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Patrick Gamsby, "Henri Lefebvre, Metaphilosophy and Modernity" (Routledge, 2025)
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- [00:00]
Matt Dawson
Hello everybody.
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Marshall Po
This is Marshall Po. I'm the founder of the New Books Network, and if you're listening to this podcast on the New Books Network, I bet you like to read. I know that I do. That's why I founded the New Books Network. So as readers, we need to know what to read. And I have a podcast to recommend for you. That being the Proofread podcast, do you have a goal to read more this year? How about a goal to read more of what you love and less of what you don't? The Proofread Podcast is here to help you. Hosted by Casey and Tyler, two English professors and avid readers with busy lives, Proofread helps you decide what books are worth spending your precious time on and what books aren't. They have 15 minute episodes that give you everything you need to know about a book to decide if you should read it or skip it. They offer a brief synopsis, there's fun and witty commentary and there are no spoilers and no sponsored reviews. Life's too short to read a bad book, so subscribe to the Proofread podcast today. And by the way, there's a new season coming soon.
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Matt Dawson
So good, so good, so good.
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Patrick Gansby
Today.
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Marshall Po
Welcome to the New Books Network.
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Matt Dawson
Hello and welcome to New Books in Sociology, a podcast on the New Books Network. My name is Matt Dawson and I'm professor of Sociology at University of Glasgow and I'm delighted to have as my guest today Patrick Gansby. Patrick is a scholarly communications librarian at Memorial University of Newfoundland and is cross appointed to its Department of Sociology and and today we're discussing his book Henri Le Metaphilosophy and Modernity, published by Routledge. So Patrick, welcome to the show.
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Patrick Gansby
Thanks so much for having me. It's a pleasure to be here.
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Matt Dawson
It's a great pleasure to have you on the show. So can you start by telling us a bit about yourself and how you came to write the book?
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Patrick Gansby
Yeah. Lefebvre's always been someone who has been swirling around somewhere in my mind ever since undergraduate. In my fourth year, I took a course on sociology of everyday life with Dr. Michael Gardner, and that had a profound influence on me, I guess, so much so I actually dedicated this book to my old professor, Michael Gardner. At first, I didn't really understand, like, whoa, it was so different from the sociology it had been studying up until that point. And so, you know, everyday life. Why would you study that? And then it started to click. And that has stayed with me up until, you know, today. And Lefebvre in particular really resonated with me. I wrote my PhD dissertation on him, and that became my first book, Boredom and Everyday Life. And I kind of see this book as almost. It's like a sequel of sorts, or a companion piece almost, in a dialectical way, like there's another side to, you know, if Lefebvre is talking about boredom, there's gotta be something along the lines of happiness also there in the conversation, those things going together. Yeah. So for me, I ended up writing this book because it was the other side of the book I had already written.
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Matt Dawson
Yeah. And I should say your previous book, which I've actually got on the bookshelf behind these. I'll just turn around to Henriette, favorite, Boredom in Everyday Life. It's also a wonderful book and I'd really recommend. Listens to it. And it is a bit of a. Having read both, I can see there's a bit of a companion piece element going on here. And it's really interesting what you said about how you came to Lefebvre, you know, almost by accident, in a way. You study the sociology of everyday life and his dare, and you come to it because one of the things I really enjoyed about your book was the way in which. And we'll perhaps get to this later on. Lefebvre is a writer who's often difficult to grasp. You know, there's not a clear. He often rejected the idea of having a system or a sort of clear sort of guide in light. It's often quite fragmentary. But what you've done very well, I think here is give a sort of framework. Framework through which a reader can approach Lefebvre's work and get A view of what Lefebvre had to say. And we were talking about this before we started recording. But as you note in your introduction, Lefebvre has very competing claims of ownership. You know that philosophy claims into sociology, complains in urban geography. But what you're attempting to do in your book is present his work as teased the title of one of Lefebvre's books, A Metaphilosophy. So perhaps a good place to start is by asking what you think Lefebvre and what you, as the author of this book, mean by metaphilosophy.
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Patrick Gansby
Yeah, I guess at first glance it almost seems like it's like philosophy of philosophy, like metadata is data about data. But that's not it. Of course, it's funny, because metaphilosophy is something that Lefebvre, of course, identified himself as, a metaphilosopher. And this popped up in a few interviews. I always think of the debate he had with Leszek Kolakowski, and both Kolakowski and the moderator, Fonzelders, they didn't know what to make of it, even as Lefebvre's explaining it. I'm a metaphilosopher and he gives some details and they think, I don't know what that is, but okay. So I think for me, in my reading of Lefebvre, it touches on a bunch of things, almost different elements of a constellation, that it is interdisciplinary, of course, and you touch on this, that philosophers could see a philosophy in him much the same as geographers could see a geography in him, sociologists, sociology, and so on. So he's all of these things and none of these things at the same time. He's not fully in a geography department. He wouldn't necessarily fit there. Similar to Marx, in a way, who is his chief inspiration. That interdisciplinary nexus of his makes it so you see part of him in a certain way. But if you take an alternate view and just see him as all of these things together, I think that's how you can really appreciate him as a scholar. He. He's constantly cutting across disciplines, topics. I mean, it's difficult to find one book you could recommend of his to get his thought, because it's all over the place. You couldn't say, oh, check out the first volume of Critique of Everyday Life, because that's where you'll see him. And then you may see a different one in the sociology of Marx, and yet a different one in the production of space. Yeah, so for me, I think his metaphilosophy he's interdisciplinary. But more importantly, I think if I had to summarize it, it would be him taking thesis 11 seriously. So the philosophers have only interpreted the world. The point, however, is to change it. He wants that to be what he calls the type of action thought, those things coming together where there is almost a utopian pointing to something else in your critique of contemporary society. So I think he's trying to carry on Marx's legacy, essentially with his metaph philosophy. And I think he would even say that Marx was the first metaphilosopher.
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Matt Dawson
Yeah, it's really interesting to take it back to Marx on the thesis 11 and thinking about the action thought and the orientation that he's doing. As I said, I think it's a very convincing way to think about Lefebvre. And metaphilosophy is one of the concepts in your title, but of course, the other one is modernity. And here in the book, you focus a lot on how Lefevre traces modernity as part of his broader concern with everyday life. And as you mentioned, Lefebvre has this critique of everyday life published in three volumes. So what was distinct about everyday life in modernity for Lefebvre? And why is this so important to his meta philosophy?
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Patrick Gansby
Yeah, and again, if you want to find out what he has to say about modernity, you would think, oh, I'll go to Introduction to Modernity. It's an introduction, it's modernity. I'm set. But no, that would probably be the worst place to start for something like that, because it's a massive book and it's divided in preludes and it ends with its beginning. And it's kind of confusing, but the way I see it is his book Everyday Life in the Modern World kind of encapsulates it. Right. Those two things are always thought together. And that can appear odd when you think of something like, okay, everyday life, what's that small? And then modernity, that's something big or historical, everyday, you know, almost. You can even say it has an ahistorical quality to it. But no, that's not how he sees it. It's those two things coming together. It's really everyday life in the modern world. But he gives us some clues throughout his texts, where even specific historical ruptures or mutations, as he'd probably say around 1910 onwards, like what he calls the space of common sense, becomes shattered there, and it's almost like a new world. And this can be confusing because he gestures towards the beginning of the modern world. With Descartes and Cartesian doubt, you know, the beginning of modern philosophy, that type of thing. But the modernity that he is, in which it can also be seen as a type of disposition, even, is different than that. So which, in a roundabout way, that helps define it, the modernity is almost this reinvention of the now, right, to have a modern thought on things. And this is where, you know, people, everyday people, come together with, you know, academics, because people refer to, you know, modern life. This. There's a TV show, Modern Family, so on and so forth. And then, you know, modernity is a big concept in the social sciences, humanities, beyond. Yeah. So for me, it made a lot of sense to have modernity highlighted here, because in my previous book, I highlighted everyday life and modernity was in the background. So for this book, modernity is in the forefront and everyday life is in the background. And I can't help but deal with them in a dialectical way, because I think that's how Lefebvre wants us to deal with them.
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Matt Dawson
And as you say, as you demonstrate quite well in the book, after 1910, there is this distinct form of everyday life for Lefebvre that in some ways become conscious of itself as well as an everyday life. And I was thinking, when you mentioned Modern Family, as you'll probably be aware, there's a bit of a Brit pop revival in Britain at the moment, with Oasis touring again, and Blur had an album called Modern Life is Rubbish. These sort of references exist for the way we think about something distinct that marks out an everyday life. And in this topic of everyday life, you mentioned this in person earlier, but you have a chapter on a topic that most people perhaps don't associate with Lefebvre and definitely don't associate with Marxism more generally, which is happiness. And here you note the ways we're inundated with the command from products of the culture we consume to be happy, that this is actually part of our everyday life is this command to be happy. And I enjoyed at one point in the book, you have this sort of bemused reflection as you're making your morning coffee and there's an artificial sweetener that's sort of asking you, perhaps demanding you to be happy, and you're saying, why is this artificial sweetener request demanding I be happy? So what then, can Lefebvre tell us about the nature of this continued command to be happy as part of everyday life?
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Patrick Gansby
Yeah, and I should say I actually brought a prop which is that very. You may not be able to see It. My camera can't focus. The audience certainly can't hear it. But, yeah, it says on the packet, be happy. It drives other people crazy. And there's a smiley face on it. Yeah, that's where I've seen that theme in Lefebvre. But it really. It dawned on me, I think, in the third volume of his critique where he was talking about modernity was promising. What did it promise? Happiness. This same kind of comment pops up in Frankfurt school writings, among other places. But it really crystallized for me when I reached for, you know, that artificial sweetener in the morning and saw, I guess, in a similar way to Lefebvre's, I guess, eureka moment with everyday life. I believe it was his wife was talking about laundry detergent or dish soap of some kind, and he thought, you know, wow, this needs exploration. But, yeah, once you start thinking about it that way, you know, how are these commodities speaking to me? And time and time again, it is them telling you to be happy. And, you know, it's not always as, you know, on the nose as that, you know, telling you directly, be happy, but actually, a lot of the time it is saying, be happy, and you start thinking about that. And this is where everyday life comes together with academia again. And I use a passage from Badu's work talking about happiness being one of the key foundational topics of philosophy. You think about that going back to the Greeks and utilitarianism, even critical theory, that happiness is a focal point for them, much the same as everyday life. Individuals, people in everyday life go about their business and are striving for happiness. The era that we're in is telling us we should be happy. It's trying to convince us that in order for us to achieve this, we need to buy something and to buy something else and something else, and it never ends. We never actually find that happiness. But I did find it interesting that for a metaphilosophical observation or even statement by Lefebvre is his basic definition of happiness, which I think is from the production of space, where he says that happiness is written on history's blank pages. So something unique, it isn't something you buy, it's not something somebody else gives to you. But your real happiness is something that you achieve not necessarily on your own, but certainly not being dictated from on high. Yeah. So for me, once you start thinking that way, modernity was promising. Would it promise happiness? You can see that theme running throughout his work.
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Matt Dawson
Yeah. And as you were talking there, I had a sudden memory of a book that was published probably 10 years or so ago now. The journalist Barbara Einrich published this book called Smile or Die. It had a different title in different parts of the world, but the version I've got, it's called Smile or Die, which is about positive thinking. And, you know, this sort of, you know, think positive, be happy. And then she talks about the dangers of that in terms of medicine, you know, to sort of overcome your problems through positive thinking, be happy. It's.
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Patrick Gansby
Yeah, it's. It's that same thing. You have to be positive. You know, if you're seen as a negative person or a negative thinker, that's bad. You know, you got to get that out of your life. You got to be positive, which is, you know, a roundabout way of accepting the status quo, things as they are. Any kind of critique or, you know, change for the better or actual happiness that gets cut off at Capella University.
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Matt Dawson
What are you eating?
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Matt Dawson
Yeah, and I think we'll probably come back to this later. But this is where we see the value of Lefevre as noting that happiness isn't achieved. Right? Some people become aware of the fact that happiness isn't necessarily achieved. But we'll come Back to that later on, because this command to be happy that, you know, is actually increasingly coming from the technology we interact with on a daily basis. And you have a chapter also discussing that. And I thought a good way to look into this, to talk about this interaction with technology we have, is to pick up on an example that you provide there. We talk about the change in ways we consume movies. So you note that when we first consume movies, we go to the cinema. It's a social event. We're all looking at a screen in front of us. Then we move to where it's done in the home where we rent tapes. And here, Patrick, you and I are perhaps showing our age because we both remember the phrase be kind, rewind, that these tapes command us to do something for the next person who has them. But now, of course, there's no tape, there's no social encounter beyond the fact that we sit down and we stream a movie that we don't really in any real sense own. It's just something that we consume for that moment. So perhaps, using this example, what does it tell us about our change in relationship to technology for Fevrem?
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Patrick Gansby
I think, well, one of the things is that we may own the technology, so we may own the form, but not the content necessarily these days. So, and this goes across, you know, different entertainment industries and other industries more generally. You know, some of the video games these days, to use a different example, you can buy a PlayStation 5, and it's diskless, there's no disk. You download the content, and you may have to pay a subscription fee depending on the game, and that's a key element, the subscription. So repeated payment for the same thing. But even the games themselves, they change. Whereas again, showing my age back with Nintendo, Super Nintendo, all that stuff, you could buy the game itself. You could go to a store, buy it, you'd own it forever, as long as it lasted, and it would be the same game. Whereas now, in order to keep interest, games change. So it's almost a type of, you know, Bauerman would call liquid modernity, where things are changing all the time and what was solid is melting into thin air, as Marx and Engels would say. But, yeah, so I think that what you've said about the ownership thing is key, that there was a time where we could own the thing, but now it's not quite reverted back to, to use the example from the movies, where people didn't own it, you had to gather in a communal space of sorts in order to watch the movie in a theater that still exists today. But then that almost heyday of being able to buy the thing and own it without worrying and hold it in your hands even, that's another key element that's gone. And now we are in a position where we're just renting things, leasing things. You could see this. I know when I went to buy a car years ago, that was the major push was to lease it, not own it. So somebody is owning these things. It's just the consumer who could own that VHS isn't owning it in the same way. And even if you purchase a movie through a subscription service of some kind, the license may make it so it goes away and you don't have it in your hands and it's gone. So I would say technology these days has advanced considerably, but it brings people together in one way, but it also creates a distance in the other. So Lefebvre would point out that he like talking about screens. Things are mediated through screens. We're mediated through a screen right now that this is quite common, that the impersonal communication that would happen in the past or even, you know, as you had to travel in a train, you would face the fellow passengers. Something like that, that were much more fragmentary would be a term that he would use in his. One of three terms he would use in his triad of fragmentary hierarchy and homogeneity. He would probably apply that term to technology. And. Yeah. That we're not. We're not as advanced as we may think is what he would say. It's like a regression with this lack of ownership in particular.
- [22:11]
Matt Dawson
Yeah, and I totally agree. And the ways in which, with your car example, particularly the sort of continuity of debt. Right. You know, one of the things that that does is the idea of like the lease in the car is the same as the subscription in the sense you say you're just debt. It's just debt building up time after time and you keep people paying. And I mean, I was thinking as well, when you were saying that about the video games, I again, I'm perhaps young my age, I still buy CDs for albums and I own some albums where I had bought the CD when it came out and the album since changed because now they can be updated via streaming and samples have been removed and song orders have been added. And I thought, do I own the album now or do you know, is what I own an outdated version of it? It's very interesting to think about the difference in these things.
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Patrick Gansby
Yeah, well, we are kind of in an era of the remastered vinyl. It Is difficult to get the original original with the imperfections, you know, I can think of, you know, some Beatles stuff. They. They have new material, somehow have new material every year. All you need is love. I know, famously has a big mistake in the guitar solo, but that has since been wiped and make. If you were to listen to the new version or new versions, you would think that, oh, the performance was perfect. But that kind of imperfection, I think, helps make something what it is. And I think technology these days is making it so, you know, the human element is going away, whether or not it's being next to somebody in a movie theater, which you can do, but it's almost. We're shifting away from that, so that human element is gone. But also the imperfection of performance, you know, as even virtuosos make the odd, you know, mistake and sometimes that makes the song. But now, even with things like auto tune and AI being thrown into the mix, is that it's almost a per way to make a song where everything is right on time, right on the beat. And to me, it becomes bland. Same thing with essay writing. If you get, you know, chatgpt to write something is bland beyond belief. There's no life there. Same thing with the art. It may look, you know, okay until you spot the third hand that, you know, the person in the image has. But, yeah, I. I don't think that Lefebvre would be impressed with the. The hyper emphasis on technology we have on the one hand, but also what it's doing for us. I know he thought that technology had the potential to help us in a lot of ways, and it does, but not the way that we actually think.
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Matt Dawson
Yeah, and I think it just. I totally agree with you in this. The human element of it is particularly significant and brings us on quite well to the next thing I wanted to talk to you about, because I'm going to quote from your book here, Patrick, on page 105, you say this quote. It could be said that Lefebvre's metaphilosophy of modernity is above all else, concerned with alienation. And we perhaps already touched upon that without saying the word already. But anyone who's read Lefebvre, especially these works in everyday life, but also Marxism and the variety of other things he's done, you're never far from this concept. Alienation is a concept that comes up for Lefebvre quite a lot. What was great about the discussion you had in the book. In the book, I thought, was the way in which you traced Lefebvre's continual defense of alienation, the ways in which, particularly in orthodox or official forms of Marxism during the 20th century, there was a desire to downplay alienation, often because the Soviet Union was alienated and people didn't want to draw attention to it, to put it bluntly. But there's other reasons. But that's one of the key reasons. And you really highlight why Lefebvre kept on defending this. So why then do you think Lefebvre's notion of alienation is a concept we need to keep in our vocabulary, something we should continue to use?
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Patrick Gansby
Yeah, well, I think somebody could ask themselves, are any possibilities being blocked? And if so, alienation is still alive because that is Lefebvre's basic definition, which I love, that it is the blockage of the possible. And that creates an opening for all avenues of everyday life, whether it be work, outside of work, leisure, anything. And I know it's been battered over the years by Marxist, non Marxists, and even, I guess, torn in a way by its public consumption. Lefebvre has been frustrated over its misuse, say that just, you know, people willy nilly adopting it, which is too bad. But yeah, he time and time again he defended it, including in that debate with Leszek Kolakowski, and he was on his own with that term. But I think of Frederick Jameson's book and original article, postmodernism or the Cultural Logic of like Capitalism, where he says, there, you know, in this era, concepts like anxiety and alienation are not really relevant anymore. And I think Lefebvre would say that they're more relevant now than ever, actually. And thinking of our use of technology and the distance that we have there from each other, from possibilities, that needs to be analyzed in great depth, more so than thrown away. But he himself, he wasn't using alienation in the same way in the later part of his career in his book Rhythm Analysis, for example. I don't think he uses it once, even though that's an unofficial part of his critique of everyday life. But yes, no, I think that it's still a relevant concept today. And I see a parallel with his work and the work of the Frankfurt school. Even Marcuse, someone that he critiqued and then softened a bit on. Marcuse has very similar comments to Lefebvre that, you know, alienation, it may have been torn or distorted in a way, but it very much needs to be revitalized.
- [28:20]
Matt Dawson
Yeah, you're right. And I teach Lefebvre and Markusa together on one of the courses I do and I show the students the critique Lefevre office of Markusa in. It's in the Sociology of Marx, isn't it? I think where he has those couple. There's a couple of pages, but I remember that's the key one where I wrote. It's also in the Explosion. He offers a critique of Markusa. Yeah, and they're a bit. They're a bit confused. I don't understand why he's so critical of him. Like, they seem to be saying similar things. Like if you read One Dimensional Man, A Critique of Everyday Life, Volume one, they're not a million miles apart from each other. And as you say, this concern valuation is really there.
- [28:58]
Patrick Gansby
No. Well, I kind of think sometimes the person you fight the most with is your sibling, for example, somebody you're so close to is who you have the most conflict with. Well, it's funny because I actually knew Herbert Marcuse's son, Peter. You know, I met him 10 years ago because I actually found early, I think it's the first draft of One Dimensional man in the archives at Brandeis University. And I got to know Peter that way, Herbert's son. And I mentioned this to him, that I thought that Lefebvre and his father were very close in a lot of ways, and he didn't agree at all. He thought they were very different thinkers. And I actually see them coming together in peers work, actually. But no, I think that there's work to be done on, you know, some comparisons between the Frankfurt School and Lefebvre. That's something I'll eventually turn to myself because Lefebvre even had admiration for Adorno, who on this particular topic would say similar things as well. But I actually think that Lefebvre is very close to Marcuse with his, you know, action thought, metaphilosophy and stepping outside of the Academy, marching in the streets. It's very much like Marcuse.
- [30:17]
Matt Dawson
Yeah, it's fascinating. As you said, lots of work to be done there. And as you've already mentioned, alienation for Lefebvre is this blockage of the possible, this idea that one of the things that alienation does is it removes the possibility of social change, of alternatives, plus think about something different. And this leads you to discuss the notion of possibilities in Lefebvre's metaphilosophy. And you've already mentioned this, one of the key elements of metaphilosophy is Lefebvre as a utopian. And I totally agree with you. That's a key part of Lefebvre, something that needs to be embraced. It's difficult to understand him without that. And you talk a lot about the notion of autogestion in Lefebvre's work, which is his main sort of utopian ideal, as you'll know. But for listeners, autogestion is roughly translated to self management. There's a whole question. We could spend a long time talking about how you translate it. That's a close way to put it. But what I find really interesting, what you do here is you talk about autogestion, but you link this explicitly to Lefebvre's advocacy of what he calls the New Romanticism. So can you tell us what this New Romanticism is and why you thought this was so central to Lefebvre's utopianism? Yeah.
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Patrick Gansby
So what I do in that chapter on Possibilities is think about some of these utopian gestures of Lefebvre, and they all kind of intermingle with one another, in my view. They may not align perfectly, but I think you can talk about them alongside one another. Excuse me. When it comes to revolutionary Romanticism, it is almost like the disposition. He doesn't ever come out and say, this is what it is. And he tells the readers in Introduction to Modernity where this comes from, that if you're looking for a Reader's Digest version of, you know, what it is to be modern, look elsewhere. That's not what this is. And so this journey that he's on in Introduction to Modernity is actually him doing the revolutionary Romanticism, I think. And he talks about having a youthful orientation. And so things like play and laughter and emotions, those are important. But it isn't a matter of choosing emotions over rationality. For example, you would say that you don't need to choose one over the other. So I would say it's a type of youthful orientation without adult supervision. It's the youth become the adults, or adults go away. Adults being the technocrats or bureaucrats that the overseers. You no longer need them. But I think it's a type of genuine pursuit of happiness. That type of goal. Right. Is thinking along those lines, not my. Whatever my retirement savings are or how my stock portfolio is doing that will lead to happiness. It's beginning with happiness and moving out from there. So I think he uses it even. Or the title even has a question mark on it. So he's not fully sure whether or not he gets there. And I think that's a clever way of showing that it isn't up to just one person to Define it much the same as the other possibilities, like differential space that he talks about. These possibilities are almost always at the end of his books. This is kind of part of his process, is after he goes through all this critique, he, unlike a lot of leftists, he offers a possibility for something else. And I think that's actually really missing in leftist discourse that, yeah, what, what are the alternatives? Instead of just accepting, you know, there is no alternative. Tina that kind of mentality, removing that blockage, being open to the possibilities, that's all part and parcel of, you know, a revolutionary romanticism.
- [34:25]
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- [34:53]
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Matt Dawson
And I think you're right to say that, you know, this is one of the value things about Lefebvre. It does always present this possibility, present this alternative. I was thinking as you were speaking there that, you know, it very much reflects the humanism in Lefebvre, this notion of sort of we need to recognize play and humanity. But that's not also about rejecting the rational. It's about recognizing the four sided nature of us and who we are.
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Patrick Gansby
Yeah. And how it's difficult because pretty much every one of his possibilities could be co opted in some way. And I think he does his best to try to make it co opt proof so it can't be recuperated back into the system. But that is a real potential for him. So you could see something like that being a slogan on a T shirt, even towards revolutionary Romanticism or utopianism, whatever, that could be bought and sold or sold and bought. Yeah. But I think it's an interesting take and actually once again, kind of think of Marcuse and him talking about a new sensibility in his essay on liberation. I see them as almost walking arm in arm with one another without knowing it necessarily.
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Matt Dawson
Yeah. Although I did have the idea jump from my mind there of the next pack of sugar we buy might say embrace a revolutionary romanticism on it rather than be happy. That could be the worst outcome of that and the co opting, as you say. So let's turn to the conclusion of your book now. So I'm going to quote from you again, Patrick, in the conclusion of your book, you say this quote, whether or not Lefebvre always acknowledged it. He was a metaphilosopher through and through each project, each book, each inquiries of his seemingly added additional color to his overarching metaphilosophy. End quote. And that's on page 134. So I wondered what you want a reader of your book to take away thinking about Lefebvre, what you spoke earlier about what led you to write the book, and particular elements and the comparison with the previous book, I guess. What do you think we've missed or not emphasized enough about Lefebvre to this point, which you think your work helps bring to light?
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Patrick Gansby
Yeah, it's okay to be a thinker of the possible and instead of having the, say, academy broken down to humanities and social scientists are more interpretation over there and then science and engineering over here doing the practical things, that those things can actually come together in a way that they're not mutually exclusive. And yeah, the boundaries are artificial. There are alternatives. It's okay to think in a dialectical way, to think the both and instead of either or and yeah, to look over fences and see what's happening. And that critique is something that should not be confused with hypercriticism or defense of the status quo. What he was doing with his metaphilosophy was really trying to make the world a better place, as funny as that sounds. And he really wanted to kind of maximize humanity's creative potential. And he did not see that happening in capitalism at all. And it's even in a way we could think of other problems that we face, like climate change. Can you really deal with that in a disciplinary way? Can capitalism really solve that? So on and so forth. So I would say yeah, cutting across artificial boundaries and thinking dialectically and critically is of vital importance as a move towards Action thought.
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Matt Dawson
Yeah. And sort of, as you say, keeping that critical side of this, working across boundaries. Right. Because I think, I mean, I don't know if this is the case in Canada, but certainly in the uk, that sort of push to interdisciplinary is often that sort of very narrow focus on almost, you know, it's sort of an even stronger focus on what is, you know, and a sort of almost documenting of what is just from different perspectives. Whereas, as you say, Lefebvre is always encouraging us to think about what could be and the possibility within that.
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Patrick Gansby
Yeah, yeah. And even just to be purely academically. Well, he would even blur those lines between what is academic, non academic, reaching out to the public and so on and so forth. But yeah, just thinking of the silos that exist in the academy and that you can find Marx in a lot of sociology departments. But even in his book, the Sociology of Marx Works, he points out that he wasn't just that he's beyond that and that it's okay to see in different thinkers a possibility for Jung's studies. And thinking that just because canon is this doesn't mean it should be moving forward, that they're forgotten thinkers that are still of relevance today. I know Lefebvre has been called the ignored philosopher, or know he's not too far from being forgotten and all that, but I think in remembering his work and thinking the way that he does, it's really. Yeah. That you're already cutting across boundaries just reading his book.
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Matt Dawson
Yeah, definitely, definitely. And I wanted to end by asking you a bit about this reading and how you came to it, because, you know, one of the things we've spoken about at times here is I love Regan Lefebvre. Right. I'd imagine you do as well, since you've written now two books on him. I think he's a wonderful person to read, but he is also someone who. There's a sort of almost dislocation when one reads Lefebvre. You know, as you mentioned, there's a dislocation in the sense of want to read a book on modernity, don't read the Introduction to Modernity, want to read a book on everyday life, don't read the Critique for everyday life, read the everyday life of the modern world. You know, there's a sort of dislocation in terms of books. He'll jump around between different things. So you'd read the Sociology of Marx and then you read the production space and sure, there's some similarities, but they're quite different. There could be dislocation within books. So, you know, think of Introduction to Modernity, as you say. It's a selection of Preludes, as he calls it. It has these long discussions of revolutionary romanticism and the nation of modernity. Then it has something like Notes on the New Town, which is this sort of very focused urban discussion talk about where he lives in France and so on. So he's a fascinating read, but it also can be a frustrating, dislocating read in some ways. So how did you. And also as part of this is that he wants to reject systematicity, right? I think he's very self consciously rejecting the idea that I am constructing a system like Althusa, to use a contemporary example of his. So how did you go about constructing the notion of Lefebvre? I'm not going to call it the systematized notion of Lefebvre in this book, but certainly the notion of Lefebvre as a metaphilosopher, the idea that this is a way we can read through Lefebvre as an approach. Was this a notion of serendipity, where much as we were talking about earlier with Lefebvre, of his wife coming in, talking about the washing up liquid, it sort of come to you, or was it more a case of you were sort of following certain themes in his writing and sort of tracing it out?
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Patrick Gansby
I think, yeah, I always think of his book, Marxist Thought in the City, and he begins that by talking about a thematic reading of Marx and Angus. And that's how he came, you know, that they didn't write about cities in the way that you may think, and that he's kind of compiling different passages, putting it in a new light, so on and so forth, without creating a system of any kind, because it's still open, you know, it's not, you know, the final. An attempt to be the final word on anything. But, yeah, for me, I started thinking about, you know, his comments and interviews, but also thinking, yeah, I've come across metaphilosophy in many different places there. It's almost like, well, after the fact, you start thinking, okay, so he calls himself that. And he actually talks about that it might be here, might be there, you know, little comments. But, you know, in the subtitle to the third volume of Critique of Everyday Life, it talks about, you know, towards a metaphilosophy and all of that. And then at the end of the production of Space, he mentions everything that came before is metaphilosophy. So just as those two examples, Lefebvre is usually seen As a thinker of space or philosopher of space, geographer even, or I would say everyday life, he probably gets the second most amount of recognition for his project there. So you take those two breaks projects of his and put them together, and he's telling us that it's all metaphilosophy. So that's a clue right there to start combing through a lot of his other texts in order to see what he had to say about it. But, yeah, I think it's an appropriate term for my reading of him, and it's something that I didn't really touch on in my first book book of his, because he was calling for a sociology of boredom that I identified, but he never actually did that. And I guess that's part of the charm there, is that if you just stick with him, there's all of these insights that he's not necessarily trying to develop on his own. He may point towards. It's a breadcrumb you could pick up and take it in a different direction. So I actually find not only metaphy appropriate for him, but I think, think his meta philosophy of not being necessarily linear with his prose is refreshing. I find, you know, it to be the journey he promises it to be. It's really rewarding, and it really goes against the instant gratification and getting from point A to point B as quickly as possible, or even, you know, not reading texts and getting ChatGPT to do a bastardized summary of a text, something like that. It's antithetical to that. So his work is a type of resistance, as Deleuze would say about writing. It's a type of resistance to that, which is. And I find that incredibly refreshing.
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Matt Dawson
Yeah, I agree. I was just thinking, as you were Speaking, what would ChatGPT do with something like notes written one Sunday afternoon, the French countryside, which is a chapter from Critique of Of Everyday Life, Volume one, which is just a discursive meditation. I mean, what does that chapter say? What's its argument? I don't quite know. But it's a brilliant chapter, and there's so many thoughts in it. There's so many interesting things. But as you say, it would be difficult to have a chatgpt summary of what exactly. That said, it's a very human document.
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Patrick Gansby
Yeah. And I again find that refreshing. And you find that at the end of Horkheimer and Adorno's Dialectic of Enlightenment, a bunch of notes. Notes, Right. That this fits with this work, but it's not the same as this work, but we're putting it together and you can explore. Yeah, I think his work resists that type of interpretation. And I think people need to return to his work for a fresh look at things. And, yeah, I hope one day somebody does that. And even, you know, they define Lefebvre in a new way that I didn't even anticipate and couldn't have foreseen, and they take his work in a new direction. I think that type of openness is not systematic at all. And I think it's really refreshing. It's like that permanent revolution that he talks about. Yeah.
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Matt Dawson
And it's a great virtue of Lefebvre that there's all these different paths that could be taken here. And I think this is one thing that I got when reading your book that I never thought before reading your book, of categorizing Lefebvre as a metaphilosopher. At least I'd seen the term a few times. When I saw the title of the book, I was like, oh, yeah, Lefebvre uses that term a few times, the book. But I'd never thought of a categorization like that. But once I read your book, I was like, yeah, that makes sense. That's definitely a way of categorizing Lefebvre. So there's lots of other paths that remain unexplored for categorizing Lefebvre, which might be what you're doing next. So what are you working on now? What's the next project after this?
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Patrick Gansby
Actually, I'm in the middle of writing a book on the Frankfurt School, which is perhaps why I've referenced that several times. It's called the Academic Library and Critical Unpacking the Library at the Frankfurt School. So it's a reading of the contemporary academic library through the eyes of Frankfurt schoolers, including Walter Benjamin and some other figures like Leo Lovantal that aren't mentioned as much. And probably that's also with Rutledge publishing that book. Book should be out next year, but after that, I'm going to read Lefebvre Alongside the Frankfurt School, which I gestured towards the end of my Metaphilosophy and Modernity book. Yeah. So that's what I'm working on. Kind of buried in the Frankfurt School texts right now. And I guess I should also say that I have a piece called Envy Lefebvre and the Sociology of Time, coming out, I think, next spring in your edited volume, the Anthem Companion to Henri Lefebvre. So I can thank you in person yet virtually for including me in that volume.
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Matt Dawson
I know. We're delighted to have you, Patrick. So, yes, that's the Anthem companion to Henri Lefebvre. Plug it now while I got the chance. The Anthem combined to Henri Lefebvre, which we hope is coming out next March, actually edited with my colleague Tilman Schwartz and I here at Glasgow. And your chapter's a wonderful chapter in there. And I think, you know, particularly people are interested in the question of possibility and Autogest John as well. There's lots in that book they'll be interested in as well. But that's another book.
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Patrick Gansby
We can read it.
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Matt Dawson
Oh, that's part of you to say that's another book for another day. The one on the academic library sounds fantastic. I've got to say that just sounds like a brilliant idea for a book. So I'm really, really looking forward to reading that as well. So as a reminder, I've been speaking with Patrick Gansby today about his book Henri Lefevre, Metaphilosophy and Modernity. As our discussion has perhaps indicated, Lefebvre is this incredibly wide ranging writer of interest across multiple areas and books that are written a particular way. There's all these different open paths, there's these different ways you could do it. But I think if you're someone listening to this and you're interested in getting an insight into Lefebvre's work, especially this notion of him as this fear is concerned with the blockage of the possible, with the notion of everyday life, modernity being concerned with the possibilities of blocking off happiness, of the idea that alternatives are possible. But there could be something else out there. Then Patrick's book is a wonderful place to go. It's a really good exploration of that topic in the forefront. I'd really recommend it to listeners who are interested in the faufra, but maybe not interested in the faux fur and just want to think about this notion of what modernity is and how different possibilities are there. So I'd really recommend it to everyone listening and thanks for coming on the show, Patrick.
- [51:30]
Patrick Gansby
Thanks so much for having me. It was a pleasure.
- [51:32]
Matt Dawson
Thank you.
- [51:44]
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