This review essay of Henri Lefebvre's Toward an Architecture of Enjoyment was originally published at Society and Space. Special thanks to Lukasz Stanek (who edited the book and wrote its wonderful introduction) for his feedback and for providing me with the photo of Lefebvre and his family at the beach reproduced at the end of this post.
Henri
Lefebvre (1901-1991) was one of the most incisive, original, and prolific philosophers
of the twentieth century, and his wide-ranging books profoundly redefined our
understanding of space as something material, produced, embodied, and disrupted
by conflict and violence. Yet it is only in 2014 that we finally have access to
his masterful Toward an Architecture of
Enjoyment, his most forceful meditation on the spatial utopia he aspired to.
Written in 1973 and subsequently forgotten for four decades, the book is an
extraordinary exploration of the affective dimensions of space, a topic that
was uncharted territory in the 1970s. Lefebvre tackled it with the creative
heterodoxy that always characterized him, blending his acute spatial gaze, the
critical spirit of Marxist theory, phenomenology’s bodily sensibility, and a
Dionysian, Nietzschean thrust. Toward an
Architecture of Enjoyment, in particular, testifies to the impact that
Nietzsche had on Lefebvre’s views of space, focused here on the most vital disposition
that defines human affects: enjoyment. This is not the commodified, shallow,
individualized enjoyment cultivated by corporatized spaces of leisure. The
enjoyment celebrated by Lefebvre is part of collective and insurgent forces
that disrupt spaces of domination and suffering, for (in his words) “only the
humiliated, the oppressed, the exploited … retain a vital, explosive energy,
the energy of enjoyment —expended in festivals and revolutions”
(70).
We owe the rescue and publication of this
notable book to the perseverance and talent of Lukasz Stanek, the Manchester-based
Polish architect who wrote the volume’s excellent and comprehensive
introduction, and who is also the author of Henri
Lefebvre on Space (2011, also published by Minnesota). In the introduction,
Stanek tells us the fascinating story of how on a 2008 trip to Spain he discovered
that the manuscript had sat for decades in the private library of Mario
Gaviria, a renowned Spanish sociologist and urban planner who was a close
friend and collaborator of Lefebvre. Gaviria and Lefebvre had spent years
analyzing the transformation of the beaches of the Mediterranean into
commodified spaces for the consumption of the northern European middle-classes.
This became an important theme in Lefebvre’s The Production of Space, which was published in 1974 and became his
most famous masterpiece (the book was published in English in 1991, months before
his death). In the 1960s and early 1970s, Gaviria and Lefebvre interpreted the transformation
of the Mediterranean into a tourist destination as a neo-colonial subordination
of southern Europe to the better-off parts of the continent. Gaviria asked
Lefebvre to write a manuscript on “the architecture of pleasure” associated
with this spatial transformation, to be submitted to the foundation that
financed the research. In 1973, Lefebvre wrote the book with the revised title
“Toward an Architecture of Enjoyment.” Making explicit his debt to his friend,
he dedicated the book to Gaviria.
Gaviria, however, was expecting something
else. Stanek does not go into details, but says that Gaviria found the
manuscript “too abstract” and did not enclose it in his report. The sole existing
copy of the manuscript ended up in Gaviria’s personal library in the basement
of an old house from the 1600s. When in 2008 Stanek told Gaviria that he would
love to see it, they both went to the old library. It took Gaviria “several
hours” to find the manuscript, which indicates that its presence had been
largely forgotten amid piles of other objects. In an illuminating interview
with Stuart Elden at Society and Space,
Stanek mentioned that a flooding in the basement had destroyed many of the
library’s books and documents. Lefebvre’s manuscript survived, but barely; it
was sitting just above the water level. Had more water flooded the basement, that
bundle of aging pages, and the ideas written on them, would have dissolved into
nothingness.
The story of the trajectory and eventual
public appearance of the manuscript is as remarkable as its content. Toward an Architecture of Enjoyment is,
indeed, a complex, “abstract” philosophical book. The style of the narrative is
vintage Lefebvre: some sections include meandering thoughts that seem to drift,
but that gradually build momentum as they weave different topics in tangential
yet ultimately illuminating ways. What Gaviria perhaps found too abstract is
that Lefebvre’s examples barely hint at Mediterranean Europe. Gaviria seems to
have wanted a more concrete reflection on the architecture created at Spanish
beaches, and Lefebvre gave him a philosophical treatise on enjoyment and space.
The book is a sweeping review of how philosophy, history, anthropology, economics,
psychology, psychoanalysis, semiotics, semantics, and architecture tackled the
problem of enjoyment in relation to space. The scope is as epic and erudite as
it is, at points, uneven. The chapters I found most compelling are those on philosophy
(chapter 5) and psychology and psychoanalysis (chapter 8). Lefebvre’s critique
of the ways in which European intellectual traditions confronted the problem of
enjoyment from ancient Greece to the twentieth century is not free from an Orientalist
common sense that occasionally romanticizes a sensuous “East” in contrast to an
austere and moralist “West,” the only moments when the narrative feels dated. And
his engagement with Spinoza’s philosophy of affects, an obviously relevant
interlocutor given Spinoza’s celebration of joy, is disappointingly brief and
superficial, even if Lefebvre is right in noting that Spinoza overlooked the
problem of space (60). Yet despite its shortfalls, the book is consistently thought-provoking
and reveals how myriad authors addressed or overlooked the affective and the
sensory in the making of space.
This engagement with multiple disciplines
is Lefebvre’s own effort to answer the book’s foundational questions: What,
exactly, is enjoyment? Which are the joys that are genuinely liberating? The book’s
brilliant translator, Robert Bononno (who also translated Lefebvre’s The Urban Revolution), warns us in the
opening pages about the well-known nuances of the word jouissance (“enjoyment”) in French, including its libidinal
connotations that make it resonate with “pleasure.” But perhaps in critical dialogue
with Gaviria’s perception that the text was too abstract, Bonono rightly points
out that Lefebvre writes about jouissance
in the most bodily and concrete sense of the term, and with the aim of
criticizing the alienating power of spatial abstractions under capitalism. The
abstractions that define capitalist, commodified space are a major theme in Lefebvre’s
The Production of Space. The fact
that the two books were written almost simultaneously often makes Toward an Architecture of Enjoyment read
like the former book’s “lost,” most assertive chapter: the moment when, after
examining how space is historically produced and turned into something alienating, Lefebvre pauses to reflect on his disruptive spatial utopia of collective joys.
For Lefebvre, enjoyment is crucial for a political understanding of spaces of freedom because its raw,
sensuous materiality is inseparable from the social conditions that
define space. Yet he also shows how elusive, multifaceted, and
fleeting this physicality is. He insists that enjoyment is momentary, slippery,
appearing only to disappear again.
Joy, he writes, is like a “surplus” that only emerges from “use” and “efforts”
(62, 75). In one of the most Nietzschean yet also most dialectical lines in the
book, Lefebvre writes that enjoyment “is merely a flash, a form of energy that
is expended, wasted, destroying itself in the process” (115). This is why for him
the idea of “architectures of enjoyment” is primarily a problem, a question for which he does not have a neat answer, and
for which no clear answer, in fact, will ever exist. Lefebvre gestures at a generative
void: a horizon of spatialized enjoyments that may be momentary and not fully apprehensible
but that are important to appreciate the liberating but also oppressive ways in
which affects contribute to producing space.
A central theme in the book is that these
flashes of joyful surplus can easily become deceiving traps that create spaces
of domination. The state always strives to domesticate popular joys and turn them
into mere “satisfaction,” which under capitalism becomes the fetishized “illusion”
of private enjoyment (5, 70). This is the “caricature of enjoyment” through
which spaces of leisure are subsumed “to the demands of profit” (101). The
ruling classes, in turn, cultivate their own perverse enjoyments, which thrive
on the suffering of others. “The powerful take pleasure in crushing the weak
and defeating an adversary whose power is equal to or greater than their own”
(16). This is why the elites have for millennia built massive, “tragic”
monuments: the “architecture of death” of the Taj Mahal in India or the
pyramids in Egypt (6). This monumentalized architecture is the best example of
the “absolute space” he would write about in The Production of Space: the places saturated with religious meaning
and claims to transcendence that dominated medieval Europe, and which were to
be eroded by the rise of capitalist spatial abstractions and their commodified functionality.
There is an important caveat, however. Architecture
will never magically generate enjoyment in and of itself. Lefebvre is hostile
to this spatial fetishism, for enjoyment can emerge from anywhere because of its
elusive, bodily, fleeting nature (an abandoned warehouse, he says, can be
quickly turned into a place of celebration). Further, if the goal of creating “a
space of enjoyment” becomes too explicit and spatially fixed, genuine enjoyment
is destroyed. In a particularly important section, Lefebvre writes that “the
places of enjoyment” should not have
pleasure or sensuality “as their function.” “Discotheques and bordellos” are for
him far from being places of enjoyment; they are defined by “the death of
pleasure,” because “the tireless pursuit of dead pleasure is hell.” “The place
of sensuality,” he adds, “need not be sensual.” This is why an architecture of
enjoyment should draw from the only possible source of pleasure: the body in its non-commodified immediacy in relation to space. “Places have
no way of giving beings what can only come from themselves, the vitality known
as desire” (112).
For Lefebvre, therefore, only collective gestures
and actions can create spaces of enjoyment, primarily through an “economy of
joy” where use-value and egalitarian appropriations prevail over commoditization
and class domination. This is an enjoyment with anti-capitalist dimensions, created
by an economy that does not have enjoyment as its goal, but “allow it” and “lead
to it” (151). This is why Lefebvre argues that “spaces of enjoyment cannot
consist of a building, an assembly of rooms, places determined by their
functions.” Rather, they emerge through bodies expending their vital energies
in “moments, encounters, friendships, festivals, rest, quiet, joy, exaltation,
sensuality, as well as understanding, enigma, the unknown, and the known,
struggle, play” (152). Lefebvre knows very well that this is a
utopian project, to be created collectively by a revolution that has yet to take
place. Yet he also warns the skeptic reader that this is a concrete utopia whose affective and spatial materiality already exists
among us, for “every time you find a place genuinely pleasing and enchanting…
you enter this utopia.” And he provocatively asks us, his readers: Would you be
able to survive “if you cannot refresh yourself in a short bath of enjoyment
from time to time?” (132).
In retrospect, Toward an Architecture of Enjoyment helps us better understand
these lines and in general Lefebvre’s political philosophy of space. The idea
that a body enjoying the beach generates a surplus of vital energy irreducible
to that place’s commoditization is probably inseparable from Lefebvre’s experience
at those beaches that inspired him to write about the spatiality of enjoyment.
In a section that sums up the book’s nuanced argument, Lefebvre wrote that
enjoyment requires “bodily immediacy,” and that it is space that provides this immediacy “between enjoyment and pleasure”
(116). It is, therefore, “space,” he wrote, “that maintains this connection
between pleasure and enjoyment: by preparing pleasure, by calibrating it, by
enabling it to surround enjoyment, even if enjoyment, in the narrow and
absolute sense, has no space.”
.png)
