Since I don’t know the backgrounds of the people who read posts here, it’s difficult for me to judge how much information to provide so that the posts will make sense, and I can easily miss the mark. Questions and comments help me get a better sense for this – and also give me a chance to comment in return, to clarify things in case other people have the same question or reaction.

I should perhaps clarify that, in this post (as in many of the other posts in this blog) I am primarily trying to spell out what another theorist is thinking. I often disagree with the theorists I’m writing about in this blog but, before I plunge into that disagreement, I first try to clarify what the original theorist was talking about. This is particularly important with someone like Benjamin, because it can be so difficult to parse what Benjamin is trying to say.

So, yes, I am familiar with Ranke. But more to the point, so was Benjamin – and I do believe that Benjamin intended to target Ranke by choosing to quote the phrase the past “as it really was”.

Basically, Benjamin is (among many other things) trying to juxtapose two approaches to history that are often perceived as direct opposites, and then argue that these apparently different approaches actually share some common assumptions, and yield a common political impact. One approach is Marxist history – specifically, the variety of Marxist history that claims to identify inexorable historical “laws”. The other is Ranke-style historical investigation that rejects concepts like historical “laws”, and focusses on grounding historical accounts in empirical fact.

For Benjamin, these two approaches are only superficially in conflict – Benjamin believes they share an underlying assumption that the past (and, by implication, the present and the future) could not have been other than what they are. In other words, Benjamin believes that both approaches understate the role of human agency.

It may well be that Benjamin (or his translators – I’m not sure how the passages read in Benjamin’s original) shouldn’t have used the term “historicism” to refer to the kind of empiricist history Benjamin wants to criticise. But this probably isn’t the most central issue.

Benjamin is, I think, trying to be deliberately contrarian by comparing Ranke’s empiricism to Marxist historical laws. He expects (I think) his readers to look at this comparison, blink, do a double take, and ask how this comparison can possibly make any sense – and then, hopefully, to move a bit closer to understanding Benjamin’s core point about the potential for human agency to bring about a freer society.

In highlighting and trying to make sense of Benjamin’s work, I’m not necessarily saying that I am a Benjamin acolyte. I tend to be drawn to theorists who are asking similar questions to mine – and I think Benjamin falls into this category. But I suspect I’d offer a different kind of answer – and also that I wouldn’t choose exactly the same targets as Benjamin does, in setting forth my own critiques. Nevertheless, I want to make sure I understand as well as I can the sorts of answers Benjamin (and others) have provided to these questions, in the hopes that this will improve the quality of my own work…

Do you know this quote’s origin and context?

Strangely, though, Habermas actually does have an audience among planners – via people like Patsy Healey and John Forester, who are mainly concerned with planning as a form of (potentially) democratic governance. And Leonie Sandercock and others have brought Foucault and Lyotard into planning discussions, as a means of casting light on power relations in the planning process.

I’m not actually trained as a planner, however (although I did play one in the workforce, for a while). I was recruited for an interdisciplinary research project into urban planning, as a member of a team deliberately recruited for their diverse academic and professional backgrounds – the hope being that, through collaboration, we’ll produce better work.

My individual task, as set out in the grant that pays the bills, is to think about how we can overcome certain dichotomies that currently characterise the planning theory literature. It’s a fantastic project, but also means I need other outlets, if I want to speak with people who are specifically interested in the sorts of things that interest me (hence the blog).

I can believe it. I’m barely able to square the critical theory and the urban planning. Anyway, didn’t Le Corbusier establish that one designs first and theorizes second?

First, just for clarity: I want to be careful not to overstate my own claims about what Marx “really meant”, whether in his early or late writings. My main goal isn’t, say, to rescue Marx from the Marxists, but more to acknowledge where I personally got a particular concept or approach. Nevertheless, my reading of Marx does run on parallel track to those of some recent Marx scholars – particularly the interpretation put forward in Postone’s Time, Labor, and Social Domination (although, for my taste, Postone is still too deeply engaged with Marxism, and also seems to perpetuate some ontological assumptions about the interaction of humans and nature that I don’t personally share).

But yes, in my reading, in his later works Marx is not trying to create some kind of alternative political economy, but rather to explain why it is that classical political economic theory sounds plausible to people – why it resonates so widely – even though it makes certain claims that are actually fairly easy to refute empirically. So this places Marx, for me, among the small collection of theorists interested in exploring this kind of question.

In terms of how to think about why people persist in believing refutable concepts – yes, I probably lean more toward the sort of Kuhnian notion that we embrace a gestalt paradigm, which focusses our attention on particular issues, and deflects our attention from others, rather than to the notion that people follow the “herd”. Not because I don’t think that people follow the herd – but because I think all people follow some herd, even when they’re feeling their most original.

To personalise this a bit, I don’t know many people in person who are interested in the sorts of questions that interest me, or who share a similar theoretical approach (unless they’ve taken courses I’ve taught, where of course I’m biasing my sample…). I know, though, that I’m still not being terribly original, because I’m aware of what is being written in other disciplines and in other countries – the explosion of work on embodied concepts, for example, or the burst of interest in self-reflexivity in the ’90s – and I can recognise that I am part of a broader “movement”, even if I have no direct, personal interactions with the other people writing on these issues.

I see this as sort of analogous to those historical moments when several people are independently working on discovering the same technology or theory, and independently produce quite similar work in a short time period: they may each individually be quite “creative” – but creativity is the child of its time, and some times lend themselves to some discoveries. (Hacking discusses the flip side of this phenomenon, when he discusses what he calls the “key turning in the lock” eureka moment in scientific work. Hacking is suspicious – and I share his suspicion – that, at such moments, we are particularly vulnerable to making logical errors or wild extrapolations in advance of the evidence, because the sense of the “key turning in the lock” can derive from how well our ideas resonate with other social and cultural experiences, rather than with how well our theories match the evidence.)

On the US elections, if you’re not already familiar with him, you might enjoy some of George Lakoff’s writings on this issue (although I have argued here that Lakoff’s political works don’t incorporate his research insights as thoroughly as they could have).

On a more crass level, putting aside the more complex issue of why people are attracted to particular political parties or ideologies, I’ve been struck since moving to Australia by how voting systems can impact election results: voting in Australia is compulsory for all citizens, and voting is also preferential (you rank candidates in order of preference, rather than choosing only one candidate). These voting system differences make the Australian system less vulnerable to exploitation by small and unrepresentative, but well-organised and disciplined, minority groups. They also, however, make it “easier” to vote for an actual minor party, because you can dictate that, once that minor party has been eliminated from a race, your vote should then be directed to a specific mainstream party. A bit of a tangent from what you were saying, though, I realise…

On publishing on the web, I suppose it depends how you think about what you’re doing. If you think of it as analogous to self-publication, then, sure, it can have an unsavoury connotation. I tend to think of it as more analogous to what I do in a classroom or at a conference – exchange ideas that aren’t fully formed, in the hopes that they’ll become stronger and clearer through discussion. Hopefully, the quality and movement of the discussion will indicate whether we’re cranks… :-) In traditional “vanity” self-publication, you don’t have the potential for this level of feedback. (Which doesn’t mean there isn’t a “vanity” element in writing for the web, but there’s a vanity element in any kind of production for an audience.)