The Production of Space
Definitions:
Space: that which we create in and around us by virtue of our bodily presence.
Place: those specific spaces to which we are affectively and physically attached, bound, or oriented toward.
Identity: our lived experience of being situated spatially and temporally; the enduring bodily and psychic perception and conception of self across spacetime(s).
Questions:
- Throughout this week’s readings, I was particularly interested in Henri Lefebvre’s concept of representational space, which he describes as “linked to the clandestine or underground side of social life” (33) and which Kirsten Simonsen describes as “the lived space; the space of inhabitants and users as well as of some artists and writers, the space they incessantly seek to create through appropriation of the environment” (7), as well as the space of “conflicting rhythms of everyday life” (Simonsen 7). While politics are certainly implicated in each level or element of Lefebvre’s dialectical triad, I found the idea of representational space to be the most productive for thinking about social difference, one of the primary preoccupations of feminists, critical race theorists, scholars of (dis)ability, etc. The ways in which we live and experience space constitute or produce the meaning(s) of our differences. While Simonsen focuses on the aspects of Lefebvre’s work that can work generatively with feminism, she neglects other fields’ attention to difference; Tuan, moreover, seems downright dismissive of ways of experiencing space that do not correspond to what we traditionally think of as able-bodiedness, let alone to the rational humanist subject (Tuan 52, 65). My question, therefore, is how might engaging a variety of differences, from gender to racialization to ability to neurodiversity (none of these being easily separable, of course), enable us to come to a more nuanced and rigorous understanding of the production of space?
- I found myself reading The Production of Space queerly; that is, I found many place/moments in the text where his theory of the production of space could be useful for theorizing queer lives. For example, Lefebvre argues that several things are necessary for a society to generate or appropriate a social space to achieve self-presentation or self-representation (34). One of these is that “the family (long very large, but never unlimited in size) be rejected as sole centre of focus of social practice, for such a state of affairs would entail the dissolution of society; but at the same time that it be retained and maintained as the ‘basis’ of personal and direct relationships which are bound to nature, to the earth, to procreation, and thus to reproduction” (34-35). This got me thinking about John D’Emilio’s essay “Capitalism and Gay Identity,” in which he argues that capitalism gave rise to a proliferation of sexual identities by virtue of the fact that the family was no longer the most important unit of social (re)production. What are other ways Lefebvre’s work has been taken up queerly? What might queer productions of social space look like, either historically or in the future?
- Finally, I was wondering about the operations of capitalism under neoliberalism while reading Lefebvre’s descriptions of state power in the latter half of the twentieth century. He argues that “The state is consolidating on a world scale. It weighs down on society (on all societies) in full force; it plans and organizes society ‘rationally’, with the help of knowledge and technology, imposing analogous, if not homologous, measures irrespective of political ideology, historical background, or the class origins of those in power” (23). How does state power look different under neoliberalism? Is space produced differently with intense privatization and the expansion of markets? Similar issues are raised with regard to Requiem for Detroit—what happens to a place when its relationships to the means of production and consumption drastically change?