The Magic and Metaphysics of Shit: The Production of Space and Digital Technology

Abstract

ABSTRACT Reading Henri Lefebvre alongside Bernard Stiegler, this paper explores the changes that have taken place to the production of space in our age of digital technology. Lefebvre sensed the radical changes taking place in society through the implementation of computational technologies. He asked a prescient question: How is this space being produced? Lefebvre was unable to foresee the significant changes to the actual mechanics of the production of space brought about by the third industrial revolution. A thinker who does do this is Bernard Stiegler who is interested in how new digital technologies change memory via tertiary mnemotechnical devices – memory storage devices that are external to the human body. Reading Lefebvre alongside Stiegler might seem unusual, however I will demonstrate that implicit in Lefebvre’s argument regarding the production of space is memory and implicit in Stiegler’s argument regarding the exteriorization of memory in technics is space.

Keywords:

• Bernard Stiegler
• Henri Lefebvre
• space
• technology

Notes

1. Benjamin H. Bratton, The Stack (Massachusetts: MIT, 2005).

2. Henri Lefebvre, The Production of Space (Malden, MA: Blackwell, 2016), 86.

3. Ibid., 46.

4. Peter Marcuse, “From Critical Urban Theory to the Right to the City,” City 13, no. 2–3 (2009): 185–197.

5. See David Harvey, “The Right To The City,” New Left Review 53 (2008) and Right to the City Alliance, accessed May 7th, 2018. https://righttothecity.org/.

6. Henri Lefebvre, Eleonore Kofman, and Elizabeth Lebas, Writings On Cities (Oxford: Blackwell, 2008), 63.

7. Ibid.

8. Henri Lefebvre, The Urban Revolution (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2003), 16–17.

9. Lefebvre, Kofman, and Lebas, Writings On Cities, 63.

10. Lefebvre, Kofman, and Lebas, The Urban Revolution, 16–17.

11. Lefebvre, Writings On Cities, 2.

12. Ibid., 181.

13. Ibid., 158.

14. David Harvey, Rebel Cities (London: Verso, 2013), xiii.

15. Karl Marx, Writings of the Young Marx on Philosophy and Society, ed. Lloyd D. Easton and Kurt H. Guddat (New York: Doubleday, 1967), 62.

16. Henri Lefebvre, “Dissolving City, Planetary Metamorphosis,” Environment and Planning D: Society And Space 32, no. 2 (2014): 203–205.

17. Henri Lefebvre, The Production of Space (Malden, MA: Blackwell, 2016), 15.

18. Ibid., 14.

19. Ibid.

20. Henri Lefebvre, L’existentialisme (Paris: Anthropos, 2001), 63.

21. Lefebvre, The Production of Space, 12.

22. Ibid., 73.

23. Ibid., 92.

24. Ibid., 94.

25. Ibid., 84.

26. Ibid., 83.

27. Ibid., 116.

28. Ibid., 142.

29. Christian Schmid, “Henri Lefebvre’s Theory of the Production of Space,” in Space, Difference, Everyday Life: Reading Henri Lefebvre, ed. Kanishka Goonewardena, Stefan Kipfer, Richard Milgram and Christian Schmid (New York: Routledge, 2008), 27–49.

30. Ibid., 33.

31. Ibid.

32. Ibid., 43.

33. Lefebvre, The Production of Space, 113.

34. Ibid., 113–114.

35. Ibid,. 38.

36. Bernard Stiegler, Technics and Time: 1. The Fault of Epimetheus, trans. Richard Beardsworth and George Collins (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1998), 1–18.

37. Schmid, “Henri Lefebvre’s Theory of the Production of Space,” 39.

38. Stephane Vial, Being and the Screen, How the Digital Changes Perception (Massachusetts: MIT, 2019).

39. Ibid., 42.

40. Wolfgang Schivelbusch, The Railway Journey: Trains and Travel in the Nineteenth Century (California: University of California Press, 2014), 45.

41. During, Stiegler, and Benoît Dillet, Philosophising By Accident (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2017).

42. Stiegler, Technics and Time: 1. The Fault of Epimetheus, 137.

43. During, Stiegler, and Dillet, Philosophising By Accident, 59.

44. Stiegler,Technics and Time: 1. The Fault of Epimetheus, 50.

45. During, Stiegler, and Dillet, Philosophising By Accident, 51.

46. Ibid.

47. Ibid., 59.

48. Stiegler, Technics and Time: 1. The Fault of Epimetheus, 17.

49. Bernard Stiegler, Technics and Time: 3. Cinematic Time and the Question of Malaise, trans. Stephen Barker (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2011), 73.

50. Ibid., 37.

51. Ibid.

52. Ibid., 73.

53. Bernard Stiegler, Technics and Time: 2. Disorientation, trans. Stephen Barker (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2009), 116.

54. Samuel Kinsley, “Memory Programmes: The Industrial Retention of Collective Life,” Cultural Geographies 22, no. 1 (2014): 155–175.

55. Stiegler, Technics and Time: 3. Cinematic Time and the Question of Malaise, 73.

56. Adam Greenfield, Radical Technologies (London: Verso, 2017), 63.

57. Ibid.

58. Bratton, The Stack, 158.

Additional information

Notes on contributors

David Capener

David Capeneris an architect, critic, writer, academic and educator based in Belfast & Dublin. He is a researcher at Technological University Dublin and is a founding member of Annex, an international research and design collective of architects, artists and researchers who are currently working on the curation and design of Ireland’s pavilion, Entanglement, for the 17th International Architecture Biennale at Venice in 2021. He teaches on the master’s program at Queens University Belfast School of Architecture.