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
labor. Consequently, spatial practices are in the thrall of conceived
space, yet they have the latent capacity, Lefebvre says, to subvert
the conceived, to “detonate” lived space and to transform the
global—but only if the severed can be reconnected and separated
commingled.
* * *
Lefebvre has no truck with binary thought and sundered practice.
Hence he has sound reasons for positing a triad. To begin with,
he wants to ensure that space doesn’t simply get equated to the
abstract and place doesn’t get equated to the concrete. But, neither,
too, does he want to give credence to the opposite view. He doesn’t
accept that space has overwhelmed place—that in our high-tech,
media-saturated society space has decoupled from its place mooring.
The idea that reality is now rootless and “nonplace” would
strike Lefebvre, the grand theorist of everyday life, as patently
ridiculous and politically dubious. He would thereby rally against
the “network society” promulgated by former colleague Manuel
Castells; namely, the “space of flows” has substituted “the place of
spaces.” This ontological binary is something Hardt and Negri’s
epistemology revels in, with its either–or mentality: “In this
smooth space of Empire,” they say, “there is no place of power—it
is both everywhere and nowhere. Empire is an ou-topia, or really
a non-place … abstract labor is [now] an activity without place …
exploitation and domination constitute a general non-place on the
imperial terrain.” 21 And, to redouble the point, they add (p. 237),
“Having achieved the global level, capitalist development is faced
directly with the multitude, without mediation.” 22
Contra Hardt and Negri, Lefebvre says, “Everything weighs
down on the lower ‘micro’ level, on the local and localizable—
in short, on the sphere of everyday life” (POS, p. 366). Indeed,
everything—the global included—“depends on this level:
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