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Progress in Human Geography
http://phg.sagepub.com/content/early/2012/05/29/0309132512446718
The online version of this article can be found at:
DOI: 10.1177/0309132512446718
published online 29 May 2012 Prog Hum Geogr
Stefan Kipfer, Parastou Saberi and Thorben Wieditz
Henri Lefebvre: Debates and controversies
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What is This?
tat
(1968, 1976a, 1976b, 1977, 1978) conclude his
lifelong critique of the state and state-like
knowledge (savoir) as a form of alienation
(Brenner and Elden, 2009a; Schmidt, 1990;
Wex, 1999). Like his contemporary Nicos Pou-
lantzas, Lefebvre treats the state as an institu-
tional condensation of social power, but he
also emphasizes the presence of the state
(state-like thinking and symbolism) in everyday
life. On this basis, Lefebvre develops the notion
of the state mode of production (SMP) to scru-
tinize the productivist logics of mid-20th-
century state forms (Stalinism, fascism, Social
Democracy) (Lefebvre, 1977). In capitalist
contexts, he focuses on the changing role of
states in promoting, financing, subsidizing,
and regulating capitalism and the class com-
promises that sustained it in West Europe. To
the productivism of the SMP, Lefebvre coun-
terposes a new left notion of radical democ-
racy: the withering away of the state in
practices of self-management (autogestion).
Lefebvres critique of state productivism is
highly relevant for contemporary analyses of
neoliberalism and its productivist critics
(Brenner, 2008).
Lefebvres discussion of the state also repre-
sents an important reformulation of his theory of
the production of space. On the one hand,
Lefebvre underlines how the state plays a cen-
tral role in the production of abstract homoge-
neous, fragmented, and hierarchical space,
and, thus, the survival of capitalism. On the
other hand, Lefebvre makes it clear that states
are themselves spatialized, and this in a variety
of possible ways. As Neil Brenner (2004) and
Manu Goswami (2004) have pointed out for
West Europe and India, Lefebvre allows us to
understand state-space in its comparative spe-
cificities without the pitfalls of methodological
nationalism so characteristic of much state
theory and (neo)realist international relations
theory. As a consequence, territory including
the territorial hierarchies Lefebvre calls colo-
nial appears as similarly produced (Brenner
and Elden, 2009b). Despite its centrality to the
definitions of modern state, territory has
remained undertheorized (Agnew, 1994; Elden,
2009, 2010; Lussault, 2007; Painter, 2010). As
Neil Brenner and Stuart Elden (2009b: 367)
suggest, Lefebvres analysis allows us to think
territory, space, and state together, and thus to
examine the historically and geographically
specific political forms of the co-production of
space and territory (state space as territory)
through the dialectics of their perceived, con-
ceived, and lived dimensions. This approach
avoids the logical conflation of territory and ter-
ritoriality (Cox, 2002; Raffestin, 1980) or the
presupposition of territory as a pregiven,
bounded region (Weber, 1968), or bounded
space (Delany, 2005; Giddens, 1981; Storey,
2001). While the social weight of state territori-
ality can help naturalize state intervention
(Brenner and Elden, 2009b: 372373), it is ulti-
mately subject to conflict, contestation, and his-
torical malleability.
Today, when many have construed the rela-
tionship between states and globalization as a
zero-sum-game (more globalization equals less
state), and have called for disaggregating the
state and the border in order to conceptualize the
various sites and modes of bordering, an
emphasis on the production of state space is
imperative. First, it allows one to see how states
remain central agents in globalized contexts,
albeit in restructured and partly rescaled
fashion. As illustrated most recently by the
Kipfer et al. 9
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bloodless coups d etats in Italy and Greece to
restore market confidence in the Euro zone
(Kouvelakis, 2011), authoritarian state inter-
vention is essential to manage and institute the
chaotic social forces of the contemporary world
order, leading to new conflicts and crises.
Rather than a national response to global
dynamics, state intervention has itself become
transnational. Second, a critical analysis of the
production of state space allows one to recog-
nize the centrality of territory in geopolitics
today, the shifts from previous imperial and
colonial eras notwithstanding. In contrast to the
naive, post-Cold War borderless world dis-
courses, the contemporary war on terror has
forced us to ponder how best to examine the
characteristics and spatial scales of borders
(Johnson et al., 2011). Lefebvres approach to
space and territory helps us comprehend the
specific forms of neocolonial space produced
by multiscalar state-strategies, notably those
oriented towards reconfiguring the geopolitical
architecture of the planet with projects of mili-
tarization and securitization.
4 Scale
Given the contemporary transnational rescaling
of states, it is no surprise that Lefebvre has
loomed large in debates about scale, either with
direct reference to Lefebvres work or indir-
ectly, via David Harveys geographical political
economy. While some theorize scale on the
assumption that Lefebvre had very little to say
about scale (Marston and Smith, 2001), others
have insightfully suggested that Henri
Lefebvres discussion of scale ( echelle), which
one can find in his work on the state, lends itself
to a critique of scalar presuppositions (Brenner,
2000). Just as space more generally, scale is not a
pregiven hierarchical frame of social action but a
historically contingent product of social pro-
cesses. In response to Brenner, some have
insisted, on specifically feminist grounds, that
Lefebvre-influenced scale debates should pay
much more attention to spatial scales, such as the
household or the human body (Marston, 2000;
Marston and Smith, 2001), while others have
argued that a focus on scale ( echelle) should not
displace Lefebvres persistent interest in levels
(niveaux) (Goonewardena, 2005; Kipfer, 2009).
As we have seen, Lefebvre understood the
urban as an intermediate level of totality (M),
which mediates the general, macro level (G)
of the far order (the state, capital, empire) and
the near order, the contradictory level of
everyday life (P). All of these levels can be
scaled, of course, but they are not synonymous
with scale. The urban is not reducible to metro-
politan regions, for example. In fact, Lefebvres
notion of the urban as level allowed him to con-
ceptualize the relationship between urbaniza-
tion and the urban (fleeting form of centrality)
in multiscalar, tendentially worldwide terms.
On this basis, some have gone as far as to sug-
gest that the urban represents the veritable epis-
teme of our time (Prigge, 1995). Most
importantly, the urban understood as level of
social reality ties urban analysis systematically
back to matters of everyday life, which, in turn,
is of paramount significance for considerations
of class, gender, race, and sexuality as lived,
bodily experience at level P everyday life. In
this light, the importance of scale as a particular
result of the production of space must be relati-
vized. On this point, the relativity of scale in
relationship to other spatial forms such as
territory and network, there is now an implicit
consensus in the literature (Jessop et al., 2008;
Schmid, 2003).
5 Gender and sexuality
If the scale debates are any indication, Lefebvre
was as little a feminist or queer theorist of gen-
der and sexuality as he was a theorist of colonial
history. In fact, Lefebvre had a basic tendency
to describe women and men in essentialist terms
or deploy gendered or heternormative imagery
to describe the world (Blum and Nast, 1996).
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This has not stopped a number of feminists and
theorists of sexuality, heternormative or other-
wise, making good use of Lefebvres work,
however. For instance, Kristin Ross (1995) has
examined the gendered relationships between
domestic and late colonial culture in urban
France. Mary McLeod (1997) has excavated
Lefebvres relevance for feminist conceptions
of ordinary architecture, and Doreen Massey
(1994) has stressed the benefits of bringing
Lefebvre in touch with feminist debates about
economic geography and radical democracy.
More recently, Lefebvres work has been redir-
ected to show how the geographies of sex work
are best considered as produced conceived,
lived, and perceived social spaces (Hubbard
and Sanders (2003), and, more generally, how
the gendered and sexualized production of
space is a profoundly corporeal affair (Friedman
and van Ingen, 2011).
What makes Lefebvres work amenable to
critical analyses of gender and sexuality, despite
itself? In his critiques of everyday life, Lefebvre
consistently emphasized the degree to which the
institution of everyday life has taken place dis-
proportionately on the backs of women, who
carried the burden of privatized consumption
work under that very postwar capitalism which,
in advertising campaigns and womens maga-
zines, promised women new levels of economic
autonomy, affective fulfillment, and sexual lib-
eration. His research on architecture and urban
planning projects was persistent in its critique
of reproductive and nuclear conceptions of
family life that undergirded the bungalow dis-
tricts and apartment superblocks he analyzed
(Lefebvre, 1970a; Stanek, 2011). In The Pro-
duction of Space and De lE
tat I. LE