O título original deste aí é 'Lefebvre, Space e Dialetic', e o escrevi como comunicação para um evento no exterior. A pedido, faço-o vir novamente a lume.
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| Dialéticas espaciais, de Lefebvre, em amor e luta |
By Ivonaldo Leite
The dialectic is the
centripetal of Henri Lefebvre’s many interests. Focusing on dialectical
materialism as a general method developed by Marx but applied by him only a
limited number of fields, Lefebvre proposed dialectical materialism as a
universal method. As Rob Shields says[i],
while Althusser and “scientific Marxists” saw economics and materialism as the
legacy of Marx, Lefebvre saw dialectic materialism as the rigorous core of
Marx’s insight. The dialectic itself thus became the cornerstone of Lefebvre’s
philosophical critique of the formal logic of traditional philosophies.
Like Marx and Engels,
Lefebvre found the positive aspect of Hegel’s dialectic in his phenomenology, where he was not content
simply to record the content of thought but attempted to develop a method that
comprehended its ongoing process of production, autopoesis and change. Seizing life only in terms of logical
concepts and celebrating the realisation of mind in social institutions such as
the state – which act progressively against the people – is rejected as a form
of alienation. This is why whole history of alienation is nothing more than the
history of the production of abstract thought, of speculative, logical thought.
Marx and Engels had
built upon the work of Feubarch, who exposed a fatal flaw in Hegel’s system: if
mind becomes nature and matter, then matter becomes mind, dissolving the basis
of Hegel´s dialectic. Feuerbach argued that philosophy was systematic religion,
and he proposed setting individuals and their relationships with each other in
the core of any post-Hegelian philosophy. Marx’s and Engels’ addition was to
reconceptualise individuals as concrete social beings in definite
historical-geographic relationships. Adopting this materialism, Lefebvre argued[ii],
Marx and Engels were the first and foremost seeking to deepen humanism and
their critique of alienation. Dialectical Materialism seeks to give thought
back its force by linking it directly to practice, and moving Hegel’s dialect
into concrete social analysis and finally applying it to economic relations
before moving on to nature. Lefebvre argue that we in turn must apply the
method of dialectical materialism to the contemporary problems. The truth, he
says, is to be found in totality. The true is the concrete. Speculation must be
transcendent.
However, Lefebvre is not
a thinker who only repeats Marx’ and Engels’ arguments about dialectical
materialism. He makes an additional contribution. Lefebvre shifts the ground of
dialectical materialism from time to space. After his best-known work on space,
he draws back from a periodicising historical narrative of the dialectical
development of modes of space and their relationship with capital and
visuality, substituting an analysis of the spatial extension of capital in the
present. Thus, for him, the contemporary
dialectic no longer clings to historicity and historical time, or to a temporal
mechanism such as thesis-antithesis-synthesis.
This, then, is what is new and paradoxical: the dialectic is no longer
attached to temporality. Therefore, refutations of… Hegelian historicity cannot
function as critiques of the dialectic.
According to that, Soja
proposes what he calls third space as
a translation of, on the one hand, Lefebvre’s three-part dialectics of the
social production of space[iii].
Ross also affirms: “time, said Feuerbach, is privileged category of the
dialectic, because it excludes and subordinates where space tolerates and
coordinates. Our tendency is to think of space as an abstract, whit physical
contexts, as the container for our lives rather than the structures we helped
create. The difficulty is also one of vocabulary, while words like ‘Historical’
and ‘Political’ convey a dynamic of
intentionality, vitality and human motivation, ‘Spatial’, on the hand, connotes
stasis , neutrality and passivity. But the analysis of social space, far from
being reactionary or technocratic, is rather a symptom of strategic thought…
that poses space as the terrain of political practice… always entails an
encounter with history of – or better, a choice of histories”[iv].
However, the claim being
argued here is that a spatialised dialectic foregrounds a new form of
affirmation-negation-negation of the negation found in the old forms of
dialectical materialism. We are aware, of course, that neither Hegel nor Marx
used the terms thesis, antitheses, syntheses (it is, rather, from Fichte) and
that affirmation-negation—negation of the negation is Marx’s and Engels’
formula. The third term of negation of the negation is that alternative route
which displaces or reconfigures – divides – the dualism of
affirmation-negation. This is the philosophical implication of Lefebvre’s
proposition that dialectics could be extended into trialectics in which a position is opened up for otherness within
dialectical materialism. Lefebvre himself does not appear to fully grasp or
exploit the importance of this shift. His description of a dialectique de triplicité as merely a three-way
dialectic consisting of a thesis with not on, but two anti-theses is confusing.
To use the example of
Lefebvre’s description of social space, it suggests that practice, thought and
imagined space are elements synthesised together in a social spatialization.
But this third term is in fact treated more as a negation of the negation than
an equal player with the first two, and he uses language that harks back to his
old work on the “total person”. Perceived, conceived and lived out are used to
describe practice, thought and imagined, respectively. The three make much more
sense if they are rethought as a dialectical contradiction of: everyday
perception/practice versus spatial theory/concepts relativised by a
transcendent, entirely other, moment: creative, fully lived space. If we still
insist on counting terms and positions, any notion of a totalising synthesis
lies in a fourth, transcendent term, what Lefebvre calls l’espace, itself - best
understood as the spatialization.
Conclusively, it is possible
to show two figures on the subject[v].
One demonstrates the interpretation of
Lefebvre’s triple dialectic and another one focuses its implications. See them.
I Affirmation
(Thesis)
e.g everyday practice
and perception
|
II Negation
(Anti-thesis)
vs. analytical theory
and institutions
|
III Negation 2
(Otherness)
vs. fully lived moments
|
IV Synthesis
i.e. social totality
Figure 1: Common interpretation
of Lefebvre’s triple dialectic
I Affirmation
e.g. everyday practice
and perceptions
|
 II Negation
vs. analytical theory
and institutions
|
IV Analytical
Synthesis
i.e social totality
revealed by theoretical
analysis
|
III Negation of the negation
(otherness)
both overturned by unpredictable
fully lived moments
|
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Figure 2: The implications of
Lefebvre’s dialectic of triplicity
Notes
[i] - See SHIELDS, Rob (1999). Lefebvre, Love and Struggle: Spatial Dialectics. London
[ii] - See LEFEBVRE, Henry (1974). Le matérialisme
dialectique. Paris: Press
Universitaires de France.
[iii] - SOJA, Edward (1996). Third Space. Oxford
[iv] - ROSS, Kristin (1988). The Emergence
of Social Space: Rimbaud and the Paris New York
[v] - According to SHIELDS, Rob (1999).
Lefebvre, Love and Struggle: Spatial Dialectics. London
