Richard Sennett
The Uses of Disorder: Personal Identity and City Life
(1970)
[172]CHAPTER SEVEN
═══🙡═══The City as
an Anarchic System
TOWARD THE END OF THE NINETEENTH CENTURY A SMALL band of men instituted a wave of assassinations, bomb- ings, and other terrorist acts in the name of what they called anarchism. As a consequence anarchism in many countries became a proscribed doctrine, and anar- chists criminals in the eyes of the law. Anarchism lit- rally means "without government" Or "without control" (an-archy). The term became overlaid with violent and terrorist associations in the late nineteenth century for peculiar reasons.
E. H. Carr has said that anarchism in the last century was a critique of society, not a plan for social reconstruc- tion. The virtues of being without government were con- ceived as correctives to the emerging industrial order, and it was difficult for anarchists to think about an anarchic society as having an ongoing life of its own. Therefore, al-
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though the rigidities and injustice of the industrial order gave the anarchists a powerful rationale for what they were against, the terms of their own thinking never told them what they were really fighting for. The Marxian terms, on the other hand, did.
Originally, anarchists and Marxians were part of the same fledgling movement. Proudhon, taken by many to be the first anarchist, thought of himself as a disciple of socialism; his ideas for "federalism" in the conduct of just social affairs were hardly plans for life without govern- ment. But as the anarchist idea ripened, as the fact of disorder seemed to become in itself a challenge to the manufacturers, anarchists moved away from the disci- pline and the search for internal structure that character- ized the First International of the Marxian socialists. It was the Russian Bakunin who personified this movement away from organized socialism; he was an intense, child- like rebel who made his sense of outrage at the cruelties around him a self-sufficing state of mind rather than a springboard for trying to change society.
I believe this limitation of the anarchists' vision, this static quality of their rejection, is what led them to vio- lence and terrorism at the century's end. For, lacking a notion of what should be instituted when injustice was overthrown, these men were naturally drawn to look at the act of rejection as a moral region of its own. The more powerful the process of rejecting, the more complete, the more purging an event it would be. If, unlike the Marx- ians, all they had was the fact of saying no, their state- ment had to be cataclysmic, had to be everything. This was the path by which Georges Sorel, the great anarchist-
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syndicalist writer, was led to see violence as a great purg. ing, cleansing act in society. The violent catharsis was so great that what happened after seemed petty and anti. climactic.
The ideas about anarchy in cities advanced so far in this essay are inherently hostile to the enshrinement of violence to which the anarchist movement of the nine- teenth century was finally led. For I have tried to look at what society should be like once it is freed of economic injustice and becomes affluent. Now, I believe, disorder is an enduring way to use the wealth and abundance of modern times; the result of this anarchy in abundant city life will be to decrease the need for violence rather than idealize the desire for it.
Such statements as there are on post-revolutionary social structure by nineteenth-century anarchists lean to a society antithetical to the dense, diverse city. Among the greatest virtues of the Paris commune, to men like Prou- dhon, was its small-group character and tightness. Carr has pointed to the same desire for little, intimate commu- nites in Bakunin's beliefs and in those of his fellow countryman Kropotkin, who looked back to the village community of the late medieval period. After the purging cataclysm of violent overthrow, the tight little band of believers--this is today Fanon's dream as well. It is a millennial vision bound to decay, for such little com munities permit the flourishing of desires for solidarity, and these desires in turn repress creative, disruptive in- novations in life style and belief.
Unlike the anarchists of his time, Marx envisioned the shape of post-revolutionary society, and discussed mech-
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anisms that would make disorder, constant change, and expanding diversity its hallmarks. But he assumed these things would come to pass of themselves, once economic injustices were routed. Marx refused to explore the possibility that rigid order, a fear of change, and a desire for sameness were innate to human beings, were generated by the very processes of human maturation. Seen in a different light, his refusal was an article of belief in the basic dignity of men. His hopes for a natural liberation, in light of the psychological researches that followed him and the experiences of "liberated nations" who have become affluent, seem now no longer possible to entertain. In an affluent world, be it pre- or post-revolutionary, the real problem is for men to be encouraged to abandon their deep-down natural desire for a comfortable slavery to the routine. This encouragement is what purposely dense, purposely decentralized, purposely disordered cities could provide.
But the question arises as to how such cities could en- dure as social systems. Isn't it a contradiction in terms to talk of an anarchic environment as enduring, and there- fore somehow stable? Furthermore, wouldn't men, faced with the disorder, gradually give it up and return to the more comfortable slaveries of the past?
Some Social Possibilities of Affluence
The modern social use of technology has been to provide men with a coherent image of order--order consisting of
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actions that are performed by passive agents. A machine in which one part or operation deviates from its precon- ceived use makes the whole go out of order, and stop functioning. The usual modes of urban planning are ex- ecuted in such metropolitan, "system" terms, derived from the model of machine productivity.
This image of technology ignores its true and humane social use, a use that makes practicable the system of social disorganization men need in order to become adults. For the productive capacities of modern industry, techno- logically in excess of what is needed for a society's bare survival, permit a greater range and complexity of con- flict than under scarcity conditions. Labor union strikes are a good example of this. In prosperous sectors of the economy where strike funds and personal income are de- veloped, the occurrence of a strike does not mean that the conflict becomes a question of whether the workers are brought to the starving point or the company to bank- ruptcy; the affluence provides a certain foor to the con- flict. The material base of the economy is such that social conflicts need not escalate to life or death struggles be- tween the parties involved.
Sociologists have usually looked at such a flooring to the economic disaster caused by group conflict as a sign of the emergence of social solidarity and sameness in a culture. Supposedly, the less cataclysmic a conflict, the less the desire or need for it. This entirely misses the point. This economic floor, which is the result of technological affluence, can actually permit greater regions of conflict than in scarcity societies, because the stakes of group con-
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flict need not escalate to the point where one of the parties must obliterate the other.
One of the most ridiculed and most feared innovations of American social planning in the last decade was the federal government's establishment of funds for local groups to use in pressing their demands against city hall and state agencies. This program could have had an enor. mously creative impact had it been adequately funded, for the government revenues were used by decentralized groups to fight only for the programs they wanted. With such a flooring they did not have to fight city hall for their economic existence as well; the existence of the groups were not dependent on the success or failure they had in funding particular programs. The local organizations did not need to tie themselves to a fixed ideology or func- tion in order to stay alive, but were permitted an inde- pendent existence. Thus they were free to grow and change direction. The point about an affluent society is that there is enough money around for this kind of eco- nomic "flooring' of conflict groups to be created. The amounts of money needed are not really large compared to the massive outlays made for nonproductive military activities. When such "flooring" exists, so that conflict over particular issues need not escalate to the level of whether one or the other of the parties must be destroyed the organizations can attain a great deal more internal flexibility in their goals and programs.
The proper uses of technological abundance, then, per- mit a social conception of survival different from that ob- taining in the scarcity economies of the past. Survival
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comes to be defined in terms of concrete actions taken to change behavior of individuals or groups in opposition: the slavery of a material reference point of existence, as Marx called it, does not interfere with this experiential interaction. In this way, Marx's idea of a post-revolution- ary anarchy would touch on the city anarchy envisioned here.
Putting abundance to such social ends, as has occurred in both American and European labor unions and inter- mittently for local community organizations, is one way that disordered relationships and conflict grouping could practicably have an ongoing life. Unlike the conflicts in times of scarcity, survival is framed in terms of whether people will be able to communicate with each other, not whether they will be able to stay alive. Again I am forced to refer to Marx: he believed that in an abundant society permanent disorder is possible because survival depends on social acts and experiences rather than the brute possession of material goods .
But there is another reason why the disordered city can have an ongoing, viable existence, a reason not referable to such theories as those of Marx. Stability Through Direct Aggression Aggressive feelings are inherent in people's lives, but ag- gression itself is a little-understood phenomenon. Psychol- gists and anthropologists have bitterly debated the
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question of why aggression exists to a much greater degree in men than in other animals. Some researchers claim aggression is the result of frustration and therefore de- veloped in the course of a life in individual ways and through personal experiences; others claim aggression to be an instinctual response, existing in the psychic make-up of men in advance of any of their particular experiences Whatever the origin of aggression, the fact of its import- ance in men's social activities cannot be denied.
The structures modern affluent communities are built on are such that basic aggression is denied outlets other than violence. Because the images of social order are functional images of preset roles to be played so that the social whole will function, aggressive behavior among the players seems at best to be a diversion from the proper workings of the community, and at worst a threat to the very idea of achievement and accomplishment. "Aggres- sion resolution" " is regarded as necessary for further group action to occur.
But if aggression is so deeply engraved in the life of men, then a society that regards aggressive outbreaks as a hindrance rather than as a serious human experience is hiding from itself. Indeed, one school of social thought now considers modern ideas for sublimating aggression, such as directing attacks away from their original targets into more socially manageable forms, as actually con ducive to the kind of emotional buildup that can suddenly burst forth in acts of unprovoked violence
The clearest example of the way this violence occurs is found in the pressures on police in modern cities. Police are expected to be bureaucrats of hostility resolution, un-
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responsive to taunts and attacks on them, passive in the performance of enforcing set rules on an unruly or violent clientele. Apart from all the theories about ethnic hatreds, "working-class authoritarianism," and the like now invoked to explain police riots, is it any wonder, in simple human terms, that the imperative to respond passively has a terrible effect on these men? The need to work aggres- sion out of their systems builds up to the point where they have to brutalize indiscriminately when unleashed on their own. A society that visualizes the lawful response to disorder as an impersonal, passive coercion only invites such terrifying outbreaks of police rioting. I am con- vinced, therefore, that no officer of "law and order" can preserve his decency under these conditions, where he is supposed to be a passive "instrument" ° of justice, a justice machine.
But in a dense city where power has been changed so that people are forced to deal directly with each other as men, not as parts of a planned order, aggressive hostilities involved in conflict could be directed to the objects of provocation. We are so enslaved to cowardly ideas of safety that we imagine direct expression of hostilities can only lead to brutal outbreaks. But such experiments in direct confrontation as the psychiatric "attack" sessions of Synanon games, where people are encouraged to express their hostile feelings about each other, almost never lead to blows, for the simple reason that there is no need for it. Hostility is actively expressed when felt, not left to fester and grow provoking.
It is said that American and western European cities are growing more violent. Some writers, like Oscar Hand-
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lin, doubt the historical validity of the assertion, and per- haps they are right to think that violent crime is no greater now than in the past. But the potential for "irrational crime, » for violence without object or provocation, is very great now. The reason it exists is that society has come to expect too much order, too much coherence in its com- munal life, thus bottling up the hostile aggressiveness men cannot help but feeling.
These new anarchic cities promise to provide an outlet for what men now fear to show directly. In so doing, the structure of the city community will take on a kind of stability, a mode of ongoing expression, that will be sus- taining to men because it offers them expressive outlets. Anarchy in cities, pushing men to say what they think about each other in order to forge some mutual patterns of compatability, is thus not a compromise between order and violence; it is a wholly different way of living, mean- ing that people will no longer be caught between these two polarities.
Why Men Will Want the New Cities
We have examined, thus far, why it would be good for the health of society if the cities of our times were changed, and why such good cities might be viable over time. But there remains an unanswered question in such a change: why should men want to make over their lives and in- habit these difficult cities? It is a question of convincing
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men who have succeeded quite well in isolating them selves in warm and comforting shelters in the suburbs, or in ethnic, racial, or class isolation, that these refuges are worth abandoning for the terrors of the struggle to survive together.
In exploring such personal desires, an urban study like this is invading what was once the domain of moral philosophers and theologians. Indeed, social studies are now attempting definitions of the good and bad goals of a life, the desirable forms of identity. Society has passed beyond the stage where it sought from divine authority firm and immutable answers to such questions, but the questions remain, in all their messiness and refusal to submit to the scalpel of numbers and quantitative an- swers: why should men want to lead a better communal life than the comfortable one they now lead?
The immediate answer to this problem might seem that these new cities would make a more just, compassionate social order, and so in the end men would come to desire them. This has been a great motive for belief in the Chris- tian sects-i.e., that one can come to desire a good end one has not yet experienced--but this belief is, I believe, a great illusion as well. If men were saintly enough to respond to such a plea, then the problems of untruthful- ness and selfishness would never have arisen in the first place. Indeed, these complex, overwhelming cities would not really lead to a self-conscious awareness of being a good person.
An anarchic survival community would not produce in each man a knowledge that he is caring or learning to care: he learns to care in order to survive, not in order to
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be good. Such a break constitutes one divide between the ethics of our own time and the religious ethics of the past. Instead of advocating the practice of goodness for its own sake, which has, as Weber believed, come to such self- righteous and intolerant ends, a modern system of ethics must make an ethical condition emerge from social situ- ations that are not consciously understood by the actors to be a search for a "better" ethical state. Looking for ethical situations in the structure of society is more honest, to my mind, than making pleas for a change of heart, more genuine than a conversion experience in which each man resolves to be good for ever after. People are too frail, and acts of mercy too easily perverted.
In his later novels, Dostoevsky gave another reason for looking at ethical desires in this way. He went so far as to believe a man could not be a good person if he were con- scious of performing good acts; Dostoevsky felt that gen- erosity and spontaneous giving become, when they reach a level of self-consciousness, a smug form of self-denial. Yet all the truly good figures in his later novels--Prince Mishkin, Alyosha, Maria--fail to survive; they are torn apart by their own goodness, because they have no other force animating their lives. These truly good men are beings without a consciousness of themselves, and with a total consciousness of others, so that they are destroyed by the very complexities of the people around them, into which they become enmeshed.
But the fate of such figures could be changed in the real world we could create in cities. In these cities, men will need to have some consciousness of themselves, they will continually be asking what it is in them that fails to be
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adequate for the social world they live in, what parts of their own lives are reconcilable or irreconcilable with the lives of the people around them. They cannot be uncon- sciousness of themselves if they are to survive; yet, like the good figures Dostoevsky pictured, they will be not con- scious that what they do is good. For men struggling to understand each other in order to survive, the question of goodness would be irrelevant.
For example, we could imagine the everyday situation in which a man refuses to face the fact that a store he is building in a certain place in a neighborhood will elimi- nate a vacant lot children have needed to play in. The businessman is obdurate, and thus the neighbors, who are the only force to curb him in the absence of any central control, must begin a long process of threatening, cajol- ing, and harrassing so that they finally make him relent and look for a more socially acceptable site for his store. But applying this pressure-_organizing boycotts and picket lines, etc.-is hardly a nourishing, satisfying task for most of the men involved in this new city role; the fact that they do something good for the community doesn't mean they like the substantive business of arguing with someone who regressed by willfully ignoring the people around him. It is the essence of a good act, as Dostoevsky said, that it does not bring a person pleasure to have been good.
How then can men become willing to endure the pain- ful processes of a more civilized order? The force driving men into this new situation is, I believe, a specifically modern kind of boredom.
The people who in the last decade have searched in
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their minds or activities for a new sense of "community" were products of the affluent suburbs for the most part. Their attitude toward these places where they grew up was strong and simple: the suburbs were boring, they were empty of life or surprise, and so on. The complaints are familiar to the point of becoming clichés. What is im- portant about them is that a large segment of the present generation means to act according to their disenchant- ment with a boring past, and try to find something better. A sense of resignation is absent in these young people; they want actively to bring something new into being.
Part of this search for a new community is seen in the areas where young people are living and want to live. It has been known for some time that some of their parents, suburbanites whose children have grown up and left home, have been moving in increasing numbers back into the center of cities, when the housing is available. But an equally significant movement of young people into the center of cities is occurring. A growing minority of young adults, as they acquire family responsibilities and chil- dren, are refusing to make the trek out to the suburbs, and are searching instead for ways to remain in the center of town. The reason for this is that they hope for some- thing "richer" in social life than what the suburb offers. It is true that a majority of the young married adults of this generation are moving into suburban homes of their own, just as the previous generation did. Yet among the more active, vital minority, a minority much greater than that to be found in the past, the old pattern is being re- jected. These young people are refusing to be bored, re- fusing to accept the dead security in which they grew up.
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It is my hope that this active refusal to accept the sim- plicities of the past will make it feasible for complex, dis- ordered settlements to be desired and accepted by this generation nurtured in affluence. What someone has called the "great refusal" • of the present generation to ac cept the secure cocoons the parents have woven can be the reason men now would be willing to endure the dis order and possible dislocation of an anarchic city environ ment.
This boredom is, however, rather strange. Most animals live by instinctual routines quite well; few men in agri cultural, pre-industrial walks of life suffered from bore- dom, although their lives were hard and the rhythms of life fixed. The peculiar character of a secure, affluent rou- tine is that it does not arise from the needs of adaptive survival with the environment or with other members of the race. It arises instead out of the fact that affluence permits men, through coherent routines, to hide from dealing with each other. Rather than face the full range of social experience possible to men, the communities of safe coherence cut off the amount of human material per- mitted into a man's life, in order that no questions of dis- cord, no issues of survival be raised at all.
It is this "escape from freedom, in Erich Fromm's words, that ultimately makes a man quite consciously bored, aware that he is suffocating, although he may re- fuse to face the reasons for his suffocation. The boredom that rises out of this hiding is quite natural, for it is, as Nietzsche said, the voice of the creature in each man try. ing to make itself heard.
If social situations can be moved, step by step, toward
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a social environment in which human diversity is per- mitted to express itself, I believe this "creature in the man" will take hold and become involved, driven by the boredom with what men do unnecessarily to keep them- selves secure. The feeling of boredom in the new middle- class generation is the hidden, and, as yet, undeveloped expression of a desire for diversity. Once this hidden de- sire has a field in which to express itself, once cities be- come responsive to human needs, the tiredness with routine that men now experience will be the conscious force moving people step by step into encountering social diversity. Inevitably the question of how differences be tween men can coexist will then arise, and the men in- volved will be caught up in the process of urban growth such as I envision it.
The refusal of the young who have grown up in afflu- ence to accept its routines as reality is a distinct emotional break with the traditional acceptance of routine under conditions of scarcity or deprivation. For the routinizing act has a real dignity when times are hard, and a refusal to accept routine seems to be the expression of a spoiled child. But that temper does not fit well the processes of a large segment of modern-day society. The routines of af- fluence seem, and are, unnecessary; there is no need for them when people have an adequate economic base. If there is any truth to the journalistic cries about the gen- eration gap, it is that the old do not understand youth's perception of present reality and that they forget that the young have never known the corrosive power of scarcity scarcity that drove their elders to see comfort and security as humanly dignified ends in a life.
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Because of the great freedom for expressing conflict that affluence could bring, because of the possibility for satisfying men's desires to aggress against each other with- out the result of mutual destruction, because the routines of hiding produced by the present communal uses of affluence are proving so distasteful to those nurtured in them, I have dared to hope that the anarchic city might be more than a utopian dream, that it might be a viable al. ternative for what now passes as social life. Our affluence in its present form is becoming an intolerable weight to those who supposedly enjoy it. That is to say- -beyond the fact that in much of western Europe and America afflu- ence is so inequitably distributed--that even those who have it have not learned to use it for humane ends. Un- like Marcuse, I am convinced that affluence can be put to good ends, in a viable, enduring, anarchic society. I be- lieve that the disgust and anxiety affluent communities presently cause in their young will make the people of this generation ready to explore the human unknown, and perhaps permit themselves to be hurt for the sake of preserving their vitality.