Abstract
As Chris Butler admits in the introduction, Henri Lefebvre “is not obviously a juridical thinker” (4) so this treatment of his contribution to legal theory stands more on Lefebvre’s analysis of state power and the way that it intersects with the politics of space, a topic to which he devoted a considerable corpus of writing over his long career. Lefebvre was something of an outsider in French theory of the twentieth century but his intellectual paths cut across many others and Butler effectively situates his work on space and everyday life among influential writers of his generation, such as Michel Foucault, Gaston Bachelard and Guy Debord. That Lefebvre is a figure ripe for consideration is without doubt but whether his accumulative literary style, his eclectic vocabulary and his elliptical logic can yield anything of substance to legal studies is the bet that Butler has taken. This book successfully distills many essential and complex aspects of Lefebvre’s writings in a clear and decisive prose – which is no mean feat – but it also demonstrates multiple avenues of potential applicability for Lefebvre’s texts to legal theory.
Butler outlines two aims of this book: to introduce Lefebvre’s social theory to legal scholars who might not have encountered it and to explore the significance of his theory “for critical investigations into law, state power, and the politics of space” (4). His idea to provide examples of “how this theory can be deployed in specific legal and political contexts” (4) might be said to constitute a third goal, namely an effort to apply the theories of an esoteric French thinker into reasonable and concrete proposals. This is the most ambitious aspect of the work and, given his success at the first two aims, Butler could have extended these efforts a bit further since the first mention of a legal statute in the book comes twelve pages from the end. But he has opened the door for others to walk through and he has raised some compelling issues in the process.
One insightful application of Lefebvre to legal theory is the way Butler conceives of justice in relation to the moment, one of the kernels of Lefebvre’s theory of everyday life (le quotidien). Drawing on the work of Rob Shields, Butler asserts that moments represent, for Lefebvre, “the fleeting possibilities for experiencing the world in an unalienated fashion” (28). And then: “Justice, like all other moments, aspires to be an absolute, but the fact that it is never quite able to be grasped or realised reveals something deeper about the nature of all moments” (28). While Lefebvre demonstrates how moments offer the opportunity to overcome alienation in modern life, Butler uses the concept of justice to open up the complexity of the moment and suggests that the concept is rich but primarily suggestive. Lefebvre describes how the moment folds back on itself, leading to further alienation, while Butler has given an example not only how such a concept might be applied to legal theory, but how justice might make its limitations more visible.
Butler’s book stages further intersections between Lefebvre’s theory and legal concepts such as his investigation of the voguish notion of transparency making the rounds of administrative circles which Butler links to Lefebvre’s theory of visibility or pairing Lefebvre’s theory of the inherent violence of abstraction with the legal order that objectifies humans into legal subjects. Yet much of the text is taken up with elucidating and, in many cases, clarifying Lefebvre’s sophisticated theoretical mystifications and so it would serve as an excellent introduction of the work of Lefebvre for readers in any field. The last chapter takes a different tack however, and works to incorporate this theoretical model into current conversations on urbanization and rights, particularly the way Lefebvre’s notion of the right to the city intersects with contemporary efforts around social justice and the city pursued by urban planners, activists and regulators.
For Lefebvre, the right to the city involves the everyday use of space by the inhabitants of the city as a mode of participation that allows individuals to reclaim the spaces of the city as public, controlled neither by the state nor private interests. Butler points out that participation is a locus of current discourse about administrative justice and even points to a Brazilian statute from 2001 that makes way for the public to participate in city budgeting processes. This comparison is productive because Lefebvre’s ideas about inhabitants’ use of urban spaces actually coincides directly with a movement in contemporary administration of cities. There is even a UN agency (UN-HABITAT) that has been established under the banner of “Urban Policies and the Right to the City” (148). Then Butler demonstrates the potential downside of such proposals through NIMBY political machinations and a particularly ugly racial profiling episode from the beaches of Sydney in 2005. While such an example would likely not fit into Lefebvre’s own rubric, it does point out that rights are no guarantee of justice and so Butler proposes a pairing of the right to the city with a right to difference, also theorized by Lefebvre. His idea of a right to difference is a response to human rights and, while it may not be one of Lefebvre’s most developed theories, it challenges human rights paradigms that are offered from above. The right to difference suggests that an authentic assertion of human rights would have to come from the people themselves and could not be guaranteed by the United Nations, or any other international agency for that matter, that wrote up the doctrine and then set out to apply it. Lefebvre’s theory suggests that there is no such thing as a universal human right and that rights cannot be granted but must be “conquered” by the people themselves. It also explains why the goal of universal human rights is still as far away as it was in 1948 when the Declaration was ratified.
Such a theory demonstrates just how challenging it is to bring Lefebvre into the domain of legal theory. He fundamentally questions many of the tacit assumptions that govern the law, the state, and the systems that humans have introduced in order to ensure their mutual benefit. His theoretical framework highlights the intangible and unpredictable aspects of human experience and he champions those as the ideal means through which to comprehend our own existence. So it is with great courage that Chris Butler has turned his mind to making such a theory accessible, and even potentially useful, in the discussion of legal theory and the application of systems of justice and administration. It gives one pause to imagine how we might understand our own juridical and administrative systems if we took seriously the right to difference which validates the particular at the expense of the universal and, in Butler’s words, proposes “political demands that are constantly reformulated from below as part of a project of anticipatory striving for differential space” (158). Butler has certainly cracked a hard nut here and the fruits may just prove to be edible.