Critique of urban "theory"
Part 1
“To this end the already specialized science of domination is further broken down into specialties such as sociology, applied psychology, cybernetics, semiology and so on, which oversee the self-regulation of every phase of the process.”
—Guy Debord, The Society of the Spectacle, Thesis 42
Here’s another different post – consider it more of an armature than an argument, with the hopes of mounting a pseudo-abolitionist critique of the “discipline” in which I currently, technically work: urban theory. As Alan Harding and Talja Blokland note in their textbook-ish Urban Theory: A Critical Introduction to Power, Cities, and Urbanism in the 21st Century, the idea of an unitary “urban theory”, variously called “urban studies”, is itself fraught, containing in it urban sociology, geography, urban politics, and urban economics. Of these, urban sociology is the only one to have an explicit historical record existing in the academy (I can say that because I am loathe to do geography so dirty as to say it’s merely a subset of urban studies and not its own discipline). Harding and Blokland, with reference to Savage, Warde, and Ward’s 2003 update of Urban Sociology, Capitalism, and Modernity, offer a succinct breakdown of urban sociology’s existential questions:
“how the urban experience feels; if and how places acquire distinctive identities; how urban life is affected by a person’s gender, class, and ethnic group or the sort of housing he/she lives in; the effect of different urban environments on social relationships and bonds; the history of urbanization; the ‘spatial structures’ of cities; the nature of, and solutions to, urban problems; and political participation and local governance.”
This is a decent enough description, though asking repeated questions does not imply a method in the same way banging your head against the wall over and over doesn’t imply you’re a hammer.
Facts
Questions of method in the discipline are continuously frustrated by a pragmatic, rough-and-ready hermeneuticist enthnography which reigns as silently as it does utterly. Given this, there is an absurd lionization of a distorted, narrowly banded notion of “practice” as “concrete activity” and “concrete activity” as something accessibly and reliably accessed through academic labor. What this means is that what passes for theory in the discipline is very often contemplative travel writing. There is a simple formula in use under the auspices of this non-method method. A particular issue, assumed to have universal importance, is brought to bear via a focus on a geographically bounded space or set of analogous spaces. Take, for example, the table of contents for the latest issue of Urban Studies on immigration:
New Jersey; Iskandar; Halle, Schwerin, Berlin, Stuttgart, and Dresden; Tokyo; Israel; the UK; the Philippines, Singapore, India, Canada, Vietnam, and Germany; Shenzhen-Hong Kong. All of the above papers rely on surveys or ethnographic interviews for empirical heft, dusted lightly with pertinent OECD or World Bank facts. Thus the relevant question, that of immigration and migration, is reforged into an experience, an event, experienced personally or interpersonally, uncoverable only in its individualized contours. Research is a phone interview. Theory becomes unfeeling casework. The issue at hand becomes a fait accompli and solutioneering utopian, dependent on the prayed-for arrival of a “city for migrants” or, for the more pragmatic, a tranche of equitable policies built off the back of a truncated whitepaper-type set of light suggestions rammed into the paper’s conclusion. Not to sound too Marxist about it, but nowhere is there a notion of “totality”; the worldview that swims into vision here is one in which the globe is a vast container of agglomerated individuals variously experiencing departures from the norm. There are not even cities within this worldview, but things named as such which are titanic beasts, forces of nature, that likewise inflict themselves upon the victim, and their privations are reported to the interviewer, who is left to do nothing but record them down dutifully. In short, there is nothing here but a review of bad things happening to good people in different places. This is the sum of urban sociology in its contemporary appearance: a pretense of objectivity in the form of a scrum of ethnographic facts surrounding a blasted lacuna where thought should be.
Guy Debord writes: “the abstract nature of all individual work, as of production in general, finds perfect expression in the spectacle, whose very manner of being concrete is, precisely, abstraction”. He goes on: “the spectacle divides the world into two parts, one of which is held up as a self-representation to the world, and is superior to the world [emphasis mine]”.1 This is an essential point. By abandoning a conscious worldview or even a tactic of comprehension (and thus installing an implicit fetishism for ‘real life’ and ‘real stories’ in, yes, a journalistic vein, in which the immediacy is the only point), there is nothing left but the malformed assurance that facts are immediate and available. This creates, in turn, a litany of worlds and cities, one for every researcher: the city of Hong Kong, through the lens of a migrant, through the retelling of the author. A global “flow” from India to Canada, experienced by one, retold by another. None of these bear any relation to their supposed location, precisely because they are intervened in by a researcher who depends implicitly on their ability to bring order into the deprived lifeworld of the subject for their own gain. Given that there is, apparently, zero interest or intention to establish even a “shared” quality of people who may be undergoing similar or adjacent experiences and exploitations and thus solidarity, such an impulse being replaced in the heart and mind of the researcher by the simplistic provision of humanitarian pity for the subject’s sorry lot in life, we may say that the prevalent mode of urban sociological research in the “practical” vein is a process of harvesting. Thus, the real, practical, immediate, sensuous concrete world is rendered down into a false, reified self-representation which is superior precisely because that which does not fit is excised. One can think of this as a practice analogous to agriculture, this harvesting, especially given that the monoculture farm bears as much relation to “wilderness” as the “urban reality” does to actual existence.
Experience
Some strains of urban theory do seek to apprehend the abstract pseudo-totality of human experience, however. This “properly theoretical” wing derives itself primarily, in the modern period, from work initially done by Bourdieu and de Certeau, and to a lesser extent Lefebvre (if you can count “rhythmanalysis” as a worthwhile contribution to anything). Primary here is the question of power as it intervenes in everyday life, which is usually visualized as a victim of (occasionally capitalist) modernity, being either colonized by the “realm of production” or being modified into a sphere of strictly consumption. There’s relatively little to find fault with in this basic schematization precisely because the dichotomy it builds off of is received from, essentially, the division of labor – see especially recent new work like Tithi Bhattarchaya’s and Nancy Fraser’s on “social reproduction theory”. For the sake of brevity here I will focus on Bourdieu’s treatments in this topic, which I would name the division between production and reproduction – though this should not be taken as an indication the two thing about the issue using this framework.
Bourdieu, in his Outline of a Theory of Practice, offers up a lexicon by which the urban “theorist” can attempt to introduce rigor into high-level abstract discussions of everyday life with a particular focus on urban existence in Euro-American cities. Here I will attend to the two most well-used concepts on offer, which in tandem constitute the backbone of his thought: “habitus” and “doxa”. Habitus is, in his words, the “durably installed generative principle of regulated improvisations, produces practices which tend to reproduce the regularities immanent in the objective conditions of the production of their generative principle, while adjusting to the demands inscribed as objective potentialities in the situation, as defined by the cognitive and motivating structures making up the habitus”. In the interest of concision, we may say this means habitus is a self-sustaining, self-monitoring regulatory structure, an invisible machine for the psychological enforcement of social and cultural norms. I much prefer his formulation, appearing a few pages later, which states that habitus is “history turned into nature” – a nightmare of dead generations weighing upon the brains of the living, to be sure, but also personal history having passed from experience into an aggregate of expectations and behaviors, what Bourdieu calls “genesis amnesia”. Essential here is the notion of repetition and cyclicality for the formation of aggregate behaviors of agents, which belong to particular groups and classes, with the emergent effect being the maintenance of an unconscious and commonsensical homogeneity. “The habitus is the universalizing mediation which causes an individual agent's practices, without either explicit reason or signifying intent, to be none the less ‘sensible’ and ‘reasonable’”. It is curious that Bourdieu’s work has been taken up so totally by urban studies, perhaps, if for the main reason that Bourdieu himself is interested on the role of language as a governor of interpersonal relationships and encounters as the arena in which habitus is established and doxa, or “the universe of the undiscussed”, the realm of unassailable social and cultural truths, is generated. If habitus is the name for the machine such as it is which establishes practices and forms of life, which the urban theorist takes to be a collection of norms and specifically “urban practices” or what have you, doxa then represents the submerged and only dimly perceptible structuration of particular thoughts and actions – which Bourdieu terms the “universe of discourse”. Again, the transit from language to urban activity is a curious one. “Space”, for Bourdieu, is obsessed over, but in the sense of a public/private distinction – that is, a debased, reified retextualization of the division between production and reproduction. This is, of course, necessary for Bourdieu, as he is interested primarily in developing in what Julien Palotta terms a “total anthropology”.2
As Ranciere notes in his (in)famous critique of Bourdieu, and what should be obvious given the gloss above, Bourdieu is concerned primarily with problems of knowledge. Caroline Pelletier summarizes Ranciere’s critique nicely: beginning with the idea that a not-insignificant number of practices and processes are in fact inaccessible to the vast majority of people, Bourdieu reserves for himself, the elite and elect (or “scientist”), the role of truthteller. “This opposition divides the social into”, she writes, “on the one hand, ineluctable processes, and on the other, controlling illusions”. Nearly identically to the role of the researcher in the above section, the ultimate effect is one in which the imbecilic masses, who know not what they do, are presided over by the sociologist. Analogously, the sociologist/researcher gains privileged sight of the structures themselves in a sick messianism accessible through pure contemplation – again, not the concrete, but a twisted representation of the same, viewed through a non-ideological (or vaguely “critical”) position which assumes mastery by virtue of being, well, dumb enough to pursue a Ph.D. in a relevant field and rich enough to spend enough time thinking about this sort of thing.
Crucial here, in both the above “ethnographic” and the current “anthropological/theoretical” strains of urban sociological thought, is a fetish for the city itself. This may seem absurd on its face. But the city remains undefined – or, if anything, is defined in the negative as “that which is not rural”. How can a discipline offer anything if its ashamed or unsure of what it is actually about?
This is a known issue with urban theory, regularly discussed with relative openness – not that this solves anything. I would argue that this debate is missing the obvious: urban sociology or theory or whatever (you may have noticed I’m using these terms interchangeably by now) is not concerned with the “urban” or even the “spatial” at all, but with the pseudo-scientific presentation of psychological activity as directed and steered by environmental conditions. It is here that truth can be found via excavation – in the richness of life and experience available only in the lifeworld.
Place
Place, borrowed nearly wholesale from “human geography”, forms the last leg of the urban-sociological tripod along with facts and experience. Place is consistently used in severe contradistinction to “space”, usually taken to mean, variously, something abstract, or filled with “capitalist logics” (lol) or otherwise “geometric”. Tim Cresswell notes, simply, that place is defined and made by “habitation” which, obviously, points us to the phenomenology of Heidegger and Merleau-Ponty. Given the ambiguity surrounding this definition, place is a difficult to pin down concept, and appears in various guises, ranging from the out-and-out fascistic (“place is a pre-historic fact of life”, “place is ‘home’”, etc.) to the ostensibly emancipatory (“right to the city” rhetoric and especially Harvey’s Spaces of Hope, or his essay on Raymond Williams and “militant particularism” make up this wing). It should be easy to see two things in this usage: on one hand, the fetish of localism qua vitalist process theory (“place is a process, a becoming”, tying back loosely to Bourdieu), and on the other hand, the same old pretense to total knowledge of the urban lifeworld. If there is a single, brutal indictment of the entire “discipline”, it is here – reaching back to Georg Simmel’s famous essay on the “blasé attitude”, “The Metropolis and Mental Life”, still a first-day text in most urban studies programs, the entire edifice of urban sociology is a horrified, reactionary response to the machinic urban world (depending on Tönnies’ gemeinschaft/gesellschaft distinction) as opposed to an authentic “community”. That Simmel’s position has been distorted over the century to the point that modern adherents can and do locate “place” in urban conditions as opposed to reserving it solely for rural, village life does not disprove this point.
Place is reactionary in nature precisely because it depends on the establishment on an archipelago of spaces and places, categorizable by an intuitive elite, who though they may professedly make their distinctions according to a criteria which centers emancipation and freedom, nevertheless engages primarily in ignorance and obfuscation: any concrete problems are deepened and thereby purified and canonized as objects of contemplation, the ‘victims’ presented as hapless sob stories; a new set of divisions are laid upon the world. What does it mean, for example, to classify Astoria as a place and Midtown as a space? Very much, academically speaking, and very little to anyone who happens to find themselves in either. Even savvier accounts that will say things like “place is a social construct, like space and time” often depend on, yes, a vision in which place is produced by “society”, in some ungodly Heideggerian-Polanyian, which is gnostic at best and purely mystical at worst. Place, when it gains a real existence (as it sometimes, but rarely does) takes the form of an exclusionary enclave, even if it is confessedly revolutionary.
In sum: if urban disciplines can be said to have a project at all, it is one of distortion, of myopia, the maintenance of false divisions in the “fabric” of society – researcher over researched, pseudo-concrete over theoretical, place over space – all bent to the singular effort of denying salient class division and, of course, class struggle. Not to be too Marxist about it.
Part 2 of this post will go into the issues of sociology itself as an “irrationalist” discipline, borrowing heavily from Lukacs’ The Destruction of Reason and Simon Clarke’s Marx, Marginalism, and Modern Sociology.
Taken from Thesis 29.
Palotta’s discussion of Bourdieu as a critic of Althusserian structuralism in his essay “Bourdieu’s engagement with Althusserian Marxism: The question of the state” is fascinating but probably something I shouldn’t get into here, partially due to the fact that Bourdieu contented himself with taking potshots at Althusserians instead of engaging heavily with his work, other than ISAs. Palotta says it best: “This silent presence of Althusser in Bourdieu’s work, and the polemical and mocking tone with which he treated his disciples, leads one to suspect a certain discomfort on Bourdieu’s part in regard to a figure from whom he is driven to distinguish himself at all costs”. This similarity