Henri Lefebvre: Introduction

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Henri Lefebvre Introduction

• Rob Shields

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Henri Lefebvre

• Introduction and Overview
• The City and Social Space
• Critique of Everyday Life
• Modernity and Globalization

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Influences -Surrealism -Marxism -Existentialism
-The Situationists Social Theory and
Contributions -Everyday Life -Mystification of
Consciousness -Alienation -Moments of
Enlightenment -Romanticism, Utopianism -Dialecti
cal Materialism -Retrojective method and
Existentialism -Revolutionary Festival and
libidinal economies of the city -The status of
the urban -The state and the production of
space -Three part dialectic Key Advances and
Controversies -Areas of existence not covered by
philosophy of being -spatialization -space and
social relations -metaphilosophy and
action -dialectic and alterity
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Legacies

• Castells The Urban Question (critic of Lefebvre)
• David Harvey Social Justice and the City
• Frederic Jameson Postmodernism or the Culture of
  Late Capitalism
• Edward Soja Third Space and other texts
• Rob Shields Places on the Margin

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The City and Social Space
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Lefebvres 4 books on the City

• Droit à la ville (1968), Pensée Marxiste et la
  ville (1972), La révolution urbaine (1970), Du
  rurale à l'urbain (1970)
• best English source Writings on Cities and
  translations in Antipode and Society and Space

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The suburban single family villa
(pavillion) -nostalgic (promises but does not
provide a place of Being (cf.
Heidegger) -ideological (the family as a unit of
social production and reproduction) -serves
economic speculation Space is nothing but the
inscription of time in the world, spaces are the
realisations, inscriptions in the simultaneity of
the external world of a series of times, the
rhythms or the city, the rhythms of the urban
population...the city will only be retought and
reconstructed on its current ruins when we have
properly understood that the city is the
deployment of time.... of those who are its
inhabitants (1967e10)
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According to Lefebvre, space can only be grasped
dialectically because it is a concrete
abstraction - one of Marx's categories, such as
exchange value, which are simultaneously a
material, externalised realisation of human
labour and the condensation of social relations
of production. The concrete abstraction is
simultaneously a medium of social actions,
because it structures them, and a product of
those actions (Gottdiener 1985128).
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Marxist Analysis of the City

• A dialectical analysis
• Relation between development of the industrial
  'base' of capitalism and the elaboration of
  urbanised society.
• 'truth' of the capitalist city morphology is
  industrialisation, and vice versa.
• transformation of space-as-landscape into
  property-as-exchange value

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Lefebvre is at the forefront of a new image of
society as a city - and thus the beginning of a
whole new thematics of inside and outside, of
inclusion in, and exclusion from, a
positively-valued modernity. Cities possess a
centre and banlieues, with citizens, those on the
interior, deciding who among the insiders should
be expelled and whether or not to open their
doors to those on the outside (Ross
1996150). What exactly is the mode of existence
of social relationships? ...The study of space
offers an answer according to which he social
relations of production have a social existence
to the extent that they have a spatial existence
they project themselves into a space, becoming
inscribed there, and in the process producing
that space itself. Failing this, these relations
would remain in the realm of pure abstraction
- that is to say, in the realm of representations
and hence of ideology the realm of verbalism,
verbiage and empty words (Lefebvre 1991d129).
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2 Key Works on Space

• 1972 paper Museum of Modern Art Symposium
  Institutions of the Post-Industrial Society
• Production de lespace (1974), De LEtat (4 vols
  1976-1978)

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For Lefebvre, space is split up across many
disciplines, each of which is partial, and which
make social space invisible as a result It is a
question of discovering or developing a unity of
theory between fields which are given as being
separate,...Which fields?...First, the physical,
nature, the cosmos, - then the mental (which is
comprised of logic and formal abstraction), -
finally the social. In other words, this search
concerns logico-epistemological space - the space
of social practices, - that in which sensible
phenomena are situated in, not excluding the
imaginary, projects and projections, symbols,
utopias (Lefebvre 1974a19).
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Trialectics of space

• 1. Spatial Practice with all its contradictions
  in everyday life, space perceived (perçu) in the
  commonsensical mode - or better still, ignored
  one minute and over-fetishized the next.
• 2 Representations of Space (discourses on space)
  the discursive regimes of theories, spatial and
  planning professions and expert knowledges which
  conceive of space (lespace conçu), and,
• 3. Spaces of Representation (Discourse of Space
  representational space), the third term or
  other in Lefebvres three-part dialectic. This
  is space as it might be, fully lived space
  (lespace vecu) moments of presence.
  Surrealist shock people into a new conception of
  the spatialisation of social life.
• All interact in social spatializations

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What is the spatial practice of the body?
Considered overall, social practice presupposes
the use of the body the use of the hands,
members and sensory organs, and the gestures of
work as of activity unrelated to work. This is
the realm of the perceived (the practical basis
for the perception of the outside world). As
for representations of the body, they derive from
accumulated scientific knowledge, disseminated
with an admixture of ideology. - from the first
medical axioms of Hippocrates through anatomic
studies by Renaissance artists such as
Michaelangelo to theories of vaccine, antibodies
and allergens in the environment. The body is
also a lived experience itself a space of
representations, The heart as lived is
strangely different from the heart as thought and
perceived. Here we are in the realm of desire
and mythification. Right-handedness as a norm,
the attachment of moral values to different parts
of the body - from wrists, ankles, to genitalia,
the lived is colonized as a space of
representations against itself. The attachment
of hygienic values to still other parts of the
body - lips, anus, fingers - is yet another
chastisement which reconfigures the dialectical
linkage of practical perception-conception-lived
image. When we shudder with disgust at
transgressions of hygiene taboos we directly
experience the overriding power of this
interconnection as involuntary trembling seizes
us and our skin crawls.
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Lespace - spatialization

• Always in progress
• (a doing)
• But with structuring effects
• (already achieved)
• Multi-scaled
• Bodies fitted to a built environment
• Landscape and nature created
• Physical but also conceptual and imagined
• Unlike Lefebvre not periodicized, not systemic
  but a formation, not homogeneous but contested
• Social Spaces are the object of struggles over
  their form, how they are represented and their
  cultural meaning.

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Lefebvre synthesizes his work on the urban with
his rural sociology, setting the city into a
systematic social spatialization a socially
produced regime of spatiality and geography Each
network or sequence of links - and thus each
space - serves exchange and use in specific ways.
Each is produced - and serves a purpose and
each wears out or is consumed, sometimes
unproductively, sometimes productively. There is
a space of speech whose prerequisites, as we have
seen, are the lips, the ears, the ability to
articulate, masses of air, sounds, and so on.
This is a space, however, for which such material
preconditions are not an adequate definition a
space of actions and of inter-actions, of calling
and of calling back and forth, of expressiveness
and power, and already at this level - of latent
violence and revolt the space, then, of a
discourse that does not coincide with any
discourse on or in space. The space of speech
envelops the space of bodies and develops by
means of traces, of writings, of prescriptions
and inscriptions (Lefebvre 1991d 403).
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History of Spatializations

• Absolute Space
• - Nature
• Sacred Space
• - City states, despots and divine-kings, Egypt
• Historical Space
• - Political states, Greek city-states, Roman
  Empire, perspective
• Abstract Space
• - Capitalism, political-economic space of
  property, lots
• Contradictory Space
• - Contemporary Global capital versus localized
  meaning
• Differential Space
• - Future space re-valuing difference and lived
  experience.

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Lefebvres Idealized natural space. His schema
begins with an originary and Edenic maternal
space (the natural) to which he seems to want to
return... Second, his framework depends upon a
heterosexuality that is fixated in a number of
rigid, gendered distinctions...equating the
paternal with activity, movement, agency, force,
history, while the maternal is passive, immobile,
subject of force and history. ...Lefebvres
version of heterosexuality turns on an
active-passive binary. If activity labour is
that which materially inscribes the body in
history, and only those inscriptions which are
coded masculine are considered, feminine bodies
necessarily become invisible...feminized
sociospatial practices and struggles are
completely ignored.... structurally female agency
is foreclosed, rendered unrecognizable and made
theoretically impossible practically such
exclusion winds up rejecting everyday forms of
non-masculinist agency (Blum and Nast 1996577).
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The classical cities of antiquity were oeuvres
(works) -unity of use and symbolic value -sites
of ritual -'stages' for the monumental 'boasts'
of 'despotic' rulers. Capitalist cities convert
what remains of the classical city-oeuvres into a
commodified terrain for speculation -the city
ceases to be the central social form and becomes
inserted into a far larger capitalist, global
network (Production de lespace 1974) -the
monumental and festive aspects are turned into
urban museums Venice or Florence
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Space is not merely economic, in which all the
parts are interchangeable and have exchange
value. Space is not merely a political
instrument for homogenising all parts of society.
On the contrary...Space remains a model, a
perpetual prototype of use value resisting the
generalisations of exchange value in the
capitalist economy under the authority of a
homogenising state. Space is a use value,
similar to...time to which is is ultimately
linked because time is our life, our fundamental
use value (Lefebvre 1978b291). Space deserves
membership in the set of productive forces.
Ownership of space certainly confers a position
in the economic structure. Evenwhen a piece of
space is contentless, its control may generate
economic power, because it can be filled with
something productive or because it may need to be
traversed by producers (Cohen 197851).
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Abstract Space 1. Quantity vs. quality The
repression of quality which re-emerges as
'leisure' 'from the space of consumption to the
consumption of space in leisure and leisure
space, or from everyday life to the
extraordinary by way of the festival...from work
to non-work' (1974a409 compare 1991d353). 2.
Global vs. local The contrast of a global
spatial practice and system under multinational
capitalism and the'myth' of the parcel, lot, and
smallest commercial units of space which is the
lived-reality for most. Abstract space is both
of these at once without any possibility of
synthesis. 3. Use value vs. exchange value
As in Marx's formulation, the use value of land
is transformed into the homogenous exchange value
of real estate. At the grand level of the
spatialisation oeuvres' are transformed into
products mere opportunities for enterprise.
Where this is not possible, they are transformed
into images of themselveseither through their
literal reproduction (Disneyland reproduces
fragments of various 'cities' and 'countries'
providing living stereotypes) or through the
operation of photography which transfers the
landscape to countless tourist postcards (see
Baudrillard 1983).
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Critique of Everyday Life
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Everyday Quotidien

• Alltäglichkeit banality
• Heidegger
• Lukàcs (c.f. Reification)
• La vie quotidien
• Lifeworld Schütz communalized empathy
• Practical attitude Husserl

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Other Uses of Everyday Life

• Goffman
• Presentation of self
• Agnes Heller
• rationalization
• Dorothy Smith
• Relations of ruling
• Bakhtin
• prosaics
• Source Gardiner Critiques of Everyday Life

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The Everyday

• -in-between
• -liminal
• -performative
• -synthetic
• -processual
• -time-space

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Critique of Everyday Life

• 4th form of alienation
• c.f. Reification - Lukàcs
• Nietzschean critique
• taken-for-granted, reveals failure of vecu
• Colonization
• gtgtCant just criticize everyday life for its
  lack of political project

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Spatialization

• Spatial in-betweenness
• spatialization of alienation
• index shadow
• ephemerality
• flow

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Everyday Life and the City

• loss of integral sense of dwelling (habiter,
  wohnen)
• critique of urban life
• lifestyle?

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Method

• Lefebvres projective-retrojective method was,
  according to Lefebvre, implicit in Marx - notably
  The German Ideology - but it is Lefebvre who
  gives it the clarity and explicit status of a
  research method. It consists of three steps
• (a) Descriptive observation informed by
  experience and general theory
• (b) analytico-retrojective analysis comparing
  back historically and to the known origins of
  other cases, and,
• (c) historico-progressive study of the genesis of
  structures, reconstructing the projection of
  trends to provide an explanatory framework for
  the present.

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Modernization and Globalization

• Lefebvre and beyond...

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Critique of Modernity

• Production de lespace (1974)
• Critique of modern modalities of thinking as well
  as of space and economics
• Critique of privileged position of time since
  Kant
• Kantian categories are empty formal containers,
  not experiences which take place or have a
  substantial quality
• Typical of abstract space

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3rd Moment of Abstract Space Space and objects
are relativized. Space, in se, cannot be seized,
becoming unthinkable. Time, in se, is also
relativized. Unity of time and space (time is
grasped as spatial change, space in time(s)).
Capitalism begins by producing things and
investing in sites. The need to reproduce social
relations modifies this. And, this is what makes
it necessary to reproduce nature and master space
in producing it (the political-economic space of
capitalism) on a global scale through a reduction
of time in order to halt the production of new
social relations "Production, at the limit,
today, is no longer a matter of producing this or
that, things or works oeuvres but of producing
space." Merchandize will occupy the entire
global space. Exchange value will impose the law
of value on the entire planet. In a sense, the
history of the world is nothing but that of
merchandize. This hypothesis pushed to its
extremes permits the discovery of obstacles and
objections. At the limit, will the state produce
its own space, the absolute political? Or can
one see the disappearance in and through the
global market of the nation-state and of its
space? (Production de lespace 3.13 p.253).
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Lefebvres Critique of the State

• Context tied closely to the intellectual
  paradigm of Marxism as a political project to
  conquer the state.
• However, he attempts a critique of Left Statism
• Bound to the political-economic conditions
  associated with the Fordist welfare state.
• Sources Swingedouw, Brenner, Elden, Antipode
  2001

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What the Left, has been proposing for years
is the same thing that the government has been
proposing. A higher rate of growth, fairer
distribution It has proposed no new concept of
society, of the state. the Left thus situates
itself on the terrain of those against whom it is
fighting. (Lefebvre De lEtat Vol.2 p.126)
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De LEtat (4 vols 1976-1978)

• Critique of the State as the foremost institution
  involved in binding space into productive
  territories
• Situates earlier work on the urban, everyday life
  in an explicitly political context
• Lefebvres analyses of state spatiality have been
  neglected. Yet an analysis and critique of the
  modern state form was a key element of Lefebvres
  writings of the 1970s
• Does not provide a critique of the dismantling of
  State Fordism in France or 70s economic crises.

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Autogestion

• Self-management, worker control or
  co-management (Castoriadis)
• critique of liberal pluralism of the Parti
  Socialiste
• Critique of State Mode of Production,
  technocratic surveillance and threat to civil
  society
• A political orientation, not an institutional
  framework grass-roots, radical democratization

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The Emergence of Counterspaces Social space
figures amongst the productive forces appears as
a privileged product sometimes consumed simply
(tourism) sometimes productively (machines,
cities) in as much as it is a productive
framework. It serves as a political instrument
allowing control of society and the means of
production through its management. It supports
the reproduction of relations of production and
property. It is the practical equivalent of the
ensemble of superstructural institutions and
ideologies. It contains virtualities -- the work
(oeuvre) and reappropration under the banner of
art and above all in the exigencies of the body
which deploys a space around itself and extends
itself through it. Thus space itself resists the
bureaucratic management of space and suggests the
sources of a counter-space (Production de
lespace 5.22 pp.402-3).
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Relevance in 2002

• critique of neoliberalism as a productivist state
  form
• rescaling/reterritorialization/redirection of
  governance and citizenship (Brenner, Putnam)
• critique of Left/social-democratic productivism
  (Jameson, Pateman)
• the critique of changing state formations
• Preserves project of a dialectical utopianism

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1. Rescaling

• Change in relevant scale of citizenship, of
  policy delivery
• the city, on one hand and the global or
  regional (Europe, OECD), on the other hand
• Lefebvre continually reminds us of the nested
  quality of spatialization from micro- to
  macro-level. Reflections of the overarching form
  are found in the smallest details of everyday
  life.

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2. Reterritorialization

• Globalization is not a just a matter of the
  withering away of the state but a shift in
  spatialization a new arrangement of territories
• The State appears to reassert itself, but does so
  in the form of new regional blocs (eg. FTAA,
  EU)
• Function as an agent for commodification and
  productivity of territories supercedes
  regulatory, redistribution and accountability
  functions
• gtgt increased geographic inequality. Supremacy of
  cities and production clusters vs. peripheries

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With the development of the modern modes of
capitalist production, the extraction of surplus
value becomes de-territorialized, notably with
the development of a global financial circuit.
Still the city continues in its old role of
coordinating the flows of energies. The economy
appears practically as a connexion of flux and
networks whose rationality is monitored by
institutions and programmed through the spatial
framework where these institutions have their
operational effects (Production de lespace 5.20
p.401).
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3. Reorientation

• Expectations of the powers of the nation change.
• Importance of cities, neighbourhoods, global
  coalitions
• Neoliberal consensus

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Globalization

• le planetaire global circuits of capital and
  of social movements
• Anticipates non-aligned movement
• NGO/civil society movements (Rio, Seattle)
• Cities and urban life are shared reference points
• Refusal of state politics, lack of presence of
  Fordist labour unions, political parties

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6.10 There is a fundamental contradiction between
globalization (the ability to manage space on a
grand scale, thus homogenization) and
parcelization (private property). Dispersion of
various aspects of capitalist productions
(Fordism) further robs space of its coherence.
It is dominated by strategic designs of
multi-nationals and superpowers. The micro-level
of space remains the site of struggle where the
objective is always and still the occupation of a
space by the various modes of politics and war
(Production de lespace 6.10 p.422-3)
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tendencies to a "counter-space" (alternative
spatial systems, arrangements, practices,
norms)with all their ambiguities and failures.
Of these, the most striking isThe space of
leisure, in particular the beach, is the ultimate
"Contradictory Space" being both a zone where the
body-subject is re-unified with the
body-as-object and a site of the reproduction of
labour and the relations of production. As such
it indicates the points of possible rupture in
the present system of contradictory, abstract,
space (Production de lespace 6.21 p.431-2)
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Postmodernism respatialization

• Postmodernism disruption of cognitive mapping
  (Jameson).
• New period (past the post)
• Much remains the same
• Spatialisation of presence (parousia) and absence
  as near-far disengaged from exclusion and
  inclusion (inside-outside).

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Presence and Absence

• Cultural oppositions sketched around the dualism
  of presence and absence
• Proximate and Remote,
• Known and Unknown,
• Being and Non-Being
• Present and Past
• Material and Abstract
• Erodes modernist categories and forms such as the
  individual, the city and the nation-state.
  Unravels web of guiding metaphors we live by

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Lefebvres triple dialectic
Both... I Affirmation and II
Negation Percu
Concu IV
Synthesis ___________________________
________

III Negation of the Negation

Vecu
(Otherness)
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A continuing story