The Uses of Disorder

Personal Identity and City Life

Richard Sennett

• Editorial: Verso
• Año: 2021
• ISBN:
  9781839764097
• Categoría: Politics & International Relations
• Categoría: City Planning & Urban Development

When first published in 1970, The Uses of Disorder, was a call to arms against the deadening hand of modernist urban planning upon the thriving chaotic city. Written in the aftermath of the 1968 student uprising in the US and Europe, it demands a reimagination of the city and how class, city life and identity combine. Too often, this leads to divisions, such as the middle class flight to the suburbs, leaving the inner cities in desperate straits. In response, Sennett offers an alternative image of a "dense, disorderly, overwhelming cities" that allow for change and the development of community. Fifty years later this book is as essential as it was when it first came out, and remains an inspiration to architects, planners and urban thinkers everywhere.

PART ONE

A New Puritanism

CHAPTER ONE

Purified Identity

IN 1929 ANDRÉ MALRAUX PUBLISHED HIS FIRST NOVEL, The Conquerors, a story of the leaders of the Chinese Revolution of 1925. Malraux’s American publisher has written of this book, “It was indeed the first moderm novel in which the raw material of politics was subordinated to the real subject matter: the characters’ search for the meaning of their lives.” The real subject matter was what we would now call the psychology of their struggle, the passions leading them to revolution.

At the center of this novel lies a clash between two kinds of leaders. Borodin and Garine are Russian revolutionaries in China guiding the native revolutionary cadres; Hong is a young Chinese who is an anarchist, originally part of the Borodin-Garine groups, but who later comes into bitter conflict with them.

Borodin and Garine are Marxist revolutionaries, but they are not ideologues. The struggle they are waging is in terms of concrete events and specific people, so that their philosophies of right bend, and are transformed by, the specific processes of revolution they experience. Borodin and Garine are not merely “tacticians”; they fight for a reason, for a cause, but that cause is not impervious to the unique, unclassifiable events the revolution spawns.

Hong, their eventual enemy, is an anarchist, yet curiously much more rigid than they are. His sense of what is the right thing to do, what is “correct,” flies in the face of the facts of the revolution; Hong is unwilling to bend, he cannot submit himself to the chaos of events in order to act, he cannot yield himself and his commitment to the test of conflicting experiences in the actual struggle. Instead, Hong must put himself in such a position that he seems to stand above the chaos, to be safe while the others are troubled, to be willfully immune when Garine and Borodin have the courage to be self-doubting and confused.

Certainly the drama Malraux fashioned out of these men’s lives—a drama based on real persons—comes from their exceptional strengths at a special historic moment. Yet what makes these revolutionaries worth exploring is not simply their distinctiveness. Malraux distilled into the character of a man like Hong the essence of certain motives for action that guide less exceptional, weaker men in their everyday affairs. It is this hidden affinity with the routine world that makes Hong so startling and the forces animating him so important.

The feelings of young doctors about to start their careers as psychiatrists seem as distant in tone and temper from the emotions of revolutionary leaders battling in China as can be imagined. Therefore it might be worth-while to look at ways the two groups of men can be guided by a common set of desires.

Recently two American researchers, Daniel Levenson and Myron Sharaf, did a study of a peculiar phenomenon among these young doctors. This was the tendency shown by many beginning psychiatrists to think of themselves as little gods, sitting in judgment on their patients and slightly contemptuous of them. The attitude, which Levenson and Sharaf called the psychiatrists’ omnipotence desire, is of course not universal, but it is frequently to be found among newly practicing therapists.

In the process of their research Levenson and Sharaf concluded that this little-god complex occurred partially out of a great fear these new practitioners had that they might be hurt by becoming involved with the problems of their patients, involved in a painful way so deeply that their own sense of themselves would dissolve. The attitude of sitting in judgment from afar, with its hidden trace of contempt, was how these new doctors defended themselves from this fear, drew a line in advance for themselves as to who they were and the relation in which they stood to their patients.

Both Hong, the young revolutionary, and these young doctors have exerted a peculiar kind of strength—a power to cut themselves off from the world around them, to make themselves distant, and perhaps lonely, by defining themselves in a rigid way. This fixed self-definition gives them a strong weapon against the outside world. They prevent a pliant traffic between themselves and men around them and so acquire a certain immunity to the pain of conflicting and tangled events that might otherwise confuse and perhaps even overwhelm them. In Hong, this defense against confusion through a rigid self-image is used to fend off the dissonance spawned by revolutionary upheaval. By making himself immutably fixed in purpose and act, Hong can transcend the experiences of horror, of guilt over killing, of sheer nerve-wracking tension that his comrades feel in their battles with the police and the city populace. In the young doctors, this defense against confusion through a rigid self-image fends off being engulfed by the enormity of their patients’ pain, a pain whose sickness lies in part in the very fact that the patients have no way to control it. For both the revolutionary and the doctors, the threat of being overwhelmed by difficult social interactions is dealt with by fixing a self-image in advance, by making oneself a fixed object rather than an open person liable to be touched by a social situation.

The sense of time involved in these acts of self-defense is more complicated than it might first appear. A peculiar behavior pattern among certain city planners, seemingly remote from either of these two situations, shows what this complexity is.

One technique of planning large human settlements developed in the past hundred years has been the device of establishing “projective needs.” This means guessing the future physical and social requirements of a community or city and then basing present spending and energy so as to achieve a readiness for the projected future state. In planning schools, beginning students usually argue that people’s lives in time are wandering and unpredictable, that societies have a history in the sense that they do what was not expected of them, so that this device is misleading. Planning teachers usually reply that of course the projected need would be altered by practical objections in the course of being worked out; the projective-need analysis is a pattern of ideal conditions rather than a fixed prescription.

But the facts of planning in the last few years have shown that this disclaimer on the part of planners is something they do not really mean. Professional planners of highways, of redevelopment housing, of inner-city renewal projects have treated challenges from displaced communities or community groups as a threat to the value of their plans rather than as a natural part of the effort at social reconstruction. Over and over again one can hear in planning circles a fear expressed when the human beings affected by planning changes become even slightly interested in the remedies proposed for their lives. “Interference,” “blocking,” an “interruption of work”—these are the terms by which social challenges or divergences from the planners’ projections are interpreted. What has really happened is that the planners have wanted to take the plan, the projection in advance, as more “true” than the historical turns, the unforeseen movements in the real time of human lives.

Why planners should be so inclined to think this way is a subject to be explored in detail later in this book. But the elements of their feelings can be discerned through what has been seen so far. City planning of this sort is the projection of a rigid group self-image similar in its motivation to the rigid individual self-images seen in the young revolutionary and in the group of young psychiatrists. For in this projected future there lies a way of denying the dissonance and unexpected conflicts of a society’s history. This attitude is a means of denying the idea of history, i.e., that a society will come to be different than it expected to be in the past. In this way, a planner at his desk can steel himself against the unknown outside world in the same way that a young doctor steels himself against his fear about the experience of dealing with his patients by playing the little god, distant and removed. For this mechanism of defense to work, then, there is a necessity for a certain kind of millennial thinking, a fear of the sources of human diversity that create history in its true sense.

When this fearful defense against the unknown future becomes regnant in a life, the acceptable future can be conceived only in the same form as the present, as a state of life for an individual or group whose features are rigidly determined and contain no hidden surprises.

Norman Cohn’s brilliant book, The Pursuit of the Millennium, investigated the lives of those unusual people and cults in the medieval era whose sense of time was governed in this way. His book concludes with a bold essay linking the sources of moderm millenarian movements, like the Nazis in Germany, to these patterns of the past. But I think the people Cohn studies are examples of a human phenomenon even more general than Cohn takes them to be. These millenarians have played out in a striking way an endemic pattern of human fear, whose traces can be found in the attitudes of such seemingly “rationalistic” people today as young doctors or city engineers, or in such anti-religious leaders as the anarchist Malraux described.

However, the model for what this pattern of fear and self-conception means does come most easily from religion. The process described thus far can be called a search for purity. The effect of this defensive pattern is to create in people a desire for a purification of the terms in which they see themselves in relation to others. The enterprise involved is an attempt to build an image or identity that coheres, is unified, and filters out threats in social experience. Naturally the drives for purification of the self that occur in deeply religious people cannot be “reduced” or simplified so that they are explained simply as a fear of the unknown. But, socially, fear of losing one’s identity through outside threats often does play a large element in religious conversions. Michael Walzer’s account of the sources of cohesion in the original Puritan community, for example, shows how the turmoil of social change and an unknown future produced among the Puritans a great fear of not knowing who they were. This fear in turn produced in their religious affairs the desire to find an absolute identity, to be fully and finally known to each other as true believers.

The search for purity in more modern, less religious, terms is for someone like the anarchist Hong the desire to create so clear and unambiguous a self-image that he becomes immune to the outside world. The jarring elements in one’s social life can be purified out as unreal because they don’t fit that articulated object, that self-consciously spelled-out set of beliefs, likes and dislikes, and abilities that one takes to be oneself. In this way, the degree to which people feel urged to keep articulating who they are, what they want, and what they feel is almost an index of their fear about their inability to survive in social experience with other men.

The seekers after purity in more religious times seemed revolutionaries to the men around them. The Puritans, or the millenarians of an even earlier era, were impatient with the ills of the temporal world and acted to make it over—or at least the swatches of it they controlled—in their own image. Indeed, today one of the easy clichés about some young revolutionaries is that their desire for purity in the society and in themselves creates the revolutionary drive.

But hidden in this desire to purify one’s identity to others and oneself is a conservative tendency. The known in this scheme of identity is so insistently taken as true that new unknowns which don’t fit are excluded. Reality cannot be permitted to be other than what is encompassed in one’s clearly articulated images of oneself and one’s world. The obvious result, then, is that the material for change, change in one’s feelings, one’s beliefs, one’s desires, is greatly weakened in a life because new events or experiences are being measured in terms of how well they correspond to a pre-existent pattern. The advent of unexpected experience is not permitted a reality of its own; the fear involved in the identity process prohibits men from feeling themselves free historical beings. Thus does this passion to create a clear self-identity act to conserve the known past in the face of the disturbing present. The historical turn, the event or experience that doesn’t fit preconceived feelings and one’s sense of place, is deflated in its “truth value.” Because of this fear, the more comfortable, the easier dicta of the past are made the final standard of reference.

The attitudes of the young revolutionary, the young doctors, and the planners are thus bound together by one truly reactionary force: experience over the course of time is subjected to a purification process, so that the threatening or painful dissonances are warded off to preserve intact a clear and articulated image of oneself and one’s place in the world. Experience is being purified by having the dissonances interpreted as less real than the consonances with what is known.

This, in crude outline, is how I believe the desire for purity can dominate the acts of people no longer enmeshed in the substantive problems of religion. Socialpsychological thinking in the past decades has tried to understand ideas such as this in what are called “lifecycle,” or developmental, terms. This approach is unlike that of the pioneer social-psychological thinkers. Freud, for example, treated the psychic processes of men as all in germ at the moment of birth; the instinctualists working on physiological problems believed set instincts innate to the organism played themselves out in changing recombination over the course of a lifetime. The newer social-psychological thinking is typified in psychoanalysis by men like Erik Erikson and pervades such movements of thought in the last twenty years as existential psychotherapy. These newer schools attempt to see how psychic materials, not just psychological problems, are generated during the course of a human lifetime; they are searching for ways to find how men create their psychologies. The new wave of psychological thinking rejects the idea that men are assigned their motives by such abstractions as “human nature” or “innate drives.”

I believe that the peculiar desire for purity I have sketched so far is an emotion created at a specific point in men’s lives. Of course it is true that human beings of all ages, from the infant to the old man about to die, have fears about the unknown. But it is no less true that the way human beings want to deal with fears and the powers men have to deal with them change radically in kind over the course of a lifetime. The peculiar response to fear of the unknown that leads to this search for a purification of one’s relations with the social world is inaugurated, I believe, in adolescence. To understand this moderm purity ritual, it is necessary to know something about the way the late-adolescent stage of life creates devices to handle disorder or painful threats.

The Emergence of Purified Identity

Were one to follow the wisdom of the contemporary press, the group of adolescents who would seem under the sway of this need for a rigid identity would be the young in revolt. Yet the young people whom the press labels as student leaders are actually deviants from the real body of student unrest. These newspaper-created “student rebels” are ideologues, whose political ideas are a throwback to the primitive formulas of the 1930’s. A great body of the young are disaffected, to be sure, but their alienation is much more courageous, precisely because they have, in my experience, the integrity to be confused about what they want for themselves. Perhaps because these young people are trying to construct a decent life for themselves without the old, easy guides, the simplicity entailed in press reporting must ignore them. But in good studies, such as those by Jack Newfield or Kenneth Keniston, the reader can only be struck by how few are under the sway of the “new fascism,” as the press calls it, or under the sway of Progressive Labor Party dogma. Rather, these affluent radicals are experimenters with themselves, and so are willing to experience painful confusion even in the face of their radical commitment.

No, the obvious comparison is too narrow and too easy. The examples of purified identity cited before reveal, in an extreme form, something nascent in more ordinary adolescent life. Adolescence is commonly thought to be a period of wandering and exploration; children become men and women sexually, the shelter of the home for a majority of the young is left behind, the capacity and the desire to act as newly independent beings grows strong. With this enlarging of human horizons in adolescence, it must surely seem inappropriate to see born at the same stage of life those tactics of evasion and avoidance of unknown, painful experiences that give rise to the desire for purity and coherence. Yet certain puzzles in ordinary adolescent behavior can be explained in no other way.

One of these puzzles is the high number of young people at the point of entering college who fasten on a choice of career without giving themselves a chance to explore alternatives. One study estimates that about three out of every five entering college students choose careers for themselves before having any experience or knowledge of their future pursuits; the striking thing is that relatively few of these students break their initial choice. In talking to students who have so committed themselves, one feels the intense desire many of them have to move out on their own; yet something hidden in themselves, something they can’t vocalize, chains them back. In American and English schools, the chains are in part created by their teachers, whose concern for professional work encourages the young to remain in fear of their own power to wander: better solid, if dull, than vital, messy, and a dilettante. But many young people in choosing a life work also chain themselves voluntarily. Many don’t want to wander; they want to be sure of what they are doing in advance of doing it.

Another pattern of purification occurs in a curious limitation on adolescent sexuality. From his study of medieval myths of love, Denis de Rougement has suggested that the search for “the” ideal man or woman is a way of avoiding loving real people, since “the” ideal mate is really only a reflection of oneself as one would like to be; it is not another person with a life of his or her own. Yet it is exactly this search for an ideal mate that flowers in adolescent sexuality, that creates its narcissism and homosexual undertow. This search for gods or goddesses to love leads the young so often, as Erik Erikson puts it, to deny the fact of another real person in sexual relations. And since another real person is not consciously present, there need not occur the endless, often painful, rebalancing between two people who are present to love each other; perfect love in adolescence suffers no such intrusions. Anna Freud has observed that the conflicts involved in an intimacy are evaded in adolescence by a rigid selective process; the young take a painful difference to be a proof that a particular partner is not “the” one.

A third pattern of avoidance the young put on their own powers is more a state of mind than a concrete activity like choosing a career or a partner in love. Yet this state of mind is to me the most marked characteristic of adolescent purity concerns. It is the attempt of the young to create an aura of invulnerable, unemotional competence for themselves. Researches into the inner life of juvenile gangs mention this attitude, but its penumbra in adolescence is much wider than the attitudes of tough kids. In the desire to be “on top of things,” to control something so totally that nothing occurs outside of one’s power, one insulates the experiences one is willing to probe or submit to. In school, for example, it is rare for students to ask each other questions in class, rather than an authority, simply to find something out. Studies of adolescent group life find, instead, a recurrent striving for a “professionalized” expertise in all kinds of activities so that one will not be embarrassed, appear confused, or taken by surprise. But when the dangers of surprise are avoided, there can be n...

Índice

• Cover Page
• Halftitle Page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Dedication
• Acknowledgments
• Contents
• Preface: Then and Now
• Introduction
• Part One: A New Puritanism
• Part Two: A New Anarchism