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
What transpires here isn’t so much the power of a homogeneous
“multitude” as a “differentialist manifesto,” a unity of
diverse peoples, the potentiality of embodied radicalism, a dogged
means toward some bigger global end. The Millau protest was an
ostensible trivial “moment” within a circumscribed lived experience.
And yet, it made the abstract space of globalization—with
its intensification of agricultural production, genetically modified
food, low-wage economics, international tariff and trade agreements—real
and down-to-earth, part of everyday life. These phenomena
already had been everyday, but they’re often difficult to
spot at ground zero. Some form of militancy is required to tease
them out, to point a finger, to make people think and act. The
Lefebvrian moment, in theory and practice, can still perceive a
possibility—a crack in the edifice—help people name in everyday
life a remote process, and make it palpable and hence challengeable
and changeable. Lefebvre bequeathed us the theoretical
“thoughtware” to give body to an abstraction, to highlight latent
political ambitions before the means necessary to realize them
have been created.
“Pressure from below,” he stated near the end of The
Production of Space (p. 383), “must confront the state in its role
as organizer of space. … This state defends class interests while
simultaneously setting itself above society as a whole, and its ability
to intervene in space can and must be turned back against it,
by grassroots opposition, in the form of counter-plans and counterprojects
designed to thwart strategies, plans and programs imposed
from above.” Challenging centrality inevitably behooves pluralism,
an assault to central power by diverse local powers, by militant
actions linked with specific grievances in specific territories.
Just as inevitable will be the centralized state’s attempt to isolate
or exploit the weaknesses of these local upsurges, of any placebased
activism. “Hence a quite specific dialectical process is set in
train” (POS, p. 382): “on the one hand, the state’s reinforcement is
139