THE POLITICS OF DIFFERENCE, COMMUNITY
AND THE ETHIC OF UNIVERSALISM
2004
By Dr Peter Critchley
(From The City of Reason vol 6 The Social Concept of the City by Peter Critchley).
With the emergence of a postmodern political culture there has been a shift in left politics from a politics of equality to a cultural politics. This new cultural politics is concerned with differences between individuals and groups, how these are created and sustained, externally imposed and culturally represented via an inherently political process of identity formation and the constitution of subjectivity. It is difficult to accommodate this `new' politics of difference within the meta-narrative of the good life and the good city defined by this thesis. This meta-narrative is constituted on the basis of a social and spatial justice defined in terms of a universal ethic. The greater stress upon the differences between individuals in the new cultural politics has the effect of diluting and even displacing the fundamental concern with equality between individuals. The new cultural politics evades being canalised into the global channels of resistance and are structured according to categories of class, gender, race, ethnicity, nationality and so on, each an exclusive identity. This fosters substantial conflict between new and old social movements, each being separately defined and organised according to one of these specific categories. According to the old politics, organised around a struggle to overcome inequality in the universal interest, such diversity would be conceived as undermining the political and organisational power of channelled struggles. In the new politics, such multiplicity is embraced as offering new opportunities. The construction of a meta-politics and meta-ethics must acknowledge the heterogeneous nature of reality by creating and sustaining an open, adaptive, coalition building politics.
Rather than simply repudiating the old dualisms of capital and labour, men and women, white and black, the postmodern cultural politics of difference has sought to rearticulate these identities within inclusionary networks that are flexible and adaptive to the particular circumstances of the present moment. These are celebrated as liberatory assertions of `otherness'; they exist as forces for heterogeneity in an increasingly homogenised world. This sustains an urban life of difference and pluralism. The pioneering texts of post-structural urbanism are Jane Jacobs' Death and Life of Great American Cities (1961) and Richard Sennett's Uses of Disorder (1970). The distinguishing feature of post-structuralism is the identification of the diverse bases of identity and the multiple roots of oppression. This recognition goes much further than the capital-labour relation and implies a celebration of difference:
It is the mixing of .. diverse elements that provides the materials for the `otherness' of visibly different life styles in a city; these materials of otherness are exactly what men need to learn about in order to become adults. Unfortunately, now these diverse city groups are each drawn into themselves, nursing their anger against the others without forums of expression. Bt bringing them together, we will increase the conflicts expressed and decrease the possibility of an eventual explosion of violence.
Sennett 1970:162
The danger is that the celebration of `otherness' and difference may come to reinforce the bifurcations and polarities that are dividing urban space within and are fostering urban incarceration. The question is whether the celebration of difference and diversity is compatible with the universal ethic that affirms that the freedom of each is compatible with the freedom of all. The universal ethic requires social and spatial justice, something that, in turn, directly addresses the inequality in the structures of reality. In postmodernist thought, however, economics - class, exploitation - is replaced by culture as the root of political identity. Individuals are members of socio-political groups from which they form their identities. There is a certain malleability about this conception which underlines the degree to which individuals may constitute their own identity. As a result, the hierarchies imposed by the objective structures and relations of capitalism are less fixed than had appeared to be the case with the Marxist political economic critique. The old and new politics can be united rather than being conceived as antithetical to each other. The emancipatory - and hence political - objective of the postmodernist project is the empowerment of those suffering from a relative lack of power. The fulfilment of this objective may coincide with the material improvement of the least powerful but is not tied to or confined within that material objective.
The demand for universality within a politics of the good has been subjected to intense criticism by those concerned with the politics of difference. Iris Young has offered the strongest, most sophisticated case for the politics of difference at the core of postmodern political culture. Young proceeds by criticising some of the dominant themes of feminism relating to the ideal of community. The `desire for unity or wholeness in discourse', she argues, `generates borders, dichotomies and exclusions'. Further, the concept of community `often implies a denial of time and space distancing' and an insistence upon `face-to-face interaction among members within a plurality of contexts'. However, Young continues, there are `no conceptual grounds for considering face-to-face relations more pure, authentic social relations than relations mediated across time and distance' (Young 1990).
Actually, there are conceptual grounds for arguing precisely this. The extent to which mediation is internal to everyday human relationships or is abstract and alienated determines the extent to which power is subject to human control, enhancing the human ontology, or is out of control, generating pathological consequences which serve to inhibit the human ontology. This is the critical point. Although Young acknowledges that `in modern society the primary structures creating alienation and domination are bureaucracy and commodification', she denies that this means that mediated relations necessarily entail alienation and domination.
Young is concerned to affirm group difference against an overarching conception of the community as oppressive of difference:
An alternative to the ideal of community .. [is] an ideal of city life as a vision of social relations affirming group difference. As a normative ideal, city life instantiates social relations of difference without exclusion. Different groups dwell in the city alongside one another, of necessity interacting in city spaces. If city politics is to be democratic and not dominated by the point of view of one group, it must be a politics that takes account of and provides voice for the different groups that dwell together in the city without forming a community.
Young 1990:227
To the extent that the freedom of city life `leads to group differentiation, to the formation of affinity groups' (Young 1990:238), so the conception of social justice appropriate to contemporary society `requires not the melting away of differences, but institutions that promote reproduction of and respect for group differences without oppression' (Young 1990:47).
The key words here are `without oppression'. That commitment to abolish oppression implies a universal ethic that makes it possible to identify the forces, relations and structures that repress an essential human potentiality or nature. The task is to reinstate the universal ethic of `rational' philosophy within a reciprocal public that does indeed celebrate difference but does so by emphasising what individuals have in common on account of their essential humanity. This means identifying the conditions and contexts individuals need to share in common in order to fully realise their potentialities as human beings.
This argument is directly relevant to urban life. Young argues that emancipation lies in the assertion of a `positive sense of group difference', the group defining itself through this process rather than being defined from the outside (Young 1990:172). The politics of difference `promotes a notion of group solidarity against the individualism of liberal humanism' (Young 1990:166).
But, surely, that rejection of the atomistic conception of liberal humanism implies an ontology of community. Young seems to identify community with a unitary and external imposition of identity. It all depends upon how broadly or narrowly community is conceived. Different groups interacting with each other within the city implies a conception of community. Interaction, like all structured human action, presupposes a context.
There is a danger of embracing an overly moral conception of community over against the real bonds and ties constructed by real individuals themselves. By positing a society of immediate face-to-face relations as an ideal community, community theorists impose a dichotomy between the `inauthentic' society of the present and the `authentic' society of the future, determined by the level of alienation and oppression associated with bureaucracy and commodification. Young rejects both sides of this dichotomy in favour of what she calls the `unoppressive city'. Young builds upon the positive experiences of city life in which differences of all kinds are embedded, negotiated and tolerated within all kinds of mediated relations in time and space. Young defines the `unoppressive city' in terms of an `openness to unassimilated otherness'.
The great merit of Young's argument is the attempt to locate the postmodern celebration of difference and diversity within an overarching conception of unity. Young's politics of difference projects a lofty ideal that, although abstract, can to be developed as the basis of an emancipatory urban politics leading to the city `without oppression'. The crucial question concerns how that abstract ideal can be embodied within urban space. At the level of the everyday urban life world, the conception raises obvious dangers of an `exclusive inclusivity' which can work to undermine the `openness to unassimilated otherness' (Young 1990).
Pursuing this politics of difference necessarily entails that the postmodern political culture be grasped in its full complexity. The appreciation of the sociology of race, gender and age as well as class within urban space, alongside the critique of everyday activities within real life in an age poised between modernity and postmodernity, opens up the city as the site of different life projects. This justifies a critically aware, sociologically sophisticated attempt to locate the various kinds of dominant and subordinate social groups that comprise the populations of the cities. This is to emphasise the fact that the city is made up of several different publics. A reconstituted urban public sphere must necessarily be multi-layered and multi-sectored. In this respect, any particular social group within the city constitute what Oskar Negt and Alexander Kluge refer to as a `counter-public', a subaltern public which possesses an emancipatory potential to the extent that the pursuit of its own interest promotes the interest of all in the struggle against oppression, exclusion and marginalisation. By virtue of challenging its own marginalisation, the counter-public tends to develop `a sense of solidarity and reciprocity rooted in the experience of marginalisation or expropriation' (Hansen 1993:xxxvi). The challenge lies in extending this sense of solidarity and reciprocity to other counter-publics fighting the same marginalisation and expropriation rooted in the same exploitative and alienative relations.
Postmodern celebrations of group difference present a conception of society as composed of diverse and separate cultural groupings and is associated with a conception of politics as coalition based. To this extent, postmodernism reproduces the conventional understanding of liberal pluralism. The Marxist perspective is critical of such pluralism in seeking to expose the inequalities between social groups structured within asymmetrical relations of class power. The end is a social emancipation through the coalition of excluded, subaltern groups that have little in common other than a shared interest in the abolition of existing hierarchical and exploitative social relations. But how to establish a coherent political agenda by relating the universal interest to the diversity of social groups remains problematic. The complexities of an alliance based politics contrast with the simple division of the class politics of the Marxist critique.
There is a pluralist dimension to Marx's argument that shows that Marxism is quite able to accommodate difference and diversity as well as new forms of expressive life world politics. Rejecting the identification of the individual with the species as inconceivable, the abolition of alienation makes it possible to conceive of a `societised humankind' in which every individual has a conscious relation to the species. Identity means that each person can appropriate the totality of the wealth of the species and conscious relation means that each individual can choose from the wealth of humanity what they need for the rich and multi-faceted development of their own personality. The development of the wealth of the human species and of the individual personality are processes which mutually involve each other (Heller 1984:155 169). Marx's communism thus realises the `rational' politikon bion by establishing a coincidence between the general-universal and the singular-individual in a community of free individuals. Communism is the realised society of realised individuals (Meikle 1985:58).
Ruling out the identification of the individual with the species, it is possible to conceive a conscious relationship of individuals to the species so that Marx's ideal can be formulated thus:
The development of all material, psychic and spiritual abilities of the human species, and the many-sided and harmonious development of individuals own material, psychic and spiritual abilities by the appropriation of the wealth of the species in a way that is suited to their own personality.
Heller 1984:169/70
Since each person is unique, Marx's `from each according to their abilities' not only implies an ideal which enables pluralism but actually presupposes it. Marx envisages `a plurality of needs, of abilities, of forms of life' (Heller 1984:171). The development of wealth is thus associated with its appropriation in a manner appropriate to the multi-faceted development of the abilities and needs of each individual.
Developing this aspect of Marx's thesis makes the point that the generation of new modes of socio-cultural and political expression characterising the emerging postmodern world is anticipated by Marx's communism. This conception is quite capable of achieving unity with difference within community. For Marx, the fundamental entities that compose society are individuals in social relations. Through development within these relations, individuals are able to become fully social and realise their human possibilities (Gould 1978:1).
Marx formulates community in such a way as to avoid abstraction and homogeneity and to incorporate the principle of modern differentiation and subjectivity. Marx here goes beyond the Aristotelian roots of his thought. Marx is not simply arguing that association is natural for human beings as social animals but is offering a novel form of association as appropriate to a society of free individuals. Unity for Marx does not refer to herd instinct. Communism is the unique combination of unity and individuality, each commensurate with rather than being reduced to the other. `Under communism, all individuals are free to pursue their own development, to differentiate themselves in the context of a truly social existence' (Forbes 1990:179).
For Marx, community under communism is generated from within individual relationships rather than imposed by any external unifying power, legal or moral. The free individual is capable of taking the initiative to rationally reorder social forces. `Communism differs from all previous movements in that it overturns the basis of all earlier relations of production and intercourse, and for the first time consciously treats all natural premises as the creatures of hitherto existing men, strips them of their natural character and subjugates them to the power of the united individuals' (Marx 1999:86). Through the transformation of existing society, `all-round dependence, this natural form of the world-historical cooperation of individuals, will be transformed by this communist revolution into the control and conscious mastery of these powers, which, born of the action of men on one another, have till now overawed and governed men as powers completely alien to them' (Marx 1999:55). Marx's conception of the relation between community and individuality thus ultimately transcends the Aristotelian conception of society as a natural phenomenon. The individuals composing communist society are not merely social beings but also free beings (Forbes 1990:179 211). There are, then, ways of conceiving community as something more than an externally imposed unity without differentiation. Marx's communist community combines unity and difference.
Young objects to `community' as projecting unity over difference (Young in Nicholson ed 1990:302). But such a view presumes that community can take only an abstract, oppressive and statist form (Hoffman 1995:208). Conceiving the individual in relational terms makes possible a conception of community that suffers from none of these defects, that is able to combine both sameness and otherness, integrating difference within unity: `A relational view of common interests requires us to break with an abstract individualism which conceives conflicts of interests in zero sum terms and with a communitarianism which denies that differences exist at all' (Hoffman 1995:209).
The appeal of the principle of community implies a communal need or essence that, if unfulfilled through the construction of a real community, tends to be projected to some ideal or institution and is re-imposed as a false universalism. To achieve genuine community, there is a need to transcend the instrumental social relations of the liberal order that fosters a dualism between social atomism and political centralisation. Within such relations, community is necessarily abstract, imposed in a legalistic sense through the state.
There is, however, no intrinsic reason why community and difference are antithetical. The antithesis between the individual and community stems from asocial social relations that separate private and public interest and that separates individuals and others. Overcoming such relations, this section has shown that the assertion of plural identities requires a universal ethico-institutional framework, since it is such a framework that alone embeds mutual recognition and respect.
4 THE UNIVERSAL FRAME
A major concern of this thesis has been to relate the universal ethic implied by `rational' philosophical conceptions of city life to the ways in which urban histories are lived, experienced and actively interpreted by the different publics who comprise actual cities. The critical question which this section addresses is that of constituting a universal moral frame which respects plural identities whilst nevertheless canalising them into the common good so as to enhance their shared and mutual interests. This involves a critical analysis of the practical strategies employed by different publics in appropriating and reinterpreting urban space and entails means respecting the view that, within each particular context there are different configurations of urban space for each of these different publics.
A united front in face of common sources of oppression is required to enable groups to confront collective and general structures of power and oppression in their communities. The question concerns how identity politics, with its tendency to dislocation, can obtain a unified discourse of justice, making the necessary connections between groups within an openly unified framework. How can a unified organisation be established without the particular agendas of social groups being subsumed under a universalist discourse or political agenda.
At a time when there is a unified capitalist class presiding over global relations of domination, creating an international framework to entrench and extend this power, subjecting urban life to external processes of investment, accumulation and production, confining inhabitants within zero-sum contexts, there are indications that some compartmentalisation is occurring within identity politics. Such compartmentalisation serves to prevent a united front. A meaningful identity politics has to be devised in terms of a universal interest and an agreed, consensual community.
The emergence of the new social movements has strengthened the view that ideas of social justice are relative. Each new social movement presses its own particular conception of what justice is. And there appears to be no way of resolving the clash of divergent conceptions. To leave the question in this state of mutual cancellation serves only to reduce the postmodernist celebration of difference to conservatism. For it becomes impossible to avoid oppression coming to be defined in a relativist and particular way. And it becomes impossible to avoid a fragmentation that builds upon existing metropolarities rooted in an actual, objective, socio-economic oppression. In this respect, Eric Hobsbawm is right to point out that whilst the mass social and political movements of the left were coalitions of group alliances, they were held together not by aims specific to the groups but by great universal causes that applied to all humankind. The movements of the left spoke the universal language of social justice and equality (Hobsbawm 1996:42). Noting that the labour movement lost the capacity to be the potential centre of a general people's mobilisation and general hope for the future when it became narrowed down to being a sectional movement of industrial workers, Hobsbawm emphasises that the `political project of the Left is universalist: it is for all human beings', for everybody as human beings rather than for some sections as something particular. `That is why the Left cannot base itself on identity politics. It has a wider agenda', however much that does involve supporting particular social groups involved in particular struggles against injustice and oppression (Hobsbawm 1996:43).
Hobsbawm thus criticises the extent to which the Left has abandoned the concern with social justice and equality in favour of identity politics. The result is that the Left has come to be conceived as a coalition of minority groups and interests: of race, gender, sexual or other cultural preferences and lifestyles. Such a postmodern politics is defined in terms of otherness, emphasising what separates one group from other groups. This enhances the forces for diremption and fragmentation. Hobsbawm notes that adding up minorities is quite distinct from winning majorities (Hobsbawm 1996:44). It is certainly very different from fostering a genuine public life.
The danger of disintegrating into a pure alliance of minorities is unusually great on the Left because the decline of the great universalist slogans of the Enlightenment, which were essentially slogans of the Left, leaves it without any obvious way of formulating a common interest across sectional boundaries.
Hobsbawm 1996:45
Hobsbawm points out here that the only one of the new social movements which crosses all boundaries is that of the ecologists.
What this means is that, for all the dangers of formulating and imposing overly-moral, overarching and homogeneous conceptions of the common good, the Left has no option other than to develop a conception of community and public life which embodies universal values of social justice and equality. As Todd Gitlin has stated in The Twilight of Common Dreams: `What is a Left if it is not, plausibly at least, the voice of the whole people? .. If there is no people, but only peoples, there is no Left' (Gitlin 1995:165). The task is to encompass difference groups within a universal public in such way as to enhance rather than inhibit their freedom. This means conceiving a way that allows all groups to negotiate the common good so that the freedom of each may coincide with the freedom of all within public life.
This is to open up a search for a way of enabling different social groups themselves to join together to negotiate the common good, compromising with each other within open and fair procedures so that a conception of and a commitment to a universal interest emerges and may command universal respect. In this way, the conception of the public good is not defined and imposed in abstraction from the groups and forces subject to it but is negotiated by them in pursuit of their own good.
The point is that a global strategy of resistance and transformation has to proceed from realities of place and community. The task is to create a common politics out of the politics of difference so that counter-publics are able to challenge the increasingly centralised power of flexible accumulation whilst nevertheless being true to the grass roots of local resistances.
There is plenty of scope here for progressive forces, at both local, regional and national levels, to do the hard practical and intellectual work of creating a more unified oppositional force out of the maelstrom of social change that flexible accumulation has unleashed.
Harvey 1989:277
Harvey raises the question of whether there is a higher order discourse to which everyone could appeal. Harvey is concerned to avoid taking capitalistic notions of social rationality and justice as universal values capable of being deployed under socialism (Harvey 1992). Social rationality and justice need to be formulated independently of prevailing social relations. There is a need to distinguish the irredeemable hostility of social groups owing to the existence of a class structure from the possible coexistence of social groups who owe their existence to social heterogeneity. This is a division between class and function. Whereas a coherent universal frame is impossible on the basis of the former, it is possible on the basis of the latter. In criticising certain social relations in favour of others according to the extent to which they enhanced or inhibited the human ontology, Marx subscribed to a notion of justice as something more than something relative to the distribution of social power. To emphasise this point, this thesis has established Marx's project in the normative and emancipatory themes of a `rational' philosophy which derives from Plato and Aristotle, conceiving the `rational' in terms of creative human self-realisation. This approach makes available the higher discourse for which Harvey searches. The point is an important one to establish if one is to negotiate a path beyond moral relativism and hence avoid postmodernist repudiations of all meta-narratives of the good life and the good city.
David Harvey has made an original attempt to draw out the implications for urban planning of Iris Young's Justice and the Politics of Difference. Harvey draws out the merits of Young's `five faces' of oppression in relation to the struggle to create liveable cities for the twenty first century:
That just planning and policy practices must confront directly the problem of creating forms of social and political organisation and systems of production and consumption which minimize the exploitation of labour power both in the workplace and the living place;
That just planning and policy practices must confront the phenomenon of marginalisation in a non-paternalistic mode and find ways to organise and militate within the politics of marginalisation in such a way as to liberate captive groups from this distinctive form of oppression;
Just planning and policy practices must empower rather than deprive the oppressed of access to political power and the ability to engage in self-expression;
That just planning and policy practices must be particularly sensitive to issues of cultural imperialism and seek, by a variety of means, to eliminate the imperialist attitude both in the design of urban projects and modes of popular consultation.
A just planning and policy practice must seek out non-exclusionary and non-militarized forms of social control to contain the increasing levels of both personal and institutionalised violence without destroying capacities for empowerment and self-expression.
That just planning and policy practices will clearly recognise that the necessary ecological consequences of all social projects have impacts on future generations as well as upon distant peoples and take steps to ensure a reasonable mitigation of negative impacts.
Harvey adds this sixth principle which acknowledges that all social projects are ecological projects and vice versa. All social projects are to be assessed for their ecological consequences.
Social policy and planning has to work at two levels in overcoming the competition between differentiated conceptions of justice in favour of a universal ethic which secures the good of all equally.
The different faces of oppression have to be confronted for what they are and as they are manifest in daily life, but in the longer term and at the same time the underlying sources of the different forms of oppression in the heart of the political economy of capitalism must also be confronted, not as the fount of all evil but in terms of capitalism's revolutionary dynamic which transforms, disrupts, deconstructs and reconstructs ways of living, working, relating to each other and to the environment. From such a standpoint the issue is never about whether or not there shall be change, but what sort of change we can anticipate, plan for and proactively shape in the years to come.
Harvey 1992
Harvey rejects the universal notions of justice embedded in the market and in state welfare capitalism and asserts that force decides between competing conceptions of justice. But in declaring authoritarian imposition and an inability to listen to alternative conceptions to be part of the problem, Harvey points to the potentially liberating effect of looking at the conceptions of social justice and rationality which have emerged from within the new social movements. Harvey's principles are devised to speak to the marginalized, oppressed and exploited in this time and place. It is out of such conceptions that a genuine liberatory and transformatory politics can be developed (Harvey 1992). And this forms the basis for a universal politics of the good.
The question of the universal cannot be avoided. Even in the most minimal of senses, a public realm will always exist in any society and will be concerned with the universal interest, making a claim to the universal interest in the making of laws and the taking of decisions. Applications can turn out to be divisive in practice, as differing conceptions of differing groups emerge from within competing interests.
Communities and the various groups comprising them need to recognise each other's legitimacy within a universal ethic. This is to situate all different groups within a common standard of justice in which the freedom of each is coexistent with the freedom of all. Without this universalism, difference can degenerate into disagreement and internal conflict can result in inaction. The lesson for urban regeneration is that identity politics, the `politics of difference', needs to be affirmed whilst pursuing a mutually agreed definition of commonality. How to realise such a definition is the critical question.
The definition of identity in purely separatist terms generates a factitious border which blocks the emergence of contact zones facilitating the interaction between different communities and which may lead to a reasonable commonality, an agreement between individuals who look and act differently but who might nevertheless reach agreement over a common appreciation of culture and experience. Digging `city trenches' (Katznelson) around single issue interests or demarcation lines makes it difficult to conceive and effect a transformative and emancipatory politics that is able to get to the heart of contemporary urban issues, relating urban problems to the megastructures of power, resources and control.
The way that the universal themes of the Left come to be replaced by an identity politics could invite degeneration into an urban populism that reinforces difference and pluralism as exclusion and marginalisation. The `democratic' component of urban populism quickly reduces itself to the defence by particular groups of their particular interests and privileges.
A more nuanced approach to particularism is available. Jurgen Habermas makes a distinction between those movements pressing the claims of particular interests and those movements whose interests are of universal significance. From this perspective it is possible to reinstate concepts of social rationality and justice as independent of prevailing relations. But there is a need for great subtlety in establishing how the universal ethic is to be constructed. The best way forward is dialogic and democratic and allows the social groups and movements to negotiate and compromise around a coherent common frame. This is to oppose a communicative model to the market model. In this communicative model, the various groups comprising society negotiate the universal interest and may renegotiate in response to changing needs and demands. All social groups active within the community need to act and mobilize to negotiate a reasonable commonality. This is to enable all groups to engage in the rational reordering of social existence so as to negotiate the common good. (This conception will be developed further in the chapter on Habermas and dialogic democratic practice).
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