Antipode - 2005 - Goonewardena - The Urban Sensorium Space Ideology and The Aestheticization of Politics

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The Urban Sensorium: Space, Ideology

and the Aestheticization of Politics
Kanishka Goonewardena
Program in Planning, Department of Geography, University of Toronto, Toronto,
Ontario, Canada; e-mail: kanishka@geog.utoronto.ca
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 Jameson’s ‘‘postmodern’’ adaptation of city planner
Kevin Lynch’s research on ‘‘cognitive mapping’’ with Walter Benjamin’s 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 Jameson’s outstanding contribution to a spatialized understanding of
‘‘postmodernism’’ lies above all in his Marxist (Lukácsian, 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 of
Henri Lefebvre, especially in the recently translated The Urban Revolution.
Space, Ideology and Aesthetics

How could space be ideological? Since Fredric Jameson (1988b:35)
raised this question some 15 years ago in an influential essay entitled
‘‘Architecture and the critique of ideology’’, various conceptions of
space—and an even greater variety of spatial metaphors—have
emerged on many fronts to furnish the governing tropes for stories
of postmodernism in critical theory and cultural studies. Architecture,
city planning and other modes of producing space, both real and
virtual, have accordingly attracted an enviable amount of respectable
attention in theories of postmodern culture—not least in Jameson’s
own, in spite of his heady commitment to a unique brand of Western
Marxist historicism. Yet for all that, and even after new ‘‘spatialities’’
have in some quarters supplanted old ‘‘historicisms’’ with a vengeance
characteristic of irredentism, the question of how space is ideological
remains, to my mind, disproportionately under-theorized.
But perhaps not surprisingly so. To be sure, the two key terms of
my question—space and ideology—have experienced divergent for-
tunes over the last two or so decades. Just as the ‘‘discourse’’ of
postmodernity endowed ‘‘space’’ with unprecedented theoretical sig-
nificance, so the concept of ‘‘ideology’’ has come under its auspices to
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The Urban Sensorium: Space, Ideology and the Aestheticization of Politics 47
a virtual standstill in the apparently forgotten tracks of historical

materialism. ‘‘Ideology’’, which Louis Althusser (1971) once provoca-
tively claimed ‘‘has no history’’, seems itself to be symptomatically
absent from history of late, as if now history has no ideology. Theo-
retical fashions, however, cannot always be taken as unmediated
reflexes of the historical conditions from which they emerge and the
realities to which they refer; and it would be unwise to infer from the
mere passing of the concept of ideology the death also of ideology.
Within this context, rather, works that take the hurried burial of
‘‘ideology’’ six feet under ‘‘discourse’’ with a grain of salt should
demand some close attention. In critical theory and cultural studies
at large, the recent studies of Terry Eagleton and Fredric Jameson
here come to mind first—for building upon earlier efforts of Western
Marxism, especially by Lukács, Gramsci, Althusser and the Frankfurt
School, to offer invaluable insights not only into the concept of
ideology but also its everyday workings in the thoroughly aestheti-
cized world of the postmodern. My debt to these—and other inter-
ventions of kindred spirit—will become evident below. For now, let
me simply say that the very preponderance of the ideologies of ‘‘end
of ideology’’ and ‘‘end of history’’ itself suggests that ideology as such
is not dead. If alive and well, moreover, the absence of its concept in
contemporary 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 without
saying’’, as Pierre Bourdieu (1977:167) noted, ‘‘because it comes with-
out saying’’.
Yet, imperceptible ideology—taken literally—would also be a con-
tradiction in terms. As forcefully demonstrated in Eagleton’s (1990)
ground-breaking study, The Ideology of the Aesthetic, in order to be
effective, ideology must also be affective, that is to say, aesthetic.
Ideology is of course about ‘‘ideas’’—about worldview, cosmology, ‘‘a
representation of the imaginary relationship of individuals to their
real conditions of existence’’ (Althusser 1971); doxa and habitus
(Bourdieu 1977); or common sense and sometimes hegemony and
utopian counter-hegemony (Gramsci 1971)—but it would be none of
these things without being aesthetic as well, if we recall what this key
concept first designated as its object: the realm of the senses. Ideas
without sensations—feelings, affections, passions and all the rest of
it—do not work too well as ideology; or in hegemony, as both
Antonio Gramsci and Joseph Goebbels well understood. Any attempt
today to redeem a concept of ideology with a view to critique, in our
increasingly globalized ‘‘society of the spectacle’’, has every reason
therefore to grant the aesthetic its due. To this end, the concept of
‘‘the urban sensorium’’ I propose here takes seriously the space of the
city as a vital ingredient and determinant of our ‘‘sensate life’’, the

48 Antipode
traditional concern of aesthetics. Before indulging in my own spec-

ulations on the relationship between the aestheticization of politics and
the mediation of ideology by space, it would better to be explicit about
what 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, the
term refers not in the first place to art, but, as the Greek aesthesis
would 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 the
mid-eighteenth century is not one between ‘‘art’’ and ‘‘life,’’ but
between the material and the immaterial: between things and
thoughts, sensations and ideas, that which is bound up with our
creaturely life as opposed to that which conducts some shadowy
existence in the recesses of the mind. It is as though philosophy
suddenly wakes up to the fact that there is a dense swarming
territory beyond its own mental enclave which threatens to fall
utterly outside its sway. That territory is nothing less than the
whole of our sensate life together—the business of affections and
aversions, 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 arises
from our most banal, biological insertion into the world. The aes-
thetic concerns this most gross and palpable dimension of the
human, which post-Cartesian philosophy, in some curious lapse of
attention, has somehow managed to overlook. It is thus the first
stirrings of a primitive materialism—of the body’s long inarticulate
rebellion against the tyranny of the theoretical. (Eagleton 1990:13)
Little Buddha, or, The Spatial Logic of Siddhartha’s

‘‘Epistemological Break’’
The concept of ‘‘the urban sensorium’’ I have in mind is best
approached—given the negligible space devoted in this theoretical
essay to concrete illustration—by way of a parable, whose basic
form will be familiar to readers of Herman Hesse’s Siddhartha. It is
not Hesse’s book that I wish to dwell on for a moment, but Bernardo
Bertolucci’s colorful cinematic adaptation of Buddha’s life-story—his
birth and upbringing as a prince, renunciation of ‘‘worldly life’’, ascetic
wandering in search of enlightenment, and spectacular attainment of
Nirvana—within another story stretching from Seattle to Kathmandu
in what one reviewer has dubbed ‘‘his first Spielberg movie’’, Little
Buddha. To begin with, a leading question: what was it that brought
Prince Siddhartha’s loyalty to royalty, as it were, to an abrupt end, and
sent him away on an ascetic journey towards Nirvana? Or, more
precisely, what was the cause of the radical epistemological break in
Siddhartha’s enviably happy princely life?

The possibility of an epistemological break is first foretold by an

astrologer at King Suddhodana’s ceremonial presentation of the new-
born prince Siddhartha to his subjects. Although this proleptic ges-
ture on the astrologer’s part—who suggests that Siddhartha will one
day become a ‘‘great ascetic’’—contradicts conventional wisdom, King
Suddhodana takes it seriously, if contemptuously. In fact, his defiant
proclamation, 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,
Siddhartha’s life from that point onward—from which his mother is
symptomatically absent, having died a few days after childbirth—
becomes inexorably enveloped by a concerned father’s design to
secure his unsuspecting son’s allegiance to the royal course of life
deemed to befit him—given the supreme importance of patrilineal
genealogy—primarily by removing from his life any possibility of
coming into contact with an experience of human suffering.
In order to address my question on Siddhartha, I should now recall
the relevance—to Little Buddha and us—of Althusser’s great redefi-
nition of ideology as a ‘‘‘representation’ of the imaginary relationship
of individuals to their real conditions of existence’’ (1971:162). For the
nature of King Suddhodana’s meticulously staged upbringing of
Siddhartha, surely, is profoundly ideological: what he attempted to
produce was nothing less than, in Althusser’s words, ‘‘a ‘representa-
tion’ of the imaginary relationship of … [Siddhartha] to … [his] real
conditions of existence’’. So we may ask further: how could such an
ideological representation, which in the last analysis was meant to
prevent one man’s suspicion of his ‘‘imaginary relationship’’ to his
‘‘real conditions of existence’’, be produced? Of course, by letting him
have the good life. But how? By sequestering him in a particular
sensorium, consisting of a lavish palace complex for every season
promising, among other amenities guaranteed to make a young man
happy, a healthy plenitude of intoxicating food and drink, exciting
sport, enchanting music and dance, and, of course, Indian women
whose beauty, much like the structure of ideology (for Althusser) or
the unconscious (for Lacan), seems to be timeless; in fact, a sensorium
within whose postmodern reincarnation it is the revanchist gentrifiers
(à 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 of
Siddhartha’s epistemological break, as it happens in his first ever
tour of his (father’s) city—a tour demanded by the prodigious son
out of an unbearable mix of boredom and curiosity about the ‘‘real
world’’. How, then, does the father represent his city to the son?
Predictably, as a seamless extension of the wholesome sensorium
within which Siddhartha had hitherto been confined, but above all,

50 Antipode
as a space in which he can (in)voluntarily (mis)recognize his

(‘‘proper’’) subject-position—that of a prince (who will one day become
a king). In other words, the carefully orchestrated urban sensorium
was meant to interpellate—hail—Siddhartha in such a way that he
would say (to himself and others) ‘‘I am [the prince] that I am!’’
(1971:179), much like Althusser’s proverbial person-in-the-street
who, upon being hailed by the police (‘‘hey, you there!’’), turns
around, and by ‘‘this mere one-hundred-and-eighty-degree physical
conversion … becomes a subject … [b]ecause he has recognized that
the hail was ‘really’ addressed to him, and that ‘it was really him who
was hailed’ (and not someone else)’’ (1971:174).
But for Suddhodana, no such luck: before anything like the now
proverbial one-hundred-and-eighty-degree turn of Structural Marxism
could happen, a sharp sideways glance in Siddhartha’s hyper-curious
gaze hits a shocking sight, and, by means of this mere ninety-degree
move, he suddenly cuts through the spectacular spell of ideology into
the living hell of human suffering. First, quite by accident, he sees,
through the city’s premeditated presentation of itself to him, two old
men—his 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 the
‘‘‘representation’ of the imaginary relationship of … [himself] to … [his]
real conditions of existence’’ (1971:162), or, according to the narrator
of Little Buddha who sounds more Benjaminian or Freudian than
Althusserian at this moment, ‘‘for Siddhartha the dream was [then]
ending and his long journey of awakening had begun’’. So Siddhartha
asks his crestfallen father ‘‘how can I live here as I have lived before
when there’s so much suffering outside?’’ and embarks on a search for
a cure for suffering and mortality, leaving his city in the dark, secretly,
through the same gates by which he had already once embarked on his
fateful urban excursion. The lesson of Bertolucci’s representation of
the ideological production of Prince Siddhartha’s life-world—as well as
its eventual critique and disintegration—for my purposes lies in his
depiction of the necessary relationship of a particular ideology to the
production of a certain kind of urban space. Or, to put it in more
general terms, most instructive in Little Buddha is the nature of the
relationship between the production of space and the production of
ideology, which is a mediate relationship, that is to say, a relationship of
mediation, 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 further
questions with which my central question is loaded. First, the concept
of mediation. What is mediate—whose 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

Science, that immediate ‘‘means ‘without intermediary,’ or, ‘not a

result’’’. And she hastens to add: ‘‘Anything which appears to be
immediate is always mediated. ‘Mediated’ means ‘brought about by an
agent,’ or, ‘the result of a process’’’. (In Adorno’s German usage, Gillian
notes, ‘‘immediate/mediate’’ does not have the temporal connotation
that it does in English.) To say, then, that ideology is mediated—with
reference to ‘‘mediate ideology’’ (as opposed to ‘‘immediate
ideology’’)—is to say that it is ‘‘brought about by an agent’’, or ‘‘the
result of a process’’. Thus the ease with which we can see the ‘‘agent’’ or
‘‘subject’’ responsible for the spatial mediation of ideology in this little
episode from Little Buddha (ie King Suddhodana) is really an invita-
tion—a challenge—to problematize the ‘‘process[es]’’ of ideological
mediation of our own cities, postmodern or otherwise, where ‘‘agency’’
itself is mediated to such an extent that it is barely perceptible. Put
differently, ‘‘mediate’’ is a homonym; and ‘‘mediate ideology’’ is not
merely a constative utterance (‘‘ideology is mediated’’), but also a
performative 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 any
recognizable trace of mediation, for the condition of its invincibility is
invisibility. Much like what Gramsci called hegemony, ideology cannot
therefore be seen as such, least of all by those who are successfully
interpellated by it. Althusser (1971:175) is right: ‘‘Ideology’’, whose
mode of presence is absence, ‘‘never says, ‘I am ideological’’’, surely,
because something that is endowed with such ontological subtleties and
epistemological niceties, also can speak silently. Nevertheless, for us this
silence is now audible, in fact deafening. Listen. Listen to the sappy
tunes of ‘‘end of ideology’’ on your political right, left and center; and
the postmodern funeral hymns to socialism and class struggle (what
Jean François Lyotard derisively dismissed as ‘‘the desire called
Marx’’), the unconscious, alienation and, among other Archimedean
footholds for radical politics, the very concept of ideology—which
indeed is quite different from ‘‘discourse’’. Such are the sounds of
symptomatic silences of our time. But it is not enough to listen. Look
around. 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 from
irrelevant referents; and, above all, a dazzling invitation to take for
granted ‘‘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 Mapping’’

Ideology, spatialized or otherwise, is not just ‘‘false consciousness’’.
This realization in fact constitutes a major achievement of Althusser’s

52 Antipode
highly original contribution—with all of its limitations—to a ‘‘positive’’

understanding of ideology and its everyday experience (see, for a
nuanced assessment, Eagleton 1991:136–156). On this conception,
ideology must also represent reality in one way or another, in addition
to misrepresenting it. As such, it needs reality—and goes some dis-
tance towards constituting reality as well. His shorthand formula
expresses this cleverly: ‘‘ideology 5 illusion/allusion’’. The implication
for critique is clear: ‘‘While admitting that … [ideologies] do not
correspond to reality, ie that they constitute an illusion, we admit
that they do make an allusion to reality, and that they need only be
interpreted to discover the reality of the world behind their imaginary
representation of that world’’ (Althusser 1971:162). I shall return to
the issue of interpretation with respect to urban space below. First,
however, a note on the aesthetics and politics of ideological allusion—
to clarify further the nature of ideology.
Now, if society were actually transparent, that is, if the totality of the
structure of social relations were directly accessible to everyday human
consciousness—then there would be no pressing need for an ideological
representation of it. But it is clearly not so. So we (all of us) have no
option but to have recourse to representation. In this regard, the extra-
ordinary meditation on truth, goodness and beauty in the ‘‘Earliest
System-Programme of German Idealism’’—co-authored by Hegel,
Schelling and Hölderlin in 1796—makes at least a couple of path-
breaking observations (cited in Eagleton 1991:151). First: ‘‘[W]e are told
so often that the great mob must have a religion of the senses. But not
only does the great mob need it, the philosopher needs it too’’. Second:
We must have a new mythology, but this mythology must be in the
service of Ideas; it must be a mythology of Reason. Until we express
the Ideas aesthetically, ie mythologically, they have no interest for
the people, and conversely until mythology is rational the philoso-
pher must be ashamed of it. Thus in the end enlightened and
unenlightened must clasp hands, mythology must become philoso-
phical in order to make the people rational, and philosophy must
becomes mythological in order to make the philosophers sensible.
Not that this would fetch high marks from postmodern populists; but
here we only need to insert ‘‘ideology’’ for ‘‘mythology’’, and ‘‘society
of the spectacle’’ for ‘‘religion of the senses’’, in order to become
Hegel’s contemporaries. Debord (1995) was surely aware of this
when he so judiciously chose the great epigraph to The Society of
the Spectacle from Ludwig Feuerbach’s Young (Left) Hegelian bible,
The Essence of Christianity:
But certainly for the present age, which prefers the sign to the thing
signified; the copy to the original, representation to reality, the
appearance to the essence … illusion only is sacred, truth profane.

Nay, sacredness is held to be enhanced in proportion as truth

decreases and illusion increases, so that the highest degree of illu-
sion comes to be the highest degree of sacredness.
Whereas Feuerbach’s stunning anticipation of the cynical prophecies of
Baudrillard and Co puts amnesiac postmodernism in some much needed
historical perspective, the ‘‘System-Programme’’ of German idealism pro-
vides an advanced version of Althusser’s (1990c:232) controversial yet
powerful thesis that we can never go beyond ideology, even after the
revolution: ie ‘‘historical materialism cannot conceive that even a commu-
nist society could ever do without ideology’’. For Hegel, Schelling and
Hölderlin are saying here, after all, that they too need aestheticized
ideology (‘‘mythology’’) as much as the ordinary mortal. This is a remark-
able theoretical move for 1796, aided no doubt by the dawning sense of
alienation and fragmentation of social life during the origins of modernity,
the essential attributes of which have been since less surpassed than
intensified. And its emphasis on enlightening (with a simple e) ‘‘mythol-
ogy’’ also deserves some credit for articulating a plausible sense in which
immortal ideology could be rendered benign: ie a hint of what ‘‘post-
revolutionary’’ ideology might be like; or what forms ‘‘conceived’’, ‘‘lived’’
and ‘‘perceived’’ space might assume for Lefebvre under socialism. What-
ever such ideology could be, here the great German idealists distinguish it
radically from the ‘‘Beautiful Lies’’ forged by ‘‘Priests and Despots’’, that
‘‘small number of cynical men, who base their domination and exploita-
tion of the ‘people’ on a falsified representation of the world which they
have imagined in order to enslave other minds by dominating their
imaginations’’ (Althusser 1971:163).
But Beautiful Lies—what Antonio Gramsci (1971) understood as
hegemony and Lefebvre theorized in his understudied book The
Survival of Capitalism (see Stefan Kipfer 2002)—are what we have
with us today, rather than Hegel and Co’s ‘‘enlightened mythology’’.
Which naturally leads to the question raised by Althusser: ‘‘Why do
men ‘need’ this imaginary transposition of their real conditions of
existence in order to ‘represent to themselves’ their real conditions of
existence?’’ What is it that enables the ‘‘small number of cynical men’’
to have their view of the world introjected by those who are domi-
nated by them? In short: what is the condition of possibility of
ideology? For Althusser, ‘‘it is clear that ideology (as a system of
mass representations) is indispensable in any society if men are to be
formed, transformed and equipped to respond to the demands of their
conditions of existence’’ (1990c:235). Eagleton explains this well in his
critical reading of Althusser in Ideology:
The workings of the social order as a whole [ie as a totality] can be
known only to theory; as far as the practical lives of individuals go,
ideology is needed to provide them with a kind of imaginary ‘‘map’’

54 Antipode
of the social totality, so that they can find their way around it. These
individuals may also of course have access to a scientific knowledge
of the social formation; but they cannot exercise this knowledge in
the dust and heat of everyday life.
Ideology, so the argument goes, springs from a situation in which
social life has become too complex to be grasped as a whole by
everyday consciousness. There is thus the need for an imaginary
model 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 whole
to get their bearings within it, it is essential to construct a myth
which will translate theoretical knowledge into more graphic,
immediate terms. (Eagleton 1991:150–151)
Given that postmodernity is quite the sublime object, it is possible,
even rewarding, to inscribe my questions about space and ideology
within this problematic of representation clarified by Eagleton, follow-
ing its rigorous theorization by Althusser (1971, 1990c), especially in
Reading Capital (Althusser and Balibar 1997). And this kind of
inscription, I shall now argue, is precisely what Jameson (1988a,
1991, 1992) has intimated in his intriguing juxtaposition of Althusser’s
redefinition of ideology with city planner Kevin Lynch’s (1960) cele-
brated concept of ‘‘cognitive mapping’’. According to Jameson:
[T]he way in which Lynch’s conception of city experience—the dia-
lectic between the here and now of immediate perception and the
imaginative or imaginary sense of the city as an absent totality—
presents something like a spatial analogue of Althusser’s great for-
mulation of ideology itself, as ‘‘the Imaginary representation of the
subject’s relationship to his or her Real conditions of existence.’’
Whatever its defects and problems [see Eagleton 1991:143–156;
Elliott 1987:172–177], this positive conception of ideology as a
necessary function in any form of social life has the great merit of
stressing the gap between the local positioning of the individual
subject and the totality of class structures in which he or she is
situated, a gap between phenomenological perception and a reality
that transcends all individual thinking and experience; but [which]
ideology, as such, attempts to span or coordinate, to map, by means
of conscious and unconscious representations. The conception of
cognitive mapping proposed here therefore involves an extrapolation
of Lynch’s spatial analysis to the realm of the social structure, that is
to say, in our historical moment, to the totality of class relations on a
global (or should I say multinational) scale. The secondary premise is
also maintained, namely, that the incapacity to map socially is as
crippling to political experience as the analogous incapacity to map

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 Lynch’s ‘‘image of the city’’ and
Althusser’s ‘‘ideology’’ by Jameson indeed opens up a new path that
still remains to be explored with sufficient attention to the mediated
relationship between ideology and space, especially concerning the
‘‘gap’’ between the more sensible textures of contemporary urbanism
on the one hand and the still more invisible and unrepresentable
totality of ‘‘global’’ social relations. The invitation for geographers,
urban planners and architects (among others) here is to ask the
following question, in order for them to go beyond the point to
which Jameson has brought his ‘‘spatial’’ account of the ‘‘cultural
logic of late capitalism’’: if there is a ‘‘gap’’ between the space of the
city and our everyday consciousness of it, and a corresponding one
between our lived experience and totality, then what is the relationship
between these two disjunctures? Or, to put it differently, what is the
role played by the aesthetics and politics of space—ie ‘‘the urban
sensorium’’, as I am elaborating it here—in producing and reproducing
the durable disjunction between the consciousness of our urban
‘‘everyday life’’ (to use the term preferred by Lefebvre and Debord)
and the now global structure of social relations that is itself ultimately
responsible for producing the spaces of our lived-experience?
Jameson clearly takes up a question quite close to but also distinct
from this one, by posing the challenge of ‘‘cognitive mapping’’ in
hermeneutic rather than urban terms:
[The] new and enormous global realities are inaccessible to any
individual subject or consciousness—not even to Hegel, let alone
Cecil Rhodes or Queen Victoria—which is to say that those funda-
mental realities are somehow ultimately unrepresentable or, to use
the Althusserian phrase, are something like an absent cause, one
that can never emerge into the presence of perception. Yet this
absent cause can find figures through which to express itself in
distorted and symbolic [ie ideological] ways: indeed one of our
basic tasks as critics of literature is to track down and make con-
ceptually available the ultimate realities and experiences designated
by those figures, which the reading mind inevitably tends to reify
and to read as primary [immediate] contents in their own right.
(Jameson 1991:411–412)
Although this particular passage addresses literary critics specifically, its
implications for what might be called a ‘‘critical urbanism’’ are evident
enough, given the role played by urban space in the production of
ideology. Yet, Jameson’s own reservations around the problematic of
‘‘cognitive mapping’’—not to mention the frequent misreading of his

56 Antipode
argument here, which geographers in particular have mistaken as a

theorization primarily of space (which it is really not) instead of totality
(which it patently is)—have also partially obscured the promising path
towards spatial, aesthetic and political questions which he himself
opens up.
Let me explain. From the outset, Jameson (1988a:353) makes it
clear that his invocation of Lynch’s research on narratives of urban
experience alongside his use of Althusser’s concept of ideology in
order to theorize the insurmountable distance between everyday post-
modern political consciousness and late capitalist social totality is only
‘‘emblematic’’. By the same token, however, in this essentially allego-
rical operation, Jameson’s concept of ‘‘cognitive mapping’’ also
remains relatively un-mediated, in any substantive sense, with respect
to urban space as such. Consider, for example, the caveat he inserts
before the last sentence in his aforementioned invocation of Lynch as
it reappears otherwise without revision three years later, now
embedded in the brilliant concluding section on ‘‘How to Map a
Totality’’ in Postmodernism:
Unfortunately, in hindsight … [the] strength of the formulation [of
cognitive mapping] is also its fundamental weakness: the transfer
of the visual map from city to globe is so compelling that it ends up
re-spatializing an operation we were supposed to think of in a
different manner altogether. A new sense of global social structure
was supposed to take on figuration and to displace the purely
perceptual substitute of the geographical figure; cognitive map-
ping, which was meant to have a kind of oxymoronic value and to
transcend the limits of mapping altogether, is, as a concept, drawn
back by the force of gravity of the black hole of the map itself (one
of the most powerful of all human conceptual instruments) and
therein cancels out its own impossible originality. (Jameson
1991:416)
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 a
ladder to be kicked away after it has done its work. As far as space is
concerned, Bergson’s warning about the temptations of spatializing
thought remain current in the age of the intercontinental ballistic
missile and the new infra-red and laser systems of which we are
so proud; it is even more timely in an era of urban dissolution and
re-ghettoization, in which we might be tempted to think that the
social can be mapped that way, by following across a map insurance
red lines and the electrified borders of private police and surveil-
lance forces. Both images are, however, only caricatures of the mode
of production itself (most often called late capitalism), whose

mechanism and dynamics are not visible in that sense, cannot be

detected on the surfaces scanned by satellites, and therefore stand
as a fundamental representational problem—indeed a problem of a
historically new and original type. (Jameson 1992:2)
No hasty offense need be taken here by radical geographers for the
painfully unceremonious image of kicking the ladder of space. For
these are excellent points: timely warnings against the fetishism of
space that masquerades as ‘‘theory’’, a senseless habit of much post-
modern thought that nonetheless continues to receive good grades in
‘‘territorial’’ disciplines such as geography. The authority invoked by
Jameson here is none other than Marx (1976:163–177), whose unsur-
passed theorization of the ‘‘Fetishism of the Commodity and Its
Secret’’, one would have thought, discouraged ‘‘radical’’ geographers
above all from reified spatial ‘‘fixations’’ in unmediated theoretical
form. They are powerful and prescient antidotes too, offered very
much in the spirit of Lefebvre’s (1991) conception of ‘‘representations
of space’’, to the intoxicating postmodern aura of GIS, GPS,
AUTOCAD and a host of other glittering seductions of ‘‘spatial-
ity’’—not least in urban planning and warfare. Yet these remarks
within the context of Jameson’s (1992:2) call for ‘‘cognitive mapping’’
still leave unresolved—theoretically no less than empirically—the
issue of how urban space actually mediates ideology by getting in
the way of ‘‘what used to be called self-consciousness about the social
totality’’; and they betray a hesitation on his part to take the full
plunge into the question of spatial mediation.
Space/Mediation/Totality: Althusser and Jameson

True, the ‘‘the mental map of the city space explored by Lynch can be
extrapolated to that mental map of the social and global totality we all
carry around in our heads in variously garbled forms’’ (Jameson
1988a:353; emphasis added). And this ‘‘mental map of the social
and global totality’’ certainly comes quite close to what Althusser
theorized as ‘‘ideology’’ by making it coterminous with the everyday
consciousness of ‘‘lived-experience’’. This last, moreover, amounts to
what Lefebvre and Debord explored with their explosive notion of
‘‘everyday life’’, following, respectively, the humanist and Hegelian-
Lukácsian traditions of Marxism—both overtly hostile to structural-
ism as much as post-structuralism. Meeting this novel extrapolation
halfway down the street, we have as well the ‘‘culture industry’’, as the
Frankfurt school philosophers theorized it—most pessimistically by
Theodor Adorno and most optimistically in relation to the modern
city and technology by Walter Benjamin (see Buck-Morss 1991,
1992). And running all the way through Jameson’s extrapolation is
also Georg Lukács’ (1971) pioneering account of the consequences of

58 Antipode
‘‘reification’’ on the consciousness of the worker. Nor should one

forget in this context the relevance of Gramsci’s (1971) revolutionary
notions of hegemony and common sense to an ‘‘emblematic’’ extra-
polation of Lynchean ‘‘cognitive mapping’’ towards—or more pre-
cisely, beyond—Althusserian ‘‘ideology’’. Jameson’s problematic of
‘‘cognitive mapping’’, in other words, harbours the potential to pull
virtually the entirety of Western Marxism into its orbit (Anderson
1976, 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 stops
rather short of a concrete abstraction: ie a substantive theorization of
the relations between the different ‘‘levels’’ or ‘‘moments’’ (however
conceived) of the social totality within which urban space now plays—
by his own admission—an increasingly influential and constitutive
a role.
Jameson, like Marx, cannot do or say everything—as some of his
critics seem to expect. What I am suggesting here, therefore, is a way
of reading the writer Hal Foster calls ‘‘America’s leading Marxist
critic’’ critically, rather than dismissively (Gregory 1994:278–282;
Soja 1996:175–176, 196–204). A considered balance sheet on the
‘‘spatial turn’’ of Jameson’s oeuvre is in any case now overdue, and
some basic requirements for such an assessment can be outlined
rapidly as follows. To begin with, a temptation to be avoided. It is a
pointless error to first assume on the basis of circumstantial evidence
that Jameson is offering a postmodern discourse on space—ie
Jameson is (postmodern!) Lefebvre—and then be disappointed that
he is after all no specialist on space, but an unreconstructed Hegelian
historicist—ie Jameson is not really (even a Marxist) Lefebvre, but
rather a pungent new brew of the old wines of Lukács, Althusser,
Sartre and the Frankfurt School, even if with hardly a hint of
Gramsci. Postmodernism, or, The Cultural Logic of Late Capitalism is
studded with sparkling references to space, no doubt; but in inter-
preting Jameson, it would be wise to bear in mind the good advice
Althusser offered in Reading Capital for ‘‘symptomatic’’ readers of
Marx: ‘‘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, it
should be clear that Jameson is no ethnographer or historian of
postmodernism; his is first and foremost a theorization of the concept
of postmodernism, not a ‘‘thick description’’ or a ‘‘history-from-below’’
of 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 of
history is no more historical than the concept of sugar is sweet’’. In
Althusserian (1990a:43–67) terms, that is, Jameson’s (1991) account
of postmodernism in Postmodernism is more ‘‘abstract-formal’’ than

‘‘real-concrete’’.) If we follow Althusser’s advice still further, then it

should also become evident that Jameson is best understood as the
most impressively dialectical theoretician today of not space, perhaps
not even post-modernity, but certainly totality—the concept he has
both 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 unfortunately
betrays little understanding of what totality actually means.
Before saying anything else, therefore, it would be useful to dispel a
few myths about totality, the conception of which Georg Lukács
(1971:27) identified as the definitive essence of Marxist criticism:
‘‘[i]t is not the primacy of economic motives in historical explanation
that constitutes the decisive difference between Marxism and bour-
geois thought, but the point of view of totality’’. With an eye on the
fascinating career of this concept through the Western Marxist trad-
ition (Jameson 1971; Jay 1984), Steven Best (1989:343–344) provides
a useful first approximation of ‘‘totality’’ as ‘‘a structure or system
comprised of parts that are constituted by the whole system to which
they belong and which interrelate with that system’’. And he aptly
contrasts this totalizing conception with the positivist and empiricist
‘‘philosophy which holds that reality is constituted of isolated, self-
sufficient particulars’’. The latter (ie anti-totalizing) attitude, it should
be noted parenthetically, is precisely what Lefebvre’s ‘‘open and
integral’’ Marxist methodology also rejected most disdainfully—a
fact that leaves little doubt as to where he stands in relation to Marx-
ism and poststructuralism, in spite of spurious attempts to read him in
North American translation as a ‘‘postmodernist’’, that is, as part of a
theoretical (or anti-theoretical) trend that for the most part lacks
either the conceptual sophistication or the political sincerity required
to distinguish between totality and totalitarianism. (The best response
against such opportunistic readings of Lefebvre to date is by Kipfer
2002; see also Neil Smith 2003.) On the inept postmodern conflation
of totality with totalitarianism, Jameson writes: ‘‘The French nouveaux
philosophes said it most succinctly, without realizing that they were
reproducing or reinventing the hoariest American ideological slogans
of the cold war: totalizing thought is totalitarian thought; a direct line
runs from Hegel’s Absolute Spirit to Stalin’s Gulag’’ (1988:354). This
is not the place to examine in any detail the reasons for the lazy
popularity of current hostility to totality, the legacy of not so much
any theoretical labour as the ideology of the Cold War, which still
equates Marxism with Stalinism and Totalitarianism (Anderson 1984;
Eagleton 1996). Suffice it to say that the typical knee-jerk reaction
against totalizing theory offered by postmodern and poststructuralist
habits of thought recalls the figure of the ostrich diving into the sand

60 Antipode
upon the perception of danger. Lefebvre once said: ‘‘we do not create
those [paradoxes] we report, just as the person who warns us of a
catastrophe or upheaval is not responsible for its occurrence. Some
people … blame meteorologists for the arrival of storms’’ (2003:91).
So too with the totality of ‘‘late capitalism’’, which Jameson—the
nemesis of anti-totalizing poststructuralism—does not create, but
only subjects to dialectical—ie totalizing—criticism, with a profound
sense 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 our
resistance to globalizing or totalizing concepts like that of the mode
of production itself, are a function of precisely that universalization of
capitalism. Where everything is henceforth systemic the very notion
of the system seems to lose its reason for being, returning only by way
of a ‘‘return of the repressed’’ in the more nightmarish forms of the
‘‘total system’’ fantasized by Weber and Foucault or the 1984 people.
But a mode of production [the Marxist concept of totality] is not a
‘‘total system’’ in that forbidding sense; it includes a variety of
counterforces and new tendencies within itself, of ‘‘residual’’ and
as well as ‘‘emergent’’ forces [à la Raymond Williams], which it must
attempt to manage or control (Gramsci’s conception of hegemony).
Were those heterogeneous forces not endowed with an effectivity of
their own, the hegemonic project would be unnecessary. Thus,
differences are presupposed by the model [of totality], something
that would be sharply distinguished from another feature which
complicates 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 difference
between the concept and the thing, between this global and abstract
model and our own individual social experience, from which it is
meant to afford some explanatory [critical] distance but which it is
scarcely designed to ‘‘replace’’ (Jameson 1991:405–406).
To some suggestions, then, about theorizing totality and ‘‘mapping’’

space within it—if only by way of an unlikely passage through
Althusser 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 Althusser’s
position was relatively restricted in this regard by his more durable
affiliation with the PCF (see Anderson 1976:38–39, 1980; Elliott
1987:186–274). The indubitable distinctions—as well as the involun-
tary correspondences—between these two French Marxists can be
best clarified, with an eye on space, in terms of their quite different
efforts to theorize totality—recognizing that within the Marxist tradi-
tion there is a rich diversity of such attempts (Jay 1984). Apart from

his powerful theory of ideology, Althusser’s (1990c:87–128) major

contribution to Marxism lies mostly in his conception of ‘‘structural
totality’’, developed most notably in the essay ‘‘Contradiction and
Overdetermination’’ and Reading Capital (Althusser and Balibar
1997)—in sustained opposition to the essentialist, reductive and
teleological tendencies he discerned in Marxism and attributed
entirely to the enduring influence of Hegel. Less overtly, and more
to the point, the thrust of his (theoretical) anti-humanist critique of
‘‘expressive totality’’ (ie a totality whose constituent elements are all
‘‘mediated’’ by one central essence, such as the ‘‘Spirit’’ or the
‘‘Economy’’), as Jameson notes, ‘‘stood as a coded battle within the
framework of the French Communist Party against Stalinism’’
(1981:37). Given the undeservedly biased and superficial treatment
Althusser has received in geography and urban studies by partisans
(Manuel Castells 1977) and critics (Neil Smith 2003) alike—the
former more damaging than the latter—it is not inappropri-
ate here torecall the tenor of the stricture that ‘‘structural totality’’
placed on not only theoretical humanism but also—and especially—
economistic determinism:
[T]he economic dialectic is never active in the pure state; in History,
these instances, the superstructures etc.—are never seen to step
respectfully aside when their work is done or, when the Time
comes, as his pure phenomena, to scatter before His Majesty the
Economy as he strides along the royal road of the Dialectic. From
the first moment to the last, the lonely hour of the ‘‘last instance’’
never comes. (Althusser 1990c:113)
In his own reworking of a Marxist concept of totality that draws as
much from Lukács and Sartre, Jameson registers the full force of
Althusser’s critique of essentialism and concept of structural totality.
In a few breathtaking passages in The Political Unconscious, however,
he also argues that Althusser’s essential point on mediation, on rigor-
ous inspection, accords well with his own Hegelian-Marxist stand-
point. For what Althusser attacks in essentialist determinism is
really ‘‘the establishment of symbolic identities between the various
levels’’ of social totality—between the political and the economic, the
ideological and economic, and so on—which all too easily ends up by
reducing every ‘‘level’’ to a more or less direct—unmediated—expres-
sion of the ‘‘laws of motion of capital’’, with no due respect to the
‘‘relative autonomies’’ of such ‘‘instances’’ as politics or ideology. This
point is very well taken, along with Althusser’s recommendation that
the ‘‘interdependency of the levels’’ be theorized ‘‘in terms of a
mediation that passes through the [whole] structure, rather than a
more immediate mediation in which one level folds into another
directly’’. For Jameson:

62 Antipode
[t]his suggests that the philosophical thrust of the Althusserian

notion of structural causality strikes less at the concept of mediation
as such, than at what the dialectical tradition would call unreflected
immediacy: and in that case, Althusser’s real polemic target is at one
with 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 a
social formation; only it relates them by way of their structural
difference and distance from one another, rather than by their
ultimate identity, as he understands expressive causality to do …
The point that must be made against Althusser’s own formulation of
the 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 structural
causality is therefore just as fundamentally a practice of mediation
as is the ‘‘expressive causality’’ to which it is opposed. (Jameson
1981:39–41)
The claim that Jameson’s oeuvre on postmodernism lacks as much
spatial mediation as is often assumed, obviously, does not mean at all
that his unsurpassed theorization of totality lacks a concept of media-
tion; on the contrary, the preceding quotation should make it clear that
there is no finer dialectical exegesis of it in contemporary critical dis-
course than in his work. But the main purpose of dwelling on mediation
at some length here is neither to praise nor bury Jameson, but to
propose a way of understanding how Henri Lefebvre might be considered
as the best guide for the kind of ‘‘spatial mediation’’ I am advocating.
Henri Lefebvre, or, The Spatial Mediation of Global

Capital
That Lefebvre offers the richest Marxist study of the city as far as the
questions broached here is well known (for the best recent assess-
ments in this regard, see Brenner 2000; Elden 2004; Kipfer 2002;
Merrifield 2002:71–92; Schmid 2002; Smith 2003). Yet, as Stefan
Kipfer in particular points out, Lefebvre has been appropriated in
several incompatible and incomplete ways within radical geography,
primarily through poststructuralist and political-economic readings.
Consequently, there exists no consensus concerning the nature of his
remarkable contribution to ‘‘urban studies’’, let alone his interventions
in the longstanding debate on totality and other vital matters such as
everyday life and the state. This state of affairs still owes something to
the earliest reception of Lefebvre’s (1991, 2003) most overtly ‘‘urban’’
works in North America, modulated as it was by the influential
responses of Manuel Castells (1977) and David Harvey (1973).
Reviewing these in his excellent ‘‘foreword’’ to the belated English

translation of The Urban Revolution, Neil Smith (2003:xi) singles out

the most controversial thesis submitted by Lefebvre to Marxist—or, as
it happened, to structural-functionalist and political-economic—
students of the ‘‘urban process’’. The thesis is this: ‘‘the problematic
of industrialization, which has dominated capitalist societies for more
than two centuries, is increasingly superseded by the urban’’. That is
to say: ‘‘the urban problematic becomes predominant’’. This conten-
tion, advanced in the wake of ‘‘[t]he political crisis of 1968’’, not only
maintained that that historical conjuncture represented ‘‘more pro-
foundly a crisis of urban society than a crisis of capitalist industrial-
ism’’, but also posed—in the minds of Lefebvre’s North American
readers—a crucial question with respect to the ‘‘possibilities of revo-
lutionary social change that comes from the streets’’: are we to now
understand the fundamental contradictions of our social totality in
terms of the dynamics of industrialization (the production of
commodities) or urbanization (the production of urban space)?
With the benefit of hindsight, this appears as an ‘‘either–or’’ type
false question. No matter how it is resolved, it needlessly forces one to
choose in favour of either society or space—hardly the intent of
Lefebvre’s profoundly dialectical work. To do justice to the latter, a
different question suggests itself. How can we read Lefebvre today as
a student above all of mediation, especially as one who accords a novel
significance to the centrality of urban space not only in the present
articulation of our social totality, but also its potentially revolutionary
transformation in the future? As a first step towards addressing this
question, I can do worse than to examine a couple of Lefebvre’s own
thoughts on mediation and totality. For in these explorations lies a
‘‘path’’ that mediates between different ‘‘levels’’ of the social totality
with utmost respect to what he calls the ‘‘concrete abstraction’’ of
urban 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 be
the third and fourth chapters of The Urban Revolution, aptly entitled
‘‘The urban phenomenon’’ and ‘‘Levels and dimensions’’. Two things
are impossible to miss in them. First of all, a spirited critique of the
critique of totality—which is also a highly original argument for a
creative brand of totalizing thought (Jay 1984:293–299)—most passio-
nately advanced in the form of a devastating attack on the disciplinary
fragmentation of specialized ‘‘knowledge’’, especially with regard to the
‘‘urban phenomenon’’. It is striking how presciently Lefebvre anticipates
the parochial nature of the ‘‘critiques’’ to which these musings would be
subjected soon enough, and also how closely his reservations concerning
the fragmentation of knowledge in separate ‘‘disciplines’’ and their
contrived re-union in the ‘‘spontaneous ideology’’ of ‘‘interdisciplinary

64 Antipode
studies’’ mirror the uncompromising attack mounted on these same

targets by his professed adversary Althusser (1990b:69–165), in the
latter’s legendary ‘‘Philosophy Course for Scientists’’ at the École
Normale Supérieure on the eve of 1968—which Castells seems to
have missed. According to Lefebvre (2003:49, 75–76): ‘‘The urban
phenomenon, taken as a whole, cannot be grasped by any specialized
discipline’’. Nor can it be apprehended by bringing ‘‘specialists (in
the fragmentary sciences) together around a table on which we
place an ‘object’ to be understood or constructed. The most com-
petent among them are the least reliable’’. ‘‘While it is true that the
urban phenomenon, as a global reality, is in urgent need of people
who can pool fragmentary bits of knowledge’’, Lefebvre insists that
‘‘[f]ragments do not constitute knowledge’’, even or especially ‘‘in
spite of the pious efforts … to assemble the provisional results of
the 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 publisher’s garbled
marketing blurb on The Urban Revolution claims): ‘‘[i]n terms of
methodology, it has been recommended that we approach the
urban phenomenon … using the dialectical method’’ (p 49). Hence
the questions: ‘‘Under such conditions, how can we achieve, even
hope to achieve, totality?’’ (p 61); ‘‘How can we make the transition
from fragmentary knowledge to complete understanding? How can
we define this need for totality?’’ (p 56).
Lefebvre’s response to these questions would be ultimately political
rather than philosophical, as he advocates an ‘‘urban strategy’’
(2003:76) mobilizing the revolutionary desires of ‘‘everyday life’’ in
the city pitted against the dominant logics of capital and state. This
strategy 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 the
Western Marxist tradition by its special attention to space and ‘‘the
urban phenomenon’’. This is the second point I wish to highlight in
The Urban Revolution. The traditional concepts of mediation in
Western Marxist theories of totality—whether Lukácsian, Althusser-
ian or Jamesonian—involve a view of society as a systemic whole
comprised of distinct ‘‘levels’’, as does Lefebvre’s, but understands
these in (some variation of) the terms minted by Marx’s 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 his
conception of mediation with special attention to space rests on the
novel configuration of the ‘‘levels’’ he proposes in the context of the
late capitalist social totality, whose architecture is integral to what he
calls ‘‘the urban revolution’’.

What are these ‘‘levels’’ and what is their ‘‘structure’’? At the ‘‘top’’,
so to speak, hovers the ‘‘global level’’ (78ff)—‘‘G’’—which pertains to
the ‘‘state as will and representation’’. Lefebvre identifies this level
with two strategies, namely, ‘‘neoliberalism’’—the reign of ‘‘private
enterprise and, with respect to urbanism … developers and bank-
ers’’—and ‘‘neo-dirigisme’’—‘‘with its emphasis … on planning, which,
in the urban domain, promotes the interventions of specialists and
technocrats’’. This is the home ground of ‘‘state capitalism’’. The
uneasy alliance between neoliberalism and neo-dirigisme at this ‘‘level
G’’ also ‘‘projects’’ itself into the built and the unbuilt domains: ‘‘build-
ings, monuments, large-scale urban projects, new towns’’ as well as
‘‘roads and highways, the urban fabric and neutral space, ‘nature
preserve’ 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 determinate
relationship to its ‘‘site’’ or ‘‘immediate surroundings’’ as well as the
‘‘situation’’ or ‘‘distant surroundings’’ and ‘‘global conditions’’. While
being ‘‘projected’’ by the level G and retaining the internally contra-
dictory relative autonomy of its own ‘‘forms–functions–structures … in
the city and of the city’’, however, level M also introjects the contested
dynamics of the vital one ‘‘below’’ it: ‘‘level P’’. This last is the level of
the ‘‘private’’ or ‘‘habiting’’, which includes, among other things,
‘‘housing primarily, including large apartment buildings, private
homes … campgrounds, shantytowns’’ etc. As such, it constitutes
much of the level of ‘‘lived-experience’’, one which Lefebvre explicates
at great length in his extensive writings on the critique of everyday life.
‘‘Even the most derisive everyday existence’’, writes Lefebvre, ‘‘retains
a trace of grandeur and spontaneous poetry, except perhaps when it is
nothing more than … the embodiment of a world of commodities,
exchange having abolished use or overdetermined it’’. As such, this
level ‘‘should no longer be approached as a residue, as a trace or
result of so-called superior levels’’, but regarded as the reservoir of
radical-utopian subjectivity capable of revolutionizing the urban (M)
and through that the global (G) as well, by means of the urban
revolution nourished by everyday life (P).
How useful are these three ‘‘levels’’—G, M and P—for an under-
standing of the social totality in terms of spatial mediation? In his
‘‘foreword’’ to The Urban Revolution, Neil Smith (2003:xii, xiv) finds
Lefebvre’s discussion of ‘‘levels’’ to be among the ‘‘less successful’’
aspects of the book: a ‘‘halting effort at what might be now called a
‘politics of scale’’’ (Brenner 2000; Smith 1990; and Swyngedouw
1997), that is, ‘‘an oblique attempt to distinguish the scales of socio-
political reality’’. It is indeed tempting to read Lefebvre’s speculations
on ‘‘levels’’ as an underdeveloped theory of ‘‘scales’’, and ‘‘the urban
question’’ itself as a ‘‘scale question’’. Yet, Lefebvre’s differentiation

66 Antipode
of ‘‘levels’’—including the very spatial image of the city he deploys

(2003:80) to distinguish them—also militates against their literal
translation into territorial scale. For his conception of the three
‘‘levels’’ occurs precisely at the dialectical intersection of the social
and the spatial—encompassing ‘‘forms–functions–structures’’ (p 80)—
rendering too heavy an emphasis on either the social or the spatial
dimension in their explication equally suspect. Moreover, these
‘‘levels’’ also merge into and emerge out of each other, much like
the elements of the ‘‘spatial triad’’ in The Production of Space, making
clear 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 88–89). Thus the ‘‘specifically urban level’’
(p 80), for example, does not coincide easily with the physical space of
the city, which in his illustration clearly makes room for all three
‘‘levels’’ to operate within it. In fact, it is in this dialectically articulated
sense that ‘‘the urban phenomenon’’, as an overdetermination of the
three ‘‘levels’’, becomes the most intensely mediated site of revolu-
tionary struggle—at once social, spatial and historical (pp 89–90).
Such is the perspective that enables Lefebvre to underscore not only
the contradictory logics operative within each ‘‘level’’ (neoliberalism
and neo-dirigisme in G, for instance) and the contested relations
between the ‘‘levels’’ (ie the hegemonic ‘‘projection’’ of the ‘‘socio-
logic’’ and the ‘‘ideo-logic’’ of G onto the space of the M; and the
counter-projection from P to G of a revolutionary politics of ‘‘every-
day life’’), but also to highlight the increasing significance of spatial
conflict in social struggle:
Urban alienation contains and perpetuates all other forms of alie-

nation. In it, through it, segregation becomes commonplace: by
class, by neighbourhood, by profession, by age, by ethnicity, by sex.
Crowds and loneliness. Space becomes increasingly rare—it is
expensive, a luxury and privilege maintained and kept up through
a practice (the ‘‘center’’) and various strategies. The city does indeed
grow richer. It attracts wealth and monopolizes culture just as it
concentrates power. But it collapses under the weight of its wealth.
The more it concentrates the necessities of life, the more unlivable it
becomes. The notion that happiness is possible in the [actually
existing] city, that life there is more intense, pleasure is enhanced,
and leisure time more abundant is mystification and myth. If there is
a connection between social relationships and space, between places
and human groups, we must, if we are to establish cohesion, radically
modify the structure of space (Lefebvre 2003:92).
Is the significance of Lefebvre’s socio-spatial conception of ‘‘levels’’

confined to The Urban Revolution (ie 1970)? Smith (2003:xiv) notes

that this language of ‘‘levels’’ (G, M and P) disappears and gives way
by 1974 to the well-known ‘‘spatial triad’’ in The Production of Space;
and that, ‘‘by the time he writes the four volumes of De l’état in the
mid-1970s, he is barely concerned with urbanization and theorizes
instead about (among other things) the globalization of the state’’
(2003:xix). He also taxes Lefebvre for providing an ‘‘oblique and
incomplete’’ answer to ‘‘the urban question’’, ie a less than adequate
account of the ‘‘political-economic transition from industrialization to
urbanization’’ (2003:xix). Smith is not incorrect. In the end, what
Lefebvre gives us is what he claims to take from Marx: not a finished
‘‘model’’, but a ‘‘path’’. Even a cursory perusal of those ‘‘other things’’
that Smith mentions parenthetically (see the bibliography in Shields
1999:190–204), however, quickly reveals the remarkable longevity of
the same three interrelated ‘‘levels’’ captured in compendium in The
Urban Revolution. For they run marathon distances through
Lefebvre’s oeuvre: level G on the globalization of the state and econ-
omy corresponds to the voluminous De l’état; level M yields numerous
writings on the ‘‘city’’ and ‘‘space’’; and in the longue durée, level P
deals in (again!) multiple volumes with ‘‘everyday life’’. The concep-
tion of these three ‘‘levels’’ not only informs Lefebvre’s outstanding
contribution to a spatially mediated theory of totality, but also guides
the totality of his life’s work. In addition, it distinguishes his vision of
the struggle for socialism: one that would be waged against the
dominant logics of the ‘‘global’’ (level G), primarily but not exclusively
on the intermediary ‘‘urban’’ terrain (level M), with the nourishment
of the utopian energies released by the contradictions of ‘‘everyday
life’’ (level P). We can ignore the vitality of these ‘‘levels’’ and their
relations, therefore, only at the risk of reducing Lefebvre’s thought to
a caricature of its integrity and richness, while impoverishing our own
politics, not least in ‘‘the urban sensorium’’.
Whither Space, Ideology and Aesthetics?

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

68 Antipode
This is Friedrich Engels (1968:54–55), at twenty-three, reporting on

how space was ideological in 1844 Manchester; and here is an ‘‘every-
day life’’ take on Los Angeles expressed by a worker employed in its
downtown two years after the notorious events of April 1992:
I think if you look at physically where the city is going, you get little
corridors of development; and, you know, you have a city that has all
these freeways and your railway lines, and it’s possible to get from
point to point without experiencing anything in the middle, by
simply taking the freeway. You can go from downtown to LAX
[the international airport] without ever seeing the poverty you are
driving through … So the physical characteristics of the city can
encourage this atomization, it can encourage more of an identifica-
tion with our economic class than with your typical community. And
that is a very difficult thing to overcome. And that’s the struggle
that’s going on right now—do you relate to LA or do you relate to
your profession or your neighborhood and, you know … I mean, it’s
not a struggle unique to Los Angeles but it is a struggle that’s
accelerated here. If you can resolve that, then you have a really
wonderful thing; and if you can’t, it’s a very serious problem.
(Goonewardena 1998:231)
With these two quotations standing as epigraphs to the concept of

‘‘the urban sensorium’’, I must bring this essay to a close with a
textbook illustration of how Lefebvre’s ‘‘levels’’ G, M and P are all
overdetermined in aestheticized and ideological urban space—by way
of Walter Benjamin’s view of Baron Haussmann’s legendary recon-
struction of Paris. What can we learn today from the minister of
Napoleon III? Benjamin (1999:23–24) writes in his essay ‘‘Paris,
capital of the nineteenth century’’: ‘‘Haussmann’s ideal in city plan-
ning consisted of long straight streets opening onto broad perspec-
tives’’, within which ‘‘the temples of the bourgeoisie’s spiritual and
secular power were to find their apotheosis’’. Contemporaries called it
‘‘strategic beautification’’. He is quick to point out that ‘‘the true goal
of Haussmann’s projects was to secure the city against civil war’’ by
‘‘widening the streets’’ in order to ‘‘make the erection of barricades in
the streets of Paris impossible’’. Here the new grand boulevard per-
spectives—which, ‘‘prior to their inauguration, were screened with
canvas draperies and unveiled like monuments’’—were also meant
to ‘‘connect the barracks in straight lines with the workers’ districts’’,
to facilitate rapid troop movement in the event of revolution. Con-
verging on Haussmann’s megalomaniac monumentalism were not
only 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’’ as
‘‘Haussmann’s expropriations give rise to speculation that borders on

fraud’’. What about the expropriated? ‘‘In 1864, in a speech before the
National Assembly’’, reports Benjamin, Haussmann ‘‘vents his hatred
of the rootless urban population, which keeps increasing as a result of
his projects. Rising rents drive the proletariat into the suburbs. The
quartiers of Paris in this way lose their distinctive physiognomy. The
‘red belt’ forms. Haussmann gave himself the title of ‘demolition
artist,’ artiste démolisseur. He viewed his work as a calling’’. Hauss-
mann’s contemporaries would not be the last to experience this—the
primal scene of capitalist urbanism.
‘‘‘Strategic beautification’ is the ur-form of the culture of the mod-
ern state’’, writes Susan Buck-Morss (1991:89–90) in her brilliant
book on Benjamin, Dialectics of Seeing. She explains how the optical
and political ‘‘illusions fostered by this ‘artist of demolition’ figured
heavily in the mythic imagery of historical progress, and functioned as
a monument to the state’s role in achieving it’’. How much have these
economic logics, political rationalities and urban strategies—in their
thoroughly aestheticized and ideological forms—changed since the
times of Engels and Haussmann? Readers of these pages will recall
Stefan Kipfer and Roger Keil’s (2002) recent critique the ‘‘embour-
geoisement of inner-city Toronto’’, now proceeding under the guise of
deregulated ‘‘mixed use’’ and ‘‘innovative’’ urban design, with frequent
appeals to the authority of Jane Jacobs. The same Manchester that
Engels visited in 1843/44 ranks as I write at the top of something
called the ‘‘Boho Britain creative index’’—according to a report
researched by the ‘‘bohemian’’ consultant Richard Florida for the
Third Way-neoliberal think tank Demos—apparently well-placed (at
level M) to show everyone how to create a ‘‘habitat’’ for the ‘‘creative
class’’ (level P) and beat the global competition in the ‘‘new global-
information-media-economy’’ (level G) (Carter 2003). Of course, few
have written with more insightful passion than Neil Smith (1996) on
how such aestheticized strategies of ‘‘urban renewal’’ and ‘‘strategic
beautification’’ now come to us with an unprecedented vengeance in
the form of ‘‘revanchist gentrification’’—involving the ‘‘innovative’’ dis-
placement of poor people and neighbourhoods in central cities by
‘‘creative’’ upper-class districts. In the ‘‘foreword’’ to The Urban Revolu-
tion, Smith recaptures with a connoisseur’s eye the now global scope of
what he memorably called ‘‘Class Struggle on Avenue B’’ in The New
Urban Frontier—in a lucid corroboration of Lefebvre’s (2003:100) fun-
damental argument concerning the increasing significance of the
‘‘everyday’’ in the ‘‘urban’’, and the ‘‘urban’’ in the ‘‘global’’:
Lefebvre remarks on the gentrification (‘‘embourgeoisement’’) of

urban centers, but that process … has changed dramatically since
the 1960s … Since the 1980s, gentrification has become increasingly
generalized as a strategy of global urban expansion. Central urban

70 Antipode
reconstruction increasingly integrates into not just the overall urban

economy but the global economy. A highly mobile global capital
increasingly descends [on] and aspires to the remake of urban
centers. At the same time there is a more or less seamless [emphasis
added] collaboration among property capital, the state, retail
capital, and financial capital than at any previous time … One can
see here a glimmering of the conceptual inversion Lefebvre poses
between the industrial and the urban. (Smith:1996: xx–xxi)
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______________ ___________________

The Urban Sensorium: Space, Ideology

Space, Ideology and Aesthetics

a virtual standstill in the apparently forgotten tracks of historical

Ó 2005 Editorial Board of Antipode.

traditional concern of aesthetics. Before indulging in my own spec-

Little Buddha, or, The Spatial Logic of Siddhartha’s

Ó 2005 Editorial Board of Antipode.

The possibility of an epistemological break is first foretold by an

Ó 2005 Editorial Board of Antipode.

as a space in which he can (in)voluntarily (mis)recognize his

Ó 2005 Editorial Board of Antipode.

Science, that immediate ‘‘means ‘without intermediary,’ or, ‘not a

The Aesthetics and Politics of ‘‘Cognitive Mapping’’

Ó 2005 Editorial Board of Antipode.

highly original contribution—with all of its limitations—to a ‘‘positive’’

Ó 2005 Editorial Board of Antipode.

Nay, sacredness is held to be enhanced in proportion as truth

Ó 2005 Editorial Board of Antipode.

Ó 2005 Editorial Board of Antipode.

spatially is for urban experience. It follows that an aesthetic of cog-

Ó 2005 Editorial Board of Antipode.

argument here, which geographers in particular have mistaken as a

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

Ó 2005 Editorial Board of Antipode.

mechanism and dynamics are not visible in that sense, cannot be

Space/Mediation/Totality: Althusser and Jameson

Ó 2005 Editorial Board of Antipode.

‘‘reification’’ on the consciousness of the worker. Nor should one

Ó 2005 Editorial Board of Antipode.

‘‘real-concrete’’.) If we follow Althusser’s advice still further, then it

Ó 2005 Editorial Board of Antipode.

To some suggestions, then, about theorizing totality and ‘‘mapping’’

Ó 2005 Editorial Board of Antipode.

his powerful theory of ideology, Althusser’s (1990c:87–128) major

Ó 2005 Editorial Board of Antipode.

[t]his suggests that the philosophical thrust of the Althusserian

Henri Lefebvre, or, The Spatial Mediation of Global

Ó 2005 Editorial Board of Antipode.

translation of The Urban Revolution, Neil Smith (2003:xi) singles out

Ó 2005 Editorial Board of Antipode.

studies’’ mirror the uncompromising attack mounted on these same

Ó 2005 Editorial Board of Antipode.

Ó 2005 Editorial Board of Antipode.

of ‘‘levels’’—including the very spatial image of the city he deploys

Urban alienation contains and perpetuates all other forms of alie-

Is the significance of Lefebvre’s socio-spatial conception of ‘‘levels’’

Ó 2005 Editorial Board of Antipode.

Whither Space, Ideology and Aesthetics?

Ó 2005 Editorial Board of Antipode.

This is Friedrich Engels (1968:54–55), at twenty-three, reporting on

With these two quotations standing as epigraphs to the concept of

Ó 2005 Editorial Board of Antipode.

Lefebvre remarks on the gentrification (‘‘embourgeoisement’’) of

Ó 2005 Editorial Board of Antipode.

reconstruction increasingly integrates into not just the overall urban

Ó 2005 Editorial Board of Antipode.

Ó 2005 Editorial Board of Antipode.

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