Space
Kanishka Goonewardena
The mediation of politics by space is as old as politics and space, even if it appears that the word “space” attained keyword status in radical discourse only recently. In A Dictionary of Marxist Thought (Bottomore 1991), Henri Lefebvre and David Harvey are conspicuously absent, and “space,” the concept with which these renowned thinkers are often associated, is omitted. The term is also missing from Raymond Williams’s Keywords (1983). As such, these books may seem as if they belonged to an old thought-world predating the age of globalization and postmodernism, in which “space” rolls off many tongues with noticeable ease and frequency.
The current popularity of “space” owes something to the sheer diversity of meanings it has acquired. Consider the notion of “safe space” advocated by LGBTQ, feminist, anti-racist, and other activists. The purpose of this formulation is to safeguard the marginalized bodies, relationships, homes, workplaces, habitats, discourses, and imaginaries from dominant social forces (Harris 2015). Even in this particular usage, however, “space” assumes many meanings: physical space (the body, bedroom, classroom, street, square, neighborhood, etc.), social space (domestic space, private space, work space, public space, etc.), political-juridical space (citizenship, human rights, civil rights, etc.), and discursive space (what can and cannot safely be said, even thought). Likewise, the feminist conceptual distinction between “public” and “private” stretches across various spatial scales from the body to the nation and beyond.
Despite these variations, some uses of “space” highlight the term’s political lineages better than others, The events of the Arab Spring (e.g., Tahrir Square, Gezi Park) and the Occupy Movement (originating in Zuccotti Park), for example, revealed that “space” is both an essential mediation of politics and an unmediated object of political struggle. Even as commentators dwelled primarily on communication technology (e.g., email, Facebook, Twitter) and organizational innovation (e.g., democratic horizontalism), those movements themselves clearly revealed their attachment—both phenomenological and political—to space. According to New York Times architecture critic Michael Kimmelman (2011): “We tend to underestimate the political power of physical places. Then Tahrir Square comes along. Now it’s Zuccotti Park, until four weeks ago an utterly obscure city-block-size downtown plaza with a few trees and concrete benches. . . . A few hundred people with ponchos and sleeping bags have put it on the map.”
Watching “the Zuccotti Park demonstrators hold one of their ‘general assemblies’” made Kimmelman think of “Aristotle, of all people,” who “believed that the human voice was directly linked to the civic order.” To underscore this point, he quoted Occupy activist Jay Gausson reflecting upon the significance of the “mic check,” invented after megaphones were banned from Zuccotti Park: “We’re so distracted these days, people have forgotten how to focus. But the ‘mic check’ demands not just that we listen to other people’s opinions but that we really hear what they’re saying because we have to repeat their words exactly.” Gausson called Zuccotti Park the “ground zero” of a new “architecture of consciousness” (Kimmelman 2011).
Echoing similar sentiments, urban theorist and activist Mike Davis (2011) noted that “activist self-organization—the crystallization of political will from free discussion—still thrives best in actual urban fora.” In contrast, “most of our internet conversations are preaching to the choir.” In his view, the movement’s occupations actualized the promising formal features of urban space celebrated by Lefebvre (2003), especially centrality and difference. These were the qualities that turned those squares not only into “lightening rods. . . . for the scorned, alienated ranks of progressive Democrats,” but also into “the common ground. . . . for imperilled, middle-aged school teachers to compare notes with young, pauperized college grads” (Davis 2011). Witnessing the same spaces, the US historian and journalist Jon Wiener (2011) exclaimed: “hardhats and hippies—together at last.”
The space of Occupy was not only physical, but also symbolic. After more than two decades of neoliberal hegemony, one associates Zuccotti Park above all with capitalism’s inherent inequity, the 99% and the 1%. But perhaps the “spatial moment” of greatest symbolic significance in the Western radical tradition is the Communards’ toppling of the Vendôme Column on May 19, 1871. Anti-Communard poet Catulle Mendès voiced the spontaneous distress of his class at the impending fate of this Parisian monument glorifying Napoleonic imperialism:
Don’t think that demolishing the Vendôme Column is just toppling over a bronze column with an emperor’s statue on top; it’s unearthing your fathers to slap the fleshless cheeks of their skeletons and to say to them: You were wrong to be brave, to be proud, to be grand! You were wrong to conquer cities, to win battles. You were wrong to make the world marvel at the vision of a dazzling France. (quoted in Ross 2015, 5)
A few days later, Communard Louis Barron recalled it otherwise:
I saw the Vendôme Column fall. . . . Immediately a huge cloud of dust rose up, while a quantity of tiny fragments rolled and scattered about, white on one side, gray on the other. . . . This colossal symbol of the Grand Army—how it was fragile, empty, miserable. It seemed to have been eaten out from the middle by a multitude of rats, like France itself. . . . and we were surprised not to see any [rats] run out. . . . The music played fanfares, some old greybeard declaimed a speech on the vanity of conquests, the villainy of conquerors, and the fraternity of the people, and we danced in a circle around the debris, and then we went off, very content with the little party. (quoted in Ross 2015, 5–8)
In her research on the Paris Commune, Kristin Ross demonstrates how the demolition of the Vendôme Column etched the Communards’ “anti-hierarchical” and “horizontal” political imaginary into popular consciousness. This ideology rejected divisions “between genres, between aesthetic and political discourses, between artistic and artisanal work, between high art and reportage” while extending radical-democratic “principles of association and cooperation into the workings of everyday life” (2015, 5). For Ross, the Commune was a “primarily spatial event” that manifested itself in the wake of the “European transformation of space into colonial space, and in the establishment of an international division of labour”:
To mention just a few of the spatial problems posed by the Commune, consider, for example, the relationship of Paris to the provinces, the Commune as an immense “rent strike,” the post-Haussmann social division of the city and the question of who, among the citizens, has a “right to the city”—the phrase is Lefebvre’s—or the military and tactical use of city space during the street fighting. (2015, 4)
Following Ross, we may recall Lefebvre’s demand that the Paris Commune be considered an urban revolution—or, in the words of the Situationists, “the only implementation of revolutionary urbanism to date” (Debord, Kotányi, and Vaneigem 1962). In their view, where the term “urban” refers to the processes of urbanization and the production of space, decisive social change ought to be understood not only with respect to time, but also with respect to social space and everyday life, precisely the material to be transformed in any revolution worthy of the name. Methodologically, both Lefebvre and the Situationists reject the conception of space as a mere container or reflection of social relations. Instead, they insist on the dialectical relationship between space and society and the fundamental role played by the production of space in social and political life. In The Production of Space, Lefebvre asks: “Is it conceivable that the exercise of hegemony might leave space untouched?” And replies: “No” (1991, 11). But he was by no means the first to comprehend the co-constitution of spatial and social relations from a revolutionary perspective. Indeed, the Communards and their allies—such as the great anarchist geographers Élisée Reclus and Peter Kropotkin—were amply aware of the spatiality of politics, especially in their pioneering vision of “anarchist communism” as a global federation of self-governing communes: a “Universal Republic” (Ross 2015).
Famously alleged to have said “I am a Marxist today so that I can be an anarchist tomorrow,” Lefebvre is rightly credited for pioneering a spatial perspective within twentieth-century critical theory.45 In this regard, the most common Lefebvre citation refers to his triadic conception of “conceived space,” “perceived space,” and “lived” space (Lefebvre 1991). Nevertheless, Lefebvre’s most significant “spatial” contribution to critical theory lies in his novel conception of social totality, which involves three levels of social reality—a “global” or “universal” level consisting of the logics of capital and state, an “everyday” or “lived” level consisting of the contestations between the aspirations and the routines of everyday life, and a “mediating level” consisting of the dynamics of “urbanization” and the “production of space” (Lefebvre 2003). Such is the holistic framework within which we can see, for example, how his theorization of the role of the state as the territorial organization of hierarchical social relations leads to a concept of “autogestion” (“self-management”) as well as a (re)definition of (neo)colonialism: “Wherever there is a dominated space generated and mastered by a dominant space—where there is periphery and centre—there is colonization” (Lefebvre 1978, 174). The same conceptual constellation clarifies why he called for “the right to the city” in opposition to the “abstract,” “homogeneous” and “hierarchical” space produced by capital and state in the “bureaucratic society of controlled consumption” (Lefebvre 1971). For Lefebvre’s concept of totality links such seemingly disparate strategies—spatial and political—by showing that they are in fact complementary demands for a quite different world in which the production of space becomes a non-alienating, radical-democratic praxis.46
Lefebvre’s thoughts regarding autogestion and “the right to the city” can be traced through the contemporary movement notion of “commoning,” which advocates the use of space for communal purposes at odds with capital and state. This orientation is evident in a wide array of activist groups subscribing to a diversity of political ideologies and organizational strategies. These include “Reclaim the Streets” groups setting up Temporary Autonomous Zones, the Shack Dwellers Movement in South Africa pursuing more permanent claims to urban space, the neighbourhood associations advocating for better living conditions in the favelas and barrios of Central and Latin America, and the slum dwellers of India confronting hegemonic possessors of political and economic power, all claiming their own space in the city. Likewise, the landless people’s movement in Brazil (Sem Terra), the peasant and rural mobilizations in India, indigenous activists in Bolivia and Canada, and the Zapatistas in Chiapas have all advocated the self-government of their traditional territories in the face of the plunder of their habitats and ways of life by what Marx called “so-called primitive accumulation.”
An instructive urban movement from the US, the Right to the City Alliance (RTTC) coalesced a variety of dispersed activist groups organizing around several issues—upon the catalytic awareness that they shared a common interest in appropriating city space (social, political, symbolic). On their website, RTTC describes itself as “a national alliance of racial, economic and environmental justice organizations” that “is building a national movement for racial justice, urban justice, human rights, and democracy” (Right to the City 2016). Significantly, and “in the realm of ideas,” the group lists “Lefebvre’s 1968 book Le Droit à la ville (Right to the City)” as “a key resource and touchstone.” To be sure, Lefebvre has inspired many activist groups, including radical architects and planners in Brazil who translated Le Droit into Portuguese in 1969. In fact, exemplary practitioners and theoreticians of architecture and urbanism such as Anatole Kopp, Lucien Kroll, Hassan Fathy and Peter Marcuse are among the best exponents of “the right to the city” tradition. The title of Brazilian communist and architect Oscar Niemeyer’s (2013) autobiography captures the essence of their intentions: “We Must Change The World.”
Although A Dictionary of Marxist Thought occludes “space,” it is impossible after reading Lefebvre and his kindred spirits to ignore the many spatial concepts of Marxism: uneven development, imperialism, colonialism, “so-called original accumulation,” and so on (1857; 1871; 1867b). Likewise, although Williams’s Keywords contains no entry on “space,” space is the keyword underlying his most impressive work. According to Williams, his “central case in The Country and the City was that these two apparently opposite and separate projections—country and city—were in fact indissolubly linked, within the general and crisis-ridden development of a capitalist economy which had itself produced this division in its modern forms” (1989, 227). More recently, US Marxist critic Fredric Jameson has alerted us to nature and land amidst the growing “preponderance of space over time in late capitalism,” arguing that “in our time all politics is about real estate.” If indeed “postmodern politics is essentially a matter of land grabs, on a local as well as global scale”—as Jameson (2015) and many activists now realize—then space is surely an ineluctable and timely keyword for radicals.
See also: Accessible; Commons; Community; Experience; Occupation; Politics; Utopia