Reason in the City of Difference

Gary Bridge

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2004
• ISBN:
  9781134444670
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Arquitectura
• Subtopic: Planificación urbana y paisajismo

In the modernist city rationality ruled and subsumed difference in a logic of identity. In the postmodern city, reason is abandoned for an endless play of difference. Reason in the City of Difference poses an alternative to these extremes by drawing on classical American philosophical pragmatism (and its contemporary developments in feminism and the philosophy of communication) to explore the possibilities of a strengthening and deepening of reason in the contemporary city. This is a transactional rationality based on communication, rather than cognition, involving bodies as much as minds, and non-discursive, as well as discursive competences. It is a rationality that emerges out of difference and from within the city, rather than over and above it.

Using pragmatist philosophy and a range of suggestive examples of urban scholarship, this fascinating book offers a new, alternative reading of the city.

1 Reason in the city of difference

INTRODUCTION

The city has always been the home of reason. From early Greek civilization the city was the polis, the location of political democracy. The agora was the site of open and enquiring debate amongst rational citizens. Yet that space of reason also excluded difference: women and slaves did not count as rational citizens. This association of reason with exclusivity and the activities of an elite persisted into the modern era, encoded in the urban Master Plan and efficient bureaucracy. In the past century the idea of reason has been assailed from all directions – through a turn to the body, to language, to culture, to the unconscious. The way that difference is registered across all these realms is now of primary philosophical and social concern. That the city should be the home to difference is an aspiration in metaphor as well as practical politics – where cities pre-eminently include the claims of multicultural and polyvalent identities. Surely it is time to banish reason, with all its exclusivities and homogenizations, from the city, and to let difference in?

THE CITY AFTER POSTMODERNISM

In his paper heralding the era of postmodernity Frederick Jameson (1984) pointed to the Bonaventure Hotel, a structure of endlessly curved mirror glass that refracted the city around it but gave no sense of its own interiority, as iconic of the new age. The postmodern turn in urban studies denied that explanations of the city could rest on ultimate foundations of knowledge and opened up the space for a cultural politics of identity (sexuality, gender and ethnicity as well as class). It treated space as multiple and emergent and critiqued the desire to locate or fix space, in the same way poststructuralist theory sought to evade the fixing of meaning in the word. And yet its anti-foundationalism and emphasis on difference ultimately meant that the postmodern city was seen as all surface, an endless play of space and difference, an unmappable space, a posthuman environment in which human activities are just one small part of an overall assemblage of emergent effects that involve also non-human biological actants, machines and texts.

In response to the claims of postmodernism, and whilst acknowledging the significance of its challenge, some urbanists claimed an interior, an identity, a stability for the city, based on certain urban orderings – be it the logic of capital, discourses of power and surveillance, or rational planning. So we have conceptions of urban space that see its coherence through the circulation of power or its pluralization through displacement and difference. These divisions can be seen in distinctions between system and lifeworld (Habermas), abstract space and lived space (Lefebvre), strategy and tactic (de Certeau), disciplinary space and heterotopias (Foucault), the space of flows and everyday life, the public and the private realm.

What I do in this book is suggest that there is another set of responses to the challenge of the postmodern city. It is a tradition of thought that has resonance with (and indeed was partly implicated in) postmodernism but it also has an earlier connection to the city: that of philosophical pragmatism. Over the last two decades there has been a rapid expansion of interest and debate around pragmatism (Rorty 1982; West 1993; Dickstein 1998; Stuhr 2003; Joas 1993). Recent developments in pragmatism have the spirit of postmodernism in the recognition of difference, but also capture some of the significance of communication and discourse after the linguistic turn in philosophy. The purpose of this book is to suggest how a certain reading of pragmatism gives us an understanding of a rationality that can live with difference, that in some senses comes out of difference and the nature of contemporary urban space. It is an understanding that does not dichotomize urban space into the instrumental or the communicative, the system and the lifeworld, abstract and lived. Rather it sees their situational interweaving in spaces of communication that are non-discursive as well as discursive. It is performative but also full of articulation and interpretation. The diversity of space-times of communication in the city is where what I call ‘transactional rationality’ is made manifest.

I think this leaves us with a different kind of city, one in which the space of power is not separate from the pluralization of difference. It is neither the postmodern city of pastiche – of separate and incommensurable social worlds that are endlessly emerging – nor is it the modernist city held together by singular orderings of capital, discourse or reason. It is instead an understanding of the city that is full of communicative difference but in which there can be an evaluation of claims across dissensus and difference, the resources for which come from the range of transactions rather than any appeals to transcendence. It is a city in which rationality is an attempt to respect difference through discursive and non-discursive argument and interpretation that goes on not in some singular public realm but in the myriad space-times of communication that exist between communities, within communities and within the ongoing project of the self.

All these themes are central to current understandings of the directions of urbanism, and all, I argue, provide the possible basis for a strengthening and deepening of reason in the city. But this is a reason very different from its forebear in modernity. Rather than being confined solely to mind, it involves body-mind as a form of intelligence. Rather than ignoring habitual action, habit provides its motive force. Rather than being based on an autonomous mind of the individual, it is built out of the social relations that make individuality possible. Rather than being confined to linguistic communication it also involves non-linguistic competences. Rather than being cool-headed and detached from emotion, emotion provides its focus. Rather than requiring coherence and self-presence, it is prompted by absences and delays. All in all it is a capacity that has always existed in the city but too often has not been able to be expressed. It is a rationality that works from within the city rather than over and above it.

RETHINKING PRAGMATISM – REVISITING CHICAGO

Philosophical pragmatism has a long-standing connection to the city. It was the work of the classical American pragmatists (Charles Sanders Pierce 1839–1914, William James 1842–1910, John Dewey 1859–1952 and George Herbert Mead 1863–1931) that was the major intellectual influence on the first sustained effort at urban theory: the Chicago School of urban ecology that came out of the Department of Sociology at the University of Chicago in the early decades of the twentieth century. There are as many pragmatisms as postmodernisms at present and even classical pragmatism was host to a range of positions from the critical realist pragmatism of Charles Pierce that assumed a world out there of which humans had fallible knowledge, through to the perspectivism of John Dewey, in which knowledge and the world was an outcome of action in different socio-cultural settings.

Despite differences there are a number of characteristics that broadly define pragmatism. One is the judgement of knowledge by its practical consequences rather than theoretical coherence. This is related to its idea of praxis: that knowledge is something that must be practically acted out. It must be tested by its consequences, rather than its a priori logical propositions. Logic is more like a process of inquiry, rather than a set of abstract propositions. ‘Reality’ is seen as unpredictable and emergent. Thus knowledge is fallible and always provisional.

One of the things Chicago School urbanists such as Park, Burgess and McKenzie took from classical pragmatism was its emphasis on the organic nature of life. Whereas positivism and mechanics were taking social science in the direction of causality and linearity and the borrowing of models from the natural sciences, classical pragmatists stressed the organic web of life as the basis of understanding social relations. For the Chicago School the city was seen as an ecosystem (and more specifically a plant ecosystem) in which different social groups vied for space and survival (Park et al. 1925). The growing metropolis of Chicago in the 1920s presented a challenging environment to which new immigrant communities had to adapt. Each community adjusted in its own way by developing its own conventions of activity in the city. But often these adaptations were undermined by the power of economic forces to disrupt social relations and re-sort people not in terms of their communities of ethnicity but rather in terms of the community of money. People were sorted in urban space according to economic status rather than community heritage. These theorizations were based on the detailed ethno-graphies of different community ‘situations’ that constituted the work of the early Chicago School and still define this tradition today (Fine 1995).

There is, I think, an understanding of rationality at the heart of the work of the Chicago School which has not been so remarked upon in urban studies. For Park (1926) rationality was the ability of an individual to be understood in public, which meant by her or his ‘moral community’. It was an idea of expression and acceptance in public. So, rationality was a form of communication, and one that is limited by one's cultural community. Park argued that economic rationality undermines community, or communicative rationality resulting in social disorganization.

The idea of rationality as a relationship to one's community is advanced strongly in the 1930s onwards by George Herbert Mead. Developing Dewey's anti-Cartesian idea of the development of mind as something socially shared, rather than being an individual attribute, Mead takes forward an understanding of the role of communication in the formation of self and community (Mead 1934). Mind is formed when gestures shared between people (or animals) come to mean the same thing for the two participants, such that they can anticipate and influence each other's behaviour. This ability to share gestures in mutual anticipation is rationality in action. In humans it develops (over human history and in the social development of each individual) into shared symbols, the most sophisticated and resourceful of which, is language. ‘Mind’ is an attribute of language. Mind as a social attribute is held together by rationality as a form of communication. For Mead rationality relied on the ‘me’ or ‘generalized other’, the ability of the individual to anticipate the response to an action by the generalized other of the community as a whole. This contrasts with the ‘I’, the unpredictable side of the self, the improviser, the historical agent. Mead gave most emphasis to the ‘me’ in ongoing social relations.

To Mead's emphasis on the ‘me’ of community Herbert Blumer (1969) stressed the symbolic forms of communication at the expense of the non-symbolic forms. This gave rise to a whole field of studies, symbolic inter-actionism, the analysis of shared symbols in social interaction out of which meaningful social worlds are built. This flowed out of Chicago School research and continues as a strong research tradition today (Fine 1995; Plummer 1997). So we have a double emphasis: on language as the significant set of symbols in communication, and, the point I wish to emphasise, on rationality as a facilitator of communication, but strictly within community. This is a continuation of Park's thinking about the separate social worlds of the city, where the city's size is able to support a critical mass and separate and diverse ways of life (witness Gans’ (1962) ‘urban villagers’; Suttles 1968; Peach 1975).

The difficulty with community ethnographies that typified the Chicago School was that they were based on microanalysis and took community norms at face value. Such studies were seen as too parochial to capture these larger circulations of power (Flanagan 1993). This was evident with the strengthening of functionalism and systems theory in urban studies but especially true after the advent of Marxist urban studies with the publication of David Harvey's Social Justice and the City (1973). Community-based analysis had no way of explaining the logic of capital accumulation and the urban process in capitalism (Harvey 1978). There was a ider rationality of the system at work that often undermined the community and communicative rationality.

The way that system rationality undermines communicative rationality is the theme taken up by Jurgen Habermas in his reconstruction of social theory (Habermas 1984, 1987). Habermas's work connects to urban studies to some extent, especially in the work of Richard Sennett (1974, 2000) in his discussion of the public sphere (which I consider in Chapter 5), and through the ‘deliberative turn’ in planning theory (discussed in Chapter 7). Habermas combines the heritage of Marxism and critical theory in his understanding of ‘the system’, with an understanding of communication in the lifeworld that is based in pragmatism, and especially the work of Mead.

Habermas's work suggests how communication, rather than simply being held within community boundaries by the binding force of communicative rationality, is held in check from without communities by the instrumental power of the system (in the form of the economic rationality of the capitalist system and the instrumental rationality of modern state bureaucracy). This is what Habermas calls the colonization, or elsewhere the provincialization, of the lifeworld by the system. Communication is distorted by capitalist ideology and removed from a communicative context by the steering media of power and money. For Habermas this is a split within rationality itself, between the instrumental rationality of the system (economic rationality and bureaucratic utilitarianism) and the communicative rationality of the lifeworld. Following a division introduced by speech act theory (Austin 1962; Searle 1969) Habermas makes this separation based on the functions of language oriented to action (instrumental) and language oriented to mutual understanding without a press to action (communicative).

PRAGMATISM AFTER POSTMODERNISM

Habermas's view of communicative action is limited to language and to a representative view of language at that. Postmodernism marked a crisis of representation and, along with poststructuralist interventions, questioned the idea that language represents reality. Habermas also has a procedural idea of rationality, one that rests on a ‘universal pragmatics’ in which implicit validity claims underlie all language use. The contents of the validity claims relate to people's ideas of the objective world, their social norms and their subjective worlds. In order to defend these worldviews in debate people must examine the basis of their validity – in terms of objective truth, social legitimacy and subjective sincerity. This reflection on one's own assumptions as well as the examination of other people’ objective, social and subjective worlds is deliberative and communicatively rational. However the rational ‘good reasons or grounds’ on which participants defend their validity claims still stresses cognition and formal communication, despite Habermas's wish to move away from a philosophy of consciousness towards a philosophy of language and intersubjectivity.

In contrast there is a view of communicative action that is much broader, including non-discursive performativity, as well as discursive communication. This approach to communication involves bodies and gestures, as well as speech and thought. It suggests that there might be all kinds of uncontrollable effects (or excess) around communication. Communicative action is fraught with inconsistencies, slippages and misunderstandings. Performativity, slips and excess in communication can be as much a resource for social transformation as the more controlled communication towards consensus, on which Habermas focused. This is the point made by Judith Butler in her work on gender norms and communication (Butler 1993, 1997). But whereas Butler looks to the effects of body excess, or communicative slips as a sort of universal quality of communication, the pragmatist approach suggests how these effects are qualities of the particular situation and communicative transaction, rather than universal qualities per se (Sullivan 2001). The pragmatist approach also suggests how communicative action constitutes situations, rather than representing them, or being contained by them. It sees dissensus being as much part of the communicative situation as consensus, and speculation being as significant as conformity.

These arguments for a more full-bodied view of communicative action (and communicative rationality) come from a group of pragmatist philosophers working in the philosophy of communication and feminism, and especially in the work of Lenore Langsdorf, Shannon Sullivan, Sandra Rosenthal and Charlene Haddock Siegfried. This deepening and broadening of the realms of communicative action is a contemporary renewal of the work of John Dewey and takes in many of the developments in contemporary philosophy after postmodernism and after the linguistic turn. This ‘communicative turn’ develops Dewey's dissolution of the Cartesian distinctions between mind and body (to body-mind) and suggests the mutual implication of instrumental and communicative rationality, argument and aesthetics, and system and lifeworld. From this perspective communicative action is implicated in systems of dispersal of power (in a Foucauldian sense) as well as being in resistance to power. Resistance is at the heart of power, rather than being provincialised and separate from it. Dissensus exists within as well as between communities, and indeed within argument and voice, as well as between them.

THE CITY OF REASON AND DIFFERENCE

A broadening and deepening of the idea of communicative action in the way suggested I think gets to the heart of contemporary debates about the city and urban space. There are the conditioning forces of tradition and the circulation of power/discourse. These ‘conserving’ forces Dewey (1922) called ‘habit’, a form of productive disposition. But tradition and power are not impervious. Non-discursive performativity and communicative ‘excess’ suggest that rationality is not limited to a form of practical reason within social boundaries. Rationality is not just confined to community, but overspills its limits. Individuals are not necessarily confined to community but increasingly operate in networks of overlapping communities – with different ties and pulls that sometimes rub against each other – a clash of habits. The city gives the chance of diverse connections as well as enclosure within enclaves: there is hybridity as well as singularity. The reproduction of structures of identity and power relies on everyday performativity of speech acts and non-discursive body communications. This approach is sensitive to the whole communicative repertoire that includes slips and give-aways that reveal other subconscious states. There are hints, innuendos, swarms of unratified messages that transact in the city. There are heart-stopping, world-disclosing moments that change the course of action and the life-course.

As those advocating the postmodern city argue, there are more voices and a greater diversity of connection, a proliferation of difference. But this might result in a city of disconnection, the city as a patchwork of difference between which it is impossible to communicate, or where any attempt to do so is an act of domination. Indeed some contemporary pragmatists think this way. Richard Rorty (2000) believes that rationality is a form of loyalty to community and that it is not possible to b...