About the Book
Spatial Ecologies takes a new look at the “spatial turn” in French cultural and critical theory since 1968. Verena Andermatt Conley examines how Henri Lefebvre, Michel de Certeau, Jean Baudrillard, Marc Augé, Paul Virilio, Bruno Latour and Etienne Balibar reconsider the experience of space in the midst of considerable political and economic turmoil. The book considers why French critical theorists turned away from questions of time and looked instead toward questions of space. It asks what writing about space can tell us about life in late capitalism. Conley links this question to the problematic of habitality, taking us back to Heidegger and showing how it informs much of French theory. Building on the author's acclaimed earlier study Ecopolitics, Spatial Ecologies argues, through the voices of the authors taken up the eight chapters, for recognition of the virtue of spatial theory and its pragmatic applications in the global milieu. It will be required reading for scholars of literary and cultural theory, and twentieth- and twenty-first century French culture.
Table of Contents:
Introduction: Space as a Critical Concept
1. Henri Lefebvre: Lived Spaces
2. Michael de Certeau: Anthropological Spaces
3. Jean Baudrillard: Media Places
4. Marc Auge: Non-Places
5. Paul Virilio: Speed Spaces
6. Deleuze and Guattari: Space and Becoming
7. Bruno Latour: Common Spaces
8. Etienne Balibar: Spatial Fictions
Conclusion: Future Spaces
Bibliography
Index
About the Author :
Verena Conley is Visiting Professor of Literature and Comparative Literature and of Romance Languages and Literatures at Harvard University, and the author of Ecopolitics: The Environment in French Poststructuralist Thought (Routledge, 1996); and Hélène Cixous: Writing the Feminine (University of Nebraska Press, 1991).
Review :
This is a working of wide-ranging and deep scholarship which brings together a range of important French thinkers for the first time within a critical, comparative argument. Spatial Ecologies makes a passionate and lucidly argued case for a renewed ecological thinking and a transformative critical practice. Spatial Ecologies is a tour de force analysis of all the major theorists/theories of space/spatiality in the contemporary era. It will become the new benchmark for work on space in critical and cultural theory. A novel explanation by a perceptive critic, wherein Conley ponders the 'spatial turn' in French critical theory from 1968 to 2012, and from Henri Lefebvre and Paul Virilio to Etienne Balibar. Assessing the postmodern experience of space and politics, economics and time, this book is an extraordinary reflection on questions of space in the epoch of late capitalism. The latest book by Verena Andermatt Conley, renowned feminist scholar and pioneering ecocritic, follows the "spatial turn" of French thought in the wake of May 1968 in order to trace how space "can now be appreciated for its ecological implications" (1). Conley's book has two separate aspects. First, it is a guide to French spatial theory, which will prove useful for those new to the field or for those, especially in English departments, who are familiar with one or two works of these theorists but who lack the historical and cultural context of French thought since the 1960s. But it is also a re- reading of these texts in light of today's pressing ecological concerns with an eye to finding new critical tools that could build habitable spaces and spaces for resistance. Conley's book is a success on both accounts- she presents a group of notably diverse and difficult thinkers in a clear and engaging way that is accessible to the uninitiated, while also providing valuable insight for those of us who have been immersed in French spatial theory. The nine French spatial theorists presented here (Lefebvre, Certeau, Baudrillard, Auge, Virilio, Deleuze and Guattari, Latour, and Balibar) are more or less familiar to English- speaking audiences (Bruno Latour perhaps overly so, Marc Auge not nearly enough). Conley shows the richness of spatial thinking in France, and also provides glimpses of an even wider fi eld of spatial thinking in France, from Henri Bergson to Gaston Bachelard, Jean- Paul Sartre, Louis Marin, Georges Perec, Helene Cixous, Michel Serres, Jacques Ranciere, Claude Levi- Strauss, and Michel Foucault. She carefully presents the thought of each of her authors in his or her own terms, with the result that complex notions of space, the city, the West, and globalization are crafted anew in each chapter. Space means something different for each of these thinkers; separating and juxtaposing the diverging formulations brings out the richness of the term. Each theorist redefines, reinvents, and distorts concepts that exist within the specific ecosystem of French thought, and that might seem opaque to English speakers without Conley's work of translation and interpretation. Chapters on catastrophic or paranoid thinkers (Virilio, Baudrillard) are Mixed with more practical thinkers (Balibar, Certeau), a structuring device that allows the reader to see how others can productively appropriate critical tools invented by even the most pessimistic of writers. Virilio's infl uence on Deleuze and Guattari, Balibar's incorporation and critique of Lefebvre and Deleuze and Guattari, the friendships forged between Baudrillard, Auge and Virilio, all constitute essential details that contextualize what amounts to thirty or more years of dialogue. Th e only one to seem slightly out of place is Latour, whose media presence and relative lack of interaction with the other writers studied in the book makes of him a useful insider/outsider precisely because his new perspectives prove to be less convincing. Conley begins with Henri Lefebvre, a writer whose work reflects the changing spatial realities in France from World War II through the end of the trente glorieuses. His seminal work, La Production de l'espace from 1974, inaugurates the search in France for the creation of habitable spaces in a world pulverized by capitalism. Conley follows with a chapter on Michel de Certeau, "as a foil and complement to Lefebvre" (28), who argues for the ability of the ordinary man to refashion space in the everyday. Space becomes a practice opposed to "proper places." To deepen and illustrate Certeau's argument, Conley evokes the work of novelist, politician, and sociologist Azouz Begag, which describes the immigrant's experience and subsequent invention of space in France. Juxtaposed to the art of spatial practice of Certeau, chapter three focuses on Jean Baudrillard's conception of media spaces, spaces of control that have substituted simulacra for the real. While Baudrillard uncovers dangerous tendencies in the contemporary media sphere, Conley is critical of his theoretical overreaching, especially evident in his idiosyncratic vision of "America" (59). Chapter four studies Marc Auge, whom Conley calls "Th e Anthropologist- Painter of Postmodern Life" (62). Auge's work on the Parisian metro and especially his concept of the "non- place" describe new challenges but also new possibilities for identity within what he calls supermodernity. Paul Virilio's thought, outlined in chapter five, exposes the disastrous effects of speed on democracy, art, and the body. The acceleration of information technologies has shrunk space and time, confining our range of motion, our ability to act in the world. Conley segues from Virilio's concept of "deterritorialization" to Gilles Deleuze and Felix Guattari's appropriation and elaboration of the term in chapter six. Deleuze and Guattari's thinking on space is the richest of the authors studied in this book, with concepts from their Mille plateaux such as nomadism, the rhizome, smooth space, and the plateau greatly expanding the spatial critic's toolbox. As Conley points out, many of their concepts might be coopted in the new context of global capitalism, but they never stopped adapting their thinking to new contexts. Conley highlights Guattari's late work, The Three Ecologies from 1989, and the need for an "ecosophy." The last two chapters juxtapose Bruno Latour and Etienne Balibar as two theorists who propose ways of negotiating space "in a world with waning nation- states and striated city- states" (111). Latour rejects ways of thinking inherited from modernism, proposing a "non- modernism" that would free us from reductive concepts and allow us to invent new spaces within machinic networks. Instead of conceiving networks as a transfer of information, Latour proposes we think in terms of transformation. Conley remains skeptical of Latour's conclusions, however, since he seems blind to questions of wealth, privilege, and citizenship. Etienne Balibar's work argues for a new conception of citizenship and subjectivity aft er decolonization and globalization. Balibar envisions the creation of new, fi ctional spaces and calls for a new type of intellectual who can translate concerns between competing universalisms. Conley calls her book an open- ended sequel to her earlier Ecopolitics: The Environment in Poststructuralist Th ought (New York: Routledge, 1997), which traced the birth of ecology in poststructuralism. Spatial Ecologies deals with a paradox of sorts. Post- '68 thought was focused on the state as a site of repression, and pushed for new spaces of contention for collective action. However, the acceleration of a globalized economy has led to a weakened nation- state and the loss of spaces for resistance, leading to creative shifts and new alliances in French thought. All the thinkers of the book share similar experiences of the loss of space, all point to similar causes, all propose the creation of new spaces. But Conley conveys the incredible diversity of conceptual responses to our new reality- given the enormity of the challenges we face, we will need all of these critical tools. "As is well known," Michel Foucault said in 1967 (to an audience of young architects and urban planners), "the great and obsessive dread of the nineteenth century was history... Our own era, on the other hand, seems to be that of space. We are in the age of the simultaneous, of juxtaposition, the near and the far, the side by side and the scattered. A period in which, in my view, the world is putting itself to the test, not so much as a great way of life destined to grow in time but as a net that links points together and creates its own muddle."[1] Many French intellectuals in the postwar years would also offer analyses of contemporary space, to the point that the entire epistemo-ideological category became something of an obsession, which was only retroactively described as a "spatial turn." Louis Althusser defined his notion of ideological state apparatuses spatially: "...ideology has no outside (for itself), but at the same time...it is nothing but outside (for science and reality)."[2] This conflation of inside and outside was described by Guy Debord in different terms as a paradoxical mechanism of modern urbanism and its collusion with capital that "eliminates geographical distance only to reap distance internally in the form of spectacular separation."[3] Verena Andermatt Conley's book, Spatial Ecologies: Urban Sites, State and World-Space in French Cultural Theory, takes up just after this intensive moment of the French renegotiation of the Marxist dialectic via the literal and metaphorical transformation of space in the decades following WWII. Her carefully curated list of philosophers and cultural critics, however, though they are very much grounded in the events of May 1968, sought to move beyond the cynicism and disillusionment that took hold of the intelligentsia at that moment.[4] Largely inspired by Henri Lefebvre's philosophical investigation of la vie quotidienne, the writers Conley chooses to focus on understand space as a series of loci of negotiation and contested identities, not as stagnant, striated fields totally controlled by the powers that be. Indeed, the author's emphasis on subject formation, communality, habitus, and citizenry is what raises this book well above the status of a simple survey text. It gives her selections a hermeneutic logic, and gives the reader a sense of purpose as well, working through the writings of more and less familiar figures in order to gain a sense of the new models of spatial subjectivity Conley ultimately suggests. There is little doubt, however, that the selections are also dictated by Lefebvre himself, and his legacy as a thinker and a pedagogue. Many of the philosophers, anthropologists, and sociologists Conley discusses were students of Lefebvre, or separated from him by only one additional degree of institutional or personal affiliation. These include Michel de Certeau, Jean Baudrillard, Marc Auge, Paul Virilio, Gilles Deleuze and Felix Guattari, Bruno Latour, and Etienne Balibar. Spatial Ecologies proceeds by devoting one chapter to each of these individuals, attempting to give a general sense of their work, and then honing in on those spatial or subjective aspects that tilt toward the book's thesis, which asserts that each author was engaging in a kind of critical and political "ecological" project, even if they did not use that term. All of them, according to Conley, "...make strident appeals for the opening of a space that would not be purely interval or dimension but where habitability would be defined in clearly existential and ecological terms" (p. 7). In the end, Conley's argument is what is known in architectural theory as "operative criticism"; her selections and readings are undertaken with a specific goal in mind, to posit new understandings of urban globalization, and the individuals and groups who inhabit those spaces. As she states in her conclusion: "...in the context of consumerism those beings that a media-driven ideological 'apparatus' shapes and colonizes have to be replaced by a new concept of citizen-subjects who, while held together by fate and analytically militant, think about habitability through the three lenses of mental, social and environmental ecology" (Conley's emphasis, p. 151). Falling between Conley's justification for her inclusions and her ultimate attempt to fuse their thought into a new method of thinking contemporary spatial existence are the chapters themselves, each of which strikes a good balance between general information for readers who may or may not be familiar with the material, and critical analyses of the texts and authors in question. For the most part, Conley chooses to focus on writers who do not fit neatly into a particular ideological category--Marxist, Deconstructionist, Phenomenologist, et cetera--but who bend the boundaries of those very categories around and through concepts of space. Indeed, some of those authors discussed--Paul Virilio and Michel de Certeau, for instance--are truly outliers within French (or any other) theory. But this only enriches the selections and serves to give a lively context to discussions of better-known figures like Baurdrillard and Deleuze. The format of the book also makes it possible for readers to dip in as they like, using the text almost as a reference. I have recommended it to a number of graduate students already, with precisely this use in mind. Having said that, Spatial Ecologies suffers at times from the weaknesses that plague all overviews-- occasional over-generalization, glosses on complex passages, and lingering questions over what material was included and excluded. Lefebvre, for instance, who spent almost half a century thinking about spatial production, is discussed for fewer than twenty pages, and Conley describes his dream of an utopian spatial praxis at one point as "charmingly romantic" (p. 27). Lefebvre's ideas about space and his implication in the urban culture of France after WWII are indeed problematic, but as Lukasz Stanek's recent monograph demonstrates, their complexity can sustain prolonged examination.[5] On the other hand, it takes Conley a comparably short space to offer one of the most illuminating readings of the difficult work of Paul Virilio I have read. Her concise formulation that, in his work, "speed itself is a milieu" (p. 81), and her explanation of that statement are remarkable. Similar minor points regarding editorial choices can also be made. The logic of the inclusions is clear, but why stop with these eight chapters? So many French authors have spoken to concerns of globalization and community in the last forty years--one thinks of the later work of Foucault, Luc Boltanski and Eve Chiapello, Chantal Mouffe, Alain Badiou, and Jean-Luc Nancy. For that matter, why limit the selection to France, when writers from so many different national contexts have written seminal and relevant texts? Conley also chooses not to focus on the psychoanalytic strain in French spatial thought, resulting in a lack of emphasis on gender as a determining factor in subject formation (Luce Irigaray is never mentioned, for instance). Also, as the book concludes and as Conley's incisive readings bring us to "...a threshold where our own spatial condition can be reconsidered" (p. 145), one is left with many questions about the self-reflexive "citizen-subject" she invokes. What actions might this subject undertake? Where might these take place, or are there real places where such actions are emerging? I found it helpful when asking these questions to think about Conley's work in conjunction with Monique Yaari's recent book Rethinking the French City, which deals more explicitly with architectural discourse and urban theory in the late twentieth century.[6] Such quibbles, though, will always attend such a book, which was clearly written as a starting point and not a definitive summary. And, indeed, it is as a kind of handbook that Spatial Ecologies works best, serving as a reference to a particular post-Marxist strain in French spatial theory and emphasizing among those texts and authors a sense of hope regarding place and inhabitation in a global context. Beyond that, however, the indeterminacies in the text have the salutary function of lending it a certain disciplinary polyvalence. This book should be read by sociologists, philosophers, designers, architects, art historians (and historians), and anyone else intent on bridging the often-yawning gap between theory and practice as regards our existence in a simultaneously expanding and contracting world. NOTES [1] Michel Foucault, "Of Other Spaces: Utopias and Heterotopias," trans. Jay Miskowiec, in Joan Ockman, ed., Architecture Culture 1943-1968 (New York: Columbia Books of Architecture and Rizzoli), p. 420. [2] Louis Althusser, Lenin and Philosophy and Other Essays (New York and London: Monthly Review Press, 1972), p. 175. Note: the italics are Althusser's. [3] Guy Debord, Society of the Spectacle, trans. Donald Nicholson Smith (New York: Zone Books, 1995), 120. [4] See Kristin Ross, May '68 and its Afterlives (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2002). [5] Lukasz Stanek, Henri Lefebvre on Space (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2011). [6] Monique Yaari, Rethinking the French City (Amsterdam and New York: Rodopi Press, 2008). This book should be read by sociologists, philosophers, designers, architects, art historians (and historians), and anyone else intent on bridging the often-yawning gap between theory and practice as regards our existence in a simultaneously expanding and contracting world.
