The Crystal Palace in London, featuring the cast-iron and sheet-glass architectural structure with the application of modern technology, is not only “an
II. Lefebvrian Analysis of Everydayness and Space
As a Marxist philosopher, Lefebvre is concerned about triviality and puts everydayness of the disadvantaged working class under the microscope. Capitalism and the accompanying effect of consumerism have invaded every worker’s
everyday life, including working/leisure time and public/private sphere. They work for the sake of consumption; the more money they spend on purchase, the more work they have to do to earn back that sum of money. Workers are held in the palm of the bourgeois’ hand in terms of every aspect of their everyday life, which
Lefebvre terms as “organized passivity” (“Everyday,” 10). To shift the role of
34 This elucidates why Hong Kong is commonly regarded as the cultural desert, mostly by Hong Kong people. Their insensitivity and lack of a sense of belonging obstruct them from identifying with Hong Kong culture which seems void of uniqueness because it is the mixture of British and Chinese cultures, and from cultivating its own culture.
workers from passivity to activity, Lefebvre urges them to grasp the understanding of everyday life. In Critique of Everyday Life Volume 1: Introduction, Lefebvre underlines the importance of presentness: once a person “can begin the conquest of his own life, rediscovering or creating greatness in everyday life—and when he can begin knowing it and speaking it, then and only then will we be in a new era” (129).
Instead of turning a blind eye to triviality and considering everydayness of the proletariat not epical, every worker ought to consciously discern the greatness in
everyday life, an effective way to rebel against the “organized passivity.” In Henri Lefebvre: A Critical Introduction, Andy Merrifield addresses the underlying reason
of Lefebvre’s urge: everyday life is precious due to its fragile nature that workers should live life to the fullest and be fully sensual in the hope of “commandeering our own very finite destiny” rather than being commandeered (2). In other words, the proletariat is not predestined to be overpowered by the bourgeoisie but is capable of handling its destiny through observing the greatness in everyday life.But how are the observation of everydayness and the rebellion against the domination of capitalism likely to happen? Lefebvre would answer: through space.
The thesis statement of The Production of Space is: “(Social) space is a (social)
product” (26).
35 Space “is not some vacuum waiting to be filled by people”(Rogers 25), but something that is produced by humans. Every society thus
“produces a space, its own space” as social space, involves and incorporates social actions of humans (Lefebvre Production 31, 33). Producing social space as a means of control, domination, and power “in the form of buildings, monuments, and works of art” (26, 33), humans are conversely produced as such that “all ‘subjects’
35 Lefebvre draws a distinction between natural space and social space, which the former is specifically indicated, whereas the latter is simply superseded by the word space. The book title, therefore, suggests the production of social space. Likewise, this chapter will use space and social space interchangeably.
are situated in a space in which they must either recognize themselves or lose themselves, a space which they may both enjoy and modify” (35). Humans produce and are produced, acting as subjects and objects; that is to say, social space, by reference to Alice Gavin, potentializes social actions and is produced by them (47).
Taking the active role of production, social space generates the (dis)order by encompassing the interrelationships with the things produced “in their coexistence and simultaneity” (73), and “infiltrates, even invades, the concept of production, becoming part—perhaps the essential parts—of its content” (85). Social space, therefore, contains “the social relations of reproduction”—the private family sphere—and “the relations of production”—the public working sphere in a hierarchical form (32).
Space is produced through the body as the agent. The use of the body, such as the use of members, sensory organs and gestures, is the prerequisite of the perceived and the lived space (40). The body constitutes and produces the space “in which messages, codes, the coded and the decoded . . . will subsequently emerge”
(200). The interactions and relations, Lefebvre asserts, among bodies are
indispensable for constituting the space (184). Conversely, space instructs body to the extent that it prescribes and forbids gestures (143). To sum up, the body “is space and has its space: it produces itself in space and it also produces that space”
(170). In Elements of Rhythmanalysis: An Introduction to the Understanding of
Rhythms, Lefebvre further expounds on the inherent rhythms of the body: “The
body consists of a bundle of rhythms, different but in tune” (20). Instead of changing life, a person “would accomplish a tiny part of the revolutionary transformation of this world [the space]” by rehabilitating the sensible in consciousness and in thought through the rhythmanalysis of the inside and the outside of the body (26).Lefebvre postulates a conceptual triad for the discussion of space. The triad refers to spatial practice, representations of space, and representational space. The first one is also called the perceived space that embodies the linkage “between daily reality (daily routine) and urban reality (the routes and networks . . .)” (Production 38). It subsumes the spatial competence and performance of every human that can be assessed empirically (38); it is “directly sensible or perceivable—open to measurement and description” (Rogers 29). The second space, known as the conceived space, is the conceptualized space that takes the form of plans, maps, or designs created by “scientists, planners, urbanists, technocratic subdividers and social engineers,” cast as the producers of space (Production 38, 43). This is the dominant space in which ideologies of the aforementioned ruling classes, including the institutions, disseminate (116); seized by ideologies, the conceived space functions repressively (Busquet 4). And hence, space is socially and politically produced (Elden 107). Representational place is the lived space of inhabitants and users, and of artists, writers and philosophers who describe rather than experience (Production 39, 43). On the one hand, this is the dominated and passively
experienced space to which the ruled classes belong; on the other hand, this is “an active place—the lived space of struggle, liberation, and emancipation” (Rogers 38). The lived space as a site of struggle, as Marx Purcell argues for Lefebvre, can be thoroughly transformed into a political community that is free from the state and capitalism, if possible—a form of radical democratization (311). Heba M.
Sharobeem draws a conclusive remark of the triad: they “refer to the physical space as we perceive or see it, to the mental space as we think of it, and to the actually lived social space . . .” (21). By decoding the codes imposed on space, we are able to construe “the transition from representational spaces to representations of space, showing up correspondences, analogies and a certain unity in spatial practice and in
the theory of space” (Production 163). In short, we can understand the perceived and the conceived space through the interpretation of the lived space.