Henri Lefebvre

Spatial Politics, Everyday Life and the Right to the City

Chris Butler

• Publisher: Routledge-Cavendish
• Year: 2012
• ISBN:
  9781134045884
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Droit
• Subtopic: Théorie et pratique du droit

While certain aspects of Henri Lefebvre's writings have been examined extensively within the disciplines of geography, social theory, urban planning and cultural studies, there has been no comprehensive consideration of his work within legal studies. Henri Lefebvre: Spatial Politics, Everyday Life and the Right to the City provides the first serious analysis of the relevance and importance of this significant thinker for the study of law and state power. Introducing Lefebvre to a legal audience, this book identifies the central themes that run through his work, including his unorthodox, humanist approach to Marxist theory, his sociological and methodological contributions to the study of everyday life and his theory of the production of space. These elements of Lefebvre's thought are explored through detailed investigations of the relationships between law, legal form and processes of abstraction; the spatial dimensions of neoliberal configurations of state power; the political and aesthetic aspects of the administrative ordering of everyday life; and the 'right to the city' as the basis for asserting new forms of spatial citizenship. Chris Butler argues that Lefebvre's theoretical categories suggest a way for critical legal scholars to conceptualise law and state power as continually shaped by political struggles over the inhabitance of space. This book is a vital resource for students and researchers in law, sociology, geography and politics, and all readers interested in the application of Lefebvre's social theory to specific legal and political contexts.

Theoretical orientations

The social theory of Henri Lefebvre

DOI: 10.4324/9780203880760-2

Throughout the twentieth century, Henri Lefebvre made extensive contributions to philosophy, political theory, sociology, geography and state theory. Much of this work was academically marginalised in France for most of the last three decades of his life by the dominance of structuralist and poststructuralist influences in the social sciences, and it has only been rediscovered in recent years through a series of newly published editions.¹ Likewise, in the English-speaking world, there was little exposure or understanding of his work before the early 1990s, when the progressive translation of a number of key texts began.² Lefebvre’s strongest influence in Anglophone countries has been on the discipline of critical human geography, where the publication of The Production of Space in 1974 was instrumental in the development of radical, materialist and theoretically critical approaches to space.³ Largely because of this ‘geographical’ introduction of his work to the social sciences outside France, his writings on space and urban questions have tended to be read much more widely than other elements of his corpus. However, Lefebvre’s vast intellectual output and the breadth of his theoretical, sociological and political concerns make it difficult to comprehend one aspect of his oeuvre properly without being aware of how it relates to others. This chapter will begin the task of explaining the central currents that run through his work by focusing on his non-reductionist philosophical position, which can be characterised most simply as part of a humanist Marxist tradition, supplemented by the ideas of Hegel and Nietzsche.⁴ In arguing that these three thinkers need to be read together, Lefebvre notes how each grasped ‘something that was in the process of becoming’ in the ‘modern world’.⁵ Marx contributes the theoretical materials for a transformative critique of capitalist social relations, Hegel reminds us of the overwhelming power of the state and Nietzsche highlights the celebration of art, festival and bodily pleasures that are the hallmarks of ‘civilization’.⁶ A number of philosophical themes that flow from the encounter between these three influences recur in Lefebvre’s writing, including the pervasiveness of human alienation, the need to situate social phenomena within a totality that is constantly open to transformation and renewal and a strident opposition to all forms of intellectual reductionism.⁷ In relation to the last of these, Lefebvre particularly opposed the fragmentation of social thought into artificial specialisations. Similarly, he sharply criticised the tendencies to collapse social relations into mental constructs such as language or discourse that are present in various poststructuralist forms of philosophical idealism. This characteristic of Lefebvre’s thinking makes it much more difficult to place his ‘open Marxism’ under the umbrella of poststructuralism than has been asserted by some writers.⁸

¹ See Elden (2006) for a discussion of this publishing history. ² Lefebvre (1991a, 1991b, 1995, 1996, 2002, 2003a, 2003c, 2004, 2005). For a rare early portrayal of the significance of Lefebvre’s influence on the Western, humanist Marxist tradition, see Anderson (1976). Other acknowledgements of his place within the French intellectual left appear in Burkhard (2000), Elden (2004c), Kelly (1982), Kurzweil (1980) and Poster (1975). ³ Although many applications of Lefebvre’s work have been perfunctory, some of the more sophisticated early examples include the writings of Mark Gottdiener (1994), David Harvey (1973) and Edward Soja (1989). ⁴ Stuart Elden has argued that Heidegger should be added to this trio of influences, and that the importance of Heidegger – particularly for Lefebvre’s later writing – has been unduly neglected: see Elden (2004a, 2004c: 76–83). For a rebuttal of both Lefebvre’s uses of Heidegger and Elden’s argument, see Waite (2008). This point will be discussed in more detail in Chapter 5. ⁵ Lefebvre (2003a: 43). ⁶ Lefebvre (2003a: 43–4). ⁷ For a detailed exposition of Lefebvre’s emphasis on the openness of the social totality, see Lefebvre (1955). ⁸ Elden (2001) makes this point most clearly in critiquing the attempts by Dear (1997) and Soja (1989) to link Lefebvre to the emergence of postmodern social theory. In agreement with most recent scholarship on Lefebvre’s work, this book will situate his writing firmly within the historical context of twentieth-century Marxist thought: see Burkhard (2000); Elden (2004c); Merrifield (2006); Shields (1999).

The second major concern of this chapter is to introduce Lefebvre’s greatest contribution to sociological method through his Critique of Everyday Life, which establishes a theoretical framework for the study of daily existence within capitalist modernity.⁹ Begun in 1947, this project was not completed until the posthumous publication of Elements of Rhythmanalysis, often regarded as the unofficial fourth volume of the Critique.¹⁰ While it is necessary to acknowledge the influence of the theorisations of the everyday by writers such as Georg Lukacs and Martin Heidegger, this chapter emphasises the originality of Lefebvre’s formulation of the concept. Importantly, Lefebvre’s work on the everyday prefigures a number of his later concerns with spatial politics and the place of the body within social theory. The experience of everyday life is depicted in these later writings as mediated and structured by the multifarious ways in which space is produced. Because social space is the product of human agency, it in turn helps to shape social, political, economic and legal relations.

⁹ Lefebvre (1991a, 2002, 2004, 2005). ¹⁰ Lefebvre (2004); Kofman and Lebas (1996: 7); Elden (2004c: 194).

Lefebvre and Marxist philosophy

At the heart of Lefebvre’s early philosophical interests was a desire to challenge the orthodoxy of French academic philosophy in the aftermath of World War I. Along with fellow members of the radical Philosophies group, Lefebvre argued that the spontaneity and flux of lived experience could not be adequately captured either by classical logic, nor by the philosophy of Henri Bergson, which was extraordinarily popular at this time. Lefebvre rejected Bergson’s method of intuition as an ‘exaltation of pure internality’ and vigorously dismissed the latter’s theory of duration for its representation of time as linear and continuous.¹¹ This intense opposition to Bergson now forms part of most accounts of Lefebvre’s intellectual development, although a number of scholars have recently argued that, not only did Lefebvre misinterpret key elements of Bergson’s philosophy, the latter exercised a significant (if unacknowledged) influence over Lefebvre’s mature work.¹² In any case, Lefebvre was at this time much more deeply attracted to a form of romantic Nietzscheanism and a non-dogmatic metaphysics as a means of providing a relevant philosophical response to the social conditions of post-war France.¹³ By the late 1920s he had begun to read Hegel and, in turn, he embraced Marx’s materialist critique of Hegel. The encounter with both these thinkers marked the end of Lefebvre’s formal attachment to philosophical idealism and the beginnings of his mature philosophy.¹⁴ Three core elements can be identified in Lefebvre’s emergent approach to Marxist philosophy: an emphasis on dialectical method and its challenge to Marxist orthodoxy; a broad interpretation of the role of alienation in contemporary social life; and a conception of society as an open totality.

¹¹ Lefebvre (1959a: 383–4), quoted in Merrifield (2006: 27–8). For other restatements of Lefebvre’s critique of Bergson, see Shields (1999: 11–13); Elden (2004b: x); Burkhard (2000: 83–4). ¹² While there is insufficient space here to discuss the relationship between Lefebvre’s work and Bergson’s ideas in any detail, quite different assessments of Lefebvre’s debt to Bergson appear in Fraser (2008) and Seigworth (2000: 244, 261 n17). ¹³ Shields (1999: 11–13, 34–5). ¹⁴ However, as will be explained in more detail later in this chapter, the influence of romanticism – and particularly Nietzsche’s writings – remained very close to the surface in his subsequent work.

Dialectical materialism

Lefebvre’s philosophical pedigree helped to ensure that his embrace of Marxism would always involve a certain resistance to theoretical and political orthodoxy. From an early point, his attempt to expound the dialectical basis of Marx’s ideas was directed at an increasingly dominant Stali...