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Sent: 05 October 2006 20:29
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Subject: [CTHEORY] 1000 Days of Theory: The City of God and the Global City
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CTHEORY: THEORY, TECHNOLOGY AND CULTURE VOL 29, NO 3
*** Visit CTHEORY Online: http://www.ctheory.net ***
1000 Days 043 05/10/2006 Editors: Arthur and Marilouise Kroker
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1000 DAYS OF THEORY
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The City of God and the Global City
======================================
~Warren Magnusson~
Augustine's famous distinction between the City of God and the City
of Man has been re-worked in many ways. George Bush and Tony Blair
certainly are not the only ones to think that we are caught up in a
global struggle between good and evil, or to suppose that this
transcendent struggle is immanent in everyday life. Nor is such
thinking confined to the religiously minded. Since the eighteenth
century, the great secular ideologists of modernity -- liberal and
socialist, progressive and conservative, anarchist and statist,
humanist and post-humanist -- have posed the most urgent problems
within an Augustinian frame.[1] They tell us that there is an
immanent, widely suppressed, but potentially transcendent "good,"
faced with an omnipresent evil that can somehow be overcome or
contained by those who commit themselves to the struggle against it.
Apocalyptic in tone, universalistic in aspiration, reductionist in
analysis, often violent in practice, this onto-theological politics
gathers us all in from time to time. Those reared in the
monotheistic cultures of Christianity, Judaism, and Islam may be
particularly vulnerable to the appeal of such a politics, but there
are many signs that people from other cultural backgrounds feel the
pull of it as well.[2] In this context, it is particularly important
to explore other ways of thinking, which are not so apocalyptic,
universalistic, reductionist, or violent. There is no easy way of
escaping Augustine's clutches, but his grip can be loosened.
My suggestion is simple: that we take Augustine's central figure, the
city, much more seriously as an analytical and political focus.
Considered on its own terms -- that is, as the form of order implicit
in urbanism as a way of life[3] -- the city transcends its place as a
subordinate entity within a particular state. Even ordinary cities
now have global reach, and the greatest of them function as command
centres for the global economy.[4] Cities are key switching points
for globalizing cultures and organizational centres for social,
political, and religious movements. Moreover, cities are connected to
one another in a way that gives form and meaning to the idea that we
all now live in a single "global city," within which a global economy
is organized and a global politics played out.[5] The city as the
embodiment of urbanism as a way of life is not a merely local
political entity. Nor can it be identified with the ancient ~polis~,
which is the model for the modern republic. No particular city is
self-contained. Nor is there a singular order to the city. A city is
multiply networked and diversely ordered, internally and
externally.[6] Most importantly, there is no sovereign centre to the
urban way of life locally or globally. Forms of order (and hence
centres of power) proliferate within and between cities. They do not
remain stable. Whereas the state is characterized by sovereignty,
cities are characterized by complicated practices of government and
self-government, which overlap and modify one another. These
practices work against any monopoly of authority. As such they can
neither redeem us from evil nor lead us to glory. Neither human nor
divine sovereignty is on offer. The global city may enable us to
govern and express ourselves in various ways, but the terms are
always limited by the freedom of others.[7]
It is the absence of sovereignty within the city as city that has
deflected the attention of political theorists from it. Political
theorists have allowed others to conceptualize the city socially,
culturally, and economically, but they themselves have failed to work
out what the city is as a form of political order. In my view, that
form is one that relates distinct practices of government and
self-government to one another by means other than sovereignty. It is
not that claims to sovereignty are unknown within the global city or
particular cities. On the contrary, such claims are common, and
sometimes seem productive. But, practices of government and
self-government develop independently, and modify the impact of any
effort to impose order by sovereign authority. Although we are
trained to think of political authority as singular (that is, as
something that flows from a sovereign centre), close attention to the
reality of cities reveals something different. Multiple authorities
are the rule, not the exception. Some of these authorities pretend
not to be political, because that gives them more autonomy in
relation to the ostensible sovereigns. (Business corporations are an
obvious example, but there are many others.) Whatever the case, the
field of government and self-government -- and hence the field of
politics within the city, globally and locally -- is likely to be
occupied by a variety of authorities that contend with one another,
cooperate at times, seek to be autonomous, and work to impose their
will in various ways. When cities work, in the sense that they
provide reasonably congenial conditions of life for people, that is
because of the ensemble of activities that these various authorities
mediate, not because of the sovereignty that particular authorities
purport to exercise. We know this, but we are too much under the
spell of sovereignty to appreciate its significance. As a result, we
exaggerate the political importance of the state and give too little
attention to other political authorities like businesses, NGOs, and
religious or other "movement" organizations that actually govern us
in a variety of ways.
Thus, to re-focus our political attention on the city is actually to
open ourselves up to a re-examination of the conditions of
possibility for civilized life. The argument in this article is
neither for nor against state,[8] but it opposes a state-centric
politics that belies the complexity of urban life and seduces us with
notions of sovereign centre from which we can all be redeemed. The
current "war on terror" (or, if you prefer, war on Islam) focuses on
cities, but from the outside. Cities and the urban networks that
connect them are recognized as the breeding grounds for the evils
that Bush, Blair, and Bin Laden seek to eliminate. Cousins under the
skin, the B & B & B warriors seek to redeem the city from without by
forcing it to surrender to sovereign authority.[9] To think otherwise
about our political possibilities is to move away from this moral
drama and from the imaginary sovereignty that incites it. This is
difficult, because we have so long been conditioned to think of
politics in sovereigntist terms. My suggestion here is that we can
use the figure of the city to work out the implications of a
different ontology of the political, one that begins from the
ubiquitous and proliferating practices of government and
self-government -- the practices that make urban life possible --
rather than from the sovereignty moves that are supposed to bring the
political into being.[10] In doing this work, we have to draw on
sources that make many people uncomfortable: in particular on the
theorists who celebrate the magic of the market. In my view, these
theorists mistake the implications of their own analysis, in that
they neglect most of the practices that make civilized life possible
in favour of the few that are associated with the market.
Nonetheless, it is important to understand that the city can be
conceived as a self-organizing system with no sovereign authority and
no ultimate goal. That idea can inform a politics very different from
the ones we associate with neo-conservatism and neo-liberalism.
The City Becomes Global
-----------------------
The now familiar notions about global cities and the larger processes
of globalization draw our attention to the way that cities work as
connectors. Cities are the places where trading expeditions are
organized. They are the sites at which information is gathered and
exchanged, the places where the surplus is sent to be distributed and
sold, and the locales where problems are identified and great
projects are formulated. There are other kinds of places where these
things happen, but the city is unique in its capacity to generate
productive connections between people who are alien to one another.
One need not be of the same religion or community or share the same
allegiance or vision of the future to connect with others peacefully
and productively. The city facilitates this, by bringing people of
diverse backgrounds together, and giving them reasons to cooperate
and live peaceably with one another. The city is a space of such
opportunity that it calls us to put our differences aside for mutual
advantage. Some of the opportunity at issue is economic, but there
are other dimensions to it: cultural, religious, social, and
political. To be "urbane" or "civilized" is to take difference in
stride, react with tolerance and curiosity to alien customs, and to
see the diversity of the city as an advantage. Every city is
potentially global in that it welcomes people in and reaches out
everywhere. In principle, a city is outside the order of sovereignty,
in the sense that it transcends the realm or the state in which it is
located and gathers people in, regardless of what the ostensibly
"sovereign" authorities say they want. Urbanism as a way of life
produces relationships that cannot easily be governed from without.
Moreover, urbanism is fruitful in a way that makes authorities of all
sorts dependent on its productivity. The productivity at issue is by
no means only economic. City life enables new understandings, creates
new connections, and produces new possibilities in every area of
human endeavour.
Max Weber thought that occidental cities were unique in the way that
they worked as islands of freedom, in which the hold of the "higher"
religious and secular authorities was loosened.[11] He exaggerated
the distinctiveness of the Western experience. Urban life has its own
logic, and everywhere it has had the effect of freeing people from
certain constraints and giving them new opportunities for connection.
When the Europeans burst out of their own corner of the world five
hundred years ago, they created some new trading routes, but mostly
they seized control of old routes and knit them together as part of a
new system. They built new cities, but for the most part they took
control of the older ones, and re-worked the urban system to new
purposes. The long process of globalization was one in which
autonomous urban systems were knit together and organized on a larger
scale, thus facilitating more intense exploitation of the countryside
and ultimately greater productivity. When the political economists of
the eighteenth century tried to make sense of the emergent order,
they focused on the exchanges that seemed to occur regardless of what
the authorities might expect or require. These exchanges produced a
civilized order more or less automatically. Everyone had an incentive
to be peaceable in order to engage in exchange, and peaceable
exchange was (for most people) more profitable than violent conquest.
So, there was an immanent order, geared to free exchange and
dependent on self-restraint or self-government, which tended to
emerge naturally if it was not perverted by violence. If the violence
of the European navigators and adventurers had been the hand-maiden
of a new world order, the order itself was of a different character,
based on free exchange between people (and peoples). Although it was
rarely recognized as such, this cooperative order was the order of
the city writ large.
Most contemporary economists have an even narrower understanding of
this order than Adam Smith did. They treat market exchanges in
abstraction, and gloss over the fact that markets work to the
advantage of the strong, the aggressive, the unscrupulous, and the
self-interested. A market-mediated order is by no means ideal (as
Marx made clear enough). That said, however, the economists are
working with an important idea, namely that order can emerge from
exchanges between people who have little in common with one another.
In fact, the differences between people can be an incentive to
exchanges of all sorts. If people see those differences as a reason
to deal peaceably with one another, rather than to attack one
another, then a peaceable order can emerge whether or not there is a
powerful figure to enforce it. To understand this is to have a
powerful insight, an insight on which the modern social sciences in
general have built. Sociologists in particular have been keen to
discern the properties of a naturally emergent order. By comparison
with the economists, they are open to a subtler and more complicated
understanding of that order. Of course, for the past century,
critical work in sociology and political economy has tended to
debunk theories that present the emergent order as benign or
inevitable. The emphasis has been on exposing the structures of
domination and plays of power that lie behind what seems like a
natural order.[12] This critical work is useful, but it often
obscures as much as it reveals. The best conventional sociologists
and economists are not just ideologists. They have been trying to
work out how a relatively benign and durable order can emerge despite
the obvious structures of domination and plays of power. This is
important work, but the neo-Augustinian political ontology on which
most critics rely leaves little room for a story that fails to
distinguish the good guys from the bad guys. The demand is for a
clear moral ground on which we can stand and do our political work.
As I shall attempt to explain in the next section, the ground
demanded is the one offered by the state (however much the critics
deny this).
One of the problems that everyone has is that social scientific
explanations tend to treat civilization as something that emerges
either by violent imposition or by a process that occurs behind
people's backs. The first sort of explanation is actually dependent
on the second, in that stories of violent imposition presuppose
processes that go on behind the backs of conquerors. The city is
destroyed; the conqueror has to rebuild it; that can only happen if
the conqueror submits to the creative energies of others. Social
scientific accounts tend to obscure the fact that the emergent order
is always established politically. In these accounts, politics is
usually associated with the moment of violent imposition (or the
ongoing practices of domination or the plays of power associated with
domination) and not with the creativity (and the practices of
peaceful exchange and cooperative effort) associated with building
and sustaining a civilization. Thus, it is hard to see that the order
at issue is always political. Critical work tends to treat politics
as a scandal. To reveal that there are structures of domination or
plays of power in a civilized order is to say that there is something
bad there, generated by "politics". The remedy for this bad politics
is always a good politics. An Augustinian political ontology always
points in that direction. The alternative to this implicit
Augustinianism is to put cheap moral judgements aside, and look more
carefully at the various political practices that come into play when
the problems of living together are posed. The problems emerge in
everyday life. Everyone is involved in them in one way or another.
Everyone has to be a politician. If a relatively benign -- or, at
least, liveable -- order emerges, it will be the result of the
political work that many, many people do. It is an open question what
importance princes, presidents and prime ministers have in this
context. Nevertheless, the lineaments of a benign order are
fundamentally political.
My point is that the city or civilization is a political construct
that needs to be understood in those terms. The most creative
political work is keyed to ubiquitous and proliferating practices of
self-government. Individuals engage in these practices when they
govern themselves, in the double sense of limiting themselves (so
that their actions do not offend or otherwise impinge negatively on
others) and taking charge of themselves. The latter part of the
practice is celebrated by the ideologists of freedom.[13] The other
part (self-limitation as opposed to self-expression or
self-fulfillment) is what enables cities to function despite the fact
that the nominal rulers are distant, ineffectual, or altogether
absent. "Live and let live" really is the principle of urban life,
for it is only on this principle that a multitude of strangers (with
different customs and beliefs) can share the same space and go about
their business in a relatively harmonious way. If Hobbes were right,
cities would be impossible. What occurs at the level of the
individual also occurs at the level of the group. Mutual
accommodation is the rule, and it is this practice that actually
enables particular groups to sustain distinct ways of life within the
city. How this works is of particular interest to economists who have
noticed how the incentive to trade generates markets governed by an
ethic of peaceable exchange. For many economists, the market is a
primordial fact, not requiring any particular explanation.
Anthropological and historical evidence suggests to the contrary that
it takes a lot of work -- political work -- to bring a market into
being and sustain it.[14] This is true whether the market is a
physical space or a more complex virtual space like the ones with
which we are now familiar. Other practices also have to develop for
civilized life to be sustained: rules of the road that enable
undisturbed passage; practices that allow even the poor to find food,
drink, and a place to sleep; rules about the keeping of animals and
the disposal of wastes; codes of accommodation that relate to
personal space, noise, and interpersonal address. The list is almost
endless. It needs to be articulated only in part to reveal something
else: namely, that the public services and facilities that we
associate with modern life generally grew out of the practical
necessities of living together in cities. We all need roads; we all
need water; we have to dispose of our wastes somehow; we all want
someone to turn to when other people break the rules. Government in
the sense of the intense, intrusive activity in which the authorities
are now engaged is something made necessary by life in cities, but it
is nonetheless the tip of the iceberg: most of the activity that
makes urban life possible occurs beneath the surface (as it were) in
practices of self-government that develop whether or not the
authorities are there to require them. The authorities generally take
these practices for granted. So, (to change the analogy) government
rests on a bedrock of self-government.
The tendency among social scientists is to treat everyday practices
of self-government as "social" or "cultural" and hence pre-political.
This is a mistake. It obscures the political work that goes into the
development and maintenance of these practices. Much of that work
goes on in public, but it involves government officials only
indirectly. People sort themselves out at bus-stops, on sidewalks, in
cafes and restaurants, on waterways and in parks. These intimate
practices of regulation and self-regulation involve plays of power,
shows of authority, threats of violence, calls to solidarity, habits
of deference, and challenges to the existing order: in short, they
involve people in an everyday politics that vexes and threatens them
from time to time, but that works surprisingly smoothly in most
instances. We notice when things are going badly -- as in Baghdad or
New Orleans recently -- because the norm is one of peaceful
co-existence enabled by ubiquitous and proliferating practices of
self-government.
Narrow and ideological as it may be, Friedrich Hayek's work is
interesting because it offers such a robust defence of the idea that
a benign social order can emerge from these practices. One of his
key claims is that the Great Society (as Adam Smith called it) is
not an organization or ~taxis~ but a spontaneous order or ~cosmos~.
This ~cosmos~ or spontaneous global order is a side-effect of things
people have done for other purposes. No one can understand it as a
whole, because it is not something that people have created
consciously. It cannot be managed or planned by a central authority,
because that authority can never comprehend it or adequately
anticipate people's reactions to the situations in which they find
themselves. Attempts to control the ~cosmos~ are counter-productive:
we must live and let live.
The Great Society arose through the discovery that men can live
together in peace and mutually benefiting each other without
agreeing on the particular aims which they severally pursue. The
discovery that by substituting abstract rules of conduct for
obligatory concrete ends made it possible to extend the order of
peace beyond small groups pursuing the same ends, because it
enabled each individual to gain from the skill and knowledge of
others whom he need not even know and whose aims could be wholly
different from his own.[15]
In Hayek's account, the key principles of the Great Society are the
ones that enable market exchange. This narrow reading is tendentious
and ideological, however. A more generous reading enables us to see
that civilization or ~cosmos~ or urbanity depends on other
principles, like mutual recognition and respect, the search for
consensus, concern for the common good, tolerance, generosity,
charity, and humanity. As Hayek tells us, we can only identify the
most valuable principles in retrospect, and we cannot predict what
new principles of conduct will make the ~cosmos~ more robust or
satisfying for people. Nonetheless, it is clear that the enabling
principles of the emergent cosmopolitan order go far beyond the ones
that Hayek himself identifies, and include many of the ones implicit
in the everyday practices of self-government that enable cities to
flourish. The Smithian Great Society and the Hayekian ~cosmos~ are
actually the effects of everyday political initiatives.
Hayek wanted to use constitutional measures to protect the
spontaneous order of the human ~cosmos~ from statist initiatives. In
a sense, he wanted to use the state against itself or (more
accurately) to organize the state to forestall initiatives that would
reshape the ~cosmos~ in accordance with some plan. Nevertheless, his
own idea of what the ~cosmos~ is and should be informed the measures
he envisaged, ones that would bind the state up and deploy it in a
particular direction. Subsequent neo-liberal measures, both domestic
and international, clearly follow from this Hayekian idea: a
particular conception of the ~cosmos~ is to be embodied in legal
principles that are beyond the control of particular states, popular
movements, or local authorities. Those who abide by these principles
are to be accepted as rights-bearing members of this liberal
~cosmos~. Others are to be treated as enemies. Thus, the current
religious crusade against the enemies of neo-liberalism follows
fairly directly from the effort to define the ~cosmos~ in advance and
constitute it in a way that reflects a particular conception of human
possibility. A more authentic commitment to the idea of a
spontaneously ordered ~cosmos~ would not involve this return to a
vengeful Augustinian moralism, nor would it lead to desperate efforts
to forestall collective initiatives. Instead, it would problematize
the moral/political centre that Hayek takes for granted: the modern
state.
The State Captures the Political Imagination
--------------------------------------------
Most analysts of the state seem to know little about the way it
developed.[16] They focus on the concept of the state in abstraction
from its practice, or on its practice in abstraction from the
concept. To understand the concept, we have to go back to the late
medieval era, and trace the emergence of ideas about the impersonal
"state". We then have to understand how the state came to be
associated with "sovereignty," a doctrine that took shape in the
sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. Modern republican or liberal
democratic theory, which evolved in the eighteenth century, was
articulated on the assumption that the sovereign state was necessary
for political order. Although this assumption certainly has been
contested -- by nineteenth century anarchists and socialists, for
instance -- it has been generally accepted since the early modern
era. Indeed, it is so widely accepted now that most analysts fail to
see any reason for making it explicit. The immediate effect of
conjoining the ideal of democracy with the concept of the sovereign
state (as happens in the contemporary political imaginary) is to give
"politics" an obvious focus. If people are to resolve the big issues
democratically, how can they not focus their attention on the venue
that has been endowed with sovereign authority: the venue where the
"ultimate" questions are decided? Surely any other politics must be
peripheral. According to this logic, a politics focused on the great
issues must be centred on the sovereign state, even if it proceeds
through other institutions and practices and is oriented toward
controlling what is outside the state.
If we look at the practice of the state as it evolved in relation to
cities, we begin to see something different: namely, that the
politics that generated new activities occurred at the boundaries of
urban self-government. This becomes clearer if we look at the history
of the public services: education, transportation, policing, public
health, and so on.[17] What we now take to be essential public
activities -- sanitary disposal of liquid and solid wastes,
suppression of fires, protection from criminal activity, maintenance
and lighting of streets, etc. -- were not always present in cities.
The great expansion of these services and facilities began in the
nineteenth century and continued on into the twentieth. The
taken-for-granted character of most of our public services and
facilities is testimony to the fact that they developed out of
people's efforts to deal with the practical problems of modern urban
life. What to do about the filth of the streets? Animals running
wild? People getting sick from the food sold in the markets? Kids
roaming the streets and getting into trouble? Disease spreading out
of control? Homeless people with nowhere to go? Workers without the
education necessary for the jobs now available? Congestion that keeps
people from getting to work? Foul-smelling air and polluted water?
When people posed these questions to themselves, it was in the
context of efforts to deal with problems by individual initiative or
group action. At a certain point, someone said that this problem
could only be solved if public authority were brought to bear, in the
form of regulations to control the activities in question or taxation
to raise the necessary revenues or direct administrative action on
the part of the public authority in question. It was in this context
also that many new public authorities were created, along with a
variety of other institutions that defy easy characterization. On the
ground, what we see now (or in any earlier era) is not the state on
the one hand and society on the other, but a panoply of institutions
rooted in people's efforts to deal with a variety of practical
problems. These institutions are ~sui generis~. They conform to no
single pattern. State activity in relation to these institutions is
second-order: a matter of rationalizing the allocation of authority,
clarifying jurisdictions, providing resources, specifying
responsibilities, and so on. So, the politics that occurs at the
level of the state is a second-order politics that only makes sense
in relation to the first-order politics that occurs on the ground
where urban services and facilities have to be developed.
Most analysts assume that the second-order activities of the state
are more significant because the state's authority is superior and
its geographical reach greater. In fact, to take rationalization as
one example, what occurs by way of the establishment of professional
norms and standards may be at least as significant universally and be
as much an effect of "indisputable authority" as anything that
emanates from the state. The political struggles around these norms
and standards are of great significance. Those struggles are rarely
mediated by the state. Instead, the state (and other authorities)
must adapt to these evolving standards. With respect to the familiar
urban services, the basic form of the school, the hospital, the paved
road, the sewerage system, and even the police force had to be worked
out politically, but the venues in which that politics occurred were
not legislative assemblies or ministerial cabinets (at least not for
the most part). If we ask how the infrastructure of the modern city
developed, we are led to many different sites of initiative,
innovation, collaboration, competition, and political dispute, sites
networked to one another in ways that do not correspond to the
hierarchy of the state. So, the ontology of urban politics (the
politics that generates the city as we know it) is quite different
from the one presented by the familiar political ontology of the
state. There is no obvious centre to urban politics, no Archimedean
point from which the political universe can be moved, and no place
whose political significance is guaranteed in advance. Where is the
best place to act? That depends on the nature of one's concerns and
on the particular configuration of forces in that time and place. We
cannot know the answer in advance.
An analyst might argue that what happens at the level of the city is
only one aspect of what happens more generally, and that "high
politics" occurs at a different level altogether. This is simply to
repeat the statist mythology, however. If cities are globally
networked -- as they evidently are -- then they are not "below"
states. They are not contained "within" states, either. (This is most
obviously the case with respect to places like New York City, but
even small communities have a presence in the world that transcends
their immediate physical boundaries, thanks to economic, social,
cultural, and political links with people elsewhere.) The
infrastructure of the modern state is essentially urban, and hence
what is "of the state" is also "of the urban" and vice versa. To
think the political through the urban rather than through the state
is not to put the traditional questions of high politics aside. It is
instead to ask how these questions appear in relation to all the
other questions of urban life.[18]
Is the imminent bird flu pandemic a matter of less concern than the
proliferation of nuclear weapons, the adoption of terror tactics by
political dissidents, the breakdown of order in major cities, the
failure to control greenhouse gases, the immigration of the poor to
the cities from the countryside, the lack of economic development in
many parts of the world, the intensification of state and private
security measures, or the general inadequacy of current mechanisms
of democratic accountability? It would be hard to judge. It is
clear, however, that each of these issues could well be considered a
matter of high politics, if the human consequences of the issues
concerned were our measure. The latter is not the measure suggested
by the political ontology of the state, however. If something is
crucial to the state, then it is a matter of high politics; if not,
not. This trivializes the matter, by making any politics that eludes
or transcends the state "low" by definition and insignificant by
implication.
The truth is that a God-figure is concealed in the conventional
political ontology of the state. The notion of an "ultimate"
authority or a "supreme" legislature is obviously borrowed from
monotheistic understandings of the order of things. Because the state
is imagined to have God-like powers, its significance is magnified,
but in a way which is ultimately self-defeating. Although the state
stands in place of God, it evidently is not God: it clearly lacks
God-like powers. Because it cannot deliver on the sovereign power
implicit in its own rationale, its ultimate authority seems hollow.
Thus, we have people drifting away from the state and hence from
politics as they conceive it, because the state/politics appears
impotent. They may engage with the particular problems of urban life
in other ways, inventing or supporting public services and facilities
at one remove from the state or helping to develop regulatory
practices that extend through the networks of everyday life. On the
other hand, they may despair of the problems and reframe them in
religious terms. This is the ground on which apocalyptic scenarios
are laid out. Some of these scenarios bring the state back in, as the
faithful are called to turn the supreme secular authority to their
purposes.
Many critiques of contemporary politics turn on a demand that we
return to the old secular faith, a faith in the state as the ultimate
redeemer. This demand is keyed to the idea that democratic politics
is the field in which questions of right and wrong are appropriately
joined. Democracy is supposed to overwhelm evil, and enable us to
work out the good life for ourselves. The state is the imaginary
centre at which our efforts come together, enabling us to deploy the
good that we embody to the very limits of our power and authority. To
lack faith in the state is to lack faith in ourselves as a sovereign
people, a people capable of remaking its life in accordance with its
own ideal of the good life. But, of course, such a faith is difficult
to sustain. What is the alternative? I want to suggest that the
alternative is in the various activities that make urban life more
bearable. None of these activities is sovereign. There is no
privileged place where we have to engage politically. Nonetheless,
there are many places where we can act productively and where we have
to be politically aware to be productive. The conventional political
imaginary induces us to think that in turning from the state we are
turning from politics. As a result, we know not what we do
politically. It is not that people are turning away from politics,
but that they have such a statist sense of what politics is that they
have trouble understanding the fields of activity in front of them in
political terms. This is profoundly disabling.
Let us be clear about what is at stake. The question is not whether
the state is withering away, morphing into a new shape, or returning
to its old form. Nor is the question whether we should or should not
act through the state. There is no reason to think that the state is
about to disappear or that the venues it offers lack promise. The
issue is how we are to conceive of our politics. Is our politics to
be centred on the state or on the practices of self-government that
enable cities to flourish?
The Political Becomes Otherwise
-------------------------------
The idea that the political can be otherwise than state-centric is
not new. In fact, it has been a constant theme in recent years, as
various groups have focused on issues that others have tried to set
outside politics proper. The disputed exclusions (women's issues and
environmental issues, for example) were often justified on the
grounds that the state lacked the authority or capacity to deal with
the matters raised, matters that were properly within the ambit of
society or culture or private business. So, to say that these
exclusions had to be overcome (as feminists and environmentalists
have done) was to say that politics had to transcend the state. This
move was and is crucial because it enabled people to see that the
line between the political and the non-political is not the same as
the line between the state and society. One can be politically active
in the state, in society, or in an indeterminate zone that seems as
much one as the other. Is that not the meaning of what we call
"social" movements, ones that defy the existing political limits, and
establish spaces for political action that connect ordinary people
with the wider world in innovative ways?[19] Once these spaces are
claimed, don't new authorities arise, ones that have a powerful call
on adherents and pose a challenge to the existing authorities?
Although the more dramatic (or dangerous) movements catch our
attention, there are many others that generate authorities quietly
and establish important new spaces for politics in the process.
Political authority takes many shapes, not only in the sense that
Weber indicated in his famous system of classification, but also in
the sense that authorities of different sorts emerge out of various
practices of government and self-government and take forms quite
particular to the purposes at hand. The authorities that deal with
child abuse are not like the ones that deal with recycling. The
individual who is called to take responsibility for child protection
is not exactly the same individual who is enjoined to take
responsibility for his or her own wastes. Different subjects or
citizens are called into being by different practices, as are
authorities with specific mandates and jurisdictions. Although there
may be similarities between the various networks of government and
self-government, there is never a complete identity. Thus, there is
no single model for politics that carries from one field to the next.
This is one of the main lessons of recent social movement politics,
but it is also a lesson implicit in discussions of governmentality
and globalization, which highlight the amorphousness of both
phenomena. The space of the political is multiform, changeable, and
ultimately so chaotic that it is not subject to sovereign control.
Thus, the Augustinian imperative implicit in sovereigntist politics
is a snare and a delusion.
Most of the political authorities within contemporary networks of
government and self-government actually make no pretence to
sovereignty. They are just "local," in a geographic sense and
otherwise. Although they claim regulatory authority and demand
autonomy, they tend to concede that their authority and autonomy is
not exclusive. Overlapping authorities are the norm. They interfere
with one another less than they might, because they differentiate
themselves from one another qualitatively. They see themselves as
authorities of different types, and often co-exist with remarkable
harmony. Even rivals can work out boundaries without too much
difficulty when they lack the capacity to destroy one another. So,
the universe of contemporary political authorities is highly
differentiated. It cannot be mapped on the assumption that all
political authority comes from a single centre, such as a
constitution, a supreme legislature, or an imperial power. We can
arrange the various authorities in a hierarchy (as
sovereigntist/Augustinian thinking encourages us to do), but that
will not tell us where the important centres of power are.
The municipality is an especially important model in this context,
because it is an integrative, but non-sovereign political authority.
The fact that the municipality is the normative political form of the
city (just as the state is the normative political form of the
nation) is significant. It suggests that a self-governing city should
not be a city-state that claims sovereignty but rather a municipality
that enables self-government more generally, something it can do by
facilitating citizen participation, connecting authorities of
different sorts with one another, and stimulating innovation. If
there is a model for global governance, it is to be found in the city
and hence in the municipality, rather than in the nation-state. Not
only is the municipal form of political organization more consonant
with urbanism as a way of life -- and hence with the emergent global
order -- but also it embodies practices that come out of our mundane
requirements rather than demands for personal, national, or global
salvation. The very modesty of the municipality is its virtue. In so
far as it is not sovereign, it is not a God-figure, and its
limitations are a constant reminder of the necessity of being modest
in our objectives and practical in our orientation. There is no
promise of transcendence in the municipality, although there is the
possibility of acting together on matters of common concern. These
matters may carry municipal leaders well beyond the bounds of their
own municipality. This need not involve conflict with the state,
since municipalities exist in a qualitatively different political
space.[20] Of course, I am well aware of the claim -- backed by
the superior courts in most countries -- that municipalities are just
creatures of the state and hence prisoners within the political
spaces of the state system. This claim is an inevitable consequence
of the logic of state sovereignty. Current European discussions of
the principle of subsidiarity replay this logic in a familiar way,
reaffirming the hierarchy even in articulating a rationale for
decentralization. Nonetheless, the idea of a municipality as a
political entity of a different type remains with us, especially here
in North America. A hundred years ago, it was common to talk of the
municipality as a "joint-stock company" belonging to the people of
the community concerned. (Was it enough to live in the community
concerned or did one have to be a property-owner to be a full
share-holder?) This conception pointed back toward the medieval
origins of cities as centres of commerce and industry. On the other
hand, there was a companion view that invoked the folk-moots of Saxon
England or the warrior-assemblies of the Germans that Tacitus had
described. Although the connection was rarely made at the time, these
moots, assemblies, or meetings of the village, town, or parish were
obviously similar to the ones that brought non-European peoples
together in their villages, clans, or wider groupings. In the decades
before the First World War, it was commonly argued that
municipalities had to take the lead in dealing with the problems of
urban-industrial life and that their strength lay in their capacity
to organize people for purposes of local self-government. The
presumption was that the state was at a distance, and that the
practical problems of urban-industrial life required political
authorities of a different type: more intimate, participatory, and
immediately rooted. Although advocates of municipal autonomy usually
deferred to the logic of state sovereignty (and so conceded that
municipal authorities could only be lesser authorities within the
order of the state, subject to the higher law of the state), there
remained an element of defiance, which was reflected in ideas like
municipal socialism. Even the idea that the municipality was a
joint-stock company suggested that municipal governments were somehow
outside the order of sovereignty.
To think of the municipality as a political authority outside the
order of sovereignty is to suggest that its roots are in the
ubiquitous practices of local self-government rather than in the
state as such. It is to pick up on Weber's conception of the city as
a sphere of "non-legitimate domination": non-legitimate precisely in
the sense that is outside the order of sovereignty. As Weber's phrase
suggests, the order of the city is not necessarily benign, but the
delusion of sovereigntist thinking is that we can free ourselves from
domination by submitting to the absolute authority of the state. The
alternative view is that political authority can be multiple in its
forms and purposes, and that qualitatively different authorities can
co-exist without any over-arching authority to regulate their
relations. This is not anarchism. Quite the contrary, one might use
the term polyarchy to describe it, had Robert Dahl not already used
that term to refer to a pluralistic order of sovereignty.[21] The
point is that the complexity of urbanism as a way of life is such
that government must take various forms if it is to be effective, and
that these various forms can co-exist with one another because they
differ in their character as well as in their scale of operations.
The notion of "side-by-side" authority is helpful in understanding
this relation, but it can be misleading if it suggests that the
authorities in question exist in comparable spaces. If authorities
are qualitatively different from one another, they occupy spaces that
are not strictly comparable. In Canada, aboriginal authorities have
been claiming a space that is incommensurable with the space of the
Canadian state. What that means in the end has still to be
negotiated, but this much is clear: Canadian sovereignty does not
limit the aboriginal right of self-government. How can that be?
Aboriginal self-government exists in a different domain from the
domain of the Canadian state, so that even if it touches on some of
the same matters -- housing, education, social services -- it
functions autonomously.[22] The analogy may be with the way that
familial authority or corporate authority functions in a different
domain from that of the state. A municipal authority, like an
aboriginal authority, is more obviously political. To the extent that
it asserts itself as an autonomous authority existing in a space of
its own -- a space of local self-government -- it sets itself apart
from the state and opens up political possibilities that cannot be
contained within the order of the state or the state system. American
municipalities that have committed themselves to the Kyoto Accord
have recognized this, following the example of many other previous
initiatives.[23]
The political form appropriate to urbanism as a way of life is not
the monopolistic state but a pluralistic order characterized by
proliferating practices of local self-government. The municipality
relates these practices to one another within a particular
geographical territory, but it lacks the capacity to impose a
sovereign order. Practices of local self-government spill over
municipal boundaries, relate municipalities to one another and to
authorities of other kinds, and divide the various municipalities
from within. Municipalities exist within the domain of local
self-government: they do not order it as sovereigns. Thus, the
practices of non-sovereign government -- and hence polyarchal
political authority in the proper sense -- are implicit in the
relations within and between municipalities. The fact that
municipalities have usually been overwhelmed by sovereign state
authority is certainly important, but not as important as we usually
imagine. Practices of local self-government are actually quite
robust. They have to be: otherwise, cities could not exist. To see
this is to see the possibilities of globalism in a new way. The fact
that we cannot have a world-state or a federation of republics on the
American model is not a matter for despair. On the contrary, it
suggests that hopes for our future lie in the practices that generate
urban order without resort to sovereignty. These are the practices
that provide us with most security -- whatever the advocates of the
gun may suggest to the contrary.
Notes:
------
[1] Compare William E. Connolly, _The Augustinian Imperative_,
Newbury Park, CA: SAGE, 1993.
[2] The ongoing conflict in Sri Lanka is one reminder of this, as is
the legacy of the Pol Pot regime in Cambodia.
[3] The phrase, "urbanism as a way of life," is from a famous 1938
article by Louis Wirth, reprinted in his _On Cities and Social Life_,
Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1964. Compare Henri Lefebvre,
_The Urban Revolution_, Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press,
2003 (originally published published in French in 1970). Simon
Parker, _Urban Theory and the Urban Experience: Encountering the
City_, London: Routledge, 2004, offers a useful overview of the
development of urban theory. See also Richard T. LeGates and Frederic
Stout, eds., _The City Reader_, 3rd ed., London and New York:
Routledge, 2003.
[4] Compare Paul L. Knox and Peter J. Taylor, eds., _World Cities in
a World-System_, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1995, and
Saskia Sassen, _The Global City: New York, London, Tokyo_, rev. ed.,
Princeton NJ: Princeton University Press, 2001.
[5] Marshall McLuhan's concept of the "global village" anticipates
this idea: _Understanding Media: The Extensions of Man_ (New York:
Signet, 1964). I develop the idea in a way pertinent to this
discussion in "Social Movements and the Global City," _Millennium:
Journal of International Studies_, XXIII:3 (Winter 1994), 621-45, and
"Politicizing the Global City," _Democracy, Citizenship, and the
Global City_, ed. Engin Isin, (London: Routledge, 2000), 289-306.
[6] Manuel Castells, _The Rise of the Network Society_, Oxford:
Blackwell, 1996.
[7] Compare Hannah Arendt, _Between Past and Future_, London: Faber,
1961.
[8] Nor is it an argument for reducing the scale of the state to that
of the city. A city-state is not inherently superior to a
nation-state.
[9] Compare Bruce B. Lawrence, ed., _Messages to the World: The
Statements of Osama Bin Laden_, London: Verso, 2005, and Michael
Ignatieff, ed., _American Exceptionalism and Human Rights_,
Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2005.
[10] Most recent accounts, such as Agamben's, follow Carl Schmitt in
this regard. They confuse politics with a certain concept of it,
produced by sovereignty. Compare Giorgio Agamben, _Homo Sacer:
Sovereign Power and Bare Life_, Stanford: Stanford University Press,
1998, and Chantal Mouffe, ed., _The Challenge of Carl Schmitt_,
London: Verso 1999.
[11] Max Weber, _Economy and Society_, Berkeley: University of
California Press, 1978, vol. 2, ch. 16.
[12] For example, see Michael Hardt and Antonio Negri. _Empire_,
Cambridge MA: Harvard University Press, 2000.
[13] Compare Nikolas Rose, _Powers of Freedom: Reframing Political
Thought_, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1999.
[14] Karl Polanyi, _The Great Transformation_, New York: Rinehart &
Co, 1944.
[15] Friedrich A. Hayek, _Law, Legislation and Liberty_, London:
Routledge, 1998, vol. 2, p. 109. Compare _The Constitution of
Liberty_, Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1960.
[16] See, however, Jens Bartelson, _A Genealogy of Sovereignty_,
Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1995, and _The Critique of the
State_, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2001.
[17] See especially Jon C. Teaford, _The Unheralded Triumph: City
Government in America, 1870-1900_, Baltimore: Johns Hopkins
University Press, 1984.
[18] The difficulties that urbanists have had with these issues
post-9/11 are reflected in two symposia: _Urban Affairs Review_ 37:3
(2002), pp. 460-67, and _International Journal of Urban and Regional
Research_ 27.3 (2003), pp. 649-98. See also Hank V. Savitch, "Does
9-11 portend a new paradigm for cities?" _Urban Affairs Review_
39.1(2003), pp. 103-27. In my view, most urbanists still think the
political in statist terms, despite their commitment to urban
analysis. Compare William Finnegan, "The Terrorist Beat: How is the
N.Y.P.D. defending the city?" ~The New Yorker~, 25 July 2005.
Finnegan's analysis makes clear that the actual struggle to deal with
terrorist threats to New York City is led by the municipal police
department, a department that necessarily thinks locally and acts
globally.
[19] Compare William K. Carroll, ed., _Organizing Dissent:
Contemporary Social Movements in Theory and Practice_, 2nd ed.,
Toronto: Garamond Press, 1997.
[20] I have explored the implications of this idea in a trio of
recent articles focused on the Canadian situation: "Are
Municipalities Creatures of the Provinces?" _Journal of Canadian
Studies_, 39:2 (Spring 2005), 5-29, "Urbanism, cities and local
self-government," _Canadian Public Administration_, 48:1 (Spring
2005), 96-123, and "Protecting the Right of Local Self-Government,"
_Canadian Journal of Political Science_, 38:4 (December 2005), 1-26.
[21] Robert A. Dahl, _Polyarchy; Participation and Opposition_, New
Haven: Yale University Press, 1971.
[22] Compare James Tully, _Strange Multiplicity: Constitutionalism in
the Age of Diversity_, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1995.
[23] See http://www.ci.seattle.wa.us/mayor/climate/ for the US Mayors
Climate Protection Agreement of 13 June 2005. I have discussed a
number of the earlier initiatives in _The Search for Political Space:
Globalization, Social Movements and the Urban Political Experience_,
Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1996, ch. 11.
--------------------
Warren Magnusson teaches urban politics and political theory at the
the University of Victoria, Canada. Among his books are _The Search
for Political Space_ (1996) and _A Political Space: Reading the
Global through Cloyoquot Sound_ (2003), with Karena Shaw.
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