Space, Difference, Everyday Life

Reading Henri Lefebvre

Kanishka Goonewardena, Stefan Kipfer, Richard Milgrom, Christian Schmid, Kanishka Goonewardena, Stefan Kipfer, Richard Milgrom, Christian Schmid

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2008
• ISBN:
  9781135918620
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Architecture
• Subtopic: Urban Planning & Landscaping

In the past fifteen years, Henri Lefebvre's reputation has catapulted into the stratosphere, and he is now considered an equal to some of the greats of European social theory (Bourdieu, Deleuze, Harvey). In particular, his work has revitalized urban studies, geography and planning via concepts like; the social production of space, the right to the city, everyday life, and global urbanization. Lefebvre's massive body of work has generated two main schools of thought: one that is political economic, and another that is more culturally oriented and poststructuralist in tone. Space, Difference, and Everyday Life merges these two schools of thought into a unified Lefebvrian approach to contemporary urban issues and the nature of our spatialized social structures.

1
ON THE PRODUCTION OF HENRI LEFEBVRE

Stefan Kipfer, Kanishka Goonewardena,
Christian Schmid, Richard Milgrom

SPACE, DIFFERENCE, EVERYDAY LIFE

The deepest troubles of the planet today do not lie only with geopolitical conflicts and world-economic ravages. They are also brewing in the metropolitan centers, as we saw most recently and clearly in the “French” suburban uprising of fall 2005, led by not quite so post-colonial subjects. Yet what happened in France in this case remains to be properly understood, especially by students of politics engaged with critical theory. After all, a few radical exponents of the latter joined the struggles against the conditions that spectacularly engulfed les banlieues in flames, placing them on a spatio-temporal axis aligned with the events of 1848, 1871, and 1968: Alain Badiou advocating for sans-papiers, Pierre Bourdieu denouncing neoliberalism, and Étienne Balibar arguing for the “right to the city” against neo-racism.¹ Even Jacques Derrida’s post-9/11 book Rogues² may be extended with a little imagination to touch on the formidable forces bearing down on the predominantly North and Black Africans now living in the formerly “red” rings of French working-class suburbs, while being subjected to the worst deprivations registered in vivid detail by Bourdieu and his colleagues.³ But an adequate account of les banlieues should exceed the work of any one of these critical thinkers. It demands a historical perspective capable of articulating spatial forms with social relations at various levels of our new global reality—from the quotidian, through the urban, to the global. Moving through these levels of analysis to make sense of rebellious actions, and their mediation by emerging relations between cities and world order, now requires a critique sharply focused on three key terms: space, difference, and everyday life.

Henri Lefebvre springs to our minds when we think of these terms with necessary reference to each other as well as the world in which we live, given how he elaborated them in a remarkably supple oeuvre of idiosyncratic marxist thought intent on the revolutionary transformation of his own times and spaces. Of course, his work will have to be considerably adapted—globalized, even—to do justice to the transnational realities of contemporary metropolitan life, in France as much as elsewhere. For Lefebvre lived the adventure of the twentieth century, not the twenty-first, to play with the title of Rémi Hess’s biography.⁴ He wrote over sixty books and numerous other publications, covering an astonishingly wide range of subjects, including philosophy, political theory, sociology, literature, music, linguistics, and urban studies, in formats that vary from popular tomes on marxism to difficult, meandering writings that escape conventional academic protocols. Having helped introduce Hegel and Marx’s early work into French debates, he developed his original heterodox marxism through a series of critical engagements with French phenomenology, existentialism, structuralism, and the surrealist, dadaist, and situationist avant-gardes. His most striking contributions include a critique of everyday life and studies of urbanization, space, and state—alongside studies of various prominent strands of French left intellectual discourse and a series of conjunctural meditations on such vital political moments as May 1968. Lefebvre was also a lifelong proponent of left-communist politics. Following his stint as an active member of the French Communist Party (PCF) from 1928 to his expulsion in 1958, he became an important exponent of the new left, contributing seminally to debates on self-management (autogestion). In addition, he directed research at the Centre National de la Recherche Scientifique (CNRS) (1949–61) and enjoyed a career as a charismatic university professor in Strasbourg (1961–5), where he collaborated with situationists, and Nanterre (1965–73), the hotbed of the 1968 student rebellion.

To contextualize Lefebvre’s reception, here we want to look at how certain Anglo-American academic circles have influentially “produced” Lefebvre, as it were. Although Lefebvre receives passing mention in various anthologies of Western Marxism, his influence in the field of critical theory broadly understood pales in comparison to the considerable attention still commanded by, say, Theodor Adorno and Louis Althusser. But matters are different in some fields of academic inquiry with which we have working relationships, ranging from architecture through urban studies to radical geography, where Lefebvre enjoys some celebrity status. Spirited but limited work in these fields, however, is beginning to make its mark in critical theory at large, especially with help from the recent publication of two quite different studies of Lefebvre by Stuart Elden and Andy Merrifield.⁵

Briefly, such is the backdrop against which we hope to lay here the interpretative ground for a “third” constellation of Lefebvre readings, one different from the two major interpretations of his work that have invariably dominated the last three decades of English-speaking “space” debates: the “postmodern” appropriations led by Edward Soja that followed the “urban political-economic” renderings centered on David Harvey. Hardly any contribution to the present volume can be adequately captured by these two avowedly spatial lines of interpretation. We contend that Lefebvre’s own view of the terms “space,” “difference,” and “everyday life” was significantly different from, if not altogether incompatible with, the particular uses of these terms in those two readings. As such, the Lefebvre that has been typically available for consumption in the Anglo-American academy amounted to a significant abstraction from Lefebvre’s self-understanding of his own interventions in revolutionary theory and practice, suitably packaged for the postmodern Zeitgeist. With the waning fortunes of the latter,⁶ however, subjective and objective conditions are now at hand for more fruitful examinations of Lefebvre.

The “third” wave of Lefebvre readings we propose links urban-spatial debates more persistently and substantively with an open-minded appropriation of his metaphilosophical epistemology shaped by continental philosophy and Western Marxism. In so doing, it also rejects the debilitating dualism between “political economy” and “cultural studies” that in effect marked the distinction between the “first” and “second” waves of Lefebvre studies, making it impossible for us to return to a simply updated or expanded earlier school of thought on Lefebvre. Indeed, one of the legacies of the debates within and on “post” theory of the 1980s and early 1990s was an often acute bifurcation of theoretical debate that identifies marxism with studies of material social relations, class, and political economy while relegating considerations of subjectivity, identity, difference, and culture to poststructuralist versions of cultural studies.⁷

Certainly, this bifurcation of theory profoundly influenced how key intellectuals—Walter Benjamin, Antonio Gramsci, Frantz Fanon, and others—were received within contemporary academic debates. This volume joins interpretive efforts on these authors by those who attempt to overcome the divide between culturalism and economism in a substantive way. We have in mind interpreters who have reignited supposedly “postmodern” problems—difference, identity, language, body, and the like—in “outdated” if not forgotten materialist, dialectical, and marxist theoretical contexts, instead of joining theoretically disparate and politically distinct strands of cultural studies and political economy.⁸ What emerges from such a reinscription in Lefebvre’s case is a heterodox and open-ended historical materialism that is committed to an embodied, passionately engaged, and politically charged form of critical knowledge. Within this context, his writings about everyday life and the city are not to be understood simply as sociological extensions of his oeuvre attractive only to specialists of “space”: urban sociologists, geographers, planners, and architects. For it was precisely through his concrete contributions to these fields that Lefebvre worked out his overall political and theoretical orientation. In that sense, we hope to demonstrate that Lefebvre’s urban and spatial writings are of more general interest for radical social and political theory. In turn, we intend to show that his adventures in French Marxism shed much-needed light on his pioneering work on space, difference, and everyday life.

THE ECONOMIC GEOGRAPHY OF LEFEBVRE STUDIES

In 1951, an exiled Theodor Adorno noted the prevalence of the commodity form in shaping knowledge production and complained about how the disarmingly practical but hierarchically ordered procedures encouraged in intellectual work fostered a servile “departmentalization of mind” that was ready to be used for whatever practical purpose power had for it.⁹ This departmentalization obtained under administered mass production in the postwar period has now been partly superseded, to be sure, but only with even more intense forms of instrumentalization and commodification. After-Fordist conditions in the academy herald less a new level of creativity than an intensified pressure to produce innovatively. The analogy between industrial practice and knowledge production indicates that university work even of the critical variety now mimics the commodity form more clearly than ever. What matters above all for those in the running for academic employment and recognition is to maximize output measured largely in quantitative terms; supplement regular university resources with external research grants that are increasingly tied to state and corporate interests; and establish hyper-specialized niches of innovation that facilitate the “branding” of one’s professional identity along with what is left of critical inquiry. This pressure for “ceaseless intellectual innovation is symptomatic of academic capitalism.”¹⁰ Entrepreneurial scholarship approximates the time-space of fashion, where the commodity fetish establishes itself through the worship of the marginally new but structurally repetitive.¹¹ This situation invites all manner of intellectual cannibalism, involving opportunistic combinations and permutations of pre-existing knowledge fragments. Translated into postmodern culture, this yields the technique that represents the reformatting of modernist parody after the deletion of its subversive intent: pastiche.¹²

Publishing a new book on Lefebvre inevitably risks adding more of the same to at least some such trends. After all, references to his work have become increasingly commonplace in Anglo-American academic circles over the last fifteen years, mostly but not exclusively in the spatial disciplines, following the 1991 translation of The Production of Space. Since the issue of this challenging but apparently popular book, there followed a steady stream of English translations of his writings on everyday life, modernity, the city, rhythmanalysis; special issues of journals; conference papers; a reader; and three book-length studies of Lefebvre.¹³ Such an array of translations and a sizeable secondary literature means that citing Lefebvre’s triadic notion of social space and his insistence on the “political” nature of space is now de rigueur for anyone trained with even a homeopathic dose of critical theory in geography, planning, or architecture. For better or worse, an academic industry on Lefebvre has developed. His increasing popularity, especially in the New World, was undoubtedly part and parcel of the prestige enjoyed by “French theory” (liberal adaptations of Derrida, Lacan, Foucault, Lyotard, Guattari) in the English-speaking academy and its transnational outposts.¹⁴

Until recently, Anglo-American interest in Lefebvre has stood in contrast to his intellectual marginalization in some other contexts.¹⁵ In France itself, Lefebvre was relegated to the margins of intellectual life after the early 1970s.¹⁶ As Gilbert and Dikeç remind us in...

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• LIST OF FIGURES
• NOTES ON CONTRIBUTORS
• PREFACE AND ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
• 1 On the production of Henri Lefebvre
• PART I: DIALECTICS OF SPACE AND TIME
• PART II: RHYTHMS OF URBANIZATION AND EVERYDAY LIFE
• PART III: DIFFERENCE, HEGEMONY, AND THE RIGHT TO THE CITY
• PART IV: CONCLUSION