This computer listing reproduces 'An English Précis
of Henri Lefebvre's La Production de l'Espace' University of Sussex,
Brighton U.K. Urban and Regional Studies Working Paper
63 (April 1988). I wish to acknowledge my debt to
Frederic Jameson who composed the original set of reading
notes upon which the first version of this Precis was
based. All translations, however, are mine and responsibility
for the decision of what to include, what to summarize,
and how to paraphrase, must remain on my shoulders. It
should also be noted that a translation by M. Enders of
Chapter 1 is available in Antipode 8. 31-5
Note: The 1991 English translation by Donald Nicholson-Smith
is now available under the title The Production of Space
(Oxford: Basil Blackwell). The major distinction with
this work is Nicholson-SMith's rendering of ‘les spaces de
représentation' as ‘representational spaces' (see
R. Shields Lefebvre - Love and Struggle. A Spatial Dialectics (Routledge
1999))
Translation copyright Rob Shields 1988. Introduction copyright Rob Shields 1987.
Page numbers and section numbers are to the 2nd French
edition of La Production de l'Espace 1981 Editions Anthropos
Paris.
Each chapter begins with a hard-page. Originally written
on a Tandy Model 100.
It is necessary to briefly introduce Lefebvre for the
English reader perhaps unfamiliar with the development of French
Marxism. Although often uncited, the thought of Henri
Lefebvre underpins the discourse of the mid-twentieth century
French intellectuals. With the work of perhaps only Sartre
as his equal, Lefebvre was a central representative of French
existential Marxism of the pre-1968 variety. In part,
his stature is due to his long presence on the scene of social theory
in France; but on the other hand, his polymathic scope
and range have led to his general neglect. In English especially
conflicting appreciations have led to a general puzzlement
over Lefebvre's exact contribution. Some authors, out of their
entusiasm for the potentials opened up by his thought
have presented his work in a highly positive light (Soja 1980; 1985).
Others ignore his work almost entirely even when it is
central to their discussion (Poster 1975). Few of his works are
available in translation and the general impression obtained
in the English urban studies literature is based on Castells'
partial reading of early works (Martins 1982) and his
structuralist critique of Lefebvre's too often unclear position and
always difficult style (Castells 1977). More recent works,
such as those by Gottdiener (1985), reduce Lefebvre's Hegelian
dialectics to a political economy. Such a state of confusion
reins that, it seems, Lefebvre real contributions have become
occluded. The lack of availability of Lefebvre's later
works outside of France belies their importance and theoretical
originality. Hopefully, in 1988 the publishers Basil
Blackwell will complete with the translation they have been working
on for the last five years. This paper might be regarded
as part of an on-going project which can only begin to attempt
to sketch the implications of Lefebvre's four-hundred
page analysis of La Production de l'espace into the working
language of English sociologists and urban theorists.
Although his influence has certainly waned since the 1970s, he
remains, as Perry Anderson has commented, a loved outsider
to the French academic establishment.
[Despite] `a general crisis of Marxism'... No intellectual
change is ever universal. At least one
exception, of signal honour, stands out against the general
shift of positions in these years. The oldest
living survivor of the Western Marxist tradition...,
Henri Lefebvre, neither bent nor turned in his eighth
decade, continuing to produce imperturbable and original
work on subjects typically ignored by much
of the Left. The price of such constancy, however, was
relative isolation. (Anderson 1983:30)
Contemporaneous with such "founder-figures" as Kojève,
(whose 1937-1939 lectures on Hegel collected by Queneau
and later translated and published in English as An Introduction
to Reading Hegel, (1947) remain as some the seminal
work for all students of Hegel) Lefebvre's work on dialectical
materialism has earned him the position of "father of the
dialectic" in France. It is for this work that he is
best known to English-speaking Marxologists. In the early 1930s,
together with Norbert Guterman he published the first
French translations of Marx's 1844 economic and political
manuscripts and in a set of anthologies over the next
thrity years introduced and wrote extensive commentaries on many
key works by Marx, Engels and Lenin which contributed
to the Hegelian revival which formed the basis for the expansion
of Marxism in France. Lefebvre, seeking to mediate between
Hegel's idealism and the materialism of Marx, encouraged
interest in the problem of ideology and its role in the
reproduction of culture and thus of modes of production (Le
Matérialism Dialectique 1939). This thematic,
which began with his book La Conscience Mystifiée (1936), has continued
in French intellectual thought through to the present
day in the work of Bourdieu. Particularly striking is the centrality
of his thesis, borrowed from Marx, that consciousness
is produced through material practices in the conduct of everyday
life. There is no branch of French social thought untouched
by this problematic.His seminal critiques of the Party doctrine
of Comintern marxism (Problèmes actuels du marxisme,
1958) earned him notoreity and eventual expulsion from the Parti
Communiste Français. This stance against reductionism
has also characterized his critiques of Althusser, semiology and
Sartrean existentialism. Lefebvre continued to play a
central role in the French reassessment of Marxism through the late
1950's and 1960's with his multi-volume studies of daily
life (Critique de la vie quotidienne (1958), Fondement d'une
sociologie de la quotidiennété (1961),
La Vie quotidienne dans le monde moderne (1968)). Significantly, he continued
to publish leading articles in the PCF's journal. Lefebvre
is part of the founding initiative of French Neo-Marxism leading
to Bourdieu's Esquisse d'une theorie de la pratique (1972)
and others of the "Daily Life" school (later represented by such
as de Certeau (La Vie quotidienne, translated as Daily
Life (1984)) and Debord (La Société du spectacle (1972)).
His
outspoken critique of structuralism through the 1960's
earned him a position in the vanguard of the post-structuralism
reassessment of language, ideology and communications.
His presence at Nanterre in May, 1968 as one of the `grands
professeurs' has led to his best remembered associations.
Indeed, 1968 was seen as a crucial test of Lefebvre's ideas--the
central slogan "au dessous les paves, la plage" ("beneath
the pavement, the beach") reeks of Lefebvre's spatial strategies
and his critique of the urban milieu in terms of its
repression of play and the ludic sphere in favour of rationality and
productivity. The failure of the 1968 student revolt
accelerated the search for alternative formulations amongst French
intellectuals. Lefebvre was bitterly criticized by such
as Castells who, only after more than a decade had passed, were
later to re-acknowledge their debt to this "grand old
man" of the European left (Castells 1983)Lefebvre himself dates his
interest in urban life from 1956. His works on urbanism
include Le Droit à la ville (1968), Du rural à l'urbain (1970),
Révolution urbaine (1970), La Pensée marxiste
et la ville (1972) which predate his major work La Production de l'espace
(1974). Lefebvre, pondering on the industrializing landscapes
of his childhood Occitaine (Les Temps de méprises 1975
Ch. 9), argues that the production of an appropriate
system of spatial attitudes, habits and territorial divisions has been
essential to the survival of Capitalism. This development
was unanticipated by Marx. Lefebvre thus argues that it is
necessary to redirect historical materialism towars a
spatial problematic (Soja 1985:108). In practice this evolved as an
extension of his series of "approximations" which first
centered around the problematic of everyday life and which were
later enlarged to encompass the spatialization of social
relations in general. This might be summarized as the theses
that:(1) social space is the location of the reproduction
of relations of production and of "society" with all its
appurtenances, in general, and (2) the internal contradictions
of capitalism have been managed through the development
of a mediating system of spatiality and of modes of occupying
geographic space.In volume four of De l'Etat (1978) this
is developed as: (3) the production of this capitalist
spatialization is accomplished through the activities of the State which
oversees what he calls the "statist mode of production".
Spatiality is not only a product but also a producer and
reproducer of the relations of production and
domination, an instrument of both allocative and authoritative
power. Class struggle, as well as other
social struggles are thus increasingly contained and
defined in their spatiality and trapped in its `grid'.
Social struggle must then become conciously and politically
spatial struggle to regain control over the
social production of this "space". (Soja 1985:110 (quotation
marks added))
After the first set of works explicitly concerned with
urban struggles and the experience of May '68, Production de
l'espace forms the keystone of the `second moment' of
Lefebvre's analysis of the urban. This may be seen as beginning
with his 1972 contribution to the colloquium `The Institutions
of the Post-Industrial Society' sponsored by the Museum
of Modern Art in New York. Having already defined the
essence of "urbanity" -- of the urban -- as being the simultaneity
of many discrete social interactions brought together
in "a centrality" Lefebvre proceeds to analyse the impact of changing
capitalist social relations of production upon the quality
of access and participation in the urban. Lefebvre's earlier
approaches focussed almost exclusively on this aspect
of "urbanity" and are critiqued for their vagueness and
anti-structuralist bias by Castells (1977) whose La Question
Urbaine is viewed by many as almost exclusively an
Althusserian structuralist response to Lefebvre's pre-1972
work (eg. Martins, 1982:166; Gottdiener, 1985). Castells
objections, the difficulties Castells' acknowledges with
his alternative formulation, and the problem of its inapplicability
to Lefebvre's later work are assessed in the author's
1986 thesis (Carleton University, Ottawa).Lefebvre's post-1972 work
as reconceptualized in Production de l'espace and restated
later in De l'Etat (Vol 4, 1978) moves the analysis of "space"
from the old synchronic order of discourses 'on' space
(architypically, that of "social space" as found in sociological texts
on "territoriality" (Hall, 1969) and social ecology (see
Ericksen 1980) to the diachronic discovery of the process by which
meta-level discourses 'of' space are socially produced.
In the process, Lefebvre attempted to establish the presence of a
conceptual and socially practiced system of "space" within
the hegemonic "logico-epistemological" theory of space
promulgated by philosophy and urban planning. Thus a
large portion of the book is devoted to developing a radical
phenomenology of space as a humanistic basis from which
to launch a critique of the individual's and community's "rights
to space" under capitalism. This phenomenological base,
and the sociological critique which is developed from it has
made La Production de l'espace especially puzzling for
mainstream urban studies scholars raised in the tradition of
political economy or ecology.
A Note on the Meaning and Translation of "l'espace"
"Space", or more properly "l'espace", is used metaphorically
and allegorically by Lefebvre. Unfortunately Lefebvre's
phrase "the production of space" (used differently by
Harvey, 1985; and by Soja, 1980; see also my discussion in Shields
1991 Ch. 1) conveys a multitide of spurious ideas and
is the proper-name of a history of mis-understanding dating back
to Medieval Scholasticism. The lesson of this history
is that "space" is far too loaded a term to be bandied about. An
examination of the very different concepts and semantic
fields around the various words for "space" in even closely-related
Western languages reveals that "space" entails not only
a physical level of conceptualization (distance, area etc.) but also
social and abstract levels (eg. the notion of "social
fields" (widely used in the French literature) or "front and back spaces"
(Goffman 1973) for the former level and such terms as
"head space" or "discursive space" for the latter). A second
problem is one of translation: our "Space" is not "l'espace"
is not "Raum". None of these corresponds to what Kant and
Leibniz called "spatium" nor do they signify what Descartes
refered to "extensio". The semantic fields of these words do
not neatly coincide. As the Inuit have twenty different
nouns to convey the (very important, in their history) nuances of
what we naively lump together as "snow" so, if "space
is important" we are in desparate need of a vocabulary for
discussing/conceptualizing the varied production/consumption
of varied spaces/places/landscapes on their own terms.1
Because Lefebvre is refering to not only the empirical
disposition of things in the landscape as "space"; but also attitudes
and habitual practices, his metaphoric "l'espace" might
be better understood as the "spatialization" of social order. In
this movement to space, abstract structures such as "culture"
become concrete practices and arrangements in space. This
term also captures the processual nature of "l'espace"
that Lefebvre insists upon. That is, it is not just an achieved order
in the built environment, or an ideology but an order
which is itself always undergoing change from within, through the
actions and innovations of social agents. This argument
is developed further in my Henri Lefebvre, the Question of Space
and the Postmodern Hypothesis (MA Thesis Carleton University
1986) and my Places on the Margin. Alternate
Geographies of Modernity (London, Routledge 1991)
Notes
1. This is especially important if we are to avoid the
problems indicated by critiques of discourses of "space" and the
"urban". Realists are right to remind us that the word
`space' is a "contentless abstraction" (Sayer 1985) which thus
varies in meaning and implication between ideologies
and between linguistic contexts. But the reality of `space' as
in "urban space" is a "concrete abstraction" in Marx's
sense (Capital: I--ie. an abstract form which nonetheless has
concrete implications, such as the commodity) which cannot
be merely dismissed or accepted in a blind empiricism.
References
Anderson, P. 1983 In the Tracks of Historical materialism
(London: NLB)
Castells, M 1977. The Urban Question (London: Edward
Arnold).
Castells 1983. The City and the Grassroots (Los Angeles:
University of California Press).
Ericksen, E.G. 1980. The Territorial Experience (Austin
Tx.: University of Texas Press).
Gottdiener, M. 1985. The Social Production of Urban Space
(Austin Texas: University of Texas Press)
Hall, E.T. 1969. The Hidden Dimension (Chicago: University
of Chicago Press)
Harvey, D. 1987. The Limits to Capital (Chicago: University
of Chicago Press).
Kojève, A. 1945. An Introduction to Reading Hegel
R. Queneau ed. (New York: Basic).
Poster, M. 1979. Existential Marxism in Postwar France
(Princeton Mass.: Princeton University Press)
Sayer, A. 1985 `The Difference that Space makes' in D.
Gregory and J. Urry 1985 Social Relations and Spatial Structures
(London:Macmillan)
Soja, E. 1980. `The Socio-Spatial Dialectic' in Annals
of the American Association of Geographers 70. 207-22.
Soja, E. 1985 `The Spatiality of Social Life: Towards
a transformative retheorization' in D. Gregory and J. Urry 1985.
Social Relations and Spatial Structures (London: Macmillan)
Shields, R. 1986. Henri Lefebvre, the Question of Space
and the Postmodern Hypothesis (MA Thesis Carleton University
Ottawa)
Shields R. 1991. Places on the Margin. Alternate Geographies
of Modernity (London: Routledge)
Shields R. Forthcoming Henri Lefebvre. A Critical Introduction
(London: Routledge)
Preci2
This computer listing reproduces 'An English Précis
of Henri Lefebvre's La Production de l'Espace' University of Sussex,
Brighton U.K. Urban and Regional Studies Working Paper
63 (April 1988).
Translation copyright Rob Shields 1988. Introduction copyright Rob Shields 1987.
Page numbers and section numbers are to the 2nd french
edition of La Production de l'Espace 1981 Editions Anthropos
Paris.
Each chapter begins with a hard-page.
HENRI LEFEBVRE: LA PRODUCTION DE L'ESPACE
CONTENTS OF THE BOOK
1. Plan of the Work (Dessein de l'ouvrage pp.7-84)
2. Social Space (L'Espace Social pp.85-196)
3. The Architectonics of Space (L'Architectonique Spatiale pp. 197-264)
4. From Absolute Space to Abstract Space (De l'Espace Absolute à l'Espace Abstrait pp.265-336)
5. Contradictory Space (L'Espace Contradictoire pp.337-406)
6. From the Contradictions of Space to a Space of Difference
(Des Contradictions de l'Espace à l'Espace
Différentiel pp.407-460)
7. `Departures' and Conclusions (Ouvertures et Conclusions pp.461-485)
1. Plan of the Work
1.1-1.13 Lefebvre outlines a number of traditional philosophical
approaches to space:
-Space as extension, after the influence of Descartes
-Early (cosmological) approaches to space: Hegel, Marx,
and Nietzche which have been relatively ignored owing
to the new situation of multinational, global, capitalism,
which poses new theoretical problems.
-space-time in mathematics and physics especially after
Einstein-metaphoric appropriations of the concept: thus,
"mental space", "pictorial space", "literary space" etc.
-"sciences" of space especially in urbanism (rational
land-use planning) and semiotics.
1.10-1.11 The multiplicity of these uses (and disciplines)
of space is an ideological cover for more suspect practices and
ideologies of space.What is needed (given the diversity
of uses of the concept) is a unitary theory of space which
will show the presence, within logico-epistemological
"space" (that of the philosophers Kant, Hegel etc.) of the
other levels of spatiality--the physical, the mental
and (most importantly) the social. This theorization would
seek not to abolish the distances and breaks between
the above different "levels", but rather the mediations
between them, bringing them into a unified framework
and allowing the possibility for new syntheses and the
overcoming of previously entrenched discipline dichotomies.
This will involve the "overcoding" of existing
discipline understandings (a translation into spatial
terms) rather than a "recoding". A new, unified object of
knoweldge will not be produced but rather a "discourse"
which allows one to reflect on the objects, divisions,
and spatial codes and discourses which exist already.This
project has been attempted previously by (1) the
surrealists (eg. Magritte challenges the spatial canon
of accepted possibility and causality); (2) Bataille's work
on a poetics of proxemité; and (3) in the operation
of modern technocracies (which subjugate and organize the
"space of the state" for orderly production and consumption).
All involve the attempt to `unify', symbolically
or otherwise, three distinct "levels" of space [26-29--see
2B, below]. The distinct but dialectically related
"levels" are reified in unitary ideologies which prevent
the comprehension of the true operation of `space' in the
daily conduct of state and capitalist power.
1.13 Three hypotheses regarding "space":
I. All of the notions and levels of space are social
products. Thus all space is social space. This "space" is neither
transparent/readable (semiotics, idealism [36] nor is
it opaque or natural (materialism, natural science
understanding). Nature is the origin of modern "space".
Today, in its "abolition" and repression into state parks
and nature reserves, the natural is present as a residue
or trace (all past spatial forms are retained in succeeding
spatial forms).
1.14 (Social) Space is socially produced.
IIA. Each mode of production has a distinct relationship
to space: it produces its own unique type of space (thus
immediately raising the question of the relationship
between that space and social reproduction). [40]
1.15-1.17
IIB. There is a threefold dialectic of space(s) [42-3]:
1. Spatial Praxis: including the production and reproduction
of specific `places', types and heirarchies of "place",
and "spatial ensembles" (ie. urban developments/projects-Ed)
appropriate to specific social formations. This
praxis assures the continuation of a social formation
in a cohesive fashion. Such cohesion implies, in
connection with social space and the relation of individuals
to that space, a certain measure of "spatial
competence" and "spatial performance" (performativité)
2. Representations of Space ("Discourses on or about
"space"-Ed) are linked to production relations and to the
order these impose. Most crucially, these "representations"
are central to forms of knowledge which in turn
ground the rational/professional power structure of the
capitalist state. These structure dominant signs,
codings, and "frontal relations" (in Goffman's sense).
3. Spaces of Representation (Discourses of dominant spatial
"systems"-Ed) offer a region of complexly coded,
decoded, and/or recoded alternatives offered as symbolic
resistance. This is linked to the clandestine and
underground dimension of social life and is particularly
expressed in art (which Lefebvre sees as the "code"
of "spaces of representation"-Ed). These suggest and
prompt alternative, revolutionary, restructurings of
institutionalized representations of space and new modes
of spatial praxis (Lefebvre suggests squatting; the
birth of the tradition of "occupying" key spatial sites
and buildings as a means of protest; slums, barrios and
favellas as a "re-appropriation" of space from a commodified
private property system which favours
absentee landlords and vacant tracts of urban land (held
for speculation-Ed)
III. Third hypothesis or implication: Lefebvre's object
of study is the process of the production of space, not space itself.
In various historical moments, the above three "levels"
will combine in distinct structural hierarchies (eg. did the
ancient Orient know of the Western distinction between
representations of space and spaces of representation?
The ideogram is both at once) [53]. In view of the changing
spatial relations in which ideologies function (eg.
in some social formations these three dimensions reinforce
eachother, in others they are contradictory) it will
be necessary to re-evaluate the older conceptions of
ideology.
1.18
IV. Fourth hypothesis or implication: Clarifying the
relationship between space and modes of production requires new
historical periodizations [57]:
- Absolute Space, the space of the primitive nomad who
survives "in spite of" space/nature. This still exists in
fragments of nature (caverns, peaks, rivers). Above this
most archaic level occured the emergence of,
- Historical or Relative Space [60], a political supersession
of Absolute space (through the territorializaion of
space under the first despots-Ed). This culminates in
the classical Western polis.
- Abstract Space coincides with capitalism [60-65]. It
involves the repression of the lived, qualitative experience
of space by the abstract and dehumanized codes of urban
planning and the homogenization of experience under
capitalism.
- This is at the same time Contradictory Space [65] which
is characterized by paradoxes and contradictions, even
in the face of the homogenization and unification of
space under capital. There are political questions to be
asked of the silence of those who use contemporary space
and are dominated by it -- their lack of resistance, or,
on the other hand, their symbolic and distorted forms
of resistance. For example, rational capitalism produces
rationalized "spaces of production" under the aegis of
the nation-state, but the repression of desire this involves
leads the the production of "spaces of leisure" (free
zones of escape, denial, resistance through folly and
unproductiveness). However, this is also the space of
festival and a potential space of the carnivalesque (the
unleashing of libidinal intensities and energies) and
thus revolt against the normative order of planned,
rational/homogenous, space. Hypothesis: there is thus
a region of political praxis which requires the elaboration
of a whole spatial dimension of theory and practice [65].
1.19 The idea of "production of space" can be linked to
a more concrete analysis of the history of European class
struggles and oppression.
1.20 A "new society" will require its own "new" (social)
space. "To change one's life, change society" must be
amended to include space. This is the "strategic hypothesis"
of the book. [72-78]
1.21 Importance of a dialectical method of analysis of
society and space
2. Social Space
2.1 The "Production" of Space: The concept of "production"
as it emerges from Hegel and from Marx and Engels--for
whom it was the concrete universal--must be enlarged
from its narrow, industrial, sense (the production of products,
commodities, exchange values) to include all types of
productions: The production of nature; production as solely
an economic idea; production of built environments etc.
The difference between "works" and "products". Works
("Oeuvres") are valued in terms of their use value. Such
"oeuvres" can be thought of as works which approach,
asymptotically, the productions of nature itself. Classical
cities were oeuvres [83ff]. eg. Venice, 13th century
Tuscany.
The capitalist order (speculative real estate) converts
these "oeuvres" into products...in the case of urban
oeuvres, turning their monumental and festive aspects
into museums of dead historical styles (eg. Venice,
Florence [89-96]. Marx demonstrates that produced objects
embody an "inner truth" of social relations and
forms. Similarly we should demonstrate the "inner truth"
of these `spaces'.
2.2 Thus it is possible to conceive of a "spatial problematic".
This would not abolish more traditional problematics (eg.
class struggle etc.) but transcodes them; it includes
urban and daily life under the more general problem of the
reproduction of the relations of production. It is a
totalizing problematic, which repudiates the "positivist" division
of labour of the social science disciplines [97ff]. It
requires the demolition of pre-existing ideologies of space and
is realizeable only in the light of the political project
to produce a radically new type of social space. This would thus
involve an ideological critique of space understood in
terms of a diachronic analysis of the production of space (as
a concept, as a reality) as against the old discourses
which focus on particular (limited conceptions of) spaces. Such
a discourse analysis would demonstrate a reality of space
as part of primary nature, part social relations and part of
the forces and means of production. Examples of regional
development patterns in France [97-102].
2.3 Social space is a multiplicity of social spaces which
interpenetrate. The unraveling of the relations between these
spaces and their forces is the object of this analysis.
2.4 How and in what sense is a critique of space possible?
An examination of the relations between the three
`dimensions' or `levels' of the three-part dialectic
reveals a logic of space which governs a wide range of normative
and discursive processes. In particular, there are the
marked effects of the increasing primacy of the visual in modern
times [112-114] Together with this, one must include
a consideration of the loss of a sense of temporality [114-115].
Time is more fundamental than space in the sense of being
the "raw material" of daily life. "But, Time is disappearing
in the social space of modernity." [114] "It is the time
of living, time as an irreducible `good' which eludes the logic
of visualisation and of spatialisation, as far as it
has a logic. Raised to ontological dignity by philosophers, time is
killed by society." [115] This is due to the modern normative
trinity: "readibility, visibility and intelligibility". Which
involves the fragmentation of space as in the photographic
image. The fragmentation of space into "lots" presupposes
this logic of visualization which replaces reality with
fragments of itself (as in images). The second logic is that of
an incessant metaphorisation [see 118] --likewise, persons
become merely bodies or numbers (analogons). Space
has both the attributes of a subject and of an object:
A facade exposes certain acts, and relegates others to the realm
of the obscene by hiding them. This in turn suggests
a psychoanalysis of space.
2.5 So, what is the equivalent of Marx's analysis of the
"inner truth" of the commodity form for space? Why not treat
space after the model of Capital? -- to look for the
essential beneath the reality. This "essential" will not be a
substance but a form -- a concrete abstraction [120].
A political economy of space is possible which would
reconsider the old object of political economy, broadening
the notion of production to include that of the production
of space [124]. This would focus on how the current political
economy of space runs the risk of coinciding with the
appearance of space as simply the global milieu of a
definitive installation of capitalism. What is implied is the well
developed distinction between thought and discourse within
a space, and thought and discourses on space which are
nothing but words and signs and the thinking of space,
which departs from the better known and less sophisticated
distinction above. This distinction in turn supposes
a critical examination of materials (words, images, symbols) as
well as of materiel: the processes of assemblage, the
method by which such materials are cut up and presented within
the frameworks of the divisions of scientific work [125].
The distinction between materials and materiel permits us
to discern the effemeral and the durable: that which
in any given scientific operation is not used up or exhausted but
which can be used again, adapted, or transferred for
application on other tasks. Materiel falls into disuse and
becomes obsolete. Such a re-examination also allows us
to examine various philosophies of space, which are often
ideological. But this is not all: the primary task is
to consider how such philosophical ideologies of space intervene
in the form of strategies in space (eg. "to attempt to
produce a global space, theirs, and to give this the status of an
absolute, bringing a logic and not least the renewal
of the concept of space") [126].
2.6 "To reduce, is one scientific procedure, faced with
the complexity and the chaos of immediate observations....
Reductionism is introduced under the colours of science."
[126] It is an "ideology which does not give its name."
[128]. To this corresponds the political practice of
the State which wishes to be and makes itself that which reduces
(cf. combustion) contradictions into itself through the
"mediation of knowledge, by strategically using a mixture of
science and ideology." [127] Specialization follows from
such "reductionality", "and each specialist doesn't just want
knowledge. With respect to the constitutive reduction
of his domain, he adopts an attitude which justifies it, that of
denial ... doesn't every specialized science have an
involvement, immediate or mediated, with space?(a) Each
specialty, one already knows, attributes to itself its
own mental and social space, in defining itself with a certain
arbitrariness, in cutting itself away from the totality
of "nature-society" ("nature-société")" ... (b) All specialties
enclose themselves in the nomenclature and classification
of that which it finds in space ... the "positive" activity of
each and every specialty. For better or worse, each specialty
opccupies itself with pronouncements (utterances) on
space ... (c) The specialties oppose a boiled down model
of knowledge to the global thought of (social) space. This
also has the advantage of liquidating time (which is
reduced to a simple "variable") [128-9].
For this reason the specialties are opposed to an overarching
contemplation of the production of space ..." (a
dialogue with possible objections they would raise follows,
[see 129-30])
Conclusion: "Spatial form" (in the sense of the "commodity
form") equals the relationship between centres and
peripheries. For example, the architypical urban form
is one of `simultaneity': of the meeting, the assembly (no
separation of centre and periphery).
2.7 "All social space is the result of a process with
multiple aspects and movements: signifying and non-signifying,
perceived and acted (lived), practical and theoretical.
In short, all social space has a history, departing from this initial
base: nature, the original given (datum) and the originary
since always endowed in the form of particular sites,
climates, settings etc. The relation of one space to
the sense of time/historical times which engendered it differs, as
long as one is expressly exposing the history of space
as such, from the representations admitted by historians ...
whose analysis framents and chops it up. ...in the history
of space as such, the historical, the diachronic, the
generating past incessantly inscribes itself in the spatial,
as if on a painting ... [One imagines time and space through
the systems of measurement which follow from the body].
The relation of the body to (the) space ... the space, the
manner of measuring it and speaking of it presents to
members of the society an image and a living mirror of their
bodies ... the adoption of the gods of another people
brings along with it the adoption of their space and their
measure. The Pantheon implies that Rome was the moment
of the mastery and transcendance of those vanquished
gods and the [respective] subordinated spaces which were
then implicated in and bound up with a master-space, that
of the Empire and the world ... The status of space and
its measurement has not changed except with an extreme
slowness, since this change is far from being complete.
Even in France, land of the "metric system", curious
measurments are still applied by habit, for the size
of shoes.* In the figure of the decimal system, a slow revolution
is underway ... The fluctuations of measurement and by
consequence the fluctuation of representations of space
accompany history ... conferring on it a certain sense
or logic: the tendency to the quantitative, to the homogenous,
and to the disappearance of bodies which seek refuge
in art." [130-2]* A pun on the accepted French way of talking
of shoe sizesin terms of "toe-tips" ("pointures" des
chausures).
2.8 To approach the history of space in a more concrete
fashion, one can examine the nation and nationalism. A history
of space must be dialectical, focussing on the production
process (of space) not on spatial objects or products as
static entities. The history of space coincides neither
with an inventory of subjects in space (which one could call
the material culture or civilization), nor with the representation
and discourses on space. It should take into account
spaces of representation and representations of space,
but above all, the links between the two as well as with social
practice.
"The history of space does not have to choose between
"processes" and "structures", between change and
invariance, between events and institutions, etc ...
2.8 Key distinctions between raw material (matériau)
and technique (matériel) in production must be acknowledged (see
literature survey [130-141]. An example of this dialectical
perspective, would be the observation that Absolute space
persists in the shape of Bachelardian forms [143-144]
-- the archaic within the instrumentalized. All of the older
orders of space are still present, surcharged and repressed
within even the most contemporary (banal) forms of space.
Modernism and space: architecture and art. The Bauhaus
as a privileged moment in the production of a pure,
contemporary, abstract space [146-151].
2.9,
2.10 &
2.11 Structuralist analysis applied as a methodology for
spatial analysis [154-175]: Two doctrines emerge.
Hermeneutics which sees sign systems as transparent (everything
reduced to a readable text) and the
"hermeneutics of suspicion" (Foucault, Derrida) which
sees language as reification and repression (in the
tradition of Neitzche) punctured by fitful eruptions
of the forces of desire which burst through the frozen
objectification of language. The relationship between
space, as a discursive entity, and language. Neitzche's
theory of tropes applied as a description of way in which
concrete space is made abstract by way of language.
The "truth" of such a "linguistic" analysis of space
lies in its revelation of the process of production and
objectification.
2.12 The metholodogical problems of "reading space" [167ff].
Many representations which "occlude" the
understanding of space come from semiology, notably the
thesis according to which social space results in a
simple marking on or imprinting of natural space, leaving
"traces". Semiology presupposes that such `marking'
has a sense -- it must be significant and be brought
into a system of encoding and decoding. This view
oversimplifies human social spatial relations to the
level of animals marking territory with scents [165] rather
than abstractly through symbolism. Such symbols always
imply a certain affective investment, "an emotive
charge ... deposited, so to speak in a place ("lieu")
and representing it for those who are away from that (now)
priviledged place. In agro-pastoral times, the symbolism
of a place and the spatial practice were inseparable."
[166] When there is only this simple, physical symbolism
can one speak of a production of space? "Not yet,
although (their) bodies, mobile and active, in this way
`spread out' (étendre) their spatial perception and
occupations, as a spider its net. If there is production,
and as far as there is production, it is for a long time
limited merely to markings, signs and symbols; they do
not change the materiality of that which they receive.
Mother-Earth (La Terre-Mère), cradle (birth-place),
field of sexual labour, grave, remains Earth.... This activity
characterizes nothing but the beginnings of organized
society...neither do the cairns and natural indices of
primitive hunters and fishermen suffice. During these
periods, the natural spaces are simply settings. Social
activity modifies them little."
"This simple, binary, representation of space engenders
the reverse and complementary representation:
"fabricated" space results only in the denaturalization
or denaturation of natural space. By which interventions?
Those, evidently, of science and technology, thus of
abstraction." But this representation of space merely
attempts to conjure, "snaps its fingers at" the diversity
of social spaces, their historical geneses, and brings them
together through a reduction to have a common character,
that of abstraction. [166-7]
"Semiology introduces the idea that space dissimulates
a reading (relève d'un lectury) and by consequence a
practice: reading-inscribing. As for space in the city,
it consists of a discourse, a language (Barthes).
"Reading space? Yes and no. Yes: the "reader" deciphers,
decodes. The speaker, who expresses himself,
translates his surroundings into a discourse. And however
no. Social space is not only a blank page on which
people (but whom?) have written their message. The space
of nature and urban space are surcharged. All is
muddle and blurriness (Tout y est brouillon et brouillé).
Signs? More like orders (Des signes? Pluto des
consignes), multiple, interfering prescriptions. If there
is a text, trace, writing, it is in the context of conventions,
of intentions, orderings, in the sense of the disorder
and of the order of society. Is space `signifying'? Certainly.
What? That which one must do and that which one cannot
do. Echoes of power (Ce qui renvoie au pouvoir).
But the message of power has always been made into a
muddle, voluntarily. It conceals itself. Space doesn't
say everything. Above all, it speaks of the forbidden
(Il dit surtout l'interdit (l'inter-dit).) Its mode of existence,
its practical "realtiy" (including its form) differs
radically from the reality of a written object, a book. Result and
logic, product and producing, it is also a stake (enjeu),
a place or site (lieu) of projects and of actions put into
play by these actions (strategies) object therefore of
bets on times to come, wagers which which are apparently
clear to their bettors, but never completely." [167]
"A space ordinates because it implies an order, thus
a disorder.... This "space" is produced before being read
(and has not been produced to be read or comprehended
but to be lived by people having a body and a life, in
their ... context. In other words, the reading comes
after the production, except in the spacial case where the
space has been produced to be read. What poses a question,
is the criteria of readability ... it seams clear that
space engendered (produced) to be read must be the most
like a cheat, the most truculent of spaces. The graphic
effect of readibility hides intentions and strategic
actions (especially as it appears in space -- as monumentality).
This is nothing but an optical illusion. Monumentality
always `imposes' readible evidence; it says just what it
wants to say, but it hides much more. Political, military,
at the extreme facist, the monument screens the will
to power and the abitrariness of force beneath the signs
and surfaces which pretend to explain the collective will
and thought. And it hides at the same time the present
and the possible." [168] Vitruvius. Venturi begins to
see space as a field of forces, full of tensions, of
distortions but it is not clear (in 1972) whether he will continue
on this path to leave functionalism, behind or whether
he is only making formalistic adjustments to theory [170].
Opacity, trompe-l'oeil, historicism and pastiche in architecture.
[170-172]
2.13 Form structure and function of space. Kristeva [175].
Example of the Latin American city with its Plaza Mayor
as a spatial strategy which organizes and implies productive
labour for its colonial inhabitants. Three levels of
Japanese space. [179-184]
2.14 Even for abstract space, a semiotic analysis tends
to simply replicate the categories of the producers and
ideologues of such a space: to isolate structure from
form and function over-privileges one dimension of space
(the cognitive representation of space (le conçu))
over the other two (perception (le perçu) and practice (le
vecu)). Codes and deciphering. Reading space. Relation
between the signifier (space, spatial formes etc.) and
its signified (the message or meaning). Conventions:
how is it that we can `understand' at at least at a basic level,
the Piaza San Marco in Venice even as a foreigner. The
possibility of multiple readings. Semantic space;
material space.
2.15 A more significant (dialectical) distinction than
the various semiotic theories have to offer is to be found in the
differentiation of dominated and appropriated space.
The former is the site of hegemonic forces (suburbia), the
latter is the site of emergent spatial revolution on
the other (eg. Latin American favellas, squatters settlements).
This last must be differentiated from the détournement
("hijacking") of space in which hegemonic space is seized
and re-functioned locally and momentarily as opposed
to the fresh production of new space (ie. new categories
of space) through its wholesale reappropriation. Historical
analysis of "appropriation", "domination" etc. of
space [185-196]. Appropriation vs. détournement
(eg. of Les Halles). Détournement as only a provisional
strategy. What is required is the production of new types
of humane space.
preci3
3. The Architectonics of Space
3.1 Debates of the classical scholars over the status
of space. Relative or Absolute? "At the extreme point of the formal
abstraction which classical metaphysics established in
the form of ontology by speculative decree, the question of
space "in itself" was substantially posed. Spinoza, from
the beginnings of his Ethics considered absolute space to
be one attribute or mode of absolute being, God. ...Is
it the unkowable? No, it is the indiscernable (Leibniz)." [197]
Today, mathematics has sided definitively with the Leibnizian
view, against Spinoza, Descartes, Newton and even
Kant. "Space, in se...is not `nothing' and neither is
it some thing...even less is it the totality of things or the form of
their sum; it is the indiscernable. To see any "thing"
(in space) it is necessary to introduce axes and an origin, right
and left, which is to say a direction to axes, an orientation...
Leibniz wanted to say that one must occupy space ...
A body. Not just the body in general, corporeality, but
a definite body, which indicates the direction of a gesture,
a rotation in it's turns, which marks off and orientates
space. For Leibniz space was absolutely relative, which is to
say endowed with a perfect abstraction which makes it,
for mathematical thought, the originary (passing easily for
transcendence) of a concrete character (in it bodies
exist and manifest their material existence)." [197-8] Space is
not pre-existing, empty, endowed only with formal properties.
The debate between the relative and absolute positions
is equivalent only to the rejection of alternative representations
-- discourses on space.
"Space" is not a container with bodies as "things in
space." This is the origin of the strategy of separation and
fragmentation of the body -- a space in itself -- from
the space it is in. If one accepts this absolute view, it follows
that any body can be placed in any location. The two
become indifferent to each other; we should grasp the
organism or object as a centre for the "production of
space" around itself (cf. the mathematics of Herman Weyl
or the sculpture of the Cubists). [199] In this view,
space is not external to the body but generated by it. "the
laws of that space, that is to say its `discernible'-ness,
are those of the living body and the deployment of its
energies." [200] The Body is the concrete transcendence
of the subject-object split, being both subject and
object-in-space. The relation of the body and space is
expressed as symmetry, mirage, reflection and rotation.
These are the properties of the body/space, not imposed
categories as philosophers have thought (cf. H. Weyl,
Symétries et mathématique moderne Princeton,
2nd. ed.) "Here is thus a route from the abstract to the concrete,
which has major importance in demonstrating their reciprocal
inherence. This `route' links also the mental and
the social. The concept `The Production of Space' takes
on a much greater force.
With several reservations and precautions this concept
can be extended to social space. "If there was a specific
social space, produced by forces deployed in sociospatial
practices it would include similar properties -- dualities,
symmetries -- which mustn't be mistaken to be derived
from either the human spirit, nor from some trancendental
spirit, but from the "occupation" of space, itself, an
occupation which it would be adviseable to understand ...
in the order and succession of the productive operations.
And then what happens to the ancient notion of
Nature? It is transformed." [200]
There are two possible routes to an explanation of the
"automorphology" or "biomorphology" of nature by
which, for example a rose comes to exhibit its symmetry.
(1) It is an exhibition of some sort of finality, evidence
of a metaphysical draughtsman. (2) Space, as such, must
be considered materialistically: The nature-space
relation doesn't imply the mediation of some external
power, nor are their "falsely-clear resolutions on the model
of an "inside-outside representation of space." [201]
Marx asks `does a spider do work?' Could one think of
the space of a spider in the manner of an abstract space
occupied by separate objects? No. This would be to attribute
to the spider an analytical-intellectual space. If
it is `instinct' could one say that the spider weaves
a web as an extension of its body? The production of space,
firstly, that of the body itself, continues until the
secretions have produced a `habitation' which serves, at the
same time as an instrument ... The spider marks out directions,
orients itself after angles, establishing symmetries
and dis-symmetries and by this practice extends itself
in space.
For the living body, the fundamental sites...[the "signature"]
of space, are immediately qualified by the body
itself. It is also always "other", `in front' of the
ego, even while still `inside' a given space. From this datum of
simple presence, the determination of space has three
aspects: the gesture, the mark (excretions, footprints) and
the trace (the intentional marking out of space). While
the trace comes late, early on in evolution animals mark
out territory and places. "In the beginning was the place,
Topos. Yes, long before the Word, Logos."[203]
Lived space (espace vécu) has its own rationality
internal to the body long before space perceived by and for
the `I' presents itself as a rupture. Before this analytic
separation, long before knowledge, there was this
`intelligence of the body'.
Time is traced out in space. Necessarily, it is local.
Space and time appear in their natural manifestations (the
growth rings of a tree) as different yet inseparable.
In this manner one begins to glimpse the duality which is
constitutive of the uniity of the living, material, being.
Its `other' it carries within itself. This doubles its
symmetry: a bilateral symmetry, one of rotation.
Around the living being is the so-called `personal space',
and within an interior space. The fundamental division
of the skin, provides the model for the division of social
space. However, in societies, such insider-outsider
separations and barriers become absolute and impermiable
... a "closed frontier". [205] Yet the model is still
valid: all space-envelopes distinguish, in a relative
fashion, an inside and an outside.
3.2 The living organism is a framework which captures
the surrounding energies of the environment, gathering excesses
to harness them to its own ends, productively modifying
or engendering a space/area. The princples of economy are
insufficient to describe biological process which depends
on gathering surpluses. The alternative principle of
necessity makes virtue of struggle etc. Hypothesis of
excess from Spinoza via Schiller and Goethe through Marx
to Nietzsche: Dyonisian aspect of existence. Freud returns
to economic mecanicism: Eros-Thanatos; Pleasure
principle-Reality principle = loss of dialectical view.
The "Nietzchian distinction between the Apollonian and
the Dionisiac retains the two aspects of the living being
and its relations with space and vice versa: violence
and stability, excess but equilibrium" [207]. Living beings
cannot be reduced to the capture of energies and their
economical employment. Priorities, enemies, and
environment constitute its space or which it is a part
(an element) receiving information. Bataille, W. Reich.
Fine versus massive Energies. flux and currents. energy
and environment as space.
To expend energy productively is central to the notion
of a "living body" and central to its relations with itself
and the space it is in. v game is a `work' ("oeuvre"),
a ludic space is a product of an act6vity which regularizes
space (assigns rules). Productive energies as relation
with self take the form of reproduction, itself characterized
by repetitions, acts reflexes.
Excessive energy as normal energy, has a double relation
with itself (the body which stores it up) and with the
"milieu", with space. In the life of every being (species,
individual, group) there are moments when the available
energy abounds, tends to explode. It can return against
itself or be expended in gratuity or grace. Negative
effects are not rare, and are associated with excesses
of energy. As a consequence, the famous "death instinct"
has nothing but a derivative existence which is misinterpreted
by Freud in his symptomatic studies, appearing
as narcissism, sadomasochism, anxiety etc. "There is
a radical difference between the conception of an instinct
or desire for death, a "vanishing" power (neantisant)
opposing itself to a an affirmation of life [which is] always
foiled -- and the thesis of the return of repressed vital
energy, after a necessary excess as such. Even if it is
necessary to conceive in space of the "negative" of energy,
that in which it [energy] expends itself, diffuses,
degrades ... death and the self-destruction are effects
not causes and reasons. The "death wish" doesn't define
itself except as improductive usage, the `misuse' of
fundamental energy. It results, dialectically in a conflictual
relation internal to this energy, a repletion which can't
be reduced to simple mecanisms of defence, equilibrium
and their balance." [210]
3.3 "Above, space has been taken partes extra partes after
Spinoza ... Even the concept of form and reflection or
duplication on the interior of the form the constituents
as such, otherwise called the concept of symmetry with its
constitutive dualities (symmetry of reflection and of
rotation) implies a circumscribed space: a body with contours
and frontiers. On all evidence these partitions and repartitions
of energies do not suffice: the fluxes circulate, and
are propagated in an infinite space." [210]
"The infinite and the finite would they not be the illusion,
the one and the other, the one of the other? the effects
of a mirage? reflections or refractions, the within and
the with-out of each part? Time in se [finitude] is an
absurdity; the same of space [infinitude] in itself.
The relative and the absolute relfect the one on the other:
endlessly referring the one to the other, like space
and time (envoient sans cess l'un à l'autre, comme l'espace
et le temps). [They are] a double surface, and double
appearances, which have one law and reality, that of
reflection and refraction. Maximal difference [See Ch.6]
is present in each movement or moment of difference,
even if minimal." [211]
3.4 However, in engendering the surface, the image and
the mirror-image, the reflection crosses the surface toward the
depths of the relation pepetition-difference. The duplication
(symmetry) repeats and however produces a difference,
constitutive of a space. Duplication and symmetry-dissymmetry
introduce notions of causality irreducible to classical
notions of linear and serial causality. [212]
The double existence of space in social life: members
situate themselves in space as objective entities at the
centre of their experience ie. subjects [212]. Social
status implies a role and a function: "an individual and a
personality. Moreover, a site, a place, a post. At the
same time space is a mediator (intermediary); a each level,
on each contour which is aimed at some other thing. This
tends to establish social space as transparence
occupied only by influences and "presences". kZ one level
opacities: bodies and and objects; on the other levels
transparent ensembles of objects.
Without these two aspects of space language itself becomes
incomprehensible ... [213]
3.5 The mirror reveals the intersection between body and
conscious of being a body, allowing us to `reflect' on our being
as bodies, as unities in the sense of subjects because
it transofrms that which one is into its sign. The unproductive
surface of the mirror signifies "me". It offers the most
unifying relationship with the ego in search of itself but also
is the one in which the form and content is the most
dissociated. [216] However, those psychoanalysts who see in
all private property a sort of "mirror effect" under
the pretext that the possession of an object by the "Ego" refers
or points back to itself, overstep the reasonable limits
of this argument.
"The mirror is thus an object amongst other objects but
different from all other objects: evanescent and
fascinating. In it and through it reassemble the traits
of other objects with respect to their spatial milieu: object
in space, informing on space, speaking of space ... In
natural and social life, the mirror introduces a truly double
spatiality: imaginary as origin and separation, concrete
and practical in as much as coexistence and difference."
Thought is often defined using the metaphor of a mirror.
Even before its actual manufacture, the mirror existed
magically, mithically. Thus the surface of water symbolises
the surface of consciousness and the material
decoding which brings the obscure to the light."
In the orientation adopted here it is necesary to establish
and develp certain general relations usually considered
as psychic as material (with a double substance as the
body subject and the mirror-object); but at the same time
as one case of a relation more "profound" and more general
which reappears in repetition and differentiation:
Symmetry: duplication, reflection, dissymetries.-Mirage
and its effects: reflections, surface-depth
relations.-Language: [mental] "reflection", oppositions,
refraction through discourse.-Consciousness of oneself
and others, of the body and of abstraction, of alterity
and alteration (alienation)-Space with its dual
determinations: fictional-real, product and productive,
materiel (equipment)-social; immediate-mediated (milieu
and transition), connextion-separation etc. [217]
A similar set of factors and characteristics appears when
sex is considered. Theory of doubles. Space and
consciousness Lacan's "mirror-stage" seen as a dialectical
enrichment of this original production.
3.6 "To bring out the bases and the fundamentals upon
which are erected, in the course of a genetic process, the spaces
of diverse societies. is nothing but the beginning of
an exploration of this, apparently translucent, `reality'. [218-9]
The effects of mirage (see above) become extraordinary.
"The power of a landscape doesn't come from what it offers
by way of spectacle but by way of that which it presents
as a mirror or mirage to each person ... This arouses the
touristic illusion, that of participation in a work (eg.
a city like Venice) and of comprehension because one passes
through a country and landscape, because one receives
passively an image. It also causes one to forget the
concreteness of the work, the products which are generated
by the activity which produces it." [219]
"These mirage effects are far-reaching. In modernity,
the more that absolute political space asserts itself, the
more its transparency becomes deceptive, the more the
illusion of a `New Life' is reinforced." [219] This
promise is neither true nor false. That the conditions
for this new life" are coming into being is truth: "that the
indication and that which is in proximity coincide, that
the immediately possible separates itself out from the
far-off and the impossible, this is the error. The space
which contains the conditions coincides with those which
both hinder and those which permit. Its transparence
is deceptives; it is in need of elucidation, even though it
appears to abolish this need. Total revolution (material,
economic, social, poticial, psychic, cultural, erotic etc.)
seems close, immanent to the present In truth, to change
the world, one must change space. The absolute
revolution? It is our image and our mirage, seen only
in the mirror of absolute (political) space." [219-220]
3.7 Social space emerges out of the measurements and paths
of tribal practice, frontiers, liminal zones, and temporary
habitations, all of which project a "representation `space'
into the cosmos" [220ff]. The body (human body, agent
etc.) must also therefore be analysed as a `social body'.
Frontiers: cosmological; personal; social; geographical etc.
[223-224].
"Social space is not socialized space (this implicit
thesis mars the work of G. Matoré L'espace humain (Paris:
La Colomb) which is however one of the best works concerning
the semantics of space and spatial metaphors)"
[220]. The idea that a socialization of what pre-existed
society took place reveals an ideology and a "reactive"
mirage-effect. To believe, for example, that natural
space, described by geography, socializes itself destines the
ideologue to soon ... regret the passing of this natural
space and to soon say that this type of space has no
importance because it has disappeared.
Social change comes about as a result of pre-existing
social practices. The Natural, the original point zero is
impossible to determine and the notion of pure, empty
"natural" space which is later filled by social life and
modified by its practices is part of this impossible
search. Vacant space, empty of mental and social life
permitting the socialization of the non-social is one
representation of space." [220] Actual historical space, is
socializing (through a multiplicity of networks) rather
than socialized. The work space is not an empty container
occupied by the entity work.
Work space consisting of great worksites (factories,
offices etc.) and their linking networks results from the
repetitive gestures and actions of productive labour
as well as the division of labour (technical and social) and
by consequence markets (local, national, global) and
finally property relations. Work space doesn't take on
contours and frontiers except abstractly as one spatial
network amongst others which interpenetrate. Its
existence is thus relative. [221]
Space is always a duality: field of action (site) and
support for action (systems of sites which facilitate energy
flows and resulting actions). It is at one and the same
time quantitative (with dimensions eg. distance) and
qualitative (where distance is also measured in terms
of fatigue); it is the `union' of materials (objects, things)
and the ensemble of materiel (tools, equipment). Space
thus appears as an objectivity but doesn't exist socially
except for activity (movement, transportation, action
etc.) [222]
"On the one hand homogeneous directions are offered,
but on the other, certain directions are valorized. The
same goes for angles and rotations (left--sinister, right--rectitude).
On the one hand space is homogenous, open
to reasonned action, but on the other, for individuals
and groups, it is full of interdictions, occult qualities, the
favourable and unfavourable." [222] Social spaces are
not defined through a reduction to this duality which
furnishes the materials for very different realizations
in different spaces. In geographical, natural space, paths
appear as simple linear traces. These routes and paths
grow and establish places (privileged sites) and
boundaries. Through these "pores", which accentuate local
particularities in the process of making use of these
(eg. a ford across a river) flow more and more dense
human movements.
These spatio-temporal activities and determinations corresp6nd
to an anthropological level of social reality
defined by marking off areas and boundaries and orientation.
This spatial mode is dominant in archaic
agro-pastoral societies. Man never ceases to mark off
space, to leave traces which are at once symbolic and
practical. He is indispensible to this space with plots
changing directions, rotations, which come about in relation
to his body considered as a centre; and in relation to
other bodies (even celestial ones ie. cosmology). [223]
The network of paths and routes constitutes a space which
is as concrete as that of the body and which extends
it. Features of the terrain become associated either
with memories or possible actions. This qualified space
which is symbolic and practical is filled with myths
and tales which support it and it them. Networks and
frontiers constitute a concrete space closer to a spider's
web than a geometric space where symbolism and
practice cannot be separated.
The relations between frontiers have a great importance
along with the relations between boundaries and named
places (eg. for the shepherd, the brook, the favourable
pastures etc.). This network of relations are
superimposed upon the network of known sites. (a) accessible
spaces of everyday use with the rules and
modalities of this practice. (b) frontiers and forbidden
zones, spaces relatively closed (friendly neighbours) or
totally closed (neighbouring enemies)(c) residences,
either sedentary or mobile(d) connecting points (sutures),
often the sites of passage and meetings, sites of exchange
which may be often forbidden except in the course of
specific rites including declarations of peace and war).
Frontiers, being such points, are thus also the points of
friction depending on the situation (nomads versus sedentary
groups separated by natural obstacles etc.) [224]
Social space has a three dimensional character: mountains
and heights, celestial beings; grottos, caverns and
hidden place; and plains and water surfaces which unite
these two are elaborated in a representation of the
Cosmos. These are further developed in myths of the Earth-Mother
and World. This qualified space is
evaluated in time, in poorly defined measures (the step,
fatigue etc.) and via the body (the foot, one arm-span
etc.). Here, rather than seeing himself as a point amongst
others in an absract milieu (as we do in our abstract
space of plans and maps) the "primitive" situates himself
with relation to a central social object: a hut, staff, and
later religious site or temple.
3.8 The historical sensorium of this social body [227-234];
(Hegel's transhistorical `Geist') offers `precious' indications
of the type of social space which it produces and lives.
Sound and space [231].
"At both the starting and ending points, we find the
body...but which body? The body of both the peasant's ox
coupled to the plow and the cavallier's horse serve as
a medium, a means and instrument, between the man and
his space. The difference between these two body-mediums
(the ox and horse) implies an analogous difference
in the spaces, which is to say that the wheat field is
a world apart from the battlefield." [225] Which definition
of the body and which body then are we talking about?
That which carries the intellectus (Platos) or the habitus
(Saint Thomas)? The glorious or grotesque body? (Rabelais,
Bakhtin) The Cartesian body-object or the
body-subject of phenomenology and existentialism? And
what of the fragmented body, represented by images
and words? Should one start from the discourse on the
body? But how can one set such limits if one starts from
such an abstracted body? And what of the "social-body"--a
murdered body, shattered by the overwhelming
practice of the division of labour? The question is how
to critique space if one accepts the body in this already
"social" space, mutilated by it? How can one define the
body itself without bringing in ideologies?"
In the preceeding sections, the body has been treated
only as the "spatial-body", which is neither subject nor
object, just the product and producer of a space, linked
intimately through various determinations: symmetries,
the interaction and reciprocity of actions, axes and
places, centres and peripheries, and concrete spatio-temporal
oppositions. The materiality of this "spatial-body" comes
from its spatiality and the energy which it deploys and
employs, not from the reunion of particles and parcels
in a framework nor is its materiality attributed to some
nature which is indifferent to space. As far as it is
a matter of a "machine" it is a double one--"sloughing off"
massive energies (metabolism, muscles, ultimately the
sex drive) on the one hand and on the other by fine
energies (the information of the senses, knowledge).
Such a dialectization concretizes the abstract Cartesian
concept of machine situated in a what is itself a representation
of space elaborated abstractly [226]
"The inherent conflicts in the spatio-temporal reality
of the body (which is neither a substance, entity, mecanism,
flux nor closed system) cumulates with the conflicts
between knowledge and action, between the brain and sex,
and between desires and needs in the human being," [226]
which is a dialectical totality. "The ogranism has no
understanding nor existence except when taken with its
spatial extensions, the space with which it is in contact
and which it produces." [227]
Does the history of the body have any relation to the
history of space? Smell, taste and sound. The separation
of the senses in social practice such that smells are
isolated from the other corresponding sensations with which
they occur (eg. an acrid smell, heat and sizzling). Hence
the emergence of `cuisine' as an "art" which re-assembles
these senses. [228-230]
"The spatial body, becoming social, isn't introduced
into a pre-existing world, it produces and reproduces it.
This body carries in it properties and spatial determinations.
In the realm of the practico-sensible, the perception
of right and left is projected and marked on the environment."
[230] Space is produced with this lateral
symmetry.
"The perceptions of the two ears do not coincide. This
difference alerts the infant and gives the density, physical
volume of the space within which it finds itself. Audition
thus mediates between the spatial body and the
localization of external bodies ... Completely homogeneous
space, perfectly simultaneous, falls into
indiscernability" [231] In the homogeneous modern space
of architecture and urbanism, this indiscernability
occurs because the markers of localization and lateralization
are obliterated, being added later for decoration
only. The result is a physical malaise felt by the body
which must work to re-orientate itself and re-territorialize
the space. This Cartesian space "is unfortunately also
that of the white page, that of the floor plan, elevations
and sections ... [which] substitutes a verbal, semantic
and semiologic space which only aggravates the problem.
A narrow and withered rationality omits the depth and
profoundness of space, of the total body ... It forgets that
space doesn't consist of the projection of an intellectual
representation ... but that it is first of all heard and acted
..." [231-2] Thus the brain which is assimilated to a
message-receiving machine in information theory (placing
in parenthesis its role and relation as an organ) should
be considered as part of a total, interacting, body which
constitutes spaces in which there are messages and codes
in the first place. Only then can we understand the
continual resurfacing and return of the repressed features
of space (eg. the subterranean, the labyrinthine, the
uterine) which mark out the contours of the Ego's relation
to space via the medium of (and as) the body. This
is why "The history of the body in the final phase of
the West is that of its revolts" (Octavio Paz, Conjunctions
et Disjunctions p.132) [232]. The carnal body revolts,
but it is not a question of a return to origins, to the
archaic, but of the actual, omitted but true, dimensions
of "our" body which have been forbidden from
manifesting themselves in the social-space of the modern
world. This elementary revolution is not only a
question of demanding a theoretical critique but of a
"turning the world upside down" (cf. Marx) an inversion
of sense, a subversion which amounts to a "breaking of
the tables of the Law" (cf. Neitzsche). [233]
The unconscious is an interstice, space, at the intersection
of the ego and the body. That which could not be
accommodated during either the long formations and deformations
of childhood. Language, signs, slip through
this interstice which permits and, indeed, encourages,
the sliding of meaning between the level of carnal life and
abstract reasoning--metaphorization. This operation introduces
a strange movement of "disincarnation" (verbal)
and "reincarnation" (real), of chaining and unlinking
[of meanings and signs], of spatialization in an abstract
expanse (étendu) and localization in a specific
area (étendu). This is the mixed space (still natural, already
produced) of the first years of life, and later of poetry,
art -- the "space of representations". [234]
3.9 The body becomes occulted in linear analytical reasoning
which evacuates difference because it unites the both the
linear and the cyclical (eg. the cycles of time and needs
and the linearity of gestures, or the market, of the
manipulation of things). The body retains the inventive
force of difference even in the midst of repetitive activities.
It is suggested that the fragmentation of the body, the
poor rapport of the Ego and its body is due to the abstract
naming of the body in language which dissociates various
parts and reassigns them in a space of representation
where they are subsequently seen as pathological. But
this exonnerates the Judeo-Christian tradition which
misunderstands the body as evil and the Taylorism of
the capitalist division of labour which is even pushed to
the point of dividing workers from their bodies, reducing
the unity of the body to specfied and timed gestures.
[236]
The relation of the body and space reflects the relation
of consciousness and the body. The total body situates
itself and fragments itself in the process of practical
functions, which includes discourse, but which can not be
reduced to it alone. This obscures the problems of the
abstract, fragmented, relation to space by which
consciousness, body and space are separated in the name
of productivity. [236]
3.10 This analysis can and must be completed by a `rhythm
analysis' in which time is grasped in its spatial form as
consecutive movements. [237]
3.11 The data of the unconscious is also to be considered
in terms of the spatial articulation between objects and
desire (désire--Hegel's `lack' inherited into
French thought via Koyré-Ed [237ff]).
3.12 Finally, spatial practice is, on this level, most
concretely articulated in the various historical and cultural systems
of "gestalt". All of these analyses would be conducted
against the background of history itself, with its initial
moment of production upon nature, then of accumulation
(dissociation of space and time, abstract thought and
economic practice), and finally, in late capitalism and
its "modernities", revealed as the necessary precondition
for the production of space itself [245-250].
3.13 Binary oppositions: objects in absolute space; accumulation
gives rise to the dissociation of space and time. This
leads to a relative space of real objects and an ineffable
emotional space (which is neutralized) [see 251-253].
1st Moment: Objects in space. Production still respects
nature, desacralizing it in the process of human work
(mostly agricultural) but concentrates the sacred character
of the elements in religious and political buildings.
The form of thought and action is not separated from
content.
2nd Moment: Accumulation and production for exchange.
The emergence of capital. Objects are dissociated
from space, form from content. Abstraction of signs erects
notions of Absolute Truth. Space becomes seen as
either a substance (Cartesian according to Lefebvre but
more properly Leibnezian-Ed) or as pure a priori (Kant).
Space and time are dissociated with the former being
subordinated to the later in the praxis of accumulation.
[251]
3rd Moment: 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.
As for Marx, the `virtual' may guide our knowledge of
the real allowing us to push thought to its limits, not
through an extrapolation of surface trends but by a consideration
of the underlying history of accumulation.
"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 dissappearance in and through the global
market of the nation-state and of its space? [253]
3.14-3.15 Monumentality in architecture is a key phenomenon
for the above deciphering of the historical development
of space, most strikingly in its degradation in the modern
era. In a sense, monumental architecture is of the most
base kind whereby, through psychoanalytic processes of
metonymy (displacement) and metaphor (substitution
of the similar), the inherent semiology of the build
edifice, is replaced by the pastiche of monumental
signification. [253-260] Worse, monumentality obscures
the action of power.
3.16 The complexity of social space appears in the liberation
of difference through critical thought. Three interlinked
levels may be distinguished. (1) Singularities around
bodies which valorize places on the basis of differing
rythms; (2) a level of Generality, thus of social practices
and social order, the division of labour etc. with its
symbols of power and violence; and (3) the level of Particularities
attributed to groups and families in defined
spaces. [261]
3.17 It would seem that the ultimate limit and horizon
of the architectonics of space has been reached in the present
moment of global capitalism [262].4. From Absolute Space
to Abstract Space
4.1 Summary of Preceeding sections [265-270]. The most
modern type of space carries all of the earlier types (the
historical spatializations) sedimented and surcharged
within itself. Psychoanalysis of historical spaces.
4.2 The oldest of these, Absolute Space [270ff], derives
from the (primitive) practices of hunters and gatherers and the
earliest farmers where the small social group is seen
as the centre of both time and space (which are unified in
seasonal activities such as the harvest) around which
the cosmos lies. Since then it has come to appear as
transcendent and sacred such that its forces and character
are attributed to the forces of nature. It is composed of
sites which are sacred and malevolent, in se, not just
signifiers of good or bad experiences. There is no
"environment", nor "site" which is distinct from the
global texture. The signified isn't separated from its signifier.
Neither is there the difference between public and private
except where life has a distinct status as religious or
political.
This is transformed into the space of the sacred city
in early civilizations, with its symbiotic relation of city and
surrounding countryside. This space is "lived" (vécu)
in relation to the body not reasoned (concu) or understood
by the intellect. Thus it is a space of representation
more than representation of space. [373] Dimensions, above
all up (cosmic, life) and down (subterrainean, repressed,
lived) take on symbolic values. This space still exists
in Western religious sanctuaries. Its forms are organized
around the thematics of identification and imitation
[274ff].
We must "radically" distinguish Roman space and spatiality
from that of the Greeks [275ff]: the latter were
always based on a harmony of form, function and structure
which is de-stabilized in the Roman practice which
reified the Greek orders into mere decoration. Hegel's
analysis of Greek art [276]. Greek habitus is inseparably
social and mental. Under Aristotle the habitus is separated
from the Intuitus. In the Roman intuitus form,
function, and structure of each thing is subordinated
to a principle of both material (need) and jurisdiction (civic)
which fixes its social use. "The unity of the Law, or
Right, Property, the City State, because lived and perceived
rather than concieved avoids any irremediable cracks.
Need versus desire in Rome [277].
4.3 The notion of Mundis: as both image or symbol and
site. [280] Category of the Other, of exclusion and later
Christian site of passage between life and death. Roman
concept of Urbs et Orbs. Rome as imago mundi which
concentrates that which tends to disperse around it and
which thus exorcises the subterranean forces of death.
[280-283] Rome offers a space which is the scene of new
social powers: a political space established not only
through action but also through an implicit practice
and images (eg. the Pantheon which collects all gods and,
metaphorically, all sites into a built framework). This
representation of space incorporated into the City, into the
paternistic laws, becomes a space of representation which
submerges itself in the Mundis, a subterranean, infernal
abyss. This later becomes the heart of Christianity.
Thus a double spatial pracitce relates the Urbs (sacred)
to the dominated countries (submissive) via the road;
private life is constituted juridically along the same
lines of ownership and of need resulting in a disequilibrium
of public and private space. A double representation
of space which is on the one hand concentric Urbs and
Orbs and on the other the perpendicular axes of the military
camp. Thirdly, a double space of representation
separates the masculine (military, authority) from the
feminine (abyss, site of death, world to be conquered).
From this derived the increasing primacy of patriarchy
and empire (self-conscious power) over subterranean
powers ("folly, Nietzchean excess, etc." which are repressed
and re-emerge in Bachanalian orgies) which is the
new "space of the state".
4.4 Christianity exists on the word play "Mundus et immundus"
and the Augustinian disjunction between time and space,
subject and object (with the deprecation of the latter).
Marxist history, in over-valuing the economic has left the
status of these terms in obscurity, fetichized by some,
discredited by others. [285]
4.5 The generating image of the space of ancient Greece
is that of the happy disposition of homes in a spatial and social
hierarchy--the Polis. The mediation of Cosmos and World
through the temple.
4.6 Mode of existence of absolute space: real or fictive? [290]
4.7 The Roman villa, by uniting and fixing the relation
of private property and space produces a new space which later,
slowly, laicizes the religious and political space of
Rome and early Christianity in the high Middle Ages. It submits
space to the dominium of the paternal social organisation
of the villa or latifundia. This definition of place, the fixing
of a juridico-social establishment to the earth is the
necessary precondition for the emergence of historical space of
capitalist accumulation when the "villa" will become
the seigneurial domain or village depending on the case.
4.8-
4.9 The Christian middle ages are seen as the re-emergence
of these `cryptic' (subterranean) forces (mundus et
immundus)-- complemented by a new luminosity and open,
public, space of markets and exchange. This leads
eventually to Renaissance perspective, increasing objectification,
and finally the reification of capital.
Commodities and commerce and the marketplace -- which
are at first liberating operations only later, in the
market, in capitalist accumulation, develop their negative
consequences [294].
4.10 The key form of the Renaissance is the city, where
revival of Vitruvian architectural categories goes hand in hand
with the perspectival approach [309ff]. The origins of
present spatial codes in perspectival rules [310ff] is
codified by Vitruvius who proposed a complete lexicon
of the elements of space (air, light, brick etc.); syntactic
rules governing the disposition of these elements; and
a stylistics (a prescriptive esthetics). The only thing
missing is an analysis of the effect of city.[313] The
dominance of the visual (le perçu) and the primacy of the
facade, later perfected by the 19th century bougeoisie
emerges in the "arena" of Papal Rome.
4.11-4.14 With capitalism and the global market, violence
takes on an economic role in the aid of accumulation. It is in
this manner that the economic becomes dominant. Northern
Europe, "The space of wars becomes the space
which is rich and peopled, the cradle of capitalism."
[319] War is thus unjustly classed as negative, while the
economic is raised up as productive. The life of this
space is violence which is often, however, latent, celebrated
in the triumphal arches and military monuments.
4.12 Space, for Hegel teminates historical time by achieving
the rational and the real simultaneously in the form of
the State. [321] In misunderstanding space, Hegel also
misunderstood violence, conceiving it only through
speculative categories, a fault criticized by Marx and
Engels. The State, as a "framework", consolidates a
"relation of forces" between classes and class fractions
and between the spaces they occupy. To this should be
added "spatial framework" which is necessary to establish
the concreteness of the State and its institutions.[324]
4.13 Visual and mathematical space from Descartes to Diderot.[327-328]
4.14 The dominant strategy of abstract space proper emerges
as a three-fold primacy of geometry (cf. Gallileo,
Descartes); of the visual (perspective) and of the phallic
(Lacanian notion of "masculine" violence, reduction of
reality to images (plans)) [330] as the approved mode
of expression of power and the state through an empty
and neutralized space [331].
#5. Contradictory Space
5.1 Space shouldn't be theorized in terms of its own codes
and logic; a dialectical theory of space must be able to
conceptualize space in terms of contradictions [337].
5.2 This "dialectical" theory doesn't only involve the
idea of a "plural" or "polyvalent" space but demands the answer to
the question "Is there a logic of space?" [338]. This
is not ipso facto a critique of the Cartesian conception of space
where space is given "en bloc" as a supra-sensible infinitude
whereby some logic predetermines a network of "real"
relations consitutive of the world of objects.
Haussman is the precursor of the most recent spatial
practice in which the space of the city is broken, fragmented
and segregated in order to produce a new unity, order,
and homogeneity (of state power). This new space is
dominated by a fundamentally visual logic which transforms
(1) solids into images and simulations (2) "dwelling"
into "habitat" (mass housing), and (3) finally reduces
space to the object of planning science.
5.3 The logical relations of this abstract/contradictory
space are those of inclusion and exclusion, conjunction and
disjunction which may be represented geometrically in
the manner of Venn diagrams where larger circles (sets)
enclose others. This captures the sense in which a human
being is in a social space. But in the comprehension of
space there are also forbidden zones where the relation
of inclusion doesn't hold. Rather the relation is one of
exclusion. Each "space" has a dual relation to its internal
set and to the exterior. In this manner, space tends to be
treated anthropologically as a means for classification
operations: as a nomenclature or taxinomy. [341]
5.4 This reduction of contained to the container eliminates
the interplay of differences, the movement of dialectic to logic,
and social space to a purely formal mental space. [342]
As for the logic of space, in a sense it is constituted
by mathematics in toto. However, space, "purely"
conceived, has neither elements nor form (cf. Leibniz),
its parts being homogeneously indiscernable. To
introduce determination, it is necessary to introduce
a content: the act of thinking of difference. [343] Along
with empiricist studies (eg. E.T. Hall's proxemics),
Phenomenology may be criticized from this basis. [343-5].
Summary [345]
5.5-5.7 Abstract space emerges in artistic expression
with Picasso [346-349] as well as with the modern architects
(Gropius, Mies, Cobusier et al). Its distinctive feature
is (1) homogeneity [347-8] at the level of exchangeable
property, and de-sacralized meanings and (2) fragmentation
(the division of space through power).
5.8 In the same period in the "advanced" countries of
the West the consideration of space outside of the limited realm
of art and philosophy began to fragment, exemplified
by the extremes of behaviourism (where space became the sum
of stimulii experienced by a subject) and ethnography
(where a analogical theory of cultural space became a cultural
model of space).
5.9 Abstract space cannot be conceived of abstractly because
abstraction at once reduces it to homogeneity yet fractures
and obfuscates its true unity. [353] Abstraction separates
logic and dialectic, reduces contradictions to coherence,
mixes up the residues of the reduction (eg. social logic
and social practice). Abstract space, considered as an
instrument, is firstly the site of nature, the tool which
wishes to master it and, as far as possible, to destroy it. It
corresponds with both the amplification of the practices
of labour but also a new abstract labour which has a social
existence. [354]
The space of homogenisation is clearly anything but homogeneous.
It contains and unifies dispersed elements
and fragments. Historically it appears as the milieu
of socio-political compromise between the aristocracy
(ownership of land) and the bourgeoisie (money), but
it is supported by the conflict between financial capital and
action in the name of the proletariat. [355]
5.10 In this spatial "tissue" intervene the avant-garde
artists who take account of the collapse of referentials. These
artists present objects in the space of the dominant
social practice. At the same time, architects support, as an
ideology behind their actions, an empty space, primordial,
a container which receives fragmented contents, a
neutral milieu or habitat receiving disjointed things,
people. In short, incoherence under the sign of coherence
-- separation and disjunction in cohesion -- flux and
ephermera in stability -- conflictual relations in the name of
the apparential logic and the effective combinatory.
This abstract space contains many other traits. It is
this space, this arrangement which dissociates desires and
needs, to then link them up again often worse off than
better. This is where the middle classes install themselves
and spread out, neutral (in appearance) because socially
and politically situated between the poles of the
bourgeoisie and working class. This space is not the
"expression" of the middle classes but, on the contrary it
is that which the grand strategies have assigned to them.
These classes find what they're looking for: a mirror
for their "reality", tranquilizing representations, an
image of a social world where they have their place, labelled,
insured, reserved. Whereas in truth in this space they
are manipulated along with their uncertain aspirations and
their very certain needs.
In abstract space, where strategies are deployed, also
the frolics and debates (les ébats et débats) of Mimesis:
fashion, sport, art, advertizing, and sexuality transposed
into ideology are unroled. [356]
5.11 This Abstract Space of anaphorization (which metamorphizes
the body out of itself into an visual ideal) is also
the space of a strange substitution concerning sex. Natural
sexual relations imply a reciprocity; in turn this tie
may recieve an abstract justification and legitimation
which changes it into a social reality. Physical reciprocity
is legalized in contractual reciprocity, in an "engagement"
which has authority as its witness and guarantee. But
in the course of this process, the initial bond undergoes
a grave modification.
The space of substitution which replaces nature with
cold abstraction, the absence of pleasure, is the mental
space of castration (at once fictional and real, symbolic
and concrete). It is that of the metaphorization where
(in particular) the image of the woman supplants the
woman, where her body is fragmented, where desire breaks
down, where life crumbles, dissipates.
Sex, having lost its status of naturality calls in vain
for a "culture" of the body, becoming itself also a localization,
a specification, a specialization with its sites and
organs, erogeneous zones assigned by the sexologists, and
organs of reproduction. Sexuality (neither culture nor
nature) appears dominated in as much as it is a coded and
decoded subsystem: a specified mediation between the
real and the imaginary, between desire and anxiety,
between needs and frustrations. In the abstraction of
a space fragmented into specialized sites, the body itself
is fragmented and pulverized. The body represented by
images, by advertizements (legs for stockings, breasts
for bras,the face for make-up etc.) decomposes desire,
dedicating it to anxious frustration and the unsatisfying
satisfaction of localized (restricted) needs. In abstract
space ... the death of the body is accomplished in a double
fashion: symbolic and concrete: by the fragmentation
of the living and by the effect of violences. In particular
the female body is changed into exchange value, a sign
of merchandise and merchandise itself.
Sex and sexuality, pleasure and enjoyment (jouissance)
are identified with sites specialized for leisure: vacation
cities and villages, ski slopes, sunny beaches. These
spaces of leisure become eroticized: the noctural spaces of
the "quartiers" and red light districts devoted to the
illusory festival. Like a game, the Eros becomes consumer
and consumed not by means of signs but by means of spectacles.
Abstract space is doubly castrating: (1) in
isolating the phallus, and (2) in projecting it outside
of the body, in fixing it in space (verticality), in putting it
under the "surveillance" of the eye. The visual and the
discursive reinforce eachother (in contextualizing
everything) in the world of signs. Under the rule of
commercial terrorism (sous la férule du terrorisme
commerciale), in the words of Schelsky, and also and
above all through localization, through spaces fragmented
and specialized in a globally homogeneous manner (form).
The abstraction of the body perfects itself through
fragmentation and (functional) localization. [357]
"A curious space: homogenous yet composed of ghettos."
[358] It is falsely true, not the object of a false
consiousness but a site and milieu which itself engenders
false consiousness. The appropriation which ought to
symbolize itself sees itself there signified and rendered
illusory. This space contains much in masking (denying)
the contained by indicating it through signs. It contains
the imaginary specified: fantastic images derived from
the established order which appear to reveal "other things"
but which are in fact the contents themselves. These
"representations" impose and prescribe in and through
the space which supports them and which gives them their
efficacity. In it operates the incessant substitution
of things by codes and representations. The "world of signs"
is not only the space occupied by these signs and images
(object-signs and object-images) but it is the space
where the Ego is no longer in rapport with its nature,
with a material, not even with things, but with things
doubled by their signs and supplanted by them. The "I",
"sign-bearer" (porte-signes) has no other business
except with the other "sign-bearers".
This homogenizing, fractured space is fragmented in an
elaborate, differentiated, fashion into sectors or
sub-system which appear to provide objective analyses,
systemic analyses. eg. the "urban system"... but can it
actually be found in this or that city? The end result
of this sectorial division of the world and society into
sub-systems is chaos.
5.12 When the square in the city, the meeting place in
the process of circulation (eg. la Place des Vosges) gives way
to the roundabout (eg. la Place de la Concorde) the quality
of urban life is degraded to the benefit of the regime
of abstract space in which atoms circulate (ie. cars).
Haussman is generally credited with breaking-up the
historical space of Paris but this involved a less-discussed
reduction and flattening out of this space into the
surface-space of the plan. In this process, "those who
see and do not know anything but of looking, those who
draw and know nothing but of drawing and those who circulate
and can do nothing but drive around in their cars
contribute to the mutilation and cutting-up of space.
The end result is that those who drive around look only
to see where they are going and do not see anything more
than road signs and directions, thus they do not
perceive anything more than their route (materialized,
mechanized, technicized) and this, only from the single
angle of functional utility: rapidity, readibility. However,
those who do not know about anything but seeing end
up by not seeing well." [360-61] The reading of a space
fabricated with a view to readibility finds, not
unexpectedly, a coherent and persuasive text laid out.
This space is defined through the perceptions of an
abstract subject, the driver, who is in only visual contact
with his or her surrounding world. "This abstract space
thus becomes the simulacrum of actual space (historically,
that of nature). The roadway becomes a lived
simulation of that which in fact is central to urbanity:
the encounter." [361]
5.13 In this Abstract Space a historical substitution
of habitat for home may be found. Historically, "home" only had
a real meaning for the aristocracy. [362] The bourgeois
apartment parodies the aristocratic "hotel" in reversing
its emphasis on the internal intimate community of the
home. Instead, the exterior facade become important,
a strict regime of functional separation and concealment
is undertaken and appearance, what can be seen by the
outside world, becomes paramount. This visual strategy
is analogous to the repression of the Eros on the level
of the person and its replacement by signifiers of intimacy
which is mythified.
The analysis of the bourgeois practice of space verifies
the above theory of Abstract Space and shows the unity
of the lived and conceived aspects of spatiality. [364]
Habitat is defined rationally and quantified as first
the minimum inhabitable volume -- a threshold of tolerability
-- and later as the minimum necessary to maintain social
control -- a threshold of sociability (or
socialization-Ed). Urban housing schemes and new towns
adopt this approach, but internal frontiers quickly
appear which mark out the "fracture lines in the homogeneity"
[365], zones within people really live, constituting
a real "Social Space".
Cartesian rationalism hands down the notion that a hierarchy
of levels, of variables and dimensions can
adequately portray reality. But this introduces logical
implications with the process of disjunction and
conjunction necessary to isolate different levels and
recombine them into a hierarchy. In terms of the study of
space this process masks the concrete relation homogeneous-heterogenous.
This oversight is crucial to the
legitimation of the rational state bureaucracy and its
practices of space such as zoning. "The unity of reason
covers and reinforces the multiple administrative divisions,
juxtapositions, superimpositions, a sort of puzzle in
which each piece corresponds to an "operation". [366]
"Abstract Space is ... repressive `par essence et par
excellence' but in a fashion particularly easy to bear because
it is multiple: an immanent repression manifests itself
sometimes through reduction, sometimes through
functional localization, sometimes through hierarchisation
and segregation, and sometimes through
estheticisation. To look (from afar), to contemplate
(that which has been separated), to manage the points of
view and perspectives changes the effects of a strategy
into esthetic art objects." [366]
5.14 The space of work-place can pervade a surrounding,
dependent, settlement establishing, de facto, the status of
workers as unfree labour even outside of the workplace.
In as much as these "islands" of labour dependent on
an enterprise link up through the market system there
is a tendency to produce a totalitarian politico-capitalism.
The large city cannot be captured in this way and is
hence the cradle of democratic autonomy and freedom.
[367-8]
5.15 Space is broken into assigned and forbidden sites.
In Abstract Space, the interdiction is the key marker of zones
as it is the inverse side of the regime of private property.
5.16 Political power is central to the apparent transparence
of space and to its maintenance. In Abstract Space power
does not appear as such -- it is not a thing nor pure
form -- but is reproduced under and through an "organization
of space" eliding, eluding and evacuating all that is
opposed to it. [370]
5.17 An analysis of space which remains faithful to the
dialectics of Capital must insist on:(1) the increasing tendency
towards the transformation of space as land into exchange
value and an arena of speculative capital (private
property, zoning) and, (2) the centrality of the machine
in this transformation of the city into a mere element of
the cpaitalist system (city as solely the "space of production",
the "place of machines", a means and medium for
production and reproduction. Thus (under the category
of "leisure") use values (eg. clean water, nature, light,
time) become scarce and mal-distributed resources (no
one has enough of all) and thus the objects of exchange
(along with such primary resources as oil etc.). [370-392]
5.18 This requires a new meditation on use value as such.
To attempt to establish the categories and concepts of the
production of space it is necessary to return to the
concept of Marx, and not only those of social work and of
production. "What is a commodity? A concrete absraction.
Abstraction? Yes, and not despite its character
as a thing, but on the contrary, in as much as social
"thing", detached during its existence from its materiality,
its usage, from productive activity, from the need that
it might satisfy ..." [392]
5.19 "Today, the scientific and technological transformations
of the modern world render a reconsideration of marxist
thought inevitable. On the other hand, taken in their
original exposé by Marx, these concepts and their
theoretical development no longer have any object. The
renewal of marxist concepts can be developed in an
optimal fashion by taking full account of space..." [395-6]
5.20 For Marx, Nature figured amongst the productive forces.
Today a distinction has been imposed, which Marx
did not introduce, between the domination and the appropriation
of nature which represents a conflict which
unfolds in space: dominated and appropriated spaces.
[396] Also, Nature appears as a resource, with use value.
Nature re-enters the scheme of production and consumption
at the moment that the circuits of exchange value
cease. It spatializes concepts such as needs, commodity,
and consumption. And it reveals that consumption
(use) is also productive.
The Machine harnesses energies and space. The City as
a vast machine [398]. 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. [401]
5.21 Constant capital or investment represents dead labour.
Under capitalism the dead hold the living. A new society
cannot be defined except through a reversal of the world
to its inverse. How can the living take hold of the
dead? Response: in the production of a new space which
is a product, but not a thing, and which is itself
productive but not of abstract things like money and
merchandise which dominate in Abstract Space, the site
and source of abstractions. [402]
5.22 Summary: 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. [402-3]
5.23 Thus space is a resource -- "nature is true wealth" (Marx).6. From the Contradictions of Space to theSpace of Difference
6.1-
6.5 Summary of the principal contradictions of 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 daily life to the non-daily
life of the festival, from work to non-work" [409]
2. Global vs. Local: The contrast of a global spatial
practice and reality under the system of multinational
capitalism, and the preserved "myth" of the parcel, housing
lot, and "home" which is the lived reality for
most Europeans. Abstract space is both of these at once,
without any possibility of sysnthesis therefore,
it is "contradictory space".
3. Use value vs. Exchange Value: Another formulation would
be in terms of the classic opposition of forces
and relations of production understood in the largest
sense as forces potentially productive of new space,
but shackled by the social relations of capitalism.
6.6 Dominated space realizes on the land the structures
and frameworks of political strategy. Through the action of
power, the space of daily practices carries in itself
norms and constraints. More than just being expressive of power,
it is repressive in the name of power. [413] Social space
gains such an efficacious normative-repressive role that the
effects of ideologies and representaions as such fall
by the wayside in comparison to it. Logic and logistics occult
the latent violence of this spatial order and practice.
The practice of space regulates life. Space doesn't have power
in itself and the contradictions of space are not determined
by it, rather the contradictions of society (eg. between
the forces of production and the relations of production)
"come into daylight" and are realized in this space, at the
level of space, engendering contradictions in space.
6.7-8 Empiricism masks contradiction under the banner
of "inconsistencies". These contradictions are discernable at
all levels from the empirical data of daily life all
the way through the political, aesthetic, and theoretical realms.
Notably there is a process which favours productive consumption
(of space as well as things) over unproductive
consumption for the purpose of enjoyment (eg. the extension
of roadways is preserved over the maintenance
of parks because roadways represent one aspect of the
utilization of space for materially productive purposes).
6.8 Other examples would include the devaluation and then
the revaluation of historic sites and great architecture which
is destroyed unless it can be made productive (through
tourism and the leisure industries).
Consider the manner in which the production of the architect
is already ideologically limited in advance by
essentially visual, reductive procedures [416-419] --
in other words, consider the impoverishing influence on
buildings by their initial conception in the form of
the "project" or sketched outline, by their unquestioning
acceptance of the "lot" as a given, neutral, parcel and
by the discourse of the architects and planners which does
not accomodate the spatial realities of the users. The
architect has a representation of space based on the
graphic mediation of plans and perspectives which is
a conceived space which is totally different from and cannot
accommodate the lived space of real people.
Space becomes a field constituted by a practice which
consists of cuts (découpages) (ie. lots), specializations
(functional separations) and is seen as passive vis à
vis these operations. "The division of labour, the division
of needs ... localized, pushed to the separation of functions,
people and things, find their framework in the spatial
field which appears neutral, objective, a rational site:
without fear, without reproach." [418]
Lived space on the other hand is subjective, not a space
of calculation. It is a space of representation which has
its origins in the experiences of childhood. We can conceive
of a possible primacy of this concrete space which
would permit a diversification of types and logics of
space -- fixed, semi-fixed, mobile and vacant
accommodating both the effemeral features of living and
the stable, "objective" features of life (Heidegger's
categories of "wandering" and "dwelling") [419]
6.9 The paradox of abstract space is that on the one hand
ever-fresh contradictions are produced, even while, on the
other hand they are continually flattened or occulted.
Thus city planning is universally recognized as a disaster, yet
it has succeeded in effectively silencing those who suffer
from it the most. Critique of Jane Jacobs [420] and
Advocacy Planning [421].
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.
Three "frameworks" or "levels" (grilles) which comprise
a taxonomy of this complex space:(1) It would
distinguish the oppositions and contrasts of space (analogical
spaces) -- isotopias -- and the relative
exclusiveness of various sub-spaces -- the heterotopias.
Finally the symbolic and imaginary zones -- the utopias
-- nature, pure knowledge, and absolute power. Paradoxically,
the symbolically derived spaces (parks, religious
buildings) are the best appropriated.(2) A classification
of the attributes of sites (public vs. private); the
mediations made by users (passages, routes). (3) The
strategic order in the spatial chaos -- the articulation of
spatial markets in land with the spaces of markets. But
this model of separations eliminates many of the
contradictions which we would hope to reveal ...
6.11 Instead, one can envision a "science of social space"
which is to say a "science of the usage of space" focussing
on the status of Abstract Space as a second nature [425].
The form of buildings, space, corresponds to a
perception of space. The functions correspond to the
living-out of a space of representation. The structure is
conceived, implying a representation of space. As a totality
it is situated in the practice of space -- its usage.
6.12 Abstract space serves as an instrument of domination,
suffocating the development and progress of other types
of space. It assassinates its historical conditions,
its internal differences and any eventual, different, spaces in
order to impose an abstract homogeneity. [427] This represents
a kind of externalized Freudian death wish in
which auto-destruction is deployed on a planet-wide scale.
But rather than analyse yet again the metaphysics
of this impulse it is essential to analyse the instrument
-- space -- and its specific, strategic, effect which is that
all obstacles -- everything that "differs" or is different,
is annihilated.
6.13-
6.15 The theory of alienation is insufficient. Theories
of difference reveal the weakness of logic and the importance
of dialectics which establishes (1) the distinction between
minimal difference (ie. that between repeated elements)
and maximal difference (ie. that which is totally different,
in another class etc.) and (2) between induced
differences (ie. within a mode of production) and produced
differences (eg. differences announcing a new mode
of production which accumulate within an old mode).
Particularities, those primary sites and resources, are
suppressed differences. Difference, heterogeneity, in the
regime of homogeneity emerges as central to resistance
in the face of centrality and normality which recuperate
and eliminate transgressions. A reawakening of the "politics
of spatial difference" (as opposed to the dictat of
spatial homogenization) in which the rich creativity
of the excluded can be developed into concrete alternatives
to the present spatial system is required. Latin American
favellas [430-31] exemplify a movement from
opposition and "alternatives" (induced difference) to
contradiction and "surpassment" (produced difference).
Without dialectical movement, any logic or strategy (which
is reified as "optimal") engenders a space which
produces a sort of tourniquet on change (eg. U.S. highway
construction [432]) and a self-reinforcing vicious
circle.
6.16 "Each strategy of space is aimed at several objectives
in the same manner that abstract space holds on to or is
in possession of many `properties'." This strategic space
permits a simultaneous pushing of disruptive groups
(workers) toward the peripheries; the organization of
the centre as site of decisions, power and information; and
the spatial planning of production and flows of goods,
information etc. ... The space of this social practice
becomes a space of arrangement: of classification in
the service of a class ... the "operative" notion of
classification and arrangement governs the entire space,
from private to public ... In effect this capacity aligns
public space on the "`privatized' space" of the dominant
class fraction ... The entire space is treated on the model
of...the private family, reproducing the relations of
production on the model of biological reproduction." [432-3].
6.17 Mimesis (imitation, substitution) plays an important
role in the reproduction and perpetuation of a spatial culture
where abstract desires are "spatialized" and abstract
spatiality is given a concrete, common-sensical unity through
the primacy of the visual. Mimesis governs the substitution
of the production of things in space for the individual
and collective production of space whereby the productive
capacity of space is harnessed.
6.18 The State and space. Feminism and the notion of a
"feminist spatiality" or mode of spatial practice. The role
of elites in demonstrating the impossibility of living
as a homogenized "mass".
6.19-
6.21 There are all sorts of tendencies to a "counter-space"
(alternative spatial systems, arrangements, practices,
norms) at work around us, with all their ambiguities
and failures. Of these, the most striking is leisure space (eg.
the Caribbean Basin or the Mediterranean) which represents
the ultimate commodification of nature and space
but which is also the moment of non-work, jouissance,
and festival which negates the entire system. 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. [443] As such it indicates the points of
possible rupture in the present system of contradictory,
abstract, space.
6.22-
6.25 The "Festival" of May '68 demonstrates the continuing
existence of a genuine urban vitality within the newer,
dominant, abstract space. This marks the ruptures which
accompanied the transition from a mode of production
of "things-in-space" to a new mode of production of space
itself. [449-50] This new spatial practice is reflected
at all levels of social action and on all three dimensions
of the spatial dialectic. It also changes the
temporal-spatial balance which is the basic parameter
of our experiences.
6.26 The practice of space is not defined by a system
but on the other hand by the "theatralization", dramatization,
of the differential moments and values inherent in space.
The technical theorization of space in planning results
in its fetishization where coherence and illusory transparence
are substituted for the uneasy pax étatique, the
conflicts and differences which actually exist. [452].
6.27 The dialectical relation of needs and desires is
also obscured in the ecological discourse which takes space as an
indifferent medium. [454]
6.28-
6.30 The practice of space is revealed through the body's
simultaneous and continuous production of difference even
in the process of repetitive gestures and actions. There
should be a "right to difference" which would fill out
the content of law in contrast to the merely formal emphasis
of the "right to private property". [456-7]
This practice is the "truth of space" which can be said
to contrast with the philosopher's emphasis on the notion
of "true space" (abstract, imposed on reality by force
of will and enforced). This practice establishes the nature
of truly social space as that of centrality, the site
of communitas, communion, and encounter which dialectically
is always engaged in a "gathering to itself" and which
always also differentiating itself into the surrounding
periphery which is organized around it. (Heidegger) Centrality
is a much more useful notion than totality, which
it displaces, relativizes, and dialecticizes. [459-60]
7. Overtures and Conclusions
7.1 "A question traverses the preceding analyses and interpretations:
What is the mode of existence of social relations?...
What is a relation [ie. those studied by the social sciences]
and where does it reside when it is never actualized in a
well determined situation?" There is no form to which
these "relations" can be attached, nor a function. "`Structure'
itself arranges elementary unities within a whole; it
requires on the one hand the ensemble (the whole) and on the
other unities. Analytic thought thus itself returns to
the [metaphysical] entitites and substantialities which it once
claimed to supplant: the `subject' and the `object',
unconsciousness, global praxis ... There are no relations without
supports [Pas de rapport sans support]" [461] Social
relations can only be understood as Marx's concrete
abstractions. "Social relations, concrete abstractions,
have no real existence except in and through space. Their
support is spatial. The connexion "support-rapport" requires
analysis in each given case. It carries an
implication-explication: a genesis, a critique of institutions,
substitutions, transfers, metaphorizations, anaomorphisms
etc. which have transformed space." [465]
7.2 These propositions imply-explain a project themselves:
a spatio-analysis [spatio-analyse] or spatio-logic. This offers
both advantages and problems. First, what is of interest
is not space as such, not types and prototypes of space but
an exposé of the production of space. The usage
of space must be put in the foreground. This implies a critique of
existing arrangements of space/spatiality. This would
be completed by a rhythm-analysis [rhythmanalyse] of the
appropriation (not consumption) of space in terms of
the body. All of space proceeds from the body even if it has
been metamorphosized to the point of obscuring this origin.
7.3 The foregoing theory and research might be situated
at the level of a meta-philosophy which denounces the
metaphors of philosophy as ideological. In particular,
occidental philosophy has betrayed the body, contributing
actively to the grand metaphhorisation which disavows
and abandons the body-subject. "The living body being at
the same time "subject" and "object" does not support
the separation of concepts ... With the Logos-King, with the
true space, the metnal and the social are separated,
like the lived and the thought, like subject and object. There has
always been some sort of project aimed at reducing the
exterior to the interior, the social to the mental, through an
ingenious topology. In vain! Abstract spatiality and
the practiced spatiality look at eachother from afar in the empire
of the visual. By contrast, in the the Reason of the
State, promised by Hegelian philosophy ... knowledge and power
contract a solid, legitimated, alliance. The subjectivism
of desire and the objectivism of representations respect this
alliance and do not approach the Logos ..." [467-8]
7.4 We are living in a moment of transition -- the "End
of this or that" -- characterized by its contradictions between
(economic) knowledge and social development, between
the social and the political, between power and knowledge,
between abstract and differential space. "This shortened
list is neither exhaustive nor a hierarchy, it just suffices to
put under our nose the bouquet of flowers poisoned by
this epoque." [469] To define it it is neceassary to establish
from where we came and where we are going -- a moment
of non-work, the ultimate sense of the accumulation of
technical means. It is also a "distant goal and meaning
which cannot be attained except by risking catastrophe,
bitterly savouring the last hours of all which had value
and [was] success. The bitter analytic of finitude, brought into
the foreground by philosophers since Hegel, brought into
fashion by diverse "moderns" since Valéry, repeats without
respite: this world is finished, time exhausted, finitude
is here.
The same dialectical movement goes from primary and primordial
nature to the second nature, from natural
space to space at the same time produced and a work of
art, the reunion of art and science. This second nature
dies slowly and difficultly, the result of automization
(pushed to the extend of occupying the vast domain of
necessity, which is to say the production of things in
space). This cannot have place except at the end of the
interminable period occupied by labour (divided indefinitely),
by acculumlation, and by reductions. A colossal
process, full of risks and perils and which can either
collapse at any moment or open up possibilities." [470]
This vast transition can be specified in a number of
fashions as it involves a number of key cleavages. Space has
been formed as predominantly male, with norms inherent
to the relation dominated-dominating. The invention
of an appropriated space, opposed to dominated space;
and the development of an architecture of joy and
gratification imply the feminization of space.
"It might also be said that we are in a transition period
between the mode of production of things in space and
a mode of production of space itself. The production
of things was promised by capitalism, dominated by the
bourgeoisie and its political creation, the state. The
production of space involves other conditions, among which
the disappearance of private property in space and simultaneously
the political state, the dominator of space.
This implies the passage from domination to appropriation
and the primacy of use value over exchange. If this
doesn't take place, the worst will arrive ... Only the
notion of a conflictual passage from one mode of production
(of things) to an other (of space) permits us to hold
on to the marxist thesis which attributes a fundamental
importance to productive forces, disengaging it [marxism]
from productivism, delivering it from the dogmatism
of (quantitative) belief." [471]
7.5 "Space becomes the principal site and area of struggles
and actions towards a goal. It has never ceased to be the site
of resources, the milieu where strategies are deployed,
but it becomes something more than the theatre, the indifferent
scene or the framework of action. Space doesn't abolish
the other materials and resources from the socio-political
game ... apart from just enveloping them, it reassembles
and substitutes itself for each of them." [471-2] It is both
medium, milieu and intermediary -- instrument -- as well
as goal.
The differential analysis has emphasized the constitutive
dualities (eg. symmetry-dissymmetry) of social space
which are supports of more complex determinations. "As
a support of production and reproduction abstract
space engenders illusions, thus a tendancy to false consciousness,
which is to say the consciousness of a
fictive-real space ... The diversity of processes may
give the imporession of an absence -- of the lack of a definite
status for abstract space. Illusion. The theory resituates
the truth of this space: its contradictory character and
dominant tendency to the homogeneous (the establishment
of a dominated)." [472-3].
7.6 Every society has dominated space through violence,
political ruse and labour. Today this takes place at the global
scale as well as at the level of the implicated spaces
...
"Languages are spoken and written in a mental space-time
which Reason tends to privilege metaphysically. They
ennunciate poorly the social time, the spatial practice."
[476] The words are lacking to explain our spatiality.
7.7 The distinction between the infra and the supra the
within (l'en-deçà) and the with-out (l'en-delà) is
as important
to the spatial realm as to that of politics. The critique
of what happens within has no meaning except by reference
to what exists "outside" as possibility [477].
The political status of space? "It politicizes that which
calls for its depoliticization. Politicized space destroys
its political conditions, because its management and
appropriation refute, deny the State with its political parties.
They call for other forms of management (self-management)
of territories, neighbourhoods etc. Space thus
aggravates the inherent conflict in the political, and
in the State as such. It introduced more strongly the
anti-political in the poltical, which is to say, political
critique which tends towards the end of the political
moment, towards its auto-destruction." [478]
7.8 The development of spatiality, the investment in the
production of space is not a question of something to be done
along the way but a question of life or death. A socialism
has demonstrated, the failure to establish a new space
results in a falling back into historical spatializations.
7.9 While the confrontations and contestations of space
can all be derived from the struggle of the classes, spatial
struggles cannot be reduced to class struggle: it is
not as if it were a battle of borders separating a field
containing the dominant classes and a field containing
the dominated. Rather the demarcations of the struggle
for space traverses all domaines and sectors of knowledge,
ideology, politics etc. Space is the uniting factor
across apparently unrelated and disorganized revolts
and struggles.
7.10 The production of space is thus part of the project
for a new society, with a new mode of production. To
successfully oppose the abstraction of dominant space,
however, this project must become concrete. The
"spatial revolution" can thus only be conceived of through
analogies with the great peasant and industrial
revolutions.
7.11 These proposals respond partly to the question of
the relation of a theory of space to the revolutionary
movement such as it exists now. The key remains to refuse
to take the term "space" trivially, without analysis,
or to confuse the space of social practice with the space
of the goegraphers or economists ... Such spaces can
only end by serving the interests and progression of
domination whereby space becomes the "regulator" which
resolves and mediates social contradictions. The foregoing
theory thus contributes to the dissociation of the
present social order by revealing the contradictions
at the heart of its prosperity. [482]
7.12 In the service of revising the process of capitalist
accumulation, the Soviet model of spatial management
privileges central sites and enterprises while the others
remain peripheral and are marginalised, becoming more
and more stagnant. The Chinese approach holds more hope:
it involves the linking up of people with their local
and national space in the construction of a new society.
This involves both a production in space of diverse
goods and a production of an entire social space which
is better and better appropriated. [483] This strategy
which emphasizes the periphery, even at the cost of a
slowing down of development, leads inevitably to the
transcendance of the urban-rural split through a mutual
transformation of the two terms.
However, this would not necessarily be the most appropriate
strategy for an industrialized country. "A
transformation of society presupposes the collective
possession and management of space through the perpetual
intervention of the "interested" with their multiple
interests, diverse and even contradictory. Thus, confrontation.
It is this which comes to light across the so-called
"environmental" problems ..." [484] The orientation of this
process which has already started is towards the transcendance
of the separations and dissociations of the oeuvre
(object carrying the mark of a subject, the creator,
artist etc.) and the product (repeated, reproduced). What
is a stake, what must be done, at the limit, is to produce
the space of the human species...to create a planetary
space as a social support for a metamorphosized daily
life, open to multiple possibilities.
This is "an orientation. Nothing more or less. It might
be called a meaning or sense. [What is] To be known:
an organ [voice] who perceives, a direction which conceives
itself, a living movement which makes its way
towards the horizon. Nothing which resembles a system."
[485]
[END]