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Henri Lefebvre

BIOGRAPHICAL DETAILS AND THEORETICAL CONTEXT

Henri Lefebvre was a Neo-Marxist and Existentialist philosopher (1901-1991), a sociologist of urban and rural life and a theorist of the State, of international flows of capital and of social space. He was a witness to the modernisation of everyday life, i the industrialisation of the economy and suburbanisation of cities in France, noting the way they combined to destroy the life of the traditional peasant. One indicator of his influence is the widespread appearance of some of his signature-concepts in left-intellectual discourse. Although not exclusively 'his' of course, Lefebvre contributed so much to certain lines of inquiry that it is difficult to discuss notions such as 'everyday life', 'modernity', 'mystification', 'the social production of space', 'humanistic Marxism', or even 'alienation' without retracing some of his arguments. Lefebvre's relevance and impact on late twentieth-century Anglo-American human geography cannot be overstated, but he cannot be fitted into a geographical straight)acket. Indeed, he was a critic of disciplinary overspecialisation in economics, geography and sociology, which he argued 'parcelled-up' the study of space. After his initial schooling on the West coast of France at St. Brieuc, in Aix-en-Provence

and in Paris, he was profoundly affected by the post-First World War malaise of the French populace who felt alienated from the new industrialised forms of work and the bureaucratic institutions of civil society. This spurred him to focus on alienation and led him to the social criticism of Marx and Hegel. Although he published a number of groundbreaking translations of Marx, Hegel and texts on Nietzsche and on Dialectical Materialism i n the 1930s, his career was disrupted by the Second World War. Because of this, his doctoral thesis focusing on rural sociology was not successfully defended until the early 1950s. He obtained a permanent university professorship i n Strasbourg i n the mid1950s, identifying w i t h the political avant garde and applying the critiques of an earlier generation of surrealists and communists to the counter-culture of the 1960s. He moved to the new university of Nanterre i n suburban Paris where he was an influential figure in the May 1968 student occupation of the Sorbonne and Left Bank. Nanterre provided an environment i n which he developed his critique of alienation being obscured by the mystifications of consumerism, suburban sprawl and Paris's heritage and tourism industries. These critiques of the city were the basis for Lefebvre's investigation of the cultural construction of stereotypical notions of cities, of nature and of regions. During his international travels from the early 1970s he developed one

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of the first theories of what came to be referred to as 'globalisation'. Although retired he continued to write and to lecture internationally until his death in mid-1991, participating in the lively debates of the 'Groupe de Hagetmau' published i n the magazine M-Marxismes, Mensuels, Mensonges. Before discovering the work of Hegel and Marx, Lefebvre was influenced by Schopenhauer to develop a romantic humanism which glorified 'adventure', spontaneity and self-expression. Lefebvre was part of the group Thilosophes' (including also Nisan, Friedman, and Mandelbrot) who were loosely connected w i t h Andre Gide, Surrealists (such as Breton) and Dada-ists such as (Tristan Tzara). I n turn, the 'Philosophes' rejection of metaphysical solutions in favour of action influenced Sartre and his circle (Short, 1966, 1979). Lefebvre's Marxist primer on the theory of Dialectical Materialism (1939; English translation 1968) made him one of the most translated French authors. He collaborated w i t h Norbert Guterman to publish the first European translations of the work of the young Marx (1934) and one of the first introductions to Hegel (1938).

Key Thinkers on Space and Place

SPATIAL CONTRIBUTIONS

Lefebvre's collaboration w i t h the Situationniste International (SI) group, led by Guy Debord, was crucial in directing his attention to urban environments as contexts for everyday life and the expression of social relations of production. Lefebvre subsequently extended his critique of the domestic life of the household to neighbourhoods and urban life, posing

the question as to what constitutes 'the urban'? His answer was that the urban is not a certain population, a geographic size, or a collection of buildings; nor is it a node, a transhipment point or a centre of production. It is all of these together, and thus any definition must search for the essential quality of all of these aspects. Lefebvre understands the urban from this phenomenological basis as a Hegelian form. The urban is social centrality, where the many elements and aspects of capitalism intersect in space despite often merely being part of the place for a short time, as is the case with goods or people in transit. This position can be contrasted w i t h Manuel Castells' dichotomy of place and the space of flows. 'City-ness' is the simultaneous gathering and dispersing of goods, information and people. Some cities achieve this more fully than others - and hence our own perceptions of some as 'great cities' per se. Every person has a Right to the City (excerpted in Lefebvre 1996) which is to insist that the city is understood as the pre-eminent site of social interaction and exchange, which Lefebvre refers to as 'social centrality'. Conceiving the citizen's 'right to the city' as a universalising principle, Lefebvre develops Marx's analysis of the citizen as a universalising Enlightenment moment. Marx conceives the citizen as a Hegelian synthesis which holds the promise of resolving the thesisantithesis opposition of Christian and Jew (Marx, 1844) but criticises Rousseau for reducing the citizen to a legal abstraction separate from the passions and beliefs of live persons. Lefebvre spatialises this, making a seminal link between the city as a technology of citizenship, transcending the differences of communities and individuals, but criticises the manner in which citizens are seen as means, rather than ends as truly free and authentic political actors (Ostrowetsky, 2008).

Henri Lefebvre

This wonderfully illustrates Lefebvre's method of spatialising Marxist theory and his championing of the humanistic tradition's authentically 'real' persons as opposed to legally 'correct' or politically 'true' individuals. The Production of Space (1991b, first published 1974) forms the keystone of the all-important 'second phase' of Lefebvre's analysis of the urban and the rural. This later phase deals with social space itself as a national and 'planetary' expression of modes of production. Lefebvre gives his term 1'espace the broad sense of active creation: 'spatialisation' is a strong translation of this sense into English (Shields, 1989). I n De VEtat (Vol 4, 1978b) Lefebvre moved his analysis of 'space' from the old synchronic order of discourses 'on' space (archetypically that of 'social space' as found i n sociological texts on 'territoriality' and social ecology) to the manner i n which understandings of geographical space, landscape, and property are cultural and therefore have a history of change. Rather than discussing a particular theory of social space, he examined struggles over the meaning of space and considered how relations across territories were given cultural meaning. In the process, Lefebvre attempted to establish the importance of 'lived' grassroots experiences and argued that geographical space is fundamentally social. This is proposed as a critique of theories of space promulgated by disciplines such as planning or geography or the everyday attitude that took spatiality for granted. To avoid typecasting spatialisations, Lefebvre insists on not finalising his analysis, presenting instead three forays into the topic. This disorderly and 'open text' resists what he detects as capitalism's method of control, which is to fix identities i n a static manner and to flatten differences (Lefebvre, 1991b: 23; 423; Soja, 1996: 8-9; Snart, 2001). Lefebvre's multidimensional thesis

is i n direct contrast to the more customary reduction of space to part of one of production, exchange or accumulation (as i n Castells, 1977). In addition to these, Lefebvre argues that space is a fourth and determining realm of social relations one i n which the production, exchange and accumulation of wealth and surplus value takes place. Space is not a given, nor is the city an object - hence the difficulties w i t h defining them. Rather space and the urban are both intangible but constitutive aspects of society: its virtual image, so to speak (Lefebvre, 2003: 45). Historical spatialisations are analysed by Lefebvre on three axes which are dialectically related to each other i n a shifting balance. These three aspects are explained in different ways by Lefebvre - simplified for the purpose of introducing them, we might say that the 'perceived space' [le pergu) of everyday social life and commonsensical perception blends popular action and outlook but is often ignored i n the professional and theoretical 'conceived space' [le congu) of cartographers, urban planners, or property speculators. Nonetheless, the person who is fully human [1'homme totale) also dwells i n a 'lived space' [le vecu) of the imagination which has been kept alive and accessible by the arts and literature. This 'third' space not only transcends but has the power to refigure the balance of popular 'perceived space' and official 'conceived space' (Shields, 1989, 1990). Gottdiener (1985) takes up Lefebvre's argument that this sphere offers lived space at its richest and most symbolic. Although suppressed i n the abstract space of capitalist societies, it remains i n art, literature and fantasy. Lefebvre cites Dada, the work of the surrealists, and particularly the works of Rene Magritte as examples challenging taken-for-granted understandings and practices of space. Also included in this aspect are clandestine and underground spatial practices which suggest and prompt

Key Thinkers on Space and Place

revolutionary restructurings of institutionalised discourses of space and new modes of spatial praxis, such as that of squatters, illegal aliens, and Third World slum dwellers, who fashion a spatial presence and practice outside of the norms of the prevailing (enforced) social spatialisation. Edward Soja tentatively envisions this three-part dialectic [dialectique de triplicite) as not 'an additive combination of its binary antecedents but rather ... a disordering, deconstruction, and tentative reconstitution of their presumed totalisation producing an open alternative that is both similar and strikingly different.' The 'triplicity' that he derives from Lefebvre's position as 'Thirding', 'decomposes the dialectic through an intrusive disruption that explicitly spatializes dialectical reasoning.... [and] produces what might best be called a cumulative trialectics that is radically open to additional othernesses, to a continued expansion of spatial knowledge' (Soja, 1996: 61). Neil Smith and others who note the links between increasing homelessness and the privatisation of public space have drawn on the many sections of Production of Space which was devoted to developing a radical phenomenology of space as the humanistic basis from which to launch a critique of the denial of individuals' and communities' 'rights to space'. In capitalist societies, for example, geographical space is 'spatialised' as lots - always owned by someone. Hence a privatised notion of space anchors the understanding of property which is a central feature of all capitalist societies. In his analysis, Lefebvre broadened the concept of production to 'social production' (unaware of social constructivist theories that had been developed by non-Francophone writers such as Berger and Luckman or by Garfinkel). Contemporaneously w i t h Poulanzas in the mid1970s he later refined his analysis via an

assessment of the role of the State. This included his interest in the changing history of capitalism and the globalisation of socio-economic relations. This was also a turn to rhythm and to space-time (Lefebvre and Regulier, 2003). A history of 'modes of production of space' or spatialisations emerged which completed Marx's vision in urban, environmental and attitudinal terms. A true Communist revolution, Lefebvre suggested, must not only change the relationship of labourers to the means of production, but also create a new spatialisation - shifting the balance away from the 'conceived space' of which private property, city lots and the surveyor's grid are prime examples. Embracing the 'lived space' of avant gardes is a device for harnessing its potential and redirecting the 'perceived space' of everyday practice. This theory provides an early bridge from Marxist ' thought to the formative positions of the German Green Party, not to mention the punk countercultures of the 1970s and anti-globalisation protests of the new millennium.

KEY ADVANCES AND CONTROVERSIES

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The core of Lefebvre's humanism is his critique of the alienating conditions of everyday life. The greatness of The Production of Space is that as an open text it transposes Marx into a method inviting readers to make their own critical synthesis of the book and of their world. Lefebvre originally developed this stance together w i t h Guterman as a critique of the alienation and false consciousness,

Henri Lefebvre

or 'mythification' i n 1930s popular and consumer culture (1936). I n 1947 he published the first of what were to be three volumes of Critique of Everyday Life. I n this series, Lefebvre presented a Marxist materialist critique of 'Everydayness' [quotidiennete, Altaglichkeit or 'banality') as a soul-destroying feature of modernity culture, social interaction and the material environment. Against 'mystification', against the banality of the 'metro-boulotdodo' ('subway-work-sleep') life of the suburban commuter, Lefebvre proposed that we seize and act on all 'Moments' of revelation, emotional clarity and selfpresence as the basis for becoming more self-fulfilled (I'homme totale - see 1959). This concept of 'Moments' reappears throughout his work as a theory of presence and the foundation of a practice of emancipation. Experiences of revelation, deja vu sensations, but especially love and committed struggle are examples of 'Moments'. By definition, 'Moments' have no duration, but can be relived. Lefebvre argues that these cannot easily be reappropriated by consumer capitalism and commodified; they cannot be codified. David Harvey has taken up Lefebvre's thinking about urban social life i n both its economic and symbolic dimensions. This work is imbued w i t h a keen awareness of the temporality of urban life both in the sense of long term accumulation in the cycles of finance, industry and infrastructure and i n the shorter term of memory and meaning at the scale of individuals and communities. After the failure of the student occupations of May 1968, Lefebvre's oeuvre was eclipsed by Louis Althusser's 'Scientific Marxism' in which the base-superstructure division was a privileged element of a structural analysis of the repressive forces and institutions of capitalist states (Zimmerman, 1975). Ironically, Lefebvre first became well known to English-speaking

theorists through the critiques of his work by Althusserians, such as Manuel Castells, who, i n The Urban Question (1977), criticized Lefebvre's urban works for their antistructuralist bias. Lefebvre's patriarchal approach to the household, his genderblindness and celebration of heterosexuality limit the usefulness of his theories for theorists of the body and sexualities. He remained within the patriarchal tradition dividing bodies and spaces heterosexually into male and female. These are conceived on the basis of a simple negation (A/not-A; that is, male/not-male) and Lefebvre, like most French theorists, was untouched by Commonwealth and American writers' theories of gay and lesbian identities as a 'third' alternative (A/not-A/ neither) outside a heterosexual dualism (Blum and Nast, 1996). Late twentiethcentury post-colonial writers developed alternative theories of ethnic and race identity without citing Lefebvre's work (with some exceptions see Gregory, 1994; Soja suggests links between bell hooks and Lefebvre). Maria Lugones (2003) proposes the figure of the 'street-walker theorist' as a critique of Lefebvre's own spatialisation which disembeds theoretical representation from the tissue of everyday urban life. Reliance on the dialectic has been surpassed by theories of alterity as complexity rather than contradiction or negation, and although he championed global underclasses of the landless poor Lefebvre did not foresee the emerging politics of multiculturalism and ethnicity. Lefebvre has little to say on the question of discrimination, or on 'insiders and outsiders' and the ethics of their relationships. He tends to conceive of the state as a once-authentic instrument of a single people which has been seized by the capitalist class for itself. Nonetheless, Lefebvre goes beyond twentieth-century philosophical debates on the nature of space which considered

Key Thinkers on Space and Place

people and things merely as being ' i n ' space to present a coherent theory of the development of systems of spatiality in different historical periods. These 'spatialisations' are not just physical arrangements of things, but spatial patterns of social action and embodied routine, as well as historical conceptions of space and the world (such as a fear of falling off the edge of a flat world). These regimes operate at all scales. At the most personal, we think of ourselves in spatialised terms, imagining ourselves as an ego contained within an objectified body. People extend themselves - mentally and physically - out into space much as a spider extends its limbs i n the form of a web. We become as much a part of these extensions, as they are of us. Arrangements of objects, work teams, landscapes and architecture are the concrete instances of this spatialisation. Equally, ideas about regions, media images of cities and perceptions of 'good neighbourhoods' are other aspects of this space which is necessarily produced by each society as it makes its mark on the Earth. What is the use of such an 'unpacking' of the production of the spatial? Lefebvre

uses the changing types of historical space to explain w h y capitalistic accumulation did not occur earlier, even i n those ancient economies which were commodity and money-based, which were committed to reason and science, and which were based i n cities (see Merrifield, 1993). One well-known explanation is that slavery stunted the development of wage-labour. Lefebvre found this unconvincing. Instead he postulated that a secular space, itself commodified as lots and private property, quantified by surveyors and stripped of the old local gods and spirits of place, was a necessary precondition for the separation of people from the means to their own subsistence other than by work i n return for wages. As well as being a product, Lefebvre reminds us space is a medium. Changes in the way we understand and live spatially provide clues to how our capitalist world of nation-states is giving way to a unanticipated geo-politics at all scales - a new sense of our relation to our own bodies, own world and the planets as a changing space of distance and difference.

LEFEBVRE'S KEY WORKS

Lefebvre, H. and Guterman, N. (1934) Morceaux choisis de Karl Marx. Paris: NRF Lefebvre, H. and Guterman, N. (1936) La Conscience Mystifiee. Paris: Gallimard. Lefebvre, H. and Guterman, N. (1938) Morceaux choisis de Hegel. Paris: Gallimard. Lefebvre, H. (1947) Critique de la vie quotidienne, I: Introduction. Paris: Grasset. Lefebvre, H.(1959) La Somme etle reste. Paris: La Nef de Paris. Lefebvre, H. (1968a) Sociology of Marx. Trans. N. Guterman. New York: Pantheon. Lefebvre. H. (1968b) Dialectical Mafer/afem. Trans. J. Sturrock. London: Cape. Lefebvre, H. (1969) The Explosion: From Nanterre to the Summit. Paris: Monthly Review Press (orig. published 1968). Lefebvre, H. (1978) les Contradiction de LEtat', De LEtat, Vol. 4. Paris: UGE. Lefebvre, H. (1991 a) The Critique of Everyday Life, Volume 1. Trans. J. Moore, London: Verso (orig. published 1947). Lefebvre, H. (1991b) The Production of Space. Trans. N. Donaldson-Smith, Oxford: Basil Blackwell (orig. published 1974). Lefebvre, H. (1996) Writings on Cities. Trans, and eds. E. Kofman and E. Lebas, Oxford: Basil Blackwell. Lefebvre, H. (2002) Critique of Everyday Life II. London: Verso (orig. published 1961). Lefebvre, H.and Regulier, C. (2003) Henri Lefebvre: Key Writings. Trans, and eds. S. Elden, E. Lebas and E. Kofman, London: Continuum. Lefebvre, H. (2003) The Urban Revolution. Trans. R. Bononno, Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press.

Henri Lefebvre

Secondary Sources and References

Blum, V. and Nast, H. (1996) 'Where's the difference? The heterosexualization of alterity in Henri Lefebvre and Jacques Lacan', Environment and Planning D: Society and Space 14:559-80. Castells, M. (1977) The Urban Question: A Marxist approach. London: Edward Arnold. Gottdiener, M. (1985) Social Production of Urban Space. Austin: University of Texas. Gregory, D. (1994) Geographical Imaginations. Oxford: Blackwell. Hess, R. (1988) Henri Lefebvre et Taventure du siecle. Paris: Editions A. M. Metailie. Home, S. (1988) The Assault on Culture: Utopian Currents from Lettrisme to Class War. London: Aporia Press and Unpopular Books. Jameson, F . (1991) Postmodernism or, the Cultural Logic of Late Capitalism. London: Verso. Lugones, M. (2003) Pilgrimages/Peregrinajes: Theorizing Coalition against Multiple Oppressions. Lanham, MD: Rowman & Littlefield. Marcus, G. (1989) Lipstick Traces. Cambridge, MA: Harvard. Martins, M. (1983) 'The theory of social space in the work of Henri Lefebvre', in R. Forrest, J. Henderson and P . Williams (eds), Urban Political Economy and Social Theory: Critical Essays in Urban Studies. London: Gower. pp.160-85. Marx, K. (1844) 'The Jewish question', H.J. Stenning (trans.), Selected Essays, Leonard Parsons 1926. pp. 40-97. Originally published 1844. Revised translation online: www.marxists.org/archive/marx/works/1844/jewish-question/ Accessed July 15 2009. Merrifield, A. (1993) 'Space and place: a Lefebvrian reconciliation'. Transactions of the Institute of British Geographers, 18:516-31. Ostrowetsky, S. (2008) 'Lldentite des droits'. Paper presented to Colloque de la pensee d'Henri Lefebvre, Vienna 2000, La Somme et le Reste: Etudes Lefebvriennes 13, pp.214. Online: cep.cl/Cenda/Cen_Documentos/Varios/S&R-13.pdf Accessed 1 July 2009. Poster, M. (1975) Existential Marxism in Postwar France: From Sartre to Althusser. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press. Ross, K. (1988) The Emergence of Social Space: Rimbaud and the Paris Commune. New York: Macmillan. Sartre, J.-P. (1958) Being and Nothingness.Trans H.E. Barnes. New York: Methuen/Philosophical Library (origi published as UEtre etleNeant, Gallimard 1943). Shields, R. (1989) 'Social Spatialisation and the Built Environment: The Case of the West Edmonton Mall', Environment and planning D: Society and Space, 7.2 (Summer), pp. 147-64. Shields, R. (1990) Places on the Margin: Alternate Geographies of Modernity. London: Routledge. Shields, R. (1999) Lefebvre: Love and Struggle: Spatial Dialectics. London: Routledge. Short, R.S. (1966) 'The politics of surrealism 1920-1936', Journal of Contemporary History, 1:3-26. Short, R.S. (1979) 'Paris Dada and surrealism', Journal of European Studies 9:1-2 (March/June). Smith, N. (1984) Uneven Development; Nature, Capital and the Production of Space. Oxford: Blackwell. Snart, J. (2001) 'Disorder and entropy in Pynchon's Entropy and Lefebvre's The Production of Space'. CLCWeb: Comparative Literature and Culture 3.4 (December). Online: clcwebjournal.lib.purdue.edu/clcweb01 -4/snart01 .html Accessed Sept 1 2006. Soja, E. (1989) Postmodern Geographies, the Reassertion of Space in Critical Social Theory. London: Verso. Soja, E. (1996) Third Space. Oxford: Blackwell. Zimmerman, M. (1975) 'Polarities and contradictions: theorectical bases of the Marxist-Structuralist encounter', New German Critique, 3:1 (Winter), pp. 69-90.

Rob Shields, University of Alberta