Antinomies of space and nature or an open totality? Neil Smith and Henri Lefebvre on nature and society

Prior to recent, systematic engagement with the whole of his corpus, geographical appropriation of the thought of Henri Lefebvre has tended to be been fragmentary and eclectic. This is aptly illustrated in Neil Smith's paradoxical claim that his production of nature thesis was inspired by Lefebvre's work on the production of space even as Smith rejected or misunderstood most of what Lefebvre actually said while reworking the production of space into an epiphenomenon of the production of nature. This paper is one of several that ramified out of our call to re-evaluate Lefebvre's conception of the nature-society dialectic in geography, and compare it and contrast it to other understandings and theorizations of the problematic. In this paper, we focus primarily on interrogating Smith's influential portrayal of Lefebvre's thought on the dialectics of nature and society, reconsider Lefebvre's discussion of the domination of nature---a category on which much of Smith's thesis pivots---, and how Lefebvre's grasp of what is now referred to as Marx's theory of metabolic rift offers an alternative route to a spatial-ecological critique of capital than various attempts to "ecologize" David Harvey's theory of spatial fix.

Napoletano, B.M., J.B. Foster, and B. Clark. 2021. Antinomies of space and nature or an open totality? Neil Smith and Henri Lefebvre on nature and society. Human Geography OnlineFirst.
DOI: 10.1177/19427786211051384

Abstract

The work of Henri Lefebvre has played a pivotal role in human geography in recent decades. At the same time, it has frequently been subject to partial and fragmented appropriations that isolate his insights on the production of space from his broader corpus, leading to confusion and misunderstanding regarding his handling of the dialectical relationships between space, time, society, and nature. In particular, Neil Smith's claim that Lefebvre's conceptualization of nature was both deficient and inconsistent with his dynamic conceptualization of space has tended to dominate geographical engagements with Lefebvre in this area. Following Smith, researchers generally reconstruct the production of space as an epiphenomenon of the production of nature. We critically assess and respond to Smith's criticisms of Lefebvre. Specifically, we contrast Lefebvre's material–dialectical approach to Smith's production-of-nature thesis. While Smith's thesis is helpful in understanding how capital attempts to subsume all of nature under commodity production, Lefebvre's dialectical conceptualization of nature–society as an oppositional unity points both to the impossibility of capital subsuming all of nature and the dangers that its attempts to do so pose to human civilization (even survival). Lefebvre's observations, regarding the growing rupture between natural processes and spatial dynamics, which he incorporates into his own elaboration of Karl Marx's theory of metabolic rift, make his work indispensable to the development of an ecospatial critique within geography and the social sciences more generally.