postmodern urbanism disrobed1: or why postmodern ...

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POSTMODERN URBANISM DISROBED1: OR WHY POSTMODERN URBANISM IS A DEAD END FOR URBAN GEOGRAPHY

Daniel Z. Sui Department of Geography Texas A&M University College Station, Texas 77843 Tel: 409-845-7154 Fax: 409-862-4487 [email protected]

One of the greatest ironies in geographical scholarship is that good criticism remains an exceedingly scarce resource. —Michael Dear (1995) Where in the waste is wisdom? —James Joyce “Geography has fallen on hard times” is how Harvard economic historian David Landes (1998, p. 1) starts his book, The Wealth and Poverty of Nations. In the first two chapters, Landes gives a candid and often blunt assessment of geography as a discipline. To Landes, the abolishment of geography at Harvard and other Ivy League universities was well deserved because of geography’s inherent intellectual weaknesses. Landes identified, among several others, three salient features of our discipline: “the lack of a theoretical basis, the all-embracing opportunism (more euphemistically, the catholic openness), the special easiness of human geography” (Landes, 1998, p. 4). It is indeed a bitter pill for geographers to swallow when our colleagues in other disciplines make such stinging remarks about geography. But the fact is, from time to time, geographers’ works truly deserve this kind of honest judgment. Dear and Flusty’s (1998) article in the Annals of the Association of American Geographers (AAAG) on “Postmodern Urbanism” is just one recent example (among many others) of this kind of work. I declare my position without any postmodern ambiguity. Although Dear and Flusty (1998) present some interesting points, their paper fails to present a set of coherent and convincing arguments. Not only are numerous arguments in their paper self-contradicting, but the paper’s overarching theme—to establish the Los Angeles School of postmodern urbanism—is problematic. Far from shedding new light, the authors generate a little heat at best or, at worst, create lots of smoke that clouds rather than clarifies our understanding of cities. I hope this review symposium will blow away the dense smoke that Dear and Flusty have generated in urban studies. In this commentary, I will first comment on Dear and Flusty’s postmodern urbanism, followed by brief remarks on postmodernism in general. I do not believe we can gain a clear understanding of Dear and Flusty’s postmodern urbanism without touching on Dear’s larger agenda: to promote postmodern geography. 403 Urban Geography, 1999, 20, 5, pp. 403–411. Copyright © 1999 by V. H. Winston & Son, Inc. All rights reserved.

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CAN YOU HAVE YOUR CAKE AND EAT IT TOO? Dear and Flusty’s key argument is that most 20th-century urban analyses have been predicated on the Chicago School’s model of concentric rings. By synthesizing recent studies on the contemporary form of Southern California urbanism, they aim to develop a new concept, called postmodern urbanism, under the banner of the Los Angeles School of centerless “keno” capitalism. The fundamental features of the Los Angeles model include a global-local connection, a ubiquitous social polarization, and a reterritorialization of the urban process in which the hinterland organizes the center. This is, indeed, an ambitious undertaking. And yet, in the conclusion, we are told that their notion of keno capitalism is not a metanarrative but rather a micronarrative awaiting dialogical engagement. If the argument to shift our understanding of cities from the Chicago School to the Los Angeles School (if indeed such exists) is not a metanarrative (which most postmodernists oppose), I really do not know what a metanarrative is. This is not a new problem in Dear’s writings: critics pointed out 10 years ago that Dear seeks to have his own cake and eat it too (Scott and Simpson–Housley, 1989). The most serious problem of the postmodern urbanism thesis, as I see it, is that the argument is premised on the dubious assumption that our society has been transformed and has moved from a modern epoch to a postmodern epoch—an unproven argument that has been hotly contested among social scientists, as the authors acknowledge in their first footnote. Following this assumption, the authors present only those studies that seem to support their argument. We are told, for example, that the Los Angeles School has emerged and replaced the Chicago School of urban studies. As the authors describe this change, readers get the impression that there has been a huge vacuum in urban research between the development of the Chicago School in the 1920s and the Los Angeles School in the 1990s. The authors lead the reader to believe that no meaningful or significant urban studies were conducted in the intermediate years. I believe that this characterization of the urban literature is neither fair nor accurate. Ironically, the three pillars used by the authors to construct their postmodern urbanism—the world-city hypothesis, the dual-city theory, and the edge-city model—are concepts that emerged in the 1960s, 1970s, and 1980s. As another example, the global-local connection thesis is built on what economist Paul Krugman has called pop internationalism (Krugman, 1997). New trade theories based on increasing returns (rather than comparative advantages) have clarified many of the misperceptions of the globalization process—for example, recent research findings revealing that globalization has minimal impact on local employment (Krugman, 1998). No wonder Krugman refers to many of the global-local connection arguments based on pop internationalism as “globaloney” (Krugman, 1998). Yet another example is Joel Garreau’s edge-city model, which Dear and Flusty employ to support their idea of centerless keno capitalism. Although Garreau captured some interesting characteristics of urban development in the United States, his journalist’s intuition and speculation have not stood up to scholarly scrutiny. Garreau’s ideas have been discredited by most urban scholars. According to Beauregard (1995), the edge-city thesis is a fatally flawed rhetorical move to mitigate the urban sting of society’s contradictions. Abbott (1993) regarded edge-city as an updated version of suburban mythmaking. The fatal flaw of looking at urban development via the edge-city lens is that it tends to lead us

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to “take the shell for the whole oyster.” Even Melvin Webber, one of the earliest urban scholars to speculate about the emergence of a post-city age (Webber, 1963, 1968), has admitted that cities are tenacious and that his previous speculations have not obtained strong empirical support because of the persisting power of propinquity (Rusk, 1995; Webber, 1996). If Dear and Flusty had paid attention to numerous studies of recent trends in the gentrification of American cities (Smith, 1996), they would not have proclaimed the argument that the hinterland organizes the center in a centerless keno capitalism. How does the hinterland organize the center that does not exist? And if the center does not exist, do Dear and Flusty mean to imply that gentrification is a myth? As for the dual-city thesis, it is problematic to use it to describe American cities, whether the dualism be Black versus White, rich versus poor, or haves and have-nots (van Kempen and Marcuse, 1997). The complexity of reality simply defies this kind of binary characterization. Marcuse (1989) has provided appropriate evidence to illustrate the muddiness of the dual-city argument. Despite these devastating and credible criticisms, Dear and Flusty have relabeled the dual-city thesis as the new world bi-polar disorder, based on which we are told that cyburbia versus cyberia and cybergeoisie versus protosurps are just the continuation of the dual-city phenomenon in the postmodern age. If the Los Angeles School of postmodern urbanism does exist, as the authors claim, I am not sure what the common threads are that tie such a diverse group of scholars’ work together. If I understand Soja, Scott, Davis, Wolch, and Dear’s writings correctly, these Los Angeles–based authors are really talking about quite different things under very different theoretical premises using very different methodologies. The so-called Los Angeles School is at best a random cannibalization of existing theoretical frameworks or, worse, a hodge-podge of ideas that happen to be developed by people living in the Los Angeles area. In contrast, scholars pursuing research under the banner of the Chicago School share a common theoretical framework (urban/human ecology) and generally accepted methodological procedures to validate and replicate their claims. That is why the Chicago School has contributed enormously to our understanding of how cities work and has exerted far-reaching influences in numerous branches of the social sciences. SHAVING NEOLOGISM WITH OCCAM’S RAZOR A further problem I have with Dear and Flusty’s Annals piece is their adoption of a promiscuous neologism (neolorrhea?) as their overall tactic for postmodern analysis. We are told that the neologistic pastiche properly may be regarded as analogous to hypothesis-generation or to the practice of dialectics. But according to Webster’s English Dictionary, neologism has two basic meanings: (1) the creation or use of new words or expressions; (2) a meaningless word used by a psychotic. How can the creation of new (much less meaningless) words be analogous to hypothesis generation or to the practice of dialectics? I understand that new words must be created to reflect changing social realities but no theoretical advancement can be made in a discipline by simply inventing new words, especially when we have no ways to validate or evaluate them. By indulging themselves in promiscuous neologism creation, Dear and Flusty tend to treat words (the medium) as worlds (the message). They seem to forget that words (or for that matter, all the tools we

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TABLE 1.—BASIC LEXICON OF POSTMODERN U RBANISM Bipolar disorder Citidel Citistat Commudities Cybergeoisie Cyberia Cyburbia Deep-time Dreamscapes

Disinformation superhighway Flexism Global latifundia Heteropolis Holsteinization In-beyond Interdictory space Keno capitalism Leitmotif

Memetic contagion Neologistic pastiche Pollyannarchy Praedatorianism Privatopia Proto-postmodern Protosurps Telegraphy

have invented) are means to certain ends. Words and tools are the ladders we use to reach higher goals. Accordingly, what really matters are not the obfuscating words we invent. What actually advances our understanding of the real world is the ideas and ideals that we aspire to communicate when we use these words. According to the principle of Occam’s Razor (also known as the principle of parsimony), with all else equal, the simplest statement about the world tends to be correct. This principle demands that one should not increase, beyond what is necessary, the number of entities required to explain anything, or that one should not make more assumptions than the minimum needed. In my opinion, Dear and Flusty have seriously violated the principle of parsimony in presenting their arguments. While preparing this commentary, I have constantly asked myself: can the ideas of postmodern urbanism be conveyed without using these words (summarized in Table 1)? My conclusion is that many (if not all) of these new words are unnecessary to describe the new urban reality. Unfortunately, linguistic parsimony is not widely regarded as a scholarly virtue, especially among some postmodernist writers. Geographers have always protested against deliberate obfuscation in geographic writing (Symanski, 1976; Billinge, 1983). In retrospect, I think Symanski’s stinging analysis of Donald Meinig’s hyperbolic style seems somewhat excessive (Symanski, 1976). It would, however, be appropriate indeed if Symanski’s techniques were used to analyze postmodernists’ writing. In Tables 1 and 2, I have listed some sample vocabulary and statements from “Postmodern Urbanism.” Dear and Flusty used these new words and phrases to describe the postmodern world (Table 1). It becomes even more problematic when these ill-defined words are used to construct convoluted sentences to make sweeping statements (Table 2) regarding emerging urban forms and processes. These sentences are, in my opinion, simply a variation of Noam Chomsky’s famous construct “colorless green ideas sleep furiously”—syntactically correct but semantically meaningless (Chomsky, 1957). As George Orwell once remarked, “if you simplify your English, you are freed from the worst follies of orthodoxy. You cannot speak any of the necessary dialects, and when you make a stupid remark, its stupidity will be obvious even to yourself” (Orwell, 1946, p. 170). Promiscuous neologism, as so clearly illustrated by Dear and Flusty throughout the paper, impedes rather than facilitates our understanding of the real world. Once we shave off the dense neologisms using Occam’s Razor, I am not sure what meaningful arguments remain.

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TABLE 2.—A CATALOGUE OF SAMPLE POSTMODERN URBANISM STATEMENTS (FROM DEAR AND FLUSTY, 1998) “As the scope and scale of, and dependency upon, globally integrated consumption increases, institutional action converts complex ecologies into monocultured factors of production by simplifying nature into a global latifundia” (pp. 60–61). “Resistance is discouraged by means of praedatorianism, i.e., the forceful interdiction by a praedatorian guard with varying degrees of legitimacy” (p. 60). “The global latifundia, holsteinization, and praedatorianism are, in one form or another, as old as the global political economy, but the overarching dynamic signaling a break with previous manifestations is flexism, a pattern of econo-cultural production and consumption characterized by near-instantaneous delivery and rapid redirectability of resource flows” (p. 61). “The inevitable tension between the anarchic diversification born of memetic contagion and the manipulations of the holsteinization process may yet prove to be the central cultural contradiction of flexism” (p. 62). “Yet what in close-up appears to be a fragmentary, collaged polyculture is, from a longer perspective, a geographically disjointed but hyperspatially integrated monoculture, that is, shuffled same set amid adaptive and persistent local variations” (p. 63). “Citistat’s internal periphery and repository of cheap on-call labor lies at the in-beyond, comprised of a shifting matrix of protosurp affinity clusters” (p. 63). “Thus the DSH also serves inadvertently as a vector for memetic contagion, e.g., the conversion of cybergeoisie youth to wannabe gangstas via the dissemination of hip-hop culture over commudity boundaries” (p. 64).

PUBLICATION ETHICS AND THE ISSUE OF SELF-PLAGIARISM Because the search for truth in postmodern discourse has been reduced to a close dialogue (actually closed monologue) with the goal of celebrating polyphony and multiple voices, we gradually are losing our ability (even willingness) to judge the quality of scholarship or make extra efforts to check the validity of an argument. The intellectual ideal of “get it right” has been superseded with “get it written” under the current academic dictum of “publish or perish.” In the case of Dear and Flusty, their basic ideas not only were published but were published twice in flagship journals. I see some serious problems here and would like to open it up for candid discussion. What is expressed here is my own observation: I have no intention to appoint myself as either judge or jury. Readers can make their own judgments. While preparing this commentary, I came across another article by Dear and Flusty in the Annals of the American Academy of Political and Social Science (AAAPSS) (Dear and Flusty, 1997). Although the AAAG article is almost twice as long as the AAAPSS piece and contains several new figures, conceptually these two pieces are the same. If one has read the article in the AAAPSS, one would learn nothing new from reading the AAAG piece. The two articles have the same structure and ideas. According to my incomplete counting, the AAAG piece contains more than 30 identical sentences and numerous iden-

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tical paragraphs that already had been published in the AAAPSS article. Dear and Flusty do not cite their AAAPSS article, although they labor in the acknowledgement to tell us how their AAAG article evolved. It is difficult to see this as a careless omission or oversight, as Dear and Flusty mention the AAAPSS special issue (in which their article appeared) twice in their AAAG article and even cite another author’s article in the AAAPSS special issue. The section on self-plagiarism in the AAG’s new Guidelines on Professional Ethics (Murphy, 1998, p. 7) states clearly that: Geographers should ensure that each article or book that they publish is a distinct piece of scholarship that is independent from any prior scholarship unless the extent of overlap with prior scholarship is explicitly acknowledged. Independent scholarship constitutes published work that does not use the same language, present the same data, or elaborate the same concept idea set forth in a prior publication. In cases where there is doubt about overlap, the potential overlap should be acknowledged through citations and/or quotations. Whether self-plagiarism occurred in this case can be determined by examining the two articles in question. If nothing else, these two pieces provide excellent materials for my students when discussing publication ethics and self-plagiarism. If I may use an architectural metaphor, I believe that Dear and Flusty have tried to build a large house on a very shaky foundation. The framing of the house has been done with some rotten studs. The electrical wiring is full of short circuits. The plumbing fails to pass inspection. To cover these fundamental problems, the authors have put up very flashy wallpaper. Even though the mortgage rate is at a historical low, I have serious doubts that this house will sell well in the academic theory market. Dear and Flusty even tried to sell it twice because they see “theories of urban structure are a scare commodity” (first sentence in the abstract). FROM THE POSTMODERN CHALLENGE TO THE POSTMODERN CHALLENGED In closing, I must comment on Dear’s larger agenda—his concerted effort to promote postmodernism in geography during the past 10 years. Dear has earned himself the reputation of being the ad man for postmodern geography (Symanski, 1994). In commenting on Berry’s call for geographers’ recommitment to a new metaphysical realism, science, and scientific method (Berry, 1993), Dear (1994b) was fearful that Berry’s effort would bring a new Dark Age to urban geography. But it was science and the whole enlightenment project that, despite their problems and imperfections, liberated people from the jail cells of ignorance and superstition of the Dark Ages. What I am really afraid of is just the opposite: that the project of postmodernism will lead us inevitably to a new Dark Age of intellectual inquiry. Since Dear’s oft-cited article (Dear, 1988), postmodern discourse has permeated certain subfields of geography like a virus. I think that it is a deadly virus because of the postmodernists’ assumed or implied ontological relativism, epistemological nihilism, and methodological neologism. If we really care about the health and survival of geography,

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we must make both individual and collective efforts to eliminate the postmodern virus before it slowly destroys geography’s fragile intellectual immune system. Ten years are enough. None of the so-called achievements of postmodern geography documented by Dear (1994a) will survive a reality check. Most of the postmodernists’ writings are largely wrong (although sometimes for the right reasons); most frequently, we cannot even tell whether they are right or wrong since we are told that everything is socially constructed. Truth is irrelevant to postmodernists. Not surprisingly, postmodern geography has increasingly become irrelevant both socially and intellectually. It is time to extricate ourselves and our students from the postmodern web by undertaking a course of intellectual self-defense. The best weapons we have for intellectual self-defense against postmodernism are rationality, reason, and science (Sokal and Bricmont, 1996). This self-defense is motivated not only by love of our discipline but also, perhaps more importantly, by the search for truth that is intellectually stimulating and socially relevant. Since most postmodernists refuse to invoke any validation procedures to test their argument, what they are practicing is cultism, not scholarship. It is time for us to get back to Enlightenment ideals, to seek re-enchantment with the world, not the word. Geographers should join the mainstream of the scientific community to disrobe postmodernism to reveal the fundamental emptiness in its ontology, epistemology, methodology, and sloppy ethics (Gross and Levitt, 1994; Koertge, 1997). Only then can we dismantle the postmodern illusions and superstitions that are so detrimental to our intellectual endeavor. Only then can we accomplish a geographic consilience (Wilson, 1998) to better understand the fabric of reality in its whole (Deutsch, 1997). If Dear’s 1988 article served as a birth announcement for postmodernism in geography, Dear and Flusty’s Annals piece properly should be read as an obituary. This article gave us an opportunity to take a reasonably unobstructed look at the emperor, and yes, he has no clothes. It is time for the next generation of geographers to start putting the first nail in the coffin before the ghost of postmodernism comes out to haunt us again. NOTE 1

The title is borrowed from Richard Dawkins (1998). I also want to thank many fellow geographers who provided critical comments on a draft of this commentary.

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Webber, M. M., 1968, The post-city age. Daedalus Journal of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, Vol. 68, 1091–1110. Webber, M. M., 1996, Tenacious cities. Proceedings of the NCGIA-Sponsored Research Conference on Spatial Technologies, Geographic Information, and the City, 214–218. Wilson, E. O., 1998, Consilience: The Unity of Knowledge. New York, NY: Knopf.