Stuart Elden:
There is a Politics of Space because Space is Political
Henri Lefebvre and the Production of Space

Introduction
The French Marxist philosopher Henri Lefebvre (1901-91), came to prominence in the 1930s with the first translation of Marx's 1844 Manuscripts. His first important works such as La conscience mystifiée and Le materialisme dialectique were published in the 1930s, and he continued working right up until his death, producing nearly seventy books. Compared to other Marxist writers who were his contemporaries, such as Sartre and Althusser, Lefebvre is relatively little known. One of his most significant works is the 1974 study La production de l'espace, recently republished in France.[1] Understandably, much of its reception has been in fields such as geography and urban studies, while the reception in the fields of political science and philosophy has been somewhat muted. However Lefebvre's work can also provide the political theorist with a useful set of conceptual tools for mapping the spatiality of politics and history, rather than simply explaining the politics and history of space.

The limited length of this paper precludes a detailed situation of Lefebvre's work, but a few important points should be born in mind. First, Lefebvre was always interested in the relationship between Hegel and Marx, and through this idealism and materialism. Instead of matter being seen as the embodiment of mental constructs, or mind being seen as the reaction to matter, Lefebvre sees both material and mental together. It is the fusion of the idealist and materialist notions, that enable an idealist and materialist approach to questions of life and lived experience.[2] Second, Lefebvre saw Marx's work as important, indeed essential, to an understanding of our times, but not something that could stand alone. To this purpose - as well as recognising the importance of Hegel he incorporated many of the insights of other thinkers, notably Heidegger and Nietzsche. This influence was apparent in the work on space, and in what Lefebvre called his most well known concept, the critique of everyday life.[3] Lefebvre was the one of the first to see Marx as a theorist of alienation, and, contra Althusser, to emphasise the continuity between the early and late works. Within the concept of everyday life is a clear use of Marx's notion of alienation, but applied beyond the economic and related to Heidegger's understanding of Alltäglichkeit.[4]

The Rural, The Urban, and the Global
Lefebvre's notion of everyday life has been usefully situated between the two principal movements of post-war French theory.[5] Rather than the bracketing of phenomenology, or the denial of experience found in structuralism, Lefebvre wishes to see how the structures, signs and codes of the everyday integrate with the biographical life. Lefebvre utilises this notion in his work on urban and rural sociology, which is examined in numerous works.[6] Lefebvre's understanding of space was further developed in La survie du capitalisme, which suggested that the reshaping of the global spatial economy was an important historical development. In his initial sketches of the practical understanding of space Lefebvre rehearses themes that would find theoretical backing in Le production de l'espace.

The relationship between the town and the countryside is, for Lefebvre, a historical relationship, with the mediating role being played by industrialisation and the advance of technology. The industrial society has, Lefebvre argues, been supplanted by urban society. This was only just beginning in Marx's time, so it is therefore understandable that he failed to perceive that "the production of the city was the end, the objective and the meaning of industrial production".[7] Writing in 1968, Lefebvre suggests that "the great event of the last few years is that the effects of industrialisation on a superficially modified capitalist society of production and property have produced their results: a programmed everyday life in its appropriate urban setting. Such a process was favoured by the disintegration of the traditional town and the expansion of urbanism".[8] What this has produced, and therefore what must be examined, is an urban environment. Lefebvre suggests that this expression is better than "technological environment", "since technology only produces an 'environment' in the city and by the city; outside the city technology produces isolated objects: a rocket, a radar station".[9] We may wish to question this assumption, as it would seem to be self-evident that the advances of technology in, for example, farming, have sculpted the "rural" as much as parallel developments have the urban. It should also not be forgotten that the environment is, of course, directly affected by state planning. This is another development of relatively recent times. As Lefebvre remarks, the state "is actively involved in housing construction, city planning, urbanisation. 'Urbanism' is part of both ideology and the would-be rational practice of the state".[10]

This understanding of the shift from the rural to the urban - both in historical terms, and in his own work - enables Lefebvre to escape the accusations that suggest that there is a strong urban bias in much continental theory. Margaret Fitzsimmons castigates Marx and Weber for this, and sees the bias continue in the more recent work of Althusser, Foucault, Derrida and Lacan. Only Lefebvre escapes her damning condemnation of "their obsession with la vie urbaine, la vie parisienne, as the only civilised manifestation of la vie quotidienne".[11] Lefebvre's understanding of the rural and urban together rather than in isolation is one of his key points: the over-emphasis on the urban is one of his criticisms of the Situationists;[12] whilst the neglect of the problems of urbanisation is seen as a fault with Marcuse.[13]

Important readings of urban and rural landscapes are found throughout his work. For example, in the first volume of the Critique de la vie quotidienne there is a chapter entitled "Notes Written One Sunday in the French Countryside", where Lefebvre takes an ordinary village in France as an example. One of the clearest parts of Lefebvre's discussion is of the village church, a reading which has distinct parallels with Nietzsche's remarks on this subject.[14] Lefebvre clearly identifies the power of the symbols in the church -  "for me this space can never be just like any other space" -  and it is evident, even in this initial sketch, that he has appropriated the Nietzschean notion of power in space: "Castles, palaces, cathedrals, fortresses, all speak in their various ways of the greatness and the strength of the people who built them and against whom they were built".[15] The reading of space is similarly evident in a work written fifteen years later, in which he contrasts the village where he lives with a new town a few kilometres away. For Lefebvre, the town is very much a planned, rather than a natural, development.[16] Lefebvre's notion of everyday life suggests that capitalism, which has always organised the working life, has greatly expanded its control over the private life, over leisure. This is often through an organisation of space.

"The new town was the typical significant phenomenon in which and on which this organisation could be read because it was there that it was written. What, apart from such features as the negation of traditional towns, segregation and intense police supervision, was inscribed in this social text to be deciphered by those who knew the code, what was projected on this screen Everyday life - organised, neatly subdivided and programmed to fit a controlled, exact time-table..."[17]

The Production of Space
In recent years there has been a noticeable shift from questions of temporality to those of spatiality. As Frederic Jameson asks, "why should landscape be any less dramatic than the event?"[18] In his work, Lefebvre suggests that just as everyday life has been colonised by capitalism, so too has its location - social space.[19] There is therefore work to be done on an understanding of space and how it is socially constructed and used. This is especially necessary given the shift to the importance of space in the modern age. Lefebvre suggests that in the past there were shortages of bread, and never a shortage of space, but that now corn is plentiful (at least in the developed world), whilst space is in short supply: "The overcrowding of highly industrialised countries is especially pronounced in the larger towns and cities".[20] Social space is allocated according to class, and social planning reproduces the class structure. This is either on the basis of too much space for the rich and too little for the poor, or because of uneven development in the quality of places, or indeed both. Like all economies, the political economy of space is based on the idea of scarcity.[21] "Today more than ever, the class struggle is inscribed in space".[22]

There are also crucial issues around the idea of marginalisation or regionalisation. This is one of Lefebvre's points in his call for the right to the city [ville]. Segregation and discrimination should not remove people from the urban.[23] Nor is space and the politics of space confined to the city. The relationship of centre and periphery is similarly evidenced elsewhere: in under-developed countries, in the rural, in the marginal regions of capitalist countries - Sicily, Scotland, the Basque area - in the suburbs and the ghettos, and in the social and political peripheries - the areas of the mad, homosexuals, women, youth, and drug takers. Several of these liminal groups have been analysed by Foucault, yet Lefebvre criticises his approach as "a lot of pin-prick operations which are separated from each other in time and space. It neglects the centres and centrality; it neglects the global".[24] The local studies are essential, but we must see the whole picture. As Harvey has phrased it, "the whole history of territorial organisation, colonialism and imperialism, of uneven development, of urban and rural contradictions, as well as of geopolitical conflict testifies to the importance of such struggles within the history of capitalism".[25] One of the reasons why capitalism has survived into the twentieth century is because of its flexibility in constructing and reconstructing the relations of space and the global space economy, in constituting the world market.[26] Lefebvre argues that space is the ultimate locus and medium of struggle, and is therefore a crucial political issue: "There is a politics of space because space is political".[27]

As many of the commentators on Lefebvre have pointed out, Marxism is not particularly noted for its attendance to questions of space. Edward Soja attributes to Marx the view that history was important, and geography an "unnecessary complication",[28] and Richard Peet suggests that "Marxism has little to say about relations with nature and sees events occurring on top of a pin rather than in space".[29] The fairness of these claims is moot, though it is certainly true that the analyses never claim centre stage. It should also be noted that some Marxists who have signally failed to make analyses have made extensive use of spatial metaphors. A classic instance is Althusser, who uses such terms as field, terrain, space, site, situation, position, but seems to rely on language alone.[30] Whilst the use of spatial language for metaphor should not be knocked, an understanding of why this language is so useful should perhaps be appended. Much spatial language deals with contestation, struggle and productivity. This is precisely because it mirrors the actual uses and experiences of space. For example, where the space of town planners is seen as a scientific object, as pure and apolitical, Lefebvre argues that has been shaped and moulded by historical and natural elements, through a political process.[31] Space is a social and political product. This is clearly why Lefebvre's main work on space is entitled La production de l'espace. There are two terms in this title, both need to be critically examined.

Though Lefebvre has been accused of prioritising the early Marx's notion of alienation over the later idea of production, it is clear in the work on space (if not elsewhere) that the mode of production is essential to the analysis. The human effects, whilst considered forcefully, do not dominate. Lefebvre unequivocally states that "(social) space is a (social) product".[32] This means that "every society - and hence every mode of production with all its subvariants... produces a space, its own space".[33] The crudities of the 1859 Preface regarding base and superstructure are not replicated, but he does recognise the causal efficacy of the forces and relations of production. He notes that there is a not a strict correspondence, and that sometimes spaces are produced by the contradictions in the mode of production. The example he gives is of the medieval town, which was produced out of feudalism, but eventually emerged victorious.[34] Lefebvre is anxious to point out that "a social space is not a socialised space",[35] it did not exist beforehand as a non-social space, as a natural space: it is produced by social forces.

An analysis of production in the modern world shows that "we have passed from the production of things in space to the production of space itself".[36] One of the key factors is technology. Scott Kirsch has pointed out that this is sometimes neglected in an analysis of Lefebvre's work: "In addition to its significance to production in space, technology also plays a mediating role in the production of space". Kirsch also cautions against "resorting to the rather cartoonish shrinking world metaphor", which risks losing sight of the complex relations between capital, technology, and space. Space is not "shrinking", but must rather be perpetually recast.[37] We might wish to modify and rephrase this last sentence. Space is not shrinking, it is being perpetually recast, but we perceive it to be shrinking.

This highlights an important point. Lefebvre not only corrected the modernist imbalance of time over space, but also, contra Kant, emphasised the historicality of their experience. No longer the Kantian empty formal containers, no longer categories of experience, time and space could be experienced as such, and their experience was directly related to the historical conditions they were experienced within.[38] For Lefebvre, of course, these historical conditions are directly linked to the mode of production: hence the production of space. Lefebvre therefore wished to make two main moves in his work. First to put space up with and alongside time in considerations of social theory, and in doing so correct the vacuity of the Kantian experiential containers. Spatiality is as important as, but must not obscure considerations of, temporality and history: "space and time appear and manifest themselves as different yet inseparable".[39] Secondly he wished to use this new critical understanding to examine the (modern) world in which he was writing. This is accomplished through an analysis of how space is produced, and how it is experienced. Space is produced in two ways, as a social formation (mode of production), and as a mental construction (conception).

What is meant by space? As Massey sensibly warns, "space" and "spatial" are regularly used as if their meaning was clear, but writers generally fail to realise that they have many different interpretations. She accepts that Lefebvre realised this, and that he is fairly explicit in his understanding of these problematic terms.[40] The situation is further complicated when we consider that the French word espace has a  wider range of meanings than "space". In English some of the other meanings might be translated as area, zone, locus or territory. Lefebvre begins La production de l'espace by suggesting that up until recently one view of space dominated. This was the view of space based on the division Descartes established between res cogitans and res extensa.[41] Space was formulated on the basis of extension, thought of in terms of co-ordinates, lines and planes, as Euclidean geometry. Kant further complicated the picture by conceiving of space and time as a priori absolute categories, structuring all experience. We have already seen how Lefebvre's emphasis on the production of space historicises this experience; the critique of Cartesian formulations still needs to be achieved.

As early as 1939, Lefebvre had described geometric space as abstractive, and had likened it to clock time in its abstraction of the concrete.[42] This is clearly drawing on the critique of geometric space in Heidegger's Sein und Zeit and later works. Just as we experience the hammer as a hammer only when there is a problem with it, we encounter space geometrically only when we pause to think about it, when we conceptualise it.[43] Our mode of reaction to space is not geometric, only our mode of abstraction is. There is an opposition established between our conception of space - abstract, mental and geometric - and our perception of space - concrete, material and physical. The latter takes as its initial point of departure the body, which Lefebvre sees as the site of resistance within the discourse of Power in space.[44] Abstract, decorporalised space is, he suggests, still another aspect of alienation.

In order to make progress in understanding space, we need to grasp the concrete and the abstract together. As was argued in Le materialisme dialectique, if only one is grasped and turned into an absolute, a partial truth becomes an error: "By rejecting a part of the content it gives sanction to and aggravates the dispersion of the elements of the real".[45] Just as Lefebvre described the state as a "realised abstraction",[46] space too is a realised (in both senses of the word) abstraction. Here there is an obvious use of idealism and materialism together. Space is a mental and material construct. This provides us with a third term between the poles of conception and perception, the notion of the lived. Lefebvre argues that human space and human time lie half in nature, and half in abstraction. His example of time is instructive: "It is obvious" that the human rhythms (biological, psychological and social time-scales - the time-scale of our own organism and that of the clock) determine the way in which we perceive and conceive of the world and even the laws we discover in it".[47] Socially lived space and time, socially produced, depend on physical and mental constructs.

This gives us a conceptual triad: spatial practice; representations of space; and spaces of representation.[48] Space is viewed in three ways, as perceived, conceived and lived: l'espace perçu, conçu, vécu. This Lefebvrian schema sees a unity between physical, mental and social space:

The first of these takes space as physical form, real space, space that is generated and used. The second is the space of savoir (knowledge) and logic, of maps, mathematics, of space as the instrumental space of social engineers and urban planners. Space as a mental construct, imagined space. The third sees space as produced and modified over time and through its use, spaces invested with symbolism and meaning, the space of connaissance (less formal or more local forms of knowledge), space as real-and-imagined.

This notion of lived space is one of Lefebvre's central contributions, though it predates his use. Heidegger's influence can be seen in many places in La production de l'espace, and in other works of the same period. What Lefebvre seems to do is to bring together much of Heidegger's work with the work of Marx. Through his work on Nietzsche and Hölderlin, Heidegger incorporated an understanding of the poetic into his work, crucially in the spatial notion of poetic dwelling, a notion of lived experience of everyday life.[49] Lefebvre's use of habiter is a direct translation of Heidegger's wohnen.[50] Indeed, in a number of places, Lefebvre cites Hölderlin's poem "poetically man dwells", and mentions Heidegger's discussion positively.[51] Lefebvre's suggestion that inhabiting [habiter] has been reduced to the notion of habitat [habitat] parallels Heidegger's notion of a crisis in dwelling.[52] As Lefebvre notes, explicitly following Heidegger, this crisis "springs from a strange kind of excess: a rage for measurement and calculation".[53] As Harvey has noted, in this view of lived space, Cartesian-Kantian notions of space are not necessarily wrong - they can be perfectly reasonable approximations - but they are approximations.[54] To repeat, they are approximations that begin at the level of abstraction, crucially one level away from the initial level of lived reaction.