Читать книгу Designing Disorder - Richard Sennett - Страница 8
ОглавлениеThe Politics of the Hidden City
In 1804, midway through the military conquest of Europe, Napoleon laid out laws to regulate civil society in France and throughout his empire. The code civil imposed order on everyday life by regulating family affairs, defining school curricula and organising religious practices. This was the first great piece of modern social engineering.
Little more than a decade later, Napoleon’s empire lay in ruins, as did his formal, rationalised plans for civil society. Writer and political thinker Benjamin Constant was happy to see it fail, but what was to replace it? Rather than return to the ancien régime past, or to the violent ideologies of the Revolution, he dreamed of a different kind of civic organisation. In his ‘The Liberty of the Ancients Compared with that of the Moderns’ in 1819, Constant argued for an ordinary life in which people are personally stimulated by the unexpected; in which social experience expanded beyond the values of like-minded ‘in groups’; in which political certainties are confronted. In Constant’s ideal society, people learn to live with, and indeed benefit from, ambiguity, contradiction and complexity. The life-stream ran deep, he argued, rather than clear. This life-stream ran through a city.
Constant proposed that a city like Paris possessed three characteristics. In the old, prerevolutionary city, rich and poor lived cheek-by-jowl with one another but did not mix. It was a city of indifferences. In the revolutionary city, especially during the 1792–94 Reign of Terror, people who did not conform to the dominant powers were hunted down and guillotined; difference became a crime. After Napoleon’s fall, from 1815 to 1830 Constant lived in a Paris whose streets teemed with people who were mutually, intensely, nervously aware of one another, but who allowed each other space to lead separate lives; the citizens were both traumatized and tamed by history’s disorder. This third, chastened Paris embodied Constant’s idea of civil society.
In this book, we explore what Constant’s vision might mean today and how it could perhaps be designed. The project began fifty years ago when I, Richard Sennett, wrote The Uses of Disorder. I knew little about Napoleon then and had never heard of Benjamin Constant. But in probing the connections between self and city, the book explored a particular version of civil society. It was premised on the not-remarkable observation that personal experience expands by turning outward rather than inward. Similarly, civil society emerges as individuals become less self-involved and more socially engaged.
But how? I argued that a dense and diverse city engages people in a particular way. It is not just a matter of exposure to or toleration of the city’s many ways of life. To connect with others who differ racially or religiously, whose ways of loving are alien, who come from distant cultures, people have to loosen up inside themselves, treating their own identities as less absolute, as less definable. You could say that people have to engage in a kind of self-disordering.
This leaves us with a big and concrete problem. A city is a physical solid that contains many different ways of living. In old French usage it is both a ville – the solid of buildings and streets – and a cité – the behaviour and outlook adopted by the people who lodge within the physical place. Could the kind of civil engagements envisaged in The Uses of Disorder be made physically? Could the buildings, streets, and public spaces be designed to loosen up fixed habits, to disorder absolute images of self?
Once printed, I was still not satisfied that I had good answers to constructing civil society materially. As I have worked increasingly as a practical city planner, this lack of material answers has remained a grave defect, in my mind – and it generated the collaboration in this book. Here, architect Pablo Sendra explores how the adaption of flexible urban infrastructure can loosen up and enrich life on the ground. Sendra’s aim is to design infrastructure that permits community innovation and surprising configurations. Though these designs could enable a complex, diverse, loose city to function, they alone cannot cause it to exist. They are tools, necessary but not sufficient for creating a nurturing urban civil society. The mark of a complex, diverse, loose city is that a person can look back and reflect that ‘life turned out differently than I expected’. That reflection is just what Benjamin Constant thought to be the rationale of civil society – life beyond the ordained, the prescribed – even though he never contemplated the sewers of Paris as a tool for creating this experiential freedom.
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Napoleon’s code civil was revolutionary in that it afforded all citizens equal rights – albeit only if those citizens were male. Napoleon championed ‘family values’ that tied women to their husbands and disenfranchised illegitimate children. Again, the code afforded religious liberty to all, freeing Protestants and Jews to pray openly in France, but it also reintroduced legal slavery into French colonies. This troubling document had a profoundly positive effect, even so, on the later pursuit of civil rights. In particular, it decreed equal schooling for all. And such demands for educational equality set in motion the post–World War II struggle for racial civil rights in America, where the code civil formed part of the background for the American Supreme Court decision to outlaw in 1954 racial discrimination in schools.
By the time The Uses of Disorder was published in 1970, the accumulated injustices done to Americans of colour had turned major American cities into violent battlegrounds. The Kerner Commission, a national quasi-governmental body, was created to analyse these riots. The mayor of New York, John Lindsay, was a member of this commission, and in 1967 I belonged to his legion of assistants. The commission concluded that ‘white society is deeply implicated in the ghetto. White institutions created it, white institutions maintain it, and white society condones it’. This might seem, perversely, to explain the title, The Uses of Disorder: violent disorder serves as a wake-up call.
Burning streets did not resurrect, however, the scenes of barricaded streets that Benjamin Constant witnessed at the end of his life, during the 1830 revolution in Paris. Here he encountered barricades raised to protect insurrectionary districts from military attack and police round-ups. A barricade was at the time constructed by throwing furniture into the street and then piling it up at corners to create an impasse. In 1830, the spaces behind barricades were vigilantly guarded by the citizens in revolt; until the military overwhelmed them, the streets were, for a few weeks, disciplined spaces. In contrast, during the violent urban disorders of the 1960s, storefronts inside poor communities were set aflame by looters who had infiltrated the rioters. The leaders of street protests could not control these violent parasites from the very beginning. As the Kerner Commission found, these looters were few in number; still, the revolutionary ‘uses of disorder’ appeared corrupted by theft.
Racial upheaval was not the only kind of disorder touching America at the time. While rarely being violent, more personalised disorder afflicted the civil society of the privileged: those who were white, middle class, heterosexual, and, if young, free from military service abroad. The discontent inside this ‘secure’ zone traced back to a malaise articulated by Benjamin Constant.
Constant was a novelist as well as a jurist; such pursuits were practised separately, imagined as the activity of different islands labelled Imagination and Philosophy. His novel Adolphe portrays a man who gives up a great romance, chronicling his falling out of love rather than the initial stoking of his ardour. Adolphe becomes bored by the storms and stresses of desire; in middle age, passion arouses him less than the allures of a career. The novelist writes this story to show how ‘small’ a human being Adolphe becomes.
The philosopher of civil society thus decries how the circumscribed life comes to fear adventure, shunning difficulties, avoiding storms and stress. This contrasts with the contemporary account of ambition drawn by Stendhal in the novel The Red and the Black. Stendhal’s protagonist, Julien Sorel, burns with ambition, driven by desire to conquer Paris and to penetrate the very heart of power, becoming a domestic Napoleon. Adolphe does not burn with passion, nor did he conform to the more German model of aspiration, a desiring of youth succeeded by resignation and regret in middle age. Adolphe is content, indeed relieved, to lead an orderly, clearly laid-out life.
Constant the philosopher did not analyse the mechanism by which such ‘smallness’ could afflict the collective civic body. That explanation appeared later, as social science. The fear explored by Adolphe’s story appeared nearly a century later in Max Weber’s writings on bureaucracy. People live inside an ‘iron cage’, Weber famously argued, when working within bureaucracies, particularly if their overriding ambition is to climb the bureaucratic ladder. The figure of Adolphe was now by Weber set in a broader context, one in which efforts to rationalise society, as the code civil, inevitably created the bureaucracies which demeaned people: ‘Rational calculation … reduces every worker to a cog in this bureaucratic machine and, seeing himself in this light, he will merely ask how to transform himself … to a bigger cog’.
Weber was not a dry observer of this process: ‘The passion for bureaucratization … drives us to despair’. He was certainly not alone in identifying this malaise. Novels like Robert Musil’s The Man Without Qualities dissected, in relentless though often comic detail, how bureaucracy makes for small life. Perhaps the most despairing image of the iron cage was elaborated by Weber’s contemporary, Rainer Maria Rilke, in his poem about a panther confined to a zoo. The poem began, ‘his vision, from the constantly passing bars, has grown so weary that it cannot hold anything else’.
Iron-cage despair afflicted those of my generation who had grown up inside the security zone. Sociologist C. Wright Mills detailed with some sympathy the construction of his parents’ particular cage: Daddy and Mummy were haunted by the Great Depression and World War II but kept those nightmares to themselves; the nightmares could be repressed thanks to America’s new prosperity and global hegemony. But by the beginning of the sixties, the children of the zone simply paced, panther-like; by the end of the decade, they sought more actively to destroy it. The young had regained the passion for experience writ large which Constant – and after him, Musil and Weber – had though shrunken. Which is where The Uses of Disorder entered the picture.
I did not come from the zone. My childhood was spent in an urban public housing project, and my single parent was a covert member of the Communist Party. I was gay, and I had lived in Chicago and New York on my own or with lovers since I was fifteen. A series of accidents led me into Harvard University as a young adult. There, at first, the sorrows evoked by those who grew up secure seemed to me self-indulgent. In time, I appreciated that their suffering was real. I was also as self-involved as any suburban Hamlet. I made big mistakes in judging the strangers with whom I mixed daily and nightly. I had survived, but I had not gained much self-knowledge.
At Harvard, I sought to find self-knowledge by writing. Something in me wanted to write, however, about places lived in rather than strict autobiography; in relating self and city, ‘city’ seemed to me the independent variable. It might be said that I was not ready to face myself. But at Harvard a mentor, psychoanalyst Erik Erikson, thought this was the right way to face: looking outward rather than inward.
The young Erikson was a Danish artist who got nowhere with art and so turned to psychoanalysis as a second-choice profession, initially training under Freud and working with children in Vienna. He fled war-gutted Europe for a post at the Austen Riggs psychiatric clinic in Massachusetts, where he became more interested in adolescents and young adults. There Erikson did the work for which he became famous, on the ‘identity crisis’ which occurs as human beings transition from adolescence to adulthood. In his view, this is such a rough passage because of the tension between seeking and shutting out new experiences. On one hand, the young thirst for the new; on the other, they fear being exposed raw. If this tension is not worked through, the young will cling to a rigid sense of self that inhibits them from accounting for difference and divergence in others.
I accepted this view in The Uses of Disorder but in time came to see it could be restructured without the Freudian plumbing of id shits, superego flushings and the like. Cognitive psychologist Lionel Festinger did so by researching the continual interplay in the brain between inductive curiosity, which opens up new perspectives, and deductive reasoning, which seeks to resolve mental disorder. In another vein, psychologist Carol Gilligan rejected the idea that an adolescent identity crisis – ‘Who am I?’ – is the defining moment when gender differences between self and others are sorted. Gender, she showed, is renegotiated again and again, across the human lifespan.
These un-Freudians rephrased what Freudian jargon calls ‘ego strength’. Whether confronted with a math puzzle, the jarring demands of a lover, or learning a new job, people need to develop an ability to deal with ambiguity, difficulty and the unknown to explore the unexpected turn rather than defend against it. And here lay Erikson’s own strength as a thinker: he was a moralist more than he was a psychoanalyst.
His moral view could be encapsulated in the phrase Less Self, More Other. That’s what happens on the positive side during an identity crisis, and indeed throughout a lifetime: a person takes in more of the outside Other, projects less of one’s Self on others. It takes psychological strength to practise this ethic but this power cannot develop in a vacuum. People have to practise Less Self, More Other, rather like going to a gym to develop one’s muscles. My insight – and I hope the durable value of my book – was that a big, dense, diverse city was the place where people could practise and gradually strengthen this moral muscle.
Were Benjamin Constant alive today, I suspect that the phrase Less Self, More Other would resonate with him. Civil society as he conceived it should turn people outward, shaking them out of their own prejudices and habits as defining absolutes of how everyone should live. But his view was more complicated, wiser than this moral nostrum, at least as I have compacted it into four words. Constant’s civil society is to be a place in which people are both mutually engaged and disengaged, a city of solitudes as well as communities.
Constant perhaps learned this duality from his liaison with Madame de Staël, a writer he met in Paris in 1795 and with whom he fled to Switzerland when Napoleon banished her in 1802. Her novel of 1807, Corinne; or, Italy, a manifesto for women’s rights lightly disguised as a story, argued for the right of women to be freed from permanent obligations in marriage, for their freedom to conduct passing affairs, for their ‘inalienable right to privacy, that is, solitude’. Never monogamous, Constant practised what Madame de Staël preached – until he and his wife, Charlotte von Hardenberg, whom he married after Madame de Staël’s death, returned to Paris.
There, his writings extended de Staël’s erotic ethics to civil society more generally. He wanted a society that challenged communal conformity and collective propriety. Civil society should embrace differences in and fluctuations of behaviour, so that people could be set free, free to be themselves – alone. The unbridgeable distances, the necessary silences, between people who differ should be acknowledged and respected. That’s what makes civil society ‘civil’, and what a big, dense, diverse city – unlike a nosy village – makes possible.
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But we cannot talk about freedom without talking about power. And the city, while being an exemplary theatre for self-expression and social engagement, is also a site of complex networks of dominance.
In 1806 Napoleon captured the city of Jena, where Georg Friedrich Hegel had been teaching. The young philosopher fled, carrying a half-finished manuscript for The Phenomenology of the Spirit but little else; Napoleon the general terrified him. In later years, Hegel came to idolise Napoleon the emperor as a heroic figure and praised the code civil as a rational way to organise civil society – but that lay in the future, when Hegel had hardened in old age as an apostle of order.
The Phenomenology is an edgier book, one in which the author argues with himself. Its most famous chapter is on ‘Lordship and Bondage’ and perhaps the most famous sentence in this chapter declares that human beings are fulfilled ‘only in being acknowledged’ by others. That is, ‘a process of mutual recognition’ is necessary for each person to feel complete in their selfhood. This might seem no more than a philosophic version of the cliché declaring that no man is an island, but Hegel turns recognition into a deeper and darker issue.
How can people of unequal standing – lords and servants, master and slaves – practise mutual recognition? The servant has to obey the master, but to Hegel this is not enough. As Hegel observed in the French Revolution, if servants do not believe in their masters, eventually they will turn on the powerful. It is a radical proposition: In the long term, power depends on voluntary obedience by those who obey. Moreover, the long-term master wants to be thought legitimate, wants his servants (in Hegel’s time, always a ‘he’) to acknowledge that he has the right to rule them.
Relations between ‘lords’ and their ‘bondsmen’, as Hegel called superiors and subordinates, had become much more likely, he thought, in his contemporary world than in past societies. In the past, religious dictates or inherited privilege legitimated a master; the master did not have to do anything himself personally when the social order was designed by God. In a secular, tradition-hostile society, recognition of a bond across the gap of unequal standing becomes more fragile. Machiavelli had observed something similar in the upheavals of Renaissance city-states, but he thought the dilemma to be one of statecraft only, of how the ruler behaved so as to elicit voluntary obedience from his subjects. By Hegel’s time, the issue had become social as well as political.
Benjamin Constant, as Hegel’s contemporary, perceived that something beyond shared suffering entwined the Parisians of the 1820s. People in the city formed a civic molecule even as most no longer believed in the revolutionary slogan liberty, equality, fraternity and few longed for Napoleon’s escape from the island prison of St. Helena. What now was the social chemistry bonding people of very unequal standing? Something did so, but what it was Constant couldn’t say.
By focusing on the servant’s own need for recognition, Hegel tried to solve this problem. A list of ‘servants’ today might include women, gay and transgender people, immigrants, ethnic minorities – anyone who is not recognised as a peer by the master. Each of these servants, Hegel says, is engaged in a duel with the master to win acceptance, be it working women who fight for recognition of their right to equal pay, gay couples seeking to adopt who argue for their right to parent, immigrants who want it acknowledged that they are loyal citizens, or transgender people who must jump through medical establishment protocols to gain legal recognition of their gender identity. In all of these cases, Hegelian logic says that the master has set the terms of acceptance. This struggle for recognition bonds servants to their masters. Even if, as in the Napoleonic code, men or religions have equal legal rights under the law, the struggle for recognition goes on in civil society. See me! Acknowledge my presence! Do not treat me as invisible!
If the servant wants freedom – rather than recognition – then they must step outside of the master’s frame of reference. And this passage progresses in four steps: The servant is first stoic about his or her own suffering, then becomes sceptical about the master’s right to impose pain; a period of detachment ensues in which the underling feels both free of the master but unsure and unhappy about what he or she should do. Reasoning at last leads to the resolution of this unhappiness.
When thinking through the same question in reference to how one might live in the city, Immanuel Kant had promoted the notion of becoming ‘cosmopolitan’, which meant engaging with strangers in discussions of reasoning and rational action. This practising of intimate distancing allowed a level of engagement without submission. However, the young Hegel doubted this version of cosmopolitan life for good historical reasons. It was not possible to come together without some collective identity emerging. In the French Revolution, strangers in the Parisian streets had come together to hunt down ‘traitors’, ‘secret aristocrats’, and other deviants, drawing together in an unreasoned passion.
In the 1890s, following firsthand encounters with the Paris Commune, Gustave Le Bon made such collective irrationality the subject of his own studies and attempted to identify the identity of the crowd. This was later followed by the contrasting work of Elias Canetti and then Sigmund Freud. Each in their way made the observation that it’s easier to lose yourself when surrounded by people you don’t know. It appeared, therefore, that the anonymous city gave licence to irresponsibility.
Moreover, Hegel seems caught in a contradiction, because he has declared that recognition by others is necessary to feel fully human. The need for authority is not always a base impulse – children need to rely on adults to learn at school and soldiers must rely on the commands of other officers to survive in battle. Therefore, rules can guide and they can reassure. It’s more so a question of which kinds of rules don’t, and under what conditions can and should people challenge lordship.
Hegel’s way through the lordship-and-bondsman dilemma is to declare that ‘through work the bondsman [servant] becomes conscious of what he truly is’; through thinking about work in relation to himself, he can ‘discover that he has a mind of his own’. Karl Marx seized exactly upon these phrases in his Phenomenology. But uneasy with an emphasis on practical activity in the everyday world, Hegel himself would, as he aged and his thought hardened, put increasing emphasis on a rational, all-comprehending, all-inclusive state to resolve the problems of lords and bondsman – the perverse conclusion the older Hegel arrived at in 1821 in The Philosophy of Right.
We want to be young Hegelians, in the sense that we want people to step outside the lordship-bondsman relationship without, as did old Hegel, then seeking refuge in a higher, rational, resolving order. But we face the same problem, in our own narrow sphere, as the young philosopher. Can a city create a chemical bond between people outside of the unequal struggle for recognition? Seemingly, a civil society that admits ructions between people and values their separateness doesn’t do much to bond them. Furthermore, we need to discriminate among rules – some provide positive guidance, others need to be disordered.
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Hegel did well to focus on labour. In modern society, the servant’s work poses complex, indeed surprising problems of authority. The bonds between employer and employee have come unglued in a new era of capitalism, beginning in the late 1970s, which sought to make organisations more ‘flexible’. In part, this flexibility means upsizing and downsizing a company’s workforce numbers in response to global market and financial conditions. It also means a constant process of internal reorganisation as the company does new things or abandons established practices. Finally, flexibility means changing the worker’s job to focus on a shifting set of tasks rather than performing a fixed function within the firm.
Flexibility has set many workers adrift. The reason for this involves time. The iron cage described by Max Weber and later C. Wright Mills structured workers’ experience of time as deep. Bureaucracy organised labour in years or decades. Workers typically worked for fewer than four employers in the course of their careers. Labour unions protected seniority for long-serving labourers and pensions rewarded such service. Organising labour in long units of time meant that a corporation would generally follow a clear internal structure: people would climb up or down fixed job ladders, knowing exactly where they stepped. Despite cyclical blips of unemployment, labour time was predictable and, in that sense, orderly.
Today’s workers experience much shorter labour time because of a reconfiguration based on power. Firms are now oriented to short-term share price rather than long-term profit. This shift speeds up and shortens labour time, as the firm requires different skills and restructures groups of workers in pursuit of short-term recognition by global investors. Flux within organisations kicks away people’s career ladders. Workers shift from task to task without an overarching narrative of where they are going. Young employees can expect to work for at least a dozen employers – or in the ‘gig’ economy, to work from month to month selling themselves to whomever will contract for their services.
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Today’s labouring servant is thus set adrift. This is where Hegel enters the picture. How can servants demand recognition of their needs, their presence, from the master? And what does this tell us about the kind of cities in which we live?
Flexible capitalism unfolds now in a rigid city. The city has become an iron cage – one that imprisons disoriented, labouring animals. There are several reasons for this paradox. The first is the withering of mixed spaces and their replacement with more homogenised districts. This process of sorting and segregating went on throughout the last century but has sped up since the early ’80s.
In the nineteenth century, the wealthy centres of London, New York and Paris were necessarily mixed because they contained a huge live-in servant population. These districts were also filled with small shops – butchers, cobblers, ironmongers – whose specialised commerce maintained affluent households. Servants and shopkeepers in turn had their own local supports, in pubs and cheap restaurants, close to where they worked. London’s Mayfair or the Upper East Side thus registered in censuses before World War I as diverse places in a particular way: they mixed the elite and the satellite working class.
Missing from the centre, however, were the middle and lower-middle classes, and the industrial labourers who were spread out in the city. From the 1870s, the middle and ‘respectable’ working classes established colonies in new suburbs, while the industrial proletariat was often condemned to live in degraded conditions near factories. Still, outer city territories were amorphous; they were mostly new housing developments that arose in erratic fashion. Whether respectable or miserable, all of these places had mixed local economies, just as in the centre. Near-in suburbs before the Great War were more like small towns than the dormitory-suburbs that sprang up after World War II.
The twentieth-century city was marked by relentless homogenisation. In the centre, the departure of live-in domestic servants meant that mews houses in London and top-floor flats in Paris became new kinds of luxury spaces. Haussmann had dreamed of remaking Paris in the mid-nineteenth century to create elegant, affluent spaces where the ugly underside of the city did not appear; a century later his wish began to be fulfilled. Outside the elegant zone, large developers came to dominate the financing and construction of housing at urban edges and in the suburbs; for these firms, homogeneous projects were much more commercially attractive than mixed-use and mixed-user ones.
Above all, the twentieth century saw the reign of zoning laws far more detailed and draconian than the rather loose standards of the nineteenth century. The history of zoning law is boring, but it has largely shaped the modern city. Written law takes aim at ambiguity. Increasingly in the decades after World War II, planners hunted down informal, abandoned or amorphous spaces.
In New York, in particular, planners’ prescriptive writing was seldom based on inductive experience of the city; their prescriptions were deductively formulated, with the division of labour as a model for the division of space: separate places for shopping, schooling, housing. New York is urbanistically distinctive because of the street-walls formed by contiguous tall buildings. These street-walls enable complexity of use and users at street level; they were replaced during the postwar years whenever possible by set-back, isolated buildings with few or no activities at street level.
This process of caging – separating – different uses, places and people has accelerated under flexible capitalism. The more the city has been sorted into different silos, the more the issues of lordship and bondage become visible and physical. The ‘lord’ becomes a rule or plan designating the precise use of each space, including who belongs there. The ‘bondsman’ is still a human being, one who submits to the rules of a space, using it as it is meant to be used; the bondsman knows, moreover, where she belongs and where she doesn’t. In New York today, the ‘lord’ of Hudson Yards is its highly articulated and regulated public space; the ‘bondsman’ are the men and women who use it exactly as planned. Moreover, few poor Latinos and African Americans will be found here; they know they don’t belong here.
Hegel’s early logic of civil society – as noted, different than his later, more statist views – is that the bondsmen set themselves free in the end by a show of indifference to the rules – say, by colonising bits of the outdoor public space in Hudson Yards for political purposes. Rather than debate planning regulations, they will speak a language to justify themselves which revolves around the need for face-to-face contact, or, more abstractly, invokes Lefevbre’s right to the city. An asymmetry results; lord and bondsman are speaking at cross purposes; thanks to this disordering, the bondsman has set her or himself free – free of the lord’s setting the terms of control.
By this same logic, Constant saw the creation of a civil society. In a good civil society, discourse is not resolved into a single set of issues for the lord and against the bondsman seeking recognition. Due to that very lack of resolution, people find spaces of freedom: they are no longer positioned, defined.
A city can make tangible this kind of civil society. The density and diverse population of a city spawns multiple scenes for civil society, so long as these spaces are not fixed in form and function. Our argument here is that the DNA for these unresolved, liberating spaces can, however, be designed.
