Pablo Markin's Research Notes on Art Museums and Biennials

Arts Disticts in Beijing and Urban Development

2010-07-09T00:03:00.057-06:00

In Beijing, the creation of Dashanzi or 798 Arts District illustrates the cultural and economic influences of urban image and post-industrial development on Chinese society, where plural efforts to preserve the respective industrial area and to use cultural policy to project a global city image reflect the effects of concomitant gentrification on contemporary China (Currier 2008: 237). Even though the cultural districts of Paris in the 1880s, London in the 1920s, and New York in the 1960s have been extensively researched, their emergent counterparts in Mumbai (Harris 2005), Mexico City (Hooks 1998), and Beijing (Currier 2008: 237; Tan 2005) are yet to be sufficiently researched especially in the context of urban transition from industrial production to cultural consumption that Beijing's more than twenty arts spaces cater to in what amounts to China's political and cultural capital rivaling other global cities in size, reach and vibrancy (Robinson 2004). In the process of Beijing's rapid growth, Dashanzi or 798 Arts District has gained prominence in China after a former military factory was reclaimed by art galleries, studio lofts. fashionable restaurants and cultural enterprises in a show of economic power increasingly being recognized to exist behind cultural districts making headway as Chinese society becomes more plural (Currier 2008: 238).

Rather than following a global trend, arts districts in China derive from its still nascent post-industrial transition bearing the marks of a distinct form of Chinese modernity (Friedmann 2006) that translated into urban change reveals that Beijing's 798 contributes to urban promotion as a consequence of transition from artistic enclave to cultural showcase as contemporary culture becomes more influential in Beijing as a global city (Currier 2008: 238). Starting in the late twentieth century, the current wave of economic globalization emphasizes service industries in urban centers (Harvey 1989; Sassen 1998, 2000, 2001) that play a role in in the structural and spatial reorganization of industrial and cultural production (Hutton 2004) that in Beijing's case resulted in growing private sector, decreasing regulation, and cultural liberalization (Currier 2008: 238-239). As China's provinces and cities evolved from a vertical decision-making structure towards greater autonomy, their local enterprises, inter-urban competition and development promotion grew (Ma and Wu 2005), as international airports, business districts, and technology zones became means for their promotion as global cities (Wu 2006) that over time became complemented with museum construction and cultural events, such as Beijing's official recognition of 798 as an important cultural asset (Currier 2008: 239).

To market themselves as unique, cities project distinctiveness by offering urban environments expressive of a creative city image (Currier 2008: 239) and made from appealing bar, cafe, club, restaurant, gallery and design districts whose artists and bohemians attract people and capital (Florida 2002; Lloyd 2006), at the same time as these not unquestionable creative strategies (Malanga 2004; Peck 2005) fending off the effects of de-industrialization (Hall 2000) respond to inter-urban competition, gentrification trends, consumer economy, and place marketing (Peck 2005) in hopes of increased tax revenue, city image promotion (Cameron and Coaffee 2005) and stimulated cultural demand (Wyly and Hammel 2005). China's arts districts demonstrate its globalization that, as opposed to West-driven and homogenizing McDonaldization (Ritzer 2007), imaginatively interprets global themes in local terms as they apply to urban economy and cultural consumption developing within particular situations and local politics, such as growing supply of real estate and new demand patterns (Currier 2008: 239-240). As the cultural and economic sides of the post-industrial transition redefine cities as sites where intangible commodities are increasingly produced (Scott 1997, 2000), their branding strategies, combined with China's joint trends of conspicuous consumption and spectacular architecture (Wu 2007) favoring land development replacing underperforming state-owned enterprises, represent, valorize, reproduce and sell cultural areas (Kearns and Philio 1993) dependent for their appeal on international associations, historic emulation, and futuristic design with contemporary art anchoring these developments in high-value cultural consumption characteristic of global cities (Currier 2008: 240; Yeoh 1999).

Though behind Beijing's branding are its rising property market, search for global recognition and desire for international prestige (Currier 2008: 240), civic boosterism and local pride also play a role in its efforts to emphasize ancient past and global future over the legacy of socialism (Broudehoux 2004). By laying stress on their real estate and cultural consumption value, arts districts run the risk of excessive commercialization and limited appeal (Zukin 1995) that commodify culture without trying to avoid turning it into predictable, simplified and themed environments (Zukin 1991), where sentimental manipulation, familiar imagery and sanitized representations leave little place for authentic, avant-garde and sophisticated culture (Currier 2008: 240-241). Beijing's image always bore the marks of cultural and political relations (Samuels and Samuels 1989) that from the time of its inception within the Confucian framework of ritual and belief have defined the urban space according to the principles that privileged orientation to the center, major axes and geometry of this city as an expression of the corresponding social order in spatial terms (Currier 2008: 241). After 1949, the People's Republic continued the practice of symbolic use of urban space as the former Imperial Palace has remained at the center of the capital city where a new social order was built through efforts to decentralize the hierarchical urban pattern by expanding the city into dispersed industrial areas that wide boulevards integrated into a concentric urban layout (Courrier 2008: 241).

Beijing's urban design remains dominated by the Imperial Palace as the nearby Tiananmen Square became associated with public events that the Communist state organized (Currier 2008: 241-242; Hou 1985). Presently, however, Beijing is on the heels of its fast and comprehensive social, economic and cultural change following on market reforms that pushed it into the ranks of global cities vying to attract capital flows gravitating towards technology, media and consumption districts epitomized by proliferating skyscraper, shopping mall, and high-end residential developments that nevertheless benefit from arts districts, such as 798, in their mix adding to the city's global image as a growing cultural destination (Currier 2008: 242). Not far from the embassy quarter and the international business district, Beijing's 798 was originally conceived as a one square kilometer industrial complex in the city's Chaoyang district that hosted the largest and most expensive factory cluster in Asia built on Sino-Soviet funds by East Germany for military purposes that by the early 1990s lost two thirds of its labor force becoming ripe for a post-industrial reinvention by new occupants (Currier 2008: 242-243). From the 1980s and 1990s, Chinese contemporary artists flocked to Beijing's artist colonies at its fringes gaining by mid-1990s in international recognition as art school professors and students attracted by its affordable rents and Bauhaus architecture set up studios in 798 that became a marketing asset for cultural entrepreneurs who spurred its rapid development after it hosted its first international exhibition in 2002 in what became a trendy district of over a hundred galleries interspersed with cafes, nightclubs, restaurants and offices with increasing real estate value (Currier 2008: 243-244).

To secure 798's future, artists residing there had to legalize their makeshift status (Ambrozy 2006a) within the framework of an urban development plan that would replace its further industrial development with its preservation as a creative industries area aiming to boost global reputation of Beijing and to tap into international art market (Currier 2008: 244-245). In a relatively short time span, 798 Arts District turned itself from a location on an underground arts scene into an international destination with the help of grassroots involvement, global influences, and bottom-up policy-making (Currier 2008: 245). From an artist community where affordable rents, spacious lofts, and outlying location made it possible to stage exhibitions, 798 developed into a cause for activism as artists organized to oppose demolitions of its architectural heritage (Bernell 2006) by intensifying exhibition activity, founding an advocacy group, and promoting free artistic expression that led to the establishment of the independent Dashanzi International Art Festival and to the publication of Beijing 798 describing the district at book length, which significantly increased the coverage it received from domestic and international media resulting in listing in guide books, blogs and international journals (Currier 2008: 245).

798's integration into Beijing's urban development plans was not without resistance in the form of lease restrictions, access disruptions, and activity limits that it had to overcome in order to establish its reputation of an avant-garde outpost (Currier 2008: 245). Grassroots efforts playing a minor role in 798's preservation, it is foreign representatives' attention to the arts area as an indicator of China's opening up (Angremy 2006), such as that of European Union's officials, and presence of international art galleries, such as Chinese Contemporary, the White Space, and Beijing-Tokyo Art Projects, that from 2004 onwards brought foreign art investment and international institutional discourse to bear on the city government's management of the area (Currier 2008: 245-246; Lily 2006). The key turning point in 798's preservation was 2004 election of sculptor Li Xiangqun into the People's Congress where he initiated the promotion of creative industries with the help of government funding amounting to US$62.5 million in 2005 (Currier 2008: 246) and the official designation of 798 as a creative business area among ten others in Beijing the next year (Li 2006), while making a special financial arrangement with owners of the district's property (Muynck 2007).

798's preservation was connected with creation of a municipal advisory committee in charge of cooperation with private bodies to further promote their support of the arts (Liu 2006) through festivals and events sponsorship (Currier 2008: 246), even though real estate profits extraction by development companies (Fu 2006) continued to take precedence over promising educational initiatives in the arts area, such as a proposal for an international architectural learning center (Manguarian and Ray 2006). However, 798's official status comes at a price of uncertainty over the extent and character of governmental involvement (Huang 2006) in keeping the economic conditions that initially attracted artists to the area, in preserving and improving the physical infrastructure of the district, and in refraining from putting limits on artistic freedom (Currier 2008: 246-247), as official oversight and registration requirements are enacted (Fu 2006; Liu 2006). Integrated into city government and real estate development plans, 798 continues to attract international interest ensuring through information technology and mass media that it retains its primary mission as an arts district (Currier 2008: 247) serving as a hot spot for tourists and investors reacting to Beijing's recognition as a global city increasingly capable of enabling local actors to successfully act on a wide variety of scales (Sassen 2004).

An outgrowth of an unofficial initiative initially, 798 is cited by government officials as a unique representation of the rise of China's contemporary cultural industries brought to their present-day success by its growing economy (Currier 2008: 247), while harking back to Beijing's ancient cultural traditions (Li 2006). After a period of preferential treatment of economic development over the needs of historical preservation in Beijing and Shanghai (Currier 2008: 247-248), 798's international renown and municipal cultural policy gave an impetus to China's emerging cultural strategy that saw more than twenty new museum or arts districts created and the Beijing International Art Biennale launched (Napack 2004), as part of Beijing's overhaul before the 2008 Olympics intended to market it as a tourist destination (Fu 2006). But the protected status of 798 implies official encroachment on artistic freedom (Currier 2008: 248) when exhibitions at and residence in the district take place within the framework of governmental regulation gaining influence not only on contemporary culture but also over urban space (Broudehoux 2004). Arts districts benefit from growing recognition of their investment value driven by the success of local contemporary art drawing on imagery and references of better recognized trend-setting locations, such as New York's SoHo (Currier 2008: 248).

As opposed to previous artist colonies, it is its professionalization that saved 798 from demolition as its artists participated in making it an integral part of Beijing's contemporary art scene by turning the district into a destination for sale and exhibition of artworks (Currier 2008: 248). Chinese contemporary art used 798's rise to international prominence creating a stable relationship between art production and the district's preservation for achieving heightened visibility, reaching international art market, and becoming exhibited at art museums and biennials, which led to steeply increasing prices at international auctions as artists' status rose together with their reputation, income, and influence (Currier 2008: 248-250). The financial viability of art districts spawned numerous other areas that improve on the model of 798 by being thoroughly planned, by offering differentiated rents, and by redeveloping other industrial spaces (Currier 2008: 250-251), as similar initiatives are being successfully launched in other cities, such as Shanghai and Harbin, where similar struggles for historical preservation and international visibility play out (Li 2006). 798's success expanded the pool of contemporary artists with resulting distinction into an avant-garde and underground period before 2000 (Connolly 2006) and more market-oriented art mixing established genres (Ambrozy 2006b), as official recognition and commercial publicity make Chinese contemporary attractive for a growing number of private collections and museums established or based in China, such as Ullens Center in 798 (Currier 2008: 251-252).

Galleries, bookshops and cafes transformed 798 into a mainstream location attracting tourist crowds, art aficionados, academic circles and corporate presence increasing the real-estate value of this district that might attract projects involving either spectacular architecture or Western museums (Angremy 2006), while dividing opinions on the eventual place of culture and art in China and on the growing role of urban development in urban culture in Beijing (Currier 2008: 252). Yet, the imminent gentrification of 798 may have positive consequences (Currier 2008: 252) as long as it contributes to creation of a mixed-use neighborhood (Mars 2006), as is apparently the intention of the city government as it tries to balance pressures to commercialize the district with urban revitalization driven by lifestyle diversity and arts scene (Chen 2006b) that easily erode when uniqueness of the place wears away through widespread imitation or excessive development (Peck 2005). That 798 consciously models itself on Bilbao's Guggenheim Museum area, London's East End, or New York's Chelsea does not reduce its need, however, to differentiate itself from other districts both in Beijing and globally in pursuit of branding strategy initiated by local artists and carried on by China's officials (Currier 2008: 253).

The urban identity of the district became rapidly commodified through its ubiquitous branding, as 798 started to cater to the bohemian sensibilities of the post-industrial recuperation of its Bauhaus architectural style as the former military factory became a launching pad for corporate marketing and image-making campaigns (Currier 2008: 253-254). From the outset, artists, as the visibility of the district rose, either replaced or combined artist studios with gallery and business spaces to make their activity in 798 financially sustainable (Ting 2006) at the same time as they became more entrepreneurial, as business- or restaurant-owners, in their approach to the traditional Western contradiction between creativity and profitability (Ley 2003) in their transition from avant-garde to mainstream that in China passed through commercialization and commodification of art (Currier 2008: 254). As opposed to the case of London's South Bank, in the absence of district planning or preservation laws for industrial heritage 798 grew from grassroots initiative following from the post-industrial sensibilities of artists and entrepreneurs (Currier 2008: 254) that were rooted in their stays in analogous lofts in New York City, London, Berlin or Tokyo, in their partnerships with established art galleries from renowned art districts in these cities, and in their desire to recreate the atmosphere of legacy industrial spaces reclaimed for contemporary cultural uses (Angremy 2006).

Attaining official status embedded the production and reproduction of the brand of 798 into the promotional media circuits aimed at raising financial and cultural profile of Beijing and China that run the risk of reducing the district to another representation of Chinese cultural heritage circulating far from its anti-traditional positioning, cultural sensibility, and local meaning (Currier 2008: 255). As an alternative to conventional real estate projects , 798 pioneered industrial heritage preservation and culture-driven urban development (Liu 2004) that taking inspiration from London's Tate Modern and SoHo, Paris' Museum d'Orsay and similar museums elsewhere references Beijing's past efforts at industrialization as everyday life of factory workers improved during Mao's time setting it apart from the imperial history of the Forbidden City (Currier 2008: 255). As part of China's modernization drive (Mars and de Waal 2004), Beijing's growing stress on its modern culture showcases the reorganization of its urban space towards contemporary artworks, coffee houses and modern bookshops that mark urban hot spots, such as 798, incorporating diverse forms of modern heritage into the changing landscape of Chinese contemporary art going through the dynamic transition from avant-garde underground to commercialized commodity attracting tourists and investors (Currier 2008: 255-256).

Under the spotlight of local and global attention, Chinese contemporary art and 798 are involved in the rapid urban change Beijing goes through as its both ancient and modern past becomes consigned to museums documenting social, artistic and architectural history likely changing the character of its arts districts to that of tourist- and mainstream-oriented compounds of flagship brad stores, luxury apartments and high-end office spaces as a possible future of this city's gentrification (Currier 2008: 256). However, the gentrification of 798, apart from its apparent signs of rent increase and resident affluence, has traits specific to its Chinese context that exceeds a narrow definition of gentrification (Smith 2002), while demanding identification as a distinct form of urban change (Currier 2008: 256). Theoretical approaches to gentrification describe it in terms of interplay of culture and class in the process of urban revitalization (Cole 1987; Ley 1996; Smith 1986, 1996; Smith and Williams 1986) as artistic appeal becomes commodified for the purposes of capital investment into undervalued city quarters that responding to changing patterns of cultural consumption (Hamnett 1991; Beauregard 1986) brings wealthy residents, real estate speculation, and cultural visibility to formerly decaying urban cores, while 798's case differs from this Western pattern in its non-central location, low residential density, and lacking displacement conflicts (Currier 2008: 256-257).

Whereas art-led gentrification presupposes an art scene as a factor in revitalization of inner cities (Cole 1987; Ley 2003), 798 corresponds to a neo-bohemian transformation of a neighborhood not by avant-garde artists but by entertainment and commerce (Lloyd 2006) that embed aesthetic value into the operation of property development, gourmet restaurants, and cultural economy (Currier 2008: 257) that cater to incoming or visiting rather then resident individuals who contribute in their turn to subsequent urban restructuring and renewal (Rubino 2005). As opposed to its conventional definition being dependent on resident displacement (Slater 2006), the gentrification of 798 takes place with cafes, galleries and workshops existing side by side (Currier 2008: 257), while capital holders and residing artists largely steer the structural change the neighborhood goes through in the wake of Beijing's economic transition (Chen 2006a). As opposed to gentrification in Western cities (Smith 1996), in 798 rather than being displaced informal markets grow (Currier 2008: 257-258), former workers benefit from factory leases, and contemporary artists gain access to art market (Cang 2006). Far from a natural phenomenon of urban development, the gentrification of 798 is a historical process with unique economic, social, and historical characteristics (Smith 1986) that are dissimilar across its cases globally that only begin to be addressed critically in scholarly literature (Atkinson and Bridge 2005; Sykora 2005) as it grapples with its cultural and national contexts where urban change reflects global trends (Currier 2008: 258-259).

Positioning of the cause of historical preservation of 798 within the context of global comparison with New York's SoHo (Zukin 1989) succeeded because of the wide recognition of the latter (Currier 259-260). Following on the use of Western references for place branding, 798's case is comparable to New York's Lower Manhattan in its repurposing of former industrial premises for art uses mainly because the latter similarly was at the epicenter of a public campaign to block a financial area development in favor of its historical preservation in 1971, which as an art district eventually attracted capital flows as did 798 possibly heading towards gentrification on SoHo's model (Currier 2008: 260-261), as Beijing seeks to claim its status as a world or global city (Li 2003: 32). Gentrification referring to urban space that increasingly caters to cultural consumption is far from being a universal course of urban development of global cities around the world, as local situations have as much bearing as do global trends on urban change that for 798 is uniquely defined by its preservation agents, off-center location, and displacement absence within the framework of Beijing's more general efforts to harness culture for burnishing of its global image and diversification of its economic base (Currier 2008: 261).

Capturing the growing importance of culture in China and its cities, 798 illustrated the role that coherent representation of urban space (Zukin 1995) can play in deciding power struggles over it as did artists' success in redefining old factories as an art district that appealed to more affluent sensibilities, global market, and plural society that were taking root in Beijing (Currier 2008: 261). Making a transition from production-oriented economy to consumer- and culture-driven development, China is yet to have its own history of urban gentrification that as in SoHo may bring in its wake luxury apartments, brand-name boutiques, tourist crowds, and famous art galleries (Currier 2008: 261), while following its own path from avant-garde and grassroots beginnings to particularly Chinese post-industrial globalization (Wu 2007). 798 offers an insight into the impact of culture on urban policy in China as an unofficial initiative for historical preservation changed urban planning norms, attracted international media attention, and diversified Beijing's economic development, which though leading to district's official control, uniform appearance and commercial exploitation sets it apart as a site of industrial heritage of the 20th century that received a rare acknowledgment due to the iconic status of Chinese contemporary art creating market for other cultural areas, circumventing top-down policy-making, and encouraging cultural influences on urban policy (Currier 2008: 262).

SIngapore Biennale as Cultural Globalization

2010-05-22T10:15:00.004-06:00

In this respect, Singapore biennale offers an illustration of how globalization, as reflected in global cities rankings, in being favoured for global summits and conferences, and in the growth of service and cultural industries, translates into changing positioning on the global map of contemporary art (Tang 2007: 365). Even though following from governmental cultural policy, it is the economic globalization of Singapore, drawing international investment and tourist flows in its wake (Chow 2006), that gave a decisive impetus to the inauguration of Singapore biennale in 2006 more oriented to the global benefit it might give to the local cultural industry than to the political credit or corporate advertisement that would accrue from it (Tang 2007: 365).

International Art Biennials in Asia

2010-05-22T07:48:00.006-06:00

Among art institutions, art biennials are among the more global, inclusive and popular, as they can be staged in any city allocating sufficient funds for an international art exhibition, as biennials are able to represent local artists alongside their international counterparts, and as biennials help less well known cities, such as Gwangju, to enter into international spotlight that global artists and curators bring to these events (Wu 2007: 379). As Asia became more represented internationally with more than ten art biennials over the 1990s and the next decade, so did grow the participation of Western curators and artists at Asian art exhibition and of their Asian counterparts at Western venues respectively (Wu 2007: 379). However, as Wu (2007: 379-380) points out, depending on their either Western or Asian geographic location, international art biennials perform different functions with the former biennials seeking to connect to global peripheries of the art worlds by inviting Asian artists and curators, whereas the latter biennials seek to establish ties to Western art institutions and curators by West-oriented scheduling and programming that would integrate them into the global rather than a regional circuit of art exhibitions, Singapore, Shanghai and Gwangju biennials coordinating openings of their shows being the case in point.

This extension of the art world map to Asia has been accompanied by the increased representation of Asian artists at Western art exhibitions, so that the pavilions the Venice Biennale has added in 1995 from Taiwan, in 2001 from Hong Kong and Singapore, in 2005 from the mainland China, and in 2007 from Macao reflect the corresponding efforts by Asian cities, such as Singapore and Hong Kong, to project a global identity internationally (Wu 2007: 380-381). Reflective of the rising interest in Asian, and more specifically Chinese, contemporary art, the new pavilions at the Venice biennial not only attest to the inclusion of Asian art into the international map of the global art world but also reflect the evolving relations within Asia that its respective pavilions represent (Wu 2007: 381-382). However, the differences between the regional and global positioning of Macao, Hong Kong and Taiwan, for example, do not necessarily translate directly into their respective participation at international art exhibitions, as the separate representation of Hong Kong and Macao at the Venice biennial only after becoming special administrative regions attests (Wu 2007: 381, 383).

Chinese contemporary art in being represented not only internationally but also regionally takes place in the context of interregional relations between different Asian art biennials as much as it does in the context of those between global centers and peripheries of the art world (Wu 2007: 383). In fact, art biennials provide important stages for articulating individual and collective identities in the overlapping frameworks of governmental institutions, discursive regimes and international norms that create the cultural maps onto which artists and curators projects their identities and those of others (Wu 2007: 383). More importantly, art biennials offer opportunities for artists and curators to stage interventions into exhibition, urban and institutional spaces that critically reflect on the artistic and curatorial practices that give rise to these events (Wu 2007: 383-384). Correspondingly, while art biennials increasingly acquire the status of international institutions governed by an evolving set of norms and discourses within the framework of international cooperation across different cultures, they do not escape the influence of international relations that structure exhibitions practices locally and globally, relative importance of global cities, and mutual mapping of centers and peripheries (Wu 2007: 384-385).

Aesthetics and Globalization at Art Biennials

2010-01-20T06:53:00.008-07:00

In Nicolas Bourriaud's (2002) view, there is a conceptual relation between the post-communist transition of the early 1990s and the contemporary art practices, such as those represented by Rikrit Tiravanija, Felix Gonzales-Torres and Maurizio Cattelan, that must have made a radical break with its theoretical foundations rooted in the foregoing history, society and culture giving way to a postmodern condition (McIntyre 2007: 35). Bourriaud connects a transition to the project-based society of global capitalism to the relational structures of contemporary art (McIntyre 2007: 35-36) paralleling in doing this the developments associated with globalization that impose their logics on society, culture and economy (Bishop 2004). By basing his theory of relational aesthetics on the social contexts of contemporary artworks, Bourriaud (2002: 109, 112-113) takes social effects of contemporary art as a starting point for probing into its effects on individuals brought into contact with each other, social reality and theoretical concepts through the mediation of artworks (McIntyre 2007: 36), even though the nature of the relationships involved remains open-ended and under-theorized (Bishop 2004: 65).

Bourriaud (2002: 11) states that contemporary art is a social practice that has to be approached on its own constantly changing terms that rather than being oppositional to social reality, as were those of aesthetic avant-garde movements of the early 20th century, are models of action and living within existing social relations (Bourriaud 2002: 13) in concrete and ameliorative ways (McIntyre 2007: 36). For McIntyre (2007: 36-37), Bourriaud's (2002: 113) historical periodization that lies at the foundation of his theory of contemporary aesthetics while seeking to differentiate itself from Guy Debord's (1995: 24) theory of the society of the spectacle, as a latest, image-driven stage in the process of accumulation of capital, hardly distinguishes itself from it, as far as the reproduction of the aesthetic spectacle is concerned. Bourriaud (2002: 113) takes post-Soviet period as a social transition from passive spectatorship to participatory involvement paralleled in the possibilities that video as opposed to video games respectively offered with corresponding parallels in emergent relational aesthetics oriented at immanent rather than transcendent concerns better pursued in the interstices between economy and society where art exhibitions become positioned (McIntyre 2007: 37).

For Bourriaud 2002: 16), art exhibitions are interstitial spaces that not only escape the logics of exchange imposed on economic and social relations but also suggest radically different possibilities of their organization (McIntyre 2007: 37). Even though McIntyre (2007: 38) criticizes Bourriaud's video game model of contemporary aesthetics, as he takes recourse to Baker's (2004: 50) efforts to draw parallels between a historical periodization of economic development towards service economy and contemporary art and to Fraser's (1997: 114) opposition of commodity production and service delivery as immaterial production, he falls short of putting contemporary art into the context of either economic theory or art practice. McIntyre (2007: 38-39) finds close fit between neoliberalism, globalization and Bourriaud's aesthetics as he contrasts the widely shared chronology of Europe's post-communist transition (Maraniello 2002: 9-11) to its changed internal relations and international role in the world where global communication, mobility and culture render previous institutions and identities obsolete. However, McIntyre (2007: 39) underscores that efforts to understand globalization need to be put into a broad historical perspective, as cross border mobility and globe-encompassing economic activity have precedents that predate current wave of global interconnection, e.g. the 19th century labor migrations and the Dutch East India Company (Cooper 2005: 91-112).

On the Crisis of Public Space in the Twentieth Century

2009-12-06T07:14:00.023-07:00

Research on urban space makes attempts to go beyond the current polarizing discussion of its future (Harlander and Kuhn 2003: 225) that, on one hand, highlights the negative aspects of downtowns' loss of civic purpose, social centrality, surveillance-free spaces, non-commercial festivities, and local cultural establishments while, on the other hand, celebrating an increase in urban diversity, urban uses, everyday appeal, and public optimism with regard to city cores (Breuer 2003b; Selle 2002). To avoid the pitfalls of proclaiming either a devaluation or a renaissance of public spaces (Breuer 2003a), it is worthwhile to bring an empirical, historical, and theoretical analysis to bear on this topic (Harlander and Kuhn 2003: 225). However, understanding of urban space presupposes forming a consensus over their functions, such as transport and transit accessibility, trade and market infrastructures, political and public representation, and leisure and entertainment qualities (Harlander and Kuhn 2003: 225). It appears, furthermore, that the public space of modern cities, considered from the point of view of cultural and aesthetic experience (Harlander and Kuhn 2003: 225-226), is primarily defined by works of Walter Benjamin (1980) and Siegfried Kracauer (1987) that reach back to Baudelaire's city flaneur, Poe's urban crowd, and Simmel's blasé attitude that capture the attraction, tempo, and diversity of urban life.

Among the factors that have historically created urban space in its modern form are the technical innovations behind the gas and, later, electric street lighting that, although predated by similar attempts since the 17th, took hold in the 19th century, when the brightly lit urban nightlife became commonplace (Harlander and Kuhn 2003: 226). Through artificial lighting, the nightlife of metropolitan cities has been able to turn its previously less explored darker as well as brighter sides to both experience and representation, as its pleasures (Schloer 1994), fascinations (Benjamin 1988), and insecurities (Harlander and Kuhn 2003: 226-227) found their depiction in literature and painting. The figure of flaneur stepping unto the urban scene in the 19th century might hark back to comparable periods of flourishing culture and economy (Harlander and Kuhn 2003: 227), such as Greek city-states where Socrates would entertain a comparable relation to urban space (Benjamin 1980: 247). It is these forms of access to urban space that flaneur typifies that, according to critical accounts of the transformations befalling public spaces of cities, become extinct under the influences of commercialization, privatization, and standardization that make the unfamiliar, foreign and different rare that call for a reorientation of analysis of urban experience (Harlander and Kuhn 2003: 227).

Even though the notion of public sphere (Habermas 1971: 8) has been ideal-typically connected to the forms of public space characteristic of Greek or Roman antiquity (Harlander and Kuhn 2003: 227), the advent of democratic forms of governance has obviated any obvious connections between public space (Flierl 2002: 18) and urban society in favour of local and supra-local interest groups that configure the relations between political transparency, public involvement and modern state to bring a fundamental structural change about (Bahrdt 1961). From an historical perspective, an urban public sphere always deviated from its ideal type so that public space has been constituted as much through its inclusive effects on ancient slave-holders, medieval guild-members, independent male citizens, political client groups, totalitarian party-members, and democratically elected parties (Harlander and Kuhn 2003: 227-228), as through those of exclusion on correspondingly disenfranchised groups, such as women and workers in the 19th century and homeless, drug-addicts and immigrant youth presently (Siebel 2003: 252). In this respect, exemplary urban projects, such as Humboldt Forum for World Cultures in Berlin, serve as focal points for symbolic struggles among various interest groups for appropriation, instrumentalization and functionalization of public space that characterize urban change, crises, and discontinuities (Harlander and Kuhn 2003: 228).

In Germany, the 1920s of the Weimar republic saw attempts to re-shape public space into an architectural crowning achievement of the democratic break with the class-divided past standing in stark contrast to socialist conception of community oriented edifices of theatre, library or concert hall that held the urban space around them culturally together (Harlander and Kuhn 2003: 228). In Berlin, where such projects failed to materialize during the years of Weimar democracy (Harlander and Kuhn 2003: 229), the surroundings of the Parliament [Reichstag] building not far from the riverbanks of Spree did continue to inspire visions of how through a public forum construction the relations between exemplary architecture, urban space and democratic government could be changed through their radically new visualization (Nerdinger 1993: 30). The rarity of the success with which urban visions of community oriented public sphere could meet, such as collectively-minded plans for inner yards and urban quarters in Vienna, Berlin or Frankfurt (Harlander and Kuhn 2003: 229), indicates the limits and crises of architectural re-interpretation of urban space in response to social, cultural and economic problems of metropolitan centers. The political confrontations and economic crises of the Weimar republic also put their stamp on its urban spaces, as the carousing and revelry of big cities neighbored with street fights among political antagonists (Harlander and Kuhn 2003: 229).

In Nazi-Germany, the exclusion of Jewish citizens from the public sphere was followed by total prevention of their access to urban space that was planned to be transformed around the concept of totalitarian cities (Harlander and Kuhn 2003: 229-230) where urban cores, central axes, and open space were aimed to be instrumentalized in accord with imperialist claims to power and domination that where channeled into monumental architecture and overpowering shows, lighting techniques and mass processions, and intensive choreography of public participation (Brockhaus 1997: 58). After the WWII, the reconstruction in East-Germany has developed a relation to city centers and main avenues that, unconstrained by real estate profit considerations, was oriented to the welfare of city dwellers (Durth/Duewel/Gutschow 1998), while borrowing its planing models from Moscow, as a communist forerunner-city (Harlander and Kuhn 2003: 230-231). In East-German cities, the city-planning principles pushed mixed use and multiple cores aside in favour of concentrating in city centers the functions of government, culture, and politics within a hierarchical structure of urban space (Harlander and Kuhn 2003: 231). In these cities, along with the satisfaction of functions of work, residence, recreation, and transport, urban spaces had to meet the needs for demonstrations laying a party-controlled claim to city centers and squares that also registered the crises in political relations, such as repressions of people's protest on May 17, 1953 (Harlander and Kuhn 2003: 231).

West-Berlin, by contrast, seeking to escape the pre-WWII monotony of tenement-construction, oriented itself to models of garden city that shortly gained upper hand in the late 1940s and 1950s, as reconstruction efforts created urban landscapes loosely put together out of open spaces that, as in Berlin's Hansa city-quarter, scattered stand-alone architectural structures across park-like areas north of Tiergarten (Harlander and Kuhn 2003: 231-232). In the 1960s, the modernizing transformation of German cities gave way to the imperatives of highway-construction that serving a booming car-owning population (Suedbeck 1993: 171) cut through urban quarters and city squares in a widely criticized turn away from post-war principles of city-planning (Harlander and Kuhn 2003: 232). As the domination of city structure by transportation lanes started to hurt the revenues of shopping districts, first urban areas reserved for pedestrians started to be established, even though the urban qualities of the historical shopping arcades were lost, as suburbs grew hand in hand with historical restoration in city-centers (Harlander and Kuhn 2003: 232). However, tendency to put higher value on urban density has led not only to formation of urban spaces in city centers that offered little more than shopping opportunities but also to convergence in urban structures in East and West Germany (Harlander and Kuhn 2003: 232).

As in the 1970s the re-orientation away from the extensive and large scale urban growth towards inner cities and urban fringes has become increasingly pronounced, the European movement for urban heritage preservation expanded from Bologna, that spear-headed it, to Germany (Harlander and Kuhn 2003: 232-233), where the rediscovery of historical urban quarters and architecture has come under criticism for the risk it courted of being generically functionalized for the competitive purposes of unique identity creation, aesthetic image making, and urban spectacle generation (Durth 1987). That urban revitalization hardly ameliorates social polarization, has a checkered success record, and seeks to elide quarters and areas lacking in visual appeal has been in the focus of critical attention since the late 1980s (Harlander and Kuhn 2003: 233-234), as sprouting new museums, shopping malls, and postmodern skyscrapers put their spectacular qualities to the functional use of urban memory, history and locality (Durth 1987: 163). The economic crisis that cities seek to offset with festivals and promotion has its roots in the loss of relevance and function of urban cores (Harlander and Kuhn 2003: 234) that become marginalized through development of transport, communication and decentralization making other forms of planned and arbitrary urbanization possible (Haeussermann 1998: 80).

Booming in Germany, suburban shopping centers attract purchasing power away from smaller retail outlets of inner cities that facing massive emptying out become increasingly protected through regulation against urban sprawl (Popp 2002), receive growing attention in urban development plans, and provide incentives for downtown shopping malls without, however, reversing the trends of profile and identity loss of urban centers (Harlander and Kuhn 2003: 234). Despite the fears that a growing role of information, globalization and communication would lead to further decline of cities (Cairncross 1997), distance-contracting global networks bring urban deindustrialization and restructuring to bear on the renewed importance of urban space (Harlander and Kuhn 2003: 234-235) that regains relevance under the changed circumstances of information economy where cities become sites of recentralization that depends on tacit, place-bound, and complex knowledge emergently finding its concentration in metropolitan inner cities (Laepple 2003: 19). A complex and contradictory change that public space goes through demands an analysis that goes beyond descriptive categories of crisis, such as privatization, surveillance and security, for which shopping malls, entertainment centers train terminals and airports serve as prime examples, in order to capture the emergent balance between public and private spaces that defines anew contemporary urban culture (Harlander and Kuhn 2003: 235).

Indeed, in Germany the oft decried tendency of public space privatization (Ronnenberger, Lanz and Jahn 1999) purportedly deriving from private despoliation or giveaway of cities (Helms 1992) is hardly born out by the empirical reality of net gains in favor of public space (Harlander and Kuhn 2003: 235) stemming from handing over into public hands of dilapidating factory floors spurred by deindustrialization with counter-tendencies being an exception rather than a rule (Breuer 2002: 10). A further threat to public space is reported to come from the spread of surveillance technologies from gated communities, themselves a rapidly growing global trend, to shopping malls and entertainment areas served by private security companies through the disciplining and constraining effect of closed-circuit video cameras (Harlander and Kuhn 2003: 235-236). However, social curbs and security provisions against threats to personal integrity, such as rape prevention (Siebel 2003: 253), belong to the basic characteristics of accessibility and anonymity that define public space (Harlander and Kuhn 2003: 236). Rather, driven by growing share of the elderly, insufficient integration of immigrants, and increasing social marginalization of city-dwellers, informal social control over metropolitan urban space gives way to its formalization under the weight of correspondingly shifting balance between open access to public space and its protection (Harlander and Kuhn 2003: 236-237).

Deriving from developments in the 1970s and 1980s in the US, the thesis of decline of the public sphere via emptying out of downtown areas and tourist oriented museum investment is not born out by developments in Europe that since the 1990s see an explosive growth in forms of appropriation of urban spaces that go beyond the strategies of commercial mobilization of event economy towards urban celebrations, processions, fairs, and concerts as a prevalent trend (Harlander and Kuhn 2003: 237). This Europe-wide transformation has increasing opportunities to experience urban space at its core (Gehl 2001), as open air seating at cafes and restaurants allows prolonged and leisurely contact with adjacent urban environments that increasingly gain both in currency and importance for both business operations and municipal regulation, in order to lend to historical urban spaces novel relevance through urban design and street furniture, as piazza development initiatives in Barcelona, Rotterdam, Rome and Lyon show (Harlander and Kuhn 2003: 237-238). For this urban change, not least decisive is political will to create interconnected pedestrian areas combined with underground garage facilities, so that a different urban aesthetics of public squares could take root (Harlander and Kuhn 2003: 238).

In Germany, this trend brings private urban planning initiatives (Raumbureau 2001) into contact with political decision-making on the municipal level (Harlander and Kuhn 2003: 238) aiming at innovative use of urban spaces to make the most of the aesthetic qualities of geography and architecture of cities. As in Stuttgart, among other urban landmarks city castles came to occupy a special position bearing upon adjoining public squares that develop into locations of overlapping day- and nightlife scenes, of public visibility of multiple groups, and of dominant vistas on downtown quarters eventually becoming embedded into upscale metropolitan redevelopment with the help of ambitious architectural projects (Harlander and Kuhn 2003: 238-239).

Der Berliner Schloss as ein barockes Gefuege

2009-09-22T07:31:00.015-06:00

In vielen Hinsichten, kann die Wiedererrichtung des Berliner Schlosses mit der Hilfe von Strukturelementen barocken Theaters intepretiert sein. Das kann man Anhand der entscheidenden Punkten des Schlossprojektes zeigen. Der Berliner Schloss wurde zum Architekturwettbewerb angeboten. In anderen Woertern sollte es eine Vision der einzigen Person sein, die einen herrschenden Ueberblick ueber das gesamte architekturelle Ensemble haben sollte. Die barocke Buehe bietete auch einen priviligierten Gesichtspunk dar, der nur der Person des Fuertstes zugaenglich war. Alle andere waren nur bedingt anwesende Zuschauer davon, war den Augen der autorisierten Persoenlichkeit gegenueber verlief. Diese Darstellungstruktur, die auf einen einzigen Gesichtspunkt aufgerichtet ist, kann man als diese der Perspektive des italienischen Renaissances bezeichnen.

In diesem Sinne fuehrt diese Tradition Architektur fort. Die barocke Buehne, aber, hat eine weitere Verbindung zum Berlinerschlossprokekt, weil in seinen Vorschriften es erfordert war, dass der Architekt auf moderne Weise nur den vierten Wand gestaltet. Die andere drei Waende sollen eine genaue historische Rekonstruktion des originellen Schlosses darstellen. In Bezug auf Stil also soll die vierte, moderne Fassade historisch unsichtbar sein, als ob es eine Oeffnung zu den in Theater sitzenden Zuschauern waere. Die anderen drei vertikalen Bauflaechen sind also die urbanen Kulissen. Im Theater representieren die Kulissen die Tiefe der kuenstlichen Perspektive, wo es keine in Wirklichkeit gibt.

Mit anderen Woertern dienen die Kulissen dem selbstbewussten Zwecke der Taeuschung der Zuschauer gerade in der Uebergangszone zwischen zweidimensionalem Raum der Representation der Malerei und dreidimensionaler Darstellung der Theater, die nur in den barocken Zeiten erst zum Ausdrueck kommt. Obwohl die Kulissenarchitektur nach Aussen und nicht nach Innen aufgerichtet ist, bildet die genaue Wiederspiegelung des historischen Plans in dem neuen Schlossprojekt eine dreiseitige Buehne der spielerischen Darstellung, wo das Echte und das Kuenstliche ihre Merkmahle gegenseitig verwechseln. Die vierte, unsichtbare Wand der theatralischen Schaubuehne unterstreicht nur die Bereitschaft, den Unterschied zwieschen Fantasie und Wirklichkeit in dem Theaterraum ausser Kraft zu setzen.

Wann die urbanen Raeume auf eine zunehmende Weise von Fantasmagorien des von der Kultur getriebenen Kapitalismus gepraegt werden, nimmt das staedtische Leben die barocken Merkmahle an. Dementsprechend wird Berliner Schloss zu einer Staette, wo die Prinzipien des barocken Theater sichtbar sind. Nicht zuletzt ist Berliner Schloss eine oeffentliche Buehne der Auffuehrung und der Suspension der Emotionen, die in ihrem Raum emotionslos ausgetragen werden. Wiederholung und Abschiebung, Werwickelung und Aufloesung, Authentizitaet und Schauspielerei praegen die Geschichte des Wiederaufbaus des Schlosses und verschmelzen sich in ihrem Ablauf. Diese Verschmelzung dieser Gegensaetze praegt die barocke Sensibilitaet ebenfalls.

Das barocke Theater, das von fein regulierten Wiederholungen seiner aesthetischen Muster, das den Emotionen nur in einer hoechst kuenstlichen Form zutage treten laesst, das die schoene Flaeche der authentischen Tiefe bevorzugt, und das die Trennlinien zwischen Kunst und Leben symbolisch aufloest, kann als eine vorlaufende zur Gegenwart der heutigen nachmodernen Periode Erscheinung gepriesen sein. Deswegen kann Berliner Schloss in den Begriffen der Analyse des barocken Theaters als nicht gerade postmodernes, sondern barockes Raum interpretiert sein.

Berlin Biennale as a Postmodern Form of Urban Governmentality

2009-07-08T08:40:00.006-06:00

At the point where "speed and slowness, decisiveness and waiting, timely action and delay" (Perniola 1995: 18) become mutually integrated, art biennials represent not only a transition towards urban governmentality but also to post-modernity. As sites where new possibilities of capitalist development are born (Lazzarato 2004; Lefebvre 1969), cities play an increasingly important role in the changing landscape of rights, authority and governmentality (Sassen 2006). Not just sites of inclusion and exclusion on an urban level, cities play an increasingly dominant role in the processes of economic, social, political and cultual accumulation. From these accumulation processes a different form of action arises that takes as its point of departure the late modern experience of reaching limits to accumulation within purely modern parameters (Schulze 2003). Rather than a matter of an agreed upon historical periodization, post-modernity comes into effect through principles of effective action under the contemporary conditions. As "strategic, sharp and pungent" (Perniola 1995: 18) appearance, representation of the "tension of contrary forces" (Perniola 1995: 18), and communication as "the transmission of knowledge and experience" (Perniola 1995: 18) increasingly bear on economic, political, social and cultural accumulation, art biennials become paradigmatic representations of post-modernity on the urban level.

Berlin Biennale as a Metaphor of Urban Post-Modernity

2009-06-13T11:13:00.016-06:00

As urban studies develop into a post-deterministic direction (Amin and Ash 2002), in terms of Perniola such an epistemological transition parts ways with an expectation of a single discoverable truth in favour of multiple valid explanations that "open up an intermediate space that is not necessarily bound to be filled" (Perniola 1995: 10). Replacing knowledge as a destination point that upon arrival lends certainty is a complex configuration of continuous and simultaneous explanations (Perniola 1995: 10) that divorce communication processes from direct advantage in social, economic, cultural or political struggles. The enigmatic meaning of urban post-modernity as a "more complex, intricate, many-sided and contradictory" (Perniola 1995: 11) reality can be translated into simplistic explanations as little as can direct impact on it of art biennails or museums. As the struggles that structure contemporary cities play out across an urban geography of "point[s] of confluence of a great many plots" (Perniola 1995: 11), the social transformation that the international profusion of art biennials reflects remains constitutively enigmatic to all of its actors.

Absent anybody who "any longer knows what is really happening" (Perniola 1995: 11), lacking capabilities to "calculate exactly the manufacturing cost of anything" (Perniola 1995: 11), and ubuquitously dominated by "a state of organized uncertainty" (Perniola 1995: 11), contemporary society finds its urban metaphor in art biennials to a paradigmatic extent. Overflowing with events and happenings, separated from art market valuations, and epitomizing institutional uncertainty, art biennials retain their enigmatic character despite their increasing coverage, attendance and interconnection. Given "that art possesses a collective content and that the experience of art can itself become philosophy" (Perniola 1995: 11), the connection that art biennials make between urban space and global culture puts them into immediate contact with post-modernity of a world where rapid urbanization, interconnection and information lay waste to the certainties of knowledge, capitalism, and experience (Schulze 2003). Embedded into the strategies of urban development of cities, art biennials, as events that are equally aesthetic and philosphical, "stake their claim to the challenges of the contemporary world" (Perniola 1995: 11) as they become signs of successful management of social, cultural and economic uncertaintly on the urban level.

Occupying a position in between complexity and explanation, art biennials emerge both from the complexity of cultural, economic, social and political relations and from the continuous explanation of their causes and their effects. Within the discourse of urban strategies that take recourse to art biennials to put cities on the international or global map of contemporary art, the transitions between plan and realization of art biennials produce a radical difference in the cultural image of the cities where they take place. Even though the repeating editions of art biennails is a process that takes place within the same urban space and within the same global culture, the fascination of biennials consists in the transition between two points of urban cultural development that "are at once identical and radically different" (Perniola 1995: 12). Exploring the relations between diversity and uniqueness while documenting the transitions from uniformity to change, art biennials consist of events, works and statements that each represent "the smallest link" (Perniola 1995: 12) between urban space and global culture that through art biennales participate in continuous processes of transition from one spatial and aesthetic scale into another.

The enigmatic fascination of art biennials stands in stark contrast to the banality of contemporary society defined by the "processes of reduction, standardization and levelling" (Perniola 1995: 12). A city that in the 1990s made consistent efforts to attain greater centrality in local, regional and global networks of social, cultural, economic and political exchange, Berlin was coming to terms with postmodern "de-historicization" (Perniola 1995: 12) during the last two decades. The historical transition towards re-unification and incessant urban change coming in its wake position Berlin in the field of tension between postmodern banality and historical enigma. In analytical terms of Debord, the urban space of contemporary Berlin respectively integrates layered architectural memory and presence of "the concentrated spectacle of totalitarian regimes and the diffuse spectacle of Western democracies" (Perniola 1995: 12-13). This integrated spectacle that art biennials seem to stage differs from its Debord's understanding. A relatively small group of international curators "like Francesco Bonami, Hans Ulrich-Obrist, Rosa Martinez and Hou Hanru" (Tang 2007: 248) regularly circulates in a largely global field of art biennials, "20–30 per year, more than 60 active worldwide" (Tang 2007: 248), that cutting across political, economic, social and cultural international divisions challenges conventional geography of modernity.

The "enigma of art and philosophy" (Perniola 1995: 13) equally confronts "nihilism, anti-intellectualism, negative and weak thinking" (Perniola 1995: 13) wherever art biennials take place. Intergrated spectacle, rather than being a defining feature of Western societies of contemporary period, as Debord (1988) argues, is characteristic of both the spread of modernity and countervailing reactions to it (Munch 1995). The global spread of the banalization of social, cultural, economic and political life lets the "planetary dimension of the spectacle" (Perniola 1995: 14) be seen in art biennials. They confront the specifically modern relations "between rationality and society" (Perniola 1995: 14) with their limits. The diametrical oppositions of Western modernity and its counter-movements give way to interrelations of urban space and global culture organized around the "unfolding of the fold and the enigma of transit" (Perniola 1995: 14) of the explanation and transmission of urban post-modernity as "[e]xhibitions now pre-produce discourse rather than wait for its postproduction" (Tang 2007: 255). With respect to urban space, art biennials unfold it for the streams of visitors, professionals and artists who not only increase its discursive density but also promote the unfolding of interregional relations via networking of geographically proximate biennials.

Standing at the intersection point of urban strategies aimed at faciliating cultural tourism, accumulating cultural capital and mobilizing regional advantages (Tang 2007: 248), art biennials contribute to making transitions that seek to acquire for their cities a status of a cultural metropolis happen. Consequently, connections between urban and regional cultural clusters become forged, as Asian biennials of Singapore, Gwanju and Shanghai, European biennials of Venice, Kassel and Muenster and Mediterranean biennials of Athens, Istanbul and Tel-Aviv group together (Tang 2007: 248). While cultural capitals may hinge for their status on tautalogical self-designation, it is art biennials that draw attention to the co-denendency of both the unfolding of strategies of urban development towards self-culturalization of cities (Reckwitz 2009) and the transition of processes of economic, cultural, political and social accumulation (Munch 1991, 1995) towards urban post-modernity. Art biennials have the capacity to "draw strength from collaborative models of regional branding, cohering cultural difference rather than dispersing it, securing territorial power via inter-dependence" (Tang 2007: 248). For the acquisition of the status of cultural metropolises, however, art biennials are instrumental as events that are "rich in meaning, heavy with significance, fertile with valuable teaching" (Perniola 1995: 15).

In other words, becoming a cultural metropolis cannot be reduced to inter-urban competition, cultural diplomacy or branding campaigns. Concentration on the mere outcome of cultural competition between cities renders it banal in as much as it exhausts itself in city rankings (Perniola 1995: 15). As something acquired after "lengthy experience and profound meditation" (Perniola 1995: 15), cultural expertise brings urban space and global hierarchies together via art biennials as events based on "an experience of the distance, the difference and the radical foreignness" (Perniola 1995: 16). The experience of art taking place at the meetig point between the rational and the irrational (Perniola 1995: 16), neither art history nor art museums appear to be adequate for the task of turning a city into a cultural capital. The international growth of art biennials in the last two decades has only a marginal impact on the international positioning of the groups of artists that come from the countries where biennials are staged. Likewise, the international building boom of new art museums and of expansion and renovation of existing ones correspondingly reduces the impact a museum can have on a city's cultural profile.

"[E]nigmatic and indeterminable" (Perniola 1995: 16), art biennials connect the experience of art itself to urban modernity that in its contemporary form acquires enigmatic, equally rational and irrational, features. In the post-modern economy of signs and space (Lash and Urry 1995), cities become signs that derive from "the reality of things" (Perniola 1995: 17). Sites of simultaneous convergence of multiple forms of cultural, economic, political and social accumulation, cities are constantly defined by "a process of passing from same to same and a persistence of what is in itself different" (Perniola 1995: 17), as their constitutive exchange mechanisms change and maintain the make-up of cities as recognisable entities. As communication becomes increasingly central to the evolvement of modernity (Munch 1991, 1995; Perniola 2009), the growing intesity of urban exchanges makes the development of urban modernity increasingly dependent on communicative governmentality that maps its urban density on the revilalization of downtown areas, museum islands and cultural districts. Growing financial investment into culture-driven urban development projects apprears to revolve around the growing communication density that reinforces networks of collaboration on urban, regional and global levels.

As changes to urban fabric seeks to preserve the original character of a city and as the preservation of urban identity calls for active intervention into urban development, cities appear to "have been, and [...] become, what they are" (Perniola 1995: 17). In the meeting of urban space and global culture that art biennials stage the philosophical opposition between unfolding spaces of cities and enigmatic cultures of the worls comes into sharp relief. Whereas urban spaces come rich with "ex-planations, de-velopments, flections and declensions" (Perniola 1995: 18), world cultures are laden with "the coincidence of antagonisms, the concatenation of opposites, the contact of things that are divergent" (Perniola 1995: 18). Art exhibitions philosophically signify the environment of urban spaces and global cultures they take place in since in them "thought and reality are tied together by an essential reciprocal belonging" (Perniola 1995: 18). Thus art biennial assert "the certainty that they belong to a single world that is common to all" (Perniola 1995: 18). In the world of disorganized capitalism (Lash and Urry 1987), cities that are "locked into identity, into particularity, into [...] fixity" (Perniola 1995: 18) are out of touch with reality of global transoformations, dynamic transitions and communicative contradictions.

Bringing intellectual, emotional and sensitive dimensions of experience together (Perniola 1995: 18), art biennials explore the "inseparability of rational and emotional aspects" (Perniola 1995: 18) of contemporary experience. Art biennials join "intellectial, emotional and practical life into a single manner" (Perniola 1995: 18) of urban experience. Urban modernity that increasingly depends on communication for its operation is marked by "a dynamism and an immediacy that heralds surprises and unexpected events" (Perniola 1995: 18). Urban modernity goes beyond "any one-sided investigative approach to what is hidden" (Perniola 1995: 18) as it is irreducible to a fixed model of capitalism. Of necessity, modernity in its analytical dimensions (Munch 1982) brings into a system of relations culture, economy, society and politics that is neither static nor deterministic. Modernity on the urban level, however, individualizes these relations within the historical limits to variation and within the historical changes to regularity. As urban governmentality, urban modernity organizes processes of cultural, economic, social and political accumulation on the urban level. Moreover, since for metropolitan cities national sovereignty is staged within their urban spaces, urban governmentality of cities aspiring to claim the status of global cities goes hand in hand with staging urban sovereignty of international relations that events connected to globe-spanning networks and regimes construct.

Berlin Biennale as a Global Structure of Contemporary Modernity

2009-05-21T09:26:00.010-06:00

The emergence of a new global geography of creativity, of which contemporary art is only a component, requires a reconsideration of the notion of modernity from a perspective that goes beyond Enlightenment framework. Urban modernity, being famously identified by Georg Simmel with modern culture, is distributed georgaphically according to the respective weight of large cities that set the parameters of cultural exchange. As modernity becomes globalized, the corresponding weight of mega-cities in Asia, Africa and Latin America (Mosquera 2005) owerwhelms both quantitatively and qualitatively the relative share in urban modernity that cities in Europe can claim. While the concept of globalization alone can be found wanting in its explanatory potential of the contemporary changes in contemporary modernity (Buchholz and Wiggenig 2005), a philosophical interpretation of modernity (Perniola 1995) may shed light on how geography and culture relate to one another within the changing relationships that have been taking shape in the last decades.

As a UNESCO City of Design, Berlin belongs to the Creative Cities Network that brings urban centers from Argentina, Australia, Canada, Colombia, China, Egypt, Germany, France, Italy, Japan, Span, UK, and USA into mutual contact around topics of literature, music, craft and folk art, design, gastronomy and media arts (UNESCO 2007). Berlin's development as a creative city leads it to discover affinities with periods and places of creativity that lay a stress on structures that bring cities together rather than set them apart. For a city it becomes as important to "remain in a direct contact with social and historical reality" (Perniola 1995: 6) as it is for a philosopher or an artist. Moreover, Berlin biennale has consistently raised its international profile by bringing artists, curators, and institutions from around the world into the shared process of cultural development. Its definitive feature is precisely that for these actors their points of departure and arrival become infrastructurally, aesthetically and culturally comparable with each other, as increasing number of countries become comparably modern.

This global transition towards a developmental plateau that increasingly holds for countries around the world for metropolitan centers translates into a need to re-imagine themselves beyond the dychotomy between modern and traditional. Not incidentally, globalization is not an exclusively modern phenomenon as interrelations between flows and places far apart has not infrequently characterized traditional societies and pre-modern epoches. Globalization builds upon and affirms inter-regional, inter-cultural and inter-national affinities. In urban terms, the interconnections between metropolitan developmental strategies and global cultural events that art biennails stress draw their importance from an epistemological approach to cities as dynamic rather than static entities. The fixed terms of reference of a static theorization of urban development promised to deterministically explain the causes of wealth and poverty of cities. In contrast, the fluid theoretical terms of a dynamic exploration of how cities develop dissolve the binary oppositions between "progress and regression, advantage and disadvatage, improvement and deterioration" (Perniola 1995: 6). As cities develop into metropolitan centers their complex dynamics is increasingly derived from "incessant micro-movements, minuscule shifts" (Perniola 1995: 6) that add up to "a real, continual and almost imperceptible transformation" (Perniola 1995: 6).

From 1990s on, Berlin has discovered the limits of static visions of its development as plans for its urban revitalisation left the city burdened with multi-billion debt. The long-awaited transformation of Berlin into a regional and global metropolitan center has trumpted deterministic expectations that straightforward office district, downtown and governmental compound renewal would bring urban development in its wake. The dynamics of metropolitan development of Berlin proved to be following a slower, less explosive scale than the shelved plans for its speculative development would demand. The hesitant start of Berlin biennale that had its second installment take place after a three year hiatus in conjunction with a downtown redevelopment project in 2000 points to a gradual reorientation to an exploratory approach to urban development that Berlin began to apply as it arrived at the limits of static models of its development. It is art biennails that map almost imperceptible changes in local and global cultural landscapes that both internationally and particularly in Berlin open a large discussion on metropolitan modernity that Perniola captures in philosophical terms.

Not unlike Jameson's (1991) discussion of the relations between late capitalism and post-modernism, cities of metropolitan modernity favor "the labyrinthine paths of experience and thought" (Perniola 1995: 7) over the domination of the ideal of "absolute transparancy" (Perniola 1995: 7) over urban space. Famous Jameson's (1991: 39) example of Bonaventure Hotel as a structure the ways of access to which and of interior orientation are far from transparent casts a philosophical shadow on Los Angeles as a metropolitan center that contradicts the principles of tranditional modernity (Davis 1990). Rather than uncovering their truth before a quest for knowledge (Shields 2008), metropolitan cities leave in the folds of their multi-dimensional existence spaces for "embracing and interweaving of different things" (Perniola 1995: 7). Hitting the boundaries of urban growth that economy, politics and society set, metropolitan centers enter the stage where deterministic visions of development have to step aside in a process of culural reorientation.

Urban change governed by the "fluctuation of the norm" (Perniola 1995: 7) replaces the belief into the "permanence of the law" (Perniola 1995: 7) that stood behind modern visions of progress. Becoming a metropolitan center itself a process that cannot be located within clear-cut geographical or temporal boundaries of a city's size or history, urban centers that vie for recognition of their position on the global map of metropolises do so by "minute transitions" (Perniola 1995: 7). Built on continuity between stages of slow change, metropolitan modernity bases its development on inflection as a "modulation, a fashioning, a continual and perpetually variable modelling process" (Perniola 1995: 7). Each metropolitan modernity a possible ideal-type in itself, it is notable that even though it is New York that provides the prototylical art museum to Guggenheim Bilbao Museum, it is the development of Bilbao into a metropolitan center that has become an ideal-type of urban revitalization. The folding of its urban space into an innovative architectual shape points to urban development as an inflection of urban design that seeks to avoid the setting in of rigidity and inflexibility of historical urban centers.

Deleuze develops his philosophy of the fold into the further direction of trasversality. As a relation established among different dimensions, it interprets urban modernity as a phenomenon defined by infinitely small scale on which it is being formed, by emergence from micro encounters at its lowest levels, by slight and almost invisible lateral shifts. Perniola's theorization of conemporay modernity sees it arising from "infinitely small displacements" (Perniola 1995: 8) as belonging to the semantic field of the notion of the fold pointing to the possibilities of exploration of cities as folded spaces rather than of uncovering of their hidden truth. Cities as sites where the Barock character of their development as decline stands revealed in the "immense subtlety of things" (Perniola 1995: 8) are nevertheless gripped in a dynamic process of transition "from one determination of being to another" (Perniola 1995: 8). Fully beloning to the world of urban modernity, where "everything exists in the present, is availanle in the here and now, and nothing is in short supply" (Perniola 1995: 8), art biennials as sites that are "full, indeed crammed, packed to overflowing, in which there is a maximum matter in a minimum of space" (Perniola 1995: 8) are urban metaphors of the fold.

Rather than drawing the impetus of their international spread from "the negative aspects of reality" (Perniola 1995: 8) and from "a world in which nothingness is triumphant" (Perniola 1995: 8), art biennials respond to the strategies of urban development that come to the fore after modernity based on overcoming existing problems succeeds. As modern capitalism destroys reasons for its own development by dint of its successful replacement of lack with abundance, the hidden truth of the development of urban modernity becomes replaced by the folded reality of metropolises of post-modernity as a driving force of its development. When, as Schulze (2003) demontrates, the development of capitalist modernity was driven by the negative contrast between exisiting reality and the best of all worlds capitalism promised to bring about, urban post-modernity turns the relation between the world as it exists and its negation in the name of a better world on its head. As possibilities for further improvement of the existing world are exhausted (Schulze 2003) and as any intervention into exisiting social order repeatedly creates new problems instead of old (Münch 1991), urban development of metropolitan centers has to prize "remaining in direct touch with reality" (Perniola 1995: 9) in order to be adequate to the present moment of modernity.

As the project of modern capitalism makes a transition from managing a legitimation crisis (Habermas 1972) to coping with a loss of orientation (Schulze 2003) that could guide its development, "[p]hilosophical reason merges with both poetic and social reason" (Perniola 1995: 9). It is at this juncture that urban spaces for art exhibitions receive increasingly prominent position in metropolitan centers where industrial disticts, port areas, and business cores cede their terrains to global museums, entertainment quarters and festival grounds. Guggenheim Bilbao Museum, Museum of Modern Art New York, Museumsquartier Vienna illustrate long term strategies of urban development that become adopted to different degrees in cities that see global culture as a route to participation in capitalist globalization. The urban scale of financial investment into these and similar projects seems to belong to what Debord calls society of spectacle that by "inflating the importance of novelty [...] destroys every yardstick" (Perniola 1995: 9). These cultural projects, however, serve "a mode of feeling both anti-nostalgic and anti-utopian" (Perniola 1995: 9) that defines Deleuze's philosophy of the fold.

Thus, urban space of metropolitan modernity becomes increasingly beholden to a continuous experience of the present that "is weighed down by the past and pregnant with the future" (Perniola 1995: 9). In this respect, different metropolises represent different points of arrival at one and the same condition of urban modernity. Not infrequently talking about a global map of contemporary art, art biennials map from different points of view a single universe of contemporary sensibility. Conferring "a new and essentially mundane significance upon the experience of absorbed concentration" (Perniola 1995: 10), art biennials by rendering aesthetic experience mundane gain, however, in seriousness and permanence as they become increasing amount of institutional support and recognition. It is from the crisis of capitalist modernity (Schulze 2003) that urban preservation, museum projects, restauration works, and community diversity immensely gain in collective respect and individual importance.

Berlin Biennale as an Urban Structure of Modernity

2009-05-17T08:53:00.005-06:00

Maurizio Cattelan, Massimiliano Gioni and Ali Subotnick, the curators of the fourth Berlin Biennale of Contemporary Art, show in their exhibition "das Leben als eine Reihe von Traumata und Kunst als ein Rätsel" (Press Release 2006: 4). This combination of individualization of life and of estrangement of art opens itself to Perniola's conception of modernity in the horizon of simultaneity. When neither past nor future represent any longer a radical difference to the present, "a return of the repressed" (Perniola 1995: viii) and "future shock" (Perniola 1995: viii) pass into one another. The resultant configuration of contemporary modernity plays out in the "relationships between humans and things" (Perniola 1995: viii). A paradigmatic expression for the crisis of historical modernity that the collapse of both past and future into the present represents can be found in art biennials. Combining the characteristics of historical museums, universal expositions and shopping malls, art biennials stand for "the contemporary imaginary" (Perniola 1995: viii) that in the contemporary configuration of moderntiy allows the society of the spectacle to unfold as a combination of urban space and global culture.

In contrast to Guy Debord's (1967, 1988) conception of the society of the spectacle that characterizes its current stage as an integration of its concentrated type of totalitarian societies and its diffuse type of liberal capitalism, Perniola understands the society of the spectacle beyond the Enlightenment categories of truth and reason (Perniola 1995: 4). Modernity that goes beyond the Enlightenment dialectics of past and future as a process in which truth and reason uncover themselves passes into the society of the spectacle where the only possible transitions are from one picture, one constellation, and one reflection to another. As a particular instance of an emergent institition of this society of the spectacle, Berlin biennale offers "Reflexionen über die conditio humana im Spannungsfeld von Angst und Unterwerfung, von Unbehagen und Offenbarung, aber auch spontane, lichte Intermezzi des Schönen" (Press Release 2006: 4). Rather than offering an aesthetic experience that is nourished by truth that encounter with artworks might reveal or is governed by reason that artistic discourse makes visible in exhibitions, the Berlin biennale stages "ein absurdes Theater, in dem Tiere, Menschen und Geister ihre tragische Rolle spielen" (Press Release 2006: 4).

The Enlightenment movement towards truth and reason founds the certainty of their arrival on overcoming the problems of knowledge that become thematized as secrets. In contrast, Gilles Deleuze (1988) introduces "a world not of secrets but of folds" (Perniola 1995: 5). Connected to "a merely empirical field of application" (Perniola 1995: 5), folds thematize the practice of "the drawing out, the unwinding, the ex-pression of something that is tangled, wound up, gathered in" (Perniola 1995: 5) that seeks to gain a direct access to "complexities and the sinuousness of concrete reality" (Perniola 1995: 6). The place of truth and reason take fiction and feeling as a development, an unfolding of thinking meets a sensuous exploration of reality. Itself taking its thematic inspiration from a work of fiction, the Berlin biennale likens the urban spaces its appropriates as exhibition halls to a narrative constellation that can serve as "ein Mikrokosmos einer ganzen Gesellschaft betrachtet werden oder als ein fiktiver Schauplatz für einen Roman" (Press Release 2006: 5). The folds of exhibition spaces explain social, economic, political and cultural reality through the affinities of its direct contact with humans and things that "belong to one and the same world" (Perniola 1995: 6).

Berlin Biennale as a Structure of Aesthetic Transit

2009-05-10T02:01:00.007-06:00

The fourth Berlin biennale, by taking a modern classic of Steinbeck's Of Mice and Men as its title and emphasising "ornament above all else" (Fricke 2006), operates from within a post-modern situation of constant availability of information on past works, styles and events. As a major binary opposite of the architectural principles of modern architecture, ornament makes a come-back in post-modernity understood as a historical reflection on the cultural, social, economic and political foundations of modernity (Munch 1984). If modernity was associated with linear progress as a transition that can be described as a movement within a well-defined set of coordinates having a hierarchical organization, post-modernity is defined by a spatial structure that no longer allows relations of hierarchy, linearity, or utility (Perniola 1995). Rather than a complete break with modernity as a form of cultural, social, political or economic accumulation (Munch 1986), post-moderntiy is closely related with the growing role of information in contemporary society (Lyotard 1979; Perniola 1995). Via information technology, data storage, transmission protocoles, ubiquitous access, internet usage, telecommunication infrastructures and visual interface, the simultaneity of transmission of information brings any two points in its networks into immediate contact that replaces linear transitions of modernity with instant transits of post-modernity (Perniola 1995).

The Berlin biennale offers many points of departure and arrival in its complex topology of exhibitions, schedule of events, and information coverage. Not offering a hierarchical, linear or instrumental vision, the biennale "meanders through countless rooms and apartments" (Fricke 2006). Its visitors are confronted with the Berlin biennale as an event that for the time of its duration remains available, accessible and unavoidable. Daily and weekly press made the Berlin biennale into a highly publicized urban, regional and international event. Journalists of Tageblatt, Switzerland, La Repubblica, Ilaly, The Guardian, UK, Gazeta Wyborcza, Poland, and The Japan Times, Japan, to name a few, extensively covered the Berlin biennial. Newspapers with global circulation, such as International Herald Tribune and The New York Times paid much attention to the biennial as well. More specialized audiences were able to read reviews in Artforum International, USA, Frieze, UK, Flash Art, Italy, and Das Kunstmagazin, Germany, among other sources. However, it becomes the urban space of the Berlin biennale that receives constant attention in the reviews. The Berlin biennale serves as a structure of aesthetic transit that brings into immediate contact the urban space it takes place in and the information media that secure its public resonance.

The curators of the biennale are seen as "attempting an archaeological exploration of the shaky foundations on which the New Berlin rests" (Maak 2006). On one hand, Berlin biennale brings urban space of Berlin in contact with global culture. On the other hand, contemporary art that Berlin biennale exhibits becomes mixed with the urban space that surrounds it. This immediate contact between urban space and contemporary art is one of many configurations that it can have, as the number and frequency of art biennials around the world constantly grows. The joint impact of banalization of art (Perniola 2004) and of globalization of cities that increasingly become both homogenized architecturally and individualized historically turns art biennials into a type of institution that undergoes neutral variation each time it takes place (Perniola 1995). Success or failure of contemporary art biennials becomes less predicated on whether they implement an institutional variation that is inherently better than others. It is their neutral variation both from one edition to another and from one art biennial to another than increasingly favours the environmental factors, such as urban culture, international curators and inter-urban relations, that determine their urban, regional or international visibility. Indeed, for art biennials of utmost importance are "la topologie, le paysage, le voisinage, les conditions du milieu" (Perniola 1995) in which they take place.

As a site of aesthetic transit, the Berlin biennale brings into immediate contact "long-past fates and fortunes" (Maak 2006), the memory of which urban spaces of Berlin hold, with "the history of the way art is seen and shown" (Maak 2006) that does not grant privilege to contemporary art among other forms of cultural expression. The qualities of precision, melancholy and earnestness (Maak 2006) that the Berlin biennale evinces do not describe it in terms of either advantage or disadvantage vis-a-vis other art biennials. As an example of institution of art biennale, the Berlin biennial represents a neutral variation that thanks to the fixation over time of its institutional contours becomes included into the circuits of contemporary art as a form of global culture. The essence of this neutral variation is the immediate contact between urban space and global culture that as a form of transit does not involve any qualitative change in either of them (Perniola 1995). However, this phenomenon of transit between urban space and global culture that art biennials make possible "permet que s'établisse une situation complètement différente" (Perniola 1995). The efforts of the Berlin biennale are directed at achieving "pathos, shock and catharsis through art" (Maak 2006). To function as a site of aesthetic transit (Perniola 1995), Berlin biennale depends on the technologies of storage and transmission of information that its uses with increasing intensity over its history.

As a space where the more urgent problems of contemporary art are addressed, the Berlin biennale is "clearly structured along specific works rather than oeuvres in general" (Heiser 2006). It is as a site of aesthetic transit between different works, genres and cultures (Perniola 1995) that Berlin biennale finds its place among other art biennials. As a post-modern departure from a hierarchical attribution of superior value to particular artworks, artistic media and national cultures becomes more widely institutionalized (Munch 1991, 1995), it is less the case that the Berlin biennale becomes more differentiated from other art biennials. It is the growing consistency (Heiser 2006) of the generic features of ever more numerous art biennials that precisely prevents a reductionist approach to artists, media and cultures that would make their differences of no significance (Perniola 1995), as critique of globalization maintains. It is the replication and mutation of art biennials that opens a theoretical horizon beyond the pitfalls of hierarchical or reductive evaluations (Perniola 1995). In this perspective, Berlin biennale not having a definitive identity becomes accessible as a performative product of action networks (Latour 2005) that across modifications, displacements and localications produces "un sens, une qualité, une sélection" (Perniola 1995).

Berlin Biennale as a Site of Aesthetic Mixture

2009-05-09T08:53:00.004-06:00

The Berlin biennale is reported to be driven by a "strangely naïve hunger for the authentic" (Fricke 2006) that the cultural turn of contemporary aesthetics connects with the mixture between art and life. The mixing takes its impetus not from juxtaposing works, bodies and sensations, but from a mutual contact that leaves respective identities, boundaries and foundations intact. As the art biennial focuses upon "real, genuine, undeniably lived life" (Fricke 2006), it opens itself up towards the exploration of possibilities of combination and hybridity between cultural and artistic dimensions that while remaining well defined come into intimate contact with each other (Perniola 1995). Thus, contemporary art turns its attention towards "le dérivé, la répétition, l'hybride" (Perniola 1995) as it incorporates into its spaces of representation artefacts, memories and narratives that derive from outside its institutional boundaries. The secondary, the repeated, and the hybrid character of everyday life becomes both a background for biennial art exhibitions and part and parcel of their operation as events that through bringing into contact of multiple disciplines, genres, and institutions de-emphasise the original, the proper, and the authentic (Perniola 1995) in their aesthetics.

This contemporary emphasis of art biennials upon mixture of art and life goes against the grain of the historicist model of artistic origin, tradition and nationality. It is in confrontation with art market, educational institutions, and art museums that art biennials lay claim to their autonomy and authority to pursue forms of exhibition, participation and representation that allow communication, transmission and enjoyment of multiple cultural forms. Thus, not only local cultures increase their possibilities to come into contact with society, economy and politics, but also global cultures. Art biennials become sites where multiple cultures become reconfigured beyond their existing processes of aesthetic legitimation. This might explain the growing number of institutional participants that on local, regional and international scales make Berlin biennale into a space where multiple actors from cultural, economic, political and social organisations come into regular contact at "opening days and during the exhibition" (KW press-release 2006).

The Simultaneity of Impersonal Feeling at Berlin Biennale

2009-05-09T04:12:00.002-06:00

Simultaneity, understood as as "un sentiment cosmique de participation collective à l'unité du monde" (Perniola 1995), privileges touch over view as a mode of aesthetic experience. Indeed, the audience of the fourth Berlin biennale is in a grip of "obsessive phantasmagorias" (Fricke 2006), as in the spaces of its exhibitions artworks bridge the distances between themselves and their viewers via affect, the differences between form and function by decoration, and the distinctions between individual and impersonal with fiction. The biennial offers to its visitors an experience that is "[v]isually striking, often decorative and with a predilection for private mythologies en miniature" (Fricke 2006). These qualities of contemporary art are implicated in the aesthetics of simultaneity that proposes a re-evaluation of the interstices, the in-between, and the intermediary (Perniola 1995).

Berlin Biennale as a Reflection of Aesthetic Topology

2009-04-26T13:16:00.004-06:00

The fourth Berlin biennale reflects the "melancholia and insecurity" (Mack 2006) of contemporary art. Born of the spatial dynamics of circulation of artworks, artists and curators, the Berlin art biennial translates their nomadic movement into the space of possibilities of sensation and emotion that draw on "le déplacement, la répartition/déploiement, la dérive" (Perniola 1995) as their conditions. No longer based on the experiences of "la permanence, l'enracinement, le domicile" (Perniola 1995), contemporary art mourns the loss of models of secure cultural belonging. As a space that is dedicated to the transgressive marginality of contemporary art, Berlin biennale is shaped by the melancholia that spatial unmooring of individual and collective identities calls forward in the present post-national moment. Urban spaces in which the Berlin biennale installed its exhibitions also document the melancholia and insecurity deriving from their witness to the passage of historical time. As a temporary backdrop to contemporary art, these urban spaces connect the city the biennial takes place in and the aesthetic sensibility of global culture to each other.

Positioned at a spatial intersection between the nomadic topologies of cultural flows and the sedentary topologies of urban places, Berlin biennale strives for a resolution of the contradictory relation between art and space. The resultant topology of art takes inspiration from the notions of simultaneity, mixture, and transit (Perniola 1995).

Berlin Biennale as a Site of Aesthetic Transit

2009-03-28T07:25:00.012-06:00

The media response to the fourth edition of Berlin biennale decidedly stresses contact over perception as it is seen to bring "a new art scene to an old city" (Smith 2006). The biennale delineates the increasingly enigmatic nature of contemporary society as it "forms a kind of rebus about the arc and tumult of life itself" (Smith 2006). Resisting "something-for-everyone impulse that plagues so many big shows" (Smith 2006), the Berlin biennial turns away from the academic aesthetics that in a large scale exhibition would indeed lead to an overwhelming emphasis on historical discourse, a bewildering multiplicity of artistic movements, and an incessant interrogation of relevance of artworks. On the contrary, the intensive exploration of the relations between artistic media, genres, and institutions that the Berlin biennial has continued on a larger scale has let to its taking of a spatial turn that has allowed it to stage a "brilliant installation" (Smith 2006) of its works, events, and contexts. In theoretical terms, this process corresponds to the transition from history to topology of art (Groys 2007; Perniola 1995). As the dynamics of circulation of artistis movements, artistic production, and cultural fashions amplifies in scope and scale, the relations between past, present and future become conflated in a space of instant availability (Perniola 1995). Installation, as a spatial aspect of art exhibitions, takes over contemplation as a guiding mode of contemporary experience of art that favors contact, enigma and anti-aesthetics over perception, explanation and beauty.

The critical response to the fourth Berlin biennale refers to its inclination to highlight the "dark, irrational and impermeable" (Thon 2006) side of aesthetic experience. In rejecting a historicist or an over-theoretical organising scheme - the "leitmotif" (Thon 2006) -, contemporary art affirms a transition to "narrative approaches" (Thon 2006). The institutional format of art biennials explores novel theoretial possibilities that release art from the necessity to establish relations with its history. This radical transition from theory to narrative has a corresponding developent in the emphasis that geography of art receives at the expense of history of art. The more widely recognized statement of the Berlin biennale becomes the urban space where it takes place - the building where its main exhibition was installed. The building, concentrating layered memories of Jewish, Communist and post-Soviet past, has "such a strong aura, that all art seems to pale beside it" (Thon 2006). It is the terms of reference of synchronicity and spatiality that organize the experience of contemporary art in terms that are proper to itself as its strives to think itself "selon l'ordre des coexistences, non selon l'ordre des successions" (Perniola 1995).

Contemporary art, exploring the possibility of a topology of art (Perniola 1995), explicitly seeks to avoid a close association with a "hermetic discourse interesting only for an exclusive coterie" (Fanizadeh 2006), as Berlin biennale is reported to attempt. As "everyday life and history in its urban context" (Fanizadeh 2006) has become increasingly central for this beiennial, it has followed a larger trend of the cultural turn of aesthetics that seeks to analyse and consider "les expériences artistiques les plus variées et contradictoires dans leur continuité et dans leurs limites" (Perniola 1995). This approach to art that is sensitive to its interconnections and its urban spaces maps the transitions "from the sublime to the private, from private space into the museum, from the museum to the scrapheap" (Rauterberg 2006) to chart a topology of contemporary art that opens it towards the possibilities of intensified sensation, feeling and thought. As the visitors of the biennial are invited to "gain surprising insights" (Fanizadeh 2006) rather than to consign themselves to the traditional aesthetic experience (Fanizadeh 2006), the anti-aesthetics of modernity of Baudelaire that explores an expanded field of intensified interest (Perniola 1995) corresponds to the intention of the Berlin biennial to adequately represent aesthetic experience in its variety and complexity (Fanizadeh 2006).

Going beyond theoretical discourse, artistic fashions and aesthetic pleasure (Searle 2006), the Berlin biennale is organized around the key reference points of placement, timeliness and journey (Searle 2006). These features of the biennial that emerge from its press reviews, visitor experience and declared mission correspond to the relations "entre lieux et formes, entre régions et langages, entre zones et styles" (Perniola 1995) that the cultural turn of contemporary aesthetics makes visible in this case study of Berlin biennial. The Berlin biennale places the emphasis on the "selection of the right works" (Searle 2006), on the "either forgotten, or never seen before" (Searle 2006) artworks, and on the claim to be "not just another biennial" (Searle 2006). Engaged in public discourse on forms, spaces and styles, Berlin biennial, along with other art biennales around the world, "identifie avant tout des identités culturelles particulières, étudie leurs caractéristiques et se préoccupe de leur conservation" (Perniola 1995). From its first edition onwards, Berlin biennale has increased its visitor, institutional and media resonance. Open to urban culture in the multiplicity of its genres, forms and periods, the Berlin biennale has followed a decidedly urban strategy in its changing reflection of contemporary aesthetics that demands "favoriser le développement, promouvoir la circulation, encourager la consommation" (Perniola 1995). Art biennials as a distinctive institutional form of global culture strike urban roots in each city where they take place via responsiveness to the needs of urban development, the velocities of information exchange, and the seductions of cultural consumption.

Berlin Biennale in the Inter-Urban Relations of Cultural Accumulation

2009-03-20T15:07:00.010-06:00

The Berlin biennial has evolved in its relation to global culture as it emphasised the inter-urban relations that the event participated in by reorganisation of urban spaces where it took place around thematic platforms, media specificity. public communication, professional collaboration and scholarly discourse. Conceived from the start as a city-oriented event, Berlin biennale, to succeed to take place for the second time in 2001 three years since its inauguration, has shifted its emphasis from the participation of international artists, in 1998 the number of invited artists was 70 as opposed to the group of 50 in 2001, to a wide panel of eighteen international curators that contributed to podium discussions embedded into the schedule of the biennale and printed publications that documented works of and interviews with artists. While the first Berlin biennale sought its place among other international art exhibitions, as its Berlin/Berlin title enters into dialogue with the New York/New York exhibition at the Pompidou Center in Paris, the second biennial has developed the relationship between arts festival and scholarly symposium that provided its initial template towards merger between the two around conceptual focal points that organised the relations between artists, curators and the public within each urban location.

As Perniola (2007) points out, the cultural turn of contemporary aesthetics cannot avoid its philosophical reconsideration since the relations between culture and society differ from place to place and from time to time. That Berlin biennale had to reorganize itself around thematic platforms, as it made efforts to ensure that its second edition takes place, points to the necessity to bring a philosophical discussion to bear on the aesthetic representation of global culture. Rather than being borne of homogeneity, global culture is made of areas of heterogeneity that in their spatial organization establish variously durable connections between space and culture. Thus, the second Berlin biennial was following in the steps of the spatialization of the relations between aesthetics, society and culture as it put the topics of corporate art, curatorial business, recycling of the conceptual, post national, and digital verite into the center-stage of its theoretical reflection. This embedding of theory and philosophy into the operational structure of art biennials, as Berlin biennale shows, becomes necessary since "from the moment we attribute a decisive importance to the self-reflection of societies, even the presumed unity of the Western point of view breaks down in a multiplicity of different perspectives" (Perniola 2007: 39-43).

While the first Berlin biennial seems to follow the principle of aesthetic disinterestedness, as it remains restated in art reviews (Plagens 2009), the second biennale opens up towards what Perniola calls Baudelaire's "anti-aesthetic orientation" (Perniola 2007: 43-46). Baudelaire's prose works prefigure the sociological theorization of "important phenomena of modernity such as fashion, the city, material life, drugs, prostitution, conflict, and exoticism" (Perniola 2007: 43-46). Already proposing the terms of connectedness, contribution and commitment as keywords for its second edition, the third Berlin biennale explicitly organizes its artwork exhibitions around the thematic hubs that deal with migration, urban conditions, sonic landscapes, fashions and scenes and another cinema. This approach to art and culture that art biennials spearhead follows in the steps of the revolt against aesthetic disinterestedness and academic aesthetics of the European enlightenment, such as it is represented in Kant's position on aesthetic judgment as divorced from any practical interest or purpose par excellance. This anti-aesthetics of Baudelaire, moreover, rather than ruling out any connection to interest and desire lays an explicit emphasis "on the intensity of feeling and on the splendor of what presents itself to the imagination" (Perniola 2007: 43-46).

Indeed, Berlin biennale appeals to an ever wider range of cultural, professional, governmental, institutional and aesthetic interests each time it takes place. If the first biennial cuts across art, architecture, design, literature, music, choreography, fashion, film and theatre in its effort to establish itself as an interdisciplinary forum, the second biennial expands the focus of its operation towards translation between art and culture that renders life into an object of insatiable interest. This transition from interdisciplinary abstraction towards intensification of interest is accomplished by stressing the relationship of Berlin biennale to its visitors, viewers, organizers and critics. In the second biennial, films, videos and installations that aim at interaction with the public receive special emphasis in its exhibition program. Cinema screenings are paired with podium discussions with international curators that cover topics of professional and general interest. An orientation towards public interest supplies an institutional framework for Berlin beinnale as it is measured, documented and staged. Beginning in 1998 for each biennial show, attendance numbers are measured, local, national and international media coverage is documented, and prominent urban locations for the majority of the biennial exhibitions are chosen.

In its opposition to academic aesthetics, Berlin biennale puts into practice the defining characteristics of anti-aesthetics that consist in "rejection of conventionality, openness to extra-European cultures and attention to alternative and even pathological experiences" (Perniola 2007: 43-46). This anti-aesthetics performs cultural turn as it intensifies the relations between art and society in the form of the surplus of interest that is invested by aesthetic imagination into the world and by society into art via financial, affective and symbolic expenditure. Save for the first biennial with higher than average attendance numbers based on its editions for which comprehensive data are available, Berlin biennale has registered an unchanged number of visitors of its second and third instances. As a transition from the same to the same in Perniola's terms, the repetition of Berlin biennale produces the radical difference of "emotional over-investment" (Perniola 2007: 46-49) that indicates a more general social transition towards a culture of performance that is "not directed toward the fulfillment of pleasure but toward the preservation of excitement" (Perniola 2007: 46-49). Thus, art biennials become quintessential sites of cultural accumulation as an addictive transition from the same to the same that in the contemporary society of the spectacle performatively "constitute a global alternative that, however, is not programmatic but factual" (Perniola 2007: 49-51).

Urban Space and Global Culture in Art Focus Jerusalem

2009-03-08T08:51:00.013-06:00

The trajectory of development of Art Focus Jerusalem to its present format from its inception in 1994 as an Israel-wide event to a city-oriented international exhibition shows a connection between urban space and global culture that became closer over the years. As a review of its third installation in 1999 indicates (Vine 2000), the first Art Focus did not have international artists take part in its show and it took place across a bewildering array of spaces across Israel. In 1996, international artists become invited to Art Focus 2 that became primarily restricted to Tel-Aviv and Jerusalem, while the next installation of Art Focus have become exclusively associated with Jerusalem that in 1999 hosted 95 Israeli and 25 international artists across the five venues of the Sultan's Pool, the Teddy Kolleck Stadium, the Israel Museum, the Bezalel Academy of Arts, and Ticho House. In its aesthetics the event that in 1999 made a claim to find a place among the burgeouning circuit of international art biennials exhibits both a cultural and an urban turn. Art Focus Jerusalem joins within a single network of spaces both Israeli independent and internationally established institutions, those that experienced international exposure and beginning artists only entering into media limelight, and site specific and local artworks and representative objects and travelling exhibits of global artists. The event critically engages the open space across the walls of the Old City, the intersticial space of leisure and entertainment of the sports complex, the gallery space of classical and contemporary art exhibitions of the museum, the studio exhibit halls of the graduating art students' show, and the alternative spaces of out-of-the-way museum locations, auction houses and commercial galleries (Vine 2000).

This transformation of Art Focus Jerusalem into an event that takes place on the cross-section of urban space and global culture has its parallel in the cultural turn in aesthetics as it became progressively divorced from philosophy (Perniola 2007). Perniola notes that as early as a decade ago aesthetics has widened its disciplinary reach to the widest possible extent that bridges across multiple domains by creative interchange of codes (Kelley 1998). As the "gap between aesthetic knowledge and contemporary society" (Perniola 2007: 39-43) closes, the emerging articulation of contemporary aesthetics opens up "an epistemological horizon characterized by flexibility" (Perniola 2007: 39-43) that in case of art biennials takes the form of the aesthetic principle that makes "the distant appear near and the near distant" (Perniola 2007: 39-43). International art biennials bring urban space, as a multidisciplinary subject of knowledge, into immediate contact with global culture, as a carrier of aesthetic knowledge. It is the margins and boundaries of contemporary aesthetics that art biennials explore while becoming increasingly relevant to cities where they take place. In Benjamin's terms it is the "sex appeal of the inorganic" that art exercises as it attracts the millions of visitors that visit art museums, fairs and biennials (Plagens 2009). It is not aesthetic knowledge or appreciation of art that brings mass attendance to art events internationally, as the time-span of viewing that artworks can statistically expect from an average visitor viewer fits the pace of walking rather than of studied contemplation, but the relations between space and pleasure in which art participates. As it becomes more important for cities to be attractive, to investors, tourists, and professionals, the nexus between urban space and aesthetic pleasure becomes one of the key factors in the globally increasing prominence of art biennials.

The relations between art and society rest as much upon their theoretical discussion as upon the institutional structures that carry them. The relations between modernity and art, since their discussion by Baudelaire, occur on the background of rapidly growing cities that in their linear transition towards modern metropolises become scenes of radical difference that the aesthetic gaze of modern art documents both in its subject matter and in its aesthetic representation. In this respect, the modern period appears to be one long transition from the same to the same with only rare moments of radical difference that puncture the narrative of modern history. As representation, in its aesthetic, scientific or literary form, approaches in its understanding the status of a simulacrum, as the relations between represented original and representational copy enter into circuits of scrutiny, criticism and contestation, representation can no longer pretend to be a straightforward copy of an original. Instead, it becomes a playful simulacrum that as a copy let loose from the foundational ties to an original becomes not so much hyperreal, as Baudrillard's nostalgia for the good original of reality would suggest, but appealing and pleasant, as Perniola's discussion of the sex appeal of the inorganic suggests.

The perfection of the simulacrum on its linear trajectory of its growth in intensity of similitude to its original - as Shanghai's skyline takes over that of New York both in its present execution and in its projected future - dissolves the hierarchy between the copy and the original. As it is no longer possible to be true to the original, the copy, in its theoretical status, becomes interchangeable with the original. Nostalgia for reality interchanges with the fascination with simulacrum. The aesthetic gaze charges with the sex appeal of the inorganic the artistic simulacra that cities, in the process of their aestheticization, turn themselves into. Art biennials become occassions not so much for seeing art as for seeing cities as aesthetic copies of themselves that stand ever closer to reality. The transition from the same to the same of cities marks philosophically their becoming simulacra, as in art biennials the difference between cities celebrating art and art celebrating cities disappears. The radical difference of contemporary art is this cultural turn of the aesthetics that follows not so much from the internal development of art theory but from the contemporary transformation of social reality. As art meets reality and theory meets society within the environment of playful interchange of codes, as the theories of postmodernism (Baudrillard; Jameson), poststucturalism (Deleuze and Guattari; de Landa) and postmodernity (Bauman; Harvey) have historically indicated, simulacrum becomes not a negative category of analysis that would point out to a lack but a positive term of reference that stands for excess.

Art museums, having stock presence on the urban topography of art biennials, with collections in excess of their exhibition capacity, with artworks on display in excess of one-day overview, and with event calendars in excess of individual time budgets are transformed into simulacra of themselves that develop strategies for urban, media, and global presence that dissolve the difference between their real condition and represented status. While global art museums, such as Guggenheim Museum make a transition from artworks to cities in order to become as institutional simulacra extremely attractive objects of investment, globalizing metropolitan centers make a transition in the opposite direction from cities to artworks in order to turn themselves into urban simulacra that irresistibly attract investment flows of desire, money and interest. As focal points of emotional, financial, and social investment, increasingly cities seek to intensify their hold on individual and collective attention that becomes aesthetic, sexualized and abstract as it becomes stronger. Detaching themselves from any straightforward relation to the circuits of either use value or exchange value, cities become simulacra that acquire fetish value that melts together their materiality and abstraction. Art biennials are material abstractions and abstract materials of this twofold process of investing urban space with aesthetic pleasure. In the age of urban repoducibility, art biennials lend to cities their aura of Benjamin's sex appeal of the inorganic through precisely what Perniola calls making "the distant appear near and the near distant" (Perniola 2007: 39-43), since this is how Benjamin defines the experience of aura in his essay on the work of art in the age of its technical reproduction, as its famous English translation has it.

First Berlin Biennale: Instroduction

2009-02-04T06:05:00.006-07:00

What, from the first, makes Berlin biennale into an international and interdisciplinary event is its begining at the 1995 Venice biennale. In that year, the Venice Aperto, an independent exhibition of contemporary art, was discontinued. To the first Berlin biennale, to take place in 1998, there still was three years, but an inclusive forum for cultural producers was felt missing among those who convened at that traditional event of the international cultural calendar. In other words, rather than a deviation from the concept of art biennial as a stage to which different nation-states send their representatives, Berlin biennale was conceived as a complementary event. It intentionally takes a distance from nationally-oriented representation towards conceptually-driven presentation of contemporary art. Thus, Berlin biennale, as do other international art events around the globe, continues the tradition of intependent artistic spaces that give wide berth of liberty to both curators and artists.

This kind of event takes leave of the intention to represent the possibly fullest palette of artists according to their place of origin. Complex international careers, overlapping geographical imaginaries, and on-going cultural exchanges appear to have legitimized the post-traditional approach to art biennials that Berlin biennale exemplifies. To the Europe of nations and ethnicities there appeared to be added another one - Europe of art biennials. It is not only that the number of various city-based art biennials has greatly grew over the last two decades, symbolically commenced with the fall of the Berlin wall. But it is also the umbrella, regional events have increased in number - Venice biennale and documenta quinquennial were joined by the travelling biennale of Manifesta. A second geography (de Certeau) of cultural exchange has put a host of cities-of-culture on the European, as well as international, map.

In Europe, and increasingly internationally, art biennials have become a matter of course. However, a look back towards the first Berlin biennale brings home how new - lasting for slightly over a decade - the phenomenon is. Notably, the scope of the issues that articles, artworks, conferences, books and commentaries that document each art biennial reaches wide beyond the ambit of art history. They cover the shadows of history, theory and space that lie thickly on these biennial events. If anything, they are ephemeral. Drawing the energy of their staying power from the forces that make fetish-objects irresistible - namely, from the intersection of materiality and abstraction (Perniola) that their exhibition halls and catalogues do not tire of mapping out -, art biennials are intermittent splashes of discursive, performative, and artistic activity.

Whether they dissipate with little trace left or whether they leave a lasting stamp on their hosting cities, art biennials challenge their commentators, narrators, and historians to explore the limits of their assumptions in their consideration of repetition and difference, contemporary art and institutional forms, and philosophical reflection and aesthetic analysis. It could be that art biennials are paradigmatic spaces of the present global moment of modernity (Appadurai). If so, one might be well advised to consider both the theoretical accounts of modernity and philosophical inquiries into aesthetics.

Art Biennials as Spaces between Philosophy and Aesthetics

2009-02-04T02:37:00.007-07:00

Art biennials pose the question of an aesthetic tour d'horizon that they represent. Rather than resolve the aporias of the theory of art - such as representation vs. reality, artworks vs. merchandise, artist vs. laborer -, art biennials lead to concentration of genres, events, and scenes. Such a situation throws the epistemological question that one might address to them upon themselves to turn these into self-reflexive ethnographies of flanerie, part theoretical and part aesthetic. The plane of discussion shifts into a space between philosophy and aesthetics. This is where the more enigmatic figures of German theorists of modenity, such as Simmel, Kracauer, and Benjamin, might have lines of connection with the philosophy of aesthetics of Mario Perniola.

Taken more concretely, art biennials invite exploration of the aesthetical situation of the time and place of their appearance. Visiting artists and curators increase the contrasts between works, places and imaginaries that in their meeting points create interpretive highlights that give guidepoints to narratives that connect philosophy and aesthetics. The events, cities, and artworks of art biennials self-reflexively relate to modernity as a topic of constant discussion taking place without a hope for a definitive resolution. The previous attempts at theoretical closures of the problematique of modernity - be they sociological or art historical -, appear singularly dated to the time and place of their appearance. The repetition of the questions of what is modern, what does it mean to be modern, and what relation modernity has with the present moment and a particular place relativizes the difference that previous theoretical constructions aiming to definitely answer these questions could claim for themselves as unique moments in their intellectual history. These questions seems to be trapped in the space between philosophy and aesthetics where art biennials explore both the possibilities of repretition and of difference.

A not uncommon junction between art biennials and art museums, whether through a series of events working around a set of pre-existing architectural spaces or as a development towards the erection of their respective built environments, feeds upon the tension that defines the relations between modernity and cities, art and society, and ethics and aesthetics. Allowing both for aesthetic and philosophical treatments these relations become activated whenever a museum becomes an architectural metaphore for a city, whenever a cultural event tests the boundaries between representation and reality, and whenever a city becomes a site for aesthetic exploration of its identity and difference. Art biennials occur at the intersection of various media, discourses, and spaces where these tensions, relations and questions play out.

Analysis of Mommaas' (2004) Cultural Clusters and the Post-Industrial City

2008-01-31T00:26:00.000-07:00

The post-Fordist strategies of cultural clustering while being employed for the sake of urban branding, positioning, and revitalization (Mommaas 2004: 507) stand at the intersection of cultural, economic, social, and political accumulation processes that within the structure of modernity (Munch 1991: 371) demand detailed delineation should the goal of urban development be achieved especially given the variation that cultural clusters bespeaking the urban interpenetration of economy and culture necessitate systematic analysis of the cultural, economic, social, and political dynamics of institutional differentiation and integration in the cultural policy projects. Since the last decade of the twentieth century the cultural clusters have increasingly become integrated into the entrepreneurial strategies of urban development (Mommaas 2004: 507-508) that have put the cultural production, presentation, and consumption into the spatial contexts ranging from separate buildings to architectural complexes networked across urban space or concentrated into quarters taking over from or replacing industrial areas appropriated for cultural, recreational, and commercial uses that can be planned ahead, informally redefined, or left vacant to subsequently be geared for urban revitalization, creative economy, and cultural planning.

Within the urban policy-making, cultural clustering entrepreneurial strategies represent a departure from a hierarchical arts organization functioning redistributively vis-a-vis their socially structured constituencies towards horizontal networks of actors engaging in interchange inclusively related to their economic, social, and political environments that take increasing part in the artistic field via investors, planners, and developers (Mommaas 2004: 508) leading thereby to the institutional interpenetration of the processes of accumulation of money, discourse, reputation, and power (Munch 1991: 371). Moreover, in the urban regeneration strategies the cultural clusters characterize the saturation stage coming in the wake of flagship projects that have to compete with other major cities already having dense festival programming, museum complexes, and theatre compounds (Mommaas 2004: 508) that drive the process of intensification of cultural consumption, production, and circulation. The broadening of the urban policy-making to include the theorization of the interpenetration processes among the social systems (Mommaas 2004: 508-509) addresses the need for precise accounting for the developments, conflicts, and interests involved in cultural projects strategies that participate in the structural functional relations leading to neither one-sided loss by the cultural system of its autonomy (Zukin 1982, 1991) nor to unchecked appropriation by the economic, political, or social systems of the urban space (Looseley 1999).

The interpenetration between the processes of accumulation of political power and cultural discourse is especially salient in the European Union (Mommaas 2004: 509) where the cultural entrepreneurship is embedded into the interchange between the cultural policy decisions and mobilization of power, on the one hand, and the political agency legitimization and the political mobilization of culture, on the other hand, (Munch 1991: 371) that influenced by the global integration of the political and cultural structures simultaneously shifts the decision-making capabilities both from the local to the global structures of accumulation and from any single social system to the relations of their institutional interpenetration (Looseley 1999). The change in the relations among the economic, cultural, social, and political systems stemming from the growing differentiation, rationalization, and interpenetration of the structure of modernity(Munch 1984: 35, 63) has triggerd a corresponding alteration in the cultural policies that feature cultural clusters as foci of negotiation of institutional autonomy, innovation, and accumulation receiving their specific expression in the action strategies, causal structures, and institional environments of the variant structures of modernity (Mommaas 2004: 509).

Analysis of cultural clustering strategies contributes to the conceptual contruction of the comparative varieties of the structure of modernity that obtain as a consequence of different urban development strategies structurally following from particular configurations of the relations among the social, political, economic, and cultural accumulation dynamically affecting policy-making, social transformations, urban hierarchies, and collective action in the fields of arts and culture, urban governance, and economic policies (Mommaas 2004: 509-510). The cultural clustering policies allow classification into such corresponding ideal-typical strategies as museum quarter, post-industrial complex, urban regeneration, old city, and theatre quarter oriented forms of differentiation, rationalization, and interpenetration among the urban varieties of the structure of modernity. The entrepreneurial strategies promoting the cultural clustering of the museum quarter type draw on the urban development policies seeking, as in Rotterdam and Baltimore, to offset rising unemployment, declining tax base, and capital flight by the collective action oriented at inner-city renewal, image overhaul, and comsumer services (Hajer 1993; Mommaas 2004: 510; Mommaas and van der Poel 1989; van Aalst 1997).

Designed by leading architects, the museum quarters usually contain classical and modern art museums, arts institutes, multi-purpose exhibition halls, nature museums, and open-air spaces for theatre and event programming serving to position the city as a culturally pioneering location (Mommaas 2004: 510). The planning of the museum quarters extends to the surrounding urban areas that are transformed, with cultural consumption in mind, into boulevards fillied with art galleries and cafes, historical atmosphere, informal networks, bars and restraunts, and education centers (Mommaas 2004: 510-511) that contribute to the success of the cultural cluster to the extent that gallery density, municipal support, and community participation increase (van Aalst 1997). In contrast, the cultural clusters using the post-industrial complexes for the urban development appropriate the sites of heavy industry, energy generation, and transportation infrastructure made obsolete, as in Amsterdam and London, by the changes in the structure of economic accumulation and transferred into the city ownership that due to the redevelopment resources lack, lingering environmental pollution, and unsuitability for residential and commerial purposes is easily adaptible for diverse short-term projects (Mommaas 2004: 511).

The combination of fashionable dining and drinking establishments, art-house film theatres, performing arts spaces, art and design companies, dance and festival environments, official and media events halls not only create a dynamic mixture of culturall activities but also attract tourists, residents, and investors who encounter in the reflexively managed historical authenticity, open variety, and bohemian atmosphere the type of cultural cluster that serves as a perfect backdrop for highly profitable dance parties, corporate meetings, and catwalk and filming events (Mommaas 2004: 511). Consequently, the necessity of investment into the infrastructure, landscape, and architectural development of the post-industrial cultural cluster creates conditions for public-private partnerships (Mommaas 2004: 511) that in the process of their institutionalization set art and cultural organizations, policy-making agendas, and economic development on the course of interpenetration. Yet another cultural clustering strategy, prevalent in towns spawned by industrial revolution, draws on deliberate cultural planning near already popular bar and restaurant areas that adjacent to former quarters of Fordist industry erased by post-industrial urban development seek to reintegrate the architectural remnants of the modernization process into downtown regeneration projects centering on service, residential, and office functions (Mommaas 2004: 512).

The cultural clustering is made part of the urban regeneration strategies with the help of local cultural managers, arts foundations, purpose-built venues, and cultural organizations that via multi-lateral negotiations arrive at an agreement to focus the cultural policy-making, economic development, and social policy on cultural quarters. On that basis the regenerated urban areas allow for on-going cultural development aiming at anchoring performing arts, cultural enterprises, specialized libraries, socially entrepreneurial projects, educational institutions, and arts and media productions in a cluster of newly designed, post-industrial, and legacy public buildings (Mommaas 2004: 512). Arts and culture can play the fuller role in the urban regeneration (Mommaas 2004: 512) the more the processes of social, political, economic accumulaton are interrelated in policy-making, institutional interpenetration, and network structure connecting individual and collective action. The increasing popularity of the cultural clustering as strategy of urban development has led in the cities performing administrative and service functions to the creation of museum quarters taking advantage of the old city centers featuring religious structures, historical facades, and transportation hubs where governmental development funds can be spent whereas the theater quarters can be situated in the vicinity of existing cultural facilities across the city space (Mommaas 2004: 513).

The promotion strategies of the old city type coherently aim at raising the quality of public, residential, recreational, and cultural areas by means of extensions and renovations of art, historical, and science museums linked into a network with other urban museums dedicated to specialist topics, with wider environmental restoration initiatives, with revitalization of the visual and performing arts, and with architectural development of studio, tourist, and professional spaces (Mommaas 2004: 513). Not being part of the tourism, investment, and services oriented urban development, the theater quarters clusters have to compete for affordable premisses with residencial, commercial, and public interest groups in order to establish urban presence in multi-purpose complexes making part of the mixed-use city neighborhoods where theatre companies highlight historical, architectural, and cultural references to reinforce their representation, funding, and publicity strategies (Mommaas 2004: 513). When the theatre quarter type strategies of cultural clustering succeed, more theatre companies are attracted into the area where they serve different stages of the theatre production, training, and promotion cycle while establishing collaborative relations among theatre companies, arts academies and centers, cultural organizations, and governmental institutions that falling into a structure of functional interrelations enable the emergence of the complementarities between the quarter and the economic development reliant on creativity, knowledge, and learning that it attracts (Mommaas 2004: 513).

The cultural clusterting rapidly becoming adopted for the strategies of urban development around the world the cultual policy-making converges on the growing emphasis on the place-based interpenetration of the processes of cultural, social, political, and economic accumulation complemented by wide variation of the institutional structures of social relations resulting from the particularities of macro environments for collective action and path-dependency of modernization (Mommaas 2004: 513-514). The entrepreneurial strategies of institutional innovation that have recourse to cultural clustering can exhibit horizontal structure of relations featuring differentiation, autonomization, and interpenetration among the cultural policy, market, discourse, and association (Munch 1991: 370) that composing the cultural system of institutonal relations enter in variable relations with the social, political, and economic systems that via their inter-systemic structure produce reflexive effects on urban culture ranging from cultural monopoly to vibrant cultural multiplicity (Mommaas 2004: 514). Under the conditions of action contingency and social complexity (Munch 1984: 119) the cultural clusters undergo the process of structural functional differentiation whereby each occupies leading position in design and planning, production and exchange, presentation and association, and decision making and distribution either separately or conjointly (Mommaas 2004: 514) leading to correspondingly weaker or stronger interpenetration links among the museums, cultural producers, corporate bodies, and governmental agencies.

The institutional framework of the cultural clusters involves various actors in the discursive management of the relations among social, political, economic, and cultural organizations (Munch 1984: 119) differently positioned with respect to their cluster network centrality, frequency of the inter-institional meetings, amount of managerial responsibility, fund-raising, cooperation and investment participation, and the distribution of the maintenance and promotion costs (Mommaas 2004: 514-515) with large institutions being less dependent on clustering strategies than small organizations are (van Bon 1999). The configuration of relationships among the social, political, economic, and cultural systems that the clusters belong to can differ in the degree of institutional interpenetration that public financial support, private funding and investment, entrance fees and lease contracts, and non-governmental and state endowments exhibit in each particular situation that either limits or increases the chances that the cultural quarters become self-sustaining via strengthening of the entrepreneurial agency, functional integration, and expertise exchange among the clustered organizations so that their local structure of inter-institutional relations can gain in urban identity, recognition, and dynamism (Mommaas 2004: 515).

Within the structure of social action (Munch 1984: 78), the agency of cultural clusters increases its spatial contingency and expands its discursive compexity by institutional openness, decreases its civic contingency and reduces its cultural complexity by relational adaptation, decreases its representational contingency and expands its urban complexity by normative consensus, and increases its organizational contingency and reduces its internal complexity by social substantiation in order that their cluster-based autonomy, institutional flexibility, and civic involvement position the cultural quarter as a place having open identity, organizational opportunities, urban relevance, and spatial anchoring (Mommaas 2004: 515). The development of the cultural clusters is path-dependent on whether they arise as a consequence of a centralized planning strategy or have emerged from multiple related projects while the differentiation between the developmental paths varies from more governmentally administered consumer-oriented clusters to more infrastructure-derived production-oriented clusters (Mommaas 2004: 515-516) as accessible spaces, cultural atmosphere, and creative community tend to be mutually reinforcing rather than planned (van Vliet 2000; ETIN Adviseurs 2003; Scott 1999).

As situated sites of institutional interpenetration among the processes of cultural, social, political, and economic accumulaton (Munch 1991: 371), the cultural clusters reflect the shifting positioning of the cultural institutions in the urban structure of social relations as more conventional city centers attract museum quarters while city margins define theatre quarters as bohemian and avant-garde (Mommaas 2004: 516) with post-Fordist cities increasingly breaking with the clear-cut spatial hierarchies in favor of cultural, spatial, and institutional innovation (Holt 1997; O'Connor and Wynne 1996). The cultural development employing the place-based entrepreneurial strategies is affected by the complexity of the relations that permit neither its reduction to structural and causal explanations nor its induction from ethnographic and classificatory descriptions (Munch 1984: 32) so that the ideal-typical conceptualization of cultural clusters beyond the general model of institutional interpenetration of the processes of accumulation within the dense urban environments of interaction demands micro analysis of the actual clustering of related activities, structured exchanges, represented identities, and situated functions (Mommaas 2004: 516-517).

The deployment of the micro corrective to the structural functionalist approach (Colomy and Rhoades 1994) allows to arrive at the institutionally entrepreneurial interests behind the strategies of cultural clusters development that unfold according to the models of individual and collective agency unlike those that govern the organizational, structural, and urban dynamics alone (Mommaas 2004: 517). The cultural clustering strategies are supported by discursive frames that justify, legitimize, and position the urban development projects in the macro environments where the entrepreneurial groups implementing the cultural policy operate to reformulate the terms of institutional interpenetration between culture and cities (Mommaas 2004: 517). The discursive frame more commonly used by the entrepreneurial strategies promoting cultural clusters refers to the improved positioning of the city in the structure of economic flows that the museum quarters and post-industrial complexes development can bring in return to municipal, regional, and national spending (Mommaas 2004: 517). As consumer, tourist, and social mobility increases, spurred by the advances in transportation, communication, and cultural infrastructures, cities have to compete for decreasing share of the constantly diversifying leisure activities ungoverned by hierarchies of taste, class, and culture (Mommaas 2004: 517-518) no longer having a discernibly structured relation to the shrinking time budgets (van den Broek et al. 1999) spread thin across globalized experience, entertainment, and alternative opportunities available to more prosperous societies increasingly prizing authenticity, creativity, and individuality over more conventional cultural consumption (Richards 2001).

The decoupling of the economic structures from the spatial structures (Knulst and Mommaas 2000) likewise makes cities less dependent on producer services and more on consumer services for their revenue flows (Mommaas 2004: 518) increasingly attracted by their cultural infrastructures (Featherstone 1991; Martin 1998) that serving a post-Fordist social structure face heterogeneity, instability, and undifferentiated taste patterns (van Eijck 1999; Wynne and O'Connor 1998) as their operating environments. The urban positioning strategies increasingly adopted as a means to counteract the on-going volatility of the locational geography of post-Fordist industries constantly optimizing the production, service, and agglomeration factors of their individual and collective action (Amin and Graham 1997; Castells 1996; Lash and Urry 1994) devalue the existing asset bases of material resources, buildings, and infrastrictures of cities while putting on them pressure to support increasingly important immaterial inputs of ambience, quality, and image value (Mommaas 2004: 518) into the circuits of social, political, economic, and cultural accumulation. Given the instability of their macro environments, the cultural clustering strategies seeking to promote the brand image of their hosting cities as places that residents, visitors, and investors might prefer over increasing number of other as marketed destinations (Mommaas 2004: 518) leverage their infrastructure of cultural consumption to achieve the saturation of the urban experiece they offer with qualities of spectacle, specialness, and signification closely related to social, political and economic accumulation (Hannigan 1998; Lury 2000; Mommaas et al. 2000) via image-making (Debord 1994), staging (MacCannell 1999), and aesthetization (Wiley 1998) strategies.

The pressures to make arts and culture more community-oriented, financially independent, and multiculturally innovative transform the cultural policy-making into an action strategy aimed at restoring relevance of cultural organizations to the experience economy of media, entertainment and tourism (Mommaas 2004: 518-519; Mommaas et al. 2000; Pine and Gilmore 1999). As classical arts and cultural heritage increasingly lose their social relevance (de Haan 1997; de Haan and Knulst 2000; Knulst 1995; Mommaas 2004: 519; O'Connor and Wynne 1996) the cultural accumulation becomes decoupled from the social structure so that not only the post-Fordist emphasis on the post-modernist affinitities with popular culture and immediate experience become predominant (de Haan and Knulst 2000) but also the modernist and classical culture has become just another sector on the market of cultural preferences (Munch 1991: 245-248). Despite the arts and cultural education programs oriented at modernist heritage the success of new cultural forms, popular music, new media, digital culture, artistic fashion, and architectural design has shifted the balance of the public policy in favor of an entrepreneurial approach towards cultural production and consumption since the criteria for culural policy-making no longer can be imposed from outside of the cultural market without running the risk of biased evaluation, selection, participation, and circulation decisions (Mommaas 2004: 519).

The cultural policy reoriented to support the entrepreneurial projects stimulates the circulation of exposure, funds, and space among the formats, activities and institutions that cross the generational, cultural, and community boundaries at the expense of making all cultural organizations more dependent on their market performance, of expanding the range of cultural topics covered by educational curricula, and of legitimizing the institutional interpenetration between culture and economy (Mommaas 2004: 519-520) so that a sustainable structure of urban relations among the processes of social, political, economic, and cultural accumulation arises (Munch 1991: 249-256). Even though the reformulation of the cultural policy away from classical and modern arts and culture towards approaching cultural market as a macro envrionment for institutionally entrepreneurial projects (Colomy and Rhoades 1994) is bound to elicit opposition from the more established arts organizations, having long enjoyed governmentally supported institutional autonomy, (Mommaas 2004: 520) the necessity of the political system to legitimate its collective decisions by the mobilization of cultural discourse and power (Munch 1991: 371) makes the post-Fordist adjustment of the governemental cultural policy towards the field of arts and culture into an indespensable measure for strengthening the independent political, economic, cultural, and social agency (Giddens 1991; Pots 2000) vis-a-vis the corresponding processes of globalization (Looseley 1999).

The cultural policy-making encouraging the proliferation of cultural entreprenerialism, arts-driven development, and institutional interpenetration widens the financial, public, and social sources of its support that can be focused on cultural clusters as intergal parts of the urban revitalization strategies able to react more effectively to the macro environment of the "global cultural industries, the commodification of culture, changing taste paradigms and the rise of new media formats" (Mommaas 2004: 520). Cultural clusters have come to the fore of the cultural policy-making due to the strategic role that the creative economy is playing in the post-Fordist restructuring of cities that pursue revitalization via structural funtional integration of cultural production into the circuits of globalized accumulation (Mommaas 2004: 520-521) where economies of added cultural value, communication and information, and creativity, experience and concepts (Waters 1995) converge upon the creative city as a place that permanently adjusts to the multiple dynamic macro environments characterized by global cycles of innovation, regeneration, and change (Landry 2000; Verwijnen and Lehtovuori 1999). The institutional interpenetration of the social, political, economic, and cultural accumulation brings about the correspondingly growing interrelationship of the policy-making in each of the accumulation systems (O'Connor 1999) so that the urban development strategies aimed at bolstering the creative economy, urban renewal, and institutional innovation have to create, stimulate, and nourish the cultural clusters serving as critical infrastructure for the on-going differentiation, interpenetration, and culturalization of the urban structure via the accumulation of creative, infrastructural, and social capital whose complementarities can compensate for risk and uncertainty (Banks et al. 2000), create stable spatial identity (van Bon 1999), and spread the creative innovation benefits (Mommaas 2004: 521).

The economic policy-making fits into such structural functional interpenetration by offering place-related advantages to the enterprizes (Simmie 2002) that exhibit economically, socially, and culturally innovative agency in the environment of volatize, ephemeral and reflexive post-industrial production dependent on constant inputs of creative individuals, open networks, and social feedback (Banks et al. 2000; Bilton 1999) where independent location, lifestyle, and professional choices are decisive (Mommaas 2004: 521). Though the emergence of such famous creative districts as Monmartre, Rive Gauche, and SoHo has been spontaneous the conditions favourable to their development can be preserved from dissapearance under the deleterious impact of social, political, and economic effects triggered by creative success (Frank 2002; Zukin 1982) should the process of institutional interpenetration be steered towards reinforcing those paths and models of interrelated development that bridge bohemian marginality and cultural start-ups, plan openness and decentralization into urban design, and link institutions of cultural production with richly diversified reception environments (Mommaas 2004: 521-522; Verwijned and Lehtovuori 1999).

The cultural clustering strategy mutually reinforces the institutional interpenetration of the social, political, economic, and cultural accumulation processes that create macro environments of risk, openness, and dynamism that are favorable to the creatively entrepreneurial individual and collective action oriented at symbolic, ephemeral, and service economy (Amin and Graham 1997; Bilton 1999; Mommaas 2004: Munch 1991; 522; O'Connor 1999; Scott 2000; van Bon 1999; Verwijnen and Lehtovuori 1999). The post-Fordist transformation of the relations among the processes of social, political, economic and cultural accumulation has made obsolete entire economic sectors of the cities formerly hosting thriving industrial, ship-building, transportation, military, religious, public, and medical infrastructures that have both thwarted attempts at their modernization and heightened the inter-urban competition where reorientation towards post-industrial economy has succeeeded thereby putting the increasing share of urban heritage in the cultural consumption into the center of entrepreneurial strategies of diversity, history, and local identity celebration (Mommaas 2004: 522). The post-Fordist accumulation has turned the post-industrial urban spaces into the environments of coexistence of counter-cultural groups and gentrified development projects, of cultural incubators and commodification of space, and of spectacular event areas and real estate speculation (Mommaas 2004: 522).

The successful integration of the post-industrial urban infrastructures into the post-Fordist accumulation as office, residential, and exhibition spaces makes the development of the cultural policy oriented at retention of the cultural producers in the cities dependent on post-industrial production into a strategy critically necessary to maintain competitive positioning within the open, creative, and mobile networks within which the cultural producers move (Mommaas 2004: 522-523). Moreover, the adoption of the cultural clustering strategies depends not only on the architectural heritage available for integration into the cultural infrastructure, but also on the emergent development, maintenance, and proliferation of the local support networks linking the cities to the circuits of symbolic, economic, and cultural accumulation (Mommaas 2004: 523). However, even though the processes of institutional differentiation, autonomization, and interpenetration are in line with the post-Fordist developments reflected in cultural policies of cities that have established cultural clusters in a bid to position themselves as centers of innovative cultural production (Mommaas 2004: 523), the individual and collective entrepreneurual strategies that have led to the respective decision making provide micro corrective to the structural explanations of the transition to post-Fordism.

The crisis in the Fordist accumulation giving impetus to the novel forms of legitimation of and of power mobilization for social, political, economic, and cultural decisions (Munch 1991: 371) has led to the renegotiation of the structure of interrelations among the insitutions, groups, and discourses bearing immediate effects of the post-Fordist reogranization of arts and culture, collective action, economic exchange, urban space, and governmental policy to promote cultural expression, investment, training, marketing, distribution, and relevance (Bianchini 1989; 37-38; Mommaas 2004: 523-524). Consequently, the cultural clustering strategies as urban linchpins of the processes of post-Fordist accumulation reproduce the social structure emerging from the deregulated social, political, economic, and cultural markets increasingly less depenent on the policy-making input for their operation via local networks, inter-institutional cooperation, and interpenetration of money, representation, reputation, and power (Mommaas 2004: 524; Munch 1991: 371). Nevetheless, contributing to cultural diversity, urban democracy, and alternative platforms (Mommaas 2004: 524), cultural clusters give spatial expression to the process of interpenetration of the social, political, economic, and cultural institutions within an open structural functional framework serving as a means of urban differentiation, autonomization, and integration.

The cultural clusters represent urban effects of the process of interpenetration of the social systems of accumulation as they enlist support via integration of the exchange of economic cooperation for social goods and services, of legitimation of political action for cultural policy-making, of cultural democracy implementation for legitimization of collective social action, of economical and infrastructural decisions for political benefits and services, of political cooperation for social policy decisions, and of cultural production and consumption for legitimization of economic agency (Mommaas 2004: 524-525; Munch 1991: 371). Though each cultural cluster realizes the interpenetration of the social, political, economic, and cultural accunmulation, the particular urban configurations these processes enter into resist generalization beyond the entrepreneurial strategies of the groups that manage, finance, justify and embed the creative quarters into the circuits of institutional accumulation accomodating both centralized consumption-oriented approach to cultural policy-making and decentralized emergence of cultural production projects (Mommaas 2004: 525). The urban particularization of the structure of modernity (Munch 1991: 368-369) depends on the local circumstances that facilitate or hamper different combinations of institutional interpenetration and their developmental trajectories which together contribute to the structural congifuration of cultural clusters as contingent outcomes of entrepreneurial strategies of policy-makers, as systems reflexively changing in response to on-going interaction between macro environments and individual and collective actors, and as environments for institutional self-observation by the organizations involved in urban development of creative economy, cultural infrastructure, and cultural democracy (Mommaas 2004: 525).

The place that arts and culture occopy in the post-Fordist urban development (Zukin 1982, 1991, 1992) draws on the dynamics of deindustrialization of cities turning their formerly industrial production districts into the quarters of cultural consumption as urban renewal procceeding via reintegration of the socially, politically, economically, and culturally marginal spaces into the urban structure of global modernity (Appadurai 1996) where the interaction between the macro environment of the post-industrial economic development and the institutionally entrepreneurial groups sets the course of the mediation among the multiple processes of urban accumulation (Mommaas 2004: 525-526). Though the projects promoting the culture-driven urban regenetration frequently meet with criticism of the dynamics of instrumentalization of culture for the purposes of economic development (Mommaas 2004: 526), such aesthetic critique of capitalism not only conflates the dynamics of modernity with its economically reductivist interpretation but also reinforces the deregulating effects of the crisis of Fordism by insisting on the autonomy of the cultural institutions that are increasingly out of touch with the social, political, economic, and cultural developments of the global modernity.

The concerns that the cultural clustering strategies of urban development raise are significant since as macro institutional environments that cultural producers and consumers confront they participate in the contradictory dynamics of modernity whereby rising real estate values hinder cultural development, rising cultural cluster popularity socially homogenizes the surrounding urban areas, and rising influx of diversity-seeking tourists increases the pressure for cultural conformity of the institutional programming (Mommaas 2004: 526). As part of the processes of social, political, economic, and cultural interpenetration, cultural clusters exhibit variation arising from the particular entreprenerial strategies of urban development that critically depend on the urban environments shaping the micro dynamics of the structure of modernity in its interdependence with the interrelations among individual organizations, available strategies, and cultural objectives (Munch 1991: 369) that institutionally mediate between culture and economy, places and flows, and agency and structure (Mommaas 2004: 526-527;) in each city according to its place in the structural functional relations of the global modernity developiong along non-linear trajectories of accumulation of capital, culture, reputation, and power (Featherstone 1991; O'Connor and Wynne 1996: 75; Schulze 1992).

The transformation of modernity towards greater differentiation, rationalization, and interpenetration of its constituent systems via continuous circuits of institutional integration, goal specification, adaptive opennes, and structural generalization (Munch 1991: 368) allows itself to be observed in the status of cultural clusters as sites of interrelated accumulation processes of discourse, reputation, power, and money that cannot impose their exclusive logic of operation on the groups and individuals pursuing other accumulation strategies without risking to undermine their legitimation, mobilization, and transaction power vis-a-vis the urban structure of post-industrial modernity (Mommaas 2004: 527-528; Munch 1991: 371). The variability of the structure of modernity allows for different models of relations where the cultural infrastructure, interest groups, and policy-making can be embedded (Mommaas 2004: 528). As institutionally entrepreneurial strategies (Colomy and Rhoades 1994), the cultural clustering policies can flexibly react to their local conditions, innovatively apply developmental models, and situatively form interest-based inter-organizational alliances (Bilton 1999; Mintzberg and McHugh 1985; Mommaas 2004: 528) thereby affecting the configuration of the interinstitutional relations in which they reflexively participate.

To the factors likely to negatively affect the effectiveness of the cultural clustering strategies belongs the lack of systemic interpenetration with the urban structure of globalized accumulation taking place via global creative industry corporations signing exclusive contracts with local cultural producers, national cultural infrastructure companies being owned by global advertisement corporations, global financial services companies building head offices in cultural quarters, and inter-institutional cooperation frameworks failing to achieve formal recognition by governmental organizations (Bilton 1999; Mommaas 2004: 529). However, without concerted social, political, economic, and cultural policy-making oriented at creating favorable macro environment for innovative entrepreneurial projects, the post-Fordist accumulation cannot on its own produce the cultural, reflexive, and strategic conditions necessary for solving its crises (Mommaas 2004: 529). The urban particularization of cultural clustering strategies represents the micro corrective to the structural functionalist approach to the models of development that the process of modernization can follow so that the post-Fordist transformation of the hierarchical social structures governing the processes of accumulation into the network-based, process-oriented, and post-industrial environments finds its urban reflection in cultural clusters (Mommaas 2004: 529-530) that have to be complemented with reflexive policy-making in tune with local structures of inter-institutional relations to be effective.

Cultural clustering strategies being increasingly adopted by the urban development policies since the late twentieth century, the spatial configurations of cultural institutions fall into inter-related patterns of differentiation, rationalization, and interpenetration that the cultural policy-making has to take into account to adequately inform individual and collective action in the post-Fordist envrionment of diverse, inclusive, and entrepreneurial inter-institutional networks (Mommaas 2004: 530). The urban structure of social relations among the accumulation processes affects the form that cultural clusters take via their activities portfolios, governance structures, financial arrangements, infrastructural embedding, and developmental trajectories that determine the balance between cultural production and consumption, between art and entertainment orientation, and between hierarchical centralization and open networks (Mommaas 2004: 530). Cultural cluster development can serve creative economy, urban positioning, cultural revitalization, architectural preservation, and cultural democracy. Importantly, the urban development deploying cultural clustering strategies is widely implemented as a result of emergent process of inter-institutional interpenetration of culture-oriented strategies of individual and collective action (Mommaas 2004: 530).

While cultural clustering strategies clearly result from the interpenetration among the processes of social, political, economic, and cultural policy-making, the eventual success of cultural clusters being dependent on institutionally entrepreneurial strategies of individual and collective actors ther urban environments critically affect the trajectories of urban development, policy-making, and global positioning (Mommaas 2004: 530). The transition to the post-Fordist forms of accumulation does not resolve the contradictions of modernity (Munch 1991) but alters them in the direction of greater complexity, instability, and reflexivity (Mommaas 2004: 530-531) forcing thereby the policy-making process on urban, regional, and national levels to increasingly take into account the on-going social differentiation, rationalization, and interpenetration as macro environment of its strategic agency. Given that the moden processes of social, political, economic, and cultural accummulation can each come to play a disproportionate role in the collective decision-making (Munch 1991), the critique of modernity has to rely on detailed analysis of the structure of inter-institutional relations in order to formulate fine-tuned strategies of urban governance, reflexive involvement, and cultural clustering.

Analysis of Amin and Graham's (1997) The Ordinary City

2008-01-21T16:52:00.000-07:00

As the centrality of cities to the world economy has become reasserted in the discourse on globalization, the world-scale flows, advanced telecommunications, and transportation networks only contribute to the dynamics where cities assume key positions in the design, management, and creativity functions that put urban centers into the structures of economic exchange, institutional policy-making, and individual and collective action (Amin and Graham 1997: 411). Cities have been attracting increasing amount of attention (Jencks 1996) from social scientists and policy makers adopting structuralist and post-structuralist approaches as urban crises and regeneration strategies have become addressed by national research programmes, international organizations, and interdisciplinary conferences oriented at the metropolitan dynamics (Amin and Graham 1997: 411). However, the emergence of the urban studies has not been connected to a central theory of contemporary cities, of their multiple structures, and of their changing functions as a number of economic, social, and cultural transitions occur that demand conceptual means to group cities into clusters with shared urban trends that integrate such elements as cultural, associational, political, and economic systems into the structure of collective action (Munch 1982: 94) that via media of institutional integration (Munch 1982: 617) would allow to determine the factors of urban regeneration or decline (Amin and Graham 1997: 411-412).

Despite the multiplication of global flows cities possess assets that contribute to reflexivity and facilitation of urban regeneration, to diversification of economic, social and cultural institutions, and to collective action oriented at implementation of entrepreneurial projects ranging from urban policy to social justice (Amin and Graham 1997: 412). While the spread of telecommunications in the 1960s gave rise to the expectations of eventual demise of cities no longer exclusively offering proximity (Boden and Molotch 1994) needed for connecting economic, social, and cultural systems into integrated structure, the spatial basis for structural functional integration was expected to be replaced with the communications infrastructure (Toffler 1980) making possible the dispersal of activities across space where the distinction among residential, industrial, and managerial districts would eventually blur (Amin and Graham 1997: 412; Pascal 1987: 602). As electronic networks increasingly mediate interpersonal communication the average size of cities was expected to fall since both personal and collective integration into the structure of modernity was decoupled from the constraints of space (Naisbitt and Aburdene 1991: 329) given the urban development trends predicted transition from cities to global villages (McLuhan 1964) as the place-based determinants of action became replaced by the communications-based flows (Amin and Graham 1997: 412; Virilio 1987: 18).

The processes of urban restructuring such as deindustrialization, inner-city unemployment, and urban crises have been mapped and measured by urban economics, geography, and planning (Martin and Rowthorn 1986; McKay and Cox 1979) that have contributed to urban policy making albeit not reaching interdisciplinary conclusions about the underlying causes, structures, or implications of the post-Fordist transformation (Amin and Graham 1997: 412). The growing relevance of urban space, policy, and economy to the understanding of representation and symbolization (Westwood and Williams 1996), identity politics (Keith and Pile 1993), collective memory (Boyer 1994), and consumption (Ellin 1995) has led to overcoming (Collins 1995; Shields 1992) the deterministic theorization of the urban dynamics (Sorkin 1992; Virilio 1987) in favor of conceiving of cities as sites of systemic interpenetration involving visual media (Robins 1996), situated individuals (Pile 1996), and social struggles (Zukin 1995) into reciprocally implicative relations (Amin and Graham 1997: 412-413). As the pressure for economic competitiveness under the conditions of flexible specialization (Amin 1994; Scott 1988) has reasserted the centrality of social networks to the post-Fordist economy, the importance of face-to-face interaction has reinforced the role of cities as nodal points in the geography of global flows (Amin and Graham 1997: 413; Thrift and Olds 1996: 314-314).

The growing urbanization of the world, regeneration of formerly industrial cities, and globally increasing proportion of urban population (Parkinson 1994) have spurred the reinterpretations of cities as structures of opportunity going beyond narrow definitions of the economic system (Amin Graham 1997: 413; Jencks 1996). The theoretical attention to cities has mainly stressed their centrality to the national economic development at the same time as increasing prominence of urban milieux in tapping economic potential of cultural, educational, and research institutions has started to redefine the conceptualization of the structure of relations in which cities participate (Amin and Graham 1997: 413). Consequently, metropolitan centers are affirmed in the importance that their location in the global structure of relations of command and control, financial operations, industrial production, corporate governance, business services, cultural institutions, international organizations, governmental agencies, and infrastructural development has in maintaining the asset base critical for urban, national, and regional competitiveness (Amin and Graham 1997: 413; Castells 1989; Freedman 1995; Parkinson 1997: 7; Sassen 1991, 1994).

In contrast to the territorial dispersal of the operation of the transnational corporations (TNCs) their headquarters have become concentrated in few urban centers where multiple inter-personal, inter-organizational, inter-urban, inter-national, and inter-regional networks converge (Fitzpatrick 1997: 9) explaining thereby the global prominence of London, New York, and Tokyo (Sassen 1991, 1994) that have risen in their urban hierarchies due to the polarizing influence of the spatial decentralization (Amin and Graham 1997: 413; Graham 1997). The post-Fordist reliance on the networks of "[t]rust, reciprocity, reflexivity, and minimization of risk" (Amin and Graham 1997: 414) steeply increases the centrality of global cities to the processes of management of the structures of both positive and negative opportunities (Mitchelson and Wheeler 1994: 88). Liberalized regulation of financial, industrial, labor, and consumption markets has made possible to apply economies of scale to management of investments, risks, services, infrastructures, and assets from global cities having positional advantage of offering high level of systemic interpenetration that distinguishes global economic institutions standing in relations of cumulative causation with each other (Amin and Graham 1997: 414).

International financial centers concentrate organizational, service, and communication infrastructures that bring macro environments of reflexive workforce, organization culture, and global management (Thrift 1994) into relations of positive feedback that amplify both the influence of networks into which global cities are embedded and the share of global flows that enter into relations of exchange, translation, and coordination (Thrift 1996b) that the struggles over the access to which via personal networks, up-to-date interpretations, and real-time information play out in such global cities as London (Amin and Graham 1997: 414). The transition to post-Fordist economic relations has also changed the perception that cities represent liability absorbing public spending on urban problems as the post-Fordist logic of accumulation has shifted its base from industrial production towards cities as media of investment, development, and accumulation (Amin and Graham 1997: 414; Jacobs 1984; Sclar 1992). Correspondingly, the post-Fordist policy-making groups involved in urban development have changed the frame of their discourse from that of regulation of industry to that of regulation of investment as cities are increasingly seen as conglomerates of labor force, profit opportunities, capital funds, circulating goods, service clusters, and organizational networks (Amin and Graham 1997: 414; Cisneros 1993: 21).

The global city becomes integrated into post-Fordist capitalist accumulation not via economic instrumentalization of the industrial system and relations but via mobilization of the capital that physical, social, and financial infrastructures can yield as investment, development, and speculation bases (Amin and Graham 1997: 414; Cisneros 1993: 21). Since the post-Fordist model of capitalism has formed in response to the profitability decreases caused by research and development costs, flexible specialization, and volatile demand, the valorization of cities as sites of agglomeration economies can be considered as part of the collective enterpreneurial strategy of cost minimization as knowledge, serivices, and information are sourced from the dense urban networks nurtured by a variety of institutional relations among the economic, societal, associational, and political systems (Knight 1995; Knight and Gappert 1989; Munch 1982: 94; Ryser 1994) that within the urban structure of their relations increase competitiveness, creativity, and connectivity of collective actors (Amin and Graham 1997: 414-415; Lash and Urry 1994). The reflexive accumulation of the post-Fordist capitalism envolves the structure of collective action in its entirety (Munch 1982) in that the institutional processes of interpenetration among its systems becomes the primary process compensating for the decline of industrial capitalism in early industrial countries by the structural functional integration among corporate, media, arts, educational, scientific, and municipal institutions (Amin and Graham 1997: 415; Knight 1995: 259).

The transition to post-Fordism in the 1980s has shifted the flexibly organized industrial production to few metropolitan areas where smaller firms form clusters of innovation, knowledge, and specialization environments (Scott 1988; Storper 1996) dependent on global transportation and communication networks that reduce economic risk and transaction costs by selecting from widely diverse information, labor, and supply-chain sources (Amin and Thrift 1992) the accelerated accumulation and circulation of which increasingly depends on the existence of spatial entrepreneurial agglomerations (Amin and Graham 1997: 415; Malmberg and Maskell 1996). The policy and planning discourse on urban renewal (Bianchini et al. 1988; Montgomery 1995) reasserts the importance of creative cities (Landry and Bianchini 1995) where urban culture, media, entertainment, sport, and education undergo institutional interpenetration of their respective social systems that meet the crises of post-Fordiasm with the strategies of experience society (Schulze 1991) organized around the practices of cultural consumption and production, information and communication networks, and night-time economies (Amin and Graham 1997: 415; Gritffith 1995; Lash and Urry 1994).

The deregulated dynamics of post-Fordism enlists the repudiation of the modernist city planning (Jacobs 1961) in favor of density, diversity, stimulation, and interaction (Montgomery 1995: 102) that promote shared spaces, public realms, mixed-use landscapes, and intercultural activities called to remedy the urban alienation, decay, polarization, and privatization (Bianchini and Schwengel 1991; Worpole 1992) that beset the cities that failing to be recognized as sites of systemic interpenetration (Munch 1991) reinforce the feedback cycle of disorganized capitalism via aesthetic critique of its effects (Amin and Graham 1997: 415-416). That the urban assets have drawn theoretical, political, and economic attention in the global context of the transition to post-Fordism that promises revitalization of the cities most affected by the decline of Fordism cannot but perpetuate the crises of the post-industrial capitalism that has inherited urban infrastructures only partially adaptible to the imperatives of the flexible accumulation (Amin and Graham 1997: 416) that overly focuses on advanced management, services, design, culture, and finance whose constitutive networks have to be seen in systemic perspective to allow comprehensive analytical approach to the urban change (Thrift and Olds 1996: 312).

The analysis of urban change that does not define its constitutive social systems, their systemic interrelationships, and the variation in the structure of the systems and their relations can hardly conceptualize the differences in how various cities respond to transformations in service industries, information infrastructures, locational policies, flows architectures, and finance instrumentalization (Amin and Graham 1997: 416; Storper 1995: 28). The methodological tendencies to overgeneralize from case studies and to overemphasize the relevance of ethnographic conclusions (Thrift 1996a) have to be controlled by a theoretical framework connecting "particular spaces, senses of time and partial representations" (Amin and Graham 1997: 416) into variable urban structures. The reasons for prominence of cities vis-a-vis global flows can only be formulated with the help of the theoretical reconstruction of the structure of global and local relations into which they are built in (Munch 1982, 1984, 1986) so that urban environments have to be approached as paradigmatic examples of their diverse interrelationships (Munch 1991) that allow only analytical rather than ethnographic reconstruction (Amin and Graham 1997: 416) of post-modern urban change (Soja 1989), global network centrality (Knox and Taylor 1995), national economic motors (Storper 1995), and creative cities (Griffiths 1995).

Since different cities can occupy dissimilar positions in the structures of inter-urban relations, the changes to urban assets, the appropriate policy recommendations, and the leading economic sectors (Amin and Graham 1997: 417) invariably have to be identified in accordance with structural and functional fit with the cities enjoying regional and global centrality, with the requirements of the translocal relations of specialization, and with networks where urban particularities can offer technological, institutional, or cultural advantage. While the methodological dangers of overgeneralization have been widely discussed in relation to research of cities (Amin and Graham 1997: 417; Jencks 1996: 26; Thrift 1996b; Shields 1995: 245), the city cannot be reconstructed in either descriptive or comparative terms as long as it is approached as an agglomeration of spaces, temporalities, and representations lacking in overarching structure, stable interrelationships, or systemic impact on action (Demattes 1988; Healey et al. 1995). The frame of reference of the ethnographic research of cities has to change from sampling of single paradigmatic sites to a multi-sited institutional ethnography which would combine the theoretical framework making possible conception of systems, interrelationships, and action structurally integrated with each other (Munch 1982; 1986) with the institutional ethnography (Smith 2005) following the methodology of the multi-sited anthropology (Marcus 1994) in, for instance, connecting global financial centers, technological and organizational innovation, and social and cultural institutions into a translocal structure of urban relations (Amin and Graham 1997: 417).

From the perspective of such a multi-sited institutional ethnography it becomes possible not only to derive the national variations (Munch 1984) of the structure of modernity (Munch 1986) but also the urban structures (Munch 1991: 232-244) of relations, systems, and entrepreneurial groups that form the spatially, historically, and relationally specific structure of interpenetration of the social systems that constitutively affect the collective action as its macro environments responsive to the structural functional differentiation according to their own scale as sites of strategic centrality, interrelated diversity, or mobile interconnection (Amin and Graham 1997: 417; Shilds 1995). Similar to how aesthetic critique of capitalism reinforces its deregulation, the post-structural critique of cities (Shields 1995: 245) adds to the "dominance of partial interpretations" (Amin and Graham 1997: 417) of the urban multiplicity precisely because of its stress on its methodological and theoretical instability that combined with the complexity of globalizing networks (Dematteis 1988) hardly makes the reconstruction of the structures of urban relations possible. The social systems composing the structure of modernity (Munch 1982, 1986) represent within the system of action an integration of its latent structures, adaptive closure of its strategies, and oriented selection of goals that reduce the urban multiplicity of individual and collective actions to a dynamic structure of systemic interpenetration where the economic (Engels 1985), societal (Amin and Graham 1997: 418), associational (LeGates and Stout 1996), and political (Mumford 1937) systems reflexively arise (Munch 1982: 94).

The contradictions of modernity (Munch 1991) find their parallels in the urban life (Amin and Graham 1997: 418; Davis 1990; Sennett 1970; Wilson 1991) as individualism irreconsilably implies both the freedom of anonymity and the subjection to anomie (Munch 1991: 31-32), as universalism irreconsilably results in both unhindered transparency and dinimished involvement (Munch 1991: 32-34), as rationalism irreconsilably produces both spectacular wealth and abject poverty (Munch 1991: 29-30), and as instrumental activism irreconsilably leads both to declining compassion and to expanding solidarity (Munch 1991: 34-37). Correspondingly, the systemic structure of urban relations (Amin and Graham 1997: 418) can be cast as an interpenetration of the social systems of economic, cultural, solidarity, and political accumulation that via respective investment of money, speech, reputation, and power give rise to a structure of dynamic, interwoven, and contingent relations (Munch 1991: 371). By the same token as the lengthening of the interdependence chains cannot explain systemic interpenetration (Munch 1982: 473), an unqualified assertion of the spatial properties of cities as the wellsrping of their special place in the structure of social, economic, cultural, and political relations (Adams 1995: 279; Amin and Graham 1997: 418; Boden and Molotch 1994: 259; Thrift 1996b) cannot explain the historical, technological, social, legal, or economic dynamics of modernization on either urban or global scale (Munch 1982).

The embedding of the city-based structure of relations into the global structure of modernity assumes growing importance in the urban theorization and policy making (Amin and Graham 1997: 418) as the circuits of financial, cultural, and economic exchange have developed from the systemic differentiation between the local and the global scale towards the structural functional integration of disembedded communication networks, trans-local social relations, global business cycles, technically mediated cultures, and communicationally displaced cities (Adams 1995; Giddens 1990). The process of systemic interpenetration has been largely neglected in the discourse on growing participation of cities in the global, regional, and national economies for the reason of which the reorganization of individual and collective action on existing and evolving spatial scales has escaped its theoretical attention that is yet to conceptualize urban creativity, innovation, and economy in terms of functional differentiation and systemic integration (Amin and Graham 1997: 418-419). With the international interpenetration of economies, cultures, and societies on the rise, cities provide increasingly more adequate analytical entry-points into the dynamics of interrelationships among urban clusters of innovation, specialization, and creativity that raise the importance of place-embedded factors emphasizing personal experience, reciprocity, and trust (Amin and Graham 1997: 419).

Likewise, the relations among dense urban nodes fall into the pattern of structural functional integration with each other within the same city and trans-locally as enclaves of creativity, innovation, and learning connect across disembedded areas to "inner-city industrial districts, cultural complexes or central business districts" (Amin and Graham 1997: 419) so that the pattern of their interrelationships resembles a network connecting a multiplicity of differentiated units (Wilson 1995) that amplify urban dynamics of global adaptability precisely via cross-currents of influences tying vast variety of needs, functions, and cimpatibilities together. As the relations of interpenetration among the social systems become increasingly more important for understanding the urban dynamics than any single social domain in isolation, the heterogeneity of rationalities, spatialities, identities, and temporalities becomes critically important catalyst of economic vitality, cultural novelty, urban governance, and institutional innovation (Amin and Graham 1997: 419). The systemic interpenetration as a process unfolding in space and time receives independent theoretical support from the analyses of heterogeneous urban integration of multiple processes undergoing real-time differentiation (Harvey 1996: 259-264) within the dynamic relational structures (Amin and Graham 1997: 419) that generate interdependent geographies of time and space (Thrift 1996a: 2; Thrift et al. 1978).

The actor-network theories (Callon 1986, 1991; Latour 1993) extend the micro corrective of the structural functionalism (Colomy and Roades 1994) to the embedding of configurations of technical artifacts (Bingham 1996; Hinchcliffe 1996) into structures of collective and individual action that rather than stressing the expanded possibilities of new technological environments (Negroponte 1995) draw attention to the relational, contingent, performative, and structural effects of agents' participation in the systemic interpenetration as social ordering (Amin and Graham 1997: 420; Bingham 1996: 647; Thrift 1996a) in the context of struggles, macro environments, and opportunities where diverse individual and collective concerns are at stake (Thrift 1996b). That the systemic interpenetration creates urban macro environments for the structurally entreprenerial strategies of "heterogenerous social groups, filieres of firms, governance agencies" (Amin and Graham 1997: 420) demands analyses of cities as sites where complex macro-micro connections put into relational perspective processes, networks, actors, things, and spaces entering into configurations of simultaneous integration and differentiation (Thirft 1996b: 1485).

Within the urban structure of systemic interpenetration the individual and collective agency assumes forms that reflect the processes constitutive of social groups, actor-networks, and time-spaces as entities reflexively participating in the reproduction of social structures on global, regional, urban, and individual scales (Amin and Graham 1997: 420; Dear 1995; Graham and Marvin 1996) that produce both highly concentrated environments of electronic securities traders (Thrift 1995) and disconnected areas outside of communications networks (Graham and Aurigi 1997). Under the influence of the momentum of the systemic interpenetration (Judge et al. 1995) the institutuional structures of cities change from hierarchical architectures to interrelated networks (Stoker 1995) that contribute to the institional differentiation creating specifically urban forms of interpenetration of public, private, non-governmental, and hybrid forms of governance (Amin and Graham 1997: 420) exhibiting greater degree of adaptability, complexity, and connectivity (Amin and Hausner 1997; Healey 1995; Mayer 1995). The research of interrelationships among the systems of economic, cultural, solidarity, and political accumulation (Munch 1991: 371) goes beyond partial perpectives and case studies generalizations towards preserving the urban complexity via systemic exploration of the dimensions of its diversity, contingency, interdependence, and structure that inform the analysis of urban dynamics, urban policy and planning, urban competitiveness, cultural institutions, and collective projects (Amin and Graham 1997: 420-421).

Across the economic, cultural, solidarity, and political systems the contingency of action stemming from hierarchies and conflicts and symbolic complexity stemming from heterogeneities and particularities (Munch 1991: 370) are reduced by the uniting force of the institutionally entrepreneurial projects that provide basis for social intergation, collective identity, and shared belonging (Amin and Graham 1997: 421). From the perspective of the systemic interpenetration of the social structure (Munch 1991: 371), the focus of the post-Fordist urban policy on the stimulation of consumption (Ritzer 1999; Zukin 1995) via promotion of spectacular architecture, cultural events, and commercial theme-parks (Gottdiener 1997) neglects the dependence of the structure of modernity on the solidarity accumulation by means of mobilization of cultural values and ideas, of economic legitimacy, and of political cooperation that cannot be based on spatial exclusion (Amin and Graham 1997: 421), social ghettoization (Wilson 1995: 158), and narrow coalitions (Judge et al. 1995). Though urban spaces have historically been integrated into the practices of "socio-spatial segregation, social control and surveillance" (Amin and Graham 1997: 421), in the structure of modernity the rational discourse on the universality of human and citizen rights affects the normative regulation of the economic exchange and the legal regulation of the social relations (Munch 1991: 367) so that urban spaces cannot be vehicles for social, racial, or gender discrimination (Boyer 1995: 82, 105, 1996; Gottdeiner 1997: 134) without corresponding deficiences of the citizenship institutions.

Critique of the rational discourse (Beauregard 1996) alone cannot account for the processes of differentiation, rationalization, and interpenetration (Munch 1991: 367) that tie liberal, cultural, social, and political rights into the structure of their institutionalization (Lovering 1995: 119) that dependent on its historical, contextual, and spatial configuration can succeed or fail to lead to urban renewal and creativity. The utilitarian interpretation of the interpenetration of the social systems conceptually privileges the marketplaces of connectivity, power, money, and culture accomulation as the respective wellsprings of solidarity, polity, economy, and creativity (Amin and Graham 1997: 422; Zukin 1995: 42) that are supposed to evolve not within the social structure of the interrelationships among the respective institutional systems (Munch 1991: 370) but as a spontaneous result of the free exchange across public spaces (Zukin 1995: 260). Since the structure of action envelops the social institutions while not being restricted to them (Amin and Graham 1997: 422; Munch 1991: 369) the interaction between individuals and social systems cannot guide urban analyses, policy, and planning in isolation from the independently occurring dynamics between cultural institutions and social structure and between individual and collective strategies and the city as agglomeration of macro institutional environments for action.

From the perspective of the micro corrective to the structural functionalism (Colomy and Roades 1994) the urban innovation and creativity have to be conceptualized as institutional entrepreneurial projects that go beyond the evolutionary, economic, or organizational innovation in the form of post-Fordist networks based on reflexive rule-making, milieux of trust and reciprocity, and epistemic community-building (Amin and Graham 1997: 422) towards further differentiation of the social structure of cities rather than social homogeneity, cultural intermingling, and pleasurable consumption (Amin and Graham 1997: 422). However, the contradictions of modernity bring the pluralization of association, the universalization of moral norms, and the rule of law (Munch 1991: 367) to bear upon the citizen, urban, and, economic rights with the effect of rising "tolerance for difference, diffuse citizeship and hybrid shared spaces" (Amin and Graham 1997: 422) that binds rational capitalism, discourse, citizenry, and authority into the dynamics of interpenetration between capital mobility, discursive inflation, disciplinary state, and governance crises. Consequently, cities as macro environments for action have to stress not only the economic and solidarity accumulation via temporary and flexible employment, family and community networks, informal and industrial services, third sector employment, environmental recuperation projects, community and social assistance services, and community banks turning urban centers into hubs of productivity growth, nonmonetary exchange, skills development, and organizational innovation (Amin and Graham 1997: 423; Thrift 1996a), but also interrelated social, governmental, economic, technological, and cultural policy-making (Munch 1991: 370).

The differentiation of the cultural accumulation occurs through investment of discourse into diverse cultural goods and services, mobilization of power, and reputation building (Munch 1991: 371) that within the urban social structure contributes to its renewal, integration, and evolution in the possible direction of inclusive, hybrid, and creol (Hall 1995) development of society, economy, politics, and culture. However, the system of interrelations among the economic, cultural, solidarity, and political accumulation processes includes among its factors the legitimation of economic activity, collective action, and political agency (Munch 1991: 371) that constrain the potential for differentiation that the urban, national, and regional social structures can have (Amin and Graham 1997: 423) as multiple countervailing influences mutually bind social systems into particular configurations exhibiting varying degress of propensity for tolerance, innovation, and growth. Not only does modern citizenry has its liberal, cultural, social, and political rights institutionalized (Wilson 1991) under the universalizing impact of the rational discourse, under the legalizing effect of rational exercize of power on urban communities, and under the pluralizing influence of rational capitalism on social association (Munch 1991: 367), but also the process of modernization as growing systemic interpenetration has to bring the rational capitalism mutually to bear both on discourse via situative adaptation of cultural ideas and rational calculation and on legal authority via accountability of action and profit taxation (Munch 1991: 368) should extremes of utilitarian exploitation, income inequality, racial, ethnic or gender discrimination, and life-chances differences be avoided (Amin and Graham 1997: 423).

Rather than a site of celebration of unmanaged diversity (Robins 1991), the city should be embedded into policies promoting social justice, community empowerment, and non-hierarchical urban planning that can rely on the institutional interpenetration between the legally regulated authority of the state and the rational discourse on civic democracy (Munch 1991: 368) jointly participating in self-determination and vocal representation of communities via formalized channels of communication on civic governance (Amin and Graham 1997: 423-424). The state concentrates power by making economic, policy, social and political decisions that respectively exchanges political goods, services, and returns with the economic system and cooperation and reputation building with the solidarity system that in return for welfare payments and community goods and services engages in economic cooperation and mobilization (Munch 1991: 371) thereby creating dynamics of system-mediated links among social justice, community-building, and empowerment (Amin and Graham 1997: 424) putting political limits on the policy effects that fiscal crises or neo-liberal state can have (Mingione 1996) while increasingly involving non-governmental organizations.

In the city, as a site of institutional interpenetration of the social systems, the dynamics of differentiation of social policy, association market, public discourse, and social coalition-building (Munch 1991: 370) alters the social structure of the spatial and temporal distribution of labor, of the geography of economic exchange, of the social boundaries of market involvement, of the media of social mobilization, and of the relationships among public, private, and voluntary organizations and regulatory frameworks (Amin 1996; Amin and Graham 1997: 424; European Commission 1995). The functional integration building upon the further structural differentiation of the social system involves a change in the structure of relations among the solidarity, political, and economic systems (Munch 1991: 370) as economic goals become intedependent with social justice, as urban associations interpenetrate with market economy and welfare state, as decision-making and authority equally engage political, economic, and social actors, as urban governance embeds state and economic institutions into public discourse, and as discursively negotiated authority replaces the politics of institutional hierarchy (Amin and Graham 1997: 424; Judge et al. 1995; Lauria 1997).

Under the influence of the institutional interpenetration, interactive governance (Amin and Graham 1997: 424), dialogic democracy (Beck 1997; Giddens 1994), communicative action (Arendt 1958, 1972; Habermas 1978, 1981) and interactive reasoning (Healey 1997; Lake 1994; Patomaki 1995) connect economic, cultural, association, and political systems into a relational structure of collective action bringing businesses, organizations, government agencies, and individuals into a decentered network where multiple rationalities, institutions, and actors mesh (Amin and Hausner 1997). The effect on urban policy-making of the institutional interpenetration consists in growing discursive complexity of the relations between political institutions and interest groups (Munch 1991: 370) that via networking, partnerships, and negotiations contribute to consensus-building, conflict resolution, and innovative solutions (Amin and Graham 1997: 425) while preserving the latent structues of transparency, empowerment, deliberation, and communication (Leedbeater and Mulgan 1994) that contribute to the civic participation in the urban governance by steering urban, social, public, arbitrage, and media policy (Graham and Marvin 1996; Hill 1994).

The insitutional interpenetration among political, economic, cultural, and association systems fosters the distribution of authority and reflexivity across governmental, business, and civic organizations that develop network-based relations of equal representation, limited power, and diffuse authority that facilitate inclusive public discourse, decision-making, associational networks, and empowerment practices (Amin and Graham 1997: 425; Cohen and Rogers 1992; Hirst 1994). The dynamics of relations among the economic, solidarity, and political systems produces the self-reinforcing causal links among economic reputation-building, political benefits, and social mobilization (Munch 1991: 371) that produce polarizing effects on the processes of accumulation of money, reputation, and power having reinforcing influence on the structure of urban relations among local interests, associative networks, and urban politics (Amin and Graham 1997: 425). The position of the cultural system in the urban structure of social relations responds to the imperatives of the cultural accumulation (Munch 1991: 371) via expanding investment with discourse of civic autonomy, contestatory politics, urban authority, and civic consensus (Healey and Vigar 1996) that accumulate social capital (Putnam 1993) by economic mobilization of communication, claim urban solidarity (Mann 1986) by social mobilization of communication, and pursue universal justice (Amin and Graham 1997: 426) by political mobilization of communication.

The process of modernization as institutional interpenetration countervails the tendency to maintain the differentiation between the rational authority, capitalism and discourse in the direction of relations of mutual interdependence between goal-oriented ethical choices and rational appropriation of nature, society, and culture (Munch 1991: 367-368) as a concomitant of social, economic, political, and cultural struggles for and against collective projects of equality, welfare, inclusion, sustainability, and urbanity (Amin and Graham 1997: 426; Escobar 1992: 426-427; Walker 1994). The global generalization of the structure of modernity has raised the level of complexity of institutional relations of the urban structures around the world beyond the grasp of models of urban decentralization, pluralism, and governance (Amin and Graham 1997: 426) towards the condition of differentiation, rationalization, and interpenetration that demands detailed mapping of the dynamics of mobilization, relations, and agency among diverse institutions, plural movements, representative groups, and formal organizations. Since the social structure of modernity is embedded into the structure of individual and collective action (Munch 1991: 369), its contextualization in particular cities has to employ the micro corrective of the structural functionalism (Colomy and Rhoades 1994) to account for how struggles among competing interest groups shape the economic, cultural, association, and political systems on the urban scale where claims for social justice, empowerment, and solidarity are made (Amin and Graham 1997: 426).

An institutional project promoting further differentiation of the social structure for the sake of solidarity, social justice, and social needs cannot abstain from the dynamics of rationalization and interpenetration as the institutionally entrepreneurial groups enter into binding interrelationships with the governmental institutions, intermediate organizations, and public discourses (Amin and Graham 1997: 426). An isolated approach to the conflicts occurring in the simultaneous and interdependent processes of political, economic, cultural, and social accumulation (Munch 1991: 371) can hardly address the political challenges of urban growth, the economic loss of city assets, the urban breakdown of civic culture, and communal powerlessness before social deregulation (Amin and Graham 1997: 427). Therefore, the interpenetration of the structures of investment of capital, discourse, reputation, and power ties the social, fiscal, economic, technological, and cultural policy-making into the waxing or waning fortunes of the urban markets of economic, social, political and cultural goods and services flowing across the social structure where circulation, distribution, and accumulation are just consequences of individual and collective actions (Munch 1991: 370-371).

Analysis of Schmidt's (2006) Multiple Modernities or Varieties of Modernity?

2008-01-18T00:36:00.000-07:00

The growing conceptual attention to multiple modernities though insufficiently theorized and lacking in empirical support gives impetus to theoretical reconciliation between a single structure of modernity and the diversity of its local realizations within the conceptual framework of the varieties of modernity that similar to the institutional analysis of the varieties of capitalism allows for comparative application of the concept of the structure of modernity to comprehensive formulation of the institutional, systemic, and contextual variation (Schmidt 2006: 77). In the 1990s, the emergence of the concept of multiple modernities (Wittrock 2000) has marked a departure from homogenizing assumptions of modernization theory, from normative privileging of Western modernity, and from oversimplification of empirically divergent processes that made it imperative to theorize historical trajectories, sociocultural backrgounds, and distinctive modernities in terms of irreducible institutional multiplicity (Schmidt 2006: 77-78). However, the modernization theory (Huntington 1971) has of necessity developed amid diversity that via its meanings, its degrees, and its patterns has determined how persistent vis-a-vis instutional change, how compatible with local conditions, and how deeply entrenched in societies, cultures, and economies it ultimately is (Schmidt 2006: 78).

Failing to disprove the modernization theory, to offer its alternative defitions, and to defend its claims to validity the conceptualization of multiple modernities (Hefner 1998; Spohn 2003) does not participate in the theoretical discussion of modernity (Weber 1978) that, as opposed to narrow focus on culture and politics, addresses modern society in its totality, processes constitutive of its emergence, and systems participant in its structure (Schmidt 2006: 78). The theory of the structure of modernity (Munch 1984, 1986) responds to the main points of the conceptualization of multiple modernities while suggesting an approach that both addresses its substantive concerns and steers clear of its pitfalls. Modernity conceived of as multiplicity of cultural rather than institutional projects (Eisenstadt 2000a) anchors the associated with it transformations of "the industrial revolution, the urban revolution, the scientific revolution, the political revolution, the educational revolution" (Schmidt 2006: 79) in the rupture with pre-modern epistemic assumptions (Wittrock 2000). The European Enlightenment has laid basis for the modernity including as contingent social order political democracy, secular state, rule of law, individual rights, market economy, civil society, and intellectual freedoms into its structure (Schmidt 2006: 79).

Though modernization is primarily associated with the industrial revolution, ascendancy of bourgeoisie, and continuous development (Kumar 1999), its expansion from the West to the rest of the world is identified with the project of modernity (Bendix 1977: 410; Habermas 1988, 1994; Marx 1936: 13; Parsons 1964) in counterposition to which stands the multiple modernities perspective (Schmidt 2006: 79). The controversial consequences that modernization has in various societies (Giddens 1990) tend to be interpreted by modernization theorists as indicators of convergent development of modern societies whereas the multiple modernities proponents draw attention to how irreducible differences are undimished by modernity (Schmidt 2006: 79-80). The multiple modernities position ranges in its applicability from states to civilizations (Huntington 1996) where diverse social institutions do not allow uniform classification according to a single set of the analytical categories of modernization (Schmidt 2006: 80; Wittrock 2000). However, the validity of culture or religion as criteria of classification into separate modernities (Tabari 2003; Weiss 2003) does not have theoretical or empirical support in so far as the comparison of the structure of the respective modernitieis is concerned (Eisenstadt 2000b) as a consequence of which the structure of modernity tolerant to variations of its particular realizations (Luhmann 1998, 2002) can be more adequate framework for comparative conceptualization of institutional, historical, and structural differences (Schmidt 2006: 80-81).

To the extent that the transition to modernity has radically revolutionary social, economic, and cultural effects (Nisbet 1966) the existence of multiple modernities is irreconsilable with modernization as a process more defined by its ruptures rather than its continuities that, though dependent on the terms of inter-institutional, inter-state, or inter-regional comparison, define modernity as a relative not an absolute condition, as a singular not a multiple event, and as a variable not a constant phenomeon (Schmidt 2006: 81). Since the definition and the magnitude of differences out of which multiple modernities could be constructed are insufficient to invalidate the theorization of the structure of modernity the latter can successfully address its criticisms by accounting for existing differences as variation of the structure common to modern societies (Schmidt 2006: 81). An approach to modernity as a singular phenomenon permits to theoretically select the decisive differences upon which claims to variation can be empirically based. Elaborating upon the varieties of capitalism approach (Hall and Soskice 2001; Streeck and Yamamura 2001; Yamamura and Streeck 2003) the varieties of modernity emphasize shared, institutional, and temporal differences that encompass the structure of modernity (Weber 1984) rather than restrict themselves to any of its systems (Schmidt 2006: 81-82).

The varieties of capitalism put the differences pertaining to cases taken for comparative analysis into structures capturing the typological features pertaining to collective action and its environments to describe each of its ideal types (Schmidt 2006: 82) so that one can classify capitalism into liberal and coordinated or into market, managed, and state-capitalist (Schmidt 2002). Importantly, institutional configurations can serve to form groups of states belonging to the same ideal type of modernity the social systems of which providing indepedent criteria for classification by similarities among welfare states employing different social policy regimes (Esping-Anderson 1990; Jones 1993), influences of Western models of capitalism on Asian welfare states (Holliday 2000; Hort and Kuhnle 2000; McLaughlin 1993), typological distinctiveness of democratic regimes (Kaiser 1997), and different legal systems across national jurisdictions (Rohl 1997) embedded into the varieties of their respective structures of modernity (Schmidt 2006: 82-83). Such comparative analyses can only draw their precision from the "concrete form and functioning" (Schmidt 2006: 83) of the institutions composing the structure of modernity that characterizes different countries as its regional varieties, historical realizations, or common types.

In the case of institution of science, the uniform benchmarks used to evaluate its results, the competition in the publication market, and the universality of scientific principles ensure that the differences among countries or regions are marginal even though the structures of access to professional positions can produce variations dependent on the degree of the structural functional differntiation of the national social structures with the system of science of the United States being more open and that of Germany more closed (Schmidt 2001, 2006: 83). The institutionalized medicine (Lock 2002) likewise does not exhibit significant differerences among modern societies where their respective social structures contribute more to the inter-state differences than the multiple modernities per se (Chirot 2001) that have to be recognized as varieties of implementation of the structure of modernity in historically, socially, and culturally specific institutions (Schmidt 2006: 83-84). Since the modernization of the European Union countries has been unevenly paced across their social systems other regions are also likely to reproduce the structure of modernity while preserving their institutional differences even as value systems, social structures, and possibilities distributions gradually increase their alignment with regionally or globally prevalent practices, principles, and arrangements as democracy (O'Donnell 1993), women rights (Dreze and Sen 1995), and universal suffrage (Phillips 1999) institutionalization processes suggest (Schmidt 2006: 84).

The departure from the multiple modernities perspective allows to take cities and regions rather than nations and civilizations into the focus of theoretical attention that puts subnational economic, political and cultural differences into explanatory context drawing on the structure of modernity having local and urban variations (Heller 1999; Putnam 1993) that position northern Italy, Kerala state of India, city-state of Singapore, region of Taiwan, state of Luxemburg, and city of Berlin vis-a-vis the modernization as more advanced representatives of a wider process of structural functional differentiation (Schmidt 2006: 84-85). Without identifying convergence with homogenization, the process of modernization involves all of the social systems of the structure of modernity as a singular phenomenon (Inglehart 1995; Inglehart and Baker 2000) qualitatively different from the pre-industrial condition that under the influence of implementation of the modern institutions (Meyer et al. 1997) gives way to structural commonalities that despite their local histories exhibit comparable struture of systemic relations (Jepperson 2002; Tu 2000) that define modern societies of mass consumption (Schmidt and Lim 2004), institutionalized individualism (Beck 1986), and post-traditional development (Phillips 1993; Schmidt 2006: 85-86; Senghaas 1998).

The multiple modernities approach does not advance understanding of modernity beyond the historical development towards the modern condition while the modernization theories do not include into their conceptual purview the structural functional analysis of modernity (Schmidt 2006: 86). Over the course of modernization, the variations of the structure of modernity exhibit convergent institutional development towards prevalence of democracy, market economy, and capitalism (Rodrick 2000; Sachs 2000; Schmidt 2006: 86; Wilensky 1975). In the global structure of the international relations the competitive advantage of the early industrial countries has been replaced by that of the late industrial nations led by China (Firebaugh 2003; Qian 2003: 298) in restoring the centrality of the East and Pacific Asia to global capitalism integrated into the international structure of modernity that as the most commonly shared condition (UNDP 2003) imposes the dynamics of structural functional differentiation and increasing autonomy and interpenetration upon the social systems involved in the process of modernization (Bell 2000) that, for instance, in China strengthens legal-rational bureaucratic instiutions, promotes freedoms of thought and speech, bolsters autonomy of scientific, legal, and economic institutions, and provides legal basis for property rights (Schmidt 2006: 86-87).

The implications of the varieties of modernity thesis require further intergation into the theory of the structure of modernity (Munch 1982, 1984, 1986) as the most promising basis for comparative study of cities, nations, and regions. The transition to modernity being the most fundamental driver of social, economic, and cultural change has released the dynamics of interrelationships among the systems of the structure of modernity that has consistently outweighed the pre-modern differences in steering the course of development towards institutional convergence (Schmidt 2006: 87-88). The theorization of the structure of modernity (Munch 1986) provides the framework to conceptualize the varieties of modernity that can accomodate existing differences among cities, nations, and regions, explicate relations among the economic, political, societal, and associational systems, delineate the social structures of societies in their entirety, and account for differentiation, integration, and interpenetration of modern institutions (Luhmann 1997; Munch 1984; Schmidt 2006: 88). The comprehensive comparison of the structures of modernity may aid in forming clusters of cities, countries, and regions based on analytical criteria of examination that within the varieties of modernity perspective takes processes of structural differentiation, systemic interpenetration, and collective agency as its benchmarks for delimitation, classification, and assessment of institutions, systems, and structures.

The varieties of modernity being clusters of societies sharing patterns of institutional configurations and relations represent a reinterpretation of Weber's approach to capitalism have to be put into the context of the structure of modernity theorization (Munch 1982, 1984, 1986). Only by building upon interdisciplinary theoretical developments and attempting to establish conceptual connections among different schools of sociology can the varieties of modernity approach be applied to such subnational entities as cities that have to be seen as representatives of the structures of modernity dependent on the coherent institional patterns clustered into structures where their component systems enter into specific relations explanatory of the economy, culture, and society. The structures of modernity approach adequately addresses the issues raised by both the multiple modernities and varieties of modernity theories since it analytically distinguishes among such systems as cultural, economic, political, legal and the interrelationships among them at the same time as specifying the terms of structural integration that are used to posit systems and conditions of their autonomy and intepenetration (Munch 1982) going beyond either clustering or classification of institutional patterns (Schmidt 2006: 89). The empirical grounding of the application of the theoretical framework of the structure of modernity to cities has to be brought into communcation with urban theories, contemporarty conceptualizations of urban change, and emerging patterns of interpenetration between economy, culture, and other social systems.

Analysis of Arnason's (2001) Capitalism in Context

2008-01-12T13:56:00.000-07:00

The recognition that discourse on capitalism is tantamount to the discourse on modernity based on determinist and reductivist premises has to lead to elaboration of systemic relations between economy, culture, and action that in historical perspective has to incorporate the contribitions of Weber, Sombart, Castoriadis, Boltanski, Chiapello, and Braudel for recontruction of the structure of modernity (Arnason 2001: 99). Rapid development of industrial capitalism in the last two centuries has been comparably described by Weber as the most decisive influence on modernity as it took its distinctively disruptive and transformative form, by Marx as the dynamic force behind the development of modernity, and by Durkheim as the process of division of labor unprecedentedly having both positive and negative social effects (Arnason 2001: 99-100). Global deregulation (Lash and Urry 1987), capitalist development (Marx 1848), and world system (Wallerstein 1995) provide highly visible examples of conflation of capitalism with modernity ascribing to the economic system increasingly pervasive social influence with the contradictions of the capitalist logic dictating the course of events around the world increasing thereby the reach of modernization (Arnason 2001: 100).

When identified with modernity (Baechler 1995), capitalism leaves to democracy the political role of institutionalization of utilitarian individualism finding its adequate reflection in the capitalist economic system that by virtue of its inherent efficiency rules out a post-capitalist transition while its development from the late medieval Europe via the modern transformation of the Western Europe towards its global expansion by the end of the twentieth century remains driven by the economic dynamics (Arnason 2001: 100-101). As an economic system, capitalism does not overlap the social system but constitutes only one among other systems that provide prolitical, societal, and association criteria for action also determined by cultural, strategic, and personality systems (Munch 1982: 94) so that the institutionalization of modernity does not change the structure of the action system but provides a uniquely different macro environment for individual and collective action (Baechler 1995). The approaches to modernity as a primarily economic phenomenon cannot but have affinity with Marx's theory of capitalism that providing common conceptual premises drew faultlines for political divisions and struggles (Arnason 2001: 102).

The specification of capitalism in terms of the structure of modernity has to account for the historical dynamics of the disruptions that context-insensitive analyses of capitalist development do not do justice to while avoiding excessive emphasis on the functional integration, adaptive upgrading, and cybernetic control of the modernization theory of Parsons, on the rational integration of contradictions between modernity and capitalism of the critical theory of Habermas, and on the reduction of modernity and capitalism to each other of the theories of modernization (Arnason 2001: 102). The concept of capitalism in classical and post-classical theory does not allow definitional reduction of it as a historical process to basic mechanisms of markets and property rights (Albert 1993) since as a historical phenomenon the understanding of which is open to debate and interpretation it has to be put into the context of contrasting approaches to its evolving theorization (Baechler and Wallerstein 1997). In parallel to the thesis of systemic interpenetration (Munch 1982: 94), Baechler's perspective constructs capitalism as an interrelationship among the systems of property rights, markets, utilitarian actions, and cultures that are oriented at maximization of economic growth (Baechler and Wallerstein 1997: 14).

By contrast, Wallerstein only needs "the permanent accumulation of capital" (Arnason 2001: 103) for his definition of capitalism that upon gaining unprecedented autonomy as an economic system has imposed its normative culture on all other systems constitutive of society and action (Baechler and Wallerstein 1997: 15) that within the relations of interpenetration can nevertheless change strategies of collective action in accordance with their own systemic logic as did the political systems of the former communist states. Even though particular social and action systems play a key role in the constitution of capitalism they do not do that alone but in concert with other systems that interpenetrate with each other via dynamic structure of their relationships rather than deterministically so that capital accumulation, technological progress, and economic growth are subject to "unpredictable patterns of change" (Arnason 2001: 104) while being part of capitalism as subsumption of human activity in the form of abstract wealth according to Marx ([1864] 1969). For the sociological analysis of capitalism to go beyond the narrow focus on capital accumulation or economic growth a more historical attention to the relations between economy and culture is needed since neither institutionalization of democracy (Baechler 1995) nor power struggles among ruling classes (Wallerstein 1995) sufficiently explain the rapidity or stages of the capitalist development (Arnason 2001: 104-105).

Likewise, the dynamics of interrelationships among the systems constitutive of modernity demands for its adequate understanding not their reduction to institutions but their definition as constellations of forces allowing for variation and change so that capitalism cannot be stablized within a single institutional configuration but has to be seen as a recursive process involving in its reproduction the structure of modernity as a whole that is as contingent, variable, and self-reflexive as individual and collective actors themselves (Arnason 2001: 105). The justification of capitalism by its economic rationality, as Castoriadis (1999) contends, appears more properly to belong to the structure of modernity organizing the action system (Munch 1982: 94) since in the process of differentiation and interpenetration the economic system maintains a complex and dynamic relationship with systems where discourse on, institutionalization of, and action governed by rationality become related to capitalist accumulation as elaborations on the neoclassical economic theory attest to (Arnason 2001: 106; Williamson 1985). Only the reformulation of capitalist accumulation as a process belonging to the structure of modernity where the economic system is embedded (Arnason 2001: 106-107) allows to avoid the extreme positions stating that either there is only a capitalist optimum point of economic equilibrium possible between rationality and development (Baechler 1995, 1: 91; 1995, 2: 160-166) or there is no equilibrium to achive because capitalism stands for unequal relations of social power mediated by struggles, institutions, and culture (Wallerstein 1995: 84).

From its earliest formulations, the concept of the spirit of capitalism corresponds to the defining configuration of the interpenetration between economy and culture that sets modernity apart from other historical macro environments for individual and collective action so that "orientation, justification and motivation" (Arnason 2001: 107) reinforce the capitalist economic growth within the structure of contraditions of modernity (Boltanski and Chiapello 1999: 41) as strategies, goals, and conditions of action become increasingly mediated by systems external to, autonomous from, and integrated with their participants (Arnason 2001: 108). The necessity of interpenetration between economy and culture finds its earliest reflection in the absolute, objective, and subjective determinants of action defined by Hegel as spirits that within the sociological context (Hintze 1987: 328) respectively consist in religious, philosophical, secular, and scientific discourses, in economic, social, and cultural institutions, and in motivations, values, and orientations (Arnason 2001: 108). Weber's thesis on the spirit of capitalism restrictively represents the interpenetration between economy and culture as an underdefined interconnection between the protestant ethic and traditional values while excluding their institutional context that only receives its credit for the captialist development as modern bureaucracy (Arnason 2001: 108-109) even though his later analyses of capitalism concentrate on historical and institutional preconditions of economic systems' differentiation (Collins 1986; Swedberg 1998) remaining to be developed into economic sociology of capitalism (Simmel [1900] 1978).

Centering on the psychological analysis of the interpenetration between economy and culture, Sombart's (1987) decription of entrepreneurial individuals that subject to enterprise-oriented goals drive economic growth to historically unprecedented social centrality combines utilitarian calculation with limitlessness of economic development lacking in normative culture to steer its direction (Arnason 2001: 109-110). Boltanski and Chiapello (1999) attempt to develop Weber's thesis within more abstract framework of economic institutions and cultural logic that in conjunction justify and legitimize the economic accumulation exhibiting regional and historical variation hardly accounted for by the concept of spirit of capitalism that as system of culture historically undergoing bourgeois, managerial, and network development has ambiguous relation to capitalism (Arnason 2001: 110). Boltanski and Chiapello extrapolate and abstract the political justification of capitalism from shared orders of worth (Boltanski and Thevenot 1999) that as structural relations among economy, politics, and culture played in early modern Europe (Hirschman 1977) the role of argumentation in favor of capitalism that under contemporary conditions corresponds to a project-oriented principle of legitimization representing a rupture with civic, market, or industrial regimes of justification (Arnason 2001: 110).

Since the spirit of capitalism implies causal relations between economy and culture, the critique of capitalism has accompanied the dynamics of economic development of modernity as its active participant via entrepreneurial strategies of collective actors, institutionalized contestation of its organizational foundations, and structural integration into its self-reflexive reproduction. In the dynamics of the spirit of capitalism (Boltanski and Chiapello 1999: 82) aesthetic and social critique have differential relation to the development of capitalism since aethetic criticism stressing disenchantment, inauthenticity, and oppression is concerned with impact of capitalist society on individuals while social criticism opposing misery, inequality, opportunism, and egoism is decrying the collective effects of capitalism (Arnason 2001: 111). Exhibiting close affinity to the anthropological critique of capitalism as ideology (Dumont 1979, 1983, 1991), Boltanski and Chiapello (1999) have primarily contributed to the ethnographic study of how contemporary capitalism integrated aesthetic critique, post-Fordism, and organizational innovation into its structure rather than to the theoretical discussion on variability of capitalist development, systemic relations between economy and culture, or institutional framework of economic analysis (Arnason 2001: 111-112).

While the interpenetration between economy and culture does not cease to be debated as the spirit of capitalism (Boltanski and Chiapello 1999), as the capitalist modernity (Marx 1848), and as social and historical contingency of economic development (Weber 1922), the contradictions of the structure of modernity (Castoriadis 1993; Munch 1992) go beyond Marx's theory of capitalism that depends on the growing role of rationality of its institutions in the theorization of which Marx's and Weber's contributions have to be systemically integrated to account for the institutions-driven economic, social, and cultural development encompassing both autonomy and interdependence as its goals (Arnason 2001: 112-113; Munch 1981). Since in the structure of modernity the economic system does not occupy a central position (Munch 1992: 94), the location of conflict, struggle, and critique in the theoretical discussion of modernity (Castoriadis 1999) is likewise determined by systematic analysis of the historical process of interpenetration of the economic system with other social and action systems that put rationality, autonomy, and variability of capitalism into reciprocal relation to the transformations in the structure of modernity (Arnason 2001: 113).

The defining impact of rationality on the modern interpenetration of economy and culture results from the historical process long preceding the chronology of modernity so that its structure has had variant realizations in much earlier historical periods as collective and individual action oriented at mastery and conquest became translated within the structure of modernity into domination of nature, rationalization of society, and maximization of economic growth harnessing other social systems to the imperatives of economic accumulation (Arnason 2001: 113-114). The interpenetration of economy and culture involves positive feedback between the social and the action systems as the political, societal, and cultural systems develop within the interdependent structure of modernity that via technological innovation, scientific knowledge, and capital investment puts rationality into historical context of economic accumulation that depends on mobilizing myths (Castoriadis 1999; Deutschmann 1997, 2001) as much as on the expanding rationalization (Arnason 2001: 114). The emergence of modernity is coterminous with the institutionalization of territorial states whose competing fiscal, administrative, and military development has connected capitalism with myths of absolutism (Henshall 1992), virtual state (Rosencrance 1999), and nation (Castoriadis 1999) whereby economic accumulation is joined with cultural frames as demarcation, regulation, and rationalization of national, modern, and capitalist spaces brings about a restructuring of individual and collective action (Arnason 2001: 114).

The dual movement of capitalist development towards both autonomy and interdependence took place amid social conflict, radical critique, political divisions (Castoriadis 1993, 1999: 75) that rather than driving capitalism and democracy to mutual negation have seen functional differentiationa and structural integration of the respective systems of action into a dynamic structure of related contradictions of economic, political, social, and cultural development (Arnason 2001: 115). Though Castoriadis recognizes capitalism, autonomy, and modernity as interrelated phenomena he nevertheless does not establish theoretically systematic relations among the structures, logics, and variants of modernity (Wagner 1994) that in his theoretical perspective being closely related to capitalism would allow an institutional alternative had criteria for specifying the social and historical meaning of an alternative modernity existed (Arnason 2001: 115). The permanent processes of growth of autonomy, rationality, and economy relies on their mutual interpenetration (Castoriadis 1999) that realizing itself in a variety of historical configurations is part of a stable structure of modernity mediating economy and culture as systems of action (Boltanski and Chiapello 1999) so that democratic politics, consumer choice, and individual autonomy are system-specific institutionalizations of the stage of economic development that makes them possible (Simmel 1990; Arnason 2001: 115-116).

The reproduction of capitalism within the structure of modernity encompasses the totality of its constitutive systems and interrelationships to integrate autonomy, authority, and rationality into dymanics of economic accumulation (Castoriadis 1993: 180) that transforms productive forces, financial capital, and commercial markets into continually expanding means for exercise of power, regulation, and mobilization (Arnason 2001: 116; Braudel 1979; Deutschmann 2001). That autonomy and interpenetration are organizing principles of the structure of modernity accounts for the political, social, and cultural contestation of capitalism as a side-effect of its development (Baechler 1995, 2: 268; Bauman 1992) since the unfettered process of inter-institutional communication makes proliferation of entrepreneurial collective projects across the structure of modernity into both consequence of and precondition for its further structural-functional differentiation (Arnason 2001: 116-117). The continued relevance of the analysis of the spirit of capitalism (Boltanski and Chiapello 1999; Castoriadis 1999) opens opportunity for application of the systematically elaborated modeling of the structure of modernity (Munch 1982, 1984, 1986) vis-a-vis its historical typology, changing configurations, and dynamic interrelationships bearing upon developmental trajectories and inter-systemic exchange that serve as macro environments for engagement of individual and collective action (Arnason 2001: 117).

In this perspective it is possible to interpret the theoretical discussion on the varieties of capitalism as part of a broader analysis of the structure of modernity (Arnason 2001: 118). In classical sociology, Weber (1968) has adumbrated the typology of capitalism, seen as gain-seeking, rationalizing, organizing, and commercial activity, that consists of six types covering economic instrumentalization of politics, war, trade, investment, industry, and finance (Weber [1922] 1976) the institutional implications of which for individual and collective action (Swedberg 1999) remain to be complemented with structural analysis of industrial and financial capitalist economies as particular institutional realizations of the structure of modernity where rationality is a salient feature of interpenetration between culture and economy (Arnason 2001: 118). Varieties of capitalism are mainly theorized based on contemporary regional and economic variation (Orru 1997) conceived of in terms of economic regimes, economic structures, capitalist institutions, functional integration, power structures, and institutional formations that are in need of micro correction of their privileging of structures at the expense of individual and collective agency (Arnason 2001: 118-119; Hall and Soskice 2001).

To capture the complexity of institutional patterns, historical backgrounds, and path-dependent developments a theoretical reconstruction of variants of the economic system such as national economies, macro-economic models (Coates 2000), regional configurations, and civilizational contexts (Eisenstadt 1996; Hamilton 1994) has to be conceptualized within the structure of modernity as much dependent on its constituent systems as the latter on their autonomous and interactive dynamics (Arnason 2001: 119-120). Consequently, the influence of the structure of modernity on the economic system obtains wihin the more general configuration of relations (Elias 1994) that involves the institutional development of the systems acting as factors giving rise to change in the structural relations both internal and external to the organization of economic institutions, social contexts, and state structures with effects contingent on relative position in the structure of modernity, in the process of its development, and in the emergent effects of inter-systemic interaction (Arnason 2001: 120). Given the interpenetration between economy and culture, the plurality of economic systems has to be theorized in the context of the corresponding variability of the structure of modernity that elaborates on Weber's rather than Marx's framework for the analysis of capitalism in comparative and historical perspective (Arnason 2001: 120; Braudel 1979; Frank 1978a, 1978b, 1998; Wallerstein 1982, 1989, 1995, 2004).

While the economic system has existed long before the rapid changes that institutionalization of the structure of modernity has introduced (Swedberg 1999: 9), the internal and interactive systemic changes that have defined the modern period have to be seen in the broad comparative perspective (Arnason 2001: 120-121). The structure of modernity as a macro environment for each of its systems also follows a long-term period of development (Braudel 1979, 3: 532) proceeding via the structural-functional differentiation towards autonomous interpenetration of its systems changing the structure of their relations rather than replacing each other over the course of their mutual development formally separable from its constitutive relations that in their modern configuration make autonomous individual and collective action possible (Braudel 1979, 2: 353) as much as its interpenetration with its systemic environments (Arnason 2001: 121; Braudel 1979, 2: 355). The institutionalization of the interpenetration of the economic system with other systems leads not only to coordination between their systemic logics but also to their conflicts as economic circulation, accumulation, and regulation forges strong systemic linkages with association, political, and societal systems (Braudel 1977: 111; Munch 1982: 94) that put purely economic action into macro environments obtaining from the larger structure of systemic relations where monopolies, state patronage, and global trade participate in already constituted economic worlds (Arnason 2001: 121-122; Braudel 1977: 62).

The dynamics of economic accumulation brings different economic systems into contact with each other developing forms of systemic interpenetration extending to their respective development of the structures of modernity that through overlapping, learning, and intergation transmit ideas, devices, and organizations, as did Islamic and European civilizations and economies, (Braudel 1979, 2: 495-499) which in the process of the growing complexity both of inter-systemic relations and of intra-systemic organization produced integrated differentiation of the instutions of modernity (Arnason 2001: 122; Braudel 1979, 2: 515). The analysis of the structure of modernity (Munch 1982, 1986) can be applied to its contemporary varieties especially given the salience of social changes associated with transition to modernity (Braudel 1979, 3: 540; Munch 1984) as compared to the economic, technological, or industrial developments (Braudel 1979, 2: 216) so that the dominance of the economic accumulation is largely owed to "social structures, political forces and cultural frameworks" (Arnason 2001: 123) putting the diverse configurations of durable inter-systemic relations into the context of comparative conceptualization of systemic coordination, differentiated networks, social institutions, communication infrastructures, entreprenerial strategies, and power accumulation in the environment of which the individual and collective action unfolds (Braudel 1977: 63).

The interpenetration of culture and economy has to be analyzed from the perspective of the strucutre of modernity (Munch 1986) within which the dynamics of transformation, instutionalization, and integration have taken place in the economic, social, and cultural systems (Braudel 1979; Castoriadis 1999; Sombart 1987; Weber [1922] 1976) that allow for multiple varieties of inter-systemic interpenetration definitive both of their respective historical development and of the emergent structures of modernity connecting them into contingent, evolving, and comparable patterns (Arnason 2001: 123-124).

Analysis of Boltanski and Chiapello's (2005) The New Spirit of Capitalism

2008-01-04T13:53:00.000-07:00

Among the most remarkable economic changes taking place in France between the 1960s and 1990s are disappearance, erosion, and diminution of active social movements, involved trade unions, real wage increases, high market positioning, upward productivitiy trends, and rapport between labor and management. The period starting in 1990s witnesses minimal social movements, defensive and passive social unions, spreading precarious employment, growing income disparity, decreasing strikes and social conflicts, growing work discipline, and improvements in industrial production. Such wide-ranging transition in the economic relations taking place with unprecedented rapidity and without meeting with significant resistance has provoked ethnographic attempts (Boltanski and Chiapello [1999] 2005) to provide explanation of the underlying factors driving such historical change. Weber's sociology of capitalism has centered on the concept of the spirit of capitalism that promises to capture the dynamic economic changes of the second half of the twentieth century especially concerning the cultural implications of the transformation reflected in the economic discourse governing the corresponding practices.

The premise of multi-sited ethnography of managerial discourse is that the practices promoted by it have more influence on general economy than their direct field of application in around one fifth of leading and multinational companies usually applying best practices later adopted by other firms, governmental agencies, and other organizations (Boltanski and Chiapello 2005: 162). Denoting the interpenetration between culture and economy, the spirit of capitalism changes in correspondence with structural differentiation of the area of overlap between value system and economic system that has developed over last decades of the twenthieth century since the economic transformation of the period has not met with sustained value-based resistance that should have occurred in case value system had remained unaffected. The social dynamics encompassing capitalist economic organization, interpenetration of economy and culture, and value system lends itself to modeling the general relations among these components in the specific form their configuration has taken in France over the period from 1970s to 1990s to contextualize the transformation of relations between economy and culture partly shared by the developed industrial economies and partly specific to structural functional relations and their development within a single country's history (Boltanski and Chiapello 2005: 162).

Purely ethnographic perspective on the process of interpenetration between culture and economy cannot analytically distinguish between the integration of economic, cultural, strategic, and personal systems into more general action system and the dynamic effects of the mutual development of these systems since contradictions between personal and economic systems, between economic and cultural systems, and between strategic and economic systems threaten to undermine the collective action they give rise to given the unequal structure of distribution of economic rewards, requirements of long-term commitment, and the importance of justification in terms of each of the action systems (Munch 1982: 94). Economic system is both integrated and differentiated from such other systems as political system given its need to mobilize economic resources for collective purposes in a self-perpertuating process of effective allocation and accumulation of capital via circulation, association system given the competition for resources and demands satisfaction creating concern for meeting market standards and for economic means via accumulation, and social system given the necessity to purchase labor power for wages and the exchange of produced goods consumed according to demand within culturally defined economic relations (Munch 1982: 129, 131; Boltanski and Chiapello 2005: 162).

Weber's formulation of the interpenetration between economy and culture broke the ground for historical contextualization of economic development and for exploring of its integration with other systems in view of the growing interpenetration of economic action with principles of equity and ethical responsibility in response to restitutive sanctions and organized activism, as association and goal-setting systems interpenetrate, and to universalistic ethics and rational action, as cultural and association systems interpenetrate, (Munch 1982: 94, 534) so that economic accumulation becoming increasingly affected by all segments of action system connects to norms of justice, rationality, and governmentality (Boltanski and Chiapello 2005: 163). Reductively Marxist approaches to economic accumulation cannot adequately account for such central characteristic of capitalism as interpenetration of culture and economy since rather than lacking restraint economic system appears to be integrated into action system that via placing restraints upon economic activity integrates it into the rest of the social system by recognition of its legitimacy and legality that personality, cultural and strategic systems have to internalize in their turn in order that lager social structure maintains its integration through discursive means of justification and normative steering of social order.

The conventional economic theory neglects its interpenetration with other systems of collective action since it restricts economy to narrowly defined links between technological progress and economic order, between enterpreneurial activity and rational economic association, and between economic market and system of rights and liberties (Boltanski and Chiapello 2005: 163; Munch 1982: 113). Such economistic definition of economic system does not allow for theoretical sensitivity to regional variation and historical change in the affective and cultural components of association system, in the normative and professional components of societal system, and in the justification and administrative components of the political system (Boltanski and Chiapello 2005: 163; Munch 1982: 113). The economic system interpenetrates with the societal system via exchange of individual commitment for possibilities offered by money, with the association system via exchange of economic security for the commitment it generates on resource markets, and with the political system via exchange of money for political power establishing rules for justice, fairness, and common good (Boltanski and Chiapello 2005: 163; Munch 1982: 131).

Seen in this perspective the interpenetration of economic system with the rest of the action system as a historical process has gone through such developmental stages as bourgeois capitalism stressing association system via enterpreneurial firms, bourgeois culture and morality, interest association politics, and personal assistance and charity socieities, as large corporation capitalism stressing societal system via professional management, welfare state, career development, and merit and credentials culture, and as contemporary capitalism stressing political system via executive administration, political exchange, legal system, and governmental policies (Boltanski and Chiapello 2005: 164; Munch 1982: 113). Business practices texts illustrate the change in the interpenetration between economy and culture occurring between 1960s and 1990s in the managerial discourse sampled with the help of two sets of representative literature composed in the respective decades largely covering the French economy so that a particular type of societal, economic, association, and political system exemplified by professional environments, work conditions, organizational forms, and management types corresponds to each period.

Thematic analysis of the two samples of professional literature has sought to uncover the prevalent formulations, problems, solutions, and negations. Additionally, for the two text samples the frequencies of usage of key terms of the analysis were computed (Boltanski and Chiapello 2005: 165). Among the conclusions that the analysis of the configuration of relations between economy and culture in the 1990s has arrived at are emegence of flexible organizations, project-centric work environments, networks replacing hierarchies, freely circulating flows, loose organizational intergation, horizontal firm structures, and minimization of bureaucracy (Boltanski and Chiapello 2005: 165-166). The problems of the 1960s' managerial literature centering on dissatisfaction with restricted decision-making, narrowly defined roles, powerful management, bureaucratic organization, and large dominating companies have become replaced in the 1990s with non-hierarchical organization, diffuse power structure, self-guiding workforce, competitive culture, and permanent organizational change. The solutions of the 1960s centered on decentralization, meritocracy, objectives-driven management, competent management, and hierarchical control, while the 1990s advised lean restructured companies, network or project organization, flexibility, innovation, competence, motivational leadership, expertise- and councel-oriented management, self-reflexivity, client-orientation, and trust. The 1960s rejected private sphere, personal judgment, nepotism, political promotions, personal ties, and privileges, while the 1990s decried old-style management, bureaucracy, and separation between private and professional spheres (Boltanski and Chiapello 2005: 165).

The requirements for job security have shifted from merit-based approach based on agreed-upon targets of the 1960s to project-oriented experience accumulation of the 1990s. Managerial discourse of the 1990s proposes organization models, structures, and strategies that suggest by their contrast to the organizational culture of the 1960s a different structure of relations the economic system is embedded into that has become established between the two periods. In the history of interpenetration between culture and economy the contemporary configuration of relations between them involves radical change in the type of interpenetration that obtains between the economic and the societal systems since the relations between the association and the societal systems have signficantly altered the acceptable definition of work situation, justifiable treatment of employees, and the desirable forms of entrepreneurial strategies (Boltanski and Chiapello 2005: 166). Correspondingly, the economic system has predominantly comprised family-owned pre-Fordist firms in the nineteenth century, large professionally managed Fordist companies from the late nineteenth to late twentieth century, and networked, start-up, financial, and niche post-Fordist companies beginning in the 1980s.

In the period of pre-Fordist capitalism, the association system emphasized independence from local communities and progress, during the phase of Fordist capitalism career development, organizational power, and industrial efficiency came to the forefront, and the transition to post-Fordist capitalism favored non-authoritarian management, fuzzy organizations, creativity and innovation, and permanent change. The societal system before Fordism consisted of domestic and market-based normative culture, during Fordism merit-based professionalism, scientific effectiveness, and objectives-oriented management gained dominance, and after demise of Fordist capitalism professional mobility, network compatibility, project-centric normative culture, and experience-based employability took center-stage. The pre-Fordist political system revolved around personal property, personal relations, charity, and paternalism, the Fordist system allowed long-term planning, career-based management, and welfare state, and the post-Fordist system is largely built around ideas of mobility, adaptability, self-reflexive aministration, self-reliance capabilities, and self-help policies (Boltanski and Chiapello 2005: 166; Munch 1982: 113).

For the purposes of the multi-sited ethnographic study of the management texts, the place in the social system that the normative culture occupies with respect to communities, professions, sciences, and cultural discourses has been denoted via notion of justificatory regime (Boltanski and Thevenot 1991) corresponding to normative validity of meaningful agrumentation, communal anchoring of commitment, and socially binding fairness and legitimacy (Boltanski and Chiapello 2005: 167; Munch 1982: 617). To bring idealist and positivist strands of sociology into common conceptual framework the changes to the normative culture as justificatory regime should be considered as a process of interpenetration among the components of social system that in the process of mutually accepted interchange correspond to the specifically involved systems thereby combining both hermeneutic understanding and causal explanation into the methodology of general theory of action that ethnography establishes corresponding parallels with standardized procedures of tests (Boltanski and Chiapello 2005: 167; Munch 1982: 254). Considered within the system of Weber's traditional, charismatic, legal-rational, and value-rational authority types, the justificatory regimes functionally differentiate into such areas of systemic interpenetration as inspirational area between charistmatic and value-rational authority, domestic area between traditional and charistmatic authority, renown area between traditional and legal-rational authority, civic area between traditional and value-rational athority, market area between charismatic and legal-rational athority, and industrial area between value-rational and legal-rational authority (Boltanski and Chiapello 2005: 167; Munch 1982: 562).

The identified justificatory regimes through evaluation, testing, categorization, and ordering generate their specific standards of comaprison that produce distributions of individuals on the legitimate scale of worth corresponding to the assessment procedure. Consequently, such regimes of justification as inspirational deriving from value specification and affective generalization emphasize spirituality and authenticity, domestic deriving from affective selection and affective bonding emphasize subordination and allegience, renown deriving from norm connection openness and normative constraint emphasize popularity and esteem, civic deriving from norm generalization and value boundedness emphasize representation and collective will, market deriving from means mobilization and goal setting emphasize competition and opportunities, and industrial deriving from rational learning and ethical control emphasize efficiency and professionalism (Boltanski and Chiapello 2005: 167-168; Munch 1982: 562). The justificatory regimes are specified in accordance with comparison principles encompassing human, natural, action, and symbolic systems, with scale of worth where relative positions are defined, with interpenetration among the human, action, symbolic and natural systems, with structure of social relations deriving from relations of worth, with relations of exchange reproducing the structure of worth, with standard test establishing a person's worth, and with ideal-typical social order corresponding to the distribution of worth (Boltanski and Chiapello 2005: 168; Munch 1982: 163).

The ethnographic study of capitalism (Boltanski and Chiapello 2005) that does not rely on highly developed theoretical framework (Munch 1982) reduces the cases of systemic interpenetration, as the justificatory regimes are shown to be, to typological procedure of identification of a "new and increasingly influential justificatory logic" (Boltanski and Chiapello 2005: 168) rather than recognizing it as an indicator of structural change so that mobility, availabolity, and networks are taken for a projects-oriented justificatory logic representing normative culture of network society. The projects-oriented justificatory regime is specified in terms of its assessment by activity, project involvement, and network connections, its low worth being connected to passivity, close-mindedness, authoritarianism, rigidity, and parochialism, its high worth dependent on adaptability, flexibility, sincerity, supportiveness, and leadership, its subjects being managers, mentors, and innovators, its objects being information technologies and work structures of sub-contracting, flexibility, outsourcing, autonomy, and franchises, its relations building on trust, communication, and adaptability, its worth structure enhancing employability within project organization, its exchange structure favours availability and short-term planning, its standard test measuring mobility between projects, and its ideal-typical order being network society (Boltanski and Chiapello 2005: 169).

The underlying argument behind the ethnographic identification of a new, network-oriented justificatory regime consists in structural functional differentiation of an autonomous agency of networking as an "art of connecting and making use of the most diverse and furtherst ties" (Boltanski and Chiapello 2005: 168) coming in contrast to asserting novelty of networks as such or of their wide reach achieved in the late 1970s. Activity serving as the general standard of the project-oriented justificatory regime differs from the industrial standard in its departure from steady and salaried work towards diffusion of distinctions between work and leisure, stability and unsteadiness, earning and volunteering, and productivity and performance as movement between projects increases in value, as activity becomes permanent state, and as encounters are structured around project-orientation (Boltanski and Chiapello 2005: 169). Duraion of projects is structured according to short-term timelines that promote, motivate, and maintain networking and contact accumulation of their participants. The project-oriented systemic logic values adaptability, flexibility, polyvalency, mobility, initiative, autonomy, risk-taking, and openness to new people, possibilities, and information (Boltanski and Chiapello 2005: 169).

Project-oriented justificatory regime defines personal worth in non-instrumental terms that encourage contribution to the common good, generation of trust, non-authoritarian leadership, toleran management, respect for differences, sharing of connections, and general enhancement of employability. Since each justificatory regime is represented by a specific vocabulary the content analysis of the management literature samples chosen for their ethographic study has uncovered the frequences of appearance of key terms in the respective bodies of literature (Boltanski and Chiapello 2005: 170). Unsurprisingly, the industrial justificatory logic dominates the textual samples both for the 1960s and for the 1990s, its criticism has increased between the two periods, its proportion to other logics of justification has decreased in the 1990s with the network logic becoming more represented, its next-ranked logic changing from domestic in the 1960s to project-oriented in the 1990s and doubling its weight in the overall ranking structure of logics of justification (Boltanski and Chiapello 2005: 170). Greatest discursive changes between the Fordist and post-Fordist periods are that network logic has risen to second ranking place in its frequency, that market logic has increased its presence in response to more competitive, restructured, and client-driven macro environment, that inspirational logic grew in strength as innovation, risk-taking, and personalization gain in traction, and that domestic and civic logics lost in presence to even greater degree than did industrial (Boltanski and Chiapello 2005: 170).

Transition of France's capitalism from Fordism to post-Fordism was accompanied by the restructuring of the systems of value, legitimacy, and relevance as people, things, and situations have become embedded into normative culture, organization types, and entrepreneurial strategies corresponding to the transformed justificatory regime that by changing standard tests alters its own systemic logic (Boltanski and Chiapello 2005: 171). As part of theoretical framework for analysis of normative change standard tests are subdivided into tests of strength and legitimate tests (Boltanski and Chiapello 2005: 171). A legitimate test is a kind of test for which the justificatory regime it belongs to supplies legitimacy by clearly stating the strength type, testing device, and test definition used for carrying out its procedure should unambiguous, qualifiable and categorizable results be obtained. In contrast, while dependent on the decision over its succes or failure, a test of strength does not prohibit mobilization of as many capabilities as possible, offers no preliminary specifications or instructions, and the possibilities of what course the test process takes are unlimited (Boltanski and Chiapello 2005: 171). In the economic system a legitimate test is embedded in the dominant mode of accumulation via normative culture that exerts both constraining and legitimizing influence on corporate activities, organizational models, and general management.

Within the market justificatory regime, the normative culture provides the existing mode of accumulation with legitimization by applying criteria of equality of chances, merit-based success, market opportunities, and competitive advantage while balance of power, "dominant positions, previous agreements and cartels" (Boltanski and Chiapello 2005: 172) prevent the income distribution in the economic system from taking form solely attributable to the market forces that are not either identical with or reducible to the normative culture. In the social system the normative culture institutionalized in its legitimate tests does not allow interpenetration among the economic, societal, associational, and political systems that constitute it as a whole even though particular enterpreneurial groups or individuals may possess strategic means to exploit opportunities where independent criteria of systemic evaluation diminish their strengths (Boltanski and Chiapello 2005: 172; Munch 1982: 131). There are situations in which tests of strengths and legitimate tests, without ever being completely separate, either coincide or are related to each other thus putting into question the legitimatory regime they avowedly reproduce as does the correlation between socioeconomic background and scholastic aptitude (Boltanski and Chiapello 2005: 172).

The legitimate test is embedded into the action system as its mode of categorization since it involves public, explicit, and institutionalized judgment that is independent of the situation of its application. The test of strength represents the mode of displacement corresponding within the action system to the entrepreneurial strategies oriented at changing macro environments in which the situational, singular, and dynamic circumstances call for entrepreneurial action rather than rule-based judgment (Boltanski and Chiapello 2005: 172). Systemic change usually involves institutional innovation by enterpreneurial groups or individuals that seeking to improve their structural position reduce the binding power of legitimate tests via strategic action involving risk, opportunity, and institutional innovation. Success of such enterpreneurial strategies gradually shifts the definition criteria of normative culture from legitimate tests to the tests of strength in any given institutional environment where novel, covert, and unregulated relationships consequently gain in importance (Boltanski and Chiapello 2005: 172). However, enterpreneurial strategies that prove to be effective in their action environment entail their institutionalization as the structural differentiation they have triggered takes form of new legitimate tests in case the change is intended to be either widely accepted or reproduced in other institutional contexts (Boltanski and Chiapello 2005: 173).

Actors benefiting from the enterpreneurial innovation tend to describe such institutional change in terms of a justificatory regime that puts high worth value on their structural position thereby rendering their achievement transparent, moral, and justifiable. Institutional change in the process of its legitimization employs legal regulation to draw the boundaries between acceptable and unacceptable utilization of new opportunities, resources, and strategies. In this respect, a justificatory regime appears to derive from a process of institutionalization of a wide-ranging transformation that in case of the transition to post-Fordist mode of regulation has made network- and project-oriented individual and collective action into a subject of discursive legitimization enabling and restricting the reproduction of the post-Fordist accumulation at the same time (Boltanski and Chiapello 2005: 173). The change of justificatory regimes depends on dual influences of the balance of power and legitimate relations that in their interplay make use of criticism of the existing system to either promote a desirable situation different from the status quo or put into question the existing normative foundations so that the discrepancies betweent the actual state of affairs and the justificatory regime constitute part of the self-reflexive dynamic of their transformation (Boltanski and Chiapello 2005: 173).

In the action system, criticism and testing practices are interrelated in as much as, on the one hand, enterpreneurial groups and individuals put into question the legitimacy of the social structure while, on the other hand, testing procedures legitimize the distributtion of individuals within the social structure. Corrective criticism of tests aims to maintain them within the boundaries of normative culture so that the application of tests and the strengths' distribution in the action system adequately reproduce its guiding principles that are assured via methodological, conventional, legal, and regulatory means used for the institutionalization of test coherence, openness, and improvement (Boltanski and Chiapello 2005: 174). Radical criticism of tests aims at their elimination or replacement on the grounds that their validity is in question. Based on the legitimacy principles of the relevant justificatory regime, corrective criticism of tests institutionalized within the action system calls for either refutation of the former by recourse to evidence or its bringing to bear on the testing procedure. Also, corrective criticism can elicit a strategic action oriented at cirucumvention of rather than direct reaction to the possible loss in legitimacy of the test so that the trade-off between test improvement and its marginalization is decided in favor of transformation of the legitimacy test into a test of strength where costs are shifted to the test-takers (Boltanski and Chiapello 2005: 174).

For the economic system the cost displacement strategies in response to contradictory pressures for both higher profits and increased wages can involve geographic relocation into regions with labor relations or environmental regulations favorable for the employers, redefinition of the career-management policy by dropping its expensive components, and transition to informal recroutment techniques to avoid testing and screening costs (Boltanski and Chiapello 2005: 174-175). These entrepreneurial strategies of displacement alter the action system as a whole so that the criticism of its justificatory regimes can no longer be waged based on previous normative culture since the configuration of interpenetration between the societal, economic, association, and political systems necessitates elaboration of new critical concepts to account for emegrent interrelationships whose "recognition, institutionalisation, codification or categorisation" (Boltanski and Chiapello 2005: 175) is yet to crystallize into the standard tests that the criticism can apply to. Criticism, therefore, can have bearing on testing processes by catagorizing tests by legitimacy and measured strengths in order to show their role in the structural and functional differentiation of individuals, by ensuring the conformity of tests to the precepts of normative culture via regulation, oversight, and correction, by maintaining the centrality of legitimate tests to the reproduction of the action system according to its normative culture, and by eliminating tests that are widely perceived to impede desirable social change (Boltanski and Chiapello 2005: 175).

The form of interpenetration characteristic of a particular action system finds its reflection the legitimate tests applied in its economic system. Interpenetration among societal, economic, association, and political systems dates to the beginning of modernity that employs justificatory regimes for its reproduction. Criticism as an integral part of a justificatory regime focuses on indequality, exploitation, and individualism when it is oriented qua social criticism at the association system where it calls labor movements to life. Criticism of the economic system takes the form of artistic criticism (Chiapello 1998) deriving from aesthetic critique of oppressive discipline, mass society, standardization, and commodification in defence of ideals of liberation, autonomy, originality, and authenticy (Boltanski and Chiapello 2005: 175-176). The transition from Fordism to post-Fordism has as its underpinning the changing configuration of interpenetration within the action system going beyond the impact of globalization, economic development, or technological change that on the example of France exemplifies the dynamics common to industrial economies. In France, the transition to post-Fordism began with the crisis in its normative culture in 1960s, when the criticism of its justificatory regimes reached its peak of labor strikes and violent confrontations, with the disorganization of industrial production when product quality fell and labor costs rose, and with the pervasive loss of legitimacy of standard tests establishing distribution of wages and profits, justifying power relations and social hierarchies, and reproducing educational, economic, and social institutions (Boltanski and Chiapello 2005: 176).

The criticisms raised at the Fordist action system centered on the crisis of its normative culture, as reflected in the corruption of the standard tests since both legitimate tests were growing more marginal to the actual reproduction of social structure and tests of steength were gaining in centrality within the action system. Institution leaders within the economic system have imputed responsibility for the crisis of the normative culture to the labor force failing to uphold discipline and common goals and to the inadequate socialization of younger entrants into the job market (Boltanski and Chiapello 2005: 176). For the crisis of 1968 in France both artistic and social criticism played equally important role as in the previous decade cultural capital stopped being restricted to narrow social circles to become available to rapidly increasing student numbers who subsequently filled managerial, professional, and technological positions it the economic system. In France the artisitic criticism demanding self-management, personal autonomy, and creativity was supported by holders of executive, professional, and technical eduication while the social criticism had its primary base of support among skilled and manual workers (Boltanski and Chiapello 2005: 176-177).

The first stage of the transition to post-Fordism taking place between 1968 and 1973 has responded to social criticism only by reliance on established procedures of collective bargaining involving state, unions, and employer organizations with improvements in minimum wage, reduction of income disparities, and improvement in job security as a result at the same time as allocation of authority was brought into closer alignment with normative culture of meritocracy (Boltanski and Chiapello 2005: 177). Thereby the centrality of the legitimate tests to the action system was restored by increasing penalties for undue advantages. The second stage of post-Fordist transition commenced in 1975 after the crisis of Fordism has continued to deepen as its justificatory regimes failed to regain legitimacy, as profits of industrial production continued to fall, and as Fordist normative culture started to be abandonded. By the late 1970s large companies have changed labor relations and working conditions based on best practices developed by sociologists and consultants that together with employer organizations have implemented a post-Fordist mode of regulation emerging out of crises of the previous decade (Boltanski and Chiapello 2005: 177).

In the economic system the disintegration of the Fordist mode of regulation into "autonomous teams, flexible schedules, bonuses, efficiency-related salaries" (Boltanski and Chiapello 2005: 177) has spread across economic structure from the management to the production organization broken down into a network of small, contract-connected, project-oriented units on the periphery of company's core activities. In the economic system the second stage of the transition to post-Fordism has involved replacing legitimate tests with tests of strength less amenable to criticism due to the incapacity of the Fordist normative culture of their "qualification, categorisation, and regulation" (Boltanski and Chiapello 2005: 178). In the 1980s, the post-Fordist mode of regulation has consolidated around networks discourse, effective labor force control, and reinvigorated economic expansion. Since post-Fordist normative culture has failed to form, the transition to post-Fordism was not met with criticism. Moreover, the post-Fordist interpenetration among economic, societal, association, and political systems has left the social criticism by labor unions without an independent object because the worker movement has lost its "isomorphic relationship to its opponent, the large integrated firm" (Boltanski and Chiapello 2005: 178).

There was no artistic criticism of post-Fordism because it has achieved its economic, social, and cultural goals, its frame of reference cannot account for systemic interpenetration replacing structures of Fordism, and its proponents have become integrated into dominant positions across social structure in France (Boltanski and Chiapello 2005: 178). The economic growth of 1980s stems from the overcoming of limitations of Fordism, the systemic interpenetration of diverse macro environment, and the transformation of normative culture that with tests of strength at its center has led to rising inequality, precarious employment, and worker impoverishment. In the economic system, the negative effects of post-Fordism brought social criticism and labor strikes of the 1990s to bear upon the efforts to introduce legitimate tests into the project-based normative culture by new regulatory means seeking to governmentally structure the flexibility, to stabilize the precarious work conditions, and to integrate profit and non-profit organization of labor relations (Boltanski and Chiapello 2005: 178). While the configuration of the action system in France is defined by the network-oriented transformation led by socialist governments responsive to the artistic criticism of the economic system, in other countries, as in the Great Britain where Thatcher government implemented market-oriented reforms, the models of systemic interpenetration depending on the outcome of collective struggles, dominant normative cultures, and legitimate justificatory regimes vary according to historical interrelationships among these components of their respectively constitutive systems (Boltanski and Chiapello 2005: 178-179).

On the basis of the ethnographic study of France's transition to post-Fordism, I have tentatively demonstrated applicability of the action theory (Munch 1982) and structural functionalist approach (Colomy and Rhoades 1994) to the ethnographic and multi-sited data exploring the crisis of French Fordism and systemic dymensions of its post-Fordist change (Boltanski and Chiapello 2005) within the framework of systemic interpenetration dynamically articulating action system and interpenetration among its differentiating subsystems. Within the proposed theoretical framework I placed the emphasis on the entrepreneurial strategies that collective and individual agents undertake within the specific macro environments they confront, on the effects that collective struggles have on the historical change in the configuration of systemic interpenetration, and on the empirical application of more general theoretical specifications of action theory, structural functionalism, and micro-macro link.

The ethnographic and multi-sited reasearch of social and economic change (Boltanski and Chiapello 2005) when decoupled from detailed theoretical frameworks (Munch 1982, 1992) exemplifies insufficiences that include lack of conceptualization of individual and collective action as strategic agency oriented at systemic environments, inability to construct capitalism as subject of theoretical reflection and to embed discussion of economic change into framework of systematically related concepts leading to their substitution by such artifacts of ethnographic methodology as tests, regimes, capitalisms, and criticisms, and weakness of explanatory models as applied to ideal-typical relations that characterize one historical configuration of systemic interpenetration from another. Nevertheless, France's example of the more general phenomenon of transition to post-Fordism has served to outline an analysis of the structure of systemic relations of interpenetration that an economic system can enter in the process of historical change that in order to avoid a macro-analytical bias has brought the theory of action (Munch 1982) to bear upon systemic relations in which individual and collective enterepreneurial strategies are deployed by active agents facing particular national traditions, political situations, economic practices, and ideological expressions (Boltanski and Chiapello 2005: 179-180).

Analysis of Arnade, Howell, and Simons' (2002) Fertile Spaces

2007-12-24T20:17:00.000-07:00

In social sciences the concept of space has been widely used to address capitalism, modernization, and globalization via examination of political, material, legal, and urban space that has remained overly theoretical in its insufficient treatment of empirical record and underdeveloped conceptualization of concrete historical situations (Arnade et al. 2002: 515). In the process of bringing space into the center of theoretical attention the causal relations deriving from material, social, cultural, and economic dimensions of space become assembled in spatial relations as generative structure of historical change. Urban spaces have to be recuperated from the historiographic reification, causal insignificance, and subsumption into social networks without, however, breaking with existing scholarly traditions that sharing an interdisciplinary momentum increasingly take recourse to space from more empirically grounded positions (Boone and Stabel 2001; Hanawalt and Kobialka 2000). During late capitalism the notion of space underlies the accounts of formation and disintegration of modern metropolitan centers, of rising preeminence of global spaces, and of spatial erasures, resistances, and contraditions that owe most in their theoretical underpinnings to Lefebvre ([1971] 1991) whose Marxist theorization of relations between space and capitalism has made greatest explanatory contribution.

According to Lefebvre, the transition to modernity has been conjoint with subordination of space to the needs of capitalist reproduction that presupposes, mobilizes, and expresses spatial relations participating in legitimation, regulation, and materialization of action that in the recoursive process of structural functionalist production of space allows for analytical differentiation of spatial practices, representations of space, and representational or lived space (Gottdiener 1985). Lefebvre offers a point of critical reflection on diverse sociological traditions of registering the effects of transition to modernity in the urban space that for German sociology (Tonnies [1887] 1963) was accompanied with institutionalization of abstract and complex interpersonal ties, for Chicago school of sociology (Park 1926, 1969) made human interaction into site of social reproduction, and for ethnographic methodology (Rothenberg and McDonogh 1993) has meant reorganization of affective relations within the structure of urban grid. From Lefebvre's perspective, conventional treatments of space conceive of it as passively preexisting container that due to lack of theoretical attention has been variously conflated with geographical place, sphere of activity, and mental abstraction overlooking the actively generative aspects of space as its rendering in social sciences as a product rather than agent of capitalist production has evidenced (Lefebvre [1971] 1991: 15).

Lerebvre's reading of capitalism allocates to space the status of an independent factor of production equally under control of property relations as other productive forces are. In an attempt to restore historicity to the category of space, Lefebvre has put the transition from premodern to modern to postmodern Western city at the center of his theoretical attention to the formation of abstract space under capitalism as a regime of accumulation that produces spaces corresponding to each of each stages of development (Arnade et al. 2002: 519) so that mechant capitalism and industrial revolution had transformed urban space in its material, discursive, and practical dimensions (Lefebvre [1971] 1991: 265, 271). Lefebvre's historical analyses have contextualized modernity's rupture with traditional societies in terms that qualified the claims of national formation to diminish the importance of place in favor of recovery of the continued relevance of spatial relations (Agnew 1989). In North America the decline of public space offers one of the corroborations of Lefebvre's theorization with concrete examples of the independent effects that urban sprawl, shopping malls, advanced communications, and commericialized entertainment facilities have on the positions different groups can claim within the current mode of capitalist accumulation (Leach 1999; Sorkin 1992) as it generates its characteristic spatial, emotional, and social structures.

Sennett in historically superimposing classical Athens and contemporary New York shows that modern urban life is defined by subjective estrangement as a function of "interaction between the individual, the community, and the built environment" (Arnade et al. 2002: 520) that follows the dynamics of modernization in spatially recreating the grid of interrelations reflecting in their form the functional integration of disconnected communities rather than structurally indicating the connection between the individual and society experientially exposed to each other (Sennett 1990, 1994). Sennett's emphasis on culture brings him into proximity with postmodern theorization of space that treats it as incommensurable with time ruling out thereby the historical analysis of the spatial relations on the grounds of ontologically antithetical status of the two categories (Foucault 1980: 149) that in their postmodern separation invite the charges of meta-narrative, linear, positivist, and objectivist essentialisms. At the intersection of cultural geography and critical theory, Soja (1989, 1996) and Dear (2000) develop their heuristics of spatiality as part of the programme of the Los Angeles school of urban studies reportedly aiming to bring the historical corrective to the urban geography of late capitalist postmodernism (Schneider 2001) in clear departure from the Chicago school functionalist interpretation of structures of metropolitan life.

As opposed to epistemologically privileging antiquity as a point of comparison for the urban studies of modern cities, Lefebvre's suggestion to recognize medieval cities of Western Europe as more immediate predecessors to modernization shifts the ground of its understanding from the traditional subjects of humanities, as does Sennett, towards the actual urban spaces where commercial, industrial, and social preconditions for modernity were forged (Arnade et al. 2002: 522). Though Lefebvre pays significant attention to the place of cities in medieval and early modern history it does not come at the expense of the blurring of such distinct theoretical aspects of space as historical production of space, conceptual multivalency of space, and social construction of space so that its actual and imagined experience, its material and discursive reification, and its physical and ideological perception fall into functionally differentiated structures that the concept of space refers to. The production of space receives its historical significance in comparative perspective that follows conceptual typology of spaces rather than historical chronology so that such kinds of space as "legal space, ritual space, or mental space" (Arnade et al. 2002: 523) allow for theoretical superimposition and differentiation of reconstructed urban spaces.

Instances of construction and realization of legal space as a consequence of specific claims-making practices expose both the indeterminacy of the space-centric interpretations and the power of space to make possible and generate realities of politics and ideology (Arnade et al. 2002: 523). In history of European cities property rights, as in London (Harding 2002), reveal complex course of development where any claim to private ownership has hardly implied clear-cut definition of rights, inviolability of their exercise, or freedom from their contestation in the legal space of cities where conflicts, overlapping jurisdictions, and unstable demarcation are commonplace rather than exceptional while involving strategic action of organization, distribution, and positioning of legal claims within cultural, social, and physical dimensions of urban space. Inverse of the private property in definition, the public domain has likewise been shapeless, illimitable, and insufficient to serve as a legal basis to claims on space in the strict sense to the extent that unpredictability and redefinition has been characteristic of pre-modern forms of urban governance having led only under the economic pressure of demographic crisis to more unambiguous definition of rights, applications, and ownership (Camille 2000; Harding 2002).

The transition from contested jurisdictions of medieval cities towads discursive production of urban space took place in the course of competition among institutions and interest groups seeking authority over control of residents, legal titles, and physical space (Attreed 2002) that leading to protracted legal adjudication have called to life strategies of narrative organization of competing claims to rights, privileges, and powers elaborated in the "process of negotiation, dispute, compromise, challenge, and counter-challenge" (Arnade 2002: 524). The initial conceptualization by historians and anthropologists of separate political, legal, and ritual spaces, in line with functional differentiation approach, (Davis 1975; Hunt 1989) is complemented by evidence that that these spaces interpenetrate each other as social actors, practices, and relations generated by them draw on the spaces of their action to acquire legitimacy, power, and resonance (Eastabrook 2002; Boone 2002). To the extent that kinds of space correspond to the operation effects of social systems, the political space of early modern England has been forged in the struggles over ritual spaces that actors representing the governmental, religious, and monarchical systems fought during the civil war (Estabrook 2002) as the mutual effects of cities, politics, religion and law have contributed to an interpenetrating redefinition of the corresponding institutions.

Over the course of seventeenth century the struggle against the subordination of religion to political authority in England has led to an increase in instutitutional autonomy of both systems at the price of their systemic interpenetration since even though secular authority over sacred spaces has been reasserted both systems became more functionally differentiated no longer sharing rights over religious spaces and systemically integrated at the same time through recognition of exclusive rights of political authority in sacred spaces (Estabrook 2002). Historiographical applications of the notion space clearly show its limitations for neither can it adequately account for social change nor supply explanatory mechanisms for strategic action since the processes of production of space undergo perfomative reduction to collective struggles over rights the power over exercise of which is sufficiently explained as the power to perform rights in the corresponding spaces, as in the case of relationships between power and ritual that appear to exclude spaces from their reproduction as mutually constitutive performances (Eastabrook 2002). Similarly, the explanation of the struggles over urban spaces of medieval Low Countries has to make micro corrective to Pirenne's (1914) imposition of macro dynamics of class analysis upon economic relations to the effect that economy as macro environment for action cannot produce impact on the micro level of individual and group action before its differentiation from other medieval systems takes place (Boone 2002) as is recognized by Lefebvre ([1971] 1991: 263-275) as he refers to the mediating role of such cities as Ghent in the production of economic space.

The contestation of ritual spaces in medieval Low Countries was part of the struggles among competing citizen groups to accumulate power to claim existing spaces for communal use, to demolish physical spaces of rival groups, and to construct architectural structures symbolizing communal space with significant economic benefits accruing to the winning party under the conditions of undifferentiated relations between capital and labor (Boone 2002). Though political space underlies the transition to guild rule as constitutive mechanism of legitimation of the political power of artisanal corporations (Boone 2002) the mirco effects of space are insufficient to explain the departure from the class struggle terminology that historical discourse has to make to account for the institutional continuity of political, ritual, and economic spaces across social change (Arnade 2002: 526-527). As scenes for struggles over dukal authority in Burgundy the urban spaces of the medieval cities are subordinate to the strategies for gaining sovereign power by the seizures into possession, symbolic appropriations, and demolitions of selectively chosen sites (Boone 2002). Reducing action to performance (Arnade 2002: 527) historiography neverless connects banner marches, kneeling ceremonies, royal inaugurations, public beheadings, church burnings, and charter destructions with the functionally differentiated structure of Lefebvre's abstract, concrete, and representational spaces as the macro environments reciprocally dependent on individual and collective action.

Without recognizing historical change as an outcome of the interplay between social action and its systemic environments Lefebvre's concept of space cannot theoretically restrict or specify the process of discursive production of distinctly legal, ritual, or material spaces on its own (Andrade 2002: 527) all the more so since the basic classification of spaces by Lefebvre into imagined, practiced, and representational also folds into them the capabilities to confer social power. The characterization of early modern Catholicism in England as feminine can be seen as an outcome of individual, discursive, and institutional action by its such female patrons as Queen Henrietta Maria more dependent for success of their activity on social systems of religion, family, and royalty than on gendered spaces or classifications (Dolan 2002). Likewise, the macro environment of histility to Catholicism in periods of its disestablishment had micro-effect of restricting its practice to private households causing thereby its association with women-related spaces. Consequently, the historiographical discourse that takes spaces into narrow focus of discourse on production of spaces not only fails to explain causal mechanisms behind historical change but also offers tautological explanation for constitution of spaces in their rhetorical construction (Dolan 2002) the latter being from the structural functional perspective only an aspect of strategic action.

Consistent application of the notion of mental space to history of medieval Christianity shows the contradiction between its origins in Greek and Roman cities and its anti-urban ethos, between its polarization into aristocratic and monastic strategies of institutional action, and between Roman empire as an historical macro environment for the Church and Christendom as an otherworldly community (Milis 2002) that cannot be explained by a process of production of space. Though the Christian discourse on urban life exhibits significant continuity from antiquity to the middle ages, informs physical constutition of religious spaces, and consistently structures monastic and canonical texts (Milis 2002) there are no explanatory relations among spaces as conceptualized by Lefebvre beyond self-constituted agency of their production or developmental factors that analysis of spaces could uncover (Andrade 2002: 529). As an example of representational space, medieval romances and didactic literature in Low Countries do not constitute an autonomous space where acts of imagination would be unaffected by the commercial, pragmatic, and enterpreneurial urban influences that have restructured the literary canon of artistocracy in order to redraw the distinctions between the city and the countryside (Lefebvre [1971] 1991: 268) according to the emerging language of capitalism (Pleij 2002).

The discursive and rhetorical reconstruction of the representational space that was constituted in the medieval cities (Pleij 2002) draws its reality from the struggles between burghers and peasants, between aristocracy and bourgeoisie, between commerce and argiculture, and between social norms of traditional respectability and "energy, intelligence, and wit" (Andrade 2002: 530) of nascent capitalism. Consequently, the methodological implications of the general theory of action, structural functionalist approach, and microsociological investigation of the role of cities in the processes constitutive of transformations of capitalism have to rest on the substantive, comparative, and theoretical studies of urban space. Due to the special role that the cities of medieval and Renaissance Europe play in sociological theories of modernity, attention to the comparative urban studies also provides historical basis for contemporary theorization of the changing "nature of urban space" (Arnade 2002: 530), especially given the case that late medieval cities in Northern Europe were capable of challenging stongest hierarchies of power of the period (Ennen 1979). In the history of the Middle Ages the effective definition of the city draws its boundary in the space where the city walls separated it from the rest of the world thereby performing defensive, legal, and social functions as urban rights only applied within so demarkated urban space, as civil equality of cities sharply contrasted with feudal system in force in the countryside, and as city-dwellers had constitutionally guaranteed political autonomy and self-governance thus providing the blueprint for the Western social and political modernization (Ennen 1972; 1979).

Not merely the sites of introduction of innovative political or legal practices, the uniqueness of the medieval cities consisted in high geographical and social mobility of their populations, in widely ranging scale of social differntiation based on economic hierarchy, social dividions, and cultural practices, in exclusive hosting of nascent industrial production and specialized occupations, in serving as nodes of world-spanning mechant networks pursuant of mercantilist trade policies, and in regulating economic exchange within city and with countryside around urban markets (Arnade 2002: 531). The late medieval city has produced its urban space as a special macro environment for action taking its preconditions from the wall defenses, multiplicity of consumer and producer services, and proximity of locations dedicated to production, commerce, exchange, politics, sociability and culture (de Certeau 1988: Kobialka 2000). However, the tradition of representing late medieval cities as sites with distinctive spatial qualities dates from the mid-nineteenth century when Marx (1978) and von Gierke ([1868-1913] 1954) have sweepingly concluded that cities had higher historical significance than countryside for the processes of capital accumulation, bolstering market relations, and creating a more egalitarian sociopolitical community (DuPlessis 1997).

Most lasting historiographical impact on theories of cities is Pirenne's (1939; 1951) explanatory structure of urban social, political, and cultural life taking recourse to centrality of marketplace, distinct privileges, and universal urban rights (Prevenier 1986; Van Uytven 1986; Verhulst 1986, 1999) and Weber's (1968: 1212-1372) casting of late medieval Northern European cities into an ideal type of Western cities as bounded, corporative, and self-governing spaces (Callies 1973; Nippel 1991; Schreiner 1986). Urban studies not only follow in the steps of the historical scholarship bearing the stamp of the penchant for theoretical reflection and for associating markets with progress prevalent in the nineteenth century, but also shares the strategies of representation of cities current as early as thirteenth century to defend special urban rights of citizens by constructing urban space of their republics as orderly, idependent, and civic enclosures surrounded by socially, culturally, and politiclly alien territory (Arnade 2002: 533). Reflecting powerful legal and political interests, the representational strategies of cities gave rise to collective action that took form of such spatial practices as construction projects, legislative acts, and documentary records aimed at making urban distinction into reality of physical space, cultural production, and abstract classifications designed to separate cities from the hinterland (Pleij 2002).

Within complex geographies of urban jurisdictions, detailed legal regulation drew many boundaries restricting access to citizenship, guilds and crafts, property ownership, and residence in order to create the space where cities enjoyed self-governance, collected idependent taxation, enforced market rules, maintained police force, and provided freedom from feudal obligations (Bodin 1954, 1955; Ennen 1955; Postan 1965). Rather than functionally differentiating itself into an abstract space for decontextualized social action, as Lefebvre would have it, the actual urban space has always been part of the relations of structural functional integration of the urban community with the lordly manors, the suburbs, and the countryside as economic, demographic, commercial, and financial flows constantly connected cities to their outside (Britnell 1996; Nicholas 1971; Reynolds 1984; Stabel 1997). On the general level of preconditions for action cities have been integrated with the country by kindred religious beliefs and organizations (Rubin 1992), by mutual support ties between urban liberties and territorial sovereigns (Chevalier 1982), and by strategic alliances and struggles playing out in a macro environment inclusive of both fedual and urban spaces alike (Mundy and Riesenberg 1958), which is revealed by attention to individual and collective action rather than to abstract, physical or representational spaces alone.

Structural functional interpenetration between cities and the country does not equal integration between the two though since it is not their aggregate qualities as concentrations of people but their systemic characteristics that made cities into important nodes of relations with feudal countryside, into novel forms of social organization, and into focal points of struggles ranging far outside the urban limits. The integration of social practices, representations of space, and social spaces into comprehensive conceptual framework has to proceed by paying attention to discursive, material, and social conditions of action within a macro environment of diverse systems that exhibit development, interpenetration, autonomy, and effectivity so that a particular urban space can be contextualized as "a site of radical experimentation, distinct powers, and privileged actors" (Arnade 2002: 535). Such attempts at understanding of urban space in structural functionalist and action theoretical perspective can hope to bridge the gap of incommensurability with social, cultural, and economic urban studies of Italian Renaissance (Muir 1995) as well as with traditions of institutional and social historical studies of Northern Europe (Arnade 2002: 535-536).

For the study of modernity and urban space Burckhardt's ([1860] 1990) work on Renaissance Italy has been a path-breaking account of transition from medieval to modern governmentality replacing parochial allegiances with wider civic collectivities that gave rise to economic, political, and cultural modernization (Baron 1955, 1966; Becker 1981; Goldswaite 1980, 1993). However, overly sharp drawing of distinction between medieval and early modern cities as macro environments offering distinctively different conditions for action overlooks similarities in the urban spaces of the cities characteristic of each mode of governmentality, as formulated by Weber and Pirenne, so that spaces ideal typically representative of modernity can be equally likely found both in Renaissance Italy and Northern Europe (Andrade 2002: 537). The process of decoupling of conceptualization of modernity from decontextualized theorization of space took inspiration from detailed archival research of extended time periods aided by sociological and athropological theories dealing with "how people experienced their cities, formed alliances, established social identities, and claimed authority" (Arnade 2002: 537). Consequently, the claim to the exceptional importance of Renaissance Italy to the process of transition to modernity has been debunked in favor of reasserting the role of urban contexts, networks, and identities in individual and collective action giving no modernizing function to a European urban space (Brucker 1969).

Neither in terms of time nor space do the cities of Renaissance Italy distinguish themselves with respect to modernization as overlapping, situated networks have been overwhelmingly constitutive of their action environments (Hughes 1977; Klapisch-Zuber [1976] 1985), as usage of urban space has been subordinated to imperatives of individual or collective action geared to gaining control over it (Muir 1981, 1989; Trexler 1980), and as collective actors maximized effeciency of cities' exploitation, rationally divided them into zones of influence, and reciprocally reinforced their symbolic and political power (Guidoni 1977). Consequently the association of cities of Renaissance Italy with modernity has increasingly come into question (Vitale and Scafoglio 1995) as the cessation of long-standing social, cultural, and ritual practices receives its appropriate recognition as crucial factor in the process of modernization (Crouzet-Pavan 1992; Davis 1994) that in the form of obviation of previous spatial hierarchies and local networks took from the medieval period until the modern developments of nineteenth and twentieth centuries to fulfill (Burkhardt 1958; White 1973). The predominant historical understanding of the Renaissance Italian city tends to concur with the theory of structural functional interpenetration as their urban spaces have been particularly instrumental to the cultural, social, and political achievements of the epoch rather than merely integrated into an overarching dynamics of modernization as rupture with medieval structure and functions of cities so that comparable processes of systemic interpenetration can be found in late medieval Northern Europe where urban law attests to both growth in autonomy and interdependence of its urban spaces (Harding 2002; Dolan 2002).

During the Middle Ages and Renaissance, urban space played important role in the struggles among urban communities and feudal hierarchies for control of cities the possession and deployment of whose symbols came into being only after protracted conflict over urbanity, privileges, and related claims. Spaces carried memory of previous struggles in the legitimacy they confurred on their occupants, in the meanings that on-going negotiations of power added, and in the power relations stemming from monopoly on urban spaces and symbols. Spaces reveal themselves as embedded into macro environments as actions are since historical research of particular places shows them to be "the result of specific contests, specific institutional changes, and specific responses to chance occurences" (Arnade 2002: 540). The historical research building upon Lefebvre's generalization of the production of space in the medieval cities of Europe fills the concepts of representational space, spatial practices, and physical space with documentary detail that replaces the emphasis on participation of space in functional differentiation with the concern with "historical change, causality, and agency" (Arnade et al. 2002: 540).

Growing attention to space follows the tendency to provide context-specific micro corrective to largely macro oriented discourses to account for reciprocities between macro and micro processes, to describe structural change in terms appropriate to its scale and scope rather than personify or de-historicize it as Renaissance city or urban democracy would, and to make analytical transition from case studies towards generative structures of historical processes that cities are embedded in. Departing from utilitarian, teleological, and deterministic assumptions, spatial history foregrounds "power, intentionality, and agency" (Arnade et al. 2002: 541) as it reflects the actions of individual actors, weighs the historical causes of experience, traces the structural impact of institutions, interprets the collective meaning of change, contextualizes the legal practices, maps geographies of the economic exchange, and draws the pictures of military confrontations. The process of production of space articulates the structure of its functional differentiation according to the specificities fully belonging to places where it becomes physically, discursively, and experientially visible as an abstract category born of reconstruction of the structure of relations that ground particular places in architectures, infrastructures, communications, distinctions, functions, and relations.

Mental, material, and practical aspects of space do not pass into each other unmediated (Milis 2002; Pleij 2002) but belong to struggles over spaces, to appropriations of space, to collective confrontations, to regulation of practices, to competing representations, and to emergent meanings and expectations (Dolan 2002). Introduction of spatial production and urban space into the scholarship of cities definitely opens new avenues of inquiry into how economic, gender, and public relations find reflection in the legal, literary, and other kinds of record of the collective and individual agents bearing an imprint on urban history. Without displacing the importance of economic relations, the formative influence of economy on cities has to be complemented with attention to space-specific accounts of urban development (Boone 2002). Never alien to cities of medieval Europe, markets were subjects of urban regulation by physical space of architecture, abstract space of legal discourse, and lived space of political decisions so that urban marketplaces were functionally differentiated by traded goods, transaction type, and traders' identity within the structure of personal mediation of market relations, of micro equilibration of supply and demand, and of particularized oversight of economy geared to everyday life and local industry (Arnade et al. 2002: 543).

Marketplaces have also interpenetrated with the rest of the medieval cities as numerous other sites have claimed their place in the economic structure that neither privileged formalized economic exchange nor kept its instutitional form unaffected by social change (Braudel 1992). Cities as sites of systemic interpenetration bring in the medieval marketplaces the logic of participation restrictions, prescribed exchange rules, production controls, and innovation prohibitions into joint operation with unrestrained freedom of action within these rules allowing the excercise of rational choice to individuals considered equal and free within these spaces (Arnade et al. 2002: 544). However, the focus on spaces leaves the process of transition to modern socities unexplained as the structure of closed places has become replaced with open societies. Medieval cities have been the historical sites of of multiple urban cultures that within the inclusive spaces of marketplaces, streets, fairgrounds, and shops have claimed legitimate participation in the production of urban space (Stabel 1999). Later differentiation of spaces, practices and representations coupled with transformation of the structure of gender, social, and economic relations demands elaboration of larger framework of spatial reorganization cutting across public, private, and market spheres (Arnade et al. 2002: 545).

Significantly, the process of creation of European domesticity has proceeded along the lines of structural differentiation that within the emerging spatial structure of social, gender, and property relations has separated domestic from public spaces, sleeping rooms from dining halls, servant rooms from bath rooms, salons and guest rooms from private chambers (Goldthwaite 1982). Of special importance to the modern production of space is the spatial construction of functional differentiation between domestic and business spaces that while not beginning until the Industrial Revolution has become combined with legal regulation of production for the market, with gendered integration of households into the economic exchange, with institutionalization of trade on corporate principles, and with transformation of firms into permanent capital-holding entities (Howell 1986; Wiesner 1993). Equally connected was marketplace to the formation of public sphere that became associated with physical space, legal protection, and legitimating power after the medieval conception of common good finding ready reflection in the shared market of corporate community served as a precursor of much later ideas of public space (Arnade et al. 2002: 546; Harding 2002).

Additionally, public space derives its history from the police regulation undertaken as part of the political efforts by princes and municipalities to constitute, legitimate, and secure public good in the streets and marketplaces (Weidenfeld 1996) as part of the urban economic policies insuring "set weights and measures, fixed time and place of commerce, established quality standards and controls, determined currency exchange rates, guaranteed safety in travel, and registered and enforced contracts" (Arnade et al. 2002: 547). Control over public spaces has inextricably been connected to political power that municipal governments, urban institutions, and corporate bodies and confraternities claimed by regularly staging symbolic appropriations of common spaces through festive, ceremonial, and ritual perfomances of collective action in display and celebration of their authority (Arnade 1996; Kertzer 1988; Kipling 1998). As the city lost its sovereignty to the territorial state the urban space has become a stake in the hegemonic struggles facilitating the transition from the ritual appropriation of the right to perform the emergent state in public to its integration into the state that replaced the space of urban autonomy with the space of state authority no longer in need to legitimate itself via urban spectacle (Arnade et al. 2002: 548). As urban spaces had actively participated in dramatic historical changes they contributed in time-, place-, and society-specific ways to the formation of structures, cultures, and communities that by participating in collective struggles have produced the spaces of cites across their history as active agents in relations of power, exchange, and accumulation.

Analysis of Doel and Hubbard's (2002) Taking World Cities Literally

2007-12-17T20:53:00.000-07:00

World cities are defined as cities that perform key functions in the global economy that in the process of competition with other urban locations for capital accumulation obtain competitive advantage not from their indiginous infrastructure but from their strategic positions in the networks of flows. The attempts at introduction of entreprneurial urban strategies (Jessop 1998) oriented at improving the image of the city by reflexive design of urban spaces through the means of their association with emotion, art, and spectacle frequently leave the task of theoretical discourse, policy-making, and urban design to define the characteristics of world city unfulfilled (Doel and Hubbard 2002: 351; Harvey 1989; Leitner and Sheppard 1999) especially when it is set in contexts of greater role of translocal economic relations on global scale (Amin and Thrift 2002). Place promotion and urban policy that seek to be effective on a global stage have to change their orientation from the local-bounded essentialist perspective counterposing city to the world as an object or a flow to the world-bounded relational approach to city as distributed across performances, clusters, and scales (Brenner 1999; Law 2000) that in their sum achieve various degrees of urban existence as world-city (Doel and Hubbard 2002: 352).

Considered from the poststructural perspective (Gibson-Graham 2000), world-cities fall short of requirements for turning their concept into an empirically specifiable phenomenon (Markusen 1999) which leads to greater stress on the self-reflexive impact of theoretical construction of world-cities on policy-making that has to become multi-scalar, context-sensitive, and process-oriented correspondingly (Doel and Hubbard 2002: 352). Since the central tenet of poststructuralism is phenomenological attentiveness to the complexity level any given research subject exhibits (Derrida 1988: 118), a theorization attempt commensurate with the poststructuralist approach has to translate the complexity of the phenomenal world into its concepts. First coined in 1915, the notion of world city (Geddes 1915) has remained shaped by its original definition as a place "where a disproportionate amount of the world's business was conducted" (Doel and Hubbard 2002: 352) despite its subsequent qualifications, abstractions, applications, and quantifications. Even though the operational definition of world cities can require large-scale empirical support (Short et al. 1996: 698), the commonly used world city attributes are transnational corporation (TNC) headquarters presence, service-sector employee numbers, foreign residents proportion, and equity market capitalization (Doel and Hubbard 2002: 353) whereas the more comprehensive rankings are based on financial assets, transportation infrastructure, population size, business services, manufacture output, TNC headquaters, and international institutions presence (Friedmann 1986) while the point esimates take the presence of internet doman names (Townsend 2001), public-private partnerships (Kresl 1995), and cultural vitality (Smith and Timberlake 1995) as indicators.

Due to the epistemological, ontological, and methodological weakness of the notion of world cities (Markusen 1999), the leading criteria for ordering their hierarchy have experienced shift from economic and financial orientation to focus on advanced producer services, credit ratings, multi-jurisdiction law, and risk management (Beaverstock et al. 1997; Friedmann 1986; Short and Kim 1998; Taylor 1997) such definitional flexibility following from irreducible polysemy of urban discourse, multiple urban contradictions and complex factor correlations of city life, and discontinuous, dispersed, and abstract character of constitutive urban phenomena (Doel and Hubbard 2002: 353-354). From the relational perspective, world cities are conceptually assembled via "distanciated social relations" (Doel and Hubbard 2002: 354) in order to countervail the tradition of theorization of cities as fixed and bounded phenomena that emphasizes "clustering, agglomeration and localization" (Amin and Thrift 2002: 51) belying the structural underpinnings of such approach. Based on dependency and world-systems theories, the analysis of world economy that highlights its structure makes the function and composition of economic activities on different scales more important in explanatory terms to undertanding how world cities operate as a global system affected in its turn by the stages of world capitalism (Storper and Walker 1989), while such form of structural analysis is open to the charges of excessive macro bias, decontextualized functionalism, and teleological essentialism (Guattari 2000).

To understand the world importance of certain cities taking over command and control functions an epistemological "shift from atomism to structural functionalism" (Doel and Hubbard 2002: 354) is necessary under the influence of temporal and spatial dispersion of relations, time-space compression via media and communication, and globalization of capital, migration, and knowledge (Harvey 1989; Virilio 1997). Arguing that globalization changes the structure of translocal flows, Castells (2000a) gives priority to global networks at the basis of the novel organizing principles of the capitalism that while being built on information significantly alter the relationships among commodities, individuals and institutions as they become complexly embedded into a networked space of flows. As capitalism acquires increasingly abstract and distributed qualities (Barnes 2001; Buck-Morss 1995; Gibson-Graham 1996), Castells (2000a, 2000b, 2000c) offers diagrammatic representations of the structural relations among world cities constituted through the global flows linking urban cores and peripheries into nodes of multiple networks that remain in need of further research on their nature (Bromley 1999), on their relation to the developmental stages of global capitalism (Doel and Hubbard 2002: 355), and on their definition (Friedmann 1986).

Due to Castells' (2000b) insufficient attention to the performative, contingent, and material aspects of the world cities (Doel and Hubbard 2002: 355), the attention should be shifted from the formal structure of global flows to its production and reproduction that the discourses on global capitalism (Gibson-Graham 1996; Thrift 2000), institutional, entrepreneurial, and organizational action (Amin and Thrift 2002), and interaction between global networks and urban hierarchies contribute to. To reconcile between the principles of contingency and invariance that derive structure out of the network of world cities a redefinition of the structure in action-terms is in order should its emergent, process-dependent, and dynamic properties be accounted for. From this perspective, Castells (2000b: 10) theorization of network as integrated unit of global operation not reducible to the scale of cities comprising it makes important contribution to the structural functionalist understanding of the global space of flows (Taylor 1997) which stresses within a global inter-urban network the functions of world cities that follow from their connectivity (Storper 1997), centrality, and nodality (Beaverstock et al. 1999; Taylor 2000).

While, exhibiting greatest connectivity, London, New York, Paris and Tokyo claim dominant positions in the global urban hierarchy, the structuring effects of connectivity as an ordering principle in the world economy promulgate themselves throughout the urban networks to produce markedly different regional variations in concentration (Doel and Hubbard 2002: 356) that within the geography of unequal globalization (Castells 200b: 10) allow for a wider number of cities to play significant roles in national, regional, and global economies precisely because they are parts of the network of global flows. In contrast to Castells' (2000b) presupposition of a set structure of the global economy where financial flows connect its nodes into a novel network, the formulation of the structure of relations among actors active at different institutional, political, and territorial scales has to take critical account of the processes, contexts, and concepts that constitute world cities (Doel and Hubbard 2002: 357). From the poststructural perspective, the global economy is emergently constituted in the movement of heterogeneous assemblages (Deleuze and Guattari 1984), in the configuration of carrying forces (Doel 1995), in the relational dynamics of flows among spaces (Doel 1999), in the becoming, mutability, and dissemination (Law 2000), and in the contradictions of network formation (Doel 1999).

As relational properties of global networks receive greater attention the heterogeneity of their constitution via the processes of production of images, discourses, and organizations (Sayer 1994; Thrift 2000) the corresponding parameters in which global spaces can be reconstructed also multiply (Amin and Thrift 2002: 61) so that an overarching conception of globalization is replaced with an emphasis on its unstable geography emerging with the help of institutional reflexivity (Amin and Thrift 2002), fragmented practices, and relational performances (Rose 1999: 248). With the practices of everyday life coming to the forefront of structural analysis of globalization, the interpetation of world cities becomes attuned to the interruptions and fluidities of their constitution (Gibson-Graham 1996; Guattari 2000), the movements of displacement, intensities, and human and non-human actors (Amin and Thrift 2002; Brenner 1998; Murdoch 1997; Thrift 2000), the spatial heterogeneities of global networks (Taylor 1997), the irreducibility and incalculability of spatial practice (de Certeau 1984; Lefebvre 1991), and financial and legal service as translation practices (Beaverstock and Doel 2001). After the poststructuralist departure from excessive emphasis on the macro theoretical factors (Thrift 1997: 143), the conceptualization of world cities gives equal weight to the microsociological reconstruction of urban phenomena from multi-sited perspective (Thrift 1997: 143) which together with the institutional approach to network formation and reproduction (Beaverstock and Doel 2001; Bingham 1996) and relational mapping of translocal assemblages (Amin and Thrift 2002: 52) avoids the reductive pitfalls of both atomistic and structuralist urban studies.

Urban agglomeration of know how and capital being the dominant approach to competitiveness of world cities (Amin and Thrift 2002) the majority of urban scholarship concentrates upon enterpreneurial strategies on the local level aimed to gain competive advantage (Kresl 1995; Porter 1998) not only decoupling the notion of the world city from international competitiveness but also treating connectivity with regard to global networks and economic competitiveness separately. Urban competitive success is widely accepted to derive from internal characteristics (Duffy 1995; Oatley 1998) while among the factors decisive for competitiveness are initial local conditions and individual entrepreurial strategies (Deas and Giordano 2001: 1413), strategic economic complementarity (Krugman 1995: 28), untraded interdependence (Boddy 1999; Storper 1997), and entrepreneurial governance of city asset bases (Jessop 1998; Swyngedouw 1997). World cities serving as arenas for individual and collective action that localize, cluster, and agglomerate urban economy that calls for such entrepreneurial strategies as growth coalitions between urban administrations and business communities (Hubbard et al. 2002), urban elites coalitions among business, real-estate, and political sectors (Logan and Molotch 1987), negotiated power clusters among dispersed urban spheres (Stone 1989), and non-hierarchical co-operation between governmental and non-governmental actors (Stoker 1995).

The major objective of the world city promotion strategies is creation of "favourable environment for business and commerce" (Doel and Hubbard 2002: 360) that comes to expression in new localism policies (Hall and Hubbard 1996; Valler et al. 2000), entrepreneurial place promotion (Gold and Ward 1994), communicational urban image marketing (Rutheiser 1996), and mixed-use urban quarters construction (Olds 1995), which while meeting with criticism for deliberate commodification of urban representations seek to reinvent cities as centers of innovation, creativity, and exchange. In spite of charges of standardization, polarization, and deleteriousness (Harvey 1989), staging of international cultural, exposition, and sports events is geared to urban transition towards post-industrial development by means of the transformation of city infrastructure (Short 1999) and strategic urban investment even though without guaranteered success (Fainstein 1994; Leitner and Sheppard 1999; Loftman and Nevin 1996). To integrate the perspectives on world cities as either self-contained economic engines or innovation hubs in a space of flows an institutional perspective is needed since it allows to show how informational, analytic, and legal translation among incommensurate networks, division of labor among human and non-human actors, and place-based constellation of distantiated practices is implemented (Doel and Hubbard 2002: 361).

Understanding global economy as a single institution where world cities mediate heterogeneous flows rather than as a hierarchical order of cities vying for access to economic gain (Amin and Thrift 2002) opens crucial possibility for structural functionalist conceptualization of urban economy within the framework of collaboration and division of institutional labor where every participating urban center enhances its global positioning, where global structural transformation brings greater urban network centrality than national economy, and where integration into global economy is facilitated by proximity to world cities (Sassen 1991). The synergies obtainable among world cities do not obviate the competition among them to the extent that the entrepreneurial strategies reflective of urban agency resulting from alliances between public and private agents (Doel and Hubbard 2002: 362) affect the relative standing of cities in the global economy in accordance to their success (Dicken 1992; Taylor 1997). The notion of urban agency depends on the structural functionalist decoupling of the place of world cities in the global structure of heterogeneous flows from the function of integration of an assemblage of mediating practices with agents, objects, and relations making part of the translocal circulation within the networks participating in construction of a world city's positioning such as local stakeholders (Stone 1989), urban institutions and agencies (Newman and Thornley 1997), globetrotting individuals and groups (Cox and Mair 1988), and practice-inventing highly mobile subjets (Thrift 2000).

Despite being embedded into global networks, world cities possess capabilities of urban agency that via connective, performative, and translative strategies can improve the relative standing the city has in these networks (Thrift 2000). Over alternative attempts to either reinforce the globality of the world versus the locality of cities or collapse the difference between the two (Massey 1999: 191), the place-based conceptions of the world cities have to be corrected with the flow-based approach (Doel and Hubbard 2002: 363) that in its emphasis on contingency and context-dependency shows a way to go beyond infrastructure projects, multi-media spectacles, and local asset base investment towards network-oriented urban policy of global extension of its translation capabilities in heterogeneous environments. To build global networks a corresponding investment into translocal projects sited outside of the world cities is necessary since only non-hierarchical, non-bounded, and non-deterministic urban policy is able to deliver benefits unrestricted to narrow segments of urban popublation, evenly distributed across global networks, and propagating "their city networks into a multiplicity of sites" (Doel and Hubbard 2002: 364).

The adoption of the flow-oriented model of urban agency opens possibilities for mutually enhancing urban identities, growth promotion within an urban network as a whole, and knowledge transfer facilitation among cities by means of pursuing regional urban growth models (Terhorst and Van de Ven 1995), innovating transnational networking (Phelps 1998), and translocal involvement of policy-making (Church and Reid 1996). While it remains to be seen whether highly conditional model of national-scale place promotion or forstering of transnationally collaborative and coalition supportive networks will prove more successful in improving relative positions of world cities, the risks attendant to excessive dependence on a small number of world cities as financial, industrial, or cultural centers need to be mitigated by the balance between both structural effects of network development and functional implications of infrastructure investment so that flexible hierarchies of world cities can appear (Doel and Hubbard 2002: 365). As established relationships among world cities undergo change, theoretical attention towards networked nature of cities can more adequately secure gain in urban competitiveness not by overly stressing their structural position in existing global hierarchies or by narrowly restricting the possibilities of their functional differentiation but by structural functionalist emphasis on enterpreneurial strategies oriented towards reflexive functions of translating among heterogeneous flows, mediating between wide-spanning networks, and multi-sited performance of globally open city.

Analysis of Munch's (1982) Parsons and Theory of Action Part Two

2007-12-03T18:30:00.001-07:00

Analysis of Munch's (1981) Parsons and Theory of Action Part One

2007-12-03T18:29:00.000-07:00

General theory of action of Parsons shares with critical philosophy of Kant its basic structure and method, its epistemological assumptions, and its object theory since the core of Parsons' theory is that "concrete action is to be explained as a result of the inner laws and the characteristic interrelations of analytically disctinct sybsystems of action" (Munch 1981: 709) so that Parsons's response to the problem of social order lying in interpenetration derives from Kantian transcendental philosophy. Parsons takes normative orientation to be fundamental to conceptualization of action that he understands as an "effort to conform with norms" (Parsons [1937] 1968: 76-77) conceived of in relational terms that map it onto space of regularities. The relation between individual action and environments that affect it as "transcendental normative conditions" (Parsons 1987: 370-371) is formulated by Parsons in clear cognizance of Kant's constitutive impact on both Durkheim's and Weber's theorization of social structure. In the field of applied sociology, Parsons' work, beginning with analysis of Weber's and Sombart's concept of capitalism (Parsons 1928, 1929), extending to economic theories of Marshall (Parsons 1931, 1932) and Pareto (Parsons 1936, [1933] 1968), culminating in discussion of social action within classic sociology (Parsons [1937] 1968), and leading to elaboration of action theory (Parsons 1978a), demands discussion as classical contribution to social theory in its own right.

Although Parsons' sociology has been associated with conservatism (Dahrendorf 1955, 1958; Gouldner 1971; Mills 1959), complicated model building, and theoretical reifications the adequacy of his theory has barely been tested to explore the range and limits of its application. Nevertheless, the groundwork for constructive interpretation (Munch 1976a, 1976b, 1978a, 1978b) and conceptual contributions (Loubser et al. 1976) to Parsons' action theory has been laid. Though the importance of Parsons' work has been ranked very high (Faris 1953; High 1939, 1950), the abstruse style of his writing has led to his theories attracting few followers not least because its complexity has continued to increase over time, which does not diminish his contribution to sociology that similar to philosophy may need to pay systematic attention to its theoretical foundations (Munch 1981: 710-711). Neither general arguments nor global judgments make possible to assess the explanatory power of Parsons' theory that draws its fruitfulness from the "joining of opposites - of general theory development with empirical-practical analysis" (Munch 1981: 711) that continually systematizes its formulation of relations between theoretical logic and social practice.

Parsons has demonstrated that when applied to diverse particular cases his theoretical framework had effect of bringing "considerable clarity, consistency, and continuity" (Parsons 1970: 868) to mutual clarification of both formal definitions of theoretical problems and empirical insight deriving from research proceeding not unlike legal adjudication. The theoretical effort of Parsons has primary importance for mutual reinforcement of explanatory power of both theoretical research and practical problem solving that can supply theoretical constructions with content and empirical intitutions with frames of conceptual reference (Munch 1981: 712). The interpenetration of theoretical concepts and intuitive experience finds it earliest explication in works of Kant that had profound importance for development of Parsons' theories of action and social systems. Via repeated engagement with Kant's Critique of Pure Reason ([1781] 1956b) Parsons's high level of understanding of it was instrumental in structuring his engagement of sociological discourse through the lense of Kantian thinking (Parsons 1970: 876). Since Parsons' theorization of action and social systems follows conceptual track of development of its structure and method that is parallel to the critical philosophy of Kant, the deficiency in historical contextualization that Parsons' work exhibits can be rectified by utilizing Kantian philosophical perspective for the sake of various concretizations of the theoretical framework of Parsons' sociology (Munch 1981: 713).

Previous attempts at assessing correspondences between theories of Parsons and Kant (Bershady 1973) have committed the error of conceiving of Parsons' action theory in narrowly functionalist, evolutionist, and historicist terms whereas Parsons work stresses "interpenetration between categories of the understanding and sense data, between the categorical imperative and hypothetical imperative, between the teleological principle and concrete judgments" (Munch 1981: 713). Parsons integrates into his theory of action the classical contributions of Durkheim, Weber, and Freud that form the underlying conceptual structure that informs without undergoing major change its expansion in his subsequent writing career. Throughout his theoretical development Parsons has stressed the importance of Kant's transcendental arguments (Parsons 1978c). Taking his point of departure from Kant's duality of theoretical categories and empirical knowledge exemplified in practical ethics or aethetic judgment Parsons expands this duality across other fields of science to formulate theoretical structure as "an a priori set of conditions without which the phenomena in question could not be conceived" (Parsons 1978c: 355-356) systematically.

In contrast to Kant, Hume's ([1748] 1902, [1739-40] 1973) empiricism and skepticism reduces knowledge to sense perceptions that bear no intrinsic connection to causal laws formulated by science that finds its support for its claims of necessary correspondence between its generalizations and regularities of experience in belief only. For Kant the possibility of scientific knowledge has as its transcendental condition the interaction between theory and experience that reciprocally verify intellection by empirical data and perception by universal categories without reducing one to Descartes' rationalism or the other to Hume's empricism (Munch 1981: 715). The hallmark of the interpenetration of abstract knowledge and emprirical data is the rational experiment of the Western science developed from the Italian renaissance and English scientistic movement when between 15th and 17th centuries diverse forms of social practice were brought together for the first time (Weber [1920] 1972, [1922] 1973). Central to the critical philosophy of Kant is the transcendental argument that only established connection between a priori categories of judgment and the sensory experience grants universal validity (Kant [1799] 1968: 22, 61-68). Kant's Critique of Practical Reason ([1797] 1967) rejects utilitarian moral theories on the basis of impossibility to derive objective necessity of moral law from individual calculations of utility thereby concluding that judgment founded upon general rules though producing on avearge correct practical decisions cannot make claims for universal validity necessary for formulation of practical laws (Kant 1956a: 37).

Binding moral laws only derive for Kant from the "linking of abstract categories and empirical ethical problems" (Munch 1981: 717) since practical validity cannot approximate universal validity for the reason of its falsifiability on particular grounds so that recourse to theoretical categories is indispensable should universally valid and order-producing laws be established (Kant 1956a: 30). The philosophical foundations of Kantian categorical imperative allows it to organize particular rules according to their universal validity that through interpenetration of logical abstraction and practical utility leads to universal moral order impossible without preventing by their mutual reconciliation conceptual systems from irrelevance and particular rules from incommensurability (Munch 1981: 717). Social development does not inevitably end in such an interpenetration, as Weber ([1920] 1972: 1: 435-438, 2: 143-146) has demonstrated, since whereas concept of natural law has consistently evolved in the West, both in China and in India abstract moral theory and practical regulation were kept in isolation from one another (Munch 1981: 717). Kant's philosophy providing presuppositions of modern scientific and moral judgment allows for reassessment of Parsons' treatment of Durkheim, Weber and Freud in order to shed light on his theory building as systematization of sociology.

Drawing upon Kant's transcendental conditions of judgment, Parsons ([1937) 1968) has been developing his theory of action with the aim of establishing its universal validity, the concern he shared with Durkheim, Weber, Marshall, and Pareto, as he recognized that social ordering directly links to the level of human action that is as much recognized to conform to the criteria of transcendental judgment as do the conceptual formulations of social theories should adequate theory of action be arrived at (Parsons 1978c: 370-371). Enlarging upon works of Pareto, Marshall, Weber, and Durkheim, since his earliest attempts at sociological theory Parsons sought to reconcile the general theory of action with the particular social systems in their interrelationship that is not unlike Kant's development of critical philosophy. Hobbes ([1651] 1966) anchors social order in shared patterns of behavior that forming a system of rational expectations prevent the war of all against all that individual calculations of utility can neither rule out or minimize its possible negative effects in situations where prisoner's dilemma applies unless some distribution of rights is universalized (Munch 1981: 719). For Parsons ([1937] 1968: 89-94) utilitarian action not only does not prevent but is also conducive to socially irrational and destructive consequences that normative distribution of rights and duties prevents by putting the principle of adherence to norms above utility calculation should normative order become a reality.

In Hobbes' ([1651] 1966) view, consistent utilitarianism has as its own limit the rational realization by actors that should lasting security be achieved only sovereign rule can guarantee common order to which their individual power should be transferred that Parsons ([1937] 1968: 93) contests on the grounds that rationality is limited to individual rather then collective level that their immediate situation makes incalculable in utilitatian terms. As long as normative limitations to the utility calculations do not obtain, the normative order is impossible to establish through the force of agreement alone, for the reason of which Hobbesian conception of sovereignty makes its authority unconditional as guarantor of legal accountability (Munch 1981: 720). That utilitarian calculations cannot provide basis for social order demonstrate Hobbes ([1951] 1966) when he opposes the state of nature when trust is absent and social order arrived at through external sanctions, Coleman (1971, 1974a, 1974b) when social exchange fails to produce social order other than via collective resources, and Vanberg (1978) when centralized power to make binding decisions collapses norms into decisions supported by force. Even though according to utilitarian models the individual motivation to accept a social order based on centralized decision-making can come from an ability to impose sanctions, the limitless field of purely utilitarian calculations undermines the possibility of a stable order where changes in the distribution of power resources can undermine an institutionalized hierarchy of power unless a normative limit to utilitarian calculation is posed to prevent an "unlimited struggle for power" (Parsons [1937] 1968: 94).

Arguing that utilitarianism does not offer explanation of social order, Parsons follows Kantian critique of skepticism in postulating that even incomplete realization of social order requires explanation of its existence especially once utilitarian solutions to the problem of order (Ellis 1971; Vanberg 1975, 1978; Schutte 1977) prove to give inadequate account of its conditions of possibility (Munch 1981: 721-722). Neither utilitarian nor normative, Parsons' solution to the problem of order is voluntarist that makes possible to represent society as not "a completely causally determined factual order" (Munch 1981: 722) but one where voluntary consent requires rational justification of norms that interpenetrate with means-ends rationality (Parsons [1937] 1968: 82). The interpenetration means, just as it does for Kant, the existence of a normative boundary to calculation of utility so that together they form the necessary structure that makes rational action possible. In parallel to Kant's treatment of universal validity, logical consistency, and causal laws as following from structured perception, cognitive boundedness, concept formation, and logical conclusions, Parsons examines action as consisting of ends, available means, given conditions, and selection principles (Parsons [1937] 1968: 77-82) that he considers as systemically generative of social order or lack thereof (Munch 1981: 724).

As condition of possibility of social order only categorical principles of action can serve since by combining normative with conditional grounds for action they offer basic dimensions for analytical description of how action takes place (Parsons [1937] 1968: 76-77) as do space and time for Kant's discussion of classical mechanics (Munch 1981: 724). As a matter of Kantian categorical rule, action based on normative principle of action can only lead to social order when exclusion of use of force and fraud is unconditional, when peaceful means of exchange is not enforced by external sanctions, and when motives for action remain constant whether one is in position of power and authority or not. To explain how social order is possible, Parsons maintains that it is necessary to step outside of utilitarian framework of explanation since action based on categorical principle does not follow from common norms, social exchange, or centralized authority (Coleman 1971; Ellis 1971; Vanberg 1978) but from a situation where "categorical obligation toward common norms" (Munch 1981: 725) is constitutive of a social system. Neither means-ends rationality nor obligation to categorical norms can alone produce existing social order but only their historical interpenetration that depends on specific conditions promoting or impeding it that adequate theoretical framework has to reconstruct. Thereby Parsons has provided theoretical articulation of how social change can be explained via reconstruction of interpenetration among institutions that compose social order.

The epistemological, sociological and psychological foundations for Parsons' theorization are provided by Whitehead, Durkheim, Weber, and Freud. Both Kant's and Whitehead's ([1925] 1967) epistemology enable sociology to formulate analytical realism (Bershady 1973, 1977; Parsons 1977b) consisting in foregrounding the role that theoretical frames play in definition, interpretation, and classification of empircal phenomena (Parsons [1937] 1968: 30) that participate in "interprenetration of empirical observation and a theoretical frame of reference" (Munch 1981: 727) that reciprocally differentiates reality, examines causal relations, and develops abstractions. Since the interplay between abstraction from particulars and particularization of abstractions is at the foundation of Parsons' theory, the latter remains unaccessible unless this backrground is brought to bear on elucidation of the "function of analytical schematization" (Munch 1981: 728). While Parsons has borrowed from Whitehead formal aspects of his theory, from Durkheim, Weber, and Freud he adopted substantively sociological, idealist, and biological aspects of conceptualization of action respectively that neither represent nor lead to reductivism.

As opposed to utilitarianism of Spencer, Durkheim ([1983] 1964) asserts the importance of categorically binding rules that in forming preconditon for social exchange should not be subject to utility calculation were societies to avoid moral crises associated with erosion of normative authority. For Durkheim normative order depends not only on obligation but also on desire to accept norms which essentially poses interpenetration between society and personality. Making observance of norms dependent on a group belonging, Durkheim (1973a, 1973b; Parsons 1967, [1937] 1968: 324-408) excessively particularized the connection between personality and society which breaks down either whenever social ties become overly weak (Durkheim [1897] 1972) or whenever institutionalization of norms is insufficient (Durkheim [1983] 1964: 1-31). Durkheim also has demonstrated that norm internalization and personality development do not exclude or take place at the expense of each other since division of labor and autonomy from primary group reinforce each other to the point where comperensive normative order and individualization presuppose one another corresponding to Parsons' interpenetration of social institutions and personality (Munch 1981: 729).

In his comparative study of religion, Weber ([1920] 1972) also refers to interpenetration to explain social change and historical development that for religious ethics and the world produces such four types of their interrelation as accommodation, isolation, reconciliation, and mutual penetration (Munch 1981: 730; Parsons 1963). Worldly accommodation is prevalent in societies where groups promoting categorical norms are not separate from pratical life and social hierarchies, as are Chinese literati (Weber [1920] 1972: 1: 276- 536), which leads to dominance of utilitarian rationality. Reconciliation is characteristic of societies separated into internally organized social spheres, such as castes (Weber [1920] 1972: v. 2), with only weak symbolic integration that makes general normative order impossible. Isolation results from separation of categorical norms as subject of intellectual discourse from conduct of everyday life, as is characteristic of Buddhism (Weber [1920] 1972: v. 2), leading to impossibility of generalized normative rules that could exercise regulatory function across society. Mutual penetration brings institutionally independent spheres under normative control that limits utilitarian calculation with ethical regulation as does Protestant capitalism (Weber [1920] 1972: 1: 17-237).

The formation of medieval city gave strong impulse to the process of interpenetration among religion, economy, and politics (Weber [1922] 1976: 1: 17-236) by bringing the respective communities into proximity that with increased interaction gradually lead to polarizing tensions that after Reformation alternatively strengthened either absolutism of dominant worldly interests or Puritanism of universal ethical conduct (Munch 1981: 731). The normative order characteristic of modernity with its co-existence of universalism and individualism, of rationalism and activism, and of its natural law and commercial law has institutional interpenetration as its major generative structure of which Weber discerned the origins in the West and Parsons systematized into theory of action (Munch 1981: 732).

Freud has contributed the psychological perspective to the theory of interpenetration of society and personality that Parsons saw as important as sociological perspective of Durkheim (Parsons 1953: 15). While Freud's analysis of personality differentiates it into an id, ego, and superego that respectively represent the libidinal drives, external reality, and cultural norms (Freud 1972), emphasizing their interpenetration Parsons points out that they are equally affected by their interrelationship with each other and their social environment (Munch 1981: 732). In the process of socialization Freud identifies forms of object cathexis transfer and differentiation of libidinal objects that are at the basis of progressive internalization of cultural norms and of growing individual autonomy that Parsons summarizes as mutually reinforcing interpenetration (Parsons 1956a, 1956b, 1964a, 1964b; Parsons and Bales 1956).

Parsons lays the foundations of a theory of interpenetration by constructively integrating Durkheim, Weber, and Freud into a theory of action that over the course of its refinement has exhibited widely reaching analytical accounts of relations of interpenetration of subsystems that while possessing their own institutional autonomy allow both for their reconstruction as ideal types and for exploration of "nature and extent of their interpenetration" (Munch 1981: 734) that only in their interaction allow for new levels of the interrelated systemic development, of the containement of tensions among social systems, and of the reproduction of institutional unity and identity (Luhmann 1977a, 1977b, 1978a, 1978b). The theoretical integration of classical sociological perspectives accomplished by Parsons remains peerless since while his efforts are directed at creation of a general theory (Munch 1980s), other attempts at theoretical generalizations mostly reduce Weber to historicist conflict theory (Bendix 1971), reinterpret Durkheim and Weber in realist and utilitarian terms (Pope 1973; Pope, Cohen, and Hazelrigg 1975; Warner 1978), produce idealist reading of Weber's sociology (Tenbruck 1975), and restrict Weber to dialectics between ideas and interests (Schluchter 1976, 1978, 1979).

Different systems do not have to exhibit complete autonomy of their rules and laws to claim independence since they usually rest on different social groups, promote disctinct social practices, and enter into relations of practical interpenetration while remaining analytically separable as would ethics and business. To grasp the dialectics of systemic interpenetration an attention has to be paid to the phenomenon of the zone of intersection between institutionalized spheres where interpenetration between them should not be equated with incorporation of one sphere into another, institutional incompatibility, and expansion of one system at the expense of another (Munch 1981: 735). The dialectics whereby the power and scope of each system in enhanced in the process of interpenetration should not be interpeted in crude functionalist terms of economic determinism (van den Berghe 1963) but rather as a direction of emancipatory development towards growing autonomy and interdependence (Nelson 1969). Over the successive stages of his theoretical development Parsons has refined his approach to analytical differentiation of social systems (Parsons 1951; Parsons and Shils 1951), to differentiation of systemic development and to theorization of the micro-macro link (Parsons, Bales, and Shils 1953), and to systemically specifying the relations of control and interchange among society (Parsons and Smelser 1956; Parsons 1969a, 1969a, 1969c), action (Parsons and Platt 1973; Parsons 1977c), and personality (Parsons 1978c). Matching in its importance the critical philosophy of Kant, the body of theory formulated by Parsons invites the examination of substantive and methodological implications his theory has both for an adequate understanding of classical social theory and for the development of contemporary sociology (Munch 1980a; Munch 1981: 735).

Analysis of Roche's (2003) Mega-events, Time and Modernity

2007-12-02T00:23:00.001-07:00

Analysis of Delanty's (2000) The Resurgence of the City in Europe

2007-12-02T00:20:00.000-07:00

Analysis of Le Galès' (1999) Is Political Economy Still Relevant to Study the Culturalization of Cities?

2007-12-02T00:19:00.000-07:00

Analysis of Smith and Timberlake's (1995) Conceptualising and Mapping the Structure of the World System's City System

2007-12-02T00:17:00.000-07:00

Analysis of Munch's (1991) American and European Social Theory

2007-11-27T17:13:00.001-07:00

Cultural backgrounds affect the social forms of theory production shaping traditions of social theory in the United States, Britain, France and Germany the changing contributions of which to world sociology can be summarized as revitalization of European social theory. As respective influences of American, Asian, and European culture rearrange to reflect the shifting international balance among the three regions, sociological discipline also participates in the process where European social thought undergoes revitalization vis-a-vis long period when American sociology prevailed. After World War II the United States has established significant presence in sociology for the reasons of having developed leading academic system, dominated the world in political affairs, expanded to commerically encompass the world economy, and forged major international organizations (Munch 1991: 314). The dominance of American sociology was based on the integration of research and teaching on the level of graduate school and on the institutionalized competition of academic instutitions on a national scale. The failure to introduce research-oriented graduate training, the lack of market competition among academic schools, and the isolation within and across national boundaries of scientific schools account for simultaneous decline of European universities (Munch 1991: 314).

In this context American sociology has established itself as professionalized discipline whereas European sociology, by contrast, has not had access to comparable organizational resources of large competitive departments. However, within economically, politically, and culturally policentric world, European Union reemerges on the basis of dramatically intensified "economic transactions, concerted political decision-making, communal ties, and cultural communication" (Munch 1991: 315) among its constituent nations that together engage in non-ideological competition with the United States and Southeast Asia in areas of economy, politics, association, and culture. As a consequence, the world dominance of American sociology will be replaced by a horizontally policentric system where European sociology becomes once again one of the three leading schools of the discipline. Rise to dominance of American sociology has been accompanied by the preeminance of structural functionalism paradigm (Parsons [1937] 1968. 1951, 1967, 1977, 1978; Merton [1949] 1968), positivistic quantitative methodology (Lazarsfeld and Rosenberg 1955), leading journals organizing scientific community - American Journal of Sociology, American Sociological Review, and Social Forces -, unified academic market with controlling agency of the journals, and highly reputed academic institutions promoting them - Harvard and Columbia (Munch 1991: 315).

Synthesized out of British anthropology, Anglo Saxon empiricism, Italitan positivism, French positivism and organicism, and German historicism and idealism, structural functionalism (Merton [1948] 1968; Parsons [1937] 1968) has reflected American society of insitutionalized individualism, instrumental activism, intersecting voluntary associations, common citizenship, institutionalized political democracy, party competition, minor political cleavages, and capitalist mass production (Munch 1991: 315-316). While each European sociological tradition had only partial ability to account for historical variability of social phenomena, the complementary diversity of European social thought has been progressively homogenized into the structural functionalism as mainstream social theory that lost connection with intellectual contraditions of its European origins (Parsons 1937, 1951, 1966, 1967, 1969, 1971, 1977, 1978). As the empirical grasp of structural functionalism on the social reality it sought to describe slipped the voices of its critics raised in 1950s have led to its demise as leading theoretical paradigm in 1960s. To account for dynamic social change, links to diverse European traditions were reestablished by Munch (1991) with European sociology, by Coser (1956, 1967) and Dahrendorf (1958a, 1958b) with European conflict theory, by Homans (1961, 1974) with European neoclassical economics, by Blumer (1969) with German hermeneutics, by Garfinkel (1967) with German phenomenology, and by Gouldner (1971, 1980) and Wallerstein (1974, 1980, 1984, 1989) with German political economy.

Save for Gouldner and Wallerstein, the institutionalization of plurality of microsociological models (Ritzer 1985) has replaced the Parsons' attempt to build a unified theoretical framework with multiple adapations of European thought to the empirical concerns of American sociology that without recourse to broad comparative approach offered few alternatives to complexity of structural functionalism (Munch 1991: 317). In all its variety of conflict theory (Collins 1975), rational choice theory (Coleman 1990), symbolic interactionism (Blumer 1969; Strauss 1978), and ethnomethodology (Garfinkel 1967) American sociology spells out basic structures of the society it studies that is constituted of "the many activities of free, independent agents who realize their individual selves through competition, exchange, negotiation, and cooperation" (Munch 1991: 317). The globally dominant position of American sociology after World War II affects development of sociological theory around the world where its academic system exerts standardizng effect on European sociology (Munch 1986b) as the sociological peruiodicals of the United States impose through their editors and reviews the format and quality requirements upon their widely disseminated distribution network marked by uniform professionalizm not unlike other American franchizes (Ritzer 1983).

American system of sociological education in its dedication to professional standards has led to greatly narrowing the range of deviation from the average scholarly quality which is not the case in Europe where exceptional diversity of its sociological tradition has made it possible to produce works of much higher level of excellence (Munch 1991: 318). Correspondingly, as the economic paradigm is increasingly ascendant in American sociology (Coleman 1990) claiming to represent as definining direction of theoretical development as did structural functionalism (Parsons 1937) the major source of inspiration for the current economic turn is neoclassical economics exclusively built around rational choice theory, which excludes multiple other aspects of social phenomena that are not only no less important than but also excercise reciprocal impact on economic calculation (Munch 1992). Economic sociology, in common with conflict theory, social interactionism, and ethnomethodology, puts transactions between free individuals at the center of its construction of social reality the theoretical parsimony, empirical applicability, and basis in common sense of American economy of which have contributed to its dominant position in social theory, which puts at a disadvantage other directions of theoretical development should American sociology retain its centrality in the world (Munch 1991: 319).

As "the most exactly and precisely formulated theory" (Munch 1991: 319), the rational choice theory enjoys the brand-name success that exact reproducibility, wide applicability, and high quality ensure for it around the world with minimal instruction on its cultural, theoretical, or philosophical underpinnings finding instead its reflection in the global expansion of Westrern capitalism. However, the rational choice paradigm represents a reductive synthesis of other sociological theories that encompass the diverse aspects of social life that go far beyond the common denominator of economic perspective (Munch 1991: 320). Rebalancing of the relations that intellectual traditions of America, Europe and Southeast Asia have in the world creates necessity to cover wider range of social phenomena that European sociology with its diverse traditions continues to have major theoretical relevance for (Munch 1991: 320). Coming from a richly interdisciplinary tradition, European sociology encompasses different national traditions where multiple theoretical schools have coexisted that "based on their own philosophical principles and methodological rules" (Munch 1991: 320) neither put any single paradigm at the center of their sociological traditions nor professionalize themselves as a discipline.

A concerted effort is required to mobilize European theoretical traditions to achieve account of reality that would be sociologically comprehensive in its dealing with diversity of social phenomena. The more important contributions to social theory come from British, French, and German traditions (Munch 1986a, 1986b, 1986c, 1989). As British sociology displaced Spencer's (1897-1906] 1975) liberalism, utilitarianism, and evolutionism, after World War II it has developed its own school of Marxist class-conflict theory by scholars like Rex (1961, 1981), Lockwood (1958), Goldthorpe (1968, 1980), Miliband (1982), and Giddens (1984) not showing philosophical influence of Hegel as did German Marxism. In Britain Marxist sociologists act in alliance with established power structures to apply class-conflict theory to labor politics, extension of rigths and welfare services, and regulation of industrial production without giving mich weight to theory development (Munch 1991: 321). The British labor politics of compromise secures the existing class hierarchy by utilizing power of mobilization through organizations and unions to bring improvements in social conditions of working classes by emphasizing solidarity and community.

Workers' struggle in Britain takes place within the structure of solidarity among classes where "tutelage from above and deference from below" (Munch 1991: 322) ensured acceptance of existing class structure that has consequently inhibited technology-related productivity increases, individual achievement, and job requirements change. Thatcherist policy of curbing union power and appealing to individualism has weakened solidarity both within and among classes that while allowing change and innovation to promote economic development of British society has made necessary to restore inter-class consensus to the establishment of which the vibrancy of Marxist sociology in Britain has made important contribution. In contrast, French sociologists belong to flourishing intellectual elite with wide audience that appreciates their works within rapidly changing cycles of intellectual fashion (Munch 1991: 323). Works of Saint-Simon (1865-1878), Comte ([1830-1842] 1969), and Durkheim ([1893] 1973) exert a definitive impact on French sociology that envisions society as an organic whole governed from the top of its hierarchic organization where every class has specialized functions that in their sum promote the development of society, liberation of individual, and general well-being.

After World War II, the impetus to the development of French sociology given by structuralism (Levi-Strauss 1947, 1962) and Marxism (Althusser and Balibar [1968] 1970) that highlighted constitutive role of autonomous structures was carried over to poststructuralism (Foucault 1969, 1971, 1975), deconstructionism (Derrida 1967), and postmodernism (Lyotard 1979, 1983; Baudrillard 1986) that interpreted social domination in terms of relations between power and discourse, of mutual implication of social structures and texts, and of "plurality of aesthetic projects" (Munch 1991: 324). Beginning with Descartes ([1637] 1963), power in French thought is perceived abstractly so that access to its manifestation lies in textual structures that only intellectuals can contest as they struggle for the achievement of universal freedom that actionist sociology (Touraine 1973, 1978) explicitly pursues. French sociology of Crozier (1964a), Bourricaud (1976), Bourdieu (1979), and Boudon (1977) combines standardized empirical approach of American rational choice theories with emphasis on social structures, which continues positivistic tradition of Durkheim and Parsons. Not without precedent in Tocqueville ([1856] 1968), for the French sociologists the social structure is represented by positional power of individuals within bureaucracies (Crozier 1964a), capital cities (Bourricaud 1976), and economic, social, and cultural capital structures (Bourdieu 1979, 1984b, 1985) that serves the mobilization of "appropriate resources in the power struggle" (Munch 1991: 325).

Drawing upon the cumulative development of philosophy and social thought since the German Enlightenment of late 18th and early 19th century, German sociology operates under the conditions of academic authonomy where theories, concepts and ideas provide its exclusive environment that has made possible its "conceptual sharpness, theoretical consistency, and logical conclusiveness" (Munch 1991: 326). In contrast to the French sociology, academic consistency of German social theory lacks innovation and spontaneity which leads to its theoretical development by way of either reinterpretation of classical and contemporary works (Habermas 1984, 1986, 1988) or return to classical problems and solutions whenever radical break with tradition is attempted (Luhmann 1984, 1986, 1988). Impact of philosophical idealism on German social thought expresses itself in rendering modern society understandable via dynamics of dialectical contradictions that are located in culture and institutions. For Kant (1964) moral universalism and moral particularism tend to converge while never coinciding whereas for Hegel (1964-1971) the freedom of reason and necessity of reality can merge by gradual resolution of contradictions between them that in the ideal sense the state is the embodimetn of as its rulings are guided by philosophical thinkers acting under autonomous academic conditions that are in stark contrast to engaged proletariat that Marx ([1843] 1956, [1867] 1962, [1885] 1964) expected to perform homologous function as agents of historical change within capitalist economy.

With tragic consequences, Nazism and Stalinism represent totalitarian extremisms that German idealism could not contain within its synthetic logic as the Nazi state sought to exterminate social contradictions of capitalism while the Soviet state pursued eradication of economic contradictions of communism both of which led to total domination by party elite for the suffering that these two totalitarian regimes inflicted in the 20th century the German social theory carries responsibility for because of lending to them intellectual legitimation, however minor it should be (Munch 1991: 327). However, contradictions of modernity have nowhere found their as deep and as sharp elucidations as in works of such German social theorists as Simmel (1890, 1900, 1908, [1914] 1926) and Weber ([1920-1921a] 1972a, [1920-1921b] 1972b. [1920-1921c] 1971, [1922] 1972c) that have made unparalleled contribution to the sociology of institutions (Schluchter 1971, 1972) and are growing in theoretical importance (Schluchter 1979, 1988) even though after a long period of narrow political reception (Mommsen [1959] 1974; Hennis 1987). In German critical theory instrumental reason prevents Enlightenment-based modernity from realizing its claims for full realization of human potential (Horkheimer 1967; Horkheimer and Adorno 1947) that either objectification of conceptual thought (Adorno [1966] 1973a) or regulatory colonization of communicative life-worlds (Habermas 1971, 1973b, 1981) are held responsible for with aesthetic criticism and communicative rationality as respectively proposed remedies.

Though Habermas argues that discursive procedures should be institutionalized connective links among specialized social areas, only together with "procedures of negotiation, compromise, and conflict settlement" (Munch 1991: 329) can they contribute to managing the complexity of modern societies composed of autopoietic systems (Luhmann 1984, 1986, 1988) that should be approached as institutionalized functional areas that contingently interpenetrate each other to leave room for action (Munch 1991) and for critical reflection (Beck 1986, 1988; Willke 1983, 1989). To manintain the relevance of distinct contributions of European social thought to the discipline of sociology it is necessary to integrate its perspectives and its variety into American sociological theory. That, however, should be achieved not via the path of standardization of sociology towards its professionalized as a discipline but via the preservation of its interrelated diversity (Munch 1991: 329). Comparative advantage of American sociology in empirical research should be combined with strengths of European theoretical achievements in order to integrate distinct contributions of diverse national traditions to world sociology.

Though exchange, cooperation, and migration have always contributed to creating areas of overlap between these traditions as did wave of refugees from Nazi Germany in 1930s, movement of British Marxist and class conflict theorists like Moore (1966), Skocpol (1979), and Wallerstein (1974, 1980, 1984), and reception of European sociology by Alexander (1982-1983, 1987), the need for integration between American and European sociology remains. No less is necessary the mutual integration of European theoretical traditions that have more developed communication and exchange with American sociology than with each other, should their interrelated diversity exert long lasting theoretical influence (Munch 1991: 330).

Analysis of Kemple's (2007) Spririts of Late Capitalism

2007-11-27T13:53:00.001-07:00

Analysis of Gieryn's (2000) A Space for Place in Sociology

2007-11-26T21:21:00.000-07:00

Analysis of Amin's (2002) Spatialities of Globalisation

2007-11-20T16:56:00.000-07:00

Analysis of Burawoy's (1998) Critical Sociology: A Dialogue Between Two Sciences

2007-11-20T16:37:00.000-07:00

The discipline of sociology has, on one hand, a set of texts that have exercised guiding impact on the history of its development and, on the other hand, a number of practices that evolve in the process of their application, which constitutes the point of Stinchcombe's (1959) essay on Weber that Burawoy (1998) relates to contemporary state of sociology. Stinchcombe's distinction of mode of operation of ideal-typical bureaucracy into, on one side, properly bureaucratic work with detailed rules, division of labor, and set procedures, and, on another side, craft-like work with only cognitive map of theory to steer the interaction between researcher and informants equally applies to sociology (Burawoy 1998: 12). Bureaucratic sociology belongs to positive models of science with separation, distance, and detachment as its hallmarks, while craft sociology relies on reflexive models of science with connection, proximity and dialogue as its major features. As each theoretical practice responds to specific sets of characteristics of social reality, the distinction of sociology as a discipline lies, however, in avoiding predominance of any single approach in favor of "mutually enriching, reciprocal engagement of positive and reflexive science" (Burawoy 1998: 12).

The practice of science carries such implications for each model of scientific inquiry that context poses most challenge for the principles of positive science while power for reflexive science as these limits to scientific inquiry simultaneously demarcate the boundaries of the world each mode of science can make transparent. Beginning with Comte who opposed positivism with its search for empirical social laws to metaphysical thinking the transformation of sociology into science has been accompanied with qualification of its claims as the discipline underwent professionalization where representation of the world and scholarly practice are held to be separate. Positive science follows four basic regulatory principles (Katz 1983) that include avoidance of reactivity where researcher should refrain from inducing bias into studied reality, insurance of reliability whereby researcher systematically selects from available data, assurance of replicability where idiosyncrasies of observer are minimized, and demonstration of representativity where derivation or testing of theory must be valid for entire population of data. However, survey research as most representative of bureaucratic mode of science demonstrates its limitations of its guiding principles as stimulus-response expectation becomes affected by survey structure, location and subject, as standardization expectation meets with diversity of respondent understanding and reaction, as stabilization expectation gets subverted by external field effects on the interview, and as sampling expectation comes undone in situations of interaction that construct their subjects and situations rather than represent (Burawoy 1998: 13).

As the survey research progressively refines its methodology to control for context effects of interview by ethnographic sensibility, of respondent by focus groups, of field and situation by factoring in larger social forces the limitations of positive science and advantages of reflexive become more apparent (Burawoy 1998: 13). While objections to objectivist effects of social science frequently proclaim the "inviolability of local knowledge" (Burawoy 1998: 13), by Geertz (1983), Bauman (1992) and Latour (1993) among others, the interpretive turn towards research context from subjective standpoint should maintain communication with positivist social science to prevent another one-sided perspective from prevailing. Reflexive sociology, as proposed by Mills (1959), Gouldner (1970), and Bourdieu ad Wacquant (1992), invites methodological specification should transition towards "reflexive model of science" (Burawoy 1998: 14) be accomplished. Corresondingly, reflexive science presupposes intersubjectivity its subjects develop over course of research, embeddedness of its objects into context-specific social processes, structuration within assymetric relations between local contexts and extralocal processes, and reconstruction of theories by strategic choice of case studies to elaborate or revise conceptual frameworks (Burawoy 1998: 14).

Reflexive science allows for transition from procedural objectivity where empirical data either corroborate or falsify theories towards embedded objectivity where gradual improvement of theory overcomes epistemological dualisms of rigidly positivist orientation to find its foundation in intersubjective participation, process dependence, complex structuration, and theoretical reconstruction. Following Lakatos (1978) reconstructions should be consistent with existing knowledge, account for anomalous cases with parsimony, offer new theoretical perspective, lead to original predictive statements, and lend themselves to corroborations. The mutual dynamics found between anomalous empirical phenomena and theories or research programs that engenders theory reconstruction should supply the starting point for the production of new knowledge through discovery of anomalies and theoretical programs. This perspective opens an interdisciplinary space where each research program plies a reflexive, political and situational course in "hierarchically organized field of competing, overlapping, clashing, and mutually constituting theories" (Burawoy 1998: 14).

As a result of the theoretical historicization and de-exoticization of the anthropological encounter, rather than reconstruct fixed norms and isolated communities reflexive anthropology started to take account of strategic action by research subjects, of problematization by anthropologists of their research, and of direct observation of events by means of extended case method (Gluckman 1958, 1961; Mitchell 1956; van Velsen 1967). As ethnography becomes methodological tool increasingly widely used in sociology it incorporates theoretical concerns of extended case method into studies that cover street society (Bourgois 1995; Susser 1982), workplace (Lee 1997; Thomas 1985), migration (Hondagneu-Sotelo 1994; Stack 1996), family (Devault 1991; Stacey 1990), schooling (Lareau 1989; Willis 1977), social movements (Fantasia 1988; Ray 1998), underdevelopment (Enriquez 1991; Beneria and Roldan 1987), organizational dynamics (Blum 1991; Smith 1990), the state (Espeland 1998; Haney 1996), and science (Epstein 1996; Fujimura 1996). As applications of ethnography continue to develop along the dimensions of intersubjective experience, comparative tracing of processes across contexts, historical interpretation of translocal structures, and cumulative theory reconstruction such methodology has to grapple with subversive effects of "multiple dimensions of power" (Burawoy 1998: 15).

Ethnographic research tends to come into contact with networks of domination that restrictively affect the possibilities for communication and discovery the attempts at intervening into which contribute to dynamics of domination already found in the research field where contestatory intention of research needs to address relations of power in their fullness. The analysis of social process cannot be rid of the objectifying effects whereby sociological reduction commits silencing by reconstructing relations of power, production of differences, and reproduction of complex field centered around actors privileged by ethnographer's account. The differences in historical, social, and theoretical scale that enter into ethnographic research of connection between micro processes and large-scale social forces lead to their contingent objectification in order to highlight their social reality as is done in institutional ethnography (Smith 1987, 1990). Ethnography sensitive to anomalous subjects of its discourse in the process of extending the reach of reconstructed theories should refrain from normalizing social reality through naturalization of existing relations, homogenization of differences, domestication of resistances, and stigmatization of traditions.

While researcher's authority in both positive and reflexive science is exercised through dimensions of "domination, silencing, objectification, and normalization" (Burawoy 1998: 16), the medium of application of authority is the control over research design in positive science and the power over context of research in reflexive science. The contradictions that science harbors in its principles and operation demand its reshaping and reappropriation with critique contributing to continuous self-monitoring of scientific practice, which, as opposed to postmodernist renunciation, does not lead to standing "helpless before the ravages of modernity" (Burawoy 1998: 16). As both positive and reflexive science discover their respective limitations the use of techniques, methods, and models becomes differentiated according to the model of science they serve. In case of interview, it can be employed either as objectifying tool of survey research of positive science or as part of reflexive method where it is "self-consciously intersubjective, highlights process through space and time, and locates the individual in historical and social milieus" (Burawoy 1998: 16). Correspondingly, participant observation can be used reflexively as part of application of extended case method or be put to positive use of grounded theory (Glaser and Strauss 1967) with outside observation, coding apparatuses, context bracketing, and theory induction.

The difference between application of ethnography in positive as opposed to reflexive science lies in whether inductive derivation of conclusions (Hochschild 1989) or critical engagement of discursive practices (Devault 1991) is sought. In historical sociology the distinction between positive and reflexive principles takes form of, on one hand, outer-historical standpoint, formal standardization, simultaneous comparison of historical contexts, and theoretical induction of explanatory factors (Skocpol 1979), and of, on the other hand, participatory reconstruction of history, orientation to singular processes over homogeneous events, changing context of interactions, and theory reconstruction vis-a-vis single case (Trotsky [1906] 1969, [1930] 1977). Being among the methods that has explored the methodological space between positive and reflexive science, feminist ethnography has not developed into systematic research, has refused to develop totalizing theories of class, race, and ethnicity, has not yet related everyday life to translocal forces, and has not translated deconstructions of theory or ideology into research programs (Burawoy 1998: 17).

Among the contributions to the reflexive science of sociology that allows to locate the discipline in the changing conditions of its existence is Castells' (1996, 1997, 1998) sociology of the post-industrial order where disparities and concentration of power, transnationalization of corporations, and development of global networks reach unprecedented scale. Proliferation of possibilities, spatial flows, and risks puts sociology together with other practices of knowledge production at the center of increasingly self-referential social order. Giddens (1992) and Beck (1992) highlight the need for reflexive science to respond to paradoxical consequences of unfolding of advanced modernization that call science to internal self-regulation, social accountability, context sensitivity, and consequences and fallibility awareness. The disciplinary reflexivity deficit of sociology has to be met with recognition of interdependence of positive and reflexive methods that can be arrived at "by holding them in tension, by interweaving them, by playing them off each other" (Burawoy 1998: 18).

How effective research methods prove to be also depends on methodological scale of phenomena studied so that translocal social forces receive reflection in survey and demographic data that is unavailable through ethnography. When different research methods are combined, their criteria of evaluation should not be merged or confused. Implication of methodologies in either positive or reflexive science also governs the choice and formulation of problems which makes interdisciplinary combination of methods conditional on corresponding change in methodological orientations. Similar to how rise of mass society brought prominence to survey research (Coleman 1986), reflexive sociology belongs to the present historical moment when apparatuses of global control proliferate in developing countries, local rebellions against the global, and postcolonial challenging of marginalization. Changes afoot in outside world also constitute the theoretical practice of sociology as symbolic analysis (Reich 1991) fits better into horizontal than hierarchical networks, action research (Touraine 1988) reinforces the dynamics of new social movements, and extended case method becomes "increasingly tied to the polarized world we study" (Burawoy 1998: 19).

Integration of structural functionalism of Parsons (1949, 1960) into present practice of largely reflexive sociology will provide it with ability to methodologically mediate between more positive economics and political science and more interpretive anthropology, history, and geography, to deal with ethnography, silencing, globalization, modernity, and theory non-dualistically, and to provide reflexive social critique sensitive to both context and power relations. However, in order to avoid imbalance between reflexive and positivist methodologies within sociology it has to articulate counterhegemonic theoretical frameworks, to force research methodologies to confront their limitations, to reconnect sociology to interdisciplinary developments, and to "respond creatively and critically to the troubles and (dis)illusions of the epoch" (Burawoy 1988: 19).

Analysis of Walby's (2007) On the Social Relations of Research

2007-11-20T16:25:00.000-07:00

While institutional ethnography takes critical position vis-a-vis traditional sociology and investigates relations occurring between local action and extra-local relations, the binary oppositions that govern its discourse call for its reflexive reformulation within the larger field of sociological theorization. As Smith asserts the inevitability with which institutional ethnographers are drawn into the ruling relations through their professional agency (2005: 206), forging conceptual linkages between theoretical discussions in sociology is as much incumbent on it as is awareness of its effects on relations of ruling in contexts of its application. In formulating institutional ethnography Smith draws on feminism (Smith 1987; 1990a; 1990b; 1992), Marxism (Smith 1977; 2004), and sociology of knowledge (Smith 1984; 1990c; 1999; 2001) in order to propose an alternative sociology (Smith 2005) that turns the knowing subject into an "entry point into the social" (Walby 2007: 1009) transcending traditional forms of objectification.

Smith's approach (2005) converges upon place that texts occupy in organizing inter-individual relations across contexts where "sequences of action coordinated in extra-local sites" (Walby 2007: 1009) enable distanciation of social relations (Smith 1987). Even though institutional ethnography intends to uncover the implication of textual mediation of relations in modes of ruling (Smith 1990b), the disciplinary distance that it claims for itself apart from the rest of the ethnographic practices is not tenable for reason that it shares with the social sciences their methodological tools (Mauthner and Doucet 2003). Institutional ethnography fully belongs to the discussion on the place of social relations in the research practice that has already been widely covered in relation to ethnographic methodology across the width of its application (Burawoy et al. 2000; Denzin 1999, 2002; Hammersley 1990; Hammersley and Atkinson 1983; Lofland and Lofland 1995; Williams 1993). In so far as institutional ethnography aims to reduce the degree to which objectification takes place in the process of research the remedy to the objectivist research practices lies in reflexive intervention in how ethnographic methodology is configured (Walby 2007: 1010).

As the intention of institutional ethnography is to seek access to extralocal organization of forms of knowledge via methodological attention to individuals (Campbell 1998), as opposted to ethnomethodology, it goes beyond the individual towards the social (de Montigny 1995: 14; DeVault 1991) and its draws attention to the locally specific organization of the setting of ethnographic research (Smith 1990b: 118). Beginning with critique of Schutz's phenomenology as a form of gendered symbolic violence (Smith 1987: 83), Smith (1977; 1990c) borrowed form Marx's method to ground her alternative sociology in in the site of people's experience, as she proceeded to investigate subjects that objectified knowledges make invisible (Smith 1987; 2005). For Smith ruling relations arise from the processes whereby governmental discourses subsume forms of knowledge originating in lived and intuitive experience of individuals (Smith 1990: 31). From the initial position of institutional ethnography on active production of social meanings by texts (Smith 1990b: 216), subsequent research reveals that texts act as "processing interchanges" (Pence 2001; Walby 2005a; 2006) in the subjective constitution of social relations where people perform interpretive work in the settings of reading (Turner 2002: 309).

From the methodological standpoint, institutional ethnography investigates how texts achieve institutional organization (Smith 2005: 181) the process of which remains constitutively open to further explication of "institutional nexuses" (Grahame 1999) and to additional problematics to which each context leads (DeVault 1999: 50). Common methodological focus on institutional ethnography turns its practitioners into participants in collective work (Smith 2005: 219) as their activities all concentrate on institutional interconnections at interview sites (DeVault and McCoy 2002: 758), multiple contexts that texts cross (Walby 2005b: 165), and rigorous explication of ruling relations (DeVault and McCoy 2002: 764). While institutional ethnography has been categorized as a philosophy of the subject (Reinharz 1992) and an individuated approach (Connell 1992), its declared aim is to produce explanatory maps of dynamic relations (Smith 1999: 129; Campbell and Gregor 2002). Despite claims to the contrary (Smith 2005: 35, 49; DeVault 1999: 66), institutional ethnography actively involves theoretical frameworks in the production of its results, shares methodological concerns with other sociological theories, and constitutes its subjects and data interpretations in the process of its research practices (Walby 2007: 1013-1014).

To designate alienation obtaining between ethnographer and informants obtaining in the process of fieldwork a designation of "social relations of research" (Oliver 1992: 102) has been proposed. However, the calls for changing social relations of research with the aim of advancing emancipatory goals do not take into account the place of ethnographic fieldwork within the larger process of knowledge production which implicates the practice of ethnography in definitions of discursive authority in science. Even though the spread of the social constructivist approach in social sciences has been widely associated with reflexive turn as a means to rectify positivist obscuring of role of researcher's subjectivity and of implicit procedural principles (Haggerty 2003: 155-156), the implications of the reflexive turn remain to be translated into reorganization of research practice. Seen as an "intervention into research practice across paradigms" (Walby 2007: 1015), reflexivity intervenes to reduce such negative effects of objectifying effects of research as truncation, ill confluence, and misrepresentation (Wilby 2003: 1015). Taken to its conceptual limits, reflexivity becomes instrumentalized for purposes of valorization of critical research (Lynch 2000), loses connection with methodological foundations of research (Macbeth 2001), and leads to unending fetishization of the research practice (Davies et al. 2004).

As researchers strive to arrive at economical explanations of reality (Law 2004), selection of relevant elements of social reality during research practice necessarily involves truncation of other components (Law and Singleton 2005) that reflexive attention to ontological and epistemological assumptions can bring to bear on ethnographic practice. Reflexivity is primarily helpful for "reconfiguring social relations of research" (Walby 2007: 1016) that through "epistemological accountability" (Mauthner and Doucet 2003: 424) can contribute to critical examination of textual practices of research and to interrogation of practices that establish authority within the relations of knowing. While institutional ethnography fails to offer methodologically viable alternatives to what it terms as monological theoretical frameworks (Smith 1990c), its focus on standpoint, institutions, and texts (Smith 2005: 52) puts it within the conceptual horizon of classical sociology (Sorokin 1956) as its theoretical stress on discovery necessitates interventions in the "research design itself" (Walby 2007: 1017) rather than in its ethical dimensions (Guillemin and Gillam 2004).

Given that sociological findings are irredeemably provisional (Vahabzadeh 2005), the process of rendering real intelligible in terms of research ontology involves truncation of its aspects (Law 2004) that reflexive attention to theoretical and methodological foundations of research practice can make transparent. Reliance on overly schematic theoretical models of social reality demands correction of "limitations that define substantive theories" (Katz 2002: 260) which finds correspondence in Smith's positing of the "subject-centered ontology of the social" (Walby 2007: 1018). Awareness of the constitutive role of ontological status of research categories makes possible reflexive intervention in the social relation of research at its decisive stages. In common with action network theory (Callon 1986; Latour 1987; Saldanha 2003), institutional ethnography concerns itself with social organization of knowledge that, however, differs from decentering of subjects in favor of "networks of sociotechnical performance" (Law 1999: 10) that submerges articulation of subject-object nexus (Smith 1990b) in the organization of the network (Latour 2000). The social relations of research are inescapably part of ethnographic fieldwork that can only ameliorate its objectifying effect by keeping the discussion of its theoretical underpinnings open (Vahabzadeh 2003) and by reflexively intervening into practical considerations that inform research practice (Law 2004).

As opposed to one-sided methodological emphasis on researcher subjectivity in the interview setting, the research interview has been recovered as a site where identities are contructed (Presser 2004), a process whereby identities are negotiated and solidified (Arendell 1997; Best 2003), a relationship where researchers and informants mutually exercise power (Thapar-Bjorkert and Henry 2004), and a space where material objects influence the interchange through their presence (De Leon and Cohen 2005). In institutional ethnography interviewing allows to "tap into people's expertise" (Campbell 1998: 57) that in the process of translation into research results becomes integrated into intersecting experiential dialogues (Smith 2005: 135-139). Within the social relations of research, interviewing corresponds to the aspect of research design that renders the statements of research participants "intelligible within one's orientation toward the world" (Walby 2007: 1020). While Goffman (1974) employs the concept of frame to describe governing structures behind everyday communication, in its attempt to displace the dominant frame of organization of knowledge (Smith 1987) institutional ethnography has developed towards sharing theoretical preoccupations of the sociological discourse its orientation to individual experience notwithstanding (Smith 2005: 139).

Interpretive practices arising during fieldwork directed to achievement of institutional ethnography aims (DeVault 1999: 66) are "always governed by the frame of institutional ethnographic discourse" (Wilby 2007: 1021). Though interview situations are fraught with possibilities of ill confluence when well-being of informants can be at stake or when researcher's frame of reference regulates articulation of the interview (Wilby 2007: 1021), they play crucial role in "method assemblage" (Law 2004: 84) that constructs a bundle of theoretical relations around research subjects and objects the practice of which institutional ethnography implicitly shares. The proposed reflexivity of institutional ethnography towards implicit accounts of social organization and ruling relations (Smith 2005: 143) does not provide methodological safeguards against self-referential reinforcement that researcher's frame of theoretical reference can impose on research results. Excessive reliance on everyday communication as experiential source of rooting authority in subjective knowledge that institutional ethnography evinces encloses it in the circle of interpretive problems that philosophical hermeneutics recognizes as pertaining to communicative practices (Gadamer 2003).

The transition to technologies of interview recording that enable production of exact interview transcripts has affected the distribution of authority within social relations of research (Lee 2004), revealed the relative paucity of application of data analysis methods in ethnographic practice (Mauthner and Doucet 1997), and shifted the focus of institutional ethnographic work towards secondary dialogue with the documentary record (Smith 2005). The process of editing (DeVault 1999: 73), explicating (DeVault 1999: 71), and integrating (Smith 2005: 143) the interview transcripts into explicative research accounts does not address in its methodology the possibilities of misinterpretation inherent in the institutional ethnography assumptions of the place of experience in knowledge organization (Smith 2005: 135). Due to the constitutive role that theory plays in qualitative data analysis (Honan, Knobel, Baker and Davies 2000), institutional ethnography has to dedicate effort to elaboration of its theoretical framework since it mediates the access of research practice to reality that it purports to discover (Walby 2007: 1024).

That institutional ethnography produces rather than discovers its research findings is accounted for by enactment of theories that researcher employ in their work (Lapadat and Lindsay 1999) and by encompassing role of analysis in data collection, assembly and representation (Weston et al. 2001). As a means for encouraging researchers to take responsibility for their authoritative role in the production of research materials a practice of interview narrative composition can be used that openly involves informants in iterative, reflexive, and participative writing of their accounts that are not unlike products of ghostwriting (Rhodes 2000). However, only bringing to bear of fully developed theoretical framework on research practice will put limitations on the authority of the institutional ethnographer (Walby 2007: 1025). To avoid infliction of symbolic violence on research subjects (Bourdieu and Wacquant 1992: 167), institutional ethnography should seek reflexive intervention into its processes of construction of social reality (Walby 2007: 1025) that remain methodologically inaccessible as long as comprehensive connections to theoretical discussions in sociology fail to be forged.

While the initial impetus for the development of institutional ethnography has come from the postmodern and poststructural bodies of theory (Smith 1999), a necessity remains to go beyond the project of critical sociology towards integration into the tradition of sociological discourse albeit from a reflexive standpoint. The way out of methodological impasse that concentration on "emancipation-regulation dichotomy" (Walby 2007: 1026) of institutional ethnography leads to lies in shifting the attention to the theoretical roots of its research practice rather than in ascription to its methods liberatory effects (DeVault 1999). In order to fulfill its mandate of creating new possibilities for sociological practice (Hammersley 2004; Smith 2005; Vahabzadeh 2003) institutional ethnography should open itself to developments that take place elsewhere in sociological discourse (Law and Urry 2004) in terms that build upon history of theoretical, methodological, and interdisciplinary reflection in sociology.

Analysis of Wright's (2003) Institutional Ethnography: A Tool For Merging Research And Practice

2007-11-20T16:18:00.000-07:00

Institutional ethnography focuses on how power is socially organized in everyday experience. Studies of institutionalized marginalization (Cunningham 1992; 2000) show insufficiency of conventional theoretical vocabulary to account for effects that practices derived from dominant culture have (Amstutz 1999). The demand to account for social relevance of multiple cultural spaces (Rocco and West 1998), discriminating effects of cultural power (Guy 1999), and external constitution of power relations (Smith 1987) makes necessary the investigation of relations between individuals and external institutional contexts. These concerns have to be remedied by methodological sensitization to institutional relations of power (Thompson and Schied 1996), ethnographic theories of everyday institutional practices (Sissell 2001), and merger of ethnographic research with theorization of large-scale social processes (Ettling 2001; Heaney 2000). Methodology of institutional ethnography concentrates on the intersection of individual experience with discursive practices, relations of ruling, and macro social processes (Smith 1987: 151-152).

Institutional ethnography covers research of "translocal processes of administration" (Devault and McCoy 2001), multi-sited formation of ruling apparatuses (Grahame and Grahame 2000), and textual organization of ruling relations (Campbell and Gregor 2002). Media of communication that lend themselves to textual analysis (Grahame and Grahame 2000) are research vehicle for institutional ethnography that through their investigation trace power relations across contexts. Institutional ethnography in its understanding of power as derivative of the processes of circulation, accumulation, and interaction is not unlike a methodological application of Foucault's theorization of relations of power articulation (1967: 234). In this regard Smith follows Foucault as she posits individuals as points of activation of a "text's ability to coordinate action and to get things done in specific ways" (Wright 2003: 245) whereby social relations of different scales articulate via texts individually reciprocal relations of power.

Applications of institutional ethnography describe how "assumptions are transported through research reports" (Wright 2003: 245) with frequently unaccounted effects of unequal distribution of chances of access to means for social mobility. These tendencies are exacerbated as economic changes setting in during 1980s bring relatively higher rewards to those meeting advanced skill requirements rather than spreading benefits across economic structure (Johnston and Parker 1987). Institutional ethnography reveals the role of textual mediation in relations between state, capital, and labor as it naturalizes differential distribution of economic rewards (Grahame and Grahame 2000: 5). Through research of everyday institutional practices (Grahame and Grahame 2000) institutional ethnography analyzes how "political discourse and organizational knowledge translate into micro practices" (Wright 2003: 246). Social organization of everyday life also allows for historical reconstruction of practices of marginalization, mobilization, and instrumentalization (Askov 2000; Darville 1995).

Institutional ethnography detects the role of such means of activation as "organizational literacy" (Darville 1995), composed of milti-sited discursive knowledge, that through accumulation, transfer, and valorization allows its carriers to successfully "navigate the social and cultural landscape" (Wright 2003: 246). Institutional ethnographic research documents the structural effects of "practical knowledge about how certain information is organizationally relevant" (Darville 1995: 257), which is implicated in the mediation of relations of power through writing (Campbell and Gregor 2002: 12). Scholarly practice becomes more reflexive of its import for liberatory institutional action (Darville 1995) by means of ethnographic research that highlights the "significance of how organizations employ and use knowledge" (Wright 2003: 247).

Institutional ethnography has significant practical potential for wide range of applied organizational contexts that rests on its address of relations between micro and macro processes, employment of multi-sited research methodology, awareness for social practices that texts activate, and facilitation of change on the local level (Wright 2003: 247). While theoretically attuned to exploring the intersection of macro processes and micro practices, the relevance of institutional ethnography to contexts where governmental policies intersect with feminist concerns, where administrative practices and judicial system interact, and where team learning affects organizational power relations makes it into an important methodological approach (Brooks 1997).