Conference Program

In this paper, I draw upon contemporary engagements with Lefebvre’s spatiotemporal critique of capitalism to argue that the emptiness of our common spaces degrades democratic commitments. Drawing from a Heideggerean phenomenological perspective, Lefebvre (2004, 2014) is concerned with the formation of being in relation to everyday life amidst the spaces of the world. Unlike Heidegger, however, Lefebvre states that it is in the everyday encounter with the world, and with the cultivated spaces of one’s immediate environment, that capitalism asserts its control (Schmid, 2022). Here, I argue that capitalism has flattened our everyday environments by eliminating materials—what Heidegger (2001) calls the ready-to-hand—through programs of austerity and by impoverishing our imaginaries by tying life’s worth to labour and consumption. A fulsome lifeworld, I contend, cannot be constructed from the remains, from the shadows and echoes of meaningful engagements with the world around us and with others. To develop this argument, I begin by describing how capitalism makes incursions into the spaces of young people’s lives in two ways: first, through consumerist online worlds; second, through classrooms eroded by neoliberal conditions. For the former, I draw on Lefebvrian analyses to describe how capital’s rapacious tendency toward marketization has shaped online environments into vapid spaces where children are both labourers for and consumers of Big Tech, but have few opportunities for meaningful human connection. For the latter, I extend the Lefebvrian analysis to argue that the neoliberal iteration of capitalism has altered the material conditions of schools, ridding them of rich, experiential opportunities for the arts and hands-on learning through underfunding. These classrooms, I suggest, are now increasingly spaces for more blinkered, algorithmically-controlled online time, as students are rarely given materials outside of laptops or phones. Both online and classroom spaces then facilitate what Crary (2022) calls an “atomized crowd of individuals” (Ch. 3, para. 48). In the third section of the paper, I discuss how a lack of space to forge communities—to meaningfully experience the in-the-world phenomenon of being with—corrodes the foundations of democratic participation. That is, as fewer materials are available ready-to-hand, there are fewer opportunities for young people to encounter and forge care for the world. This lack of connection, of intention, and of imaginaries is a product of the emptiness of capitalist space, but not an accidental one. It is a way of insuring that democracies are less viable and that oligarchic regimes face fewer obstacles. I conclude my paper with an invitation to consider what Lefebvre’s relentless focus on space permits us to see: that cultivating time and place for togetherness, in respite from capitalist phenomena, is a promising way forward. I assert that place-based, material enrichments should form the basis for arguments in support of public education, and for how children might spend their leisure time as well.