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The Urban Sensorium: Space, Ideologyand the Aestheticization of Politics

Kanishka GoonewardenaProgram in Planning, Department of Geography, University of Toronto, Toronto,

Ontario, Canada; e-mail: [email protected]

This essay outlines a theoretical framework for investigating the links between the production of

urban space (Lefebvre) and the production of ideology (Althusser) and hegemony (Gramsci) by

proposing the concept of the urban sensorium. With a view to the aesthetics of urban experience

and everyday life, this concept aligns Fredric Jamesons postmodern adaptation of city planner

Kevin Lynchs research on cognitive mapping with Walter Benjamins insights on aestheticiz-

ing politics in order to ask: how does urban space mediate ideology and produce hegemony while

aestheticizing politics? In so doing, the spotlight falls on a conceptual constellation including four

key theoretical terms: ideology, aesthetics, mediation and totality. While working through

them, the essay argues that Jamesons outstanding contribution to a spatialized understanding of

postmodernism lies above all in his Marxist (Lukacsian, Althusserian and Sartrean) theorization

of mediation and totality; whereas radical students of the city can find the richest dialectical

elaboration of these two concepts with special attention to space and urbanism in the oeuvre ofHenri Lefebvre, especially in the recently translated The Urban Revolution.

Space, Ideology and AestheticsHow could space be ideological? Since Fredric Jameson (1988b:35)raised this question some 15 years ago in an influential essay entitledArchitecture and the critique of ideology, various conceptions ofspaceand an even greater variety of spatial metaphorshaveemerged on many fronts to furnish the governing tropes for storiesof postmodernism in critical theory and cultural studies. Architecture,city planning and other modes of producing space, both real andvirtual, have accordingly attracted an enviable amount of respectableattention in theories of postmodern culturenot least in Jamesonsown, in spite of his heady commitment to a unique brand of WesternMarxist historicism. Yet for all that, and even after new spatialitieshave in some quarters supplanted old historicisms with a vengeancecharacteristic of irredentism, the question of how space is ideologicalremains, to my mind, disproportionately under-theorized.

But perhaps not surprisingly so. To be sure, the two key terms ofmy questionspace and ideologyhave experienced divergent for-tunes over the last two or so decades. Just as the discourse ofpostmodernity endowed space with unprecedented theoretical sig-nificance, so the concept of ideology has come under its auspices to

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a virtual standstill in the apparently forgotten tracks of historicalmaterialism. Ideology, which Louis Althusser (1971) once provoca-tively claimed has no history, seems itself to be symptomaticallyabsent from history of late, as if now history has no ideology. Theo-retical fashions, however, cannot always be taken as unmediatedreflexes of the historical conditions from which they emerge and therealities to which they refer; and it would be unwise to infer from themere passing of the concept of ideology the death also of ideology.Within this context, rather, works that take the hurried burial ofideology six feet under discourse with a grain of salt shoulddemand some close attention. In critical theory and cultural studiesat large, the recent studies of Terry Eagleton and Fredric Jamesonhere come to mind firstfor building upon earlier efforts of WesternMarxism, especially by Lukacs, Gramsci, Althusser and the FrankfurtSchool, to offer invaluable insights not only into the concept ofideology but also its everyday workings in the thoroughly aestheti-cized world of the postmodern. My debt to theseand other inter-ventions of kindred spiritwill become evident below. For now, letme simply say that the very preponderance of the ideologies of endof ideology and end of history itself suggests that ideology as suchis not dead. If alive and well, moreover, the absence of its concept incontemporary theoretical discourse only renders the reality of ideol-ogy all the more potent and imperceptible. Ideology, Althusser(1971:172) remarked, never says I am ideological. It goes withoutsaying, as Pierre Bourdieu (1977:167) noted, because it comes with-out saying.

Yet, imperceptible ideologytaken literallywould also be a con-tradiction in terms. As forcefully demonstrated in Eagletons (1990)ground-breaking study, The Ideology of the Aesthetic, in order to beeffective, ideology must also be affective, that is to say, aesthetic.Ideology is of course about ideasabout worldview, cosmology, arepresentation of the imaginary relationship of individuals to theirreal conditions of existence (Althusser 1971); doxa and habitus(Bourdieu 1977); or common sense and sometimes hegemony andutopian counter-hegemony (Gramsci 1971)but it would be none ofthese things without being aesthetic as well, if we recall what this keyconcept first designated as its object: the realm of the senses. Ideaswithout sensationsfeelings, affections, passions and all the rest ofitdo not work too well as ideology; or in hegemony, as bothAntonio Gramsci and Joseph Goebbels well understood. Any attempttoday to redeem a concept of ideology with a view to critique, in ourincreasingly globalized society of the spectacle, has every reasontherefore to grant the aesthetic its due. To this end, the concept ofthe urban sensorium I propose here takes seriously the space of thecity as a vital ingredient and determinant of our sensate life, the

The Urban Sensorium: Space, Ideology and the Aestheticization of Politics 47

2005 Editorial Board of Antipode.

traditional concern of aesthetics. Before indulging in my own spec-ulations on the relationship between the aestheticization of politics andthe mediation of ideology by space, it would better to be explicit aboutwhat I mean by aesthetics, with some help from Eagleton:

Aesthetics is born as a discourse of the body. In its original for-mulation by the German philosopher Alexander Baumgarten, theterm refers not in the first place to art, but, as the Greek aesthesiswould suggest, to the whole region of human perception and sensa-tion, in contrast to the more rarefied domain of conceptual thought.The distinction which the term aesthetic initially enforces in themid-eighteenth century is not one between art and life, butbetween the material and the immaterial: between things andthoughts, sensations and ideas, that which is bound up with ourcreaturely life as opposed to that which conducts some shadowyexistence in the recesses of the mind. It is as though philosophysuddenly wakes up to the fact that there is a dense swarmingterritory beyond its own mental enclave which threatens to fallutterly outside its sway. That territory is nothing less than thewhole of our sensate life togetherthe business of affections andaversions, of how the world strikes the body on its sensory surfaces,of that which takes roots in the gaze and the guts and all that arisesfrom our most banal, biological insertion into the world. The aes-thetic concerns this most gross and palpable dimension of thehuman, which post-Cartesian philosophy, in some curious lapse ofattention, has somehow managed to overlook. It is thus the firststirrings of a primitive materialismof the bodys long inarticulaterebellion against the tyranny of the theoretical. (Eagleton 1990:13)

Little Buddha, or, The Spatial Logic of SiddharthasEpistemological BreakThe concept of the urban sensorium I have in mind is bestapproachedgiven the negligible space devoted in this theoreticalessay to concrete illustrationby way of a parable, whose basicform will be familiar to readers of Herman Hesses Siddhartha. It isnot Hesses book that I wish to dwell on for a moment, but BernardoBertoluccis colorful cinematic adaptation of Buddhas life-storyhisbirth and upbringing as a prince, renunciation of worldly life, asceticwandering in search of enlightenment, and spectacular attainment ofNirvanawithin another story stretching from Seattle to Kathmanduin what one reviewer has dubbed his first Spielberg movie, LittleBuddha. To begin with, a leading question: what was it that broughtPrince Siddharthas loyalty to royalty, as it were, to an abrupt end, andsent him away on an ascetic journey towards Nirvana? Or, moreprecisely, what was the cause of the radical epistemological break inSiddharthas enviably happy princely life?

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The possibility of an epistemological break is first foretold by anastrologer at King Suddhodanas ceremonial presentation of the new-born prince Siddhartha to his subjects. Although this proleptic ges-ture on the astrologers partwho suggests that Siddhartha will oneday become a great asceticcontradicts conventional wisdom, KingSuddhodana takes it seriously, if contemptuously. In fact, his defiantproclamation, holding the infant Siddhartha aloft for everyone to see,that he [Siddhartha] will be a great king! clearly betrays an unmis-takable fear on his part that this may not come to pass. Consequently,Siddharthas life from that point onwardfrom which his mother issymptomatically absent, having died a few days after childbirthbecomes inexorably enveloped by a concerned fathers design tosecure his unsuspecting sons allegiance to the royal course of lifedeemed to befit himgiven the supreme importance of patrilinealgenealogyprimarily by removing from his life any possibility ofcoming into contact with an experience of human suffering.

In order to address my question on Siddhartha, I should now recallthe relevanceto Little Buddha and usof Althussers great redefi-nition of ideology as a representation of the imaginary relationshipof individuals to their real conditions of existence (1971:162). For thenature of King Suddhodanas meticulously staged upbringing ofSiddhartha, surely, is profoundly ideological: what he attempted toproduce was nothing less than, in Althussers words, a representa-tion of the imaginary relationship of [Siddhartha] to [his] realconditions of existence. So we may ask further: how could such anideological representation, which in the last analysis was meant toprevent one mans suspicion of his imaginary relationship to hisreal conditions of existence, be produced? Of course, by letting himhave the good life. But how? By sequestering him in a particularsensorium, consisting of a lavish palace complex for every seasonpromising, among other amenities guaranteed to make a young manhappy, a healthy plenitude of intoxicating food and drink, excitingsport, enchanting music and dance, and, of course, Indian womenwhose beauty, much like the structure of ideology (for Althusser) orthe unconscious (for Lacan), seems to be timeless; in fact, a sensoriumwithin whose postmodern reincarnation it is the revanchist gentrifiers(a` la Neil Smith 1996) who dream of being sequestered.

Yet the political moral of the story is that, like all suffering and joy,ideologies are transitory. Thus our case in point is the manner ofSiddharthas epistemological break, as it happens in his first evertour of his (fathers) citya tour demanded by the prodigious sonout of an unbearable mix of boredom and curiosity about the realworld. How, then, does the father represent his city to the son?Predictably, as a seamless extension of the wholesome sensoriumwithin which Siddhartha had hitherto been confined, but above all,



as a space in which he can (in)voluntarily (mis)recognize his(proper) subject-positionthat of a prince (who will one day becomea king). In other words, the carefully orchestrated urban sensoriumwas meant to interpellatehailSiddhartha in such a way that hewould say (to himself and others) I am [the prince] that I am!(1971:179), much like Althussers proverbial person-in-the-streetwho, upon being hailed by the police (hey, you there!), turnsaround, and by this mere one-hundred-and-eighty-degree physicalconversion becomes a subject [b]ecause he has recognized thatthe hail was really addressed to him, and that it was really him whowas hailed (and not someone else) (1971:174).

But for Suddhodana, no such luck: before anything like the nowproverbial one-hundred-and-eighty-degree turn of Structural Marxismcould happen, a sharp sideways glance in Siddharthas hyper-curiousgaze hits a shocking sight, and, by means of this mere ninety-degreemove, he suddenly cuts through the spectacular spell of ideology intothe living hell of human suffering. First, quite by accident, he sees,through the citys premeditated presentation of itself to him, two oldmenhis first sight of old age. And then, again for the first time,labouring men and women, sick people and a dead person. Finally,by the time he sees an ascetic-priest, he has already seen beyond therepresentation of the imaginary relationship of [himself] to [his]real conditions of existence (1971:162), or, according to the narratorof Little Buddha who sounds more Benjaminian or Freudian thanAlthusserian at this moment, for Siddhartha the dream was [then]ending and his long journey of awakening had begun. So Siddharthaasks his crestfallen father how can I live here as I have lived beforewhen theres so much suffering outside? and embarks on a search fora cure for suffering and mortality, leaving his city in the dark, secretly,through the same gates by which he had already once embarked on hisfateful urban excursion. The lesson of Bertoluccis representation ofthe ideological production of Prince Siddharthas life-worldas well asits eventual critique and disintegrationfor my purposes lies in hisdepiction of the necessary relationship of a particular ideology to theproduction of a certain kind of urban space. Or, to put it in moregeneral terms, most instructive in Little Buddha is the nature of therelationship between the production of space and the production ofideology, which is a mediate relationship, that is to say, a relationship ofmediation, and, above all, a relationship which poses my central ques-tion: how does urban space mediate ideology?

By way of a few clarifications, I can now broach several furtherquestions with which my central question is loaded. First, the conceptof mediation. What is mediatewhose opposite, within the constella-tion of concepts invoked here, is immediate? Gillian Rose (1978:150)explains in her book on philosopher Theodor Adorno, The Melancholy

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Science, that immediate means without intermediary, or, not aresult. And she hastens to add: Anything which appears to beimmediate is always mediated. Mediated means brought about by anagent, or, the result of a process. (In Adornos German usage, Gilliannotes, immediate/mediate does not have the temporal connotationthat it does in English.) To say, then, that ideology is mediatedwithreference to mediate ideology (as opposed to immediateideology)is to say that it is brought about by an agent, or theresult of a process. Thus the ease with which we can see the agent orsubject responsible for the spatial mediation of ideology in this littleepisode from Little Buddha (ie King Suddhodana) is really an invita-tiona challengeto problematize the process[es] of ideologicalmediation of our own cities, postmodern or otherwise, where agencyitself is mediated to such an extent that it is barely perceptible. Putdifferently, mediate is a homonym; and mediate ideology is notmerely a constative utterance (ideology is mediated), but also aperformative one, a call to mediate, to make ideology mediate, that is,to intervene critically and render ideology visible: break its spell.

Why? Because ideology is immediate! It will not willingly admit anyrecognizable trace of mediation, for the condition of its invincibility isinvisibility. Much like what Gramsci called hegemony, ideology cannottherefore be seen as such, least of all by those who are successfullyinterpellated by it. Althusser (1971:175) is right: Ideology, whosemode of presence is absence, never says, I am ideological, surely,because something that is endowed with such ontological subtleties andepistemological niceties, also can speak silently. Nevertheless, for us thissilence is now audible, in fact deafening. Listen. Listen to the sappytunes of end of ideology on your political right, left and center; andthe postmodern funeral hymns to socialism and class struggle (whatJean Francois Lyotard derisively dismissed as the desire calledMarx), the unconscious, alienation and, among other Archimedeanfootholds for radical politics, the very concept of ideologywhichindeed is quite different from discourse. Such are the sounds ofsymptomatic silences of our time. But it is not enough to listen. Lookaround. Yes, all we are now supposed to see is schizophrenic euphoria;a postmodern urban sensorium suffused with all kinds of hallucino-genic intensities; an intoxicating play of irreverent signs cut loose fromirrelevant referents; and, above all, a dazzling invitation to take forgranted the society of the spectacle, whose very condition of possibi-lity Guy Debord (1995: Section 171) correctly attributed to urbanism.Space! It is the postmodern opium of the people.

The Aesthetics and Politics of Cognitive MappingIdeology, spatialized or otherwise, is not just false consciousness.This realization in fact constitutes a major achievement of Althussers



highly original contributionwith all of its limitationsto a positiveunderstanding of ideology and its everyday experience (see, for anuanced assessment, Eagleton 1991:136156). On this conception,ideology must also represent reality in one way or another, in additionto misrepresenting it. As such, it needs realityand goes some dis-tance towards constituting reality as well. His shorthand formulaexpresses this cleverly: ideology5 illusion/allusion. The implicationfor critique is clear: While admitting that [ideologies] do notcorrespond to reality, ie that they constitute an illusion, we admitthat they do make an allusion to reality, and that they need only beinterpreted to discover the reality of the world behind their imaginaryrepresentation of that world (Althusser 1971:162). I shall return tothe issue of interpretation with respect to urban space below. First,however, a note on the aesthetics and politics of ideological allusionto clarify further the nature of ideology.

Now, if society were actually transparent, that is, if the totality of thestructure of social relations were directly accessible to everyday humanconsciousnessthen there would be no pressing need for an ideologicalrepresentation of it. But it is clearly not so. So we (all of us) have nooption but to have recourse to representation. In this regard, the extra-ordinary meditation on truth, goodness and beauty in the EarliestSystem-Programme of German Idealismco-authored by Hegel,Schelling and Holderlin in 1796makes at least a couple of path-breaking observations (cited in Eagleton 1991:151). First: [W]e are toldso often that the great mob must have a religion of the senses. But notonly does the great mob need it, the philosopher needs it too. Second:

We must have a new mythology, but this mythology must be in theservice of Ideas; it must be a mythology of Reason. Until we expressthe Ideas aesthetically, ie mythologically, they have no interest forthe people, and conversely until mythology is rational the philoso-pher must be ashamed of it. Thus in the end enlightened andunenlightened must clasp hands, mythology must become philoso-phical in order to make the people rational, and philosophy mustbecomes mythological in order to make the philosophers sensible.

Not that this would fetch high marks from postmodern populists; buthere we only need to insert ideology for mythology, and societyof the spectacle for religion of the senses, in order to becomeHegels contemporaries. Debord (1995) was surely aware of thiswhen he so judiciously chose the great epigraph to The Society ofthe Spectacle from Ludwig Feuerbachs Young (Left) Hegelian bible,The Essence of Christianity:

But certainly for the present age, which prefers the sign to the thingsignified; the copy to the original, representation to reality, theappearance to the essence illusion only is sacred, truth profane.

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Nay, sacredness is held to be enhanced in proportion as truthdecreases and illusion increases, so that the highest degree of illu-sion comes to be the highest degree of sacredness.

Whereas Feuerbachs stunning anticipation of the cynical prophecies ofBaudrillard and Co puts amnesiac postmodernism in some much neededhistorical perspective, the System-Programme of German idealism pro-vides an advanced version of Althussers (1990c:232) controversial yetpowerful thesis that we can never go beyond ideology, even after therevolution: ie historical materialism cannot conceive that even a commu-nist society could ever do without ideology. For Hegel, Schelling andHolderlin are saying here, after all, that they too need aestheticizedideology (mythology) as much as the ordinary mortal. This is a remark-able theoretical move for 1796, aided no doubt by the dawning sense ofalienation and fragmentation of social life during the origins of modernity,the essential attributes of which have been since less surpassed thanintensified. And its emphasis on enlightening (with a simple e) mythol-ogy also deserves some credit for articulating a plausible sense in whichimmortal ideology could be rendered benign: ie a hint of what post-revolutionary ideology might be like; or what forms conceived, livedand perceived space might assume for Lefebvre under socialism. What-ever such ideology could be, here the great German idealists distinguish itradically from the Beautiful Lies forged by Priests and Despots, thatsmall number of cynical men, who base their domination and exploita-tion of the people on a falsified representation of the world which theyhave imagined in order to enslave other minds by dominating theirimaginations (Althusser 1971:163).

But Beautiful Lieswhat Antonio Gramsci (1971) understood ashegemony and Lefebvre theorized in his understudied book TheSurvival of Capitalism (see Stefan Kipfer 2002)are what we havewith us today, rather than Hegel and Cos enlightened mythology.Which naturally leads to the question raised by Althusser: Why domen need this imaginary transposition of their real conditions ofexistence in order to represent to themselves their real conditions ofexistence? What is it that enables the small number of cynical mento have their view of the world introjected by those who are domi-nated by them? In short: what is the condition of possibility ofideology? For Althusser, it is clear that ideology (as a system ofmass representations) is indispensable in any society if men are to beformed, transformed and equipped to respond to the demands of theirconditions of existence (1990c:235). Eagleton explains this well in hiscritical reading of Althusser in Ideology:

The workings of the social order as a whole [ie as a totality] can beknown only to theory; as far as the practical lives of individuals go,ideology is needed to provide them with a kind of imaginary map



of the social totality, so that they can find their way around it. Theseindividuals may also of course have access to a scientific knowledgeof the social formation; but they cannot exercise this knowledge inthe dust and heat of everyday life.

Ideology, so the argument goes, springs from a situation in whichsocial life has become too complex to be grasped as a whole byeveryday consciousness. There is thus the need for an imaginarymodel of it, which will bear something of the oversimplifying rela-tion to social reality that a map does to an actual terrain Society,in the terminology of the eighteenth century, has become sublime:it is an object which cannot be represented. For the people as a wholeto get their bearings within it, it is essential to construct a mythwhich will translate theoretical knowledge into more graphic,immediate terms. (Eagleton 1991:150151)

Given that postmodernity is quite the sublime object, it is possible,even rewarding, to inscribe my questions about space and ideologywithin this problematic of representation clarified by Eagleton, follow-ing its rigorous theorization by Althusser (1971, 1990c), especially inReading Capital (Althusser and Balibar 1997). And this kind ofinscription, I shall now argue, is precisely what Jameson (1988a,1991, 1992) has intimated in his intriguing juxtaposition of Althussersredefinition of ideology with city planner Kevin Lynchs (1960) cele-brated concept of cognitive mapping. According to Jameson:

[T]he way in which Lynchs conception of city experiencethe dia-lectic between the here and now of immediate perception and theimaginative or imaginary sense of the city as an absent totalitypresents something like a spatial analogue of Althussers great for-mulation of ideology itself, as the Imaginary representation of thesubjects relationship to his or her Real conditions of existence.Whatever its defects and problems [see Eagleton 1991:143156;Elliott 1987:172177], this positive conception of ideology as anecessary function in any form of social life has the great merit ofstressing the gap between the local positioning of the individualsubject and the totality of class structures in which he or she issituated, a gap between phenomenological perception and a realitythat transcends all individual thinking and experience; but [which]ideology, as such, attempts to span or coordinate, to map, by meansof conscious and unconscious representations. The conception ofcognitive mapping proposed here therefore involves an extrapolationof Lynchs spatial analysis to the realm of the social structure, that isto say, in our historical moment, to the totality of class relations on aglobal (or should I say multinational) scale. The secondary premise isalso maintained, namely, that the incapacity to map socially is ascrippling to political experience as the analogous incapacity to map

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spatially is for urban experience. It follows that an aesthetic of cog-nitive mapping in this sense is an integral part any socialist project.(Jameson 1988a:353)

This striking juxtaposition of Lynchs image of the city andAlthussers ideology by Jameson indeed opens up a new path thatstill remains to be explored with sufficient attention to the mediatedrelationship between ideology and space, especially concerning thegap between the more sensible textures of contemporary urbanismon the one hand and the still more invisible and unrepresentabletotality of global social relations. The invitation for geographers,urban planners and architects (among others) here is to ask thefollowing question, in order for them to go beyond the point towhich Jameson has brought his spatial account of the culturallogic of late capitalism: if there is a gap between the space of thecity and our everyday consciousness of it, and a corresponding onebetween our lived experience and totality, then what is the relationshipbetween these two disjunctures? Or, to put it differently, what is therole played by the aesthetics and politics of spaceie the urbansensorium, as I am elaborating it herein producing and reproducingthe durable disjunction between the consciousness of our urbaneveryday life (to use the term preferred by Lefebvre and Debord)and the now global structure of social relations that is itself ultimatelyresponsible for producing the spaces of our lived-experience?Jameson clearly takes up a question quite close to but also distinctfrom this one, by posing the challenge of cognitive mapping inhermeneutic rather than urban terms:

[The] new and enormous global realities are inaccessible to anyindividual subject or consciousnessnot even to Hegel, let aloneCecil Rhodes or Queen Victoriawhich is to say that those funda-mental realities are somehow ultimately unrepresentable or, to usethe Althusserian phrase, are something like an absent cause, onethat can never emerge into the presence of perception. Yet thisabsent cause can find figures through which to express itself indistorted and symbolic [ie ideological] ways: indeed one of ourbasic tasks as critics of literature is to track down and make con-ceptually available the ultimate realities and experiences designatedby those figures, which the reading mind inevitably tends to reifyand to read as primary [immediate] contents in their own right.(Jameson 1991:411412)

Although this particular passage addresses literary critics specifically, itsimplications for what might be called a critical urbanism are evidentenough, given the role played by urban space in the production ofideology. Yet, Jamesons own reservations around the problematic ofcognitive mappingnot to mention the frequent misreading of his



argument here, which geographers in particular have mistaken as atheorization primarily of space (which it is really not) instead of totality(which it patently is)have also partially obscured the promising pathtowards spatial, aesthetic and political questions which he himselfopens up.

Let me explain. From the outset, Jameson (1988a:353) makes itclear that his invocation of Lynchs research on narratives of urbanexperience alongside his use of Althussers concept of ideology inorder to theorize the insurmountable distance between everyday post-modern political consciousness and late capitalist social totality is onlyemblematic. By the same token, however, in this essentially allego-rical operation, Jamesons concept of cognitive mapping alsoremains relatively un-mediated, in any substantive sense, with respectto urban space as such. Consider, for example, the caveat he insertsbefore the last sentence in his aforementioned invocation of Lynch asit reappears otherwise without revision three years later, nowembedded in the brilliant concluding section on How to Map aTotality in Postmodernism:

Unfortunately, in hindsight [the] strength of the formulation [ofcognitive mapping] is also its fundamental weakness: the transferof the visual map from city to globe is so compelling that it ends upre-spatializing an operation we were supposed to think of in adifferent manner altogether. A new sense of global social structurewas supposed to take on figuration and to displace the purelyperceptual substitute of the geographical figure; cognitive map-ping, which was meant to have a kind of oxymoronic value and totranscend the limits of mapping altogether, is, as a concept, drawnback by the force of gravity of the black hole of the map itself (oneof the most powerful of all human conceptual instruments) andtherein cancels out its own impossible originality. (Jameson1991:416)

And here he is barely a year later, in The Geopolitical Aesthetic:

Space and demography offer the quickest short-cuts to this percep-tual difficulty [of cognitive mapping], provided each is used like aladder to be kicked away after it has done its work. As far as space isconcerned, Bergsons warning about the temptations of spatializingthought remain current in the age of the intercontinental ballisticmissile and the new infra-red and laser systems of which we areso proud; it is even more timely in an era of urban dissolution andre-ghettoization, in which we might be tempted to think that thesocial can be mapped that way, by following across a map insurancered lines and the electrified borders of private police and surveil-lance forces. Both images are, however, only caricatures of the modeof production itself (most often called late capitalism), whose

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mechanism and dynamics are not visible in that sense, cannot bedetected on the surfaces scanned by satellites, and therefore standas a fundamental representational problemindeed a problem of ahistorically new and original type. (Jameson 1992:2)

No hasty offense need be taken here by radical geographers for thepainfully unceremonious image of kicking the ladder of space. Forthese are excellent points: timely warnings against the fetishism ofspace that masquerades as theory, a senseless habit of much post-modern thought that nonetheless continues to receive good grades interritorial disciplines such as geography. The authority invoked byJameson here is none other than Marx (1976:163177), whose unsur-passed theorization of the Fetishism of the Commodity and ItsSecret, one would have thought, discouraged radical geographersabove all from reified spatial fixations in unmediated theoreticalform. They are powerful and prescient antidotes too, offered verymuch in the spirit of Lefebvres (1991) conception of representationsof space, to the intoxicating postmodern aura of GIS, GPS,AUTOCAD and a host of other glittering seductions of spatial-itynot least in urban planning and warfare. Yet these remarkswithin the context of Jamesons (1992:2) call for cognitive mappingstill leave unresolvedtheoretically no less than empiricallytheissue of how urban space actually mediates ideology by getting inthe way of what used to be called self-consciousness about the socialtotality; and they betray a hesitation on his part to take the fullplunge into the question of spatial mediation.

Space/Mediation/Totality: Althusser and JamesonTrue, the the mental map of the city space explored by Lynch can beextrapolated to that mental map of the social and global totality we allcarry around in our heads in variously garbled forms (Jameson1988a:353; emphasis added). And this mental map of the socialand global totality certainly comes quite close to what Althussertheorized as ideology by making it coterminous with the everydayconsciousness of lived-experience. This last, moreover, amounts towhat Lefebvre and Debord explored with their explosive notion ofeveryday life, following, respectively, the humanist and Hegelian-Lukacsian traditions of Marxismboth overtly hostile to structural-ism as much as post-structuralism. Meeting this novel extrapolationhalfway down the street, we have as well the culture industry, as theFrankfurt school philosophers theorized itmost pessimistically byTheodor Adorno and most optimistically in relation to the moderncity and technology by Walter Benjamin (see Buck-Morss 1991,1992). And running all the way through Jamesons extrapolation isalso Georg Lukacs (1971) pioneering account of the consequences of



reification on the consciousness of the worker. Nor should oneforget in this context the relevance of Gramscis (1971) revolutionarynotions of hegemony and common sense to an emblematic extra-polation of Lynchean cognitive mapping towardsor more pre-cisely, beyondAlthusserian ideology. Jamesons problematic ofcognitive mapping, in other words, harbours the potential to pullvirtually the entirety of Western Marxism into its orbit (Anderson1976, 1998). For all that promise, however, as an essentially allego-rical or analogical construct produced by means of a clever juxtaposi-tion, this novel meditation on cognitive mapping by Jameson stopsrather short of a concrete abstraction: ie a substantive theorization ofthe relations between the different levels or moments (howeverconceived) of the social totality within which urban space now playsby his own admissionan increasingly influential and constitutivea role.

Jameson, like Marx, cannot do or say everythingas some of hiscritics seem to expect. What I am suggesting here, therefore, is a wayof reading the writer Hal Foster calls Americas leading Marxistcritic critically, rather than dismissively (Gregory 1994:278282;Soja 1996:175176, 196204). A considered balance sheet on thespatial turn of Jamesons oeuvre is in any case now overdue, andsome basic requirements for such an assessment can be outlinedrapidly as follows. To begin with, a temptation to be avoided. It is apointless error to first assume on the basis of circumstantial evidencethat Jameson is offering a postmodern discourse on spaceieJameson is (postmodern!) Lefebvreand then be disappointed thathe is after all no specialist on space, but an unreconstructed Hegelianhistoricistie Jameson is not really (even a Marxist) Lefebvre, butrather a pungent new brew of the old wines of Lukacs, Althusser,Sartre and the Frankfurt School, even if with hardly a hint ofGramsci. Postmodernism, or, The Cultural Logic of Late Capitalism isstudded with sparkling references to space, no doubt; but in inter-preting Jameson, it would be wise to bear in mind the good adviceAlthusser offered in Reading Capital for symptomatic readers ofMarx: Let us do to him the duty of taking him not at his word,but at his work. For all the vivid anecdotes, images and metaphors, itshould be clear that Jameson is no ethnographer or historian ofpostmodernism; his is first and foremost a theorization of the conceptof postmodernism, not a thick description or a history-from-belowof its actual uneven and fitful development through time or space.(There is a distinction to be made between the concept and its object:as Althusser once said in deliberate provocation, the concept ofhistory is no more historical than the concept of sugar is sweet. InAlthusserian (1990a:4367) terms, that is, Jamesons (1991) accountof postmodernism in Postmodernism is more abstract-formal than

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real-concrete.) If we follow Althussers advice still further, then itshould also become evident that Jameson is best understood as themost impressively dialectical theoretician today of not space, perhapsnot even post-modernity, but certainly totalitythe concept he hasboth clarified and defended since at least Marxism and Form (1971)with a prodigious display of theoretical energy and erudition in con-temporary culture against the virulently anti-totalizing grains of post-modern and poststructuralist thought, much of which unfortunatelybetrays little understanding of what totality actually means.

Before saying anything else, therefore, it would be useful to dispel afew myths about totality, the conception of which Georg Lukacs(1971:27) identified as the definitive essence of Marxist criticism:[i]t is not the primacy of economic motives in historical explanationthat constitutes the decisive difference between Marxism and bour-geois thought, but the point of view of totality. With an eye on thefascinating career of this concept through the Western Marxist trad-ition (Jameson 1971; Jay 1984), Steven Best (1989:343344) providesa useful first approximation of totality as a structure or systemcomprised of parts that are constituted by the whole system to whichthey belong and which interrelate with that system. And he aptlycontrasts this totalizing conception with the positivist and empiricistphilosophy which holds that reality is constituted of isolated, self-sufficient particulars. The latter (ie anti-totalizing) attitude, it shouldbe noted parenthetically, is precisely what Lefebvres open andintegral Marxist methodology also rejected most disdainfullyafact that leaves little doubt as to where he stands in relation to Marx-ism and poststructuralism, in spite of spurious attempts to read him inNorth American translation as a postmodernist, that is, as part of atheoretical (or anti-theoretical) trend that for the most part lackseither the conceptual sophistication or the political sincerity requiredto distinguish between totality and totalitarianism. (The best responseagainst such opportunistic readings of Lefebvre to date is by Kipfer2002; see also Neil Smith 2003.) On the inept postmodern conflationof totality with totalitarianism, Jameson writes: The French nouveauxphilosophes said it most succinctly, without realizing that they werereproducing or reinventing the hoariest American ideological slogansof the cold war: totalizing thought is totalitarian thought; a direct lineruns from Hegels Absolute Spirit to Stalins Gulag (1988:354). Thisis not the place to examine in any detail the reasons for the lazypopularity of current hostility to totality, the legacy of not so muchany theoretical labour as the ideology of the Cold War, which stillequates Marxism with Stalinism and Totalitarianism (Anderson 1984;Eagleton 1996). Suffice it to say that the typical knee-jerk reactionagainst totalizing theory offered by postmodern and poststructuralisthabits of thought recalls the figure of the ostrich diving into the sand



upon the perception of danger. Lefebvre once said: we do not createthose [paradoxes] we report, just as the person who warns us of acatastrophe or upheaval is not responsible for its occurrence. Somepeople blame meteorologists for the arrival of storms (2003:91).So too with the totality of late capitalism, which Jamesonthenemesis of anti-totalizing poststructuralismdoes not create, butonly subjects to dialecticalie totalizingcriticism, with a profoundsense of contradiction and a keen eye for the possible in the real,as Lefebvre was fond of saying:

[T]he waning of our sense of history, and more particularly ourresistance to globalizing or totalizing concepts like that of the modeof production itself, are a function of precisely that universalization ofcapitalism. Where everything is henceforth systemic the very notionof the system seems to lose its reason for being, returning only by wayof a return of the repressed in the more nightmarish forms of thetotal system fantasized by Weber and Foucault or the 1984 people.

But a mode of production [the Marxist concept of totality] is not atotal system in that forbidding sense; it includes a variety ofcounterforces and new tendencies within itself, of residual andas well as emergent forces [a` la Raymond Williams], which it mustattempt to manage or control (Gramscis conception of hegemony).Were those heterogeneous forces not endowed with an effectivity oftheir own, the hegemonic project would be unnecessary. Thus,differences are presupposed by the model [of totality], somethingthat would be sharply distinguished from another feature whichcomplicates this one, namely, that capitalism also produces differ-ences and differentiation as a function of its own internal logic[uneven development]. Finally it is clear that there is a differencebetween the concept and the thing, between this global and abstractmodel and our own individual social experience, from which it ismeant to afford some explanatory [critical] distance but which it isscarcely designed to replace (Jameson 1991:405406).

To some suggestions, then, about theorizing totality and mappingspace within itif only by way of an unlikely passage throughAlthusser and Lefebvre. Which may be not so strange, perhaps,given that both were understandably hostile to the prevailing ortho-doxies of Marxism in their own inimitable ways, although Althussersposition was relatively restricted in this regard by his more durableaffiliation with the PCF (see Anderson 1976:3839, 1980; Elliott1987:186274). The indubitable distinctionsas well as the involun-tary correspondencesbetween these two French Marxists can bebest clarified, with an eye on space, in terms of their quite differentefforts to theorize totalityrecognizing that within the Marxist tradi-tion there is a rich diversity of such attempts (Jay 1984). Apart from

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his powerful theory of ideology, Althussers (1990c:87128) majorcontribution to Marxism lies mostly in his conception of structuraltotality, developed most notably in the essay Contradiction andOverdetermination and Reading Capital (Althusser and Balibar1997)in sustained opposition to the essentialist, reductive andteleological tendencies he discerned in Marxism and attributedentirely to the enduring influence of Hegel. Less overtly, and moreto the point, the thrust of his (theoretical) anti-humanist critique ofexpressive totality (ie a totality whose constituent elements are allmediated by one central essence, such as the Spirit or theEconomy), as Jameson notes, stood as a coded battle within theframework of the French Communist Party against Stalinism(1981:37). Given the undeservedly biased and superficial treatmentAlthusser has received in geography and urban studies by partisans(Manuel Castells 1977) and critics (Neil Smith 2003) aliketheformer more damaging than the latterit is not inappropri-ate here torecall the tenor of the stricture that structural totalityplaced on not only theoretical humanism but alsoand especiallyeconomistic determinism:

[T]he economic dialectic is never active in the pure state; in History,these instances, the superstructures etc.are never seen to steprespectfully aside when their work is done or, when the Timecomes, as his pure phenomena, to scatter before His Majesty theEconomy as he strides along the royal road of the Dialectic. Fromthe first moment to the last, the lonely hour of the last instancenever comes. (Althusser 1990c:113)

In his own reworking of a Marxist concept of totality that draws asmuch from Lukacs and Sartre, Jameson registers the full force ofAlthussers critique of essentialism and concept of structural totality.In a few breathtaking passages in The Political Unconscious, however,he also argues that Althussers essential point on mediation, on rigor-ous inspection, accords well with his own Hegelian-Marxist stand-point. For what Althusser attacks in essentialist determinism isreally the establishment of symbolic identities between the variouslevels of social totalitybetween the political and the economic, theideological and economic, and so onwhich all too easily ends up byreducing every level to a more or less directunmediatedexpres-sion of the laws of motion of capital, with no due respect to therelative autonomies of such instances as politics or ideology. Thispoint is very well taken, along with Althussers recommendation thatthe interdependency of the levels be theorized in terms of amediation that passes through the [whole] structure, rather than amore immediate mediation in which one level folds into anotherdirectly. For Jameson:



[t]his suggests that the philosophical thrust of the Althusseriannotion of structural causality strikes less at the concept of mediationas such, than at what the dialectical tradition would call unreflectedimmediacy: and in that case, Althussers real polemic target is at onewith that of Hegel, whose whole work is one long critique of pre-mature immediacy [The] Althusserian structure, like all Marx-isms, necessarily insists on the interrelatedness of all elements in asocial formation; only it relates them by way of their structuraldifference and distance from one another, rather than by theirultimate identity, as he understands expressive causality to do

The point that must be made against Althussers own formulation ofthe problem is that the distinguishing of two phenomena [levels]from each other, their structural separation, and that in quite spe-cific ways, is also a form of mediation. Althusserian structuralcausality is therefore just as fundamentally a practice of mediationas is the expressive causality to which it is opposed. (Jameson1981:3941)

The claim that Jamesons oeuvre on postmodernism lacks as muchspatial mediation as is often assumed, obviously, does not mean at allthat his unsurpassed theorization of totality lacks a concept of media-tion; on the contrary, the preceding quotation should make it clear thatthere is no finer dialectical exegesis of it in contemporary critical dis-course than in his work. But the main purpose of dwelling on mediationat some length here is neither to praise nor bury Jameson, but topropose a way of understanding how Henri Lefebvre might be consideredas the best guide for the kind of spatial mediation I am advocating.

Henri Lefebvre, or, The Spatial Mediation of GlobalCapitalThat Lefebvre offers the richest Marxist study of the city as far as thequestions broached here is well known (for the best recent assess-ments in this regard, see Brenner 2000; Elden 2004; Kipfer 2002;Merrifield 2002:7192; Schmid 2002; Smith 2003). Yet, as StefanKipfer in particular points out, Lefebvre has been appropriated inseveral incompatible and incomplete ways within radical geography,primarily through poststructuralist and political-economic readings.Consequently, there exists no consensus concerning the nature of hisremarkable contribution to urban studies, let alone his interventionsin the longstanding debate on totality and other vital matters such aseveryday life and the state. This state of affairs still owes something tothe earliest reception of Lefebvres (1991, 2003) most overtly urbanworks in North America, modulated as it was by the influentialresponses of Manuel Castells (1977) and David Harvey (1973).Reviewing these in his excellent foreword to the belated English

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translation of The Urban Revolution, Neil Smith (2003:xi) singles outthe most controversial thesis submitted by Lefebvre to Marxistor, asit happened, to structural-functionalist and political-economicstudents of the urban process. The thesis is this: the problematicof industrialization, which has dominated capitalist societies for morethan two centuries, is increasingly superseded by the urban. That isto say: the urban problematic becomes predominant. This conten-tion, advanced in the wake of [t]he political crisis of 1968, not onlymaintained that that historical conjuncture represented more pro-foundly a crisis of urban society than a crisis of capitalist industrial-ism, but also posedin the minds of Lefebvres North Americanreadersa crucial question with respect to the possibilities of revo-lutionary social change that comes from the streets: are we to nowunderstand the fundamental contradictions of our social totality interms of the dynamics of industrialization (the production ofcommodities) or urbanization (the production of urban space)?

With the benefit of hindsight, this appears as an eitheror typefalse question. No matter how it is resolved, it needlessly forces one tochoose in favour of either society or spacehardly the intent ofLefebvres profoundly dialectical work. To do justice to the latter, adifferent question suggests itself. How can we read Lefebvre today asa student above all of mediation, especially as one who accords a novelsignificance to the centrality of urban space not only in the presentarticulation of our social totality, but also its potentially revolutionarytransformation in the future? As a first step towards addressing thisquestion, I can do worse than to examine a couple of Lefebvres ownthoughts on mediation and totality. For in these explorations lies apath that mediates between different levels of the social totalitywith utmost respect to what he calls the concrete abstraction ofurban space, one that also builds bridges between two kinds of con-cepts: ie formal-abstract (say, the urban phenomenon) and real-concrete (say, Paris 1968).

What, then, does Lefebvre say? A rewarding place to begin would bethe third and fourth chapters of The Urban Revolution, aptly entitledThe urban phenomenon and Levels and dimensions. Two thingsare impossible to miss in them. First of all, a spirited critique of thecritique of totalitywhich is also a highly original argument for acreative brand of totalizing thought (Jay 1984:293299)most passio-nately advanced in the form of a devastating attack on the disciplinaryfragmentation of specialized knowledge, especially with regard to theurban phenomenon. It is striking how presciently Lefebvre anticipatesthe parochial nature of the critiques to which these musings would besubjected soon enough, and also how closely his reservations concerningthe fragmentation of knowledge in separate disciplines and theircontrived re-union in the spontaneous ideology of interdisciplinary



studies mirror the uncompromising attack mounted on these sametargets by his professed adversary Althusser (1990b:69165), in thelatters legendary Philosophy Course for Scientists at the EcoleNormale Superieure on the eve of 1968which Castells seems tohave missed. According to Lefebvre (2003:49, 7576): The urbanphenomenon, taken as a whole, cannot be grasped by any specializeddiscipline. Nor can it be apprehended by bringing specialists (inthe fragmentary sciences) together around a table on which weplace an object to be understood or constructed. The most com-petent among them are the least reliable. While it is true that theurban phenomenon, as a global reality, is in urgent need of peoplewho can pool fragmentary bits of knowledge, Lefebvre insists that[f]ragments do not constitute knowledge, even or especially inspite of the pious efforts to assemble the provisional results ofthe intellectual division of labour into little balls of knowledge(pp 49, 55). He clearly demands here a totalizing approach,not sounding poststructuralist at all (as the publishers garbledmarketing blurb on The Urban Revolution claims): [i]n terms ofmethodology, it has been recommended that we approach theurban phenomenon using the dialectical method (p 49). Hencethe questions: Under such conditions, how can we achieve, evenhope to achieve, totality? (p 61); How can we make the transitionfrom fragmentary knowledge to complete understanding? How canwe define this need for totality? (p 56).

Lefebvres response to these questions would be ultimately politicalrather than philosophical, as he advocates an urban strategy(2003:76) mobilizing the revolutionary desires of everyday life inthe city pitted against the dominant logics of capital and state. Thisstrategy of urban practice in opposition to industrial practice,moreover, stems more or less directly from his theorization of medi-ation, which is distinguished from that of his counterparts in theWestern Marxist tradition by its special attention to space and theurban phenomenon. This is the second point I wish to highlight inThe Urban Revolution. The traditional concepts of mediation inWestern Marxist theories of totalitywhether Lukacsian, Althusser-ian or Jamesonianinvolve a view of society as a systemic wholecomprised of distinct levels, as does Lefebvres, but understandsthese in (some variation of) the terms minted by Marxs base-super-structure dialectic (model would be too rigid a word for this image):the levels of the economic, the political, the ideological and so on.Lefebvre does not forget or reject them. But the originality of hisconception of mediation with special attention to space rests on thenovel configuration of the levels he proposes in the context of thelate capitalist social totality, whose architecture is integral to what hecalls the urban revolution.

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What are these levels and what is their structure? At the top,so to speak, hovers the global level (78ff)Gwhich pertains tothe state as will and representation. Lefebvre identifies this levelwith two strategies, namely, neoliberalismthe reign of privateenterprise and, with respect to urbanism developers and bank-ersand neo-dirigismewith its emphasis on planning, which,in the urban domain, promotes the interventions of specialists andtechnocrats. This is the home ground of state capitalism. Theuneasy alliance between neoliberalism and neo-dirigisme at this levelG also projects itself into the built and the unbuilt domains: build-ings, monuments, large-scale urban projects, new towns as well asroads and highways, the urban fabric and neutral space, naturepreserve sites etc. Next we have the crucial level M (mixed, medi-ator or intermediary), which is the specifically urban level (80ff).This mediate level distinguishes itself by assuming a determinaterelationship to its site or immediate surroundings as well as thesituation or distant surroundings and global conditions. Whilebeing projected by the level G and retaining the internally contra-dictory relative autonomy of its own formsfunctionsstructures inthe city and of the city, however, level M also introjects the contesteddynamics of the vital one below it: level P. This last is the level ofthe private or habiting, which includes, among other things,housing primarily, including large apartment buildings, privatehomes campgrounds, shantytowns etc. As such, it constitutesmuch of the level of lived-experience, one which Lefebvre explicatesat great length in his extensive writings on the critique of everyday life.Even the most derisive everyday existence, writes Lefebvre, retainsa trace of grandeur and spontaneous poetry, except perhaps when it isnothing more than the embodiment of a world of commodities,exchange having abolished use or overdetermined it. As such, thislevel should no longer be approached as a residue, as a trace orresult of so-called superior levels, but regarded as the reservoir ofradical-utopian subjectivity capable of revolutionizing the urban (M)and through that the global (G) as well, by means of the urbanrevolution nourished by everyday life (P).

How useful are these three levelsG, M and Pfor an under-standing of the social totality in terms of spatial mediation? In hisforeword to The Urban Revolution, Neil Smith (2003:xii, xiv) findsLefebvres discussion of levels to be among the less successfulaspects of the book: a halting effort at what might be now called apolitics of scale (Brenner 2000; Smith 1990; and Swyngedouw1997), that is, an oblique attempt to distinguish the scales of socio-political reality. It is indeed tempting to read Lefebvres speculationson levels as an underdeveloped theory of scales, and the urbanquestion itself as a scale question. Yet, Lefebvres differentiation



of levelsincluding the very spatial image of the city he deploys(2003:80) to distinguish themalso militates against their literaltranslation into territorial scale. For his conception of the threelevels occurs precisely at the dialectical intersection of the socialand the spatialencompassing formsfunctionsstructures (p 80)rendering too heavy an emphasis on either the social or the spatialdimension in their explication equally suspect. Moreover, theselevels also merge into and emerge out of each other, much likethe elements of the spatial triad in The Production of Space, makingclear scalar demarcations of them doubly problematic. On this,Lefebvre is explicit: during the critical phase of the urban revolution,these levels and dimensions tend to blur as [t]he city explodes and[t]he urban arrives (pp 8889). Thus the specifically urban level(p 80), for example, does not coincide easily with the physical space ofthe city, which in his illustration clearly makes room for all threelevels to operate within it. In fact, it is in this dialectically articulatedsense that the urban phenomenon, as an overdetermination of thethree levels, becomes the most intensely mediated site of revolu-tionary struggleat once social, spatial and historical (pp 8990).Such is the perspective that enables Lefebvre to underscore not onlythe contradictory logics operative within each level (neoliberalismand neo-dirigisme in G, for instance) and the contested relationsbetween the levels (ie the hegemonic projection of the socio-logic and the ideo-logic of G onto the space of the M; and thecounter-projection from P to G of a revolutionary politics of every-day life), but also to highlight the increasing significance of spatialconflict in social struggle:

Urban alienation contains and perpetuates all other forms of alie-nation. In it, through it, segregation becomes commonplace: byclass, by neighbourhood, by profession, by age, by ethnicity, by sex.Crowds and loneliness. Space becomes increasingly rareit isexpensive, a luxury and privilege maintained and kept up througha practice (the center) and various strategies. The city does indeedgrow richer. It attracts wealth and monopolizes culture just as itconcentrates power. But it collapses under the weight of its wealth.The more it concentrates the necessities of life, the more unlivable itbecomes. The notion that happiness is possible in the [actuallyexisting] city, that life there is more intense, pleasure is enhanced,and leisure time more abundant is mystification and myth. If there isa connection between social relationships and space, between placesand human groups, we must, if we are to establish cohesion, radicallymodify the structure of space (Lefebvre 2003:92).

Is the significance of Lefebvres socio-spatial conception of levelsconfined to The Urban Revolution (ie 1970)? Smith (2003:xiv) notes

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that this language of levels (G, M and P) disappears and gives wayby 1974 to the well-known spatial triad in The Production of Space;and that, by the time he writes the four volumes of De letat in themid-1970s, he is barely concerned with urbanization and theorizesinstead about (among other things) the globalization of the state(2003:xix). He also taxes Lefebvre for providing an oblique andincomplete answer to the urban question, ie a less than adequateaccount of the political-economic transition from industrialization tourbanization (2003:xix). Smith is not incorrect. In the end, whatLefebvre gives us is what he claims to take from Marx: not a finishedmodel, but a path. Even a cursory perusal of those other thingsthat Smith mentions parenthetically (see the bibliography in Shields1999:190204), however, quickly reveals the remarkable longevity ofthe same three interrelated levels captured in compendium in TheUrban Revolution. For they run marathon distances throughLefebvres oeuvre: level G on the globalization of the state and econ-omy corresponds to the voluminous De letat; level M yields numerouswritings on the city and space; and in the longue duree, level Pdeals in (again!) multiple volumes with everyday life. The concep-tion of these three levels not only informs Lefebvres outstandingcontribution to a spatially mediated theory of totality, but also guidesthe totality of his lifes work. In addition, it distinguishes his vision ofthe struggle for socialism: one that would be waged against thedominant logics of the global (level G), primarily but not exclusivelyon the intermediary urban terrain (level M), with the nourishmentof the utopian energies released by the contradictions of everydaylife (level P). We can ignore the vitality of these levels and theirrelations, therefore, only at the risk of reducing Lefebvres thought toa caricature of its integrity and richness, while impoverishing our ownpolitics, not least in the urban sensorium.

Whither Space, Ideology and Aesthetics?

Owing to the curious lay-out of the town it is quite possible forsomeone to live for years in Manchester and to travel daily to andfrom his work without ever seeing a working-class quarter or cominginto contact with an artisan. He who visits Manchester simply onbusiness or for pleasure need never see the slums, mainly becausethe working-class districts and the middle-class districts are quitedistinct. This division is due partly to deliberate policy To such anextent has the convenience of the rich been considered in theplanning of Manchester that these plutocrats can travel from theirhouses to their places of business in the center of the town by theshortest routes, which run entirely through working-class districts,without even realizing how close they are to the misery and filthwhich lie on both sides of the road.



This is Friedrich Engels (1968:5455), at twenty-three, reporting onhow space was ideological in 1844 Manchester; and here is an every-day life take on Los Angeles expressed by a worker employed in itsdowntown two years after the notorious events of April 1992:

I think if you look at physically where the city is going, you get littlecorridors of development; and, you know, you have a city that has allthese freeways and your railway lines, and its possible to get frompoint to point without experiencing anything in the middle, bysimply taking the freeway. You can go from downtown to LAX[the international airport] without ever seeing the poverty you aredriving through So the physical characteristics of the city canencourage this atomization, it can encourage more of an identifica-tion with our economic class than with your typical community. Andthat is a very difficult thing to overcome. And thats the strugglethats going on right nowdo you relate to LA or do you relate toyour profession or your neighborhood and, you know I mean, itsnot a struggle unique to Los Angeles but it is a struggle thatsaccelerated here. If you can resolve that, then you have a reallywonderful thing; and if you cant, its a very serious problem.(Goonewardena 1998:231)

With these two quotations standing as epigraphs to the concept ofthe urban sensorium, I must bring this essay to a close with atextbook illustration of how Lefebvres levels G, M and P are alloverdetermined in aestheticized and ideological urban spaceby wayof Walter Benjamins view of Baron Haussmanns legendary recon-struction of Paris. What can we learn today from the minister ofNapoleon III? Benjamin (1999:2324) writes in his essay Paris,capital of the nineteenth century: Haussmanns ideal in city plan-ning consisted of long straight streets opening onto broad perspec-tives, within which the temples of the bourgeoisies spiritual andsecular power were to find their apotheosis. Contemporaries called itstrategic beautification. He is quick to point out that the true goalof Haussmanns projects was to secure the city against civil war bywidening the streets in order to make the erection of barricades inthe streets of Paris impossible. Here the new grand boulevard per-spectiveswhich, prior to their inauguration, were screened withcanvas draperies and unveiled like monumentswere also meantto connect the barracks in straight lines with the workers districts,to facilitate rapid troop movement in the event of revolution. Con-verging on Haussmanns megalomaniac monumentalism were notonly aesthetics and politics but also economics. The enabling condi-tion for reformatting Paris, Benjamin notes with a proleptic touch,is Napoleonic imperialism, which favours investment capital asHaussmanns expropriations give rise to speculation that borders on

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fraud. What about the expropriated? In 1864, in a speech before theNational Assembly, reports Benjamin, Haussmann vents his hatredof the rootless urban population, which keeps increasing as a result ofhis projects. Rising rents drive the proletariat into the suburbs. Thequartiers of Paris in this way lose their distinctive physiognomy. Thered belt forms. Haussmann gave himself the title of demolitionartist, artiste demolisseur. He viewed his work as a calling. Hauss-manns contemporaries would not be the last to experience thistheprimal scene of capitalist urbanism.

Strategic beautification is the ur-form of the culture of the mod-ern state, writes Susan Buck-Morss (1991:8990) in her brilliantbook on Benjamin, Dialectics of Seeing. She explains how the opticaland political illusions fostered by this artist of demolition figuredheavily in the mythic imagery of historical progress, and functioned asa monument to the states role in achieving it. How much have theseeconomic logics, political rationalities and urban strategiesin theirthoroughly aestheticized and ideological formschanged since thetimes of Engels and Haussmann? Readers of these pages will recallStefan Kipfer and Roger Keils (2002) recent critique the embour-geoisement of inner-city Toronto, now proceeding under the guise ofderegulated mixed use and innovative urban design, with frequentappeals to the authority of Jane Jacobs. The same Manchester thatEngels visited in 1843/44 ranks as I write at the top of somethingcalled the Boho Britain creative indexaccording to a reportresearched by the bohemian consultant Richard Florida for theThird Way-neoliberal think tank Demosapparently well-placed (atlevel M) to show everyone how to create a habitat for the creativeclass (level P) and beat the global competition in the new global-information-media-economy (level G) (Carter 2003). Of course, fewhave written with more insightful passion than Neil Smith (1996) onhow such aestheticized strategies of urban renewal and strategicbeautification now come to us with an unprecedented vengeance inthe form of revanchist gentrificationinvolving the innovative dis-placement of poor people and neighbourhoods in central cities bycreative upper-class districts. In the foreword to The Urban Revolu-tion, Smith recaptures with a connoisseurs eye the now global scope ofwhat he memorably called Class Struggle on Avenue B in The NewUrban Frontierin a lucid corroboration of Lefebvres (2003:100) fun-damental argument concerning the increasing significance of theeveryday in the urban, and the urban in the global:

Lefebvre remarks on the gentrification (embourgeoisement) ofurban centers, but that process has changed dramatically sincethe 1960s Since the 1980s, gentrification has become increasinglygeneralized as a strategy of global urban expansion. Central urban



reconstruction increasingly integrates into not just the overall urbaneconomy but the global economy. A highly mobile global capitalincreasingly descends [on] and aspires to the remake of urbancenters. At the same time there is a more or less seamless [emphasisadded] collaboration among property capital, the state, retailcapital, and financial capital than at any previous time One cansee here a glimmering of the conceptual inversion Lefebvre posesbetween the industrial and the urban. (Smith:1996: xxxxi)

ReferencesAlthusser L ([1962] 1971) Ideology and ideological state apparatuses (notes towards

an investigation). In Lenin and Philosophy (pp 127186). Translated by B Brewster.New York: Monthly Review Press

Althusser L ([1967] 1990a) On theoretical work: Difficulties and resources. Translatedby J H Kavanagh. In G Elliott (ed) Philosophy and the Spontaneous Philosophy ofthe Scientists and Other Essays (pp 4367). London: Verso

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