Henri Lefebvre’s Urban Revolution (2003 [1970]) discussion of necessary concepts for theorizing the city. His achievement is the construction of a theoretical and sociological object – the urban – quite distinct from the city.
The urban remains a mystery. Lefebvre refers to urban society as a virtual object which might be approached but not known through the city as a material environment. This virtuality, the urban itself is a ‘blank… a dark moment… a blind field’ (26). In Lefebvre’s romantic parlance,
Blank is a rupture or paradox in the banal field of everyday, material order. Their pragmatic dimension is metisage and maronnage, the ruse.
Dark moments are black boxes, gaps in the understanding of critical processes which come about because virtualities and abstractions are misunderstood as material actualities. We are blinded by ideologically luminous sources of knowledge which illuminate an elsewhere. A dazzled stare at the world of commodities masks its emptiness and virtuality.
Blind fields lie between disciplines, fields of knowledge. Lefebvre comments that they are ‘not merely dark and uncertain…but blind in the sense that there is a blind spot on the retina’ (29). They are unseen and unknowable. They are out of the epistemological map save for anomalous indicators of their present. But they are not off of the ontological chart. They are risks – a term which has its origins in the Spanish term for ‘reef’ unseen but existing. As such they are actual possibles which can be understood in probabilistic terms. The everyday is often unperceived (cf. Blanchot). It is not there to be known as it already is first hand, but simply to be acknowledged.
I stress the ontological terms of the concrete-abstract-virtual-probable as a way of sorting through and teasing out Lefebvre’s mixture of concept and affect in his writing. He slides between the tangible and the intangible. Stressing the tyranny of abstractions, the alienated, disembodied quality of philosophical concepts while lauding not only concrete action but the insightful, totalizing moments of communion, connection, kairos, which can be found even in the most squalid and banal aspects of everyday life…