Henri
Lefebvre’s vast, multifaceted The
Production of Space could probably be said to advance any number of
arguments, but I think his most compelling argument is the one that brings
space and knowledge into a classical Marxist framework: capitalist Western
society is moving from the production of things in space to the production of
space itself, which means that capitalist powers are increasing their hold and
surveillance on ordinary people (aka space is now shaping the working
class). However, all is not lost: no
matter how much they try, the people who build and shape “dominant” space and
employ the working class can’t squeeze the working class out of existence or
keep them from “appropriating” and shaping space to suit their own needs, nor
can they make the world a completely visual, timeless, ideological
construct. Regular people have bodies,
and we live in specific places at specific historical moments, and we shape
those places (yeah, I said places, not spaces) into unique, historical “works
of art” that contrast with the partially commodified built environment
constructed by the ruling class. To say
that capitalism has moved beyond the product to space itself is to argue for
both an increasing attempt at totalizing control of society through space AND
increased resistance from the people who live in, experience, and shape that
space – with the potential for a socialist revolution where appropriated spaces
based on the human body/lived experience and use-value take precedence over
dominant, visual spaces and exchange-value.
Things
he does well: Lefebvre is working primarily within Philosophy, though he
declares several times that he wants to abolish disciplinary divides and
develop a unitary theory of space that everyone can use. Somewhat like de Certeau, Lefebvre is trying
to find a way to go from structuralism – particularly Barthes’ semiology – to a
decentered, poststructuralist conception of space and social formations. Unlike de Certeau, however, Lefebvre is
working explicitly within the Marxist tradition, so I might say he’s going for
more of a Marxist – post Marxist transition.
His additions to Barthes are a) the body and b) power. He follows the “critical” approach of
classical Marxists in that his writing is part descriptive (dissection of
current conditions), and part prescriptive (showing how to get from here to the
revolution!), but he relies heavily on Deleuze (who I never realized was
actually using Hegelian terminology until just now, but hey), especially regarding the general and the particular and the whole bit on difference and repetition
in the construction of space. He
emphasizes production and processes and the movement made possible by the
dialectic. I think his big takeaways are:
the distinction between dominant and appropriated space/ the idea that space
both shapes and is shaped by social relations, particularly the relations of
production; the emphasis on the (fleshly) body, spatial practice, and lived
experience instead of a mental, primarily visual space; the tendency for
capitalism to want to create as homogenized, timeless, placeless a surface as
possible and the ability for embodied users to create unique places by giving
spaces a history (i.e., by putting them in time); that space is to language as
base is to superstructure (i.e., fuck the discursive plane); and the tension
between local places (that operate via dialectics and power) and global
capitalist networks – not world-systems, mind you, but networks – that operate
within triads, especially the capitalist one of land, labour, and capital, aka
rent, wages, and profit. (228) Social
struggle is spatial struggle; no space can exist apart from ideology/
particular social structures.
Things
I didn’t like so much: Ok, I realize he’s doing some important work by arguing
against a conception of space as a coherent entity (hence hegemony, which
allows him a good deal of messiness and gets him out of the trap of
totalization), and sure, the form of your work (particularly when you’re
engaging with theories of language) is implicit in your overall argument, but
writing in such a fragmented, repetitive, circular way does no one any
favors. Also he is hella intense with
the Marxism, which aside from being annoyingly polemical is theoretically
problematic: he has a hard time integrating a basically deterministic,
systematic, rational, Enlightenment mode of analysis with the “fleshly body”
and with global capitalism – he ends up creating a zillion dialectics and
triads and shaping them into a network, which, sure, is probably how the world
works, but despite his insistence that it’s not reductive – it’s
reductive. Even with the messiness and
the insistence that the class struggle no longer has a terrain or clear
boundaries, it’s still neat and discrete.
Finally, despite insisting that disciplines should not get in the way of
a theory of space, he primarily locates himself within philosophy. This wouldn’t be so bad, except that, again,
it gets in the way of his insistence on lived experience and physical, human
space as the base upon which the superstructure of language and interpretation
is built: as a philosopher, he argues that concepts (the concept of space, for
instance) are foundational, rather than lived experience. While I think he’s right to suggest that
psychoanalysis might help him out of this quandry (it would link up nicely with
his sensing-thinking-social triad), he doesn’t have much psychoanalysis in
here. He has Lacan, but Freud? Zizek?
(Was Zizek after him?)
Some
connections: David Harvey’s post-Marxism is all over this book. Lefebvre is obviously widely-read in his
field, and engages easily with Foucault, Hegel, Marx (a lot), just to name a
few. He engages particularly with
Deleuze, whose “body without organs,” “difference and repetition,” distinction
between the singular and the general, and construction of a decentered
(social?) field infuse Lefebvre’s thinking throughout, sometimes provoking him
(fragmented bodies without organs drive him nuts!) sometimes sustaining him
(the decentered field underpins his theory of global capitalism.) He also, particularly in the conclusion,
engages with the world-systems theorists, arguing that constructing the world in
terms of flows and systems a) completely disregards the roads, objects, trucks,
cities, trains, boats, political issues, etc., that create a global capitalist
network (true) and b) is falsely totalizing because c) it completely ignores
the embodied, lived experience (and agentive potential) of the working class
AND d) it also disregards Gramsci’s theory of hegemony. He thus paves the way for more nuanced
interpretations of the global capitalist system.
And before I go, here is Lefebvre's "conceptual triad of space:"
1.
Spatial practice: production and/or reproduction in a particular
place within a particular social formation
2.
Representations OF space: these are tied to the relations of production social order they produce. They are historically contingent, and they mix understanding and ideology, so they are both political and coherent. They operate in opposition to lived, historical space and are articulated with power. They include knowledge, signs, codes; official space; rational,
legible space; dominant or dominated space; architecture; part work, part product; more abstract space.
3.
Representational space embodies complex
symbolisms, clandestine, underground, social life; it is associated with lived experience, the body, the symbolic and non-verbal; it is living, not
coherent; it works only, not necessarily leaving a record in the built environment; and it is underpinned by historical space.
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