Andrew's Wiki
Production Of Space

• Spaces not immobile, but traversed with energy and flows: energy comes into the house, is manipulated and consumed by the occupants 93
• The old abstraction of space is “fetishized” (“users cannot recognize themselves within it” AND they are proven incapable of critiquing it 93)
• Space is not neutral but political
• It is systematized but the system is never complete or completely coherence 11: it’s not PERFECTLY controlled by, say, capitalism “not thoroughly purged of contradictions” 11
  • it is an “open totality” rather than a closed one
• Warns against using space metaphorically: you hear about mental spaces, literary spaces, spaces in artist’s canvas…but this is circular thinking b/c you never actually defined what space itself was
  • why do you think mental space will be the same as physical space? you make this comparison to cover up shoddy thinking (“ignoring any need for logical links” 5 and thus circular proof)
• Says that the scientific understanding of space recapitulates the Western Logos, that is the “I” subject who confronts objects. Even though we’ve tried to go beyond Cartesian thought in other areas, we still do so in space.
  • abstract “cogito” replaces “collective subject” 4
  • ex: Chomsky, Foucault, Kristeva, Derrida
    • “philosophico-epistemological notion of space is fetishized and the mental realm comes to envelop the social and physical ones” 5
    • this is the academic problem: instead of being scientific, they just reveal class bias; they need it b/c they want to have an autonomous Mental Space that ideology can’t touch
• Three Concepts: “perceived – conceived – lived”
  • 1) Spatial practice
    • “The spatial practice of a society secrets that society’s space; it propounds and presupposes it, in a dialectical interaction”
    • to figure this out, you decipher the space that was made
    • cohesive, but not coherent (that is it isn’t “logically conceived”)
  • 2) Representations of space
    • “conceptualized space, the space of scientists, planners, urbanists, technocratic subdividers and social engineers”
    • the dominant kind of space (it is constructed)
    • in ours, it’s the numbers game
    • usually has a worked-out system of signs attached to it: its own language
  • 3) Representational spaces
    • “space as directly lived through its associated images and symbols, and hence the space of ‘inhabitants’ and ‘users,’ but also of some artists,” writers, and philosophers
    • it is experienced passively (space is dominated by number 2, remember) but the imagination wants to reappropriate it and change it 39
    • “it overlays physical space, making symbolic use of its objects”
    • only results in symbolic works (no building construction usually)
    • often uses signs, symbols
    • not coherent or consistent
• Abstract space: it’s primarily visual, geometrical, “makes a tabula rasa of whatever stands in their way, of whatever threatens them – in short, of differences…space performing the function of a plane, a bulldozer, or a tank” 285
  • seen as absolute: homogeneous, which gives you power over it (reducing things lets you, say, put a house on a piece of paper)
  • spectacularized (he takes from Guy Debord), therefore a part (visual) is taken for the whole: it’s a normalize metonym: thus space becomes passive, only an image: “space has no social existence independently of an intense, aggressive, and repressive visualization” 286
    • body disappearing…
  • abstracted space needs to be full: male violence, vertical buildings (skyscraper)
• “The fact is that around 1910 a certain space was shattered. It was the space of common sense, of knowledge, of social practice, of political power, a space thiterto enshrined in everyday discourse, just as in abstract thought….”
  • What is gone? Euclidean space; perspectivist space; “along with other former ‘commonplaces’ such as the town, history, paternity, the tonal system in music, traditional morality and so forth.” 25
• “(Social) space is a (social) product.” 26 “a tool of thought and action”
  • space is not a given
  • each space has its own sets of social practice
  • space is a part of the social process of production and reproduction: “Social space is a social product – the space produced in a certain manner serves as a tool of thought and action. It is not only a means of production but also a means of control, and hence of domination/power.”
• He influenced Harvey and Soja
• He’s a Marxist
  • Want to change things? Change space: “Change life! Change Society! These ideas lose completely their meaning without producing an appropriate space. A lesson to be learned from soviet constructivists from the 1920s and 30s, and of their failure, is that new social relations demand a new space, and vice-versa.”

Annotate Bib

• Lefebvre�s landmark exploration into the relationships among physical, mental, and social space attempts to move beyond the various theories of space adopted and rejected at various points of time. He traces how the history of this discussion�how classical discussions of space (What is space? Is it a type of experience or an objective reality?) by philosophers like Kant and Descartes were abandoned in favor of mathematical spaces (both the measured spaces of geometry and the various hypothetical non-Euclidean spaces), which in turn were abandoned for epistemological spaces (the spaces that are �purely� mental rather than physical, yet for which we never receive clear definitions or explanations of) and, most recently, to social spaces�leaves completely undertheorized the connections between �the space of the philosophers and the space of people who deal with material things� (4).
  Criticizing the circular nature of these past conceptions of space, which troublingly make contemporary use of the familiar cogito of Descartes, the abstract universal subject, and assume the supposedly �extra-ideological� status of mental space, Lefebvre castigates everyone from Levi-Strauss and Barthes to Kristeva and Derrida for being party to the resurgence of the Subject specifically because they endow mental space with the qualities of physical, social space. Such unreflective processes lead to a chaos in which anything becomes a space or a world, even before the properties of space have been identified. As semiotics turns its tools onto space, it troublingly reduces space to a message that can be read (therefore over-valuing text and skipping over irreducible space itself), rather than something that people may construct as well as read. Not only, then, do critics indiscriminately use space as a metaphor, but also they ignore the potentials of social, physical space�so Lefebvre would not agree with a �geography of literature� unless it takes account of the construction of the self, as well as of interactions in social space and of the political effects of the certain forms of relations between space and self. As such warnings suggest, Lefebvre conceives any theoretical �science of space� as a manipulation of knowledge for political ends, accompanied by an ideology that conceals the political nature of the conception of space and a tendency towards simulations and constructions of space rather than a simple, direct physical connection to �true� space. For Lefebvre, all space is hegemonic space, controlled by the bourgeoisie, even though such control is not perfectly nor totally exercised (that is, there are �holes� and contradictions in capitalist space). He calls for a �unitary� theory of space that incorporates the physical, mental, and social aspects of space (which we can neither �conflate� nor �separate� [12]); allows for conflicts and controversy, both power and subversion; reflects a dialectics in which many spatial codes compete for recognition; and that uses not an abstract critical theory but instead a practical investigation of moments, descriptions, and �cross-sections� of interactions between people and their surroundings. These stipulations lead him to various conclusions, but, combined into a master thesis, they proceed as such: spaces are historical productions, objective yet subject to revision, of specific societies at specific moments. Absolute spaces are politically significant space�chunks of nature given sacred meaning�while abstract spaces are economically significant�consisting of the semiological relations of place to ideology. Also significant is the �conceptual triad� that guides his analyses of specific examples�the combination of spatial practice (the production of continuous, cohesive social space through spatial practice), representations of space (the almost-verbal dominant codes governing spatial practice), and representational spaces (space as lived symbology; the complex spaces connected to art and freed from the demands of coherence and continuity). Despite these tools, however, he admits that all discourse on space can only comment on the process of the production of space, not space or even things-in-space, yet claims that this restriction does not preclude political change or activism.