Sennett - Uses of Disorder

Other Books By Richard Sennett

Families Against the City: Middle-Class Homes of Industrial Chicago, 1970

Nineteenth-Century Cities, Essays in the New Urban History (co-author), 1969

Classic Essays on the Culture of Cities (editor), 1969

THIS IS A BORZOI BOOK PUBLISHED BY ALFRED A. KNOPF, INC.

Copyright 1970 by Richard Sennett

All rights reserved under International and Pan-American Copyright Conventions. Published in the United States by Alfred A. Knopf, Inc., New York, and simultaneously in Canada by Random House of Canada Limited, Toronto. Distributed by Random House, Inc., New York.

Library of Congress Catalog Card Number: 71-106628

eISBN: 978-0-307-82608-4

v3.1

For Carol

The idea for this book came to me during a walk with Erik Erikson one morning in a New England graveyard. I should like to thank him for the steady encouragement he gave me in subsequent months. I should also like to thank Jon Cobb, Jane White, and my wife, Carol, for helping me find the intellectual direction of my reflections. I owe a special debt of thanks to Angus Cameron, who helped me define the purpose of this book at a critical stage of the writing.

During the past decade people of diverse social backgrounds and political opinions have awakened to the need to reconstruct city life. The riots forced mass attention on black poverty, but young people, who came alive in the 1960s after the silence of the previous generation, have developed an interest in cities that is more wide-ranging. For they have sensed in dense city life some possibility of fraternity, some new kind of warmth, that is now understood in the vague term community.

In large part, the search of young people outside the ghetto for urban community of this sort, for a relatedness and sharing, has been self-defeating. Some people tried to find this relatedness in the black ghetto itself, but the solidarity of the black brothers was bought at the expense of much pain and is not for outside consumption. The blacks told the affluent whites to find the warmth in themselves. Some people tried to find community by radicalizing the working class, but the working class is not buying a student alliance these days and broke kids heads when it responded to them at all.

So the search for community has come to be a search for some life principle in young people as they arewhite, affluent, and unhappy with the cocoons their parents spun around them. And the process of elimination that has forced this search back to an honest self-analysis has also brought the movement for social and personal renewal to a standstill. What does it mean for a white, educated, affluent person to feel a sense of community with other people? People in the suburbs have a sense of togetherness, of possessing an identity, a sense of we as a community, but that kind of social cohesion is exactly what most people nurtured in suburbs are seeking to escape. It is freedom of some kind that is included in this vague new ideal of community, but what kind of community freedom is there beyond the freedom from material want?

Here is obviously no small problem, no little twist in our history. This is the first generation that has lived with both the achievement of affluence as a constant force in life, and the problems of what to do with it. Yet the force of change released in the last decade has come to an impasse precisely because this generation has none of the old hiding places left, cannot pretend to identify itself as a voice of the blacks or the white poor. It is left with the real problem of making a social life out of its own social materials, out of affluence and freedom from the struggle against scarcity and want. And it has no model from the generation that brought the affluence into being, since the willful innocence of the suburbs does not seem to be a satisfying way to sustain a social life, seems in fact to be a voluntary servitude to unruffled ease.

If and when the United States ends its venture in Vietnam, if people can draw the lesson and end the morass of endless military expenditure, there will be an enormous amount of funds that can, and perhaps economically must, be spent on domestic renewal. The generation gap will then be posed anew. If we want to end the physical depravity of slum housing, slum education, slum health, what should we do: build as we have before, and so induct the blacks and the poor whites into the malaise already felt by the white children of affluence? Increasingly, the poor are voicing their objections to that old way; they are saying that the ghetto brownstones are better, in the end, than the marvels of the new housing projects; something essential, also called community, is eclipsed by entry into the city forms of affluence as things now stand.

One of the strangest features of modern community life is that this problem has crossed the revolutionary line. The post-Revolutionary order in Russia and in its more affluent satellites seems exposed to a complex of dangers that were supposed to be stilled in the process of revolutionary upheaval. The young in these countries see their parents using affluence in ways they find disturbing; a kind of willful simplicity in the families of bureaucrats and a routinization of the pattern of daily life seem as deadening to young people in Moscow as they do to young people in New York. Again the problem: What does one do with community life when freedom from want has been achieved? The Revolution redistributed wealth, but the fact of Revolution did not determine mine how the eventual affluence was to be taken into a life, what men would dedicate themselves to when they no longer needed to struggle for enough to eat.

Many revolutionary writers have expressed concern about what their societies have to sustain beyond the fact of the old injuries. Their thoughts, like those of young people in our society, have come to focus on what kind of community sharing ought to reign under conditions of relative economic plenitude. Men like Herbert Marcuse and Franz Fanon have arrived at a specific answer. They believe that the revolutionary passage ought to be an emotional experience that transcends ridding a society of tyrants; it should be an education accustoming men to accept a certain amount of anarchy and disorder in their lives. To change the leaders of a society without changing the amount of disorder that the society will bear is ultimately to have no revolution at all. Marx, in his manuscripts of 1844, understood this; to be free in a post-revolutionary world was, he wrote, to transcend the need for order. Yet in Marxs early work was the dream that economic abundance would itself remove the structural need in society for order. At that time he believed that repressive order grew not merely out of the inequitable distribution of wealth but also out of the fact that there was not enough to go around. This is why critics like Sartre see in Marx the philosopher of plenitude, of a society that could exist beyond the order produced by economic scarcity.

Of the revolutionary writers who saw that this dream of freedom would not arise from the brute fact of redistribution, Franz Fanon, the Algerian psychiatrist, has been the most explicit in spelling out what kind of community structure is necessary in the post-revolutionary society to achieve the goal of nonroutine life. For Fanon, the freedom inherent in making revolution can only live as long as the revolutionaries remain outside the confines of city life; he believed they must look at the city as a human settlement, a human community, hostile to the force of their own commitment. Fanon believed that the necessity for bureaucracy in a city and the anonymous character of human contacts there were bound, in the end, to destroy the feeling of closeness, of men wanting to share a better, more just life for all. By the same token, these dense places would frighten men into pursuing safe routines where they knew they would not be overwhelmed. They would thus be pushed into private circles of security and eventually lost as revolutionaries.