Edited by Joan Ockman

THE PRAGMATIST
IMAGINATION
THINKING ABOUT “THINGS IN THE MAKING”

Temple Hoyne Buell Center Princeton Architectural Press

for the Study of American Architecture
Columbia University
 Edited by Joan Ockman
with a general introduction by John Rajchman
and an afterword by Casey Nelson Blake

THE PRAGMATIST
IMAGINATION
THINKING ABOUT “THINGS IN THE MAKING”

a compilation of papers based on the proceedings of a workshop

held at Columbia University on May 1–2, 2000

presented by the Temple Hoyne Buell Center for the Study of American Architecture
Graduate School of Architecture, Planning and Preservation, Columbia University

with major funding from the Skidmore, Owings & Merrill Foundation
and the Graduate School of Architecture, Planning and Preservation, Columbia University

published by Princeton Architectural Press

November 2000
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 THE FUTURE / THE PAST
032 Introduction A N D E R S S T E P H A N S O N
036 Democracy’s Mythmakers N A D I A U R B I N AT I
044 Urban Projects and Adjustment to the
Future J E A N - L O U I S C O H E N
052 From Network to Patchwork

CONTENTS D AV I D L A P O U J A D E

THE PUBLIC
006 General Introduction J O H N R A J C H M A N 062 Introduction G W E N D O LY N W R I G H T
016 Pragmatism/Architecture: The Idea 066 For an Agonistic Public Sphere
of the Workshop Project J O A N O C K M A N C H A N TA L M O U F F E
024 Glossary 076 Democratic Public Space
R O S A LY N D E U T S C H E
082 Public Space / Private Space
GERALD E. FRUG
092 On the Line between Procedures
and Aesthetics H A S H I M S A R K I S
104 Land Settlement, Architecture,
and the Eclipse of the Public Realm
KENNETH FRAMPTON
 AESTHETICS / EXPERIENCE
114 Introduction J O H N R A J C H M A N
116 On Pragmatist Aesthetics
RICHARD SHUSTERMAN
122 Anodyne B E R N A R D T S C H U M I
128 Repeat / Complete: Notes for a
Digital Agora PA U L M I L L E R A . K . A . DJ SPOOKY

TECHNOLOGY AND ITS

IMPACT ON PERCEPTION
136 Introduction R E I N H O L D M A R T I N
138 Untitled Remarks J O N AT H A N C R A R Y
148 Pragmatism at War P E T E R G A L I S O N
152 Notes on the Thing E L I Z A B E T H G R O S Z
160 The Ether and Your Anger:
Toward a Pragmatics of the Useless
BRIAN MASSUMI

SOCIAL LIFE AND THE PLACE AND CITIZENSHIP

EVERYDAY WORLD 222 Introduction A N D R E A S H U Y S S E N
170 Introduction M A R Y M C L E O D 224 The Making and Unmaking of
176 Extraordinary Appetites: A Japan Democratic Spaces T E R E S A C A L D E I R A
Not-at-Home-with-Itself S A N D R A B U C K L E Y 234 The Place of African Cities
186 Reconsidering Pragmatism and ABDOUMALIQ SIMONE

the Chicago School I S A A C J O S E P H 244 (a)way station: A Narrative of Domestic

196 What Do Young Artists Want? Space and Urban Migration M A B E L W I L S O N
MARTHA ROSLER 248 Dialectics of Place and Citizenship
204 Short Presentation on Everyday Life S A N D H YA S H U K L A

S TA N L E Y A R O N O W I T Z 254 The Global City: The Denationalizing

208 It Happens Every Day MARSHALL BERMAN of Time and Space S A S K I A S A S S E N

266 Afterword: What’s Pragmatism

Got to Do with It? C A S E Y N E L S O N BLAKE

274 Notes on Contributors

280 Acknowledgments
JOHN RAJCHMAN
GENERAL INTRODUCTION
The diverse, overlapping, open, unexpected
series of statements that comprise this
volume help pose a question: what is it
today to think or to imagine, to construct
or to design, in relation not to “things
made” but to “things in the making”? From
this perspective they together broach the
possibility of a new pragmatism in theory
and imagination.
Pragmatism is of course an old thing. It was
the name given to the kind of philosophy
started in New England by Charles Peirce,
popularized by William James, extended
into the 20th century by John Dewey. It
remains one of the richest, most singular
episodes to emerge at the end of the 19th
century or at a moment Europeans call
“modernity”; we may think of Peirce as an
American contemporary of Nietzsche and
Baudelaire. But today, in much altered cir-
cumstances, does pragmatism still harbor
unexpected powers, untapped secrets,
allowing it to take off anew, in perhaps
unrecognizable guises? Can it also itself
still be a “thing in the making”?
Each of the early pragmatists was an original
thinker whose work goes off on diverse paths,
entering into discussion or debate with
many others, confronting the new forces
and questions of the day. Taken together
their work forms a sprawling, multiple thing,
not governed by programmatic statements,
which we can enter and exit in different
ways. Already Peirce could not abide the
pragmatism James had attributed to him.
He proposed to rebaptize his philosophy
“pragmaticism,” a label, he said, unlovely
enough that no one would try to steal it.
Cantankerous and solitary, Peirce wrote
short papers on many topics. He started
many things even if he finished nothing.
He invented a semiology still current in art-
critical debates. He was the first philoso-
pher actually to conduct experiments and
to use randomization techniques in them;
and at one point he proposed to call his
philosophy “tychism” or the philosophy of
chance. He had a view of reality as vague
or anexact, beyond the limitations of our
measurements. He thought that inquiry had
a great advantage over the doctrine of church
or party as a way of “fixing our beliefs”—
it took truth to be what comes out in the
long run. Each of these ideas would assume
new forms in James and Dewey.
7

1. William James,
“Bergson and His Critique
of Intellectualism,”
in A Pluralistic Universe
(Lincoln: University of
Nebraska Press, 1996).
2. Gilles Deleuze, Essays
Critical and Clinical
(Minneapolis: University of
Minnesota, 1997), pp. 86ff.
See also his essay on the
treatment of whole and frag-
ment in Whitman (pp. 56ff.).
The logic of a space or time
in which “the whole is not
given” is a constant theme
in Deleuze, and is found in
his own discussion and use
of Bergson and extends
to his understanding of cine-
matic signs and images. It
is a logic inseparable from
a pragmatism that says that
“the multiple” is something
we must always make anew.
That is, at least, one connec-
tion I try to present in my
book The Deleuze Connections
(Cambridge, Mass.: MIT
Press, 2000).
3. Lapoujade elaborates this
principle in the thought of
William James in explicit
contrast to Richard Rorty
in his book William James:
Empiricisme et pragmatisme
(Paris: PUF, 1997).
8
In particular, we find them at work in William
James’s talk of “things in intellectualism,”
first given in 1908.1 His picture of things
in the making was directed at once against
Hegel’s holism and Russell’s atomism and
involved a “critique of the intellectualism”
that went with each — a critique of “abstrac-
tions” that says the abstract doesn’t explain;
it is, on the contrary, what itself needs to
be explained by reinsertion into the plural,
divergent space from which it derives. Might
we then use this cluster of ideas as a point
of entry into the great pragmatist edifice?
Might we extract from it a larger picture
of the space or the time of “things in the
making” and the “pragmatist” relation we
have to it? In effect that is a tack suggested
by Gilles Deleuze2 and pursued in this volume
by David Lapoujade3 and Isaac Joseph, who
explore the fate of the notion of such a net-
work or patchwork space, first broached by
the Chicago School, especially in the work
of Robert Park and his notions of public and
mass spaces in cities. This thread is taken
up in another way by Elizabeth Grosz and
Brian Massumi in terms of what it might mean
for an approach to technological arrange-
ments, and the role of the body or sensation
in them, and the manner in which they may
be said to evolve; in this way they complicate
the relation of pragmatism to questions of
instrumentality or instrumentalism. Implicitly,
they raise the question of how today prag-
matism might treat the question of the
digital instruments that take off from a
“military-industrial” situation to transform
urban and architectural spaces.
But this volume includes many contributors
with other kinds of links with pragmatism,
often also unexplicit or unself-conscious.
For the aim of the workshop was not just
commentary; it was rather to identify new
zones where we are now seeing unforeseen
“things in the making,” and to pose new
problems which have antecedents in the
great pragmatist philosophers, but which
reappear today in new light that complicates
them in turn. The proof of the undertaking
would then lie, in good pragmatist manner,
in the outcome: in the ways that such zones
help stimulate new thinking, open up new
ideas, shift accustomed boundaries today —
in other words, in uses rather than interpre-
tations. In that way the present project
might itself take part in the kind of prag-
matism which lies in our relations to those
things still in the making that provoke us
to think, to imagine, and so to act, create,
transform, in new ways.
How, for example, might such philosophy
conceive or complicate our sense of the
processes and the spaces of the politics of
democratization that, over the last decade,
have assumed growing importance in many
different places in the world? Is it that
America — or what Dewey called “pragmatic
America”— has become a new model for
the rest of the globe;4 or is it rather that
others, elsewhere, now find themselves in
the condition of the “swerve” taken by the
American pragmatists, of not knowing what
they might yet become, of having to experi-
ment, and experiment with themselves,
rather as if America had assumed the role
5
of the “old country,” even to Europe?
That is a question confronted at the outset
by the partially displaced Europeans who
opened the workshop. But one might also
ask whether the shift from the “mechanical”
type of technology and corresponding view of
the operations of the mind that confronted
the original pragmatists to the “informational”
or “digital” type that has so dramatically
taken off in the last decades supplies condi-
tions in which to carry on such experimenta-
tion. Or does it tend to prevent or inhibit it?
Do the new patterns of immigration and
shifting borders after colonialism and the
Cold War offer geographic conditions in
which to exercise the imagination of “things
in the making” in and around us? Might
one use it to extend the idea of citizenship
beyond the horizon of the nation-state in
which it has often been enclosed to the
urban situations that such processes have
helped to transform? Such were some of
the larger questions put on the table. They
helped establish a number of connections
to the very idea of pragmatism, of which
we might distinguish three lines.
4. See John Dewey,
“Pragmatic America,”
New Republic, April 12, 1922,
pp. 185–87. Dewey writes
in this article (p. 186),
“Undoubtedly in expressing
his sense of a world still
open, a world still in the
making, William James
reported…a characteristic
feature of the American
scene. Be the evils what they
may, the experiment is not
yet played out. The United
States are not yet made; they
are not a finished fact
to be categorically assessed.
Mr. James’ assertion that the
world is still making does not
import a facile faith. He knew
well that the world has also
its madeness, and that what
is done and over with fearfully
complicated the task of mak-
ing the future that human bet-
ter we should like it to be.”
5. Cornel West develops the
idea of pragmatism’s “swerve”
from Europe and its episte-
mologies in The American
Evasion of Philosophy:
A Genealogy of Pragmatism
(Madison: University of
Wisconsin Press, 1989).
9
1.
Pragmatism is a philosophy that, for certainty
and invariable method, substitutes experi-
mentation and belief in the world. To think
about things in the making is thus to think,
and think of ourselves, “experimentally.”
But in what does such experimentation con-
sist and what is it good for? In the work-
shop, this question was tackled in several
ways. Today a strength of Peirce’s semi-
otics may lie in the fact that it is not domi-
nated by the models of modern linguistics or
language-theory, allowing us instead to look
at non- or pre-linguistic ways images are
formed or arranged. The importance that
Peirce’s notion of indexicality has had for
understanding the new space of photo-
graphic images may be understood in this
6
way; and in explicit contrast to structural
linguistics, Deleuze has turned to Peirce
to analyze the original way cinema presents
movement and time, in particular with
respect to the new urban conditions of
Europe after the Second World War.7
Yet it would seem that such uses of Peirce
go against the grain of what is sometimes
called “neopragmatism,” or the revival of
pragmatism engineered by Richard Rorty,
leading to a wide-ranging debate in the
1980s, here and abroad. Rorty gave us a
pragmatism that “takes the linguistic turn”
to become a philosophy of conversation
among different, even incommensurable
vocabularies with no other foundation than
agreements reached through them. It is in
the name of such foundationless vocabular-
ies that Rorty proposes that we abandon
everything John Dewey sought under the name
“experience” in favor of a kind of linguistic
culturalism.8 Richard Shusterman parts
company with Rorty on this score, and
starts to ask whether there is not after all
something in the pragmatist conception of
“experience” that might allow us to reinvent
a “pragmatist aesthetics” that would move
beyond exhibition spaces to what in the
body is prior or irreducible to language.
Might we then think of such “aesthetics”
already in the work of Alexander Dorner;
and so imagine a kind of transformation
of exhibition spaces to allow for a kind of
pragmatist aesthetic laboratory, concerned
precisely with questions of “things in the
making”?9 Might we develop the relevant
6. Rosalind Kraus, “Notes
on the Index,” in The Avant-
Garde and Other Modernist
Myths (Cambridge, Mass.:
MIT Press, 1985). Peirce’s
allusive remarks on the dia-
gram might be used to
extend this analysis.
7. Gilles Deleuze, in Cinema
2 (Minneapolis: University of
Minnesota, 1986), opposes
Peirce to the linguistic mod-
els used by Christian Metz.
More generally in Deleuze’s
work, we find an attempt to
extend “semiotics” to a
region of expression prior to
notions of ideas of form and
context, signifier and signi-
fied, that underlie the ideas
of medium or of linguistic
system, thereby being
capable of developing what
Peirce called “firstness.”
There would then exist a
whole “pragmatics” of the
uses of language no longer
contained in the langue-
parole or competence-
performance distinctions.
On this point, see his
“Postulates of Linguistics,”
in A Thousand Plateaus
(Minneapolis: University of
Minnesota Press, 1988).
8. Richard Rorty,
“Dewey’s Metaphysics,”
in Consequences of
Pragmatism: Essays
1972–1980 (Minneapolis:
University of Minnesota,
1982), pp. 72–89.
9. See Joan Ockman, “The
Road Not Taken: Alexander
Dorner’s Way Beyond Art,”
in R. E. Somol, ed., Autonomy
and Ideology: Positioning an
Avant-Garde in America (New
York: Monacelli Press, 1997).
 notions of experience and experiment in
terms of the whole problem of “sensation”
and its relation to the role of the body in
vision? Jonathan Crary’s new book takes
up this question, looking at a network of
related psychological, neurological, and
philosophical writing in the late 19th century,
which includes not only Bergson, but also
James and Dewey. His focus is on the prob-
lem of attention and its destablizations in
our understanding of the whole question
of the being of sensation that Cézanne
bequeathed to modernity; thus he is led to
ask whether we are not confronted today
with a kind of generalized “attention deficit
10
10. Jonathan Crary, disorder” to be chemically relieved. That
Suspensions of Perception:
Attention, Spectacle, and
was a notion that, in the workshop, also
Modern Culture (Cambridge, caught the attention of young Paul Miller
Mass.: MIT Press, 1999).
a.k.a. DJ Spooky That Subliminal Kid in his
peculiar cut-and-paste mix of material from
the tradition. It is, of course, quite rare that
a scholarly or intellectual gathering inspires
a collaboration among ar tists working
in different domains and mediums —
something toward which, it would seem,
Dewey’s own “critique of intellectualism”
was specifically directed. In this case, Paul
Miller’s piece with Bernard Tschumi seemed to
bring out precisely the role of “experience”—
of bodily sensation, affect, movement — in
what Tschumi has called an “architecture
of the event.”
But a pragmatist conception of “experience”
led in another direction as well in the
workshop — to the question of the turn to
the “everyday” in the conception and prac-
tice of art as well as in the nature of critical
thinking, for example, in the work of Martha
Rosler. A larger question emerged as to
the relation of such “experience” to the
problem of the everyday, an issue Henri
Lefebvre helped encourage in artistic prac-
tice and the critical analysis of urban space.
On this score Isaac Joseph and Sandra
Buckley seemed to move in somewhat dif-
ferent directions from Stanley Aronowitz in
his tour of the transformations in New York
City that have come after the problem of
“the everyday” was introduced in critical
thought and practice in the 1960s and ’70s.
The problem of the nature of “experience”
and “experimentation” in pragmatism, or
in a new pragmatism, thus opened to larger
questions of politics and critical thought.

12
2.
Among the great pragmatists it was John
Dewey who elaborated the link between
pragmatism and the very nature of democra-
tic politics or a democratic polity; and cen-
tral to his conception was the role of the
public and so, by extension, what, following
Hannah Arendt or Jürgen Habermas, is now
called “public space” and “public realm.”
For both Cornel West and Richard Rorty that
is a key element in a “pragmatist” concep-
tion of what it is to do philosophy; yet each
takes the idea in a somewhat different
direction. West has tried to push it in the
direction of a “radical democracy” capable
of responding to the new “politics of
difference.” We might view this attempt
as opening the question of how to extend or
elaborate the notion of “the common” (and
so of the “everyday”) in pragmatism. What
we have in common would in these terms
be not a fixed essence, but, on the contrary,
an irreducible plurality or “difference” in the
arrangements and spaces in which we find
ourselves at a particular time and place,
exposing them to new forces and so to
experimentation; pragmatism would involve
the active belief or ethic that our common
being is never given or found but always in
the making. Beyond the “abstract space” of
modernism, or the “collage space” of post-
modernism, what might it then mean today
to introduce such “non-essentializable plu-
rality” into our conception of urban environ-
ments; what kind of design might it involve,
and what conception of social or public
space would have to include it? On this
score, it would seem that the debate on
public space and its relation to democratic
politics has itself been elaborated along
new lines since Dewey.
Rosalyn Deutsche, for example, has used
a conception of “agonistic democracy” or
“agonistic citizenship” advanced by Chantal
Mouffe to understand the critical art prac-
tices of Krzysztof Wodiczko or Barbara
Kruger in the 1980s;11 and in the workshop 11. Rosalyn Deutsche,
Evictions (Cambridge, Mass.:
Mouffe tried to show how this conception MIT Press, 1996).
differs from models of “deliberative democ-
racy,” sometimes associated with Dewey or
preserved in the notions of “solidarity” or
“consensus” Rorty has used in his quarrel
with the New Left. The problem of a “prag-
matist” view of “public space” thus opens
onto another issue tackled in the workshop,
the problem of new geographies. How might
it be applied to what might be called the
“borders of democracy,” or to those real
points, at once internal and external, public
and private, that today cause us to rethink
the nature of democracy and its relations
13

with place and space? Drawing on her forth-
coming book, Teresa Caldeira offered a kind
of ethnographic diagram of the violence that
has grown up in São Paolo after the democ-
ratization of the government, which might
serve not only to reintroduce the question
of citizenship in a contemporary urban
context, but also to suggest how detailed
or “thick” ethnographic “diagrams” might
be used to indicate or diagnose possibilities.
One way to exercise a “pragmatist imagina-
tion” today might lie in this “cartographic”
direction rather than the “utopian” one
whose failures or disappointments have
led some to a stance of studied melancholic
disappointment. The new question of the
“geographies of citizenship” thus rejoins
the question of a shift from the Europe-
America axis that preoccupied the early
pragmatists, raised at the outset of the
workshop when it was asked what role
America and Americanization would play
in the ways pragmatism might be pursued
or extended today.
14
3.
Experimentalism, pluralism of those “things
in the making” we have in common, the
bodily sensations through which they are
given — we might direct such a pragmatism
not simply to space but also to time and
history, the history we write as well as
the history we make. In effect, that was
a question also posed at the outset of the
workshop by Nadia Urbinati. Is there a
“pragmatist” or “experimentalist” relation
to the future that is unlike “avant-gardist”
or “progressivist” ones, or at least pushes
them in another direction; which no longer
tries to predict or program, but rather to
diagnose the unknown or unforeseen forces
knocking at the door? Does the notion of
“things in the making” in and around us
then suppose a zone of historical indetermi-
nation allowing for such experimentation?
We find the question posed in various ways
in relation to new technologies or media,
the forces they bring with them, the ques-
tions they pose, the ways in which today
they cause us to evolve. But we also find it
in AbdouMaliq Simone’s view of the rallying
cry of African youth, “to transcend our past,
to discover our past,” and the manner in
which it forms part of a complex condition
of “preparedness” that might serve as a
starting point for a new urbanism in Africa
today. But might it also become a premise
of the painstaking investigations undertaken
by historians, already implicit, for example,
in Manfredo Tafuri’s critique of “operative
history”? In particular, might it be applied
to the work of intellectual historians of prag-
matism? In his reactions to the workshop,
Casey Blake seems to think not. But perhaps
in a general conception of pragmatism one
would need to move away a bit from the
“irony” he finds in the tension between
what is and what should be, toward the vital
“humor” that lies instead in things in the
making and the way they serve to mix
things up and pose new questions, even
for historians.
For the workshop, which brought together
distinguished scholars in many fields, was
not intended to rehearse familiar ideas about
known objects. It was an attempt to find
a discussion-form that might allow a little
fresh air for those willing to take on those
processes, as yet unmade, that provoke us
to think or imagine new things in new ways.
It was thus an attempt to offer a discursive
framework for something like what Gerald
Frug called “fortuitous associations,” or
Isaac Joseph called “gatherings in the
making,” or Hashim Sarkis called “the
practical withdrawal from prior programs.”
It was, in short, an attempt to put into
practice the pragmatist maxim according
to which there is nothing in the making
unless what is already there is unsettled,
mixed up, and mixed together anew, without
prior program, encompassing plan, or single
fixed end.
15
PRAGMATISM /
ARCHITECTURE:

The following compilation of position papers

and essays is based on a workshop that
took place at Columbia University in May
2000 under the auspices of the Temple Hoyne
Buell Center for the Study of American
Architecture. It was the outcome of discus-
sions with a number of colleagues inside
and outside of architecture concerning
the widely acknowledged schism existing
between the theory and practice of archi-
tecture today. This schism has its origins in
the 1960s, the moment when architectural
theory first became a mature discourse in
the United States, heralded by a think tank
like the Institute for Architecture and Urban
Studies in New York City and its journal
Oppositions. It was also at this time that
members of a newly politicized generation
of architects and architecture students
mounted a challenge to a profession that
it saw as arrogant, irrelevant, and anti-
intellectual. During the following decades
the aphasia between architectural theory
and practice intensified as “theory” became
an increasingly autonomous and often arcane
field of specialization within the schools and

THE IDEA OF THE
WORKSHOP PROJECT
media, preoccupied with debates taking place
in philosophy and literary criticism but ironi-
cally enough (given its beginnings) distanced
from everyday problems of the built environ-
ment. Especially on the East Coast, intellec-
tual discourse in architecture was largely
dominated by Continental philosophies —
from the brilliantly combative but implacable
resignation of Manfredo Tafuri and the Venice
School in the 1970s to the often esoteric
play authorized by French poststructuralism
in the 1980s. A consequence was the
alienation of the professionals from the
intellectuals, and vice versa. By the late
1990s, partly in reaction to this situation,
but also in the climate of a booming economy
and plenty of buildings coming out of
the ground, a desire to reconceptualize
architectural practice in terms of some
new realities became manifest.
It is in this context that pragmatism seems
potentially to offer a fresh point of depar-
ture. Enjoying a revival recently in philoso-
phy and other disciplines — from social
1
thought and law to culture — might it also
JOAN OCKMAN
serve as a lever to pry open some hardened
formations in architecture, by now giving
signs of having run their course? At the most
general level, pragmatism defines itself
as a theory of practice. It is also, more
polemically, an anti-theoretical theory: its
antifoundationalist view of the world is in
keeping with a contemporary architectural
sensibility that — like other postmodern
practices — remains wary of modernist
absolutes. At the same time, the central
pragmatist commitment to social ameliora-
tion and ethical praxis furnishes grounds
for reclaiming a portion of that modernist
heritage that many architects still refuse,
in all conscience, to abandon.
Apart from these explicitly ideological
considerations (which no doubt can lead
to some strange bedfellows, as Casey Blake
cautions in his afterword to this volume —
even if, in my opinion, the gambit is worth
the risk), pragmatist discourse has over 1. See Morris Dickstein, ed.,
The Revival of Pragmatism:
the course of its history revolved around New Essays on Social
Thought, Law, and Culture
a constellation of themes that are also of
(Durham, N.C.: Duke
central significance to architecture and University Press, 1998).

2. Peter Galison, “Aufbau/
Bauhaus: Logical Positivism
and Architectural Modernism,”
Critical Inquiry 16
(summer 1990), pp. 709–52.
3. See Casey Nelson Blake,
“The Perils of Personality:
Lewis Mumford and
Politics after Liberalism,”
in Robert Hollinger and David
Depew, eds., Pragmatism:
From Progressivism to
Postmodernism (Westport,
Conn.: Praeger, 1995),
pp. 88–106.
18
urban design. Among others, these include
the Deweyan “problem of the public” and,
by extension, public space; questions of
technological innovation and experimental
forms of inquiry; and a view of the relation-
ship between aesthetics and experience.
From a historical standpoint, considering
the parallelisms between the intellectual
development of pragmatism and modern
architecture — both products of cultural
conditions ushered in by late 19th- and early
20th-century modernity — I find it rather
remarkable that an extended conversation
between the two has never really occurred.
There have, however, been some suggestive
points of tangency. For example, the rela-
tionship between pragmatism and logical
positivism, including the contacts that
took place between these philosophies and
the Bauhaus, first in Germany and later in
Chicago (a subject to which John Rajchman
initially drew my attention, broached in
2
an interesting essay by Peter Galison ),
has interesting implications. Likewise, the
altercation in the 1930s between Lewis
Mumford, the foremost architecture critic of
the day, and John Dewey, over pragmatism’s
alleged acquiescence to technocracy,
reexamined in a discerning essay by Casey
Blake,3 continues to be relevant, especially
so at a moment when computer technology
is becoming hegemonic in the design fields.
Although the historiographic relationship
between architecture and pragmatism
remains outside the specific purview of
this workshop, it is implicitly a subtext.
As director of an architectural study center
that is nominally American — and someone
who never considered herself an Americanist
before assuming this position — I have spent
some time in recent years thinking about
what makes American architecture
“American.” In the canonical histories
of 20th-century architecture, one of the
recurrent tropes, one may say stereotypes,
seems to be the characterization of
American architecture as driven by practical
exigencies and commercial realities.
European architecture, on the other hand,
is seen as underpinned by theories and
doctrines. (As I have already suggested,
this situation changed somewhat in the
1960s, when American architectural thought
became less provincial.) To take just one
example, in a classic essay on the Chicago
skyscraper, Colin Rowe describes the devel-
opment of this building type in the United
States during the 1880s and 1890s as a
matter of “fact rather than idea.”4 In con-
trast, in Europe, where the high-rise building
was still more a fantasy than a buildable
reality in the early 1920s, a full-fledged
theory of the skyscraper was already emerg-
ing. Within this perspective, the arrival of
Mies van der Rohe in Chicago in the 1930s
represents a consequential convergence of
American and European ideologies.
Other recent writers have also emphasized
this interpretation or perception of American
architecture as “pragmatic” (in the generic
sense of practical, matter-of-fact, busi-
nesslike), including, most incisively, Manfredo
5
Tafuri and Jean-Louis Cohen. Yet as a
theory of Americanism in architecture
chiefly formulated by Europeans — and not
infrequently carrying a pejorative charge —
it seems ripe today for recontextualization.
In this respect, pragmatist philosophy,
inasmuch as it has repeatedly been charac-
terized as an American national philosophy
and stigmatized as a philosophy of capitalism,
4. Colin Rowe, “Chicago
offers a parallel. Needless to say, I propose Frame” (1956), republ. in
The Mathematics of the Ideal
this comparative project without chauvinistic Villa and Other Essays
intentions. Certainly in a post-Cold War epoch (Cambridge, Mass.: MIT
Press, 1976), pp. 89–117;
when globalization is frequently accounted phrase quoted, p. 99.
to be synonymous with Americanization, the 5. See, for example,
question of a new American “international Manfredo Tafuri, “The New
Babylon: The ‘Yellow Giants’
style,” in both architecture and intellectual and the Myth of
discourse, is inescapable. To what extent Americanism,” in The Sphere
and the Labyrinth: Avant-
is the paradigm of the American Century Gardes and Architecture from
still operative — if it ever really was anything Piranesi to the 1970s
(Cambridge, Mass.: MIT
more than a one-sided myth (see Anders Press, 1987), pp. 171–89;
and Jean-Louis Cohen,
Stephanson’s comments on this in his intro-
Scenes of the World to Come:
duction to the first group of papers) — and European Architecture and
the American Challenge,
how is American hegemony, in cultural fields 1893–1960 (Paris:
too, being renegotiated today? Flammarion, 1995). For
the influence of pragmatism
As a related issue, again from the vantage on Tafuri’s intellectual
formation, see the interview
point of a historicization of theory, pragma- published in the special issue
of ANY, no. 25–26 (spring
tism’s rise and fall and recent rise seems
2000), “Being Manfredo
suggestive with respect to the trajectory of Tafuri,” p. 14.
19
American architecture. Pragmatism largely
went into eclipse after the Second World
War as analytic philosophy, a European import,
became ascendant, making pragmatism look
naive and unrigorous. Why, then, should it
have come back into intellectual currency
in the early 1980s, catalyzed by Rorty’s
Philosophy and the Mirror of Nature (1979)?
This question, addressed by John Rajchman
and Cornel West in their book Post-Analytic
Philosophy, is one for historians of philos-
6
ophy. Yet from an architectural perspective
it leads one to think about an analogous
“scientistic” development in postwar
American architecture and the subsequent
revision of this attitude under the name
of postmodernism.
To return to the specific evolution of the pre-
sent project, the original intent was to pre-
sent a conference at the Graduate School of
Architecture, Planning and Preservation at
Columbia exploring as many of these ideas
as possible. Two years ago, funding
for such an event materialized through the
generosity of the Skidmore, Owings & Merrill
Foundation. One of the largest and most
prestigious architectural firms in the United
States, SOM has historically been a practice
whose work has affinities to pragmatist
“ways of doing.” The Foundation was very
interested in sponsoring a “year 2000”
event that would address the theory/
practice schism in contemporary architec-
ture. They preferred to hold it in a setting
that was not strictly academic, however,
as they felt that the issue was, after all,
to bridge the divide between scholars and 6. John Rajchman and Cornel
West, eds., Post-Analytic
professionals. At the same time, it seemed Philosophy (New York:
to those of us at the Buell Center that a Columbia University Press,
1985).
scholarly event was indispensable to educat-
ing the architectural community to this new
(to architects) philosophical discourse, and
Columbia a natural choice with its historical
ties to pragmatism through John Dewey.
After a series of discussions the SOM
Foundation agreed to underwrite a two-
stage event, the first part a scholarly and
multidisciplinary workshop at Columbia, the
second part, more directly focused on archi-
tecture, to take place six months later at
the Museum of Modern Art in New York.
21

7. Arthur Lovejoy, “Thirteen
Types of Pragmatism,” in
The Thirteen Pragmatisms
(Baltimore: Johns Hopkins
University Press, 1963),
pp. 1–29.
22
The present publication was to act as a kind While this multiple genealogy may or may
of bridge between the two. not provide a license to “pick your pragma-
tism,” the intent of the workshop was most
It was my privilege to collaborate on this
explicitly not to forward any one pragmatist
project with John Rajchman and Casey Blake.
“line.” Nor was it to rehearse philosophical
The diverse knowledge and perspectives
debates that have already taken place, nor to
that each brought to it, the former as a
convert the uninitiated. While the issues
philosopher with a strong interest in archi-
broached in the six sections of this publica-
tecture and visual studies, the latter as a
tion all have some prehistory in American
specialist in American studies with a focus
pragmatist discourse, the “pragmatist ques-
on urban history, served to produce a rather
tions” raised at the outset of each section
singular event. Indeed, on first glance read-
and in the glossary that follows were meant
ers may find it startling that despite its
mainly to serve as inspirational (or con-
purport to have something to do with prag-
tentious) points of reference, catalysts for
matism or neopragmatism, the book includes
departure. The contributors to this volume
a minority of people explicitly affiliated
come from an exceptionally wide spectrum
with this philosophy, at least in an orthodox
of disciplines and areas: from philosophy,
sense. Yet perhaps this is less extraordinary
political theory, sociology, anthropology, the
in the context of an intellectual tradition
history of science, literature, public policy
that has always been marked by hetero-
and urban studies, the art world, popular
geneity — that in Peirce, James, and Dewey
music, and architecture; and from European,
it has not one but three founding fathers,
Asian, Latin American, and African as well
and that already in 1908 it provoked a cri-
as U.S. studies. Again, the aspiration was
tique entitled “Thirteen Types of Pragmatism”
not merely to pay lip service to diversity, but
on the basis of the wide-ranging and even
to provide a kind of petri dish for generating
conflicting directions it was taking.7
fresh thinking about a set of important social
and cultural transformations still very
much “in the making” and by their nature
superseding disciplinary and cultural bound-
aries. Very simply, the objective of the
workshop was to open up a new context
for conversation.

Finally, the paradoxical coupling of the words

“pragmatist” and “imagination” in the title
is meant to have a somewhat explosive
effect — something like William James’s
provocative use of the metaphor “cash-value”
to dramatize the pragmatist idea that any
theory of truth, meaning, or reality can only
be verified in terms of the concrete differ-
ences it makes when implemented and
tested in actual experience. The “pragma-
tist imagination” may, in turn, be taken as
a complementary construct to that of the
utopian imagination. The two represent
alternative strategies for orienting ourselves
to the future. Unquestionably the world in
the year 2000 still needs utopian thinkers.
But I believe, with William James, that
today we also need “more imagination
of realities.”

23
GLOSSARY
Why pragmatism?

It is no accident that American pragmatism once again rises to the

surface of North American intellectual life at the present moment, for
its major themes of evading epistemology-centered philosophy, accenting
human powers, and transforming antiquated modes of social hierarchies
in light of religious and/or ethical ideals make it relevant and attractive.
The distinctive appeal of American pragmatism in our postmodern
moment is its unashamedly moral emphasis and its unequivocally
ameliorative impulse. In this world-weary period of pervasive cynicisms,
nihilisms, terrorisms, and possible extermination, there is a longing for
norms and values that can make a difference, a yearning for principled
resistance and struggle that can change our desperate plight.
Cornel West, introduction to The American Evasion of Philosophy: A Genealogy of Pragmatism (1989)

Imagination

[Imagination] designates a quality that animates and per vades all

processes of making and observation. It is a way of seeing and feeling
things as they compose an integral whole. It is the large and generous
blending of interests at the point where the mind comes in contact with
the world. When old and familiar things are made new in experience,
there is imagination. When the new is created, the far and strange
become the most natural inevitable things in the world. There is always
some measure of adventure in the meeting of mind and universe, and
this adventure is, in its measure, imagination.
John Dewey, Art as Experience (1934)

Thinking and talking

Without discussion intellectual experience is only an exercise in a

private gymnasium. It has never been put to the test, never had to
give an account of itself. It is some such motive that impels people
25
 to discussion; though they are too often content with the jousting of
pasteboard knights. But a good discussion is not only a conflict. It
is fundamentally a cooperation. It progresses towards some common
understanding. This does not mean that it must end in agreement. A
discussion will have been adequate if it has done no more than set
the problem in its significant terms, or even defined the purpose that
makes such a setting significant….The impulse for discussion is an
impulse towards the only environment where creative thinking can be
done. All the more reason why an instinct for workmanship should
come in to insure that thought does not lose itself in feeble sparring
or detached monologue.
Randolph Bourne, “On Discussion,” in History of a Literary Radical and Other Essays (1920)

Laboratory or workshop?

…the method of laboratory science…is the method whose structure

and generic postulates [Charles Sanders] Peirce wishes to generalize
and ubiquitously to apply. Such generalization occurs in Peirce by means
of “analogical extensions” from scientific practices. He is viewing mind
or imagination as laborator y….Only by keeping in mind the fact that
Peirce is attempting to extend his laboratory practices, as he was aware
of them, into all inquiry can we understand his reformulating and going
behind, beneath, doubt as an experience. We can understand his
inclusion of fact and action as elements involved in the precipitation
of doubt. In the laborator y, experimental action is actually arrested by
emergent, exceptional fact; and the experimenter is forced to revise
or reject the hypothesis or belief upon which the experimental action
was predicated. Experimentation is the “difficult art,” the technique
of seeking out emergent exceptions, for this “difficult art” of instituting
doubt can, from the Peircian perspective, be nothing other than

26
experimentation, during the course of which factual items arise,
“surprising” the investigator precisely because they cannot be
subsumed within the belief-habit or hypothesis whose experimental
actuation they interrupted….Challenging the dominant epistemological
traditions, which he largely subsumes under the spirit of Cartesianism,
Peirce analogically translates the component elements of experimental
science into a formulation of the general structure of the processes
of inquir y. His conceptions of doubt arise readily from within this
program, from within the metaphor: mind as laborator y. For mind
genuinely at work with meanings, theories, and with words exemplifies
to Peirce the form of experimental inquiry. The structure of each inquiry
is carried over into mind. It is, synoptically, then, the “laboratory habit
of mind” which is the central thought-model for Peirce.
C. Wright Mills, “The Laboratory Style of Inquiry,” in Sociology and Pragmatism: The Higher Learning in America (1964)

Things in the making

What really exists is not things made but things in the making. Once
made, they are dead, and an infinite number of alternative conceptual
decompositions can be used in defining them. But put yourself in the
making by a stroke of intuitive sympathy with the thing and, the whole
range of possible decompositions coming at once into your possession,
you are no longer troubled with the question which of them is the more
absolutely true. Reality falls in passing into conceptual analysis; it
mounts in living its own undivided life — it buds and burgeons, changes
and creates. Once adopt the movement of this life in any given instance
and you know what Bergson calls the devenir réel by which the thing
evolves and grows. Philosophy should seek this kind of living under-
standing of the movement of reality, not follow science in vainly
patching together fragments of its dead results.
William James, “Bergson and His Critique of Intellectualism,” in A Pluralistic Universe (1909)

27
THE FUTURE / THE

Do classic narratives of the 20th

century need to be rewritten?
PAST How should we imagine the future?

How should the past be reimagined?

Is the “American Century” over?

29
 ANDERS STEPHANSON
INTRODUCTION
It perhaps seems peculiar to invite four
Europeans to open up a discussion about the
narratives of pragmatism and “the American
Century,” but one does not have to evoke
the great names of past commentaries to
say that Europeans have frequently provided
good insights about things “American.”
Having been convened on May Day in the
millennial year 2000, one is bound to remark
on some telling historical ironies. It is often
forgotten that this celebration of working-
class solidarity across borders began as a
struggle for the eight-hour workday in the
United States a little more than a century
ago, only to be appropriated and institution-
alized elsewhere — in Europe above all.
Now, on the millennial eve, it appears to
be fading there as well and the future may
well look suspiciously like a very “American”
one indeed.
The idea of the millennium, meanwhile, is
of course deeply suffused with Christian
symbolism, while “century” as a foundational
notion of historical periodization is a secular
invention of the Enlightenment. Now, as
May Day is symptomatically fading amidst
the neoliberal end of history, the preceding
century is renarrativized in strong millenarian
overtones as having been preeminently an
“American” one. It deserves to be pointed
out that throughout most of that century,
it appeared quite otherwise. Indeed, when
Time/Life founder Henry R. Luce coined the
phrase in early 1941, things were looking
rather dim and grim and anything but
American. The crushing demoralization of the
Depression was yet to be cast aside by the
massive war mobilization that regenerated
capitalism and spirit alike in the United
States. The world was in fact dominated by
aggressive dictators. Luce, alarmed by this,
was using his slogan to exhort the public
to assume what he (born in China, the son
of a missionary) considered the moral duty
of the United States to intervene in the
world to uplift and right it.
Even in 1945, after the enormously
successful war effort, few expected a world
based on what we now tend to think of as
“American” principles. The common wisdom
in the West, on the contrary, was that the
future would involve only limited doses of
“free enterprise” and that the guiding politi-
cal truth would feature state control over, or
at least responsibility for, the process of
capital accumulation — as was indeed
exemplified by the mobilization. As for the
postwar world, whose end may be dated to
the
collapse of the Soviet Union around 1990,
31
 it was surely not a story of “American” the necessarily utopian character of the
success, global reach notwithstanding. “American mission in the world” has always
Various histories of that epoch are obviously been an intricate one, critical yet also
possible — decolonization, for instance — heavily suffused with the dispositions of
but none can entail any simple “rise of that ideology.
America” to the center of the universe.
Some of these themes are illuminated
One is reminded that when Luce died in
more specifically and incisively in the three
1967, the United States was slowly coming
contributions to follow, by Nadia Urbinati,
to experience for the first time what it is
Jean-Louis Cohen, and David Lapoujade.
like to lose a war and a deeply disgraceful
The object of each is markedly different,
one to boot. “The American Century,” then,
but together they provide a fittingly thinking
is a recent rationalization, a retrospective
initiation into “things in the making.” Cohen
projection of teleological nature.
explores the issues of planning and archi-
In the end, the United States has always tecture, Urbinati deals with political theory
been a world empire in Otto Hintze’s sense and the present against a vast historical
of the term. Like Rome, this empire is in span from Plato and Tocqueville to Emerson
principle the world, or the world to be. There to Rorty, while Lapoujade performs a highly
is an outside, to be sure, but it is intrinsi- original probe of William James.
cally not an equal: in principle, it is either
evil or an undifferentiated, amorphous mass
to be acted upon in some manner or other.
“America” is not, and never can be, one
among many powers; and so it can never
really embrace any truly international order
either. The place of pragmatism and thinking
about things in the making through this
would-be American century is a fascinating
historical problem. For the relation between
pragmatic thought (as it has developed
from James through Dewey to Rorty) and

32
33
 N A D I A U R B I N AT I

DEMOCRACY’S
MYTHMAKERS
In what follows I shall focus on the absent third term in the heading
of this group of papers, namely “the present.” The present is the
dimension of decision and action, when choice makes its cutting-edge
appearance in the world, dividing the perception of temporality into a
before and an after. In fact, one might say that it is the act of making
choices that brings the differentiation of time into life. In Homer’s
Odyssey, Penelope’s choice of not choosing may be seen as a decision
to suspend temporal differentiation and action. Suspended within an
eternal present, Penelope’s life loses its differential development. From
this choice on, her life is a timeless repetition of the same gestures;
it is no longer a story to be told. The consciousness of the intrinsic
link between the act of choosing, the ordering of time, and individual
differentiation is one of the crucial themes of American philosophy.
It crisscrosses and unifies it, beginning with its gestation in transcen-
dentalism and continuing up to maturity in pragmatism. In fact, the
theme extends far beyond these theoretical events.

34
THE PRESENT IS THE TEMPORAL DIMENSION OF AGENCY; IT IS
AT THE CORE OF WILLIAM JAMES’S DEFINITION OF PRAGMATISM
AS “THINGS IN THE MAKING.”

The present as the “temporalization” of contingency is also at the

core of Richard Rorty’s political project of bringing American philosophy
back to its democratic tradition. It is noteworthy that the centrality
of the temporal dimension of the present belongs both to American
political and philosophical culture and to the democratic condition. In
Achieving Our Country Richard Rorty aims to bring this characteristic
to our attention. Moreover, he wants us to interpret it in its political
significance and, finally, to make it the polar star of political action.
 The propensity to associate democracy with
the living present of individuals is a well-
known topos in political theory. However, until
the growth of an autonomous American philo-
sophical tradition, it mainly had a negative
connotation, signifying the intrinsic and
incurable per version of democracy. Plato
associated democracy with loss of memory,
and then related the loss of memory to
subjectivism and perspectivism, factors that
made democracy attractive and dangerous
at once. He compared democracy’s state of
oblivion to the land of the lotus eaters, where
Ulysses and his companions came ashore
before reaching the land of the Cyclops (that
is, the tyrants). The hegemony of the present
was the open door to equality and the celebra-
tion of individuals in their “multicolored”
variety and as they were. But as tradition
was the guardian of wisdom and the authority
of the past the temporal dimension of aris-
tocracy, democratic equality and individualism
were destined lead to tyranny.
More or less like Plato, Alexis de Tocqueville
depicted the democratic condition as a
corrective against time and an inversion of
the hierarchy of the past over the present.
For Tocqueville, American democracy was an
organic society led by a headless and imper-
sonal power. It was a comprehensive order
that owed its strength not merely to its
36
institutional system — which was seldom
faulty or imprecise in its outcomes — but to
its propensity to become more-than-political,
to permeate the habits and gestures of men
and women in everyday life. Yet for Tocqueville,
too, forgetfulness of the past was the first
step toward anomie and conformism. With
the act of declaring herself the master of her
own choice, the individual took upon herself
a responsibility under whose weight she could
easily succumb. Between the many who got
lost and the few who emerged, forgetfulness
swept up those who were too afraid to try
the extremes and allowed themselves to be
transported by the current. Thus forgetfulness
implied the end of politics. Politics demanded
individual differentiation; it demanded person-
al responsibility and even sacrifice. Equality
of conditions, on the other hand, was a
leveling agent that erased uniqueness and
difference. It injected predictability into human
action and imparted uniformity to individual
choices — two characteristics that inhibit the
power to act politically. As in the case of
Penelope, the life of democratic individuals
seemed to Tocqueville not to have a story to
be told. It was subsumed by the hegemonic
dimension of the “here and now.” Immersed
in their quotidian contingency, democratic
individuals lost track of the past and thus
severed their connections with their fellows.
IF WE TURN NOW TO THE AMERICAN THEORISTS, WE SEE THAT THE
HEGEMONY OF THE PRESENT LOSES ITS NEGATIVE CONNOTATION
AND BECOMES THE DISTINCTIVE TRAIT OF MODERN SOCIETY.
Ralph Waldo Emerson claimed the creative
value of self-reliance against the builders of
tombs and writers of history. Needless to say,
overturning the hierarchical order of the past
in favor of the present did not for him involve
a condition of forgetfulness. For Emerson, the
individual acquired her independence not at the
price of knowledge of the past, but through it.
Like Walt Whitman, he ascribed a regenerative
and aesthetic function to history insofar as the
present (the individual) was able to appropriate
it. As in the neo-idealist philosophy of
Benedetto Croce, making history amounts to
liberating and emancipating oneself from it.
This act of liberation is for the sake of action,
not of erudite or scientific knowledge. History
as such, according to Croce, has no life. It
receives life from those moral and political
actors who reconstruct it in search of mean-
ings and ideals that are relevant to them in
the present. This is the core theme of American
pragmatism that Rorty wishes to revive.
The overturning of the past’s domination can
be interpreted from two perspectives, one
social and political, the other aesthetic. These
perspectives are complementary in that they
represent the outside and inside of the democ-
ratic condition. The former, on which I shall
focus here, frames the political discourse
of American democratic liberalism from John
Dewey to John Rawls. Individuals are to be
judged and considered according to what they
personally are and do. The claim for the priority
of the present is, in this case, a claim for
equal consideration. Both Dewey’s writings
on democracy and Rawls’s Theory of Justice
pivot on the idea that the past exercises an
arbitrary domination over individuals since it
obstructs the expression of a “reasonable
human autonomy.” The task of justice for
Dewey and Rawls is to prevent the “accidents”
of both nature and social sedimentation —
both expressions of the domination of the
past over the present — from affecting the
basic distribution of liberties and opportunities.
IN THIS SENSE ONE MAY SAY THAT THE CULTURAL
PREMISE OF THE CONTEMPORARY THEORY OF
JUSTICE IS FOUND IN THE TENSION BETWEEN
PAST AND PRESENT THAT HAS PERMEATED THE
WRITINGS OF AMERICAN THEORISTS SINCE THE
AGE OF TRANSCENDENTALISM.
However, the priority of the present can be
stated not only with respect to the past
but also the future. When this occurs, the
celebration of “contemporaneity” turns our
attention toward another aspect of politics —
its ideological function. This is the frame
within which Richard Rorty situates his project
of liberating American culture from the myth
of objectivism and essentialism, in their forms
of both analytic neutrality and grand theory.
DEMOCRACY’S MYTHMAKERS 39
 Objectivity, Rorty argues, is of no use to
democratic political deliberation. Democratic
deliberation is about what decisions we should
make, and as such about what we are. Like
an individual’s biography, the representation
of a nation’s identity cannot profit from neutral
criteria, nor from an “ought to be” dictated by
a teleological philosophy of history.
FOR RORTY, DEMOCRACY OR, MORE PRECISELY,
AMERICAN DEMOCRACY, IS PERMEATED WITH
AXIOLOGICAL CONTINGENCY. TO DISCLAIM
THIS IS TO DENY THE POSSIBILITY OF POLITICAL
AGENCY, TO DISSOCIATE, IN JAMES’S TERMS,
“THINKING” FROM “MAKING.”
According to Rorty, this dissociation is the
prime cause of two “diseases,” one coming
from a sense of guilt or sin, the other from
the rejection of a common identity in the name
of principles and a goal lying outside history.
In both cases, politics disentangles itself from
its actual makers and, in so doing, sacrifices
hope, commitment, and solidarity. In both
cases, Rorty argues, philosophy is in the
service of spectatorship, not agency. A specta-
torial posture is peculiar to those who locate
themselves outside the current of the present
and thus outside the cooperative experimenta-
tion that makes our social ties robust. To
40
seek to remove oneself from the current of
the present is to try to keep one’s hands clean
of compromise and negotiation. In sum, it
is to depart from democratic deliberation
and dismiss any commitment to reformism.
When Rorty accuses the academic Left of
abandoning the philosophy of contingency,
he is also accusing it of injecting an antide-
mocratic attitude into American culture and
society. The academic Left, he admonishes,
is seeking to be an avant-garde, while democ-
racy can tolerate no political discourse other
than pragmatic reformism. This is because
it cannot be permitted to have any privileged
political protagonist.
THE FIL ROUGE OF AMERICAN
PHILOSOPHY, AND OF
PRAGMATISM AS ITS MOST
SOPHISTICATED EXPRESSION,
IS THUS ANTITELEOLOGY.
“The price of temporalization is contingency,”
writes Rorty. There is no deeper truth than
that resulting from the struggle among inter-
pretations, no objective criteria aside from
the verdict coming from the political arena —
victory or defeat. From an axiological relativism
we are brought back to political realism. This
is not, according to Rorty, something to be
regretted. Indeed, if the deliberative field of can Rorty’s call for a return to a national tradi-
modern democracy is an open field regulated tion be a viable democratic strategy outside of
by accepted procedures, then the work to be the American case?
done is that of creating dreams and visions,
of challenging one narrative with another. It THE EXPLICITLY NATIONALISTIC THRUST OF
is ideological work, even if its tools are neither
knowledge of God’s will nor scientific facts.
RORTY’S BOOK IS TO REFUSE THE UNIVER-
They are, instead, myths and “utopian dreams.” SALISTIC CHARACTER OF ALL PROGRESSIVE
Democracy needs mythmakers. This was PHILOSOPHY COMING FROM THE ENLIGHTENMENT.
also the message coming from Emerson, who
created the most powerful myth of American However, the American democratic ideal too
individualism — self-reliance — and purposefully contains a strong universalistic message.
constructed a negative myth of Europe in Unless one does not want to circumscribe
order to contrast it with the myth of America’s democracy within the borderlines of a specific
originality and superiority. countr y — America, in Rorty’s case — one
cannot be indifferent to the conditions of
In the preface to the Italian translation of
suffering and exploitation in which the majority
Rorty’s Achieving Our Country, Gianni Vattimo
of the world’s population is languishing at pre-
raises several important questions with respect
sent. Above all, one cannot be indifferent to
to this strategy of contingency. He asks
the fact that these conditions are an effect
whether a politics that aims to represent the
not only of the nondemocratic cultural tradi-
“party of hope” can indeed do away with all
tions of the countries in which they occur but
normativism and universalism. Whereas the
also of a world economic order whose leading
vindication of contingency can be effective
principles have been shaped within our own
as a critique of grand theories and totalizing
“humanistic liberal” society. If the celebration
projects of refoundation, it cannot, however,
of the American democratic tradition is not
offer a criterion for differentiating among
confronted with the deficiencies of democracy
different “parties of hope.” If the political
existing outside America, the risk is that it
agon is a battlefield of interpretations with
will become isolationist indifference — and,
no points of orientation apart from the strength
implicitly, a celebration of a world order that
of its mythmakers, then is it not just another
is inherently antidemocratic.
form of realism or social Darwinism? Moreover,

DEMOCRACY’S MYTHMAKERS 41
URBAN PROJECTS
AND ADJUSTMENT
TO THE FUTURE
 JEAN-LOUIS COHEN

I will engage the questions that have been posed not from a philosophical
point of view but on the basis of the research I have produced at the
intersection of architecture and history. In particular, I will try to look at
the urban dimension of architecture, which has been at the center of
many of my writings, taking advantage of the present invitation to relate
my ideas to pragmatist thought in order to reconsider this research from
several different angles.

I WILL RETURN FIRST TO THE ISSUE OF AMERICANISM, WHICH

I DEFINE AS AN IDEAL CONSTRUCTION HAVING TO DO WITH THE
WAY EUROPEANS ENVISION THEIR OWN FUTURE.

43
 Through my investigation of Americanism in on the widespread experiences of work and
architecture, and in its broader extension to life abroad.) As the French novelist Georges
other spheres of practice, I have pursued a Duhamel observed in his book America the
long-standing curiosity about the different ways Menace (1930), Americanism has to do with
the future has been conceived and represented time: the American scene prefigures and
since the Industrial Revolution. Within this displays that which is supposedly the destiny
perspective, “America” has, since the early of Europe. We are speaking here less about
20th century, replaced England as the stage “influence” than a complex pattern of ideal
upon which the most advanced technical, relationships. If we subscribe to the Jungian
cultural, and social changes have been antici- concept of a collective unconscious,
pated. Meanwhile, other visions of the future Americanism may be defined as a sort of
have coexisted with this one: of Germany as ideal of the collective self.
a primary example of industrial civilization;
Besides having to do with time, Americanism
of Soviet Russia as an example of “rational”
also operates in several other dimensions.
economic conduct, especially with its Five-Year
First of all, it has to do with space, both in
Plans in the decade following the Depression.
depth and breadth. It conveys images of
In America itself, images of an urban future
metropolitan density and new scales of urban
were constructed at the turn of the century
development — for instance, the multilevel
by City Beautiful urbanists with reference to
vision of a future city designed by Harvey Wiley
Renaissance Italy and eclectic France.
Corbett in 1913 as a solution to the problems
Beyond this notion of Americanism, or the of automobile traffic. Moreover, in terms of
representation of futures modeled on an idea landscapes, whether natural or man-made,
of America, a more objective process of urban or rural, Americanism tends to involve
Americanization may also be observed, at the sentiment of the sublime.
least since the First World War. Americanization
derives from the adjustment of actual methods
and themes to direct observations made on
the American scene, and this process is in
large part shaped by experiences acquired in
the New World by travelers, experts, and publi-
cists. (A similar pattern may be found in the
context of colonialism, whose shaping force
on the colonial powers at home was based

44
SECOND, THE GEOGRAPHICAL PATTERN OF AMERICANISM IS NOT
STABLE, BUT RATHER FOLLOWS CLOSELY UPON THE “MAKING OF
URBAN THINGS.”
From Chicago attention migrated to New York
in the early years of the 20th century, then
back to Chicago in the 1930s. After 1945, the
interest of Europeans — and others, including
Latin Americans and Asians — drifted toward
Los Angeles. Most recently Houston, Phoenix,
and perhaps even Seattle have captured the
Americanist imagination. At each stage of the
process, a synecdoche operates whereby one
particular city is taken as representing the
whole of America.
Third, Americanist visions of the future have
been affected by the production and consump-
tion of images of all types, from late 20th-
century engravings to photography, film, and
television soaps. This imagery is drawn from
both high and low culture — including technical
and scholarly publications, surveys, and
large-audience media — in an endless recycling
of images and tropes.
It would be incorrect to assume that America
ever acquires complete transparency in the
eyes of European observers. The representa-
tions conveyed to the various types of audi-
ences miss many points. Perhaps one of the
most obvious blind spots is the inability on
the part of Europeans to see, and even more
to reproduce, the widespread dynamism of
America, on which Henry James commented
so convincingly. A question I cannot answer
at this point is the incidence of pragmatist
thought in the circulation of ideas between
the two worlds. A comparative study on the
migration of pragmatist discourse by way
of conferences, lectures, and of course trans-
lations through England, France, Germany, Italy,
and perhaps Russia during the first half of the
20th century would no doubt be a useful way
of documenting this aspect.
I will now move on to another group of
questions in which the problem of time is
also centrally implicated.
IF PRAGMATISM IS ABOUT “THINGS IN
THE MAKING,” AND PRAGMATISM IN THE
ARCHITECTURAL SPHERE IS ABOUT BUILDINGS
AND CITIES IN THE MAKING, THE QUESTION
OF TEMPORALITY CAN HARDLY BE AVOIDED.
The internal temporalities of the design process
as well as the temporalities of social life
as interiorized in the design — the ways in
which the latter are anticipated, planned, or,
conversely, repressed — deserve our attention.
The response to the future in actual architec-
ture and urban planning cannot be reduced, as
in the case of Americanism, to the idealization
of a “more advanced” remote scene with which
builders, planners, and politicians identify. The
future, that is, is not always to be found across
the ocean. It can also be a horizon within the
design process. Every architectural and urban
work is, of course, based on the projection of
URBAN PROJECTS AND ADJUSTMENT TO THE FUTURE 45
 an ultimate stage in the configuration and use
of space. But the way in which this stage is,
in its turn, subject to change in time is a key
characteristic of different architectural and
urban visions.
THUS, IN CONTRAST TO A HISTORY OF BUILDINGS
AND URBAN COMPOSITIONS BASED ON A
MAPPING OF THEIR COMPARATIVE FIGURATIVITY,
ONE MIGHT INTERROGATE THEIR SPECIFIC
APPROACHES TO THE PHENOMENON OF TIME.
An analysis of the particular futures built
into architectural and urban conceptions can
illuminate both the intentions and methods
of their authors. I will discuss extremely briefly
two polar examples in order to make my point
a little clearer, contrasting urban projects
designed in the particular historical conjuncture
of the 1910s and 1920s, when patterns of
modernization and modernism coincided.
The first project has a quasi-canonical value
in architectural history. In his Voisin plan for
Paris, conceived in 1925 as a polemical
statement aimed at arousing public reaction,
Le Corbusier imagined a complete transforma-
tion of the center of the French capital with
the insertion of a central business district,
a cité des affaires, into an area where the
historic heart of the city had beaten for
centuries. I will not discuss the iconoclastic
dimension of this design, which leaves only
48
the Palais Royal, the Opéra, and a handful
of major monuments standing, razing all
the historical fabric. The visual comparison
suggested by Le Corbusier in The City of
Tomorrow (1925) between his scheme and
the cityscape of Manhattan is telling.
THE PARIS PLAN DOES NOT
IMPLY A PROCESS OF GROWTH
AND CHANGE, NOR A PRINCIPLE
OF INCREMENTAL AND INDI-
VIDUAL FUTURE BUILDING.
IT IS RATHER A SINGLE GES-
TURE IN WHICH THE FUTURE
OF THE CITY IS IN SOME WAY
FROZEN. IT IS AN ARCHITECT’S
URBANISM.
Le Corbusier’s denunciation of Manhattan’s
visual “anarchy” — in agreement, by the way,
with Henry James’s remarks in The American
Scene — could thus be read in a different way.
His rejection of visual competition between
high-rises does not bring about a “Cartesian”
rigor in the definition of the urban landscape,
as the Paris architect intended, but rather
a refusal of any kind of change in use and
shape after the implementation of the scheme.
It is true that in his later urban schemes,
Le Corbusier proves himself to be more open
to ideas of adaptation and adjustment. From
Paris to Rio de Janeiro, from Algiers to Addis POËTE WROTE, “THE REMOTE PAST IS INCLUDED
Ababa, his initial designs evolve through a
IN TODAY’S CITY JUST AS A SNOWBALL INITIALLY
process of careful adjustment to political
situations and specific sites, and also under- SHAPED BY THE HANDS AND SUBSEQUENTLY
take an endless search for a scale of buildings ROLLED ON THE SHINING WHITE GROUND GROWS
practical enough to allow their implementation. OUT OF CONTROL. THE SIMPLE EFFECT OF
The process of actually “making” things
DURATION PRODUCES AN OBVIOUS EFFECT:
becomes increasingly evident in his programs,
as in the “Bastion Kellermann” housing block THE CITY HAS LIVED AND IS PERMEATED WITH
designed for the 1937 international exposition MOVEMENT AND CHANGE.”
in Paris, intended as an active construction
site with workers and cranes. But such epics The second urban project I wish to cite
of the building process do not contradict belongs to this same culture and is one in
the static character of Le Corbusier’s urban which we might see an example of pragmatist
schemes, which remain forever defined in urbanism. I allude to the plan designed by
his master plans. urbanist Henri Prost for colonial Casablanca
between 1914 and 1917 and implemented
A completely opposite attitude may be found
in the following decades. The difference
in what I would call the “pragmatist city”
between Prost’s plan and Le Corbusier’s has
envisioned by other planners belonging to
nothing to do with the fact that the former
the French school of urbanism. A theoretician-
remained on the drawing board (at least in
historian like Marcel Poëte and a professional
Paris). It is rather a matter of methodology.
like Henri Prost, both active between 1910
(Morocco, by the way, under French rule
and 1940, were predominantly concerned
from 1912 to 1956, is one of the clearest
with duration. In dealing with historical change
contexts of Americanism, thanks in particular
within the city, Poëte observed what he called
to the ideas of the first colonial commander,
the “urban being,” echoing the ideas of Henri
Hubert Lyautey. The arrangement of powers
Bergson. In this regard he was promoting
he established was a complex system of
an attitude similar to that defined by William
knowledge and action, involving intricate
James as a “living understanding of the
patterns of hegemony as well as the exercise
movement of reality.” In his essay “Les Idées
of pure violence.)
bergsoniennes et l’urbanisme” (1935),

URBAN PROJECTS AND ADJUSTMENT TO THE FUTURE 49

 Of course, Prost’s urban plan for the economic
capital of the French protectorate has no
explicit, documented relationship with philo-
sophical pragmatism. But the experimental
practice he defines derives from a continuous
observation of the making of the city. Prost
does not crystallize the shape of the future
city in one preconceived physical envelope
in which every building fits neatly and obedi-
ently. Drawing on past and contemporary
experience — the zoning regulations of Paris
(1902) and New York (1916) respectively —
he creates a framework in which room for
change and diversity is built in.
HE ACCEPTS THE INEVITABILITY OF PATCHES,
CERTAINLY NOT WITH AN INTENT TO FLY IN THE
FACE OF EVERY TYPE OF URBAN REGULATION,
BUT RATHER IN ORDER TO ESTABLISH FLEXIBLE
RULES ALLOWING FOR CHANGE OVER SHORTER
OR LONGER PERIODS OF TIME.
His vision of a modern metropolis inhabited
by widely different classes, communities, and
religious groups thus takes the form of a
constructed patchwork. Reversing the classical
ground of urban sociology, the city may be said
to be an inverted laboratory: the patchwork is
not something detected retrospectively, as in
the well-known image of Chicago as a mosaic,
but to a large extent is planned.
50
Prost’s flexible planning methodology allows
not only for changes in the use of urban
spaces, but also anticipates the effect of
wear, i.e., of the rapid obsolescence of form
in a developing metropolis. Seen from this
perspective, his plan has aged rather well.
Some optimistic predictions of growth have
failed to materialize in certain areas, while
others remain incompletely “filled” with
buildings. Yet uneven development seems
to have been planned as such.
After leaving Morocco in 1923, Prost would
design a regional plan for the western area
of the French Riviera that reflects similar
concerns. One of his chief ideas was to
provide for a transformation over time of
typical sections of roads, from narrow country
paths to urban boulevards. His goal was less
to guide development through a premature
provision of exceedingly wide lanes awaiting
future traffic and roadside construction than
to define ample rights-of-way on which a
measured densification could take place at
its own pace.
The figure that I see in Prost’s Morocco and
Riviera plans as opposed to the “frozen”
figures of mainstream modernism is not one
of adjustment of real designs to a preestab-
lished scheme. It is rather adjustment of
basic urban components to the rhythms and
sequences of urban development.
PROST’S OPENNESS TO THE DIRTY, MESSY INTERPLAY OF THE
FORCES THAT SHAPE THE URBAN MOSAIC STANDS IN CONTRAST
TO LE CORBUSIER’S APPARENT REDUCTION OF THE COMPLEXITY
OF THE CITY TO THE INTERPLAY OF STATE POLITICS AND
STATIC PRISMS.

Another similar analysis of urban strategies contrary, fetishizes change with its devices.
might be proposed through a discussion of Strategic planning, however, the third
the relationship projects and plans presuppose approach, is closest to pragmatist thinking.
with the past in existing or historic cities. It is based on the concept of modification,
Is our view of the past colored by a vision articulating stable structures and programmed
of a particular “golden age” or a “correct” indetermination.
historical moment? Is it subject to an instru-
In short, the relationship to duration — the
mental reconstruction governed by ideological
representation of the future and the ways
criteria? Or do we understand the past as a
of adjusting to it — is one area in which a
layering of significant moments in a collective
meaningful intersection can be discerned
memory? Here, of course, politics and the
between architectural culture and pragmatism,
search for historical legitimacy play according
probably the most relevant one with respect
to a rather different score.
to the study of cities.
I will conclude this brief exploration by sug-
gesting a typology of three urban strategies
that is predicated on their relationship to
duration. It complements in a way the widely
accepted distinction between progressive
or “anticipatory” and culturalist or “passéist”
planning proposed by Françoise Choay in
her 1965 L’Urbanisme, utopies et réalités.
Passéist planning operates through the
reproduction or simulation of past urban
forms, whereas anticipatory planning freezes
change into definitive patterns or, on the

URBAN PROJECTS AND ADJUSTMENT TO THE FUTURE 51

D AV I D L A P O U J A D E

FROM NETWORK
TO PATCHWORK
 WHAT DOES IT MEAN TODAY TO FEEL JAMESIAN? DOES IT MAKE
ANY SENSE? FOR BEING JAMESIAN DOES NOT MEAN TO BE EITHER
PRAGMATIST IN TODAY’S TERMS OR EVEN NEOPRAGMATIST.

James’s pragmatism has of course nothing to do with the linguistic

turn, not even as a vague and naive premise. One of the difficulties
of today is to think the philosophy of James without considering it
as a pre-Wittgensteinian or pre-Austinian thought (but the immediate
benefit of it is that we don’t have to consider ourselves as “neo”).
My purpose is not historical either. I’m not tr ying to go back to the
time when pragmatism was not a linguistic concept and far from being
so. The question is, what can be made to speak to us again today
in James’s thought?

53
 First, as it is the provocation for our discus- Maybe we can find another vision of
sion, I would like to start with the sentence pragmatism if we try to answer the question:
of William James: “What really exists is not in what way can we say that things are in the
things made but things in the making.”1 making? Let’s trace the relations of cognition
as described by James: “My thesis is that
FROM A VERY GENERAL POINT OF VIEW, THE the knowing here is made by the ambulation
PHILOSOPHY OF WILLIAM JAMES IS A PHILOSOPHY through the inter vening experiences…
Intervening experiences are thus as indispens-
OF BECOMING, BUT CONCEIVED AS THE MOVEMENT
able foundations for concrete relations of cog-
OF MAKING. WHAT I WANT TO DESCRIBE HERE, nition as intervening space is for a relation of
OR RATHER TO TRACE, IS THIS MOVEMENT IN distance. Cognition, whenever we take it con-
SPECIFIC TERMS. IN WHAT WAY CAN WE SAY cretely, means ‘determinate’ ambulation.”3 To
refer to this process as ambulatory does not
THAT THINGS ARE IN THE MAKING?
mean that cognition is necessarily prey
By answering this question, we may better to errancy, but rather that it moves from next
understand what James’s pragmatism means. to next, by successive links. To know is to
And maybe we will see that it doesn’t mean traverse the relations that permeate experience.
what it is most commonly supposed to mean. This forms a first dimension: to know is to
Pragmatism is often regarded as a practical, draw lines.
useful, concrete, functional philosophy. All
1. William James, A Pluralistic
But when we ask ourselves how the lines
these ambiguous terms favor the cliché of
Universe (Lincoln, Neb.: themselves are formed, a second dimension
University of Nebraska Press,
a philosophy devoted to capitalist industry,
appears. For the lines are so many bridges
1996), p. 263. the philosophy of American imperialism. As
that must be built from one term to a next.
2. “Pragmatism’s Conception
James said, “Truth for us is simply a collective
As James remarks, “The idea however doesn’t
of Truth” (1907) in William name for verification-processes, just as health,
James, Pragmatism (Buffalo:
immediately leap the gulf, it only works from
wealth, strength, etc., are names for other
Prometheus Books, 1991), next to next so as to bridge it, fully or approxi-
p. 96.
processes connected with life, and also
mately.”4 Ambulation moves from next to next
pursued because it pays to pursue them.”2
3. William James, The by successive linkages. Knowledge grows
Meaning of Truth (Cambridge,
If you advert to this formula, then pragmatism
through the addition of fragments, bits. The
Mass.: Harvard University becomes businessman’s philosophy, a kind
Press, 1975), pp. 246-47.
second element, after the line, is thus the
of ready-made of the commercial spirit: wealth,
patch. For example, in James’s psychology,
4. Ibid., p. 264. strength, and profit are the lonely truths.
the “stream of consciousness” appears as a
parade of patches (“fields of consciousness”),
heterogeneous in their motifs, homogeneous
in their composition.
THE TEXTILE MATTER OF
EXPERIENCE REVEALS ITSELF
AS COMPOSITE. ALTHOUGH
CONTINUOUS AND HOMOGE-
NEOUS, IT IS NEVERTHELESS
THE CASE THAT IT CONSISTS
OF PATCHES LINKED TO EACH
OTHER IN DIFFERENT WAYS.
This means that knowledge and consciousness,
but also the entire world, are constructed
like patchworks, from next to next. The world
weaves a gigantic patchwork. In this sense,
James speaks of a “mosaic philosophy.”5
There is an incalculable number of networks,
superimposed upon each other, forming a
composite fabric. As James writes, “We our-
selves are constantly adding to the connexions
of things, organizing labor unions, establishing
postal, consular, mercantile, railroad, telegraph,
colonial, and other systems that bind us and
things together in ever wider reticulations….
From the point of view of these partial systems,
the world hangs together from next to next in
a variety of ways.”6
The theme of the patchwork or of a mosaic 5. William James, Essays
in Radical Empiricism
philosophy finds its extension in the 1920s in (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard
the work of the Chicago School of sociology. University Press, 1976), p. 22.
The city is described there as a fragmented 6. William James, Some
reality through the diversity of neighborhoods, Problems of Philosophy
the small isolated worlds that shelter (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard
University Press, 1979), p. 69.
immigrant populations, and the anonymous
gatherings of displaced individuals. As Park 7. Robert E. Park, Human
Communities (Glencoe, Ill.:
writes, “processes of segregation establish
moral distances which make of the city a
Free Press, 1952), p. 47.
mosaic of small worlds, touching each other
without interpenetrating. This gives individuals
the possibility of quickly and easily passing
from one moral environment to another
and encourages this fascinating, though
dangerous, experience, which consists in
living in several different worlds, contiguous
surely, but distinct nevertheless.”7
But following the other dimension, following
the bundle of lines, the world forms not so
much a patchwork as a gigantic network.
LINES AND PATCHES, NETWORK AND
PATCHWORK, ARE THE TWO GREAT AXES
OF THE CONSTRUCTION OF EXPERIENCE AND
OF THE GROWTH OF THE WORLD. THE WORLD
APPEARS AS A BUNDLE OF RELATIONS:
for example, light as a line of influence, space
as a relation of linkage, time as a continuous
relation of enveloping, and the line of
FROM NETWORK TO PATCHWORK 55
consciousness whose path progresses
through these other lines. Here is how one
must always start: with a multiplicity of
relations that are interlaced and superimposed
upon each other in all directions, revealing
themselves as one follows them.

This is how we can answer the question we

were asking: in what way can we say that
things are in the making? One must think of
the world both as a vast fabric composed from
next to next and as a system of networks.
Patchwork and network are the two ways by
which things are in the making for William
James. But patches and lines can be com-
pared to two different features: the city and
the traveler. To understand such a relation,
one must define more precisely the nature
of patches and lines.

First, the patch. A patch, or a bit, or a piece,

must be considered as a whole, but a frag-
mentary whole. The whole is full of itself; still
there is always something that escapes. In
other terms, the whole is open, as in Bergson’s
philosophy. That’s what William James says:
“Things are ‘with’ one another in many ways,
but nothing includes everything, or dominates
over everything. The word ‘and’ trails along
after ever y sentence. Something always
escapes.”8 A patch is always prolonged by
something that turns into another whole.
That’s what James calls the “fringes.” The
fringes link the whole together. In every whole,
you have a central motif, a peripheral theme,
and — almost unconscious — the fringes.
Exactly like a carpet in Henry James’s novels:
a figure in the carpet, but all the meaning
escaping by the fringes.
What has this to do with the city? Let’s take,
for example, the organization of Chicago. You
find the same structure (or should we say
the same “texture”?) — a center, a periphery,
and fringes, a kind of indefinite, vague frontier
between two distinct areas, what urbanists
call “zones.”
EVERY CITY IS A KIND OF
PATCH, A MOSAIC OF PATCHES,
A MOSAIC OF FIGURES IN
THE CARPET.
Second, the line. If the philosophy that came
out of pragmatism is perhaps the American
philosophy par excellence, one will doubtless
judge that this is the case because it thinks
of relations as great systems of indefinitely
constructible networks that overlap in all direc-
tions, thus anticipating the great developments
in 20th-century communications networks,
spreading from mosaic-city to mosaic-city.
It seems we are not far from concurring here
with the traditional definition of pragmatism
as promoting American capitalism and its 8. James, A Pluralistic
Universe, p. 321.
commercial values. Yet, according to James,
the philosopher does not cease to ambulate
among those vast networks. He therefore
seems to us much closer to a migrant worker
than a businessman.
LIKEWISE, JAMES’S PHILOSOPHY SEEMS MUCH
CLOSER TO A LESS TRIUMPHANT SOCIAL ORDER,
THAT OF THE HOBOES, WHOSE WAY OF LIFE
WAS DESCRIBED BY THE CHICAGO SCHOOL
OF SOCIOLOGY. 9
They make up part of an mmense, dispersed 9. See Nels Anderson, The
Hobo: The Sociology of the
flux of migrant workers who traverse the United
States, from Chicago to the West Coast,
Homeless Man (Chicago:
University of Chicago Press,
depending on the availability of seasonal 1923).
work, organizing themselves into temporary
local societies: hobohemia. They travel a
piece of the road, going from transitions to
temporary stays.
It is thus in a different way that James’s
philosophy can be said to be the philosophy
of American philosophy.
FROM NETWORK TO PATCHWORK 59
 THE PUBLIC
Do pragmatist hopes for a revitalized public sphere have implications
for forms of public space and urbanism?

60
What are the conditions for a vibrant democratic
public life today?

How have changed relationships between public and private life

affected our conception of a democratic social order?
 INTRODUCTION
GWENDOLYN WRIGHT
If any foundationalist premises exist in
pragmatism, they are lodged in a deep
commitment to the public. The public is
an unstable entity, however, one that in the
past usually needed space to operate, yet
often reacted unpredictably to any specific
setting. Representation thus poses a
dilemma. If legible spatial images encourage
engagement, they also suggest a resolution
that may be illusory, partial, or simply
dated. Even if one concentrates on places
associated with democracy, that term today
might imply political representation, social
diversity, privileged status, consumerism,
or aesthetic challenges to the status quo.
Indeed, both recent architecture and
scholarly writing about the public tend to
fetishize certain archetypal settings such
as the Greek agora, the 19th-century town
square, the streets of Benjamin the flâneur,
or those of Certeau the bricoleur. To be sure,
sites like these have a potent resonance,
but the meanings are never inherent in
forms or phrases. Adamant verbal or spatial
representations of “democratic space” can
even undermine that very goal by suggest-
ing that it has been achieved. One thinks
immediately of exclusionary spaces like
shopping malls and gated communities,
both of which claim to protect the public
by keeping out various intrusions. We must
also confront the limitations of the computer
and the internet. Many people are excluded
from cyberspace because of cost, location,
and lack of technological knowledge. In
addition, these technologies aggravate the
isolation between individuals and groups
of people, while they obscure sources of
information and ideas. All the same, it
is not enough simply to disparage these
FRANKLIN GOTHIC 63
 phenomena, dismissing them as a perverse
corruption of an ideal. We must also ask
what can be done to mitigate the inevitabil-
ity of unforeseen problems, to work with
contingencies and change over time.
Pragmatism must therefore be cautious
about representing the public with any
particular aesthetic or policy. The goal
is not a rallying consensus but rather
conversation and spirited contention:
ways to talk about issues like the public
responsibilities of intellectual life, the frus-
trating contingencies of group interaction,
an expansion of the people involved in
decision-making, and the very nature of
debate and opinion in public discourse.
If one domain of pragmatism, that of intel-
lectual inquiry, engages these topics in
terms of scholarship, its experimental side
seeks places for social and political action.
64
The point of departure for the following set
of papers was a series of questions. How is
“the public” or, in more specific and diverse
terms, “a public,” made, sustained, and
enlarged? What are the relationships between
the public and public space in a democracy?
How do these change across time, geography,
and social group? What kinds of events —
joyous and difficult, programmed and spon-
taneous, traditional and untested — need to
happen in democratic public space? How
might a site encourage, protect, or hinder
certain kinds of activities and encounters?
What is the role of boundaries that define
or limit public space? How can conflicting
opinions and goals generate vigorous
debate, perhaps even new alternatives?
Although none of the following authors
would call her- or himself a pragmatist, we
all agreed to open up the format of discrete
individual position papers into a more
dialogic conversation. Each statement
responds to questions or issues raised in
one another’s papers. Each author provides
some important clarification and critical
analysis about the public sphere, even as
she or he tests theories in the domain of
imagination and action, probing particular
kinds of public spaces. This approach to
intellectual life suggests the cartography
of pragmatism as a constellation or a road
map, one that encourages us to move
between different points of view, charting
possible critiques, visions, and strategies.
C H A N TA L M O U F F E

FOR AN AGONISTIC
PUBLIC SPHERE
I would like to present some reflections concerning the kind of public
sphere that a vibrant democratic society requires.

THE THESIS THAT I SHALL PUT FORWARD IS THAT IT IS IN THE

CONTEXT OF THE INCREASINGLY IRRELEVANT ROLE PLAYED IN
DEMOCRATIC SOCIETIES BY THE POLITICAL “PUBLIC SPHERE”
THAT WE SHOULD UNDERSTAND THE INCREASING DOMINANCE
OF JURIDICAL AND MORAL DISCOURSE, A DOMINANCE THAT I
SEE AS PROFOUNDLY INIMICAL TO DEMOCRACY.

67
 There are many reasons for the decline of
the political. But I intend to concentrate my
attention on one dimension that I take to be
particularly important, the lack of democratic
forms of identification offered to citizens in
current liberal democratic societies. I am
referring to identifications through which
passions could be mobilized toward demo-
cratic designs and which would provide the
basis for a vibrant agonistic debate about
the shape and future of the common life.
By democratic identifications I need to specify
at the outset that what I have in mind are col-
lective forms of identification, that is, political
identities, made available by discourses that
construct specific “subject positions”that allow
individuals to acquire a democratic political
identity. It is only when those discourses are
available that democratic citizenship becomes
a reality and that citizens’ participation in the
basic decisions concerning the polity becomes
possible. In order to clarify the view that I
am proposing, it is necessary to explain how
I envisage the nature of politics. I see politics
as aiming at creating unity in a context of
conflict and diversity.
IN THE FIELD OF THE POLITICAL WE ARE ALWAYS
DEALING WITH A “WE” AS OPPOSED TO A “THEM.”
CONTRARY TO WHAT SOME PRETEND, DEMOCRA-
TIC POLITICS DOES NOT MEAN THE END OF THE
WE/THEM DISTINCTION BUT THE DIFFERENT
WAY IN WHICH IT IS ESTABLISHED.
This is why I have argued that the central
category in democratic politics is the category
of the “adversary,” the opponent with whom
we have in common a shared allegiance to
democratic principles but with whom there
is disagreement about their interpretation.
We fight with this adversary because we want
our interpretation to win, but we do not put into
question the legitimacy of her interpretation
and her right to defend her position. This
confrontation among adversaries is what I
have called the “agonistic struggle.” I consider
it to be the very condition of a vibrant democ-
ratic life. Today, because of the lack of a
democratic political public sphere where
agonistic confrontation can take place, the
legal system is seen as responsible for
organizing human coexistence and regulating
social relations. Given the growing impossibility
of envisaging the problems of society in a
political way, there is a marked tendency
to privilege the juridical terrain and to expect
the law to provide solutions for all types
of conflicts.
There are many reasons for the crisis of the
democratic political public sphere. Some have
to do with the predominance of a neoliberal
regime of globalization, others with the type
of individualistic consumer culture that now
pervades most advanced industrial societies.
From a more strictly political perspective,
IT IS CLEAR THAT THE COLLAPSE OF COMMUNISM AND THE
DISAPPEARANCE OF THE POLITICAL FRONTIERS THAT HAVE
STRUCTURED THE POLITICAL IMAGINARY DURING MOST OF
THIS CENTURY HAVE CREATED A VOID THAT HAS LED TO THE
CRUMBLING OF THE POLITICAL MARKERS OF SOCIETY. THE
BLURRING OF THE FRONTIERS BETWEEN RIGHT AND LEFT WHICH
WE HAVE STEADILY WITNESSED IN WESTERN COUNTRIES —
AND WHICH HAS SOMETIMES BEEN PRESENTED AS A SIGN OF
PROGRESS AND MATURITY— IS IN MY VIEW ONE OF THE MOST
PERNICIOUS MANIFESTATIONS OF THE DISINTEGRATION OF THE
POLITICAL DIMENSION.

In other contexts, I have tried to show how
the current celebration of the center and the
lack of effective democratic alternatives to the
present order are at the origin of the growing
success encountered by parties of the extreme
right. I have argued that once passions cannot
be mobilized by democratic parties because
they privilege a “consensus at the center,”
those passions tend to find other outlets in
diverse fundamentalist movements, around
particularistic demands, or in nonnegotiable
moral issues. When a society lacks a dynamic
democratic life with a real confrontation among
a diversity of democratic political identities,
the terrain is laid for other forms of identifica-
tions to take their place, identifications of an
ethnic, religious, or nationalist nature, which
lead to the emergence of antagonisms that
cannot be managed by the democratic process.
However, it is not easy in the present intellec-
tual climate to recognize this problem, let
alone to begin searching for remedies. Our
present Zeitgeist is profoundly hostile to
such an understanding, dominated as it is
by a real aversion to the political. Indeed
what is fashionable today is ethics, morality,
law, but certainly not politics. No wonder there
are so many people heralding the “end of
politics” and rejoicing about the disappearance
of antagonism. The leitmotif nowadays is
the need for consensus, shared values,
an involvement in “good causes.” Among
politicians the dominant discourse is about
the “radical center beyond right and left,”
the “third way,” and a general reconciliation
in an all-inclusive “people.”

FOR AN AGONISTIC PUBLIC SPHERE 69

I SUBMIT THAT WHAT WE ARE WITNESSING WITH THE CURRENT
INFATUATION WITH HUMANITARIAN CRUSADES, ETHICALLY
CORRECT GOOD CAUSES, AND THE HYPERTROPHY OF THE
JUDICIARY IS THE TRIUMPH OF A MORALIZING LIBERALISM,
WHICH PRETENDS THAT THE POLITICAL HAS BEEN ERADICATED
AND THAT SOCIETY CAN NOW BE RULED THROUGH RATIONAL-
MORAL PROCEDURES AND CONFLICTS RESOLVED THROUGH
IMPARTIAL TRIBUNALS. AS A POLITICAL THEORIST I AM
PARTICULARLY CONCERNED WITH THE PERNICIOUS INFLUENCE
THAT POLITICAL THEORY IS PLAYING IN THIS DISPLACEMENT
OF POLITICS BY MORALITY.
Indeed, in the approach that is fast imposing
the terms of the discussion under the name
of “deliberative democracy,” one of the main
tenets is that political questions are of a moral
nature and therefore susceptible to a rational
treatment. The objective of a democratic society
is, according to such a view, the creation of
a rational consensus reached through appro-
priate deliberative procedures whose aim is to
produce decisions that represent an impartial
standpoint equally in the interests of all. All
those who put into question the very possibility
of such a rational consensus, and who affirm
that the political is a domain in which one
should always rationally expect to find discord,
are accused of undermining the very possibility
of democracy.
This theoretical trend to conflate politics
with morality, understood in rationalistic
and universalistic terms, has very negative
consequences for democratic politics because
it erases the dimension of antagonism that
I take to be ineradicable in politics. It has
contributed to the current retreat of the politi-
cal and its replacement by the juridical and the
moral, which are perceived as a particularly
adequate terrain for reaching impartial deci-
sions. There is therefore a strong link between
this kind of liberal discourse and the demise
of the political. In fact, the current situation
can be seen as the fulfillment of a tendency
that is inscribed at the very core of liberalism,
which, because of its constitutive incapacity
to think in truly political terms, always has to
resort to another type of discourse: economic,
moral, or juridical. This is very clear in the
work of John Rawls, for instance, who cites the
Supreme Court as the best example of what
he calls the “free exercise of public reason,”
in his view the ver y model of democratic
deliberation. For deliberative democrats,
we have now reached the stage of “reflexive
modernization” where the left/right divide is
not relevant anymore and where decisions on
matters of common concern can result in the
free and unconstrained public deliberation of all.
Another example of this trend can be found
in the work of Ronald Dworkin, who in many
of his essays gives primacy to the independent
judiciary seen as the interpreter of the political
morality of a community. According to him all
the fundamental questions facing a political
community in the field of employment, educa-
tion, censorship, freedom of association, and
so on are better resolved by judges, providing
that they interpret the Constitution with
reference to the principle of political equality.
There is very little left for the political arena.
Even pragmatists like Richard Rorty, despite
carrying out a far-reaching and important
critique of the rationalist approach, fail to
provide an adequate alternative.
INDEED THE PROBLEM WITH RORTY IS THAT,
ALBEIT IN A DIFFERENT WAY, HE ALSO ENDS
UP BY PRIVILEGING CONSENSUS AND MISSING
THE DIMENSION OF THE POLITICAL.
FOR AN AGONISTIC PUBLIC SPHERE 71
 To be sure, the consensus that he advocates
is to be reached through persuasion and
“sentimental education,” not through rational
argumentation, but he nevertheless believes
in the possibility of an all-encompassing
consensus on liberal values.
But this is to miss a crucial point, not only
about the primar y reality of strife in social
life and the impossibility of finding rational,
impartial solutions to political issues, but also
about the integrative role that conflict plays
in modern democracy.
A WELL-FUNCTIONING DEMOCRACY CALLS FOR
A VIBRANT CLASH OF DEMOCRATIC POLITICAL
POSITIONS.
If this is missing there is always the danger
that this democratic confrontation will be
replaced by a confrontation between non-
negotiable moral values or essentialist forms
of identification. Too much emphasis on
consensus together with an aversion toward
confrontation leads to apathy and disaffection
with political participation. This is why a
vibrant democratic life requires debate about
possible alternatives. In other words, while
consensus is necessary, it must be accom-
panied by dissent. There is no contradiction in
saying this, as some would pretend. Consensus
is needed on the institutions that are consti-
tutive of democracy, but there will always
be disagreement concerning the way social
justice should be implemented in and through
those institutions. In a pluralist democracy
72
such disagreements should be considered as
legitimate and indeed welcome. They provide
different forms of citizenship identification
and are the stuff of democratic politics.
This is what the struggle between left and
right should be about. This is how I envisage
the agonistic struggle among adversaries.
When such an agonistic democratic public
sphere is missing and when antagonisms
cannot be given a political outlet that will
allow them to be transformed into agonism,
democracy suffers.
What is urgently needed is an alternative to
the dominant approach in democratic political
theory, one that would revitalize the demo-
cratic public sphere by providing political forms
of identification around clearly differentiated
democratic positions as well as the possibility
of choosing between real alternatives.
THIS IS WHY AGAINST THE
TWO EXISTING MODELS OF
DEMOCRATIC POLITICS, THE
AGGREGATIVE ONE AND THE
DELIBERATIVE ONE, I WANT
TO ARGUE FOR A MODEL OF
AGONISTIC PLURALISM, ONE
THAT ACKNOWLEDGES THE
ROLE OF POWER RELATIONS
IN SOCIETY AND THE EVER-PRE-
SENT POSSIBILITY OF ANTAGO-
NISM.
According to such a view the aim of demo-
cratic institutions is not to establish a rational
consensus in the public sphere but to provide
democratic channels of expression for the
forms of conflicts that are considered to
be legitimate. This is a way to envisage
democracy that recognizes the dimension
of what I propose to call the political, i.e.,
the potential antagonism inherent in social
relations. It can take many forms and can
never be absolutely eradicated. This notion
of “the political” needs to be distinguished
from that of “politics,” which refers to the
ensemble of discourses, institutions, and
practices whose objective is to establish an
order, to organize human coexistence in a
context that is always conflictual because
of the presence of the political. The aim of
democratic politics according to such a view
is to “domesticate” hostility, to create the
institutions through which this potential
antagonism can be transformed into “ago-
nism,” in which instead of having a relation
friend/enemy, we will have a confrontation
between adversaries.

To be sure this is a view that is far from

the one that is today fashionable among
the advocates of deliberative democracy
and a third way. But I submit that it is the
condition for revitalizing democratic politics
and for reversing the dangerous trend of
disaffection with democratic institutions which
we are witnessing today and which I believe
constitutes a serious threat to the future
of democratic institutions.

FOR AN AGONISTIC PUBLIC SPHERE 73

R O S A LY N D E U T S C H E

DEMOCRATIC
PUBLIC SPACE
DEMOCRATIC PUBLIC SPACE IS AN ETHICO-POLITICAL
RELATIONSHIP IN WHICH THE SOCIAL ORDER IS CONSTITUTED
AND PUT AT RISK: BOTH AT THE SAME TIME.

It is a relationship of openness to the Other, and to others. In arriving

at this position, I have followed Claude Lefort, who argues that public
space emerges when, with the declaration of the rights of man and
citizen, the meaning of society is relocated from a transcendent to
a political realm. We no longer refer to a substantial basis of “the
people,” something given from outside the social world, something
that belongs to the people as a property. Therefore, we also no longer
refer to a substantial basis of the power that the people authorize in
a democratic form of society. Society becomes an enigma. The with-
drawal of the ground has several effects. Because our commonality is
indeterminate, it is open to question, which is to say that uncertainty
is the condition of public life. Because right has no foundation, it is
coextensive with, not prior to, politics. Thus, in declaring rights we
lay claim to a right to politics. And because the identity of society as
a whole, like any social identity, is “purely social,” it can never be
internally complete or coincide with itself. For it comes into being only
through a relationship with an outside, a relationship that Chantal Mouffe
and Ernesto Laclau call “antagonism” and equate with the political.

77
 I also believe that critical, yet traditional no longer be construed as an object for the
theories of public space as a public sphere subject, for its understanding. Avowing that the
of rational-critical debate are “unreasonable,” world does not belong to “me” or to “us” makes
in Emmanuel Levinas’s sense of the word. us reasonable. In the presence of the Other,
They establish a rigid division between the the social world slips from the subject’s grasp.
public and the private: the private is a realm
By contrast with ethical vision, the impartial
of conflicts and differences, in which our vision
social vision possessed by inhabitants of the
is partial, the public a realm where we adopt
classical public sphere is possible only in the
the point of view of the totality. In the public
presence of society set up as an object, one
sphere, we build an all-inclusive or potentially
that itself transcends partiality. I have there-
all-inclusive consensus, using human language
fore argued that the opposition between public
to find a basis of consensus that exists
and private space in traditional discourse
outside the deformations of language. Erasing
about the public sphere — the opposition that
the exclusions that constitute any consensus,
depends on an image of society as a closed
classical theories disavow the presence of the
totality — produces a third space: the total
other. Using Levinas’s terms, one might say
vantage point or complete subject.
that they remain indifferent to the Other, which
for Levinas manifests itself precisely as that
which cannot be encountered from a position TRADITIONAL DISCOURSE IS
of full understanding. The Other is unamenable MASCULINIST, IF BY THIS WE
to totality yet speaks of the world. The presence MEAN AN ORIENTATION TOWARD
of the Other calls into question my possession
of the world, and the calling into question is
THE IDEAL OF COMPLETION
what Levinas calls ethics, which, he continues, IN SELF AND SOCIETY. THE
leaves us bereft of totalizing vision. Like MASCULINIST POSITION, OR
democracy, the ethical relationship appears THE FANTASY OF SUCH A
when certainty disappears; when, acknowledg-
ing otherness, we lose our footing and thus,
POSITION, MEETS OTHERS IN
as Julia Kristeva says, become receptive RELATIONS OF APPROPRIATION
to conflicts. More: “The capacity to be non- AND CONQUEST.
indifferent to the other is the essence of the
reasonable human being.” Non-indifference, or
responsibility, means that the social world can

78
The paradigm is the fetishistic disavowal of
sexual difference inherent in the “perception”
that woman is “castrated,” a perception that
presupposes a state of wholeness from which
it is possible to fall and, as a consequence,
transforms difference into “loss.” In this spirit,
masculinist theories about the public sphere
force difference into privacy. That which trou-
bles the security of the boundaries between
private/nonpolitical space — the sphere of
partiality — and public/political space — the
sphere of wholeness — must be controlled
by masculine force. Sometimes the feminine
threat is feminism itself, as when public sphere
theories implicate feminist critiques of total-
izing visions of society in the loss of public
space. I have argued that these theories are
afflicted with a dread of the openness and
indeterminacy of society, a dread that half-
jokingly I’ve called “agoraphobia.”
I know that this statement of my position on
the meaning of the public is too brief. I hope
it is not too abstract. My position evolved in
the early 1980s out of my interest in a specific
political issue. At that time, a new public art
“industry” was born. As a critic concerned with
art’s social functions, I argued that so-called
public art was serving as the aesthetic arm
of another phenomenon: urban redevelopment.
In turn, 1980s redevelopment was the local
component of a global spatio-economic
restructuring, which facilitated advanced
capitalism’s new international division of labor
and new forms of oppression. Redevelopment
at the urban level also expedited new socio-
economic relations within the city, providing
housing and services for a new white-collar
labor force and destroying the conditions of
sur vival for residents no longer needed in
the city’s economy. One of redevelopment’s
products was a huge population of people
without homes.
Rhetoric about publicness helped confer
democratic legitimacy on the redevelopment
process. Dominant urban and architecture
discourses praised the city’s new public
spaces. There was a sharp increase in public
art commissions and intensified talk about
public art, especially art that took part in
designing redeveloped spaces.
BRINGING THE WORD PUBLIC INTO PROXIMITY
WITH THE WORD ART PERFORMED A LEGITIMAT-
ING FUNCTION BECAUSE EACH TERM CONNOTES
UNIVERSALITY: THAT WHICH IS PUBLIC IS ALL-
INCLUSIVE; THAT WHICH IS ART EXPRESSES THE
HUMAN ESSENCE. BOTH TRANSCEND SOCIAL
CONFLICT AND DIVISION.
The phrase public art comes doubly burdened
as a figure of universal accessibility. Homeless
people, products of conflict, were and still are
DEMOCRATIC PUBLIC SPACE 79
represented as bringers of conflict to public
spaces that would otherwise be unified. These
images of persons without homes are fantasies
of completion. They transform the negativity
that keeps society from achieving closure —
the absence of a ground — into a positivity —
the presence of the homeless person, whose
elimination will “restore” social order. I
supported artworks that helped produce a
democratic public sphere by mounting what
Henri Lefebvre calls a “critique of space.”
The purpose of such art was to expose
the conflicts that are internal to seemingly
harmonious public spaces and, in some
cases, to claim for homeless people a “right
to the city,” to use Lefebvre’s famous phrase.
What kind of rights claim is this? Combining
Lefebvre with Lefort and other contemporary
theorists of rights, I argued that the right to
the city not only lays claim to physical spaces.
It declares the right to constitute and question
our manner of living together in the city, which
is to say it declares the right to politics and
the public sphere. Perhaps this right is propa-
gated through the mere presence in parks,
squares, and streets of those who have been
excluded. Yet it cannot be invoked in the name
of “proper” owners of space or of restoring a
once unified, non-alienated spatial condition
undisturbed by antagonisms, as it is by some
radical urbanists.
FOR ONCE WE POSE THE QUESTION OF THE
RIGHT TO THE CITY DEMOCRATICALLY, WE
DISPENSE WITH APPEALS TO GROUNDS OF
MEANING THAT EXIST OUTSIDE OF DISCURSIVE
INTERVENTION AND INSTEAD ACKNOWLEDGE
THAT OUR RESPONSES TO THE QUESTION
DEPEND ON OUR REPRESENTATIONS OF
PUBLIC SPACE. FOR THIS REASON, I DO NOT
DISTINGUISH BETWEEN SO-CALLED DISCURSIVE
OR “METAPHORICAL” SPACE AND SO-CALLED
CONCRETE OR “MATERIAL” SPACE.
Those who insist on such a distinction often
call the second space “real,” the first “unreal,”
and then accuse anyone concerned with
subjectivity in representation of abandoning
real political struggles taking place in real
public spaces. It is of the utmost importance
that we build a public that does not ignore
the presence of that which is unavailable to
preconceived notions of the social world,
forcing it into unreality.
DEMOCRATIC PUBLIC SPACE 81
 GERALD E. FRUG

PUBLIC SPACE /

82
Public policy — American law — is currently eroding the existence of
public space and fostering instead a privatized version of space.

BY PUBLIC SPACE, I MEAN A PLACE THAT IS

OPEN TO ANYONE WHO DECIDES TO ENTER IT.

PRIVATE SPACE
 This, of course, is a utopian definition. No
space has ever been fully open in this way.
Even the public streets, public parks, public
schools, and public transportation in America’s
large cities have been organized in a way that
makes some people feel reluctant to enter
them. Still, America’s large cities are a place
where such a conception of public space is
at least possible. In fact, they have often
provided people with the experience of being
in spaces where they encounter unfamiliar
strangers. As a result, they have been one
of the principal locations in America where
people have had the experience of being part
of what I call a fortuitous association: a group
of people within which you happen to find
yourself — a group that you have to learn to
get along with whether you like it or not. Here
are eight ways that prevailing legal rules are
undermining the availability of this kind of
public space in America:
State law currently
1 . S U B U R B A N I Z AT I O N .
empowers American suburbs to engage in
exclusionary zoning. It therefore enables
prosperous suburbs to exclude not only the
poor but anyone who cannot afford a house
priced at a specified level. State law also
authorizes these suburbs to spend the money
they raise from property taxes solely on local
residents. This rule of taxation enables local
residents to make sure that their tax money
is not spent on anyone poorer than they are
because, as we have just said, they have
already excluded such people from town. Given
these two legal rules, those who can afford
to move across city lines can dramatically
84
improve their quality of life by leaving other
people behind. Some people move to wealthy
communities, if they can afford it, simply to
save the money that they would have spent
on the poor had they remained in a class-
integrated jurisdiction. These two legal rules,
in short, create a sprawl machine — a legally
generated incentive to move out of town. As
the wealthy move to their suburbs with this
cost-consciousness in mind, taking their
resources with them, the cities they abandon
begin to decline. As a result, people in the
middle class who have remained in these
jurisdictions move to their own suburbs and
exclude those poorer than they are, and the
cities they leave behind decline even further.
When this sprawl machine is fully in operation,
neither the central cities nor the individual
suburbs have a truly diverse population. Class —
and racial — segregation becomes the norm.
2 . S E G R E G AT I N G L A N D U S E S . It is not just the
places where people live that are segregated
in the suburbs. Traditional land-use rules
require that residential life, shopping, and work
life take place in three different, separated
spaces. As a result, residential neighborhoods
become closed to outsiders for the simple
reason that there is no reason to go there:
strangers are attracted to shopping and
enter tainment, not to houses occupied by
strangers. Moreover, the office parks and
shopping centers now being built in many
American suburbs are private property. The
office parks therefore can be organized to
exclude anyone not an invited guest.
UNDER CURRENT SUPREME COURT DECISIONS, THE SHOPPING
CENTERS CAN EXCLUDE PEOPLE — SUCH AS PROTESTERS — WHO
THE PROPERTY OWNERS THINK DETRACT FROM THE SHOPPING
EXPERIENCE. 1
It is not surprising, therefore, that most
office parks and shopping centers provide
little opportunity to encounter unfamiliar kinds
of strangers. In fact, most shopping malls
are designed to attract only a limited range
of people: shopping centers with a Nieman
Marcus don’t have a Kmart.
The kind of
3 . H O M E O W N E R S A S S O C I AT I O N S .
segregation of housing and land use I have
just described has not provided a space that
is isolated enough for some people in America.
As a result, the most common form of housing
now being built in the suburbs, as well as in
some central cities, takes the form of private,
gated communities. These private develop-
ments use private law rules, rather than local
government law, to isolate themselves from
outsiders. Like the suburbs, they can exclude
outsiders, but they do so by relying on property
owners’ right to exclude rather than on zoning.
They too spend the money they raise from
taxes — which they call assessments — solely
on themselves, but they do so by invoking
contract law rather than tax law. To protect
themselves from outsiders, these gated
communities rely on interpretations of property
and contract law that are highly controversial
given the effect that this “secession of the
successful” has on those who live outside
the walls.2 Nevertheless, their interpretation
is widely accepted. As a result, many people
move to residential subdivisions populated
by people like themselves and, once there,
accept with pleasure detailed restrictions on
their lives — age restrictions on who can live
in their house, limits on what they can plant in
their yard — in exchange for the security that 1. Lloyd v. Tanner, 407 U.S.
551 (1972).
sameness generates. Guests are screened by
security guards.
Many
4 . T H E O R G A N I Z AT I O N O F P U B L I C S C H O O L S .
American suburbs have good public schools —
that’s one of the main reasons people move
to them. But these public schools are not
public in the sense that they are open to any-
one who decides to enroll in them. Quite the
contrary. The suburbs in which these schools
are located rely on zoning law rather than
admissions offices to screen out the kind of
students thought not to fit in. This screening
device has produced the current segregation
of American schools by race — a segregation
that is as intense now as it was in the 1950s.
IN FACT, ZONING LAW HAS HELPED PRODUCE
A PRIVATIZED FORM OF THE PUBLIC SCHOOL.
When John Dewey described the social function
of the public schools, he said that in a public
school “each individual gets an opportunity
to escape from the limitation of the social
group in which he was born, and to come into
contact with a broader environment.”3 This no
longer describes a vast number of the public
schools that exist in America today. 2. See generally, Robert
Reich, “The Secession of the
5. TRACKING WITHIN THE PUBLIC SCHOOLS. Even Successful,” New York Times,
when public schools admit a diverse group of January 20, 1991, sect. 6,
students, it doesn’t follow that the schools are p. 16.
organized so that the students can learn to 3. John Dewey, Democracy
engage each other. On the contrary, academic and Education: An Introduction
to the Philosophy of Education
tracking — the division of the student body into (New York: Macmillan, 1916),
fast, average, and slow classes — is standard pp. 20–21.
PUBLIC SPACE / PRIVATE SPACE 85
 educational policy in America’s public schools,
and not just for English and math. Academic
tracking is one of the ways Americans first
learn that a heterogeneous group should be
divided into different spaces — spaces not just
for smart and dumb, but for whites and blacks,
college-bound and vocationally tracked, cool
and nerd. This process has helped Americans
learn an important, and destructive, lesson
from an early age: being in the same space
with different kinds of people not only feels
uncomfortable but impedes personal advance-
ment. Later in life, the same attitude helps
generate support for exclusive suburbs and
gated communities.
Schools are not the only
6 . C R I M E P O L I C Y.
city service that has contributed to the privati-
zation of formerly public spaces. The other
principal reason that leads people to move
to exclusive suburbs and gated communities —
along with the desire for good schools — is
the fear of crime.
IN AMERICA, THE PREDOMINANT STRATEGY THAT
INDIVIDUALS EMPLOY IN DEALING WITH CRIME IS
TO MOVE AWAY FROM IT.
Even escape is usually not enough: once
located in the right kind of neighborhood,
people isolate themselves further by relying
on security guards, alarm systems, locks,
window bars, sur veillance cameras, doormen,
dogs, speed bumps, mace, and guns — far
more than they rely on city police. The very
presence of a young black male triggers
86
security concerns in many neighborhoods; so
does the presence of anyone else who seems
different. This reliance on isolation rather
than crime prevention as America’s principal
crime-control strategy divides metropolitan
areas into separate areas for different kinds
of people and, perhaps more than any other
single policy, erodes the vitality of public space
in America.
7. FUNDING HIGHWAYS RATHER THAN MASS TRANSIT.
One final city service seems worth mentioning
here. The rules adopted by federal, state,
and local governments support highways at
the expense of mass transit. Mass transit
and walkable streets are two of the major
sources of public space in America: they enable
the daily experience of crossing paths with
different kinds of people. Driving, on the other
hand, is a privatized affair: it fosters focusing
on oneself (daydreaming, putting on make-up),
interaction with people one knows (car phones),
or, at its most expansive, listening to the radio.
Thus, governmental decisions that favor cars
over mass transit have helped insure that the
commute between the gated community and
the office park — and between the two of them
and the shopping mall — requires no more
contact with unfamiliar strangers than these
places themselves.
8. BIDS. Of course, we still have large, open
cities in America. And many of them have
mass transit, public schools, streets lined
with stores, and housing close to work. Yet
even in these cities, legally created efforts
are being invented to privatize public space.

One form this effort has taken has been the
creation of “business improvement districts ”—
organizations that are designed to police and
clean up the public streets in areas like mid-
town Manhattan. These organizations are
run by property owners, not by residents. And
they adopt the perspective of these property
owners when questions about the nature
of public streets arise — matters such as
the presence of homeless, street peddlers,
and others considered undesirable. The
constitutionality of this kind of property-owner
government was upheld very recently by the
United States Court of Appeals in New York.
The court rejected the argument that local
policy governing the nature of public streets
should be based on democratic — one-person,
one-vote — decision-making.4
These eight types of rules, and many others
like them, provide the background legal
structure for democracy in America today.
They foster a privatized sense of self that
structures the consciousness of people when
they act as citizens. As a result, they help
generate support for withdrawal rather than
engagement, sameness rather than diversity,
separation rather than openness, avoidance of
conflict rather than the capacity to deal with it.
I THINK THAT ALL OF THESE RULES SHOULD BE
REPLACED BY RULES THAT HAVE THE OPPOSITE
EFFECT—RULES THAT HELP PEOPLE ADJUST
TO THE IDEA THAT THE WORLD IS FILLED WITH
PEOPLE DIFFERENT FROM THEMSELVES, THAT
HELP THEM COPE WITH THE FACT THAT THIS
DIFFERENCE SOMETIMES MAKES THEM FEEL
UNCOMFORTABLE, AND THAT ENABLE THEM TO
STRETCH THEIR OWN SENSE OF SELF BY BEING
INTRODUCED TO UNFAMILIAR LIVES.
There is no way for law to be neutral
on whether we promote the values of open-
ness or isolation. Legal rules shape the nature
of our cities and metropolitan areas whether
we like it or not. Our only choice is determin-
ing what kind of rules — and therefore what
kind of urban life — we want to promote.
I do not have the space to outline here the
kind of legal rules that might turn America’s
existing urban policy upside down.5 A few
broad sketches will have to suffice.
We should, first of all, organize American 4. Kessler v. Grand Central
metropolitan areas in a way that opens up the District Management
Association, Inc., 158 F.3d
boundaries that now divide and separate the 92 (2d Cir. 1998).
different cities and suburbs that make up
5. For a more detailed
America’s metropolitan regions. We should exploration of these ideas,
recognize the effect that exclusionary zoning see Gerald Frug, City Making:
Building Communities without
is now having on outsiders — above all, the
Building Walls (Princeton:
fact that one of its consequences is the disin- Princeton University Press,
vestment in, and decline of, those sections 1999).
of the metropolitan region where the excluded
have been allowed to go.
We should recognize that the tax revenue
generated from commercial and industrial
property does not belong to the residents
of the jurisdiction in which it is located. Why
should the taxes on a shopping mall owned
by nonresidents — a place where people
throughout the region shop — be spent only
on people who live nearby?
PUBLIC SPACE / PRIVATE SPACE 87
We should alter current zoning rules to reinte-
grate housing and commercial life, not simply
to cut down on the necessity of having to use
the car for every errand but to open up the
streets to more kinds of people.
We should recognize the impact that the
proliferation of gated communities is having
on American metropolitan areas as a whole.
Too many residents of these communities have
been led to think that they have no obligation
to support public services outside their walls.
Even elderly people who move to these com-
munities sometimes do so in order to avoid
paying the taxes that support the schools that
are educating the next generation.
We should open the public schools to outsiders
through a metropolitan-wide public school choice
program. Such a metropolitan-wide program
would not undermine neighborhood schools —
after all, most Americans prefer sending their
children to neighborhood schools — unless, of
course, these schools continue to be as radi-
cally unequal as they are now.
We should organize the suburbs, and not just
those who live in high-crime neighborhoods,
to support, and pay for, crime-control efforts
wherever crime is located. Crime prevention
benefits more than those now most plagued
by crime; it also opens up the areas of cities
now closed to outsiders.
We should allocate money to mass transit and
public streets not simply for environmental
reasons but to encourage the creation of the
kinds of public space that they both facilitate.
Finally, we should insist on democratic organi-
zation of business improvement districts —
indeed, we should insist on a form of democ-
ratic control that would allow visitors who
fear being harassed, as well as those who
live nearby, to be represented.
No one thinks that implementing the kind of
opposite urban policy that I have just sketched
would automatically create more open public
space and therefore a better background for
democratic decision-making. We all know that
one cannot simply adopt policies and thereby
bring about the world we would like to have.
Some of the new policies I have just advocated
will backfire; efforts to evade these rules will
be as common as efforts to evade the current
ones. Unintended consequences are inevitable.
As John Dewey teaches us, “failure to recog-
nize that general legal rules and principles are
working hypotheses, needing to be constantly
tested by the way in which they work out in
application, explains the otherwise paradoxical
fact that the slogans of liberalism of one period
often become the bulwark of reaction in a
subsequent era.”6 We should build institutions 6. John Dewey, “Logical
in American metropolitan areas that have the Method and Law,” 10 Cornell
L. Q. 17, 26 (1924).
flexibility to engage in the unavoidably endless
revision and modification of the legal rules
that structure metropolitan life. The task of
designing that kind of institution is the focus
of a wide variety of democratic theorists. My
message to those interested in this effort is
simple: we need to understand how pervasive-
ly the current legal structure undermines the
kind of open, contentious, and diverse democ-
ratic society that most of us want to create.
PUBLIC SPACE / PRIVATE SPACE 89
 HASHIM SARKIS

ON THE LINE
BETWEEN PROCEDURES
AND AESTHETICS

92
ARCHITECTS GENERALLY RESENT THE PUBLIC’S
PARTICIPATION IN DESIGN.

In the context of a liberal democracy, an empowered public laying claims

to the built environment confronts architects who invoke the same
grounds of liberalism to free aesthetic expression from public interven-
tion. A line has been drawn by way of settling these competing claims,
whereby procedural matters in architecture, like zoning, programming,
concerns for context and the environment, have been given over to public
scrutiny, whereas aesthetic issues for the most part (and as architects
would like to believe) have been left to architects. This line characterizes
both the discipline and profession of architecture today, and it is often
mistaken for a division between the discipline and the profession.
 To be sure, this line between aesthetic and
procedural issues in architecture has not
emerged simply as a way of making peace
between architects and their publics. Designers
alone are no longer able to handle increasingly
complex procedural issues. Moreover, the line
between procedures and aesthetics appears
to correspond to a respective distinction
between the right and the good, a distinction
that liberal politics upholds as a precondition
for pluralist democracy: the book of justice
should be kept separate from the book of
morality. As a result, the debate in architecture
has become rigidified, and architects have
turned their focus largely to aesthetic issues
in order to liberate their practice from the
increasing complexity and the moot nature
of procedural questions.
It is not the presence of the line that is the
problem but its rigidity. As things stand today,
the line is detrimental to achieving a more
effective link between design and democracy
for at least four main reasons:
First, architects assume that, given this set
division of labor, democratic concerns are
adequately addressed by the procedural side.
They therefore give up on addressing them
through aesthetic means. When they do
address them, they do so inadequately. For
example, architects advocating a populist
94
position, like Robert Venturi and Denise Scott
Brown, simply accept that popular taste repre-
sents a social majority without questioning the
ways in which majorities exclude certain social
groups. They do not think of architecture as
a means for transforming popular taste or for
expanding the scope of the public.
Second, this division comes to mean that
architecture involves two separate roles: one
in which the architect is a citizen participating
in a public decision-making process about
the built environment, and another in which
the architect is an individual indulging in an
almost private creative process. The first role
is mundane but democratic and reflects a
collective opinion; the second is creative
and reflects individual expression.
THE SEPARATION OF OPINION
FROM EXPRESSION, OF POLITICS
FROM AESTHETICS, CHARAC-
TERIZES THE SEPARATION
BETWEEN THE COLLECTIVE
AND INDIVIDUAL ASPECTS OF
ARCHITECTURAL PRODUCTION.
Third, by giving up on procedural issues too
readily, architects allow their practices to
be governed by the institutional models of
 a democracy rather than establishing models
that are unique to their field. They give up on
the possibility that there are aspects of demo-
cratic life and participation that are unique to
architecture. They do not understand that what
constitutes “the public” in political life is not
the same as what constitutes it in architectural
or urban design.
Finally, procedures have become restrictive for
design creativity.
IN MANY CASES ARCHITECTS
HAVE BEEN LEFT WITH VERY
LITTLE TO OPERATE WITH.
When procedures are not continuously
interrogated with respect to their democratic
claims, they have the potential to become
suffocating for architects.
While the separation between procedures and
aesthetics has been in place for a long time,
it was never as rigid as it has become today.
More impor tantly, the histor y of American
architecture and urbanism is replete with
reform projects which emanate from particular
political movements and in which architects
have been more successful in straddling the
line. These earlier designers understood that
aesthetic freedom could be gained by, for
96
example, addressing the concerns of disem-
powered groups. I would like to offer evidence
for this contention with reference to four
“experiments” in American architecture. Each
of them is connected to a particular revisionist
project in American democracy, namely John
Dewey’s radical progressivism. I have also
chosen them as examples because they
represent a range of positions addressing
different scales of political life.
1. Louis Sullivan’s development of a populist
aesthetic for the immigrant populations of
Chicago;
2. Kevin Lynch’s search for an inclusive,
neutral public space in the context of the
civil rights movement;
3. The firm of Caudill Rowlett Scott’s involve-
ment in the empowerment of emerging com-
munities in the Southwest through the design
of public schools;
4. Christopher Alexander’s organicist aesthetic
code and “small professionalism” in his attempt
to implement the ideals of the New Left.
Architects like Louis Sullivan in turn-of-the-
century Chicago saw the return to neoclassi-
cism as detrimental to the populist project
of democracy in America. While populism in
politics meant resistance to large corpora-
tions, Sullivan understood that in architecture
it could also mean embracing large corporate
clients like those building the new department
stores because such programs provided
social space for the lower classes and for
immigrants. Believing that equal access to
goods would eventually lead to equal access
to the good life, he decorated the Carson Pirie
Scott department store with organic rather
than classical motifs. This more populist
aesthetic appealed to the immigrant popula-
tions, contrasting with their “unmediated”
experiences of buildings as they walked down
the urban streets. Despite his functionalist
rhetoric, Sullivan used the facades of his
buildings —not his clients’ plutocratic power —
to appeal to a mass audience.
The civil rights movement propelled an urban
planner like Kevin Lynch to examine the over-
laps among different citizens and groups in
terms of their collective perception of the city.
It also encouraged him to look for ways in
which the transformations of the built environ-
ment through urban renewal could be used
to transform these overlaps into public spaces
for all citizen groups in the city. He launched
a discussion about what constitutes neutrality
in spatial terms and what can serve as a
spatial precondition for playing out the social
diversity in American cities. In his design for
Government Center in Boston, for example, he
tried to apply the notion of formal imageability
that he had developed in his written work as
a condition which precedes formal diversity
and which is necessary for the expression
of a pluralist society. (Incidentally, his concept
of neutral space as a necessary platform in
a pluralist society precedes John Rawls’s fuller
formulation of this concept by about ten years.)
Responding to the increased demand for
schools in the 1950s and 1960s, the school
architects of the period, particularly the firm
of Caudill Rowlett Scott (CRS), invented for
their clients in the new postwar suburban
communities deliberation processes like
programming and squatting. Through these
processes the diverse decision-makers on
the public school boards could negotiate their
ambitions for the future generations. The
school architects thus used the school con-
struction process as a means for coordinating
the conflicting views of the different scales
of government on community and education.
In many cases, it was the school buildings and
not the educational program that instigated
a sense of political association among the
different members of the otherwise apolitical
suburban communities.
In the early 1970s Christopher Alexander
proposed a “pattern language” for architecture
that would allow inhabitants to take part in
the design and development of their own
ON THE LINE BETWEEN PROCEDURES AND AESTHETICS 97
buildings. Architecture became a tool for the ideas of today’s radical and pluralist politics.
transformation of society through grass-roots They are also important because they con-
participation from conception to construction. tributed to shaping many of today’s institu-
Analyzing the primitive means and crude tional arrangements. Unfortunately these
techniques of construction was important to arrangements have lost their connection to
him because he believed architecture provided their original audiences and political agendas.
society with a much-needed image of organi- They have been reduced to procedures.
cism. His aesthetic project, of using his pattern
Nonetheless, if we purposefully analyze these
language to create unity among different
experiments, two sets of strategies emerge
buildings, was intended as a model for
out of them, offering a basis for more
establishing a continuity between grass-roots
effective future action.
movements and society-wide transformation,
precisely where New Left politics failed to Diverging strategies
provide such coordination and continuity. Within the previous four experiments, each
of the architects addresses a very different
In hindsight, we can look at these experiments
population group and scale of collective life.
critically and assess the reasons for their
Each uses a different set of procedures and
failures. It is impor tant to note that these
practices. In some cases the architects adhere
experiments do not represent the entire
to existing institutional set-ups, in other cases
spectrum of positions then or now. They
they do not. CRS worked within the deliberation
also do not fully correspond to the political
procedures of school superintendents and
projects of today. For example, today’s
parent-teacher associations on one level,
conception of pluralism is different from
while on another they introduced the squatting
that of the civil rights movement, and today’s
approach and programming as formats for
emerging communities may not look at schools
debate and deliberation closer to architecture.
as the best means through which to define
Alexander found it necessary to revise the
their identities. At their best, however, these
whole process of building and contracting in
experiments are important because they
order to make small projects, or incremental
demonstrate that reform can be effective when
and user-motivated growth, the norm in
aligned with politics without being overwhelmed
development culture.
by them. The politics that inspired them
contributed to shaping some of the central

ON THE LINE BETWEEN PROCEDURES AND AESTHETICS 99

 These positions also relate differently to
the process of design and the problems that
architects face, or choose to face. They reflect
different political views. Indeed, in order to
play out their political role most effectively,
architects may have to undertake very divergent
approaches to design. The aim of adopting
such divergent strategies is to allow architec-
ture to become a means by which political
positions are articulated but also reciprocally
to think these political positions through their
architectural ramifications. Here are three
such strategies:
1. Architects should clarify their political
positions in relationship to the political
positions of their clients. Do they express
them or resist them? Architects should at
once embrace and resist the political positions
of their audiences. In this way, they become
agents rather than merely advocates.
2. When they take a position, architects
should aim to articulate, not illustrate, the
political differences of their audiences. There
are aspects of political life, such as public
space, that do not acquire full articulation until
they are addressed architecturally as well.
3. A politically directed practice should focus
on a certain kind of project. For example, a
communitarian design approach would find its
best articulation in institutional buildings or in
100
the design of communities. On the other hand,
it may have very little to say with respect to
the design of individual dwellings. Architects
should concentrate on the kinds of projects
that best reflect their political positions.
Converging strategies
While operating on divergent and sometimes
even opposing fronts, the architects of the
positions examined above concurred in the
belief that in order for revision to become
effective, there needed to be fundamental
structural changes in architecture, and these
structural changes could affect the line
between procedures and aesthetics. They
also concurred on some of the main strategies
for bringing about these changes. Here are
five such strategies:
1. ADDRESSING AESTHETIC ISSUES IN NON-
AESTHETIC TERMS. This entails opening up
issues traditionally kept within disciplinar y
bounds to public scrutiny. How, for example,
can a populace understand classical motifs
in architecture when it is not immersed in
classical principles and when it is such a
mixed public? Sullivan’s response, as already
suggested, was to develop a type of organic
ornament that he believed was more univer-
sally accessible. At the same time, the attempt
to express aesthetics issues in non-aesthetic
terms has, in certain contexts, led to an
effacement of the architect’s identity or of
architecture itself, resulting in an absence
of a sense of agency. Such a dilemma is
illustrated by the extremity of Alexander’s
position as well as by that of Robert Goodman
in the 1970s. In other cases it has led to
the developing of a double-tiered aesthetic,
understood by a knowledgeable elite in one
way and by the general public in another. This
is the case with the populism of Robert Venturi
and Denise Scott Brown. In its better forms,
however, this strategy means two things, as
the above examples illustrate: questioning
the bounds in which aesthetics have been
placed, but also — and as John Dewey
proposes — allowing aesthetics to extend
between production and perception as an
open exchange between architects and their
publics. In this sense, to seek a non-aesthetic
formulation of aesthetics and then turn it into
a transcendental meditation on “the timeless
way of building,” as Alexander did, was to
make a point and then miss it. There is a
related risk in adopting this strategy, namely
that of giving up disciplinary and professional
autonomy. I will return to this very important
issue at the end.
2 . A D D R E S S I N G I N H A B I TAT I O N R AT H E R T H A N
PROGRAM. The strategy of transcending
program or function in order to address
inhabitation has to do with the need to
question conventional associations between
program and form. It aims to leave the
association between form and function
open to revision based on the experiences
of emergent groups and their habits. These
experiences are best addressed before they
are translated into predetermined program-
matic or formal images. This is what the CRS
programming approach meant before it turned
into a formulaic procedure. A shortsighted
understanding of this strategy, however,
can lead back to entangling architecture
in the social sciences and to assuming
responsibilities it is not equipped handle.
3 . P R O P O S I N G F L E X I B L E P R O C E D U R E S T H AT A R E
O P E N T O T H E N E E D S O F T H E A U D I E N C E S I N V O LV E D .
Procedural openness means using the specific
requirements of individual projects to redefine
the fixed procedures of the discipline and the
profession. Openness cannot be boundless,
to be sure. Yet it is an important strategy for
allowing repressed voices to be heard. Revising
such procedures as programming, design
reviews, and so on can help redefine aesthetic
problems. This strategy brings to the fore
another structural issue, namely how to open
up the frameworks of architectural practice and
the architectural discipline to the possibility
of revision by everyday practices. The New
Urbanists provide a good example of the diffi-
culty of this strategy. On the one hand, they
ON THE LINE BETWEEN PROCEDURES AND AESTHETICS 101
 understand the need for every project to develop
its own deliberation process and charrette; but
on the other hand they adopt too immediately
into architecture models of political represen-
tation developed in other areas.
4. RELYING ON ICONOCLASM AS A WAY TO QUESTION
E S TA B L I S H E D M O R A L I T I E S T H R O U G H D E S I G N .
Iconoclasm here means questioning the validi-
ty of certain images and their fixed association
with certain moralities. Meaning in architecture
should remain contested, particularly in
relation to emerging social groups. The call
to adopt an iconoclastic attitude is parallel
to the call to address inhabitation rather than
program because, here again, instead of
accepting specific styles and imagery, it dimin-
ishes formal preconceptions — it turns the
image mute, as Lynch wanted. This does not
mean a complete abandonment of iconogra-
phy. It should not lead to the monastic
practices of such contemporary iconoclasts
as Peter Eisenman (especially in his early
work). This advocacy of iconoclasm echoes
the call in Dewey’s aesthetics for a “light-
handed” morality.
is developmental. Moreover, the tasks entailed
by this strategy — such as constantly reforming
finance, zoning, and linkages — are ver y
difficult to realize because the already
complex procedures of architecture are fixed
by even more complex legal ones. They hardly
allow for resistance, let alone transformation.
Alexander’s attack on development culture is
a case in point (even if, in his case, the means
of attack were questionable). At a society-
wide level, transformation is difficult through
individual projects. The ecology movement
is inadvertently making such transformative
action more possible, as are new kinds of link-
ages within the profession and design practice
generally. But we are a long way from creating
design incentives for these transformations.
The above strategies do not aim to erase the
line between aesthetics and procedures. They
simply aim to rethink, with every building, the
fundamental basis around which architecture
has come to be fractured along this divide and
to redraw the line whenever necessary. The
immensity of the task may be overwhelming.

5. CONCEIVING DESIGN PROJECTS IN REDISTRIBU-

The
T I V E R AT H E R T H A N D E V E L O P M E N TA L T E R M S .
redistributive strategy is the most difficult one
to advance because, according to a deeply
engrained belief in most cultures, architecture

102
DEMOCRACY, AS OSCAR WILDE QUIPPED, INVOLVES TOO MANY
MEETINGS. THE RESULTANT FATIGUE MAY LEAD US BACK TO
ACCEPTING FIXED PROCEDURES AND AESTHETIC CONVENTIONS.

But the architect’s exercise of agency need
not mean full engagement of every issue on
both sides of the line. It should mean the
readiness to ask fundamental questions when
the need arises. This means that the line
should be rendered flexible so that it can
be pushed around.
AT THE SAME TIME, THE
DISENGAGEMENT OF AN
AESTHETIC PRACTICE LIKE
ARCHITECTURE FROM OTHER
SOCIAL AND POLITICAL PRAC-
TICES MAY AT TIMES PROVE
TO BE AS USEFUL AS ITS
ENGAGEMENT. WHEN ASKED
HOW HIS AESTHETIC THEORY
RELATED TO HIS POLITICAL
PROJECT, JOHN DEWEY SAID
THAT IT DID NOT.
Dewey’s unexpected answer suggests that
the rationality that guides our political lives
cannot guide every aspect of our existence.
The world of Dewey, as Hilary Putnam
explains, is made of two kinds of “goods,”
the rational and the aesthetic. In the present
context, this distinction suggests that there
is a limit to every political project no matter
how comprehensive it aspires to be. There
are aspects of life and experience that are
unique to architecture. Paradoxically, Dewey’s
much-criticized separation of aesthetics and
rationality encourages the development of
another kind of political role for aesthetic
practices. They can become positions from
which deeply held moralities and rationalities
that guide our political lives can be questioned.
If architecture is completely overwhelmed
by politics and absorbed into its processes,
it cannot transform them. In order to become
engaged effectively, architects must maintain
the strategic possibility of remaining partly
disengaged.

ON THE LINE BETWEEN PROCEDURES AND AESTHETICS 103

LAND SETTLEMENT,
ARCHITECTURE, AND
KENNETH FRAMPTON

It is perhaps somewhat extraneous to approach the issue of pragmatics

with an obser vation about the status of the homo faber at different
moments in time. All the same, it is instructive to note that in the
medieval period the master builder largely ser ved the spiritual and
temporal powers, the priest and the prince. Beginning in the French
Enlightenment the responsibility of the architect turned toward designing
institutions of the state. With the emergence of architecture as a
bourgeois profession in the 19th century the client base became more
secular and middle class, while in the 20th century radical socialism
came to conceive of the architect as serving society as a whole. As the
Dutch architect Aldo van Eyck once put it,
THE ECLIPSE OF THE
PUBLIC REALM
“PREVIOUSLY THE ARCHITECT SERVED THE PRIEST AND THE
PRINCE, NOW THE PRIEST AND THE PRINCE ARE DISESTABLISHED.
THUS IF NOT AN ARCHITECTURE FOR ALL THEN NO ARCHITECTURE
AT ALL.”
This aphoristic statement ought to remind us how removed we are
from the various public housing programs promulgated in Europe and
America between the two world wars as well as from the welfare state
assumptions of the post-Second World War era.

105
 Prior to the mass ownership of the automobile,
a certain reciprocity existed between the
distribution of civic amenities and the density
of the residential fabric. Despite the advent
of the street-car suburb, the railroad seems to
have had only a limited impact on traditional
patterns of land settlement. People still lived
relatively close together because they could
hardly do otherwise.
WHAT HANNAH ARENDT CALLS THE “SPACE OF
PUBLIC APPEARANCE” WAS ASSURED BY THE
STREET AND THE CIVIC INSTITUTIONS TO WHICH
IT GAVE ACCESS:
the village green, the town hall, the school,
the public library. However, after the Second
World War “main street,” which had hitherto
served as the public spine of the provincial
city or village, came to be undermined by the
symbiotic effects of the interstate freeway
system and the proliferation of shopping malls.
The subsequent destruction of the traditional
street by the suburban strip was an all-pervasive
condition by the time Serge Chermayeff and
Christopher Alexander published their seminal
thesis in 1963, Community and Privacy. In
106
retrospect, we may regard their low-rise, high-
density housing paradigm as a neocapitalist,
automotive land-settlement pattern capable
of sustaining a modicum of public space
while simultaneously resisting the tendency
to commodify the landscape with regard to not
only residential stock but also natural topog-
raphy. Community and Privacy postulated an
alternative pattern for decentralized land
settlement that was neither the sedate garden
city of the turn of the century nor the specu-
lative subdivision that had come to dominate
megalopolitan development in the second half
of the 20th century. The very title of the book
suggests a pattern of settlement capable of
mediating between the privacy of the family
and the communality of the public realm.
While metropolises were already being
surrounded by suburbs by the middle of the
19th century, suburbanization did not really
emerge as a global process until the mid-20th
century. Soon after, the French geographer
Jean Gottmann coined the term megalopolis
to describe an urbanized region like the
Bos-Wash corridor — the built-up, urbanized
continuum extending from Boston to
Washington, D.C.
ONCE THE CONTINENTAL AUTOROUTE INFRASTRUCTURE WAS
LAID IN PLACE, SUBURBANIZATION PROVED TO HAVE NO
NATURAL LIMIT, AS ATTESTED BY THE FACT THAT THE NUMBER
OF PEOPLE IN NORTH AMERICA LIVING IN SUBURBIA HAS
DOUBLED SINCE 1960. TODAY ONLY A THIRD OF THE POPULATION
STILL LIVES IN CITIES.
The post-1945 suburbanization of the United class and race. In contrast to the heteroge-
States was facilitated through massive state neous and relatively egalitarian character
subvention of the interstate freeway system. of the traditional city, the rise of private
Combined with the not-so-benign neglect of education and the recent emergence of gated
rail transit and the kind of assisted suburban suburban communities with their own security
housing encouraged under the GI Bill and forces have fur thered the “spontaneous”
FHA mortgage regulations, this new network creation of Third World conditions inside
converged with the vested interests of the oil supposedly First World economies. We thus
and automobile lobbies. The extent to which have the familiar phenomenon of uneven
zoning codes and building regulations have development taking place over a broad front
been far from neutral in this regard is evident within the nation-state.
to any architect who has ever attempted to
On top of all this we need to bear in mind that
provide an alternative form of land settlement
we live in a democracy where only 34 percent
in a suburban context. By a similar token, it
of the electorate exercises their right to vote.
has long been apparent how suburban commu-
This prompts one to wonder whether there is
tation has served to deprive older and still
any correlation between the privatization of the
economically viable urban concentrations of
suburbs and the depoliticization of society as a
their legitimate tax base, inasmuch as many
whole. As far as “thinking about things in the
people earn their livelihood in the city but
making” is concerned, we must add to this list
live beyond its fiscal boundaries. Gerald Frug’s
of disconcerting conditions the further fact that
paper in this volume affords further evidence
of the way in which an anti-city prejudice
is built into state legislation governing the ONLY SOME 10 PERCENT OF THE BUILT
relative fiscal and political power of the city ENVIRONMENT IS SUBJECT TO ANY KIND
and suburb. For example, Frug describes how OF INTERVENTION BY AN ARCHITECT.
zoning codes generally function as screening
devices for maintaining social segregation of
the public education system in terms of both

LAND SETTLEMENT, ARCHITECTURE, AND THE PUBLIC REALM 107


1. Hannah Arendt, The Human
Condition (Chicago: University
of Chicago Press, 1998
[1958]), p. 201.
WE HAVE SUFFICIENT REASON TO BE SKEPTICAL
ABOUT THE POLITICAL BENEFITS OF THIS FORM
OF FREE-FLOATING TELEMATIC INTERCHANGE.
So much for the relevance of the architectural
profession to the megalopolitan situation in
which we find ourselves.
If suburban privatization has led to negative
political, cultural, social, and ecological conse-
quences, from a more positive perspective we
must insist on the dependence of democracy
on spaces of public appearance. It is Arendt,
again, who has put this most clearly in her
book The Human Condition: “The only indis-
pensable material factor in the generation
of power is the living together of people. Only
where men live so close together that the
potentialities for action are always present
can power remain with them, and the founda-
tion of cities, which as city-states have
remained paradigmatic for all Western political
organization, is therefore indeed the most
important material prerequisite for power.”1
While such a classical formulation may fairly
be challenged in our internet age with all its
rhetoric of popular democracy,
It is here, perhaps, with the potential of
physical space for sustaining face-to-face,
confrontational discussion and debate, that
the architect resurfaces as an agent who still
has some marginal critical relevance in the
late-modern world.
HOW ELSE, OTHER THAN BY
PROVIDING A PROVOCATIVE
PUBLIC MICRO-REALM,
CAN THE ARCHITECTURAL
PROFESSION SIGNIFICANTLY
INTERVENE IN THE UNIVERSAL
MEGALOPOLIS?
This question has hardly been addressed
by the recent proliferation of prestigious
museums, which are the late-modern equiva-
lent of those 19th-century representational
buildings that were once largely dedicated
to the ministration of the spirit or the
governance of the state.
Whether public micro-realms such as I have
in mind come to be fully consummated by
society in political terms cannot, of course,
be predetermined; and in any case such a
direct, naive hypothesis would be a regression
into behaviorism. On the other hand, the
consequences of the absence of real spaces
of discourse —that is, the inadequate environ-
mental articulation of such spaces — become
manifest, in my view, in situations where
face-to-face discourse has been inhibited or
prohibited. It is significant that at the time
of the late shah of Iran’s so-called White
Revolution the brief for the design of a univer-
sity campus outside Isphahan carried the
stipulation that the campus be designed in
such a way that there would be no areas
conducive to spontaneous public assembly.
It is symptomatic of the privatized suburban-
ization of our “motopian” society that such
basic civic amenities as schools, sports arenas,
shopping centers, and health facilities are
invariably disaggregated from one another,
either by unwalkable distances or by equally
forbidding tracts of black-top parking unre-
lieved by any kind of planting or shelter. Thus,
instead of augmenting and strengthening the
space of public appearance that each institu-
tional threshold potentially contributes to the
public domain, the various civic and service
institutions are split apart in such a way as
to assure that only a single, specific function
will be ser ved, more or less in isolation,
as efficiently as possible. While the recent
emergence of the mega-mall as a quasi “city-
in-miniature” can possibly be explained in part
as a way of compensating for the extreme
alienation experienced by society, this space
too is exclusively dedicated to consumerism.
Needless to say, it guarantees little in social
or political terms. It is worth noting that such
centralized marketing institutions are forbidden
by law in Norway, where the citizenry has opted
to preserve traditional shopping streets rather
than ruin them economically through suburban
mega-marketing methods.
It is a sign of the current confusion in archi-
tectural education and practice that we have
largely lost our capacity to address ourselves
critically to such socially degenerative manifes-
tations. Surely, though, architecture has the
capacity to concern itself with the specifics
of such a program. The fact that it does not
do so today speaks all too clearly to the issue
at hand.
LAND SETTLEMENT, ARCHITECTURE, AND THE PUBLIC REALM 109
 WHAT WE HAVE WITNESSED OVER THE PAST TWO DECADES
LARGELY AMOUNTS TO A DEPOLITICIZED AESTHETICIZATION AND
TECHNIFICATION OF THE ARCHITECTURAL MODUS OPERANDI —
THE RELEGATION OF THE ARCHITECTURAL PROGRAM, THAT IS,
TO A FACTOR THAT IS SATISFIED IN THE MOST IMMEDIATE AND
RUDIMENTARY WAY IMAGINABLE, EITHER THROUGH SPECTACULAR
IMAGERY OR TECHNICAL EFFICIENCY.

In contrast to this, we may evoke the kind
of delicately nuanced programmatic design
that used to make itself regularly manifest in
the heyday of the modern movement, let us
say between 1925 and 1975, especially in
the design of such public amenities as high
schools and hospitals. In these instances,
particular attention was paid not only to
aesthetic and representational values but
also to the threshold or interface between
the institution and society. Within these micro-
spaces there was an adequate hierarchical
articulation of the relationship of the public
domain to the private, culture to nature, and
so forth. We may perhaps exonerate the
degeneration of this system of values in
contemporary architectural practice by arguing
that our current modus is nothing more than
a direct reflection of the depoliticization of
society as a whole. Indeed, the fact that one
can hardly think of an exemplary school or
hospital built in the United States in the last
thirty years (let alone affordable housing)
speaks to the fundamental malaise that lies
at the base of all this: that is to say, our
society’s current incapacity to guarantee the
fundamental civilized rights of education and
health to all.
There are, however, two other basic issues
with which the pragmatics of building culture
must surely come to terms. The first is the
time-honored issue of durability, that is, the
degree to which any structure is capable of
withstanding the ravages of time as well as its
own inevitable transformation over time. The
second is the emerging issue of sustainability,
in the broad sense of the overall ecological
fit between the building and its environment.
Both of these factors have fundamental impli-
cations for a pragmatics of built culture, and
both leave much to be desired with regard
to the way in which architecture is generally
taught and practiced in the United States
today. In the first instance, there is the current
fashion of deprecating detailed design in favor
of an overall sculptural dynamism and three-
dimensional gestalt, ignoring the intrinsic
quality of the joints and seams that must
necessarily be present in the constitution
of any tectonic form. In the second instance —
and it goes without saying — architectural
culture stands to be enriched rather than
impoverished by being modulated appropriately
in ecological terms.

110
THIS IMPLIES A DISTANCING FROM THE GLOBALIZING TECHNOLOGY
THAT ASPIRES TO REDUCE BUILT CULTURE TO A UNIVERSAL
TECHNIQUE EQUALLY APPLICABLE ALL OVER THE WORLD
IRRESPECTIVE OF MANIFEST VARIATIONS IN CLIMATE AND
TOPOGRAPHY, NOT TO MENTION IN LOCAL MATERIALS, TECHNIQUES,
AND REGIONAL VALUES.

It is difficult to interrelate all these factors in articulate the condition, if for no other reason
a single synergetic entity and to demonstrate than that it is a way of contravening our
the dynamic relationships that obtain among prevalent tendency to fall into a kind of
land settlement patterns, welfare provisions post-socialist euphoria — or should we
(or lack thereof), building practices, and say somnambulism — in which technocratic
governmental ecological policies, in both a commodification is seen as inevitably
macro and a micro sense. If we could do so, determining every field of human endeavor
however, we would more clearly grasp the web without any redress.
of symbiotic causalities necessary to assure
specific desirable environmental qualities. These
include not only a poetics of architecture but
a potential contribution to the realization of a
more liberative society. Nevertheless, it is at
least possible to indicate through a prognosis
such as this one where the problem areas
lie. As I have suggested, the latter are not
only cultural but also political. To be sure,
saying so changes nothing. Nonetheless, it
appears a crucial if quixotic undertaking to

LAND SETTLEMENT, ARCHITECTURE, AND THE PUBLIC REALM 111

 AESTHETICS /

Is there such a thing as a

pragmatist aesthetics today?

If so, what would its formal

implications be?
EXPERIENCE
Is the concept of aesthetic experience helpful in reconciling the
disparities between artistic production and consumption, or should
these remain separate spheres of activity?

113
INTRODUCTION Is a “pragmatist aesthetics” possible? What
would it mean to speak of a “pragmatist

JOHN RAJCHMAN imagination,” or a pragmatist or experimental

conception of the exercise of the imagination?
What would it mean to insert it into art
gallery or museum or university spaces — what
notion of “the public” would be involved?
Does there after all exist an irreducibly
“aesthetic” or “experimental” element in
political or critical thought? What might it
mean for the question of new technologies
or new media that have increasingly come
to dominate aesthetic debate today?

As Richard Shusterman suggests, if we find

aspects of all these questions already in
John Dewey, they perhaps take us beyond
Dewey’s particular conception of experience
to the peculiar conditions under which we
think and work today. Indeed, a kind of open
question runs throughout the workshop,
taken up in a number of different ways and
contexts. In part it is a question of how a
pragmatist or “experimentalist” conception
of aesthetics or of the imagination might
confront two other models in modern theory:
1. a “formalist” conception of the autonomy
of works, and the ideas of “modernity” and
“modernism” (and so “postmodernism”) built
upon it;
2. a critical conception of art in its relation
to public, mass, community, people —
or to their alienation or dissolution — for
example, the critique of “spectacle” inspired
by Adorno or Lyotard’s idea of the space and
time of “dissensus.”
Could a pragmatist or experimentalist aes-
thetics shows us a way out of the impasses
into which these other conceptions of the
imagination and critical thought seem to
have led us, and if so how? Perhaps this
is the larger problem in terms of which
it becomes useful for us today to look
back at Dewey’s conception of art as expe-
rience, or at Charles Sanders Peirce’s
conception of signs and images, or again,
at William James’s attempt to imagine,
along with Henri Bergson, a sort of critical
or inventive “interstitial space” between
stimulus and response in the flow or
construction of experience.
At the same time, the panel tried to initiate
a small experiment of its own that might
show one way such questions may already
be at work in practice. It proposed a kind
of “encounter” between an architect and
an artist, working in different areas, each
concerned with questions of “mixing” and
“event” linked to the larger theme of “things
in the making.” Paul Miller, an artist who
counts his activity as DJ as part of his
work, offers a statement looking back to
pragmatist and other writings as kinds of
“found objects.” His attempt to think about
the flows in Bernard Tschumi’s architecture
through his own partially musical, partially
digital means served to suggest one way
that bodily experience, affect, and movement
might be involved in what Tschumi has
called an “architecture of the event.” The
encounter between the two moved out from
the workshop to a joint presentation at the
Venice Biennale, from which the images
offered below by Tschumi are extracted.
115
ON PRAGMATIST
AESTHETICS
RICHARD SHUSTERMAN
The ver y notion of pragmatist aesthetics may strike many as
fundamentally paradoxical. The pragmatic, of course, is closely wed
to the idea of the practical, precisely the idea against which the
aesthetic is traditionally contrasted and often oppositionally defined
as disinterested and purposeless. One of the central aims of my
philosophical work is to relieve this paradox by challenging the
traditional practical/aesthetic opposition and enlarging our conception
of the aesthetic from the narrow domain and role that philosophy’s
dominant ideology and cultural economy have assigned it.1 1. See, for example, my
Pragmatist Aesthetics: Living
Beauty, Rethinking Art (Oxford:
THE EMANCIPATORY ENLARGEMENT OF THE AESTHETIC INVOLVES Blackwell, 1992; 2nd ed.,
New York: Rowman & Littlefield,
RECONCEIVING ART IN MORE LIBERAL TERMS, FREEING IT 2000); Practicing Philosophy:
FROM ITS EXALTED CLOISTER, WHERE IT REMAINS ISOLATED Pragmatism and the
Philosophical Life (New York:
FROM LIFE AND CONTRASTED TO MORE POPULAR FORMS OF Routledge, 1997); and forth-
coming, Performing Live:
CULTURAL EXPRESSION. Aesthetic Alternatives for the
Ends of Art (Ithaca: Cornell
University Press, 2000).
Art, life, and popular culture all suffer from these traditional oppositions
and the narrow identification of art with so-called high fine art. In both
my defense of the aesthetic legitimacy of popular art and my account
of ethics as an art of living I aim at a more expansive and democratic
reconception of art.

117
 In rethinking art and the aesthetic, a pragma-
tist aesthetics also rethinks the role of
philosophy. No longer neutrally aimed at
faithfully representing the concepts it examines,
philosophy becomes actively engaged in
reshaping them to serve us better.
THE TASK OF AESTHETIC THEORY, THEN, IS
NOT TO CAPTURE THE TRUTH OF OUR CURRENT
UNDERSTANDING OF ART, BUT RATHER TO
RECONCEIVE ART SO AS TO ENHANCE ITS ROLE
AND APPRECIATION. THE ULTIMATE GOAL IS
NOT KNOWLEDGE BUT IMPROVED EXPERIENCE.
Truth and knowledge should, however, be
indispensable to achieving this. Similarly, while
it should not ignore the traditional problems
of philosophy of art, pragmatist aesthetics —
if it wants to make a real and positive differ-
ence — cannot confine itself to the traditional
academic problems but must address today’s
live aesthetic issues and new artistic forms.
Thus besides considering the classic topics
of aesthetic experience, organic unity, the
logics of interpretation and evaluation, and
the definition of art, my work has also been
devoted to topics of contemporary popular
culture: from rap and country music to the
aesthetics of urban living and body disciplines.
118
In seeking to bring theory closer to the experi-
ence of ar t so as to deepen and enhance
them both, a pragmatist aesthetics should
not restrict itself to the abstract arguments
and generalizing style of traditional philoso-
phical discourse. It needs to work from and
through concrete works of art. These should
be taken not as cursorily considered examples,
but as foci of sustained aesthetic analysis,
objects whose experience is enriched through
close and theoretically informed critical study.
In my book Pragmatist Aesthetics I attempt
this more aesthetic style of analysis through
chapter-length close readings of a poem by
T. S. Eliot and a rap by Stetsasonic. Although
this bringing together of high modernism and
hip-hop might be seen as symptomatic of
the worst of postmodern eclecticism, I prefer
it to be taken as emblematic of a sociocultural
ideal where so-called high and low art (and
their audiences) together find expression and
acceptance without oppressive hierarchies,
where there is difference without domination
and shame.
PRAGMATIST AESTHETICS
BEGAN WITH JOHN DEWEY—
AND ALMOST ENDED THERE.
Dewey’s influence in American aesthetics was
significant but very short-lived, submerged
already in the 1950s by the rising current of
analytic aesthetics. To help revive pragmatist
aesthetics for contemporary culture, I have
tried to deal with two problems in Dewey. First,
there is his conservative aesthetic taste,
which even in 1934 did not really extend to
modern art later than early postimpressionism.
And though Dewey vaguely gestures toward a
revalidation of popular art, complaining that
popular arts “were not even thought of as arts”
because they “obtained no literary attention,” he
himself fails to give them more than the most
fleeting mention. While his text does contain
aesthetic analysis (with illustrations) of the
works of high art and of non-Western folk art,
there is no real discussion of contemporary
popular arts. Moreover, his passing reference
to movies, jazz, and comics ends by associating
them with “the cheap and the vulgar” to which
the frustrated “esthetic hunger” of the masses
is directed. Without concentrated aesthetic
attention to the popular arts how can they
escape their image as cheap and vulgar, and
why does Dewey not provide this when they
need it more than high and folk art, which
have already achieved aesthetic recognition?
Dewey’s most likely answer here would be to
appeal to his theory of art as experience —
powerful, transformative experience. If art is
defined as such experience, then simply our
experiencing that experience could establish
it as a work of art. But how can aesthetic
experience claim so much?
SINCE DEWEY DEFINES AESTHETIC EXPERIENCE
IN TERMS OF IMMEDIATE, NONDISCURSIVE
QUALITY, IT REMAINS ESSENTIALLY MUTE,
NO MATTER HOW POWERFUL.
It therefore, in itself, cannot provide adequate
legitimation for critical judgments. For legiti-
mation is social and justificator y, and thus
requires discursive means of consensus-
formation. In short, art criticism is needed not
simply to sharpen perception for experience,
but also to provide the social preconditions
and practices necessary for proper aesthetic
appreciation.
This points to a second, deeper problem in
Dewey’s aesthetics. His global, revisionary
definition of art as experience is extremely
problematic and thus tended to discredit
his whole aesthetic theory in the eyes of
analytically trained philosophers. Much art,
particularly bad art, fails to engender Deweyan
aesthetic experience, which, on the other
hand, often arises outside art’s institutional
limits. Moreover, although the concept of art
(as a historically determined concept) can be
somewhat reshaped, it cannot be convincingly
defined in such a global way as to be made
coextensive with aesthetic experience. No
matter how power ful and universal the
aesthetic experience of sunsets is, we are
hardly going to reclassify them as ar t.
ON PRAGMATIST AESTHETICS 119
 Further, while Dewey defines art as aesthetic
experience, he also defines that experience
as indefinable and ineffable through its
immediate nondiscursive quality. Moreover,
he seems to treat it too much as a universal
ahistorical essence rather than highlighting
its inevitable historical inflections and cultural
structurings.

For such reasons, analytic philosophy tended

to be extremely critical of the concept of
aesthetic experience, often eschewing its
use and condemning it as a chimera.
Moreover, in making the linguistic turn,
neopragmatism has also tended to neglect
or reject this crucial aesthetic notion. Richard
Rorty, for example, who has done most to
revive Dewey’s profile and advocate a poetic
pragmatism, sharply critiques Dewey’s use
of the notion of experience and argues that
the concept should be altogether dismissed
and replaced by purely linguistic notions.

MUCH OF MY CURRENT WORK IN PRAGMATISM

IS TO DEFEND BOTH THE CONCEPT OF
AESTHETIC EXPERIENCE AND THE CONCEPT OF
EXPERIENCE IN GENERAL, PARTLY BY MAKING
A CASE FOR THE PRESENCE AND VALUE OF THE
NONDISCURSIVE DIMENSIONS OF OUR LIFE AND
EXPERIENCE. THIS HAS LED ME TO A FIELD I
CALL “SOMAESTHETICS.”

120
 ANODYNE
BERNARD TSCHUMI
At “The Pragmatist Imagination” workshop, Bernard Tschumi and
Paul Miller (a.k.a. DJ Spooky That Subliminal Kid) showed preliminar y
images of a piece eventually to be exhibited at the Venice Biennale
2000. It was an unusual collaboration between a musical and visual
ar tist and an architect. Tschumi had been asked by the Biennale to
exhibit images of movement in space in one of his buildings. Yet he
felt that photographs and models would not be sufficient to convey
the idea of action and interaction inside the new Alfred Lerner Hall
student center at Columbia University. DJ Spooky, an artist, writer, and
musician based in New York, worked with both images and film footage
of the building to produce another kind of representation. One of the
most striking moments was Spooky’s derivation of electronic music
from a set of drawings of the glass ramps. The result took the building
one step further into the realm of music and media culture.

123
 THE DESIGN OF THE STUDENT CENTER IS ABOUT MIXING THE
OLD AND THE NEW, THE NORMATIVE AND THE INVENTIVE, SPACES
AND EVENTS.

The building combines a historical context —

McKim, Mead and White’s neoclassical
master plan of the 1880s, with its brick and
stone materiality —with an unusual set of
suspended glass ramps linking the more
conventional parts of the building. The ramps
are a place of encounter and social interac-
tion. They lead you to a 1,100-seat auditorium,
a cinema, an experimental theater, rehearsal
rooms, food places, and other spaces. New
technologies were used to build the ramps so
that they would hold a large glass wall, giving
visitors the sense that they are constantly on
stage as they walk up and down the ramps.

In the five-minute film and animation shown

at the workshop, further mixing devices in
the digital and musical realm expanded the
original building project.

126
 REPEAT/COMPLETE:
PA U L D . M I L L E R A . K . A .
NOTES FOR
D J S P O O K Y T H AT S U B L I M I N A L K I D

Here space destroys time, and time sabotages space. Description makes
no headway, contradicts itself, turns in circles. Moment denies continuity.1

128
A DIGITAL AGORA
K U T K U LT U R E

4 a.m. remix mode open / status: flow / caffeine > cd : dir > go to:
somewhere in social space, somewhen, someone walking…
1. Alain Robbe-Grillet, “Time
It’s difficult to condense how electronic media have created a kind and Description in Fiction
of incidental flux in our culture. People tend to forget how much things Today,” in For a New Novel
(New York: Grove Press, 1965),
have evolved from 20th-century modes of cultural production. p. 155.
2. “The Uncanny” (1919), Scrollback, browser regress, flip to a different
republ. in Sigmund Freud,
Writings on Art and Literature
time. The frenzied tempo of the 1920s.
(Stanford: Stanford University F. Scott Fitzgerald and the Harlem Renaissance
Press, 1997), pp. 214–15. of African-American philosopher Alain Locke.
The word boom summons up a lot of connota-
tions: An America after the First World War
just becoming familiar with terms like million
and intercontinental. The passage from seem-
ingly irreversible cultural developments. The
seasonal rhythms of rural society fracturing
on the myriad surfaces of the nation’s newly
urbanized imagination. The passage from
national economies based on the land and
on ar tisan-oriented “crafts” into industrial
economies driven by mechanized mass culture.
The migration from “traditional” family “units”
into impersonal aggregates of mass culture.
And so on. The list continues, but you get the
picture. From day to day I try to think about
it as a kind of “attention deficit disorder”
writ large across the entire spectrum of post-
industrial culture.
I THINK OF ART AND AESTHETICS IN THE AGE
OF INFORMATION WHILE CHANNEL-SURFING
THROUGH THE DETRITUS OF THE LAST CENTURY,
JUMPING FROM WEB PAGE TO WEB PAGE,
LOOKING AT ALL THE SOUND BITES AND TV ADS,
HEARING THE RADIO BROADCASTS, SWITCHING
TOPICS AND STYLES.
It’s simply a part of how we do things in the
everyday at this point. It’s what makes the
world as we live it go ’round. Disjunctions and
dislocations, frames and fragments, transfers
and transpositions. Significations of a world
of narratives gone AWOL, unscripted, into
a contemporary moment made of continuity,
regularity, and displacements. As always, it
all depends on your perspective.
But Freud already expressed this kind of
“cultural synchronism” in terms of his notion
of the uncanny back in 1919. So did Walter
Benjamin in his reading of the shopping
arcades of 19th-centur y Paris. Each has
resonances with what I call “kut kulture”
today, but for radically different reasons.
In his essay on the uncanny, Freud focuses on
the idea of the “double” as a way of describing
someone who is able to appropriate elements of
your identity and represent you, but, alas, who
isn’t you. It flips into a tale of moving through
a city without reference points. For Freud the
crux of this idea came when he was walking
through the streets of an unfamiliar city. This
kind of détour created a situation where the
environment folded in on itself and created
deep tension. “All these considerations prepare
us for the discovery that whatever reminds
us of this inner ‘compulsion to repeat’ is
perceived as uncanny,” he writes after his
dizzying journey through the urban landscape.2
WITH THIS FREUD ANTICIPATES OUR OWN IMMERSION IN A
DYNAMIC AND UNCERTAIN CULTURAL MILIEU AND PLACES US
DIRECTLY IN FRONT OF A CHALLENGE-RIDDEN FUTURE WHERE
FLUX SEEMS LIKE THE ONLY CONSTANT. IT’S KIND OF LIKE MOVING
IN SOME STRANGE, ORGANIC, NEUROCHEMICAL SOUP COMPOSED
OF THOUSANDS OF DISTINCT KINDS OF MACROMOLECULES
WITH OPEN BONDING SITES.
No matter what kind of chemical valence
the different particles have, no matter what
thoughts the neurotransmitters being fired at
the different synapses create, you know you’ll
find some locations with receptor sites you
can bond to. I like to call it “particle behavior.”
This sense of complete nonspecific movement
was also what the Beats in the ’50s were
infatuated with. Nowadays it gets combined with
absurd stuff like Flat Eric. Just think of this
ultra-hip cartoon puppet who cruises around
L.A. with a human sidekick. (Check out the
downloadable videos at http://209.201.89.223/
home/flateric/videos.html, with a pounding
minimal techno pulse for their soundtrack,
and you’ll get what I mean.)
VISUAL IDIOM: A MODULAR DIALECT OF THE
I N T E R FA C E B E T W E E N R A D I C A L LY D I F F E R E N T U R B A N
INTERSTICES. Railways, airports, information
centers, public performance spaces, internet
and world wide web access points all point
to a dispersion of the previously fixed rules
about architecture and presence, architecture
and cultural production. A new cartography
emerges from the interplay among these com-
plex variables to form a kind of hyper-agora
as we move easily through intersecting subway,
rail, and airline terminals and the streets
making up the 21st-centur y urban context.
Envision the analytic skills to navigate the
terrain and conceptualize at the mega and
micro scale. Engage them with an ability to
think synthetically — or perhaps one should say
syncretically. Each building and architectural
space becomes a different vision of a hypo-
thetical cultural and economic nexus made
real. Sound is a reflection of the same social,
economic, and geographic patterns, a floating
signifier of a world more and more reflecting
a condition of cultural reconstruction and
recontextualization.
THERE’S A SENSE THAT THE HUMAN BODY
IS BEING TRANSFORMED INTO SOME SORT
OF HYPERTEXTUAL WAY-STATION, LINKED
TO EVERYTHING AND NOTHING AS THE CITY
EVOLVES AND CHANGES AROUND IT.
The hyper-agora I mentioned above is a
reflection of this condition.
So Flat Eric’s kind of movement comes into
being a lot earlier than he would have us
imagine. Not just the theories of Freud and
Benjamin but the fractured photographs of
Eadweard Muybridge and Etienne-Jules Marey
point to a new kinetics of flow, a turbulence
that accompanies any movement or thought.
Dynamic wave patterns and trace structures
are etched into ever y air current moving
around the human (and nonhuman) gesture.
All of these become the “imminent domain”
of 20th-century thought.
REPEAT / COMPLETE 131
 There’s a movement among artists these days
toward what I like to call “prosthetic realism,”
a kind of multimedia version of the surrealists’
game of Exquisite Corpse. Only the body and
the elements that make up what we conceive
as the body are becoming the constituent
pieces of a puzzle some like to describe as
a “self-made map.” When you confront this
kind of perceptual implosion, it’s like looking
at the ocean from above and seeing that every
island is the tip of a mountain, part of a larger
substructure that coheres beneath the surface.
It’s the play of the planet’s surfaces that
makes things seem to rise and fall. Beneath
the waves the story of the world is written.
AND AS THE BROKEN-UP WAVE DYNAMICS THAT
MAKE UP ANY GESTURE ATTEST, WE’RE ONLY AT
THE BEGINNING OF UNDERSTANDING HOW WE
MOVE IN THE CURRENTS OF HUMAN EXISTENCE.
Art has always been the filter of how we look
at the changing human form. Artists continue
to investigate these changes today. For exam-
ple, take a look at Lilla LoCurto and William
Outcault’s body maps and full-body scans based
on Geocart software written by Dr. Helaman
Ferguson, a mathematician and sculptor, which
were shown at M.I.T.’s List galleries earlier
this year. Selfpor trait.map is made up of
chromogenic prints using a state-of-the-ar t
full-body scanner that employs lasers to collect
132
thousands of sur face points on the body. By
using this type of imaging to scan their own
bodies so as to create a new kind of topo-
graphical map, LoCurto and Outcault transform
the concept of self-portraiture. They challenge
art-historical and scientific modes of represen-
tation, confronting the social and technological
changes that have merged male and female
aspects of the body. What landscape comes
to mind when the human body is the map?
What directions should be taken?
Interchangeable
Luminous
Ersatz
An asymmetric parable: Rimbaud said that
poetry would have to become a “systematic
derangement of the senses” to keep up with
the march of progress. Now, after a century
of shifting values, we’ve come full circle.
Back to 1919. Freud is ruminating about how
he arrived at a certain point in a certain city,
and how that point keeps returning again and
again as he walks through the different piazzas
searching for a double he will never find.
Like The Blair Witch Project and Being John
Malkovich, the uncanny is simply another,
sequential aspect of the already-known waiting
behind the next corner to surprise us with
what we already know.
NEXT INTERSECTION, NEXT CROSSROADS — SWITCH! WAKE UP!
IT’S THE YEAR 2000 ALREADY.
DIFFERENT ASPECTS OF ARCHITECTURE
A N D R E P R E S E N TAT I O N
1. Bernard Tschumi’s Pyramid and Labyrinth
project: http://www.tschumi.com/
2frame.htm
2. Self-portrait.map: http://web.mit.edu/lvac/
www/WINTER2000/locurtoutcault.html
3. Net Composition and Culture Map:
http://www.turbulence.org/
4. Carmin Karasic’s Digital Underground
Railroad project: http://www.xensei.com/
users/carmin/pixelart.htm#ugrr
5. 3-D rendering maps and virtual architec-
ture: http://www.activeworlds.com/
index.html
6. Brian Carroll’s electronic architecture
project: The Panopticon/Centrifuge of Noise,
http://www.architexturez.com/ae/
7. Marcos Novak’s Manifesto of
Transarchitecture: http://www.t0.or.at/~krcf/
nlonline/nonMarcos.html
D J S P O O K Y ’ S D I S C S I N S E R I O U S R O TAT I O N ,
J U N E / J U LY 2 0 0 0
Top 10
1. Sussan Deyhim, Madman of God: Divine
Love Songs of the Persian Sufi (Masters,
Crammed Discs)
2. Mix Master Mike, Eye of the Cyclops
(Asphodel)
3. Mark Dresser and Frances-Marie Uitti,
Sonomondo (Cryptogramophone)
4. DJ Krush, Code 4109 (Sony Music)
5. Raymond Scott, Manhattan Research Inc
(Basta)
6. Various artists, JazzActuel (Charly)
7. DJ Cheb i Sabbah, Maha Maya: Shri Durga
Remixed (Six Degree Records)
8. Kim Cascone, Cathode Flower (Mille
Plateaux)
9. Ghost Dog, The Way of the Samurai,
soundtrack (Epic/Razorsharp)
10. Various artists, Wreck This Mess:
Remission 2: Ambient-Industrial versus
Electronic-Dub (Noise Museum Recordings)
Bonus beats
11. Various artists, Ohm: Early Gurus of
Electronic Music, 1948–1980 (Ellipsis Arts)
REPEAT / COMPLETE 133
TECHNOLOGY
AND
ITS IMPACT
What transformations in perception, experience, and habit are taking
place in response to accelerating technological change?

Do scientific methodologies need to be restructured in light of new

logics of organization, information, and temporality?

How is technology altering the distribution of knowledge and power

in society and with what consequences?

ON PERCEPTION

135
INTRODUCTION REINHOLD MARTIN
In the interest of allowing the following
texts to speak for themselves, I will offer
only a few introductory remarks regarding
the overall subject at hand, technology
and its impact on perception, and the insti-
tutional and intellectual contexts in which
this discussion took place. I therefore
begin simply by pointing out that, despite
(or perhaps because of) their working in
diverse fields, all of the participants who
took part in this session have had, in
different ways, very direct interactions
with architectural discourse.
This fact raises a series of questions about
architecture’s own sense of disciplinarity,
questions that are also raised by the
convening of a conference entitled “The
Pragmatist Imagination: Thinking About
‘Things in the Making’” at the Buell Center
for the Study of American Architecture.
At one level, it should appear self-evident.
Architecture is certainly one among many
“things in the making” with which contem-
porary thought is confronted at every turn.
And certainly, at least those strains of prag-
matist thought with American origins would
seem to bear some consideration in the
context of the study of American architec-
ture. It is also worth remarking that for
the past two decades or so, certain aspects
of American architectural discourse have —
notoriously, for some — taken on a similarly
interdisciplinary cast, albeit one heavily
conditioned by self-reflexive, critical dis-
courses originating for the most part on the
European continent. Thus again, there would
seem to be a certain self-evidence in implic-
itly countering this tendency, or at least
redirecting it, with the introduction (or
reintroduction) into the architectural context
of that body of thought loosely known as
“pragmatism,” with its overtones of direct
action, immediacy, and immanence.
But it is exactly this kind of self-evidence
that the most rigorously vigilant discourses
of the 20th century — including the best
of pragmatist thought — have taught us to
guard against. For indeed, more often than
not such self-evidence serves to obscure,
rather than reveal, the stakes of a given
intellectual encounter. In other words, what
is at stake in the reintroduction of an
American architectural audience — whether
at the Buell Center or the Museum of
Modern Art — to the interdisciplinary prob-
lematics of pragmatist thought is hardly
self-evident. Among other things, we might
speculate that it involves a reconsideration
of the nature of so-called “theory” in
architectural discourse, perhaps with an
appeal to a certain self-evidence — a certain
“pragmatics”— regarding architecture’s
sociocultural agency that holds “theory”
accountable for all manner of empirical
lapses. At risk and at play in such a recon-
sideration would be architecture’s own
ability to make a space for the contributions
of distinguished thinkers such as those on
this panel dedicated to the theme of tech-
nology and perception. Again, it would
appear self-evident that such a subject
would be of immediate interest to an
architectural audience, for indeed archi-
tecture can and must be understood as —
among other things — one of many “tech-
nologies of perception.” But it is to the
immense credit of all of the contributors to
this session that each in turn succeeded
in displacing the self-evidence of their own
presence in such a colloquium, and of the
disciplinary perspectives that they repre-
sent, onto another stratum, in which the
stakes are somewhat higher than the mere
revision of one discipline’s (architecture’s)
system of legitimation and/or discursive
orientation. Thus, we are far removed from
a pedantic enumeration of pragmatist
“influences” or a narrow accounting of
architectural (or other) “applications” when
we consider questions concerning techno-
logy and perception as follows. We are
instead transported into a realm in which
the interdisciplinary resonance of the
subject matter is, strangely, only amplified
by intensely specific — disciplinary — research.
137
 J O N AT H A N C R A R Y

One of the most pervasive ideological constructions currently operative

is that an unprecedented historical shift has recently occurred with
remarkable suddenness, ushering in an era of globalization, of universal
communication and connectivity. In one sense, this techno-economic
fantasy, this vision of a “wired world,” took shape alongside the
“collapse” of an East--West system, and it promoted the notion that the
late 20th century marked the decisive triumph of a totalizing free market
with its promises of growth, prosperity, and the Westernization of the
planet. But the self-congratulatory accounts of this supposedly revolutionary
transformation simultaneously had to reassure that on another level
in fact nothing had changed — that despite sweeping systemic, institu-
tional, and technological reconfigurations human life and experience
could flow on in a fundamental continuity and sameness. Contemporary
138
actuality is clearly much closer to the inverse of this general narrative.
UNTITLED REMARKS
THE GLOBALIZATION OF A SEAMLESSLY WIRED WORLD IS NOT IN
PLACE AND PROBABLY NEVER WILL BE. AT THE SAME TIME THERE
HAS BEEN AN ENORMOUS SET OF DERANGEMENTS IN THE MAKE-UP
OF INDIVIDUAL AFFECTIVE, PERCEPTUAL, AND COGNITIVE
EXPERIENCE THAT CHALLENGE ANY EASY ASSUMPTIONS OF
CULTURAL CONTINUITY BETWEEN THE PRESENT MOMENT AND
SEVERAL DECADES AGO.

Perhaps we have reached a threshold from

which it is no longer a question of traditional
habits, responses, emotions that are being
challenged, but rather a point (partly genera-
tional) from which that older field of meanings
has moved beyond recovery or even beyond
clear recall.

As recent critics have insisted, “globalization”

is a misleading term in that it seems to
connote a sense of spatiality or territory, albeit
on a large scale. But as we well know, the
operation of global capitalism is predicated on
the irrelevance of territory. Marx had already
foreseen this as early as the 1850s when
he wrote that the essence of capitalism was
“the annihilation of space by time” and a
striving “to drive beyond every spatial barrier.”

UNTITLED REMARKS 141

 FOR THE FIRST TIME IN HISTORY
THERE HAS BEEN A DELINKING
OF ECONOMIC CIRCULATION
FROM PHYSICAL SPACE,
AS ABSTRACTED FORMS OF
WEALTH HAVE A MOBILITY
AND FLUIDITY UNRELATED TO
WHAT WE USED TO THINK OF
AS LOCATION.
142
This should not lead us to hyperbolic asser-
tions about the disappearance of space or
the ubiquity of instantaneous speed and so
on. We must begin to understand the strange
kind of dislocations and adjacencies that
now constitute subjective experience. It has
become a truism that many of our lives are
an irreducible mix of continuity and disjunction
in the way our absorption into disembodied
technological environments is immediately
adjacent to the materiality and intersubjectivity
of “real” lived extensive space. Obviously
there have been many forms of technological
prosthesis throughout history but never has
there been a powerful set of imperatives
to “inhabit” a “world” that is fundamentally
uninhabitable except on a phantasmic level.
Because of the absolute priority intrinsic
to the operations of economic exchange, the
privilege accorded to its digital domains is unas-
sailable, and we are only in the first stages
of the depreciation and disparagement of a
“brick and mortar” world. Both the tangible
“real” world and our own corporeal existence
seem progressively more dilapidated in com-
parison with the infinite phantasmagoria of
images and data available on-line.
THE ENTROPY AND DECAY OF
OUR PHYSICAL SURROUNDINGS
AND ALL THE COSMETIC,
GENETIC DEFICIENCIES OF OUR
OWN BODIES, ESPECIALLY
AGING AND MORTALITY, ARE A
PERMANENT HUMILIATION IN
THE FACE OF DEMATERIALIZED
DIGITAL PHENOMENA.
It is, of course, entirely logical now that
immense corporate industries are relentlessly
trading upon the fragility of the body to expand
a central arena of consumption: bio-engineering,
prosthetic surgery, psycho-chemicals soon to
be available for endless emotional needs (e.g.,
an anti-shyness drug now in trials), the so-called
“anti-aging industry,” and the commercialization
of the human genome, to name a few. But
these are also the issues out of which counter-
models of the body are being invented which
affirm its political volatility and which might
work against its fraudulent domestication.
The paradigm shift now underway, however,
is not analogous to previous historical trans-
formations. The rise of typographic culture
did not suddenly occur after the 15th-century
invention of the printing press and movable
type. It took place slowly over several cen-
turies, and its effects were not fully in place
until the late 18th or early 19th centuries in
terms of an extensive diffusion across a social
field. Perhaps most significantly though,

WE ARE NOT WITNESSING SO MUCH A CHANGE IN TECHNOLOGICAL

CONCEPTIONS, FROM ONE DOMINANT ARRANGEMENT OF
MACHINIC SYSTEMS TO ANOTHER, BUT THE EMERGENCE OF
AN UNPRECEDENTED DYNAMIC OF CONTINUOUS INNOVATION
AND OBSOLESCENCE.

U NTI TL ED RE MA RK S 143
 It is not as if we are in a transitional period
of adjustment to a new set of tools, which will
all seem quite mundane in another generation,
like the telephone or radio. For the vast majority
of people, our perceptual and cognitive
relationship to communication and information
technology is and will continue to be estranged
because the velocity at which new products
emerge and reconfigurations of technological
systems take place preclude the possibility
of ever becoming “familiar” with a given
arrangement. What we commonly refer to as
photography, film, video, television, for example,
no longer have a relatively stable identity but
are now subject to frequent mutations as
part of larger technological transformations.
Whatever is currently touted as essential
to our practical needs is always already disqui-
etingly close to the precipice of obsolescence.
Life becomes an anxiety-filled sequence of
replacements and upgrades. Given the impos-
sibility of meaningfully integrating technological
tools into a coherent field of creative activity,
it becomes important to invent provisional and
flexible strategies of adaptation and imagina-
tion outside of the enforced rhythms of hi-tech
consumption. Perception itself is so closely
aligned with these rhythms that its primar y
characteristic is its continual permutations.
144
For every improvement in techniques for
controlling the structure of perception, there
are parallel shifts in the shape of inattention,
distraction, and various states of “absent-
mindedness.” There is a continual emergence
of new thresholds at which an institutionally
competent subjectivity veers into something
dispersed, unfocused, and nonproductive,
in forms of what we could call passive non-
compliance. These are experiences that hint at
a wide range of noninstrumental and deviant
interfaces. Since so many forms of institution-
ally modeled perception, beginning in the early
20th century, have entailed cognitively “pro-
cessing” heterogeneous stimuli (whether film,
radio, television, cyberspace), the swerves
into inattentiveness increasingly have produced
alternate experiences of dissociation, of
temporalities that are not only dissimilar but
also fundamentally incompatible with normative
institutional arrangements. The daydream,
which is an integral part of a continuum of
attention, has always been a crucial but inde-
terminate part of the politics of everyday life.
However, as Christian Metz and others have
argued, in the 20th century both film and
television have entered into a “functional com-
petition” with daydream. Although its history
will never be formally written, the daydream is
nonetheless a stubborn domain of resistance
that exists within any system of routinization
or coercion. Similarly, disciplinary patterns
of vision based on imperatives of recognition,
identity, and stabilization are never fully sepa-
rate from nomadic models of cognitive flux,
which allow the generation of novelty, difference,
and instability.
However, one central feature of many contem-
porary technological arrangements is the
imposition of a permanent low-level attentive-
ness that is maintained to varying degrees
throughout large expanses of waking life.
THE LATER 19TH CENTURY SAW
THE ONSET OF A RELENTLESS
COLONIZATION OF “FREE” OR
LEISURE TIME, WHICH INITIALLY
WAS RELATIVELY SCATTERED
AND PARTIAL IN ITS EFFECTS.
THE BREAKS AND INTERVALS
WITHIN THIS FIELD WERE
CONDUCIVE TO OSCILLATIONS
BETWEEN SPECTACULAR ATTEN-
TIVENESS AND THE FREE PLAY
OF SUBJECTIVE ABSORPTIONS
OF MANY KINDS. BUT NOW, AT
THE START OF THE 21ST CENTURY,
THE LOOSELY CONNECTED
MACHINIC NETWORK FOR
ELECTRONIC WORK, COMMUNI-
CATION, CONSUMPTION, AND
RECREATION HAS NOT ONLY
DEMOLISHED WHAT LITTLE
REMAINED OF THE DISTINCTION
BETWEEN LEISURE AND LABOR,
BUT HAS COME, IN LARGE
ARENAS OF WESTERN SOCIAL
LIFE, TO DETERMINE HOW
TEMPORALITY IS INHABITED.
 New information and telematic systems simu-
late the possibility of meanderings and drift,
but in fact they constitute modes of sedenta-
rization, of separation, in which the flow of
stimuli and the rhythm of response produce
an unprecedented mixture of diffuse attentive-
ness and quasi-automatism, which can be
maintained for remarkably long periods of
time. In these technological environments, it’s
questionable whether it is even meaningful
to distinguish between conscious attention to
one’s actions and mechanical autoregulated
patterns. What once might have been called
reverie now most often takes place fully aligned
with preset rhythms, events, and speeds
that affirm the irrelevance and decrepitude of
whatever is not integrable or compatible with
their formats.
146
It is pointless to regret what Paul Virilio
describes as “the disintegration of direct
perception” or what Italo Calvino calls the loss
of our capacity “for bringing visions into focus
with our eyes shut.” But it is equally self-
defeating to uncritically celebrate or acquiesce
to the dominant technological modalities
available today. It is particularly important to
determine what creative possibilities can be
generated amid electronic forms of boredom,
habit, and addiction. Now the question is how
and whether alternate perceptual modes such
as trance, distraction, daydream, or attentive-
ness to the fringe or periphery of events can
flourish within the interstices of these circuits.
Especially revealing are those now common
liminal moments when, for example, one
turns off a computer after having been on-line
or immersed in any digital ambience for an
extended period. There is a brief interval
before the world fully recomposes itself, when
one’s immediate surroundings (usually a
room and its contents) seem both vague and
oppressive in their actuality, their heaviness,
their vulnerability to decay, their obdurate
resistance to being clicked away in an instant.
It is also an interval vividly revealing of the
disparity between one’s sense of limitless
“connectedness” while on-line and a stark
intuition of the enduring fact of one’s subjec-
tive isolation and contingent physiological
existence. Yet it is only out of this kind of
apprehension of “transitive parts”— to use
William James’s term — that experiments and
operations within the world can take place,
without technological delusions and without
nostalgia for an older model of “authentic”
experience and objects.
 PRAGMATISM AT WAR

148
PETER GALISON

Seen from the redoubt of the physical sciences, one long war shadowed
the last century from 1939 to 1989, and the story did not end there.
Surveillance, communication, targeting, computation, and nuclear
weapons have shaped much of the contours of science at the century’s
close. Engagement with the battlefield, with engineers, with a hidden
enemy, conditioned the way physicists plied their craft — and the ways in
which physics linked to the panoply of sciences around it. Confronting
war, the pragmatist imagination in science took a specific turn.

At the largest scale, the war made the labora-
tory into a factory. After all, Los Alamos, Oak
Ridge, and Hanford were not “like” factories,
they were factories—factories that, in the case
of Hanford, took over 130,000 workers to
complete. Nuclear physics went from being an
infinitesimal enterprise in early 1942 to an
industry larger, by the summer of 1945, than
the entire Detroit automobile manufactory. But
the transformation was not just one of scale.
Suddenly physicists had to speak with engi-
neers, and perhaps more importantly they had
to listen to the engineers’ own way of parsing
the world. Before the war, electrical engineer-
ing circulated around power production on one
side and radio engineering on the other. By
and large, physicists did not have much to do
with either, although the material culture of
radio engineering populated some laborato-
ries. After the Japanese attack at Pearl Harbor,
American efforts in radar multiplied explosive-
ly. For the first time, American physicists had
to work side by side with radio engineers, and
not merely by engaging the engineers as tech-
nicians.
On the contrary: To build new kinds of small-
wavelength (and therefore accurate) radars,
new tools were needed as the ordinary compo-
nents of radio making were clearly irrelevant.
Wires, capacitors, resistors, and inductors
were not much different in length from the
waves that made radar work. Consequently,
the old-style radio components were useless:
they simply became antennae. A new genera-
tion of electronic components that could move
and modify radar waves into a useful search-
light would have to be designed out of copper
boxes, slits, cylinders, and other hollowed-out
conductive materials. Radio engineers there-
fore needed physicists. In particular, they need-
ed theoretical means of tackling the complicat-
ed wave guides that split, transpor ted, and
transformed microwave radiation.

149
 At first physicists took the view that they
would simply “solve” the problem fully. After
all, they were rightly proud that decades of
experience with Maxwell’s theory of electricity
and magnetism had taught them so much
about properties of electric and magnetic
fields. But these peculiarly shaped devices of
welded copper were vastly more complex than
any previous problem in ordinary electrody-
namics. Worse, the whole point of the radar
work was to vary the circuits in an endless
quest to improve performance, augment
power, reduce the size of the waves, screen
out noise. So even if one such complicated
volume of copper could be understood today,
tomorrow there would be two different ones on
the engineers’ table.
Wartime radar engineers desperately needed
a microwave analogue of the kind of analysis
they did for ordinary radios. For example,
radio engineers did not calculate the detailed
oscillations of the cardboard that vibrates in
a loudspeaker. Instead, they characterized the
speaker by a black box, that is, by an “equiva-
lent circuit” that had the same relations
of input and output as one found in a real
speaker. The slogan was: give me the voltage
in and the voltage out; give me the current
in and the current out — I don’t care what
happens between the two points.
LEARNING TO SPEAK AND THINK LIKE THESE
OPERATIONS-ORIENTED ENGINEERS BECAME A
CENTRAL CONCERN OF THE RADAR PHYSICISTS.
150
On both the Japanese side and the American
side, theorists, slowly and painfully, learned to
abandon their older ideals of knowing the elec-
trical and magnetic fields all the way down,
so to speak. On both sides, facing each other
across the battlefield, they learned to ask first
and foremost after inputs and outputs, shunting
aside the search for the detailed processes
in the recesses of those copper volumes.
After the war, both Julian Schwinger and
Shin’ichiro Tomanaga took their new-found
black boxism to the heart of theoretical
physics. Both began to abandon the search
to understand what happened in particle colli-
sions “all the way down,” and instead both
concentrated on characterizing the particles
some distance away from their interaction.
Particle physics, “pure physics,” was reread
as if it were a junction box in a radar circuit.
We are now quite habituated to thinking of
theory, whether in philosophy or physics, as
trickling down to the other domains of knowl-
edge: it is yesterday’s news that physical
theory might shape experiment, and experiment
might lead to changes in engineering. By
contrast, it inverts our prejudices to see pure
theory rewritten because of its encounters
with the works of engineers. But it is this latter,
engineering-driven process that so character-
ized the wartime engagement of the sciences.
Month after month, year after year, wartime
physicists and engineers attacked problems
in this bottom-up way, with physicists always
pressed to confront the problem of rapidly
scaling up to production long before “normal”
prewar procedures would have let it be so.
It is well known, for example, that Richard
Feynman spent the war at Los Alamos. We
usually hear his often-told anecdotes about
cracking safes, outwitting psychiatrists, and
playing bongo drums — an interruption from
physics. But what Feynman actually did at
Los Alamos is quite a bit more significant for
the wartime history of the bomb, and also for
what he did afterward. For example, Feynman
was sent to Oak Ridge to inspect the facility’s
handling of the nuclear waste generated as
the fissionable isotope of uranium, U235, was
separated from the inert variety, U238. The
Oak Ridge engineers knew perfectly well how
many kilograms of U235 it took to create a
fission chain reaction, so they separated the
quantities of waste into separate barrels of
U235, each of which sat in a solution that
included water and contained less than the
estimated critical mass. Feynman practically
went into shock when he discovered that the
water, by slowing down the neutrons and
therefore making them more potent activators
of fission, so dramatically dropped the critical
mass that the Oak Ridge containers were on
the ragged edge of having its waste matter go
critical. Over the next months the engineers
pressured Feynman to begin teaching them
rules—rules to calculate the critical mass for
different solutions, different concentrations,
different geometries of storage. And Feynman
produced these rules, rules of calculation
useable by engineers outside the club of
nuclear physicists.
Another example: on arrival at Los Alamos,
one of Feynman’s tasks was to calculate the
amount of “active material” needed for various
geometries of nuclear reactors. Again, after
solving one geometry and then another, he
began to search for a more modularized way
of approaching the problem. Yet again Feynman
faced this sort of problem as Hans Bethe,
head of the theory group, assigned him the
task of exploring various geometries that might
be used as shapes for the atomic bomb’s
nuclear core. Here too engineers were never
interested in just one configuration. They
always wanted to be able to move one item,
expand another, substitute a third: waste
barrels, critical cores, reactor geometries.
Feynman, a leading scientist of Los Alamos,
was also its best student, learning to think
about physics from a perspective that was both
pure and engineered at the same time. When
Feynman came back to pure physics after the
war, he, like so many others, returned with a
new vision of what science should be like; in
his specific case, the war inflected his old
interests in quantum electrodynamics. Now, in
the years immediately following the war, he pro-
duced a set of modular relations that snapped
into place — rules that could be used even by
non-experts as they came, with his eponymous
diagrams, to calculate the likelihood of electrons
and photons colliding in various ways.
SCHWINGER ONCE SAID THAT FEYNMAN, WITH
THIS DIAGRAMMATIC REASONING, HAD BROUGHT
QUANTUM ELECTRODYNAMICS TO THE MASSES.
PRAGMATISM AT WAR 151
 It was no accident. Over the course of four
years, Feynman had had to learn to bring
nuclear physics to the engineers and officers
who handled the vast production system of a
technoscientific world at war.
Philosophy of science had to skip a beat to
pick up the rhythm of this new form of scien-
tific work. Philipp Frank, one of the leaders of
the left wing of the Vienna Circle (along with
Otto Neurath and Rudolf Carnap) recast his
philosophical views after the war. As a refugee
in the 1930s, he had begun to assimilate the
American philosophical tradition, hoping to join
Viennese logical positivism with an indigenous
American pragmatism and operationalism. Now,
in 1946, after spending at least part of the
war working on the wartime uses of applied
mathematics, he began, self-consciously,
to go beyond the grand, semantically based
unification program of the prewar era. In one
programmatic text written just after the war,
he wrote: “[A] vast field of research is opened
up. ‘Hybrid fields’ like ‘mathematical biophysics’
or ‘mathematical economics’ are no longer
isolated cells where some awkward professors
may enjoy their strange fancies but by the
application of logico-empirical and socio-
psychological analysis these ‘cross-connections’
become the roots of new developments lead-
ing toward the integration of human knowledge
and human behavior. These queer cross-
connections become the avan[t]guard of the
science of the future.” Among the goals of
these new unified sciences would be an
analysis of the role of governmental interven-
tion in science — and the merging of science
and technique.
152
Frank’s plea for this new model of science
issued directly from the scientists’ wartime
experience. The Harvard psycho-acoustic labo-
ratory and the electro-acoustic laboratory were
but two such piecewise unified structures. But
a walk around any of the principal American
campuses in the postwar period revealed many
more such laboratories, and Frank needed
only look to his colleagues in the Harvard
physics department to meet, over and over
again, veterans of these efforts. So when the
Rockefeller Foundation responded to Frank’s
request for some modest funding toward the
unity of science, they reflected, in their internal
report, that biophysics, biochemistry, psycho-
physiology, and social psychology were the
“borderland fields” that “contributed new data”
to the quest for a unitary picture of nature.
One of the fields of inquiry taken up by Frank’s
new Institute for the Unity of Science was
cybernetics. A term coined by Norbert Wiener,
cybernetics designated that collection of fields
concerned with self-governing processes,
that is, fields where feedback leads a system
toward a goal. Wiener’s own interest in such
processes began very early in the war when
he saw the aerial threat to Britain as a deci-
sive moment in history. Determined to develop
a better method for tracking, and therefore
shooting down, German bombers, Wiener
began building a device that could characterize
statistically an individual pilot’s behavior and
then use that characterization to predict his
future moves. Knowing the airplane’s position
even a few seconds in advance would be
sufficient for anti-aircraft fire to reach the
plane and destroy it.
In rapid succession, Wiener began to gener-
alize. First, he began to see the self-correcting
Anti-Aircraft Predictor as equivalent to the
pilot’s intention; the pilot was nothing other
than a self-correcting device. Then Wiener and
his colleagues came to apply the same form
of analysis to the anti-aircraft gunner — the
“we” and the “them” entered into a similar
regime of calculation. But the spiral of expan-
sion continued:
NOT JUST THE GUNNER AND
BOMBER BUT THE GENERALIZED
HUMAN TASK WERE FORMS
OF GOAL-DIRECTED FEEDBACK
SYSTEMS. SELF-GUIDED MIS-
SILES AND TORPEDOES WERE
REALLY NO DIFFERENT FROM
THERMOSTATS AND HUMANS
TRYING TO PICK UP A GLASS,
OR A HEART ESTABLISHING
AN APPROPRIATE BEAT.
Wiener would write in 1950: “We believe that
men and other animals are like machines from
the scientific standpoint because we believe
that the only fruitful methods for the study of
human and animal behavior are the methods
applicable to the behavior of mechanical objects
as well. Thus, our main reason for selecting
the terms in question was to emphasize that,
as objects of scientific enquiry, humans do
not differ from machines.”
Soon Wiener’s cybernetic program became a
rallying cr y for computer scientists, econo-
mists, cultural anthropologists, physiologists.
So effective and all-embracing did it seem
that it made per fect sense for Wiener to begin
speaking in theological terms: “Since I have
insisted upon discussing creative activity
under one heading, and in not parceling it
out into separate pieces belonging to God,
to man, and to the machine, I do not consider
that I have taken more than an author’s
normal liberty in calling this book God and
Golem, Inc.”
153

Further development of the
themes presented here on
cybernetics, postwar scientific
unification movements, and
wartime physics can be found
in some of my previous publi-
cations: “The Ontology of the
Enemy: Norbert Wiener and
the Cybernetic Vision,”
Critical Inquiry 21 (1994), pp.
228–66; “The Americanization
of Unity,” Daedalus 127
(1998), pp. 45–71; Image
and Logic: A Material Culture
of Microphysics (Chicago,
1997); and “Feynman’s War:
Modeling Weapons, Modeling
Nature,” Studies in the History
and Philosophy of Science
29B (1998), pp. 391–434.
154
Certainly many of Wiener’s social and natural
science colleagues saw such a move as
reasonable — Philipp Frank’s Unity of Science
organization took up religion as one of its
interdisciplinary “borderland” areas, working it
with the same postwar pragmatic enthusiasm
as they did problems of linguistics, anthro-
pology, and computation. Cybernetics itself
became a major research arena for the
Unity of Science movement. And yet,
despite this globalizing impulse of the
cyberneticians, the field of inquir y retained
cer tain features of its war time origins.
Always Wiener returned to a vision of the
world cast in terms of struggles against an
Opponent — sometimes a manichean enemy,
the opponent of games and war. This was
the other faced down by operations research,
game theor y, and cybernetics — the three
manichean sciences, as I’ve called them
elsewhere. And sometimes the antagonist
was passive, similar to the manichean one,
but incapable of changing the rules in mid-
course. Nature itself was such an “Augustinian
devil,” and the struggle for science was a
battle against this opponent.
How different these local patches of common
knowledge were from the esperanto-like dreams
of prewar Vienna. Not only did religion shift from
its prewar place as a “pseudo-problem” to a
postwar topic of inquiry. Even more importantly,
ONE SEES HERE THE ABSOLUTE
LIMITLESSNESS OF THE
PRAGMATIC MODERNISM THAT
EMERGED FROM THE WAR.
Here was a pragmatic vision that was more
than a simple transcription of the pragmatism
of Peirce, James, or Dewey. This new stance
before the world was a different kind of
pragmatist imagination, an engineering take
on the knowledge that permanently altered
its form.
As we examine the intersection of pragmatism
with war, we must not halt the analysis at the
level of images of the nuclear or imaginary
projections of a demonic enemy. At stake
were far more fibrous forms of reasoning that
guided scientific inquiry in much more subtle
and encompassing ways — the turn to black
boxes, intensive calculation, simulation,
modularization. Hanging over the whole: the
seeming inevitability of understanding as
antagonism, be it manichean or Augustinian.
155

ELIZABETH GROSZ
Let me present my argument in the form of postulates, or rather provocations,
1.
The thing has, in the West, always been con-
ceived as the passive, inert, unresisting other
or counterpart to the subject, consciousness,
or mind, that is, as matter, substance, or
noumena. The thing is that against which mind
is understood, its other or object.
2.
There is another less systematic and more
submerged tradition of the thing within the
histor y of philosophy, which arguably dates
from the work of Dar win, and meanders
through Nietzsche, to Peirce, James, and
Bergson, to Rorty and Deleuze. This counter-
tradition conceives of the thing not as other,
but as provocation or incitement for the
subject: the thing is that which prompts us
to act, to invent, to practice, to extend
ourselves beyond ourselves.
156
NOTES
3.
Within this later tradition, the thing itself is
divided or duplicated. It is both resource or
raw material, the given or starting point of life
and the human (Heidegger’s standing reserve
or Lacan’s Real); and it is also the product,
effect, or construct of the living (Marx’s com-
modity, Bergson’s object). The thing is both
pre- and post-technological, that which technol-
ogy finds given and remakes as its own. In this
sense, technology must be understood to be
the second-order thing, the thing that finds and
makes other things, as it itself has been made.
4.
Within the pragmatist tradition, the world itself,
and our being positioned within it, generates
questions, problems, provocations for life:
What to eat? How to attain it? How to live?
By what means? Things are the way in which
life responds to these provocations. Both
instinct and intelligence, blind animal and
intelligently directed (primate or mammal)
behaviors, are incited by the real, and produce
things, the division of the real, as their mode
of acting in the world and rendering it manage-
able. The thing is a cutting out of the real, the
solidification of what exists in the flux of the
real. It is an outline imposed on the real by
our purposes and needs.
ON THE THING
A BRIEF MANIFESTO on the thing.

5. 7.
This cutting of the world, this whittling down Technology, as metaproduction, is the result
of the plethora of the world’s interpenetrating of the living being’s capacity to utilize the
qualities into objects amenable to our action, non-living (and the living) prosthetically. This
is a fundamentally constructive process: we prosthetic existence is the living’s dependence
make or fabricate the world of objects as an on and capacity to harness and incorporate
activity we undertake by living with and assimi- the non-living into its bodily practices. What
lating objects. We make objects in order to pragmatism entails is a recognition that the
live in the world. Or, in another, Nietzschean technological is and always has been the
sense, we must live in the world artistically, condition of human action, as necessary for
as homo faber. us as things themselves. Technology can
be conceived as the cultural correlate of the
6.
thing, which is itself the human or living
This process of fabrication of the world into
correlate of the materiality of the world.
things, objects with clearly delimitable and
determinable relations, finds its natural incli-
nation directed to solids. Things are solids,
conceived progressively as more and more
minute in their basic constitution, as physics
itself elaborates more and more minute funda-
mental particles. Yet physics itself remains
incapable of understanding what is fluid, innu-
merable, outside calculation without reduction
to solids. It is this flux, though, sometimes
recognized in philosophy, that provides the
condition for the generation of new things from
old things. Our “artisticness,” as Nietzsche
puts it, our creativity, in Bergsonian terms,
consists in nothing else than the continuous
experimentation with the world of things to
produce new things from the fluidity or flux
that eludes everyday need, or use-value.

157
 8.
Bergson claims that the intellect transforms
matter into things, which render them as
prostheses, artificial organs. And in a surpris-
ing reversal, at the same time as it humanizes
or orders nature, it appends itself as a
kind of prosthesis to inorganic matter itself,
to function as its rational supplement, its
conscious rendering. Matter and life become
reflections, through the ordering the intellect
makes of the world. Things become the mea-
sure of life’s action upon them, things become
“standing reser ve,” life itself becomes
extended through things.
158
9.
Inorganic matter, transformed into an immense
organ, a prosthesis, through the intellect, is
perhaps the most primordial or elementary
definition of architecture itself, which is, in a
sense, the first prosthesis, the first instrumen-
tal use of intelligence to meld the world into
things, through a certain primitive technicity, to
the needs of the living. The inorganic becomes
the mirror for the possible action of the living,
the armature and architecture necessary for
the survival and evolution of the living.
10.
The limit of the intellect is in a sense the limit
of the technical and the technological. The
intellect functions to dissect, divide, atomize:
contemporary binarization and digitalization
are simply the current versions of this tendency
to the clear-cut, the unambiguous, the opposi-
tional or binar y impulses of the intellect,
which is bound by the impetus to (eventual
or possible) actions.
11. 12.
Thus technology is not the supersession of Perhaps the question ahead of us now is this:
the thing, but its ever more entrenched func- What are the conditions of digitization and
tioning. The thing pervades technology, which binarization? Can we produce technologies of
is its extension, as well as extends the human other kinds? Is technology inherently simplifi-
into the material. The task before us is not cation and reduction of the real? What in us is
so much to make things, and resolve relations being extended and prosthetically rendered in
into things, more and more minutely framed technological development? Can other vectors
and microscopically understood; rather, it may be extended instead? What might a technology
be to liberate matter from the constraint, the of processes rather than things look like?
practicality, utility of the thing, to orient tech-
nology not so much to knowing and mediating
as to experience and the rich indeterminacy
of duration. Instead of, in the Bergsonian
sense, understanding the thing and the tech-
nologies it induces through intellect, perhaps
it can also be developed through intuition,
that Bergsonian apprehension of the unique
particularity of things, and of the time within
which things exist.

NOTES ON THE THING 159


BRIAN MASSUMI
1. William James,
“Pragmatism’s Conception of
Truth,” Pragmatism and the
Meaning of Truth (Cambridge,
Mass.: Harvard University
Press, 1978), p. 98.
2. Ibid., pp. 32, 169.
THE ETHER
AND YOUR ANGER:
TOWARD A
PRAGMATICS OF
THE USELESS
Pragmatism is often understood to err on the side of the objective. Its
dictum that something is “true because it is useful”1 is easily caricatured
as a philosophical apotheosis of American instrumentalism. Objects, it
would seem, figure in the world according to their ends: their potential
to perform utilitarian functions. The world is a boundless collection of
exploitable resources through which the rugged individual moves at will:
user in a used world. The extreme objectivism of assuming that the
world is a preconstituted collection of objects defined by their functional
“cash-value”2 swings seamlessly into the frontier subjectivism of the
purposive human actor par taking freely of its resources. As a result,
pragmatism will just as often be understood as erring on the side of the
subjective. Concepts such as William James’s “pure experience” seem
to confirm the objectivism even in their apparent appeals to an ineffable
subjective essence. Without the mooring in utility, the subject would be
swept away in the “stream.”
As James takes pains to suggest in the pref-
ace to The Meaning of Truth, it is necessary
to understand pragmatism in the context of
the allied theory of radical empiricism in order
to appreciate its force. Essays in Radical
Empiricism seems at first to confirm the
emphasis on end-objects. “[W]hat the knowing
actually and practically amounts to [is a]
leading-towards, namely, and terminating-in
percepts.”3 A “leading-towards,” however, is
already much more open-ended than a “use,”
as is a “percept” in comparison to a functional
object. That a radical empiricism will not in
fact be either a subjectivism or an objectivism
is immediately announced in James’s specifi-
cations that the terminating occurs “through
a series of transitional experiences which the
world supplies” but that neither the experience
nor the percept arrived at are to be under-
stood in terms of a subjectively contained
consciousness. What is radical about radical
empiricism is that there are not, on the one
hand, objective transitions-leading-to-functional-
ends in the world and, on the other, experiences-
and-percepts corresponding to them in the
subject. Classically, objects and their associ-
ated operations are in the world, while percepts
registering them are in the subject. What
James is saying, by contrast, is that both are
in the transition. Things and their experience
are together in transition. There is no oscilla-
tion in the theory between extremes of objec-
tivism and subjectivism because the object
and subject fall on the same side of a shared
movement. The question is what distinction
their movement makes, according to which
they fall on the same side. The answer will
be surprising to those who equate pragmatism
with instrumentalism.
James uses the simple example of describing
a building to a skeptical friend (54–56). There
is nothing you can say, he suggests, that can
verify your description. There is no sure way
for your friend to know that you’re not being
inaccurate or deceitful unless you walk together
to the building and you point out convergences
between what you had said and what you
are both now experiencing. The truth of the
experience is the fulfilled expectation. So far,
it’s all pretty pedestrian. But for James the
demonstrative pointing-out is less an external
referencing of an object by a subject then an
indexing of two subjects to the same phase in
the “ambulatory” movement. The demonstra-
tive puts the subjects in synch, as two poles
of the same fulfillment. It is less indicative
of an object than performative of a sharing.
The object does not figure “in itself.” It figures
differentially, as approached from disjunct
perspectives (skepticism and the desire to
convince), linked in a moving-toward. The
object figures again as bringing those subjec-
tive poles of the movement into phase. Their
difference of approach is resolved in the 3. William James, Essays in
collective ability to point and say, “that’s it!” Radical Empiricism (Lincoln:
The demonstrative exclamation marks the University of Nebraska Press,
1996), p. 25. All parenthetical
operative inclusion of the object in the move- citations in the text are to this
ment, as a trigger of its components‚ entering text unless otherwise noted.
into phase. The “object” is an exclamation 4. Deleuze, in Difference and
point of joint experience.4 In that punctuating Repetition, would call the
role, it is “taken up” by the movement. The object under this aspect the
sign of a “remarkable point”
object and the concerned “subjects” figure in course of a “dramatiza-
as differential poles integrating into a unity tion.” Trans. Paul Patton (New
of movement. The unity lasts as long as its York: Columbia University
Press, 1994), pp. 245,
demonstrative performance. It is an event: a 251–53.
rolling of subjective and objective components
into a mutual participation co-defining the
same dynamic.
161

5. For an excellent study of
James’s philosophy consonant
with this perspective (and to
which this account owes
much), see David Lapoujade,
William James: Empirisme et
pragmatisme (Paris: PUF, 1997).
162
In the aftermath of the event, the unity resolves SUBJECT AND OBJECT ARE
back into differentials, and the movement
GIVEN OPERATIVE DEFINITIONS
continues, relatively de-defined again: it is
possible that disagreement will arise later on BY PRAGMATISM. THEY ARE
about what was demonstrated at that point. NOT PLACED IN ANY KIND OF
The movement may then retrace its steps, METAPHYSICAL CONTRADICTION
to repeat the demonstration, exclaiming a
OR OPPOSITION.
different integration, and a redefinition. The
object is taken up by the movement again,
They are defined additively,(9) according to
but in a new capacity, as an object no longer
their multiple takings-up in events, in a contin-
only of skepticism but of dispute. Whether the
uing movement of integration and decoupling,
object as taken up differentially by the move-
phasing and dephasing, whose dynamic takes
ment the second time is strictly the “same”
precedence over their always-provisional
as it was the first is not a question of concern
identities. Subject and object are grasped
to pragmatism. What is of concern is that
directly as variations: not only of themselves,
unfolding differentials phase in and out of
but of each other. Their open-ended ability to
integrating events in which they figure as
cross over into each other is the very “stuff”
dynamically interlinked poles: that there is a
of the world. As it is of experience. The phrase
punctuated oneness in a manyness ongoing.
“the world of experience” is a redundancy.
Once the emphasis is placed on the transitional-
These Jamesian moves already undermine
definitional nature of the “terminus,” it is clear
any equation of pragmatism with a “naive”
that the identity of the event’s components
instrumentalism, turning it decisively toward
cannot predate their integration. What the
a philosophy of the world’s continuing self-
object will have been, what precisely will have
invention. This turn to a creative philosophy
been the role of the subjects, is clear only
allies pragmatism with Bergsonism more than
in retrospect, after each integration, by which
any other current.5 In places, James makes
time they are already in transit to another
the turn even more sharply. Ninety-nine times
“terminus.” Already all over again in the mak-
out of a hundred, he writes, the ideas we
ing. James will go so far as to say that what
hold true are “unterminated perceptually,”
constitutes a subject and what constitutes an
and to continue is “our practical substitute
object varies. A component that was a subject
for knowing in the completed sense.”(69)
at one terminus may be taken up as an object
A usefully terminated experience in which the
in the next, or function as both at the same
identity of the components in play definitively
time.(15) This is obvious when you remember
crystallize into a clearly objective or subjective
that as a perceiver you are always perceivable
role even for an exclamatory moment is the
by another, in whose experience you figure
exception. Usually the world only brinks on
as an object. Or that an object may be re-taken
definitive self-punctuations.
up as a memory, crossing from objective to
subjective status.(61)
“Ether-waves and your anger, for example, are Rather than arriving at end-objects, or fulfilling
things in which my thoughts will never percep- objective ends, we are carried by wavelike ten-
tually terminate, but my concepts of them lead dencies, in a roll-over of experiences perpetu-
me to their very brink, to the chromatic fringes ally substituting for each other. “[W]e live for-
and to the hurtful words and deeds that are wards,” but since we have always already
their really next effects.”(73) The trigger-object rolled on, “we understand backwards.”(238)
is rarely arrived at as a terminus. The world —
experience — normally contents itself with PARTICIPATION PRECEDES COGNITION. THIS IS
brinking on “really next effects.” A “terminus”
is like a basin of attraction that draws you
THE SENSE OF JAMES’S FAMOUS SAYING THAT
toward it, as by a gravitational pull, but no WE DON’T RUN BECAUSE WE ARE AFRAID. WE
sooner does it do this than it spins you off ARE AFRAID BECAUSE WE RUN.
again, as by a centrifugal force. The world
doesn’t stop at your anger. An angr y word Since we are always on the brink, we are too
or deed snowballs into an unfolding drama busy rolling-on to doubt the running reality.
sweeping you and all around you along. You The question of the truth or falsehood of the
are always really living in a centrifugal hurtle crests and troughs through which we pass —
to a next effect. whether they are “merely” (subtractively)
subjective, merely appearances or illusions —
“WE LIVE, AS IT WERE, UPON doesn’t even arise. “These [transitional]
termini…are self-supporting. They are not ‘true’
THE FRONT EDGE OF AN
of anything else, they simply are, are real.
ADVANCING WAVE-CREST, AND They ‘lean on nothing’…Rather does the whole
OUR SENSE OF A DETERMINATE fabric of experience lean on them.”(202)
DIRECTION IN FALLING FORWARD
IS ALL WE COVER OF THE
FUTURE OF OUR PATH. IT IS AS
IF A DIFFERENTIAL QUOTIENT
SHOULD BE CONSCIOUS AND
TREAT ITSELF AS AN ADEQUATE
SUBSTITUTE FOR A TRACED-OUT
CURVE. OUR EXPERIENCE…IS
OF VARIATIONS OF RATE AND OF
DIRECTION, AND LIVES IN THESE
TRANSITIONS MORE THAN IN
THE JOURNEY’S END.”(69)

THE ETHER AND YOUR ANGER 163

 In the end (or more precisely, in the never- The surprise answer to the question of what
ending), the pragmatic truth is not fundamen- distinction there is between the subject and
tally defined by a functional fit between a will object in their shared movement is: virtual-actual.
and a way, or a propositional correspondence “As yet” (on the crest) subject and object are
between subjective perceptions and a self- unqualified. They are at this point only
same object. Rather, it has to do with a “self- virtually subject or object. Actually, they are
supporting” of experience brinking, on a roll what they will have been. The subject
to really-next-effects. What we experience is and the object fall into definition on the same
less our objects‚ our confirmed definitions, side of the actual-virtual distinction: the actual
or our own subjectivity than their going-on side. That is, they fall in retroactively (in the
together — their shared momentum. Being trough). Their actual definition is a kind of
swept up by the world constitutes a lived belief experiential doppler effect immediately register-
in it: an immediate, moving, embodied, partici- ing their already having passed, in the momen-
patory belief. Belief is not propositional (“that tary calm before the next wave rolls up.
is what it is”). It is the undoubtable rush of
fear, anger, or expectation whose object has SUBJECTS AND OBJECTS
already zoomed past before it is fully defined
ARE NOT PRECONSTITUTED
(“so that was it!”). “[D]efinitely felt transitions”
are “all that the knowing of a percept by FOUNDATIONS FOR PURPOSIVE
an idea can possibly contain or signify.”(56) MOVEMENT YIELDING USEFUL
Riding the wave, we are in “a that which is EFFECTS. THEY ARE EFFECTS:
not yet any definite what, tho’ ready to be all
MOVEMENT-EFFECTS, DIRECTLY
sorts of whats; full of both oneness and of
manyness, but in respects that don’t appear.” REGISTERED PASSINGS-ON
(93–94) This, James writes, is “what I call THAT ARE ALSO PHASINGS-OUT.
the ‘pure’ experience. It is only virtually or
potentially either object or subject as yet. For
the time being, it is plain, unqualified actuality,
a simple that.”(23) “[I]t is only when our idea
[our expectation of perceiving something]
has actually terminated in the percept that
we know ‘for certain’ that from the beginning
it was truly cognitive of that….We were virtual
knowers…long before we were certified to
have been its actual knowers, by the percept’s
retroactive validating power.”(68)

164
How can James turn subjects and objects This brings us to James’s pivotal definition of
into phasings or effects and also say that we what constitutes a radical empiricism and, when
have an immediate, undoubtable, belief in coupled with pragmatism, precludes its being
the world? The answer is that even if you do an instrumentalism: the primacy of relation.
not have a founding relation between a subject
and an object, you still have an effective, THE WORLD REVOLVES AROUND ITS MOMENTOUS
if passing, relation of experience to itself.
“[T]houghts…are made of the same stuff
RELATION TO ITSELF.
things are.”(37) “[T]heir starting-point thereby
becomes a knower and the terminus an object Relations, James insists, are as real as the
meant or known.”(57; emphasis in original) terms in relation (subjects, objects, sense-data).
“The first experience knows the last one”(58) And relations are themselves experienced:
retrospectively. Thought and thing, subject “[T]he relations that connect experiences
and object, are not separate entities or sub- must themselves be experienced relations,
stances. They are irreducibly temporal modes and any kind of relation experienced must be
of relation of experience to itself. The wave- accounted as ‘real’ as anything else in the
crest is an interference pattern between the system.”(42)
forward momentum, or prospective tending,
rolling on from its starting point in a last termi- “The parts of experience hold together from
nus toward an already anticipated end-object, next to next by relations that are themselves
and the backwash of the really-next-effect by part of experience. The directly apprehended
virtue of which the starting point retroactively universe needs, in short, no extraneous
becomes a knowing subject. In experience, trans-empirical connective support, but
what goes along comes around. The world possesses in its own right a concatenated
rolls in on itself, over its own expectations or continuous structure.” (Pragmatism and the
of reaching an end. It “snow-balls,” start to Meaning of Truth, 173)
terminus. The world is “self-supporting” in
the sense that it feeds on its own momentum,
folding its movement around on itself, always
“additively,” the end of every roll a return to
the beginning, only more so: further on, spin-
ning off virtual subjects and objects, like flakes
in its actual wake. Everything in the world of
experience is contained in this self-augmenting
movement. There is no metaphysical opposition
or contradiction, only the productive paradox
of a self-contained becoming. A becoming-
more and a becoming-many through the same
momentum: many-more one-ward.

THE ETHER AND YOUR ANGER 165

 An example: giving. Our commonsense way of
thinking about a relation like giving would be
to analyze it into its terms, or decompose it
into parts, then put it all back together again.
In this case, you decompose the giving into a
giver (A), a gift (B), and a recipient (C). In theo-
ry, you should be able to reconnect A to B
(giver to gift) and B to C (gift to recipient) and
get the giving again. But what you actually get
is two successive holdings: A holding B, then
C holding B, with nothing to hold the holdings
together. What holds the holdings together
isn’t in the terms, or their part-to-part connec-
tions. What holds the holdings together is a
oneness-in-manyness of a moving on. It is
what runs through the parts and their hold-
ings, without itself being held; what is unmiss-
ably experienced without being seen. That —
the relation — is not in the giver. Nor is it in
the gift. Nor in the recipient. It is what runs
through them all, holding them together in the
same dynamic. It is integrally many things:
“concatenated and continuous.” It is whatever
tendency impels or compels the giving. It is
the desire to please another, or to bind anoth-
er to oneself. It is an obligation, which obliges
in return. For a giving is never solitary. It calls
for more. It is serial, ongoing. It is in the con-
ventions that define the timing and sequence,
that define what gift is desirable or appropriate
when. It is also in the sensual qualities of the
gift (unromantically, its “sense-data”). It is the
fragrance or the sparkle. It is all of these
things, folded into and around each other to
form an experiential envelope, “full of oneness
and manyness in respects that don’t appear”
— incorporeal medium holding the gift up for
the giving, and holding the successive holdings
to the same event. Holding-up/holding-togeth-
er, integral unseen medium of suspension:
that does it.
166
The suspension-event is an incorporeal enve-
lope of sociality. The gift relation is not fully
personal, nor is it objective. It is immediately
social — in a way singularly independent from
the particular nature of the terms in social
relation. The giver or recipient may be male or
female, young or old, or what not. The gift may
be flowers or diamonds, or what not. The that
holding the holdings together is a multiplicity
of what-nots, a ready-to-be-all-kinds. The rela-
tion is a suspension of the particular defini-
tions of the terms in relation. If it is as real as
they are, its reality is of a different order: an
implicate order of ready-to-be-things folded
eventfully into each other. If the implicate
order is of the order of an event, like every
event really-next-effects will unfold from its
happening: to be continued.
Again, “really-next-effect” means “transition
takes precedence.” The gift is defined as the
object of the giving by the event of the offer’s
passing unbroken into an acceptance.
Reciprocally, the giver and the recipient are
defined as the subjects of the giving by the
object’s eventfully having passed. The radically
empirical point is that the all-around lived
medium, or the experienced envelope of rela-
tion, is a ready-to-be (virtual) coexistence of
terms held in a non-decomposable unity of
movement that determines what they will have
been in passing. That translates into the con-
ceptual rule of thumb that the terms in rela-
tion belong to a different order than their rela-
tion. Terms in relation, parts of the whole,
serially unfold over the course of events. But
they do so by virtue of an infolding, or impli-
cate, order holding them, wholing them, in the
same event.
THE LOGIC OF COEXISTENCE IS
DIFFERENT FROM THE LOGIC OF
SEPARATION. THE LOGIC OF
BELONGING IS DIFFERENT FROM
THE LOGIC OF BEING A PART.
This means that in order to get the whole pic-
ture (including the real, suspended ways it
doesn’t appear) you have to operate with both
logics simultaneously: the conjunctive and the
disjunctive. “Radical empiricism is fair to both
the unity and the disconnection.”(47) It trans-
lates metaphysical issues of truth and illusion,
subject-object correspondence, into issues of
continuity and discontinuity.
THESE ARE BASICALLY PRAGMAT-
IC ISSUES: WHEN AND HOW TO
MAKE A BREAK, AND IN MAKING
A BREAK, TO MAKE AN ENCOM-
PASSING CONNECTION, AND TO
WHAT REALLY-NEXT-EFFECT.
(You can never take back a gift. It incorporeally
binds you to another, and in so doing irre-
versibly cuts into your having been apart.)
Together, radical empiricism and the pragmatic
theory of truth lead to an odd constructivism,
in which experience is at the same time self-
standing and self-contained, and always to be
invented, according to passing logics of cut
and connection. For it is always only in pass-
ing that things prove useful: as provisionally
as ether waves, as ephemerally as your anger,
as corruptibly as a gift. The only preconstitut-
ed function of things is becoming.
Approaching things this way saves you fussing
over the cognitive status of your experience.
Disbelieving, are you? Feeling a tad illusion-
ary? Don’t worry. Everything is as real as its
next-effect. Just concentrate on the cut-and-
connection that will make a next-effect really
felt. In any such event, you are, as you always
are, already redundantly implicated in the
world of experience.
You do not run purposively through the world
because you believe in it. The world, surprising-
ly, already runs you through. And that, really
felt, is your belief in it. Virtual participation,
really, brinking on truly, precedes actual cognition.
CUT-AND-CONNECTION TO MAKE FELT AN
EFFECT: A DEFINITION OF ART. PRAGMATISM,
AS AUGMENTED BY RADICAL EMPIRICISM’S
VIRTUAL-FRIENDLY RELATIONISM, ENDS UP
ALLYING NOT WITH INSTRUMENTALISM OR ANY
VULGAR FUNCTIONALISM, BUT WITH ART (LIVING
ART, ARTS OF LIFE). IT HAS LESS TO DO WITH
END-USE THAN TRANSITIONAL EXPRESSION:
CREATIVE PHILOSOPHY. THE TRUTH IS NOT
“OUT THERE.” IT IS IN THE MAKING.
THE ETHER AND YOUR ANGER 167
 EVERYDAY

168
 SOCIAL LIFE
AND THE
WORLD
What might a pragmatist city look like?

What types of interaction and participation would it foster?

What cultural forms would embody it?

INTRODUCTION MARY MCLEOD
The two broad, interrelated themes “social
life” and the “everyday world” are very
much at the heart of the pragmatist project:
to detach philosophy from its isolation and
speculative remoteness by shifting its focus
from the rarefied realm of metaphysics to
the more earthly concerns of improving
human existence.
As a working definition (and in this sense in
a pragmatist vein), we might say that social
life consists of our exchanges, encounters,
conflicts, and connections with one
another — that is, human interaction not as
abstract citizens or as economic agents but
as real people relating to each other in the
flow of daily life. Social life doesn’t imply a
rigid boundary between the public and pri-
vate domains but rather a continuum that
includes both, ranging from sharing a park
bench with a stranger or nodding hello to an
acquaintance on the street, to arguing poli-
tics or enjoying holiday festivities with
friends and family. The everyday world is the
stage on which we conduct our daily lives,
and thus the place of social interaction. And
like social life, it embraces domestic life
and work (but not necessarily as economic
production), and all those moments in
between. The everyday world is not a single
place at a certain moment but many places
and many moments; it has a quality of fluidi-
ty and transience, but also of repetition and
stability. Amorphous and all-encompassing,
it requires no further definition; we all know
what it is. For the pragmatist, what is
important is how we solve problems of daily
existence and expand life’s potential.
Although there is no pragmatist theory of
everyday life, the concept permeates prag-
matist thought, whether Charles Sanders
Peirce’s insistence on relating thinking to
human conduct or William James’s plea to
work “within the stream of experience” and
to consider “the particulars of life.” James
described the pragmatist as someone who
turned away from “abstraction” and “pre-
tended absolutes” toward “concreteness,”
“facts,” “acts,” and “results.” His “real
world” was open, pluralist, and “in-the-mak-
ing.” Of all the pragmatists, however, it was
John Dewey who spoke most directly about
everyday life, giving it a more immediate
social and political cast, and who influenced
the Chicago School’s theories of public com-
munication and action. Whereas James
focused on personal psychology and an indi-
vidual’s religious beliefs, Dewey turned
toward collective issues such as education,
democracy, mass society, and community. In
the broadest sense, the “everyday world”
and “social life” were the subjects of his
philosophy. He hoped to understand and
improve them, setting such goals as “self-
fulfillment” and “to live more interestingly
with one another,” which he saw as integral-
ly related. Like George Herbert Mead, his
colleague at the University of Chicago, he
believed that the self was socially constitut-
ed. “The non-social individual,” Dewey
wrote, “is an abstraction arrived at by imag-
ining what man would be if all his human
qualities were taken away.” Hence his
yearning for a “great community” and his
understanding of art as generating a
“heightened vitality,” not in “private feel-
ings” but in “active and alert commerce
with the world.”
Dewey insisted that art should be part of
the continuum of daily experience and
observed that the arts that have “the most
vitality for the average person are things he
does not consider to be arts,” such as
movies, jazz, and the comic strip. Similarly,
he rejected the idea that architecture was
aesthetically contaminated by “use,” and
praised its expression of man’s needs,
struggles, and hopes. Nor was Dewey an
arcadian nostalgist, as some critics have
suggested. Although he condemned the
hideousness of much profit-driven contempo-
rary architecture, he appreciated that mod-
ern urban civilization was breeding its own
aesthetic, and that “rural” forms were “los-
ing their place as the primary material of
the experience.”
Dewey’s embrace of everyday life offers an
interesting comparison with the ideas of
another philosopher who tried to wrench his
discipline from the stranglehold of meta-
physical abstraction: the French Marxist
Henri Lefebvre. Lefebvre, born in 1901, four
decades after Dewey, was not opposed to
theory per se, but, like Dewey, deeply com-
mitted to examining everyday life with the
aim of discovering modes of action that
might lead to a richer and fuller life. He
believed that a serious shortcoming of exist-
ing Marxist theory was its failure to address
the subject of everyday life. While its theo-
rists had given ample attention to econom-
ics, political institutions, and class, they
had neglected to examine both the oppres-
sive and liberating dimensions of daily exis-
tence. Lefebvre spent much of his career,
from the early 1930s to the 1980s, develop-
ing a “critique of everyday life.” He regarded
everyday life as the sum total of all the
material attributes of our daily suste-
nance — food, clothing, home, furniture —
plus something that escaped physical
171
description and philosophical categorization,
a kind of residuum or “non-philosophical
reality.” It was all the oppressions and tedi-
um of daily survival, but it was also perme-
ated by a certain lyricism, “a dramatic atti-
tude.” Like Dewey, he espoused a romantic
faith in the possibilities of human fulfillment
and expanded potential. Again, this was not
an issue of isolated individualism but a form
of humanism arising from rich and vital
social exchanges — Marx’s total man. If
Dewey’s notion of community was exempli-
fied by the New England town meeting, with
its civilities and common aspirations,
Lefebvre’s model was the festival, whether
the Dionysian joy of peasant celebrations or
the revolutionary fervor of the Paris
Commune. His deep commitment to the
urban dweller’s “right to the city” stemmed
from his belief that intense social and cul-
tural interaction was fundamental to human
happiness.
Both thinkers, in their very different styles,
were deeply committed to experimentation.
They envisioned life as a kind of laboratory:
an open-ended project of exploration and
discovery. Each regarded imagination and
intelligent investigation as essential to cre-
ating new ways of living. Two real-life exam-
ples, both in Chicago in the 1890s, were
Jane Addams’s Hull House and the Laboratory
School founded by John Dewey. Near the end
of the decade, Addams wrote that an “ideal
settlement” would “test the value of human
knowledge by action, and realization” and
that such a project “is an attempt to
express the meaning of life in terms of life
itself.” For Lefebvre, the possibilities lay
more with avant-garde art and “moments”
of intense social, political, and cultural
change. For a brief period he put his faith in
the activities of the Situationists, and then,
in the years following the 1968 revolt, in
campaigns for urban reform.
There are, of course, important differences
between the two thinkers: Lefebvre’s self-
conscious critique of everyday life was still
very much part of an effort to discern a
totality, however open-ended and in flux that
might be. As a rigorous dialectician, he was
firmly committed to a mode of reason that
would somehow incorporate non-reason.
From this perspective, Dewey’s outright
rejection of any philosophical notion of uni-
versal truth seems more radical than
Lefebvre’s revisionist Marxism (and more in
sympathy with the postmodern rejection of
absolutes), and it was this quality — cele-
brated in Richard Rorty’s writings since the
late 1970s — that largely sparked a
renewed interest in pragmatism. However,
Lefebvre, perhaps because of his very
insistence on the dialectic and totality,
gave a deeper account of the passions and
irrationalities of man, including the dark
side of human nature, while retaining some
vision of transformation and utopian poten-
tial. As poststructuralism has increasingly
come into question in the past decade
and now seems ever more detached from
issues of practical life and social change,
Lefebvre’s writings have regained their
relevance and influence, especially in the
English-speaking world — perhaps because
of his refusal to relinquish agency and
action in the face of sweeping bureaucrati-
zation and numbing routine. Not coincidentally,
there also seems to be a resurgence of
appreciation for the constructive side of
Dewey — his commitment to addressing “the
problems of men” — even as new readers of
his works separate themselves from his
naive optimism in America’s mission and
from his faith in the possibility of achieving
a “great” community.
The following papers address in various ways
some of the questions posed by both Dewey
and Lefebvre about everyday life and explore
its problems and potentials. Three general
topics seem of particular relevance. First,
how might we assess the politics of everyday
life? Has it led to an avoidance of tough politi-
cal questions (economic power, party control,
legal rights, political access), or has it helped
open politics to a broader range of issues,
such as childcare, the elderly, housing, adult
education, leisure time — indeed, many of the
themes that Dewey broached in his social
democratic vision? Or is the relentless homog-
enization of everyday life — poignantly
described by Stanley Aronowitz in his portray-
al of contemporary New York City — so perva-
sive and totalizing that little, short of unfore-
seen revolution or sweeping natural disaster,
will alter its course? Alternatively, does the
celebration of everyday life also lead to a kind
of political deadlock in its seeming endorse-
ment of the status quo — of life-as-it-is? And
has the very idea of everyday life undergone
commodification in academia and mass cul-
ture, thus undermining its critical power? Or
should we see the current widespread
endorsement of the “everyday” as a sign of a
new social tolerance?
This brings us to the second issue: how does
everyday life bring attention to the needs and
desires of “others,” not just some abstract
“other”? Does its emphasis on arenas tradi-
tionally considered marginal to the major
issues of power — domesticity, consumption,
173
entertainment (in the writings of Lefebvre), or
education and immigrant lives (Dewey,
Randolph Bourne, Horace Kallen) — allow us
to go beyond reductive visions of equality,
community, and national identity to consider
new, more nuanced ideas of collectivity and
connection? Certainly Marshall Berman, in
the following beautiful reading of three dif-
ferent kinds of community, offers some new
perspectives, women’s perspectives, unfore-
seen by either Dewey or Lefebvre, that sug-
gest further contemplation. Or, to turn to
the subject of immigrants, how might we
translate Kallen’s notion of the “mosaic” or
Bourne’s idea of “trans-nationalism” to the
issues raised by present-day American eth-
nic communities? In the case of Sandra
Buckley’s nuanced presentation of Brazilian-
Japanese in Japan, how do the fluid and
complex hybrids produced in everyday life
complicate these ideas of ethnic identity?
Third, and finally, what is the relationship
between art and everyday life? Both Dewey
and Lefebvre wanted to break down the
long-standing barriers between art and
everyday life, and both saw in art a vision of
man’s potential. Although Lefebvre’s aes-
thetic proclivities were more forward-looking
than Dewey’s, and gave greater credence to
the critical and subversive dimensions in
art, both thinkers refused to divide aesthetic
experience from everyday experience. In
short, they hoped to make life into a kind of
art—to endow daily existence with the rich-
ness, imagination, and liberating possibili-
ties that they discovered within art.
Although no one would claim success in
that domain, we might reverse the equation,
and ask to what extent has art of the past
few decades — with its multimedia experi-
ments and deliberate blurring of high-low
boundaries — become everyday life?
Paradoxically, has it lost its utopian aspira-
tion and transformative potential as it has
begun to dissolve this long-standing divide,
perhaps only to establish new hierarchies
and barriers? How should we interpret the
youthful experiments (deadpan, narcissistic,
and exploratory) that Martha Rosler so
acutely describes, as she ponders the differ-
ences between her students’ work and her
own efforts? And how does architecture
relate to these issues? Do Dewey’s rare ref-
erences to contemporary architecture
(notably his praise of Helmle and Corbett’s
Bush Terminal building of 1918) or his more
general remarks about flux and stability in
art have any relevance to contemporary
architecture practice? And should we so
readily dismiss his insistence on experience
as the most meaningful dimension of art and
architecture? How is experience affected by
the use of the computer in architecture
design? In the case of virtual architecture,
do we need to rethink the idea of experi-
ence itself?

It is perhaps not accidental that most of the

authors of the following papers (namely
Stanley Aronowitz, Marshall Berman, and
Martha Rosler) have been more deeply
touched by a Marxist legacy than a pragma-
tist one, although each would also assert
that there is something in their American
experience and intellectual formation that
has strongly shaped and transformed any
Marxist sympathies. Perhaps ironically, it is
our one French author, Isaac Joseph, who,
while intimately familiar with Lefebvre, most
clearly opts for a pragmatist course, turning
to the Chicago School of sociology for an
understanding of the pluralism that immi-
grants bring to urban life and a vision of the
kind of urban civility that might be achieved.
Sandra Buckley, an Australian specializing in
Japanese culture, stands somewhat outside
this constellation — and perhaps partly
because of this distance, suggests some
provocative connections among everyday
life, collective identity, and the ideas of
William James.

175
 EXTRAORDINARY
APPETITES:
A JAPAN
NOT-AT-HOME-WITH-ITSELF
SANDRA BUCKLEY
There has been a rapid change in the faces that pour out of bicycle
parking lots and train and bus stations into the major plants and
subcontract factories that crowd the industrial flatlands hugging the
Japanese eastern seaboard.
Towns flow over one into the next in a blur of
low-rise high-density low-income housing.
Contract and part-time labor combined with
seasonal hirings create a transitional, predom-
inantly male work force living in crowded, often
shared accommodation, driven to cafes, bars,
and local restaurants by the lack of cooking
facilities, lack of space, and lack of communi-
ty. In one town on the edge of the Hiroshima
industrial complex there is a remarkable scene
that unfolds each evening rising in a crescen-
do of sound, smells, movement, and emotions
on the weekends. By early evening smoke
begins to billow out of the exhaust funnels of
a tired old prefab restaurant that sits precari-
ously leaning into a dirt car park. By seven
o’clock the smell and heat of flaming barbecues
hangs thick in the air, and the sharp black edge
of the smell of charring meat is accompanied by
the stinging chorus of fat searing on hot coals.
The language shouted over the work of the fires
is not easy to grasp. It hits the ear hard and
fast, punctuated with full-bodied laughter.
Voices are raised in shouts, but the flavor
is warm-hearted, not angry. As the numbers
grow into a crowd people flow out into the
car park dragging chairs and trestles out of a
shiny tin shed that stands in stark contrast to
the faded fragile walls of the prefab. The num-
bers still grow and the voices of women and
children now blend into the cacophony of
sounds — cooking, laughter, greetings, shouts
for the lost salt shaker, children squealing as
they chase each other through the maze of
trestles. Music begins, loud and unexpected —
the voice is female, the beat Latin and roman-
tic, and the words Portuguese. Soon the men
and women crowded around the tables eating
are crooning the chorus aloud, swaying to the
rhythm of the beat as they mix food, song, and
conversation in a rich patchwork. As the barbe-
cues die out, eating gives way to dancing. The
diners who have lingered indoors till now spill
out into the car park to join the dancers and
with them come the cooks. The three dogs
that lie sprawled and oblivious by the entrance
to the kitchen rise up suddenly and pitch into
a frenzy of barking as the youngest of the four
women who come out of the kitchen throws a
saucepan of bone scraps. She shouts at them
in Korean to quell their barking, then gives up
and joins the dance.
177
 By the next summer the prefab will be replaced
by a bigger building with new gas-fired barbe-
cues and a custom-made bar counter.
Business is good. The Kim family had made
ends meet for decades, feeding and making
a home for the thousands of Korean workers
drawn to the area by the promise of regular
work, even if it was low paid, long hours, and
tough conditions. But over the 1990s the com-
munity dwindled as kids grew up and left for
better lives in Osaka or Tokyo, and the parents
became too old and tired after decades of
1. This description of the hard labor. It was a new wave of workers into
Korean barbecue was initially the area that refired this neighborhood restau-
developed in discussions with
Karen Tei Yamashita at the rant. A family-owned Korean barbecue has
University of California, transformed into a vibrant center for the
Santa Cruz, during the 1988 lives of the Brazilian-Japanese, who now fill
colloquium series
sponsored by the History of the jobs left behind by departing Koreans
Consciousness program. and Japanese.1
THE LANGUAGE, FOOD, MUSIC, AND DANCE
THAT BLEND WITH THE BARBECUE SMOKE
WRAPPED AROUND THE CAR PARK EVERY NIGHT
IS A CULTURAL BRICOLAGE OF KOREAN,
BRAZILIAN-JAPANESE, AND JAPANESE.
For local and transient Japanese laborers also
find their way into this emerging community.
The hot chile and garlic of the Korean barbe-
cue is now blended with new sweet hot spices
and deep, dark bitter chocolate. Tomatoes and
nuts blend in with cabbage, and on Fridays the
Korean meats give way to steamy pots of
tangy seafood paella — a cultural and culinary
feast of community becoming or, in Giorgio
Agamben’s terms, coming community.
178
Ten percent of the working-age male popula-
tion of Brazilian-Japanese reside in Japan
today and not Brazil. Significant numbers of
immigrants, legal and illegal, have arrived in
Japan, and Tokyo in particular, over the last
two decades. This is consistent with the con-
temporary pattern of transnational labor migra-
tion into global cities like Tokyo.2 The majority
of the recently arrived and established ethnic
communities in and around Tokyo today are
directly linked to the colonial history of this
global center whose urban fringes they now
inhabit: e.g., Chinese, Koreans, Malays,
Filipinos(as), Thai, Micronesian-Japanese.
While marginalized on the urbanscape of con-
temporary Japan, these communities are cen-
tral to the economic landscape. Many
Japanese who migrated to Brazil in the first
half of the 20th century were driven to leave
Japan in the hope of supporting their families
from abroad. Usually they were the sons of
struggling rural communities forced into pover-
ty by government policies that forwarded
Japan’s rapid industrialization and militariza-
tion through the heavy taxation of the agricul-
tural sector. A significant number of
Okinawans also fled to Brazil to escape tough
new land reforms imposed by the colonial
administration on Okinawa during the 1910s
and 1920s. Now, in a reverse movement,
descendants of this earlier wave of migration
are returning to Japan, in significant numbers.
How permanent this relocation will be for how
many is yet to be seen. But the pattern began
with the intent of a temporary relocation, just
as did the initiating flow to Brazil in the early
1900s.
MUCH OF THE COMPLEXITY OF
CONTEMPORARY “JAPAN” IS
MASKED BY THE EVER-PRESENT
PREFIX “POSTWAR” — THE
COLD WAR IS OVER, THE
BERLIN WALL HAS BEEN DOWN
FOR A LONG TIME NOW, BUT
JAPAN REMAINS “POSTWAR.”
The prefix effectively cuts across the historical
landscape isolating the period after 1945 from
the official policies and practices as well as
the individual and community experiences of
the war and prewar periods. The pre- and post-
prefixes also focus attention on the war as a
rupture, a gulf separating the before from the
after, an aberration. The recent work to provoke
and cultivate a postcolonial space in Japan
entangles the movement of people and the set-
tling and unsettling of communities across the
artificial divide of this historical bracketing.
The disconnectedness of the chronological
periodization of prewar, wartime, and postwar
distorts the nontemporal and nonlinear conti-
nuities and complicities of contemporary 2. See Saskia Sassen,
The Global City: New York,
encounters with Japan. Approximately London, Tokyo (Princeton:
585,000 of the 1,354,000 resident aliens Princeton University Press,
documented in Japan in 1994–95 were self- 1991).
identified as both permanent residents and as 3. Kazuaki Tezuka, “Sabetsu
members of households that resided in Japan to Kyosei no Shakai,” in
Gendai Shakaigaku series,
or its colonies prior to Japan’s defeat in vol. 15 (Tokyo: Iwanami
1945.3 The extent of population movement — Shoten, 1997), pp. 134–35.
voluntary and forced — between Japan and its
colonies has been widely unrecognized, con-
tributing to a myth of insularity and homogene-
ity. By 1937 the population of Saipan in
the Japanese Micronesian Protectorate was
96 percent Japanese and Okinawan, while
300,000 Koreans resided in Osaka in 1940,
and some 400,000 Japanese had to be repa-
triated from northeastern China at the end of
the war in 1945. We still know very little of
the interaction in daily life and the community
conditions that existed between non-Japanese
and Japanese both in Japan and in the
colonies. The histories that have been written
remain predominantly concerned with the instru-
ments of colonial rule and military expansion.
THE STORIES OF THE MUNDANE REMAIN LARGE-
LY UNTOLD, EVEN TABOO, FOR THE INTIMACY OF
THE DETAIL OF THE EVERYDAY EASILY BORDERS
ON NOSTALGIA — AN UNCOMFORTABLE EMOTION
FOR BOTH EX-COLONIZER AND POSTCOLONIAL.
EXTRAORDINARY APPETITES 179
In examining the ordinary lived experiences of
contemporar y Japan’s new immigrants, it is
necessar y to “work over” (to use Emmanuel
Levinas’s term) the in-between of Japan’s
official history of colonialism and the memo-
ries and expectations projected by Japan’s
emerging communities as these are played out
in the everyday. The extraordinariness of these
ordinary spaces and experiences has to be
contrasted with the ordinariness of the extraor-
dinary strategies of internationalization and
globalization that characterize Japan’s official
policy and its consumer markets. The popular
usage of globalization and internationalization
in ad copy and government policy has come to
stand in for the most recent manifestation of
the processes of production of “Japanese-
ness.” There has been a rapid insertion of
concepts of ethnicity and multiculturalism into
the space of the popular (fashion, television,
advertising, food, travel), and there is a grow-
ing concern that, in the staging of Japan’s
internationalization, multiculturalism and diver-
sity are functioning as a cultural landscape for
the performance of a newly tolerant Japan.
However, for the “tolerated” this is only one
more manifestation of a relationality of differ-
ence measured today, as in colonial Japan, in
degrees of proximity to “Japaneseness.” The
core assumption of calls for “the cultural diver-
sification of the Japanese” or the “becoming
multicultural of Japan” is arguably not the
elimination of difference but the transforma-
tion of the relations of difference. If the 1990s
have seen an intense multiculturalization of
both elite and popular consumer culture in
Japan, the same decade has witnessed a con-
certed move to contain and control the ethnic
diversification of the immigrant labor force.
THE EXPERIENCE OF BRAZILIAN-JAPANESE IN
JAPAN EXPOSES THE CONSTRUCTEDNESS OF
THE NOTION OF AN INTRINSIC “JAPANESENESS”
AND AT THE SAME TIME UNDERLINES THE
IMPOSSIBILITY OF “BECOMING JAPANESE.”
Invited to Japan as cheap alternative labor
because of an assumed shared ethnicity, this
extensive community now finds itself maligned
and marginalized. Popular mainstream carica-
tures of Brazilian-Japanese in Japan as messy,
noisy, and demonstrative, lovers of loud
music, smelly foods, and dancing, are the dis-
criminatory expressions of disappointment at
the difference that indeed locates this immi-
grant population in greater proximity to some
other ethnic communities than to any inherent
Japaneseness. The everyday life of Japan’s
multi-ethnic communities is kept at a safe
distance, effectively quarantined, from the
staging of a multicultural Japaneseness. We
must step into this messy, noisy, smelly space
of the ever yday in order to explore the
distance separating the image of the tolerant
Japan from the lived experiences of the
tolerated communities of established and
recent immigrant communities.
EXTRAORDINARY APPETITES 181
 It is a long way from the outdoor barbecue
where we began to the background sound of
muzak-style Brazilian beat, stylish menus, wait-
ers in Brazilian costume, and the carefully
presented small portions of mildly spiced dish-
es served on china plates to the expensively
dressed clientele of the latest Brazilian-
Japanese restaurant to open in the up-market
Roppongi district of Tokyo. The cook is actually
Japanese. The three waiters are Brazilian-
Japanese — an accountant, an engineering
student, and a bank clerk when in Brazil. It is
not so far from that barbecue to the deportation
detention area of Narita airport.
As a nation always intent on defining itself as
modern (now even postmodern), democratic,
and like — but not the same as — the West,
Japan has construed itself and Japaneseness
exclusively in the present, excluding past and
future through diverse and adaptive strategies
of forgetting (forgetting both past and future).
The “Brazilian-Japanese problem,” as it is now
referred to, is not just a problem but a crisis
in the tight weave of Japaneseness, for it
threatens an uncontainable eruption into the
present of both the past and future. In recent
Korean-Japanese, Brazilian-Japanese, and
Okinawan literature and poetry there has
emerged a new term, “not-at-homeness,” that
is offered as an alternative to the inevitability
and impossibility — the inconcongrous condition—
of the process of “becoming Japanese.”
182
In many ways the Brazilian-Japanese workers
are like the hoboes of the 1920s in the United
States described by David Lapoujade, else-
where in this volume, in his exploration of
William James’s notion of patches. They too
move from where there is no work to where
there is the possibility of work. What is fearful
for the Japanese authorities is not the move-
ment itself — for that movement is an essen-
tial product and support of the very economic
landscape it traverses — but the surplus of
intensity of movement at the local sites of
everyday practice. However, I would call these
sites not “patches”— with all the implications
of a holding together and a mending or extend-
ing of the whole — but rather a “fray.” What is
identified as a patch is already, for all the
indeterminacy that James would attribute to
the term, already patched, already implicated
and invested in the fabric of the whole “in the
making.” The patch is not a space of the
emergence of the new but a linking of the new
to the whole. Patching may foreground the
craft of the line/seam, but the seam must
finally hold and the patch is only a patch and
not a scrap if it is integrated within the whole
that is a patchwork. What constitutes the
fabric of the whole is always negotiated in the
unfolding relationality of patches and
lines/seams to the processes of being “in the
making.” This “in the making” might also be
called diplomacy, a diplomacy that manages
the “holding” in place or in proper relation (to
the whole) through processes of strategic
exclusions and inclusions.
THE “BRAZILIAN-JAPANESE”
PROBLEM IS A FRAY, ON THE
OTHER HAND, AN INTENSITY OF
MOVEMENT THAT ERUPTS
UNPREDICTABLY AND REFUSES
SUCH “HOLDING” STRATEGIES.
The movement of the fray is not a linear
movement — it is neither a movement toward
or away from anything. It is not a relational
condition but a density of “not at-homeness”
that threatens the integrity of the entire fabric
of the whole. Nor is a fray a fringe — a tolerated
marginalization, a decorative edge, an ethnic
Brazilian pattern worker hemming Kenzo’s
latest designer shirt. If it cannot be patched,
it is the beginning of the undoing of the whole
from the outside in.
The fray of the “Brazilian-Japanese problem”
threatens the invasion of past and future into
the myth of Japan’s modern, democratic pre-
sent, an unraveling of the strategies of forget-
fulness in the democratic present, at the heart
of this landscape “in the making” that is
Japaneseness. The fray cannot be occupied, it
is not a space of habitation. It is a space that
can only be exited, and the beginnings of the
exiting of the duration of the fray are per-
formed in the “approach,” the diplomacy that
may take the name of education, welfare,
wage control, immigration policy, or multicultur-
alism, but will finally begin the processes of
embedding and overlaying that draw it “into
the making.”
4. See Isabelle Stengers,
But this is a diplomacy that is distinct from
Cosmopolitiques,
that sense in which the same term is mobilized vol. 7 (Paris: La Découverte,
by Isabelle Stengers.4 For Stengers, diplomacy 1997), pp. 99–122.
embraces the processes of “calling into ques-
tion” and stepping into the fray. This engage-
ment with the fray might be likened to Levinas’s
“encounter.” Out of such an engagement with
the not-at-homeness of the fray might emerge
the potential of a Japan not-at-home with
itself — a working over of the present. But that
is the stuff of a far longer article than this.
EXTRAORDINARY APPETITES 183
185
Rather than presenting my research on underground public space and railway stations,
I would like to pose some questions that stem from my research program on pragmatism
and civil religion as related to urban experience.

RECONSIDERING
PRAGMATISM AND THE
CHICAGO SCHOOL
 ISAAC JOSEPH

MY EFFORT IS TO UNDERSTAND THE INTELLECTUAL CONNECTIONS BETWEEN

PRAGMATISM AND THE CHICAGO SCHOOL OF SOCIOLOGY, AND TO RECONSIDER
THE MEANING OF AMERICANISM FROM THAT POINT OF VIEW.

We can recall three sentences from this heritage, each of them of an intellectual order, rather
like la consigne des Lumières acknowledged by Michel Foucault:

1.
We have to grasp our time in thought (John Dewey);

2.
Social sciences are but the way to understand what newspapers are talking about (Robert Park);

3.
Our civil competences are resources to warm the world (Erving Goffman).

187
 If we agree that political theory cannot ignore
the reality and consequences of urban experi-
ence, and that urbanity and relations in public
are the ground of our judgments about the
public good and how it is managed, we should
keep these three statements in mind together.
So is there anything like a pragmatist view of
urban life and urbanity, and how would this
specific view come to terms with a problem of
contemporary big cities like immigration? In
Sarajevo or Cairo (for example) people feel
threatened by the invasion of new citizens
coming from rural backgrounds, unfamiliar with
city life and customs.
PERHAPS WE CAN LEARN FROM THE PRAGMATIST
AND CHICAGO HERITAGE TO THINK OF URBAN
CULTURE NOT AS A STATIC REALITY BUT AS A
PROCESS OF TRANSFORMATION OF EXPERIENCE
188
in which everyone must “redefine…situations,”
as William Thomas puts it in The Polish
Peasant in Europe and America (1927). This
intellectual heritage focuses on the immigrant
as a “marginal man” (outsider), treating him
as a public figure and hero of modern times
alongside the entrepreneur. In Chicago School
vocabulary, the immigrant represents not just
the “other” (or the social hero of otherness)
nor the simple fact of multiculturalism.
The social experience of migration is one of
invasion. The immigrant, like every other
citizen, is understood as an invader (in Latin,
intrus), one who finds his way in an unknown
social world (whether as a matter of chance,
experience, or a radical change in belief).
The Chicago intellectual heritage suggests that
we must attempt to understand foreigners’
behavior not by comparing it to ordinary peo-
ple’s behavior but, looking at the problem the
other way around, by studying ordinary peo-
ple’s conduct and socialization processes
through the categories of immigrant experi-
ence: observation, exploration, negotiation,
cooperation. In creating hyphenated identities,
an immigrant society has immediate social
and political consequences. And beyond this,
as Michael Walzer has pointed out with regard
to the specific contribution of American social
and urban studies — namely its construction
of the concept of socialization — ordinary social
relations may be viewed as a generalization
of the immigrant experience.
This heritage is grounded in a theory of public Second, the Chicago approach to the urban
space that differs in several ways from the world and public space is also a theatrical
one we find in Marxist approaches to the approach. We can find a basis for it in the
urban world and everyday life, exemplified, for theories of Park, Kenneth Burke, and Goffman,
instance, by the work of Henri Lefebvre and or in Deleuze’s and Peter Sloterdijk’s readings
his followers: of Friedrich Nietzsche. This approach argues
for an empty public space, a place where an
First of all, in Marxist approaches there is no
action occurs in front of an observer. (This is
room for the concept of the “stranger” as we
the minimalist definition proposed by Peter
find it in Georg Simmel’s sociology and in
Brook for theatrical space.) According to this
Park’s and Ernest Burgess’s early writings.
notion of the emptiness of public space, the
Instead, the stranger is a mixture of the for-
anthropological structure of gatherings must be
eigner and the marginal man. He is what Gilles
understood as an organization of a plurality of
Deleuze would call un personnage conceptuel.
perspectives. There is no global perspective in
As a consequence, the criticism of the urban
a railway station or in a city street, even if city
world is always grounded in an ideology of
planning or French grands travaux try to impose
“appropriation” and in strong ties of community
such axes majeurs and preferred points of view.
life (or in Lefebvre’s vocabulary, in a political
In other words, pluralism is not just the diversity
fascination with “communities of reciprocal
of private experience in confrontation with a
exaltation”). These are far from the “restrained
homogeneous public space: rather, our experi-
vital engagements” Simmel describes in the
ence of public space is structurally distributed
modern metropolis. These weaker ties are con-
throughout the “urban scene.”
gruent with another value of urban life, which is
not appropriation but accessibility and self-
exposure.

RECONSIDERING PRAGMATISM AND THE CHICAGO SCHOOL 189

 Third, the theatrical approach to public space is
consistent with microsociological studies of
distributed cognition and activity. These studies
have put emphasis on the body language
involved in public space experience. The public
domain cannot be constrained to discourse prac-
tices because, as Rosalyn Deutsche has pointed
out, it is a domain of perception and imagina-
tion. Nor is this domain an a priori realm of polit-
ical order or communication. Bodies are engaged
in real encounters and local civil norms.
IN OTHER WORDS, PUBLIC SPACE IS NOT THE
GROUND OF A LOST SOCIAL CONCRETENESS OR
PLENITUDE BUT AN ACTUAL ENVIRONMENT IN
WHICH SOCIAL LIFE IS IN THE MAKING.
It is not the device of social incorporation but
the governing idea (idée régulatrice) of actual
gatherings and encounters. Here again we are
close to John Dewey’s position as Richard
Rorty has summarized it. Democracy must be
conceived not as a lover’s kiss but as an
urban encounter.
190
One more word about invaders, invasion, and
urban ecology. Although the Chicago School
was concerned largely with the actual living
conditions of immigrants (following on the
work of the philanthropic movement and their
theme of “how the other half lives”), Park,
citing social historians Frederick Teggart and
Ludwig Gumplowicz, saw processes of migra-
tion as large catastrophes on the scale of
civilization and invasions as the consequences
of these processes. Therefore, the ecological
reading of urban issues is much more than
a convenient metaphor. In fact, it has two
practical meanings for urban research: it
explains the social experience of interactions
with the immigrant, and it is an anti-eugenic
intellectual device. The social problems and
social disorganization of ethnic neighborhoods
are not the result of ethnic backgrounds and
origins but rather the consequence of the
resources available in a specific social envi-
ronment. Ecology thus functions as a critique
of eugenics. It implies a vocabular y of
contexts that the researcher must describe
ethnographically — and Ulf Hannerz is correct
when he says that urban anthropology began
with Chicago ethnography — against a vocabu-
lary of social identities and motives.
Another consequence of the ecological
approach to space is that the competition for
space is naturalized at ever y level or scale
of urban life, that is, not only at the level of
housing and residential areas but in ever yday
interactions in the streets or subway stations.
THE COMPETITION FOR SPACE
IS NOT A PRIVATE INTEREST
PROCESS BUT A PUBLIC CONCERN Our modern “global cities” seem to embody a
parochial culture of public space with a crys-
AFFECTING EVERYDAY LIFE. tallized definition of civil norms. The develop-
Lyn Lofland has shown how urban public life
comprises a “world of strangers” and a place
where involvement and availability are at a pre-
mium. Public space is “naturally” a contested
domain, and the “mosaic” organization of
urban settlements leads to a pluralistic view of
the urban fabric as a social laboratory.
To summarize the double theoretical heritage
of urban space “in the making,” the theatrical
approach and the ecological one, we may say
that the former conceives space as empty and
the latter as full. What consequences might
we draw from this heritage for contemporary
research on metropolitan social life? And what
might we say with respect to the relationship
between pragmatism and everyday social life?
ment of mass travel and touristic rhetoric, the
conventional vocabulary of services and the
“user-centered” approach of the management
of services, have a significant consequence in
the emergence of an international civil society
that is not restricted to the domain of public
opinion but includes the various expectations
of anonymous users, for instance in places of
interchange. These civil norms that apply to
urban spaces (security and safety, cleanliness,
information, responsiveness) are at the same
time values of urban hospitality and amenities
RECONSIDERING PRAGMATISM AND THE CHICAGO SCHOOL 191
 I do not want to say much concerning the
Goffmanian approach and its relevance for the
analysis of these civil norms. His work is useful
both for the ethnographic description of interac-
tions between users and of service encounters.
It allows us to understand empirically how an
agreement is constructed in social situations
and how people manage to “warm the world,”
as Goffman puts it in the very last pages of
Frame Analysis. If we were to construct a
“pragmatist test” (to quote William James) for
civilities, we would say that they must “warm
the world,” just as the concept of God or the
Absolute for James meant that there was some-
thing like a promise in the world.
THE OPTIMISTIC FLAVOR OF
PRAGMATIST AND CHICAGO
SCHOOL WRITINGS IS RELATED
TO THE BELIEF IN THE APTITUDE
OF INDIVIDUALS TO ADJUST
AND INVENT SOCIAL NORMS IN
PROBLEM SITUATIONS.
192
Civilities, however, are but one part of our
problem because they presuppose something
we must call reciprocity, or the presumption of
equality. If we wish to figure out what a “civic
realism” for our present time might be, we
must go further and reverse Goffman’s argu-
ment: we must try to understand ceremonies
and sacred values that are sacred not only on
their face.
We should also remember that pragmatism,
far from being a philosophy of arrangement, is,
as Deleuze said, “an attempt to transform the
world, to think a new world, a new man in the
making.”1 The processual or “in the making”
quality of civilities or civicism means they
must be studied as emergent phenomena or
as things that have already undergone a
process of accomplishment. It means also
that, among the different pieces of the social
patchwork, they are working agreements that
presuppose a common belief in this world. To
quote Deleuze:
“…the Americans invented the patchwork, just
as the Swiss are said to have invented the
cuckoo clock. But to reach this point, it was
also necessary for the knowing subject, the
sole proprietor, to give way to a community of
explorers, the brothers of the archipelago, who
replace knowledge with belief, or rather with
‘confidence’ — not belief in another world, but
confidence in this one, and in man as much
as in God….Pragmatism is this double princi-
ple of archipelago and hope. And what must
the community of men consist of in order for
truth to be possible? Truth and trust.”2
For instance, we should understand the rele-
vance of the proposal made by Park, and
before him by Georg Simmel, to study social
relations as social distances. If we conceive
of urbanity in terms of distances rather than
differences, we accept James’s precept to see
the “ambulatory” side of things rather than
their “saltatory” side. Namely, we must keep
in mind “the pieces of intermediary experi-
ences” that constitute, for instance, migrant
experiences or experiences of “the other.”
That means we should pay attention to hesita-
tions (as Gabriel Tarde and Deleuze define
them: as infinitesimal social oppositions)
instead of crude oppositions between social-
ization and desocialization. And we should
also pay attention to spacing (espacement)
rather than space. Difference is something
that opposes places (lieux) to so-called non-
places (non-lieux). The actual experience of
space, for instance in a railway station, is
made up of continuities and thresholds mixed
with discontinuities.
1. “…une des tentatives pour
transformer le monde, et pour
penser une nouveau monde,
un nouvel homme en tant
qu’ils se font.” Gilles Deleuze,
Critique et clinique (Paris: Les
Editions de Minuit, 1993),
p. 110. Italics in original.
Translated slightly differently
in Gilles Deleuze, Essays
Critical and Clinical
(Minneapolis: University of
Minnesota Press, 1997), p.
86.
2. Ibid., pp. 86–87.
What kind of civic culture can we imagine for a
world “en processus, en archipel”? To under-
stand public issues from an urban perspective,
we should try to fill the gap between a microso-
ciological approach to the civilities of everyday
life and the ecology of civicism. For instance,
we should try to understand what the spatial
and material conditions of a gathering in a rail-
way station or subway are. Accessibility, from
this perspective, is a realistic value and means
very different things. Among them are ordinary
feelings — for example, the basic trust of pas-
sengers on a subway. Accessibility is a realistic
value because it indicates what the “affor-
dances” (to use James J. Gibson’s term) of an
urban place are, and at the same time it
emphasizes the visibility and exposure of par-
ticipants. These “intermediary experiences” of
civicism fill the gap between visual affordances
in practice and the abstract notion of public
good, visibility, and observability; between
practical conditions and the abstract notion of
public space; and between the availability and
responsiveness of a “street-level bureaucrat”
(as Michael Lipsky puts it) and the abstract
notion of public service.
RECONSIDERING PRAGMATISM 193
But if we want to understand a gathering in
the making, the emergence of a gathering, we
must be realistic in another sense as well and
take into account the consequences of the
“plurality of explorations”: the tension between
agreements and disagreements. This amounts
to more than simply Goffmanian “civil inatten-
tion.” It involves the overcoming of misunder-
standings and a deference to a public good
that is not the same thing as a common good.
As John Dewey defines it, the public presup-
poses the political sense of mésentente.3
Dewey writes, “It is not without significance
that etymologically ‘private’ is defined in oppo-
sition to ‘official,’ a private person being one
deprived of public position. The public consists
of all those who are affected by the indirect
OF COURSE, THIS WAY OF
THINKING ABOUT POLITICS
AND PUBLIC PROBLEMS IS FAR
FROM THE THEORIES OF
POLITICAL ARENAS CONCEIVED
AS CHAMPS DE FORCES OR
PRODUCTION ARENAS BUILT ON
ECONOMIC MODELS WHERE
CITIZENS ARE BUT ALIENATED
CONSUMERS.
I do not think we should be afraid of the col-
3. I borrow this term from
lapse of the so-called philosophy of suspicion Jacques Rancière. His book
(philosophie du soupçon) as long as we are La Mésentente: politique et

consequences of transactions to such an concerned by the consequences of actions. It philosophie (Paris: Galilée,
1995) is translated as
extent that it is deemed necessary to have is no worse to pay attention to the conse- Disagreement: Politics and
those consequences systematically cared for. quences of an action than to be suspicious Philosophy (Minneapolis:

Officials are those who look for and take care
of the interests thus affected.”4 Further,
“Indirect, extensive, enduring and serious con-
sequences of conjoint and interacting behavior
call a public into existence having a common
about its motives. Moreover, the suspicious
interpretation is not the privilege of the social
scientist or political theorist but the social
competence of everyone. Nor should we be
afraid of the word opportunism, which defined
University of Minnesota Press,
1999).
4. John Dewey, The Public and
Its Problems (Athens, Ohio:
Swallow Press, 1991 [1927]),
pp. 15–16.

interest in controlling these consequences.”5
pragmatism for Peirce. Methodical oppor- 5. Ibid., p. 126.
tunism is an ordinary way of thinking and act-
ing to solve problems in their contexts. It is a
relevant description of the way people act and
move in a street or railway station.

The pragmatist heritage can help us assuage

our doubts about “speaking on our own
behalf” (parler pour son propre compte) and
still ask questions about the role ordinary peo-
ple play as “officials” within the public
domain. Agreements and disagreements are
not just characteristics of exchanges in the
marketplace, but actual experiences. This is
so for anyone who takes responsibility for his
or her own actions.

RECONSIDERING PRAGMATISM AND THE CHICAGO SCHOOL 195

 WHAT DO
YOUNG ARTISTS
MARTHA ROSLER WANT?

196
Cultural trends that have been identified and analyzed
for a long time appear to have reached a certain
“tipping point,” presenting, in effect, a new paradigm.
I will confine my attention to art-world artists, and
ultimately to young artists and art students. The ways
in which modernist artists used to determine their
direction had already collapsed by the beginning of the
1960s. The decline of the Kantian paradigm and its
assumption of transcendence as the lodestar of art
production coincided with the increasing impossibility
of identifying with the working class or even with craft
values. In its primary successor, Pop, the social
“landscape” (non- or anti-transcendent) became the
field of attention and the source of material for artists.
The encounter with popular and mass culture was
accompanied by the application of their indigenous
criteria, especially celebrity culture and the search for
a mass audience. The latter longing was destined to
remain unrequited, but the fear and envy of artists
for mass culture’s power and reach have remained,
as I elaborate below.

197
 Artists, a subculture in close alliance with
poets, writers, filmmakers, dancers, theater
people, and musicians, also looked for autono-
my from the system that appeared to trap
them in producing commodities for the well-to-
do. By the mid-1960s artists had refurbished
a rationalist tradition handily traceable to
Marcel Duchamp. At the same time, in New
York City, Fluxus was reviving the (European)
Dadaist efforts to bring art into everyday life,
not as a kind of leveling of high and low, but
as a way of revolutionizing the practices of
everyday life. In other words, the idea was not
to free art of its social connection, to flatten
the meaning of art into a sort of technical
exercise or fun experience, but to challenge
the institutionalization of top-down power and
control in society and bring about liberation —
of art and society.
ARTISTS TRIED TO SCALE DOWN ART’S CON-
CERNS FROM THE GRANDIOSE AND UNIVERSAL-
IZING AMBITIONS PRESUMED TO UNDERLIE
ABSTRACT EXPRESSIONISM TO AN ENGAGEMENT
WITH THE CULTURE AND PRACTICES OF EVERY-
DAY LIFE. BUT THIS TOOK DIVERGENT FORMS.
198
It depended partly on whether the avant-gardes
in question were influenced by John Cage and
the interpretations of Zen his practice invoked.
Unlike, say, the tendencies of Pop art, particu-
larly Warhol’s, this Cagean moment smuggled
a kind of transcendence in by the back door,
and it certainly muted or erased the notion of
the revolutionary transformation of everyday
life suggested by the earlier Dadaists. On the
one hand, then, there was a kind of Cagean
quietism and search for a phenomenological
gateway to the Absolute, and on the other
there was a kind of ruckus-raising that would
challenge the dominance of a soul- and spirit-
deadening bourgeois culture.
Artists still tended to harbor a sense of social
mission, if not messianism, and many artists
wanted their art to offer a form of resistance
to the war in Southeast Asia, even if not neces-
sarily as a direct engagement with politics.
Although some ar tists did seek such an
engagement, many more were of the mind that
the practices or even simply the forms and
actions that characterized or constituted every-
day life provided a more important grounding.
Social critique was as likely to be embedded in
a rethinking of representation and its formal
means as it was to engage abstract and univer-
salizing theorizing on the one hand or agitprop
or social critique on the other. The wide delegit-
imation of social authorities and institutions of
governance, the application of the celebrity par-
adigm to art and many other elements of pub-
lic life, the new social movements that led to
the nascence of identity politics, the assertion
and redefinition of the artist’s own identity
together with a search for autonomy through
the founding of new artist-run institutions all
helped to provide sources of direction other
than Hegelian negation or Kantian transcen-
dence through the end of the 1970s.
But the picture changed at the start of the
1980s, when the booming economies of the
United States, Germany, and Japan began gen-
erating tremendous art sales, allowing dealers
to reassert control over the system of produc-
tion, distribution, and publicity. This effectively
put an end to the consensus among art-world
artists that autonomy of their work from com-
modity status was their driving issue. The
state had already begun chipping away quite
determinedly at the funding system that
helped maintain the artist-run, nonprofit
“spaces” that allowed artists to experiment
with performance, installation, video, and
other apparently uncapitalizable forms.
BUT THE DISQUIET THAT ARTISTS FELT WITH
RESPECT TO THE MASS MEDIA SINCE THE DIS-
APPEARANCE OF THE TRANSCENDENCE PARA-
DIGM WAS ONLY EXACERBATED BY THE SUB-
SUMPTION OF ART CAREERS UNDER THE MASS-
MEDIA MODEL, FOR IN THE APPARENTLY DECI-
SIVE ISSUE OF AUDIENCE REACH, THE ART
WORLD WAS REVEALED AS INSIGNIFICANT.
(See Alvin Gouldner on the envy of artists for
the prepotent means of production and distrib-
ution of the mass media.) I stubbornly believe
that despite this, the reach of art-world art
extends beyond its primary audience. This is
so for the simple reason that its audience
includes the elites and shapers of a wide array
of social institutions. Besides, artists have
quite consistently been propelled by the belief
that they are a cadre, a social avant-garde
(even if one can hardly define, let alone identi-
fy, this vague entity of the avant-garde any
longer). The alternative self-definition of artists
as mere bearers of stylistic newness is largely
unacceptable. Very recently, the last mode of
production that allowed artists to set aside a
field of operation exempt from commodity val-
ues and still answering to the communicative
paradigm — namely video — has become the
signature commodity of the era, in the form of
video installation.
WHAT DO YOUNG ARTISTS WANT? 199
 Artists still believe they have a privileged role,
but its outlines and demands are not so
apparent. Part of the self-definition of many
young artists remains some degree of identifi-
cation with social losers and marginal or
oppressed groups, reflecting their own feelings
of disempowerment. At the least, young artists
tend to see themselves as disaffected chal-
lengers to the power institutions of society.
The young artists I teach do not seek to join
the dot-com generation. But by and large they,
like many other young people, are not interest-
ed in macro-level power relations. Thanks in
part to the banalization of existence as pre-
sented by the mass media and advertising,
they hardly perceive the outlines of power in
the world outside the everyday. They do not
read the newspaper — that is already an old
story. At a get-together with a French acquain-
tance who is a professor of art and a Spanish
curator, we all agreed that this was so; but it
was the opinion of my French friend that young
people are afraid of the newspaper because it
puts demands on them — interrupts their train
of thought, if not their passivity, in the face of
a world beyond their own direct experience.
But what surprised me was that my students
do not, contrary to the mantra of youthful
intellectual sloth, get their news from televi-
sion. They don’t “get the news” from anywhere
and appear surprised by the question. Turning
inward, they appear to want to reconstitute a
form of bohemia, by default. But it no longer
seems fashionable to identify as (punk) musi-
cians. Tattooing and other forms of bodily dis-
play have become mainstream and suburban,
engaged in by teenyboppers, so a core identity
cannot be assembled around it.
200
Many young artists say they want to make art
about everyday life. It shows in the automatic-
camera style of photographs of daily life, a
cross between, say, Nan Goldin and Richard
Billingham or Nick Waplington, in the popularity
of Wolfgang Tillmans. But this kind of work is
vaguely mysterious if it does not have a sensa-
tional and voyeuristic core to reveal — say, the
hidden life of subcultures or drunken council
house dwellers — but rather seems to be ordi-
nary scenes of nothing much. (But voyeurism
is very much in vogue again, as is abjection.)
THE DISAPPEARANCE OF
NARRATIVE THAT SEEMS TO
GO HAND IN HAND WITH THE
FLATTENING OF EXPERIENCE,
THE FOREGROUNDING OF THE
BANAL, AND THE WINKING OF
THE MEDIA TOWARD INFANTILE
SELF-INVOLVEMENT LEAVES
PEOPLE UNCERTAIN ABOUT
WHAT IT IS THEY ARE BUSILY
REPRESENTING.
Along with this muzziness goes a startling
degree of inarticulateness, even in the young
artists who are currently doing quite well in
New York commercial galleries.
The lack of a conceptual framework is trace-
able in part to the loss of social goals and
ideals, to the loss of the very notion of histori-
cal telos or the lumpiness of the course of
human history. Did I say history? The students
are busy learning how to construct a persona
and manage it. The stability of representation
is undermined by a general sense of horizon-
lessness, not to mention the brute fact of the
manipulability of images, their radical dissocia-
tion from their base in “the real.” Several
times I have run across artists who have
decided to photograph their faces every single
day, forever. (Two are my students. I received
a printed booklet of such images by someone
else in the mail the other day, and I have seen
other, similar projects.) I suspect their obses-
sion centers on the fact that they no longer
have any idea what the role of the portrait
might be. (Photographic) portraiture has
moved from the encounter of a social self with
an internal vision of eternity to a disclosure, or
controlled disclosure, of an essential self, to
the management of the image of the atomized
individual I mentioned earlier who is engaged
in that labor I mentioned earlier of constant
self-construction and management. The dra-
maturgical theory of the performance of the
everyday is fully in play, but in addition, artists
are now referred to as entrepreneurs, and
thus the identity under constant construction
is an entrepreneurial one.
ARTISTS ARE INCREASINGLY
DIVIDED FROM ONE ANOTHER
BY THE COMPETITION OF
ALL AGAINST ALL AND THE
NEED TO SEEK LEGITIMATION
FROM THOSE OUTSIDE THAT
COMMUNITY OF PRODUCERS.
To avoid seeing themselves as “content
providers” operating off a particular “platform”
(or perhaps as merely engines of blank fash-
ion) some seek an external touchstone in a
neoformalism without a notion of the
Sublime — not moving very far from content
provision after all — or in a madly hypostatized
imagery of a wild Beauty that might be able to
evade unidimensionality. The obsessional
aspect is also expressed in a project I saw
reported in the Times the other day: Someone
attached a camera to his dashboard and
rigged it to take a photo every set number of
minutes as he drove from New York to
California. But unlike the similar conceptual
projects of thirty years ago, there was no
thought of confronting the mechanical nature
of the apparatus or the relationship to time or
even the aleatory dimension of the project.
There is no invocation of banality or the plain-
ness of everyday life. Instead, the driver took
a picture of the Statue of Liberty at one end
and the Golden Gate Bridge at the other, both
on foot, establishing that the idea of the pro-
ject was to show the inexpressible majesty of
the United States of America — the Sublime
without sublimity. The apparatus becomes the
acceptable mechanism for the inability to
make a choice other than replicating the princi-
ple of television, namely flow.
WHAT DO YOUNG ARTISTS WANT? 201
 Despite the forgoing observations, I have dis-
covered that my students are fascinated by the
introduction of even a mildly abstract and criti-
cal vocabulary. Even more importantly, you are
saying, what about the young people in Seattle
and Washington, D.C.? What about the anti-
sweatshop and the fair trade movements?
What about the high school gay-straight
alliances? What indeed? Students have been
enormously receptive to these issues, and mine
seemed excited to see a series of videotapes
made about the anti-WTO demonstrations in
Seattle. The burden of social meaning has been
so burned out of the familiar, long-standing
issues passed along to them that they are not
even hostile to the idea of organized labor; not
even the stigmatizations remain. (Several peo-
ple in different classes wept when I showed
Barbara Kopple’s 1986 film about a Kentucky
miners’ strike, Harlan County, U.S.A, not to
mention Michael Wilson, Paul Biberman, and
Paul Jarrico’s 1954 Salt of the Earth.) But
reports from Seattle and Washington from
movement veterans have been that the very
active young people who took part are enacting
democracy in the streets, operating in small,
often ad hoc groupings, some making tactics up
as they go along, although I don’t want to
underplay the degree of advance strategic
preparations. The demonstrations are orga-
nized, and people attend, without a core of
speeches or marches or meetings around which
those demonstrations occur.
202
To return to the question of (young) artists,
their involvement with questions of the every-
day reflects an almost Foucauldian vision of
the multiple links or networks of power
between individuals, groups, or collectives and
the State. It is oriented, though inarticulately,
to the whole field of practices that structure
human activity. The political rationality of
neoliberalism seems to work simultaneously in
an individualizing and totalizing manner. The
regulatory mode of even the most banal ele-
ments of life in the built environment is a sub-
ject of artists’ vision, although it still appears
that the landscape of power can occasionally
be inhabited by a collective or transitory group-
ing of people directly challenging or contesting
the operation of power. Then the terrain in
view in the phenomenological field shifts
toward a picture that seems on the surface to
be more like that which animated my own
activism, but may be based on different
premises entirely. I have a strange feeling of
disconnect from these students, a feeling of a
radically different center of engagement,
unlike anything I have felt before.
SHORT PRESENTATION
ON EVERYDAY LIFES TA N L E Y A R O N O W I T Z
The imagination is seized by events, and we TRACING THE CHANGES IN THE CHARACTER OF
measure histor y by them. We read in our
LIVED EXPERIENCE, THE RELATION OF REIFIED
newspapers that in Seattle more than 50,000
demonstrators marched against the calumnies FRAMEWORKS TO “SUBJECTIVE” TIME (WHERE
of the World Bank and the International SUBJECTIVE IS NOT REGARDED AS INDIVIDUAL
Monetary Fund; we debate the wave of gradu- EXPERIENCE BUT AS FELT OR FROZEN COLLEC-
ate assistants’ union organizing; we fret about
TIVE LIFE) REMAINS, DESPITE THE WORK OF
assassinations of unarmed immigrant blacks
in New York. But the underpinnings of life — the HEIDEGGER, LEFEBVRE, DE CERTEAU, AND
routines of buying, cooking, and eating, even GOFFMAN, THE GLARING ABSENCE IN SOCIAL
the time sequences that constitute labor — are THEORY AND SOCIAL INQUIRY.
taken for granted and systematically forgotten
and, more egregiously, regarded as unworthy
of examination save by journalists who, it may
be argued, remind us that the devil of life is in
the details. Or, if the quotidian is investigated by
professional academic observers, its elements
are subsumed within other frameworks. These
frameworks — “consumer society,” youth,
“violence,” labor outcomes like productivity or
capital accumulation, and so forth — mask lived
experience or what Bergson termed durée.

205
 To face the utter banality of the everyday, its
anonymity and repetitions, is to face real life.
It brings to us recognition that, for the most
part, the preponderance of daily practices are
forgettable and, like the woman in the dunes
who tries to dig out of mounds of sand every
day, we must face the dishes. There is no end
to routine. We prefer to plot our lives in terms
of its highlights — graduations, first-time sex,
weddings, funerals, or the accidental and con-
tingent incidents, the differences by which we
mark and periodize our own trajectories.
Of course, as second-wave feminists have bit-
terly pointed out to men, even in our relatively
sophisticated and liberated culture, men
remain, for the most part, immune from these
considerations except when they take on the
mantle of criticism, quite a different activity
from everyday care — changing diapers, wash-
ing clothes, and being ever vigilant about our
children’s natural inclination to get into harm’s
way. And notwithstanding more than a genera-
tion of harping and some male accommoda-
tion to the demand to share housework and
childcare, in an era when a majority of women
hold full-time jobs out of the home, everyday
life remains part of women’s work. For women
the time of respite is almost nil, unless one is
fortunate enough to have money to contract
many of these tasks to others.
206
For me, the most important respite comes
with my frequent walks, sometimes to school
or another destination, which frame the utter
boredom associated with traversing the same
space over and over. Sometimes I walk to new
places. As a native New Yorker I find few of
them in Manhattan, except those created by
the ongoing reduction of ordinary living spaces
by the building boom oriented, in the main, to
the wealthy and becoming wealthy. My “pro-
ject” is to chronicle, at least in my mind, the
changes that development has wrought. I note
the closing of a favorite store, usually a bak-
ery or butcher shop, and, in lower Manhattan,
keep track of the gallery closings and their
replacement by the steady accumulation of
boutiques housed usually in enormous
spaces; or of the appearance of Starbucks
and other coffee bars that litter the blocks
where once small factories were surrounded
by tenements and are now the homes of
upscale magazines, commercial art studios,
and book publishers. Below Fourteenth Street
the tenements remain, on the East Side and
even in the south Village, but they are populat-
ed by fledgling cadres of Wall Street brokerage
houses, commercial artists, writers, and edi-
tors who have crowded out the former working-
class residents, not only the vanishing Puerto
Ricans but the Ukrainians and Poles, the rem-
nants of whom still are visible in the form of
venerable institutions such as the National
Homes and ethnic restaurants. But the latter
have acquired a new clientele.
IN THE “PRAGMATIC” CITY, THE
BOTTOM LINE RULES AS NEVER
BEFORE.
To one who has lived in this town most of his
life, it remains hard to remember what it once
looked like. Towers and renovated buildings
abound where once regular people lived. The
“rootless cosmopolitan” need no longer book
airline or train tickets; she may stay in the city,
sipping an overpriced caffe latte in a chain cof-
fee bar while witnessing her landscape vanish
before her eyes in silent homage to the power
of capital to obliterate the past, to remake his-
tory in the image of an ever-changing future.
Under these circumstances the main health
hazard is vertigo. And despite the apparent
diversity of the city, with all of its newcomers —
most of them transient — in Manhattan the
main social disease is growing social and cul-
tural homogeneity, which, if we accept the
genetic prohibition against incest, will eventu-
ally render us a little slow. To relieve the bore-
dom we grope for the exotic in our foods, pre-
tend to be hip in the simulated cafe scene,
but it is bereft of the intellectual debate and
artistic community that accompanied the real
thing. Rather, we are surrounded by impres-
sionist and abstract expressionist prints that
adorn the walls of our watering holes, and just
plain ad designs framed as high art. It is more
likely for a couple of day traders to inhabit
these venues, eating their goat cheese sand-
wiches on six-grain bread, than to spot margin-
als scribbling their poetry or novel.
Then there are the endless tourist buses
roaming the little island. These days most out-
of-towners do not gawk; they seem in a hurry
to get it over with. When they walk the streets
they wear international clothes and their hair
no longer has that foreign look since local hair-
dressers have mastered many styles. In fact,
if you don’t pay attention to the invariant map
and camera, the tourist’s only distinguishing
feature is his language, which admittedly gives
some flavor to the streets.
Then it’s back home to the laundry, all the
while reading the newspaper for stories
missed at breakfast. There is the inevitable
flurry of telephone calls, most of them from
friends trying to arrange lunch meetings or stu-
dents asking for recommendations. More and
more frequently I pine for somewhere else,
away from the profound sense that I have lost
my city, mourn the feeling that it has become
a vast real estate enterprise and construction
site. But I am just as inevitably sobered by the
realization that only another recession can halt
the relentless drive for “development,” or
another crime wave — not the killings of outer-
borough livery cab drivers, nobody will move
because of their fate, but a Manhattan
wave — so that New Jersey and Westchester
parents can no longer say, with a sigh of relief,
they no longer worry about their kids living and
roaming Manhattan. Then I realize I really
don’t want even a media-manufactured crime
wave. My own kid roams the city.
SHORT PRESENTATION ON EVERYDAY LIFE 207
 IT HAPPENS EVERYDAY
MARSHALL BERMAN

208
MY CENTRAL POINT OF REFERENCE WILL BE JANE JACOBS’S BREAKTHROUGH
BOOK, THE DEATH AND LIFE OF GREAT AMERICAN CITIES. THE PARTICULAR
JACOBSEAN THEME I WANT TO FOCUS ON IS THE ROMANCE OF “EVERYDAY LIFE.”
I’M GOING TO TRY TO PLACE JACOBS’S VERSION OF THAT ROMANCE IN A LARGER
INTELLECTUAL CONTEXT. I’LL ALSO BE REFERRING TO A FILM, A NOVEL, AND A
SONG; BUT EVEN WHEN JACOBS ISN’T ONSTAGE, SHE WILL BE THE STAR.

The first chapter in my story belongs to the

philosopher Martin Heidegger. For decades
people have noticed affinities between prag-
matism and existentialism. Both kinds of
thinkers look at human experience freshly and
directly, without any metaphysical assumptions
about what it means. But different thinkers
see different things.
AMONG PRAG AND EX THINKERS, HEIDEGGER
IS PROBABLY THE ONE WHOSE STATURE IS
HIGHEST TODAY, AND THIS GIVES AN EXTRA
RESONANCE TO ALL HE SAYS. LOOKING AT
EVERYDAY CITY LIFE, HE DOESN’T SEE MUCH;
OR RATHER, HE SEES A PROSPECT THAT IS
BOTH BARREN AND THREATENING.

209

1. Martin Heidegger, Being
and Time (New York: Harper,
1962), pp. 164–65.
I’m going to quote a highly evocative passage
from his masterpiece, Being and Time (1926).
When I use the expression “the ‘they,’” this is
a rather clunky translation of a central
Heideggerian term, das Mann.
“…In the environment that lies closest to us,
the public environment [where we] utilize pub-
lic means of transport, and make use of infor-
mation services like newspapers, every other
is like the next. This being-with-one-another
dissolves one’s own being into the being of
others…[Here] the real dictatorship of the
‘they’ is unfolded. We take pleasure as ‘they’
take pleasure…we find shocking what ‘they’
find shocking. The ‘they,’ which is nothing defi-
nite, and which includes everyone, prescribes
everyday being.
“The ‘they’ has its own ways in which to be. It
maintains itself in averageness…it keeps
watch over everything exceptional…everything
that’s primordial gets glossed over…This
leads to the leveling down of the possibilities
of being. Distancing, averageness, and leveling
down constitute the ways of Being that we
know as the public world.”1
Heidegger here is attacking group pressures
and social conformity and their power to crush
the individual. He is working in a vein that
was opened up by 19th-century liberals like
Alexis de Tocqueville and John Stuart Mill.
(Of course, he would rather die than give any
credit to thinkers who were not only liberal but
non-German.) When he talks about “the dicta-
torship of the ‘they,’” he is on to something
real that most of us can surely recognize. But
then it all gets tangled up in right-wing clichés
about the repulsiveness of the city, of the
masses, of democracy. His exceptional individ-
uals are so frail and fragile that they can be
destroyed by everyday life: not only by physical
contact with ordinary people, as on a bus or
train, but even by sharing their language, in
books or newspapers, or on radio. And it does-
n’t even matter what ordinary people are say-
ing or doing. They are malignant, destructive to
true being, just by being there. Heidegger’s pre-
Nazi sensibility grows out of a burning desire to
confront everyday life, mixed up with a naked
terror of this life. I don’t think much of the way
he dealt with these contradictions, but at least
in his pre-Nazi years, he expressed them with
poetic vividness and intensity.

I have cited the section above because, for

Heidegger, it is unusually concrete. I am
struck by his focus on public transportation.

TO BE AN EVERYDAY PASSENGER IN A MASS

TRANSIT SYSTEM — ONE OF THE MOST WIDELY
SHARED IDENTITIES IN THE MODERN WORLD —
WHY SHOULD THIS REPRESENT “A LEVELING
DOWN OF THE POSSIBILITIES OF BEING”?

210
As the proud holder of a Metrocard, I feel this
feeling is radically wrong — that anyone who
can think this is missing something big. Now,
how can I explain how it’s wrong? Where can
I find images of the way the identity of a
passenger in mass transit can actually repre-
sent a leveling up of the possibilities of being?
But it occurs to me that this is exactly what
happens in one of my all-time fave movies,
Frank Capra’s (and screenwriter Robert
Riskin’s) romantic comedy It Happened One
Night, released in 1934.
I AM THINKING ABOUT A SCENE
IN THAT MOVIE IN WHICH A
CROWDED, GRUNGY BUS IS A
MEDIUM FOR BILDUNG, A
PLACE WHERE YOU CAN LEARN
TO BE A HUMAN BEING.
In this scene one gets a feeling for the bus’s
spontaneous sweetness and joie de vivre and
its unexpected community. Leading up to it is
a hopelessly complex plot. I’ll only tell a little.
The bus is on the road from Miami to New
York. Claudette Colbert is an heiress who has
run away from her billionaire family, but she
still treats people as servants to be ordered
around. When the bus makes a brief stop, she
says she will be late and tells the driver to
wait for her. She is indignant when he fails to
wait and instead leaves according to his
schedule . (So in the scene I’m referring to,
she is on her second bus of the day.) Then,
in the terminal, she puts her bag down without
realizing she has to watch it, and it gets
ripped off with all her money. She’s broke and
in trouble, but doesn’t know how to ask for
help, or to stand in line, or to say please.
(You might even say she’s had a Heideggerian
upbringing. Of course, Capra and Riskin don’t
say anything like this. But if somebody were to
read them the above passage from Being and
Time, you can bet they would understand.)
Clark Gable, a plebeian and a seedy reporter,
falls for her at once (as we all do), and calls
her a spoiled brat, and it’s clear he’s right.
But she says that all her life she has been
powerless: always surrounded by chaperones
and bodyguards, never free to choose her
clothes, budget her money, arrange her time,
or even walk around in the street; and it’s
clear she’s right too. She has been brought up
as a hot property, but she has never had the
freedom to possess herself. The audience can
see her yearning to belong to what the early
19th and the late 20th century called “civil
society”: a world full of people who are sleazy
and mundane, but lively and interesting, who
affirm themselves and their own basic rights,
but also who recognize each other’s. Some
people call this democracy.
Capra folds the perennial romantic question,
whether the stars can walk off in each other’s
arms, into a larger political question: whether
America, so full of beauty and vitality but torn
by class difference and strife and hate, can
become a civil society. We are meant to see
the bus trip as both a political and existential
trial for America, although its moral serious-
ness is unadvertised and drenched in wise-
cracks and charm. In the scene I’ve been
referring to, as Colbert sings along, she pass-
es the test, precisely because she’s forgotten
that it is a test. She joins in the song, but
feels no need to take the lead, and thus
shows that she can be comfortable as an ordi-
nary citizen, as one of many everyday people.
IT HAPPENS EVERY DAY 211
 And what about that sad and silly song, a
song that could just as well be called “I’m
Proud to Be a Loser”? As they sing, this bunch
of total strangers, all involved in their own sep-
arate projects, come together spontaneously
to form an unexpected but real community.
Their social contract is Capra’s deeper political
theme. Here he achieves imaginatively just
what the New Deal was trying to do politically.
You could say that both are triumphs of North
American magic realism.
ONE NIGHT ALSO MAKES A LEAP IN URBAN
CULTURE: IT SHOWS US HOW PUBLIC TRANSIT CAN
SYMBOLIZE PUBLIC LIFE, A LIFE THAT ENABLES
PEOPLE TO GROW, SEPARATELY AND TOGETHER,
AND TO MUTUALLY RECOGNIZE EACH OTHER;
AND THAT LEVELS UP THE POSSIBILITIES OF BEING.
class, Robert Moses was the most flamboyant
and maybe the most avidly malevolent.
(“You’ve got to hack your way through with a
meat ax,” about the Bronx.) But his outlook on
the world was typical rather than original. It
was positively Heideggerian in its disdain for
city life, in its belief that urban crowds and
noise were a leveling down of being, in its
search for clean, low-density environments
where the self could spread out and become
itself again. Moses was famous for his seduc-
tive brochures, for his power to deploy a lyrical
language of “great ideals.” He fought to
replace the 19th-century “man in the street”
with a 20th-century “man in the car,” not so
much for the sake of economic efficiency, but
rather in the name of human fulfillment.

The New Deal was one of the supreme cre-

ative moments in American history. But it
unfolded in contradictory ways. It gave new
powers to the people, but it also immensely
expanded the power of the national state. As
the state enlarged, a new class of federal
bureaucrats emerged to run it. Most of these
men came from cities, but they developed
grand designs — especially the design of the
1940s war economy and the Cold War-era fed-
eral highway system — that dissolved public
transit systems and made cities themselves
increasingly peripheral and expendable. In this

212
AMERICA HAS BEEN EMBRACED BY A RIBBON OF ENDLESS HIGHWAYS FOR
ALMOST FIFTY YEARS. IT WOULD BE SILLY NOT TO SEE THAT PLENTY OF PEOPLE
HAVE FELT FULFILLED ON THOSE GROUNDS. BUT IT’S ALSO IMPORTANT TO SEE
WHAT THE EXPRESSWAY WORLD HAS DONE TO THE FORM OF PUBLIC SPACE THAT
CAPRA WAS CELEBRATING, WHERE CLAUDETTE COLBERT COULD BECOME A
HUMAN BEING. ALL OVER AMERICA, IT HAS VIRTUALLY DISAPPEARED. HALF A
CENTURY AGO, THAT BUS WAS CLOSE TO MOST AMERICANS’ EVERYDAY LIFE.
When Jane Jacobs’s great book came along in But there are occlusions in her vision that
1961, one of the keys to its instant allure was even readers who love her can’t help but see.
its appreciation of city life in ways that were Are there really no personal or social conflicts
both pragmatic and existential. Many people on this block? No larcenies or adulteries? No
understood the intellectual importance of husbands beating up their wives, no couples
“being-there,” but didn’t have a public language splitting up, kids turning into dope fiends, fam-
that could enable them to be there where they ilies defaulting on their mortgages, tenants
really were, in the places where their real lives losing their jobs and failing to make the rent?
went on. What Jacobs did, above all, was to No people quietly or noisily going crazy? (And
give us a language to appropriate our own other people mad at them because people
experience. As she sits on her front stoop and going crazy don’t keep up their houses?) Isn’t
watches life go by, she seems to embrace the there more than enough class hatred, religious
world. Baudelaire said the modern artist should hatred, ethnic hatred to go around? Aren’t
épouser la foule; Jacobs may be the first per- plenty of Jacobs’s neighbors seething with stu-
son to have married her own block. That block pid prejudices against each other? Isn’t the
was Hudson Street in the West Village. It is a block full of people who would love to knock
toney street today, after three decades of gentri- each other’s block off? And isn’t everybody on
fication, but it was pretty grungy forty years ago, the block caught up in the leaps and lurches
and Robert Moses, then head of the Mayor’s of a real estate market that can make success
Commission on Slum Clearance — Moses had more dangerous than failure?
many jobs in those days — had put it on a list
to be torn down. Death and Life features a JACOBS’S VISION SEEMED SO DIRECT AND
spectacular set-piece consisting of 24 hours in
STRAIGHTFORWARD FORTY YEARS AGO. TODAY,
the life of her block, from the familiar sounds
that wake her up before dawn to the mysteri- WE’VE GOT TO WONDER, IS THIS PRAGMATISM
ous sounds (who’s playing the trumpet? who OR PASTORAL? IS IT DIRECT EXPERIENCE OF
was that crying?) that put her to sleep in the CITY LIFE OR A GRID OF PRESCRIBED HAPPY
middle of the night. She opens up a kind of
MEANINGS FORCIBLY IMPOSED ON CITY LIFE?
cross-section of her life, life with a husband,
children, friends, taking care of people and
things from hour to hour. She encounters
people she knows and those she doesn’t, she
mixes real and imagined neighbors, she lives in
layers, she drifts in and out of dreams. It’s also
hard to know how much modern fiction Jacobs
had read, but her trip through a day is written
with an imaginative brilliance that evokes James
Joyce and Virginia Woolf. It’s hard to know how
many movies Jacobs had gone to, but she man-
ages to create a street with an aura like Frank
Capra’s bus: an anonymous site that people
walk on by, but that fulfills the need for roots
and makes people existentially at home.
Jacobs’s urban vision contributes to pragma-
tism, to what I call North American magic real-
IT HAPPENS EVERY DAY 215
ism, and to participatory democracy.
 It evokes the British romance of civil society in
the 1840s, where everything fit together magi-
cally, and a whole world of real trouble that
didn’t fit was simply left out. (Not just Marx
and Engels, but also Charles Dickens, the
Brontë sisters, Thomas Carlyle, Matthew
Arnold, John Stuart Mill, William Morris, creat-
ed their works inside the great gulf between
the romance of civil society and the epoch’s
troubled real life.) In one of her great pas-
sages, Jacobs writes,
“Under the seeming disorder of the old
city…is a marvelous order for maintaining the
safety of the streets and the freedom of the
city. It is a complex order…all composed of
2. Jane Jacobs, The Death movement and change, and although it is life,
and Life of Great American
Cities (New York: Vintage, not art, we may fancifully call it the art form of
1961), p. 50. the city and liken it to the dance.”2
I still think it’s true, and inspired. But if “the
art form of the city” is going to thrive, it has
got to incorporate a lot more of the awful truth.
216
I haven’t been able to find out whether Jacobs
and Grace Paley were friends, or if they
worked together politically, in their West Village
glory days forty years ago. But if you compare
Paley’s “Faith” stories, set in and around
Washington Square Park, with Death and Life,
the affinities are obvious. Both are intellectual
women who take great pride in their domestici-
ty, their childcare, their neighbors (and neigh-
borliness), their sensitivity to every vibration
on the street. Both believe that everyday city
life has a transcendent value; to attune your-
self to this life is to grow up, to become a
democratic citizen, to make progress, to raise
the level of being.
FOR PALEY, THE HOLY PLACE
WHERE EVERYDAY LIFE
BECOMES TRANSCENDENTAL IS
THE PARK.
To make yourself at home in the park, with
parents and children and rivals in love and ex-
lovers (out with their new sets of kids) and ex-
friends (with whom you must still share space)
and pamphleteers (for and against all you
love) and cops, is to be a Mensch, a serious
human being. If we think of them as a sister
act, Jacobs is the artificially “good” older sis-
ter, who, although she lives in one of New
York’s ultra-bohemian neighborhoods, presents
herself as serenely untouched by temptation,
and Paley the happily “bad” kid sister, com-
pletely at home in bohemia, who not only
sleeps around but talks about sex with brava-
do, and who has no problem about fighting for
peace and going to jail — or rather (at least in
her earlier stories), her only problem is who is
going to take care of the kids if she does,
because, for her, the kids are what make
everyday life holy.
I could say plenty more about both Jacobs and
Paley and the way their experience as women,
lovers, wives, mothers, shapes and colors
their perspectives on everyday life. But I’ll
mention just one other thing. In Paley’s first
“Faith” story, from the early 1960s, “Faith in a
Tree,” her heroine-narrator and two other left-
ist bohemian (premature hippie?) single moth-
ers are attending their kids in the playground,
while various men buzz around, say sweet
things about the kids, and check their mothers
out. The women grasp and resent this
process, but they all want, as Faith says, “car-
nal love.” At this point, Paley launches a dar-
ing metaphor: “The trick,” says Anna, “is to
know the speculators from the investors.”
In this world of women who identify them-
selves with their neighborhood, its real estate
market has become a symbol of sexual love.
In a breezily cynical way that Brecht would
admire — for that matter, Brecht himself could
have been one of those guys — they conceive
themselves as properties, hoping to live their
lives in such a way that they will “appreciate”
in value, but uncertain of their ability to sur-
vive the erotic market over the long haul. They
see pretty much all men as exploiters, yet they
identify with the ones who are willing to exploit
them over a long term, as distinct from those
who just want to get in and out fast. The
women around her agree. Yes, that’s life.
Faith tells us (the audience) that yes, this is
an important part of life, but it’s just as
impor tant to remember there’s more.
Meanwhile the sun shines, the park is radiant,
the trees and the kids are growing beautifully.
We see Faith’s kids, like many kids exposed to
fast sexual scenes, sounding grimly cynical
very young. But Faith, in this story at least, is
“in a tree,” twelve feet above the ground, sym-
bolically absorbed into nature, but also gaining
some perspective on the sleazy goings-on at
ground level, so that she can see the cynicism
as part of a glorious process of growth. This
short story is a little like that short chapter in
Marx’s Capital, chapter 32, “The Historical
Tendency of Capitalist Accumulation.” If we
can just gain some perspective, we can keep
on keeping on, live through the casual brutali-
ties of everyday life, draw more life from the
sun. This is the Marxism of the Mothers of
Washington Square Park.
IT HAPPENS EVERY DAY 217
 Allow me to close by invoking the opening
lines from a song that more than any work I
know conveys the humanistic and liberating
possibilities inherent in the idea of “everyday
life.” The song is Everyday People by Sly & the
Family Stone. It was a hit in the 1970s. It
expresses a great many of the countercul-
ture’s most generous impulses, along with a
fairly nuanced awareness of the trouble we
may find trying to fulfill them. Note that this
song is copyright 1968. It comes at the very
start of the age of identity politics, addresses
these questions, and thinks its way through
them. (This is why everybody should listen to
Rock & Roll…if you can still find it.)

Sometimes I’m right & I can be wrong

My own beliefs are in my song
The butcher, the banker, the drummer and then
Makes no difference what group I’m in
Yeah, yeah, I am everyday people
There is a blue one who can’t accept a green
one
For living with a fat one trying to be a skinny one
Different strokes for different folks
3. Sly & the Family Stone,
Everyday People, ©1968 by And so on and so on and Scooby dooby do
Daly City Music. Oh sha-sha we got to live together.3

218
 PLACE
ANDHow shall we address the new types and forms of place emerging today?

CITIZENSHIP
Are new forms of “citizenship” arising that transcend national boundaries?

How are the new forces of globalization and deterritorialization causing us to rethink
issues of identities, rights, and civicism?

221
ANDREAS HUYSSEN INTRODUCTION
The coupling of citizenship, with its prevail-
ing national and formal connotations, and
place, which suggests concrete locality and
its very different ways of shaping belonging,
opens up new dimensions in our understand-
ing of citizenship. As James Holston and
Arjun Appadurai argued in a recent issue of
Public Culture, citizenship can be under-
stood as referring not only to national voting
rights and laws of immigration, to passports
and alien residence cards, but also to the
more immediate sense of urban belonging
and the articulation of rights and responsi-
bilities of all inhabitants of the city. In this
understanding, citizenship and place are not
opposed to each other as abstract versus
concrete, legal versus affective, but are
intimately linked to each other in the new
urban configurations of our time.
Let me open this discussion with a concrete
example from the orbit within which I work,
an architectural-aesthetic example that may
well make political claims for such a newer
sense of citizenship. In 1916, two years into
World War I, the Reichstag, the parliament
of the German empire, was granted a new
inscription above its portal by Kaiser
Wilhelm. The inscription read in bold letters,
“Dem Deutschen Volke” — to the German
Volk, or to the German people. This was two
years after the restrictive new citizenship
laws based on blood lineage and descent
(ius sanguinis) rather than place of birth
(ius soli) had been introduced in Germany,
largely, of course, as a result of worries, deep
worries, about East European immigration.
In the spring of 2000, the German
Parliament, now housed in this renovated
(Sir Norman Foster) building in Berlin,
approved, after heated debate and with the
slimmest of margins, a counterinscription,
to be installed permanently in one of the
inner courtyards of this very same building .
This counterinscription is a project designed
by the New York artist Hans Haacke, who
recently caused controversy in New York
with a provocative installation at the
Whitney Museum that coupled speech acts
by Mayor Rudolph Giuliani with those of
Joseph Goebbels, propaganda minister of
the Third Reich, and Pat Buchanan, all
referring to censorship of the arts.
Hans Haacke’s new inscription for the who may not benefit from German citizen-
Reichstag, on top of an installation in the ship. In that sense, Haacke’s linguistic
courtyard and to be viewed from above, provocation moves us out of the realm of
supplements the inscription on the portal. the nation or the nation-state as it still
But it is an inscription that is not high up defines citizenship today, at least at the for-
on the facade but down on the inner ground, mal juridical level. But it also allows us to
and it simply reads “Der Bevölkerung,” shift our focus to issues of place, to the
which means “to the population.” The word multiple ways in which urban and national
Bevölkerung is a neutral, demographic term, space is actually used, deployed, and manip-
and it lacks the ideological burden of das ulated by the various strata and groups of a
Volk. Haacke thus deploys a clever politics Bevölkerung, of an increasingly heteroge-
of language right in the major building neous population.
of German political representation.
The following statements on citizenship and
Bevölkerung refers to anyone living on
place continue the debate on public space
German territory, immigrants and all. As a
and public sphere, but add a significant the-
word, it is not serviceable for the unitary
oretical and political dimension.
notions of Volk, nation, or state, and it thus
transcends traditional notions of citizenship
by implication. Haacke’s project with its
provocative inscription moves the citizen-
ship debate in a welcome direction. Key
is no longer even the distinction between
ius sanguinis and ius soli, which divides
German laws of citizenship from those of
other Western countries. Central becomes
instead the issue of place, habitation,
residency, and community within a larger
geography and a more flexible notion of
citizenship. The notion of Bevölkerung
includes immigrants and diasporic minorities

223
 THE MAKING
AND UNMAKING
OF
DEMOCRATIC
SPACES

224
 TERESA CALDEIRA

To look for spatial practices and forms of citizenship in the making in

contemporary metropolises is to encounter contradictory tendencies.
Cities, and especially large metropolitan regions, have become strategic
arenas for the development of new forms of identities, citizenship, and
claims to rights. Nevertheless, urban space is one of the main arenas
in which the expansion of citizenship and rights has been contested and
unmade in recent years. In many contemporary cities, new patterns of
urban segregation based on fortified enclaves mark new forms of exclu-
sion, erode public spaces, segregate social groups, and challenge new
claims for incorporation. Both processes — the creation of new forms of
identities and citizenship and the isolation and fortification of the upper
classes — are coeval, interconnected, and new. Thus, to focus on recent
transformations in the intersection of place and citizenship means to
analyze processes that create new democratic spaces and simultane-
ously those that unmake them.

225
 Metropolitan regions have acquired a crucial
role in the present context of globalization.
They not only become important hubs in
transnational economic production and in cir-
culation of people, but also are crucial sites
for the impact of a global discourse on democ-
racy. From their very different locations in the
new global order, São Paulo and Los Angeles
can help us to think of the opposite processes
of incorporation and exclusion, affirmation of
new identities and elaboration of new racisms,
legalization and criminalization, expansion of
political citizenship and erosion of civil rights
that mark contemporary metropolises all
around the world.
SÃO PAULO, WITH ITS ALMOST 17 MILLION
INHABITANTS, IS TODAY THE FOURTH LARGEST
METROPOLITAN REGION OF THE WORLD.
226
But it is still a region on the periphery of
the global. Economically, it is going through
industrial restructuring and a deep economic
recession, as the countr y abandons the
previous model of growth based on impor t
substitutions and embraces neoliberal policies
that supposedly will generate a better
location in the new globalized economy.
So far, these policies have produced a deep
economic recession, expressed in an unem-
ployment rate of around 20%, and have also
aggravated what was already one of the most
scandalous patterns of inequality in the world
with respect to the distribution of income.
New claims for rights and citizenship typically
come from those on the social margins. In
contemporary metropolises, they also come
from people whose lives involve some kind of
illegality. Their actions to put forward claims
for rights end up altering legal regimes in addi-
tion to political ones. The development of the
periphery of São Paulo clearly shows these
processes of the expansion of citizenship,
legalization, and incorporation of citizens into
local versions of global discourses and prac-
tices of rights. On the periphery of São Paulo,
poor workers have reinvented themselves as
political actors as they transformed their
everyday lives, their houses, and their neigh-
borhoods. They created new forms of neighbor-
hood-based political organizations through
which they invented and legitimated their
“rights to the city.” In spite of their continuous
poverty and exploitation, they have affirmed
their dignity and modernity.
They built houses that fully attest to their
competence in the languages of consumption
and changed ways of organizing their families
and conceiving of gender and generation roles.
The majority of the population of São Paulo lives
on the periphery. Fifty percent of the heads of
households there make less than three minimum
salaries a month, i.e., less than $210 in U.S.
currency. Nevertheless, 70% of the families
live in houses that they own and are built by
themselves in a process called autoconstruction
(autoconstrução). Workers who came to
São Paulo to work in its industries found that
the only housing alternative available to them
was to settle in “the middle of nowhere,”
buying a cheap lot and building and furnishing
their houses step by step, as resources were
made available and often over an entire life-
time. Most of these houses are either illegal or
irregular, not because the workers have invad-
ed land, but because they have either bought
land from developers who were swindlers or
who sold irregular lots, or because they could
not afford to build according to city codes and
pay all the required taxes and registrations.
Illegality and irregularity are the prices workers
have to pay to settle on the periphery of the
industrial metropolis. However, this has never
stopped them from elaborating their houses,
expressing in every choice of material and
design their knowledge and personality. The
house facades make public statements about
the owner’s status, taste, and incorporation
into the modern city. The interiors display an
elaborate knowledge of fashion and style and
a considerable access to goods, in spite of
poverty. These houses are therefore complex
statements of distinction and belonging —
statements that can be bitterly resented by
members of the upper classes who have
always thought of the marks of modernity and
consumption as being exclusively their own.
THROUGH THE COMBINATION OF AUTOCON-
STRUCTION AND ILLEGALITY, POOR WORKERS
HAVE NOT ONLY URBANIZED THE PERIPHERY
AND CONSTRUCTED THEIR INSERTION IN THE
MODERN CITY, BUT ALSO TRANSFORMED THEM-
SELVES INTO CENTRAL POLITICAL ACTORS IN
THE DEMOCRATIZATION PROCESS THAT BOTH
PROVOKED THE END OF THE MILITARY DICTATOR-
SHIP AND FOLLOWED IT.
THE MAKING AND UNMAKING OF DEMOCRATIC SPACES 227
 At the root of their political mobilization was
the illegal/irregular status of their properties
and the precarious situations of their neighbor-
hoods, which the public authorities had failed
to provide with services and infrastructure,
alleging exactly their irregular status. Thus, a
central inspiration for these movements was
an urban and collective experience of marginal-
ization and abandonment in spite of individual
efforts of integration through work and con-
sumption. Residents of the periphery orga-
nized social movements to claim their “rights
to the city,” i.e., their rights to its legal order
and to the types of infrastructure and service
available in central neighborhoods.
228
However, these movements also had other
non-local inspirations, and their transformative
effects reached well beyond their localized
demands. One of the most important non-local
influences came from the Catholic church and
Liberation Theology, from which the move-
ments took part of their discourse on rights
and received a significant institutional support
in times of tough political repression.
Additional support came from the trade-union
movement, from political parties such as the
PT (Party of the Workers), from diverse NGOs,
and from the feminist movement. The most
direct effect of the actions of residents of the
periphery was to provoke changes in the
practices and policies of the local administra-
tion. These changes included borrowing
heavily from the World Bank to invest in urban
infrastructure and offering a series of
amnesties that legalized many proper ties on
the peripher y. This combination of legaliza-
tion and improvement in infrastructure radically
changed the status of the peripher y in the
cityscape, a transformation analogous to
that of the political status of their residents
obtained through the organization of social
movements. Another crucial effect of these
movements was to accelerate the democrati-
zation process and to change its quality.
The vigilance of popular movements forced
the political incorporation of the working
classes, and led to the consolidation of a
series of rights in the 1988 constitution.
Finally, the social movements transformed gen-
der roles. Most of those participating in social
movements in São Paulo were women. They
started to do so saying that they had free time
and legitimating their actions on the basis of
their roles as responsible mothers struggling
to improve the living conditions of their chil-
dren. However, their incursions into public life,
their continuous participation in meetings
around the city, their frequent absences from
home, their learning about the “world out
there,” as they say, and their dealing with
political parties, politicians, church representa-
tives, and feminists ended up radically altering
the way they think of themselves as women.
This transformative experience of thousands of
poor women coincided with other processes
also altering the social situation of women.
These include mainstream mass media that
embraced very progressive representations of
women, emphasizing their autonomy and right
to choose by themselves; the expansion of
access to education, which in one generation
made the proportion of women with formal
education surpass that of men at all levels;
a large incorporation of women into the labor
force (51% of Brazilian women are integrated
into the labor force, of which they constitute
41%); and an incredible adoption of birth con-
trol that resulted in fertility rates dropping
from six children per woman in 1996 to 2.9 in
the late 1960s. Think of all these transforma-
tion against the background of strong patriar-
chalism and female submission, and you can
imagine how radically gender roles and domestic
relationships changed in a short period of time.
In some respects, the periphery of São Paulo
is not too different from the poor areas of Los
Angeles, a case much better known than that
of São Paulo. Los Angeles’s cheap labor force
consists of a large contingent of poor interna-
tional migrants whose access to the city is
often possible through situations of illegality
and irregularity, although of a different sort
from in São Paulo, a city of national migrants.
However, in their struggles for incorporation,
poor migrants in Los Angeles also find support
from institutions such as a Catholic church
inspired by Liberation Theology and numerous
NGOs and advocacy groups that bring to them
global discourses of rights and a similar sense
of the “right to have rights” that inspired São
Paulo’s social movements. Thus, there are
movements for organizing migrants around the
right to unionize and to vote. Moreover, Los
Angeles’s inner-city poor immigrants rent and
even buy cheap houses that they skillfully
transform, decorate, and equip with all the
merchandise required of a modern urban
dweller, from video, television, video games,
and Disney souvenirs to cell phones, computers,
and the ubiquitous utility vehicle.
IN LOS ANGELES AS IN SÃO PAULO, DOMESTIC
SPACE AND CONSUMPTION ARE THE MEANS
FOR ELABORATING SIGNS OF BELONGING AND
DISTINCTION.
THE MAKING AND UNMAKING OF DEMOCRATIC SPACES 229
 However, the most emblematic recreation of
identities and rights in global metropolises
such as Los Angeles comes from the
affirmation of ethnic and cultural identities.
As non-Anglo migrants from different ethnic
groups have become the majority, Los Angeles
has been consistently described as a space
of multiculturalism. This demographic
transformation has suggested to some
obser vers the development of a new cultural
syncretism in Los Angeles, cross–cultural
fusion, coalition-building, and so on. There is
also much talk about hybridity and border
cultures, deterritorialization, and diasporic
cultures. In sum, if neighborhood residential
space became the source of new claims
about identity and belonging in São Paulo,
in Los Angeles it is ethnic displacement and
rear ticulation that produces a new civic
culture and politics.
However, in the last two decades, powerful
transformations in both metropolitan regions
have jeopardized these diverse movements for
the expansion of citizenship and civic identi-
ties. These are processes that unmake the
claims of incorporation, and they are materially
embodied in the urban environment. The case
of São Paulo is especially obvious, although
that of Los Angeles is also apparent. As the
periphery urbanized and was symbolically and
legally incorporated into the city, and as the
democratization process took roots and the
working poor were acknowledged as political
actors, the elites began to retreat from the city
and especially from its public space. They
used the fear of violent crime — which in fact
grew from the mid-1980s on — as their main
justification to migrate by the hundreds of
thousands to areas on the outskir ts of the
metropolitan region that they could better
control and from which they could exclude the
poor. They built for tified enclaves for their
residence, leisure, and work. They adopted a
new view of the virtues of private initiative that
is not in opposition to the neoliberal policies
that they adopted in the management of the
economy. These policies resulted in the retreat
of the state from various areas in which it
traditionally had a central role, such as urban
services, infrastructure, telecommunications,
steel and oil production, and so on.

NEOLIBERAL POLICIES GENERATED A DEEP ECO-

NOMIC CRISIS THAT JEOPARDIZED THE POOR’S
CONTINUED INCORPORATION INTO THE CITY
THROUGH THE PROCESS OF AUTOCONSTRUCTION.

230
The preference for private solutions also has Privatization and rigid boundaries (either mate-
meant a new approach to urban space by the rial or symbolic) fragment what used to be
elites. This entails primarily a trading of urban more open spaces and serve to keep groups
and public spaces for new privatized spaces apart in both São Paulo and Los Angeles.
for collective use. This trade has various mani-
festations. An advertisement campaign for a SEPARATIONS ARE CONSTANTLY ELABORATED
theme-park gated community for the elites in
São Paulo found a quite synthetic way of
IN VARIOUS WAYS: BY WALLS, DESIGN DEVICES,
expressing it. The residential enclave called SUSPICION, PREJUDICES, AND THE FEAR OF CRIME.
Place des Vosges literally copies the Parisian
square. But it places it inside of a fortress of This fear is productive: it makes everyday con-
high walls and numerous security devices versations circulate that articulate new sym-
served by an army of private guards on 24- bols of discrimination and criminalization of
hour duty. The ad pictured the French square poor people and members of ethnic groups.
and its Brazilian for tified copy, announcing: Moreover, it is productive as it legitimates the
“The only difference is that the one in Paris expansion of a booming industry of security
is public. And yours is private.” As private services needed to enforce the new regime of
solutions proliferate and become the most distances and boundaries in the city space, an
desirable and distinctive ones, previously good expansion that at the limit destabilizes one of
urban spaces turn into leftover spaces the main sources of legitimacy of the modern
abandoned to those who cannot move out and state: its monopoly of the means of violence.
live behind walls. In Los Angeles, the walls
and security devices may be less explicit, but
they are not less present. Gated communities
and secured spaces for commerce, work,
and leisure have expanded throughout the
metropolitan region, and signs announcing
“Armed Response” have become crucial
in the art of expressing distinction in the
new urban environment.

THE MAKING AND UNMAKING OF DEMOCRATIC SPACES 231

 As the elites retreat to their new private and
fortified enclaves, these spaces become the
most prestigious expression of status and dis-
tinction. Inevitably, then, this new language of
distinction reaches the periphery of São Paulo
and the inner city of Los Angeles. As the aes-
thetic of security reins, the builders of auto-
constructed houses in São Paulo now trans-
form their facades to express their personality
through elaborate designs of fences and gates
and elaborate discourses despising other poor
people who do not have the same possibility
of becoming home owners. In Los Angeles,
ethnic minorities fight each other in the
spaces of the inner city, spaces not rarely
transformed into fortified war zones with the
help of the police forces. Crime and violence
are significantly higher in São Paulo than in
Los Angeles, but in both metropolitan regions
violence is higher in the poor areas and espe-
cially victimizes the poor. It is also among the
poor and members of ethnic minorities that
civil rights are especially disrespected.
232
The contradiction between the processes
transforming cities such as Los Angeles and
São Paulo is evident. International migration
and multiculturalism are experiences that
challenge boundaries, as do democratization
and the claim for rights. The reactions to
them are racism, segregation, and authoritari-
anism, all experiences of rigidifying and polic-
ing boundaries. Although the former are expe-
riences of openness, the latter are undemoc-
ratic experiences of enclosure and intoler-
ance. Metropolitan regions such as São
Paulo and Los Angeles are marked by both
types of experiences, which are tensely con-
nected. However, it is clear that what is being
reproduced at the level of the built environ-
ment is essentially rigid boundaries and intol-
erance. The space of these cities is the main
arena in which these antidemocratic tenden-
cies are ar ticulated. The problem is that once
walls are built, they shape public life in a dis-
tinctive way. When walls set the stage for
public interaction, the space for cordiality and
civility shrinks. Moreover, although other
processes may globalize and free residents
of large cities from local restrictions, the
practices of space localize. When the avail-
able spaces are ar ticulated upon principles
of inequality and separation they can hardly
be liberating or promote integration, as the
poor residents of both São Paulo and Los
Angeles have been learning recently.
Among the conditions necessary for democra-
cy is that people acknowledge those from
different social groups as co-citizens, i.e.,
having similar rights despite their differences.
However, cities segregated by walls and
enclaves foster the sense that different
groups belong to separate universes and have
irreconcilable claims. Cities of walls do not
strengthen citizenship but rather contribute to
its corrosion. Moreover, this effect does not
depend directly on either the type of political
regime or on the intentions of those in power,
since the design of the enclaves and walls
entails by itself a certain social logic.
If the experiences of separateness expressed
in the urban environment become hegemonic,
people become alienated from democracy and
the possibilities of new forms of citizenship.
However, given the disjunction between
different types of experiences in cities such
as Los Angeles and São Paulo, there is also
hope that the reverse could happen, that is,
that the experiences of challenging boundaries
and of democratization could extend into the
built environment.

THE NEW URBAN MORPHOLOGIES OF FEAR GIVE

NEW FORMS TO INEQUALITY, KEEP GROUPS
APART, AND INSCRIBE A NEW SOCIABILITY THAT
RUNS AGAINST THE IDEALS OF THE MODERN
PUBLIC AND ITS DEMOCRATIC FREEDOMS.

When some people are denied access to certain

areas and when different groups are not allowed
to interact in public space, then references to
ideals of openness, equality, and freedom as
organizing principles for social life are no longer
possible, even as ideals. The consequences of
the new separateness and restriction of public
life are serious: “defensible” architecture and
planning may only promote conflict instead
of preventing it, making clear the extension of
social inequalities and the lack of commonalties.

THE MAKING AND UNMAKING OF DEMOCRATIC SPACES 233

ABDOUMALIQ SIMONE

THE PLACE
OF AFRICAN CITIES
INSIDE OUT

African cities often appear to act in an incessant state of preparedness.

Driven as they have been by discourses of war, contestation, and
experimentation, these cities keep residents in an almost permanent
state of changing gears and focus, if not location. Of course, there are
quarters where most of the residents have spent their entire lives growing
up, raising families, and devoted to the same occupation or way of life.
But even these stabilities are situated in a larger arena where social
economies must be prepared to exert themselves with large measures
of fluidity. Indeed, if you take the life stories of many households
across the region, people have been prepared to migrate at a moment’s
notice, to change jobs, residences, and social networks with little
apparent hesitation.

235
 This sense of preparedness, of the ability to
be ready to switch gears, has significant impli-
cations on what residents think it is possible
to do in place, in the place of the city (and
also in place of the city). Households display
considerable determination and discipline to
save over the course of many years to send
children to university, build a house, or buy
tickets so one or more members can migrate
elsewhere. They are in a place; they demon-
strate commitment to it. But at the same time,
African cities operate as a platform for people
to engage in processes and territories else-
where — with a marked sense of exteriority.
The referent of this elsewhere has commonly
been other cities, both within and outside the
continent. Increasingly, it also includes various
interiors — rural areas, borders, and frontiers.
The interiors are also symbolic and spiritual.
They concern geographies that are “off the
map” — as demonstrated in popular descrip-
tions of subterranean cities, spirit worlds,
lucrative but remote frontiers, and underground
highways along which pass enormous wealth.
236
This sense of preparedness is an enormous
task given the ease with which multinational
capital can directly penetrate the diamond
regions, the timber forests, and oil shelves.
Africa contains rural and urban areas that slip
further away from the control of normative
institutions and discourses, even though, at
least theoretically, access to any point in any
given territory is now more precise and possi-
ble. As such, physical movement of both indi-
viduals and collectives is increasing. There are
people who can no longer operate or position
themselves in places where disorder is increas-
ing. There are others who seek the relative
invisibility of disordered places in order to pur-
sue new opportunities. And there are many
who move back and forth among these places.
Cities have been the places where Africans
have most intensely engaged the conflicts pre-
cipitated by their own points of view, their polit-
ical and economic practices, and their hetero-
geneous, often contradictory, representations
of outside worlds. Cities have also been
places where their own strivings and delibera-
tions about present and future ways of living
were most adamantly structured by the
wavering demands of external powers.
Regulating the city became a map for regulat-
ing the territory of colonial jurisdiction. During
the colonial period, innovations derived from
city living, although very much at work in the
configuration of African urban spaces, were
also largely put to work in rural areas outside
the city, and also in other cities both in Africa
and abroad. The effects brought about by this
spreading of innovation were then reincorporat-
ed into the city.
Developments in cities enabled the rural areas
to produce and organize themselves in differ-
ent ways. Increases in rural productivity
allowed different kinds of consumption and
thus social organization in the city. But people
were also driven from the rural areas, margin-
alized by the changes, and came to cities as
places of refuge. This circuit frequently con-
founded clear divisions between the city and
the country, or between one city and others.
Yet, the city’s surrounding areas could never
be a totally sufficient or satisfactor y “out-
side” — i.e., a friction-free place to target the
accomplishments of the urban outside the
“city walls.” Those remaining in rural areas
were often suspicious of whatever came
from the city. They were often amenable to
the distor ted reasser tions of customar y
authority and thus resisted this deployment
of urban experience.
Still, a certain urban connection to the rural is
at work that goes beyond the exigencies of
day-to-day economic survival or connections
based on affection. The assertion of this con-
nection is an acknowledgment of a cumulative
African urban experience that requires the
insertion of the rural in its midst. Sometimes
the “outsides” of the colonial city were the
only available spaces in which the particular
experiential wisdom of African urban residents
could be enacted. Sometimes the rural areas
could be places where the colonial gaze wasn’t
as strong, where urban Africans didn’t always
have to show a certain measure of compliance.
At the same time, engagement with colonizers
was constant. In that constancy, negotiation
and flexibility were necessary. Europeans and
Africans had to “borrow” incessantly from
each other if they were to be engaged with
each other. This was the case even where liv-
ing and working spaces were segregated.
MORE THAN PERHAPS OTHER CITIES, AFRICAN
COLONIAL CITIES DEPENDED UPON A MULTITUDE
OF SHIFTING, HIGHLY LOCALIZED, AND FLUID
TACTICS IN ORDER TO KEEP THE ENGAGEMENT
GOING. DESPITE ALL THE OVERBLOWN CLAIMS
MADE ON THIS CONCEPT, A CERTAIN URBAN
HYBRIDITY WAS POSSIBLE.
The process of urban identity-making and
exchange was just that — a continuous process
of making and exchanging. Yes, people had
their identities. Different moral regimes, gover-
nance systems, and economic practices were
associated with different quarters. But still
residents from all walks of life “tried out” dif-
ferent ways of being and doing things in the
city. Regularities were sought and often institu-
tionalized. Very little that was tried was com-
pletely discarded or given up. Operational
memory was thus spatialized. In other words,
African residents came to work out specific
places and domains for being specific things,
negotiating what were often contradictory
needs and aspirations. There were places to
“keep tradition alive” and there were places to 1. See Valdo Pons,
be “modern,” places to be a “kinsman” and Stanleyville: An African Urban
places to be a cosmopolitan urban “dweller,” Community under Belgian
Administration
as well as more textured and subtle combina- (London: Oxford University
tions of these primarily artificial polarities.1 Press, 1969).
THE PLACE OF AFRICAN CITIES 237

2. Filip de Boeck, “Beyond the
Grave: History, Memory, and
Death in Postcolonial
Congo/Zaire,” in Richard P.
Werbner, ed., Memory and
the Postcolony: African
Anthropology and the Critique
of Power (London and New
York: Zed Books, 1998).
3. Célestin Monga, The
Anthropology of Anger: Civil
Society and Democracy in
Africa (Boulder, Colo.: Lynne
Rienner, 1996).
238
THE PLACE OF BELONGING
The absence of a canonized urban history
enables communities to proceed with greater
openness in generating their own nonlinear
dynamics. But such openness can also reflect
the fragmentation of collective consensus and
signal the absence of interwoven social lega-
cies and destinies.2 In many African cities, the
rallying cry of youth is the desire to “transcend
our past, discover our past.” This is a seem-
ingly contradictory couplet. But it nevertheless
goes beyond transcending or discovering what
that past really was. This rallying cry implies
that the capacity to recognize and understand
what has taken place rests in the ability to get
out of what has taken place and “by any
means necessary.”
But does the orientation implicitly suggested
by this “banner” of youth convey an overly ges-
tural despair? Many Dakar youths, for exam-
ple, when they use one of their favorite say-
ings, Boul falé — which basically means, “we
have stopped caring” — explain that it conveys
a sense of preparedness. If we do not care
about anything that is conventionally taken to
be ours — i.e., our religion, our politics, our
authority systems, our sense of the egalitarian
achieved through our social mores, our
national identity, etc. — then we are prepared
to take on anything we need to be in order to
get us beyond the rut in which we find ourselves.
This profession of indifference is almost a
discourse of redemption. As one Senegalese
youth, Amadou Diop, puts it, unless we are
able to take ourselves some place else, every-
thing we supposedly care for doesn’t matter.
Here, the elsewhere that is sought becomes
the definitive redemption for all that is
considered endogenous — i.e., all the signs of
belonging, of being Senegalese. Much of this
indifference stills relies upon the totalization
of a negative. The present must be canceled
out so that something unspecified can fill the
vacuum, something that inevitably must be
better than what came before. Although a
space for risk and determination is opened
up in what youth tend to see as calcified,
dinosaurlike social orders, what dangers are
raised by this game and by this determination?
Célestin Monga describes an “autistic” ten-
dency that has come to the fore in a rejection
of authority. The authority rejected is particu-
larly that of the authority of interpretation that
specifies how links to the past should be
made. The authority of interpretation is
replaced by what he sees as a more chaotic
handling of disenchantment, in turn reinforced
by the inattention of the international commu-
nity to the realities of African life.3
 In talking about contemporary Congo,
Filip de Boeck discusses forms of a contem-
porar y reinvocation of divination. But as he
points out, the dead that are called upon are
no longer situated in a specific symbolic
space that is clearly identified. Such a space
would allow the living to use this invocation
as a means to identify a specific place that
they could occupy in the present. Rather, such
forms of divination tend to unleash death
onto the living as some non-specific presence.
Divination traditionally highlighted the extent to
which birth proceeds from death in a cyclic
process that establishes a sense of continuity
and of connection between ancestors and the
living. But de Boeck identifies a “revisionary”
4. De Boeck, ibid. divination as the process of being thrown into
5. Ibid. a world of the living increasingly characterized
by and shared with death.4 Contemporary
diviners call up a wide range of references,
names, and citations from all over the place.
As such, divination is no longer capable of
establishing an unyielding continuity of a given
community against which changes can be reg-
istered and assessed.
240
It is this capacity to remember that is neces-
sary in order to secure a sense of ongoing-
ness. For it is the capacity to remember that
enables individuals to affirm that the present
isn’t the only thing or the only condition that
has to be. For a sense of ongoingness
“knows” that which clearly has passed and is
over. When the relationship is broken, as de
Boek puts it, the living become the “living
dead” while the dead expand their presence
into the living. The crisis in the Congo, there-
fore, has much to do with too much death and
the loss of the capacity to mourn and remem-
ber the dead. It has much to do with the inabil-
ity now to identify and place the dead within
the scheme of things so that people might ori-
ent themselves in the present and make a
space for new operations.5
THE COMPLEXITIES OF BELONGING
Cities both support and undermine the possi-
bilities for such linkages. Much of colonialism
and postcolonialism has reified what Africans
were to themselves and others. An immutable
“tradition” has been ascribed to those
assigned a particular place. How do cities get
beyond this state of being frozen in time? As
de Boeck puts it, the act of remembrance may
be one important tool. Another, as John
Rajchman suggests in a different context, is
the capacity to expose the complexity in the
fabric of things. In invoking Gilles Deleuze, he
reminds us that in the midst of every space
and every location there is a substantial and
groundless complexity of arrangements and
interactions — among “particles,” trajectories,
and strata — that take that space outside of
itself. The revelation of this capacity is not an
act of a particular remembering, i.e., an act of
repositioning or relinking an observer to a more
perspicacious line of sight.
Rather, Rajchman says, such complexity is 6. See Rajchman’s essay
revealed in the moments in which a place is “Folding,” in his book
Constructions (Cambridge,
“blown apart”— redistributing what has come Mass.: MIT Press, 1998),
before and opening up to what is yet to come.6 esp. pp. 18–19.
The emergence of subjective views — i.e.,
those views capable of “leading the way” onto
new, uncharted directions that affirm a peo-
ple’s or a city’s capacity for life — are formed
in the “cracks” or the intervals of the conven-
tional frames, the “best practices,” or the
“world with which we must deal,” and those
many virtual spaces that both disrupt those
frames and introduce new enfoldings. For the
act of memory is not simply the process of
recall. Rather, that which is to be remembered
finds its dynamism only in divergence, only in
being “reinstated” in an experience that has
not been lived. Memory is thus a reaffirmation
of lines, movement, and the sense that one
has come from somewhere and will also go
some place else.
THE PLACE OF AFRICAN CITIES 241
 THE AFRICAN URBAN HISTORY THAT MUST BE In some respects, then, cities reflect these ten-
sions about belonging, and they are acted out
DEALT WITH IS THE HISTORY OF BELONGING.
in many ways. On the one hand, certain groups
WHO BELONGS TO PARTICULAR CITIES; WHICH of inhabitants may act excessively in their
CITIES BELONG TO PARTICULAR PEOPLE? claims about belonging. Often urban life has
been characterized by the competition among
What has been available to belong to? certain patron-client networks or communities
Thinking about notions of belonging raises the that think that the city belongs exclusively to
possibility of looking at what it is possible to them. Their certainty and confidence may
do within cities and how they are lived. Do enable them to make things happen — to build
cities provide possibilities for intersecting infrastructures, create opportunities of all
remembered linkages to the past with all kinds sorts. But they also have a limited desire or
of virtual divergences from it? Is the capacity ability to acknowledge this same right and
of what has come before strengthened by ability to make things happen for others. Power
virtue of the many different uncharted direc- is infused into the city, but in a way that implicitly
tions it is able to pursue? If so, the capacity links the capacities of some to the incapacities
for people in a city to live depends on there of others. Power is either diverted from the
being a more open and complex space to construction of new spaces of habitation —
which to belong. in the fullest sense of making spaces for more
complex and rich experiences of living—or links
To belong to a place means to be available to
processes of development, transformation, and
participate in all that it could become. In many
enrichment to the defense of privilege.
walks of life, it is clear that the absence of
belonging produces a host of defensive pos-
tures. These postures include limiting how visi-
ble or noticeable one is to others. They include
adamantly repeating the supposed order of
things — e.g., the obsessive rituals through
which one ensures a sense of security and
sameness: always having to stay “close to
home,” always being wary of turning one’s
back, or of being gone for any length of time.
Such postures also include a fear that others
will take one’s place, or that one requires an
exclusive relationship with the territories,
resources, and opportunities available within
the place to which one belongs.
242
THE PROLIFERATION OF DISPUTES CONCERNING BELONGING,
FROM THE CONTESTED CITIZENSHIP OF KUANDA IN ZAMBIA AND
OUATTARA IN CÔTE D’IVOIRE SO AS TO ELIMINATE THEIR PRESI-
DENTIAL CANDIDACIES, TO THE EXPULSION OF “MIGRANTS” IN
GABON, TO INTENSIFIED ETHNIC CLAIMS OF PARTICULAR
REGIONS IN CAMEROON, TO THE FIGHT OVER WHETHER SHARI’A
BELONGS IN NIGERIA, ALL REINFORCE THE NEED TO SECURE AND
CONSOLIDATE PARTICULARISTIC IDENTITIES.

They also reinforce the need to operate through

organizational vehicles that are more flexibly
defined and undercoded. Indeed, residents of
African cities often display a remarkable capaci-
ty to operate in the interstices of stability and
instability, individuation and forms of social
solidarity, the material and spiritual — where
nothing is canceled out, where everything
assumes a parallel existence with little contra-
diction and, therefore, little hesitation to cross
lines of logic or territory. Such flexibility applies
to the function of memory and history as well.
Who, then, will tell the important stories? How
will they be told, and from what place?

THE PLACE OF AFRICAN CITIES 243

 M A B E L O . W I L S O N A N D PA U L D . K A R I O U K
(A)WAY STATION:
A NARRATIVE OF
To be unhomed is not to be
homeless, nor can the “unhomely”
be easily accommodated in that
familiar division of social life into
private and public spheres.1
244
A recently published report by the United
Nations High Commissioner states that 45 mil-
lion migrants, refugees, and expellees —
victims of poverty, famine, epidemics, natural
catastrophes, unemployment, civil wars, and
persecutions — are in the midst of flight to
new homes.2 Most migrants are destined for
the city. Of interest for us in this phenomenon
is that in the formation of their new communi-
ties, peoples in migration do not alter urban
form in immediately apparent ways. Instead
these transformations originate from the con-
fines of their domestic spaces.
DOMESTIC SPACE
AND URBAN MIGRATION
Unlike Western and particularly American
paradigms of domesticity where stability and
permanence are implicit, domestic space
for many migrants is inherently provisional.
For these people it is either the first transition
point in a long period of adaptation and
assimilation or a place where life is suspended
preceding a return to their original home. In
both cases these homes — a hotel room, the
spare room of a relative or friend, or a refugee
center — constitute not only physical but also
psychological way-stations, between memories
of their homelands from which they recently
departed and desires for those places where
they aspire to be.
For many, migratory movement disrupts estab-
lished patterns of domestic life. These sites
1. Homi Bhabha, The Location
become way-stations where the migrant
of Culture (London: Routledge,
assembles a temporary home out of material 1994), p. 9.
possessions — transported objects of senti-
2. Gert Mattenklott, editorial,
mental value and newly acquired objects of Daidalos 54 (December
consumer culture. Rather than moving immedi- 1994), pp. 22–23.
ately into a domestic setting whose spaces
are parceled according to specific functions—
for example: “living room,” “bedroom,”
“kitchen,” “bathroom” — this interim home
becomes a dense amalgam of belongings and
overlapping daily activities.
245
 For migrants, life within these new homes
reconciles individual desires with external
pressures as they encounter unfamiliar social,
cultural, and political contexts. Regardless of
their status as immigrants or relocating
nationals, all migrants must respond to the
forces of new values, new traditions, new
emotional and perceptual relationships within
the public spheres of the city. In many
instances, state and other institutions pro-
foundly affect how migrants perceive and con-
ceive of their political agency. Those who
migrate to the United States, for example,
have their rights apportioned according to a
myriad of classifications of their legal status:
F1 or Student, TN or Professional Under
NAFTA, TPS or Temporary Protected Status, or
Undocumented Immigrant, to name a few on
the extensive list. Under these designations,
the state renders immigrants visible or invisi-
ble within a web of rules and regulations. More
importantly, as non-citizens, immigrants cannot
challenge these laws by fully participating in
the democratic process. This exclusion from
the political sphere, coupled with innumerable
social injustices, hinders access to adequate
medical care, education, legal representation,
and fair wages — privileges that Americans are
guaranteed by law. Likewise, for those who
migrate internally within the United States,
class, ethnic, or racial discrimination can limit
full participation in the political process. As a
consequence of these constraints, social and
economic advancement for them can stagnate.
246
YET DESPITE THESE
HINDRANCES, MIGRANTS DO
CONSTITUTE ALTERNATIVE PUB-
LIC SPHERES THAT FACILITATE
POLITICAL ENGAGEMENT
WITHIN THEIR COMMUNITIES.
THESE GROUPS COMPRISE
WHAT NANCY FRASER TERMS
“SUBALTERN COUNTERPUBLICS.”3
By merging with other social movements,
these more powerful coalitions can publicize
their positions and interests. They can, for
example, protest legislation that limits immi-
grant rights or rally support to fund immigrant
and working-class initiatives. Despite being
“public” in intent because they outwardly
address political and social injustices, however,
these “counterpublic spheres” cohere through
social relationships forged within the migrant’s
temporary homes. And because these migrant
communities assemble and disperse over time
as people move to new homes elsewhere,
such public spheres have a limited existence.
The migrant’s home affords a convergence of
domestic and public spheres, albeit briefly.
(a)way station, an installation by Paul Kariouk
and Mabel Wilson, originated at the Storefront
Gallery in New York in 1999. By making refer-
ence to these temporary homes, it speculated
upon the psychological and physical dimension
of migration’s relationship to domestic space
and the city. It compressed the space of
migratory inhabitation into the scale of archi-
tectural representation. Packed with oddly
juxtaposed possessions, (a)way station’s richly
layered visual and aural field allowed the
viewer to imagine the domestic space of
the migrant. Expressing the conditional nature
of migration’s architecture, its contents
were assembled from possessions taken in
transit — furniture, mementos, clothing — along
with the construction materials that comprise
the migrant’s interim home — plywood,
linoleum, carpet. (a)way station’s densely
packed walls, assembled into fifteen illuminat-
ed structures, incorporated sound equipment
that relayed spoken narratives of migration
gathered from personal recollections.
(a)way station was predicated upon the under- 3. Nancy Fraser, “Rethinking
standing that the project would travel to multi- the Public Sphere: A
Contribution to the Critique of
ple venues. In some ways utopian, it was con- Actually Existing Democracy,”
structed for no exact place and designed to in Bruce Robbins, ed., The
transform itself as it was unpacked, according Phantom Public Sphere
(Minneapolis: University of
to the conditions of its new space. This condi- Minnesota Press, 1993), p.
tion of indeterminacy is akin to that of the 14. Fraser, drawing on the
migrant who cannot move fluidly in his/her work of Gayatri Spivak, con-
ceptualizes the subaltern
new context and whose ability to adapt is counterpublic as “parallel dis-
arrested by unfamiliar social, political, and cul- cursive arenas where mem-
tural conditions that provide limited choices. bers of subordinated social
groups invent and circulate
As Franz Fanon — whose own identity and counterdiscourses, so as to
agency were subjugated by the racist colonial formulate oppositional inter-
and nationalist societies he encountered dur- pretations of their identities,
interests, and needs.”
ing his migratory travels between Martinique
and Paris — wrote, 4. Franz Fanon, Black Skin
White Masks (New York: Grove
Press, 1967), p. 229.
I am for somewhere and for something
else…in the world in which I travel, I am
endlessly creating myself.4
(a)way station could not have been carried out without the invalu-
able assistance of Yusuke Obuchi. Funding for it was made pos-
sible by grants from the New York State Council for the Arts, Lef
Foundation, and Graham Foundation, with additional support
from California College of Arts and Crafts, Reichold Chemicals,
the University of Florida, and Storefront for Art and Architecture.
Photographs by Peter Tolkin.
(A)WAY STATION 247
 Although the associations between place and citizenship are evident,
I shall try to cast their relationship also as dialectical, to establish a set
of tensions between them. Such tensions between place and citizenship
come to the fore in my own work on Indian immigrant cultures in post-
war New York and London. Briefly, I shall elaborate some of the insights
that have emerged from my research in order to construct a lens for
seeing anew the broader problematics of the questions of place and
citizenship, as well as the role of nation, identity, and civic responsibility
in the context of globalization.

DIALECTICS
OF PLACE AND
CITIZENSHIP

248
In a chapter of the book on which I am currently
working, India Abroad: Transnational Ethnic
Cultures in Postwar American and Britain, I
consider the development of two Indian com-
munities, one in Southall, London, and another
in Jackson Heights, Queens, and the manner
in which these spaces have come to embody
“Indianness” for their participants and to rep-
resent “Indianness” for the worlds outside.
These are two distinct communities, which I
have juxtaposed precisely for the effect of dif-
ference. In the first case, of Southall, a largely
working-class Punjabi population went to
England in the late 1950s to 1960s to trans-
form an outlying space of London into a promi-
nent symbol of “black Britain” — with complex
and antagonistic race relations, working-class
forms of ethnicity, descriptions as a self-con-
tained “Little India,” and finally the expression
of numerous communal conflicts with the
homeland. From the early 1960s until the pre-
sent, Indians have lived and worked in
Southall and remade the place in the form of
what many social scientists would call a clas-
sic ethnic enclave, or what may be more
legible as an “ethnic community.” Jackson
Heights, in the borough of Queens, for many
S A N D H YA S H U K L A
outside of New York proper, also submits to
the informal moniker of a “Little India,” yet is
the consequence of rather different social
forces, primarily of middle-class, and creden-
tialed, migrations to the United States after
the landmark 1965 Immigration and
Naturalization Act. Jackson Heights was very
much a planned community in the early
1900s, when developers sought to create a
residential space outside metropolitan New
York and built garden apartments there, and
also in a more recent period, when this space
and other spaces of ethnicity have been creat-
ed. It was the careful deliberations of a civil
engineer in 1973, to open an electronic goods
store somewhere in Queens to which people
could easily commute on the number 7
subway line, which initiated the movement
of many other Indian stores to a roughly five-
block area. Jackson Heights is a site that, like
Southall, has definite geographic parameters,
but is defined not by Indian residence but by
Indian commerce. The local population of
South Asians is quite small. It is instead
those South Asians that come from all over
the tri-state area that populate this place,
however temporarily, with ethnic subjects.
(A)WAY STATION 249
 Engaging with the ethnographic in my work has
entailed a comprehension of and interest in
what people say and do in places like Jackson
Heights and Southall, while also encompass-
ing the construction of these spaces on con-
ceptual ground. In other words, I have had to
ask what sorts of images are circulating. What
kinds of stories can we tell? Here I very much
appreciate Rosalyn Deutsche’s admonition not
to submit to the division between material and
metaphorical space, but to keep those
spheres alive, together. To be sure, Jackson
Heights and Southall are both examples of
community formation. But while Southall
harkens back to older models of affiliation, to
place, to residence, to workplace, and to the
insertion into the national, Jackson Heights, I
would argue, symbolizes the new and increas-
ingly common spatial-cultural arrangements
arising from the processes of globalization.
HERE PEOPLE’S RELATIONSHIPS TO PLACE ARE
STRATEGIC, FLEETING, AND VERY MUCH SHAPED
BY THE PRODUCTION AND CONSUMPTION OF
EASILY MOVABLE GOODS AND SERVICES.
250
As such, Jackson Heights is now known as a
place to perform “Indianness,” not only among
Indian migrants in the U.S., but within the
Indian diaspora all over the world. While
Indians in the tri-state area may embark on
weekly or monthly pilgrimages to Jackson
Heights to stock up on spices or other food-
stuffs, Indians from East Africa, the Caribbean,
and yes, India too, stop over on their way to
(and from) Kennedy airport to pick up cheap
electronic goods and luggage. This is to say
that the currency of the place extends far
beyond its geographical boundaries.
The concept of citizenship in this scenario is
complicated, and perhaps even vexed. One
avenue into this new analytical field is through
the ways that those in Jackson Heights have
laid claims to public space. Indian, Pakistani,
and Bangladeshi merchants in Jackson Heights
have banded together in the effort to officially
designate the space a “Little India” for the
increased profitability it might bring to the area.
(Here I note the obvious, that the absence of
subcontinental antagonisms in this strategic
grouping, between Indians and Pakistanis, for
example, is astonishing.) The shop owners
have acted locally in other ways too, at one
point marching to the police station to protest
inattention to a spate of jewelry store rob-
beries. In these moments they express affilia-
tions to their “neighborhood” and, as well, one
could certainly infer, to a pluralist model of
America that stresses rights for individuals and
groups, and, in its multiculturalist variant, cele-
brates discrete origins for ethnic groups. The
merchant-citizen of this space appears through
the rhetoric of the market.
Likewise, the experience of going to, partaking
in the pleasures of, and remembering Jackson
Heights is through consumption. As Teresa
Caldeira’s communities and Mabel Wilson’s
examples evince as well, consumption in
Jackson Heights is the framework for a kind of
citizenship and for claims to the public sphere.
Jackson Heights is a group of public streets,
yet store owners hire private security people.
The distinction between “the private” and “the
public” is thus blurred. There are contesta-
tions within the sphere of consumption that
are racially coded (it’s obviously not seam-
less), and I do not mean to exalt this model;
we would be wise to remember that racial vio-
lence often attends attempts to claim space.
“Black business” has been the target of much
antagonism in Britain; Korean delis in U.S.
urban centers are the site of a number of com-
plicated conflicts; and in the tragic recent inci-
dents in Pittsburgh, there is reason to believe
that an Indian man was killed and another crit-
ically wounded because a sign outside their
shop read “Indian grocery.”
While South Asians working and consuming
in Jackson Heights claim membership in the
U.S. marketplace and act as citizens of local
publics, many of them also remain deeply com-
mitted to India (and Pakistan and Bangladesh).
Various merchants are involved in organizations
like the Overseas Friends of the Bharatiya
Janata Party (a rightist, Hindu, and antisecular
movement), and many, indeed, retain Indian
passports so that they can more easily return
to their homeland upon retirement.
As those subjects may be at once American
ethnics, Indian transnationals, and world capi-
talist actors, so too is the place, Jackson
Heights, able to articulate itself to the national
and the global in ways that contain not only
some specific location (of a place nearby or far
away) but, as well, a more diffused sense of
“Indianness.” In this regard, it is a kind of
diasporic public sphere. There are no easy uni-
ties to be had by and in this space.
WHAT DO WE MAKE OF THAT WHICH, IN IMAGE
AND IN MATERIAL REALITY, IS A PUBLIC (AND
A PLACE) THAT DOES NOT OBSERVE THE
NORMAL BOUNDARIES OF LOCALE, OF NATION,
OF TRANS-NATION, OF ETHNICITY?
(When I recently watched the broadcast of a
World Cup qualifying match between Peru and
Chile in a Jackson Heights theater devoted to
showing Hollywood films, it occurred to me that
these spaces do not even respect those home-
land boundaries inherent in notions of diaspora.)
DIALECTICS OF PLACE AND CITIZENSHIP 251
 In terms of more formal ways of thinking about
place, I want to make two brief points. First,
the new relationships forged in and through
Jackson Heights seem to me to be profoundly
linked to transformed ideas of the urban and
suburban. As Jackson Heights has a liminal
relationship to New York, it may, paradoxically,
be an ideal site in which to study new mean-
ings for the city. It may not be the strategic
city that Saskia Sassen has written about, and
yet it may be central to the ways that diasporic
and ethnic cultures are lived. Second, and
related to the first point, spatial arrangements
reflect the impact of a process that social sci-
entists have called “third worldization.” This
terminology demands elaboration.
WHAT DOES IT MEAN FOR A FIRST-WORLD PLACE
TO BECOME A THIRD-WORLD PLACE? SURELY
THE FORMS OF CITIZENSHIP MUST SHIFT AS
WELL. HERE WE MIGHT ASK ABOUT THE CONTIN-
UED USEFULNESS OF THE DICHOTOMOUS CATE-
GORIES OF “FIRST” AND “THIRD” WORLDS.
1. “Trans-National America,”
in Randolph Bourne, History
of a Literary Radical and Other
Essays, ed. Van Wyck Brooks
(New York: B.W. Huebsch,
1920), pp. 296–97.
252
Clearly the cultural formations with which we
are dealing are fragmented and profoundly
unwhole. I should like to suggest that perhaps
the model of pluralism, and even the forms of
democracy that might follow, are a poor fit for
these circumstances. While reference might
be made to William James or John Dewey, I
will direct my attention to Randolph Bourne’s
work, in particular his article “Trans-National
America,” an oft-cited set piece for those in
American studies who are trying to internation-
alize the field and for a range of people work-
ing on breaking down the borders of the U.S.
nation. Bourne makes a number of complex
and wonderful observations in this article: he
acknowledges the folly of ideas like the melt-
ing pot; he decries the parochialism surround-
ing responses to immigrant groups, particular-
ly in the context of 1916, in the middle of the
First World War. He speaks for a transnational
America that can represent the varied (and dis-
crete) traditions of its peoples, and can be a
“leader of nations.” But the address remains
within the model of U.S. imperialism. It antici-
pates the triumphalism of the “American cen-
tury.” Bourne notes,
“Only America, by reason of the unique liberty
of opportunity and traditional isolation for
which she seems to stand, can lead in this
cosmopolitan enterprise. Only the American —
and in this category I include the migratory
alien who has lived with us…has the chance
to become that citizen of the world. America is
coming to be, not a nationality, but a trans-
nationality… ”1
At its best, though, the diasporic public sphere
challenges nationalisms, and in its more mild
form, it creates a space for the multiplicity
of affiliations.
ULTIMATELY, THE “ONLY AMERICA,”
“ONLY THE AMERICAN” SO
PROMINENT IN BOURNE’S
ARTICLE IS TOO STRUCTURALLY
SIMILAR TO THE TRIUMPHS
OF U.S. IDEOLOGIES AND
ECONOMIES TO BE EASILY
TRANSPORTED WITHOUT
REFLECTION TO A DISCUSSION
OF NEW TRANSNATIONAL FORMS
OF CITIZENSHIP AND PLACE.
I suggest that we revisit postmodernism’s
critique of the unitary subject, of the idea that
subjects can act. It seems to me that the thrust
of a postmodernist politic is that it decenters
the subject and decouples it from action, and that
this can be a vehicle for critiquing imperialism.
Pluralities, it must be said, are temporary and
performed, and I would ask if this structure
can contain the fluidity essential to migrant
cultures. In posing this question I mean to mil-
itate against ideologies of the U.S. as a nation
of migrants, of multi-cultures. While for Bourne
transnationalism belonged to America, today
transnationalism belongs to the migrants.
IT STRIKES ME THAT RATHER THAN THINKING IN
TERMS OF MULTIPLICITY (IN TERMS OF IDENTITY,
CITIZENSHIP, AND PLACE), WE MIGHT BE BETTER
SERVED BY A MODEL OF SIMULTANEITY IN
WHICH WE WOULD BE LOOKING MORE CLOSELY
FOR THE DIALOGUE BETWEEN DIFFERENT WAYS
OF EXPERIENCING AND UNDERSTANDING THE
WORLD, BETWEEN DIFFERENCES THEMSELVES.
To return to the theme of “things in the mak-
ing,” I must suggest that the identities emerg-
ing from the kinds of formations I have
observed are yet to be fully determined, and
the question of who and what is a citizen must
be approached with the antidogmatism and
attention to context that is the inheritance pro-
vided by pragmatism. Maybe alternative
spaces evidence the fragility of the totalities in
which they have been located, existing in and
through nations; and maybe there will never
again be a public square, of the kind that was
once imagined, in the United States.
DIALECTICS OF PLACE AND CITIZENSHIP 253
 SASKIA SASSEN

THE GLOBAL CITY:

THE DENATIONALIZING
OF TIME AND SPACE
The experience of the global is partial. It is not an all-encompassing
umbrella. The multiple processes that constitute it inhabit and shape
specific rather than universal structurations of the economic, the politi-
cal, the cultural, the subjective. In so doing, new spatialities and tempo-
ralities are produced, coexisting yet distinct from the master temporality
and spatiality of the “national.” In the interplay of their differences,
strategic openings have emerged.

Such strategic openings are especially evident
in sites where these intersecting temporalities
and spatialities assume thick and consequen-
tial forms. Among these sites are what I call
global cities.
THE GLOBAL CITY IS A BORDER
ZONE WHERE THE OLD SPATIAL-
ITIES AND TEMPORALITIES OF
THE NATIONAL AND THE NEW
ONES OF THE GLOBAL-DIGITAL
AGE GET ENGAGED.
Out of their juxtaposition comes the possibility
of a whole series of new economic and cultural
projects. There are other sites, including
microsites, where the juxtapositions of different
spatialities and temporalities are likely to be
thick, charged. One question that comes to
mind is whether art in some of its instantiations
can represent such a microsite of juxtapositions,
one that captures a key dynamic of transitioning.
In what follows I explore some of these issues
by emphasizing the locational and institutional
embeddedness of economic globalization and
by arguing that the combination of this embed-
dedness with the specificity of globalization
entails the partial unbundling of what histori-
cally have been constructed as national spa-
tialities and temporalities. This unbundling of
the national produces openings for other
dynamics and actors to emerge in the interna-
tional arena besides the national state. Do we
see here the formation of a new politics?
T H E S PAT I A L I T I E S A N D T E M P O R A L I T I ES
OF THE GLOBAL
The insertion of the global in an overwhelming-
ly nationalized institutional world engenders a
partial unbundling of that national order. It is
partial because the geography of economic
globalization is strategic. It is not diffuse, nor
is it an all-encompassing condition.1 Further, it
is partial in the sense that national space was
probably never a unitary condition, even
though institutionally constructed as such. One

255
 way of conceptualizing this insertion of the
global in the national is as a partial and incipi-
ent “denationalization.”2 This partial unbundling
of the national is produced through the prac-
tices and institutional forms of the global,
which in turn produces its own specific cross-
border spatialities and distinct temporalities.
The process of denationalization I am seeking
to specify here cannot be reduced to a geo-
graphic conception, as was the notion in the
heads of the generals who fought the wars for
nationalizing territory in earlier centuries. This
is a highly specialized and strategic denation-
alizing of specific institutional arenas.
Manhattan and the City of London are the
equivalent of free-trade zones when it comes
to finance. But it is not Manhattan as a geo-
graphic entity, with all its layers of activity,
functions, and regulations, that is a free-trade
zone. It is a highly specialized functional or
institutional realm that becomes denational-
ized. However, this institutional arena has dis-
tinct locational patterns with a disproportion-
ate concentration in global cities. And this has
the effect of reterritorializing even the most
globalized, digitalized, and partly dematerial-
ized industries and markets.
256
This reterritorializing also involves a complex
and dynamic interaction with the authority of
the national state. The strategic spaces where
many global processes are embedded are
often national; the mechanisms through which
new legal forms, necessary for globalization,
are implemented are often part of state insti-
tutions; the infrastructure that makes possible
the hypermobility of financial capital at the
global scale is embedded in various national
territories. Thus one way of conceiving of the
inevitable negotiations with the national is in
terms of this partial and strategic dynamic of
denationalization.3
From this perspective, understanding the
spatiality of economic globalization only in
terms of hypermobility and space/time
compression — the dominant markers in
today’s conceptualization — is inadequate.
Hypermobility and space/time compression
need to be produced, and this requires vast
concentrations of very material and not so
mobile facilities and infrastructures. And they
need to be managed and serviced, and this
requires mostly place-bound labor markets for
talent and for low-wage workers. The global
city is emblematic here, with its vast concen-
trations of hypermobile, dematerialized finan-
cial instruments and the enormous concentra-
tions of material and place-bound resources
that it takes to make the former circulate
around the globe in a second.4
Even the vast new economic topography that Yet complex as these dynamics of newly pro-
is being implemented through electronic space duced and newly unbundled spatialities are,
is one moment, one fragment, of an even they are not enough to specify the processes
vaster economic chain that is in good part that constitute economic globalization. Its
embedded in non-electronic spaces. The most strategic economic projects have emerged in
advanced information industries, such as the play between two master/monster tempo-
finance, are installed only partly in electronic ralities, within which we exist and transact
space. And so are industries that produce (and enact all kinds of microtemporalities).
digital products, such as software design. One of these is a collapsing temporality — that
of the national state as a historical institution,
THE INCREASING DIGITALIZA- a master temporality often thought of as
historical time. The other is a new temporality,
TION OF ECONOMIC ACTIVITIES
that of economic globalization. In the intersec-
HAS NOT ELIMINATED THE NEED tion of these two coexisting temporalities we
FOR MAJOR INTERNATIONAL see the formation of new economic dynamics
BUSINESS AND FINANCIAL CEN- and opportunities that drive and constitute
economic globalization and can be thought of
TERS AND ALL THE MATERIAL
as partly denationalized temporalities.5
RESOURCES THEY CONCEN-
TRATE, FROM STATE-OF-THE-ART
TELEMATICS INFRASTRUC-
TURES TO BRAIN TALENT. WE
TEND TO OPERATE IN TOPOGRA-
PHIES THAT WEAVE BETWEEN
ACTUAL AND DIGITAL SPACE.
EVEN AS WE ARE INCREASING-
LY RELOCATING ACTIVITIES TO
DIGITAL SPACES, WE CONTINUE
TO LOCATE DIGITAL CAPACITIES
IN THE HUMAN BODY.

THE GLOBAL CITY 257

 Elsewhere I have argued that what we could This narrow focus has the effect of evicting
think of as the dominant narrative or main- from the account the place-boundedness of sig-
stream account of economic globalization is nificant components of the global information
a narrative of eviction.6 Key concepts in the economy and the fact that there is a far broad-
dominant account of globalization, information er range of types of urban spaces involved than
economy, and telematics all suggest that place some of the master images suggest.
no longer matters and that the only type of
Insofar as an economic analysis of the global
worker that matters is the highly educated
city recovers the broad array of jobs and work
professional. This account privileges the
cultures that are part of the global economy,
capability for global transmission over the
although typically not marked as such, it
concentrations of built infrastructure that
allows us to examine the possibility of a new
make transmission possible. It privileges
politics of traditionally disadvantaged actors
information outputs over the workers produc-
operating in this new transnational economic
ing those outputs, from specialists to secre-
geography. This is a politics that lies at the
taries; and the new transnational corporate
intersection of economic par ticipation in the
culture over the multiplicity of cultural environ-
global economy and the politics of the
ments, including reterritorialized immigrant cul-
disadvantaged, and in that sense would add
tures, within which many of the “other” jobs of
an economic dimension, specifically through
the global information economy are carried out.
those who hold the other jobs in the global
economy — from factor y workers in expor t
IN BRIEF, THE DOMINANT NARRATIVE CONCERNS processing zones to cleaners on Wall Street.
ITSELF WITH THE UPPER CIRCUITS OF CAPITAL,
NOT THE LOWER ONES, AND WITH THE GLOBAL
CAPACITIES OF MAJOR ECONOMIC ACTORS, NOT
THE INFRASTRUCTURE OF FACILITIES AND JOBS
UNDERLYING THOSE CAPACITIES.

258

THE CENTRALITY OF PLACE IN A
CONTEXT OF GLOBAL PROCESS-
ES ENGENDERS A TRANSNA-
TIONAL ECONOMIC AND POLITI-
CAL OPENING IN THE FORMA-
TION OF NEW CLAIMS AND
HENCE IN THE CONSTITUTION
OF ENTITLEMENTS, NOTABLY
RIGHTS TO PLACE, AND, AT THE
LIMIT, IN THE CONSTITUTION OF
“CITIZENSHIP.”7
The city has indeed emerged as a site for new
claims: by global capital, which uses the city
as an “organizational commodity”; but also by
disadvantaged sectors of the urban popula-
tion, frequently as internationalized a presence
in large cities as capital. The denationalizing
of urban space and the formation of new
claims centered in transnational actors and
involving contestation raise the question,
whose city is it?
I see this as a type of political opening
that contains unifying capacities across
national boundaries and sharpens conflicts
within such boundaries. Global capital and
the new immigrant work force are two major
instances of transnationalized categories
that have unifying proper ties internally and
find themselves in contestation with each
other inside global cities.8
REVISITING THE EDGE
The partial unbundling of the national through
the insertion of the global in the national pro-
duces a rescaling of old hierarchies — running
from the local, regional, and national, on to
the global. Going to the next scale in terms of
size is no longer how integration is achieved.
The local now transacts directly with the
global — the global installs itself in locals,
and the global is itself constituted through
a multiplicity of locals.9
The distinction between the global and the
local needs to be rethought, notably the
assumption about the necessity of proximity in
the constitution of the “local.” For example,
BOTH THE NEW INTERNATIONAL PROFESSIONALS
AND THE NEW IMMIGRANT WORKERS OPERATE
IN CONTEXTS THAT ARE AT THE SAME TIME
LOCAL AND GLOBAL.
The new professionals of finance are members
of a cross-border culture that is in many ways
embedded in a global network of “local”
places — a set of particular international finan-
cial centers, with much circulation of people,
information, and capital among them. Further,
as financial centers, London, New York, Zurich,
Amsterdam, and Frankfurt are all part of an
international yet very localized subculture of
work. We see here a proximity, but it is not
embedded in territorial space; it is rather a
deterritorialized form of proximity containing
multiple territorial moments. Likewise many
immigrants tend to be part of a cross-border
network that connects specific localities — their
new communities and their localities of origin
in home countries. Although different from the
financiers, they nonetheless also have the
experience of deterritorialized local cultures
not predicated on locational proximity.10
THE GLOBAL CITY 259
 One way of reading this is as a tearing away
of the “context” or the “surrounding” and its
replacement with the fact of the global. The
strategic operation is not the search for a con-
nection with the “surroundings,” the context.
It is, rather, installation in a strategic cross-
border geography constituted through multiple
“locals.” The spatiality thus produced can be
thought of as a cross-border network of specific
sites embedded partly in the national but
constituted through spatial and temporal
practices that distinguish these from others,
notably those of the national as historically
constructed.11
Two points come to mind. First, global cities
structure a zone that can span the globe, but
it is a zone embedded in and juxtaposed with
older temporalities and spatialities. My research
on the new interface economies that dominate
the global city indicates that it is precisely this
juxtaposing that produces it. I would be inter-
ested in understanding whether in the case of
the microenvironments represented by certain
kinds of art, for instance digitally produced
environments or objects, there is a similar
dynamic of what appear as opposites but are
in fact mutual presuppositions. Such microen-
vironments might present themselves as self-
contained settings made possible by digital
capacities; yet they might well arise precisely
out of the fact of the limitations of the non-dig-
ital condition and in this sense be engen-
dered, ironically, by what they are not.
260
Financial capital illustrates the second and
more general point I am trying to make. I have
argued elsewhere that the ascendance and
capacity of finance to subject other forms of
capital to its modes has to do with the coexis-
tence of its different temporalities (much
shorter for finance than that of other forms
of capital) and spatialities (the hypermobility
of finance’s dematerialized outputs) compared
with other forms of capital. Finance by itself,
without the other forms of capital, could not
do much with its own speeds.12 How would
this type of juxtaposition of differences work
out in an analysis of the microenvironments
of certain forms of art?
It seems to me that, as in art, micro-instantia-
tions of this dynamic might be subject to the
same tension between global span and sited
materialities. Here I find interesting conceptu-
al resonances with art projects that negotiate
the relationship between the almost limitless
freedom (so to speak) of certain forms and
the constraints of the materials that go
into their execution. This revisits the tension
between that which is experienced as limit-
less, dematerialized capacity, as in the digital,
and materialities that are sited.
Second, although it spans the globe, the new
zone that is being structured spatially and
temporally is inhabited/constituted by multiple
units or locals — it is not only a flow of transac-
tions or one large encompassing system.
The global city is a function of a global network;
there is no such thing as a single global city,
as one might have had with the empires of old,
each with its capital. This network is constitut-
ed in terms of nodes of hyperconcentration of
activities and resources. What connects the
nodes is dematerialized digital capacity; but
the nodes incorporate enormous amounts and
types of materialities, sited materialities.
This means that we need to decode what is
local (or national?) in such locals, in what has
historically been constructed as local because
sited in a place. And it means specifying
what are the new territorial and institutional
conditionalities of the local — of that which is
present in a place — in a global and digital
era. These features also raise the question
of how the edge works, about the presence
or absence of intersections between different
environments, about what happens to
contextual conditions.
The orientation of the local is simultaneously
toward itself and toward the global. The inten-
sity of each environment’s internal transactions
is such that it overrides all considerations of
the broader locality or context within which it
exists. The new networked sub-economy of
the global city occupies a strategic geography
that is partly deterritorialized, cuts across
borders, and connects a variety of points on
the globe. It occupies only a fraction of its
“local” setting. Its boundaries are not those
of the city where it is partly located, nor those
of the “neighborhood.”13
How this would work for certain forms of art
is not clear to me; but it is possible that the
issue of the edge, the surrounding, the locus
also holds for art that is marked by the intensity
of its internal transactions and its cross-border,
transnational rather than contextual orientation.
THE GLOBAL CITY 261
 UNBUNDLINGS AND NEW OPENINGS

The unbundling of the national along with the The large city of today emerges as a strategic
specific dynamics of denationalization as site for these new types of operations. It is
instantiated in the global city has contributed a nexus where the formation of new claims
to creating operational and conceptual open- materializes and assumes concrete forms.
ings for other actors and subjects. The loss of power at the national level produces
the possibility for new forms of power and
The ascendance of a large variety of non-state
politics at the subnational level. The national
actors in the international arena signals the
as the container of social process and power
expansion of an international civil society. This
is now cracked open. This cracked casing
is clearly a contested space, particularly when
offers possibilities for a geography of politics
we consider, for example, the logic of the capi-
that links subnational spaces. Cities are fore-
tal market — profitability at all costs — against
most in this new geography. One question this
that of the human rights regime. But it does
engenders is how and whether we are seeing
represent a space where other actors can gain
the formation of a new type of transnational
visibility as individuals and as collective
politics that localizes in these cities.
actors, and come out of the invisibility of
aggregate membership in a nation-state exclu-
sively represented by the sovereign.

There are two strategic dynamics I am isolating

here: the incipient denationalizing of specific
types of national settings, particularly global
cities; and the formation of conceptual and
operational openings for actors other than
the national state in cross-border political
dynamics, particularly the new global corporate
actors and those collectivities whose experi-
ence of membership has not been subsumed
fully under nationhood in its modern
conception — e.g., minorities, immigrants,
first-nation people, and many feminists.

262
1. There is disagreement in the literature on this point. Some
authors see globalization as a universal and universalizing condi-
tion, especially when it comes to the sphere of consumption. In
my research I have tended to focus on the sphere of “produc-
tion,” by which I mean to include the operations necessary for
the management and coordination of the global economy as well
as those that organize the appropriation and control of profit.
2. See Saskia Sassen, Losing Control? Sovereignty in an Age of
Globalization (New York: Columbia University Press, 1996).
3. Taking as the starting point the specificity of a national/local
setting makes it possible to trace the resistances, accommoda-
tions, and inertias of the national to the agency of the global,
whether this agency comes from the outside or the inside of the
national. And it makes it possible to capture the many particular
trajectories through which this insertion materializes in different
institutional orders within different national states, the multiple
forms it assumes, and the multiple cross-border networks that
are thereby constituted. Dynamic processes and border zones
emerge in the juxtapositions of the national and the global thus
understood. See my forthcoming article, “Spatialities and
Temporalities of the Global,” in Public Culture 12, no. 1 (2000),
special issue on globalization.
4. It is precisely the combination of the spatial dispersal of
numerous activities and telematic global integration that has
contributed to a strategic role for major cities in the current
phase of the world economy. See, e.g., Paul L. Knox and Peter J.
Taylor, eds., World Cities in a World-System (Cambridge:
Cambridge University Press, 1995); and Michael A. Cohen et al.,
eds., Preparing for the Urban Future. Global Pressures and Local
Forces (Washington, D.C.: Woodrow Wilson Center Press, 1996),
in particular, Richard Stren, “The Studies of Cities: Popular
Perceptions, Academic Disciplines, and Emerging Agendas,” pp.
392–420. Beyond their sometime history as centers for world
trade and banking, these cities now function as command points
in the organization of the world economy, as key locations and
marketplaces for the leading industries of our period (finance
and specialized services for firms), and as sites for the produc-
tion of innovations in those industries. These cities have come
to concentrate such vast resources, and the leading industries
have exercised such massive influence on the economic and
social order of these cities, that the possibility of a new type of
city arises.
5. See Sassen, “Spatialities and Temporalities of the Global.”
6. Saskia Sassen, Globalization and Its Discontents (New York:
New Press, 1998).
7. See Joan Copjec and Michael Sorkin, eds., Giving Ground:
The Politics of Propinquity (London: Verso, 1998); and Social
Justice 20, nos. 3–4 (fall–winter 1993), special issue entitled
“Global Crisis, Local Struggles.”
8. Immigration, for instance, is one major process through which
a new transnational political economy is being constituted, one
that is largely embedded in major cities insofar as most immi-
grants, whether in the U.S., Japan, or Western Europe, are con-
centrated in major cities. It is, in my reading, one of the constitu-
tive processes of globalization today, even though not recognized
or represented as such in mainstream accounts of the economy.
9. I also see this in the political realm, particularly the kind of
“global” politics attributed to the internet. I think of the latter
rather as a multiplicity of localized operations, but with the differ-
ence that they are part of a global network. This produces a
“knowing” that re-marks the local. See the chapter “Electronic
Space and Power” in my Globalization and Its Discontents.
10. Thus, for instance, in my research on these two types of
workers I have found that they operate in labor markets that are
local even though not characterized by territorial proximity, as
the standard model of such markets would have it.
11. We can then think of the global economy as materializing in
a worldwide grid of strategic places, uppermost among which are
major international business and financial centers. This global
grid constitutes a new economic geography of centrality, one that
cuts across national boundaries and across the old north-south
divide. See, e.g., Knox and Taylor, World Cities in a World-
System; Michel Peraldi and Evelyne Perrin, eds., Reseaux pro-
ductifs et territoires urbains (Toulouse: Presses Universitaires du
Mirail, 1996). A key aspect of the spatialization of global eco-
nomic processes that I cannot develop here is digital space; but
see Florian Rotzer, Die Telepolis: Urbanität im digitalen Zeitalter
(Mannheim: Bollmann, 1995); Futur Antérieur 30–32 (1995),
special issue “La Ville-Monde aujourd’hui: entre virtualité et
ancrage,” ed. Thierry Pillon and Anne Querrien; and Sassen,
Globalization and Its Discontents, chap. 9.
12. See Saskia Sassen, “Juxtaposed Temporalities: Producing
a New Zone,” in Cynthia Davidson, ed., Anytime (Cambridge,
Mass.: MIT Press, 1999), pp. 114–21.
13. On another, larger scale, I have found rather clearly in my
research on global cities that these cities develop a stronger ori-
entation toward the gobal markets than toward their hinterlands.
Thereby they override a key proposition in the urban systems lit-
erature, to wit, that cities and urban systems integrate in order
to articulate national territory. This may have been the case dur-
ing the period when mass manufacturing and mass consumption
were the dominant growth machines in developed economies
and thrived on the possibility of a national scale. But this is not
the case today with the ascendance of digitalized, globalized,
dematerialized sectors such as finance.
THE GLOBAL CITY 263
CASEY NELSON BLAKE AFTERWORD:
At the end of a collection as varied as this
one, which ranges from neo-Marxist cri-
tiques of economic globalism to strictures
against nostalgia for understandings of
place, citizenship, and culture bounded by
physical geography and nationality, it seems
only appropriate to forgo summary remarks
and end instead with a series of questions.
Those questions are all versions of one
question, the Tina Turner Question implicit
in all these essays: What’s pragmatism got
to do with it? Is pragmatism, understood as
an intellectual, political, and philosophical
tradition, an appropriate point of departure
for the stances recommended in these
papers? If pragmatism is to stand for some-
thing more than openness to the new —
“an old name for new ways of thinking,” as
historian James Kloppenberg wryly charac-
terizes various strains of “neo-pragmatist”
1
thought — or more than a philosophical
gloss on a left-liberal politics that once took
its inspiration from Gramsci and the young
Marx, then it must set some limits on the
arguments we may put forward under its
banner. Asking the Tina Turner Question may
help us think through more precisely what
pragmatism as a historical tradition has to
offer the papers collected here, whether it
does in fact authorize their authors’ commit-
ments, and what, if anything, the pragmatist
imagination has to offer discussions of
architecture, design, urban space, and polit-
ical change at this turn-of-the-century
moment.
The first version of that question might read
as follows: Is there a necessary connection
between a pragmatist theory of truth —
a pragmatist stance on epistemology, if you
will — and any particular political position?
Many of the papers here assume such a
connection, but it is not at all clear from
their formulations why philosophical pragma-
tism must underwrite one or another strain
of left-liberalism (the dominant political note
sounded throughout this collection), as
opposed to some other political stance.
There has, in any event, been a long-stand-
ing debate within pragmatist circles on this
very issue, with Richard Rorty arguing for
maintaining a hard distinction between
Dewey’s critique of foundationalism and his
left-progressive positions on political and
social issues. By contrast, Jürgen Habermas
and, to a lesser extent, Kloppenberg, Robert
Westbrook, and Cornel West have all traced
the relationship between a pragmatist epis-
temology and a radical-democratic politics.
That this is by no means a settled issue in
pragmatist circles is evident in the essays
in the recent anthology of writings by histo-
rians and political theorists on Richard
Rorty edited by John Pettegrew, titled
A Pragmatist’s Progress? Richard Rorty and
American Intellectual History.
WHAT’S PRAGMATISM GOT TO DO WITH IT?
A second version: Is there a connection
between a pragmatist aesthetics of the sort
that Richard Shusterman recommends and
any particular approach to architecture and
urban design? It is worth pointing out that
none of the central thinkers in the American
pragmatist tradition wrote at length on
these subjects. Dewey’s Art as Experience
brilliantly restates the republican concep-
tion of art as a civic good but has nothing
of consequence to say about the aesthetics
and design of the built environment. In the
end, it may turn out that Thorstein Veblen
and Lewis Mumford — two thinkers who
deserve to be considered within the pragma-
tist “community of discourse”2 — are more
helpful to thinking through the relationship
between pragmatism and architecture than
are James or Dewey. Veblen and, especially,
Mumford sought to articulate the architec-
tural and design implications of a pragma-
tist aesthetics rooted in lived experience.3
Though their functionalist aesthetic may
clash with the sensibilities of today’s post-
modernists and historicists, it is worth
remembering that both Veblen and Mumford
understood functionalism as a democratic
ideal, critical of market imperatives. It is
precisely because their humanistic function-
alism cuts against the grain of the stale
polemics between modernists and postmod-
ernists that it deserves a second look today.
A third question follows from the version
above: Does a pragmatist hope for a revital-
ized public sphere carry with it a commit-
ment to particular understandings of public
space, place, and scale? Here it seems to
me the pragmatist legacy is muddled at
best, since pragmatists have been hard
pressed to explain how a general predisposi-
tion to things public should translate into
spatial and place-based projects. Those who
would seek in pragmatism additional ratio-
nale for “postnational” and “transnational”
approaches to political and cultural criticism
are especially likely to be disappointed. For
pragmatists can be found occupying local-
ist, regionalist, nationalist, cosmopolitan,
and internationalist stances throughout
their movement’s history.
Questions of place and scale bedeviled John
Dewey throughout his entire career as a
political thinker. On the one hand, Dewey’s
ideal of the public and his hopes for a more
expansive democratic practice rested on a
belief in the importance for civic culture of
face-to-face deliberation in local govern-
ment, the school, the workplace, and other
relatively small-scale settings. When it
came to national identity, Dewey was an
unabashed American exceptionalist, though
of a decidedly radical-democratic sort. It is
impossible to imagine him endorsing
267
 accounts of United States national identity
as inherently predatory or repressive. On the
other, Dewey understood that the industrial-
capitalist transformations of the 19th and
early 20th centuries had nationalized and
even globalized the economic and political
processes that shaped the lives of individu-
als in the United States, while draining local
institutions of efficacy and power. As a
result, he looked to radio, the syndicated
press, and other communications technolo-
gies that transcended the local as
resources for a revitalized public sphere.
He even endorsed U.S. participation in the
First World War, in part as a spur to the
cosmopolitan transformation of a formerly
provincial American culture. But it was
precisely the relationship between local
participatory democracy and the larger-scale
organs and institutions of what Dewey
called the “Great Society” that made
The Public and Its Problems such a muddled
work of political theory, as even his admirer
Robert Westbrook concedes.4
Nor do other thinkers in the pragmatist orbit
offer much clearer guidance on matters of
space, place, and scale. Lewis Mumford, an
indefatigable critic of the nation-state and
the industrial “megamachine,” imagined
urban public spaces as sites for civic and
268
artistic self-fashioning. His localism, so rem-
iniscent of William James’s anarchistic
opposition to “bigness in all its forms,” may
be an embarrassment to contemporary acad-
emics who pride themselves, above all, on
their liberation from the constraints of geog-
raphy, nationality, and place-based communi-
ties. But Mumford also made countless
appeals for the creation of regional and
international authorities responsible for
everything from water management to the
abolition of nuclear weapons. James’s stu-
dent W.E.B. Du Bois sought originally to
root his sweeping reinterpretation of
African-American culture and U. S. history,
The Souls of Black Folk, in a close examina-
tion of the culture of the southern Black
Belt. Yet Souls was also deeply informed by
Du Bois’s cosmopolitanism and by his edu-
cation in classical English and Continental
humanism. As his career progressed, Du
Bois became not only a Marxist internation-
alist but a great theorist of Pan-
Africanism — a move that may or may not be
viewed as a repudiation of his early pragma-
tism. Even Randolph Bourne’s famous call
for a “trans-national America” eludes easy
characterization as a “post-national” mani-
festo. If Bourne skewered the “melting-pot”
ideal for assimilating immigrants, he also
complained that “America [had] as yet no
impelling integrating force….In our loose,
free country, no constraining national pur-
pose, no tenacious folk-tradition and folk-
style hold the people to a line.”5
If pragmatists past offer no clear prescrip-
tions on these issues, many of their contem-
porary heirs have formulated cautious
defenses of civic nationalism that sit uneasi-
ly with the globalist trends on American
campuses. Both David A. Hollinger’s
Postethnic America and Rorty’s Achieving
Our Country seek to preserve national civic
culture as a site for democratic political
possibility.6 Whether Hollinger and Rorty are
right or wrong in their rearticulation of civic
nationalism matters less, in this instance,
than does their reading of pragmatism as an
inspiration for such a position.
Finally, there remains the question of what
resources pragmatism offers to the specific
political, social, economic, and cultural con-
ditions of our turn-of-the century moment,
which differs dramatically from the one that
James and Dewey confronted. Or to borrow
the title of an article by political theorist
Jeffrey Isaac, is the revival of pragmatism
practical? In that article, and in a related
essay on “the poverty of progressivism,”
Isaac draws sharp contrasts between these
two historical periods that should give
pause to those who assume that a revival of
intellectual pragmatism will contribute to a
resurgence of progressive politics.7 Isaac
notes the presence in James’s and Dewey’s
lifetimes of ascendant labor and women’s
movements, vigorous leftist political parties
and unions, and an emerging civil rights
movement, all of which posed a significant
threat to the existing order that had to be
answered or coopted by dominant political
and economic interests. Churches enlivened
by the social gospel and universities ener-
gized by the promise of the new social sci-
ences educated two or three generations of
intellectual activists on the progressive left.
Meanwhile, an emergent Fordist capitalism
required a strong nation-state to limit the
inefficiencies of unregulated competition,
buy off popular discontent through welfarist
measures, and meld an ethnically diverse
working class into an “American” national
bloc that would both support the state in its
international mission and serve as a mass
market for the new consumer economy.
Together, these developments created a
political culture far more hospitable to a
pragmatist-informed progressivism than any-
thing imaginable today. The left wing of the
progressive movement that included Dewey,
Jane Addams, Randolph Bourne, and other
pragmatist thinkers was to a large extent
parasitic on a more moderate or even corpo-
ratist strain of progressivism that — wittingly
or not — met the needs of a Fordist
project. Writing at a very different moment
in the history of capitalism, at a time when
popular forces and reformist institutions
are decidedly weaker than their counter-
parts a century ago, Isaac finds little reason
to assume that more talk of pragmatism in
workshops like this one will have significant
political consequences. Isaac’s sober
account offers an implicit rebuke to those
who imagine an immediate political payoff
from the pragmatism revival.
269
As I hope these remarks suggest, I find no
easy or immediate answers to the question
that provides the title for these reflections.
As admirable and well-intentioned as the
papers in this volume are, many seem to me
to advance positions that have only the
most tenuous relation to pragmatism as a
historically coherent intellectual tradition. Is
pragmatism really a “usable past” for such
positions? By the same token, I am skepti-
cal of the idea that there are necessary con-
nections between pragmatism as a philo-
sophical stance and the politics favored by
most workshop authors, between pragmatist
aesthetics and specific currents in contem-
porary architecture and design, and between
the pragmatist revival in the universities and
future political hope. At the very least, such
connections have yet to be established, in
theory and in practice. If there is such a
thing as the “pragmatist imagination,” I
believe it must be wedded to a pragmatist
ethic of irony — an ethic that insists that we
see “things as they are, thrown against the
background of things as they ought to be,”
to borrow Bourne’s words in “The Life of
Irony.”8 Among other things, such an ethic
would uphold the now-unfashionable proposi-
tion that there are realms of human experi-
ence — loyalty, love, friendship, and solidari-
ty are good places to start — that cannot
and should not be reduced to money, mar-
kets, celebrity, and power. That ethic would
also require that we maintain an ironic dis-
tance from academic pronouncements about
the goodness of all that comes wrapped in
the mantle of the new and the global, and
nurture instead what Bourne elsewhere
called “deep dissatisfaction with self and
with the groups that give themselves forth
as hopeful.”9 Yes, there is the contrarian
spirit of the malcontent in such an ethic.
But then again, as Bourne told us,
“Malcontentedness may be the beginning of
promise.”10
1. James T. Kloppenberg, “Pragmatism: An Old Name for Some New Ways of Thinking?” in John Pettegrew, ed., A Pragmatist’s
Progress? Richard Rorty and American Intellectual History (Lanham, Md.: Rowman & Littlefield, 2000), pp. 19–60. Kloppenberg’s
title is a play, of course, on the subtitle to William James’s classic 1907 collection, Pragmatism, “A New Name for Some Old
Ways of Thinking.”

2. The phrase is David A. Hollinger’s; see the essays collected in his In the American Province: Studies in the History and
Historiography of Ideas (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1985).

3. For Mumford’s relation to the pragmatist tradition, see my Beloved Community: The Cultural Criticism of Randolph Bourne, Van
Wyck Brooks, Waldo Frank, and Lewis Mumford (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1990).

4. See Robert B. Westbrook, John Dewey and American Democracy (Ithaca, N.Y.: Cornell University Press, 1991), pp. 314–18.

5. Randolph Bourne, “Trans-national America,” in Olaf Hansen, ed., The Radical Will: Randolph Bourne, Selected Writings
1911–1918 (New York: Urizen Books, 1977), p. 255. See also my essay, “‘The Cosmopolitan Note’: Randolph Bourne and the
Challenge of ‘Trans-national America,’” culturefront 4, 3 (winter 1995–96), pp. 25–28.

6. David A. Hollinger, Postethnic America: Beyond Multiculturalism (New York: Basic Books, 1995); and Richard Rorty, Achieving
Our Country: Leftist Thought in Twentieth-Century America (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1998).

7. See Jeffrey C. Isaac, “Is the Revival of Pragmatism Practical, or What Are the Consequences of Pragmatism?” in Pettegrew,
ed., Pragmatist’s Progress, pp. 151–80, and “The Poverty of Progressivism: Thoughts on American Democracy,” Dissent, fall
1996, pp. 40–49.

8. Randolph Bourne, “The Life of Irony,” in Hansen, ed., Radical Will, p. 138. For a revealing comparison of Bourne and Rorty on
irony, see John Pettegrew, “Lives of Irony: Randolph Bourne, Richard Rorty, and a New Genealogy of Critical Pragmatism,” in
Pettegrew, ed., Pragmatist’s Progress, pp. 103–34.

9. Randolph Bourne, “Twilight of Idols,” in Hansen, ed., Radical Will, p. 346.

10. Ibid., p. 347.

271
 NOTES ON CONTRIBUTORS
Stanley Aronowitz is Distinguished Professor of Sociology at
City University of New York Graduate Center. Social critic, public
intellectual, and prolific writer, he has had a diverse career
ranging from supervising community employment programs to
organizing oil, chemical, and atomic workers and working as a
steelworker and lathe operator. He is a member of the editorial
board of Cultural Critique, American Culture, New Politics, and
Social Text. His most recent publications include From the Ashes
of the Old: American Labor and America’s Future (Houghton
Mifflin, 1998) and The Knowledge Factory: Dismantling the
Corporate University and Creating True Higher Learning (Beacon,
2000). A volume coedited with Mark Poster, The Information
Subject, is forthcoming this year (Gordon & Breach).
Marshall Berman teaches political theory and urbanism at the City
University of New York. His most recent book is Adventures in
Marxism (Verso, 1999), a reconsideration of the Communist
Manifesto on its sesquicentennial and in the aftermath of the fall
of communism. His extensive critical writings have appeared in
The Nation, The Village Voice, Dissent, New Left Review, and other
journals, and he serves on the editorial board of Dissent. His clas-
sic All That Is Solid Melts into Air was first published in 1982.
Casey Nelson Blake is professor of history and directs the
American Studies program at Columbia. A former fellow of the
Woodrow Wilson Center, he is the author of Beloved Community:
The Cultural Criticism of Randolph Bourne, Van Wyck Brooks,
Waldo Frank, and Lewis Mumford (University of North Carolina,
1990). His essay “The Perils of Personality: Lewis Mumford and
Politics after Liberalism” appears in the anthology Pragmatism:
From Progressivism to Postmodernism, ed. Robert Hollinger and
David Depew (Praeger, 1999). A new edition of Mumford’s Art
and Technics was published by Columbia University Press this
year with his introduction. He is currently writing a book on
American public art since the 1960s.
Sandra Buckley directs the Center for Arts and Humanities at
the State University of New York at Albany and was formerly
professor of East Asian Studies at Griffith University, Australia.
She focuses on issues of gender, domesticity, and popular
culture in the context of contemporary Japanese studies. She
is the editor of Broken Silence: Voices of Japanese Feminism
(University of California, 1997). A new book, Culturezones:
Mapping the Contemporary Japanese Landscape, is in preparation.
272
Teresa Caldeira teaches anthropology at the University of
California, Irvine. Her research concerns processes of social
discrimination, urban segregation, racism, and the expansion of
citizenship from a comparative perspective. She is particularly
interested in the impact of these processes as they affect
women and transitions to democracy. Her book City of Walls:
Crime, Segregation and Citizenship in São Paulo (University
of California) is in press.
Jean-Louis Cohen is professor of architectural history at the
Institut français d’urbanisme at the Université de Paris VIII and
the Institute of Fine Arts, New York University. His book Scenes
of the World to Come: European Architecture and the American
Challenge, 1893–1960 (Flammarion, 1995) accompanied a
major exhibition at the Canadian Centre for Architecture. A new
book, Casablanca. Mythes et figures d’une aventure urbaine
(Hazan, 1998), with Monique Eleb, is now being translated
into English. He is currently engaged in the creation of a new
architectural museum, the Cité de l’Architecture et du Patrimoine,
in the Palais de Chaillot in Paris.
Jonathan Crary is associate professor of art history at Columbia
University and a founding editor of Zone Books. His most recent
book, Suspensions of Perception: Attention, Spectacle, and
Modern Culture (MIT Press, 2000), traces changes in human
perception in the late 19th and early 20th century as reflected
in art theory, philosophy, and scientific psychology. Techniques
of the Observer: On Vision and Modernity in the 19th Century
was published in 1990 (MIT Press).
Rosalyn Deutsche is an art historian and critic based in New
York. Her work draws on feminist and postmodern ideas about
the politics of visual representation and subjectivity, especially
in relation to public space. Evictions: Art and Spatial Politics was
published in 1998 (MIT Press). She is a coauthor of the exhibi-
tion catalogue Barbara Kruger (Museum of Contemporary Art,
Los Angeles, 1999). She has taught at Massachusetts Institute
of Technology, Columbia, Cooper Union, and the Whitney
Independent Study Program.
Kenneth Frampton is an architectural historian and holds the
Ware professorship at Columbia Graduate School of Architecture.
Among his numerous publications are Studies in Tectonic Culture
(MIT Press, 1995) and Modern Architecture: A Critical History
(World of Art, 1992). His argument for a new “critical regionalism”
in architecture, first advanced in 1983, has been a seminal
polemic in the field. An edited volume, Technology, Place and
Architecture: The Jerusalem Seminar in Architecture, appeared
in 1998 (Rizzoli).
GERALD E. FRUG was recently named Louis D. Brandeis
Professor at Harvard Law School, where he has taught since
1981, for his contributions to teaching and scholarship in urban
legal studies. His research focuses on legal problems of local
governments and legal theory. His book City Making: Building
Communities without Building Walls was published by Princeton
University Press in 1999.
PETER GALISON is Mallinckrodt Professor of the History of
Science and Physics at Harvard University. His work explores the
interactions in 20th-century physics among the “subcultures” of
experimentation, instrumentation, and theory. Recent books
include The Architecture of Science, edited with Emily Thompson
(MIT Press, 1999); Picturing Science, Producing Art, with Carolyn
Jones (Routledge, 1998); Image and Logic: A Material Culture
of Microphysics (University of Chicago, 1997); and The Disunity
of Art: Boundaries, Contexts, and Power, edited with David
Stump (Stanford University, 1996). In 1997 he was named a
John D. and Catherine T. MacArthur Foundation Fellow.
ELIZABETH GROSZ’s work focuses on feminist theory, politics,
and Western philosophy. She was trained as a philosopher at
the University of Sydney, where she taught from 1978 to 1991.
Since then she has taught widely in Australia and the United
States, where she is now Park Professor of Comparative
Literature at the State University of New York at Buffalo. Her
most recent book is Becomings: Explorations in Time, Memory,
and Futures (Cornell, 2000). Space, Time and Perversion:
Essays on the Politics of Bodies came out in 1995 (Routledge).
ANDREAS HUYSSEN is Villard Professor of Germanic Languages
and Comparative Literature and director of the Center for
Comparative Literature and Society at Columbia. A number of
his recent writings have focused on monuments and memory in
the context of postmodernity. Twilight Memories: Marking Time in
a Culture of Amnesia was published by Routledge in 1995. He
is coeditor of New German Critique.
ISAAC JOSEPH teaches sociology at the Université de Paris
X–Nanterre. He has been interested in the Chicago School of
sociology and pragmatist thought since the publication of his
book L’École de Chicago: naissance de l’écologie urbaine
(Aubier, 1979, with Yves Grafmeyer). Recent books include La
Ville sans qualités (Editions de l’Aube, 1998) and Erving
Goffman et la microsociologie (PUF, 1997). He coedited a spe-
cial issue of Raisons pratiques, no. 7, “La Folie dans la place”
(L’EHESS, 1996) as well as the volume Métiers du public: les
compétences de l’agent et l’espace de l’usager (CNRS, 1995).
DAVID LAPOUJADE is the author of William James: Empirisme et
pragmatisme (PUF, 1997). He teaches the history of British and
American philosophy at the Université de Paris I.
REINHOLD MARTIN teaches architectural theory, history, and
design studio at Columbia University and holds architectural
degrees from Rensselaer Polytechnic, the Architectural
Association in London, and Princeton. He is a founding coeditor
of Grey Room, a new scholarly journal devoted to the theorization
of modern and contemporary architecture, art, and media. With
his partner, Kadambari Baxi, he is a principal in the firm of
Martin/Baxi Architects and the author of Entropia (Black Dog,
2000).
BRIAN MASSUMI, an associate professor of English, works on
poststructuralist theory, theories of perception, space and
motion, new media, and cultural studies. Currently he is
completing a book entitled The Critique of Pure Form: The Union
of the Senses and the Genesis of Forms. Translator of Gilles
Deleuze and Félix Guattari’s Mille Plateaux (University of
Minnesota, 1987), he is the author of A User’s Guide to
Capitalism and Schizophrenia: Deviations from Deleuze and
Guattari (MIT, 1992). Forthcoming next year are his Parables for
the Virtual (Harvard University) and an edited volume, A Shock
to Thought: Expression after Deleuze and Guattari (Routledge).
MARY MCLEOD is an associate professor at Columbia University,
where she teaches history and theory of architecture and design
studio. Her recent writings, especially concerned with issues
of feminism in architecture, the everyday, and the history of the
modern movement, have appeared in numerous journals and
anthologies, including Architecture Theory since 1968 (MIT Press,
1998), Architecture of the Everyday (Princeton Architectural
Press, 1997), Architecture and Feminism (Princeton Architectural
Press, 1997), and Architecture in Fashion (Princeton Architectural
Press, 1994). She has recently completed editing a book
on the French designer Charlotte Perriand, to be published by
Harry N. Abrams in 2001.
273
 Paul Miller a.k.a. DJ Spooky That Subliminal Kid is a writer,
conceptual artist, and musician who mixes diverse music
genres, urban scenes, and high/low cultural commentary
in his work. His albums include The Quick and the Dead
(Beggars Banquet/Sulfur, 2000), Subliminal Minded: The EP (Bar
None, 1999), File under Futurism (Caipirinha Productions, 1999),
Necropolis: The Dialogic Project (Knitting Factory Works, 1996),
and Songs of a Dead Dreamer (Asphodel, 1996). For his writings
and sounds: http://www.DJspooky.com.
Chantal Mouffe is a social and political philosopher. Her recent
work develops a theory of radical democracy based on political
pluralism and the maintainance of social differences. The editor
of Deconstruction and Pragmatism (Routledge, 1996) and
Dimensions of Radical Democracy: Pluralism, Citizenship,
Community (Verso, 1996), she is the author, most recently,
of The Democratic Paradox (Verso, 2000) and The Challenge of
Carl Schmitt (Verso, 1999). A collection of her writings together
with Ernesto Laclau is Laclau and Mouffe: The Radical
Democratic Imaginary (Routledge, 1998). Currently Quinton Hogg
Senior Research Fellow at the Centre for the Study of Democracy
at the University of Westminster in London, she has held visiting
professorships around the world and is a member of the Collège
International de Philosophie, Paris.
274
Joan Ockman directs the Temple Hoyne Buell Center for the
Study of American Architecture at Columbia, where she also
teaches architectural history and theory. Her book Architecture
Culture 1943-–1968: A Documentary Anthology was published
by Rizzoli in 1993. She coedited the volume Architecture
Criticism Ideology (Princeton Architectural Press, 1985).
A monographic essay by her on Alexander Dorner, an avant-garde
German museum director of the 1920s later influenced by
pragmatist philosophy, “The Road Not Taken: Alexander Dorner’s
Way Beyond Art,” appears in the volume Autonomy and Ideology:
Positioning an Avant-Garde in America, ed. R. E. Somol
(Monacelli, 1997).
John Rajchman is a philosopher with special interest in the
arts and architecture. Currently a visiting professor in the art
history department at Columbia, he has previously taught at
Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Cooper Union, and the
Collège International de Philosophie in Paris. Among his books
are The Deleuze Connections (MIT, forthcoming 2000),
Constructions (MIT Press, 1998), Truth and Eros: Foucault,
Lacan, and the Question of Ethics (Routledge, 1991), and
Philosophical Events (Columbia, 1990). He is the editor of
French Philosophy 1945–1995, with Etienne Balibar (New Press,
forthcoming 2001); Pure Immanence (Zone Books, 2000); The
Virtual House (ANY 20, 1997); Lightness (ANY 5, 1994); and
The Identity in Question (Routledge, 1995). His book Post-
Analytic Philosophy, coedited with Cornel West (Columbia, 1985),
helped reintroduce pragmatist philosophy into contemporary
intellectual debates. His essay “A New Pragmatism?” appears
in Anyhow, ed. Cynthia Davidson (MIT Press, 1998).
Martha Rosler is an artist based in New York. Her diverse work,
ranging from photography, video, public art installations, and
performance pieces to fiction and critical writing, focuses on the
sociopolitical myths and realities that constitute a late-capitalist,
patriarchal culture. In 1989 her curatorial project at the DIA Art
Foundation, “If You Lived Here…,” offered a critique of housing,
homelessness, and architectural planning in New York City.
A major international retrospective of her work was mounted in
2000 at the New Museum of Contemporary Art and the Inter-
national Center for Photography in New York, with an accompany-
ing publication, Martha Rosler: Positions in the Life World (MIT
Press, 1999). Among other recent publications is In the Place of
the Public: Observations of a Frequent Flyer (Cantz, 1998).
Hashim Sarkis is an assistant professor of architecture at
Harvard and a practicing architect in Lebanon. His scholarly
research centers on democratic practices and representations in
20th-century American architecture and urbanism. A current project
concerns the design and planning of educational facilities in the
United States after World War II. His built architectural work
includes a housing complex for fishermen in Tyre, Lebanon. He
is the program director of Plan B, Institute for Urban Design
Studies in Lebanon and the Middle East, a nonprofit research
organization concerned with postwar reconstruction. With Peter
Rowe, he coedited the book Projecting Beirut: Episodes in the
Construction and Reconstruction of a Modern City (Prestel,
1998).
Saskia Sassen is professor of sociology at the University of
Chicago and Centennial Visiting Professor at London School of
Economics. Her most recent books are Guests and Aliens (New
York: New Press, 1999) and Globalization and its Discontents:
Essays on the New Mobility of People and Money (New York:
New Press 1998). Her two books on cities, The Global City
(Princeton University) and Cities in a World Economy (Pine Forge),
have been reissued in updated editions in 2000. She is current-
ly completing Cities and Their Cross-Border Networks, to be
published by the United Nations University Press, and a research
project, “Governance and Accountability in a Global Economy.”
Sandhya Shukla teaches in the department of anthropology
and the Center for the Study of Race and Ethnicity at Columbia.
She received her doctorate from Yale in 1998. Her recent
writings include “New Immigrants, New Forms of Transnational
Community: Post-1965 Indian Migrations,” Amerasia Journal,
1999; “Building Diaspora and Nation: The 1991 ‘Cultural
Festival of India,’” Cultural Studies, 1997; and “Feminisms of
the Diaspora Both Local and Global: The Politics of South Asian
Women Against Domestic Violence,” in Women Transforming
Politics (New York University, 1997).
Richard Shusterman is a philosopher and cultural critic, and
author of a number of books on pragmatism and aesthetics:
Pragmatist Aesthetics: Living Beauty, Rethinking Art (2nd ed.,
Rowman & Littlefield, 2000); Performing Live: Aesthetic
Alternatives for the Ends of Art (Cornell, forthcoming 2000);
Practicing Philosophy: Pragmatism and the Philosophical Life
(Routledge, 1997); and Sous interprétation (L’Eclat, 1994).
He is also the editor of Bourdieu: A Critical Reader (Blackwell,
1999). Some of his essays on art, music, and cultural criticism,
including pieces from The Nation, The Chronicle of Higher
Education, and the Philly Rap fanzine, appear on his web page:
www.temple.edu/aesthetics. He chairs the department of
philosophy at Temple University.
AbdouMaliq Simone has worked as an urbanist in the Graduate
School of Public Development Management at the University of
Witwatersrand in Johannesburg and as a senior researcher with
the Coalition for the Development of Urban Africa in Dakar. He
was a Rockefeller Humanities Fellow at the International Center
for Advanced Studies at New York University in 1999–2000. His
research focuses on new modalities of social affiliation, econo-
my, and subjectivity in the context of the dispersal and reconfigu-
ration of African cities. His books include Urban Process and
Change in Africa (Dakar, 1998) and In Whose Image? Political
Islam and Urban Practices in Sudan (University of Chicago, 1994).
275
 Anders Stephanson, associate professor of history at Columbia,
works on international history, the historiography of U.S. foreign
relations, and political and cultural theory. His most recent book
is Manifest Destiny: American Expansionism and the Empire
of Right (Hill & Wang, 1996). He is currently completing two
studies: The Cold War as U.S. Ideology and The U.S. in the
World: Six Diplomatic Historians.
Bernard Tschumi is dean of the Graduate School of Architecture,
Planning and Preservation at Columbia and principal of
Bernard Tschumi Architects, New York and Paris. His theoretical
writings and design projects — revolving around an architecture
of “space, event, and movement” — propose a theory of
architecture as a programmatic trigger for action. His books
include Architecture and Disjunction (MIT Press, 1996),
Event-Cities (MIT, 1994), and the forthcoming Event-Cities 2
(MIT, 2000). Tschumi’s first large-scale architectural project was
his winning competition entry for the Parc de la Villette, Paris
(1983–95). Among his most recent is the Alfred Lerner Hall
student center on the Columbia campus (completed 1999),
where part of the workshop took place.
276
Nadia Urbinati is a specialist on liberal and socialist thought
with particular interest in 19th- and 20th-century Europe and
America. She teaches in the department of political science at
Columbia. Her book Individualismo democratico. Emerson,
Dewey e la cultura politica americana was published in 1997
(Donzelli). She is the editor of translations of the writings of two
Italian theorists: On Liberal Revolution by Piero Gobetti (Yale,
2000) and Liberal Socialism by Carlo Rosselli (Princeton
University, 1994). She is currently working on a book on John
Stuart Mill’s political and moral ideas.
Mabel Wilson teaches architectural design and theory at
California College of Arts and Crafts and is a partner in the
design collaborative KW:a with Paul Kariouk. Her written and
architectural work focuses on the way social identities — race,
gender, sex, and ethnicity — are constructed in architectural
space. Wilson and Kariouk’s most recent project, (a)way station,
described in their collaborative contribution to this volume, was
initially installed at the Storefront Gallery for Art and Architecture
in New York in 1999. Her writings have been published in
Assemblage, Harvard Design Magazine, ANY, and elsewhere.
She is a doctoral candidate in the American Studies Program
at New York University
Gwendolyn Wright teaches architectural history and theory at
Columbia. She has long been interested in social issues in
architecture and urban design. Her books include The Politics
of Design in French Colonial Urbanism (University of Chicago,
1991); The History of History in American Schools of
Architecture, 1865–1975 (Princeton Architectural Press, 1991);
Building the Dream: A Social History of American Housing (MIT,
1981); and Moralism and the Model Home: Domestic
Architecture and Cultural Conflict in Chicago, 1873–1913
(University of Chicago, 1980).
277
Thank you

to the Skidmore, Owings & Merrill Foundation for munificent and enthusiastic support of this
project—to director Craig Hartman as well as to David Childs, Marilyn Taylor, and Richard Tomlinson;

to Bernard Tschumi for helping underwrite the workshop and for encouragement of the idea;

to the board of advisors of the Buell Center for valuable input over several years of planning, in
particular, to Mary McLeod, Bob Bruegmann, and Dell Upton;

to Terry Riley for making it possible to coordinate events at Columbia and MoMA;

to Kevin Lippert of Princeton Architectural Press for willingly taking on this publication, agreeing
that a volume about "things in the making" would be an ideal candidate for his press’s first
electronic book; also to Nicola Bednarek at PAP for friendly assistance;

to Salomon Frausto for indispensable production help; and to Rebeca Golden, for generously
donating time and energy;

to Brett Snyder and Mimi O Chun for an extraordinarily imaginative book design; also to Dean
DiSimone for an elegant website;
to Andreas Huyssen, Reinhold Martin, Mary McLeod, Anders Stephanson, and Gwendolyn Wright
for serving as moderators and then contributing the introductions to the sections of this book;

to Casey Blake, for judicious advice and welcome critical perspective throughout;

finally, to John Rajchman, for all the thinking that went into making this thing.

J.O.
WHAT IS IT TODAY TO THINK OR TO IMAGINE, TO CONSTRUCT OR TO DESIGN, IN RELA-
TION NOT TO “THINGS MADE” BUT TO “THINGS IN THE MAKING”? THIS WAS THE
QUESTION — A PRAGMATIST QUESTION — POSED TO 33 LEADING THINKERS IN THEIR
FIELDS, INCLUDING PHILOSOPHERS, SOCIAL THEORISTS, CULTURAL CRITICS, AND
PRACTICING ARTISTS AND ARCHITECTS, WHO TOOK PART IN A WORKSHOP SPON-
SORED BY THE TEMPLE HOYNE BUELL CENTER FOR THE STUDY OF AMERICAN
ARCHITECTURE AT COLUMBIA UNIVERSITY IN SPRING 2000. DISCUSSIONS RANGED
FROM THE RELATIONSHIP BETWEEN ART AND EXPERIENCE TO THE IMPACT OF NEW
TECHNOLOGIES ON HUMAN CONSCIOUSNESS, FROM PROBLEMS OF PUBLIC SPACE TO
CONTEMPORARY TRANSFORMATIONS IN EVERYDAY LIFE, FROM THE FUTURE OF THE
NATION-STATE TO EMERGENT FORMS OF “TRANSNATIONAL” CITIZENSHIP. THE
PROVOCATIVE THEORETICAL SPECULATIONS, COMMENTARY, AND POSITION STATE-
MENTS COMPILED HERE ARE AVAILABLE BOTH IN PRINT AND ON LINE.

STANLEY ARONOWITZ MARSHALL BERMAN

CASEY NELSON BLAKE
SANDRA BUCKLEY TERESA CALDEIRA JEAN-LOUIS COHEN JONATHAN CRARY
ROSALYN DEUTSCHE KENNETH FRAMPTON GERALD E. FRUG
PETER GALISON ELIZABETH GROSZ ANDREAS HUYSSEN ISAAC JOSEPH
DAVID LAPOUJADE REINHOLD MARTIN BRIAN MASSUMI MARY MCLEOD
PAUL MILLER A.K.A. DJ SPOOKY CHANTAL MOUFFE JOAN OCKMAN
JOHN RAJCHMAN MARTHA ROSLER HASHIM SARKIS SASKIA SASSEN
SANDHYA SHUKLA RICHARD SHUSTERMAN ABDOUMALIQ SIMONE
ANDERS STEPHANSON BERNARD TSCHUMI NADIA URBINATI
MABEL WILSON GWENDOLYN WRIGHT