Transcript Hauptseminar: Rethinking Space - uni

Hauptseminar:
Rethinking Space
Magdalena Nowicka
Joost van Loon
New Orleans (Hurricane Katrina)
• The conceptions, perceptions,
management and distributions of risks
• The political economy of security
• The socio-economic ordering of the city
• he geography of racism
• The sociology of the ‘apocalypse’
(individualization, globalization, existential
insecurity)
The Production of Space
(L’Espace)
• ‘Social space works (along with its
concept) as a tool for the analysis of
society’ (Lefebvre, 1990: 34).
• Lefebvre develops a theory of Social
Spatialization (Shields).
The denial of space
• Dominance of Euclidian geometry
• 16th-17th century mathematics undermines this
• Philosophy ‘takes over’ (Descartes, Kant) and
institutes ‘abstract mental space’
• Lefebvre insists on
– (a) the central role of real, physical space
– (b) re-thinking space as part of a critical, intellectual
praxis, situated in a critique of capitalist society.
Marxist roots
• Lefebvre insists on an integrated ‘science of space’
focusing on the following aspects
– ‘political use’ of space (in capitalism),
– ‘ideology’ of space (as the concealment of its actual workings)
and
– space as a technological utopia (which is central to for example
planning and architecture).
• He states that the science of space should constitute a
truth of space that is not simply epistemological, but ‘real’
and ‘politically adequate’.
• He develops the latter point with reference to the
concept of knowledge which in French can be either
savoir (dominant ideology) or connaissance (good
sense).
3 fields of analysis
• physical
• mental
• social
Philosophical anchoring
• Lefebvre asserts that we should not give
up on the unity between the real and our
ability to conceptualize it and focuses on
‘the production of space’ as what Hegel
calls a ‘concrete universal’; this enables us
to keep a dialectical understanding of the
relationship between language and space.
• Example: surrealism as poiesis (poetry,
creation) – the limits of signification.
Foundational thinkers:
• Hegel (dialectics, subject, time),
• Nietzsche (force, reproduction)
• Marx (production, struggle).
Reification
• ‘space has taken on a life of its own’
• like money it is at once abstract and real.
• Lefebvre argues against both:
– (1) the illusion of transparency in which
design is a mediator in which social space is
reduced to mental space;
– (2) the realistic illusion (naïve empiricism)
which fetishizes matter as that which is by its
very self obvious, natural and selfexplanatory.
hypotheses
• (a) as social space takes hold, nature retreats
• (b) each mode of production produces its own
space (e.g. space is always particular, singular
historical) – this sets up his overall framework
• (c) knowledge (connaissance) of space must
reproduce and expound the process of
production, which becomes a problematic
contrast between ‘time’ and ‘presence’
• (d) a perspective on history is not the same as
grounding analysis on the historicity of events
A summary of his thesis
• Thus space may be said to embrace a multitude
of intersections, each with its assigned location.
As for representations of the relations of
production, which subsume power relations,
these too occur in space: space contains them in
the form of buildings, monuments and works of
art. Such frontal (and hence brutal) expressions
of these relations do not completely crowd out
their more clandestine or underground aspects:
all power must have its accomplices – and its
police. (Lefebvre, 1990: 33)
The analytical framework
• -1- spatial practice - produced in action
and perceived (reflexivity)
• -2- representations of space – represented
in discourse and conceived in abstraction
• -3- representational spaces – lived and
experienced (dominated space).
A critique
• By conceptualizing space as presence, yet
functional beyond what can be perceived
(but conceived and experienced), he falls
into the trap of what Derrida calls a
‘metaphysics of presence’ – the assumed
equivalence between real and
(scientifically adequate) representation.
A phenomenological approach
• Spatialization as performed (emerging
from and constituted in action)
• The centrality of hyper-reality (all space is
already mediated) as starting point
• What is revealed are indexes (shadows,
resonance) which ‘point’ towards (=
spatialization)
• Empirical research as essential but does
not ‘represent’ the truth of space
An Outline of the Programme
• 1. Introduction (New Orleans)
BLOCK I: Theoretical Groundwork
• 2. Political Economy, Globalization, Power (Cyberjaya)
• 3. Power, Control, Embodiment, Identity (BBC East Midlands)
• 4. Virtuality and Territoriality (Second Life)
BLOCK II: Case Studies
• 5. The City (Formulating a Research Question)
• 6. The Airport (Creating and Analytical Framework)
• 7. The Home and the Office (Developing a Methodology)
• 8. The Shopping Mall (Gathering Data)
• 9. Cyberspace (Analyzing Data and Writing a Report)