Time, Action, Space

TIME, ACTION, SPACE Robert Beauregard1 Graduate School of Architecture, Planning, and Preservation Columbia University Abstract: Postmetropolis deepens Edward Soja’s engagement with the sociospatial dialectic, one of his major contributions to urban theory. It also represents an uncharacteristic foray into history. The objectives of my contribution are to probe his treatment of time and to extend his sociospatial dialectic into the realm of actor-network theory, thereby further situating the material- ity of the city at the theoretical center of social thought. [Key words: sociospatial dialectic, history, actor-network theory.] In his 1980 essay “The Socio-Spatial Dialectic,” Edward Soja chastised Marxist political economists— David Harvey and Manuel Castells in particular—for acknowledging the importance of space and yet continuing to subjugate it to an aspatial mode of production. It was as if these theorists were so concerned about being labeled spatial fetishists or so driven by the need to remain true to the epistemological dominance of class conflict that they could recognize space but not theorize it. For these scholars, Soja wrote, theorizing space threatened their identity as Marxists. Consequently, space remained—for them— epiphenomenal, a conceptual appendage to their theoretical projects. Soja went on to argue—and this is key to all of his subsequent writings, Postmetropolis included—that these theorists had committed a second sin: they ignored someone with solid Marxist credentials who had given space its theoretical due. Acknowledging that capitalism had undergone profound changes since the late 19th century and that Marxist theory had to adapt accordingly, Henri Lefebvre, Soja claimed, had solved the theoretical puzzle of how the social relations of production and the social relations of space func- tioned together to enable capitalism not just to survive but to thrive as well. Lefebvre’s insight was that capitalism overcame its internal contradictions and continued to expand by occupying and producing space. Urban space had become a force of production, not simply one of production’s many consequences. In fact, the urban problematic had “supplant[ed] industrialization as the motive force of social change,” to use Neil Smith’s (2003, p. xvi) characterization. For Lefebvre, urban space was “a place of encounter, assembly, and simultaneity” (Lefebvre, 2003, p. 118) where capitalism prospers and also where it encounters the “concrete contradictions” that subvert it, drive historical change, and engender political resistance. Soja’s 1980 article presented space as a “material product” (p. 207) whose presence was theoretically and practically equivalent to the social relations of production. Pro- duction relationships were not dominant “in the last instance,” to use Louis Althusser’s rhetorical phrase, but rather “dialectically intertwined [with] and inseparable” (p. 209) 1Correspondence concerning this article should be addressed to Robert Beauregard, Graduate School of Architec- ture, Planning, and Preservation, Columbia University, New York, New York, 10027: telephone, 212-854-6280; fax: 212-864-0410; email: [email protected] 470 Urban Geography, 2011, 32, 4, pp. 470–475. DOI: 10.2747/0272-3638.32.4.470 Copyright © 2011 by Bellwether Publishing, Ltd. All rights reserved. TIME, ACTION, SPACE 471 from the social relations of space. The “social relations of production are both space- forming and space-contingent” (p. 211), Soja wrote, and he quoted Lefebvre in support: “Space and the political organization of space express social relationships but also react back upon them” (p. 210). Once created, then, space becomes a phenomenon of causal significance. And, because both space and class relations originate in the mode of production, space is ontologically and epistemologically equivalent to, but not substitutable for, the social relations of production. For the past 30 years, this understanding of the sociospatial dialectic has been central to Soja’s view of the urban condition. His elaboration of these themes in his 1989 Post- modern Geographies and his even more forceful evoking of Lefebvre in his Thirdspace of 1996, are indicative of the persistence and intellectual perspicacity that he has brought to the incorporation of space in social theory. Grounded in the sociospatial dialectic, Postmetropolis (2000) augments Soja’s body of work in four important ways. First, it provides more detail on his decades-long analysis and interpretation of Los Angeles, a task he began in Postmodern Geographies, continued in the next book, Thirdspace, and has further elaborated in his most recent work, Seeking Spatial Justice (2010). Second, Soja foreshadows his commitment to spatial justice, also more fully developed in his latest book. Third, he offers an historical analysis of urbanization. Lastly, he deepens our understanding of the sociospatial dialectic. My comments address the last two of these contributions: Soja’s treatment of history and his claim that space is a material product. First, consider history. Almost one-third of Postmetropolis is an historical investigation of the “spatial specificity of urbanism” in which Soja also reviews the urban rupture of the 1960s and provides a brief, schematic history of Los Angeles. The history of urbanization is broken down into phases: (1) origins (with brief discussions of Jericho and Çatalhöyük); (2) a “second” urban revolution involving the rise of city-states, using Ur as the main example; and (3) a third, capitalist phase characterized by the rise of such industrial metropo- lises as Manchester and Chicago. The central dynamic of urbanization—what Soja labels synekism—is invariant across the three phases; the economic, ecological, and creative interdependencies “that arise from the purposeful clustering and collective cohabitation of people in space” (p. 12) are always present. In fact, the generative impulses of agglomera- tion persist despite the crises of the 1960s that produced a “transformative moment in the geohistory of modernity” (p. 96)—a possible fourth phase. That Soja even included a “history” in Postmetropolis was unexpected. The major prem- ise of his first book in 1989, and one of the motivations behind the sociospatial dialectic, was the complaint that “an essentially historical epistemology continues to pervade the critical consciousness of modern social theory” (1989, p. 10). This, he noted, subordinates and, worse, silences a critical spatialization. His life project was thus announced: to give to space a theoretical status equal to that of time by establishing an epistemology of the spatial. In Seeking Spatial Justice, Soja makes this point even more forcefully: we must “put[ting] space first [my emphasis] as the primary discursive and explanatory focus” (2010, p. 7) of social theory. Nonetheless, Soja also recognizes that society is constituted spatially and temporally, and that attending to space does not mean abandoning historical analysis. Rather, social theorists need to acknowledge that all human being-in-the-world is “essentially social, temporal, and spatial” (Soja, 2010, p. 70). 472 ROBERT BEAUREGARD Soja’s history of urbanization in Postmetropolis, then, is a strategic move made to fuse time and space theoretically. In doing so, Soja treats time as a matter of chronology—first one thing happens and then another, with this flow interrupted by crises and fractures that create periods or phases of history. Between phase changes, time stands still. The struc- tural logic of, and thus within, each phase is “fixed” and only at the “breaks” does the developmental regime change and history occur. As conceived here, time is not as ontologically complex and as epistemologically rich as space (cf., Abbott, 2001, pp.209–260; Griffin, 1992; Megill, 2007). Soja’s schematic history of Los Angeles can serve as an example. The city’s history is framed as a series of long waves of alternating phases of boom and restructuring woven together by synekism. Growth within each boom phase leads to a crisis and requires that the old developmental logic be replaced in the succeeding phase. Time is cyclical (thus the “long waves”), punctuated, and, within phases, stilled. Overall, any sense that events and conditions cumulate temporally to create crisis is smothered by the timeless contradictions of growth. Thinking history as delineated by stages is rhetorically powerful and widely used, and not just by traditional Marxists. What it offers in comprehension, however, it gives up in empirical authenticity. Path dependency and sedimentation, two key aspects of any historical analysis, are ignored. The approach, moreover, is undermined in the next third of the book. There, Soja writes 30 years of the history of Los Angeles in the eternal present, abandoning an historical sensibility and making time seem like an unwelcome theoretical obligation. The city’s history from 1970 to 2000 is flattened into a single temporal dimen- sion with space organized by functions (e.g., governance) and forces (e.g., globalization). In short, and despite his statements to the contrary, Soja seems reluctant to give time an epistemological status equal to that of space. Just as the Marxist theorists of 30 years ago acknowledged space but did not properly theorize it, Soja’s treatment of time is similarly problematic. My second point has to do with the unrealized potential in Postmetropolis regarding the sociospatial dialectic. Consider, as a starting point, Soja’s extension

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