Philosophy and the City: Interdisciplinary and Transcultural Perspectives
330
Philosophy and the City: Interdisciplinary and Transcultural Perspectives
330Hardcover
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Product Details
| ISBN-13: | 9781786604590 |
|---|---|
| Publisher: | Rowman & Littlefield Publishers, Inc. |
| Publication date: | 03/18/2019 |
| Pages: | 330 |
| Product dimensions: | 6.24(w) x 9.10(h) x 0.96(d) |
| Age Range: | 18 Years |
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CHAPTER 1
Capitalism, Form and the Philosophy of the Urban
David Cunningham
In his recent introduction to the mammoth 2014 collection Implosions/Explosions: Towards a Study of Planetary Urbanization, geographer Neil Brenner argues that almost all major twentieth-century approaches to the 'urban question' have taken as their 'primary unit of analysis and site of investigation' what he terms an 'entity commonly labelled as the city' (2014, 14). If the work of the Chicago School and their influential 1925 'mission statement' The City, coauthored by Ernest Burgess and Robert Park, is identified by Brenner as perhaps particularly exemplary in this respect — certainly for urban sociology as a discipline — more generally, he argues, the epistemological frameworks dominant within urban studies have simply assumed as self-evident that their object of study should be 'primarily, if not exclusively, ... "city-like" (nodal, relatively large, densely populated and self-enclosed) sociospatial units' (2014, 14). '[U]nderneath the tumult of disagreement and the relentless series of paradigm shifts that have animated urban theory and research during the last century, a basic consensus has persisted: the urban problematique is thought to be embodied, at core, in cities ', understood as fundamentally and qualitatively distinct from 'a non-city social world ... located "beyond" or "outside" them' (2014, 15).
Brenner's text is one of a series of recent accounts (see, for example, Brenner and Schmid 2013; Merrifield 2013) that — drawing, in particular, upon the writings of the French philosopher and social theorist Henri Lefebvre during the 1960s and 1970s, and upon his vision of an emergent planetary urbanization — have sought to argue that, in the face of an increasingly globalized capitalist modernity, the 'sociospatial relations of urbanism that were once apparently contained' within city-like 'units' have, as Brenner puts it in one evocative passage, 'now exploded haphazardly beyond them, via the ever-thickening commodity chains, infrastructural circuits, migration streams and circulatory-logistical networks that today crisscross the planet' (2014, 16). The consequence is that, as Edward W. Soja and J. Miguel Kanai put it in their own contribution to the Implosions/Explosions collection, 'The Urbanization of the World':
More than ever before, it can be said that the Earth's entire surface is urbanized to some degree, from the Siberian tundra to the Brazilian rainforest to the icecap of Antarctica, perhaps even to the world's oceans and the atmosphere we breathe. Of course, this does not mean there are dense agglomerations everywhere, but the major features of urbanism as a way of life — from the play of market forces and the effects of administrative regulations, to popular cultural practices and practical geopolitics — are becoming ubiquitous. To a degree not seen before, no one on Earth is outside the sphere of influence of urban industrial capitalism. (2014, 150)
It is these 'new formations of a thickly urbanized landscape' that have therefore become 'extremely difficult, if not impossible, to theorize, much less to map, on the basis of inherited approaches to urban studies' (Brenner 2014, 18).
Such accounts reflect a broader concern with dynamic processes of urbanization, as opposed to the apparently delimited object that is 'the "thing" we call a "city"' in recent urban studies (Harvey 2014, 61). And, at a broadly empirical level, among the most obvious consequences of this reorientation has been a shift of focus from the description of older city 'typologies' — centred on those more or less 'constant' spatial forms that have been historically understood as characteristic of the 'city'— to a focus on various infrastructural flows, logistics and networks as perhaps most constitutive of the ubiquity of the urban today. At the same time, conceptually, however, what has been principally at stake here are, I think, the ways in which, for Brenner and others, the 'city' has come to be constructed as an effectively transhistorical and quasi-anthropological category in urban theory more generally. Projected back from today into the ancient world of the polis or urbs, the essential form of the city —'nodal, relatively large, densely populated and self-enclosed' — has in this way been fixed in place as a means of continuing to conceptualize the dominant social and spatial character of the urban present. Yet the consequence, Brenner argues, is an effective occlusion of the history of the 'urban' or of 'urbanization' as distinctive socio-spatial logics that, far from being reducible to or merely extending the form of the city, may in fact historically supplant and displace it and so 'cast doubt upon established understandings of the urban as [itself] a bounded, nodal and relatively self-enclosed sociospatial condition' (2014, 15). As a call to reorient the 'discipline' of urban studies, what Brenner terms the 'unit of analysis' thus shifts from 'methodological cityism' (focused on a 'bounded' settlement type, in which 'the phenomenon of cityness is increasingly universalized as a settlement type around the world') to a new conception or 'vision' of 'urban theory without an outside', focused on the 'urban as an unevenly developed yet worldwide condition and process of sociospatial transformation'; one that is, formally, 'open, variegated, multiscalar' (2014, 22; emphasis added).
While such an urban theory without an outside may build upon 'various concepts, methods and mappings' from the latter half of the last century, as Brenner makes clear, it is, first and foremost, the work of Lefebvre that constitutes the principal influence, both in Brenner's own work and that of others associated with his project including Andy Merrifield, Roberto Luis Monte-Mór and Christian Schmid (Brenner 2014, 15). Indeed, Implosions/ Explosions begins by situating the very foundations of 'the urbanization question' in an extract from Lefebvre's The Urban Revolution, published in 1970 but only translated into English in 2003, and closes, too, with one of Lefebvre's very final works, published in Le Monde in 1989, the essay 'Dissolving City, Planetary Metamorphosis'.
Famously, the 'theoretical hypothesis' at the heart of The Urban Revolution — pitched somewhere between speculation and emergent actuality, or what Lefebvre terms a 'virtual object'— is that 'society has been [or is becoming] completely urbanized' (Lefebvre 2003, 2; emphasis added; Brenner 2014, 17). The tendencies that Lefebvre observed in the late 1960s would, when 'actualized on a planetary scale', thus result in what Brenner describes as 'a relentless, if fragmentary, interweaving of an urban fabric — a "net of uneven mesh" — across the entire world' (Brenner 2014, 17; see also 36, 37–38). At its ultimate horizon lies a situation in which 'urban practices, institutions, infrastructures and built environments are projected aggressively into and across the erstwhile non-urban realm, annihilating any transparent differentiation between city and countryside, and linking local and regional economies more directly to transnational flows of raw material, commodities, labor and capital' (Brenner 2014, 17; Lefebvre 2003, 14). In Lefebvre's own words: if the 'urban fabric grows, extends its borders', such a concept 'does not narrowly define the built world of cities but all manifestations of the dominance of the city over the country ... a vacation home, a highway, a supermarket in the countryside are all part of the urban fabric' (Lefebvre 2003, 3–4).
In the essay that follows, I want to begin to consider what such an opposition between the 'bounded' or 'self-enclosed' city and the apparently limitless contemporary 'urban fabric' — as a question of the urban 'form(s)' at stake in recent urban studies — might mean, then, for an attempt to think the urban 'philosophically' today. But, before doing so, it is worth sketching out a little further Lefebvre's own appeal to the urban in this regard.
PHILOSOPHY, THE CITY AND THE URBAN
Although Brenner's concern is as much conceptual or theoretical as it is empirical — a large part of the argument of his work concerns, after all, the problems of defining the 'urban' itself and the problems entailed by its more or less exclusive association with an inherited notion of the bounded 'city'— perhaps understandably, he and the various contributors to Implosions/ Explosions largely ignore, or steer clear of, Lefebvre's own pivotal claim that, in seeking to 'take up a radically critical analysis and to deepen the urban problematic', it is neither sociology nor geography but philosophy with which one has to begin. Yet, in fact, in both The Urban Revolution and his celebrated essay 'The Right to the City', published two years earlier in 1968, Lefebvre is remarkably clear that, as against the more or less specialized domains of economic, political or social science — the 'fragments of indigestible knowledge' characteristic of what he terms a 'fact-filled empiricism' — it is, above all, philosophers who have truly 'thought the city', who 'have brought to language and concept urban life' (Lefebvre 1996, 86; emphasis added).
One answer to the question of 'why philosophy?' lies, in this context, in Lefebvre's own critique of a positivist 'urban sociology or urban economy' during the postwar period, which, as he notes, 'present[s] itself as a counterweight to classical philosophy' (Lefebvre 2003, 5, 16). Indeed, it was, from this perspective, the perceived need to overcome the fragmentation of such 'specialized work and compartmentalized specialisms in the sciences of human "reality"' (Lefebvre 2016a, 53) that largely explains Lefebvre's own vigorous assertion that it must be philosophy that remains the starting point for any urban theory worthy of the name:
While it is true that the urban phenomenon, as a global reality, is in urgent need of people who can pool fragmentary bits of knowledge, the achievement of such a goal is difficult or impossible. Specialists can only comprehend such a synthesis from the point of view of their own field, using their data, their terminology, their concepts and assumptions. [...] The problem remains: How can we make the transition from fragmentary knowledge to complete understanding? How can we define this need for totality? (2003, 54, 56)
As he puts it elsewhere in The Urban Revolution, the 'urban phenomenon, taken as a whole, cannot be grasped by any specialized science' (53; emphasis added). As much to the point, as soon as it 'attempts to extend its properties', he argues, such positivism tends itself always to produce a covert and unreflective move from the specializations of 'science' to the more general terrain of 'philosophy', by virtue of its own necessary claim, 'consciously or not', upon this very 'need for totality', since it is, historically, philosophy which has 'totality as fundamental interest for its own sake' (Lefebvre 2003, 64). The result is that as 'soon as we insist on' totality, we cannot so much negate philosophy — as various positivisms might like to believe — as we must necessarily extend 'classical philosophy by detaching its concepts (totality, synthesis) from the contexts and philosophical architectures in which they arose and took shape' (63), given the necessity and unavoidability of general concepts as points of mediation between the different specific knowledges of the urban.
Nonetheless, if it is philosophy, as Lefebvre writes, which, historically, 'supplies this scope and vision', this has to be read alongside his accompanying assertion in The Urban Revolution that 'whenever philosophy has tried to achieve or realise totality using its own resources, it has failed' (64). Consequently, philosophical thinking (or what Lefebvre sometimes terms a 'metaphilosophy') must be reconceived as a project of totality which nonetheless philosophy as such cannot accomplish. As Lefebvre puts it in the 1965 book Metaphilosophy, the 'difficulty' is that 'the notion of totality imposes itself. It is indispensable. Without it, knowledge is dispersed; it accepts the fragmented division of labor without challenging it'. Yet 'if we start from totality ... reflection deduces or constructs arbitrarily instead of studying the facts. It systematizes. There is always a risk of passing from the partial to the total, concluding from the part to the ensemble' (2016a, 51). Philosophy cannot, in and of itself, 'resolve the split [between 'the real' and 'the ideal'] from which it starts' (46).
The obvious reference point here is Marx. Lefebvre begins the second chapter of Metaphilosophy, titled 'The Superseding of Philosophy', with a quote from the young Marx's notes for his doctoral thesis: 'The becoming-philosophy of the world is at the same time the becoming-world of philosophy. Its realization is at the same time its loss' (Lefebvre 2016a, 13; Marx 1967, 62). To be something more than ideology, in other words, philosophy needs to actualize itself in the world, so negating its condition as mere thought or speculative 'abstraction'. This is what, following Marx's own recourse to Hegelian dialectics, Lefebvre describes as the demand for philosophy to supersede itself. (Lefebvre uses the French term dépasser here, as a translation of Hegel's Aufhebung [2016a, 22].) To think totality in relation to a contemporary planetary urbanization is a project 'issuing from philosophy but superseding it by definition' (38). What is meant by 'metaphilosophy' partly names then, for Lefebvre, this sense of a self-critical philosophical thought that, in reflection upon and reciprocal mediation with other modes of thinking, both retains its perspective of totality — in relation to a theoretical knowledge of urban form as an immanently fragmented whole (see Cunningham 2005; 2009) — and yet indicates and recognizes its own limits. As Lefebvre puts it: 'Totality, to the extent that there can be a question of such, reaches us only in fragmentary form' (2016a, 51).
Much more could be said of this conception of totality in Lefebvre, and of its relation to a wider Hegelian-Marxist tradition. Yet the important point to note — at least for my purposes here — is that such 'fragmentation' is not simply an intellectual, disciplinary question concerning philosophy and its necessary limits, but also concerns the (changing) character of the 'world' itself in capitalist modernity. That is to say: if, increasingly, the urban phenomenon itself is, in actuality, 'universal', a 'global reality', as Lefebvre (like Brenner) claims, then one requires, more than ever, the 'scope and vision' provided by philosophy, even as one must recognize its radical lack of self-sufficiency to grasp this 'reality' fully in itself (2003, 54). As Lefebvre remarks, the question of the urban is one
which is in itself neither economic, sociological nor political, but encompasses all these determinations and levels. The economic, the sociological, the political as such, as fragmented realities or fragments of reality, each make up a part of the works of social man in praxis. Investigation bears on a totality (broken, fragmentary, contradictory). Besides, it is neither external to the 'real', nor located above what the philosophical method contributes. It bears on the 'real'. (2016a, 39)
(Continues…)
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