Henri Lefebvre: A Critical Introduction - autonomous learning

H e n r i L e F e b v r e
the blanket category of economic globalization. Neoliberal pundits
like economist Richard O’Brien now suggest that because the
economy is supposedly a totalizing force, footloose and fancyfree,
everywhere and hence nowhere in particular, a Lefevbrian
antithesis is in our midst: “The End of Geography.” 10 Here big
finance and mobile money arguably run roughshod over specific
geographical contouring, like national jurisdictional boundaries,
and trample over politics itself. So the “end of geography” is, for
O’Brien, tantamount to “death of politics,” the denouement of the
New Right’s withering away of the state, because there’s now no
political space for any alternative, no geographical niche or strategic
spatial maneuvering for anything but neoliberal financial logic.
It’s an inexorable inundation that no Noah’s ark can withstand.
The SMP has calibrated society to such a finely tuned degree that
it pervades everything and everybody. It’s the economy, state, and
civil society all rolled into one.
The post-Seattle Left has come up with its own, curious version
of this thesis. In their Marxist blockbuster Empire, the hardhitting
duo Michael Hardt and Antonio Negri don’t so much hail
the end of geography as extend geopolitical frontiers to the absolute
max. “Empire” is their slippery concept for disentangling a
similarly slippery and entangled globalized world order, an order
about as old as The Production of Space. Empire is different from
the imperialist Empire of old, say Hardt and Negri; above all, it’s
the Empire of globalization, a new kind of “decentered” sovereignty,
having no boundaries or limits—other than the limits of
planet Earth. While it flourishes off U.S. constitutionalism and
frontierism, Empire isn’t simply American nor is the United States
its center: Empire has no center. Its power dynamics don’t operate
like any Hobbesian Leviathan; power isn’t repressive from the
top-down, administered on the unruly rabble below. Rather, power
is more “biopolitical,” regulating people from within, seeping into
subjectivity and through the whole fabric of society. 11
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