Henri Lefebvre - The Production of Space

TRANSLATED BY HENRI LEFEBVRE
Translated by
Donald Nicholson-Smith Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
[Production de l'espace, English]
The production of space I Henri Lefebvre; translated by Donald Nicholson-Smith p. em.
Translation of: La production de l'espace.

Includes bibliographical references and index. ISBN 978-0-631-18177-4 (pbk.: alk. paper)
1. Space and time. I. Title.

BD621.1.4813 1991
115-dc20 90-21058 CIP
A catalogue record for this title is available from the British Library.

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Envoi

Imprisoned by four walls
(to the North, the crystal of non-knowledge a landscape to be invented
to the South, reflective memory
to the East, the mirror
to the West, stone and the song of silence) I wrote messages, but received no reply.

Octavia PazContents

Translator's Acknowledgements IX
1 Plan of the Present Work 1
2 Social Space 68
3 Spatial Architectonics 169
4 From Absolute Space to Abstract Space 229
5 Contradictory Space 292
6 From the Contradictions of Space to Differential Space 352
7 Openings and Conclusions 401
Afterword by David Harvey 425
Index 435

Translator's Acknowledgements

For various forms of aid in the preparation of this translation, I should like to express my sincerest gratitude to T. J. Clark, Andre Fougerousse, Lisa Mockler, M. N. Rublowska and - most particularly - the late Susan C. K. Hopkins. I should also like to thank my copy editor, Graham Eyre; and, above all for their patience, John Davey and Jan Chamier, my editors at Blackwell Publishers.

D. N.-S.1Plan of the Present WorkI

Not so many years ago, the word 'space' had a strictly geometrical meaning: the idea it evoked was simply that of an empty area. In scholarly use it was generally accompanied by some such epithet as 'Euclidean', 'isotropic', or 'infinite', and the general feeling was that the concept of space was ultimately a mathematical one. To speak of 'social space', therefore, would have sounded strange.

Not that the long development of the concept of space had been forgotten, but it must be remembered that the history of philosophy also testified to the gradual emancipation of the sciences - and especially of mathematics - from their shared roots in traditional metaphysics. The thinking of Descartes was viewed as the decisive point in the working-out of the concept of space, and the key to its mature form. According to most historians of Western thought, Descartes had brought to an end the Aristotelian tradition which held that space and time were among those categories which facilitated the naming and classing of the evidence of the senses. The status of such categories had hitherto remained unclear, for they could be looked upon either as simple empirical tools for ordering sense data or, alternatively, as generalities in some way superior to the evidence supplied by the body's sensory organs. With the advent of Cartesian logic, however, space had entered the realm of the absolute. As Object opposed to Subject, as res extensa opposed to, and present to, res cogitans, space came to dominate, by containing them, all senses and all bodies. Was space therefore a divine attribute? Or was it an order immanent to the totality of what existed? Such were the terms in which the problem was couched for those philosophers who came in Descartes's wake - for Spinoza, for Leibniz, for the Newtonians. Then Kant revived, and revised, the old notion of the category. Kantian space, albeit relative, albeit a tool of knowledge, a means of classifying phenomena, was yet quite clearly separated (along with time) from the empirical sphere: it belonged to the a priori realm of consciousness (i.e. of the 'subject'), and partook of that realm's internal, ideal - and hence transcendental and essentially ungraspable structure.

These protracted debates marked the shift from the philosophy to the science of space. It would be mistaken to pronounce them outdated, however, for they have an import beyond that of moments or stages in the evolution of the Western Logos. So far from being confined within the abstractness with which that Logos in its decline endowed so-called pure philosophy, they raise precise and concrete issues, among them the questions of symmetry versus asymmetry, of symmetrical objects, and of the objective effects of reflections and mirrors. These are all questions to which I shall be returning because of their implications for the analysis of social space.

II

Mathematicians, in the modern sense of the word, emerged as the proprietors of a science (and of a claim to scientific status) quite clearly detached from philosophy - a science which considered itself both necessary and self-sufficient. Thus mathematicians appropriated space, and time, and made them part of their domain, yet they did so in a rather paradoxical way. They invented spaces - an 'indefinity', so to speak, of spaces: non-Euclidean spaces, curved spaces, x-dimensional spaces (even spaces with an infinity of dimensions), spaces of configuration, abstract spaces, spaces defined by deformation or transformation, by a topology, and so on. At once highly general and highly specialized, the language of mathematics set out to discriminate between and classify all these innumerable spaces as precisely as possible. (Apparently the set of spaces, or 'space of spaces', did not lend itself very readily to conceptualization.) But the relationship between mathematics and reality
- physical or social reality - was not obvious, and indeed a deep rift had developed between these two realms. Those mathematicians who had opened up this 'problematic' subsequently abandoned it to the philosophers, who were only too happy to seize upon it as a means of

making up a little of the ground they had lost. In this way space became
- or, rather, once more became - the very thing which an earlier philosophical tradition, namely Platonism, had proposed in opposition

to the doctrine of categories: it became what Leonardo da Vinci had called a 'mental thing'. The proliferation of mathematical theories