Book Review: New frontiers of space, bodies and gender

Abstract

worth in opening this question up, so that the recourse to Lefebvrian reasoning does not lead us into mechanical valorization of the worst sort. Mary Ann Tétreault, for instance, gives a welcome outing to civic republican conceptions of public space and the ‘spaces of appearance’ neglected by Lefebvre; her concept of ‘meta-space’, where dimensions of public and private space intersect or overlap, is particularly useful. This is not going ‘beyond the public/private distinction’, as the editors insist, so much as emphasizing the necessary and inevitable blurring of boundaries in civil life, and locating the possibilities for freedom in the very ambiguity of these boundaries. Ted Kilian, in one of the best chapters in this collection, goes further than this, rightly stressing current confusions over the definition and interpretation of public space. Kilian moves things forward by stressing, like Tétreault, the public/private distinction rather than mechanically denigrating it. For him, publicity and privacy are not characteristics of space, but expressions of coexisting power relationships in space. This means that we should not reify space as public or private – exclusion and access are not good or bad in themselves, we infer – and we should devote our attention instead to ‘the processes in which the necessary contestation of privacy and publicity is played out’. Of course, if Kilian is right to insist that there is no public space, as such, the whole project of this volume begins to look a little odd. Once more, I have the feeling that the focus on a Lefebvrian production of public space collaborates with the same mechanical, productivist, reifying orientation we have all become rather quick to denounce. In the end, what the editors call ‘the perpetual permutation of public space’ escapes them. And perhaps we should be grateful for this: the ambiguities of public and private space are still more empowering than Lefebvre’s contradictory and unhelpful definitions. The editors begin this volume by noting that public spaces are the testing grounds of social theories and political ideals (rather than the other way round); if so, the implicit privileging of the claims of philosophy and social theory here seems misguided.