This computer listing reproduces 'An English Prcis of Henri Lefebvre's La Production de l'Espace' University of Sussex, Brighton U.K.

Urban and Regional Studies Working Paper 63 (April 1988). Andrew Sayer, working paper editor. I wish to acknowledge my debt to Frederic Jameson who composed the original set of reading notes upon which the first version of this Precis was based. All translations, however, are mine and responsibility for the decision of what to include, what to summarize, and how to paraphrase, must remain on my shoulders. It should also be noted that a translation by M. Enders of Chapter 1 is available in Antipode 8. 31-5 Note: The 1991 English translation by Donald Nicholson-Smith is now available under the title The Production of Space (Oxford: Basil Blackwell). The major distinction with this work is Nicholson-SMiths rendering of les spaces de reprsentation as representational spaces (see R. Shields Lefebvre - Love and Struggle. A Spatial Dialectics (Routledge 1999)) Translation copyright Rob Shields 1988. Introduction copyright Rob Shields 1987. Page numbers and section numbers are to the 2nd French edition of La Production de l'Espace 1981 Editions Anthropos Paris. Each chapter begins with a hard-page. Originally written on a Tandy Model 100. Reformatted June 2010 for internet distribution. Please note that the page numbers will have changed.

HENRI LEFEBVRE: LA PRODUCTION DE L'ESPACE

Rob Shields INTRODUCTION It is necessary to briefly introduce Lefebvre for the English reader perhaps unfamiliar with the development of French Marxism. Although often uncited, the thought of Henri Lefebvre underpins the discourse of the midtwentieth century French intellectuals. With the work of perhaps only Sartre as his equal, Lefebvre was a central representative of French existential Marxism of the pre-1968 variety. In part, his stature is due to his long presence on the scene of social theory in France; but on the other hand, his polymathic scope and range have led to his general neglect. In English especially conflicting appreciations have led to a general puzzlement over Lefebvre's exact contribution. Some authors, out of their entusiasm for the potentials opened up by his thought have presented his work in a highly positive light (Soja 1980; 1985). Others ignore his work almost entirely even when it is central to their discussion (Poster 1975). Few of his works are available in translation and the general impression obtained in the English urban studies literature is based on Castells' partial reading of early works (Martins 1982) and his structuralist critique of Lefebvre's too often unclear position and always difficult style (Castells 1977). More recent works, such as those by Gottdiener (1985), reduce Lefebvre's Hegelian dialectics to a political economy. Such a state of confusion reins that, it seems, Lefebvre real contributions have become occluded. The lack of availability of Lefebvre's later works outside of France belies their importance and theoretical originality. Hopefully, in 1988 the publishers Basil Blackwell will complete with the translation they have been working on for the last five years. This paper might be regarded as part of an on-going project which can only begin to attempt to sketch the implications of Lefebvre's four-hundred page analysis of La Production de l'espace into the working language of English sociologists and urban theorists. Although his influence has certainly waned since the 1970s, he remains, as Perry Anderson has commented, a loved outsider to the French academic establishment. [Despite] `a general crisis of Marxism'... No intellectual change is ever universal. At least one exception, of signal honour, stands out against the general shift of positions in these years. The oldest living survivor of the Western Marxist tradition..., Henri Lefebvre, neither bent nor turned in his eighth decade, continuing to produce imperturbable and original work on subjects typically ignored by much of the Left. The price of such constancy, however, was relative isolation. (Anderson 1983:30) Contemporaneous with such "founder-figures" as Kojve, (whose 1937-1939 lectures on Hegel collected by Queneau and later translated and published in English as An Introduction to Reading Hegel, (1947) remain as some the seminal work for all students of Hegel) Lefebvre's work on dialectical materialism has earned him the position of "father of the dialectic" in France. It is for this work that he is best known to English-speaking Marxologists. In the early 1930s, together with Norbert Guterman he published the first French translations of Marx's 1844 economic and political manuscripts and in a set of anthologies over the next thrity years introduced and wrote extensive commentaries on many key works by Marx, Engels and Lenin which contributed to the Hegelian revival which formed the basis for the expansion of Marxism in France. Lefebvre, seeking to mediate between Hegel's idealism and the materialism of Marx, encouraged interest in the problem of ideology and its role in the reproduction of culture and thus of modes of production (Le Matrialism Dialectique 1939). This thematic, which began with his book La Conscience Mystifie (1936), has continued in French intellectual thought through to the present day in the work of Bourdieu. Particularly striking is the centrality of his thesis, borrowed from Marx, that consciousness is produced through material practices in the conduct of everyday life. There is no branch of French social thought untouched by this problematic.His seminal critiques of the Party doctrine of Comintern marxism (Problmes actuels du marxisme, 1958) earned him notoreity and eventual expulsion from the Parti Communiste Franais. This stance against reductionism has also characterized his critiques of Althusser, semiology and Sartrean existentialism. Lefebvre continued to play a central role in the French reassessment of Marxism through the late 1950's and 1960's with his multi-volume studies of daily life (Critique de la vie quotidienne (1958), Fondement d'une sociologie de la

quotidiennt (1961), La Vie quotidienne dans le monde moderne (1968)). Significantly, he continued to publish leading articles in the PCF's journal. Lefebvre is part of the founding initiative of French Neo-Marxism leading to Bourdieu's Esquisse d'une theorie de la pratique (1972) and others of the "Daily Life" school (later represented by such as de Certeau (La Vie quotidienne, translated as Daily Life (1984)) and Debord (La Socit du spectacle (1972)). His outspoken critique of structuralism through the 1960's earned him a position in the vanguard of the post-structuralism reassessment of language, ideology and communications. His presence at Nanterre in May, 1968 as one of the `grands professeurs' has led to his best remembered associations. Indeed, 1968 was seen as a crucial test of Lefebvre's ideas--the central slogan "au dessous les paves, la plage" ("beneath the pavement, the beach") reeks of Lefebvre's spatial strategies and his critique of the urban milieu in terms of its repression of play and the ludic sphere in favour of rationality and productivity. The failure of the 1968 student revolt accelerated the search for alternative formulations amongst French intellectuals. Lefebvre was bitterly criticized by such as Castells who, only after more than a decade had passed, were later to re-acknowledge their debt to this "grand old man" of the European left (Castells 1983)Lefebvre himself dates his interest in urban life from 1956. His works on urbanism include Le Droit la ville (1968), Du rural l'urbain (1970), Rvolution urbaine (1970), La Pense marxiste et la ville (1972) which predate his major work La Production de l'espace (1974). Lefebvre, pondering on the industrializing landscapes of his childhood Occitaine (Les Temps de mprises 1975 Ch. 9), argues that the production of an appropriate system of spatial attitudes, habits and territorial divisions has been essential to the survival of Capitalism. This development was unanticipated by Marx. Lefebvre thus argues that it is necessary to redirect historical materialism towars a spatial problematic (Soja 1985:108). In practice this evolved as an extension of his series of "approximations" which first centered around the problematic of everyday life and which were later enlarged to encompass the spatialization of social relations in general. This might be summarized as the theses that: (1) social space is the location of the reproduction of relations of production and of "society" with all its appurtenances, in general, and (2) the internal contradictions of capitalism have been managed through the development of a mediating system of spatiality and of modes of occupying geographic space.In volume four of De l'Etat (1978) this is developed as: (3) the production of this capitalist spatialization is accomplished through the activities of the State which oversees what he calls the "statist mode of production". Spatiality is not only a product but also a producer and reproducer of the relations of production and domination, an instrument of both allocative and authoritative power. Class struggle, as well as other social struggles are thus increasingly contained and defined in their spatiality and trapped in its `grid'. Social struggle must then become conciously and politically spatial struggle to regain control over the social production of this "space". (Soja 1985:110 (quotation marks added)) After the first set of works explicitly concerned with urban struggles and the experience of May '68, Production de l'espace forms the keystone of the `second moment' of Lefebvre's analysis of the urban. This may be seen as beginning with his 1972 contribution to the colloquium `The Institutions of the Post-Industrial Society' sponsored by the Museum of Modern Art in New York. Having already defined the essence of "urbanity" -- of the urban -- as being the simultaneity of many discrete social interactions brought together in "a centrality" Lefebvre proceeds to analyse the impact of changing capitalist social relations of production upon the quality of access and participation in the urban. Lefebvre's earlier approaches focussed almost exclusively on this aspect of "urbanity" and are critiqued for their vagueness and anti-structuralist bias by Castells (1977) whose La Question Urbaine is viewed by many as almost exclusively an Althusserian structuralist response to Lefebvre's pre-1972 work (eg. Martins, 1982:166; Gottdiener, 1985). Castells objections, the difficulties Castells' acknowledges with his alternative formulation, and the problem of its inapplicability to Lefebvre's later work are assessed in the author's 1986 thesis (Carleton University, Ottawa).Lefebvre's post-1972 work as reconceptualized in Production de l'espace and restated later in De l'Etat (Vol 4, 1978) moves the analysis of "space" from the old synchronic order of discourses 'on' space (architypically, that of "social space" as found in sociological texts on "territoriality" (Hall, 1969) and social ecology (see Ericksen 1980) to the diachronic discovery of the process by which meta-level discourses 'of' space are socially produced. In the process, Lefebvre attempted to establish the presence of a conceptual and socially practiced system of "space" within the hegemonic "logico-epistemological" theory of space promulgated by philosophy and urban planning. Thus a large portion of the book is devoted to developing a radical phenomenology of space as a

humanistic basis from which to launch a critique of the individual's and community's "rights to space" under capitalism. This phenomenological base, and the sociological critique which is developed from it has made La Production de l'espace especially puzzling for mainstream urban studies scholars raised in the tradition of political economy or ecology. A Note on the Meaning and Translation of "l'espace" "Space", or more properly "l'espace", is used metaphorically and allegorically by Lefebvre. Unfortunately Lefebvre's phrase "the production of space" (used differently by Harvey, 1985; and by Soja, 1980; see also my discussion in Shields 1991 Ch. 1) conveys a multitide of spurious ideas and is the proper-name of a history of misunderstanding dating back to Medieval Scholasticism. The lesson of this history is that "space" is far too loaded a term to be bandied about. An examination of the very different concepts and semantic fields around the various words for "space" in even closely-related Western languages reveals that "space" entails not only a physical level of conceptualization (distance, area etc.) but also social and abstract levels (eg. the notion of "social fields" (widely used in the French literature) or "front and back spaces" (Goffman 1973) for the former level and such terms as "head space" or "discursive space" for the latter). A second problem is one of translation: our "Space" is not "l'espace" is not "Raum". None of these corresponds to what Kant and Leibniz called "spatium" nor do they signify what Descartes refered to "extensio". The semantic fields of these words do not neatly coincide. As the Inuit have twenty different nouns to convey the (very important, in their history) nuances of what we naively lump together as "snow" so, if "space is important" we are in desparate need of a vocabulary for discussing/conceptualizing the varied production/consumption of varied spaces/places/landscapes on their own terms.1 Because Lefebvre is refering to not only the empirical disposition of things in the landscape as "space"; but also attitudes and habitual practices, his metaphoric "l'espace" might be better understood as the "spatialization" of social order. In this movement to space, abstract structures such as "culture" become concrete practices and arrangements in space. This term also captures the processual nature of "l'espace" that Lefebvre insists upon. That is, it is not just an achieved order in the built environment, or an ideology but an order which is itself always undergoing change from within, through the actions and innovations of social agents. This argument is developed further in my Henri Lefebvre, the Question of Space and the Postmodern Hypothesis (MA Thesis Carleton University 1986) and my Places on the Margin. Alternate Geographies of Modernity (London, Routledge 1991) Notes 1. This is especially important if we are to avoid the problems indicated by critiques of discourses of "space" and the "urban". Realists are right to remind us that the word `space' is a "contentless abstraction" (Sayer 1985) which thus varies in meaning and implication between ideologies and between linguistic contexts. But the reality of `space' as in "urban space" is a "concrete abstraction" in Marx's sense (Capital: I--ie. an abstract form which nonetheless has concrete implications, such as the commodity) which cannot be merely dismissed or accepted in a blind empiricism.

References Anderson, P. 1983 In the Tracks of Historical materialism (London: NLB) Castells, M 1977. The Urban Question (London: Edward Arnold). Castells 1983. The City and the Grassroots (Los Angeles: University of California Press). Ericksen, E.G. 1980. The Territorial Experience (Austin Tx.: University of Texas Press). Gottdiener, M. 1985. The Social Production of Urban Space (Austin Texas: University of Texas Press) Hall, E.T. 1969. The Hidden Dimension (Chicago: University of Chicago Press) Harvey, D. 1987. The Limits to Capital (Chicago: University of Chicago Press). Kojve, A. 1945. An Introduction to Reading Hegel R. Queneau ed. (New York: Basic). Poster, M. 1979. Existential Marxism in Postwar France (Princeton Mass.: Princeton University Press) Sayer, A. 1985 `The Difference that Space makes' in D. Gregory and J. Urry 1985 Social Relations and Spatial Structures (London:Macmillan) Soja, E. 1980. `The Socio-Spatial Dialectic' in Annals of the American Association of Geographers 70. 207-22. Soja, E. 1985 `The Spatiality of Social Life: Towards a transformative retheorization' in D. Gregory and J. Urry 1985. Social Relations and Spatial Structures (London: Macmillan) Shields, R. 1986. Henri Lefebvre, the Question of Space and the Postmodern Hypothesis (MA Thesis Carleton University Ottawa) Shields R. 1991. Places on the Margin. Alternate Geographies of Modernity (London: Routledge) Shields R. Forthcoming Henri Lefebvre. A Critical Introduction (London: Routledge)

Preci2 This computer listing reproduces 'An English Prcis of Henri Lefebvre's La Production de l'Espace' University of Sussex, Brighton U.K. Urban and Regional Studies Working Paper 63 (April 1988). Translation copyright Rob Shields 1988. Introduction copyright Rob Shields 1987. Page numbers and section numbers are to the 2nd french edition of La Production de l'Espace 1981 Editions Anthropos Paris. Each chapter begins with a hard-page.

HENRI LEFEBVRE: LA PRODUCTION DE L'ESPACE CONTENTS OF THE BOOK 1. 2. 3. 4. 5. Plan of the Work (Dessein de l'ouvrage pp.7-84) Social Space (L'Espace Social pp.85-196) The Architectonics of Space (L'Architectonique Spatiale pp. 197-264) From Absolute Space to Abstract Space (De l'Espace Absolute l'Espace Abstrait pp.265-336) Contradictory Space (L'Espace Contradictoire pp.337-406)

6. From the Contradictions of Space to a Space of Difference (Des Contradictions de l'Espace l'Espace Diffrentiel pp.407-460) 7. `Departures' and Conclusions (Ouvertures et Conclusions pp.461-485)

HENRI LEFEBVRE: LA PRODUCTION DE L'ESPACE 1. Plan of the Work 1.1-1.13 Lefebvre outlines a number of traditional philosophical approaches to space: -Space as extension, after the influence of Descartes -Early (cosmological) approaches to space: Hegel, Marx, and Nietzche which have been relatively ignored owing to the new situation of multinational, global, capitalism, which poses new theoretical problems. -space-time in mathematics and physics especially after Einstein-metaphoric appropriations of the concept: thus, "mental space", "pictorial space", "literary space" etc. -"sciences" of space especially in urbanism (rational land-use planning) and semiotics. 1.10-1.11 The multiplicity of these uses (and disciplines) of space is an ideological cover for more suspect practices and ideologies of space.What is needed (given the diversity of uses of the concept) is a unitary theory of space which will show the presence, within logico-epistemological "space" (that of the philosophers Kant, Hegel etc.) of the other levels of spatiality--the physical, the mental and (most importantly) the social. This theorization would seek not to abolish the distances and breaks between the above different "levels", but rather the mediations between them, bringing them into a unified framework and allowing the possibility for new syntheses and the overcoming of previously entrenched discipline dichotomies. This will involve the "overcoding" of existing discipline understandings (a translation into spatial terms) rather than a "recoding". A new, unified object of knoweldge will not be produced but rather a "discourse" which allows one to reflect on the objects, divisions, and spatial codes and discourses which exist already.This project has been attempted previously by (1) the surrealists (eg. Magritte challenges the spatial canon of accepted possibility and causality); (2) Bataille's work on a poetics of proxemit; and (3) in the operation of modern technocracies (which subjugate and organize the "space of the state" for orderly production and consumption). All involve the attempt to `unify', symbolically or otherwise, three distinct "levels" of space [26-29--see 2B, below]. The distinct but dialectically related "levels" are reified in unitary ideologies which prevent the comprehension of the true operation of `space' in the daily conduct of state and capitalist power. 1.13Three hypotheses regarding "space": All of the notions and levels of space are social products. Thus all space is social space. This "space" is neither transparent/readable (semiotics, idealism [36] nor is it opaque or natural (materialism, natural science understanding). Nature is the origin of modern "space". Today, in its "abolition" and repression into state parks and nature reserves, the natural is present as a residue or trace (all past spatial forms are retained in succeeding spatial forms). 1.14(Social) Space is socially produced. IIA. Each mode of production has a distinct relationship to space: it produces its own unique type of space (thus immediately raising the question of the relationship between that space and social reproduction). [40] 1.15-1.17 IIB. There is a threefold dialectic of space(s) [42-3]: 1. Spatial Praxis: including the production and reproduction of specific `places', types and heirarchies of "place", and "spatial ensembles" (ie. urban developments/projects-Ed) appropriate to specific social formations. This praxis assures the continuation of a social formation in a cohesive fashion. Such cohesion implies, in connection with social space and the relation of individuals to that space, a certain measure of "spatial competence" and "spatial performance" (performativit) 2. Representations of Space ("Discourses on or about "space"-Ed) are linked to production relations and to the order these impose. Most crucially, these "representations" are central to forms of knowledge which in turn ground the rational/professional power structure of the capitalist state. These structure dominant signs, codings, and "frontal relations" (in Goffman's sense). 3 . Spaces of Representation (Discourses of dominant spatial "systems"-Ed) offer a region of complexly coded, decoded, and/or recoded alternatives offered as symbolic resistance. This is linked to the

I.

clandestine and underground dimension of social life and is particularly expressed in art (which Lefebvre sees as the "code" of "spaces of representation"-Ed). These suggest and prompt alternative, revolutionary, restructurings of institutionalized representations of space and new modes of spatial praxis (Lefebvre suggests squatting; the birth of the tradition of "occupying" key spatial sites and buildings as a means of protest; slums, barrios and favellas as a "re-appropriation" of space from a commodified private property system which favours absentee landlords and vacant tracts of urban land (held for speculation-Ed) III. Third hypothesis or implication: Lefebvre's object of study is the process of the production of space, not space itself. In various historical moments, the above three "levels" will combine in distinct structural hierarchies (eg. did the ancient Orient know of the Western distinction between representations of space and spaces of representation? The ideogram is both at once) [53]. In view of the changing spatial relations in which ideologies function (eg. in some social formations these three dimensions reinforce eachother, in others they are contradictory) it will be necessary to re-evaluate the older conceptions of ideology. 1.18 IV. Fourth hypothesis or implication: Clarifying the relationship between space and modes of production requires new historical periodizations [57]: - Absolute Space, the space of the primitive nomad who survives "in spite of" space/nature. This still exists in fragments of nature (caverns, peaks, rivers). Above this most archaic level occured the emergence of, - Historical or Relative Space [60], a political supersession of Absolute space (through the territorializaion of space under the first despots-Ed). This culminates in the classical Western polis. - Abstract Space coincides with capitalism [60-65]. It involves the repression of the lived, qualitative experience of space by the abstract and dehumanized codes of urban planning and the homogenization of experience under capitalism. - This is at the same time Contradictory Space [65] which is characterized by paradoxes and contradictions, even in the face of the homogenization and unification of space under capital. There are political questions to be asked of the silence of those who use contemporary space and are dominated by it -- their lack of resistance, or, on the other hand, their symbolic and distorted forms of resistance. For example, rational capitalism produces rationalized "spaces of production" under the aegis of the nation-state, but the repression of desire this involves leads the the production of "spaces of leisure" (free zones of escape, denial, resistance through folly and unproductiveness). However, this is also the space of festival and a potential space of the carnivalesque (the unleashing of libidinal intensities and energies) and thus revolt against the normative order of planned, rational/homogenous, space. Hypothesis: there is thus a region of political praxis which requires the elaboration of a whole spatial dimension of theory and practice [65]. 1.19The idea of "production of space" can be linked to a more concrete analysis of the history of European class struggles and oppression. 1.20A "new society" will require its own "new" (social) space. "To change one's life, change society" must be amended to include space. This is the "strategic hypothesis" of the book. [72-78] 1.21Importance of a dialectical method of analysis of society and space

2. Social Space 2.1 The "Production" of Space: The concept of "production" as it emerges from Hegel and from Marx and Engels-for whom it was the concrete universal--must be enlarged from its narrow, industrial, sense (the production of products, commodities, exchange values) to include all types of productions: The production of nature; production as solely an economic idea; production of built environments etc. The difference between "works" and "products". Works ("Oeuvres") are valued in terms of their use value. Such "oeuvres" can be thought of as works which approach, asymptotically, the productions of nature itself. Classical cities were oeuvres [83ff]. eg. Venice, 13th century Tuscany. The capitalist order (speculative real estate) converts these "oeuvres" into products...in the case of urban oeuvres, turning their monumental and festive aspects into museums of dead historical styles (eg. Venice, Florence [89-96]. Marx demonstrates that produced objects embody an "inner truth" of social relations and forms. Similarly we should demonstrate the "inner truth" of these `spaces'. 2.2 Thus it is possible to conceive of a "spatial problematic". This would not abolish more traditional problematics (eg. class struggle etc.) but transcodes them; it includes urban and daily life under the more general problem of the reproduction of the relations of production. It is a totalizing problematic, which repudiates the "positivist" division of labour of the social science disciplines [97ff]. It requires the demolition of pre-existing ideologies of space and is realizeable only in the light of the political project to produce a radically new type of social space. This would thus involve an ideological critique of space understood in terms of a diachronic analysis of the production of space (as a concept, as a reality) as against the old discourses which focus on particular (limited conceptions of) spaces. Such a discourse analysis would demonstrate a reality of space as part of primary nature, part social relations and part of the forces and means of production. Examples of regional development patterns in France [97-102]. 2.3 Social space is a multiplicity of social spaces which interpenetrate. The unraveling of the relations between these spaces and their forces is the object of this analysis. 2.4 How and in what sense is a critique of space possible? An examination of the relations between the three `dimensions' or `levels' of the three-part dialectic reveals a logic of space which governs a wide range of normative and discursive processes. In particular, there are the marked effects of the increasing primacy of the visual in modern times [112-114] Together with this, one must include a consideration of the loss of a sense of temporality [114-115]. Time is more fundamental than space in the sense of being the "raw material" of daily life. "But, Time is disappearing in the social space of modernity." [114] "It is the time of living, time as an irreducible `good' which eludes the logic of visualisation and of spatialisation, as far as it has a logic. Raised to ontological dignity by philosophers, time is killed by society." [115] This is due to the modern normative trinity: "readibility, visibility and intelligibility". Which involves the fragmentation of space as in the photographic image. The fragmentation of space into "lots" presupposes this logic of visualization which replaces reality with fragments of itself (as in images). The second logic is that of an incessant metaphorisation [see 118] --likewise, persons become merely bodies or numbers (analogons). Space has both the attributes of a subject and of an object: A facade exposes certain acts, and relegates others to the realm of the obscene by hiding them. This in turn suggests a psychoanalysis of space. 2.5 So, what is the equivalent of Marx's analysis of the "inner truth" of the commodity form for space? Why not treat space after the model of Capital? -- to look for the essential beneath the reality. This "essential" will not be a substance but a form -- a concrete abstraction [120]. A political economy of space is possible which would reconsider the old object of political economy, broadening the notion of production to include that of the production of space [124]. This would focus on how the current political economy of space runs the risk of coinciding with the appearance of space as simply the global milieu of a definitive installation of capitalism. What is implied is the well developed distinction between thought and discourse within a space, and thought and discourses on space which are nothing but words and signs and the thinking of space, which departs from the better known and less sophisticated distinction above. This distinction in turn supposes a critical examination of materials (words, images, symbols) as

well as of materiel: the processes of assemblage, the method by which such materials are cut up and presented within the frameworks of the divisions of scientific work [125]. The distinction between materials and materiel permits us to discern the effemeral and the durable: that which in any given scientific operation is not used up or exhausted but which can be used again, adapted, or transferred for application on other tasks. Materiel falls into disuse and becomes obsolete. Such a re-examination also allows us to examine various philosophies of space, which are often ideological. But this is not all: the primary task is to consider how such philosophical ideologies of space intervene in the form of strategies in space (eg. "to attempt to produce a global space, theirs, and to give this the status of an absolute, bringing a logic and not least the renewal of the concept of space") [126]. 2.6 "To reduce, is one scientific procedure, faced with the complexity and the chaos of immediate observations.... Reductionism is introduced under the colours of science." [126] It is an "ideology which does not give its name." [128]. To this corresponds the political practice of the State which wishes to be and makes itself that which reduces (cf. combustion) contradictions into itself through the "mediation of knowledge, by strategically using a mixture of science and ideology." [127] Specialization follows from such "reductionality", "and each specialist doesn't just want knowledge. With respect to the constitutive reduction of his domain, he adopts an attitude which justifies it, that of denial ... doesn't every specialized science have an involvement, immediate or mediated, with space?(a) Each specialty, one already knows, attributes to itself its own mental and social space, in defining itself with a certain arbitrariness, in cutting itself away from the totality of "nature-society" ("nature-socit")" ... (b) All specialties enclose themselves in the nomenclature and classification of that which it finds in space ... the "positive" activity of each and every specialty. For better or worse, each specialty opccupies itself with pronouncements (utterances) on space ... (c) The specialties oppose a boiled down model of knowledge to the global thought of (social) space. This also has the advantage of liquidating time (which is reduced to a simple "variable") [128-9]. For this reason the specialties are opposed to an overarching contemplation of the production of space ..." (a dialogue with possible objections they would raise follows, [see 129-30]) Conclusion: "Spatial form" (in the sense of the "commodity form") equals the relationship between centres and peripheries. For example, the architypical urban form is one of `simultaneity': of the meeting, the assembly (no separation of centre and periphery). 2.7 "All social space is the result of a process with multiple aspects and movements: signifying and non-signifying, perceived and acted (lived), practical and theoretical. In short, all social space has a history, departing from this initial base: nature, the original given (datum) and the originary since always endowed in the form of particular sites, climates, settings etc. The relation of one space to the sense of time/historical times which engendered it differs, as long as one is expressly exposing the history of space as such, from the representations admitted by historians ... whose analysis framents and chops it up. ...in the history of space as such, the historical, the diachronic, the generating past incessantly inscribes itself in the spatial, as if on a painting ... [One imagines time and space through the systems of measurement which follow from the body]. The relation of the body to (the) space ... the space, the manner of measuring it and speaking of it presents to members of the society an image and a living mirror of their bodies ... the adoption of the gods of another people brings along with it the adoption of their space and their measure. The Pantheon implies that Rome was the moment of the mastery and transcendance of those vanquished gods and the [respective] subordinated spaces which were then implicated in and bound up with a master-space, that of the Empire and the world ... The status of space and its measurement has not changed except with an extreme slowness, since this change is far from being complete. Even in France, land of the "metric system", curious measurments are still applied by habit, for the size of shoes.* In the figure of the decimal system, a slow revolution is underway ... The fluctuations of measurement and by consequence the fluctuation of representations of space accompany history ... conferring on it a certain sense or logic: the tendency to the quantitative, to the homogenous, and to the disappearance of bodies which seek refuge in art." [130-2]* A pun on the accepted French way of talking of shoe sizesin terms of "toe-tips" ("pointures" des chausures). 2.8 To approach the history of space in a more concrete fashion, one can examine the nation and nationalism. A history of space must be dialectical, focussing on the production process (of space) not on spatial objects or products as static entities. The history of space coincides neither with an inventory of subjects in space (which one could call

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the material culture or civilization), nor with the representation and discourses on space. It should take into account spaces of representation and representations of space, but above all, the links between the two as well as with social practice. "The history of space does not have to choose between "processes" and "structures", between change and invariance, between events and institutions, etc ... 2.8 Key distinctions between raw material (matriau) and technique (matriel) in production must be acknowledged (see literature survey [130-141]. An example of this dialectical perspective, would be the observation that Absolute space persists in the shape of Bachelardian forms [143-144] -- the archaic within the instrumentalized. All of the older orders of space are still present, surcharged and repressed within even the most contemporary (banal) forms of space. Modernism and space: architecture and art. The Bauhaus as a privileged moment in the production of a pure, contemporary, abstract space [146-151]. 2.9, 2.10 & 2.11 Structuralist analysis applied as a methodology for spatial analysis [154-175]: Two doctrines emerge. Hermeneutics which sees sign systems as transparent (everything reduced to a readable text) and the "hermeneutics of suspicion" (Foucault, Derrida) which sees language as reification and repression (in the tradition of Neitzche) punctured by fitful eruptions of the forces of desire which burst through the frozen objectification of language. The relationship between space, as a discursive entity, and language. Neitzche's theory of tropes applied as a description of way in which concrete space is made abstract by way of language. The "truth" of such a "linguistic" analysis of space lies in its revelation of the process of production and objectification. 2.12The metholodogical problems of "reading space" [167ff]. Many representations which "occlude" the understanding of space come from semiology, notably the thesis according to which social space results in a simple marking on or imprinting of natural space, leaving "traces". Semiology presupposes that such `marking' has a sense -- it must be significant and be brought into a system of encoding and decoding. This view oversimplifies human social spatial relations to the level of animals marking territory with scents [165] rather than abstractly through symbolism. Such symbols always imply a certain affective investment, "an emotive charge ... deposited, so to speak in a place ("lieu") and representing it for those who are away from that (now) priviledged place. In agro-pastoral times, the symbolism of a place and the spatial practice were inseparable." [166] When there is only this simple, physical symbolism can one speak of a production of space? "Not yet, although (their) bodies, mobile and active, in this way `spread out' (tendre) their spatial perception and occupations, as a spider its net. If there is production, and as far as there is production, it is for a long time limited merely to markings, signs and symbols; they do not change the materiality of that which they receive. Mother-Earth (La Terre-Mre), cradle (birth-place), field of sexual labour, grave, remains Earth.... This activity characterizes nothing but the beginnings of organized society...neither do the cairns and natural indices of primitive hunters and fishermen suffice. During these periods, the natural spaces are simply settings. Social activity modifies them little." "This simple, binary, representation of space engenders the reverse and complementary representation: "fabricated" space results only in the denaturalization or denaturation of natural space. By which interventions? Those, evidently, of science and technology, thus of abstraction." But this representation of space merely attempts to conjure, "snaps its fingers at" the diversity of social spaces, their historical geneses, and brings them together through a reduction to have a common character, that of abstraction. [166-7] "Semiology introduces the idea that space dissimulates a reading (relve d'un lectury) and by consequence a practice: reading-inscribing. As for space in the city, it consists of a discourse, a language (Barthes). "Reading space? Yes and no. Yes: the "reader" deciphers, decodes. The speaker, who expresses himself, translates his surroundings into a discourse. And however no. Social space is not only a blank page on which people (but whom?) have written their message. The space of nature and urban space are surcharged. All is muddle and blurriness (Tout y est brouillon et brouill). Signs? More like orders (Des signes? Pluto des consignes), multiple, interfering prescriptions. If there is a text, trace, writing, it is in the context of conventions, of intentions, orderings, in the sense of the disorder and of the order of society. Is

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space `signifying'? Certainly. What? That which one must do and that which one cannot do. Echoes of power (Ce qui renvoie au pouvoir). But the message of power has always been made into a muddle, voluntarily. It conceals itself. Space doesn't say everything. Above all, it speaks of the forbidden (Il dit surtout l'interdit (l'inter-dit).) Its mode of existence, its practical "realtiy" (including its form) differs radically from the reality of a written object, a book. Result and logic, product and producing, it is also a stake (enjeu), a place or site (lieu) of projects and of actions put into play by these actions (strategies) object therefore of bets on times to come, wagers which which are apparently clear to their bettors, but never completely." [167] "A space ordinates because it implies an order, thus a disorder.... This "space" is produced before being read (and has not been produced to be read or comprehended but to be lived by people having a body and a life, in their ... context. In other words, the reading comes after the production, except in the spacial case where the space has been produced to be read. What poses a question, is the criteria of readability ... it seams clear that space engendered (produced) to be read must be the most like a cheat, the most truculent of spaces. The graphic effect of readibility hides intentions and strategic actions (especially as it appears in space -- as monumentality). This is nothing but an optical illusion. Monumentality always `imposes' readible evidence; it says just what it wants to say, but it hides much more. Political, military, at the extreme facist, the monument screens the will to power and the abitrariness of force beneath the signs and surfaces which pretend to explain the collective will and thought. And it hides at the same time the present and the possible." [168] Vitruvius. Venturi begins to see space as a field of forces, full of tensions, of distortions but it is not clear (in 1972) whether he will continue on this path to leave functionalism, behind or whether he is only making formalistic adjustments to theory [170]. Opacity, trompe-l'oeil, historicism and pastiche in architecture. [170-172] 2.13Form structure and function of space. Kristeva [175]. Example of the Latin American city with its Plaza Mayor as a spatial strategy which organizes and implies productive labour for its colonial inhabitants. Three levels of Japanese space. [179-184] 2.14Even for abstract space, a semiotic analysis tends to simply replicate the categories of the producers and ideologues of such a space: to isolate structure from form and function over-privileges one dimension of space (the cognitive representation of space (le conu)) over the other two (perception (le peru) and practice (le vecu)). Codes and deciphering. Reading space. Relation between the signifier (space, spatial formes etc.) and its signified (the message or meaning). Conventions: how is it that we can `understand' at at least at a basic level, the Piaza San Marco in Venice even as a foreigner. The possibility of multiple readings. Semantic space; material space. 2.15A more significant (dialectical) distinction than the various semiotic theories have to offer is to be found in the differentiation of dominated and appropriated space. The former is the site of hegemonic forces (suburbia), the latter is the site of emergent spatial revolution on the other (eg. Latin American favellas, squatters settlements). This last must be differentiated from the dtournement ("hijacking") of space in which hegemonic space is seized and refunctioned locally and momentarily as opposed to the fresh production of new space (ie. new categories of space) through its wholesale reappropriation. Historical analysis of "appropriation", "domination" etc. of space [185-196]. Appropriation vs. dtournement (eg. of Les Halles). Dtournement as only a provisional strategy. What is required is the production of new types of humane space.

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preci3 3. The Architectonics of Space 3.1 Debates of the classical scholars over the status of space. Relative or Absolute? "At the extreme point of the formal abstraction which classical metaphysics established in the form of ontology by speculative decree, the question of space "in itself" was substantially posed. Spinoza, from the beginnings of his Ethics considered absolute space to be one attribute or mode of absolute being, God. ...Is it the unkowable? No, it is the indiscernable (Leibniz)." [197] Today, mathematics has sided definitively with the Leibnizian view, against Spinoza, Descartes, Newton and even Kant. "Space, in se...is not `nothing' and neither is it some thing...even less is it the totality of things or the form of their sum; it is the indiscernable. To see any "thing" (in space) it is necessary to introduce axes and an origin, right and left, which is to say a direction to axes, an orientation... Leibniz wanted to say that one must occupy space ... A body. Not just the body in general, corporeality, but a definite body, which indicates the direction of a gesture, a rotation in it's turns, which marks off and orientates space. For Leibniz space was absolutely relative, which is to say endowed with a perfect abstraction which makes it, for mathematical thought, the originary (passing easily for transcendence) of a concrete character (in it bodies exist and manifest their material existence)." [197-8] Space is not pre-existing, empty, endowed only with formal properties. The debate between the relative and absolute positions is equivalent only to the rejection of alternative representations -- discourses on space. "Space" is not a container with bodies as "things in space." This is the origin of the strategy of separation and fragmentation of the body -- a space in itself -- from the space it is in. If one accepts this absolute view, it follows that any body can be placed in any location. The two become indifferent to each other; we should grasp the organism or object as a centre for the "production of space" around itself (cf. the mathematics of Herman Weyl or the sculpture of the Cubists). [199] In this view, space is not external to the body but generated by it. "the laws of that space, that is to say its `discernible'-ness, are those of the living body and the deployment of its energies." [200] The Body is the concrete transcendence of the subject-object split, being both subject and object-in-space. The relation of the body and space is expressed as symmetry, mirage, reflection and rotation. These are the properties of the body/space, not imposed categories as philosophers have thought (cf. H. Weyl, Symtries et mathmatique moderne Princeton, 2nd. ed.) "Here is thus a route from the abstract to the concrete, which has major importance in demonstrating their reciprocal inherence. This `route' links also the mental and the social. The concept `The Production of Space' takes on a much greater force. With several reservations and precautions this concept can be extended to social space. "If there was a specific social space, produced by forces deployed in sociospatial practices it would include similar properties -- dualities, symmetries -- which mustn't be mistaken to be derived from either the human spirit, nor from some trancendental spirit, but from the "occupation" of space, itself, an occupation which it would be adviseable to understand ... in the order and succession of the productive operations. And then what happens to the ancient notion of Nature? It is transformed." [200] There are two possible routes to an explanation of the "automorphology" or "biomorphology" of nature by which, for example a rose comes to exhibit its symmetry. (1) It is an exhibition of some sort of finality, evidence of a metaphysical draughtsman. (2) Space, as such, must be considered materialistically: The nature-space relation doesn't imply the mediation of some external power, nor are their "falsely-clear resolutions on the model of an "inside-outside representation of space." [201] Marx asks `does a spider do work?' Could one think of the space of a spider in the manner of an abstract space occupied by separate objects? No. This would be to attribute to the spider an analytical-intellectual space. If it is `instinct' could one say that the spider weaves a web as an extension of its body? The production of space, firstly, that of the body itself, continues until the secretions have produced a `habitation' which serves, at the same time as an instrument ... The spider marks out directions, orients itself after angles, establishing symmetries and dis-symmetries and by this practice extends itself in space. For the living body, the fundamental sites...[the "signature"] of space, are immediately qualified by the body itself. It is also always "other", `in front' of the ego, even while still `inside' a given space. From this

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datum of simple presence, the determination of space has three aspects: the gesture, the mark (excretions, footprints) and the trace (the intentional marking out of space). While the trace comes late, early on in evolution animals mark out territory and places. "In the beginning was the place, Topos. Yes, long before the Word, Logos."[203] Lived space (espace vcu) has its own rationality internal to the body long before space perceived by and for the `I' presents itself as a rupture. Before this analytic separation, long before knowledge, there was this `intelligence of the body'. Time is traced out in space. Necessarily, it is local. Space and time appear in their natural manifestations (the growth rings of a tree) as different yet inseparable. In this manner one begins to glimpse the duality which is constitutive of the uniity of the living, material, being. Its `other' it carries within itself. This doubles its symmetry: a bilateral symmetry, one of rotation. Around the living being is the so-called `personal space', and within an interior space. The fundamental division of the skin, provides the model for the division of social space. However, in societies, such insider-outsider separations and barriers become absolute and impermiable ... a "closed frontier". [205] Yet the model is still valid: all space-envelopes distinguish, in a relative fashion, an inside and an outside. 3.2 The living organism is a framework which captures the surrounding energies of the environment, gathering excesses to harness them to its own ends, productively modifying or engendering a space/area. The princples of economy are insufficient to describe biological process which depends on gathering surpluses. The alternative principle of necessity makes virtue of struggle etc. Hypothesis of excess from Spinoza via Schiller and Goethe through Marx to Nietzsche: Dyonisian aspect of existence. Freud returns to economic mecanicism: Eros-Thanatos; Pleasure principle-Reality principle = loss of dialectical view. The "Nietzchian distinction between the Apollonian and the Dionisiac retains the two aspects of the living being and its relations with space and vice versa: violence and stability, excess but equilibrium" [207]. Living beings cannot be reduced to the capture of energies and their economical employment. Priorities, enemies, and environment constitute its space or which it is a part (an element) receiving information. Bataille, W. Reich. Fine versus massive Energies. flux and currents. energy and environment as space. To expend energy productively is central to the notion of a "living body" and central to its relations with itself and the space it is in. v game is a `work' ("oeuvre"), a ludic space is a product of an act6vity which regularizes space (assigns rules). Productive energies as relation with self take the form of reproduction, itself characterized by repetitions, acts reflexes. Excessive energy as normal energy, has a double relation with itself (the body which stores it up) and with the "milieu", with space. In the life of every being (species, individual, group) there are moments when the available energy abounds, tends to explode. It can return against itself or be expended in gratuity or grace. Negative effects are not rare, and are associated with excesses of energy. As a consequence, the famous "death instinct" has nothing but a derivative existence which is misinterpreted by Freud in his symptomatic studies, appearing as narcissism, sadomasochism, anxiety etc. "There is a radical difference between the conception of an instinct or desire for death, a "vanishing" power (neantisant) opposing itself to a an affirmation of life [which is] always foiled -- and the thesis of the return of repressed vital energy, after a necessary excess as such. Even if it is necessary to conceive in space of the "negative" of energy, that in which it [energy] expends itself, diffuses, degrades ... death and the self-destruction are effects not causes and reasons. The "death wish" doesn't define itself except as improductive usage, the `misuse' of fundamental energy. It results, dialectically in a conflictual relation internal to this energy, a repletion which can't be reduced to simple mecanisms of defence, equilibrium and their balance." [210] 3.3 "Above, space has been taken partes extra partes after Spinoza ... Even the concept of form and reflection or duplication on the interior of the form the constituents as such, otherwise called the concept of symmetry with its constitutive dualities (symmetry of reection and of rotation) implies a circumscribed space: a body with contours and frontiers. On all evidence these partitions and repartitions of energies do not sufce: the uxes circulate, and are propagated in an innite space." [210] "The innite and the nite would they not be the illusion, the one and the other, the one of the

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other? the effects of a mirage? reections or refractions, the within and the with-out of each part? Time in se [finitude] is an absurdity; the same of space [infinitude] in itself. The relative and the absolute relfect the one on the other: endlessly referring the one to the other, like space and time (envoient sans cess l'un l'autre, comme l'espace et le temps). [They are] a double surface, and double appearances, which have one law and reality, that of reflection and refraction. Maximal difference [See Ch.6] is present in each movement or moment of difference, even if minimal." [211] 3.4 However, in engendering the surface, the image and the mirror-image, the reflection crosses the surface toward the depths of the relation pepetition-difference. The duplication (symmetry) repeats and however produces a difference, constitutive of a space. Duplication and symmetry-dissymmetry introduce notions of causality irreducible to classical notions of linear and serial causality. [212] The double existence of space in social life: members situate themselves in space as objective entities at the centre of their experience ie. subjects [212]. Social status implies a role and a function: "an individual and a personality. Moreover, a site, a place, a post. At the same time space is a mediator (intermediary); a each level, on each contour which is aimed at some other thing. This tends to establish social space as transparence occupied only by influences and "presences". kZ one level opacities: bodies and and objects; on the other levels transparent ensembles of objects. Without these two aspects of space language itself becomes incomprehensible ... [213] 3.5 The mirror reveals the intersection between body and conscious of being a body, allowing us to `reflect' on our being as bodies, as unities in the sense of subjects because it transofrms that which one is into its sign. The unproductive surface of the mirror signifies "me". It offers the most unifying relationship with the ego in search of itself but also is the one in which the form and content is the most dissociated. [216] However, those psychoanalysts who see in all private property a sort of "mirror effect" under the pretext that the possession of an object by the "Ego" refers or points back to itself, overstep the reasonable limits of this argument. "The mirror is thus an object amongst other objects but different from all other objects: evanescent and fascinating. In it and through it reassemble the traits of other objects with respect to their spatial milieu: object in space, informing on space, speaking of space ... In natural and social life, the mirror introduces a truly double spatiality: imaginary as origin and separation, concrete and practical in as much as coexistence and difference." Thought is often defined using the metaphor of a mirror. Even before its actual manufacture, the mirror existed magically, mithically. Thus the surface of water symbolises the surface of consciousness and the material decoding which brings the obscure to the light." In the orientation adopted here it is necesary to establish and develp certain general relations usually considered as psychic as material (with a double substance as the body subject and the mirror-object); but at the same time as one case of a relation more "profound" and more general which reappears in repetition and differentiation: Symmetry: duplication, reflection, dissymetries.-Mirage and its effects: reflections, surface-depth relations.-Language: [mental] "reflection", oppositions, refraction through discourse.Consciousness of oneself and others, of the body and of abstraction, of alterity and alteration (alienation)Space with its dual determinations: fictional-real, product and productive, materiel (equipment)-social; immediate-mediated (milieu and transition), connextion-separation etc. [217] A similar set of factors and characteristics appears when sex is considered. Theory of doubles. Space and consciousness Lacan's "mirror-stage" seen as a dialectical enrichment of this original production. 3.6 "To bring out the bases and the fundamentals upon which are erected, in the course of a genetic process, the spaces of diverse societies. is nothing but the beginning of an exploration of this, apparently translucent, `reality'. [218-9] The effects of mirage (see above) become extraordinary. "The power of a landscape doesn't come from what it offers by way of spectacle but by way of that which it presents as a mirror or mirage to each person ... This arouses the touristic illusion, that of participation in a work (eg. a city like Venice) and of comprehension because one passes through a country and landscape, because one receives passively an image. It also causes one to forget the concreteness of the work, the products which are generated by the activity which produces it." [219]

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"These mirage effects are far-reaching. In modernity, the more that absolute political space asserts itself, the more its transparency becomes deceptive, the more the illusion of a `New Life' is reinforced." [219] This promise is neither true nor false. That the conditions for this new life" are coming into being is truth: "that the indication and that which is in proximity coincide, that the immediately possible separates itself out from the far-off and the impossible, this is the error. The space which contains the conditions coincides with those which both hinder and those which permit. Its transparence is deceptives; it is in need of elucidation, even though it appears to abolish this need. Total revolution (material, economic, social, poticial, psychic, cultural, erotic etc.) seems close, immanent to the present In truth, to change the world, one must change space. The absolute revolution? It is our image and our mirage, seen only in the mirror of absolute (political) space." [219-220] 3.7 Social space emerges out of the measurements and paths of tribal practice, frontiers, liminal zones, and temporary habitations, all of which project a "representation `space' into the cosmos" [220ff]. The body (human body, agent etc.) must also therefore be analysed as a `social body'. Frontiers: cosmological; personal; social; geographical etc. [223-224]. "Social space is not socialized space (this implicit thesis mars the work of G. Mator L'espace humain (Paris: La Colomb) which is however one of the best works concerning the semantics of space and spatial metaphors)" [220]. The idea that a socialization of what pre-existed society took place reveals an ideology and a "reactive" mirage-effect. To believe, for example, that natural space, described by geography, socializes itself destines the ideologue to soon ... regret the passing of this natural space and to soon say that this type of space has no importance because it has disappeared. Social change comes about as a result of pre-existing social practices. The Natural, the original point zero is impossible to determine and the notion of pure, empty "natural" space which is later filled by social life and modified by its practices is part of this impossible search. Vacant space, empty of mental and social life permitting the socialization of the non-social is one representation of space." [220] Actual historical space, is socializing (through a multiplicity of networks) rather than socialized. The work space is not an empty container occupied by the entity work. Work space consisting of great worksites (factories, offices etc.) and their linking networks results from the repetitive gestures and actions of productive labour as well as the division of labour (technical and social) and by consequence markets (local, national, global) and finally property relations. Work space doesn't take on contours and frontiers except abstractly as one spatial network amongst others which interpenetrate. Its existence is thus relative. [221] Space is always a duality: field of action (site) and support for action (systems of sites which facilitate energy flows and resulting actions). It is at one and the same time quantitative (with dimensions eg. distance) and qualitative (where distance is also measured in terms of fatigue); it is the `union' of materials (objects, things) and the ensemble of materiel (tools, equipment). Space thus appears as an objectivity but doesn't exist socially except for activity (movement, transportation, action etc.) [222] "On the one hand homogeneous directions are offered, but on the other, certain directions are valorized. The same goes for angles and rotations (left--sinister, right--rectitude). On the one hand space is homogenous, open to reasonned action, but on the other, for individuals and groups, it is full of interdictions, occult qualities, the favourable and unfavourable." [222] Social spaces are not defined through a reduction to this duality which furnishes the materials for very different realizations in different spaces. In geographical, natural space, paths appear as simple linear traces. These routes and paths grow and establish places (privileged sites) and boundaries. Through these "pores", which accentuate local particularities in the process of making use of these (eg. a ford across a river) flow more and more dense human movements. These spatio-temporal activities and determinations corresp6nd to an anthropological level of social reality defined by marking off areas and boundaries and orientation. This spatial mode is dominant in archaic agro-pastoral societies. Man never ceases to mark off space, to leave traces which are at once symbolic and practical. He is indispensible to this space with plots changing directions, rotations, which come about in relation to his body considered as a centre; and in relation to other bodies (even celestial ones ie.

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cosmology). [223] The network of paths and routes constitutes a space which is as concrete as that of the body and which extends it. Features of the terrain become associated either with memories or possible actions. This qualified space which is symbolic and practical is filled with myths and tales which support it and it them. Networks and frontiers constitute a concrete space closer to a spider's web than a geometric space where symbolism and practice cannot be separated. The relations between frontiers have a great importance along with the relations between boundaries and named places (eg. for the shepherd, the brook, the favourable pastures etc.). This network of relations are superimposed upon the network of known sites. (a) accessible spaces of everyday use with the rules and modalities of this practice. (b) frontiers and forbidden zones, spaces relatively closed (friendly neighbours) or totally closed (neighbouring enemies)(c) residences, either sedentary or mobile(d) connecting points (sutures), often the sites of passage and meetings, sites of exchange which may be often forbidden except in the course of specific rites including declarations of peace and war). Frontiers, being such points, are thus also the points of friction depending on the situation (nomads versus sedentary groups separated by natural obstacles etc.) [224] Social space has a three dimensional character: mountains and heights, celestial beings; grottos, caverns and hidden place; and plains and water surfaces which unite these two are elaborated in a representation of the Cosmos. These are further developed in myths of the Earth-Mother and World. This qualified space is evaluated in time, in poorly defined measures (the step, fatigue etc.) and via the body (the foot, one armspan etc.). Here, rather than seeing himself as a point amongst others in an absract milieu (as we do in our abstract space of plans and maps) the "primitive" situates himself with relation to a central social object: a hut, staff, and later religious site or temple. 3.8 The historical sensorium of this social body [227-234]; (Hegel's transhistorical `Geist') offers `precious' indications of the type of social space which it produces and lives. Sound and space [231]. "At both the starting and ending points, we find the body...but which body? The body of both the peasant's ox coupled to the plow and the cavallier's horse serve as a medium, a means and instrument, between the man and his space. The difference between these two body-mediums (the ox and horse) implies an analogous difference in the spaces, which is to say that the wheat field is a world apart from the battlefield." [225] Which definition of the body and which body then are we talking about? That which carries the intellectus (Platos) or the habitus (Saint Thomas)? The glorious or grotesque body? (Rabelais, Bakhtin) The Cartesian body-object or the body-subject of phenomenology and existentialism? And what of the fragmented body, represented by images and words? Should one start from the discourse on the body? But how can one set such limits if one starts from such an abstracted body? And what of the "social-body"--a murdered body, shattered by the overwhelming practice of the division of labour? The question is how to critique space if one accepts the body in this already "social" space, mutilated by it? How can one define the body itself without bringing in ideologies?" In the preceeding sections, the body has been treated only as the "spatial-body", which is neither subject nor object, just the product and producer of a space, linked intimately through various determinations: symmetries, the interaction and reciprocity of actions, axes and places, centres and peripheries, and concrete spatio-temporal oppositions. The materiality of this "spatial-body" comes from its spatiality and the energy which it deploys and employs, not from the reunion of particles and parcels in a framework nor is its materiality attributed to some nature which is indifferent to space. As far as it is a matter of a "machine" it is a double one--"sloughing off" massive energies (metabolism, muscles, ultimately the sex drive) on the one hand and on the other by fine energies (the information of the senses, knowledge). Such a dialectization concretizes the abstract Cartesian concept of machine situated in a what is itself a representation of space elaborated abstractly [226] "The inherent conflicts in the spatio-temporal reality of the body (which is neither a substance, entity, mecanism, flux nor closed system) cumulates with the conflicts between knowledge and action, between

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the brain and sex, and between desires and needs in the human being," [226] which is a dialectical totality. "The ogranism has no understanding nor existence except when taken with its spatial extensions, the space with which it is in contact and which it produces." [227] Does the history of the body have any relation to the history of space? Smell, taste and sound. The separation of the senses in social practice such that smells are isolated from the other corresponding sensations with which they occur (eg. an acrid smell, heat and sizzling). Hence the emergence of `cuisine' as an "art" which re-assembles these senses. [228-230] "The spatial body, becoming social, isn't introduced into a pre-existing world, it produces and reproduces it. This body carries in it properties and spatial determinations. In the realm of the practico-sensible, the perception of right and left is projected and marked on the environment." [230] Space is produced with this lateral symmetry. "The perceptions of the two ears do not coincide. This difference alerts the infant and gives the density, physical volume of the space within which it finds itself. Audition thus mediates between the spatial body and the localization of external bodies ... Completely homogeneous space, perfectly simultaneous, falls into indiscernability" [231] In the homogeneous modern space of architecture and urbanism, this indiscernability occurs because the markers of localization and lateralization are obliterated, being added later for decoration only. The result is a physical malaise felt by the body which must work to re-orientate itself and re-territorialize the space. This Cartesian space "is unfortunately also that of the white page, that of the floor plan, elevations and sections ... [which] substitutes a verbal, semantic and semiologic space which only aggravates the problem. A narrow and withered rationality omits the depth and profoundness of space, of the total body ... It forgets that space doesn't consist of the projection of an intellectual representation ... but that it is first of all heard and acted ..." [231-2] Thus the brain which is assimilated to a message-receiving machine in information theory (placing in parenthesis its role and relation as an organ) should be considered as part of a total, interacting, body which constitutes spaces in which there are messages and codes in the first place. Only then can we understand the continual resurfacing and return of the repressed features of space (eg. the subterranean, the labyrinthine, the uterine) which mark out the contours of the Ego's relation to space via the medium of (and as) the body. This is why "The history of the body in the final phase of the West is that of its revolts" (Octavio Paz, Conjunctions et Disjunctions p.132) [232]. The carnal body revolts, but it is not a question of a return to origins, to the archaic, but of the actual, omitted but true, dimensions of "our" body which have been forbidden from manifesting themselves in the social-space of the modern world. This elementary revolution is not only a question of demanding a theoretical critique but of a "turning the world upside down" (cf. Marx) an inversion of sense, a subversion which amounts to a "breaking of the tables of the Law" (cf. Neitzsche). [233] The unconscious is an interstice, space, at the intersection of the ego and the body. That which could not be accommodated during either the long formations and deformations of childhood. Language, signs, slip through this interstice which permits and, indeed, encourages, the sliding of meaning between the level of carnal life and abstract reasoning--metaphorization. This operation introduces a strange movement of "disincarnation" (verbal) and "reincarnation" (real), of chaining and unlinking [of meanings and signs], of spatialization in an abstract expanse (tendu) and localization in a specific area (tendu). This is the mixed space (still natural, already produced) of the first years of life, and later of poetry, art -- the "space of representations". [234] 3.9 The body becomes occulted in linear analytical reasoning which evacuates difference because it unites the both the linear and the cyclical (eg. the cycles of time and needs and the linearity of gestures, or the market, of the manipulation of things). The body retains the inventive force of difference even in the midst of repetitive activities. It is suggested that the fragmentation of the body, the poor rapport of the Ego and its body is due to the abstract naming of the body in language which dissociates various parts and reassigns them in a space of representation where they are subsequently seen as pathological. But this exonnerates the Judeo-Christian tradition which misunderstands the body as evil and the Taylorism of the capitalist division of labour which is even pushed to the point of dividing workers from their bodies, reducing the unity of the body to specfied and timed gestures. [236]

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The relation of the body and space reflects the relation of consciousness and the body. The total body situates itself and fragments itself in the process of practical functions, which includes discourse, but which can not be reduced to it alone. This obscures the problems of the abstract, fragmented, relation to space by which consciousness, body and space are separated in the name of productivity. [236] 3.10This analysis can and must be completed by a `rhythm analysis' in which time is grasped in its spatial form as consecutive movements. [237] 3.11 The data of the unconscious is also to be considered in terms of the spatial articulation between objects and desire (dsire--Hegel's `lack' inherited into French thought via Koyr-Ed [237ff]). 3.12Finally, spatial practice is, on this level, most concretely articulated in the various historical and cultural systems of "gestalt". All of these analyses would be conducted against the background of history itself, with its initial moment of production upon nature, then of accumulation (dissociation of space and time, abstract thought and economic practice), and finally, in late capitalism and its "modernities", revealed as the necessary precondition for the production of space itself [245-250]. 3.13Binary oppositions: objects in absolute space; accumulation gives rise to the dissociation of space and time. This leads to a relative space of real objects and an ineffable emotional space (which is neutralized) [see 251-253]. 1st Moment: Objects in space. Production still respects nature, desacralizing it in the process of human work (mostly agricultural) but concentrates the sacred character of the elements in religious and political buildings. The form of thought and action is not separated from content. 2nd Moment: Accumulation and production for exchange. The emergence of capital. Objects are dissociated from space, form from content. Abstraction of signs erects notions of Absolute Truth. Space becomes seen as either a substance (Cartesian according to Lefebvre but more properly Leibnezian-Ed) or as pure a priori (Kant). Space and time are dissociated with the former being subordinated to the later in the praxis of accumulation. [251] 3rd Moment: Space and objects are relativized. Space, in se, cannot be seized, becoming unthinkable. Time, in se, is also relativized. Unity of time and space (time is grasped as spatial change, space in time(s)). Capitalism begins by producing things and investing in sites. The need to reproduce social relations modifies this. And this is what makes it necessary to reproduce nature and master space in producing it (the political-economic space of capitalism) on a global scale through a reduction of time in order to halt the production of new social relations. As for Marx, the `virtual' may guide our knowledge of the real allowing us to push thought to its limits, not through an extrapolation of surface trends but by a consideration of the underlying history of accumulation. "Production, at the limit, today, is no longer a matter of producing this or that, things or works [oeuvres] but of producing space." Merchandize will occupy the entire global space. Exchange value will impose the law of value on the entire planet. In a sense, the history of the world is nothing but that of merchandize. This hypothesis pushed to its extremes permits the discovery of obstacles and objections. At the limit, will the state produce its own space, the absolute political? Or can one see the dissappearance in and through the global market of the nation-state and of its space? [253] 3.14-3.15 Monumentality in architecture is a key phenomenon for the above deciphering of the historical development of space, most strikingly in its degradation in the modern era. In a sense, monumental architecture is of the most base kind whereby, through psychoanalytic processes of metonymy (displacement) and metaphor (substitution of the similar), the inherent semiology of the build edifice, is replaced by the pastiche of monumental signification. [253-260] Worse, monumentality obscures the action of power. 3.16The complexity of social space appears in the liberation of difference through critical thought. Three interlinked levels may be distinguished. (1) Singularities around bodies which valorize places on the basis of differing rythms; (2) a level of Generality, thus of social practices and social order, the division of labour etc. with its

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symbols of power and violence; and (3) the level of Particularities attributed to groups and families in defined spaces. [261] 3.17It would seem that the ultimate limit and horizon of the architectonics of space has been reached in the present moment of global capitalism [262].

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4. From Absolute Space to Abstract Space 4.1 Summary of Preceeding sections [265-270]. The most modern type of space carries all of the earlier types (the historical spatializations) sedimented and surcharged within itself. Psychoanalysis of historical spaces. 4.2 The oldest of these, Absolute Space [270ff], derives from the (primitive) practices of hunters and gatherers and the earliest farmers where the small social group is seen as the centre of both time and space (which are unified in seasonal activities such as the harvest) around which the cosmos lies. Since then it has come to appear as transcendent and sacred such that its forces and character are attributed to the forces of nature. It is composed of sites which are sacred and malevolent, in se, not just signifiers of good or bad experiences. There is no "environment", nor "site" which is distinct from the global texture. The signified isn't separated from its signifier. Neither is there the difference between public and private except where life has a distinct status as religious or political. This is transformed into the space of the sacred city in early civilizations, with its symbiotic relation of city and surrounding countryside. This space is "lived" (vcu) in relation to the body not reasoned (concu) or understood by the intellect. Thus it is a space of representation more than representation of space. [373] Dimensions, above all up (cosmic, life) and down (subterrainean, repressed, lived) take on symbolic values. This space still exists in Western religious sanctuaries. Its forms are organized around the thematics of identification and imitation [274ff]. We must "radically" distinguish Roman space and spatiality from that of the Greeks [275ff]: the latter were always based on a harmony of form, function and structure which is de-stabilized in the Roman practice which reified the Greek orders into mere decoration. Hegel's analysis of Greek art [276]. Greek habitus is inseparably social and mental. Under Aristotle the habitus is separated from the Intuitus. In the Roman intuitus form, function, and structure of each thing is subordinated to a principle of both material (need) and jurisdiction (civic) which fixes its social use. "The unity of the Law, or Right, Property, the City State, because lived and perceived rather than concieved avoids any irremediable cracks. Need versus desire in Rome [277]. 4.3 The notion of Mundis: as both image or symbol and site. [280] Category of the Other, of exclusion and later Christian site of passage between life and death. Roman concept of Urbs et Orbs. Rome as imago mundi which concentrates that which tends to disperse around it and which thus exorcises the subterranean forces of death. [280283] Rome offers a space which is the scene of new social powers: a political space established not only through action but also through an implicit practice and images (eg. the Pantheon which collects all gods and, metaphorically, all sites into a built framework). This representation of space incorporated into the City, into the paternistic laws, becomes a space of representation which submerges itself in the Mundis, a subterranean, infernal abyss. This later becomes the heart of Christianity. Thus a double spatial pracitce relates the Urbs (sacred) to the dominated countries (submissive) via the road; private life is constituted juridically along the same lines of ownership and of need resulting in a disequilibrium of public and private space. A double representation of space which is on the one hand concentric Urbs and Orbs and on the other the perpendicular axes of the military camp. Thirdly, a double space of representation separates the masculine (military, authority) from the feminine (abyss, site of death, world to be conquered). From this derived the increasing primacy of patriarchy and empire (self-conscious power) over subterranean powers ("folly, Nietzchean excess, etc." which are repressed and re-emerge in Bachanalian orgies) which is the new "space of the state". 4.4 Christianity exists on the word play "Mundus et immundus" and the Augustinian disjunction between time and space, subject and object (with the deprecation of the latter). Marxist history, in over-valuing the economic has left the status of these terms in obscurity, fetichized by some, discredited by others. [285] 4.5 The generating image of the space of ancient Greece is that of the happy disposition of homes in a spatial and social hierarchy--the Polis. The mediation of Cosmos and World through the temple.

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4.6 Mode of existence of absolute space: real or fictive? [290] 4.7 The Roman villa, by uniting and fixing the relation of private property and space produces a new space which later, slowly, laicizes the religious and political space of Rome and early Christianity in the high Middle Ages. It submits space to the dominium of the paternal social organisation of the villa or latifundia. This definition of place, the fixing of a juridico-social establishment to the earth is the necessary precondition for the emergence of historical space of capitalist accumulation when the "villa" will become the seigneurial domain or village depending on the case. 4.8-4.9 The Christian middle ages are seen as the re-emergence of these `cryptic' (subterranean) forces (mundus et immundus)-- complemented by a new luminosity and open, public, space of markets and exchange. This leads eventually to Renaissance perspective, increasing objectification, and finally the reification of capital. Commodities and commerce and the marketplace -- which are at first liberating operations only later, in the market, in capitalist accumulation, develop their negative consequences [294]. 4.10The key form of the Renaissance is the city, where revival of Vitruvian architectural categories goes hand in hand with the perspectival approach [309ff]. The origins of present spatial codes in perspectival rules [310ff] is codified by Vitruvius who proposed a complete lexicon of the elements of space (air, light, brick etc.); syntactic rules governing the disposition of these elements; and a stylistics (a prescriptive esthetics). The only thing missing is an analysis of the effect of city.[313] The dominance of the visual (le peru) and the primacy of the facade, later perfected by the 19th century bougeoisie emerges in the "arena" of Papal Rome. 4.11-4.14 With capitalism and the global market, violence takes on an economic role in the aid of accumulation. It is in this manner that the economic becomes dominant. Northern Europe, "The space of wars becomes the space which is rich and peopled, the cradle of capitalism." [319] War is thus unjustly classed as negative, while the economic is raised up as productive. The life of this space is violence which is often, however, latent, celebrated in the triumphal arches and military monuments. 4.12Space, for Hegel teminates historical time by achieving the rational and the real simultaneously in the form of the State. [321] In misunderstanding space, Hegel also misunderstood violence, conceiving it only through speculative categories, a fault criticized by Marx and Engels. The State, as a "framework", consolidates a "relation of forces" between classes and class fractions and between the spaces they occupy. To this should be added "spatial framework" which is necessary to establish the concreteness of the State and its institutions.[324] 4.13Visual and mathematical space from Descartes to Diderot.[327-328] 4.14The dominant strategy of abstract space proper emerges as a three-fold primacy of geometry (cf. Gallileo, Descartes); of the visual (perspective) and of the phallic (Lacanian notion of "masculine" violence, reduction of reality to images (plans)) [330] as the approved mode of expression of power and the state through an empty and neutralized space [331].

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5. Contradictory Space 5.1 Space shouldn't be theorized in terms of its own codes and logic; a dialectical theory of space must be able to conceptualize space in terms of contradictions [337]. 5.2 This "dialectical" theory doesn't only involve the idea of a "plural" or "polyvalent" space but demands the answer to the question "Is there a logic of space?" [338]. This is not ipso facto a critique of the Cartesian conception of space where space is given "en bloc" as a supra-sensible infinitude whereby some logic predetermines a network of "real" relations consitutive of the world of objects. Haussman is the precursor of the most recent spatial practice in which the space of the city is broken, fragmented and segregated in order to produce a new unity, order, and homogeneity (of state power). This new space is dominated by a fundamentally visual logic which transforms (1) solids into images and simulations (2) "dwelling" into "habitat" (mass housing), and (3) finally reduces space to the object of planning science. 5.3 The logical relations of this abstract/contradictory space are those of inclusion and exclusion, conjunction and disjunction which may be represented geometrically in the manner of Venn diagrams where larger circles (sets) enclose others. This captures the sense in which a human being is in a social space. But in the comprehension of space there are also forbidden zones where the relation of inclusion doesn't hold. Rather the relation is one of exclusion. Each "space" has a dual relation to its internal set and to the exterior. In this manner, space tends to be treated anthropologically as a means for classification operations: as a nomenclature or taxinomy. [341] 5.4 This reduction of contained to the container eliminates the interplay of differences, the movement of dialectic to logic, and social space to a purely formal mental space. [342] As for the logic of space, in a sense it is constituted by mathematics in toto. However, space, "purely" conceived, has neither elements nor form (cf. Leibniz), its parts being homogeneously indiscernable. To introduce determination, it is necessary to introduce a content: the act of thinking of difference. [343] Along with empiricist studies (eg. E.T. Hall's proxemics), Phenomenology may be criticized from this basis. [343-5]. Summary [345] 5.5-5.7 Abstract space emerges in artistic expression with Picasso [346-349] as well as with the modern architects (Gropius, Mies, Cobusier et al). Its distinctive feature is (1) homogeneity [347-8] at the level of exchangeable property, and de-sacralized meanings and (2) fragmentation (the division of space through power). 5.8 In the same period in the "advanced" countries of the West the consideration of space outside of the limited realm of art and philosophy began to fragment, exemplified by the extremes of behaviourism (where space became the sum of stimulii experienced by a subject) and ethnography (where a analogical theory of cultural space became a cultural model of space). 5.9 Abstract space cannot be conceived of abstractly because abstraction at once reduces it to homogeneity yet fractures and obfuscates its true unity. [353] Abstraction separates logic and dialectic, reduces contradictions to coherence, mixes up the residues of the reduction (eg. social logic and social practice). Abstract space, considered as an instrument, is firstly the site of nature, the tool which wishes to master it and, as far as possible, to destroy it. It corresponds with both the amplification of the practices of labour but also a new abstract labour which has a social existence. [354] The space of homogenisation is clearly anything but homogeneous. It contains and unifies dispersed elements and fragments. Historically it appears as the milieu of socio-political compromise between the

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aristocracy (ownership of land) and the bourgeoisie (money), but it is supported by the conflict between financial capital and action in the name of the proletariat. [355] 5.10In this spatial "tissue" intervene the avant-garde artists who take account of the collapse of referentials. These artists present objects in the space of the dominant social practice. At the same time, architects support, as an ideology behind their actions, an empty space, primordial, a container which receives fragmented contents, a neutral milieu or habitat receiving disjointed things, people. In short, incoherence under the sign of coherence -- separation and disjunction in cohesion -- flux and ephermera in stability -- conflictual relations in the name of the apparential logic and the effective combinatory. This abstract space contains many other traits. It is this space, this arrangement which dissociates desires and needs, to then link them up again often worse off than better. This is where the middle classes install themselves and spread out, neutral (in appearance) because socially and politically situated between the poles of the bourgeoisie and working class. This space is not the "expression" of the middle classes but, on the contrary it is that which the grand strategies have assigned to them. These classes find what they're looking for: a mirror for their "reality", tranquilizing representations, an image of a social world where they have their place, labelled, insured, reserved. Whereas in truth in this space they are manipulated along with their uncertain aspirations and their very certain needs. In abstract space, where strategies are deployed, also the frolics and debates (les bats et dbats) of Mimesis: fashion, sport, art, advertizing, and sexuality transposed into ideology are unroled. [356] 5.11 This Abstract Space of anaphorization (which metamorphizes the body out of itself into an visual ideal) is also the space of a strange substitution concerning sex. Natural sexual relations imply a reciprocity; in turn this tie may recieve an abstract justification and legitimation which changes it into a social reality. Physical reciprocity is legalized in contractual reciprocity, in an "engagement" which has authority as its witness and guarantee. But in the course of this process, the initial bond undergoes a grave modification. The space of substitution which replaces nature with cold abstraction, the absence of pleasure, is the mental space of castration (at once fictional and real, symbolic and concrete). It is that of the metaphorization where (in particular) the image of the woman supplants the woman, where her body is fragmented, where desire breaks down, where life crumbles, dissipates. Sex, having lost its status of naturality calls in vain for a "culture" of the body, becoming itself also a localization, a specification, a specialization with its sites and organs, erogeneous zones assigned by the sexologists, and organs of reproduction. Sexuality (neither culture nor nature) appears dominated in as much as it is a coded and decoded subsystem: a specified mediation between the real and the imaginary, between desire and anxiety, between needs and frustrations. In the abstraction of a space fragmented into specialized sites, the body itself is fragmented and pulverized. The body represented by images, by advertizements (legs for stockings, breasts for bras,the face for make-up etc.) decomposes desire, dedicating it to anxious frustration and the unsatisfying satisfaction of localized (restricted) needs. In abstract space ... the death of the body is accomplished in a double fashion: symbolic and concrete: by the fragmentation of the living and by the effect of violences. In particular the female body is changed into exchange value, a sign of merchandise and merchandise itself. Sex and sexuality, pleasure and enjoyment (jouissance) are identified with sites specialized for leisure: vacation cities and villages, ski slopes, sunny beaches. These spaces of leisure become eroticized: the noctural spaces of the "quartiers" and red light districts devoted to the illusory festival. Like a game, the Eros becomes consumer and consumed not by means of signs but by means of spectacles. Abstract space is doubly castrating: (1) in isolating the phallus, and (2) in projecting it outside of the body, in fixing it in space (verticality), in putting it under the "surveillance" of the eye. The visual and the discursive reinforce eachother (in contextualizing everything) in the world of signs. Under the rule of commercial terrorism (sous la frule du terrorisme commerciale), in the words of Schelsky, and also and above all through localization, through spaces fragmented and specialized in a globally homogeneous manner (form). The abstraction of the body perfects itself through fragmentation and (functional) localization. [357] "A curious space: homogenous yet composed of ghettos." [358] It is falsely true, not the object of a false consiousness but a site and milieu which itself engenders false consiousness. The appropriation which

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ought to symbolize itself sees itself there signified and rendered illusory. This space contains much in masking (denying) the contained by indicating it through signs. It contains the imaginary specified: fantastic images derived from the established order which appear to reveal "other things" but which are in fact the contents themselves. These "representations" impose and prescribe in and through the space which supports them and which gives them their efficacity. In it operates the incessant substitution of things by codes and representations. The "world of signs" is not only the space occupied by these signs and images (object-signs and object-images) but it is the space where the Ego is no longer in rapport with its nature, with a material, not even with things, but with things doubled by their signs and supplanted by them. The "I", "sign-bearer" (porte-signes) has no other business except with the other "sign-bearers". This homogenizing, fractured space is fragmented in an elaborate, differentiated, fashion into sectors or sub-system which appear to provide objective analyses, systemic analyses. eg. the "urban system"... but can it actually be found in this or that city? The end result of this sectorial division of the world and society into sub-systems is chaos. 5.12When the square in the city, the meeting place in the process of circulation (eg. la Place des Vosges) gives way to the roundabout (eg. la Place de la Concorde) the quality of urban life is degraded to the benefit of the regime of abstract space in which atoms circulate (ie. cars). Haussman is generally credited with breaking-up the historical space of Paris but this involved a less-discussed reduction and flattening out of this space into the surface-space of the plan. In this process, "those who see and do not know anything but of looking, those who draw and know nothing but of drawing and those who circulate and can do nothing but drive around in their cars contribute to the mutilation and cutting-up of space. The end result is that those who drive around look only to see where they are going and do not see anything more than road signs and directions, thus they do not perceive anything more than their route (materialized, mechanized, technicized) and this, only from the single angle of functional utility: rapidity, readibility. However, those who do not know about anything but seeing end up by not seeing well." [360-61] The reading of a space fabricated with a view to readibility finds, not unexpectedly, a coherent and persuasive text laid out. This space is defined through the perceptions of an abstract subject, the driver, who is in only visual contact with his or her surrounding world. "This abstract space thus becomes the simulacrum of actual space (historically, that of nature). The roadway becomes a lived simulation of that which in fact is central to urbanity: the encounter." [361] 5.13In this Abstract Space a historical substitution of habitat for home may be found. Historically, "home" only had a real meaning for the aristocracy. [362] The bourgeois apartment parodies the aristocratic "hotel" in reversing its emphasis on the internal intimate community of the home. Instead, the exterior facade become important, a strict regime of functional separation and concealment is undertaken and appearance, what can be seen by the outside world, becomes paramount. This visual strategy is analogous to the repression of the Eros on the level of the person and its replacement by signifiers of intimacy which is mythified. The analysis of the bourgeois practice of space verifies the above theory of Abstract Space and shows the unity of the lived and conceived aspects of spatiality. [364] Habitat is defined rationally and quantified as first the minimum inhabitable volume -- a threshold of tolerability -- and later as the minimum necessary to maintain social control -- a threshold of sociability (or socialization-Ed). Urban housing schemes and new towns adopt this approach, but internal frontiers quickly appear which mark out the "fracture lines in the homogeneity" [365], zones within people really live, constituting a real "Social Space". Cartesian rationalism hands down the notion that a hierarchy of levels, of variables and dimensions can adequately portray reality. But this introduces logical implications with the process of disjunction and conjunction necessary to isolate different levels and recombine them into a hierarchy. In terms of the study of space this process masks the concrete relation homogeneous-heterogenous. This oversight is crucial to the legitimation of the rational state bureaucracy and its practices of space such as zoning. "The unity of reason covers and reinforces the multiple administrative divisions, juxtapositions, superimpositions, a sort of puzzle in which each piece corresponds to an "operation". [366] "Abstract Space is ... repressive `par essence et par excellence' but in a fashion particularly easy to bear

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because it is multiple: an immanent repression manifests itself sometimes through reduction, sometimes through functional localization, sometimes through hierarchisation and segregation, and sometimes through estheticisation. To look (from afar), to contemplate (that which has been separated), to manage the points of view and perspectives changes the effects of a strategy into esthetic art objects." [366] 5.14The space of work-place can pervade a surrounding, dependent, settlement establishing, de facto, the status of workers as unfree labour even outside of the workplace. In as much as these "islands" of labour dependent on an enterprise link up through the market system there is a tendency to produce a totalitarian politico-capitalism. The large city cannot be captured in this way and is hence the cradle of democratic autonomy and freedom. [367-8] 5.15Space is broken into assigned and forbidden sites. In Abstract Space, the interdiction is the key marker of zones as it is the inverse side of the regime of private property. 5.16Political power is central to the apparent transparence of space and to its maintenance. In Abstract Space power does not appear as such -- it is not a thing nor pure form -- but is reproduced under and through an "organization of space" eliding, eluding and evacuating all that is opposed to it. [370] 5.17An analysis of space which remains faithful to the dialectics of Capital must insist on:(1) the increasing tendency towards the transformation of space as land into exchange value and an arena of speculative capital (private property, zoning) and, (2) the centrality of the machine in this transformation of the city into a mere element of the cpaitalist system (city as solely the "space of production", the "place of machines", a means and medium for production and reproduction. Thus (under the category of "leisure") use values (eg. clean water, nature, light, time) become scarce and mal-distributed resources (no one has enough of all) and thus the objects of exchange (along with such primary resources as oil etc.). [370-392] 5.18This requires a new meditation on use value as such. To attempt to establish the categories and concepts of the production of space it is necessary to return to the concept of Marx, and not only those of social work and of production. "What is a commodity? A concrete absraction. Abstraction? Yes, and not despite its character as a thing, but on the contrary, in as much as social "thing", detached during its existence from its materiality, its usage, from productive activity, from the need that it might satisfy ..." [392] 5.19"Today, the scientific and technological transformations of the modern world render a reconsideration of marxist thought inevitable. On the other hand, taken in their original expos by Marx, these concepts and their theoretical development no longer have any object. The renewal of marxist concepts can be developed in an optimal fashion by taking full account of space..." [395-6] 5.20For Marx, Nature figured amongst the productive forces. Today a distinction has been imposed, which Marx did not introduce, between the domination and the appropriation of nature which represents a conflict which unfolds in space: dominated and appropriated spaces. [396] Also, Nature appears as a resource, with use value. Nature reenters the scheme of production and consumption at the moment that the circuits of exchange value cease. It spatializes concepts such as needs, commodity, and consumption. And it reveals that consumption (use) is also productive. The Machine harnesses energies and space. The City as a vast machine [398]. With the development of the modern modes of capitalist production, the extraction of surplus value becomes de-territorialized, notably with the development of a global financial circuit. Still the city continues in its old role of coordinating the flows of energies. The economy appears practically as a connexion of flux and networks whose rationality is monitored by institutions and programmed through the spatial framework where these institutions have their operational effects. [401] 5.21Constant capital or investment represents dead labour. Under capitalism the dead hold the living. A new society cannot be defined except through a reversal of the world to its inverse. How can the living take hold of the

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dead? Response: in the production of a new space which is a product, but not a thing, and which is itself productive but not of abstract things like money and merchandise which dominate in Abstract Space, the site and source of abstractions. [402] 5.22Summary: Social space figures amongst the productive forces; appears as a privileged product sometimes consumed simply (tourism) sometimes productively (machines, cities) in as much as it is a productive framework. It serves as a political instrument allowing control of society and the means of production through its management. It supports the reproduction of relations of production and property. It is the practical equivalent of the ensemble of superstructural institutions and ideologies. It contains virtualities -- the work (oeuvre) and reappropration under the banner of art and above all in the exigencies of the body which deploys a space around itself and extends itself through it. Thus space itself resists the bureaucratic management of space and suggests the sources of a counterspace. [402-3] 5.23Thus space is a resource -- "nature is true wealth" (Marx).

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6. From the Contradictions of Space to theSpace of Difference 6.16.5 Summary of the principal contradictions of abstract space: 1. Quantity vs. Quality: The repression of quality which re-emerges as "leisure": from the space of consumption to the consumption of space in leisure and leisure space, or: from daily life to the nondaily life of the festival, from work to non-work" [409] Global vs. Local: The contrast of a global spatial practice and reality under the system of multinational capitalism, and the preserved "myth" of the parcel, housing lot, and "home" which is the lived reality for most Europeans. Abstract space is both of these at once, without any possibility of synthesis therefore, it is "contradictory space". Use value vs. Exchange Value: Another formulation would be in terms of the classic opposition of forces and relations of production understood in the largest sense as forces potentially productive of new space, but shackled by the social relations of capitalism.

2.

3.

6.6 Dominated space realizes on the land the structures and frameworks of political strategy. Through the action of power, the space of daily practices carries in itself norms and constraints. More than just being expressive of power, it is repressive in the name of power. [413] Social space gains such an efficacious normative-repressive role that the effects of ideologies and representaions as such fall by the wayside in comparison to it. Logic and logistics occult the latent violence of this spatial order and practice. The practice of space regulates life. Space doesn't have power in itself and the contradictions of space are not determined by it, rather the contradictions of society (eg. between the forces of production and the relations of production) "come into daylight" and are realized in this space, at the level of space, engendering contradictions in space. 6.7-8 Empiricism masks contradiction under the banner of "inconsistencies". These contradictions are discernable at all levels from the empirical data of daily life all the way through the political, aesthetic, and theoretical realms. Notably there is a process which favours productive consumption (of space as well as things) over unproductive consumption for the purpose of enjoyment (eg. the extension of roadways is preserved over the maintenance of parks because roadways represent one aspect of the utilization of space for materially productive purposes). 6.8 Other examples would include the devaluation and then the revaluation of historic sites and great architecture which is destroyed unless it can be made productive (through tourism and the leisure industries). Consider the manner in which the production of the architect is already ideologically limited in advance by essentially visual, reductive procedures [416-419] -- in other words, consider the impoverishing influence on buildings by their initial conception in the form of the "project" or sketched outline, by their unquestioning acceptance of the "lot" as a given, neutral, parcel and by the discourse of the architects and planners which does not accomodate the spatial realities of the users. The architect has a representation of space based on the graphic mediation of plans and perspectives which is a conceived space which is totally different from and cannot accommodate the lived space of real people. Space becomes a field constituted by a practice which consists of cuts (dcoupages) (ie. lots), specializations (functional separations) and is seen as passive vis vis these operations. "The division of labour, the division of needs ... localized, pushed to the separation of functions, people and things, find their framework in the spatial field which appears neutral, objective, a rational site: without fear, without reproach." [418] Lived space on the other hand is subjective, not a space of calculation. It is a space of representation which has its origins in the experiences of childhood. We can conceive of a possible primacy of this concrete

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space which would permit a diversification of types and logics of space -- fixed, semi-fixed, mobile and vacant accommodating both the effemeral features of living and the stable, "objective" features of life (Heidegger's categories of "wandering" and "dwelling") [419] 6.9 The paradox of abstract space is that on the one hand ever-fresh contradictions are produced, even while, on the other hand they are continually flattened or occulted. Thus city planning is universally recognized as a disaster, yet it has succeeded in effectively silencing those who suffer from it the most. Critique of Jane Jacobs [420] and Advocacy Planning [421]. 6.10There is a fundamental contradiction between globalization (the ability to manage space on a grand scale, thus homogenization) and parcelization (private property). Dispersion of various aspects of capitalist productions (Fordism) further robs space of its coherence. It is dominated by strategic designs of multi-nationals and superpowers. The micro-level of space remains the site of struggle where the objective is always and still the occupation of a space by the various modes of politics and war. Three "frameworks" or "levels" (grilles) which comprise a taxonomy of this complex space:(1) It would distinguish the oppositions and contrasts of space (analogical spaces) -- isotopias -- and the relative exclusiveness of various sub-spaces -- the heterotopias. Finally the symbolic and imaginary zones -- the utopias -- nature, pure knowledge, and absolute power. Paradoxically, the symbolically derived spaces (parks, religious buildings) are the best appropriated.(2) A classification of the attributes of sites (public vs. private); the mediations made by users (passages, routes). (3) The strategic order in the spatial chaos -- the articulation of spatial markets in land with the spaces of markets. But this model of separations eliminates many of the contradictions which we would hope to reveal ... 6.11 Instead, one can envision a "science of social space" which is to say a "science of the usage of space" focussing on the status of Abstract Space as a second nature [425]. The form of buildings, space, corresponds to a perception of space. The functions correspond to the living-out of a space of representation. The structure is conceived, implying a representation of space. As a totality it is situated in the practice of space -- its usage. 6.12Abstract space serves as an instrument of domination, suffocating the development and progress of other types of space. It assassinates its historical conditions, its internal differences and any eventual, different, spaces in order to impose an abstract homogeneity. [427] This represents a kind of externalized Freudian death wish in which autodestruction is deployed on a planet-wide scale. But rather than analyse yet again the metaphysics of this impulse it is essential to analyse the instrument -- space -- and its specific, strategic, effect which is that all obstacles -everything that "differs" or is different, is annihilated. 6.136.15The theory of alienation is insufficient. Theories of difference reveal the weakness of logic and the importance of dialectics which establishes (1) the distinction between minimal difference (ie. that between repeated elements) and maximal difference (ie. that which is totally different, in another class etc.) and (2) between induced differences (ie. within a mode of production) and produced differences (eg. differences announcing a new mode of production which accumulate within an old mode). Particularities, those primary sites and resources, are suppressed differences. Difference, heterogeneity, in the regime of homogeneity emerges as central to resistance in the face of centrality and normality which recuperate and eliminate transgressions. A reawakening of the "politics of spatial difference" (as opposed to the dictat of spatial homogenization) in which the rich creativity of the excluded can be developed into concrete alternatives to the present spatial system is required. Latin American favellas [430-31] exemplify a movement from opposition and "alternatives" (induced difference) to contradiction and "surpassment" (produced difference). Without dialectical movement, any logic or strategy (which is reified as "optimal") engenders a space which produces a sort of tourniquet on change (eg. U.S. highway construction [432]) and a self-reinforcing vicious circle.

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6.16"Each strategy of space is aimed at several objectives in the same manner that abstract space holds on to or is in possession of many `properties'." This strategic space permits a simultaneous pushing of disruptive groups (workers) toward the peripheries; the organization of the centre as site of decisions, power and information; and the spatial planning of production and flows of goods, information etc. ... The space of this social practice becomes a space of arrangement: of classification in the service of a class ... the "operative" notion of classification and arrangement governs the entire space, from private to public ... In effect this capacity aligns public space on the "`privatized' space" of the dominant class fraction ... The entire space is treated on the model of...the private family, reproducing the relations of production on the model of biological reproduction." [432-3]. 6.17Mimesis (imitation, substitution) plays an important role in the reproduction and perpetuation of a spatial culture where abstract desires are "spatialized" and abstract spatiality is given a concrete, common-sensical unity through the primacy of the visual. Mimesis governs the substitution of the production of things in space for the individual and collective production of space whereby the productive capacity of space is harnessed. 6.18The State and space. Feminism and the notion of a "feminist spatiality" or mode of spatial practice. The role of elites in demonstrating the impossibility of living as a homogenized "mass". 6.19-6.21 There are all sorts of tendencies to a "counter-space" (alternative spatial systems, arrangements, practices, norms) at work around us, with all their ambiguities and failures. Of these, the most striking is leisure space (eg. the Caribbean Basin or the Mediterranean) which represents the ultimate commodification of nature and space but which is also the moment of non-work, jouissance, and festival which negates the entire system. The space of leisure, in particular the beach, is the ultimate "Contradictory Space" being both a zone where the bodysubject is re-unified with the body-as-object and a site of the reproduction of labour and the relations of production. [443] As such it indicates the points of possible rupture in the present system of contradictory, abstract, space. 6.22-6.25 The "Festival" of May '68 demonstrates the continuing existence of a genuine urban vitality within the newer, dominant, abstract space. This marks the ruptures which accompanied the transition from a mode of production of "things-in-space" to a new mode of production of space itself. [449-50] This new spatial practice is reflected at all levels of social action and on all three dimensions of the spatial dialectic. It also changes the temporal-spatial balance which is the basic parameter of our experiences. 6.26The practice of space is not defined by a system but on the other hand by the "theatralization", dramatization, of the differential moments and values inherent in space. The technical theorization of space in planning results in its fetishization where coherence and illusory transparence are substituted for the uneasy pax tatique, the conflicts and differences which actually exist. [452]. 6.27The dialectical relation of needs and desires is also obscured in the ecological discourse which takes space as an indifferent medium. [454] 6.28-6.30 The practice of space is revealed through the body's simultaneous and continuous production of difference even in the process of repetitive gestures and actions. There should be a "right to difference" which would fill out the content of law in contrast to the merely formal emphasis of the "right to private property". [456-7] This practice is the "truth of space" which can be said to contrast with the philosopher's emphasis on the notion of "true space" (abstract, imposed on reality by force of will and enforced). This practice establishes the nature of truly social space as that of centrality, the site of communitas, communion, and encounter which dialectically is always engaged in a "gathering to itself" and which always also differentiating itself into the surrounding periphery which is organized around it. (Heidegger) Centrality is a much more useful notion than totality, which it displaces, relativizes, and dialecticizes. [459-60]

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7.

Overtures and Conclusions

7.1 "A question traverses the preceding analyses and interpretations: What is the mode of existence of social relations?... What is a relation [ie. those studied by the social sciences] and where does it reside when it is never actualized in a well determined situation?" There is no form to which these "relations" can be attached, nor a function. "`Structure' itself arranges elementary unities within a whole; it requires on the one hand the ensemble (the whole) and on the other unities. Analytic thought thus itself returns to the [metaphysical] entitites and substantialities which it once claimed to supplant: the `subject' and the `object', unconsciousness, global praxis ... There are no relations without supports [Pas de rapport sans support]" [461] Social relations can only be understood as Marx's concrete abstractions. "Social relations, concrete abstractions, have no real existence except in and through space. Their support is spatial. The connexion "support-rapport" requires analysis in each given case. It carries an implication-explication: a genesis, a critique of institutions, substitutions, transfers, metaphorizations, anaomorphisms etc. which have transformed space." [465] 7.2 These propositions imply-explain a project themselves: a spatio-analysis [spatio-analyse] or spatio-logic. This offers both advantages and problems. First, what is of interest is not space as such, not types and prototypes of space but an expos of the production of space. The usage of space must be put in the foreground. This implies a critique of existing arrangements of space/spatiality. This would be completed by a rhythm-analysis [rhythmanalyse] of the appropriation (not consumption) of space in terms of the body. All of space proceeds from the body even if it has been metamorphosized to the point of obscuring this origin. 7.3 The foregoing theory and research might be situated at the level of a meta-philosophy which denounces the metaphors of philosophy as ideological. In particular, occidental philosophy has betrayed the body, contributing actively to the grand metaphhorisation which disavows and abandons the body-subject. "The living body being at the same time "subject" and "object" does not support the separation of concepts ... With the Logos-King, with the true space, the metnal and the social are separated, like the lived and the thought, like subject and object. There has always been some sort of project aimed at reducing the exterior to the interior, the social to the mental, through an ingenious topology. In vain! Abstract spatiality and the practiced spatiality look at eachother from afar in the empire of the visual. By contrast, in the the Reason of the State, promised by Hegelian philosophy ... knowledge and power contract a solid, legitimated, alliance. The subjectivism of desire and the objectivism of representations respect this alliance and do not approach the Logos ..." [467-8] 7.4 We are living in a moment of transition -- the "End of this or that" -- characterized by its contradictions between (economic) knowledge and social development, between the social and the political, between power and knowledge, between abstract and differential space. "This shortened list is neither exhaustive nor a hierarchy, it just suffices to put under our nose the bouquet of flowers poisoned by this epoque." [469] To define it it is neceassary to establish from where we came and where we are going -- a moment of non-work, the ultimate sense of the accumulation of technical means. It is also a "distant goal and meaning which cannot be attained except by risking catastrophe, bitterly savouring the last hours of all which had value and [was] success. The bitter analytic of finitude, brought into the foreground by philosophers since Hegel, brought into fashion by diverse "moderns" since Valry, repeats without respite: this world is finished, time exhausted, finitude is here. The same dialectical movement goes from primary and primordial nature to the second nature, from natural space to space at the same time produced and a work of art, the reunion of art and science. This second nature dies slowly and difficultly, the result of automization (pushed to the extend of occupying the vast domain of necessity, which is to say the production of things in space). This cannot have place except at the end of the interminable period occupied by labour (divided indefinitely), by acculumlation, and by reductions. A colossal process, full of risks and perils and which can either collapse at any moment or open up possibilities." [470] This vast transition can be specified in a number of fashions as it involves a number of key cleavages. Space has been formed as predominantly male, with norms inherent to the relation dominated-dominating. The invention of an appropriated space, opposed to dominated space; and the development of an

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architecture of joy and gratification imply the feminization of space. "It might also be said that we are in a transition period between the mode of production of things in space and a mode of production of space itself. The production of things was promised by capitalism, dominated by the bourgeoisie and its political creation, the state. The production of space involves other conditions, among which the disappearance of private property in space and simultaneously the political state, the dominator of space. This implies the passage from domination to appropriation and the primacy of use value over exchange. If this doesn't take place, the worst will arrive ... Only the notion of a conflictual passage from one mode of production (of things) to an other (of space) permits us to hold on to the marxist thesis which attributes a fundamental importance to productive forces, disengaging it [marxism] from productivism, delivering it from the dogmatism of (quantitative) belief." [471] 7.5 "Space becomes the principal site and area of struggles and actions towards a goal. It has never ceased to be the site of resources, the milieu where strategies are deployed, but it becomes something more than the theatre, the indifferent scene or the framework of action. Space doesn't abolish the other materials and resources from the sociopolitical game ... apart from just enveloping them, it reassembles and substitutes itself for each of them." [471-2] It is both medium, milieu and intermediary -- instrument -- as well as goal. The differential analysis has emphasized the constitutive dualities (eg. symmetry-dissymmetry) of social space which are supports of more complex determinations. "As a support of production and reproduction abstract space engenders illusions, thus a tendancy to false consciousness, which is to say the consciousness of a fictive-real space ... The diversity of processes may give the imporession of an absence -- of the lack of a definite status for abstract space. Illusion. The theory resituates the truth of this space: its contradictory character and dominant tendency to the homogeneous (the establishment of a dominated)." [472-3]. 7.6 Every society has dominated space through violence, political ruse and labour. Today this takes place at the global scale as well as at the level of the implicated spaces ... "Languages are spoken and written in a mental space-time which Reason tends to privilege metaphysically. They ennunciate poorly the social time, the spatial practice." [476] The words are lacking to explain our spatiality. 7.7 The distinction between the infra and the supra the within (l'en-de) and the with-out (l'en-del) is as important to the spatial realm as to that of politics. The critique of what happens within has no meaning except by reference to what exists "outside" as possibility [477]. The political status of space? "It politicizes that which calls for its depoliticization. Politicized space destroys its political conditions, because its management and appropriation refute, deny the State with its political parties. They call for other forms of management (self-management) of territories, neighbourhoods etc. Space thus aggravates the inherent conflict in the political, and in the State as such. It introduced more strongly the anti-political in the poltical, which is to say, political critique which tends towards the end of the political moment, towards its auto-destruction." [478] 7.8 The development of spatiality, the investment in the production of space is not a question of something to be done along the way but a question of life or death. A socialism has demonstrated, the failure to establish a new space results in a falling back into historical spatializations. 7.9 While the confrontations and contestations of space can all be derived from the struggle of the classes, spatial struggles cannot be reduced to class struggle: it is not as if it were a battle of borders separating a field containing the dominant classes and a field containing the dominated. Rather the demarcations of the struggle for space traverses all domaines and sectors of knowledge, ideology, politics etc. Space is the uniting factor across apparently unrelated and disorganized revolts and struggles. 7.10The production of space is thus part of the project for a new society, with a new mode of production. To successfully oppose the abstraction of dominant space, however, this project must become concrete. The "spatial

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revolution" can thus only be conceived of through analogies with the great peasant and industrial revolutions. 7.11 These proposals respond partly to the question of the relation of a theory of space to the revolutionary movement such as it exists now. The key remains to refuse to take the term "space" trivially, without analysis, or to confuse the space of social practice with the space of the goegraphers or economists ... Such spaces can only end by serving the interests and progression of domination whereby space becomes the "regulator" which resolves and mediates social contradictions. The foregoing theory thus contributes to the dissociation of the present social order by revealing the contradictions at the heart of its prosperity. [482] 7.12In the service of revising the process of capitalist accumulation, the Soviet model of spatial management privileges central sites and enterprises while the others remain peripheral and are marginalised, becoming more and more stagnant. The Chinese approach holds more hope: it involves the linking up of people with their local and national space in the construction of a new society. This involves both a production in space of diverse goods and a production of an entire social space which is better and better appropriated. [483] This strategy which emphasizes the periphery, even at the cost of a slowing down of development, leads inevitably to the transcendance of the urbanrural split through a mutual transformation of the two terms. However, this would not necessarily be the most appropriate strategy for an industrialized country. "A transformation of society presupposes the collective possession and management of space through the perpetual intervention of the "interested" with their multiple interests, diverse and even contradictory. Thus, confrontation. It is this which comes to light across the so-called "environmental" problems ..." [484] The orientation of this process which has already started is towards the transcendance of the separations and dissociations of the oeuvre (object carrying the mark of a subject, the creator, artist etc.) and the product (repeated, reproduced). What is a stake, what must be done, at the limit, is to produce the space of the human species...to create a planetary space as a social support for a metamorphosized daily life, open to multiple possibilities. This is "an orientation. Nothing more or less. It might be called a meaning or sense. [What is] To be known: an organ [voice] who perceives, a direction which conceives itself, a living movement which makes its way towards the horizon. Nothing which resembles a system." [485]

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