OMG 6 years later and I wrote about Ed Soja again

What to do with a socio-spatial dialectic?

For a group of readings which not only play Marxism at the margins, but engage with it directly, it is fair to ask of them back a very Marxist question: what about Praxis? It is one thing to appreciate the intellectual gymnastics of Lefebvre and his “dense drift across a series of themes, disciplines, topics and targets” as Mark Rainy calls it. It is another thing to shape his amble around the Hegelian Place de L’Etoile into actionable theory. Postmodern Geographies is a fascinating meditation on the question of space in capitalism and geography in modern critical theory. But one can not help but wonder about the relevancy of this to radical politics and emancipatory writing while wading through passages on spatialized ontology. But the refocus on both of these works on space and class struggle come at a perfect time as political debates try to make sense of the supposed total digitization of political and social life. We have their ideas for our use whenever we insist that the streets still matter.

Although 1973 might feel like ancient history to us now, we can take comfort knowing that in his own time Lefebvre was responding to the temptation to ignore the centrality of space in political struggle. His conversation throughout his work with the project of the situationists means that he was well aware of the trend towards reducing everything to the spectacle. If Hegel were alive today he’d probably tell you that the spirit of history had been uploaded to the World Wide Web.     

In Postmodern Geographies, Soja explains how geography was often neglected for being

considered to be stilted, empirical, and thoroughly undialectical as opposed to the preferred

focus on time and history. He gives a thorough summary of why space has often been pushed

to the side by the injunction to “always historicize”. In the chapter on the Socio-spatial Dialectic, Soja provides some fascinating viewpoints and directs our attention towards an understanding of why controlling public space is still important in our contemporary age. Political power is not only interested in controlling what goes on at the point of production, in the realm of ideology (and its digital manifestations), but indeed aims to create a built environment conducive to the survival of capitalism. Class struggle, therefore, must include a fight over the production of space and its “territorial structure of exploitation and domination”.

It is not enough that a radical democratic politics have an egalitarian space for all to speak. It must also demand questions over the use of space itself as up for discussion. At the risk of making homologies between space and the economic realm, Marxist Geography works to reminds us that a substantial political demand is one which argues about the means of their production. When thinking about a fight over use of a public square, or the fate of a marginalized urban group, foreign wars, or even our own individual place in everyday life, it is useful to remember its injunction: always territorialize!