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 materiality 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]

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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 dimension 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 of his original claim that spatial relations emanate from the mode of production. In Postmetropolis, he argues that the “spatiality of human life … begins with the body, with the construction and per- formance of self, the human subject” (p. 6), thereby giving greater specificity to his claim that space is a material product, and elaborating on his assertion in 1980 that space is “an evolving product of human action” (Soja, 1980, p. 210). The concept of action, though, calls out for greater theoretical attention than Soja has given it. Many social theorists (e.g., Massey, 2005) maintain that space emanates from action, but how actually does this happen and, once created, how does space influence subsequent actions? What are the spaces that result from automobile production, military excursions, flash mobs, shopping trips, and academic panels? Why do some of these spaces become relatively fixed—become places—while others quickly evaporate? Moreover, given the multiplicity of actions occurring at any time, what sense are we to make of the correspond- ing profusion of intersecting spaces? How do their influences operate, and how do we dis- entangle them or, better, bundle them together such that we can understand the dynamics of cities and regions? What might help to answer these questions is a better sense of what we mean by an actor—how we define actors, what powers we confer on them, how we understand their TIME, ACTION, SPACE 473

actions as inherently social (that is, never independent of the actions of others), and the extent to which these actors are both space-forming and space-contingent. Focusing on actors compels a greater sensitivity to how decisions are made and events occur. It thereby brings into view the temporally and spatially grounded particularities that social theory often overlooks. To achieve this, we need to leave behind Henri Lefebvre and, instead, learn from another French intellectual—Bruno Latour. Notably, I am interested in Latour’s claim that we can only understand social relations by following the actors. Latour has thought a great deal about what an actor is. In his actor-network theory (Latour, 2005), actors come into existence when action occurs. Consequently, these theorists are less concerned than most urban scholars with whether an actor is an elected official or a real estate developer, a com- munity activist or baseball team owner; they start with actions, not pre-defined interests. Fearful of the pitfalls of methodological individualism, these theorists also place actions and actors within networks. An actor exists only when its actions influence a network: that is, when network relationships are changed. When this happens, “action” has taken place and actors have come into being. If network relationships have not changed, action has not occurred and the actor does not exist either practically or theoretically. An actor who does not act is irrelevant. Most importantly for my purposes, by defining actors in this way, more than individu- als, social movements, multinational corporations, and states can become actors. Non- human things can be actors as well, a theoretical shift that gives space additional material presence. When the emergence, removal, or functioning of a “thing”—whether it be a bridge, a black bear, a cellular phone, an abandoned automotive assembly plant, or a lectern—changes the relationships among actors in a network, such non-human things have also become actors. Such thinking inverts the classic Marxist idea that “dead labor” is embodied in commodities. From the actor-network perspective, the labor within commodities continues to live. These theorists also make a related theoretical move by arguing that no social being acts in the absence of things that join it as equals. Human action is contingent on a non-human world; the two are reciprocally constitutive. “Contrary to the assertions of methodological individualism,” as Michael Callon (2002, p. 214) has written, “the agent who makes decisions is not the human being but the human being equipped with tools.” To omit non- human things from urban theory is equivalent to the mainstream economists’ practice of developing models of national economies based solely on formal sector data (Mitchell, 2002). Excluded is the informal activity without which these formal economies could not function. In effect, while an admirer of the brilliance of the sociospatial dialectic, I have come to believe that it is two-dimensional when it should be three-dimensional. Space, and less so time, are accounted for—but “mass” is not. This is unacceptable for any theory that claims to be substantially urban. Cities and regions are nothing if they are not collections of things, both human and non-human. The interaction of these things in networks is what gives presence and meaning to the spaces that we call cities. Space matters, but things matter as well, and equally so (Hommels, 2008). This argument has implications for the sociospatial dialectic and, by extension, our understanding of the “urban condition.” One of those implications should be obvious: the “social” in Soja’s formulation now becomes more inclusive, bringing non-human things 474 ROBERT BEAUREGARD within its realm. More precisely, its actors are now inseparable combinations of humans and non-humans. The collusion between the two is what makes the world. In this way, actor-network theory reveals the materiality of space. When conceived as a void, space is stripped of its substantive moment. But when the actions of non-human things are recognized and space is made a product of action, space takes on a material existence. Space is now inseparable from the bodies that act, and thereby becomes a substantive, rather than metaphysical, presence. This line of thinking also deepens our understanding of the relationality of space. Instead of thinking of space solely as the juxtaposition and interaction of actors, it adds the requirement that action must occur and networks change if space is to exist. Actions create space only if network relationships are altered. This has a number of important implications. One is that scales are now reconceived as networked or, more precisely, the spatial expressions of networks. Another is that as networks change, space changes; space has a temporal dimension. If we believe in the sociospatial dialectic, every modulation in a network triggers a new space that must be incorporated into our theorizing. Los Angeles is always a different city. Such a conception of actors and space forces us to think dynamically. Actors and space appear only when network relationships are transformed. Thus we are always thinking about differences, and always thinking of them along the three dimensions of space, time, and mass. In conclusion, Edward Soja convinced me that space matters and that any theoretical construction that left it a limp afterthought was wrong. Time also matters. And although Soja is less critically committed to it than he is to space, Postmetropolis, nevertheless, encourages us to think historically about geography. Moreover, by posing space as a material product, Soja nudges us to a deeper understanding of the sociospatial dialectic, one of his principal contributions to how we think about the world.

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