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Author’s post-print (i.e. final draft post-refereeing) – see http://www.sherpa.ac.uk/romeo/issn/0038-2876/.
Publisher’s version available at http://saq.dukejournals.org/content/113/2/313.abstract - please cite the latter.
Lost in Space? Lefebvre, Harvey and the Spatiality of Negation
Greig Charnock
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It’s all fine and good…to evoke relational conceptions such as the proletariat in
motion or the multitude rising up. But no one knows what any of that means
until real bodies go into the absolute spaces of the streets…at a particular
moment in absolute time.
…To neglect that connectivity is to court political irrelevance (David Harvey,
Rebel Cities).
What, if anything, is intrinsically spatial about saying ‘no’ to austerity, or to capitalism
generally? It certainly appears that the urban character of recent popular uprisings – from
Tahrir Square to Syntagma Square; from Puerta del Sol to Zuccotti Park – suggest that there
is some necessarily spatial dimension to contemporary forms of revolt. John Holloway
suggests that interstitial revolution can be usefully thought of in terms of ‘cracks’: moments
of refusal (of ‘the No’) that reveal the possibility of a (not-yet-)existing world built on dignity
and mutual recognition rather than upon abstract labor and the command of money.
‘Perhaps the most obvious way of thinking of cracks is in spatial terms’, proposes Holloway
(2010: 27): ‘Here … we shall not accept the rule of capital or the state, we shall determine
our own activity’.
This paper is motivated by Holloway’s part-spatial conceptualization of cracks, but also
out of an engagement with two avowedly dialectical and Marxist thinkers of space whose
works have found contemporary resonance in the anti-austerity-related slogan of ‘the right to
the city’: Henri Lefebvre and David Harvey. In searching for initial clues to the connectivity
between time, space and negation, I find that the two versions of the production of space
offered up by Lefebvre, on the one hand, and Harvey, on the other, are not as easily
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reconcilable as one might be led to think. Both thinkers open the door to markedly different
– and, in their own way, problematic – notions of the critique of capitalist space and of the
spatiality of emancipatory politics.
Lefebvre: Negative Critique and the Spatiality of (Dis-)Alienation
Prior to the ‘discovery’ of the works of Henri Lefebvre by Anglophone scholars in the
1990s, his reception in France and elsewhere was primarily as someone who wrote about
dialectical method (Shields 1999: 109). A hallmark of Lefebvre’s writings is therefore the
extent to which they are consistently methodologically minded, the dialectic being the thread
that runs through his prolific and thematically varied output over several decades. This is
certainly the case with his writings on space, originally published between 1968 and 1974. In
these, and in addition to arguing persuasively that space should be thought of in dialectical
terms of its social production – rather than in purely Cartesian and Euclidean terms –
Lefebvre’s signal methodological contribution is to highlight the anti-representational
orientation of Hegelian Marxism (see Charnock and Ribera-Fumaz 2011). That is, his
critique of ‘formal logic’ emphasized at once the dialectic’s ability to reconcile social
scientific analysis with flux, inner relations, determinate negation, mediation and Becoming,
while also exposing the ‘terrorism’ inherent to dominant, representational norms of analysis
based upon purely formal or speculative methods of abstraction. For Lefebvre,
representational knowledge about the world is but an ideological product of the will to
abstract from concrete, lived experience (du vécu) (e.g. Lefebvre 1991: 230). Time and again,
Lefebvre reveals the limits to formal logic, but also at the level of serviceable representations
that have a ‘real’ and violent effect. In his work on space and urbanism, Lefebvre therefore
railed against ‘models’ – abstract but concretely applicable representations of a projected,
planned society in which some kinds of social and spatial practice are condoned and others
dismissed as pathological or dysfunctional. Lefebvre’s work therefore reinforces that aspect
of the dialectic which Marx demonstrated in his own critique of political economy: that it has
the power to offer an understanding of the real movement of society whilst also exposing
even the most developed form of non-dialectical consciousness of that society to be
ideology and necessarily in the service of the reproduction of alienation.
Lefebvre’s antidote to formal logic, speculative philosophies, structuralism, existentialism,
and Soviet Diamat was what he repeatedly calls ‘metaphilosophy’ (see Charnock 2010). At
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root, metaphilosophy is concerned with praxis: ‘Production produces man. So-called “world
history” or the “history of the world” is nothing but the history of man producing himself,
of man producing both the human world and the other man, the (alienated) man of
otherness, and his self (his self-consciousness)’ [sic] (Lefebvre 2008: I, 237). The purpose of
critique, for Lefebvre, is therefore to illuminate and decipher human alienation on the basis
of praxis (ibid.: 137); it is to ask: ‘How can men live as they are living, and how can they
accept it?’ [sic] (ibid.: 30). Lefebvre’s own exploration of this question led him to develop his
critique of everyday life over the course of four decades, and to his work on the production
of (urban) space.
Lefebvre’s gambit in his 1968-74 writings is his assertion that ‘urbanization’ has
superseded ‘industrialization’ – an historical process he claims Marx could not have foreseen,
situated as he was within an epoch of ‘competitive capitalism’ (Lefebvre 1976: 10). Lefebvre
explains that capitalism gave birth to urbanization as an ‘active abstraction’ (Kerr 1994: 28);
in a sense, a wayward and patricidal offspring of industrialization (Lefebvre, 2000: 47;
Merrifield 2011a: 469). Motivated by what he judged to be an insufficient attention to space
in Marx and Marxism generally (Elden 2004a: 184-186) – as well as his own immersion in
architectural and urbanist milieus from the late 1960s (Stanek 2011) – Lefebvre sought to
show how capitalism produces its own abstract space – materially and in ideological,
representational terms – and, in so doing, creates the permissive conditions for the
reproduction of the relations of production according to their own immanent requirements
and not simply those that feed and support the production of surplus-value in the factories
(Lefebvre 1976). Time has been ‘reduced’ to constraints of space – circumscribed and
suppressed within the abstract space of the urban form. The process of mediation that re-
produces the relations of production in a contradictory form, according to Lefebvre, is
therefore that of urbanization – the production of (urban) space.
‘This, then, is what is new and paradoxical’, explains Lefebvre (1976: 17): ‘the dialectic is no longer
attached to temporality … To recognize space, to recognize what “takes place” there and what it
is used for, is to resume the dialectic; analysis will reveal the contradictions of space’. Praxis
and production are still at the root of Lefebvre’s analysis, and it should be stressed that class
struggle and bourgeois class strategy (directed through the homogenizing, ‘terrorizing’ power
of the state) still has a large part to play in his depiction of the urban mode of existence as
one of ‘permanent crisis’ (Lefebvre 2003; 2008: III). Lefebvre remains committed to tracing
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the movement of (dis-)alienation and in putting to work ‘the critical labor of the negative’
(Zuss 2005). According to Lefebvre we should view space in contradictory terms – difference
being necessarily constitutive of urbanization, notwithstanding its homogenizing drive to
concretize ‘abstract space’. Lefebvre traces ‘the existence of irreducibles, contradictions and
objections that intervene and hinder the closing of the circuit [of everyday life], that split the
structure’ (Lefebvre 2000: 75). In his view, then, there is some residuum of human
subjectivity and style that capital has been unable to subsume, invert or control, and it is this
insight which holds the key to understanding the contradictions inherent to the production
of abstract space.
Lefebvre’s now famous clarion call for the ‘right to the city’ was, therefore, one that he
bequeathed to urban subjects brought together under the centralizing and homogenizing
process of urbanization but subjected to a programmed circuit of everyday life in, what he
termed, the ‘bureaucratic society of controlled consumption’ (Lefebvre 2000). The working
class remains the revolutionary subject for Lefebvre – not exclusively because of its
exploitation as the source of labor-power or its relation to the development of the
productive forces in industry, but because ‘it gathers the interests … of the whole society
and firstly of all those who inhabit’ (Lefebvre 1996: 158). Ultimately, then, Lefebvre’s
recourse to Heidegger reveals the extent to which the class struggle is now no longer
necessarily a struggle against capital; rather, the struggle is against the reduction of inhabiting
(habiter; wohnen) to habitat (Elden 2004b: 96), and against the production of space as
determined by anything other than generalized self-management (autogestion) of all urban
citizens on the basis of the mutual recognition of difference and particularity.
Ultimately, for Lefebvre, an urban revolution remained only a possibility – albeit one
which has been revealed in all too transient, explosive ‘moments’ such as that of the events
of May 1968. Like Holloway’s cracks, Lefebvre’s moments attest to the interstitial character
of revolution, and resonate, perhaps, with Adorno’s methodological preoccupation with
‘opening the non-conceptual within the concept’ (Bonefeld 2012: 130). However, unlike
Bonefeld and Holloway, who cling to time as the locus of critique, Lefebvre suggests that the
critical labor of the negative should necessarily be aimed at space: ‘(Social) space is a (social)
product’, asserts Lefebvre (1991: 26); and ‘there is a politics of space because space is political’
(Lefebvre 2009: 174). As one critic corroborates, ‘Lefebvre attempts to develop a method
which is able to apprehend social space as such, in its genesis and its form, with its own
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specific time or times (the rhythm of daily life), and its particular centers and, what Lefebvre
calls, polycentrism (agora, temple, stadium, etc)’ (Kerr 1994: 25). This reading of Lefebvre’s
identification of the social content of spatial forms as being the key to ‘the possible’, and to
the extent that he finds the Marxian critique of political economy to be a once necessary but,
now, insufficient and misdirected endeavor, has profound implications for both critique and
emancipatory politics.
The Limits to Lefebvre
There are several possible objections to Lefebvre’s arguments. One might justifiably criticize
Lefebvre for merely asserting, and never explicitly explaining, the salience of the urban
problematique (Harvey 1974: 239). One might also raise concerns about the ‘contextual
boundedness’ of aspects of Lefebvre’s work (Brenner 2008: 242), insofar as it is of its time
(steeped in frustration with everyday life in Gaullist France). Alternatively, Lefebvre has been
dismissed as but another outmoded Marxist whose ‘social critique’ has been rendered
obsolete by the transformation to flexible capitalism and the transformation of the ‘subaltern
subjectivity’ of the ‘liberated individual’ (Ronneberger 2008). But I want to highlight
fundamental issues with Lefebvre’s ‘application’ of his dialectical logic to ‘the urban’ and to
space from the perspective of the critique of political economy; a Marxian interrogation of
Lefebvre’s Marxism, in other words.
The basis of an arraignment against Lefebvre is already suggested in Smith’s (1990: 92,
189 fn. 46) passing reference to Lefebvre’s ‘reproductionism’, and to his drawing of too
marked a distinction between the development of the forces of production versus the social
relations of production. But this is more developed in a little-known article by Derek Kerr.
In this, he surmises of Lefebvre (1976; 1991) that: ‘Class struggle and history are reduced to
abstract time and exist in the container of abstract space, while this space has contradictions
of its own which can then externally “envelop historical contradictions”. But by separating
out contradictions of space from those in space and by reducing class struggle and history to
the latter, it is not clear what constitutes the contradictions of space’. He continues: ‘If social
relations are inherently spatial and temporal then there can be no separation in/of dualism’
(Kerr 1994: 32); furthermore, to ‘displace time by space merely obscures the dynamic and
contradictory nature of the capital relation and the ways in which this expresses itself in a