The two-fold character of place Sample Clauses

The two-fold character of place. Xxxx’x conceptualisation of two-fold character of labour, is crucial for Xxxxxxxx’x (1991) critique of abstraction and understanding of a two-fold character of space, or what the author terms “differential space”. Importantly, Xxxxxxxx draws explicitly on and seeks to expand and spatialise Xxxx’x dialectical method. Through Xxxxxxxx’x (1991) “regressive-progressive” method, the author highlights the need for analyses which walk back from present structures to their concrete historical conditions and then “retrace” their steps back to the present. Xxxxxxxx (1991, 66) writes: “For how could we come to understand a genesis, the genesis of the present, along with the preconditions and processes involved, other than starting from that present working our way back to the past and then retracing our steps?” In Chapter 4, I use this conceptualisation to understand both the “double space” of Gurgaon’s urban villages, which set the terms for peasant rentiers’ integration into urban land markets and yet provide their ultimate exclusion. Similarly, in Chapters 5 and 6 I use this conceptualisation to understand how the organisation of social reproduction in the city, sets the terms of workers’ reproduction as flexible labour yet equally provides the terrain for a subversive and oppositional politics. Crucial for both arguments, is a way of thinking about the urban as a negotiated terrain of hegemony, and not simply a prefigured space of agglomeration, consumption and (re)production. In Xxxxxxxx’x The Production of Space (1991) “abstract space” refers to the concrete historical process through which conceptions, materialities, and experiences of space intertwine. For Xxxxxxxx, under dominant conditions of capitalism, the state attempts to produce an abstract commodity in space, homogenous and fragmented, parcellised along cleavages of “minimal difference”. Here “minimal” difference refers to alienated particularities their difference extends as far as the “diversity between villas in a suburb full of villas” (372). Xxxxxxxx (ibid, 320) notes that “under its homogenous aspect, space abolishes distinctions…simultaneously this same space is fragmented and fractured in accordance with divisions of labour and divisions of needs and functions”, “space is whole and broken, global and fractured” (ibid, 356). Crucially, Xxxxxxxx argues that to present these two aspects of space, homogenous and fractured, as a conflictual binary “is to betray its truly dual nature” (ibid, 355-356...