Soja’s Postmodern Geographies

Posted on April 24, 2011 by Teo Ballvé

Soja, Edward W. 1989. Postmodern Geographies: The Reassertion of Space in Critical Social Theory. London: Verso. [Ch 1-3]

I learned a lot from this book. Reading about Marxism and geography feels a bit like peering into a family album. Ed Soja’s central argument in these first three chapters is that stubborn historicism has led to the detrimental neglect (and void) of spatiality in social theory, roughly since between the downfall of the Paris Commune (if not post-1848) and the 1960s. Continue reading →

Posted in David Harvey, Dialectics, Henri Lefebvre, Historical Materialism, Marxism, Michel Foucault, Spatiality | Comments Off on Soja’s Postmodern Geographies

Spaces of Capital

Posted on April 23, 2011 by Teo Ballvé

Harvey, David. 2001. Spaces of Capital: Towards a Critical Geography. New York: Routledge. [Chapters from Part II].

Geography of Capitalist Accumulation (1975)

In this first chapter, we can see Harvey beginning to develop much of what later becomes central aspects of later works, e.g. uneven development, the role of credit, overaccumulation and imperialism, spatial fixes, and space-time compression. He writes that locational theory provides a bridge between Marx’s theories about the accumulation of capital and imperialism. He faults theorists of imperialism for providing one-sided analyses that fail to grasp the necessary links between accumulation and imperialism. The unavoidable tendency for the overaccumulation of capital—i.e. a surplus of labor and capital without any conceivable means for bringing them profitably together—constitutes the paramount crisis dynamic that forces capitalism to make new room for itself (in either temporal or spatial terms). Continue reading →

Posted in David Harvey, GWF Hegel, Historical Materialism, Karl Marx, Marxism, Political Economy, Primitive Accumulation, Spatiality, The State | 3 Comments

The Spatial Fix Revisited

Posted on April 20, 2011 by Teo Ballvé

Harvey defines his notion of the “spatial fix” in terms of the junky that needs a “fix,” but that fix is entirely fleeting and never satiates the junky’s need for smack, or in this case capitalist expansion. The resolution is temporary and never permanent. Moreover, the spatial fix merely reproduces capitalism’s contradictions on an ever-expanding scale. Continue reading →

Posted in David Harvey, Historical Materialism, Marxism, Political Economy, Spatiality | 2 Comments

Uneven Development

Posted on April 20, 2011 by Teo Ballvé

Smith, Neil. 1990. Uneven Development: Nature, Capital, and the Production of Space. Athens, GA: University of Georgia Press.

The basic argument and premise of the book is that “the uneven development of capitalism can be best conceived as resulting from contradictory tendencies toward the differentiation and equalization of levels and conditions of development … differentiation and equalization are inseparable, mutually implicative” (xii). The primary means through which this contradictory movement happens is through the socio-spatial division of labor and the profit-seeking dynamics internal to capitalist development, which unleashes tendencies toward differentiation and equalization through space, but these contradictory tendencies always pass each other like ships in the night, much the same way as happens with price. Differentiation trends toward equalization through the logics of capital, but it “passes” equalization, leading only toward more very inequal kinds of differentiation, creating once again a terrain for profitable investment and the cycle repeats itself. Continue reading →

Posted in Marxism, Political Economy, Spatiality | 2 Comments

Spaces of Global Capitalism

Posted on April 19, 2011 by Teo Ballvé

Harvey, David. 2006. Spaces of Global Capitalism. London: Verso.

Harvey’s book is a collection of two lectures and an essay. The first lecture is mainly about how neoliberalism was constituted as a class project, and how it played out in and through uneven geographical development. The second lecture is an outline of a general theory of uneven geographical development. The final essay is titled, “Space as a Key Word,” where he discusses his thinking about space and brings the tripartite production of spatio-temporality within a Marxist political economic framework. Continue reading →

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Spectacle and the Production of Space

Posted on April 19, 2011 by Teo Ballvé

The Society of the Spectacle helps me pick up where I left off with my recent comments about the centrality of “fetishism” and “critique” in Henri Lefebvre’s work. Put simply, Guy Debord’s “spectacle” is Marx’s notion of fetishism writ large. Rather than social relations primarily mediated by mystified things (i.e. commodities), as Marx would have it, Debord sees that social relations between people have become deeply mediated by images and representations. Continue reading →

Posted in City, Critique, Dialectics, Guy Debord, Henri Lefebvre, Karl Marx, Power, Spatiality, Spectacle | Comments Off on Spectacle and the Production of Space

Lefebvre, Fetish, Critique

Posted on April 19, 2011 by Teo Ballvé

I’d argue that the most important thread running through Henri Lefebvre’s entire work is the notion of fetishism. Almost everything that he worked on can be traced back to Marx’s ideas about the “commodity fetish.” When paired with the concept of fetishism, it becomes much easier to make sense of some of Lefebvre’s main—not only his, of course—keywords (alienation, mystification, reification, abstraction, everyday, social space, the urban, autogestion, the state, time). The radical roots of Lefebvre’s unique and heterodox brand of Marxism are grounded in his critique of fetishism in its various forms; it’s through this lens that one aspect of Lefebvre’s robust understanding of “critique” as a form of social/intellectual political praxis can be best understood. Continue reading →

Posted in City, Critique, Everyday Life, Guy Debord, Henri Lefebvre, Karl Marx, Spatiality | 3 Comments

Security, Territory, Population

Posted on March 20, 2011 by Teo Ballvé

Foucault, Michel. 2007. Security, Territory, Population: Lectures at the Collège de France, 1977-1978.

Foucault says he’s following the genesis of a political knowledge that put “population” at the center of its concerns. He uses “government” as the guiding thread of this genesis. “Population,” for Foucault, denotes the making of the biological features of the human species as the object of political strategy. If the primary site of discipline is the body, the primary site of biopower or biopolitics is population. Nonetheless, from the outset of the lectures he’s at pains to note that he’s not drawing up epochal transitions of sovereign power, to disciplinary power, and then to a society of say security or government (8, 10, 107). Continue reading →

Posted in City, Governmentality, Michel Foucault, Political Economy, Power, Spatiality, The State, Violence | 5 Comments

Society Must Be Defended

Posted on March 19, 2011 by Teo Ballvé

Foucault, Michel. 1997. Society Must Be Defended: Lectures at the Collège de France, 1975-1976

He starts the lectures defining “subjugated knowledges,” as those that have been both written out of history and submerged in it in a masked form. He calls them “Knowledges from below” and a “historical knowledge of struggles” (7). Genealogy, he suggests, is a way of getting at these knowledges and struggles; “they are about the insurrection of knowledges” (9). He moves from this discussion to begin talking about a “certain” economism of power; that is, the view held in both liberal and Marxist thought that power is a thing that can be invested, withdrawn, possessed, surrendered, etc as if it were a commodity. He suggests that rather than seeing power this way, we should first be analyzing it in terms of conflict, confrontation and war, inverting Calusewitz’s proposition to say that politics is the continuation of war by other means. Continue reading →

Posted in Michel Foucault, Power, Race & Ethnicity, Violence | 5 Comments

The Production of Space

Posted on February 19, 2011 by Teo Ballvé

After having just finished Capital (Vol. I), Henri Lefebvre’s The Production of Space makes so much more sense than the first time a read it. (Though hugely insightful, it’s still a total slog to read.) The reasons behind my understanding it better via Capital are many, but most basically it comes down to Lefebvre’s proposition that space, like commodities, both embodies and conceals social relations. Building from Marx’s account of commodities, Lefebvre shows how space is a “concrete-abstraction.” It involves mental constructions and abstractions, it also entails a material physicality, and these only gain concreteness through and in human practice—space, like capital, is fundamentally a social process. Marx’s notion of “fetish” is an integral part to Lefebvre’s entire project. In many ways, he wants to do with space what Marx accomplished viz. commodities and exchange; and do to philosophico-scientific thinking on space what Marx did viz. political economy. Continue reading →

Posted in Dialectics, Hegemony, Henri Lefebvre, Karl Marx, Marxism, Political Economy, Power, Spatiality, The State | 5 Comments