#10

Lefebvre, The Production of Space, "From Absolute Space to Abstract Space":

"In the extensions and proliferations of cities, housing is the guarantee of reproductivity, be it biological, social or political. Society -- that is, capitalist society -- no longer totalizes its elements, nor seeks to achieve such a total integration through monuments. Instead it strives to distil its essence into buildings. As a substitute for the monumentality of the ancient world, housing, under the control of a state which oversees both production and reproduction, refers us from a cosmic 'naturalness' (air, water, sun, 'green space'), which is at once arid and fictitious, to genitality -- to the family, the family unit and biolgocial reproduction. [...] Shattered by a host of separations and segregations, social unity is able to reconstitute itself at the level of the family unit, for the purposes of, and by means of, generalized reproduction." (232)

Exercise of political power required for transit from absolute to abstract space

Rome, the mundus, paternal law: "The Pater-Rex did not have a passive relationship to the world; rather, he reorganized it according to his power and rights, Property and Patrimony, jus utendi et abutendi -- the limits of which were set not by the 'being' of others but rather by the rights of those among the others who partook of the same power. The Pater-Rex, later Imperator, at once magistrate and priest, thus reconstituted the space around him as the space of power. [...] Paternity's imposition of its juridical law (the Law) on maternity promoted abstraction to the rank of a law of thought. Abstraction was introduced -- and presupposed -- by the Father's dominion over the soil, over possessions, over children, over servants and slaves, and over women." (243)

"What Rome offers is an image that engenders (or produces) space. What space? Specifically, the space of power. Political space is not established solely by actions (with material violence generating a place, a legal order, a legislation): the genesis of a space of this kind also presupposes a practice, images, symbols, and the construction of buildings, of towns, and of localized social relationships." (244-45)

Why did the process of accumulation begin not in antiquity, where numerous favorable preconditions were present, but in medieval Europe (ca. 12th century)?
"I propose the following answer: the space that emerged in Western Europe in the twelfth century, gradually extending its sway over France, England, Holland and Italy, was the space of accumulation -- its birthplace and cradle. Why and how? Because this secularized space was the outcome of the revival of the Logos and the Cosmos, principles which were able to subordinate the 'world' with its underground forces. Along with the Logos and logic, the Law too was re-established, and contractual (stipulated) relationships replaced customs, and customary exactions. (P). With the dimming of the 'world' of shadows, the terror it exercised lessened accordingly. It did not, however, disappear. Rather, it was transformed into 'heterotopical' places, places of sorcery and madness, places inhabited by demonic forces -- places which were fascinating but tabooed. Later, much later, artists would rediscover this ferment of sacred and accursed. At the time when it held sway, however, no one could represent this 'world'; it was simply there. Space was ridden with hidden powers, more often malign than well-disposed. Each such place had a name, and each denomination also referred to the relevant occult power: numen-nomen. Place names (lieux-dits) dating from the agro-pastoral period had not been effaced during the Roman era. On the contrary, the Romans' innumerable minor superstititions relating to the earth, carried down via the villae and tied into the great maledictions of Christianity, could only sustain the profusion of sacred/cursed sites scattered across the face of the land. In the twelfth century a metamorphosis occured, a displacement, a subversion of signifiers. More precisely, what had formerly signified, in an immediate manner, that which was forbidden, now came to refer solely to itself qua signifier -- stripped of any emotional or magical referential charge. [...] Besides being decrypted, medieval space was also cleared. Social practice -- which did not know where it was going -- made space available for something else, made it vacant (though not empty). As part of the same process, the 'libido' was freed -- that tripartite libido which was denounced by Augustinian theology and which founded the secular world: libido sciendi, dominandi, sentiendi: curiosity, ambition, sensuality. Thus liberated, libido mounted an assault upon the space open before it. This space, deconsecrated, at once spiritual and material, intellectual and sensory, and populated by signs of the body, would become the recipient, first of an accumulation of knowledge, then of an accumulation of riches. Its source, to locate it precisely, was less the medieval town envisaged as a community of burghers than that town's marketplace and market hall (along with their inevitable companions the campanile and the town hall)." (263-64)

"Money and commodities, still in statu nascendi, were destined to bring with them not only a 'culture' but also a space. The uniqueness of the marketplace, doubtless on account of the splendour of religious and political structures, has tended to be overlooked. We should therefore remind ourselves that antiquity looked upon trade and tradespeople as external to the city, as outside its political system, and so relegated them to the outskirts. The basis of wealth was still real property, ownership of the land. The medieval revolution brought commerce inside the town and lodged it at the centre of a transformed urban space. The marketplace differed from the forum as from the agora: access to it was free, and it opened up on every side onto the surrounding territory -- the territory the town dominated and exploited -- and into the countryside's network of roads and lanes. The market hall, an inspired invention, was for its part as far removed from the portico as it was from the basilica; its function was to shelter the transaction of business while permitting the authorities to control it. The cathedral church was certainly not far away, but its tower no longer bore the symbols of knoledge and power; instead the freestanding campanile now dominated space -- and would soon, as clock-tower, come to dominate time too." (265)

cryptic space -- taboo and mystery of the underworld
Gance's walking dead
ground-space as underworld, city as grotto/catacomb
Adorno/Horkheimer and the incantatory word

On war: "Between the twelfth and the nineteenth centuries wars would revolve around accumulation. Wars used up riches; they also contributed to their increase, for war has always expanded the productive forces and helped perfect technology, even as it has pressed these into the service of destruction. Fought over areas of potential investment, these wars were themselves the greatest of investments, and the most profitable. Cases in point are the Hundred Years War, the Italian wars, the Wars of Religion, the Thirty Years War, Louis XIV's wars against the Dutch and against the Holy Roman Empire, and the wars of the French Revolution and Empire. The space of capitalist accumulation thus gradually came to life, and began to be fitted out. [...] Industry would pitch its tent in a space in which the communitarian traditions of the countryside had been swept away and urban institutions brought to ruin by wars (through the links between towns, the 'urban system', had not disappeared). This was the space, piled high with the rich spoils of years of rapine and pillage, which was to become the industrial space of the modern state." (275-76)