in approaches to the problems of urban life. The composite of Bergson–Lefebvre provides the basis for articulating a philosophy of the urban.

Markets, bodies, and rhythms: A rhythmanalysis of financial markets from open-outcry trading to high-frequency trading

“…Much of the extant scholarship on Lefebvre's rhythmanalysis examines its potential in empirical explorations of, for example, festival spaces (Duffy et al, 2011), the night-time economy (Schwanen et al, 2012), pedagogy (Hopwood, 2014), street performance (Simpson, 2008(Simpson, , 2012, and various other phenomena relating to cities and the everyday (Cronin, 2006;Edensor, 2010;Goh, 2014;Vergunst, 2010). Others have discussed how Lefebvre's rhythmanalysis connects to his wider oeuvre and how it draws inspiration from and may be related to the work of other theorists, be they rhythmanalysts or not (Borch, 2005;Butler, 2012;Crang, 2001;Elden, 2004;Fraser, 2008;Henriques, 2014;Henriques et al, 2014;May and Thrift, 2001;Mels, 2004;Pantzar, 2010;Prior, 2011;Simonsen, 2005).…”

The Diary of a Failed Spanish Capitalist: Individualism and the Ambivalent Critique of Pablo Sánchez's El alquiler del mundo (2010)

“…If the recent film Biutiful (2010) zooms in on the streets of Barcelona, capturing the exploitative effects of a 'model' of capitalist urbanism that has been more concerned with appearance than with substance (Degen 2004a;2004b;Delgado Ruiz 2007;Fraser 2010;, then the novel El alquiler del mundo (Sánchez 2010) zooms up into the city's corporate offices, delivering instead the slick image of the Catalan capital as a powerful hub for Spanish capital flows. Nevertheless, Pablo Sánchez's recent prize-winning novel (which won the first-ever Francisco Casavella Prize in 2010) is not a story of corporate triumph but rather a cautionary tale foregrounding the dangers of capitalist excess.…”

Beyond rhythmanalysis: towards a territoriology of rhythms and melodies in everyday spatial activities

“…Fraser (2008) has also documented a consistent attitude in Lefebvre to obscure his sources, especially never mentioning Bergson as a major source:Lefebvre, comments Fraser (2008, p 342) 'continues to work with Bergsonism without calling it by that name' .…”