Henri Lefebvre: Introduction
Rob Shields
Henri Lefebvre
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Introduction and Overview
The City and Social Space
Critique of Everyday Life
Modernity and Globalization
Influences
-Surrealism
-Marxism
-Existentialism
-The Situationists
Social Theory and Contributions
-Everyday Life
-Mystification of Consciousness
-Alienation
-‘Moments’ of Enlightenment
-Romanticism, Utopianism
-Dialectical 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
Henri Lefebvre 1901-1991
910
920
930
940
950
960
970
980
Lycee Louis le Grand (Paris)
Schopenauer, will and ‘adventure’
Philosophy, Theology with Blondel (Aix en Provence 1918)
Joachim de Flore (life/law/spirit)
Post World War I ‘malaise’ - slow economic reconstruction (industrialization)
French modernization in the 1920s - social reconstruction
Philosophy Bergson, Brunschwicq (Sorbonne, Paris 1919-1925)
Nietzsche
1924 first publications
‘Adventure and poetic revolution as response to alienation
Surrealism and Dada Philosophies
Breton, Tzara, Aragon, Hegel
Proto-existentialism: Nisan, Sartre, Politzer, Gide
Surrealists join Parti Communiste Français 1928 (PCF)
Translations of Marx, Hegel 1929
1934 with Norbert Guterman, Morceaux choisis de Karl Marx 1934
Marx, Engels
Spanish Moroccan war
Front Populaire, Fustel de Coulanges, Morhange
Critique of Everyday Life 1935
Heidegger: Everydayness: Alltäglichkeit
Mystification and false consciousness La Conscience mystifiée, 1936
Le nationalisme contre les nations, 1937
World War II
Resistance
Logique formelle, logique dialectique 1947
Toulouse Radio
Strasbourg: Institute de sociologie
debates with Sartre
New Cities and the urbanization of the peasantry
Excluded from PCF 1955
Vallée de Campan: Etude de sociologie rurale 1963
The Situationniste Internationale: Debord
La Proclamation de la Commune 1965
Nanterre 1967
Le Droit à la ville 1968
May 68
The Explosion 1968
Cohn-Bendt, Baudrillard and the Nanterre students
debates against Structuralism: Althusser
Urban Studies Production de l’espace 1974
Hegel, Marx, Nietzsche, ou le royaume des ombres 1975
debates against Bergsonism Foucault, Lyotard, Deleuze
De L’Etat: Les contradictions de l'Etat moderne, La dialectique de l'Etat 1976 4th of 4 vols.
Spatializing the dialectic: an opening to otherness
1983-84 - Sabbatical in California
Action Directe and the Groupe de Navarrenx
‘Rhythmanalysis’
Legacies: Conducting wire; Ironic: ‘I am the last humanist marxist’ - Jean Baudrillard
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
The City and Social Space
Lefebvre’s 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
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 (1967e:10)
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 1985:128).
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
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
1996:150).
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 1991d:129).
2 Key Works on Space
• 1972 paper: Museum of Modern Art
Symposium ‘Institutions of the PostIndustrial Society
• Production de l’espace (1974), De L’Etat (4
vols 1976-1978)
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 logicoepistemological space - the space of social practices, - that in which sensible
phenomena are situated in, not excluding the imaginary, projects and
projections, symbols, utopias (Lefebvre 1974a:19).
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 (l’espace conçu), and,
• 3. Spaces of Representation (Discourse of Space; ‘representational
space’), the third term or ‘other’ in Lefebvre’s three-part dialectic.
This is space as it might be, fully lived space (l’espace vecu)
‘moments’ of presence. Surrealist: shock people into a new conception
of the spatialisation of social life.
• All interact in social spatializations
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. Righthandedness 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 perceptionconception-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’.
L’espace - 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.
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).
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.
Modes of Production of Space:
Absolute Religious
Differe
ntial
Historical
Abstract (Capitalist)
Contradictory
_____________________________________________________________________________
-500BC
0AD
500
1000
| Trade develops
in Europe
1200
1400
1600
1800
1974+
| 1585-90 Sixtus V
Axes and vistas of
Rome
| 1792 French Revolution
| 1917 Russian Revolution
| 1927-1953 Stalinism
| 1174: Early
| Spanish-Moroccan War
European
| 1435 Alberti:
| 1871 Paris Commune
trade fairs
Perspective
| 1954-62 Algerian Civil
War
| 1661-68
| 1954 French leave
Versailles
Indochina (Vietnam)
| Dadaism 1914-1926
| 1916-1936 Surrealism
| 1687 Newton
| 1958-69 Debord
Principia
Internationale
Situationniste
Mathematica
| 1965-68
| 1253 Brügges
Urban revolts
trade-rights
| 1641-50 Descartes
(May 68)
Major works incl.
| 1961 Jane Jacobs
| 1381 Venice
Discourse on Method
Life and Death of
Mediterranean sea rights
the Great American
City
| 1791-93
| 1969-Structuralist
Metric system
Marxism
| 1282 Hansiatic League
| 1435 Brunelleschi
Florence Baptistry
Examples
|1225-74 Thomas Aquinas
City of God
| 1492 Columbus
|1445 Gutenberg
printing press
|1465 Filarette:
Ideal city
|1807 Manhattan
street grid
| 1852-70
Hausmann
Paris Blvds.
| 1781-90
Kant’s main
works
| 1919-33
Bauhaus
| 1807-30
| Siegried Giedeon
Hegel’s
Main works | 1925
Corbusier
Plan Voisin,
Paris
| 1517-29 Luther:
Reformation
| 1519-21 Magellan
circumnavigates globe
| 1516 More’s Utopia
|1513-32 Machiavelli
The Prince
| 1933 Athens charter
International style in
Architecture
1957 Brasilia
| 1961 Zevi
and modernist
planning theorists
Lefebvre’s 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.
...Lefebvre’s 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 1996:577).
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 l’espace 1974)
-the monumental and festive aspects are turned into
urban museums: Venice or Florence…
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 1978b:291).
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 1978:51).
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' (1974a:409; compare
1991d:353).
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).
Critique of Everyday Life
‘Everyday’ – Quotidien
• Alltäglichkeit –banality
– Heidegger
– Lukàcs (c.f. ‘Reification’)
• La vie quotidien
• ‘Lifeworld’ – Schütz – communalized empathy
• Practical attitude – Husserl
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
‘The Everyday’
-in-between
-liminal
-performative
-synthetic
-processual
-time-space
Critique of Everyday Life
4th form of alienation
c.f. Reification - Lukàcs
Nietzschean critique
taken-for-granted, reveals failure of vecu
Colonization
>>Can’t just criticize ‘everyday life’ for its lack of political
project
Spatialization
•
•
•
•
•
Spatial in-betweenness
spatialization of alienation
index & shadow
ephemerality
flow
Everyday Life and the City
• loss of integral sense of dwelling (habiter, wohnen)
• critique of urban life
– lifestyle?
Method
• Lefebvre’s 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.
Modernization and
Globalization
Lefebvre and beyond...
Critique of Modernity
Production de l’espace (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’
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 l’espace
3.13 p.253).
Lefebvre’s 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…
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 l’Etat Vol.2 p.126)
De L’Etat (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
• Lefebvre’s analyses of state spatiality have been
neglected. Yet an analysis and critique of the modern
state form was a key element of Lefebvre’s writings
of the 1970s
• Does not provide a critique of the dismantling of
‘State Fordism’ in France or 70s economic crises.
Autogestion
• Self-management, ‘worker control’ or comanagement (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
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 l’espace 5.22 pp.402-3).
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
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 microto macro-level. Reflections of the
overarching form are found in the smallest
details of everyday life.
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
• >> increased geographic inequality. Supremacy of
cities and production clusters vs. peripheries
With the development of the modern modes of capitalist
production, the extraction of surplus value becomes deterritorialized, 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 l’espace 5.20 p.401).
3. Reorientation
• Expectations of the powers of the nation
change.
• Importance of cities, neighbourhoods,
global coalitions
• Neoliberal consensus
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
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 l’espace 6.10 p.422-3)
…tendencies to a "counter-space" (alternative spatial systems, arrangements,
practices, norms)…with all their ambiguities and failures. Of these, the most
striking is…The 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 l’espace
6.21 p.431-2)
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).
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”
Lefebvre’s triple dialectic
}
Both... I Affirmation
and
II Negation
}
Concu
}
Percu
___________________________________
}
}
III Negation of the Negation
Vecu
(Otherness)
}
}
IV “Synthesis”
A continuing story…