Re-encountering Lefebvre: Toward a critical phenomenology of social space

Abstract

In this article, I present a critical phenomenological reworking of Lefebvre’s theory of social space from the perspective of minority subjects. To do so, I identify phenomenological themes present in The Production of Space, reading it alongside Merleau-Ponty’s Phenomenology of Perception. This reading emphasizes Lefebvre and Merleau-Ponty’s shared critiques of space, their relational ontologies, and their emphasis on bodily practice. With these shared concerns in view, I then extend this phenomenological reading of Production by bringing it into conversation with scholarship in critical phenomenology. Critical phenomenology has developed largely out of the work of Merleau-Ponty and seeks to revise classical phenomenological accounts to attend to issues of race, gender, sexuality, disability, and other categories of social difference. I demonstrate how critical phenomenology can be brought to bear on Lefebvre’s account of social space and the subject, considering how it can concretize and actualize the political potential Lefebvre attaches to differential embodiment in Production. Bringing these perspectives to bear on Lefebvre’s conception, I argue, does important work to actualize his vision of differential embodiment as a political and spatial practice.

Is post-phenomenology a critical geography? Subjectivity and difference in post-phenomenological geographies

“…Yet existing work that straddles these divides and their competing commitments proves encouraging (e.g. Simonsen, 2010), as do new engagements between critical phenomenology and geographic theory (Kinkaid, 2019c).…”

“…Merleau-Ponty’s work – the most salient reference point for both post-phenomenology and critical phenomenology – is similarly concerned with articulating a lived account of perception and embodiment more generally. In his major work, Phenomenology of Perception (2012 [1945]), Merleau-Ponty builds an account of the embodied subject and its engagements with objects and others, demonstrating how acts of perception link the material, symbolic, and embodied into a relational whole (see Kinkaid, 2019c, for a detailed treatment of his relational ontology). In doing so, he rejects empiricist and idealist accounts of the subject and space, looking to embodied experience for a new philosophical ground.…”

“…This unmarked subject is indeed problematic. In recognition of this, much critical phenomenological work has started from the interpretive space opened up by inserting minority bodies into Merleau-Ponty’s framework (see Ahmed, 2006; Kinkaid, 2018, 2019c; Lee, 2014; Norwood, 2018; Young, 1990). This move within critical phenomenology has thus been a generative starting point for revising the classical phenomenological subject.…”

“…The first move critical phenomenologists make to correct the oversights of the classical phenomenological subject is to undertake phenomenological description from the perspective of concrete, historically situated subjects, particularly ‘minority subjects’ (Kinkaid, 2019c). The experiences of these subjects, by virtue of their non-normative embodied identities, gestures, and spatial practices, illuminate how spaces and worlds are formed around the bodies of normative subjects and how space becomes organized around logics of identity and difference.…”

Entangled phenomenologies: Reassessing (post-)phenomenology’s promise for human geography

“…Comfort is enacted through correlational rules, which are uncovered as we (phenomenologically) analyse the relations between bodies, circumstances and objects. Reflecting on such rules brings to light how certain spaces and objects are engineered to make certain bodies more comfortable than others, as Bissell's account shows, and hence enables us to address and change these rules, revealing phenomenology's critical potential (on critical phenomenology, see also Kinkaid, 2020aKinkaid, , 2020bMattingly, 2019;Simonsen, 2013).…”