The Mirror of Production (Le Miroir de la production) – Jean Baudrillard

About the Work

The Production of Space is a work of social theory by the French Marxist philosopher Henri Lefebvre, translated into English by Donald Nicholson-Smith and published by Basil Blackwell in Oxford and Cambridge, Massachusetts. The French original appeared under the title La production de l’espace, issued by Editions Anthropos. The book runs to seven chapters, followed by an afterword by David Harvey and an index, and it opens with an epigraph drawn from Octavio Paz—an “Envoi” in which a speaker imprisoned by four walls (North: the crystal of non-knowledge; South: reflective memory; East: the mirror; West: stone and the song of silence) writes messages and receives no reply. That image of enclosure, reflection, and unanswered communication sets the tone for what follows: a long, demanding inquiry into the space we inhabit, how it is made, and who profits from it.

“It replaces a brutal reality with a materially realized appearance; reality is changed into appearance.”

The book is not a treatise on geometry or a work of architectural criticism in the ordinary sense. It is an attempt to think space as a social product—something generated by societies and modes of production rather than given by nature or elaborated purely in the mind. Lefebvre writes as a philosopher who has absorbed Marx, Hegel, and Nietzsche, and who is equally at home among mathematicians, planners, semioticians, and poets. The prose moves between abstract argument and concrete example: a Parisian mansion converted into workshops, a Venetian lagoon, a motorway slicing through countryside, a tenant in a government-subsidized high-rise. The result is a book that is at once theoretical and polemical, addressed to specialists in many disciplines and distrustful of all of them.

Context

The book belongs to a period in which “space” had become a fashionable and contested term across the human sciences. Lefebvre notes that until recently the word carried a strictly geometrical meaning—an empty area, qualified as Euclidean, isotropic, or infinite, and treated as ultimately mathematical. To speak of “social space” would have sounded strange. He traces how this changed: philosophy once testified to the sciences’ emancipation from metaphysics, with Descartes viewed as the decisive point, ending the Aristotelian tradition that treated space and time as categories for naming and classing sense evidence. With Cartesian logic, space entered the realm of the absolute—Object opposed to Subject, res extensa opposed to res cogitans—dominating all senses and bodies by containing them. Spinoza, Leibniz, and the Newtonians asked whether space was a divine attribute or an immanent order; Kant revived and revised the category, separating space from the empirical sphere and lodging it in the a priori realm of consciousness, partaking of a transcendental and essentially ungraspable structure.

Modern mathematicians then emerged as proprietors of a science detached from philosophy, inventing an infinity of spaces—non-Euclidean, curved, x-dimensional, configurational, abstract, defined by deformation, transformation, topology. But the relationship between mathematics and physical or social reality was not obvious, and a deep rift developed. Mathematicians abandoned the problem to philosophers, who seized it to regain lost ground; space once more became what Platonism had proposed against the doctrine of categories—what Leonardo da Vinci called a “mental thing.” Epistemology inherited this notion of space as a mental place. Set theory fascinated philosophers, writers, and linguists, producing proliferating “sets” with their “logics,” none sharing anything with Cartesian philosophy. We hear of literary space, ideological spaces, dream space, psychoanalytic topologies. Conspicuous by absence from these epistemological studies is the idea of “man” and of space itself. Michel Foucault asserts that knowledge (savoir) is the space where the subject may take up a position and speak of objects, but never explains what space is, nor how it bridges the theoretical and the practical, the mental and the social. Noam Chomsky reinstates the Cartesian cogito, positing a linguistic level with “a finite set of levels ordered from high to low,” postulating a mental space with orientations and symmetries while ignoring the gap separating it from social space. Lefebvre detects in such authors a paralogism: leaping over an area, ignoring logical links, invoking coupure, rupture, or break. The criticism applies, he says, to Julia Kristeva’s semiotics, Jacques Derrida’s grammatology, and Roland Barthes’s general semiology—a school promoting the sophistry whereby the philosophico-epistemological notion of space is fetishized and the mental envelops the social and physical. A few suspect the need for mediation; most spring from mental to social. A powerful ideological tendency expresses dominant-class ideas; a “theoretical practice” produces an apparently extra-ideological mental space which becomes the locus of a theoretical practice separated from social practice.

Against this background, Lefebvre stages a confrontation with several figures who tried, in different ways, to grasp space as a whole. Surrealism, for all its theoretical apparatus, failed: its poetry preferred the visual to seeing, rarely listened, and neglected the musical. Breton spoke of existence’s “deep night” being pierced into “total transparency,” and acknowledged a Hegelian-derived project pursued through the affective overburdening of the loved object; but the surrealists produced only a lyrical metalanguage of history, an illusory fusing of subject and object. Their verbal metamorphosis changed nothing; language alone could not leap from exchange to use. Georges Bataille sought a junction between inner experience, physical nature, and social space, but his way was Nietzsche’s—eruptive, disruptive—accentuating divisions and widening gulfs until intuition leaps across: earth to sun, night to day, life to death, logical to heterological, normal to heteronomic. In Bataille all space is apprehended tragically; the centre has its tragic reality (sacrifice, violence, explosion), as does the periphery. In diametrical opposition, the theorist of technology Jacques Lafitte glimpsed a unitary theory of space, proposing “mechanology” as a general science of technical devices responsible for material reality, knowledge, and social space. Lacking information science and cybernetics, he still gave form to the unitary hypothesis, bringing technocratic-functionalist-structuralist ideology to bear and producing a technocratic Utopia. He compared “passive” (static) machines to architecture and the vegetable kingdom, and “active” machines to animals, schematizing nature, knowledge, and society’s genesis.

Hegel stands as “a sort of Place de l’Etoile” in this history. In Hegelianism, historical time gives birth to state-occupied space; time solidifies within space’s immanent rationality. The Hegelian end of history does not eliminate historicity’s product, which asserts self-sufficiency; history transforms from action to memory, production to contemplation. After this fetishization of space, philosophy sought to restore time: Marx’s revolutionary time, Bergson’s duration, Husserl’s phenomenology. In Lukács’s anti-Hegelian Hegelianism, space defines reification and false consciousness. Only Nietzsche maintained space’s primordiality—”Where there is space there is being.” Nietzschean space shares nothing with Hegelian space; Nietzschean time, cyclical and tragic, shares nothing with Marxist historicity. Lefebvre closes this survey with three contemporary points: the state consolidates worldwide, crushing time, imposing equilibrium, feedback, self-regulation, so that Hegelian space returns; other forces resist, since state normality makes transgression inevitable, and a new tragic negativity manifests as violence; and the working class has not said its last word, class struggle persists in myriad forms, and workers opt for the withering away of work itself. Marxist thought, he insists, cannot disappear.

Structure of the Book

The book opens with a chapter titled “Plan of the Present Work,” which lays out the central proposition and the conceptual apparatus that the rest of the volume will elaborate. This opening chapter is itself a survey of the intellectual terrain: it moves from the history of the concept of space in philosophy and mathematics, through the failures and partial insights of surrealism, Bataille, and Lafitte, to Hegel and Nietzsche, and then states the book’s aim—to detonate the present state of affairs by fostering confrontation between ideas that illuminate the modern world as “prefigurations lying at the threshold of modernity.” Sources invoked along the way include Lewis Carroll as the author of Symbolic Logic, Hermann Hesse’s Das Glasperlenspiel, Hermann Weyl’s Symmetry, and Nietzsche’s Das Philosophenbuch.

From there the argument turns to the central proposition: “(Social) space is a (social) product.” Space has a reality distinct from yet like commodities, money, and capital; it serves as tool of thought and action, means of production, control, domination, power—yet escapes those who use it. The book seeks to demonstrate that social space is irreducible to mental or physical space. Two illusions are identified and dismantled: the illusion of transparency, in which space appears luminous and intelligible, assuming a coincidence between social and mental space and tied to the fetishism of speech and writing; and the realistic illusion, in which space appears naturally simple and substantial, closer to naturalistic materialism. Each illusion embodies and nourishes the other.

The conceptual triad that organizes the whole inquiry is then introduced: spatial practice (production and reproduction, continuity, cohesion); representations of space (tied to production relations, knowledge, signs, codes); and representational spaces (space directly lived through images and symbols). The chapter elaborates each term with examples—the daily life of a tenant in a government-subsidized high-rise as modern spatial practice; the conceptualized space of scientists, planners, urbanists, and technocratic subdividers as representations of space; the space of “inhabitants” and “users,” overlain with symbolic use of objects, as representational space. The triad is dialectical: three elements, not two, since two-element relations reduce to oppositions, contrasts, and antagonisms—echoes, repercussions, mirror effects. Philosophy struggled to get beyond dualisms: subject and object, Descartes’s res cogitans and res extensa, Kantian and neo-Kantian Ego and non-Ego. Such “binary” theories share nothing with Manichaean cosmic struggle; their dualism is mental, stripping living activity from life, thought, and society. After Hegel and Marx, philosophy reverted to “relevant” dualities, drawing in specialized sciences, defining intelligibility via opposites; such a system has neither materiality nor loose ends—a “perfect” system whose rationality seems self-evident, with magic power to turn obscurity into transparency and decrypt. Thus knowledge (savoir) put itself in thrall to power, suppressing resistance and obscurity.

The body enters here: a subject’s relationship to space implies a relationship to his own body and vice versa. Social practice presupposes body use—hands, members, sensory organs, gestures of work and non-work—the realm of the perceived. Representations of the body derive from accumulated scientific knowledge mixed with ideology. Bodily lived experience may be complex and peculiar because “culture” intervenes via symbolisms and the long Judaeo-Christian tradition. The perceived-conceived-lived triad loses force as an abstract “model”; if it cannot grasp the concrete, its import is limited to one ideological mediation among others. The Western town from the Italian Renaissance to the nineteenth century enjoyed auspicious conditions: representation of space dominated and subordinated a religious-origin representational space reduced to symbolic figures. Tuscan painters, architects, and theorists developed perspective on the basis of social practice resulting from a historic change in town-country relations. The vanishing line, vanishing-point, and meeting of parallel lines “at infinity” determined a representation at once intellectual and visual, promoting the primacy of the gaze in a “logic of visualization,” enshrined in architectural and urbanistic practice as the code of linear perspective.

Later chapters take up the history of space, the relationship between domination and appropriation, the role of class struggle in the production of space, and the critique of space as a fetishized abstraction. The book examines historical examples—Venice, the Marais district of Paris, the Pantheon in Rome, the Greek city with its agora, temple, and stadium—and engages critically with theorists of space such as Siegfried Giedeon and Bruno Zevi, and with architects such as Robert Venturi and Le Corbusier. It closes with reflections on the mode of existence of social relationships, the extension of historical and dialectical materialism, and the possibility of a new space—urban space as product and work, in the sense in which art created works.

Inside the Book

The Geometrical and the Social: Space Before Lefebvre

The book opens with its front matter: the title page, copyright details (the French original La production de l’espace, 1974/1984; the English translation by Donald Nicholson-Smith, 1991), cataloguing data listing Lefebvre’s birth year as 1905 and the subject heading “Space and time,” and an epigraph from Octavio Paz. In that epigraph a speaker imprisoned by four walls—North a crystal of non-knowledge, South reflective memory, East the mirror, West stone and the song of silence—writes messages but receives no reply. The contents list seven chapters plus an Afterword by David Harvey, and the translator thanks his collaborators and editors.

Lefebvre begins by noting how recently “space” meant only a geometrical emptiness—Euclidean, isotropic, infinite, ultimately mathematical—so that “social space” would have sounded strange. He traces the concept’s history: philosophy registered the sciences’ emancipation from metaphysics, with Descartes the decisive break that ended the Aristotelian treatment of space and time as categories for naming sense evidence. Cartesian space entered the realm of the absolute, as res extensa opposed to res cogitans, containing and dominating all bodies. Spinoza, Leibniz, and the Newtonians debated whether space was a divine attribute or an immanent order; Kant made it relative yet a priori, separated from the empirical sphere and partaking of consciousness’s ungraspable structure. These debates, Lefebvre says, still raise concrete questions—symmetry and asymmetry, mirrors and reflections—that matter for social space.

Mathematicians, Epistemologists, and the Mental Thing

Modern mathematicians became proprietors of a self-sufficient science, inventing an infinity of spaces—non-Euclidean, curved, x-dimensional, topological—and seeking to classify them, though the “space of spaces” resisted conceptualization. The rift between mathematics and physical or social reality was abandoned to philosophers, who seized it to regain lost ground, so that space once more became what Leonardo called a “mental thing.” Epistemology inherited this notion; set theory fascinated philosophers, writers, and linguists, and no limits were set on generalizing mental space—literary space, dream space, psychoanalytic topologies. Conspicuously absent is any idea of “man” or of space itself. Foucault asserts knowledge is the space where a subject may take up a position and speak of objects, but never explains what space is. Linguists eliminated the collective and concrete subject, promoting the impersonal “one,” yet the abstract cogito re-emerged in neo-Hegelian, neo-Kantian, neo-Cartesian forms, aided by Husserl. Chomsky reinstates the Cartesian cogito, positing a mental space with orientations and symmetries while ignoring its gap from social space. These authors commit a paralogism: leaping over an area, invoking rupture or break—a criticism applying to Kristeva’s semiotics, Derrida’s grammatology, and Barthes’s semiology, a school that fetishizes the philosophico-epistemological notion of space so the mental envelops the social and physical. A powerful ideological tendency expresses dominant-class ideas, producing an apparently extra-ideological mental space.

Surrealism, Bataille, Lafitte, and Hegel

The “Plan of the Present Work” opens with a first-person account of superstitious practices—opening and shutting a door, slipping a knife between book pages to divine a woman’s inclinations, rearranging objects while scrutinizing their positions—attributed to Breton’s L’amour fou. Surrealism’s poetic project failed despite its manifestoes: it preferred the visual to seeing, neglected the musical, and produced only a lyrical metalanguage of history, an illusory fusing of subject and object; language alone could not leap from exchange to use. Bataille sought a junction between inner experience, physical nature, and social space, but unlike the surrealists he did not pursue imagined synthesis; his way was Nietzsche’s—eruptive, disruptive—accentuating divisions until intuition leaps across, apprehending all space tragically. Jacques Lafitte, diametrically opposed, glimpsed a unitary theory through “mechanology,” a general science of technical devices, producing a technocratic Utopia. The text then returns to Hegel, “a sort of Place de l’Etoile”: historical time gives birth to state-occupied space, and after this fetishization philosophy sought to restore time—Marx’s revolutionary time, Bergson’s duration, Husserl’s phenomenology. Only Nietzsche maintained space’s primordiality: “Where there is space there is being.”

Three Contemporary Points and the Central Proposition

Three contemporary points follow: the state consolidates worldwide, crushing time and imposing equilibrium, so Hegelian space returns; other forces resist, and a new tragic negativity manifests as violence; the working class has not said its last word, and workers opt for the withering away of work itself. The book’s aim is to detonate this state of affairs, fostering confrontation between ideas illuminating the modern world as prefigurations of modernity, drawing on Carroll, Hesse, Weyl, and Nietzsche. Its central proposition: “(Social) space is a (social) product.” Space has a reality distinct from yet like commodities, money, and capital; it serves as tool of thought and action, means of production, control, domination, and power—yet escapes those who use it. Two illusions are named: the illusion of transparency, tied to fetishism of speech and writing, and the realistic illusion, closer to naturalistic materialism; each embodies and nourishes the other. Natural space is disappearing; every society produces its own space, containing relations of reproduction and of production, and under capitalism three levels: biological reproduction, reproduction of labour power, and reproduction of social relations of production.

The Conceptual Triad and the Body

The triad is introduced: spatial practice (production and reproduction, continuity, cohesion); representations of space (tied to production relations, knowledge, signs, codes); and representational spaces. Anticipating an objection—that earlier societies did not “produce” space as a vase or house is produced—the text imagines ecologists and historians answering differently, then returns to the concepts. Spatial practice secretes and presupposes a society’s space in dialectical interaction; under neocapitalism it links daily routine and urban networks in a paradoxical association including extreme separation. Representations of space are the conceptualized space of scientists, planners, and technocratic subdividers, dominant in any mode of production and tending toward verbal signs. Representational spaces are directly lived through images and symbols, dominated and passively experienced, which imagination seeks to change. The dialectic is of three elements, not two; two-element relations reduce to oppositions and mirror effects, and philosophy struggled to get beyond dualisms. The body is then considered: a subject’s relation to space implies relation to his own body and vice versa; social practice presupposes body use, representations of the body mix knowledge with ideology, and lived bodily experience is complicated by culture and the Judaeo-Christian tradition. The perceived-conceived-lived triad loses force as an abstract model; its interconnection is a logical necessity, but coherence is another matter, probably achieved only under favourable conditions—as in the Western town from the Italian Renaissance to the nineteenth century, when representation of space dominated a religious-origin representational space, and Tuscan painters and architects developed perspective, enshrining the primacy of the gaze in a “logic of visualization” coded as linear perspective.

The Work, the Product, and the Fate of the City

The passage opens on a note of elegy: the moment of creation is past, and a city’s disappearance is imminent. Because such a place remains full of life yet is threatened with extinction, a work deeply affects anyone who takes pleasure in it—and thereby contributes to its demise. The same holds for a village or a fine vase. These things occupy a space that was never produced as such. A rose, the text notes, does not know that it is a rose. A city, unlike a flower, has been composed by people and well-defined groups, yet it lacks the intentional character of an art object. What were the great cathedrals? Political acts. Ancient statues immortalized the dead so they would not harm the living; fabrics and vases served a purpose. The appearance of art, shortly before the appearance of its concept, implies the degeneration of works—and no work was ever created as a work of art, so art, especially writing, heralds decline. Did art as a specialized activity destroy works and replace them with products destined to be exchanged, traded, and reproduced ad infinitum? Did the finest cities come into being like plants and flowers in a garden—works of nature, unique, albeit fashioned by highly civilized people? A footnote points to Heidegger’s commentary on Angelus Silesius in Der Satz vom Grund.

Social Space and the Reign of Repetition

Under the heading of social space, the text asks whether works stand in a transcendent relationship to products; whether village and city can be dealt with solely by reference to the notion of a work; whether collectivities close to nature make the concepts of production and product, and any “production of space,” largely irrelevant; and whether there is a danger of fetishizing the notion of the work, erecting unjustified barriers between creation and production, nature and labour, festival and toil, the unique and the reproducible, difference and repetition, the living and the dead. Such an approach, it warns, would force a radical break between the historical and economic realms. Modern towns, outskirts, and new buildings resemble everything else; the split between architecture and urbanism has not increased diversity. Repetition has defeated uniqueness; the artificial has driven out spontaneity; products have vanquished works. Repetitious spaces result from repetitive gestures of workers using duplicatable instruments—machines, bulldozers, concrete-mixers, cranes, pneumatic drills. Such spaces are interchangeable because homologous, homogeneous so they can be exchanged, bought, and sold, with differences assessable in money as volumes and distances. Repetition reigns supreme. Such a space is a product in the strict sense: reproducible and the result of repetitive actions. A further aspect is its increasingly pronounced visual character—made with the visible in mind, the visibility of people, things, spaces, and contents. The predominance of visualization conceals repetitiveness. People take sight for life itself. We build on papers and plans; we buy on the basis of images. Sight, once epitomizing intelligibility in the Western tradition, has become a trap: the means whereby diversity may be simulated and a travesty of enlightenment ensconced under the sign of transparency.

Venice as Exemplary Case

The text returns to Venice: a unique space, a true marvel, but not a work of art because it was not planned in advance. It was born of the sea gradually, not like Aphrodite in an instant. To begin with there was a challenge—to nature, to enemies—and an aim: trade. The settlement on the lagoon cannot be separated from a vaster space: a system of commercial exchange taking in the Mediterranean and the Orient. Another prerequisite was continuity ensured by a grand design and the dominance of a political caste, the thalassocracy of a merchant oligarchy. From the first piles driven into the lagoon mud, every site had to be planned and realized by people: political chiefs, supporting groups, construction workers. Close behind practical responses to the sea came public gatherings, festivals, grandiose ceremonies, and architectural inventiveness. Here is the relationship between a place built by collective will and thought and the productive forces of the period. This place was laboured on: sinking pilings, building docks, erecting palaces constituted social labour under difficult conditions and under decisions made by a caste destined to profit. Behind Venice the work lay production. The emergence of social surplus production—a form preceding capitalist surplus value—had already heralded this. In Venice, surplus labour and social surplus production were not only realized but mostly expanded on the spot. That this surplus was put to aesthetically satisfying use cannot conceal its origins.

The Critique of Space and Its Obstacles

A critique of space is necessary but seems paradoxical because space is neither subject nor object—which may explain the lack of architectural or urbanistic criticism comparable to art, literature, music, and theatre criticism. Such criticism is called for because spaces cannot be explained by myths of pure transparency or opacity; spaces conceal contents through meaning, absence of meaning, or overload of meaning; and spaces sometimes lie like things, though they are not things. Using the example of a house built around 1950 with six storeys, the author argues that critical analysis would destroy its appearance of solidity, revealing it as permeated by streams of energy—water, gas, electricity, telephone lines, radio and television signals. The house emerges as a two-faceted machine: one calling for massive energy supplies, and an information-based machine with low energy requirements. Similar observations apply to the street and the city, a constantly burning bonfire. An exact picture of this space would differ from the representational space inhabitants have in mind, which, despite inaccuracy, plays an integral role in social practice. The error is that when social space is placed beyond our range of vision, its practical character vanishes and it is transformed into a kind of absolute. In face of this fetishized abstraction, users turn themselves, their presence, their lived experience, and their bodies into abstractions too. Fetishized abstract space gives rise to two practical abstractions: users who cannot recognize themselves within it, and a thought which cannot adopt a critical stance towards it. Vis-à-vis lived experience, space is neither a mere frame nor a neutral container. Space is social morphology: to lived experience what form is to the living organism. To picture space as a frame or container is probably the initial error—or is it ideology? The latter, more likely. Who promotes it? Who exploits it? And why and how?

The theoretical error is to see a space without conceiving of it, without assembling details into a whole reality, without apprehending contents in terms of their interrelationships within containing forms. Rectification would lead to dissolution of major ideological illusions. A space that is apparently neutral, objective, fixed, transparent, innocent or indifferent implies more than an inoperative system of knowledge. It is a whole set of errors, a complex of illusions, which can cause us to forget that there is a total subject which acts continually to maintain and reproduce its own conditions of existence, namely the state, along with its foundation in specific social classes. We also forget that there is a total object, namely absolute political space—that strategic space which seeks to impose itself as reality despite being an abstraction, albeit one endowed with enormous powers because it is the locus and medium of Power. Whence the abstraction of the user and of that so-called critical thinking which loses all critical capacities when confronted by the great Fetishes.

There are many lines of approach to this truth. The important thing is to take one instead of making excuses or taking flight.

Venturi and the Dialectical Field of Architecture

Robert Venturi, architect and theorist, wants to make space dialectical—not an empty neutral milieu holding dead objects but a field of force full of tensions and distortions. Whether this escapes functionalism and formalism beyond mere formal adjustments remained, in 1972, to be seen. Painting on buildings seems a feeble way to retrieve classical architecture’s richness; using mural surfaces to depict social contradictions while producing more than graffiti would be paradoxical if design, reading and writing as practice, and the signifier-signified relationship projected as form-function all dissolve conflicts into transparency, a one-dimensional present, and a pure surface.

An imagined interlocutor calls the arguments tendentious, claiming true innovators work on forms and signifiers—writers produce discourse this way—while architects concerned with content, users, and dwelling merely reproduce outdated forms. The reply concedes that work on signifiers is creative but questions whether it covers all fields: there comes a moment when formalism is exhausted and new content must destroy form to open innovation. The harmonists invented a great musical form, but formal discoveries by natural philosophers and theorists like Rameau did not exhaust its possibilities—only Mozart or Beethoven achieved that. Palace builders worked on signifiers of power within monumentality, on spatial textures not texts. Formal invention required dialectical interaction between signifying and signified elements. A combinatorial system of signs has a shorter life than its individual combinations; saturation sets in once it is recognized, and changing combinations cannot remedy it. Work on signifiers facilitates messages only if the labour is not patent; visible traces divert the reader to the writing and writer, sharing the producer’s fatigue.

Transparency, Weightlessness, and the Phallic Realm

The passage stresses the destructive, reductive effects of the readable and visible, of the priority of the visual, implying priority of reading and writing. Emphasis on visual space accompanied the search for weightlessness. Some claim Le Corbusier pioneered this, but actually Brunelleschi, then Baltard and Eiffel, blazed the trail. Once weightiness is abandoned, volumes can be broken up and reassembled per architectural neoplasticism. Modernity reduces iconological forms—signs, symbols—to surface effects; volumes lose physical consistency. Interior walls lose spatial or bearing roles; exteriors become mere membranes dividing inside from outside. Users project the private versus threatening-outside antagonism into an invented absolute realm, using signs of property. For thought in thrall to transparency, partitions collapse; space is comminuted into iconological figures invested with worth by colour or material. Circumscribed space vanishes like mass; inside and outside melt into transparency. Paradoxically this proceeds under the banner of structures, distinctions, and inside-outside relationships. The visual space of transparency conceals a content: the phallic realm of supposed virility. It is repressive—nothing escapes power’s surveillance; opaque things and partitions disappear. This opposes real requirements: private life ought to be enclosed and finite, public space an opening outwards—yet the opposite happens.

Form, Structure, Function

Social space relates to three concepts: form, structure, function, each providing a code and method. These terms carry ambiguity. Form has aesthetic, plastic, abstract senses; generally it evokes contours, boundaries, limits, areas, volumes. Formal description may aspire to exactitude yet be shot through with ideological elements, especially with reductionistic goals—a defining characteristic of formalism. Space may be reduced to formal elements, giving rise to systems: golden number, Doric, Ionic, Corinthian orders, moduli. No term exists in isolation; forms, functions, structures are given through a material realm binding them while preserving distinctions. In an organism these are discernible; a residue remains calling for categories of being, nature, substance, matter. For a produced object, practical action on materials blurs distinctions so the three imply one another—implicit in pre-industrial works, approaching its limit under modernity. With design, materiality gives way to transparency, perfect readability; form becomes merely the sign of function, and their clear relation gives rise to structure. Designers sometimes disguise a bed as a cupboard or a refrigerator as bookshelves—the signifier-signified dichotomy suits such objects but is more limited than semiological orthodoxy admits. For social realities the opposite obtains: distances between forms, functions, structures lengthen and detach; relationships become indecipherable as the hidden takes over. An institution may have functions opposed to its apparent forms and avowed structures—justice, military, police. Object-space and institution-space diverge radically in modern society: bureaucracy proclaims itself readable and transparent yet epitomizes opacity—likewise all state and political apparatuses.

Abstract Forms and the Diachronic-Synchronic Axis

Logical form, identity, reciprocity, recurrence, repetition, difference are inseparable from content. Marx, following Adam Smith and Ricardo, showed how the form of exchange achieved predominance with specific functions and structures. The form of social space—centre-periphery—recently entered thinking about forms. Urban form—assembly, encounter, simultaneity—belongs among classic forms with centrality, difference, recurrence, reciprocity. Pure forms cannot be detached from content; each analytic stage deals with a residue, an irreducible substrate. Mediations exist: the curve is mediated by the curved line, the straight form by the straight line. In texture, formal elements diversify, introducing repetition and difference, articulating whole and parts. Romanesque cloister capitals differ within a model.

Before distinguishing domination from appropriation, one must address the relationship between the diachronic and synchronic axes. No space vanishes without a trace: the sites of Troy, Susa, and Leptis Magna still enshrine superimposed spaces of successive cities. Without this, there would be no interpenetration of spaces, rhythms, or polarities. Each new addition inherits and reorganizes what came before; each period or stratum carries its preconditions beyond their limits. This involves metaphorization but also metonymization, since superimposed spaces form an ensemble or whole. These notions serve an expository function, describing how natural space is not completely absorbed into religious and political space, nor these into historical space, nor any of these into practico-sensory space where bodies and objects cohabit in objectality. What is described are metamorphoses, transfers, and substitutions: natural objects—a mound of earth, tree, or hill—remain perceived within their natural contexts even as social space fills with objects apprehended through shared objectality.

Dominated Space and the Origins of Power

The text then turns to dominated space: space transformed and mediated by technology and practice. Modern instances—a slab of concrete, a motorway—are immediately intelligible as such. Technology’s domination of space is becoming completely dominant. This dominance has deep roots in history, its origins coinciding with political power itself. Military architecture, fortifications, ramparts, dams, and irrigation systems exemplify dominated space. Such spaces are works of construction rather than works in the earlier sense, and not yet products in the narrow industrial meaning; dominant space is invariably the realization of a master’s project. To dominate space, technology introduces a new form into pre-existing space—generally rectilinear or rectangular, such as a meshwork or chequerwork. A motorway brutalizes the countryside, slicing through space like a great knife. Dominated space is usually closed, sterilized, emptied out. The concept gains full meaning only contrasted with the opposite and inseparable concept of appropriation.

In Marx, appropriation is sharply opposed to property but not thoroughly clarified.

Monumentality and the Collective Mirror

For millennia, monumentality embraced every aspect of spatiality at once—the perceived, the conceived, and the lived, representations of space and the representational spaces proper to each faculty. Monumental space offered each member of a society an image of membership, a collective mirror more faithful than any personal one; this recognition effect outweighs the psychoanalysts’ mirror effect. Everyone partook fully, under an accepted Power and Wisdom, and the monument effected a consensus that rendered it practical and concrete. Repression and exaltation were scarcely disentangled, repression metamorphosing into exaltation. Semiology cannot cover all the facets of the monumental, and its residual, irreducible, unclassifiable element is the most precious. Cathedral space supplies answers to every question assailing anyone crossing the threshold—footsteps, noises, singing, incense, sin and redemption, ideology, symbols—a total being in total space experienced through bodies. Conquerors and revolutionaries often burned or razed monuments, sometimes redirecting them; use goes deeper than codes of exchange.

Monuments are imposing in their durability; a cyclopean wall seems eternal, escaping time. Monumentality transcends death and the death instinct, embedding transcendence as an irreducible foundation, and its atemporality overwhelms anxiety even in funerary monuments. The Taj Mahal’s Empress’s Tomb bathes in gracefulness, whiteness, floral motifs; monuments transmute fear of time and death into splendour. Yet durability achieves no complete illusion, and credibility is never total: it replaces brutal reality with materially realized appearance. Durability is the will to endure, and imperishability bears the stamp of the will to power. Only Will—mastery, will to will—can overcome or believe it overcomes death, while knowledge shrinks from the abyss. Only through the monument, through the architect as demiurge, can death’s space be negated and transfigured into living space extending the body, serving what religion, political power, and knowledge share.

Defining Monumental Space

Semiological categorization and symbolic explanations must be restrained—not refused—in defining monumental space, for the monument is not reducible to language or discourse. A spatial work attains a complexity fundamentally different from a text: not texts but texture. Texture is large space covered by networks or webs; monuments are strong points, nexuses, anchors. Social practice is expressible but not explicable through discourse; it is acted, not read. A monumental work, like a musical one, has no signified but a horizon of meaning, a shifting hierarchy of meanings. Its social and political operation traverses codes and subcodes yet surpasses them, implying a supercoding toward an all-embracing totality. Traces of violence, death, negativity, and aggressiveness are erased and replaced with tranquil power and certitude encompassing violence and terror; the mortal moment of the sign is temporarily abolished. A Greek theatre presupposes tragedy, comedy, the city’s people, allegiance to heroes and gods, converging music, choruses, masks, and tiering with language and actors; spatial action overcomes conflicts momentarily, opening from everyday concerns to collective joy.

Turmoil is inevitable once a monument loses prestige or retains it only through admitted oppression. When a city or people suffers dispersal, buildings and their functions come into their own; housing prevails over residence. Buildings root in warehouses, barracks, depots, rental housing—they have functions, forms, structures, but do not integrate the moments of social practice. As sites, forms, and functions are no longer focused by monuments, the city’s fabric unravels, generating violence, and space becomes prone to sudden eruptions. The balance between monuments and buildings has shifted: buildings are to monuments as everyday life to festival, products to works, lived experience to merely perceived, concrete to stone. A new dialectical process is needed to overcome the contradiction, accelerating the tendency that destroyed monumentality but could reinstitute it within buildings, restoring unity at a higher level. Absent such transcendence: stagnation, crude interactions, spatial chaos. Buildings and dwellings are dressed in monumental signs—facades, then interiors. Moneyed homes underwent superficial socialization with reception areas, bars, nooks, divans bespeaking erotic life, pale echoes of aristocratic palaces. The town, blown apart, is privatized superficially through urban decor and design, fake environments. Instead of a three-stage dialectical resolution: stagnant opposition, poles confronting face to face, then relapsing into muddle.

From Greek Absolute Space to Roman Abstraction

Western absolute space was strictly measured, empty, hermetic volume constituting the rational unity of Logos and Cosmos—a regulated principle under political religion applying to mental and social life, materialized in monuments governing time through coordinated materials achieving natural and rational equilibrium. The Greeks, essentially sculptors, shaped natural materials, wood then stone, into meanings embodying social abstractions like assembly, shelter, protection; Hegel saw space as external to mental and social acts, and Greek art symbolized gods, heroes, kings, and leaders, especially in sculpture’s architectural and organic aspects. The Romans split this Greek unity, reintroducing difference, relativity, and civil aims into a space where politics and religion fused with mathematical rationality in metaphysical closure. The Greek city-state—beautiful, true, good—identified mental with social, symbolisms with reality, thought with action, but was destined to degenerate; Nietzsche saw this apotheosis pointing to decline. Roman diversity, governed by external constraint rather than internal unity, contained seeds of growth.

Greek philosophy, Aristotle more than Plato, formulated form, function, and structure; Plato’s unity shone with ontological transcendence, Aristotle’s became theory of discourse, classification, coherence. Once formulated, concepts detached: the conceived separated from the lived, habitus from intuitus. Roman intuitus retained unity—baths exemplifying form, structure, and function subordinated to material and juridical principles dictating social use. Roman space, though encumbered by objects, was productive and freer; need was an almost total determinant, and baths and villa answered the demands of free—and rich—citizens. Slaves enabled the city-state, but a self-proclaimed Marxist philosophy positing a slave-based mode of production renders unintelligible Athens, Rome, Logos and Cosmos, and Roman Law. Greek invention may link to alphabet, script, graphics, arithmetic, and geometry, but only subsidiarily. Absolute space gives rise to diverse forms; reason and myth cannot be cleanly separated, and the labyrinth restored mystery, the maternal principle, envelopment, temporal cycles.

Absolute, religious and political space is made up of sacred or cursed locations—temples, palaces, monuments—governed by prohibitions, sometimes merely indicated by a stone, post, hole, or hollow, more commonly circumscribed by perimeter and meaningful form. Everything was situated, perceived, and interpreted through such places; absolute space is not a collection of sites and signs but a mental-and-social space comprehending the group’s entire existence, with no environment or distinct site. No signifier/signified distinction existed; secret space was revealed by spatial order. Symbolisms and signs had not yet separated; decoding occurred through acts and ceremonial—Greek processions and theories. One must not attribute to an ancient Greek climbing to the Parthenon a tourist’s decoding attitude. Time contained the spatial code and vice versa; there was no aestheticism, co-optation of emotions, or mediated decodings. Intuitus and habitus avoid anachronistic categories generated by intellectus.

The Formal Logic of Space and the Anthropological Levels

The passage begins by insisting that the logical relations of inclusion, exclusion, implication, and explication presuppose no prior reality or truth; they are strictly formal, demonstrable through geometric figures without any need for representation, and they hold in practical space just as they do in spatial practice. Human beings, it argues, do not stand before social space like spectators before a picture or a mirror—they know they have a space and are in it, acting and situating themselves as participants. For anthropology studying archaic or peasant societies, these enveloping levels run from the body and its proxemics, to the dwelling with its rooms, to the village or hamlet with its dependent lands—fields, fallow, pasture, wood, forest, game preserves—beyond which lies the strange, foreign, hostile. The child, like “primitive” peoples, must pass from the space of its body to its body in space, then to perception and conceptualization. These achievements rest on objective material properties, symmetries and duplications on which inclusions and exclusions are superimposed: prohibited places, holy or damned heterotopias, set against open or encouraged ones, dividing space into beneficent, maleficent, and neutral.

Iteration, Reduction, and the Objection to Formalism

Two converging approaches to iteration are proposed—one from the implied, one from the implying; one enumerating parts and objects in space, the other describing space as a whole. Exact correspondence between implication and explication would let us grasp the genesis of space as both social and mental, abstract and concrete, a claim anthropology allegedly confirms for Dogon, Bororo, or Basque villages and for Greek or modern towns. But present-day anthropology tends to treat space as classification, nomenclature, taxonomy, converging with similar procedures applied to the family, exchange, communication, and tools—assigning “pure” categorizations implicit in its objects while evacuating the object itself. The objection follows: extreme reductionism reduces time to space, use value to exchange value, objects to signs, reality to the semiosphere, dialectic to logic, social space to formal mental space. The text challenges the conflation of empty Euclidean space, visual space, and practical space, critiques the Cartesian model and the “blank sheet of paper” metaphor invoked by Norberg-Schulz, and warns of rifts between conceived, perceived, and lived—representations of space versus representational spaces. It condemns the false consciousness of abstract space and announces that political economy must be reinstated, now as a political economy of space and its production.

Painting Around 1910 and the Crisis of the Subject

Turning to painting around 1910, the passage contrasts academic painters of “beautiful” expressive figures with the avant-garde, which detached the meaningful from the expressive and witnessed the crisis of the subject; only signifying elements could now be communicated. The turning point is dated 1907, when Picasso discovered a new way of painting—full canvas surface, no horizon or background—while Matisse perfected rhythmic treatment of the surface. Picasso structured and rendered the surface dialectical through antagonism of line and plane, dismantling objects, reducing and restoring depth in analytical cubism. The liberation of the signifier, the sign detached from the signified, anxiety before shattered figures, and violence replacing subjectivity all follow. Picasso is treated as a “case,” not a revolutionary communist artist—the “communist world” never accepted him; he supplied the vision the existing world awaited, parallel with imperialism, the Great War, and the Bauhaus. His space heralded modernity’s space: a dictatorship of the eye and phallus, aggressive virility, machismo, cruelty toward the female body—yet he glimpsed a coming differential space.

Wright, Le Corbusier, and the Naivety of Art History

Frank Lloyd Wright abolished enclosing walls, reducing them to transparent membranes, letting light flood in, matter becoming an envelope as architecture strove for immateriality. Then came disjunction: walls lost importance, interior space was liberated, the façade vanished (reappearing in the fascist era), and the street was sundered—visible in Le Corbusier’s “freedoms” that actually fracture space, ideologizing nature, sunshine, greenery. Artists, the text argues, are not the cause of space; art historians are naive. Klee and Kandinsky invented a new spatiality, possibly going further than Picasso; in Klee, thought guided by the eye revolves around the object to situate it. Painters revealed the social and political transformation of space, while architecture served the state—Bauhaus and Le Corbusier expressed state capitalism’s requirements, much as Russian constructivists identified state socialism’s. The order of power, the male, the moral order is naturalized, and a contrast is drawn between pre- and post-First World War creativity and second post-war sterility.

The Fragmentation of Spatial Thinking and the Mutilation of Space

Between the wars, spatial thinking fragmented: cultural space theses contested by behavioural space theses, culturalist anthropology opposed by behaviourist psychology, converging in the United States, while ethnologists projected analyses of isolated societies onto the present and future. The visual-spatial realm, heir to history and its violence, wields a vast reductive power, destroying natural and urban landscapes through covert displacements more significant than events. The Place des Vosges transformed from an isolated meeting-place into an intersection, the Palais Royal abandoned as a meeting-place—subtle changes sacrificing city life to abstract space where cars circulate like atomic particles. Haussmann shattered Paris’s historical space to impose strategic, planned, demarcated space, mortally wounding the double network of streets and passageways. Total visualization corresponds to a state-bureaucratic strategy, realized almost comically in Niemeyer’s Brasilia. The reduction targets Euclidean space, flattened to a single plane; those who only see, only draw, or only drive each mutilate space. The driver perceives only his route, materialized and technicized—speed, readability, facility. Reading manufactured space is pleonasm, a pure illusory transparency, a perfect booby trap. Space is defined by an abstract subject equipped with highway-code literacy and the eye alone; volume yields to surface, overall view to visual signals along fixed trajectories, producing a simulacrum of full space, travelling becoming gestural simulation of former urban encounter. Space mirrors the thinking subject, who passes through the looking-glass like Carroll’s, becoming lived abstraction.

Residence, Housing, and the Fracture Lines of Social Space

A substitution occurs: residence replaced by housing, functionally abstract. Ruling classes seize abstract space as a tool of power, organizing production and generating profit. Hölderlin’s “Man resides as a poet” cannot obscure that residing meant nothing outside the aristocracy, serving nobles and priests. The hôtel particulier, developed by decadent aristocracy and aped by the bourgeoisie, has sumptuous rooms set back from streets, opening onto a courtyard; the aristocrat neither sees nor is seen, “is” per se; essence lies in interior disposition, the façade secondary, often lacking. No privacy exists; privacy and façade come only with the bourgeoisie. The bourgeois apartment parodies the mansion but opens rooms to the street; the visible and visual command; façades align along streets; perspectivist rationality governs; bodily functions are relegated to rear kitchens, bathrooms, water closets, bedrooms along dark corridors. The outside predominates; Eros disappears into the two-tiered interior; bourgeois space implies filtering of the erotic, repression of libidines—caesura and censure.

Knowledge, Science, and the Science of Space

The closing movement of the book begins by distinguishing connaissance from savoir. Connaissance carries self-criticism and a critique of what exists; it seeks to grasp the global and extends into philosophy, joining social practice through the concept of production. This is what the text calls “metaphilosophy”: grounded in philosophy but opening it toward the real and the possible. When the critical moment arrives, connaissance generates the concrete universal, and questions about a specified subject or identifiable object lose their validity. “Science,” by contrast, means detailed work within a specified field and strict methods, breeding scepticism toward specialist dogmas. The science of space is framed as a science of use, while the social sciences—political economy, sociology, semiology, computer science—partake of exchange and aspire to be sciences of communication. The science of space concerns material, sensory, natural realms, emphasizing “second nature” (city, urban life, social energetics) against nature-centred approaches like “environment,” and it grants appropriation special status: appropriation and use against exchange and domination.

Co-optation, Form, Function, Structure

Co-optation sits between domination and appropriation, between exchange and use; opposing it to production mistakes its character. It can produce a space—Christianity’s co-optation of the Roman basilica, originally secular and civic, gave it religious and political role, with crypt and tombs shaping the cross form and intersecting ribs marking a turning-point. Form corresponds to communication (perceived); function to the directly experienced in representational space; structure is conceived, implying representation of space—all within spatial practice. Defining use solely as function is reductionistic: formalism emphasizes form and communicability, functionalism stresses function (eliminating multifunctionality), structuralism treats structures as technological objects. Use corresponds to the unity and collaboration of these factors. No plan maintains perfect balance, and emphasis on one moment doesn’t imply the demise of others. Classical art’s genius needs resuming, like philosophy; music’s three moments—rhythm, melody, harmony—ensure endless production, while works around one moment are monotonous.

Abstract Space and the Theory of Difference

Abstract space, the tool of domination, asphyxiates what is conceived within it, destroying historical conditions and differences to impose abstract homogeneity. Its lethal power is questioned—nuclear threat, technology, population, development, ecology, death instinct—but the text asks whether examining the instrument (space) makes more sense. Space harbours and transforms causes into operational agents; instrumental space aims at eliminating what is different. The theory of alienation is necessary yet inadequate—so true it is uncontested, hence trivial. The theory of difference covers knowledge and thinking about knowledge, from conceived to directly lived, logic to dialectic. Two distinctions matter: minimal versus maximal differences (logic), and induced versus produced differences (dialectical movement). Induced differences remain within a system (villas in a suburb, fashion variations); produced differences presuppose the shattering of a system, born of explosion. Repetitions generate differences; the qualitative arises from the quantitative and vice versa. Under historical time, induced differences coexist with produced differences promoting a mode’s demise. Particularities (primary nature, sites, resources) clash, producing differences properly so called; distinguishing particularities from differences dispenses with “specificity” and “authenticity.”

Margins, Shanty Towns, and Spatial Strategy

Differences endure on the margins of the homogenized realm—resistances or externalities, lateral, heterotopical, heterological. What is different is first what is excluded: city edges, shanty towns, forbidden games, guerrilla war. The centre seeks to absorb differences; if there is no counterattack, centrality tests its power to integrate, recuperate, destroy. Latin American shanty towns (favelas, barrios, ranchos) manifest intense social life, ordering space effectively and eliciting nervous admiration; spontaneous architecture proves superior to specialists’ organization. Spatial duality creates the impression of dual political power—mistaken, measuring dominant space’s repressive capacity. Conflictual duality is transitional between opposition and contradiction. Goodman’s “asphalt’s magic circle” illustrates a spiral: federal petrol tax funds highways, benefiting oil and auto companies, increasing sales, consumption, revenues. This logic implies productive consumption producing surplus value and another space, with state intervention serving capital while appearing to serve communication and growth. Spatial strategy forces worrisome groups to the periphery, makes central spaces scarcer, organizes the centre as the locus of decision, wealth, power, information, and finds allies in the middle strata. Space sorts and classifies in service of a class; structuralism legitimates this strategy, serving power. Operational notions of arrangement govern all space, public and private, serving homogenization; the state arranges and classifies, conflating public space with the private space of the hegemonic class.

Mimesis, the Political Question, and the Contradictions of Urbanness

Mimesis plays a contradictory role in the domination of space, producing signs of nature rather than nature itself. Social spatial practice initially grasped nature intuitively, incorporating and demoting femaleness, reducing it to subordinated femininity. Intuitus became habitus, then intellectus, constructing abstract geometric, visual, phallic space—the state’s political “medium.” Now we approach tautology: producing only the reproducible, repetition; the production of space becomes the reproduction of things in space. The “political question” breaks into sub-questions: the political sphere, politics in the capitalist mode of production, politicians. The state-space relationship tightens; state apparatuses intervene continually in space. In France, prefects link localized actions to national plans. The proliferation of links renders the state redundant, prompting decentralization demands. Local powers resist absorption; Hegel’s absolute state cannot complete itself. Urban reality cannot be brought to a complete halt: centralism and monumentality rest on simultaneous inclusion and exclusion, since a centre gathers things only by pushing them away and a monument attracts only by creating distance. The reduction of old particularities inevitably produces new differences; the urban realm, though dominated and ravaged, reconstitutes itself, and the contradiction between the passivity and activity of inhabitants is never fully resolved in favour of passivity. “Urbanness” is contradictory: the city can deflect class struggles and disperse dangerous elements, offering inoffensive objectives like improved transportation, yet city and periphery also become arenas of action no longer confined to factory or office floor. The city is both setting and stake of struggle; aiming for power requires occupying that space and creating a new political morphology, implying a critique in acts of the old political sphere.

Appropriation, the State, and the Withering-Away

Appropriating politically dominated space is an enormous political problem, insoluble without a critique of the political realm, of specific politics, and of the state—without a withering-away of the state, by whatever route. Appropriation versus domination becomes a dialectical contradiction as the appropriation of space, development of the urban sphere, metamorphosis of everyday life, and transcendence of the city-country split clash with the state and politics. Dominant space imposed by the state on its subjects is the seemingly non-violent space of a pax estatica (in Western countries a pax capitalistica) reminiscent of the Pax Romana; abstract space, though seemingly secured against violence, is inherently violent—as are residential suburbs, holiday homes, fake countrysides, imitations of nature.

Main Arguments

The book’s central claim is that social space is a social product. Space is not a neutral container, a mere frame, nor a passive receptacle into which human activity deposits itself. It has a reality distinct from yet comparable to commodities, money, and capital; it serves as a tool of thought and action, a means of production, a means of control, domination, and power—yet it escapes those who use it. The book seeks to demonstrate that social space is irreducible to mental or physical space, and that the failure to recognize this has produced a whole complex of illusions.

Two illusions are identified. The first is the illusion of transparency: space appears luminous, intelligible, as though social space and mental space coincided. This illusion is tied to the fetishism of speech and writing; it is a transcendental illusion. The second is the realistic illusion: space appears naturally simple and substantial, as though language were a “bag of words.” This is closer to naturalistic materialism. Each illusion embodies and nourishes the other. Both must be dismantled if the production of space is to be understood.

From the central claim follow several implications. Natural space is disappearing. Every society, every mode of production, produces its own space—the Greek city with its agora, temple, and stadium is an example. Social space contains relations of reproduction (sexes, age groups, family) and relations of production (division of labour). Under capitalism three levels can be distinguished: biological reproduction, reproduction of labour power, and reproduction of social relations of production. The production of space is thus not a metaphor but a material process, and it is performed solely by classes, fractions of classes, and groups representative of classes.

Class struggle plays a cardinal role in this production. Today more than ever, class struggle is inscribed in space. It is that struggle alone which prevents abstract space from taking over the whole planet and papering over all differences. Only class struggle has the capacity to differentiate, to generate differences not intrinsic to economic growth qua strategy, logic, or system—differences neither induced by nor acceptable to that growth. The forms of class struggle are now far more varied than formerly, including political action of minorities. During the first half of the twentieth century, agrarian reforms and peasant revolutions reshaped the planet’s surface; many of these changes served abstract space by smoothing out and automatizing previously existing space of historic peoples and cities. More recently, urban guerrilla actions and intervention of the “masses” in urban areas extended this movement, particularly in Latin America. The events of May 1968 in France—when students occupied and took charge of their own space, and the working class immediately followed suit—marked a new departure. The halting of this reappropriation of space, though doubtless temporary, gave rise to a despairing attitude: it is argued that only bulldozers or Molotov cocktails can change the dominant organization of space, that destruction must precede reconstruction. Lefebvre asks what “reconstruction” entails—whether the same means of production will produce the same products, or whether those means must also be destroyed. This posture minimizes actual contradictions in society and space, attributes a hermetic quality to the “system,” and in heaping invective upon it comes under its spell, glorifying its power beyond reasonable bounds. Such “schizophrenic leftism” secretes its own unconscious contradictions; its appeal to absolute spontaneity in destruction and construction implies destruction of thought, knowledge, and creative capacities on spurious grounds that they stand in the way of an immediate, total, never-defined revolution.

The bourgeoisie still has the initiative in its struggle for and in space, which brings up the passivity and silence of “users” of space. Abstract space works complexly: it implies a tacit agreement, a non-aggression pact, a contract of non-violence. It imposes reciprocity and communality of use. In the street, each individual is supposed not to attack those he meets; transgressors are deemed criminal. This presupposes a “spatial economy” allied but not identical to verbal economy. This economy valorizes relationships between people in particular places (shops, cafes, cinemas), giving rise to connotative discourses generating “consensuses” or conventions—for example, that a place is trouble-free, a quiet area. Denotative discourses have a quasi-legal aspect working for consensus: no fighting over who occupies a spot; spaces left free; allowance for “proxemics”—maintenance of “respectful” distances. This entails a logic and strategy of property in space: “places and things belonging to you do not belong to me.” Communal or shared spaces whose possession or consumption cannot be entirely privatized continue to exist—cafes, squares, monuments. This spatial consensus constitutes part of civilization much as prohibitions against acts considered vulgar or offensive to children, women, old people, or the public. Its response to class struggle, as to other violence, amounts to formal and categorical rejection.

Every space is already in place before the appearance of actors; these actors are collective as well as individual subjects, since individuals are always members of groups or classes seeking to appropriate the space. This pre-existence conditions the subject’s presence, action, discourse, competence, and performance; yet the subject’s presence, action, and discourse, while presupposing this space, also negate it. The subject experiences space as an obstacle, as resistant “objectality” at times as implacably hard as a concrete wall, extremely difficult to modify and hedged about by Draconian rules prohibiting modification. The texture of space affords opportunities not only to social acts with no particular place or link in it, but also to a spatial practice it does determine: collective and individual use—a sequence of acts embodying a signifying practice even if not reducible to such. Life and death are not merely conceptualized, simulated, or expressed by these acts; rather, it is in and through them that life and death actually have their being. Within space, time consumes or devours living beings, giving reality to sacrifice, pleasure, and pain. Abstract space—the space of the bourgeoisie and capitalism, bound up with exchange (of goods and commodities, of written and spoken words)—depends on consensus more than any space before it. Within this space violence does not always remain latent or hidden. One of its contradictions is that between the appearance of security and the constant threat, and indeed occasional eruption, of violence.

The old class struggle between bourgeoisie and aristocracy produced a space where signs of that struggle are still manifest. Innumerable historic towns were transformed by that conflict, whose traces and results may easily be seen. After its political triumph in France, for example, the bourgeoisie smashed the aristocratic space of the Marais district in the centre of Paris, pressing it into the service of material production and installing workshops, shops, and apartments in the luxurious mansions of the area. This space was thus both uglified and enlivened, in characteristically bourgeois fashion, through a process of “popularization.” Today, a second phase of bourgeoisification is proceeding apace in the Marais.

The book also argues against treating space as a passive receptacle or as a work of art. The “moment of creation is past,” and a city’s disappearance is imminent; because it remains full of life yet threatened with extinction, a work deeply affects anyone who uses it as a source of pleasure and thereby contributes to its demise. The same applies to a village or a fine vase. Such objects occupy a space not produced as such. A flower is invoked: “A rose does not know that it is a rose.” A city, unlike a flower, has been “composed” by people and well-defined groups, yet lacks the intentional character of an “art object.” The great cathedrals were political acts; ancient statues immortalized the dead so they would not harm the living; fabrics and vases served a purpose. The appearance of art, shortly before the appearance of its concept, implies the degeneration of works, and no work was ever created as a work of art—so art, especially writing and literature, heralds decline. Art as a specialized activity destroyed works and replaced them with products destined to be exchanged, traded, and reproduced ad infinitum. The finest cities came into being like plants and flowers in a garden—works of nature, unique, albeit fashioned by highly civilized people.

Under the heading “Social Space,” the text asks whether works stand in a transcendent relationship to products; whether village and city can be dealt with solely by reference to the notion of a work; whether collectivities close to nature make the concepts of production and product, and any “production of space,” largely irrelevant; and whether there is a danger of fetishizing the notion of the work, erecting unjustified barriers between creation and production, nature and labour, festival and toil, the unique and the reproducible, difference and repetition, and the living and the dead. Such an approach would force a radical break between the historical and economic realms. Modern towns, outskirts, and new buildings resemble everything else; the split between “architecture” and “urbanism” has not increased diversity. Repetition has defeated uniqueness; the artificial and contrived have driven out spontaneity and naturalness; products have vanquished works. Repetitious spaces result from repetitive gestures of workers associated with duplicatable instruments: machines, bulldozers, concrete-mixers, cranes, pneumatic drills. Such spaces are interchangeable because homologous, or homogeneous so they can be exchanged, bought, and sold, with differences assessable in money (quantifiable) terms as volumes, distances, and so on. Repetition reigns supreme. Such a space is a product strictu sensu: reproducible and the result of repetitive actions. Space is produced even when not on the scale of major highways, airports, or public works. A further aspect is their increasingly pronounced visual character: made with the visible in mind—visibility of people, things, spaces, and contents. The predominance of visualization (more important than “spectacularization,” which it subsumes) conceals repetitiveness. People take sight, take seeing, for life itself. We build on papers and plans; we buy on the basis of images. Sight and seeing, once epitomizing intelligibility in the Western tradition, have become a trap: the means whereby, in social space, diversity may be simulated and a travesty of enlightenment ensconced under the sign of transparency.

Venice serves as an exemplary case: a unique space, a true marvel, but not a work of art because it was not planned in advance. It was born of the sea gradually, not like Aphrodite in an instant. To begin with there was a challenge (to nature, to enemies) and an aim (trade). The settlement on the lagoon—swamps, shallows, outlets to the open sea—cannot be separated from a vaster space: a system of commercial exchange not yet worldwide but taking in the Mediterranean and the Orient. Another prerequisite was continuity ensured by a grand design, an ongoing practical project, and the dominance of a political caste—the “thalassocracy” of a merchant oligarchy. From the first piles driven into the lagoon mud, every site had to be planned and realized by people: political “chiefs,” supporting groups, and construction workers. Close behind practical responses to the sea (the port, navigable channels) came public gatherings, festivals, grandiose ceremonies (such as the marriage of the Doge and the sea), and architectural inventiveness. Here is the relationship between a place built by collective will and thought and the productive forces of the period. This place was laboured on: sinking pilings, building docks and harbourside installations, erecting palaces constituted social labour under difficult conditions and under decisions made by a caste destined to profit. Behind Venice the work lay production. The emergence of social surplus production—a form preceding capitalist surplus value—had already heralded this. In Venice, surplus labour and social surplus production were not only realized but mostly expanded on the spot, in the city. That this surplus production was put to aesthetically satisfying use, per the tastes of prodigiously gifted and highly civilized yet ruthless people, cannot conceal its origins.

A critique of space is called for because spaces cannot be explained by myths of pure transparency or opacity; spaces conceal contents through meaning, absence of meaning, or overload of meaning; and spaces sometimes lie like things, though they are not things. The critique should rip aside appearances that are not particularly mendacious. Using the example of a house built around 1950 with six storeys, the author argues that critical analysis would destroy its appearance of solidity, revealing it as permeated by streams of energy—water, gas, electricity, telephone lines, radio and television signals. The house emerges as a two-faceted machine: one calling for massive energy supplies, and an information-based machine with low energy requirements. Occupants perceive, receive, and manipulate energies the house consumes massively (for lift, kitchen, bathroom). Similar observations apply to the street (a network of ducts) and the city (consuming colossal physical and human energy, a constantly burning bonfire). An exact picture of this space would differ from the representational space inhabitants have in mind, which, despite inaccuracy, plays an integral role in social practice.

The error or illusion is that when social space is placed beyond our range of vision, its practical character vanishes and it is transformed into a kind of absolute. In face of this fetishized abstraction, “users” turn themselves, their presence, their “lived experience,” and their bodies into abstractions too. Fetishized abstract space gives rise to two practical abstractions: “users” who cannot recognize themselves within it, and a thought which cannot adopt a critical stance towards it. If reversed, it would become clear that critical analysis of space as directly experienced poses more serious problems than any partial activity, including literature, reading and writing, art, music. Vis-à-vis lived experience, space is neither a mere “frame” nor a neutral container. Space is social morphology: to lived experience what form is to the living organism, bound up with function and structure. To picture space as a “frame” or container is probably the initial error—or is it ideology?