City senses: On the radical possibilities of pragmatism in geography

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Geoforum 39 (2008) 1570–1584 www.elsevier.com/locate/geoforum

City senses: On the radical possibilities of pragmatism in geography Gary Bridge School for Policy Studies, University of Bristol, 8 Priory Road, Bristol BS8 1TZ, United Kingdom Received 6 July 2006; received in revised form 1 February 2007

Abstract This paper explores the radical possibilities of pragmatism for geography using the illustration of arguments concerning a renewed (urban) public realm through the exchange of validity claims in communication. Pressing further the pragmatist possibilities of Habermas’s idea of communicative action it draws on John Dewey’s work, and a range of contemporary pragmatist philosophers, to consider human communicability in its widest sense. This is then explored using an example of the spatiality and performativity of body-minds in a range of communicative spaces of the city. Then the paper moves on to consider the radical implications of pragmatism for geography in general in terms of body-mind/environment relations; a transactional view of space; experience, rationality and radical democracy. Ó 2007 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved. Keywords: Validity claims; Communicative spaces; Radical democracy; The city; Pragmatism

‘‘Pragmatism constitutes, besides Marx and Kierkegaard, the third Young Hegelian tradition, and the only one that convincingly develops the liberal spirit of radical democracy’’ (Habermas, 2002, p. 228). ‘‘I am now again in New York City and Brooklyn . . . The splendour, picturesqueness, and oceanic amplitude and rush of these great cities, the unsurpassed situation, rivers and bay, sparkling sea-tides, costly and lofty new buildings, facades of marble and iron, or original grandeur and elegance of design . . . the tumultuous streets, Broadway, the heavy, low musical roar, hardly ever intermitted, even at night . . . the great Central Park, and Brooklyn park of hills . . . the assemblages of citizens in their groups, conversations, trades, evening amusements . . . the like of these completely satisfy my sense of power, fullness, motion, etc. and give me, through such senses and appetites, and through my aesthetic conscience, a continued exaltation and absolute fulfilment’’ (Whitman [1871], 2004, p. 405).

E-mail address: [email protected] 0016-7185/$ - see front matter Ó 2007 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved. doi:10.1016/j.geoforum.2007.02.004

1. Introduction This paper explores the relevance of pragmatist ideas for thinking about the city and the public realm and then considers the radical possibilities of these ideas for geography. It follows several contemporary pragmatist philosophers who seek to develop the pragmatist elements of Habermas’s ideas of the public and communicative action through a more extended engagement with the ideas of John Dewey. The paper takes further the earlier application of Deweyan ideas to the communicative spaces of the city (Bridge, 2005) through a more specific discussion of the possible types of communicative validity in an urban context and the resonance of pragmatist thinking for thinking about space and geography more generally. Beyond validity as ‘legibility’ or community social norms it suggests how the sensory environment and performative ‘hum’ of the city might provide the backdrop for wider rational communicative action. In the course of this discussion Dewey’s ideas of body-minds and environment; transaction; experience (especially aesthetic experience); experimentation and rationality are raised. These notions are applied to the examples of Jane Jacobs’s discussion of the hum of neighbourhood life from Death and Life of

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Great American Cities, to Jane Addams’s Hull-House settlement and the ways that class habitus and urban social divisions could be un-settled by the spatial relations of body-minds in a ‘domestic’ setting, to de Certeau’s (1984) discussions of walking the city, to the coffee houses of the 18th century metropolis that pre-occupied Habermas in his earlier work on the rise of the bourgeois public realm (Habermas, 1989). I then broaden the discussion to suggest how ideas of body-minds, transaction, the relationship of rationality to performativity and experimentation – aligned with broader pragmatist ideas of processual experience, anti-cartesianism and fallibilism – might be relevant to discipline of geography more generally, and especially in its radical edge in thinking about communication, democracy and social reconstruction. 2. Rethinking critical theory Jurgen Habermas is one of a group of philosophers (including other prominent figures such as Rorty, 1982; Bernstein, 1991, 1998) that has tried to examine the consequences of the encounter between Euro-American critical theory and American philosophical pragmatism. In the two volumes of his Theory of Communicative Action (1984, 1987) Habermas turns to philosophical pragmatism in the idea of the phenomenology of the ‘lifeworld’ and the pragmatics of communication (drawing on Speech Act theory) to rescue an idea of rationality and social renewal from the ravages of the competitive instrumentalism of the capitalist ‘system’ (that had been so well analysed by his forebears in the Frankfurt School). Habermas’s project is, importantly, to try to establish the grounds for the possibility of radical democracy in spite of the fully acknowledged oppressions of capitalism. Habermas accepts the poststructuralist critique of the ‘metaphysics of presence’, a philosophical system that privileged the idea of consciousness and cognition, especially in relation to rationality. He shares with his Frankfurt School mentors the fear of the oppressive consequences of a means-ends (instrumental) rationality being put in service of the automatic impulse to accumulation that is the dynamic of capitalism and that has come to motivate action and, significantly, communication, in various ‘distorted’ ways. This ‘system’ communication, although dominant and dominating, is, however not the only way in which human beings communicate. Using the insights of Speech Act Theory (Austin, 1962; Searle, 1969) Habermas identifies system communication with perlocution which is a form of communication in which the criterion of success is action (doing something by saying something). Perlocution dominates because it matches the imperatives of capitalism and the exploitation of labour. Getting others to do things works in parallel with a certain form of rationality, means-ends or instrumental rationality, that has become oriented to process (capital accumulation) rather than substantive ends (value rationality). Yet the perlocutions that ally with instrumental rationality are only one form of

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communication and a ‘parasitic’ one at that. It is parasitic in that it mimics validity claims (in an empty way) that in other forms of communication are only substantively obtained, through experience and mutual understanding. These other forms of communication are the more fundamental locutions and illocutions of everyday speech. Locutions are the sayings of speech and illocutions the shared symbols that ‘agreements’ in communication can take on (such as ‘hello’ being a greeting). Locutions and illocutions are forms of communication where the criterion of success is mutual understanding, rather than action. They go on in everyday talk and carry with them implicit validity claims that operate in different spheres. In Habermas’s framework, the now familiar validity claims relate to the objective world of truth; the social world where the validity is rightness or legitimacy of social norms; and the subjective world of the expression of inner feelings in which the validity criterion is sincerity. Participants in communication, however trivial or mundane that communication may be, are always resting the communication on the implicit validity claims of truth, legitimacy or sincerity. These claims are often taken for granted, because for example they relate to well established social norms or traditions, or in a more intimate context, they reflect familiarity of personality in the case of subjective expression: they exist in a lifeworld of shared communication. The lifeworld of shared communication that Habermas draws on is an idea that was developed by that influential figure of classical pragmatism: George Herbert Mead. Mead (1934) had an idea of communication that involved the development from simple physical gestures (in human evolution, as well as the cognitive development of an individual). In the process of communicative development with others the individual comes to share certain gestures that call up in the other a response that can be anticipated because the gesture means the same thing to both parties. Mead likens this sharing of gestures, and the sense of cognitive anticipation it brings about, as a sharing of mind. The gestures become ever more sophisticated until they reach their most advanced stage: the repertoire of shared symbols that is language. As a collection of shared symbols language is the most complex sharing of minds. Mind and cognition in this view is something that is socially shared rather than being an individual attribute. Cognition is, in this sense, communicative. In this social development of self Mead makes a distinction between the ‘I’ and the ‘Me’. The ‘I’ is the biological/ historical agent that is unpredictable and capable of improvisation. The ‘Me’ on the other hand is the ‘generalised other’ of the community. In the exchange of gestures in communication through to the development of language rationality is deeply implicated. It is the ability of the individual to anticipate the reaction of the community to a certain gesture or statement. Rational anticipation of the community response encourages the individual to exercise self-restraint (Kang, 1976). Because language is seen as the most advanced form of symbol sharing, all the perfor-

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mative and innovative utterances of the ‘I’ must conform to Mead’s ‘Me’ in order to be rationally acceptable. This puts rationality in close connection with linguistic representation and reception: ‘‘the performative meaning of the ‘I’ becomes for Habermas Mead’s ‘Me’ which must be capable of accompanying all my speech acts (Habermas, 1996, p. 189; Rosenthal, 2002). Thus even though Habermas allows for the performative expression of the ‘I’ and indeed gives it the validity claim of sincerity in the pragmatics of communication, in reality the expressive potential of the ‘I’ is subsumed by the generalised expectations of the community as a whole. Expressive communication is set apart from rationality in this way. The development of communicative competences is a part of the formation of mind as a socially shared asset. Embedded in this communicative sharing are claims that relate to the different spheres of validity - be it towards the objective world, the social norms or subjective sincerity of expression. What unites all these spheres is the overall aim at mutual understanding and what Habermas claims is the universal nature of the pragmatics of communication that always involves the use of implicit claims to validity whatever the communicative context or sphere of validity. What Habermas’s project seeks to do politically is to ‘grow out’ the principles of communicative action found in the lifeworld into more public spaces and forms of discourse. If participants in conversation had to seek mutual understanding with strangers this would have the effect of making the claims to validity that are implicit within many instances of communication much more explicit. If I have to make statements about my objective, social or subjective dispositions towards the world knowing that you may not share some of those dispositions then I am forced to examine, or at least anticipate, my own validity claims because I might have to redeem them and defend them if you question them for their good reasons or grounds. And you must do the same. If we both have to anticipate the reaction of the other to the validity claims on which we build our statements that deliberative moment is also a rational one in that it makes us examine the good reasons or grounds for our own statements. This needn’t be an instant recognition but as the conversation proceeds some form of selfrealisation will be the effect. As we talk about our interests and think about the validity of them through our communicative claims then in some senses we might transcend our own self-interest as we come to see the common procedures on which substantive claims are made and as we contextualise our claims in the face of the other’s claims. This ultimately might lead to a reworking of ethical positions as they emerge out of discourse (discourse ethics). Habermas’s thesis has been criticised in a wide variety of ways. One important set of criticisms relate to his focus on talk. First of all talk in public has historically been the preserve of men (Benhabib, 1996, 1992; Fraser, 1992; Young, 2000). One could add that it has been restricted to certain ‘public’ spaces: the agora, the debating chamber, the club,

the coffee house (Habermas, 1989). Habermas’s theory of communicative action is in this sense actually a theory of linguistic action (Langsdorf, 2000, 2002). There have been efforts by a group of contemporary pragmatist philosophers to broaden out the understanding of forms of communicability (that coincide with insights elsewhere, from anthropology for example – Finnnegan, 2002). These insights have been developed in thinking about space and the possible communicative spaces of the city (Bridge, 2005). What I seek to do here is push these ideas more explicitly in terms of thinking about claims to validity in communication, the nature of communicative spaces andwhat these pragmatist insights might do for urban geography and human and physical geography more generally. 3. The ‘legible’ city The first of Habermas’s dimensions of validity claims is truthfulness in the ‘objective’ world of external nature. It involves a cognitive, objectifying attitude. This is the world of science and agreed facts. In relation to the city these attitudes have dominated urban planning, especially in the idea of the rational, comprehensive plan (see, for example, Boyer, 1983, for a critique). The assumption was that the purpose of planning was to impose order on an inherently chaotic and unruly city. This meant architects and planners having a view from above. Vidler (2000), for instance – describes the impact on Le Corbusier of his early flights above Paris and the ability this afforded him to see the city as a whole. This is reflected in planning practice that treated the city as a whole city that could be directed by an instrumental rationality that planner and citizen could acknowledge. The city is objectified into different specialist zones and uses that should be kept apart with efficient transportation and circulation between them. The city is imagined as a machine with component parts that everyone understands. I think the communicative claim to validity in this ordering of the city is legibility. For the planners and architects legibility meant the ability to adopt a god like view from above, to see the whole city, and plan its efficient organisation accordingly. In urban government legibility has been the ability of the powerful to see, and control, urban residents (most famously seen in the Haussmannisation of Paris, where the tiny streets that could be barricaded by an insurgent public – were swept away by the grand boulevards that allowed sight lines of power across the city). For urban residents legibility is seeing your place in the city and the ways through it. The legibility claim is limited to a narrow (but historically powerful) form of communication – that of ‘visuality’ (as Sennett, 1990, so well captures in his idea of the conscience of the eye). It is also objectifying in that it reduces visuality to certain abstract elements – what Lynch (1960) identifies as paths, edges, districts, nodes, landmarks. Legibility is a claim to validity that has been immensely powerful in shaping the city and creating the city and an

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objective (and objectified) world. But that power is not complete. There are other forms of communication at work in the city (besides the visual) and there are various urban practices that re-shape the orderings of legibility to suit more familiar social and cultural norms (as Holston, 1989, has revealed in such detail in his anthropology of Brasilia). These social and cultural worlds in the city relate to Habermas’s second or social world, in which the claims to validity are the legitimacy of those differing social and cultural norms. This was very much the concern of the first systematic analysis of the city (that was also influenced by philosophical pragmatism) – the Chicago School of urban ecology. 4. Rethinking Chicago and the ‘moral order’ Habermas’s second sphere of communication is the social world in which the criteria of validity is the legitimacy, or otherwise, of prevailing social norms. Habermas’s theory, as we have seen, puts all innovative and performative utterances squarely behind the communicative assent of the community (Mead’s ‘Me’) in order to make those utterances effective. This binding of rational communication to community norms was inherent in the thinking of the Chicago School of urban ecology. Here the city is imagined as an organism, rather than a machine. Drawing in part on the work of Dewey, Robert Park made a distinction between urban communities that possess a moral order in which the community represents collective values, and communities that result from economic competition and the sorting of occupations into neighbourhoods distinguished by different property values and based on status not solidarity. The collective representation of community will was for Park the moral order (Park, 1926). Proper rationality was the ability to be understood in public. All this is part of the ‘‘web of communication’’ that is cultural and linguistic and typically results in self-restraint and consensus. Whilst economic rationality ranges across the whole city (like the instrumental rationality of the system analysed by Habermas) the rationality of cultural communication occurs within communities and separates the city in to a ‘‘mosaic of little worlds which touch but do not interpenetrate’’ in Park’s famous phrase (Park, 1925, p. 40). These assumptions founded the hugely productive research field of symbolic interactionism and the continuing legacy of the original Chicago School (Fine, 1995). It also fostered a particular way of thinking about space. In qualitative research, the Chicago ethnographies traced the paths of adaptation of different immigrant groups to the overall environment of the city and how different enclaves of the city permitted very different social norms and ways of life: Park’s mosaic. In quantitative terms, it took Park’s (1925) statement on the equivalence of social and physical space and distance into measures of concentration or dispersion of different ethnic groups (Peach, 1975) as a measure of interaction or segregation from each

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other in the city. Chicago ethnography is the search for and acknowledgement of differing community norms in the city. The quantitative approach assumes the significance of residential space and contiguity in the formation and separateness of different communities. The implicit validity claims that both the quantitative and qualitative approaches rest on is the ‘generalised other’ community norms either read off behavioural practices (qualitative) or residential space. 4.1. Performativity in public Erving Goffman, whilst solidly in the symbolic interactionist tradition, takes a slightly different path from the community approach by emphasising the individual staging of social life and the dramaturgical aspects of communication (Goffman, 1959, 1970, 1971, 1974). Rather than the naturalised ethnographies of the Chicago School, or the statistical measures of urban space in the social segregation tradition, Goffman’s is an approach that emphasises artificiality rather than normativity. Rather than the ‘I’ conforming to the ‘Me’ (as Mead and Symbolic Interactionism assume) this is to some degree a release of the performative ‘I’ (although only partially, as I shall argue). Richard Sennett’s work draws on Goffman (as well as others such as Clifford and Marcus, 1986; Geertz, 1983) in interesting ways that I think offers a way out of the impasse that puts communicative potential behind community norms and enclave space. Sennett (1974, 2000) suggests a way of thinking about communication in public that transcends social and community difference. In contrast to Habermas, he is happy to see the separation of expressive potential of the self from the dictates of rationality. Using Habermas’s example of public communication in the coffee houses of the eighteenth century metropolis Sennett argues that the key thing about communication in these contexts was that the speakers borrowed the conventions of the theatre in order to communicate with emotional force to strangers. This emotional, expressive form of communication made their utterances credible to their audience, just as they would be in the theatre. It also meant that the speakers lost themselves in the performance and this was a way of overcoming self-interest. Speakers literally forgot who they were (their social position, their partial interests). The forms of expression of the theatre allowed participants to communicate through difference and self-dramatisation. One of the many intriguing aspects of this vision of the public is that it hints at a much broader communicative repertoire than simple linguistic expression on which Habermas’s theory was predicated. The tone of delivery, the accompanying gestures and body language, are crucial parts of the performance. Paralinguistic communication is as crucial an element as the linguistic. The other element that I think is powerful for this discussion is that the criterion for successful communication

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is credibility. The way that speakers can convince strangers of the credibility of their information is as much performative as it is more narrowly linguistic. The mores of the theatre create a common expressive repertoire that creates an ‘as if’ communication, as though these very different social actors are in the same public realm. What is intriguing is that (to contrast with Habermas), the judgement of expressive validity claims is about judging communication in its widest sense. This is much more than simple truthful representation of an inner subjective self (sincerity in Habermasian terms). Judgement of the credibility of a performative communication involves the resonance of the setting as well as a wide view of communicative action. The stage is as important as the action. All these elements combine to constitute the credibility of the expressive ‘I’. Goffman’s and Sennett’s interpretations I believe hint at a different conception of space. Rather than being the stable container and spatial extent of community norms (Park’s mosaic) space begins to be implicated in the validity criteria themselves. Rather than being the setting for rational debate and the redeeming of validity claims, space becomes part of the assessment. Validity is being extended beyond the narrowly linguistic in to a wider communicative realm in which space is a constitutive part. Of course some of this is presaged in earlier interactionist work. Goffman, more that anyone, is sensitive to the spatial micro-politics of social life and indeed his frame analysis (Goffman, 1959, 1974) could be envisaged as the spatial framing of social activity in a much broader sense. Goffman and other interactionist research tend to rely however on a notion of a fully formed individual personality: a ‘self’ that is presented to the world in different ways and in different spaces, (in front and back regions for example). Ultimately, despite the performative improvisations, interaction takes place between fully formed selves. And these selves are still fully formed in a Meadian way. They act on and respond to social symbols in communication. As selves they are formed more out of Mead’s ‘Me’ than the performative ‘I’. Even those notorious improvisers that Goffman (1955) describes, such as the ‘street stemmers’ who deceive people passing on the street to cheat them out of money, are using the background of certain socially agreed norms of behaviour, such as saving another’s face in public, in order succeed in their trickery. The improvisations of the trickster rely on conformity to certain social norms around behaviour in public (in certain socio-cultural/historical situations). It also relies on the conventions of talk in public. Alternatively, there are available interpretations of performative communication in which a broader view of communicative action itself and the spaces of communication are co-constitutive of (political) selves, rather than relying on some prefigured notion of solid individual selves (Kristeva’s, 1991, myth of interiority). For this, we need to turn to a number of contemporary pragmatist philosophers.

5. Releasing the performative ‘I’ This widening of the understanding of communication has been pursued by several contemporary pragmatist philosophers (Langsdorf, 2000, 2002; Rosenthal, 1990; Siegfried, 1996; Sullivan, 2001; Jackson, 2001). Their work starts to reconfigure the field in a number of ways by drawing on three aspects of John Dewey’s work: body-mind; transaction; and a broad view of communication. First it focuses on an idea of transaction rather than interaction. Transaction is concerned with the co-constitution of organisms rather than the interactive exchange between fully formed entities. The qualities of emergent transactions are at the forefront of Dewey’s thinking. Thus he prefers a philosophy that is based on verbs rather than nouns (bodying rather than body). Human organisms transact for Dewey as body-minds. Dewey refutes the Cartesian distinction between mind and body and insists on the hyphenated body-mind to represent a continuum of response of an organism to its environment (including other organisms). The body bits of body-minds carry intelligence about going on in the world and contain dispositions about the world in continuation with the more cognitive operation of mind that tend to operate when the environment is novel or problematic. The idea of body-minds in transaction (bodying) is captured by Shannon Sullivan (drawing on Dewey – Sullivan, 2001) ‘‘organisms, such as humans, are not ‘located’ within the epidermis in an isolated, self-contained way: they are instead constituted by things ‘outside’ the skin as ‘within’ it, as well as by the skin, or site of transaction itself’’ (Sullivan, 2001, p. 13). There are deeper philosophical implications here. Sullivan again: The process of organisms living in processes that reach across and through skins illustrates the dynamic quality of transaction without suggesting a formlessness in which entities are in such flux that they have no stability, order or identity . . . In its rejection of static ontology the notion of transaction does not reify flux or complete dissolution of identity. Put another way, the concept of transaction no more supports a process metaphysics than it does a static metaphysics (Sullivan, 2001, p.13). Dewey claims that transaction is ‘‘a stability that is not stagnation but is rhythmic and developing’’ (Dewey, 1958, p. 25). In this sense bodies are not entities but activities, transactions with certain qualities. Bodying involves body-minds. As Dewey defined it: . . . body-mind simply designates what actually takes place when a living body is implicated in situations of discourse, communication and participation. In the hyphenated phrase body-mind, ‘body’ designates the continued and conserved, the registered and cumulative operation of factors continuous with the rest of nature, inanimate as well as animate; while

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‘mind’ designates the characters and consequences which are differential, distinctive of features which emerge when body is engaged in a wider, more complex and interdependent situation (Dewey, 1958: p. 285). The responses of the body-mind are along a continuum from the physical, psycho-physical through to the mental. The body has a disposition and is a form of intelligence ongoing in the world. When the environment presents novelty or becomes problematic that response becomes more mentalistic. Body-minds in transaction are communicative in ways that are not just limited to talk. In fact, communication as transaction has a constitutive rather than representative function (including talk). Crucially it does not privilege language as the ultimate communicative endeavour, or as some end point in a developmental or evolutionary sequence of communicative competence (and the way that Mead and the interactionists tend to in the shared symbols of the ‘Me’ or the ‘generalised other’). The performative ‘I’ is always effective in communication and it involves forms of communication (including aesthetic communication) that are not easily represented in speech and text (Langsdorf, 2002). As Langsdorf argues: Expanding comprehension . . . calls upon a constitutive rather than representative understanding of communicative experience’s task, in order to direct participants toward the unsayable: to what cannot be transmitted because there is no antecedent to transmit. It requires calling upon the enduring presence of non-discursive, somatic experience to expand out discursive parameters, and so relies upon Dewey’s thesis that somatic experience – which is ‘had’ but not known . . . continues its efficacy throughout all modes of communication’’ (Langsdorf, 2002, p.152). This communicative transaction involves ‘‘the ways in which people (and animals) somatically develop their interaction with their environments (e.g. chronemics, haptics, kinesics, proxemics, and vocalics) in ways that cannot be represented, but must be performed by communicating bodies’’ (Langsdorf, 2002, p. 147). This is particularly important in any reconstitution of the public realm. In a parallel move feminist political philosophers such as Fraser (1992) and Young (2000) suggest a bracketing of the representative function of language spoken in public (and its male-ness) in order to re-articulate meanings that have not been valorised historically or symbolically – through the devices of greeting, rhetoric or storytelling for Young (2000), and in order to constitute subjects politically through articulation for Fraser in various subaltern counter publics (Fraser, 1992). It is the possibilities of a re-articulation of agency that emerge from these discussions that have begun to fascinate geographers in their turn to performativity and develop-

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ment of ideas of non-representational theory (Thrift, 2003; Dewsbury, 2003). This work draws on Judith Butler’s (1993, 1997) ideas on the citational and potentially transgressive aspects of performativity in reproducing gender norms, but also opening up the space for transgression. The pragmatist response is somewhat different in that it insists on the significance of the ‘had’ body as well as the ‘known’ body and that transaction implies a two way coconstitution rather than the one way relationship at the moment of performativity (Sullivan, 2001). Sullivan criticises Butler for implying a transcendent quality to performative excess whereas the pragmatist response it to look for the excess in concrete situations and practices (Sullivan, 2001, pp. 98–99). These forms of transactional bodying are also ways of knowing, forms of ‘performative enquiry’ (Langsdorf, 2002). They are forms of enquiry as praxis in an emerging environment against which these practices are trialled. They are experimental and not always successful (the fallibilism of pragmatism). Ways of communicating also involve an aesthetic sense. Aesthetic experience can be seen as part of the ongoing experience of everyday life. Dewey emphasises artwork the experience of making rather than the art object itself: ‘‘the actual work of art is what the product does in and with experience’’ (Dewey, 1934, cited in Langsdorf, 2002, p. 153). Art is in this sense the purest form of communication in the way that it connects, or communicates across experiences. This again is not static but rhythmic and emerging: ‘‘experience is a matter of the interaction of the artistic product with the self . . . it is not therefore twice alike for different persons . . . It changes with the same person at different times as he brings something different to a work’’ (Dewey, 1934, cited in Langsdorf, p. 153). Art as aesthetic experience has consummatory qualities but only as a renewal, rather than an end point of experience. Part of the consummatory nature of aesthetic experience is its powers of revelation or world disclosure. Wellmer (1991) and others, drawing in part upon Dewey, as well as Derrida and Heidegger, suggest how world-disclosing language is vital for moral and intellectual progress. Aesthetic communication has the potential to disclose apparently familiar realities in surprising ways – it has a truth potential. Discussion thus far has suggested that there are potential claims to communicative validity, beyond the clarity and sincerity of expression in language, that result from experimentation and aesthetic experience involving transactions between bodies. The paper now moves to a consideration of the Hull-House Settlement in Chicago run by Jane Addams, a project in which John Dewey was closely involved. Hull-House can be seen as pragmatism in action in that its approach to the problems of urban poverty was practical and action oriented, using an experimental and experiential approach. In terms of communicative action, it offers an illustration of discursive and non-discursive communication between body-minds in ways that start to

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break down class/body habitus (between the middle-class settlement residents and the working-class neighbourhood residents) and that as a consequence start to instill new forms of communicative validity. I then go on to discuss Jane Jacobs’s idea of the successful sidewalk and de Certeau’s idea of walking the city before moving on to a discussion of the eighteenth century coffee house. All of these are posed as examples of the kinds of activity that provide possibilities for new forms of communicative validity in the city. 6. Aesthetic validity and Hull-House domesticity If aesthetic experience is another communicative realm to add to Habermas’s three worlds of objective, social and subjective (as the pragmatist philosophers Langsdorf and Rosenthal argue) what then is the criterion of judgement – the validity claim at stake? Langsdorf and Rosenthal suggest in various ways that it is communicability itself. An alternative way of expressing this is in the idea of inhabitation. Inhabitation captures the idea of communication (objective, social, subjective and aesthetic) in which validity claims are offered and redeemed in response to an ever changing environment. Inhabitation is the way of being in the city in transactions that involve body-minds. It incorporates ongoing habit as a disposition towards the world: ‘‘through habits formed in intercourse with the world, we also in-habit the world. It becomes a home, and the home is part of our everyday experience’’ (Dewey, 1958, p. 104). But as well as a form of knowing that involves both the dispositions of ‘had’ bodies it also involves the performative enquiry of ‘known’ bodies. It involves discursive and non-discursive communication, improvisations and mistakes as well as conformity to norms. It is emergent and ecological not through set symbols but rather in the tension between the ‘biological’ I of impulsion and the social ‘Me’. It is a way of being ‘located’ that is more akin to de Certeau’s ‘‘mobile organicity’’ (de Certeau, 1984, p. 99), or as I see it to Dewey’s idea of rationality as the melioration of diverse habits and speculative impulses, rather than any allegiance to the rootedness of language and validity in the Heideggerian sense. In terms of radical democracy, it acknowledges that transformation may not be through talk in public but through a social sensitivity to the other that results from the familiarity of home as much as the civility of the street. This is not a case of ‘families against the city’ (Sennett, 1984) but rather forms of domesticity that are public in that they are a coming together of strangers and an acknowledgment and working across difference. One intriguing example of this is Hull-House, the settlement house in a poor immigrant west side Chicago neighbourhood set up by Jane Addams and Ellen Gates Star in 1889. Addams and Star were middle class philanthropists who sought to establish educational programmes and nascent forms of social work in a needy neighbourhood by living there themselves. Hull-House had strong

connections to philosophical pragmatism, especially through John Dewey who was on the board and was a frequent visitor in his time at Chicago University. For Dewey and the settlement residents themselves this was an experimental and experiential intervention. The act of settling in to an unknown neighbourhood space was also an act of social unsettling, a disruption. Addams and her colleagues were constantly pulled up by their own prejudices and previous experiences. Charlene Haddock Siegfried describes it in this way: Jane Addams’ insistence that reciprocity ought to characterise the relationship between social worker and client, teacher and student, and her testimony that she daily learned as much from the poor among whom she chose to live as she taught them, were neither a priori deductions from moral principles nor idle platitudes, but conclusions reached from reflections on her experience. She consciously tested her own beliefs in her interactions with others and discarded or revised them as needed. She brought with her to Hull-House a profound respect for the Other in her or his uniqueness, for example, but throughout Twenty Years at Hull-House she reveals how the concrete specificity of her interactions helped her recognise the class and ethnic prejudices informing her good intentions while a the same time providing the means for developing an authentic appreciation of and more knowledgeable response to a lived diversity that could not have been predicted beforehand (Siegfried, 1996, p. 78). Shannon Jackson interprets an early instance of this (Jackson, 2001, p. 122): Environmental comfort more often manifests itself in nerves that feel less tight, a sense of balance and ease of breath that releases in the presence of the familiar. When Addams and Ellen Star first moved into their new environment, they brought with them all the trappings of a former existence, placing Addams’ inherited silver on an elegant sideboard and hanging brocade curtains in the grand windows. Jackson relates how Addams rapidly realised the semiotics of privilege this conveyed and rapidly removed them. The questioning of (in Bourdieu’s terms) habitus represents an unsettling of class distinction and power. This is represented elsewhere in Hull-House in the ways that bodies transacted in the space of the house. It is also evident in the more formal spaces of performance such as the HullHouse theatre initiatives and in the dance classes. In certain ways these were attempts by the reformers to inculcate middle class dispositions and deportment onto working class bodies but it also unsettled middle class mores in this regard. This is an unsettling of the effortless aesthetic sense of self that comes with class distinction. This is also seen in play. The sports and games played at Hull-House were guided by Addams’s ideas of play as mimesis, identification

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and substitution (Jackson, 2001, p. 117), providing loosened boundaries between the self and the other and forms of emotional expression that helped fuse identities. In the terms of my argument, it is an implicit challenge to instilled ways of in(habit)ation, to the aesthetic claims to validity and offers the potential to in-habit in new ways, new dispositions (in Dewey’s and Bourdieu’s terms, although Dewey had a much more active view of habit as ‘will’). Jackson links experience and space in her articulation of the Hull-House practices. The multi-purpose agendas, methods, and effects of Hull-House reform required an understanding of social space and how to manipulate it. In the process of facilitating new kinds of social performances, the settlement also experimented with alternative styles of living and created various kinds of transformational spaces for middle-class reformers, late-Victorian women, unnaturalized immigrants, adolescent girls and incorrigible boys, factory workers, and ‘children’ (as the concept was being developed). The settlement differed in method from other philanthropic efforts of the time in that its reformers moved into neighbourhood they sought to help. Mingling the two connotations of the word settlement (1) a place or region (2) and agreement composing differences – the movement employed a spatial method to achieve its social mission. A ‘‘place’’ was materially and metaphorically cleared exclusively committed to facing difficulties of class and culture. To engage in settlement life as a resident was thus to make a spatial commitment, allowing aspects of one’s living, working and leisure to be transformed and renegotiated. On the other hand, the neighbours of the Nineteenth Ward produced themselves as agents within spaces unfamiliar to many reformers – an Italian farm, a Jewish ‘ghetto’, an immigration detention center, a saloon, a tenement, a factory. A face to face interaction between a Hull-House resident and her neighbor was thus an encounter between two sets of experiences, an unequal accommodation between different spatial legacies (Jackson, 2001, pp. 23–24). Hull-House represented a series of disruptions in which space was deeply implicated. There was the disruption of the ideas of public/private. Hull-House was a home but also a site of public activities – painting, dance and reading classes and a neighbourhood cre`che, for example. It also broke down bourgeois modes of domesticity through its communal living arrangements. The semiotics of a public-private space are shown in the example of Addams putting away the family silver and taking down the brocade curtains. Addams and her companions further disrupted the public-private distinction through the idea of the home reaching into the city in various ways. One of these was the idea of ‘‘civic housekeeping’’ in which the conditions in the city at large constituted an expanded arena of the home. It also directly impacted on the domestic situation of the

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nineteenth ward through municipal regulation and the conditions of work. The idea of civic housekeeping provided a rationale for the extension of female middle class reformer into municipal activities and the wider public realm. As well as dealing with more established dispositions Hull-House practices were also experimental and improvisational. Addams describes one such initiative: Our next cooperative experiment was much more successful, perhaps because it was much more spontaneous. At a meeting of working girls held at Hull-House during a strike in a large shoe factory, the discussions made it clear that the strikers who had most easily frightened, and therefore the first to capitulate, were naturally those girls who were paying board and were afraid of being put out if they fell too far behind. After a recital of a case of particular hardship one of them exclaimed: ‘Wouldn’t it be fine if we had a boarding club of our own and then we could stand by each other in a time like this?’ After that events moved quickly. We read aloud together Beatrice Potter’s little book on ‘Cooperation’, and discussed all the details and fascinations of such an undertaking, and on the first of May 1891, two comfortable apartments near Hull-House were rented and furnished. The settlement was responsible for the furniture and paid the first month’s rent, but beyond that the members managed the club themselves . . . At the end of the third year the club occupied all of the six apartments which the original building contained, and numbered fifty members. (Addams, 1968, pp. 135– 137). Hull-House also disrupted categories of settlement and movement. A space dedicated to settling, reform and focus was in fact constantly in motion. In part this was because of the number of children active in its space but also in the need to re-arrange furniture and fittings in each of the rooms, several times a day in order to accommodate all the different activities. Hull-House residents would be rushing to finish dinner as neighbourhood residents queued outside waiting for the dining room to be rearranged for art class. These rhythms and movements were reflected in the changing shape of the building as extensions were added or other properties were acquired. The choreography of the building was a core part of the settlement experience for settlers and neighbourhood residents. In terms of the aesthetics of communicative action it is significant that the first dedicated extension of Hull-House was an art gallery, the Butler gallery. The first intention of the settlers was to enlighten and uplift neighbourhood residents by exhibiting works of beauty donated by the great and the good of Chicago society. Neighbourhood residents took art classes. There was a later shift, Jackson remarks, to a more participatory paradigm where art became less an exercise in uplift than a vehicle for creative agency because it was not burdened by the alienation of the formal labour process. Later the Butler gallery would be used to exhibit

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work by neighbourhood residents rather than importing ‘‘harmony and reasonableness’’ from outside (Jackson, 2001, p. 107). This intersects with Dewey’s idea of art as communication and connectedness. ‘‘Settlers and fellow pragmatists came to locate the benefits of aesthetics in the labor of participatory production, not that of readerly evaluation’’ (Jackson, 2001, p. 110). Such aesthetic forms of communication and cooperation have the potential for world disclosing insights that have a place in an expanded idea of rationality that includes reason giving and world disclosure. As Duvenage (2003, p. 132) argues ‘‘any theory of rationality that fails to incorporate a positive account of novel experience and creative meaning change is inadequate’’. Habermas considers only the rationality of validity-oriented speech and action (the rationality of reason giving), not the rationality associated with disclosing different horizons of meaning. For Dewey the activity of disclosure is one type of action on a cognitive continuum. Dewey does not draw ‘‘a too strong cognitive boundary between the cognitive capacity for world disclosing and the capacity for giving reasons’’ (Kompridis, 1994, cited in Duvenage 2003, p. 134). The world disclosing aspects of aesthetic communication are at play in the city as a whole, where the juxtapositions of sensory experiences and the capacity for shock or surprise is always at large. As well as these sharp experiences there is also the constant hum of the city and the way that this can form the backdrop to other communicative repertories. 7. Aesthetic validity and the city 7.1. Walking and talking Another way of understanding aesthetic validity, we might call adventures in anonymity. De Certeau was getting at this when he drew a parallel between speech acts and walking. The ability to walk the city and draw together different locations and experiences in novel ways is like improvising in language. He points to the appropriation of space by an ‘I’ which of course from a Deweyan perspective puts the ‘I’ in tension with the social ‘Me’ (what de Certeau differentiates as ‘style’ and ‘use’). De Certeau sees this through the ‘‘conjunctive and disjunctive articulation of place’’ (de Certeau, 1984, p. 99). He stresses the ‘‘phatic aspect – terms that initiate, maintain or interrupt contact, such as hello, well, well, etc. Walking, which alternately follows a path and has followers, creates a mobile organicity in the environment, a series of phatic topoi’’ (p. 99). These innovatory acts of the ‘I’ need to match a certain audience’s ability to receive them without threat (the use for style). Linguistic breakdown is always a possibility, hence the importance of the phatic function of language that supports more portentous conversation (Young, 2000 has pointed to the importance of greeting, as well as storytelling and rhetoric in this

regard). The phatic utterance ‘‘gambols, goes on all fours, dances or walks about with a light or heavy step, like a series of hellos in an echoing labyrinth, anterior and parallel to informative speech’’ (de Certeau, 1984, p. 99). This playful, innovative ‘I’ of communication can be held in place and be meaningful (even though novel) to receiving audience in ways that have further implications for the idea of public space. The ways that communication gets anchored and accepted for further exchange requires strategic rationalities in a minimal sense that provide ‘speech places’ that temporarily stabilise communicative norms (Bridge, 2003). Innovation or novelty and unpredictability are still aspects or city life. The juxtapositions and contrasts that de Certeau is using on his walk and in talk are part of the common experience of the city as a sensory environment. But much of where the sense of aesthetic validity comes from is more mundane and is something to do with the everyday hum or rhythm of the city. This activity forms the backdrop of communicative action. To begin to illustrate this we return to the site privileged by Habermas in his treatment of the growth of the public realm. 7.2. Ordered chaos in the coffee house In their review of the literature on the early modern coffee house Laurier and Philo (forthcoming) suggest that Habermas paints too settled and deliberative a picture of the coffee house environment. These were not stilled spaces of calm and rational public debate but rather much more boisterous and busy in terms of spatiality, sociability and practices. Laurier and Philo point to Edward Ward’s contemporary depiction (1698–1700) of Will’s coffee house in London, from which they take the title of their paper: [It contains] a parcel of muddling muckworms . . . as busy as so many rats in an old cheese loft: some coming, some going, some scribbling, some talking, some drinking, others jangling, the whole room stinking of tobacco like a Dutch scoot, or a boatswain’s cabin . . . being half chocked with the steam that arose from their soot-coloured ninny broth, their stinking breaths and the suffocated fumes of their nasty puffing-engines . . . (Mackie, 1998, p. 144, cited in Laurier and Philo, forthcoming). There is a hum and flow of non-discursive activity involving body gestures, the noise of argument and laughter and assent, the scraping of chairs, the clatter of cutlery. These are spaces of rough and idle conversation. I would argue the evidence Laurier and Philo cite suggests too a mix of spontaneous action and situational conventions, a kind of background hum that provides the possibility of public conversation but in all its embodiment, flow and chatter. Citing Ellis (2002, p. 7), they suggest how ‘‘the coffee house established an unstated set of relational group dynamics which allowed it to confirm what it did best, which was

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to create distinct sociability’’ (also Ellis, 2004). Laurier and Philo conclude . . . Habermas overstates the extent to which coffee houses were relatively contained and egalitarian spaces of calm rational-critical debate, and we have proposed that an alternative account is needed: one that inquires into their stabilisation of the public and its others, and relatedly of public opinion and its alternates, out of spatial and social fluidity, multiplicity and dissipation of the city’’ (Laurier and Philo, forthcoming). This flow that provides stability is part of what I would argue is the transactional rationality of the situation and setting, relying on implicit claims to validity, not in terms of winning argument but a set of performative and aesthetic surroundings that provide the possibility for communicative action in its widest sense that may, in turn, provide the particular foundations for a wider public realm and a deeper deliberative democracy. 7.3. Street ballet in New York city Returning to the quotations that began this paper – Whitman’s celebration of the experience of New York: . . . the assemblages of citizens in their groups, conversations, trades, evening amusements . . . the like of these completely satisfy my senses of power, fullness, motion, etc,. and give me, through such senses and appetites, and through my aesthetic conscience, a continued exaltation and absolute fulfilment. (Whitman [1871], 2004). Inhaling and exhaling the senses of the city is an experience that excites his aesthetic conscience, and attunement to others through being in the city. This is the validity claim that the deeper idea of communicative rationality rests on. It involves as much of the impulsion of the performative ‘I’ as the more usual conformity of the ‘Me’ to the generalised other of the community. The improvisation and unpredictability of the ‘I’ is instead mediated by the sort of aesthetic conscience or validity claim to which Whitman refers. This involves non-discursive as well as discursive communication, a social sensitivity played out in the ambiance of city dwelling (including its diversity and dissensus). It is a rationality of city life fully and concretely lived. This is a ‘way of being’ in the city that I think has antecedents in planning theory and is most clearly represented in the life of a New York neighbourhood in the classic work of Jacobs (1993 [1961]) Under the seeming disorder of the old city, whenever the old city is working successfully, is a marvellous order for maintaining the safety of the streets and the freedom of the city. It is a complex order. Its essence is intricacy of sidewalk use, bringing with it a constant succession of eyes. This order is all com-

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posed of movement and change, and although it is life, nor art, we may fancifully call it the art form of the city and liken it to the dance – not a simpleminded precision dance with everyone kicking up at the same time, twirling in unison and bowing off en masse, but to an intricate ballet in which the individual dancers and ensembles all have distinctive parts which miraculously reinforce each other and compose an orderly whole. The ballet of the good city sidewalk never repeats itself from place to place, and in any one place is always replete with new improvisations (Jacobs 1993, pp. 65–66). I think what Jacobs is getting at here is the ability to inhabit the city is as much about something like peripheral vision involving discursive and non-discursive communication, the edges of communication in which the deeper (what Forester, 2000 calls) ‘participatory regimes’ are established and maintained. And Jane Jacobs is right to suggest that these tonal routines are significant in establishing a wider public realm. As previously discussed in this paper this has been suggested more recently in Young’s (2000) pointing to greeting (as well as storytelling and rhetoric) as a significant component in the foundation of a successful public realm. This is the ‘‘small change’’ as Jacobs puts it, out of which a wider public realm is built. It is also an idea of communicative action in its widest sense. It suggests an experience of the city that allows for consummatory experience revealing new horizons of meaning as well as discursive argument over meaning. This ‘art form of the city’ requires constant renewal through new improvisations – it is never still. That too is suggestive of the more speculative side of rationality. Innovation is required to sustain an overall equilibrium. Rationality is rhythmic in that sense. It is these rhythms that are at the heart of progressive planning and democratic renewal. The opening up of the idea of communicative rationality through a pragmatist understanding of communicative spaces in the city has, I believe, wider implications for the radical import of pragmatism in geography. 8. The radical possibilities of pragmatism for geography Pragmatism chimes with geographical analysis in its privileging of the environment (both human/cultural and physical) in which human organisms exist. As a form a naturalised Hegelianism it does have a strong sensitivity to the ongoing challenge of dealing with the challenges of the environment. This is not a naturalised view of the environment however. The environment is partly premeditated (in terms of the shared symbols of culture) and this premeditated environment demands a form of rationality that is instantiated with power relations (see Kang, 1976; Bridge, 2005) in its discursive effects. But this is a terrain also that is constantly interrupted by the physicality of the social world. It denies a separation between the cultural and social and the physical or material. In this there are

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clear connections, both to Marxist geography and more specifically to recent discussion of materiality and a new political ecology (for example, Heynan et al., 2006). In terms of urban geography, it points to the closer integration of understanding of material processes and the sociality of the city. A second element of pragmatist thought is that it treats environment/organism relations as transactional. Dewey was a philosopher of verbs rather than nouns. Transaction is distinct from interaction which implies communication between two fully formed organisms. In transactions, the environment and organism are co-constituted (though not necessarily equivalently). Organisms (including humans) do not come ready made. They are always in process. So too are their environments, which do not appear themselves ready made. Objects come into being in the way that they object to the organisation of energies by an organism and the organism’s reaction to that. It is in the quality of relations that the analysis focuses. There are strong antecedents here to Actor Network Theory and the way that ‘‘actors, define themselves, and others in interaction, in the intermediaries they put into circulation’’ (Callon, 1991, p. 135). Unlike actor network theory I think it presents the possibilities of a more radical idea of human agency beyond effects in assemblages or networks. I think pragmatism enhances the radical possibilities for geography in its anti-cartesianism. Already acknowledged in forms of ANT and non-representational geography, pragmatism offers a radical alternative to conventional western philosophy in its denial of the separation of mind and body. Pragmatism (via Dewey) has a particular view of the role of bodies in ongoing life. Dewey deliberately refers to the continuum body-mind in this regard. Also bodies are not embodied objects with density and set boundaries – they are defined rather by their various transactions with the environment. Transactions are mainly experienced by organisms through their ‘bodying’. Dewey argued that organisms live ‘as much in process across and ‘through skins as in processes ‘within skins’ (Dewey and Bentley, 1991, p. 119, see Sullivan, 2001). This starts to give an account of human activity that is thoroughly relational in its spatialities because space is constituted in the communicative regimes (near or at a distance) of human and non-human actors. Dewey stressed the importance of habit and experience in human transactions, habit being an expression of ongoing will or disposition (Dewey, 1958, 1922). This suggests the spatialities (and temporalities of ongoing habit, or habitus as Bourdieu would say) but also, as the Hull-House illustration indicates, how bodies might be the site for the destabilisation of habits and new forms of intelligent communication across social divisions. As has been argued this is not a situation in which the cognitive and the symbolic (especially in language), supersede these other forms of transaction. In positing, the impulsion of the body-mind elements of physical biological bodying are present and significant in all forms of

communication. This opens up scope for a geography of bodying that connects with, but provides an alternative to, the corporeal view of bodies (derived from Merleau Ponty, 1962). It is much more resonant of the performative turn but one that, as Sullivan (2001) has argued, involves the situational and the transactional, rather than the more transcendent qualities of body excess that Butler’s work implies. Again the situated ‘interspatialities’ of bodies (Jackson, 2001) in the Hull-House example, is highly suggestive of the communicative significance of body transactions. Hull-House encouraged a range of transformative actions. From collective action over factory work practices and other forms of collaborative, practical problem solving (such as a day-time nursery for working parents), to forms of shared activity that started to break down habitual assumptions about the possibilities or value of education, to more micro encounters that started to disrupt the differences between bodies, through play, or acting, or sport, or dance – the space of Hull-House started to change assumptions and horizons of possible action (for both middle class residents and working class neighbours). Along with this was the disruption of the public and the private and the reaching out from an apparent ‘domestic’ realm into the public realm of local and indeed national politics (through ideas like civic housekeeping) – activity might have been localised but it was by no means innocent, or parochial. Another radical element of the spatiality of body-minds or the spaces of bodying is that they capture the emotional qualities of transaction and communication full on. But rather than being a force field of effects in the kind of neo-Spinozean way that Thrift (2003) suggests, these are affects and emotions that transact situationally, that are the qualities of certain situations, and that are a part of rationality. Again we return to Dewey: Complex and active animals have, therefore, feelings which vary abundantly in quality, corresponding to distinctive directions and phases – initiating, mediating, fulfilling or frustrating – of activities, bound up in distinctive connections with environmental affairs (Dewey, 1958, p. 258). Just as there is no separation of body and mind there is no separation of emotion and reason: The conclusion is not that the emotional, passionate phase of action can be or should be eliminated on behalf of bloodless reason. More ‘passions’ not fewer is the answer. To check the influence of hate there must be sympathy, while to rationalise sympathy there are needed the emotions of curiosity, caution, respect for freedom of others – dispositions which evoke objects which balance those called up by sympathy and prevent its degradation into maudlin sentiment and meddling interference. Rationality . . . is not

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a force to evoke against impulse and habit. It is the attainment of a working harmony among diverse desires (Dewey, 1922, p.196). An understanding of the significance of emotions in communication and response resonates well with the emerging geography of the emotions literature (for example, Bondi et al., 2005). In terms of thinking about public space and radical democracy there is scope to engage much more with ideas of the ‘democracy of the emotions’ (Hoggett and Thompson, 2002). In what ways can passion and commitment, anger and desire be a part of the democratic process, especially if some of those partial and situated passions are extreme? For Habermas of course the resolution is through communicative debate and the relativising of validity claims through verbal discussion. Perhaps as I have suggested there is a richer engagement of claims in communicative action in its fullest sense involving ways of being in the city (or inhabitation). Dewey points to a rational resolution out of the encounter of the passions, rather than the removal of passion. His vision may seem rather too optimistic and harmonious but the fullest register of communicative encounter, including the emotions, is worth exploring in terms of new ways of being or thinking, or even expressing differences. Elsewhere I have explored these ways of opening up public space and communication in the city (Bridge, 2005). What all this points to I think is a different type of politics of place. The community and locality is often the place of partiality and passion. The playing out of difference in certain localities can be both accommodative (Watson, 2006) and divided. Treating the city as an ecology of communicative spaces (both agonistic and accommodative) might enable us to rethink and redo the democratic process. As geographers we can revisit the interactionist work and the work on urban social segregation, but in ways that do not, as they do ultimately, privilege certain forms of communication (the linguistic) over others, and a static form of residence (from the census) for ways of life. A transactional approach might help rethink the politics of place, to suggest inhabitation rather than residence. It points to a new conception of place-making (again suggested by the example of Jackson’s work on the interspatiality and peformativity of Hull-House). It will also re-connect geography with discussions in political theory, a relationship that has been, with notable exceptions (Smith, 2000; Barnett, 2003) all too weak. The other forms of radicalising that pragmatism offers geography is through its emphasis on experience and its notion of practice. Experience is shaped by objects (or the way that phenomena object to action – some more powerfully than others). It is composed of networks of relations, involving different sensory registers and is an outcome of human/non-human communicating. In contrast to developments in geography that take these developments to be constitutive of a post-human environment I think pragmatist understandings suggest a reassertion of human action. Concrete experience is an outcome of the

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tangling of ongoing human/environment relations (i.e. experience is concrete and processual), what Mead has called ‘a vague sense of thick agency’ (Mead, 1964, cited in Rosenthal, 2002). This sense of agency is built out of communicability and those discursive and non-discursive communicative acts with which this paper has concerned itself. The idea of communicability and the networked relations of the intersubjective lifeworld (or rather transactional lifeworld involving subjects-in-process) would I believe develop the insights of the phenomenological approach in geography (Ley and Samuels, 1978; Relph, 1976; Tuan, 1977, 2004) that were concerned with the lifeworld as more individualised spatial experiences. The communicative spaces of the lifeworld develop this thinking in terms of pragmatism’s concern with radical democracy. The other strand of anti-cartesianism is bringing together knowledge and action in the form of practice. Knowledge is seen as a form of performative enquiry in which understandings of the world are an outcome of practical activity in that world and the truth potential is the way that diverse situations are connected up in experience. Whilst perhaps not having the big problem/big solution aspect that Marxism has, it is nevertheless related in its radical potential in several ways. As Habermas has said it shares its Young Hegelianism with Marxism and Kierkegaard’s philosophy. Human everyday experience should be connective and transactional. Blocks to this are objects that inhibit human development (be they power, or capitalism, or instrumental rationality). Communicability – somatic, gestural, linguistic, aesthetic, spiritual in its fullest sense is what Dewey called ‘a life fully lived’ and in his idea of growth. Pragmatism and its emphasis on truth as connective in practical achievement and rationality in communication that also encompasses performative enquiry – the speculative side of experience – all point I think to a renewed sense of human agency, a life fully and concretely lived, in a processual sense (see Rosenthal, 1990). In his latest work The Self Awakened: Pragmatism Unbound (2007) Roberto Unger suggests the potential for radical transformative human action by ridding pragmatism of its naturalism. By shedding an epistemology of naturalism (humans with limited powers in a risky natural world) and acting on the pragmatic view of truth, concept formation and speculative experience enhances our ability to make change. The degree of emphasis we give to human agency in the world of other acting things is at the heart of many contemporary debates in geography (such as ANT and its radical symmetry of human and non-human action). The human experience portrayed in pragmatism is defined though communicability in ways that have been discussed in this paper. But what if this very faculty of communicability is the one that imposes the limits on radical action. In this way Giorgio Agamben (Agamben, 1993) has argued, drawing inspiration from Guy Debord’s Society of the Spectacle (1995) that the ultimate triumph of capitalism lies in its colonisation of human communicability

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itself. ‘‘It is clear that the spectacle in language, the very communicativity or linguistic being of human . . . what hampers communication is communicability itself: humans are separated by what unites them (Agamben, 1993, p. 82). Agamben’s is a more thoroughgoing idea of the reach of distorted communication than Habermas’s identification of the system and instrumental rationality as the problem. If the elements of language aimed at reaching understanding free of instrumental perlocuation and if the ‘I’ that is the possibility of historical agency are in fact products of mediatised communication, then there is nowhere left to hide. There is no possibility of a self-constituting public beyond the society of the spectacle. Despite all this Agamben does give hope of a coming community on the other side of the evacuation of meaning and belonging from language, a community without belonging in the traditional sense. Again the reconstitution is through a linguistic representation. But the terrain of communicability (as Butler and others have pointed out) is much rougher, shot through with inconsistencies and slippages, unpredictability and dissensus, discursive and non-discursive communication, discursive power and resistance to discursive power, all of which might be constitutive of a renewed sense human agency, the constitution of a public and a more radicalised democracy. I think it is necessary to situate pragmatism in relation to Marxism, so long the standard bearer of radical thought in geography. There is a temptation to critique pragmatism in relation to Marxism for its parochialism, both in terms of its American roots and in its apparent localism in the identification and solving of problems. It has also of course been tarred with the brush of liberalism in its functionalist and meliorative tendencies, tinkering at the edge of the worst effects of capitalism, rather than centrally concerned with the identification of the structural bases of inequalities. By situating truth claims in situations, tested through practice it might seem to miss bigger truths, such as the laws of motion of capital. Its emphasis on melioration may seem complicit with capitalism and insipid in comparison to the more revolutionary transformations of human/ environment relations that Marxism proposes. First of all, I think it’s instructive that Habermas, so versed in his Marxism and critical theory, turned to pragmatism for the possibilities of social renewal (and he has continued to warm to pragmatism ever since – see Aboulafia et al., 2002). Habermas sensed that in the lifeworld there were communicative possibilities that capitalist imperatives could not wholly subsume. Agamben raises however the prospect of such domination through the distortion of communicability itself but seeks resolution from new meanings established in communicative communities that are emergent and based neither on belonging nor on past symbolic orders. A more thorough-going idea of communicative action suggests the iterations of existing power relations but also inconsistencies and slippages, improvisations and embellishments that are the sites of social reproduction and social change. Small scale activities, mundane

in nature (as the Hull-House example suggests) to do with the encounter between bodies, and the other spatial histories they involve, and the idea or ideal of an individual agency socially experienced, a life fully lived (as Dewey would say) is just as revolutionary a prospect as the transformation of labour time into work. It is, in many senses, a continuation of Marx’s early work on the dimensions of (and restrictions on) human sensuous practical activity (Marx, 1988 [1844], see Ostrow, 1990). The continual questioning of validity through inhabitation (through bodyminds) of social, subjective, objective and aesthetic claims to validity (in organism-environmental relations and ways of life) makes pragmatism’s exposal of radical democracy a powerful vehicle for social transformation as well as reform and to which the sensitivities of geography are fully attuned. These concerns I think should give a renewed sense of space – as relational, defined by the quality of transactions (both co-present and distanciated). This renewed sense of space is concerned with the ways that these transactions facilitate or inhibit growth and how they register the impacts of wider power discourses. The way that communicative experience bangs into other discursive regimes is the way that experience is shaped by power (in ways that critical theorists and poststructuralists have examined so well). The communicative spaces of experience are also sites of discontinuities, infelicities, innovatory acts. It is here that validity is not registered in the ‘objective’ legibility of space (as in the modernist city), nor in the legitimacy of community (and enclave space), nor even in the expressive sincerity of the self (or lifeworld space). But it is here that validity claims themselves are a form of spatial practice, where validity is judged as a form of inhabitation, an ability to belong to the city without its legibility and its traditions of community and culture and individualised experience. Acknowledgements An earlier version of this paper was given at the session ‘Where is public space?’ Organised by Clive Barnett and Stephanie Simon, AAG conference, Chicago 2006. My thanks to them and all those who asked questions in the session. I am very grateful for the very helpful comments of the three anonymous referees for this paper. References Aboulafia, M., Bookman, M., Kemp, C. (Eds.), 2002. Habermas and Pragmatism. Routledge, London. Addams, J., 1968. Twenty Years at Hull-House. Macmillan, New York. Agamben, G., 1993. The Coming Community. University of Minnesota Press, MI, USA. Austin, J.L., 1962. How to Do Things with Words. Oxford University Press, Oxford. Barnett, C., 2003. Culture and Democracy: Media, Space and Representation. Edinburgh University Press, Edinburgh. Benhabib, S., 1992. Situating the Self: Gender. In: Community and Postmodernism in Contemporary Ethics. Polity, Cambridge.

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