Henri Lefebvre: A Critical Introduction - autonomous learning

G L o b a L i z a t i o n a n d t H e s t a t e
quantity of labor.” 20 This second kind of labor, labor toted up as
value and exchange value, is what Marx tagged “abstract labor.”
Marx makes an analytical distinction rather than a real-life
separation and shows Lefebvre how to keep the link between
the specific and the general, quality and quantity, use value and
exchange value, and the concrete and the abstract in taut dialectical
tension. You can’t have one without its “other”: without use
values commodities would have no exchange values; if they don’t
have exchange values, tailors and shirt manufacturers, at least in
our society, would stop making shirts. Similarly, abstract space is
reality only insofar as it is embedded in absolute space; space has
reality only insofar as it is embedded in place. Absolute space lives
on as a basic empirical building block, as the ontological layering
of society, just as the dynamics of daily life still respond to classical
Newtonian physics—even after Einstein’s revolution, even
after Heisenberg’s “uncertainty principle.” Atomic particles may
be in two places at once but people can’t; daily life—lived space
of representation—is always couched in absolute time and space,
is always located and locatable in observable empirical reality.
Place matters for life and for politics. And it poses dilemmas for
theory.
Lefebvre’s spatial triad tackles the theoretical conundrum by
giving a dialectical contradiction a “triple determination.” Absolute
and abstract spaces, for him, become two different guises of a unity
straddling three identifiable moments: the conceived–perceived–
lived. Here it’s possible to recognize how conceived spaces of
representation are geared toward the production of abstract space,
with its global reach, while absolute space is the locus of perceived
spatial practices and daily life. The process world of abstract space
is the representation of space commandeered by the rich and powerful,
by CEOs and cybernanthropes, by state politicians and freemarket
planners, by those who’re invited to global summits like
the World Economic Forum, who conceive spaces every year at
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