us to think that liberal individualism and communitarianism exhaust the possibilities for conceiving social relations. 15 City Life and Difference* I share many of the communitarian criticisms of welfare Iris Marion Young ·. capitalist liberal democratic theory and society. I shall argue however that the ideal of community fails to offer an ap propriate alternative vision of a democratic polity. This ideal The tolerance, the room for great differences among .. expresses a desire for the fusion of subjects wit? one another neighbors - differences that often go far deeper ·.· which in practice operates to exclude those With whom the differences in color -which are possible and normal group does not identify. The ideal of community ~enies and intensely urban life, but which are so foreign to .represses social difference, the fact that the pohty cannot and pseudosuburbs, are possible and normal '~be thought of as a unity in which all partic~pants. s.har~ a streets of great cities have built-in equipment ··.• common experience and common value~. In Its pnvllegi~ strangers to dwell in peace together on civilized but · d face-to-face relations, moreover, the Ideal of commuruty sentially dignified and reserved terms. . :denies difference in the form of the temporal and spatial ',distancing that characterizes social process. As an alternative to the ideal of community, I propose One important purpose of critical normative theory is ·~an ideal of city life as a vision of social relations affirming offer an alternative vision of social relations which, in difference. As a normative ideal, city life instantiates words of Marcuse, "conceptualizes the stuff of which relations of difference without exclusion. Different experienced world consists ... ~t~ a ~ew to its P
250 252 City Life and Difference Iris Marion Young 253
THE OPPOSITION BETWEEN INDIVIDUALISM AND I share these critiques of liberalism. Liberal social on COMMUNITY tology has no place for a concept of social groups. I have characterized a social group as the relational outcome of Critics of liberalism frequently invoke a conception of com interactions, meanings, and affinities according to which munity as an alternative to the individualism and abstract people identify one another. The self is indeed a product formalism they attribute to liberalism. 4 They reject the image · of social relations in profound and often contradictory ways . of persons as separate and self-contained atoms, each with . A person's social group identities, moreover, are in some the same formal rights, rights to keep others out, separ · meaningful sense shared with others of the group. ate. For such writers, the ideal of community evokes the I have also criticized liberalism's consumer-oriented pre- absence of the self-interested competitiveness of modern . suppositions about human nature, and agree with Barber society. In this ideal, critics of liberalism find an alternar that these lead to an instrumentalist understanding of the tive to the abstract, formal methodology of liberalism. function of politics. With Barber and other new republi Existing in community with others entails more than merely · . · <:an theorists, I too reject the privatization of politics in respecting their rights; it entails attending to and sharing . liberal pluralist processes, and call for the institution of in the particularity of their needs and interests. democratic publics. I think, however, that all these criti In his rightly celebrated critique of Rawls, for example, cisms of liberalism can and should be made without em Michael Sandel argues that liberalism's emphasis on the bracing community as a political ideal. primacy of justice presupposes a conception of the self as Too often contemporary discussion of these issues sets an antecedent unity existing prior to its desires and goals, up an exhaustive dichotomy between individualism and whole unto itself, separated and bounded. 5 This is an unreal .··.community. Community appears in the oppositions indi and incoherent conception of the self, he argues. It would vidualism/community, separated self/shared self, private/ be better replaced by a conception of the self as the prod, public. But like most such terms, individualism and com uct of an identity it shares with others, of values and goals ···.·· munity have a common logic underlying their polarity, which that are not external and willed, as liberalism would have · makes it possible for them to define each other negatively. it, but constitutive of the self. This constitutive conception ·. · Each entails a denial of difference and a desire to bring of the self is expressed by the concept of community. ·. · multiplicity and heterogeneity into unity, though in op B~amin Barber6 also uses the idea of community to evoke · . posing ways. Liberal individualism denies difference by a vision of social life that does not conceive of the person· :>positing the self as a solid, self-sufficient unity, not defined as an atomistic, separated individual. Liberal political theory · by anything or anyone other than itself. Its formalistic ethic represents individuals as occupying private and separat~ :. of rights also denies difference by bringing all such separ spaces, as propelled only by their own private desires. This ·. ·· individuals under a common measure of rights. Pro is a consumer-oriented conception of human nature, in whicn. . ponents of community, on the other hand, deny difference social and political relations can be understood only as goods by positing fusion rather than separation as the social ideal. instrumental to the achievement of individual desires, .• They conceive the social subject as a relation of unity or not as intrinsic goods. This atomistic conception generates··· ··. composed by identification and symmetry among of political theory that presumes conflict and competition ·individuals within a totality. Communitarianism represents as characteristic modes of interaction. Like Sandel, Barber< ··an urge to see persons in unity with one another in a shared appeals to an ideal of community to invoke a conception · ·. the person as socially constituted, actively oriented toward .. For many writers, the rejection of individualism logically affirming relations of mutuality, rather than oriented solely entails the assertion of community, and conversely any re toward satisfying private needs and desires. 7 jection of community entails that one necessarily supports 254 City Life and Difference Iris Marion Young 255 individualism. In their discussion of a debate betweenjean meanings he finds in Rawls is precisely that in constitutive Elshtain and Barbara Ehrenreich, for ex:ample, Harry Boyte community subjects share a common self-understanding.11 and Sara Evans8 claim that Ehrenreich promotes individu He is also explicit about social transparency as the mean alism because she rejects the appeal to community that ing and goal of community: Elshtain makes. Recent accounts of the debate among pol itical theorists generated by communitarian critiques of Rawls And in so far as our constitutive self-understandings com all couch that debate in terms of a dichotomy between prehend a wider subject than the individual alone, whether liberal individualism and community, suggesting that these a family or tribe or city or class or nation or people, to two categories are indeed mutually exclusive and exhaust this extent they define a community in the constitutive all possible social ontologies and conceptions of the self. 9 sense. And what marks such a community is not merely Thus even when the discussants recognize the totalizing a spirit of benevolence, or the prevalence of communitarian and circular character of this debate, and seek to take a values, or even certain 'shared final ends' alone, but a position outside its terms, they tend to slide into affirming common vocabulary of discourse and a background of one or the other "side" of the dichotomy because that di implicit practices and understandings within which the chotomy, like the dichotomy a/not-a, is conceived as ex:haust opacity of the participants is reduced if never finally ing all logical possibilities. dissolved. In so far as justice depends for its pre-emi nence on the separatedness or boundedness of persons in the cognitive sense, its priority would diminish as that THE ROUSSEAUIST DREAM opacity faded and this community deepened.12
The ideal of community ex:presses a longing for harmony . Barber also takes shared subjectivity as the meaning of among persons, for consensus and mutual understanding, community. Through political participation individuals for what Foucault calls the Rousseauist dream of confront one another and adjust their wants and desires, creating a "common ordering of individual needs and wants a transparent society, visible and legible in each of its •··· into a single vision of the future in which all can share." parts, the dream of there no longer existing any zones of. Strong democracy seeks to reach a "creative consensus" which darkness, zones established by the privileges of royal power .• ·.. through common talk and common work creates a "com or the prerogative of some corporation, zones of disor~ , mon consciousness and political judgment".15 der. It was the dream that each individual, whatever Some theorists of community, on the other hand, replace position he occupied, might be able to see the whole · commonness in the meaning of community with mutuality society, that men's hearts should communicate, their visioo and reciprocity, the recognition by each individual of the be unobstructed by obstacles, and that the opinion of· 14 10 individuality of all the others. Seyla Benhabib, for ex:ample, all reign over each. . · regards a standpoint that emphasizes the commonness of Whether expressed as shared subjectivity or common cc» persons as that of an ethic of rights and justice of the sort sciousness, or as relations of mutuality and reciprocity, the that Rawls represents, which she calls the standpoint of ideal of community denies, devalues, or represses the the "generalized other." Moral theory must also express a logical difference of subjects, and seeks to dissolve ...... uu ..• complementary point of view what Benhabib calls the stand inexhaustibility into the comfort of a self-enclosed point of the "concrete other." Benhabib refers to this as a Sandel is explicit about defining community as vision of a community of needs and solidarity, in contrast subjectivity. The difference between his own constitutive with the community of rights and entitlements envisaged ing of community and the instrumental and 'by liberalism: 256 City Life and Difference Iris Marion Young 257
The standpoint of the "concrete other," by contrast, re .. Other persons never see the world from my perspective, quires us to view each and every rational being as an and in witnessing the other's objective grasp of my body, individual with a concrete history, identity, and affective · actions, and words, I am always faced with an experience of emotional constitution. In assuming this standpoint, we · · myself different from the one I have. abstract from what constitutes our commonality and seek This mutual intersubjective transcendence, of course, makes to understand the distinctiveness of the other. We seek ·.sharing between us possible, a fact that Sartre notices less to comprehend the needs of the other, their motivations, than Hegel. The sharing, however, is never complete mutual what they search for, and what they desire. Our relation · understanding and reciprocity. Sharing, moreover, is fragile. to the other is governed by the norm of complementary recJ. At the next moment the other person may understand my procity: each is entitled to expect and to assume from the ·· words differently from the way I meant them, or carry my other forms of behavior through which the other feels rec· actions to consequences I do not intend. The same difference ognized and confirmed as a concrete, individual being with that makes sharing between us possible also makes misunder specific needs, talents, and capacities. . . . The moral cat· standing, rejection, withdrawal, and conflict always possible egories that accompany such interactions are those of re conditions of social being. sponsibility, bonding, and sharing. The corresponding mocal Because the subject is not a unity, it cannot be present feelings are those of love, care, sympathy, and solidari~, to itself, know itself. I do not always know what I mean, and the vision of community is one of needs and solidarity. 5 ·need, want, desire, because meanings, needs, and desires ·.· do not arise from an origin in some transparent ego. Often Despite the apparent divergence of Sandel's and Barber's I express my desire in gesture or tone of voice, without language of shared subjectivity and Benhabib's language . meaning to do so. Consciousness, speech, expressiveness, of complementary reciprocity, I think all three express a are possible only if the subject always surpasses itself, and similar ideal of social relations as the copresence of subjects. 16 · is thus necessarily unable to comprehend itself. Subjects Whether expressed as common consciousness or as mutual all have multiple desires that do not cohere; they attach understanding, the ideal is one of the transparency of sub layers of meanings to objects without always being aware jects to one another. In this ideal each understands the ci each layer or the cormections between them. Consequently, others and recognizes the others in the same way that they any individual subject is a play of difference that cannot understand themselves, and all recognize that the others be completely comprehended. understand them as they understand themselves. This ideal If the subject is heterogeneous process, never fully present thus submits to what Derrida calls the metaphysics of pres to itself, then it follows that subjects cannot make them ence, which seeks to collapse the temporal difference inher selves transparent, wholly present to one another. Conse ent in language and experience into a totality that can be quently the subject also eludes sympathetic comprehension comprehended in one view. This ideal of community denies by others. I cannot understand others as they understand the ontological difference within and between subjects. themselves, because they do not completely understand In community persons cease to be other, opaque, not under themselves. Indeed, because the meanings and desires they stood, and instead become mutually sympathetic, understand express may outrum their own awareness or intention, I ing one another as they understand themselves, fused. Such may understand their words or actions more fully than they. an ideal of the transparency of subjects to one another denies The ideal of community expresses a desire for social the difference, or basic asymmetry, of subjects. As Hegel . wholeness, symmetry, a security and solid identity which is first brought out and Sartre's analysis deepened, persons objectified because affirmed by others unambiguously. This necessarily transcend one another because subjectivity is is an understandable dream, but a dream nevertheless, and, negativity. The regard of the other is always objectifying. as I shall now argue, one with serious political consequences. 258 City Life and Difference Iris Marion Young 259
PRMLEGING FACE-TO-FACE RELATIONS the possibility arises of the relations between the two being mediated through the third, and so on. The The ideal of community as a pure copresence of ~·waa... a\J•u of relations among persons by the speech and to one another receives political expression in a vision of other persons is a fundamental condition of political life that privileges local fac~to-face direct aeJ:n04::><·· . The richness, creativity, diversity, and potential racy. Critics of welfare capitalist society repeatedly lnvorU-11: a society expand with growth in the scope and means of such a model of small group relations as a political media, linking persons across time and distance. The The anarchist tradition expresses these values most the time and distance, however, the greater the tematically, but they retain their form in other D.Uilnbc7 of persons who stand between other persons. soils as well. This model of politics as founded in ta(:e-t~rl"· am not arguing that there is no difference between small face relations poses as the alternative to the impersonality', in which persons relate to one another face-to-face alienation, commodification, and bureaucratization of g~ other social relations, nor am I denying a unique value ance in existing mass societies. such fac~t~face groups. Just as the intimacy of living a few others in the same household has unique di The .incarnation of this project is the immediate, u ...... ~ IU.Ijl,ava..., that are humanly valuable, so existing with others unmediated, community that enters so profoundly communities of mutual regard has specific character the fashioning of our humanity. This is the COJ!IlDlUility of warmth and sharing that are humanly valuable. in which we genuinely encounter each other, the is no uestion either that bureaucratized, capital world that is only a bare step above our private society discourages and destroys such com in short, our towns, neighborhoods, and municipalities. of mutual friendship, just as it pressures and Several problems arise when a community that ragments families. A vision of the good society surely should fac~to-face relations is taken as the ideal of pohty~ institutional arrangements that nurture the sp~ The ideal presumes a myth of umnediated. social relationa. experience of mutual friendship which only relatively and wrongly identifies mediation with alienation. It deni~. groups interacting in a plurality of contexts can pro difference in the sense of temporal and spatial distancing. But recognizing the value and specificity of such fac~ It implies a model of the good society as consisting of d&: · Eu--I:il.c::~ relations is different from privileging them and centralized small units which is both unrealistic and pol-: them as a model for the institutional relations of itically undesirable, and which avoids the political question society. of just relations among such decentralized communities. In my view, a model of the good society as composed of As the above quotation indicates, theorists of community 'Oee:entra.lized, economically self-sufficient, fac~t~face com privilege fac~t~face relations because they conceive them '"""''·... u ...._.,. functioning as autonomous political entities does as immediate. Immediacy is better than mediation because' politics, as its proponents think, but rather avoids immediate relations have the purity and security longed irst, it is wildly utopian. To bring it into being for in the Rousseauist dream: we are transparent to one . require dismantling the urban character of modern another, purely cop resent in the same time and space, ..•. ·· , a gargantuan overhaul of living space, workplaces, enough to touch, and nothing comes between us to ob-, of trade and commerce. A model of a transformed struct our vision of one another. 'llv·iPI·v must begin from the material structures that are This ideal of the immediate copresence of subjects, how- . to us at this time in history, and in the United States ever, is a metaphysical illusion. Even fac~t~face relations are larg~scale industry and urban centers. between two people is mediated by voice and gesture, spacing ·._. More importantly, however, this model of the good society and temporality. As soon as a third person enters the in-·· as usually articulated leaves completely unaddressed the 'i ' 1: 260 City Life and Difference Iris Marion Young 261 ·..• ·.···1.···...... f, question of how such small communities relate to one another. munity is a group that shares specific heritage- a common Frequently the ideal projects a level of self-sufficiency and .· self-identification, a common culture and set of norms. Self decentralization which suggests that proponents ·. identification as a member of such a community also often few relations among these communities except occasional · occurs as an oppositional differentiation from other groups, friendly visits. Surely it is unrealistic, however, to assume .: who are feared, despised, or at best devalued. Persons feel that such decentralized communities need not engage in ex.teJl.; ·. · a'sense of mutual identification only with some persons, feel sive relations of exchange of resources, goods, and culture. · . in community only with those, and fear the difference others Proponents frequently privilege face-to-face relations in confront them with because they identify with a different reaction to the alienation and domination produced by huge, ' culture, history, and point of view on the world. The ideal faceless bureaucracies and corporations, whose actions and of community, I suggest, validates and reinforces the fear decisions affect most people, but are out of their control. and aversion some social groups exhibit toward others. If Appeals to community envision more local and direct con community is a positive norm, that is, if existing together trol. A more participatory democratic society should iQii with others in relations of mutual understanding and reci deed encourage active publics at the local levels of procity is the goal, then it is understandable that we exclude neighborhood and workplace. But the important political and.avoid those with ~hom we do not or cannot identify. question is how relations among these locales can be or Richard Sennett19 discusses how a "myth of community" ganized so as to foster justice and minimize domination operates perpetually in American society to produce and and oppression. Invoking a mystical ideal of community implicitly legitimate racist and classist behavior and policy. does not address this question, but rather obscures it. Politics In ~any towns, suburbs, and neighborhoods people do have must be conceived as a relationship of strangers who do Image of their locale as one in which people all know not understand one another in a subjective and immediate one another, have the same values and life-style, and relate sense, relating across time and distance. with feelings of mutuality and love. In modern American society such an image is almost always false; while there may be a dominant group with a distinct set of values and UNDESIRABLE POLITICAL CONSEQUENCES OF THE l~e. style, within any locale one can usually find deviant in IDEAL OF COMMUNITY dividuals and groups. Yet the myth of community operates ~trongly to produce defensive exclusionary behavior: pressur I have argued that the ideal of community denies the differ~ mg the Black family that buys a house on the block to ence between subjects and the social differentiation of tem leave, beating up the Black youths who come into "our" poral and spatial distancing. The most serious political neighborhood, zoning against the construction of multiunit consequence of the desire for community, or for copresence dwellings. and mutual identification with others, is that if often oper The exclusionary consequences of valuing community, ates to exclude or oppress those experienced as different rnor:eover, ~e. not restric~ed .to bigots and conservatives. Many Commitment to an ideal of community tends to value alld , radical political orgamzatlons founder on the desire for enforce homogeneity.18 community. Too often people in groups working for social In ordinary speech in the United States, the term cOIIl'- . change take mutual friendship to be a goal of the group, munity refers to the people with whom one identifies in a and thus j~dge themselves wa?ti~ as a group when they specific locale. It refers to neighborhood, church, sc do not achieve such commonahty.2 Such a desire for com It also carries connotations of ethnicity, race, and othet ·.· munity often channels energy away from the political goals group identifications. For most people, insofar as they con- · of the group, and also produces a clique atmosphere which sider themselves members of communities at all, a com- ·keeps groups small and turns potential members away. 262 City Life and Difference Iris Marion Young 263
Mutual identification as an implicit group ideal can reprO:-. ever, reveals that even in such group-specific contexts affinity duce a homogeneity that usually conflicts with the orgm cannot mean the transparency of selves to one another. If ization's stated commitment to diversity. In recent years mas~ in their zeal to affirm a positive meaning of group specificity socialist and feminist organizations, for example, have taken people seek or try to enforce a strong sense of mutual identi racial, class, age, and sexual diversity as an important elk fication, they are likely to reproduce exclusions similar to terion according to which the succes_s of political those they confront. Those affirming the specificity of a group izations should be evaluated. To the degree that they take affinity should at the same time recognize and affirm the mutual understanding and identification as a goal, they may group and individual differences within the group. be deflected from this goal of diversity. The exclusionary implications of a desire for face-to-face relations of mutual identification and sharing present a prOO. CITY LIFE AS A NORMATIVE IDEAL lem for movements asserting positive group difference. I argue that the effort of oppressed groups to reclaim their group Appeals to community are usually antiurban. Much socio identity, and to form with one another bonds of positive . logical literature diagnoses modern history as a movement cultural affirmation around their group specificity, consti to the dangerous bureaucratized Gesellschaft from the man tutes an important resistance to the oppression of cultural .. ~. ageable and safe Gemeinschaft, nostalgically reconstructed imperialism. It shifts the meaning of difference from otherness · . ·· as a world of lost origins. 22 Many others follow Rousseau in and exclusion to variation and specificity, and forces domi~, iomanticizing the ancient polis and the medieval Swiss Burger, nant groups to acknowledge their own group specificity. ·•·• deploring the commerce, disorder, and unmanageable mass does not such affirmation of group identity itself express, character of the modern city.23 Throughout the modern an ideal of community, and is it not subject to exclusionary period, the city has often been decried as embodying im impulses? morality, artificiality, disorder, and danger - as the site of Some social movements asserting positive group differ• treasonous conspiracies, illicit sex, crime, deviance, and ence have found through painful confrontation that an urge disease. 24 The typical image of the modern city finds it ex to unity and mutual identification does indeed have. pressing all the disvalues that a reinstantiation of community exclusionary implications. Feminist efforts to create women's . would eliminate. spaces and women's culture, for example, have often U" • .·· Yet urbanity is the horizon of the modern, not to men sumed the perspective of only a particular subgroup of. tion the postmodern, condition Contemporary political theory women - white, or middle class, or lesbian, or straight ...... must accept urbanity as a material given for those who thus implicitly excluding or rendering invisible those women··· live in advanced industrial societies. Urban relations define 21 among them with differing identifications and experiences. . the lives not only of those who live in the huge metropolises, Similar problems arise for any movement of group identifi. but also of those who live in suburbs and large towns. Our cation, because in our society most people have multiple . social life is structured by vast networks of temporal and group identifications, and thus group differences cut across, spatial mediation among persons, so that nearly everyone every social group. depends on the activities of seen and unseen strangers who These arguments against community are not arguments .·.··• mediate between oneself and one's associates, between one against the political project of constructing and affirming .·. self and one's objects of desire. Urbanites find themselves a positive group identity and relations of group solidarity, relating geographically to increasingly large regions, thinking as a means of confronting cultural imperialism and dis,. · little of traveling seventy miles to work or an hour's drive covering things about oneself and others with whom one ·, for. an evening's entertainment. Most people frequently and feels an affinity. Critique of the ideal of community, how• ·· casually encounter strangers in their daily activities. The 264 City Life and Difference Iris Marion Yaung 265 material surroundings and structures available to us define ·.· individual ends. City dwellers are thus together, bound to and pr~supl?ose urba1_1 relationships. The very size of .one another, in what should be and sometimes is a single populations m our society and most other nations of . Their being together entails some common problems world, coupled with a continuing sense of national or ~..... _•. .,. common interests, but they do not create a community iden~ity with millions of other people, supports the con' . shared final ends, of mutual identification and reciprocity. clusi?n that a vision of dismantling the city is hopelessly · ':>A normative ideal of city life must begin with our given utopian. experience of cities, and look there for the virtues of this Starting from the given of modern urbanlife is not simply of social relations. Defining an ideal as unrealized possi necessary, moreover; it is desirable. Even for many of those •An•U~L£'"'" of the actual, I extrapolate from that experience who decry the alienation, bureaucratization, and mass such virtues. character of capitalist patriarchal society, city life exerts a powerful attraction Modern literature, art, and film have · Social Differentiation Without Exclusion celeb~ated city life, its energy, and cultural diversity, tech nological complexity, and the multiplicity of its activities. .. City life in urban mass society is not inconsistent with sup ~ven many o~ the most staunch proponents of decentral~ portive social networks and subcultural communities. Indeed, Ized commumty love to show visiting friends around the for many it is their necessary condition. In the city social ~oston _or ~an Francisco or New York in or near which they . . differences flourish. Modernization theory predicted hve, ~hmbing up towers to see the glitter of lights and .. · decline in local, ethnic, and other group affiliations as sampling the fare at the best ethnic restaurants. .universalist state institutions touch people's lives more di I propose to construct a normative ideal of city life as an rectly and as people encounter many others with alternative to both the ideal of community and the liberal identifications and life styles different from their own. There individualism it criticizes as asocial. By "city life" I mean a is. considerable evidence, however, that group differences The urban ideal expresses difference as a side-by-side par- .· fulness, for it holds out the possibility that one will lose ticularity neither reducible to identity nor completely other. one's identity, will fall. But we also take pleasure in being In this ideal groups do not stand in relations of inclusions . open to and interested in people we experience as different. and exclusion, but overlap and intermingle without becom 'We spend a Sunday afternoon walking through Chinatown, ing homogeneous. Though city life as we now experience · ·'or checking out this week's eccentric players in the park. has many borders and exclusions, even our actual exJ)erh: We look for restaurants, stores, and clubs with something ence of the city also gives hints of what differentiation without·.·. for us, a new ethnic food, a different atmosphere, a exclusion can be. Many city neighborhoods have a distinct · .'·rli·fff'rf"Tlt crowd of people. We walk through sections of the ethnic identity, but members of other groups also dwell in city that we experience as having unique characters which them. In the good city one crosses from one disti . are not ours, where people from diverse places mingle and neighborhood to another without knowing precisely where .. then go home. one ended and the other began. In the normative ideal of . The erotic attraction here is precisely the obverse of com city life, borders are open and undecidable. munity. In the ideal of community people feel affirmed be cause those with whom they share experiences, perceptions, Variety and goals recognize and are recognized by them; one sees oneself reflected in the others. There is another kind of The interfusion of groups in the city occurs partly because . pleasure, however, in coming to encounter a subjectivity, a of the multiuse differentiation of social space. What makes · set of meanings, that is different, unfamiliar. One takes urban spaces interesting, draws people out in public to them, pleasure in being drawn out of oneself to understand that gives people pleasure and excitement, is the diversity of there are other meanings, practices, perspectives on the city, activities they support. When stores, restaurants, bars, clubs, and that one could learn or experience something more and parks, and offices are sprinkled among residences, people different by interacting with them. have a neighborly feeling about their neighborhood, they .. The city's eroticism also derives from the aesthetics of go out and encounter one another on the streets and chat. its material being: the bright and colored lights, the gran They have a sense of their neighborhood as a "spot" or deur of its buildings, the juxtaposition of architecture of "place," because of that bar's distinctive clientele, or the different times, styles, and purposes. City space offers de citywide reputation of the pizzas at that restaurant. Both lights and surprises. Walk around the corner, or over a business people and residents tend to have more commit few blocks, and you encounter a different spatial mood, a ment to and care for such neighborhoods than they do for new play of sight and sound, and new interactive movement. single-use neighborhoods. Multifunctional streets, parks, and The erotic meaning of the city arises from its social and neig.hborhoods are also much safer than single-use spatial inexhaustibility. A place of many places, the city functionalized spaces because people are out on the streets folds over on itself in so many layers and relationships that during most hours, and have a commitment to the place.29 it is incomprehensible. One cannot "take it in," one never feels as though there is nothing new and interesting to ex Eroticism plore, no new and interesting people to meet. City life also instantiates difference as the erotic, in the Publicity wide sense of an attraction to the other, the pleasure and excitement of being drawn out of one's secure routine to Political theorists who extol the value of community often encounter the novel, strange, and surprising. !lo The erotic construe the public as a realm of unity and mutual under dimension of the city has always been an aspect of its fear- standing, but this does not cohere with our actual experience 268 City Life and Difference Iris Marion Young 269 of public spaces. Because by definition a public space is a lie is heterogeneous, plural, and playful, a place where people place accessible to anyone, where anyone can participate witness and appreciate diverse cultural expressions that they and witness, in entering the public one always risks encoun do not share and do not fully understand. tering those who are different, those who identify with different groups and have different opinions or different forms of life. The group diversity of the city is most often appar· ent in public spaces. This helps account for their vitality and excitement. Cities provide important public spaces - 1. Jone jacobs, The Death and Life of Great American Cities (New York: streets, parks, and plazas - where people stand and sit Random House, 1961). together, interact and mingle, or simply witness one another, 2. Herbert Marcuse, One-Dimensional Man (Boston: Beacon, 1964), p. 7. without becoming unified in a community d "shared final ends. • • 3. Amy Gutmann, "Communitarian Critics of Liberalism," Philosophy Politics, the critical activity of raising issues and decid· and Public Affairs, vol. 14 (summer 1985), pp. 308-22; H. N. Hirsch, ing how institutional and social relations should be organ "The Threnody of Liberalism: Constitutional Liberty and the Renewal m Community," Political Theory, vol. 14 (August 1986), pp. 423-49; ized, crucially depends on the existence of spaces and forums Allen Buchanan, "Assessing the Communitarian Critique of Liber to which everyone has access. In such public spaces people alism," Ethics, vol. 99. Uuly 1989), pp. 852-82. encounter other people, meanings, expressions, issues, which · 4. Robert Paul Wolff, The Poverty of Liberalism (Boston: Beacon, 1968); they may not understand or with which they do not ident· Christian Bay, Strategies for Political Emancipation (Notre Dame: Uni ify. The force of public demonstrations, for example, often . versity of Notre dame Press, 1981). 5. Michael Sandel, Liberalism and the Limiis ofJustice (Cambridge Uni consists in bringing to people who pass through public spaces versity Press, 1982). those issues, demands, and people they might otherwise avoid 6. Benjamin Barber, Strong Democracy (Berkeley and Los Angeles: Uni As a normative ideal, city life provides public places and versity of California Press, 1984). forums where anyone can speak and anyone can listen. 7. Martha Ackelsberg, "Communities, Resistance and Women's Activ Because city life is a being together of strangers, diverse ism," in Ann Bookman and Sandra Morgen (eds), Women and the Politics of Empowerment (Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 1988). and overlapping neighbors, social justice cannot issue from 8. Harry Boyte and Sara M. Evans, "Strategies in Search of America: the institution of an Enlightenment universal public. On Cultural Radicalism, Populism, and Democratic Culture," Socialist the contrary, social justice in the city requires the realiza· Review (May-August 1984), pp. 73-100. tion of a politics of difference. This politics lays down in 9. Drucilla Cornell, "Two Lectures on the Normative Dimensions of stitutional and ideological means for recognizing and Community in the Law," Tennessee law &view, vol. 54 (winter 1987), pp. 327-43. affirming diverse social groups by giving political repre 10. Michel Foucault, Power/Knowledge (New York: Pantheon, 1980). sentation to these group, and celebrating their distinctive .11. Michael Sandel, Liberalism and the Limits of justice (Cambridge characteristics and cultures. In the unoppressive city people University Press, 1982), pp. 62-3, 173. open to unassimilated otherness. We all have our familiar 12. Ibid., pp. 172-3. relations and affinities, the people to whom we feel close IS. Benjamin Barber, Strong Democracy (Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1984). and with whom we share daily life. These familial and social 14. Drucilla Cornell, "Two Lectures on the Normative and Dimensions groups open onto a public in which all participate, and of Community in the Law," Tennessee Law Review, vol. 54 (Winter that public must be open and accessible to all. Contrary to 1987). pp. 327-43. the communitarian tradition, however, that public cannot be , 15. Seyla Benhabib, Critique, Norm and Utopia (New York: Columbia conceived as a unity transcending group differences, nor as . University Press, 1986), p. 341. 16. jacques Derrida, Of Grammatology (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins Uni entailing complete mutual understanding. In public life the · versity Press, 1976), pp. 137-9. differences remain unassimilated, but each participating group. 17. Murray Bookchin, The Rise of Urbanization and the Decline of Citiz.enship acknowledges and is open to listening to the others. The pub- · (San Francisco: Sierra Club Books, 1987), p. 267; Peter Manicas, 270 City Life and Difference The Death of the State (New York: Putnam, 1974), pp. 246-50; Christian Bay, Strategies for Political Emancipation (Notre Dame: University of Notre Dame Press, 1981), chaps 5 and 6; Charles Part IV Taylor, "The Nature and Scope of Distributive Justice," in Philosophy and the Human Sciences (Cambridge University Press, 1985), pp. 27-8. 18. H. N. Hirsch, "The Threnody of Liberalism: Constitutional Liberty and the Renewal of Community," Political Theory, vol. 14 (August 1986), pp. 423-49. Social Relations and 19. Richard Sennett, The Fall of Public Man (New York: Random House, 1974), chap. 2. Public Places 20. Jane Mansbridge, Beyond Adversarial Democracy (New York: Basic Books, 1980), chap. 21; Wini Breines, Community and Organiz.atiDn in the New Left: 1962-1968 (South Hadley, Mass: Bergin, 1982). 21. Elizabeth V. Spelman, The Inessential Woman (Boston: Beacon, 1989). l 22. Maurice Stein, The Eclipse of Community (Princeton University Press, 1960); Robert A. Nisbet, The Q)utstfor Community (New York: Oxford University Press, 1953). 23. Charles Ellison, "Rousseau and the Modern City: The Politics of Speech and Dress," Political Theory, vol. 13 (November 1985), pp. 497-534; Richard Sennett, The Fall of Public Man, op. cit., chaps 7-10. 24. George Mosse, Nationalism and Sexuality (New York: Fertig, 1985), pp. 32-3, 137-43; Sander L. Gilman, Difference and Panthology: Ster~ types of Sexuality, Race, and Madness (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1985), p. 214. 25. Claude Fischer, To Dwell Among Friends: Personal Networks in Town and City (University of Chicago Press, 1982), pp. 206-30; Joseph Rothschild, Ethnopolitics (New York: Columbia University Press, 1981). 26. Joseph D'Emilio, Sexual Politics, Sexual Communities (University of Chicago Press, 1983). 27. Martin Sanchez Jankowski, City Bound: Urban Life and Political Attitudes among Chicano Youth (Albuquerque: University of New Mexico Press, 1986). 28. Claude Fischer, To Dwell Among Friends: Personal Networks in Town and City (University of Chicago Press, 1982), pp. 206-40. 29. Jane Jacobs, The Death and Life of Great American Cities (New York: Random House, 1961), chap. 8; Richard Sennett, The Fall of Public Man, op. cit., chap. 4; William Whyte, City: Rediscovering the Center (New York: Doubleday, 1981). 30. Roland Barthes, "Semiology and the Urban," in M. Gottdiener and Alex:andros P. Lagopoulos (eds), The City and the Sign: An Intro duction to Urban Semiotics (New York: Columbia University Press, 1986). ,; ,, ,j