Footnotes from ‘The Production of Space’

Chapter 1

Pg 4,Foucaults ‘the trajectory of meaning’ and ‘space of dissensions’
Pg 4,Lenin argues that the thought of space reflects objective space like a copy or a photograph
Pg 5,Barthes on Lacan ‘His topology does not concern within and without, even less above and below ; it concerns, rather a reverse and an obverse in constant motion-a front and a back forever changing places as they revolve around something which is in the process of transformation, and which is indeed, to begin with, is not
Pg 5, This is not true of Claude Levi-Strauss, the whole of whose work implies that from the earliest manifestations of social life mental and social were conflated by virtue of the nomenclature of the relationships of exchange. By contrast, when Derrida gives precedence to the ‘graphic’ over the ‘phonic’, to writing over speech, or when Kristeva brings the body to the fore, clearly some search is being made for a transition or articulation between on the one hand, the mental space previously posited(i.e. presupposed) by these authors, and on the other hand, physical/social space.
Pg 8,[English speaking experts tend perhaps not to use the word ‘space’ with quite the same facility as their French -speaking counterparts use the word espace, but they do have a corresponding fondness for such spatial terms as ‘sector’ and ‘sphere’-Translator.]
Pg 10, This is an antagonistic and hence differentiating distinction, a fact which Michel Foucault evades in his Archeologie du savoir by distinguishing between savoir and connaissance only within the context of an espace du jeu or ‘space of interplay’, and on the basis of chronology or ‘distribution in time’. [The savoir/connaissance distinction cannot be conveniently expressed in English. Its significance should be clear from the discussion here; see also belowpp 367-8. Wherever the needs of clarity seemed to call fot it, I have indicated in parenthesis whether ‘knowledge’ renders savoir or connaissance-Translator.]
Pg 13 including Claude Levi-Strauss’s attempts to draw for models on Mendeleev’s classification of the elements and on general combinatorial mathematics.
Pg 22 A tradition to which both Maurice Merleau-Ponty and Gilles Deleuze belong.Cf.Gilles deleuze and Felix Guattari, L’anti-Oedipe, rev.edn (Paris: editions de Minuit, 1973), p114
Pg 24 Here without further ado - and I hope without too much irony- are some of the sources I have in mind: the works of Charles Dodgson/Lewis Carroll(but with the emphasis on the author of Symbolic Logic and Logic without Tears rather than on the author of the Alice books); Hermann Hesse’s Das Glasperlenspiel (1943),tr by Mervyn Savill as Magister Ludi (London:Aldus, 1949 1nd New York:Henry Holt, 1949) and by Richard and Clara Winston as The Glass Bead Game (New York:Holt, Rinehart and Winston,1969), especially the passage on the theory of the game and its relationshipwith language and space-the space of the game itself and the space in which the game is played, namely Castalia; Hermann Weyl’s Symmetry(Princeton,NJ: Princeton university Press, 1952); and Nietzsche-especially, in Das Philosophenbuch/Le Livre du philosophe (Paris: Aubier-Flammarion, 1969), the fragments on language and the ‘theoretical introduction on truth and lies’. It should be borne in mind that the works cited here, like those mentioned elsewhere in this book, are meant to be placed in the context of spatial practice and its levels (planning, ‘urbanism’, architecture).
Pg 33 These terms are borrowed from Noam Chomsky, but this should not be taken as implying any subordination on the theory of space to linguistics.
Pg 36 A thesis basic to the approach of Jacques Lacan and his followers.
Pg 51 I am thinking for instance , of the Parti Socialiste unife (PSU) AND ITS LEADER mICHEL Roscard, defeated in the French elections of 1973, or of George McGovern’s defeat in the US presidential election of 1971.
Pg 63 This is not to say that it is reducible to what Kostas Axelos, in his long philosophical meditation in the Heraclitean mould, refers to as the ‘game of the world’.
Pg 66 Marx, Grundrisse, p.105.this is an appropriate moment to point out a serious blunder in Panorama des sciences socials (see above note 4), where the method here discussed is attributed to Jean-Paul Satre, Sarte’s own discussion of method, however,- an article reprinted in my Du rural a l’urbain (Paris: Anthropos, 1970); see Satre, Critique de la raison dialectique (Paris: Gallimard, 1960);pp 41 1nd 42, and Panorama pp.89ff. Panorama is thus wrong on two counts, for what is involved here is actually the trajectory of Marxist thought itself.

Chapter 2

Pg 119 See above my remarks on the space of Tuscany and its repercussions for the art and science of the Quattrocentro. We shall return to these issues later in connection with Erwin Panofsky’s Gothic Architecture and Scholasticism and Pierre Francastel’s Art et technique au XIX et XX siecles. So long as the focus is on architecture, the best discuaaion is still E.E. Viollet-le-Duc, Entretiens sur l’architecture (Paris: A Morel 1863-72) Eng tr by Benjamin Bucknall: Lectures on Architecture (Boston, Mass:Ticknor, 1889)
Pg 125 In 1920 Klee had this to say: ‘Art does not reflect the visible; it renders visible’
Pg 136 See Julia Kristeva’s doctoral thesis, ‘ Langage, sens, poesie’(1973), which puts much emphasis on the distinction between the semiotic realm (involving instincts) and the symbolic one (involving language as a system of communications). Indeed, Kristeva goes even further in this direction than Jacques Lacan in his Ecrits (Paris: Seuil, 1966). The author most adept at keeping both these balls in the air is Roland Barthes, as witness his entire work. The problem is forcefully posed by Hermann Hesse in his Glass Bead Game but Hesse offers no solution.
Pg 166 See Rapoport House Form and Culture. Like Hall Rapoport inflates the significance of socio-cultural factors and ‘actors’

Chapter 3

Pg 171 In a discussion which starts out from the ‘classical’ thesis of Leibniz, Newton and Kant. Weyl is led to express some reservations about Ersnt Mach’s position. Does this mean that his own stance supports that taken by Lenin in Materialism and Empirio- Criticism? Not exactly;Weyl would probably feel that Lenin asked the right question-but took bad aim and missed the target
Pg 182 Symmetry in the sense of bilateral symmetry is a strictly mathematical and absolutely precise concept, according to Weyl: ‘A body, a spatial configuration, is symmetric with respect to a given plane E if it is carried into itself by reflection in E. Take any line I perpendicular to E and any point p on I :there exists one and only one point p’ on I which has the same distance from E but lies on the other side. The point p‘ coincides with p only if p is on E. Reflection is that mapping of space upon itself S: p-p’that carries the arbitrary point p into this its mirror image p’,with respect to E’(Symmetry, pp4-5). The interest and importance of the mirror derives not, therefore, from the fact that it projects the ‘subject’s (or Ego’S) image back to the ‘subject’(or Ego), but rather from the fact that it extends a repetition (symmetry) immanent to the body into space. The Same (Ego) and the Other thus confront each other, as alike as it is possible to imagine, all but identical, yet differing absolutely, for the image has no density, no weight. Right and left are there in the mirror, reversed, and the Ego perceives its double.’
Pg 183 Apropos of this development and the dualism that underpins it, see the last writings of Maurice Merleau-Ponty, notably L’oeil et l’esprit (Paris: Gallimard, 1964) where he abandons a phenomenological account of perception in favour of a deeper analysis. Merleau-Ponty remained attached, however, to the philosophical categories of ‘subject’ and ‘object’, which have no relation to social practice.
Pg 184 Paz examines the body, the mirror, and a variety of dualisms and their dialectical interactions, in the light of poetry. He draws a distinction, and points up antagonism, applicable to all societies, cultures or civilizations, between the signs of the ‘body’ and the signs of the ‘non body’
Pg 184 oddly absent from bachelard’s La poetique de l’espace, mirrors held a special fascination for surrealists. One, Pierre Mabille, devoted a whole book to the subject. Cocteau gave mirrors an important role in both his poetic and cinematographic works; it was in this connection that he invented the superstition of the ‘purely’ visual. Consider too the immense part played by the mirror in every major tradition, whether popular or artistic.Cf. Jean-Louis Schefer .Scenographie d’un tableau (paris:Seuil, 1969). The psychoanalysts have made great play with the ‘mirror effect’ in their attempts to demolish the philosophical ‘subject’. Indeed they have gone far too far in this direction, for they consider the mirror effect only out of its properly spatial context, as part of a space internalised in the form of mental ‘topologies’ and agencies. As for the generalization of the ‘mirror effect’ into a theory of ideologies, see Louis Althusser’s article in La Pensee, June 1970. this is the product of a fantasy and of a half conscious wish to preserve dogmatic Marxism.
Pg185 In his Le systeme des objects (Paris: Gallimard, 1968), Jean Baudrillard sees the mirror as nothing more, for the bourgeois, than an extension of ‘his’ drawing-room or bedroom. This is to limit the mirror’s real significance, and in effect to abolish the (psychoanalytic) notion of narcissism. The ambiguity (or duality) of these phenomena, along with their inherent complexity, emerges clearly from the analyses of Jacques Lacan (cf.’his account of the mirror stage in ‘La Famille’, Encyclopedia Francaise, Vol V111: henri wallon, ed., La vie mentale, Paris, 1938), but Lacan does not provide much in the way of elucidation. La vie mentale, Paris, 1938), but Lacan does not provide much in the way of elucidation. For him the mirror helps to counteractthe tendency of language to break up the body into pieces, but it freezes the Ego into a rigid form rather than leading it towards transcendence in and through a space which is at once practical and symbolic(imaginary).
Pg 190 Pace Georges Matore whose L’espace humain (Paris: La Colombe, 1962), though one of the best discussions of semantics and spatial metaphors, is limited in its significance because of the author’s espousal of this erroneous thesis.
Pg 199 Alfred Ange Tomatis is a well known authority on hearing, the inventor of a mechanical (electronic) ear, and the author of many contributions to orthophonics.
Pg 221Clearly we are not concerned here with architectural space understood as the preserve of a particular profession within the established social divison of labour.

Chapter 4

Pg 247 As demonstrated from his own particular perspective-that of psycholocial history-by Jean-Pierrre Vernant. See his Mythe et pensee chez les Grecs, etudes de psycholgie historique (Paris: Francois Maspero 1965) Eng tr Myth and Thought among te Greeks (London and Bostob, Mass: Routledge and Kegan Paul 1983).Vernant’s interpretation of the Greek mind though mor precise than Nietzsche and more firmly grounded in philology, lacks the poetic breadth of the Nietzchean view.
Pg 249 Cf Nietzsche’s repriseof the concept of eris in Thus Spoke Zarathustra tr RJ Hollingdale (hammonsworth, Middx:Penguin, 1961): ‘of the Friend’ in part 1 and ‘Of the Compassionate’ in part 11: also ‘You should always be the first…….- this precept made the soul of a Greek tremble’(‘Of the Thousand and One Goals’.for the dual aspect of eris, see Vernant, Mythe et pensee.
Pg 259 There is nothing intrinsically wrong with the introduction of these philosophical (scholastic) concepts, but their speculative use without any point of reference besides the Thomist system itself, opens the way to some very questionable manoeuvres.
Pg 259 Octavia Paz attempts to paint a symmetrical picture of relationships-similarities and contrasts-between medieval Christian and Buddhist art.
Pg 262 It is hard to imagine a less convincing or murkier thesis than the claim of some psychoanalysts that speech is linked to the penis; see for example C.Stein L’enfant imainaire (Paris: Denoel, 1971). As for a phallus that allegedly castrates the clitoris and diminishes the vagina,it hardly seems unjust that it should subsequently be emasculated by the ‘eye of God’ see S.Vidermann La construction de l‘espace analytique (Paris: Denoel, 1970). I cannot help feeling that something essential is being overlooked amidst all tis exchanging of low blows.
Pg 269 in his investigation of the ‘open work’ and the ‘absent structure’, Umberto Eco embraces error and even delusion when, without a shred of supporting evidence, he accepts the notion that, thanks to a favourable historical development and the increasing rationality of society, art, culture and material reality, the whole complex has in the second half of the twentieth century become susceptible of coding and decoding. According to Eco, this superior rationality takes the form of communication. The communicable is presumably decipherable, and consequently everything in the culture-each element or aspect of it-is said to constitute a semiological system. This evolutionistic rationalism and this sanguine view of the nature of communication (reading/writing) are typical embodiments of Eco’s almost charming ideological naivety.
Pg 271 Vitruvius’s plan and discussion of the Roman theatre show how the ‘musical harmony of the stars’ goverened the sounds of musical instruments just as it governed zodiacal fortunes. Similarly he asserts that the pitch of the human voice is regulated by its position relative to the harp or ‘sambuca’ clearly discernible in the heavens.

Chapter 5

Pg 297 See Lexis Carroll Symbolic Logic and the Game of Logic (New York: Dover 1955), ‘The Biliteral Diagram, ‘The Triliteral diagram’ and the accompanying table of the classes and of the interpretation of spatial classes.
Pg 298 Among them Heidegger, Merleau-Ponty,Bachelard and Piaget
Pg 301 Cf Whilhelm Boeck and Jamie Sabartes, Picasso (New York and Amsterdam: Harry N Abrams, 1955) ‘Unlike the many-figured paintings of 1906, Les demoiselles d’Avignon shows no space surrounding the figures’
Pg 301 ………the space they occupy and the space they leave unoccupied complement each other as the positive and negative’
Pg 324 The fate of Marxism has meant-and who by this time could still be unaware of it?- that all dispute, discussion or dialogue concerning the crucial areas of the theory has been prevented. For instance, any attempt to restore to its proper place the concept of ground rent has for decades been utterly squelched, whether in France, in Europe or in the world at large, in the name of a Marxism that has become mere ideology- nothing but a political tool in the hands of apparatchiks.

Chapter 6

Pg 364 Incidentally it is worth noting Goodman’s pertinent criticisms of Robert Venturi’s thesis, as set forth in Complexity and Contridiction in Architecture (New York: Museum of Modern Art/Doubleday 1966): as Goodman effectively demonstrates Venturi’s pseudo-dialecticalization of architectural space confuses the mildest of formal contrasts with true spatial contradictions.
Pg 365 [On the distinction between connaissaissance and savoir, se above p10 note 16
Pg 373 For the theory of difference see my Logique formelle,logique dialectique, 2nd edition(Paris:Anthropos, 1970) especially the preface. For induced versus produced differences see my Manifeste diffferentialiste(Paris:Gallimard)
Pg 374 Goodman After the Planners part 11 pp113
Pg 391 These remarks are inspired by Radovan Richta La civilisation au Carrefour (Paris:Seuil, 1974),translated from the Czech:Civilizacia na razcesti(Bratislava:Vydavatal’stvo literatury,1966)
Pg 394 See Rene Girard la violence et le sacre (Paris:Grasset,1972)
Pg 399 Fredrich Nietzsche, ‘On the Blissful Islands’in Thus Spoke Zarathustra,trRJ Hollingdale (Harmondsworth, Middlx:Penguin,1961)p110

Chapter 7

Afterwards