Henri Lefebvre and Education

Space, history, theory

Sue Middleton

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2013
• Print ISBN: 9780415792110
• eBook ISBN: 9781135092276
• Topic: Education
• Subtopic: Education General

During his lifetime Henri Lefebvre (1901-1991) was renowned in France as a philosopher, sociologist and activist. Although he published more than 70 books, few were available in English until The Production of Space was translated in 1991. While this work - often associated with geography - has influenced educational theory's 'spatial turn,' educationalists have yet to consider Lefebvre's work more broadly.

This book engages in an educational reading of the selection of Lefebvre's work that is available in English translation. After introducing Lefebvre's life and works, the book experiments with his concepts and methods in a series of five 'spatial histories' of educational theories. In addition to The Production of Space, these studies develop themes from Lefebvre's other translated works: Rhythmanalysis, The Explosion, the three volumes of Critique of Everyday Life and a range of his writings on cities, Marxism, technology and the bureaucratic state. In the course of these inquiries, Lefebvre's own passionate interest in education is uncovered: his critiques of bureaucratised schooling and universities, the analytic concepts he devised to study educational phenomena, and his educational methods.

Throughout the book Middleton demonstrates how Lefebvre's conceptual and methodological tools can enhance the understanding of the spatiotemporal location of educational philosophy and theory. Bridging disciplinary divides, it will be key reading for researchers and academics studying the philosophy, sociology and history of education, as well as those working in fields beyond education including geography, history, cultural studies and sociology.

1 Overview

Henri Lefebvre and education

Now and again we will need to lay bare a certain nefarious pedagogic illusion, and in doing so we will be able to highlight the part played by education and its importance in everyday life. This illusion is twofold: on the one hand, a fetishism of the partial, and thus of the fragmentary and the specialised, an acceptance of fragmentation and the dismissal of totality; on the other hand, a fetishism of the total, an equalising of differences, a superficial encyclopedism, and a belief in the complete mastery of pedagogy and human knowledge over human nature. There is a middle way between the dismissal of totality and the fetishism of the total, and critique of everyday life can help to define it.

(Lefebvre 2002: 68)

Introduction

The series to which this book contributes is entitled ‘New Directions in Philosophy of Education’. It approaches this in three main ways. First, it introduces key ideas and works of an important philosopher, Henri Lefebvre, to an educational audience. Written from a transdisciplinary perspective, it does not approach this task from within philosophy of education. Viewing it as a component of a broader field of educational thought, it focuses a Lefebvrian lens on educational theory itself. While Lefebvre's writing is often regarded as theoretical, it was built on empirical foundations. For most of his career, Lefebvre worked as a sociologist, competing for research grants. My second task is to demonstrate, by means of five research exemplars, how Lefebvrian concepts and methods can be put to work in educational inquiries. Each project is concerned with the spatiotemporal location and ‘travels’ of educational theory, including (but not limited to) the university subject education studies.

My third objective is to suggest how an educational reading of Lefebvre might supplement scholarship in disciplines such as geography, sociology or cultural studies. As a multidisciplinary field education studies is united by one common object of inquiry: pedagogy. As exemplified in the epigraph to this chapter, Lefebvre was deeply interested in the pedagogical. But to date, at least in English-speaking contexts, reference to this is largely missing in the literature. Lefebvre, I argue, was concerned with pedagogy in two senses: as an object of inquiry and an ethical practice — how best to facilitate human ‘becoming’.

This introductory chapter begins with a brief overview of Lefebvre's influence in education studies. It introduces his life and works, their accessibility and interpretations in English and educational insights in them. It assembles a Lefebvrian conceptual toolkit and outlines the projects in which it will be put to work in the chapters that follow.

Lefebvre and education studies

Henri Lefebvre (1901–1991) is increasingly cited in education studies. Most of these references are to his book The Production of Space (1991c) [henceforth, Production], its spatial trilogy of ‘the perceived, the conceived and the lived’ providing educationists with conceptual tools for their research. Educationists' enthusiasm for Lefebvre has been described as part of a broader ‘spatial turn’ in educational scholarship (see Lingard and Gale 2007: 1, Gulson and Symes 2007b: 101). Indeed, preoccupation with space is evident in the programmes of recent educational research association conferences (including the American Educational Research Association [AERA]). Special issues of education journals, including that of Britain's Educational Research Association (BERA), have adopted themes such as ‘critical geography's’ relevance to educational inquiries (Helfenbein and Taylor 2009). Production's ‘perceived, conceived and lived’ spaces have featured in such forums.

Although Lefebvre produced a vast body of work, with a few exceptions (including Burke 2001,Tamboukou 2003,Thomson et al. 2010), references by educationists to texts other than Production are scarce. One explanation is the volume and breadth of Lefebvre's writing:

Given that he published seventy books in his lifetime, two more have appeared posthumously, and that these ranged widely from literary theory to politics, from sociology to philosophy, from urban and rural theory to history, it is extremely difficult to get a handle on how his work functioned as a whole.

(Elden 2004b: 4)

A second reason is that much of the recent work on Lefebvre has, understandably, worked with the few English translations available — particularly The Production of Space (Elden 2001: 810). Bibliographies of Lefebvre's works — translated and untranslated — have been compiled by Shields (1999: 191–204) and Elden (2004b: 257–62).

Published in France in 1974, La Production de l'espace's English translation did not appear until 1991. Until then, Anglophone readers encountered Lefebvre through secondary sources such as geographer David Harvey's account (1973) of his untranslated works on cities. Further books by Harvey (notably 1990, 1996) introduced many Anglophone scholars to Production. Accordingly, in Anglophone scholarship Lefebvre's work was located differently than it had been in France. Andy Merrifield summarises:

In the Anglophone world, geographers, urbanists, and cultural theorists have appropriated Lefebvre as their own during the past decade or so. There, The Production of Space, perhaps Lefebvre's best-known book, is one of his least-known texts in the Francophone world.

(2006: xxxii)

Similarly, Michael Trebitsch points out that in Anglophone countries,

It was his thinking on urban questions … and especially that key work The Production of Space … which earned Lefebvre recognition — strangely unconventional recognition, since it was bestowed less by philosophers and sociologists than by geographers, urbanists and architects.

(2005: xxii)

Philosopher Stuart Elden argues that the dominance of the spatial in Anglophone readings of Lefebvre distort his message. He traces such misreadings to Lefebvre's bilingual interlocutors. Notably, he accuses geographer Edward Soja (1996, 1989) of marginalising ‘the question of history with the theoretical reassertion of space’ (Elden 2001: 812). Soja has been identified as ‘a key reference point’ in educationists' engagements with Lefebvre (Gulson and Symes2007a: 9).

While the conceptual trilogy of ‘perceived, conceived and lived space’ Lefebvre outlined in Production is influential in education studies, as yet there has been little engagement with the book's broader theoretical and methodological dimensions. Production is based on the premise that space and time need ‘to be thought together rather than separately’ (Elden 2004a: xvii). This historical dimension of Lefebvre's work is often missed. The editors of an educational policy studies collection wrote:

It is of note that while educational history is a long established field, with a celebrated body of literature and scholarship that has contributed to understanding the way education systems have developed, educational geography — its spatial equivalent — remains relatively underdeveloped and unnamed, though a few have identified themselves as practising it.

(Gulson and Symes 2007a: 9)

While the idea of ‘educational geography’ is interesting, its separation from the history of education entrenches existing epistemological, institutional and professional segmentations in education studies specifically, and in the humanities and social sciences more broadly: disciplines that foreground the synchronic and those prioritising the diachronic or temporal.

Historians of education are increasingly questioning this divide. Catherine Burke noted ‘a significant growth of interest among historians of education in questions of space, place, material cultures and the travel of knowledge and theory’ (2010: 667). Britain's History of Education Society devoted a recent conference and journal issue to ‘Putting education in its place: space, place and materialities in the history of education’ (ibid.), including contributions from geographers (Livingstone 2010) and architects (Kozlovsky 2010). Extending their horizons beyond their field's traditional preoccupations with ‘the nation’ (Caruso 2008), historians of education are engaging with a wider range of levels and scales: from transnational approaches that make ‘the world their reference point’ (Andrés 2009: 561) to micro-level studies of personal documents (see McCulloch 2011: 71–82). As in other education disciplines, historians of education are finding Lefebvre's writing, especially Production, useful in helping them attend to space and time together (for example Grosvenor and Lawn 2004).

Here Stuart Elden's distinction between ‘histories of space’ and ‘spatial histories’ is useful (2004b: 194). ‘Histories of’ educational spaces make spaces their objects of study: for example, transnational networks (Fuchs 2007), school districts (Saint 2010), school buildings (Kozlovsky 2010) and classroom equipment (Herman et al. 2011). ‘Spatial histories’ are also informed by spatial concepts, with space ‘not simply an object of analysis, but a constituent part of the analysis itself’ (Elden 2004b: 194). In a series of exemplars, this book experiments with Lefebvrian concepts as resources for ‘spatial histories’ of educational theory.

Lefebvre's life and works

Merrifield argues that ‘Anglo-American studies that see Lefebvre as a preeminent spatial thinker and urbanist — themes he only began to pick up as a sexagenarian — often overlook the fact that he was first of all a Marxist’ (2006: xxii; see also Goonewardena 2008; Elden 2004b). During a long life of writing, teaching and political activism, working ‘between’ the theory of alienation Marx laid out in his 1844 Manuscripts and the phenomenology of everydayness Heidegger suggested in Being and time, ‘Lefebvre provided a detailed reading of how capitalism had increased its scope in the twentieth century to dominate the social and cultural world as well as the economic’ (Elden 2004b: 9).

Rob Shields writes: ‘Like an electric wire Lefebvre (even unwittingly) conducted ideas from generation to generation and movement to movement’ (1999: 89). Growing up in the Pyrenees, Lefebvre was at first attracted to the study of rural life (see Merrifield 2006). During the 1920s, he studied at the Sorbonne in Paris. Stunned by the malaise of the French populace following World War One, Lefebvre drew on Marx's early writings (see Lefebvre 1974) to explore the people's alienation ‘from the new industrialised forms of work and the bureaucratic institutions of civil society’ (Shields 2004: 208). Engaging in fieldwork as well as ‘high theory’, Lefebvre argued, ‘Marx is not a sociologist, but there is a sociology in Marx’ (Lefebvre 2003a: 33, also 1968: 22, emphasis in the originals). Throughout the 1920s, Lefebvre associated with Paris's artistic avantgarde — Dada, Cubists, and Surrealists — attracted by ‘their attempt to engage with social life and to disrupt the repetitiveness of daily routine through a kind of poetic guerrilla warfare’ (Shields 1999: 33). He later wrote:

The leading surrealists sought to decode inner space and illuminate the nature of the transition from this subjective space to the material realm of the body and the outside world, and thence to social life. Consequently, surrealism has a theoretical import which was not originally recognised.

(Lefebvre 1991c: 18)

Lefebvre was highly politically active. He joined France's Communist Party (PCF) in 1928, remaining a member until 1958 when, rebelling against its dogmatism (discussed later), he was expelled. As fascisms gained ascendancy in Europe, together with Norman Guterman, Lefebvre translated and interpreted texts by Marx (notably his 1844 Manuscripts), Engels and Heidegger. Published in France in 1940, Lefebvre's Dialectical materialism attacked the economic determinism of France's Marxist establishment (for an overview see Lefebvre 2009b; Kipfer 2009). During the Second World War Lefebvre fled Paris ‘in the face of Nazi occupation and then removed by the Vichy government from a teaching position’ (Harvey 1991: 427), he found exile in the Pyrenees. There, fighting for the Resistance, he helped local railwaymen ‘derail enemy trains and sniff out collaborators’ (Merrifield 2006: 3). Published in France in 1947, the first of the three volumes of Lefebvre's Critique of Everyday Life [henceforth Critique] was largely a response to the immediate post-war turmoil. Between 1949–1961 Lefebvre was director of research at the Centre Nationale de la Recherche Scientifique in Paris (Kipfer et al. 2008).

Lefebvre was France's first professor of sociology. From 1961–1965 he held a chair in Strasbourg, with the Institut de Sociologie Urbaine, where he ‘undertook many studies under contract, for example the Ministère de l'Équipement’ (Kofman and Lebas 1996b: 17). He continued to identify with the political avant-garde and applied ‘the critiques of an earler generation of surrealists and communists to the counter-culture of the 1960s’ (Shields 2004: 208). At this time he experienced a tumultuous period of engagement and falling-out with Guy Debord's Situationists (Trebitsch 2002). Reflecting this oppositional stance, the French original of volume two of Critique was published in 1961. From 1965–1973 Lefebvre held a chair at the new university of Nanterre in suburban Paris. His Sociology of Marx was published in 1966 (but not translated until 1981). At Nanterre Lefebvre was a powerful influence in students' occupation of the Sorbonne and Left Bank in May 1968. Indeed, David Harvey notes that Lefebvre is ‘sometimes depicted as “father” of that movement’ (1991: 430). Published that year (and translated a year later), Lefebvre's book on these events, The explosion, was a critique of university education. Also in 1968, Lefebvre's 1940 publication Dialectical materialism was translated into English (see Kipfer 2009).

Following 1968, Lefebvre wrote prolifically on themes of urbanisation and formulated one of the first theories of gl...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• New Directions in the Philosophy of Education Series
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Table of Contents
• Foreword
• Acknowledgements
• 1 Overview: Henri Lefebvre and education
• 2 Production of space: labouring families in a new colony, 1841–1845
• 3 Everyday life:‘New Education Fellowship’ activists, 1928–1948
• 4 Dwelling: Sylvia Ashton-Warner at home and school, 1939–1959
• 5 The Rhythmanalyst: doctoral students, 1968–1998
• 6 The bureaucratic state: teacher educators, 1990s–2013
• Conclusion: Lefebvre as educational theorist
• References
• Index