See Stuart Elden's most recent Society & Space contributions: Introducing Kostas Axelos and ‘The World’, Change and Continuity, From Hinterland to the Global: New Books on Historical and Political Understandings of Territory, Being-with as Making Worlds: The ‘Second Coming’ of Peter Sloterdijk and Contributions to Geography? The Spaces of Heidegger's Beiträge, Governmentality, Calculation, Territory

In his work Lefebvre uses three words, and their derivatives, which appear close but that are worth conceptually disassociating.

The first is le global. In Lefebvre this generally means the general, not the global. There is a general level (le niveau global) of analysis. The French word globalisation is a more recent rendering of a term that is taken from English. In common with other French theorists, but much earlier than Anglophone appropriations, Lefebvre instead uses mondialisation.

The second set of words, then, are those linked to le monde, the world. Lefebvre published this very piece in the journal Le Monde diplomatique! Lefebvre uses several related words, including le mondial, the worldwide, mondialité, and mondialisation, which has the connotation of becoming-world, or becoming-worldwide. It is a process of transformation as things spread and relate to the world. It is a movement of thought that makes possible a practice. When Lefebvre talks of a scale in this register, it is l’échelle mondiale – a worldwide scale as opposed to a global level.Despite contemporary, twenty-first century dictionaries telling us there is a one-to-one equivalence between mondialisation and globalisation, this is not how Lefebvre and his colleagues understood things. In this piece, for example, Lefebvre contrasts “the local and the worldwide” (2014: 205), not the local and the global. Even one sentence that is translated as “we are currently in a transitory period of mutations in which the urban and the global crosscut and reciprocally disrupt each other” (2014: 204) actually relates “l’urbain et le mondial” (1989: 16).

The third set of words are the ones he especially uses in this piece. This is the notion of le planétaire, the planetary. Here, Lefebvre argues that there is a new threat: “the planetarization [la planétarisation] of the urban” (2014: 205). He illustrates this with his fairly well-known analysis of the simultaneous homogenization and fragmentation of spaces. This term would need to be related to one that is largely absent here, that of la terre, which in French means both earth (and la Terre as planet Earth) and land. Land and earth are two crucial categories that also need further investigation and unpacking as crucial forms of political space.

These three terms, globe-world-planet, with their related yet differentiated meanings, are important in terms of contemporary debates. All-too-often, ideas of world-cities, global-urban connections, and planetary urbanization are used as if their meanings were effectively interchangeable. Just as valuable work has been done, some in the wake of Lefebvre, distinguishing between the overlapping yet non-congruent senses of ‘city’, ‘urban’ and ‘urbanisation’, so too should we seek to some clarification between ‘world’, ‘globe’ and ‘planet’.

As with Lefebvre I would be resistant to attempts to sharply define each, as terms with static, fixed designations. Instead, two possible modes of analysis present themselves. One would be to trace a genealogy of each, an examination of the relation between word-concept-practice, which would bear some relation to the work I have done on territory (Elden, 2013). Some elements of that project can be found in Lefebvre’s work, such as The Urban Revolution (2003) and those he has influenced, such as Edward Soja (especially 2000). Such a historical-conceptual task would be worthwhile, undoubtedly, perhaps even necessary, but ultimately insufficient to the pressing political issues at stake today (see Elden, 2009).

The second is to return to Lefebvre’s interlocutors, of whom Eugen Fink and especially Kostas Axelos are the most significant in this register (see Fink, 1960; Axelos, 1969; Elden, 2008a, 2008b). Lefebvre’s most explicit discussion of these themes is found in De l’État and related works of that time (1976-78, 2009). Reading all this work, with the dialogue between Greek, French and German, helps to make sense of some of the conceptual-political issues at stake. Conceptual-political, because Lefebvre took the world-related ideas of these two prominent post-Heideggerians to task for being too philosophical, and insisted on putting them to work in his state, space, world writings of this period. Neil Brenner and I discussed some of these issues in relation to Lefebvre’s usage of the terms in more detail in our introduction to State, Space, World (2009, especially pp. 20-26) – a collection that sought to give a sample of Lefebvre’s writings on political spaces at different scales, and to frame it within his work on the state mode of production and radical democracy.

That collection’s broad agenda, Lefebvre’s piece here, written at the end of his long life, and its contemporary translation and appropriation (see also Brenner ed. 2013) leads to a third mode in which we can take these studies forward. Building on the historical-conceptual, and the conceptual-political, this is a register that we could call the more explicitly political. How do we make sense of the global forces actively reshaping the political spaces of the world, transforming the planet and its materiality into resource and market? How can we retrieve a sense of the earthy, worldly physicality of the ‘geo’ in thinking geopolitics? How do we make sense of the space of the world? These are questions I am thinking through, and which relate to, without entirely replicating, the project Wachsmuth and Brenner invoke. Why is there such a disconnect between philosophical work on the world and concrete political and geographical analysis of globalisation? Why is work on globalisation often so theoretically impoverished and, concomitantly, why are philosophies of the world so often disconnected with contemporary political transformations? Why is geopolitics today frequently merely international politics writ large? For me, thinking through the relation between the three terms globe-world-planet, following and in critical relation to Lefebvre, is one of the ways this short piece acts as “a signpost and rallying call for that ongoing theoretical and political project” (2014: 201). 

References

Axelos K (1969) Le jeu du monde. Paris: Les Éditions de Minuit.

Axelos K (1984) Systématique ouverte. Paris: Les Éditions de Minuit.

Brenner N (ed) (2013) Implosions/Explosions:Towards a Study of Planetary Urbanization. Berlin: Jovis.

Brenner N and S Elden (2009) Introduction: state, space, world: Lefebvre and the survival of capitalism. In: N Brenner and S Elden (eds) Henri Lefebvre State, Space, World: Selected Essays. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, Minneapolis, pp 1–50.

Elden S (2008a) Mondialisation before Globalization: Lefebvre and Axelos. In: Kanishka Goonewardena et. al. (eds) Space, Difference, Everyday Life: Reading Henri Lefebvre. New York: Routledge, pp. 80-93.

Elden S (2008b) “Eugen Fink and the Question of the World. Parrhesia 5, pp. 48-59.

Elden S (2009) Terror and Territory: The Spatial Extent of Sovereignty. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press.

Elden S (2013) The Birth of Territory. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.

Fink E (1960) Spiel als Weltsymbol. Stuttgart: Kohlhammer.

Lefebvre H (1976-78) De l’État, Four volumes. Paris: UGE.

Lefebvre H (1989) Quand la ville se perd dans une métamorphose planétaire. Le Monde diplomatique, pp. 16-17.

Lefebvre H (2003) [1970] The Urban Revolution. R Bonano (trans) Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press.

Lefebvre H (2009) State, Space, World: Selected Essays. N Brenner and S Elden (eds) Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press.

Lefebvre H (2014) [1989] “Dissolving City, Planetary Metamorphosis. L Corroyer, M Potvin, and N Brenner (trans) Environment and Planning D: Society and Space 32(2), pp. 203-205.

Soja, EW (2000) Postmetropolis: Critical Studies of Cities and Regions. Oxford: Blackwell.

Wachsmuth D and N Brenner (2014) Introduction to Henri Lefebvre’s ‘Dissolving city, planetary metamorphosis.’ Environment and Planning D: Society and Space 32(2), pp. 199-202.