When Forms of Life Become Unintelligible: the Neo-Rural Production of Space

In this paper I propose a different reading of Henri Lefebvre’s concept of the ‘production of space’, adopting a broader conception of ‘space’ as opposed to most interpreters that emphasize the centrality of urbanization in his critical theory of space. Besides, I propose to examine the implicit ontologico-political implications that connect strands of Lefebvre’s critique of abstract forms of knowledge across his work on everyday life and on space. Then, I propose a critical confrontation between the concept of the production of space and the literature on the ‘form of life’. This concept acquired philosophical traction first in Wittgenstein (2009 [1953]), who defined the Lebensform as the shared set of social practices, natural behaviours and cultural contexts within which the language receives sense. Recently, Rahel Jaeggi recovered the concept in her Critique of Forms of Life (2018), where she proposed a critical theory of forms of life understood as sets of social practices involving a normative social learning process. Since the production of space involves social practices which are socially-historically specific and imply confrontations between competing social imaginaries and normative criteria, I advance the proposal to interpret forms of life in association with peculiar modes of production of space. Therefore, the production of space can be studied as enabling/disabling certain forms of life. Vice-versa, forms of life can be analysed for their capacity to produce space in peculiar configurations that can make them more or less resilient, democratic, alternative or conformist to a hegemonic orientation. In the final section of the paper, I adopt this model as an interpretative framework to investigate some recent forms of life on the verge of a re-emergence of the ‘rural’. The selected cases show different ways to deal with the alienating force of the urban production of space in an era where the hegemony of this mode of production—especially in the Global North—seems ever more contestable. Nevertheless, I intend to show that these productions of ‘radical’ rural space—both at the level of the ‘conceived’ as well as the ‘perceived’ and ‘lived’ space (Lefebvre, 1976 [1974])—actualize rather different forms of life and normative claims. Thus, the production of space affects the mutual intelligibility between competing forms of life, calling for interpretative models to assess the validity of their respective normative claims while taking care of their specificity. In the end, I argue that investigating them from the perspective of the production of space would favour a better understanding of political conflicts via reframing them as conflicts of mutual intelligibility between liminal forms of life with different ontologies of space.