Radu Lungu
Introduction and Aim
Early sociological thought about the urban has been the subject of extensive critique since the second World War. Much of this critique has focused on a Foucaldian analysis of the discipline’s positivist and totalizing tendencies, which are generally ascribed to positivism and to a will to legitimize the discipline and give it an identity and purpose in the ‘ecology’ of theories about society (Meyer, 1982; Watkins, 1953). As a result of these critiques, sociology and urban theory have ‘officially’ purged themselves of most claims to objectivity, and have begun to favour a multiplicity of narratives and theoretical perspectives to the older grand unifying theories (Kughapan, 2014). Still, like a return of the repressed, grand narratives about society obviously rooted in concepts easily traceable to early sociology and urban theory appear from time to time, and when they do they usually generate a great deal of interest, both in the field and in adjacent disciplines, in particular in the arts.[1]
This essay is an attempt at sketching out why these theories enjoy these ‘revivals’ and why they stimulate such interest. I will argue that the brand of criticism mentioned fails to tell the complete story of the theorists’ motivations. Present in most of these critical accounts but never insisted on is an idea which has echoes in the writings of Frederic Jameson (1991: 308-11), and which links the tendency towards the formulation of grand narratives to an experience of ‘modernisation’. As we shall see, ‘modernisation’ implies a juxtaposition of different social orders, ways of living or modes of production. I aim to suggest that it is the very multiplicity of perspectives on different social orders coexisting in a global system of domination offered by postcolonial urban critique,[2] along with the experience of ‘Skyboxification’ in the West which are stimulating the persistence of these theoretical tendencies.[3] These tendencies then point to more than just the theoretician’s ‘will to power’—they are symptoms of the effects of late-capitalism, of our attempts at understanding it as a system which seems to be able to perpetuate the sort of ‘unevenness of development’ older theorists were so concerned with.
Positivism, Historicism and the Roots of Sociology
Many take the publication of Auguste Comte’s ‘Course in Positive Philosophy’ (1830-1842) as the moment marking the birth of Sociology. Comte does indeed come up with both the term ‘sociology’ in roughly the sense it was later to be understood in, and with the term ‘positivism’, which is now and has been for a while, the subject of much critique (Heilborn, 1990: 153). Comte’s direct influence on Sociology as an academic discipline is realistically speaking, not very significant (Heilborn, 1990: 154-5). Still, as we shall see, positivist ideas of the sort Comte was advocating sit at the centre of the discipline’s original epistemological system.
Positivism has since become virtually synonymous with what Peyton V. Lyon calls ‘scientism’ —’the belief that all, or virtually all, moral and political problems can be solved by methods similar to those used in the natural sciences’ (Lyon, 1961: 55). As Heilborn (1990: 153) points out, labelling someone a positivist is one of the more serious accusations that can be made in an academic context today. But, in Comte and even Durkheim’s time, positivism was seen in a very different light. It is important then to sketch out how positivism was originally outlined as an approach, how it became integrated into sociological thought and how it was later critiqued.
If one wants simply to make the point that the 19th century marked a high point of confidence in the methods of the natural sciences and in their scope, Saint-Simon is the perfect example.[4] He argued, before Comte or Marx and in parallel with Hegel for the idea that history is progressing in a series of stages, and that each stage corresponds to a particular philosophical system embodied in a specific social and professional class (Manuel, 1963: 233). Our age, he claimed, was the age of science—it followed that society needed to restructure itself following a ‘positive’ approach—that is, following the methods and approaches of the natural sciences, under a class of scientist-leaders (Manuel, 1963: 211). Saint-Simon’s professed confidence in science was so great that he was the first to make the claim that one can, from deductions about the past, make accurate predictions about the flow of history and the future—he was, in effect, the first historicist proper (Lyon, 1961: 59).
But a confidence in the natural sciences and in man’s ability to gain knowledge about the world around him through them was not the only impetus behind Saint Simon’s ideas. It pays to remember that, as Lyon notes, Saint-Simon’s thought is also marked by the belief that periods of social change are inherently dangerous and must be transcended in favour of a new period of order:
Having narrowly survived the French Revolution, he was obsessed with the need to re-establish social order on a new basis which would prevent the recurrence of such catastrophic upheavals. He believed that unrest would last until ideological uniformity had been reimposed and control over society transferred to new elites which, had they but the wit to recognize it, already possessed the elements of power. (Lyon, 1961: 55)
There are of course some disturbing overtones to these ideas, as they imply a ‘setting apart’ of the researcher from his object of study. But, we are not dealing with a Luddite either—Saint-Simon never advocates for a return to older forms—only for an authoritarian control of the transition to new ones.
These three strands of thought—first, a confidence in the natural sciences and a belief in the transferability of their methods, second, a general apprehension of change and a belief that society must be organized from above, and third, a tendency to respond to this perceived danger with an attempt to form a theory on the basis of which to assume control of society’s development—will come to mark the social sciences until the Second World War, and to a lesser extent after.
American Urban Sociology and Social Control
Skipping ahead to the early 20th century, we see that all three strands are still alive and well in sociology, in particular in urban theory from the United States, where they have been introduced to academic circles by John Stuart Mill who argued along similar lines to Saint-Simon, whom he had in fact met at the age of 14:
The first of the leading peculiarities of the present age is that it is an age of transition. Mankind have outgrown old institutions and old doctrines, and have not yet acquired new ones. When we say outgrown, we intend to prejudge nothing. A man may not be either better or happier at six-and-twenty, than he was at six years of age: but the same jacket which fitted him then, will not fit him now. (Mill, Robson & Priestley, 1963: 228)
Many of the early urban theorists like Louis Wirth and Robert E. Park held views along similar lines. Because of their concern for the preservation of social order in the face of change, many have labelled their thought ‘anti-urban’ (Goist, 1971: 46-7) or conservative (Watkins, 1953:). But, as Park (1971: 47) argues, this is not quite right. None of these theorists are advocating a return to previous forms of community, though they may lament the loss of what they perceived to be the effects—the forms of social organisation—those communities produced. It is interesting to remark that a key point for Goist is the idea that what he calls the ‘search for community’ came to be the dominating concern of Park’s thought as a response to the social upheaval caused by the Civil War, the industrialisation of society and the westward expansion of the US (Goist, 1971: 47).
To put it briefly, the American formulation of the problem of social control was essentially this—how can civility and cooperation be ensured in the face of changes that cause the loosening of the social structures which have ensured them in the past—and the original answer given was, as Meier (1982: 36) and other critics note (Entrikin, 1980; Watkins, 1953) —through the scientific study and organisation of society in accordance with the methods of sociology.
Sociology, in turn, was to borrow from the natural sciences. The natural sciences offered two things: guaranteed legitimacy in that intellectual context, as we have seen, and, equally importantly, metaphoric and interpretative potential. Park in particular borrowed heavily from ecology (Goist, 1971: 51), and this led to the Zonal Approach to urban theory, championed by the Chicago School. Ecologically speaking populations are conceived of as supported and determined by the territories they occupy: so Park imagined a theory of the urban along similar lines (Goist, 1971: 52).
This approach has been subjected to a set of criticisms that are now standard in academia when such ‘imports’ from the natural sciences are concerned. I will not review them here extensively. Meier (1982: 52) for instance claims that a determining factor in the sociological approach was the imperative to differentiate itself from economics. Seen in this light, the borrowing from the natural sciences is reduced to a Foucaldian claim to legitimacy in the search for the power to turn ‘theory’ into ‘practice’.
Postmodern and Postcolonial Urbanism and The Return of the Repressed
This strand of anti-positivist critique coupled with a historicist critique, have dominated later urban theory, especially in postcolonial and postmodern contexts (Kughapan, 2014; Lynn, 2014). Of the original scientism or positivism, all that is left today is (a harshly critiqued) architectural determinism, as in the work of Marc Augé (1995) or Tim Gregory (2009). Grand narratives and totalizing theories have proven more resilient however—though not for a lack of critique.
In his highly influential Postmodern Geographies, Ed Soja argues for a re-evaluation of contemporary social theory and analysis from a spatial instead of a temporal perspective. The focus on time, with the grand narratives it has produced, has failed, for Soja, to offer up a valid theory for postmodern cities like Los Angeles (Dear, 2000: 71). Soja and the LA School he is part of, along with postmodern urbanism in general have contributed significantly to the ‘spatial turn’ in social sciences, and to the critique of historicist thought in its disciplines. Still, even in Soja there are tendencies towards older styles of narratives. Dear gives an overview of Soja’s thought that shows its totalizing tendencies:
According to Soja, modernization refers to ‘a continuous process of societal restructuring that is periodically accelerated to produce a recomposition of space-time-being in their concrete forms […] that arises primarily from the historical and geographical dynamics of modes of production. (Dear, 2000: 74)
Soja in fact identifies three characteristics of our ‘age’: posthistoricism, post-Fordism (an increasingly flexible, disorganized regime of capitalist accumulation, to which I shall return in a moment) and postmodernism: a change in how we experience social being (Dear, 2000: 75).
This is not at all that different to the narrative Augé offers. His concept of supermodernity rests on a set of three similar root causes, though this time around seen in a fatalistic light: posthistoricism becomes an excess of time, through which history is pushed out of our search for meaning; post-Fordism, an excess of space, having to do with the suppression of the authentic ‘anthropological place’ as a result of the imperatives of modern capitalism, and its replacement with the ‘non-place’; postmodernism, which is characterized as an ‘excess of self’, a sort of anomie writ large (Augé, 1995: 22-37). Both Soja and Augé’s ideas are predicated on the idea of a total shift—from a condition of relative equilibrium to one of fundamental imbalance—from ‘old’ or proto-modernity to ‘supermodernity’ or ‘postmodernity’.
Towards an alternative critical approach
One way to explain the tendency towards totalizing views of society which sidesteps the Foucaldian perspective discussed above is to frame it following Frederic Jameson’s observations on what he calls ‘modernisation’.
For Jameson, modernism as a cultural phenomenon and all that it entails—in particular its search for root causes and grand explanatory narratives is the result of what he calls the ‘uneven’ process of modernisation (Jameson, 1991: 309). As our society transitions from one mode of production to another, we experience ‘modernisation’—the very instability identified by the early urban theorists and discussed above. While the process is not yet complete, Jameson argues, the co-existence of two modes of productions, two versions of society, is what triggers the ‘modern’ cultural response—the attempt to understand how this coexistence is possible and how it will develop. Once modernisation is complete, postmodernism follows and the drive to historicist thought is lost:
Ours is a more homogenously modernized condition: we no longer are encumbered with the embarrassment of non-simulateneities and non-synchronicities. Everything has reached the same hour on the great clock of development or rationalization (at least from the perspective of the West). This is the sense in which we can affirm, either that modernism is characterized by a situation of incomplete modernisation, or that postmodernism is more modern than modernism itself. (Jameson, 1991: 310)
So, Jameson’s ideas seem to offer a valid alternative explanation for the drive towards grand narratives and totalizing approaches in the earlier urban theorists. To understand why it persists in a postmodern period, apparently in defiance of Jameson’s account, we need look no further that postmodern urban theory itself. First, as Napong Tao Kugkhapan (2014: 126) and Andrew Lynn (2014) show in their reviews of the stages of the disicpline, a fundamental contemporary development is the opening up of the field to postcolonial and non-western theory in general. These ideas, developed in places where the economic and social realities are very different to Western ones, step in to fill the conceptual hole left in Jameson’s idea of the process of ‘modernisation’ once it has completed in the west. Postcolonial urban theory also needs, by virtue of its vocation, to think in terms of global relationships and gobal systems of exchange, a project which will always involve some form of grand historical narrative and which will always come back to the effects of ‘modernisation’—which in the colonial context has often been experienced as a violent upheaval of society from the outside.[5]
Modernisation, in fact, understood in this Jamesonian way, as the unbalanced coexistence of two socioeconomic realities also persists in the West. Lynn (2014) and Dear (2000: 151-57) both identify ‘Skyboxification’, post-Fordism/flexism and the tendency towards the sharp segregation of communities in terms of wealth into areas that sometimes support vastly different social systems as key to the postmodern built environment.
Conclusion
What this analisis suggests—short and selective as it is—is that postmodern critique of the Foucauldian manner discussed above and exemplified by Robert Meyer—while effective at purging the discipline of scientism and positivism—even when coupled with the sort of critique coming from economists like J. W. N. Watkins is unlikely to lead to a full understnading of the motivations behind the drive to formulate the sort of theoretical concepts discussed. It also suggests that we may expect, if these tendencies towards inequality among global and local regions are to persists, several other ‘modernist’ reactions—and, as Jameson points out—modernisms can just as easily be luddite as they can be progressive. My tentative suggestion is to consider turning to a Marxist-based critique of the sort suggested by Jameson, which looks for explanations beyond the ‘will to power’ of the theorist, in the structure of the reality he or she is responding to.
Notes
[1] Examples within the discipline include Auge (1991) and Gregory. (2009) For an overview of some responses from the Arts see Pecotic (2005).
[2] For a review of the major tendencies in postcolonial urban theory see Kughapan (2014).
[3] This is part of the current jargon in the field representing the tendency of postmodern metropolitan centers to display sharp segregation along class lines in its environment and social structure—enclaves of gated communities and ghettoes in Andrew Lynn’s terms (Lynn, 2014).
[4] For an overview of Saint-Simon’s thought, see Marcuse (1941/1955: 331), referring to Memoire sur la Science de l’Homme, written in 1813.
[5] For a postcolonial perspective on the restructuring of urban theory, see Roy (2009) and Robinson (2002); For an overview of postcolonial approaches to urban theory in general see Kugkhapan (2014:126).
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