H.Lefebvre's thought who can introduce the

Henri Lefebvre (1901-1991), a master of modern French thought born with the 20th century, left a rich spiritual legacy of more than 60 books and 300 essays for posterity in his more than 60 years of creative life, and is widely recognized as the "father of the critical theory of everyday life", the "father of modern French dialectics", and an important founder of regional sociology, especially urban sociology. He is recognized as the "Father of Critical Theory of Everyday Life" in the Western academic world, the "Father of Modern French Dialectics", and an important founder of regional sociology, especially the theory of urban sociology.

It is worth mentioning that, after the first English translation of the first volume of Lefebvre's important work Critique of Everyday Life in 1991, the English translation of the next two volumes is expected to come out around 2003. This is the third foreign language translation after the German and Japanese translations of the three volumes of the Critique of Everyday Life.

An evaluation of Lefebvre's Critique of Everyday Life?

1. A Commentary on the Sources and Early Formative Studies of Lefebvre's Critical Theory of Everyday Life?

Mark Post found that Lefebvre's concept of the critique of everyday life was first found in the book The Mystified Consciousness . This book was the first of the author's projected Five Essays on Materialist Philosophy, the third volume of which was to be titled The Critique of Everyday Life. Ten years later, the "third volume" became a reality at greater length, and the Critique of Everyday Life has been Lefebvre's life's work ever since.

Tribich argues that Lefebvre's conception of everyday life may have been influenced by Heidegger's view of the "everyday state" and the "common man" in Being and Time rather than by Lukács's view of objectification. After studying Hegel's Phenomenology of Spirit, Heidegger's Being and Time and Marx's Paris Manuscripts as a young man, Lefebvre wrote his book The Mystified Consciousness with Gutmann around 1933 without reading Lukács's History and Class Consciousness, especially his theory of "objectification". The Mystified Consciousness. It was in this book that Lefebvre raised the problem of the alienation of everyday life, which he would later systematize. As can be seen from the title of the book, Lefebvre realized that the deepest and most widespread alienation in capitalist society was not the alienation of labor, which Marx abhorred at that time, but the "self-deception" of ideology, which was pervasive in every corner of daily life in modern society. Unlike History and Class Consciousness, this book argues that all consciousness, including Lukács's proletarian class consciousness, has a mysterious and deceptive aspect.

Bukhard argues that the formation of Lefebvre's critical theory of everyday life began, for practical reasons, with a critique of fascism. According to Lefebvre, one of the main reasons for the failure of European revolutions and the rise of fascism was the mystification of the consciousness of everyday life, especially the mystification of the two ideologies of individualism and nationalism. This is similar to the views and experiences of the Frankfurt School. However, Lefebvre later shifted his focus to the study of mass consumer society, unlike Adorno and others who were caught up in the philosophical and aesthetic critique of fascism. Early on, Lefebvre's critique of everyday life was linked to his contemporaries, such as Gramsci's theory of ideological hegemony, Lukács's critique of objectification and class consciousness, and Adorno's dialectic of the Enlightenment and theory of the cultural industry. In the later period, his theory of "consumption-led bureaucratic society" was linked with Marcuse's theory of one-way society and Foucault's theory of punitive society. The intellectual roots of Lefebvre's early critical theory of everyday life are to be found in his and Gutmann's unique understanding of Marx's notion of alienation, and of Hegel's system and methodology, in the course of the publication of the Selected Writings of Marx and Lenin's Notebooks on the Hegelian Dialectic.

2. A study of the meaning and character of Lefebvre's concept of everyday life?

The uniqueness of Lefebvre's critical theory of everyday life is linked to the richness of its central concept of "everyday life". Schertz finds that Lefebvre grasped the concept of "everyday life", le quotidien, in the light of the surrealism of the early twentieth century. The everyday is a concept that reflects the stereotypical, trivial and repetitive quality of life under capitalist conditions. "The everyday and the everydayness cannot be simply equated with the everyday life or the everydayness of life. The everyday and the everydayness cannot be simply equated with "everyday life" or "daily life". The latter usually refers to the uncategorizable, habitual, routine nature of day-to-day life, rather than to the alienated, dry "day-to-dayness" that characterizes everyday life in a critically specific way. In the words of Antho ny Giddens, one is the monotonous machine-like rhythmic daily life of modern society, the other is the daily life of ancient society, full of concrete and rich meaning.

Scherz points out that in Lefebvre's work, daily life refers to a monotonous and meaningless life, not to the daily routine. This is in marked contrast to Heller's position, which tends to understand everyday life as a state of "truth" in an ontological sense. What Lefebvre highlights is the absence of authenticity and the pervasive alienation that characterizes the dominance of everyday life. Everyday life is thus not a process of creative self-realization; it is at the same time a world of strange adventures, a process of overcoming or abandoning contradictions.

3. A study of the connection and difference between Lefebvre's early and middle critical theories of everyday life?

In Post's view, the first volume of the Critique of Everyday Life has not yet really led Marx's philosophy into a sociology of modernity as a critique of everyday life, but mainly used the theory of alienation of labor in Marx's critique of political economy to logically analyze and expose the phenomenon of total alienation of the capitalist society, and in particular, to y criticize the phenomenon of ideological alienation. In the second volume, Lefebvre steps out of the general framework of the theory of alienation, abandons the classical Marxist dichotomy of economic base and superstructure, and regards daily life as a new "platform" independent of the two "platforms" of economy and politics. And this "platform" of everyday life has been put in a more important and dominant position than production: everyday life has replaced Marx's factory floor as the core of society; modern everyday life has taken on the role of the "economy" in the past. Its dominance is the source of the new revolution. For everyday life has become an important part of the organization of capitalist society, a central area of oppression.

Scherz discusses in detail the changes and differences in Lefebvre's theory of everyday life. In Lefebvre's early book, The Mystified Consciousness, everyday life was simply the dull, monotonous reality of every day life, which would eventually be replaced by a revolutionary, non-alienated social life. Nearly forty years later, in his series of books, The Critique of Everyday Life, everyday life is presented as a basis for resistance and renewal of social life, which can be revealed as a mysterious aura (moment) and a non-alienating presence - like sunlight penetrating through clouds: the monotony of everyday life is like a layer of clouds, while the presence of the moment is like a dazzling, brilliant light. The moment is the salvation of everyday life: the monotony of everyday life is like a layer of dark clouds, while the presence of the moment is like a dazzling sunshine. The moment is the salvation of everyday life: "everyday life = monotony ÷ present moment". For Scherz, it is important to understand everyday life as everyday life and to distinguish it from the trivial "everydayness" that master theorists such as Lukács, Heidegger, and Lefebvre called it. From The Mystified Consciousness to The Critique of Everyday Life, Lefebvre has always studied such a trivial and monotonous everyday life. For Lefebvre, to discover authentic Marxism is to discover the epistemology of the Critique of Everyday Life.

Gardiner examines in some depth the differences between the first volume of Lefebvre's Critique of Everyday Life and the two books, Everyday Life in the Modern World, i.e., he examines and reviews with relative concentration the clear distinction between Lefebvre's earlier critique of everyday life and his later critique of everyday life. On the whole, Lefebvre's Critique of Everyday Life, Volume I, takes a relatively philosophical and optimistic stance towards everyday life, whereas Everyday Life in the Modern World has a more microcosmic and pessimistic understanding of everyday life. In the perspective of the first volume, the alienated everyday world includes both oppressive and liberating elements. Everyday life is the deepest link between social activities and the institutional structure of society, the common ground of all cultural phenomena, and the source of revolutions of a general nature. Everyday Life in the Modern World, on the other hand, argues that whereas at the beginning of the modern era everyday life was a neglected and therefore marginalized sphere, in advanced capitalist societies modern everyday life has been comprehensively organized and integrated into the overall chain of production and consumption. Daily life has become the main battlefield of capitalist domination and competition, and is no longer a forgotten corner. Modern society has become a "bureaucratic society of controlled consumption" rather than a society of leisure and abundance where people can make free choices. In the modern world, everyday life has been invaded by technological rationality, market exchanges, and multifaceted colonization by the system of symbolic domination of the media. As Marx pointed out, capitalist society is a society in which exchange value transcends and is divorced from use value, a society in which production is for the sake of production rather than for daily life, which leads to the alienation phenomenon of the disappearance of the meaning of life and the disappearance of the system of reference to reality in capitalist society. From a linguistic point of view, the everyday world in which people live is a mythical world floating with symbols of all kinds, a world in which language has become a purely visual stimulus without any definite meaning or corresponding humanistic significance. That is to say, language is no longer a symbol that represents reality, but an independent self-reproducing and reproducing system of referents and symbols. The multifaceted signs and symbols have been replaced by abstract universal codes. The direct fear of the domination of nature, of the domination of violence, which was so common in pre-industrial societies, has disappeared, but today one lives in an era of symbolic, institutionalized, abstract, anonymous, functional domination from which one cannot escape, an era in which there is no longer a concrete fear, but therefore a universalized terror. It is for this reason that Lefebvre always insisted that today's social emancipation must be general rather than specific (e.g., economic or political, cultural), and that it must be a festive, artistic, and instantaneous version of everyday life.

The study of the late Lefebvre's theory of the "production of space" and the theory of the sociology of the city is an important part of the study. The study of the theoretical problems of urban sociology. [HS]]

The Lefebvre accepted in the West is no longer the Marxist philosopher who studied the alienation of everyday life, but a geographer, sociologist, and even a postmodern critical theorist who studied the problem of space and the city.

Kaufman and Lebas argue that the French academy currently focuses on accepting Lefebvre from the perspective of urban sociology, while the English-speaking world tends to accept Lefebvre from the perspective of spatial theory, geographic theory and postmodernism. That is to say, the French-speaking community considers Lefebvre's main work to be the book The Power of the City. In other words, the French-speaking community considers Lefebvre's main work to be The Power of the City, while the English-speaking community considers Lefebvre's main work to be The Production of Space. Both editors tend to regard Lefebvre as an urban sociologist. In their view, one of the major contributions of Lefebvre in works such as The Power of the City is the clear distinction between industrialization and urbanization and the importance of urbanization in the reconstruction of modern daily life. In Lefebvre's view, urbanization and industrialization were not homogeneous, but rather contradictory and dual processes. Industrialization was initially predicated on the destruction of urbanization. Industrialization is a process of growth and economy, while urbanization is a process of development and living, and therefore industrialization cannot be substituted for urbanization. Lefebvre's study of everyday life in the city aims to dismantle the traditional rationalist or Platonic philosophical ideal state of homogenized design and control of urban life and to reconstruct a differentiated spatial utopia.

In contrast to the tendencies of Kaufmann and Lebas, Schertz argues that while Lefebvre's greatest contribution to Marxism may have been his continued use of dialectical materialist methodology to study the problems of modern everyday life, his greatest current influence on Western thought has been in the discovery of "social space". "Lefebvre continued to translate his original conception of everyday life into a sphere within the spatial and urban realm." Lefebvre's most important contribution was to shift the basis of dialectical materialism from time to space. In the afterword to the English translation of his book The Production of Space (Lefebvre, 1 991b), David Harvey, a leading American leftist geographer, notes that through the historical events of 1968, Lefebvre recognized the significance of the condition of everyday life in the city as being at the heart of revolutionary passions and politics. This view stands in opposition to the narrow vision of traditional Marxism, which is concerned only with the politics of the workplace. For Lefebvre, space is not the usual concept of geometry and traditional geography, but a process of reorganization of social relations and the practical construction of a social order; not a homogeneous abstract logical structure, nor an established a priori order of domination of capital, but a dynamic and contradictory heterogeneity of practices. Spatiality is not only produced but also reproduced. Marx only saw material production within the constraints of space and time, but failed to see that capitalist "production" is a process of spatial "self-production" that continually transcends the limits of geography and space. One of Lefebvre's most important contributions was to propose a "historical approach to spatial production". Drawing on Marx's theory of mode of production and theory of social formations, he understood the historical process of spatialization so far as the following stages: First, absolute space - the state of nature; second, sacred space - Egyptian temples and the state ruled by tyrants; III. Historical space: the political state, the Greek city-state, the Roman Empire; IV. Abstract space: capitalism, the space of the political economy of property; V. Ambivalent space: contemporary globalized capitalism versus localized meanings; VI. Differential space: the future space of reassessing difference and lived experience.