i on thomas paine reviews: origins of crisis in ussr - Common Sense

Trial by Space: Reflections on Lefebvre Page 29
abstract space of 20th century capitalism. . "By the time this process is complete, space
has no social existence independently of an intense, aggressive and repressive
visualisation .... The rise of the visual realm entails a series of substitutions and
displacernents by means of which it overwhelms the whole body and usurps its role."
(Lefebvre 1991 p286) The abstract space of capitalism, then, is a "phallic-visualgeometric
space" (Lefebvre 1991 ~289). one which is a medium of exchange tending to
absorb use. This in no way excludes its political use, rather the opposite. It is in this
space that the "world of commodities" is deployed along with its logic (calculation,
planning, programming) and its world-wide strategies, as well as the power of money and
that of the political state. Within this space, the town - once the forcing-house of
accumulation and the centre of historical space - has disintegrated. (Lefebvre 1991 pp53,
307) "The outcome has been an authoritarian and brutal spatial practice, whether
Haussmann's or the later, codified versions of the Bauhaus or Le Corbusier ...." (1991
~308)
Given the importance of the state in the formation of abstract space, Lefebvre outlines his
concept of the state, one which is both interesting and at odds with much of the
contemporary debate. The state, for Lefebvre, is a differentiated unity of violence and
territory. "Sovereignty implies 'space', and what is more it implies a space against
which violence, whether latent or overt, is directed - a space established and constituted by
violence." (1991 p280) The development of accumulation through violence broke the old
spatial forms giving rise to the nation state, based on a circumscribed territory, that
triumphed over both the city state and the imperial state. The violence inherent in the
state's constitution and reproduction originated in nature, as much with respect to the
sources mobilised as with respect to the stakes - namely land and wealth. At the same
time it aggressed all of nature, imposing laws upon it and carving it up administratively
according to criterion quite alien to the initial characteristics of either the land or its
inhabitants. (ibid) What is interesting and extremely useful is Lefebvre's emphasis on the
spatiality of the state. "Without the concept of space and of its production the framework
of power (whether as reality or concept) simply cannot achieve concreteness." (1991 p281)
The space is that of a centralised power which sets itself above other power and eliminates
it. This insight is worth emphasising. The relationship befween institutions other than
the state itself (eg. university, tax authority, judiciary) and the effectiveness of those
institutions has no need of the mediation of the concept of space to achieve self-
representation, for the space in which they function is defined by statutes which fall
within the political space of the state. "By contrast the state framework, and the state as
framework, cannot be conceived of without reference to the instrumental space that they
make use of. Indeed each new form of the state, each new form of political power,
introduces its own particular way of partitioning space, its own particular administrative
classification of discourses about space and about things and people in space." (1991 p281)
According to Lefebvre, the abstract space of capitalism, as expressed in and through the
state. has a particular form and nature and "it" is also the space through which the
capitalist 'trinity' is rendered concrete. "In this way the capitalist 'trinity' is established in
space - that trinity of land-capital-labour which cannot remain abstract and which is
assembled only within an equally tri-faceted institutional space: a space that is first of all
global, and maintained as such - the space of the sovereignty, where constraints are
implemented, and hence a fetishised space, reductive of differences; a space, secondly, that
isfragmnted, separating, disjunctive, a space that locates specificities, places or localities,
both in order to control them and in order to make them negotiable; and a space, finally,
that is hiermhica& ranging from the lowliest places to the noblest, from the tabooed to