Fetishistic concrete abstraction,social constitution and social domination in Henri Lefebvre’s writings on everyday life,cities and space

Abstract

This article reconstructs the role that fetishistic concrete abstraction plays in Henri Lefebvre’s writings on everyday life, cities and space. I begin by distinguishing between Lefebvre’s theories of alienation and romantic domination and fetishistic social domination. I then reconstruct the latter showing how Lefebvre interprets Marx’s critique of political economy as an account of the social constitution of the fetishistic concrete abstractions of economic social forms, which as supraindividual and autonomous entities invert to collectively dominate, but not entirely determine, the individuals within the social relations that collectively create them. Finally, I show how this conception of fetishistic concrete abstraction runs through Lefebvre’s work, where it serves as a ‘basis’ for his attempts to ‘elaborate, refine and complement’ Marx’s critique of political economy by conceiving how abstract social domination is constituted, embedded and resisted in everyday life, cities and space while also pointing out where it is amalgamated but not reduced to Lefebvre’s expansive theory of alienation and romantic domination. Consequently, rather than simply seeing Lefebvre as the ‘reigning prophet of alienation’ with an expansive transhistorical notion of alienation and romantic domination founded on a problematic opposition between quantity and quality, I show that Lefebvre’s work on everyday life, cities and space should also be seen as possessing a historically specific theory of abstract domination based on the critique of political economy.