Bo Grönlund (ed):Lefebvre's first ontological transformation of space- Lived, Perceived and Conceived SpaceThis tekst is 99,9% based on quotes from Lefebvre's 'The Production of Space'. For each key term / concept, all the indexed pages have been used, and besides this all other pages considered relevant. The quotes have been rearranged and combined by me in a rather free way, with the purpose to gather and - if possible - grasp the essence of the different terms and concepts. To 'straiten out' Lefebvre in this way is to some degree a dangerous undertaking, as his spiralling dialectics and large knowledge can only partially be re-presented in this way. To get a comprehensible overview of his thinking on his spatial terminology, the 'compiled' text below might be an aid though. Look at it as my attempt to organise systematic reading notes. Hopefully You will read them together with the book itself (recommended): Henri Lefebvre: 'The Production of Space', Blackwell, Oxford UK, 1991 (translated by Donald Nicholson-Smith). My editing work was done at Nordplan in Stockholm in some intense summer weeks of 1993. Later Rob Shields have written a good short overview 'Lefebvre - Love & Struggle - Spatial Dialectics, Routledge, London, 1999. Shields got my reading notes earlier in the 1990s as You can see in his book.
Lived space (Representational space):
Space as directly lived through its associated images and symbols. Practical and directly experienced social space. An initial intuitus, immediate and close to nature's immediacy (incorporate femaleness as well as maleness). Life without concepts. It may be directional, situational or relational, because it is essentially qualitative, fluid and dynamic. Representational spaces need obey no rules of consistency or cohesiveness. It is alive: it speaks. The experience of space in the traditional emotional and religious manner. Formed by everyday life The space of the everyday activities of "users" (or "inhabitants") - a concrete one, i.e. subjective. The "users" naively experienced space. The dominated - and hence passively experienced - space, making symbolic use of its objects. The representational space is the space that the inhabitants have in their minds. Have their sources in history of a people as well as in the history of each individual: childhood memories, dreams, uterine images and symbols (holes, passages, labyrinths) (studied by etnology, anthropology, psychoanalyses - although in a forgetful way). As a space of subjects, that originates in childhood, it is produced already in the first year of a persons life, and later through poetry and art. The first level of Lefebvre's ontological transformations of space: affective, bodily lived experience. It embraces the loci of passion, of action and lived situations, and thus immediately implies time. It has an affective kernel or centre: Ego, bed, bedroom, dwelling, house, square, church, graveyard. The FUNCTION is carried out, effectively or not, and corresponds to the directly experienced in a representational space. Space as actually "experienced" prohibits the expression of conflicts. Redolent with imaginary and symbolic elements. Representational space, embodying complex symbolisms, sometimes coded, sometimes not, linked to the clandestine or underground side of social life, as also to art. Nature and fertility is included in representational spaces. Tend towards non-verbal symbols and signs. Absolute space survived as the bedrock of historical space and the basis of representational spaces (religious, magical and political symbolisms). Only products of representational spaces are symbolic works - often unique. In Roman times representational space was dual in character: masculine / feminine, In Rome women, servants, slaves, children all had their own lived (representational) space. Antiquity's representational spaces have survived. It is by taking representational spaces as its starting point that art seeks to preserve or restore the lost unity of representations of space and representational space, of time and space; Epical space and lyrical space; In the theatre the space of the dramatic action itself; The space of painters and architect in medieval times; Bachelard's space of dreams; Maybe Frank Lloyd Wright's spaces, Gaudi's no doubt. Surviving or stagnant elements that counter to 20. Century modern space is found especially on the plane of representational space.
Perceived Space (Spatial practice):
Spatial practice is empirically observable. The readable/visible. Hearing plays a decisive role in perceived space, but also eyes. West, east, north, south, high, low, before, behind. Like all social practice, spatial practice is lived directly before it is conceptualized. Social and spatial practice is „reality". Habitus. A spatial practice must have a certain cohesiveness, but this does not imply that it is coherent (in the sense of intellectually worked out or logically conceived). The specific spatial competence and performance of every society member can only be evaluated empirically. Spatial practice is the practice of a repressive and oppressive space. The way space is appropriated. The way space is dominated. Including the way the body is appropriated/dominated. Spatial practice embraces production and reproduction. In spatial practice the reproduction of social relations is predominant. Under neo-capitalism it embodies a close association, within perceived space, between daily reality (daily routine) and urban reality (the routes and networks which link up the places set aside for work, „private" life and leisure. This association is a paradoxical one, because it includes the most extreme separation between the places it links together. „Modern" spatial practice might thus be defined - to take an extreme but significant case - by the daily life of a tenant in a government-subsidized high-rise housing project. Users and inhabitants are marginalized by spatial practice to the extent that we lack well-defined terms. Languages are clumsy in relation to social time and spatial practice The spatial practice of a society secretes that society's space; it propounds and presupposes it, in a dialectical interaction; it produces it slowly and surely as it masters and appropriates it.. I.e. the network of roads; motorways ; the politics of air transport . The second level of Lefebvre's ontological transformations of space: socio-political signification. The FORM corresponds approximately to the moment of communication - hence to the realm of the perceived Spatial practice thus simultaneously defines: places - the relationship of local to global; the representation of that relationship; actions and signs; the trivialized spaces of everyday life; and, in opposition to these last, spaces made special by symbolic means as desirable or undesirable, benevolent or malevolent, sanctioned or forbidden to particular groups. From an analytic standpoint, the spatial practice of a society is reveal through the deciphering of its space. In Rome dual in character: the Roman road links the urbs to the countryside over which it exercises dominion. The gate, through which the imperial way proceeds from urbs to orbis, marks the sacrosanct enceinte off from its subject territories and allows for entrance and exit. Now substituted by signified, mental, abstract space. Spatial practice is observed, described and analysed on a wide range of levels: in architecture, in city planning or „urbanism". Planning, „urbanism" and architecture are levels in spatial practice The whole of form, function structure, perceived, directly experienced and conceived is located within a spatial practice. A spatial practice destroys social practice; social practice destroys itself by means of spatial practice. Spatial practice is neither determined by an existing system, be it urban or ecological, nor adapted to a system, be it economic or political. Social space (spatial practice) has by now achieved - potentially - a measure of freedom from the abstract space of quantifiable activities, and hence too from the agendas set by reproduction pure and simple. Pressure from below must also confront the state in its role as organizer of space, etc. in the form of counter-plans and counter-projects
Conceived Space (Representations of space):
Conceptualized space without life. Abstraction. Conceived = known. Intellectus. Intellect. Thought. Elaborated representations of space. A space of calculations. Geometric, visual, phallic Representations of space are certainly abstract, but they also play a part in social and political practice. Representations of space are toed to the relations of production and to the „order" which those relations impose, and hence to knowledge, to signs, to codes, and to „frontal" relations. The producers of space have always acted in accordance with a representation. Such representations are thus objective, though subject to revision. Have a practical impact.. The space of scientists, planners, urbanists, technocratic subdividers and social engineers, as of a certain type of artist with scientific bent, all of whom identify what is lived and what is perceived with what is conceived. This is the dominant space in any society (or mode of production). Empty space in the sense of a mental and social void which facilitates the socialization of a not-yet-social realm is actually also merely a representation of space A part of the history of ideologies - in a nonrestricted sense. The third level: the conceived, where the dissemination of the written word and of knowledge welds the members of society into a „consensus", and in doing so confers upon them the status of „subjects". The STRUCTURE is conceived and implies a representation of space. Conceptions of space tend, with certain exceptions, towards a system of verbal (and therefore intellectually worked out signs). Architects space is a representation of space - a conceived space, thought by those who make use of it to be true, despite the fact - or perhaps because of the fact - that it is geometrical: because it is a medium for objects, an object in itself, and a locus of the objectification of plans. Their intervention occur by way of construction - of architecture (conceived of not as the building of a particular structure, palace or monument, but rather as a project embedded in a spatial context and a texture which call for „representations" that will not vanish into the symbolic or imaginary realms. Arcane speculation about numbers, with its talk of the golden number, moduli and „canons", tend to perpetuate this view of matters. Also related to monumental space. Maps and plans, transport and communications systems, information conveyed by images and signs. In Roman times dual: the orbis and the urbs, circular and the military camp with cardo and decumanus. Roman citizens thought them as the world. Antiquity's representations of space have collapsed The code of linear perspective - developed as early as the Renaissance: a fixed observer, An immobile perceptual field, a stable visual world. A homogeneous, clearly demarcated space complete with horizon and vanishing-point.- for some artists and men of learning since around 1420. Classical perspective combines ideology and knowledge within a (socio-spatial) practice. Maybe most of Le Corbusier's buildings and plans. But also Thomas Aquinas. Representations of space are shot through with knowledge (savoir) - i.e. a mixture of understanding (connaissance) and ideology - which is always relative and in a process of change.
|