“The Devastating Conquest of the Lived by the Conceived”

Abstraction

It is customary in Anglophone academia to think of Lefebvre first and foremost as a theorist of space, and thus to regard his concept of abstract space as an extension of his broader thinking on spatiality, while overlooking the significance of abstraction. This approach is based on a reading of Lefebvre that prioritizes those works written during the late 1960s and early 1970s, when space was indeed the primary focus of his attention (see in particular Lefebvre, 1968/1996, 1970/2003a). However, Lefebvre’s abiding concern over the course of his long intellectual career—from the 1920s to the 1980s—was not with space but with the alienation and abstraction characteristic of capitalist modernity (Elden, 2001; Shields, 1999). Throughout his lifetime, Lefebvre’s political and philosophical project was essentially concerned with the problem of alienation as set out by Marx in the 1844 Manuscripts (Lefebvre, 1986/2009, pp. 268-269; Marx, 1977). For the young Marx, the alienation of capitalist society, based on the separation of the producer from the means of production, is not reducible to economic exploitation, but also “estranges man from his own body, as well as external nature and his spiritual aspect, his human aspect” (Marx, 1977, p. 69). Against the orthodox Marxism of his time, which either dismissed the concept of alienation or limited it to the economic sphere, ¹ Lefebvre identified with the Romantic influences in Marx’s early work (Shields, 1999, p. 73), following Marx in arguing that alienation encompasses not only economic alienation in the sphere of production and property relations but also political alienation in relation to the state, and what the young Marx might have termed a human or spiritual alienation within everyday life—the evisceration of symbolic significance and creative autonomy from the realm of lived experience (Lefebvre, 1947/1991, p. 229).

For Lefebvre, this latter form of alienation constitutes “an increasing abstraction of human actions stripped of their living substance” (Trebitsch, 1991, p. xxiii). Lefebvre’s enduring concern with abstraction is visible in his early involvement with the Surrealist and Dadaist movements (Shields, 1999), in his critique of everyday life, his writings on “linear time,” his rejection of productivist rationality, and his analysis of “the bureaucratic society of controlled consumption” (Lefebvre, 1971/2000). His understanding of abstract space as “the location and source of abstractions” (Lefebvre, 1974/1991, p. 348) should thus be interpreted, not as an assertion of the philosophical or political primacy of social space, but as the spatial dimension of his long-term and multifaceted critique of “the devastating conquest of the lived by the conceived, by abstraction” (Lefebvre, 1980/2006, p. 10).

Lefebvre’s writings on abstraction draw on Marx’s theory of abstract labor and Heidegger’s critique of abstract technocratic representations, conceptualizing abstraction as a process “to which the world of commodities, like that of techniques, belongs” (Lefebvre, 1981/2008, p. 5). ² In the Grundrisse, Marx claims that in capitalist society “individuals are now ruled by abstractions, whereas previously they depended on one another” (Marx, 1973, p. 164). Central to his argument is his identification of the substance of value in capitalist society as abstract labor—labor in general stripped of all qualitative difference and reduced to a quantitative measure of socially necessary labor time. The exchange value of commodities is expressed in the form of money, the universal equivalent through which qualitatively distinct-use values are rendered quantitatively commensurable. Through the deepening of commodification and the expansion of capitalist social relations intrinsic to the dynamics of capital accumulation, the diversity of use values and the richness of social life are increasingly subsumed beneath the homogeneity of exchange value and the alienation of abstract labor (Žižek, 1989, p. 17). As Lefebvre concludes, despite being only “quantitative abstractions, abstract expressions of social, human relations,” value and money thus “materialize, intervene as entities in social life and history, and end by dominating instead of being dominated” (cited in Charnock, 2010, p. 1285).

Lefebvre and other heterodox Marxists (see, e.g., Postone, 1993; Sayer, 1991; Sohn-Rethel, 1978) have argued that this material process of abstraction manifests itself in dominant modes of modern thought. From this perspective, technocratic rationality’s emphasis on abstraction and quantification, exemplified by Cartesian notions of time and space as homogenous and infinitely divisible, is a representational expression of capitalist society’s domination by the logic of the commodity. The abstraction characteristic of modernity is thus understood as a representational expression of alienation (Shields, 1999, p. 44). For Lefebvre, however, the abstractions of technocratic rationality are not only alienated but are also alienating in terms of the instrumental role they play in the material abstraction of lived experience. As Goonewardena (2008, p. 128) notes, “at the most general—basic—level, Lefebvre’s elaboration of alienation deals with the ‘will to abstract’ manifest in capitalist-industrial rationality.” In theorizing technocratic rationality in these terms, Lefebvre was influenced by Heidegger’s critique of technology. In contrast to orthodox Marxism’s degeneration into “an ideology of expansion, as productivism, as organizing rationality” (Lefebvre, 1971/2000, p. 96), Lefebvre saw Heidegger as “among the first to perceive and foresee the dangers inherent in over-valuing technology” (cited in Elden, 2004, p. 79). Heidegger (1978a) argued that the essence of modern technology is not to be found in technological products or processes, but rather in a specific mode of representation, an abstract “way of revealing” that he called “enframing.” Enframing reduces nature to the status of “standing reserve”—a stock of resources to be rendered available for exploitation. While enframing is an invaluable tool in the manipulation of nature, Heidegger denied that it provides direct and exclusive access to “reality,” arguing that it is only one among many possible ways of seeing through which Being is simultaneously revealed and obscured (Lovitt, 1977, p. xxvii). For Heidegger, the “danger” of technology is thus not only the physical destruction of nature but also the alienation of a world in which enframing has excluded all other modes of representation (Heidegger, 1978a, p. 332).

The influence of Heidegger’s concept of enframing is visible in Lefebvre’s critique of the reductive technocratic rationality deployed in the production of abstract space (discussed below), through which abstract representations are projected onto the terrain of lived experience, as blueprints for its material transformation (see, e.g., Lefebvre, 1974/1991, p. 334, 1979/2009, p. 187). However, just as Lefebvre adopts Heidegger’s assertion of the social power of representations against the materialist reductionism of orthodox Marxism, so he counters Heidegger’s idealism by grounding the logic of technocratic rationality in the materiality of capital (Elden, 2008, p. 87) and by identifying capital itself, rather than a fetishized “technology,” as the driving force behind the technological domination of nature and human beings (Lefebvre, 1974/1991, p. 343). Abstraction is thus understood by Lefebvre as a concrete historical process in which capital accumulation and technocratic rationality—materiality and representation—are dialectically intertwined. ³

The History of Space

In order to conceptualize the process of abstraction as an intertwining of materiality and representations in relation to the production of space, Lefebvre suggests that we think in terms of a triad of spatial practices—the social practices through which space is materially produced, representations of space—the ways in which space is abstractly conceived, and representational spaces—the phenomenological spaces of lived experience (Lefebvre, 1974/1991, pp. 33-45). ⁴ In The Production of Space, Lefebvre deploys this “spatial triad” in tracing “the history of space as it proceeds from nature to abstraction” (Lefebvre, 1974/1991, p. 110). Within this history of space, spatial transformations are related but irreducible to transformations in the mode of production (Lefebvre, 1977/2003, p. 88), and remnants of the spaces of the past always remain as potentially disruptive elements within the transformed spaces of the present (Lefebvre, 1974/1991, pp. 164, 229). Lefebvre’s account begins with absolute space, the space of ancient civilizations, which emerges from the consecration of “fragments of nature,” such as caves, mountains, and springs, within an “agro-pastoral space.” These sacred locations are developed into ceremonial sites at which symbolic buildings are constructed. Urban space comes into conflict with rural space, and class societies emerge, dominated by priestly castes and based on tribute. Absolute space is therefore at once religious and political, encompassing the whole of social space, but focused on the sacred spaces at its center, which retain a “strictly symbolic significance.” In contrast to abstract space, absolute space “is lived rather than conceived, and it is a representational space rather than a representation of space” (Lefebvre, 1974/1991, pp. 48, 234-252).

The historical distance between absolute space and abstract space is measured by the long evolution of “historical space,” in which relations of private property and exchange gradually subsume other forms of sociality, and the appropriation of nature is replaced by its domination. ⁵ Emerging in Europe between the 11th and 13th centuries, historical space is composed of disparate rural fiefdoms linked to relational networks of market towns and incipient urban systems. While remnants of absolute space survive within it, historical space is increasingly secularized and stripped of its symbolic content, with the market rather than the ceremonial site becoming the primary locus of social activity. Accompanying this process of secularization and commodification is an increasing domination of representations of space over representational spaces—the conceived over the lived—epitomized by the development of linear perspective and geometric space during the Renaissance, and by the utilization of such codes in the service of accumulation (Lefebvre, 1974/1991, pp. 252-285). The emergence of historical space from within absolute space is therefore characterized by the growing material and representational abstraction of social practice.

The commodification of land and labor and the development of industrial capitalism are accompanied by and realized through the shift from historical space to abstract space. Abstract space begins to take shape in the 19th century and evolves in the 20th century into an “urban fabric” (Lefebvre, 1970/2003a, pp. 3-4) founded on a “vast network of banks, business centres, and major productive entities . . . motorways, airports and information lattices,” configured by state power, and subordinated to the logic of capital, “with all that it entails: accumulation and growth, calculation, planning, programming” (Lefebvre, 1974/1991, pp. 53, 307). Consistent with Lefebvre’s understanding of abstraction as a process in which materiality and representations are dialectically intertwined, the emergence of abstract space involves both the concretization of abstract social relations in material reality and the growing social power of an abstract rationality. Through the concrete process of primitive accumulation—the separation of peasants from the land and the creation of markets in land and labor—space ceases to be “sacred and inalienable as a patrimonial and collective good and becomes a commodity just as any other” (Lefebvre, 1980/2009, pp. 214). As a commodity to be bought and sold in lots, space acquires the properties of homogeneity, divisibility, and interchangeability characteristic of exchange value (Lefebvre, 1974/1991, pp. 75, 337). This process, through which space becomes an abstraction in social practice (Harvey, 1989, p. 177) is accompanied by the rise to conceptual prominence of the abstract Cartesian representation of space as homogenous, continuous, and emptied of all natural and social content (Casey, 1997, pp. 273-274; Sohn-Rethel, 1978, pp. 48-49).

For Lefebvre, this representation is no mere fetishized appearance of capitalist social relations (Lefebvre, 1974/1991, p. 307) but functions as a technology of “abstraction wielding awesome reductive power vis-à-vis ‘lived’ experience” (Lefebvre, 1974/1991, p. 52). As Elden (2004, pp. 183) points out, “Lefebvre and Heidegger both realize the Cartesian understanding of space as calculable and controllable allows social and technological domination.” Used by the state as a technocratic device, Cartesian representations of space become instrumental in the planned production of abstract space. The representation of space as a homogenous plane serves in the concrete production of a homogenous national territory, (Lefebvre, 1974/1991, pp. 287, 355), while the representation of space as a void facilitates the manipulation of social space as an exploitable resource, “a neutral medium into which disjointed things, people, and habitats might be introduced” (Lefebvre, 1974/1991, p. 308). ⁶

The outcome is the reduction of natural and social reality to a “naked, empty social space stripped bare of symbols” (Lefebvre, 1961/2002, p. 305). Absolute space and historical space are “liquidated” (Lefebvre, 1974/1991, p. 122), and “representational space disappears into the representation of space” (Lefebvre, 1974/1991, p. 398). However, despite its tendency toward homogenization, abstract space is riven with contradictions, arising from the residues of the social spaces that preceded it, and from its simultaneous tendency toward fragmentation. In defining abstract space as both homogenous and fragmented, Lefebvre is referring on one hand to its existence as a commodified space—in which all elements are rendered equivalent as exchange values, but which is necessarily fragmented into individual lots and parcels (Lefebvre, 1977/2003, pp. 87-88), and on the other hand to its status as a political space—in which the state aims both to create a homogenous society and to exploit and control existing differences (Lefebvre, 1974/199, p. 282). ⁷

For Lefebvre, abstract space both contains and obstructs the possibility of a differential space, which would draw on the remnants of absolute and historical spaces, and on the contradictions that abstract space itself produces, accentuating differences in contrast to the homogeneity of abstraction, while simultaneously overcoming alienation by “restoring unity to what abstract space breaks up,” and by emphasizing appropriation and use “against exchange and domination” (Lefebvre, 1974/1991, pp. 52, 368). Lefebvre has been criticized for his vague and limited account of differential space in The Production of Space, which tells us little about what such a space might be like and how it might be realized in social practice (see, e.g., Dimendberg, 1998, p. 33; Smith 2003, p. xiv). While this can partly be explained by his rejection of the political domination inherent in rigid models and systems (Lefebvre, 1969/1970, p. 43), it is also the case that a wider reading of Lefebvre allows us to build a more detailed picture of what he meant by differential space. The same is true of the concept of abstract space itself, which attains greater conceptual “concreteness” when related to Lefebvre’s works beyond The Production of Space, particularly those in which he develops his ideas on productivism, the state, spatial planning, and everyday life. The following sections discuss the relationship between these ideas and the concept of abstract space, after which I return to the question of differential space.

Abstract Space and the State

In his interpretation of the concept of abstract space, Derek Gregory (1994, p. 402) suggests that abstract space is “pre-eminently the space of exchange value.” However, while the commodification of space is certainly of great significance in the historical emergence of abstract space, it would be more accurate to describe abstract space as the space of productivism. Lefebvre defines productivism as “the idea that the problems of growth and the quantitativism which they involve are the essential problems, and that the strategic objective is indefinite growth” (Lefebvre, 1973/1976, p. 100). For Lefebvre, in contrast to orthodox Marxists, productivism rather than property relations becomes the fundamental object of critique (Brenner, 2001, p. 803), as it is productivism that defines the shared project of state capitalism and state socialism in the 20th century, ensuring a deepening of instrumental rationality and technocratic abstraction despite a putative reduction in the social power of exchange value (Lefebvre, 1974/1991, p. 55). This demands a critique of the state, as it is through the power of the state that the ideology of productivism is concretized in space.

After completing The Production of Space, Lefebvre’s next major project was De L’Etat, a four-volume work that took the state as its central theme. In De L’Etat, Lefebvre theorizes the modern state in terms of the State Mode of Production (SMP). The emergence of the SMP constitutes a “qualitative transformation” that Lefebvre considers to be the most significant “event” of the 20th century (Elden, 2004, p. 222), occurring at “the moment at which the State takes charge of growth” (Lefebvre, 1979/2001, p. 773). While the Stalinist state is the paradigm of the SMP, Lefebvre also considers the fascist state, the USA of the New Deal, and the European welfare state as significant instances of the same phenomenon (Elden, 2004, pp. 220-223), in which the state “plans and organizes society ‘rationally,’ with the help of knowledge and technology, imposing analogous, if not homologous, measures irrespective of political ideology, historical background, or the class origins of those in power” (Lefebvre, 1974/1991, p. 23). ⁸

Central to Lefebvre’s theorization of the SMP in De L’Etat is a development of his concept of abstract space. Although he here tends to speak of “state space” rather than “abstract space,” his insistence that “the articulation between the SMP and space is crucial” (Lefebvre, 1977/2003, p. 85) is based on an understanding of state space as abstract space—instrumental, urbanized, productivist, and homogenising. Space is both the “privileged instrument” (Lefebvre, 1977/2003, p. 85) of the SMP, through which it controls the process of accumulation, and the material condition of its power. The productivist project, according to which “economic growth and industrialization have become self-legitimating, extending their effects to entire territories, regions, nations, and continents” (Lefebvre, 1970/2003a, p. 3), demands the development of a state form with the organizational capacity to produce space on a “grand scale” (Lefebvre, 1977/2003, p. 90)—“a physical space, mapped, modified, transformed by the networks, circuits and flows that are established within it—roads, canals, railroads, commercial and financial circuits, motorways and air routes, etc” (Lefebvre, 1977/2003, p. 84). Equally, the SMP itself only achieves political domination through the concrete abstraction of social space—the production of a homogenous national territory “organized according to a rationality of the identical and the repetitive that allows the state to introduce its presence, control, and surveillance in the most isolated corners” (Lefebvre, 1977/2003, p. 86).

As state space, abstract space “is not only produced by the forces and relations of production and property; it is also a political product, a product of administrative and repressive controls, a product of relations of domination and strategies decided at the summit of the State” (Lefebvre, 1980/2009, p. 214). This space is produced through the technology of spatial planning, which uses “knowledge to ‘structure’ space in the perspective of unlimited growth” (Lefebvre, 1973/1976, p. 113) and to impose order on the “irrationality” of preexisting social spaces. Spatial planning is depicted as a purely technocratic operation—“the epitome of rational abstraction” (Lefebvre, 1970/1976, p. 31), thus concealing its deeply political nature as “the manipulation of society by the state” (Lefebvre, 1973/1976, p. 11). By representing social space as homogenous, empty, quantitative, and geometrical (Lefebvre, 1970/2003a, p. 48, 1977/2003, p. 90), spatial planning erases contradictions and imposes an imaginary coherence that functions “to reduce reality in the interests of power” (Lefebvre, 1974/1991, p. 367).

Lefebvre’s critique of technocratic representations is thus not primarily concerned with the abstraction of the representations themselves but rather with the concretization of these abstractions as an expression of state power, and the consequent abstraction of lived reality itself (Lefebvre, 1968/1996, p. 191). Lefebvre repeatedly emphasizes that, despite abstraction’s apparent lack of substantive content, “there is a violence intrinsic to abstraction, and to abstraction’s practical (social) use” (Lefebvre, 1974/1991, p. 289), which is in fact directly related to the apparent political neutrality of its representations. Thus, the representation of nature as a set of natural resources facilitates its destruction (Lefebvre, 1974/1991, p. 280); the representation of social space as homogenous is instrumental to the state’s erasure of preexisting differences (Lefebvre, 1970/2003b, p. 186); and the representation of the planned spaces of the state as rational and coherent both conceals and perpetuates “the relations of domination” (Lefebvre, 1977/2003, p. 95). The intrinsic violence of abstract space is therefore only fully realized through the concretization of abstract representations within the materiality of everyday life—the process through which, in Lefebvre’s words, “a strategic space . . . seeks to impose itself on reality despite the fact that it is an abstraction” (Lefebvre, 1974/1991, p. 94).

Abstract Space and Everyday Life

All aspects of Lefebvre’s work are permeated by his concern with everyday life, through which he challenged Western philosophy’s disdain for lived experience, and orthodox Marxism’s limitation of alienation to the workplace and the relations of production. Lefebvre argues that the spatial levels of the urban and the state are based on that of everyday life, despite appearances to the contrary (Lefebvre, 1970/2003a, p. 88). The SMP “bears down” on everyday life from above, disguising the fact that everyday life itself is “the soil on which the edifice rests” (Lefebvre, 1981/2008, p. 123). This process contains an essential contradiction between the accumulative imperative of the capitalist state and the nonaccumulative tendencies of everyday life, which “evolves according to a rhythm that does not coincide with the time of accumulation and in a space that cannot be identified with that of cumulative processes” (Lefebvre, 1971/2000, p. 61, 1961/2002, p. 335). Everyday life is thus subordinated to productivism, but remains resistant to it, and is therefore both a realm of alienation and the site of a possible “disalienation” (Lefebvre, 1981/2008, pp. 18-19).

Abstract space is concretized within everyday life through an intertwined set of material and representational processes, through which the richness of lived experience is progressively eviscerated. Central to this process is the contradiction between abstract representations of space and the representational spaces of lived experience (Lefebvre, 1974/1991, pp. 116, 362). This contradiction is manifested in the politics of spatial planning, which “soars up into the abstract space of the visible, the geometric . . . The planners who draw up master-plans . . . pass from the lived to the abstract in order to project that abstraction onto the level of the lived” (Lefebvre, cited in Gregory, 1994, p. 404). The concretization of the abstract representations of spatial planning through the transformation of preexisting representational spaces strips these spaces of their spontaneity, diversity, and symbolic content, as part of a broader process of abstraction though which “lived experience is crushed, vanquished by what is ‘conceived of’” (Lefebvre, 1974/1991, p. 51).

Lefebvre’s exploration of the contradictions between representations of space and representational spaces, the conceived and the lived, is again indebted to Heidegger, and in particular to the concept of “dwelling” with which Heidegger confronted technocratic rationality. Citing Hölderlin, Heidegger asserts that “man dwells on the earth,” not only in terms of her cultivation of it, and her construction upon it, but also “poetically,” through a fullness of lived experience that predates and potentially transcends the productivist abstractions of enframing (Heidegger, 1971; Hofstadter, 1971, pp. xiv-xvii). His argument is adopted by Lefebvre, who claims that “the earth is the dwelling of man,” and that “dwelling, in its essence, is poetic” (Lefebvre, 1966/2003, p. 122). For Heidegger, dwelling is “none other than the relationship between man and space,” and is “the basic character of Being, in keeping with which mortals exist” (Heidegger, 1978b, pp. 359, 362). Lefebvre therefore insists that the way in which we appropriate space is not in any sense secondary or “superstructural” in relation to more essential determinants but is “a fundamental feature of the human condition” (Lefebvre, 1966/2003, p. 122). Paraphrasing Heidegger, Lefebvre suggests that abstract space’s lack of “poetry” derives “from a strange kind of excess: a rage for measurement and calculation.” Producing space “on the basis of economic or technological dictates,” he concludes, “is as far removed from dwelling as the language of machines is from poetry” (Lefebvre, 1966/2003, p. 122).

Lefebvre conveys the spatial dimension of the abstraction of everyday life and its colonization by the state with his concept of “habitat,” which he contrasts to dwelling (or “habiting”), again with reference to Heidegger. Habitat is typified by (though not restricted to) the planned space of housing estates and new towns. As an integral component of abstract space, habitat is “imposed from above as the application of a homogenous global and quantitative space, a requirement that ‘lived experience’ allow itself to be enclosed in boxes, cages, or ‘dwelling machines’” (Lefebvre, 1970/2003a, p. 81). As Heidegger (1978b, p. 348) insists, such spaces may be well-designed and may provide all the services and amenities judged necessary for modern life, yet this “holds no guarantee that dwelling occurs in them.” Lefebvre agrees, arguing that although technocrats may view the standard of living achieved in these urban developments to be “satisfactory” in quantitative terms, “the relationship of the ‘human being’ with the world, or with ‘nature’ and its own nature . . . has never experienced such profound misery as during the reign of habitat and so called ‘urbanistic’ rationality” (Lefebvre, 1968/1969, p. 98, 1970/2003a, p. 83).

Heidegger’s response to this apparent paradox tends toward a politically dangerous appeal to the “rootedness” of “traditional” societies (Heidegger, 1971, 2003). ⁹ Lefebvre, however, challenges habitat’s failure to allow for dwelling by again shifting from Heidegger to Marx. Reaffirming the Romantic roots of Marx’s original critique of alienation against both the conservative romanticism of Heidegger and the reductive economism of orthodox Marxism, Lefebvre advocates a “revolutionary romanticism” (quoted in Elden, 2004, p. 119), which remains true to what he perceives as the style of “authentic Marxist thought . . . the style of the intensification and broadening of life” (Lefebvre, 1962/1995, p. 140). ¹⁰ For Lefebvre, alienation must be thought of as “the impossibility of full development . . . the obstruction of the possible, and not the loss of past riches” (Lefebvre, 1980/2006, p. 64). Man therefore “dwells poetically” in Lefebvre’s sense of the term, not by virtue of fixity in place and culture, but only to the extent “that his inhabiting is in some sense his creative work” (Lefebvre, 1966/2003, p. 130). The state’s control of lived space through the production of habitat—and of abstract space in general—is thus problematic, not because it violates a preestablished order, but because it alienates human beings from our creative capacity to produce our material and representational spaces, and to control our everyday lives and our relations with nature (Lefebvre, 1961/2002, p. 78, 1962/1995, p. 138). This space of alienation is therefore not to be countered by the restitution of an imagined past but must instead be transfigured through the realization of the disalienated possibilities that abstract space itself contains via the removal of the obstacles that it presents to our collective appropriation of space (Lefebvre, 1968/1969, p. 98). Lefebvre seeks to capture this possibility with his concept of differential space.

Differential Space

For Lefebvre, critique “implies possibilities, and possibilities as yet unfulfilled. It is the task of critique to demonstrate what these possibilities and this lack of fulfilment are” (Lefebvre, 1961/2002, pp. 18-19). As a critical category in Lefebvre’s sense of the term, differential space can be understood as the possible within the real, the potential postcapitalist space that exists as a “virtual object” within the “illusory transparency” of abstract space itself (Lefebvre, 1961/2002, p. 118, 1974/1991, p. 393). As with abstract space, the concept of differential space as set out in The Production of Space can only be adequately understood in the context of Lefebvre’s broader work. Furthermore, the interpretation of abstract space presented here would itself be incomplete if, as in other interpretations, differential space were overlooked, or given only superficial treatment (see, e.g., Dimendberg, 1998, p. 33; Gregory, 1994, pp. 368-406). Lefebvre’s dialectical method implies the internal relation of abstract space and differential space, such than one cannot be grasped independently of the other. “Real alienation can be thought of and determined only in terms of a possible disalienation” (Lefebvre, 1961/2002, p. 207), and our understanding of the alienation of abstract space therefore requires that it be measured against the possible disalienation of a differential space. This section thus sets out an interpretation of differential space that draws on Lefebvre’s ideas on difference, autogestion, and the transformation of everyday life.

In Lefebvre’s opinion, the increasing political significance of the state-led production of space necessitates a form of revolutionary action that is explicitly oriented against the state and toward the subversion of abstract space, based on the contradictions internal to it. As discussed above, Lefebvre considers abstract space to be at once homogenous and fragmentary. This contradiction—as an expression of capital’s internal contradictions, intertwined with further contradictions between the conceived and the lived, and between state productivism and everyday life—implies that the spatially homogenizing aspirations of the state can never be fully realized. For Lefebvre, this multiplicity of struggles cannot be captured by the orthodox Marxist understanding of class, which has itself become a reductive and homogenizing abstraction and which must be reimagined in terms of a politics of difference (Lefebvre 1981/2008, pp. 109-122), However, rather than fetishizing “difference” and “diversity” as such, Lefebvre distinguishes between “induced” and “produced” differences, and between “minimal” and “maximal” differences. Induced differences are those produced within and consistent with the functioning of the capitalist system, while produced differences are those that the state cannot accept. Similarly, minimal differences are “particularities” unthreatening to the established order while maximal differences directly challenge that order (Kipfer, 2008, pp. 202-203; Lefebvre, 1974/1991, p. 372). ¹¹ The state strives to fragment maximal differences into particularities and to transform produced differences into induced differences, against which Lefebvre’s politics of difference pursues unity-in-difference, in opposition to “differentiations induced within existing abstract space” (Lefebvre, 1974/1991, p. 64). ¹²

For Lefebvre, it is only class struggle—in this nonhomogenizing, differential understanding of the term—which “prevents abstract space from talking over the whole planet and papering over all differences,” as it alone has the capacity to generate and sustain “differences which are not intrinsic to economic growth . . . that is to say, differences which are neither induced by nor acceptable to that growth” (Lefebvre, 1974/1991, p. 55). While orthodox Marxism and state socialism have assimilated “class struggle” within the ideology of productivism, Lefebvre is clear that it is precisely this ideology that any truly maximal politics of difference must challenge. He thus advocates “a strategy which would join up . . . peripheral elements . . . with those elements from the working class who can free themselves from the ideology of growth” (Lefebvre, 1973/1976, p. 119, 1981/2008, p. 30). In rejecting productivism, this strategy would rediscover what Lefebvre considers to be the heart of Marx’s own project—the transformation of everyday life (Lefebvre, 1947/1991, p. 227).

As discussed above, Lefebvre identifies this transformation not with the restitution of an imagined past but with the collective production of social reality or autogestion (1968/1996, p. 76, 1968/1969, p. 90). Though not discussed in The Production of Space, autogestion is central to Lefebvre’s (1966/2009) anticapitalist politics, and is implicit in his vision of a differential space. According to Lefebvre’s use of the term, autogestion asserts the primacy of use value over exchange value and is premised on the collective self-management of production, political institutions, and everyday life, in contrast to the totalizing logic of the SMP (Lefebvre, 1968/1969, pp. 84-90, 1979/2001, pp. 779-780). ¹³ In the 1970s, Lefebvre extended his concept of autogestion to include “the organization of space” (Lefebvre, 1976/2009, p. 160), arguing that the increasingly intensive production of abstract space was provoking the development of a new spatial politics of resistance and transformation. Against the dual imperatives of productivism and the reduction of differences that configure abstract space, Lefebvre claimed that urban and peasant social movements were demonstrating that “Space is not merely economic, in which all the parts are interchangeable and have exchanges value . . . (and) is not merely a political instrument for homogenizing all parts of society” (Lefebvre, 1979/2009, pp. 191, 193). For Lefebvre, these movements revealed and embodied the emergent possibility of a politics of “spatial (territorial) autogestion, direct democracy and direct democratic control, and the affirmation of the differences produced in . . . and through this struggle” (cited in Brenner, 2001, pp. 796). Autogestion can thus be understood as the praxis of a differential space.

A broader reading of Lefebvre beyond The Production of Space therefore provides the concept of differential space with substantive content: territorial autogestion, the politics of difference, and the transformation of everyday life, in opposition to alienation, homogenization, and the domination of lived experience by technocratic abstractions. ¹⁴ Finally, it is important to emphasize that while differential space would necessarily be a postcapitalist space, it would also be a postproductivist space (Lefebvre, 1973/1976, p. 119, 1974/1991, p. 422), as the reductive instrumental rationality through which everyday life is subordinated to the productivist imperative would otherwise imply the continued domination of society by abstractions. Lefebvre’s vision of differential space as an inversion of the alienated realities of abstract space—use over exchange, difference over homogeneity, the qualitative over the quantitative, the lived over the conceived (Lefebvre, 1968/1996, p. 37, 1980/2006, p. 302)—demands the transcendence of productivism and the flourishing of a postproductivist society. For Lefebvre, liberation from the ideology of growth would not entail stagnant austerity but would make possible a disalienated society of material abundance and creative freedom. ¹⁵ The collective realization of this possibility was the desire that motivated Lefebvre’s lifelong commitment to a revolutionary romanticism, within which his vision for a differential space must be understood as an internally related moment, just as the concept of abstract space is one moment within his multifaceted critique of abstraction.

Conclusion

This article has presented a reinterpretation of Lefebvre’s concept of abstract space, which unlike previous interpretations is based on an analysis of the relationship between this concept and other aspects of Lefebvre’s work beyond The Production of Space. By relating the concept of abstract space to key ideas from across Lefebvre’s oeuvre concerning abstraction, productivism, the state, technocracy, everyday life, dwelling, autogestion, and difference, my interpretation of the concept has sought to synthesize Lefebvre’s central themes within a coherent theoretical approach. This reinterpretation of abstract space thus aims to provide a means of “operationalizing” Lefebvre’s diverse thought, without betraying his own rejection of models and doctrines by reducing his work to a rigid structure or a closed system (Lefebvre, 1961/2002, p. 1, 1968/1996, p. 63). ¹⁶

My interpretation of abstract space differs from other engagements with Lefebvre’s theory of the production of space by asserting the significance of abstraction for Lefebvre, as a dimension of his complex understanding of alienation. This emphasis on abstraction and alienation grasps what I consider to be most unique and important about Lefebvre’s theorization of social space. While other social theorists have arguably advanced beyond Lefebvre in their grasp of the political economy of the capitalist production of space (see, e.g., Brenner, 2004; Harvey, 1982; Smith, 1984), I would suggest that Lefebvre’s most significant contribution to our understanding of capitalist space lies in his attention to the lived experience of abstract space as an alienated space, his theorization of the contradictions that emerge through the projection of abstractions onto the terrain of everyday life, and his exploration of the possibilities that these contradictions reveal.

For Lefebvre, the critical value of alienation lies not in the concept alone but also in the possibility for a disalienated social practice that the concept reveals. The identification of abstract space as an alienated space of homogenization and state control reveals the possibility of differential space as a disalienated space of heterogeneity and autogestion. While many interpretations of Lefebvre have focused on his assertion that “capitalism survives through the production of space” (Lefebvre, 1973/1976, p. 21), far fewer have appreciated the extent to which Lefebvre’s work holds this claim in dialectical tension with an equal insistence on the significance of the appropriation of space for our full realization as human beings, in terms of the collective creation and transformation of our own lived reality. For Lefebvre, the production of space “is inherent in what it is to be human” (Lefebvre, 1966/2003, p. 123), and our capacity to control this process defines his interpretation of Heidegger’s concept of dwelling. Abstract space is therefore an alienated space to the extent that it deprives human beings of the ability to dwell in this sense, and a differential space can accordingly be understood as a space that is expressive of this creative freedom.

In summary, my reinterpretation of Lefebvre’s concept of abstract space understands the capitalist production of space as a process of abstraction, through which capitalist social relations and reductive technocratic representations of space are progressively concretized in lived material reality, and through which this reality is itself rendered increasingly abstract. This process is necessitated by the fundamental imperatives of the capitalist state to expand economic growth and to create a homogenous national territory within which political and cultural differences can be managed and controlled. However, just as the capitalist state survives through its domination of the space of everyday life, so our capacity to collectively appropriate, create, and transform our own material and representational reality is essential to a disalienated spatial practice. The survival of the capitalist state is thus dependent on the production of a lived space within which we are unable to fully realize the multiplicity of our human potentialities, which for Lefebvre is the most fundamental characteristic of alienation. Nevertheless, despite its totalizing ambitions, the state necessarily fails to produce abstract space as a totality. The contradictions of capital itself, combined with those that emerge through the projection of abstractions onto lived reality, together ensure that the materiality of abstract space fails to reproduce the rational coherence and social emptiness of its representations, instead confronting us as a space of domination, struggle, and possibility.