Product / Work
Production
Labour
Commodification
and social space - something in between
Lefebvre didn't disappoint: I was expecting something incomprehensible from a 1970's French philosopher and that was pretty much what we got. Grinding through the passages, paragraph by paragraph, I think I established some of the points he was making, but it was not until the fourth or fifth attack I finally breached through to his conclusion. Those guys didn't like being succinct did they? Did the publishers pay by the word?
Presumably some of what he has written has lost its power over time. I think some of the struggle to comprehend the overall point he was trying to make is due to the time he goes to expand upon points which were probably revolutionary at the time, but are now fairly widely understood and accepted. For instance, a large portion of the text goes into trying to convince the reader that the production of social space should not be purely understood through economic (Marxist and er... post-Marxist?) interpretations of "Production" ie too narrow a definition. If that was the point he was trying to make, it seemed a fairly obvious one now, but possibly it was radically different from the prevailing view at the time of writing. Having said that, maybe I think it is widely accepted now, but there is a lot of evidence to the contrary. Isn't the world we live in increasingly produced and defined along economic lines?
He goes on to define the conception of a "work" and a "product", and to say that these two concepts are not so far apart as they must have seemed in the 1970's. Again, I found this confusing, as for me there is a definite grey area between what is a work and a product, but maybe that wasn't understood to be the case in the 1970's. I found myself repeatedly thinking "Well, DUH..." (a la Bart Simpson) at the conclusion of his long constructions to explain something.
He uses the example of Venice to show how the unique set of circumstances could create Venice as a work, but then it must have been built also with the characteristics of a product (repetition, labour, capital etc). His conclusion seems to be that the city is neither a product nor a work, but something more. Again, I found myself thinking, "Yes, obviously," but maybe this was against the prevailing orthodoxy of the day?
Space is not abstract - it is a physical entity - but our understanding of, our idenitification of it, has an abstract element. A complex set of variables, including the material nature of the place, but also external factors such as the historical context (for instance with Venice's place in a Mediterranean trading web) blend together to form our understanding of the social space. Because of the 'coming together' of these factors, including a temporal element, places such as Venice are unique, and are more closely associated with "works". The situation that brought those variables together could never be repeated. However, globalisation and the increasing spread of commodification of abstract ideas and space, as well as physical objects, is homogenizing these variables, so that space is becoming less differentiated, more repetitious and therefore, more of a 'product'. This is a problem because it limits creativity and ingenuity. As he suggests with the example of Tuscany, the new social space created by a combination of co-operative farming (workers with a vested interest), physical change (cypress trees) and increased overall wealth generated as a result, created the situation where artists could observe and speculate on this new situation, thereby 'discovering' perspective. This suggests that differentiated space can be the source of social change and discovery.
One element of his text that I disagreed with though, was his definition and assumptions regarding nature. It's a bit Rousseau-Noble-Savage sort of thing isn't it? "Consider the rose" and all that... He says nature does not produce, that it creates simply, without any self-consciousness. "To say 'natural' is to say spontaneous." (He goes on to say that Nature is gradually drawing away from us, that 'anti-nature' is killing it off.) I agree that globalisation and the increasingly 'networked' world is creating a place which has no true 'wild' - a big problem not just environmentally, but for our own psyche I think. But I don't agree that there is such a clear delineation between 'natural' things and products, or works, made by man. What about milk cows? They are about as 'produced' as anything is possible to be, carefully managed and selected for generations to be walking milk factories, far from anything that would have roamed any pre-historic grassland. But would you then call them unnatural? This could be applied to many more complex areas of modern biology, but he was writing before genetics had really made these definitions so blurry.
There are many elements in the text, enough for now though I think, I'm off to my local zinc-topped bar for a Gauloise and a Pernod, and a rumination on the esoteric blah blah blah...
Production
Labour
Commodification
and social space - something in between
Lefebvre didn't disappoint: I was expecting something incomprehensible from a 1970's French philosopher and that was pretty much what we got. Grinding through the passages, paragraph by paragraph, I think I established some of the points he was making, but it was not until the fourth or fifth attack I finally breached through to his conclusion. Those guys didn't like being succinct did they? Did the publishers pay by the word?
Presumably some of what he has written has lost its power over time. I think some of the struggle to comprehend the overall point he was trying to make is due to the time he goes to expand upon points which were probably revolutionary at the time, but are now fairly widely understood and accepted. For instance, a large portion of the text goes into trying to convince the reader that the production of social space should not be purely understood through economic (Marxist and er... post-Marxist?) interpretations of "Production" ie too narrow a definition. If that was the point he was trying to make, it seemed a fairly obvious one now, but possibly it was radically different from the prevailing view at the time of writing. Having said that, maybe I think it is widely accepted now, but there is a lot of evidence to the contrary. Isn't the world we live in increasingly produced and defined along economic lines?
He goes on to define the conception of a "work" and a "product", and to say that these two concepts are not so far apart as they must have seemed in the 1970's. Again, I found this confusing, as for me there is a definite grey area between what is a work and a product, but maybe that wasn't understood to be the case in the 1970's. I found myself repeatedly thinking "Well, DUH..." (a la Bart Simpson) at the conclusion of his long constructions to explain something.
He uses the example of Venice to show how the unique set of circumstances could create Venice as a work, but then it must have been built also with the characteristics of a product (repetition, labour, capital etc). His conclusion seems to be that the city is neither a product nor a work, but something more. Again, I found myself thinking, "Yes, obviously," but maybe this was against the prevailing orthodoxy of the day?
Space is not abstract - it is a physical entity - but our understanding of, our idenitification of it, has an abstract element. A complex set of variables, including the material nature of the place, but also external factors such as the historical context (for instance with Venice's place in a Mediterranean trading web) blend together to form our understanding of the social space. Because of the 'coming together' of these factors, including a temporal element, places such as Venice are unique, and are more closely associated with "works". The situation that brought those variables together could never be repeated. However, globalisation and the increasing spread of commodification of abstract ideas and space, as well as physical objects, is homogenizing these variables, so that space is becoming less differentiated, more repetitious and therefore, more of a 'product'. This is a problem because it limits creativity and ingenuity. As he suggests with the example of Tuscany, the new social space created by a combination of co-operative farming (workers with a vested interest), physical change (cypress trees) and increased overall wealth generated as a result, created the situation where artists could observe and speculate on this new situation, thereby 'discovering' perspective. This suggests that differentiated space can be the source of social change and discovery.
One element of his text that I disagreed with though, was his definition and assumptions regarding nature. It's a bit Rousseau-Noble-Savage sort of thing isn't it? "Consider the rose" and all that... He says nature does not produce, that it creates simply, without any self-consciousness. "To say 'natural' is to say spontaneous." (He goes on to say that Nature is gradually drawing away from us, that 'anti-nature' is killing it off.) I agree that globalisation and the increasingly 'networked' world is creating a place which has no true 'wild' - a big problem not just environmentally, but for our own psyche I think. But I don't agree that there is such a clear delineation between 'natural' things and products, or works, made by man. What about milk cows? They are about as 'produced' as anything is possible to be, carefully managed and selected for generations to be walking milk factories, far from anything that would have roamed any pre-historic grassland. But would you then call them unnatural? This could be applied to many more complex areas of modern biology, but he was writing before genetics had really made these definitions so blurry.
There are many elements in the text, enough for now though I think, I'm off to my local zinc-topped bar for a Gauloise and a Pernod, and a rumination on the esoteric blah blah blah...
