The Imaginative Structure of the City (review)

In many respects, Alan Blum's The Imaginative Structure of the City can be read as a reprise of the conception of the modern city elaborated in the wake of Ferdinand Tönnies's influential Gemeinschaft und Gesellschaft (1887). In the sociological perspectives of Tönnies's immediate successors, Max Weber and Georg Simmel, the city as an object of sociological investigation emerged at the interstices of processes of economic rationalization (Gesellschaft) and forms of customary association thought to at once pre-date and survive within those processes (Gemeinschaft). While both Weber and Simmel evinced a sober awareness of the dominant role assumed by economic rationality in the metropolitan context, both also followed Tönnies in insisting on the perdurance, within this context, of forms of symbolic exchange that elude that rationality.

In the second sentence of the book's introduction, Blum directly invokes Weber's sociology of the city as the source for his own conception of the city as engaged in a 'struggle with its two-sided character as an organization ruled by its self-understanding as a division of labor and by its need and desire for communality.' He then goes on in the book's first chapter to suggest that one can discern an interpretive dilemma in Weber's approach to the city as both a 'marketplace' and a 'political-administrative unity.' This dilemma, reminiscent of Martin Heidegger's description of the 'hermeneutical circle,' does not arise from any difficulty in entering the interpretive enterprise. Rather, it arises from the fact of our having always already entered it, for the immemorial status of that entry militates against the possibility of its ever being fully absorbed by critical reflection. As Blum puts it: 'The relationship between the same and the other [constitutive of the civic arena] is not first a relationship between the inquirer and the "external" world but a movement within inquiry itself ... That is, Weber has some kind of knowledge of what the city is that he needs and desires to ground. Weber begins with his result (say, common-sense knowledge), and will end by seeking to recollect this beginning.' The Imaginative Structure of the City is therefore as much a book about the grounds for social inquiry as it is one about the city as a possible object of such inquiry. Better, it is one in which the dilemmas associated with the former are imbricated in the antinomies associated with the latter.

But why should the city serve as the privileged locus for the dilemmas Blum associates with social inquiry? The answer lies in Blum's conception of what a city is. For him the city is not in the first instance an aggregate of built form and attendant infrastructure, or a geographical territory animated by dense occupation and intensified economic activity, nor even a juridico-political corporation. Though Blum concedes that it is also all those things, the city is for him above all else the symbolic matrix for any negotiation of our collective self-understanding. In this negotiation, which Blum describes as 'a free space of meaning,' the singularity of our individual experiences plays an essential role, that of ensuring the link between commonsensical and critical understandings of the shared situation.

Blum's modus operandi is therefore one that begins with phenomenological description of typical experiences, only then to situate the grounds for this typicality in mechanisms of symbolic exchange. 'Nighttime' and 'The Scene,' the book's fifth and sixth chapters, are particularly successful applications of this method. Both capture dimensions of late metropolitan experience that, while everywhere palpable, elude any quantitative measure. What is more, they reveal the extent to which these dimensions of social experience are the objects of a process of collective negotiation that is only partly conscious, since the laws of symbolization that determine this negotiation also determine critical reflection on it.

If the merely partial character of this understanding marks a point of frustration for theoretical inquiry into the city, it also secures that 'indeterminacy' thanks to...