Henri Lefebvre: A Critical Introduction - autonomous learning

H e n r i L e F e b v r e
Davos, Switzerland. Representations of space are likewise projected
onto lived reality by the World Trade Organization and the
World Bank, and conjured up on endless corporate and state flip
charts in neat boardrooms and cabinet offices, cordoned off from
the messy disorder of lived experience outside. The reality of these
abstract representations provide the context for neoliberal spatial
practices across the globe, as well as the grassroots activism scattered
around assorted spaces of representation.
Neither realm—the absolute lived or the abstract conceived—
exists as opposites in a binary; yet neither are they the same reality.
They are, in fact, two instances within one world, relative distinctions
within a unity, definite relations within neocapitalist globality.
Lefebvre is smart enough to know not only the global forest and its
constitutive trees; he also knows how each realm is mediated. He
knows how mediation resides within, not between, each moment:
mediation isn’t a third piece to slot into a gap. Lefebvre knows the
mediation between space and place, between the abstract and the
concrete is intrinsic to each respective opposite. Spatial practices,
those practical routes, networks, and received actions ingrained
and normalized within lived experience, play a crucial mediating
role in global space. They keep the global and the local scales
together, yet apart.
On the one hand, everyday spatial practices make the local
seem absolutely local; on the other hand, they make the global,
especially as it is filtered through the TV or chronicled in the
“International News” pages of the dailies, seem absolutely global,
as something beyond the reach of any place-bound locality.
Spatial practices thus pivot around the “thing” world of everyday
life, and they internalize both representations of space and
spaces of representation. But this everyday perceptual thing-world
is flush with processes and representations that aren’t graspable
from the level of perception and lived experience alone—rather
like abstract labor isn’t graspable from the standpoint of concrete
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