Environment and Planning D; Society and Space 1996, volume 14, pitgcft 559-580

Where's the difference? The hctcrosexualization of alterity

in Henri Lefebvre and Jacques Lacan1

Virginia Blum
Department of English, University of Kentucky, Lexington, KY 40506-0027, USA
Heidi Nast
International Studies, DcPnul University, Chicago, IL 60614-3298, USA
Received 26 April 1994; in revised form 2 January 1996

Abstract. It has been largely overlooked that Henri Lefebvre in his book The Production of Space
draws heavily upon Lacanian psychoanalytic accounts of the emergence of subjectivity in theorizing
political relations, Lefebvre implicitly repudiates at the same time that he builds upon Lacan's
distinctions between real, imaginary, and symbolic registers of subjectivity. For Lcfebvre, Lacan's
registers give primacy to visuality and hetcrosexualized familial dynamics while lived material,
spatial, and political experience arc incidental to subject formation and systems of meaning.
Lefebvre transforms Lacan's registers by historicizing them in spatially dialectical terms, loosely
replacing them with distinct forms of evolutionary spatialitics which he calls natural, absolute,
and abstract, In the process, he both subverts and reproduces Lacan's paternal-maternal (hetero-
sexual) order. Wc hold that Lcfcbvrc's critique provides powerful theoretical tools for understanding
how altcrity and signification are always and inevitably politically and materially mediated
through corporealities and 'space*. Nonetheless, Lcfcbvrc can only work out his spatial dialectic
of history in hctcrosexist terms: although he usefully identifies maternal - paternal metaphors in
different Western social formations over time, he fails to interrogate directly the very hetero-
sexuality that gives these metaphors their relational significance and force. In short, he brings us
to the brink of a nonhctcrosexist domain, but never enters it. In this paper then, wc outline the
striking parallels in the theoretical frameworks of Lefebvre and Lacan in order to illustrate how
both theorists focus on gender construction as the fundamental social process through which
altcrity is achieved. At the same time, wc unpack the underlying phallocentrism and hcterosex-
ism that sustain their versions of alterity, subjectivity, and agency, in the process showing how
Lefebvre deftly undermines the apolitical stance of Lacan. In conclusion, we strive to recuperate
the crucial liberatory aspects of Lefebvre's project through considering how wc might go on to
dislocate received versions of capitalism and sexual difference.

Preface
Henri Lefebvre strongly opposed structuralisms of any sort (Lefebvre, 1971). In
The Production of Space, originally published in 1974, Lefebvre directly condemns
the structuralist projects of many of his French contemporaries and predecessors,
including Saussure, Lacan, Levi-Strauss, Althusser, and Barthes.(1) For Lefebvre,
structuralist theories totalize, systematize, and take for granted bodies and spaces,
thereby eliminating possibilities for creative acts and political agency as well as
structural transformations.<2) Some of his most strident objections are levelled at
t This work is the result of an entirely collaborative effort that challenged both of us to think
creatively across two very different disciplines.
<*> See Gregory (1995), Grosz (1990), Roudinesco (1990); Shields (1994), Schneiderman (1983),
and Turkle (1978) for some description and discussion of the social, political, and material
interconnectedness of French intellectuals with whom Lefebvre interacted or was familiar.
<2) On the structuralist semiotic "decoding" elaborated upon in some of Barthes's early work
Lefebvre (1991, page 162) writes: "what is overlooked is the body. When 'Ego' arrives in an
unknown country or city, he first experiences it through every part of his body .... For it is by
means of the body that space is perceived, livedand produced ... [Also] absent from Barthes's
perspective, is power. Whether or not it is constitutional, whether or not it is disseminated
through institutions and bureaucracies, power can in no wise be decoded. For power has not code."
560 V Blum, H Nast

structuralist linguistic theories which, according to Lefebvre (1991, page 136),

require that space be a mere container or register (rather than generator) of written
or verbally expressed meaning such that space and discourse are conflated:
"As for space, it is supposedly given along with and in language, and is not
formed separately from language. Filled with signs and meanings, an indistinct
intersection point of discourses, a container homologous with whatever it contains,
space so conceived is comprised merely of functions, articulations and connec-
tionsin which respect it closely resembles discourse. Signs ... are sufficient unto
themselves, because the system of verbal signs (whence written language derives)
already embodies the essential links in the chain, spatial links included."
Jacques Lacan comes under particular scrutiny for what Lefebvre argues is his
privileging of the visual over the spatial in signifying lived experience and subjectivity.
Lacan's subject, Lefebvre avers, is produced exclusively in the arena of images and
language; consequently, the body is reduced to two dimensions. Originally no more
than the effect of a two-dimensional image (indeed the image of an image, as we
discuss below in our section on the mirror stage), which is then processed through
the defiles of the signifier (language), the spatial, relational (signifying) body does
not exist for Lacan. The only 'third dimension' theorized by Lacan, the dimension
that founds and mediates alterity, is the phallusthe signifier without a signified
which produces and sustains all meaning in the world without itself being implicated
in the meaning-making machinery. The phallus is never located. Indeed, as Lefebvre
indicates, it is detached (both literally and figuratively) from the body that needs to
be suppressed in order for the Lacanian phallic economy to function. Nonetheless,
Lefebvre's cogent critique of Lacan's notions of the phallus, signification, and
languagehis bases of the Symbolicleaves intact significant parts of Lacan's hetero-
sexist and masculinist structuralist framework.
Given that theorizations of heterosexuality are central to this paper, we define it
here: by heterosexuality we mean the apparent fixity of reproductive gender roles
whereby mothering and fathering are construed as the only representational modes
for sexual activity as well as the ultimate goal of the sexual relation. The hetero-
sexualization of gender roles has the effect of de-eroticizing the sexual relation
precisely because sexuality is subordinated to a 'higher' purpose, procreation.
Consequently, heterosexuality can seem to be nonsexual and functionally necessary
in contrast to other sexualities whose erotic practice is foregrounded.
To show how Lefebvre's theorization of alterity and signification both repudiates
and mirrors Lacan's, we begin this paper by outlining and comparing the evolutionary
frameworks of both theorists. In the process we demonstrate that, despite structural
similarities, Lefebvre's project, in contrast to Lacan's, has the potential to transcend
phallogocentrism and heterosexist accounts of alterity because of his emphasis on
embodied agencies. He asks who is holding the pen, who is thrusting the fist, who
occupies the towers, etc. Whereas Lacan's investment in heterosexuality results in
an apolitical and complacent account of psychosexual development, Lefebvre clearly
recognizes the degree to which heterosexuality has historically sustained and shaped
political relations. He shows how contradictions within the maternal-paternal order
offer us possibilities for rupture into nonpatriarchal forms of difference.
At the same time, however, Lefebvre's notion of difference continues to remain
affixed to a heterosexuality that is never fully acknowledged or unpacked; that is, he
discusses the political dynamics of history in terms of the maternal and paternalas
if these terms were not embedded in a heterosexual matrix of significations (above),
as if patriarchy were not equal to heteropatriarchy. It is precisely the ways in which
Lefebvre condemns (yet ends up being complicit with) Lacan's phallogocentrism
Where's the difference? 56 1

that makes him an excellent example of how received models of (sexual) difference
are reproduced by not taking into account their heterosexualized foundation. In the
last part of the paper, then, we attempt to question how phallogocentric theories of
sexuality and capitalism can be explicitly and practically undermined.
Our project adds a much-needed dimension to Lefebvre's work and to analyses
of spatiality more generally. As Michael Dear (1994) recently noted, since The Produc-
tion of Space was translated into English in 1991 a "veritable industry of Lefebvrian
analyses" of space has resulted (see also Curry, 1994, page 40). Given Lefebvre's
importance to current geographic scholarship (for example, Curry, 1994; Harvey,
1990; Merrifiekl, 1993; Soja, 1991), it is necessary to distinguish between the
heterosextsm of his theoretical framework and the libcratory aspects of his project.(3>

Lacan's real and Lcfcbvrc's natural

The "real" is among Lacan's most elusive concepts. (l) "The lack of the lack makes
the real", writes Lacan, "which emerges only there, as a cork. This cork is supported
by the term of the impossibleand the little we know about the real shows its
antinomy to all verisimilitude" (1978, page ix). Although Lacan would claim that
the real is anything but a naive notion of 'reality', there are times when this order
strikingly resembles Nature in the way that it both opposes Culture and is connota-
tively linked to the maternalspecifically, an infantile perspective on the maternal.
Thus, this "lack of the lack" is a lost (and clearly fantasmatic) plenitude, a perfect
continuity between the world's providing and the infant's need. This is the decep-
tion, for Lacan, at the heart of the maternal functionher invidious lure that
threatens to make psychotic the subject who fails to separate. The psychotic,
unconstrained by the incest taboo, unmoved by the father's Law (the paternal
metaphor that Lacan terms the Name-of-the-Father) is said by Lacan to be living
in the real. Abiding by laws of the paternal order, namely, the incest prohibition
and the consequent punishment by castration, ensures the child's entrance into the
symbolic chain of signification; indeed, all human signifying systems (for example,
kinship, juridical) collapse without this sustaining function of the signifier to harness
the infant's desire and divert it from the mother.(5) Alterity, then, is founded through
renouncing the mother's body.
<3> Even geographical works demonstrating the theoretical affinities of Lacan and Lefebvre
have not addressed the heterosexist bases through which both scholars elaborate alterity (for
example, Gregory, 1995; Shields, 1994).
(4) This elusiveness is evident in the different ways in which the real has been interpreted by
theorists of Lacan. Malcolm Bowie (1991, page 106), for example, asks if the real is "outside
or inside? Is it a vacuum or a plenum?" By this he is referring both to the distinction Freud
articulated between material reality (the outside) and psychical reality (the inside) as well as
whether the real is a rupture in the otherwise intact fabric of the symbolic order of Western
culture or a full and unmediated connection with the material world. Slavoj Zizek ( 1 9 9 1 ,
pages 14-15), on the other hand, describes the Lacanian real as "the pulsing presymbolic
substance in its abhorrent vanity". The real, for Zizek, is presymbolic because it cannot be
recognized or identified through the defiles of the signifier. Consequently, it cannot be named
according to a system of meaning produced through difference. This "presymbolic" status of
the real, however, is not a temporal designation: rather, the real is one of the three orders (the
imaginary, the symbolic, the real) elaborated by Lacan to describe the different registers of
psychical experience.
(5)
One wonders, given the connection between the real, psychosis, and incest, if the real is
where incest can happen? More importantly, if the prohibition placed on the mother's body is
enforced through paternal law, is the real the place of the maternal? Although Lacan's real
certainly cannot be directly equated with the undifferentiated state of wholeness experienced
(continued over)
562 V Blum, H Nast

Such renunciation of the maternal body leads to, as Lefebvre maintains, the
suppression of (prohibition or exile) the body itself from Lacan's physical economy,
this body whose 'blueprint' is the body of the mother.<6) In the following passage
Lefebvre points to Lacan's need to abject the maternal through representing the
incest taboo as the cornerstone of civilization. Lefebvre writes:
"the prohibition which separates the (male) child from his mother because incest
is forbidden, and the prohibition which separates the child from its body
because language in constituting consciousness breaks down the unmediated
unity of the bodybecause, in other words, the (male) child suffers symbolic
castration and his own phallus is objectified for him as part of outside reality.
Hence the Mother, her sex and her blood, are relegated to the realm of the
cursed and the sacredalong with sexual pleasure, which is thus rendered both
fascinating and inaccessible.
The trouble with this thesis is that it assumes the logical, epistemological,
and anthropoligical priority of language over space. By the same token, it puts
prohibitionsamong them that against incestand not productive activity at the
origin of society" (1991, pages 35-36).
Indeed, a social system that takes prohibition as its founding moment demands, as
Lefebvre points out, the subjection of the body to what is imagined to be a 'higher'
orderthat of the lawbased in language.
Despite his criticisms of Lacan, however, Lefebvre's category of "natural
space" sounds suspiciously like Lacan's real. According to Lefebvre, alterity was
preceded by natural space, a space that "wasand it remainsthe common point
of departure: the origin, and the original model, of the social processperhaps
even the basis of all 'originality'" (1991, page 30; see also page 408). The exact
qualities of this space Lefebvre defines in only the vaguest of terms. It is none-
theless possible to isolate several important characteristics.^
First, it seems to have existed primarily during the Neolithic period or "agricultural
and pastoral" time, when stones and cairns were the main material traces of social
activity (page 142). At this time, human activity flows or extends outward from
"nature" im-mediately; humans are "like a spider spinning its web" such that their
works can not be considered "real labour". As Lefebvre (page 142) puts it, everyday

<5> continued
by the infant in relation to the mothera theory propounded by diverse psychoanalystsone
wonders why it is that the failure of the incest taboo (the cornerstone of the symbolic order),
winds up stranding the subject in the realwith his or her mother? Why is it that the mother
(here presented as the dangerous lure into insanity) is aligned against the Law, against
the Symbolic order, against Culture? Unless she is Nature? Might she even beDeath?
Elsewhere, Lacan suggests that the real inevitably confronts us, regardless of our machina-
tions, our symbolizations, and our inventions, in the form of chance, the unassimilable (that is,
trauma), and death (Lacan, 1978, page 55). Chance events, for example, can destabilize (even
momentarily) the symbolic (Culture) edifice of subjectivity.
(6) Bowie (1991) goes so far as to celebrate this suppression of the body in Lacan: "Rather
than furnish a detailed account of what sexual beings do, he propounds an eroticized science
of meaning, modelling devices for which are derived from logic, rhetoric and topology.
Lacan's Eros finds its primary expression neither in physical sensations nor in desirous mental
states, nor yet in the organs and erotogenic zones that, for other theorists of sexuality,
allow the pursuit of pleasure to be mapped and logged on the surface of the human body"
(page 122).
(7)The reason that Lefebvre's notion of natural space is so difficult to discern has to do in
part with the fact that he uses the phrase 'natural space' to connote two very different things.
Most saliently, he uses the phrase in lieu of 'physical space'.
Where's the difference? 563

practice,
"consists in marking particular locations and indicating routes by means of
markers or blazes .... During these primitive phases, the itineraries of hunters
and fishermen, along with those of flocks and herds, are marked out, and topoi
(soon to become Ucux dits, or 'places called* such and such) arc indicated by
stones and cairns wherever no natural landmarks such as trees or shrubs are to
hand. These arc times during which natural spaces are merely traversed. Social
labour scarcely affects them at all. Later on, marking and symbolization may
become individualized or playful procedures ..." (his emphasis).
This passage suggests, then, that natural space is at first prediscursive, existing
outside a symbolic order. Because it is not yet abstract, political, or productive,
it abides in the realm of "pre-history" (page 120). It is a time of "rhythms" and
"the modifications of those rhythms and their inscription in space by means of
human actions" (page 117).
Lack of symbolic mediation through language also means that there is no sense
of embodiment or, as Lefebvre notes, natural space is a world of "chaos which
precedes the advent of the body" (page 117). This is because the body is (symboli-
cally) undifferentiated from its surroundings: "the networks of paths and roads
made up a space just as concrete as that of the bodyof which they were in fact an
extension", an integrity he again compares with the relation of the spider and its
web (page 194). These "natural" relations ruptured with the birth of a "politics"
which depended upon the formal (symbolic) recognition of altcrity (below). At this
time, "the invisible fullness of political space ... set up its rule in the emptiness of a
natural space confiscated from nature" (page 49, our emphasis).
Significantly, all of the metaphors which Lefebvre draws upon to describe the
'natural' have traditionally been tied to the maternal: it is originary, rhythmic,
prepolitical, prediscursive, prehistoric, and empty. This oblique maternal subtext of
Lefebvre's natural is reminiscent of Lacan's account of the real.
Although both Lefebvre and Lacan locate the origin of the subject and of
history in a prediscursive maternal realm, their representations of this maternal
are quite different. Whereas Lefebvre offers us a maternal Utopia of undisrupted
plenitude, Lacan's maternal constitutes the primary threat to the Symbolic order.
Lamented lost home or the horror of engulfmentever-flowing milk or the frustrating
breast that produces anarchic rage: Lefebvre and Lacan act out the culturally pervasive
splitting of the mother. These opposite, but equally fantasmatic, accounts of the
maternal profoundly inform their theories of the emergence of the social subject.
As we shall show, Lacan's rather subtle feminization (and maternalization) of the
real leads to a dis-embodied account of the spatial.

Lefebvre's imago mundi, Lacan's imago: absolute space, and the 'mirror stage'
For both Lefebvre and Lacan, psychical and corporeal separations from the maternal
realm are what become the basis for constructions of difference and subjectivity.
Both theorists depend on tropes of the 'mirror' to explain how this separation occurs.
For Lacan, subjectivity is precipitated during "the mirror stage", a transitional
period that typically occurs when an infant is between six and eighteen months old.
The characteristics of this stage are briefly as follows: a child recognizes and hence
situates itself through identifying with an image outside itself, "out there". Lacan
calls upon the trope of the mirror image to stand paradigmatically for any image
with which the infant identifies. The mirror or image with which the child identifies
is for Lacan the founding model for an illusory totality of a "self; the mirror-image
is the ideal or totalized ego whom the infant longs to become. Lacan calls this
564 V Blum, H Nast

internalized mirror image an imago to emphasize the fantasmatic quality of the

relationship between a perceived image and a perceiving infant who is not yet a
subject. It is only consequent to the child's physical internalization of the image that
the ego is founded. Subjectivity is spatially and ontologically decentered] the subject
is shaped literally from the outside in. Crucially, both subjectivity and alterity, which
are mutually constitutive, happen in the child's relationship with its own image.
The sense of alterity established through the mirror-image is, moreover, a complexly
negotiated one. On the one hand, it is fundamentally based upon misrecognition:
The mirror-image 'out there' is in one sense 'me'; on the other hand, it is 'out there'
and therefore 'not-me'. Of equal importance is the fact that the image 'out there'
produces a Gestalt of wholeness (the image is a coherent unity) that exceeds the
infant's feelings of bodily awkwardness and fragmentation. At the same time, this
wholeness is what makes the infant aware that it is fragmented (it is not whole, yet)
and thus in situational rivalry with its mirror-image.
"The mirror stage is a drama whose internal thrust is precipitated from insuffi-
ciency to anticipationand which manufactures for the subject, caught up in the
lure of spatial identification, the succession of phantasies that extends from a
fragmented body-image to a form of its totality that I shall call orthopaedic"
(Lacan, 1977a, page 4).<8>
What is noted but nonetheless left underdeveloped by Lacan is the degree
to which mirroring entails a number of spatial violations. First, I (here) am there
(in the mirror-image); there (the mirror-image) is here (ego). Second, the image itself
is two-dimensional and accordingly founds a two-dimensional subject. Third, the
image is a symmetrical inversion of the spectating body. That the mirror allows the
spectating child to occupy both positions at once means that the distance, difference
in dimensionality, and asymmetry between them are fantasmatically collapsed.
For Lacan, the mother plays a key role in the mirror stage in that she is assumed
to be the most proximal to the child throughout infancy and therefore the child's
primary or dominant "other" (Lacan, 1977b). In this sense, the child is said to first
know or negotiate its world through its mother, a way of knowing that Lacan deems
irnaginaryS9) This "other" is not, however, unmediated and therefore experienced naively
outside paternal law and language. Rather the mother-figure is seen as already bound,
defined, and structured by the Law, for which reason she is also (m)Other (see Bowie,
1991, page 138). Accordingly, she introduces the world of the Father to the child by
bringing paternal rules and regulations to the child performatively, which the child then
registers visually. These bourgeois heterosexualized positions of the nuclear family
undergird and inform Lacan's theorization of psychosexuality. As John Brenkman
(1993) puts it in his brilliant account of how psychoanalysis has suppressed the social
origins of masculinity: "The male child encounters the law limiting his desire in the
voice of the command the symbols designating the father as castrator and law-giver.
But it is through the process of recognizing himself in the father that he learns
masculinity and heterosexuality. His relation to his mother becomes Oedipal only as
he is socialized into masculinity and heterosexuality" (page 57).
(8)
Importantly, this fragmentation is something experienced retroactively, that is, in relation to
an anticipation of becoming whole, like the coherent unified image. As such, mirroring carries
with it profound implications for cultural constructions of time. In particular, through the
mirror, the infant's past is retroactively represented as a "body-in-pieces" at the same time that
the future is framed as a process of becoming the idealized image. It is this simultaneity that
Lacan locates as the primordial "violation of chronology" for the ego wherein "both future
and past are ... rooted in an illusion" (Gallop, 1985, page 81).
<9) Lacan uses the term "imaginary" to refer to the psychical register where images are
mistaken for reality.
Where's the difference? 565

Lcfcbvrc criticizes Lacan's notion of mirroring on three levels. I;irst, he claims

that mirroring is not about a disembodied ego passively locating itself in some two-
dimensional, apolitical mirror-surface. Second, it is also not about this disembodied
ego serving merely as a tabula rasa onto which ideal images are introjected passively,
nnrcissistically. Third, mirroring is not restricted to the human form and to dyadic,
specular relationships between two individuals or between individual and image.
But rather than discarding these cords of Lacanian theory, Lefebvre critically
reweaves them. Lefebvre tells us that mirroring involves the entirety of a subjects
relationship to a sociospatial landscape; it is about how a subject identifies with and
becomes materially and spatially embedded within the material world. He writes:
"The power of a landscape docs not derive from the fact that it offers itself as a
spectacle, but rather from the fact that, as mirror and mirage, it presents any
susceptible viewer with an image at once true and false of a creative capacity
which the subject (Ego) is able, during a moment of marvellous self-deception,
to claim as his own" (page 189).
When gazing out onto a material, sociospatial order 'out there*, then, we imagine
that it is we who have created it. We project onto the entire material world the
fantasmatic coherence of our ego. Obversely, specular introjection of the landscape
shores up the ego\s sense of power and coherence.
Lefebvre situates this mirroring in a complex evolutionary framework of spatial
history born through intersubjectivity and political engagement. Analogous to the
Lacanian subject's visually mediated passage from the real to the mirror stage,
Lcfcbvre's subject emerges bodily and politically from natural space into what he
calls absolute space. For both theorists, these movements found alterity.
The most important characteristic of absolute space (what Lefebvre calls "the
space of religion", page 163) is that it is mediated through language. Following
on the heels of natural space, absolute space "introduced the highly pertinent
distinction between speech and writing, between the prescribed and the forbidden,
between accessible and reserved spaces, and between full and empty" (page 163).
At the same time, however, form and function, signifier and signified, meaning
and action were inseparable. This unity was supplied through an originary Logos
that meant that meaning was lived in an immediate sense. Accordingly, Logos-
derived (divine-like) univocal meanings obtained in the world. Nonetheless, this
unity soon began to rupture, a rupture which Lefebvre discusses in terms of the
changing significance of pillars. During early Greek times, he says, pillars were
not mere functional elements. Rather, through the originary Logos, they were
considered material bridges between heaven and earth. Structure or signifier (in this
case the pillar) and what it signified (divine connections) were not conceived of
dichotomously.
Such unity began to tear during the time of Plato and, especially, Aristotle
for a number of reasons, and by Roman times was completely rent. Male Roman
political and religious elites defined and assigned meanings to the world through
arbitrarily coupling signifiers and signifieds according to their own political interests.
Meaning no longer flowed naturally out of Logos or logic, as was typical of early Greek
time, but from instating things, that is from assigning them politically negotiated and
therefore arbitrarily assigned meaning through Law. The divine-like order that had
previously made form and meaning continuous and inseparable was increasingly
replaced by an elite secular order: The pillar lost its ability to speak of an im-mediate,
logical and divine order and was reduced to an object-thing given meaning through
symbolic mediation. The early Logos-form of absolute space was in this way
replaced by patriarchal Law.
566 V Blum, H Nast

Lefebvre describes the qualities of this "fallen" absolute space in part by

recounting and interpreting the mythical narrative of Remus's founding of Rome.
Remus, we are told, "described a circle [defining the circumference of Rome] with
his plough" (page 244), consequently creating the prototypical circular orbis charac-
teristic of the Roman city, an inscription that would serve as the dominant image or
imago mundi of the Roman world:
"Orbis and urbs: always the circular, non-geometric form. The resulting rationality,
whether spatial or juridical, is detectable everywhere ... vault, arch, circle (circus,
circulus)even the Roman toga, which, in some periods at any rate, was cut by
simply opening a hole for the head in a round piece of material...
... [As a result the] way citizens 'thought' their city was not as one space among
others but instead as something vaster: the city constituted their representation
of space as a whole, of the earth, of the world" (page 244).
Remus's inscription created an urban space ontologically distinct from that
surrounding it: The city was identified with Civilization and the Law of the Father
whereas the not-city was identified with the maternal, materiality, and Nature.
As Lefebvre (1991, page 243) writes:
"The Father predominated; he became what he was: chief, political soldier, and
hence Law or Right ...
... Patriarchal power was ... accompanied by the imposition of a law of signs
upon nature through writing, through inscriptionsthrough stone."
The feminine, in contrast, became associated with Nature-yet-unclaimed beyond the
city walls and with urban lands juridically regulated as private (owned) property:
"Assigned to the feminine sphere were immediate experience, the reproduction of
life (which was, to begin with, inextricably bound up with agricultural produc-
tion), pleasure and pain, the earth, and the abyss below" (page 243).
Lefebvre thus sets up an implicit dichotomy between "spaces" that are not only
gendered but heterosexualized (paternal/maternal). He employs what Doreen Massey
has called a dichotomous dualism:
"[It] is neither a simple state of difference (A,B,...) nor a dualism constructed through
analysis of the interrelations between the objects being defined (capital:labour).
It is a dichotomy specified in terms of a presence and an absence; a dualism
which takes the classic form of A/not-A" (1992, page 71).
Further, although Lefebvre does not explicitly theorize the heterosexism sustaining
this alterity, he does theorize how constructions of the maternal and the paternal
served politically to articulate and harness "spaces of alterity". Thus, the emergence
of city-states is set in a context of growing alienation between town and country,
male and female.
The concept of imago mundi is key to understanding how Lefebvre's absolute
space bodily elaborates upon, and provides political insights into, the Lacanian
mirror stage. Lefebvre's clearest example of an "imago mundi", beyond the orbis of
the Romans, is the "flower" in whose shape the urban layout of Florence in the 12th
century was ostensibly structured (page 119). By presenting the world all-at-once,
the flower-image provided an illusion of ordered naturalness that was unselfcon-
sciously and unreflectively lived and reproduced. Accordingly, form and meaning
were lived out in apparent unity: the flower-shaped design of Florence, laid down
and legitimated by patriarchal politicoreligious elites, was not seen by the populace
as an abstract symbol set apart from what was lived in the world. Rather, the flower
of Florence was lived as a flower in ways that bounded Nature off from Culture, the
maternal from the patriarchal. In this sense, the Florentians' sense of the possible
and of the world was contained by the flower.
Where'n the difference? 567

Lefebvre\s discussion implies that the imago mundi materially arranged the
world according to a heterosexual logic derived from paternal Law at the same time
that the 'flower' dissimulated the political origins and cocrcivencss of its creation.
As a template of sociospatial order, the imago mundt materially and visually
ordered the world in ways that practically communicated a taken-for-grantcd
heteropatriarchy to the subject, at the same time providing the subject with a partic-
ular and unquestioned absolute experience of \space\ Given the overt sexualization
of subject-world relationships, it is telling that Lefcbvre never addresses hetero-
sexuality as such, even though he embeds his sociospatial analyses in a vocabulary
of the maternal and paternal.
There are noticeable similarities between Lcfehvre's imago muncli and Lacan's
imago: like the child experiencing alterity in relation to its lawful* (m)Other in the
mirror stage, Lefebvre sees humankind as a whole negotiating altertty through its
lawful' imago mundi; in neither instance are the patriarchal laws that give structure
and meaning to the world made transparent to those negotiating them. This is because
the law covers-over or makes natural its forceful couplings of signifier and signified,
Like the (m)Other of Lacan, the imago mundi provides the basis for a naively felt
phenomenal sense of alterity which obscures a politics of heteropatriarchy.
Lacan\s theory of an ego (formed through a purely visual relationship to surface
imagesthe imago) is resituated and rccoded by Lefebvre in terms of bodily spatial
processes in which visuality plays only a part. In Lefebvre's words, the subject,
enmeshed in Law, experiences and reproduces the sociospatial order of the imago
mundi through a corporealized process of identification and imitation that is very
different from Lacan's two-dimensional subjectivity. As Lefebvre writes,
"These mental categories, destined to become those of imagination and reflective
thought, first appear as spatial forms. The material extension of absolute space
occurs by virtue of these processes, to the benefit of priestly castes and the
political power they exercise or serve" (pages 236-237).
Lefebvre's formulation of alterity is consequently, unlike that of Lacan's bound
into a socially wide and dimensionally deep space of power and engagement.
The world, according to Lefebvre, could be reduced to two dimensions, but only by
replacing bodily, intersubjective engagements with visual consumption. Spatial,
corporeal experiences of the world would then be equated with what is seen.
Lefebvre compares the passivity of a vision-centered relation to the world with the
touristic experience of a landscape:
"A landscape ... has the seductive power of all pictures, and this is especially true
of an urban landscape ... that can impose itself immediately as a work. Whence
the archetypal touristic delusion of being a participant in such a work, and of
understanding it completely, even though the tourist merely passes through a
country or countryside and absorbs its image in a quite passive way" (page 189).
To the tourist, the landscape offers "an image at once true and false of a creative
capacity which the subject (Ego) is able, during a moment of marvellous self-deception
to claim as his own" (page 189). Set apart from the world, the tourist claims
knowledge of it. Although such knowledge is constituted primarily visually, the
tourist claims that he or she knows, this knowledge becoming the basis of what we
might call (following Lacan) spatial meconnaissance.
Lefebvre finds such visual reductionism in structuralist semiotic approaches to
space, especially that outlined by Barthes:
"In point of fact this approach leaves two areas untouched, one on the near side
and the other on the far side, so to speak, of the readable/visible. On the near
side, what is overlooked is the body. When 'Ego' arrives in an unknown country
568 V Blum, H Nast

or city, he [sic] first experiences it through every part of his bodythrough his
senses of smell and taste as {provided he does not limit this by remaining in his car)
through his legs and feet. His hearing picks up the noises and the quality of the
voices; his eyes are assailed by new impressions. For it is by means of the body
that space is perceived, livedand produced. On the far side of the readable/
visible, and equally absent... is power" (1991, page 162; our emphasis).
In both passages, then, Lefebvre underscores the connection between visuality,
leisure, and corporeal and political disengagement. Both the tourist 'passing through'
and the 'Ego' remaining in the car are passive, disengaged, bourgeois figures, figures
with the cultural and financial means by which to reduce the world to an image.
For these reasons, Lefebvre finds spatial fault with Lacan's theorization of the
subject in the mirror-stage. For Lefebvre, Lacan's subject is passively mired in a
spatial meconnaissance typical of the tourist or bourgeois, car-bound 'Ego'. Although
Lefebvre appreciates the psychical power of the mirror, unlike Lacan, he under-
stands mirroring to be a process of visual signification endemic to commodification
and capitalism, but which is also continually struggled against and transcended in
bodily, political ways. In a rare explicit reference to Lacan, tellingly placed in a
footnote, Lefebvre writes that Lacan's theory of the mirror stage, "freezes the Ego
into a rigid form rather than leading it towards transcendence in and through a
space which is at once practical and symbolic (imaginary)" (page 185). For Lefebvre,
then, what is lacking in Lacan's analysis of mirroring is some recognition of under-
lying material, spatial, and political forces that exceed the visual domain.(10) The
Lefebvrian subject of absolute space is always bodily, spatially, and politically
embedded in a material order, an imago mundi 'out there', which is similar to the
location of the Lacanian imago that originates from 'outside' the introjecting subject.
Nevertheless, Lefebvre's outside world, in contrast to that of Lacan, resists the
two-dimensional snapshot imposed by a 'frozen' Ego.
As with Lefebvre's theorization of 'natural space', however, there are a number
of problems with his characterization of the absolute. He merely states, for example,
that patriarchal Law emerged and established itself as male and that the imago mundi
of both Greek and Roman society were designed and sustained by men (scribes,
warriors, male leaders, the papacy, etc). He offers no discussion and no insights into
the participation, subjectivity, and struggles of those not empowered, particularly
women. In this sense, he reproduces the structuralist heterosexism of Lacan. Second,
Lefebvre's statements about history are given meaning retrospectively by creating a
system of the narrative coherence of history premised upon an irreducible gendered
Cartesian dichotomy of mind(man)-body(woman). Nonetheless, we find path-breaking
his attempts to bring together intrapsychic, spatial, and corporeal aspects of subjectivity
(io) This transcendence is elaborated in some detail in the following passage, a passage rife
with veiled critical allusions to Lacan and his theory of the mirror stage, which we have
numbered: "The mirror discloses the relationship between me and myself, my body and the
consciousness of my bodynot because the reflection constitutes my unity qua subject[l],
as many psychoanalysts and psychologists apparently believe, but because it transforms what
I am into the sign of what I am. This ice-smooth barrier, itself merely an inert sheen,
reproduces and displays what I amin a word, signifies what I amwithin an imaginary
sphere which is yet quite real[2]. A process of abstraction thenbut a fascinating abstraction.
In order to know myself, I 'separate myself out from myself. The effect is dizzying. Should
the 'Ego' fail to assert hegemony over itself by defying its own image, it must become Narcissus
[someone whose identity depends upon the mirror to continually shore up its subjectivity)or
Alice [whose two-dimensional mirror-world is identified with the material world]. It will then
be in danger of never rediscovering itself, space qua figment will have swallowed it up, and
the glacial surface of the mirror will hold it forever captive in its emptiness, in an absence
devoid of all conceivable presence or bodily warmth[3]" (1991, pages 185-186).
Where's the difference? 569

and his implicit location of hctcroscxuality as a driving political force in *space* and
history. All of these aspects are elaborated upon further in his account of historical
and abstract space, His theori/ation of this space is partly established in opposition
to Lacan\s theory of the phallus.

Lefcbvre's historical space and abstract space and Lacan's Symbolic

Both Lcfcbvrc and Lacan explain how the dyadic structure of mirroring is trans-
cended or ruptured through 'outside* forces, For Lacan, the unmediated identification
in the imaginary register ruptures with the intrusion of a third term, the phallus,
signifier of the division and desire that give rise to subjectivity. This is a long
process that, as we will show, originates with the cognitive and spatial separation of
the child from the mother, continues through the mirror stage, and is subsequently
worked out substitutively through language. It is the entrance into language which
founds the symbolic domain in the subject. Most importantly, the phallus as the
significr that both arises from and represents altcrity (the separation from the
mother who is then 'other* and the recognition of sexual difference) is incorporated
into the very structure of signification for Lacan. Hence, his theory of altcrity is
inextricably bound to an essential hcteropatriarchal account of the family and the
simultaneous and related hctcroscxualization of difference. Given that Lcfcbvrc
stridently repudiates and yet builds upon Lacan's version of the phallus and language,
we discuss it in some detail below.
For Lacan, the phallus is the significr of the desire for that which will put an end
to desirewhich is ultimately unattainable by the subject. It is because nothing will
suffice that Lacan calls the phallus "a signifier without a signified". Desire for the
phallus takes the human subject for a ride along the chain of linguistic displacement
and substitution, all objects substituting for the originary and impossible one. He
writes that the phallus "designate^] as a whole the effect of there being a signified
inasmuch as it conditions any such effect by its presence as signifier" (1985a,
page 80). It is because it is not real (Lacan claims that it cannot be identified with
an organ) that the effects of the phallus are all the more profound and unshakable.
As Jacqueline Rose (1985, page 49) writes:
"For Lacan, men and women are only ever in language .... All speaking beings
must line themselves up on one side or the other of this division [which occurs
in relation to the phallus], but anyone can cross over and inscribe themselves on
the opposite side from that to which they are anatomically destined. It is, we
could say, an either/or situation, but one whose fantasmatic nature was endlessly
reiterated by Lacan..."
At one one level, then, the body seems to be incidental to, and at times altogether
eliminated from, Lacan's account of the emergence of sexual difference and the
Symbolic order. To some degree his locating of identity in language itself (away from
the body) must be understood as standing in opposition to a flourishing mid-1950s
post-Freudian biologism. Yet, Lacan's antibiologism, his implicit condemnation of
the prevailing insistence upon a corporeal innateness and inevitability of masculinity
and femininity,*11) leads him to the opposite extreme: he locates subjectivity entirely
in languageof which the body becomes merely an effect. Lacan's assertion that the
Symbolic order precedes the human subject means, then, that subjectivity comes at
the price of shedding the body altogether.
Lacan's omission of the body is not altogether complete, however, in that he
depends upon essentiahzed anatomies to sustain much of his theory. Although, as
(n>See, for example, Helene Deutsch's (1930) work on female masochism and the maternal
destiny of women.
570 V Blum, H Nast

Rose avers, he would claim that we transcend our anatomical destiny through language,
his language paradoxically seems chained to 'anatomical' difference. Lacan's famous
statement that sexual difference only takes place "in the case of the speaking being",
is thus countervailed by his investment in the same old phallogocentric story of
organ difference and bourgeois heteropatriarchal child-rearing practices.
Despite his expressed effort to disengage anatomically gendered bodies from
their traditional familial roles, his theory nevertheless depends on positioning women
as primary caretakers and identifying men with the extradomestic sphere. Moreover,
the maternal is characterized as that which the child needs to escape in order to
achieve subjectivity; escape is facilitated through pursuit of the phallus. The phallus,
then, is what draws the child out of the maternal swamp to the loftiness of the 'outside'
Symbolic paternal order. Harkening back to a very literal psychoanalytic under-
standing of penis envy, Lacan casts the mother as the originary desiring subject
(of the penis) in his economy of psychosexual development. The dynamics of desire
in the mother-child relation underscore not only the mother's desiring subjectivity
but her pivotal role in producing a desiring subject, the child.
The child is said to turn away from the mother when it sees that it is no longer
the center of her world, that it alone is incapable of completing the world of the
mother. Lacan tells us that the child's relation to the mother, constituted as it is
"by the desire for her desire, identifies himself with the imaginary object of this
desire in so far as the mother herself symbolizes it in the phallus" (1977b,
page 198). Whether the mother's attention is directed to the father, another child,
or a job, it is the structure of the divergence of her desire from the child that is
crucial; it precipitates the child into subjectivity at the same time that subjectivity is
characterized by the very split from which it emerges. These object relations are
illustrated by Lacan in the following diagram:

Ph)

La nostal ie
(M) (E) g
du phallus
"Here's the situation as I sketch it outhere, the imaginary, that is, the desire of
the phallus on the part of the mother, there, the child, our center, who has to
make the discovery of this beyond, the lack in the maternal object. This is at
least one of the possible outcomesfrom the time the child finds a way of
saturating the situation and comes out conceiving the situation as possible, the
situation turns around him.
What do we find effectively in the fantasy of the little girl, and also of the
little boy? Inasmuch as the situation turns around the child, the little girl finds
then the real penis there where it is, beyond, in he who can give her the child,
identified, Freud tells us, in the father" (Lacan, 1994, page 202).<12>
(12)This passage has been translated from French (Lacan, 1994, page 202) by the authors and
Professor Suzanne Pucci. The original text reads: "Voyez la position telle que je la dessine
ici Timaginaire, c'est-a-dire le desir du phallus chez la mere, la l'enfant, notre centre, qui a a
faire la decouverte de cet au-dela, le manque dans l'objet maternel. C'est au moins une des
issues possiblea partir du moment ou l'enfant trouve a saturer la situation et a en sortir en
la concevant elle-meme comme possible, la situation pivote autour de lui. Que trouvons-nous
effectivement dans le fantasme de la petite fille, et aussi du petit gargon? Pour autant que la
situation pivote autour de l'enfant, la petite fille trouve alors le penis reel la ou il est, au-dela,
dans celui qui peut lui donner l'enfant, a savoir, nous dit Freud, dans le pere."
Whore's the difference? 571

The child's desire, then, is inaugurated by its recognition that it is not the sole
object of the mother's desire, a recognition that produces a profound sense of loss.
This 'something* othcr-than-thc-child that the mother desires is what Lacan con-
strues as the phallusthat object which (if the child possessed it) would restore the
original relation of wholeness with the mother, What the mother's desire reveals to
the child is that she is nonphallic (castrated), her lack' introducing the possibility of
'absence* into the child's psychical economy. The resulting body-image of the child
is thereby constitutionally and continually threatened with fragmentation and loss.
The child consequently strives to recover its central place in the mother's life and to
overcome its loss by having what the mother wants, namely the phallus. As Lacan
(L985b, page 83) writes,
"If the desire of the mother is the phallus, then the child wishes to be the phallus
so as to satisfy this desire. Thus the division immanent to desire already makes
itself felt in the desire of the Other, since it stops the subject from being satisfied
with presenting to the Other anything real it might have which corresponds to
this phalluswhat he has being worth no more than what he does not have as
far as his demand for love is concerned, which requires that he he the phallus."
The phallus is at once the term of division and transcendence: it is that which
leads the mother's desire away from the child and that which holds out the possibil-
ity of a reforged connection with the maternal.(,3) The connection must be pursued
indirectly through substitution, through the order of language. Significantly, it is
only the boy's body which is indelibly marked as capable of delivering or giving up
a phallus-gift, the pcnis.(,,1) This corporeal positioning of the gift once again under-
mines Lacan's putative distinction between corporeality and language, the penis and
the phallus. As we can see, his psychosexual framework is structurally grounded
in the heterosexual paradigm of the mother-son dyad, a potentially transgressive
unit that is contained only by the incest taboo. This is because it is only the boy
who is capable of action (in the form of giving), impressing (both in the sexual
act and more generally impressing himself upon the world in the form of produc-
tion), and signifying. Such reasoning suggests that only subjects who occupy the
masculine position are capable of primary acts of signification,
At the same time, the feminine subject is informed through paternal law that she
is 'not-all' in relation to the phallic functionshe has no object to give, nothing to
impress upon the world, nothing to inscribe. She enters the symbolic domain, but as
a subject of the law, able only to recycle the symbolic domains created by men. She
is not capable of primary acts of signification.
In the end, Lacan's universalizing, decorporealized, and culturally decontex-
tualized account of psychosexual development forestalls political change through
denying the political embeddedness of sexual identity. Not only does he theorize
desire from within the bourgeois nuclear family, thus limiting familial and social
diversity, he also grounds alterity and desire within naturalized anatomical difference.

<13> Having what the mother desires is negotiated differently for girls and boys. In identifying
with the paternal order, the male child wants to have the phallus that will reconnect him with
the mother. The penis of little boys is identified as that which might satisfy the mother, but
this is coupled with an incest taboo. The little boy therefore decides to become just like his
father and to wait to find a mother-substitute later in life to whom he can can deliver his
phallus-gift and make her complete. The little girl, in contrast, lacking on her body the
signifier associated with the mother's desire, instead fantasmatically becomes the link that will
restore her to a mythic prediscursive integrity.
(14> For an excellent account of the distinction between the Freudian penis and the Lacanian
phallus, see Jean-Joseph Goux (1992).
572 V Blum, H Nast

He consequently binds our options to functionalist (structuralist) reiterations of the

patriarchal same. It seems that the only difference Lacan can recognize is that
which distinguishes the child from the mother. Forcing upon us a script that casts
the phallus as the only means of escape from the maternal, his 'family romance'
celebrates the Culture-father releasing children from the predatory grasp of the
Nature-mother. Indeed, we might argue that, inasmuch as Lacan's phallus stands for
an escape from the maternal, the mother is implicitly equated with the materiality of
the body itself: she becomes 'body'. As a result, all acts of signification in the
Lacanian schema reproduce the originary separation from the maternal/body; we
speak our way out of the body.
In contrast, corporeality and 'space' are central to Lefebvre's history, which he
locates not in the divergence of the mother's desire away from the child, but in the
desire of various patriarchal political forces 'outside' absolute space. These forces
rupture the unmediated social relations that made the imago mundi an absolute
world unto itself. The paternal 'outside' is thus that which contests and thereby
exposes the imago mundi as a political construction. As we shall discuss below, it is
this rupture that allows for the production of an abstract space sustained by a
phallic political agency, what he calls the "phallic formant".
The rupture of absolute space was initiated by a group which Lefebvre mono-
lithically calls "barbarians". Heterosexist imagery prevails in his account of this
process: the barbarians "violated the sanctity of private property" (formerly "sterile");
this "fertilization" "gave birth to a [new] space" (1991, pages 252-253). This barbarian
conquest was important in that it secularized what had been the quasi-divine status
of a feminized Roman private property. Penetrating Roman lands, the barbarians
ruptured the specular absoluteness of the old sociospatial order. This was because
the politicoreligious insularity of the imago mundi could not contain them. Shattering
this world's illusory (imaginary) divinity and absolutism, the barbarian conquest
allowed for the emergence of new secular forms of historical and abstract space.
Nation-states would rise up from the ruins of the city-states of Roman days.
Historical space was the first to emerge, but only after the secularized, broken-
down space of the absolute became a site for "the accumulation of all wealth
and resources: knowledge, technology, money, precious objects, works of art and
symbols" (page 49), namely during the rise and dominance of merchant capitalism.
Such accumulation was, moreover, informed by the beginning of a separation of
productive activity ("labour") from reproduction (a process "which perpetuated
social life"), both activities having formerly been household-based (page 49). Later,
human beings themselves became abstracted and owned through the commodifica-
tion of labor and the emplacement of labor into private or owned spaces of capital,
both movements resulting in the overshadowing of historial space by abstract space.
Central to Lefebvre's account of the emergence of both historical and abstract space
was the hiving off of signifiers from their signifieds predominantly through the
agency of capital and the state. Capital came to dominate processes of primary
signification, that is, the creation of new signifiers and signifying fields, through its
ability to forcibly reduce three-dimensional, performative (lived) aspects of significa-
tion to two (below).
Progressive abstraction of spatiality and labor began when capital and the state
seized upon abstract Euclidean space to frame and situate the world. Euclidean
space allowed three-dimensional social relations and private property to be pro-
jected 'scientifically' onto two-dimensional surfaces. Lived forms were reduced to
planar configurations that could be much more easily managed through written
means, including directives, quotas, diagrams, and maps. In other words, by placing
Where's the difference? 573

the world inside Euclidean space and then geometrically manipulating it, capital
projected and managed the world through surfaces.
As the acting-out part of communication was eroded or, in Lefebvre's terms,
displaced, onto signifying surfaces (of written commands, maps, and plans), the
embodied, performed metaphors of imago mundi were dimensionally flattened.*15*
Imago mundi such as the flower of Florence could no longer be lived out as a
flower, im-mcdintcly, unrcflectively. Rather, the form of the flower, taken over by
capital and commodified, was reduced to, and thereby managed through, drawings,
enumerations, quotas, catalogues of sales, and receipts. The form of the flower
could theoretically attain any meaning assigned to it by capital: it could be an
ashtray, a pencil sharpener, a plastic facsimile, a hairpin. Metaphor and metonymy,
two aspects of language that Lefebvre insists were originally lived-out bodily/
spatially (Florence-as-flower), were reduced to mere "figures of speech1' leading to a
"logic of visualization":*16*
"The 'logic of visualization'... now informs the entirety of social practice .... In the
course of the process whereby the visual gains the upper hand over the other
senses, all impressions derived from taste, smell, touch and even hearing first
lose clarity, then fade away altogether, leaving the field to line, colour and light.
In this way, a part of the object and what it offers comes to be taken for the
whole. This aberration, which is ... normalizedfinds its justification in the
social importance of the written word ... all of social life becomes the mere
decipherment of messages by the eyes, the mere reading of texts" (page 286).
What is crucial here is that this flattening of the world through written language
belies the fact that there is something beyond the two dimensions that is doing the
flatteninga vertical force field of sorts. As Lefebvre writes:
"[Abstract] space cannot be completely evacuated, nor entirely filled with mere
images or transitional objects. It demands a truly full objectan objectal 'absolute'.
So much, at least, it contributes. Metaphorically, it symbolizes force, male
fertility, masculine violence. Here again the part is taken for the whole; phallic
brutality does not remain abstract, for it is the brutality of political power, of the
means of constraint: policy, army, bureaucracy. Phallic erectility bestows a
special status on the perpendicular, proclaiming phallocracy as the orientation of
space, as the goal of the processat once metaphoric and metonymicwhich
instigates this facet of spatial practice" (pages 286-287).
It is this privileged third direction of force and agency that Lefebvre calls the phallic
formant of abstract space, clearly drawing on psychoanalytic constructions of the
phallus. This might be the upright pen (which writes down quotas and issues pink
slips) as well as repressive state apparatuses (which materially enforce such symbolic
acts). In other words, for Lefebvre, the phallus is the godlike verticality of force
and agency that capitalism assumes in order to signify the world in ways that further
its own goals. The symbolic domain of capital and abstract space is therefore that
which is achieved through control over the third dimension of space and bodies.
Those not allowed such verticality, those who are commodified and scripted into
place, make up the not-vertical, the oppressed. Lefebvre depicts this vertical force
(15)
Lefebvre writes that surfaces included "a 'plan', a blank sheet of paper, something drawn
on that paper, a map, or any kind of graphic representation or projection" (1991, page 285).
(16)
It is this originally spatially communicative fullness that Lefebvre refers to when he writes
that "Metaphor and metonymy are not figures of speechat least not at the outset. They
become figures of speech. In principle, they are acts" (page 139). And that, "Although 'figures
of speech' [literary forms of metaphor and metonymy] express much, they lose and overlook,
set aside and place parentheses around even more" (page 140).
574 V Blum, H Nast

as masculine: it "'is'namely, arrogance, the will to power, a display of military and

police-like machismo, a reference to the phallus and a spatial analogue of masculine
brutality" (page 144). Importantly, he represents the relationship between capital
and labor in terms of a heterosexual paradigm. Labor is emasculated to the degree
that it is named and assigned meaning by capital, a structural relationship that
renders it passive; the modern capitalist state neutralizes "whatever resists it by
castration or crushing" (page 23).
Lefebvre's analysis of abstract space, then, locates Lacan's version of the phallus
in corporeal, spatial, and political terms. Rather than history being restricted to the
familial domain, it is situated in terms of a dynamic of 'nature', capital, and labor.
The fist that works to reduce the lived world onto two-dimensional 'symbolic'
surfaces is one of great material and social force, a force that Lacan makes incidental
to his dialectic of desire. Furthermore, whereas Lacan claims that the phallus is the
necessary cornerstone of language and culture (it rescues us from an oppressive
maternal), Lefebvre casts the phallus in morally and structurally negative terms.
Lefebvre also goes on to show how recent contradictions in the production of
abstract space offer opportunities for entertaining nondichotomous, non-phallus-
based forms of difference. Unlike Lacan, then, who leaves us stranded in an
unending reiteration of the phallic familial same, Lefebvre supplies us with practical
and political visions of escape.

Contradiction and difference

For Lefebvre, the production of abstract space has radically changed since its early
capitalist inception. The increasing replacement of labor by machinery has resulted
in a contradiction: a large labor surplus exists with decreasing means with which to
consume. To save the system from collapse, capitalists have developed new 'spaces
for consumption'. Profits are rescued at the same time that new jobs (in construc-
tion, road-building, tourism) are created. These would include private beaches,
parks, golf courses, commercial gardens (for example, Busch Gardens), marine
worlds (for example, Seaworld), and other vacation and leisure areas. These areas
serve as a new form of fixed capital that stimulates 'nature', producing what
Lefebvre calls a "second nature".(17) Capital is hence sedimented to, and allied with,
a form of 'nature'. This relationship dramatically refigures the social imagination
and the vicissitudes of desire between capital, labor, and the consumer.
Instead of desire being mediated through commodities that a consumer buys
which involves being part of a market 'penetrated' by a phallically positioned
capitalconsumers increasingly think about what utopic place they will penetrate
and inhabit for the sake of pleasure, an intercourse that is rented, not bought. What
is barely alluded to by Lefebvre is that this change repositions and resexualizes
relations between capital and labor: Consumers are made phallic while capitalist
forces are feminized; capital spatially lays itself out to seduce mass markets and to
be filled by paying customers (see also page 248). These persons pay-to-penetrate
an area on an occasional basis, when they so choose. In the process, consumers are
encouraged ('freed') to express their desire towards an unpolluted (maternal? virginal?)
expanse of 'nature'. The body is encouraged to break out of rote everyday move-
ments needed in the production and reproduction of everyday capitalist life

(17)
Lefebvre also forecasts an idyllic "second nature" that will result when (in a typical
Marxian scenario) machinery eventually liberates labor from laboring. Workers, subsequently
freed from work, will then live in an Edenic "second nature". This "second nature" is
therefore a kind of precursor to the Edenic form.
Where's the difference? 575

(page 353). We (as consumers) arc encouraged to use a place, rather than engage in
exchange relations. We are encouraged to dwell on the quality of a place, rather
than on the quantity of things bought or owned. Last, and most importantly, we are
inspired to appropriate rather than dominate space (page 410).
Lefcbvre theorizes that capitalism's shift to a "mode of production of space* has
had potentially revolutionary effects. Given a general realization that we can create
a 'second nature1, it is now much easier for communities critical of capitalist values
and abstract space to imagine and work towards producing alternative forms of
'space' that are noneapitalist. New social movements arc inspired and enabled to
produce counterplans for space that arc then "tried out", the plans undergoing what
he calls "trials by space" (page 416). As Lefebvre writes,
"Productive forces have ... taken another great leapfrom the production of
things in space to the production of space. Revolutionary activity ought, among
other things, to follow this qualitative leapwhich also constitutes a leap into the
qualitativeto its ultimate consequences. This means putting the process of
purely quantitative growth into questionnot so much in order to arrest it as to
identify its potential. The conscious production of space has 'almost' been
achieved. But the threshold cannot be crossed so long as that new mode of
production is pre-empted by the selling of space parcel by parcel" (page 357, his
emphasis).
What is revolutionary, then, is the emergence of spatial possibilities and desires
as such, allowing noncapitalist social arrangements previously suppressed or reduced
to be expressly corporealized and spatialized. Through communities appropriating
and reorienting space in critical ways, abstract spatial relations can be ruptured.
Whereas on the one hand, Lefebvre argues that such a reorientation is necessary on
a global scale (to the extent that capitalism is global), he sees transformation as
only ever occurring in partial, particularistic, and local ways. What results is not an
ultimate or perfect global resolution, but rather temporally and spatially uneven
patchworks of change.
Lefebvre's reworking of a traditional Marxist program for universal revolution is
somewhat revolutionary in itself. Whereas previously, revolution "was long defined
either in terms of a political change at the level of the state or else in terms of the
collective or state ownership of the means of production as such (plant, equipment,
industrial or agricultural entities)" and assumed "the rational organization of produc-
tion and the equally rationalized management of society as a whole", today, "such
limited definitions of revolution no longer suffice". What needs to be worked
toward is
"a collective ownership and management of space founded on the permanent
participation of the Interested parties', with their multiple, varied and even
contradictory interests. It thus also presupposes confrontationand indeed this
has already emerged in the problems of the 'environment' (along with the
attendant dangers of co-optation and diversion)" (all quotes from page 422).
Spatial appropriation can occur in two ways. First, those who are conscious of
the contradictions in contradictory space can harness them to serve transformative
agendas. Thus, 'green' parties appropriate the very discursive representations of
'second nature' purveyed by capitalism, calling upon and exploiting these repre-
sentations to subvert the degrading environmental effects of capitalism itselfits
exploitation and waste products.
A second method of appropriation occurs through spatial productions of difference.
Importantly, Lefebvre tells us that there are two primary forms of social difference,
induced and produced. Induced difference is not appropriative. Such divisions as
576 V Blum, H Nast

obtain between capital and labor are internal to, and generated by, the system of
capitalism as a whole. "An induced difference", Lefebvre explains, "remains within a
set or system generated according to a particular law. It is in fact constitutive of
that set or system" (page 372). Induced difference hence arises out of the domina-
tion of capital over labor.
In contrast, produced difference allows for appropriation in that it "presupposes
the shattering of a system; it is born of an explosion; it emerges from the chasm
opened up when a closed universe ruptures" (page 372). This is a difference that
confronts the system with its own blind spotsit is unassimilable difference born
out of what is at first structurally induced. Shantytowns, for example, grow up on
the margins of urban centers from capitalist processes that displace rural farmers
and an urban poor at the same time that these persons supply capitalists with cheap
labor. In other words, shantytowns are induced by a system that positions them as a
constitutive 'outside'. Nonetheless such structural placement can be shattered if
shantytown dwellers consciously refuse and find ways successfully to resist their
subordinate positionality.
Although we would not want to disregard the innovativeness of Lefebvre's
analysis, it is important to point out some theoretical problems with his critique.
First, there is an implicit Edenic quality to his 'second nature' that is reminiscent
of his account of an earlier 'nature' and natural space, couched in metaphors of
the maternal (above). One wonders, then, whether his predicted 'revolutions' will
transcend or reproduce the gendered hierarchies of heterosexuality. Does not
heterosexuality itself, given its dominant force in shaping history and alterity, have
to be ruptured in order for radically different sociospatial modalities to arise?
If not, what is to say that 'second nature' will not also be structured according to the
masculine gaze and desire?
Second, why must difference only emerge as an effect of the center's agency.
Struggles in the margins are consequently made to appear as secondary (reactionary)
rather than generative. This chain of causality draws upon an active-passive binary
that haunts Lefebvre's historiographical account of spatial change, something which
we shall elaborate upon further in our conclusions. He also occasionally calls upon
a 'female principle' to rescue us from the masculine brutality of abstract space, but
never clearly defines what this might be. Indeed his descriptions of the feminine as
primarily that which is abjected makes it difficult to grasp how he might ever
theorize women's agency.

Conclusions
It is not generally acknowledged that a psychoanalytically based understanding of
alterity informs much of Lefebvre's analysis of 'space' outlined in The Production of
Space (1991). Most importantly, his theorization of alterity through psycho-
analytically informed accounts of heterosexuality and his sustained reworking of
these accounts are systematically disregarded.(18) Consequently it is not recognized
that Lefebvre's spatially dialectical understanding of history is ultimately not
founded on class struggle (Harvey, 1990; Merrfield, 1993), but on the construction

<18) One way of gauging his emphasis on psychoanalytic theories is to skim the subject index
of the book where numerous citations of terms such as the "unconscious", "psychoanalysis/
psychoanalysis of space", "prohibitions", "phallic/phallic verticality", "narcissism", "mirrors/mirror
effects", "genitality", "Ego", and "desire(s)" are listed.
Where's the difference? 577

of altcrtty itself.(t,,) Accordingly, he processes class struggle through a vocabulary of

heterosexual positions within the bourgeois family (see also Lefebvre, 1990).
Our work, in contrast, has emphasized the connections between Lefebvre and
Lacanian psychoanalysis. We explored Lefebvre's criticisms of the apolitical, aspatial,
and decorporealizing manner in which Lacan theorizes alterity, subjectivity, and
signification. We also showed how Lefebvre relocates the production of subjectivity
(history) from within the intrafamilial domain to the sociospatial,
Lefebvrc's work is ground breaking for at least three reasons. First, it charts the
changing ways in which constructions of the maternal and paternal have been paradig-
matically extended across politics and 'space'. Second, he exposes the bourgeois
origins of Lacan's mirror-stage and the spatial privilege and violence subtending
the pivotal role of the phallus. Third, he presents a revolutionary corrective for
'thinking' space in Marxian terms.
Nevertheless, there are a number of problems with his analysis that need to be
addressed. First, his schema begins with an originary and Edcnic maternal space
(the natural) to which he seems to want to return (second nature). Second, his
framework depends upon a heterosexuality that is fixated in a number of rigid
gendered distinctions that wind up equating the paternal with activity, movement,
agency, force, history, while the maternal is passive, immobile, subject to force and
history. Most problematic is the degree to which Lefebvre's version of heterosexual-
ity turns on an active-passive binary. If activity is that which materially inscribes
the body in history, and only those inscriptions which are coded masculine are
considered, feminine bodies necessarily become invisible. 'Masculine' agency is
privileged partly through emphasizing masculine spaces; the more mutable and
'feminized' sociospatial practices and struggles are completely ignored.
Definitional exclusion of the feminine plays itself out at two interconnected
levels: structurally female agency is foreclosed, rendered unrecognizable, and made
theoretically impossible; practically such exclusion winds up rejecting everyday
forms of nonmasculinist agency that have traditionally gone unrecorded. Ironically,
Lefebvre winds up reproducing corporeally the very decorporealizing strategies of
Lacan. Lacan's single 'sex' (the phallic) reemerges in Lefebvre's single agentthe
man. Lefebvre's examples of female agency are few in number and couched in
vague and contradictory terms. And when he does speak of potential female revolt,
the fact that he isolates Valerie Solanas (a lesbian extremist) belies an underlying
conviction that historical change is effected ony through phallic aggressivity.
Third, Lefebvre's schema is evolutionary and, despite statements to the contrary,
totalizing. In between his opening nostalgia for and closing prophetic recuperation
of the 'maternal', Lefebvre outlines a developmental history of sociospatial progress
in which the only 'authentic' struggles against heteropatriarchy are deferred to
future contradictory and differential space. All struggles to date are consequently
subordinated to an overarching telos; ignored are the power of noncapitalist cultural
projects, struggles, and differences as well as the activities of those who have no
representative status in the capitalist system. Indeed, as Gibson-Graham (1993)
argues with respect to Marxian constructions of capital more generally, we have a

(19> Merrifield (1993) is a particularly good example of how the heterosexist language of
Lefebvre is reproduced. In reference to his avowed Lefebvrian interpretation of space he
writes, "Capital is an inexorably circulatory process diffusive in space which also fixates itself
as a thing in space and so begets a built environment. The fixity nature (the things quality) of
the geographical landscape is necessary to permit the flow and diffusive nature of capital; and
vice versa ... flows do take on a thing form in place and hence are always vulnerable in that
place" (page 521).
578 V Blum, H Nast

capitalism with no 'outside'. Spatiohistories cannot happen outside of capitalismat

least not any worth recording. Even when Lefebvre theorizes produced difference,
it is always a consequence of the agency of capital. His retrospective superaddition
of a corrective 'mode of production of space' allows him to explain why revolution
has been delayed and to sustain a Marxian fantasy of global change. Through such
an adjustment the erstwhile troubling delay of the revolution is simply ingested
as part of the process instead of becoming the end of the story. Retrospection is
thus integral to providing spatiohistory with narrative coherence, in the process
guaranteeing that his historical trajectory will always be 'right'.
Last, the ways in which Lefebvre and Lacan figure the structures of both capitalism
and heterosexuality make them appear identical and interdependent. Because male
agency is the only agency identifiable, femininity of all kinds is ultimately repre-
sented as politically irrelevant. Lefebvre's gendered dialectic reproduces the very
binary logic sustaining Lacan's phallic regime. Monolithic, enforced through masculine
agency, and ultimately dependent on the submission of a feminized other (be it women
or e-masculated labor), Lefebvre's political program remains inflexibly a story for
and about men.
Because transcending masculinist capitalism is central to Lefebvre's project,
it is crucial to take note of the blind spots and impasses that have led him to be
complicit with that which he otherwise repudiates. Given the widespread influence
of his work, we must be wary of inadvertently appropriating aspects of Lefebvre's
study that might thwart rather than stimulate liberatory initiatives. In closing, then,
we would like to suggest a few ways of moving beyond the theoretical impasses of
both Lefebvre and Lacan: how should we locate difference; where is the difference
and how are we to recognize it?
To begin with, we need to recognize that the negation sustaining contemporary
forms of heterosexuality can be resisted. At the same time, even granting that a
negation-dependent form (A/not-A) of heterosexuality is dominant in Western
cultural contexts, it is always exceeded. Just as Lefebvre posits that we always
bodily and spatially exceed the surface of the mirror, so too we continually exceed
the disciplining patriarchal codes of contemporary social orders. As many have
written, there are significations and valorizations of female bodies that disobey,
resist, and overcome their dominant coding as 'lack' (for example, Butler, 1990; 1993;
Grosz, 1994; Irigaray, 1993).
What has not been discussed sufficiently, however, is how this excess pervades
all sexualities to the point that sexuality itself becomes a problematic category.
Many 'heterosexual' women, for example, obviously valorize their bodies in ways that
exceed the narcissistic economy of being the object of male desire. So, too, lesbians,
to varying degrees, have worked to wrest a positive sexuality from double negation
(not-A/not-A) in the process forging possibilities for nonphallic economies of
desire. Similarly, bisexuals, transvestites, transsexuals, and gay men, have corporeally
remapped desire in ways that resist homogenization.
What we need to recognize, then, is how these contradictory, excessive sexualities
have also (and always) traversed bodies and 'space', interfusing with sociospatial
relations which exceed received capitalist representations. Counter to Lefebvre's
evolutionary scenario, where such excesses would be cast as emerging only during a
revolutionary 'end time', we find that radically different ways of signifying the
corporeal and the spatial have always occurred, albeit in historically variable (versus
dialectically progressive) ways. What these 'presences' would suggest, then, is that
we need to reconceptualize "capitalism not as something large and embracing but as
something partial" (Gibson-Graham, 1993, page 18). Gibson-Graham suggests that
Where's the difference? 570

one way we might do this is to take something considered central to capitalism's

existence, such as property law, and recognize it in noneapitalist contexts.*20*
We might also locate communities that recognize and work towards 'difference'
outside capitalist systems, in the process making irrelevant the induced/produced
distinction theorized by Lefebvrc. This is clear, for example, in various indigenous
movements that seek to recover differences denied to them. In reference to the
armed conflict in Chiapas, Mexico that succeeded the passage of the NAFTA
agreement, for example, Guatemalan activist and Nobel prize winner Rigobcrta
Menchu (1994, page 59) writes,
"Although those indigenous to the continent want to feel integrated and improve
their lives, they want to do so in a way that differs from the economic premises
of a NAFTA-type agreement. In the first place, NAFTA does not take into
consideration the fundamental fact that the land has been taken away from the
indigenous peoples of this region ... [W]hilc NAFTA may create new markets
and a better economy, it does not take into consideration the indigenous world
view or way we understand our surroundingsin a word, our cosmology. None
of the Western development programs or models understand the difference
between the organizing principles of the marketbanking, corporations, and
enterpriseand our organizing principles, community life. We want holistic,
integrated development that holds the community sacred. We see the community,
not the market, as the building block of a model of self-reliant development
based on cooperative village life. The cooperatives we are establishing are not
dependent on government aid, but are self-sustaining. They arc also sustainable
in the environmental sense. Crops are not grown for export in a way that would
outstrip the local ecology; the land is exploited only insofar as it is necessary to
feed the local community .... The cooperative at Los Pinos ... bears notice ...
We call this place La Nueva Esperanze, The New Hope. It is a model to show
the world that other forms of development in keeping with our cultural traditions
are possible."
This passage demonstrates that, for many indigenous persons, capitalism functions
as merely an adjacent economic system which is for the most part outside their
imperatives, their codes of achievement and failure, the scope of their desires.
Certainly initiatives such as these may be tenuous. But, by recognizing local refusals
to capitalist relations it becomes apparent that capitalism is also vulnerable to
ideological shifts, activists' initiatives, and fluctuating economic trends beyond the
'system's' control. In a sense, capitalists must work around and through difference,
such that gaps, fissures, and contradictions are always present and yet often unrecog-
nizable, unpredictable. In order to overcome the monolithic effect of Heterosexuality,
of Capitalism, we must be attuned to their partialities and multiplicities. It is the
differences within these ostensibly self-identical edifices that offer a map as to
where we might find difference without them.
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P 1996 a Pion publication printed in Great Britain