Melis Menent

Philosophy of The City Madrid

Urban Identity

Jurgen Habermas mentioned the notion of ‘Everyday’ only in passing. It is not one of the central themes to his work. It is in ‘Between Facts and Norms’ that this notion got my attention while working on the idea of Constitutional Patriotism. Lingering into the first Appendix, the Everyday made a brief appearance together with several other notions. 

[In the grand scheme of things, it became easier to understand how a certain interpretation of constitutional patriotism can be formed. Notions follow one another and they can be linked together in particular ways. This is how several ideas sit together when my work is read together. I wrote it by digging something out of something bigger. In today’s paper, I seek to add a new twist to the smaller ideas that stem from Habermasian political theory. Neither Constitutional Patriotism nor the Everyday are in the centre of the political theory within this particular literature. Despite this, I find it intriguing to ponder upon what they might mean and what else can be read together.]

This is how the very word ‘everyday’ appears:

“The fact that everyday affairs are necessarily banalized in political communication also poses a danger for the semantic potentials from which this communication must still draw its nourishment. (A culture without thorns would be absorbed by mere needs for compensation… It settles over the risk society like a foam carpet.) No civil religion, however cleverly adjusted, could forestall this entropy of meaning… Even the moment of unconditionality insistently voiced in the context transcending validity claims of everyday life does not suffice…” (Habermas, 1998, p.490) 

There is so much packed into a small space in this reference to everyday. It does not come on its own: what are the everyday affairs? How’s language involved? He moves on to a form of religion that comes out of a civil status. I argue that this sense of everyday is a simple repetition of things: it takes different dimensions of human life into it. The broader Habermasian political work can be read to have several levels of integration: local, supranational and international. The simplicity of the everyday fixes our regard on that which is not as idealistic as the universalistic principles are. There are two different principles in his work, the D and the U principles: Discourse and Universality. The simplicity of everyday harkens back to what we do, within a given space that we are inhabit.

The notion of religion and universality appears in this notion of Everyday:

“Another kind of transcendence is preserved in the unfulfilled promise disclosed by the critical appropriation of identity-forming religious traditions, and still another in the negativity of modern art. The trivial and everyday must be open to the shock of what is absolutely strange, cryptic or uncanny. Though these no longer provide a cover for privileges, they refuse to be assimilated by pre-given categories.” (Habermas, p.490)

The pre-given categories can be read to stem from medieval relations representing an economic class structure of today. Habermas equates the simplicity of everyday life to maintaining potential privileges that were undeserved. I wish to bring the notion of Everydayness to the first layer of the idea of Constitutional Patriotism: while constitutional patriotism has three levels, it is merely the first one that is national, local and particularistic. It is within this level that we can approach Everydayness: with simple repetitions, which are comforting and necessary. Habermas’s reference to it makes the repetitions of the everyday life, the everyday affairs, negative. He likens the ‘triviality’ of it to the ‘negativity’ of modern art. Both can be read to be positive: art and everyday.

The language Habermas uses is more clear and critical than usual. There’s a sense of disdain toward art, but ‘negativity’ means something very complex in the Frankfurt tradition. He moves on to mildly threaten the uncritical approach toward the everyday life: it is the unquestioned repetitions of the simple which ought to be placed under the limelight. Anything can happen, and it is the sense of false certainty that can change in the future. It is the simplicity of everyday that must allow space for a critical cosmopolitanism that brings the outer layer of the Stoic self closer inwards. 

(Mill- Inwardness)

More Habermasian

Most notions, in Habermasian political theory, are interlinked. This is the first difficulty before studying his broader theory. He did not develop solely on the idea of an urban life, nor did he dwell on the cities on their own. Here, I will seek to bring the ideas of identity and city closer together. I seek to discuss the notions of everyday, uncanny, freedom, tradition, enlightenment, economy and walking in the cities. 

Cities have transformed the way the societies are formed. Individuals get together in different ways in places where there is enough infrastructure to live. The population size impacts heavily the way the individuals relate to one another. While the size of the population of a place of habitation has increased, the way the economic relations are formed were transformed too. The means of production, to use Marxist terminology, have shaped what the individuals need in order to live. It is through an economic political organisation that the urban dwelling went against the rural. 

The city has recreated the sense of knowing one another. It is in an urban setting that the individuals no longer feared the neighbourhood pressure. This is another dimension of the transformation of the economic mode of production. No longer obligated to know the people who are selling him or her the things that she needs, the urban city dwellers became able to reform their relationships: both public and private. The urban environment has allowed the separation of the public from the private for the production and the consumption of economic goods. The land, no longer at the heart of socio-economic relations, took a back seat in the new setting.

Initially, the very first time I read it, I thought that the importance of the ‘quotidian’ was also missing in the political theory that I had been focusing on. I made a mark in my own copy of the book, saying: ‘quotidian’. I had thought it to be an odd reference to an angle of time that was available in the Habermasian political theory.

Durkheim

Durkheim wrote on the economic and social system. In his account of individuals relating to one another, the notion of ‘anomie’ comes together with an account of ‘industry’. He specifically uses the language of ‘corporations’ referring to bigger scale business, impacting employment and the human relations that are trapped within those structures. It is within a system of ‘anomie’ that there is a sense of loss of meaning among the individuals constituting a society. 

“…the corporative system would be preserved from the tendency towards stagnation that it has often been criticised for in the past, for this was a defect rooted in the narrowly communal character of the corporation. As long as it was limited to the town, it was inevitable that it become a prisoner of tradition, like the town itself. In so restricted a group, the conditions of life are almost invariable, habit has complete control over people and things, and anything new comes to be feared… Too many different men would be involved to lead to a situation of unchanging uniformity.” (Giddens, p. 188). 

In this sense, the sense of sameness forces itself on the individuals who form the groups within rural environments. It is without a city that the society needs communal relationships as opposed to those that take hold in larger groups. Which is good, which is bad? I want to leave it to the reader to consider the pros and cons of both forms of forming and maintaining social bonds.

Durkheim mentions different solidarities: one mechanic and another organic. In a society which has organic solidarity, the society relies less on imposing ‘uniform rules’ on everyone. Mechanic solidarity prioritizes professionalism and relies on different kinds of relationships. While organic solidarity seems to be more rural, more communal, it is mechanic solidarity that allows us to read an urban population with respect to the kinds of relationships and attachment that is at hand.

FREUD 

Merriam Webster Dictionary: “Uncanny: supernatural in character, being beyond what is normal”

While the notion of social integration within cities can be read with social theory from Durkheim, another one of Habermas’ brief account of ‘everyday’ describes what the future holds as ‘uncanny’. The unexpected and intelligent also got my attention and I wish to see what else has been named ‘uncanny’ in contemporary social theory. I only have limited space and time, as every research matter. I argue that Habermas’ simple and in a sense ‘trivial’ everyday can be compared to Freud’s little known about work titled ‘Uncanny’. 

The book ‘Uncanny’ is about Leonardo da Vinci. It is a memory of his childhood and an account of genius. It tells us of his own life within a historical context. 

“What strikes the layman as a masterpiece may appear to its creator as an unsatisfactory embodiment of his intentions” Freud wrote. It is a book about creativity. In this sense, art is a way of expressing one’s own feelings, while transforming them into a piece that serves the purpose of a tool. A tool bringing the recipient of the information closer to the producer of it. Freud thinks of Leonardo da Vinci as a ‘creator’ in this sense. It is interesting that he chooses this term: an artist is a creator. It’s a deitic approach to creativity, one which is not allowed in all cultures. 

“The small is no less wonderful or significant than the great” (Freud, p.54). The simplicity of everyday, too, is small. The Everyday does not allude to the perfection of universalism, neither does it develop on the moral principles that we can read elsewhere. This is how Freud can be read together with Habermas here: it is our emotions which connect us to our surroundings, allowing and hindering us to engage in the actions that we may carry out. Buying the newspaper, getting fresh bread, focusing on fresh milk… Any one of these acts are significantly less important than the greater good. Despite their simplicity, it is through these gestures that we are ‘grounded’. Sometimes for the good, sometimes for the bad…

Another work from Sigmund Freud is the ‘Future of An Illusion’. The moral ideas laid bare in this Freudian work are more universal. In the Future of An Illusion, we have the the relationship between the mind and religion presented to us. In Marx, we have clear references to religion being the opium of the people. But he then makes the society a political economic one. The impact of religion on the social mind is translated into a mode of production, constituting the basis of an economic infrastructure of a given country at a time. For the purpose of my doctoral research, what matters is the broader global public sphere with the nation states in them. This is why I have chosen to discuss identity with the example of supranational institutions like the European Union and the United Nations. 

MARX

Distanced from the means of production which were initially attached to the land, societies started looking for earning their livelihoods in post-industrial economic social conditions. The Earth is not land directly, it’s similar but different. It is within ‘given social relations’ that things translate into class and economy. Without the kinds of relations developed and maintained by the societies, land could not have spoken for itself. It does not, when its rights are stolen or when it’s abused. Despite being a source of many values, the land does not translate directly into the economic production of a post-capitalistic society. There are processes, a certain chain, which takes time to take hold. It is in the third volume of the Capital which Marx specifies his approach toward land and what it does for the economy.

“It is the great merit of classical economics to have dissolved this false appearance and deception, this automization and ossification of the different social elements of wealth vis-à-vis one another, this personification of things and reification of the relations of production, this religion of everyday life, by reducing interest to a part of profit and rent to the surplus above the average profit, so that they both coincide in surplus-value; by presenting the circulation process as simply a metamorphosis of forms, and finally in the immediate process of production reducing the value and surplus value of commodities to labour (Marx, p.969).” {Chapter: The Revenues and Their Sources, The Trinity Formula.}

Classical economics is the opposite of the economic system which Marx wants to establish. The social dimension of the economic system is most striking in his verbalisation. The ‘Everyday’ appears to be a religion, for Marx. It is through the integration of economic categories, smaller details that this religion form itself. He allows us to think of the sense of repetitions in everyday life. What food shopping does for me, as an individual, is read through a financial lens for Marx.

CERTEAU

The notion of a city appears in Michel de Certeau’s ‘L’invention du Quotidien’. He compares the cities of Rome and New York, in particular. He argues that New York does not age, that it does not learn to age. He points out to the World Trade Center and to Wall Street as distinct places adding to the character of a city, something that’s intrinsic to architecture. He argues that the most significant Western urban landmark is the ‘World Trade Centre’’; a place which we come to remember with the taint of terror today (ibid).

A comparison between Rome and New York is distinct. It tells us of the past and of the future. Certeau mentions the interpretations of the past and the future one more time: “the past is opaque and the future is uncertain on a surface that can be changed” (Certeau, p.142). What is it about a city which allows us to reflect? Which allows somebody to forget the past? I wish to learn more about the ways in which architecture could mark, maintain and change.

There are instances, occurrences and buildings within a city which stop the sense of ‘place’. Place is ‘space’, there can be more or less space within the design of a city. The architectural background shaping the unchangeable surroundings of oneself forms what one can and can’t do. Having to follow a certain route, being obligated to form a queue in the traffic, and the lights which are absent or present. We have lights regulating the traffic, and lights for advertisement. Every other light is used differently among different cities across the world. The light of the day, most important of all, is not always available to the society due to the architectural abuse of land.

[In French: “A la difference de Rome, New York n’a jamais appris l’art de vielillir en jouant de tous les passés. Son present s’invente, d’heure en heure, dans l’acte de… defier l’avenir” (Certeau, p.139)…Le World Trade Center n’est que la plus ,monumental des figures de l’urbanisme occidental… La ville est un grand monastère, Erasme” (Certeau, p.142) Un passe opaque et un future incertain en un surface traitable]

MILL

The notion of tradition appears in Mill’s essay titled ‘On Liberty’ too. In addition to Habermas and Durkheim alluding to ‘tradition’, Mill focuses on using one’s own intellectual capacity to think in relation to the decisions made before oneself, what tradition holds and anything that’s ‘pre-given’ in Habermasian terminology.

“The human faculties of perception, judgment, discriminative feeling, mental activity, and even moral preference, are exercised only in making a choice. He who does anything because it is the custom makes no choice. He gains no practice either in discerning or in desiring what is best. The mental and moral, like the muscular powers, are improved only by being used. The faculties are called into no exercise by doing a thing merely because others do it, no more than by believing a thing only because others believe it.” 

Previously in my work I have likened the notion of ‘partially inscribed reason’ to nationalism for a possible transformation of nationalism in light of universalistic principles. The city, the mechanical and organic solidarities, stand somewhere in between when it comes to tidying things up. A categorical approach can both be useful and reductionist. Despite this, I wish to ponder upon the similarities and draw comparisons between different ideas. Reason is one such idea. Mill refers to ‘reason’ in a similar manner to that of Habermas: 

“If the grounds of an opinion are not conclusive to the person’s own reason, his reason cannot be strengthened, but is likely to be weakened, by his adopting it: and if the inducements to an act are not such as are consentaneous to his own feelings and character… it is so much done towards rendering his feelings and character inert and torpid, instead of active and energetic.”

It is the freedom of thought and choice which allows one to be active. Under the social circusmtances which it is not possible to think for oneself, one cannot be active. ‘Man cannot be happy without being free’. Is there something about cities allowing people to make their own choices? The way that attachment forms and reforms allows the city dwellers to make their own choices. In larger societies where there have been different pressures, the idea of ‘organic solidarity’ or social pressure are hardly considered to be risks to the freedom of thought and expression. Solidarities and attachment of different forms offer a transformation for the conventional problem of a ‘neighbourhood pressure’. No longer able to know others in the same way, everyday affairs are carried out differently. 

The word ‘inert’ appears in the dictionary as such: very slow to move, lacking the capacity to be active.

“He who lets the world, or his own portion of it, choose his plan of life for him, has no need of any other faculty than the ape-like one of imitation. He who chooses his plan for himself, employs all his faculties. He must use observation to see, reasoning and judgment to foresee, activity to gather materials for decision, discrimination to decide”

“And these qualities he requires and exercises exactly in proportion as the part of his conduct which he determines according to his own judgment and feelings is a large one…  What will be his comparative worth as a human being? It really is of importance, not only what men do, but also what manner of men they are that do it. Among the works of man, which human life is rightly employed in perfecting and beautifying, the first in importance surely is man himself. 

…Human nature is not a machine to be built after a model, and set to do exactly the work prescribed for it, but a tree, which requires to grow and develop itself on all sides, according to the tendency of the inward forces which make it a living thing” (Mill, On Liberty, p.55)

 A transformation towards a new understanding of the self, to be able to think for oneself as an individual or as a collectivity is understood as a process. This process, understood as progress towards that which is accepted to be a better position, is a movement aiming at a perfectly just order. Moral Consciousness and Kohlberg’s interpretation by Habermas holds that this progress, I argue, aims at a legal orientation. By referring to humanity as a whole especially with reference to Europe, Habermas hints at his cosmopolitan tendency. 

Conclusion:

It is for cosmopolitanism that the external circle of the Self moves inward. Nussbaum borrows this from the Stoics. The simplicity of everyday ought to be open to change, to that which is new. What is unexpected, ‘uncanny’ for Habermas is similar to the experience of ‘da Vinci’, the prominent Enlightenment painter. 

Marx alludes to the everyday as a religion. Durkheim and Habermas both use ‘tradition’ as a place to start. The individual and the society can move toward Enlightenment in a number of ways. Economic relations can create a system of repetitions; repetitions of a non-ideal kind. Corporations impact bonds among individuals for Durkheim. Freud does not forget about love and knowledge for his ‘uncanny’ while Certeau observes the city as an image. 

BIBLIOGRAPHY:

Certeau, Arts de Faire

Giddens, Durkheim Reader

Freud, Uncanny

Freud, Future of an Illusion

Habermas, Between Facts and Norms

Habermas, The Crisis of the European Union

Marx, Capital

Mill, Utilitarianism

Stanga, Carlo. Domestika “Architectural Illustration: Capture A City’s Personality” (online)