Wen Quan: The French Phenomenological Foundations of Western Marxist Spatial Philosophy
As one of the mainstream discourses of Western left-wing radical thought since the 1960s, Marxist spatial critique—which originated in France and subsequently flourished within Anglophone academia—possesses a profound metaphysical connection with the logical trajectory of French phenomenology during the mid-to-late 20th century. On one hand, from the perspective of specific academic history, this is reflected in the fact that the concept of "differential space"—the starting point of the spatial turn in Western Marxist philosophy, aimed at sublation [1] of the abstract spatial order of capital and constructed around a spatial triad—is a crystallization of Henri Lefebvre’s critical inheritance of certain phenomenological categories. These include the "situated" ambiguous experience proposed by Maurice Merleau-Ponty within the horizon of the "body-space" dialectic, as well as the "othered" spatial heterotopia identified by Michel Foucault in the context of the "body-power" dialectic. On the other hand, from the general trajectory of intellectual history, this manifests in the resonance produced at the spatial level between the "materiality," "practicality," and "struggle-oriented" [2] qualities emphasized by Marxist philosophy and the traditions of "corporeality," "otherness," and "lived experience" characteristic of French phenomenology—a tradition that performed existentialist and materialist "misreadings" of Husserl’s idealist phenomenological legacy through the lenses of both Heideggerian and Hegelian philosophy. In other words, taking Merleau-Ponty, Foucault, and Lefebvre as nodes, the conceptual evolution revealed in the dimension of intellectual history—moving from "ambiguous experience" to "othered space" and finally to "differential space"—reflects both the opportunity for French phenomenology to wed itself to Marxist philosophy via the medium of "space," and the attempt by Western Marxist thought to derive inspiration for its discursive turn from the field of phenomenology.
It is thus evident that although the Western Marxist philosophical critique of space, pioneered by Lefebvre, has developed in complex and multifaceted directions, subsequent scholarly inquiries into related issues cannot bypass the theoretical high ground opened by Lefebvre. Precisely for this reason, the thought of "space"—nurtured by French phenomenology and implanted into the framework of Marxist philosophy by Lefebvre through critical inheritance—undoubtedly determined that the movement of Marxist spatial critique, which became a grand spectacle after the 1960s, is essentially the intellectual crystallization of the intervention of French phenomenology into Marxism (or vice versa).
I. Merleau-Ponty’s Body-Space Dialectic and Ambiguous Experience
The emergence of Merleau-Ponty’s philosophy of the body can be seen as a weather vane for the spatial turn in Western Marxist research paradigms. By reconstructing the fragments of spatial philosophy within Husserl’s phenomenological legacy, he outlined a brand-new interpretive perspective for the theoretical presuppositions concerning the dialectical relationship between "matter, practice, and freedom" found in the young Marx. Indirectly, he provided a spatial metaphysical foundation, colored by phenomenology, for the shift in Western Marxist discursive paradigms after the 1960s. Academically, the core of the issue lies in Merleau-Ponty’s attempt to replace Husserl’s essentialist transcendental intuition with situated bodily intentionality within the dimension of the phenomenology of perception. Furthermore, surrounding the dialectical relationship between the body and space, he highlighted ambiguous experience with space as its vehicle, thereby echoing Marx’s free practice mediated by matter. This mainly includes the following three progressive levels:
First is the repositioning of transcendental space by the situated body. This is nothing less than the foundational step by which Merleau-Ponty subverts the phenomenological tradition since Husserl and takes the opportunity to introduce the concept of ambiguity. For Husserl, objectified space or spatial objects are the result of transcendental apperception (Auf-fassung) within the perceptual field of sensations characterized by orientation (Zuwendung) and grasping (Er-fassung). Moreover, "the field as a perceptual field is a perceptual space, containing all individual things within it along with all their spatial forms. Each perceived object is presented within perception as a configuration of space at a position in that field, that is, presented through its qualitatively filled form." In other words, in the context of Husserlian phenomenology, space is rather an intentional form projected outward by a "perceptual field" endowed with spatial significance. Through transcendental reduction, it is further transformed into the field of "proto-presence" (Urpräsenz) for the scientific cognition of space. Consequently, space becomes a purely reflective existence that brackets [3] individual experience, and by virtue of its clarity and lack of ambiguity in transcendental intuition, it cancels the ambiguity of experience itself. Regarding this, Merleau-Ponty pointed out sharply: "We must not remain in a reflective attitude, in an irreproachable Cogito; we must also understand the natural situation that reflective consciousness finds following itself, and which is therefore part of its definition. Consequently, one no longer affirms an absolute unity (Unité)." Furthermore, "the center of philosophy is no longer a transcendental subjectivity that is everywhere and nowhere." It is easy to see that the key link in Merleau-Ponty’s transformation of Husserl’s view of space is the re-confirmation of the absolute priority of the "natural situation" in which the intentional subject resides over the reflective space governed by "transcendental subjectivity." This so-called "situation" (or "context"), in Merleau-Ponty’s view, is nothing less than the phenomenological junction between space and the body where intentionality occurs. He noted: "Each person feels given a body, given a situation, and through the body and situation, given existence; all that he knows of himself passes over into the other at the very moment he feels his surprising power." That is to say, it is the situatedness of the body itself that grants transcendental spatial phenomena the possibility of objectification.
This leads to the question of the constitution of space by the body. It should be said that "in Husserl's first approach to the subject, space is treated as a strict object. Therefore, a concept of living space capable of responding to the existential body cannot emerge here. Even if he emphasizes here that the centric or centralized body is the essence of objective space, the latter remains a purely visual space." In essence, this is merely the result of the Cogito as a transcendental subject performing an essential construction of space through the mode of "seeing" (Voir). As for concrete spatial experience, it is transcendentally bracketed during the intentional process. Conversely, Merleau-Ponty argues: "The ultimate meaning of the Cogito is not to reveal a universal constituent, or to reduce perception to an act of understanding, but to verify the fact of reflection which both governs and maintains the ambiguity of perception." And the ambiguity of perception is precisely the mode of being within space for the body that is situated and constructs spatial imagery from a situated perspective. Therefore, space is rather the "horizon" of the body. It "is a new type of being, a being of porosity, pregnancy, or generality, a being before which horizons open and in which the being is caught and contained." In this scenario, space is no longer a pure relationship of the positions of things or a static intentional form of the subject; rather, it "is a complex qualitative existence capable of responding to the subject’s kinesthetic experience and thereby becoming actualized." Taking the situation as its base, it reflects the conjugate structure between the body and space.
Second is the endowment of meaning to kinesthetic space by the ambiguity of bodily experience. If the introduction of the concept of situation marks Merleau-Ponty’s preliminary negation of Husserl’s determinations regarding spatial attributes, then the process by which his so-called ambiguous bodily experience endows space with meaning signifies the final establishment of a spatial phenomenology at the perceptual level, premised on dialectical negation. The latter can be seen as a deepening of Merleau-Ponty’s inquiry into the constitutive problem of space. To be sure, Husserl also analyzed the situational basis upon which space is constituted, centering on the relationship between perception and spatial objects. He believed that "in the constitution of the perceived spatial object itself, even if it is only a purely visual spatial phantom," "we already have a latent, analytically demonstrable formation of a constitutive synthesis; it is indeed an 'appearance,' and this appearance refers to the kinesthetic 'environment' to which it belongs." "This object becomes the basis for all spatial objects and thus for all objects of material reality." However, in Merleau-Ponty’s view, the "kinesthetic environment" (i.e., the phenomenal field) regarded by Husserl as the basis for spatial objects and spatial perception remains a transcendental category in a purely reflective sense. It denies the primordiality of bodily experience and treats "my presence" as a false existence eventually extracted by transcendental intuition. Thus, "any momentary perceptual space (the perceptual field of proto-presence) or the spatial proto-presence as the stable total form of the objects perceived within that moment" can only be a transcendental sensation field presented in a total form, a profile of vision. Consequently, the perceptual constitution of space by the body is transformed into a process of transcendental constitution in which the transcendental "perceptual field" dictates the specific position or manner (Wie) through which the body grasps space. In view of this, Merleau-Ponty points out that the body's constitution of space is not a matter of a subject controlled by a transcendental Cogito performing passive positional confirmation of a space already pre-grasped by transcendental ideas within the boundaries demarcated by the "perceptual field" of proto-presence. To the contrary, it is rather the process by which the living body endows space itself with meaning according to the current situation. By appropriating the concept of negation from Hegelian dialectics, he further analyzes:
In fact, this false certainty of my presence is nothing but a deeper or double negation. It entirely occupies my field of life, yet this also means it is about to merge back into the world: a moment later, as I say this, it may have already disappeared, giving way to another "this." It is only because it is fleeting, constantly threatened by another "this," that it determines my nothingness. Its "pressure" on me is merely the negation of other negations—of the past "this" that "was" and the future "this" that "will be"—thus, filling the crack is actually digging the rift.
Clearly, by revealing the instantaneous correspondence between "my presence" and a specific spatial position, Merleau-Ponty identifies the internal mechanism of how the perceiving body constitutes phenomenal space through its own dialectical movement. As the medium for the subject’s leap from the "field of life" to the "world," the "this" that can fill a position and thereby determine in what form the body endows space with meaning is nothing other than the primordial spatial situation conjugate with bodily experience. In the transition between past and future tenses, it marks the possibility for the body—located at a certain position and enveloped by a perceptual field constructed by current experience—to grasp nothingness imaginatively, thereby endowing it with spatial meaning. This undoubtedly shows that only through the dialectical movement of the primordial spatial situation and bodily experience is space constructed as a whole on a diachronic level. The latter signifies not only the body’s experiential apperception of different perceptual fields but further indicates that the spatial whole is merely "wrapped tightly in the mist of what people call the sensible world and the historical world, a total mixture of body and spirit wrapped by the humans of bodily life and the humans of cultural life, by the present and the past." Therefore, the construction of space or the endowment of meaning by the body is actually the process by which the subject injects the ambiguity of situated experience into homogeneous space, thereby recognizing the possibility of spatial connection with others who are in different situations. Its essence is to "rediscover phenomena, the layer of living experience through which others and things first appear to us, and the system of 'I-Other-Thing' in its nascent state." In other words, for Merleau-Ponty, the bodily constitution of space is the establishment of ambiguous intersubjectivity.
Third is the metaphor of ambiguous spatial experience for free material practice. It should be said that Merleau-Ponty’s dual emphasis on spatial situation and ambiguous experience serves as a phenomenological echo to the presuppositions of the young Marx regarding free practice within a material environment. Beyond doubt, for Marx, "the first premise of all human history is, of course, the existence of living human individuals. Thus the first fact to be established is the physical organisation of these individuals and their consequent relation to the rest of nature." It is not difficult to see that Marx actually identified the bodily elements through which practice occurs and its synchronic connection with the surrounding material situation. Regarding this, Merleau-Ponty...
Merleau-Ponty, within a phenomenological context, further points out: "In Marx, 'matter' is never considered in isolation, any more than 'consciousness' is elsewhere; it is embedded in the human system of coexistence, where it creates a common situation for simultaneous and successive individuals, ensuring the universality of their projects and making possible another line of development and a historical meaning." In this way, Merleau-Ponty establishes a phenomenological equivalence between experiential situations and the material environments in which praxis unfolds, as well as between the bodily subject and the subject of praxis. Prior to this, he had already stated: "The spatiality of the body is not a spatiality of position, like that of external objects or the spatiality of 'spatial sensations,' but rather a spatiality of situation." Accordingly, Merleau-Ponty introduces the concept of space into the interpretative framework of the category of praxis through the material relationship between the body and its environment.
It is worth mentioning that since bodily experience coupled with a situation possesses ambiguity, at the spatial level, "what Marx calls praxis is the meaning that emerges spontaneously in the interweaving of the various activities by which man organizes his relations with nature and with others." This "interweaving," which corresponds to "ambiguity," not only reflects the complexity of the situation (or environment) upon which praxis relies but also highlights the transcendence of praxis itself over that situation. On this point, centered on the dialectical relationship between what Marx called the economic base and ideology, Merleau-Ponty opportunely adds: "The economy of an epoch arouses an ideology because it is lived by men who seek to realize themselves there; in one sense, it limits their horizon, but in another sense—as with Marx himself—they do not merely suffer it, they understand it and thereby make it possible to transcend it." This transcendence signifies freedom. As Marx stated: "For the practical materialist, i.e., the communist, the whole problem is to revolutionize the existing world, to practically oppose and change things as they find them." As for the change and revolutionizing of the existing world or things, in Merleau-Ponty's system of the phenomenology of perception, this is nothing less than the body's positional negation of the established situation and its re-endowment of spatial meaning. It reveals that the body attached to the "here" and "now" is always midway through spatial meaning and, as the "perceptual field" constructed by the situation shifts, undergoes a historical horizon-shift in its mode of grasping the world.
Evidently, by appropriating Husserl's phenomenological paradigm, Merleau-Ponty’s spatial-philosophical interpretation of the early Marx actually uses the dialectical movement of body-space as an opportunity to restore—albeit in a distorted form—within the context of the phenomenology of perception, the transcendence of Marx’s philosophy of praxis over Hegel's philosophy of cognition, intending to realize the intellectual principle of philosophical liberation at the level of reality. Consistent with the negation of transcendental spatial construction by ambiguous spatial experience, just as "the young Marx says, one 'destroys' philosophy as detached cognition only in order to 'realize' it." Precisely for this reason, Marx did not cast the dialectic into objects situated in transcendental space, "but transplanted it into humanity." Only in this way can praxis, within real space and by virtue of the transcendence generated by the ambiguity of the situation and bodily experience, urge society to gradually tend toward "the realized naturalism of man and the realized humanism of nature." From this, it can be seen that Merleau-Ponty's phenomenological reading of the early Marx can be regarded as his subject-philosophical reconstruction of Marx’s theory of material praxis by highlighting bodily space. As a scholarly metaphor, the latter laid the initial humanist tone for the formation of Western Marxist spatial thought, which originated in France and flourished in the English-speaking world after the 1960s.
II. Michel Foucault's Dialectic of Body-Power and Heterotopian Space
If Merleau-Ponty, based on the spatial intentionality of the body, opened the existential-phenological high ground for the spatial-philosophical turn in contemporary Western Marxism, then Foucault, by shifting from existential phenomenology to material phenomenology, further identified that the dialectical relationship between the situated body and space is actually the result of power projected onto the empirical world. To be sure, at first glance, Foucault appears as an opponent of phenomenology. Yet it is an indisputable fact that "he always unconsciously regarded phenomenology as an important way to resolve the problem of man's dual existence (the cogito and the unthought—Author's note). Compared to the Husserlian transcendental ego-constituting activity's decisive effect on all objective meaning, Foucault leaned more toward his teacher Merleau-Ponty's thesis that the transcendental subject must be situated in the world through the body." This indicates that "he maintained an accepting attitude toward Merleau-Ponty’s view that 'incarnate consciousness holds priority in existential phenomenology' and agreed with existential phenomenology's analysis of actual experience." It is precisely for this reason that, by examining the metaphysical premises within the tradition of Western philosophical idealism from which oppressive power arises, he attempted to restore the freedom of the empirical subject controlled by the idealist order through the negation of transcendental reflection. This, in turn, coincides with the theoretical aspirations of contemporary Western Marxism. Worth mentioning is that Foucault's investigation of the dialectical relationship among the triad of "subject-power-freedom" likewise involves an analysis of the conjugate structure of "body-space." According to the corresponding logical order, the latter primarily covers the following three aspects:
First is the displacement of the material "empirical" subject by the idealist "cogito" subject, and the problem of the intellectual constitution of modern power diagrams. For Foucault, this is closely related to the formalizing trend in modern Western society of the discursive systems that construct and transmit knowledge. He points out that since the 19th century, with the decline of the representational function of discourse and its development toward formalization, the complete autonomy of words—resulting from the emergence of literature itself or pure writing—undoubtedly caused the ideality and materiality of words to coexist, leading to an extreme expansion of the materiality of words. In such a situation, the "spoken" (Dit) becomes an external material force alienated from the subject; it incorporates the subject, who was originally the user of discourse, into the declarative logic of discourse itself. Consequently, "when the subject uses a certain discourse, these various forms resolve into different identities, positions, and stances that the subject can occupy or accept, and into the discontinuities of the fields of which the subject speaks. Furthermore, if these fields are linked by a series of relations, the establishment of this series is not determined by the synthetic activity of a consciousness identical to itself, silent and prior to any speech, but rather by the specificity of discursive practices." From this, it is not difficult to see that Foucault actually reveals the internal semantic mechanism by which the subject is dominated by idealist power by identifying the modern turn in the attributes of discourse. But more importantly, the acquisition of material self-sufficiency by idealist discourse or words is fundamentally derived from the dominance of the "cogito" transcendental subject in the tradition of modern Western philosophy. Regarding this, Heidegger specifically emphasized: "Man's status among beings is now completely different from that of medieval or ancient man; the decisive thing is that man himself specifically takes this position as one constituted by himself, man consciously adheres to this position as one taken by him, and ensures this position as the basis for a possible unfolding of humanity." Clearly, it is because the "cogito," through reflection, performs an indirect "constituting" role on the subject as an existent and its "status" of existence that idealist forces become the basis for "ensuring humanity." Formal discourse or words are merely the concrete expressions of this force.
In view of this, to paraphrase Heidegger, Foucault further asks: since within the "cogito" in the modern sense there is a "distancing" effect capable of both separating and recombining the thinking that faces the self with the thinking rooted in the "unthought," then, when the direct correspondence between the "cogito" (idealist reflection) and the "sum" (empirical existence) disappears, a sharp question becomes inevitable: In order for "I am" what I do not think, and for my thought to be what "I am not," how are the "I" as a thinking thing and that which is my thought to be defined? This leads to Foucault's fierce critique of the Husserlian transcendental phenomenological tradition. For the latter, the answer to the above question is rather that the transcendental subject achieves complete idealist unity by making the external entirely subordinate to itself through radical reflection. But Foucault believes this is precisely the source of phenomenology’s subsequent and continuous disintegration into ontological descriptions of experiential "unthought." It is precisely such an "unthought" existence, intermittently drifting outside the reflective "cogito" and thereby provoking the "cogito's" intention to grasp it, that allows idealist knowledge systems to be historically perfected. That is to say, the moving cause that truly endows ideals or épistémès with material power is the "cogito" subject's process of reflective subsumption of the "unthought" that is both within and outside it and appears in the form of the "Other." This means that the power-operation mechanism that disciplines the empirical subject is actually the result of the subject's self-alienation through reflection when facing its own "unthought" situation (or context). The latter corresponds to the "in-itself" as opposed to the "for-itself" in Hegel, and in Marx, it directly manifests as the alienated human being.
Second is the disciplining of the living "subject-body" by the intellectual "power system," and the problem of the spatial grounding of modern political structures. In Foucault's view, the process of power's generation and operation actually includes two complementary stages: the "cogito" subject's idealist subsumption of "unthought" existence, and the subsequent projection of the "reflective" order formed thereby back into the "unthought" existence already grasped by the transcendental subject. This is primarily manifested when the self becomes "a theme or object (subject) of oral discourse or verbal writing activities controlled by idealist power, and in this act, this alienated experience of the self is further reinforced and broadened"; these "disciplinary techniques of power applied to the body" then "produce from the enslaved body a certain soul-subject, ego, mind, etc.," a series of idealist power orders. The key link connecting the two, for Foucault, is the construction of space by power and its dissemination within space. In this regard, he specifically noted in an interview: "People often reproach me for being obsessed with these concepts of space; I am indeed obsessed with them. But I believe that through these concepts I have indeed found what I was looking for: the relationship between power and knowledge. Once knowledge can be described in terms such as region, domain, implantation, and displacement, we can grasp the process of knowledge as a form of power and the effect of disseminating power." Thus, space in a broad sense is nothing less than the discursive boundary of idealist knowledge and the positional collection from which knowledge produces power effects. The mechanism by which power controls the subject, in Foucault's view, manifests as the encroachment of the transcendental spatial order constructed by the "reflective" subject into empirical space. This is concentrated in the fact that: "Once forms of power operate directly in daily life, they categorize the individual. It marks individuality on him, attaches an identity, and imposes a set of laws of truth, so that he himself and others can recognize themselves by it. It is the form of power that makes the individual a subject." That is to say, the so-called subjectification of the individual is actually the process of spatial positioning of the existential individual by intellectual power. Its reified form is the oppressive disciplining of the body by political forces situated within space.
Accordingly, Foucault argues that in the operational process of conceptual power, "the body is also directly involved in a political field; power relations have an immediate hold upon it; they invest it, mark it, train it, torture it, force it to carry out tasks, to perform ceremonies and to emit signs. This political investment of the body is bound up, in accordance with complex reciprocal relations, with its economic use." In this way, primordial bodily experience is expropriated by conceptual spatial power, subsequently becoming a carrier and vassal of the transcendental order. At the phenomenological level, this is prominently manifested as the alienating effect of pure "looking" within visible space upon intersubjective relations. The former acts as a "surveillance gaze," prompting that "each individual, under the weight of this gaze, will end up by interiorizing it to the point that he is his own overseer, each individual thus exercising this surveillance over, and against, himself." Regarding this, Foucault could not help but exclaim: "A superb formula: power is exercised concretely and in detail, like quicksilver, at the lowest possible cost." It must be said that through his phenomenological investigation into the dialectical relationship between body, space, and power, Foucault undoubtedly struck the deep machinery of modern Western political structures. This is "nothing other than the complex relationship between the subject and 'speech' (discourse analysis), 'action' (care of the self), and 'knowledge' (self-knowledge), the core of which is a concern for power strategies directed at the body and mind." Therefore, Foucault's academic task lay in "revealing the fate of bodily experience in the process of modernity, thereby providing some alternative choice or choices for the body’s return to itself." Given this, a conception of "heterotopia" concerning bodily liberation and subjective freedom emerges as called for. This, in turn, constitutes the ultimate aim of Foucault's material phenomenology.
Third is the opening of a totality-based "liberation politics" by the otherness of "spatial heterotopias," and the problem of their spatial substitution for the modern power order. It is an indisputable fact that Foucault’s phenomenological investigation into the relationship between the body (or subject) and power aims to construct a spatial philosophical perspective capable of grasping the developmental trajectory of modern Western society, while outlining the metaphysical basis for the shifting of power itself from the "grand strategies of geopolitics to the little tactics of the habitat." Accordingly, he further identifies that the conceptualizing effect of the transcendental "cogito" subject upon the body and space is nothing less than the logical starting point from which oppressive power is born. The latter implies that "the subject will one day—in the form of historical consciousness—reappropriate all those things that were kept at a distance by difference, recover mastery over them, and find in them the place where we can become subjective consciousness." That is to say, the essence of power discipline is the elimination of difference by space that has been conceptualized by subjective consciousness. But the crux of the matter is that it is precisely this "difference" (the aforementioned "unthought"), acting as the "other" to transcendental reflection, that constitutes the vital node for disintegrating the system of power. Within a spatial horizon, Foucault further reifies this as "heterotopias," noting that as a kind of space of otherness, "this place is in no place, even if it may be possible to indicate its location in reality. Because they are absolutely different from all the sites that they reflect and speak about, I shall call them, by way of contrast to utopias, 'heterotopias'."
It is worth mentioning that Foucault actually takes the distinction between "utopia" and "heterotopia" as an opportunity to derive a dual critique: of the tradition of Western conceptual philosophy, and of Western Humanist Marxism which takes the former as its touchstone. For him, "utopias, which present society itself in a perfected form, or else society turned upside down, but which have no real place in empirical reality," are none other than the best metaphor for the reflective subsumption of empirical existence itself by the transcendental "cogito." It is precisely because of this that a conceptual power system can be established within space. As a static, intentional wish, it is incompatible with the living being-in-the-world [11] which is itself composed of the "unthought" other. Under such circumstances, even if movements of revolution or struggle predicated upon it become possible (such as revolutionary movements aimed at abstract and static humanism), they remain merely false utopias rooted in conceptual grand narratives that fail to eradicate the system of power discipline. Reflected in the Western Marxism influenced by this, this is concentrated in the fact that "in order to bring into play the theme that opposes the openness of historical life to the 'statism' of structures, 'closed' systems, and necessary 'synchronicity,' people had to humanize Marx’s doctrine, turn Marx into a totalizing historian, and rediscover humanist discourse in his exposition." Little do they know that this precisely emasculates the vital quality of Marxism as something that exists outside the current power system and constantly negates it as an "other." As Marx emphasized when defining communism: "Communism is for us not a state of affairs which is to be established, an ideal to which reality [will] have to adjust itself. We call communism the real movement which abolishes the present state of things. The conditions of this movement result from the premises now in existence." From this, it is not difficult to see that Foucault’s view of "spatial heterotopia" as the constant negation of the conceptual power system by the "unthought" other happens to echo Marx’s identification of "communism" as a "real movement that constantly transforms reality based on existing material premises." Within a phenomenological horizon, this is nothing less than empirical bodily experience (or practice) performing a totalizing transformation of existence itself—which is currently enveloped by conceptual power (or ideology)—within a space constructed by the "unthought" other (i.e., the material environment or situation).
Undoubtedly, Foucault's emphasis on power space and "spatial heterotopia," while deepening Merleau-Ponty's dialectic of bodily space, clarified a more concrete path of discourse for the subsequent spatial turn in Western Marxism through his emphasis on the concept of the "other." It should be said that "his theory of experience, knowledge, and power resembles a certain effort of reduction, and to an extent approaches what Merleau-Ponty calls bodily experience, only he emphasizes the material dimension of the body more strongly." Accordingly, by reifying "experiential" "situations" into the "unthought" "other," and equating the transcendental "cogito" with conceptual "power," he provided the corresponding spatial-philosophical grounds for Marx’s conception of political liberation—framed by material practice—within the transformation from ambiguous spatial experience to the spatial heterotopia of otherness. This line of thought was fully inherited by Henri Lefebvre, the pioneer of the spatial philosophy of Western Marxism. It is precisely based on Foucault's material-phenomenological reconstruction of Merleau-Ponty's existential phenomenology, and his identification of the fact that conceptual power constantly diffuses through space, that Lefebvre—within the context of the critique of everyday life—aimed at the pursuit of "differential space," thereby laying the initial metaphysical foundation for the tide of spatial critique in Western Marxism that subsequently flooded the academic world.
III. Henri Lefebvre's Spatial Triad and Differential Space
The body-space philosophical tradition, constructed successively by Merleau-Ponty and Foucault in the fields of existential phenomenology and material phenomenology, was only truly implanted into the theoretical lineage of contemporary Western Marxist philosophy by Lefebvre. Accordingly, the priority of the ambiguous experience of the situational body over reflective transcendental space identified by Merleau-Ponty, as well as the negativity of the body driven by the "unthought" other toward conceptual spatial power proposed by Foucault, acquired a brand-new expression within the context of Marxist philosophy. As the metaphysical starting point for the spatial turn in Western Marxism, they were further summarized by Lefebvre as the process by which practicing individuals in everyday life look for "differential space" capable of achieving self-liberation outside the representations of space woven by capital power. This, in turn, leads to the spatial triad [12] involved in Lefebvre's radical interpretation of the body-space relationship.
By no mere coincidence, in direct line with the phenomenological tradition of Merleau-Ponty (who saw space as the intertwining of situational experience and conceptual reflection) and Foucault (who saw space as a mixture of the "heterotopia" of otherness and the conceptual "field of power"), Lefebvre’s construction of Marxist spatial theory began in a similar form with a reflection on the ambiguity of the spectacle of everyday life. He pointed out: "Everyday life is a space in which the process of dialectical movement reaches a point of interruption, where opacity and transparency, the clearly visible and the invisible, the decisive and the ephemeral, are unpredictably entangled." In Lefebvre's view, this "entanglement" is rather the game and antagonistic merger between material spatial practice and the thoughts and ideas (i.e., ideology) that influence the forms of spatial practice at a certain stage. Together, they outline the dialectical unity between the abstractness of (social) ideas and the concreteness of (social) practice within everyday life. Regarding this, Lefebvre further emphasized: "This produced object [the social form of existence of everyday spatial life—Author's Note] crosses through the abstract without disappearing into it or leaving it. Abstraction is not a concrete copy of something, but the abstract and the concrete are inseparable; the unity of the abstract and the concrete determines everyday life." The crux of the matter is that with the historical intervention of capitalist modes of production and exchange, the inherent balance of this dialectical unity between the abstract and the concrete at the level of everyday life—which constitutes the human condition—has been broken. Previously, Lefebvre specifically mentioned that concrete spatial practice (La pratique spatiale), abstract representations of space (Les représentations de l’espace), and transcendent representational spaces (Les espaces de représentation) [13] "will make their own contributions to the production of space in different ways according to their respective natures and attributes, and according to the requirements of society or the so-called mode of production and historical stage." In other words, the space of everyday life was originally the reification of the spatial triad—spatial practice, representations of space, and representational spaces—at the level of reality. However, the abstract effect of the alienation of the logic of capital, through abstract representations of space, has completely expropriated the constructive significance of spatial practice and representational spaces for space itself.
In Lefebvre's view, this is undoubtedly closely related to the nature of the representation of space itself. As Marx said: "In all forms of society there is one specific kind of production which predominates over the rest, whose relations thus assign rank and influence to others. It is a general illumination which bathes all the other colours and modifies their particularities. It is a particular ether which determines the specific gravity of every being which has materialized within it." Correspondingly, as a constitutive element of space "linked to the relations of production and to the 'order' which those relations impose, and hence to knowledge, to signs, to codes, and to 'frontal' relations," the representation of space is the concrete form of expression of this "particular ether." Precisely because of this, it is naturally the power-laden carrier that the logic of capital must first seize in order to manipulate space. Taking this as a premise, "capitalism has found the means to attenuate its internal contradictions for a century, and has successfully acquired an entirely new opportunity for 'development': namely, by occupying and producing a space." This space is the "abstract space" in which capital holds absolute dominance and carries out the total colonization of everyday life. Therein, concrete practical activity will no longer be "an activity related to the permanent elements of social life—the process of reproduction. On the contrary, it is detached from this activity and occupied by abstractions. That is, it is encroached upon by abstract social labor and abstract space." In this way, the subject's practical construction of space is alienated into the process of production and reproduction of capitalist space. It means that the conceptual power of capital has obtained a material basis, enabling it to act upon empirical everyday life in an exclusionary manner.
From a metaphysical perspective, this once again involves Lefebvre's...
This is a creative expansion of what Merleau-Ponty and Foucault identified as the domination of the empirical (or situational) body by conceptual (or reflective) power. It is worth noting that when Marx discussed related issues, he used the symbolic nature of money as an example to point out indirectly that within the space of capital—predicated on abstract labor and value exchange—"to determine the value of the product conceptually, this metamorphosis in the mind is sufficient (in which the product exists merely as an expression of quantitative relations of production). This abstraction is enough for comparing commodities; but in actual exchange, this abstraction must be objectified, symbolized, and realized through a sign." That is to say, in the abstract space of capital, signs that have already been endowed with material force (i.e., money itself) act as a conceptual power manipulating spatial practice, playing a decisive role in how space manifests. Accordingly, Lefebvre further emphasized that "like all social practices, spatial practice is a lived and immediate reality before it is conceptualized; but because fictional speculativity takes precedence over life, practice disappears along with life." Clearly, the "fictional speculativity" Lefebvre speaks of is the intrinsic attribute of the metaphysics of money contained within the logic of capital. It constructs a whole set of oppressive power orders and, mediated by rational subjects who obey market laws, forcibly implants the abstract space of capital into everyday life. This is concentrated in the fact that "as a product, social space is manufactured according to operational instructions in the hands of a group of experts and technocrats; these experts and technocrats themselves represent specific interests and, simultaneously, a mode of production. Therefore, there is no genuine or pure space; there is only space produced according to certain models (that is, modes of production) developed by particular groups within the general social structure." It represents an exclusive intellectual power that, in an abstract totalizing form, ruthlessly oppresses the individuals within it. The key to the problem is that this "intellectual terrorism" diffused throughout space has profound metaphysical foundations in the idealist tradition of Western philosophy. The philosophy of the "reflective" subject, which rejects the "unthought" [14] natural situation and the ambiguity of bodily experience, is the primary culprit. Under its dominance, "abstraction takes hold of what relates to the body, and nature recedes into the background. This misunderstanding of Western tradition proves that it merely stands at the threshold of discourse, enumerating all its crimes so as to exonerate tradition while defending 'real' abstract space."
Thus, the abstract unity of conceptual power obscures the concrete differences of empirical practice, with the former—in the form of capitalist social relations—constituting the sole basis for determining the attributes of social space. However, Lefebvre discovered the inherent contradictions of capitalist space within this abstractly unified power order. This is manifested in the fact that, during the process of politicizing intellectual power, "social space both concentrates and solidifies political centralization, while also particularizing and fragmenting it. While the State determines and freezes centers of decision-making, space is classified and thus atomized through hierarchical relations with the center." The direct cause of this situation is the structural paradox inherent in capital’s spatial planning based on value exchange. To this end, Marx pointed out on one hand: "The universal tendency of capital is to assimilate those places that are premises of circulation, centers of production for circulation—that is, to transform them into sites of capitalized production and sites for the production of capital." That is to say, the first important task of the logic of capital is to integrate the spatial whole into the trajectory of the capital power system. On the other hand, Marx emphasized: "Capital as a whole exists simultaneously, spatially side-by-side in its different stages... thus performing its functions sequentially in all stages and functional forms." This indicates that besides assimilating the spatial landscape with abstract power, the second important task of the logic of capital is to place its various links into different spatial units one by one, thereby realizing value exchange within space. Consequently, a massive tension arises between capital's abstract command over space and its fragmented design of space. It is through this spatial contradiction that Lefebvre discovered the possibility of dismantling the power order of capital. He noted:
Space itself is both a product of the capitalist mode of production and a political-economic tool of the bourgeoisie. But now this has become the manifestation of its inherent contradictions. That is to say, the spatial dialectic, which once appeared in time and manifested through its own realization, will begin to operate in space in unexpected ways. This is directly manifested in the fact that spatial contradictions do not eliminate the contradictions arising from historical time but leave them behind, elevating old contradictions to a higher level on a global scale. As some contradictions weaken, others are fully intensified. At this point, the system of contradictions takes on a brand-new meaning and marks the birth of "something other"—that is, another mode of production.
Clearly, Lefebvre here deepens the understanding of the spatial trialectic. By introducing the concept of the "Other," he further transforms the previously mentioned triadic dialectical relationship of "spatial practice—representations of space—representational space" into a triadic relationship of "abstract space—spatial contradictions—differential space." As the spatial basis for the birth of "another mode of production" distinct from the capitalist mode, "differential space," in Lefebvre’s view, stands in opposition to the homogenized abstract space and seeks to explore a new type of space for existing differences and particularities. Therefore, this is "another world, a radically open meta-space where everything can be found, where new possible discoveries and political strategies emerge in endless succession; but here people must never stop, must constantly engage in self-criticism to move toward new sites and new understandings, and must constantly seek difference; this is a space of 'otherness,' a strategic and heterogenous space beyond the known and the taken-for-granted." In other words, Lefebvre’s so-called "differential space" is actually a negative "third party" localized within the binary opposition of capital’s abstract space. In an absolutely external form, it exerts a continuous impact on the metaphysical system of power inherent in the logic of capital.
Based on the above judgment, Lefebvre, centering on the dialectical relationship between the abstract spatial power structure and the movement of concrete spatial practice, further pointed out: "Structure is the finite (determined and logical) aspect of movement, while the situation constitutes those infinite, changing aspects. The situation is expressed through a structure, and the structure marks the situation. However, when the situation changes, the structure also changes or even collapses. Structure tends to maintain and stabilize the situation. For this reason, structure and situation have a dialectical relationship where neither is absolutely prominent; but in this dialectical relationship, a third party—the process of transformation—plays a fundamental role." It is not difficult to see that Lefebvre’s analysis of "differential space" appearing as a "third party" is built upon his creative appropriation and organic integration of the "situational" experience and "othered" space identified by Merleau-Ponty and Foucault, respectively. Its ultimate goal is to prove that the starting point for Marxist philosophy’s counter-offensive against the capitalist system is its exploration of practical possibilities outside the existing power order. For Marx himself, this interest was already evident as early as the drafting of his doctoral dissertation. In his commentary on Epicurus's theory of the declension (swerve) of atoms, Marx noted: "Epicurus expressed the materiality of the atom through its rectilinear motion, and realized the formal determination of the atom through the declension from the straight line... Lucretius is therefore right to assert that the declension breaks the 'bonds of fate' [15], and just as he immediately applies this thought to consciousness, so it can be said of the atom that the declension is precisely that something in its breast that can fight and resist." From this, we can see that Marx's use of Epicurus’s "atomic swerve" as a starting point to open the metaphysics of liberation politics shares a profound resonance with Merleau-Ponty’s "ambiguous experience," Foucault’s "othered space," and Lefebvre’s "differential space" in their negation of the conceptual power order of capital. It is precisely because of this that Lefebvre, through the dialectically negative connotation of "differential space," provided a path toward radically open space for "nomadic Marxism." This space is not in the "middle" or a synthesis of the center-periphery polarities of his world; it is "far away," in a (third) world that can only be accessed and explored through meta-philosophy. This so-called "meta-philosophy" emphasizes a spatial critique theory of "difference," "contingency," the "Other," as well as "ambiguity" and "intertwining." Through this, Lefebvre, acting as the consummator of the marriage between French phenomenology and Marxism and the founder of the Marxist philosophy of space, provided the direct academic basis and the initial practical paradigm for the subsequent surge of Western radical spatial critique.
It is certain that the spatial turn in Western Marxist philosophy during the mid-to-late 1960s was by no means an accidental event in the evolution of the history of thought. On the contrary, it was the intellectual crystallization of the German phenomenological tradition opened by Husserl, which was creatively "misread" by French academia through the philosophical lenses of Heidegger and Hegel. Merleau-Ponty, Foucault, and Lefebvre were undoubtedly the founders of this pursuit. Meanwhile, at the metaphysical level, the history of ideas—evolving from the "ambiguous" bodily experience of space to the "othered" spatial heterotopia and finally to the "third" differential space—unmistakably reflects the process by which the phenomenological discourse of French philosophy, centered on bodily intentionality, entered into a marriage with Marxist philosophy within the horizon of "space." This was both a logical necessity for French academia to overcome the crisis of existential phenomenology and turn toward material phenomenology, and an inherent meaning of the qualities of embodiment, ambiguity, situationality, and otherness characteristic of French phenomenology itself. This coincided with Marx’s early emphasis on "contingency," "materiality," and "struggle," as well as his later liberatory political presuppositions in the context of maturing historical materialism, which used free and conscious material practice to resist the irrational systems of capitalism. Because of this, the concept of space generated within phenomenological soil reached a threshold in Lefebvre’s implicit absorption of Merleau-Ponty's and Foucault’s thought and was fully implanted into the framework of Western Marxist philosophy. Furthermore, as successors to Lefebvre and representative figures of Western Marxist spatial critique theory, whether David Harvey, Manuel Castells, Edward Soja, or their students, all have treated Lefebvre as a point of reference or critique. This fully confirms that the trend of Western Marxist spatial philosophy, which originated in the 1960s and flourished in the English-speaking world, shares common intellectual resources with French phenomenology.