Henri Lefebvre: A Critical Introduction - autonomous learning

H e n r i L e F e b v r e
a crucial difference between Lefebvre’s theorization of abstract
space and SMP and Hardt and Negri’s Empire: the former anchors
a shifting capitalist reality solidly in sidewalk space rather than
cyberspace. Instead of becoming groundless, free-floating, and
virtual, abstract space, under a super- and suprastate mode of production,
exists materially in absolute space: the latter may have
been replaced, but it certainly hasn’t disappeared. Absolute space
survives, lives on, Lefebvre stresses, as “the bedrock” of abstract
space; the distinction is historical not ontological: abstract space is
meaningless outside of absolute space, outside of some physicality,
much as the market price for diamonds doesn’t make sense
without a diamond mine. Marx reaffirms this message: “it appears
paradoxical,” he said in Capital, “to assert that uncaught fish are
means of production in the fishing industry. But hitherto no one has
discovered the art of catching fish in waters that contain none.” 19
The transition from absolute to abstract space mirrors the transition
Marx identified between concrete and abstract labor: “productive
activity (concrete labor) became no longer one with the process
of reproduction which perpetuated social life; but, in becoming
independent of that process, labor fell prey to abstraction, whence
abstract social labor—and abstract space” (POS, p. 49). All labor,
of course, is expenditure of human energy in a particular form, with
a definite aim. In its differentiated quality, as “concrete labor,” it
creates use values; in its capitalistic guise, concrete labor assumes
an undifferentiated character, becomes objectified in a commodity,
and enters the world as exchange value. Then what was once
the specific activity of, say, making a shirt immediately becomes
general, becomes labor that’s conditioned by the socially necessary
labor time required to make shirts. “In its first aspect,” wrote
Marx, “labor presents itself as a given use-value of the commodity;
in its second, it appears as money, either as money proper or as a
mere calculation of the price of a commodity. In the first case we
are concerned exclusively with the quality, in the second with the
132