Transcript Rational fictions and imaginary systems: Cynical ideology

Rational fictions and imaginary systems:
Cynical ideology and the problem
figuration and practice of public housing
John Flint (University of Sheffield)
and
Joe Crawford (University of Stirling)
Paper presented at the Housing Studies Association
Annual Conference: ‘The Value of Housing’
University of York, 15-17 April 2014
The problem figuration of the
contemporary housing crisis
• Focused on UK and US
• Carlen’s concept of imaginary systems and Zizek’s
concept of cynical ideology
• Embedded in national discourses and localised practice
• To mask alternative social realities and deny an
explicitly articulated politics of housing
• Enhanced understanding of the practice and politics of
housing
• The public realm, including public housing, and the
construction of social reality
Painting the housing picture:
‘painting out’ injustice?
“States of physical environment serve as a substrate for
justifications and rationalizations of the way things are,
for the demonstration of problems and their explanation
and for accusations of blame” (Hamblin, 1994: 332).
President Franklin Roosevelt on the ‘ill housing’ of the
United States:
“But it is not in despair that I paint you that picture. I
paint it for you in hope- because the nation, seeing and
understanding the injustice in it, proposes to paint it out”
(quoted in Heathcott, 2012a: 361).
Crisis, governance and naming the world
• Catherine Bauer (1934): Modern housinghousing a legitimate arena for public deliberation
and governmental action (Heathcott, 2012b)
• Reactions to economic and social crisis in late
Victorian period and after Great Depression of
the 1930s was to establish public housing
programmes in private and laissez faire societies
• Naming the world (Bourdieu, 1991)
• Defining the limits of urban governance (Crook,
2008)
Power and problem figurations
• Foucault (1977) and Bourdieu (1984): Power is
tolerable only on condition that it masks and
disguises itself and dissimulates and obfuscates
its true nature
• Generating an imaginary of uniformity and order
from chaotic and changing social reality (Scott,
1998; Carlen, 1991)
• The construction of (public) housing problems
(Stone, 1989; Jacobs et al., 2003)
• Problem figuration (Van Wel, 1992)
Rational fictions and imaginary
systems
• Van Wel (1992): Rational fictions- structure of
problem figuration is rational in terms of goals,
structures and mechanisms, but assumptions and
prioritisations reflect a structure of bias filtered
through fictional images and interpretations of
the problem and subjects of intervention (e.g.
public housing or welfare state obsolescence)
• Associative figuration (Rousseau, 1762; Barker,
1960; Anderson, 1983): how the world should be,
linked to fairness and decency.
Carlen’s imaginary in practice
• Carlen (2008): material reality counter to stated objectives of
‘official’ project (resource constraints and opposition)
• Appearance of doing something and managing perceptions
(Lovering, 2007)- the symbolic and unintended ideological products
of governance
• Economic and political impetus for imaginary practice: ‘everyone
knows’, ‘acting ‘as if’’: rhetoric becomes reality and ‘acquiescence in
the absurd’ (Carlen, 2008)
• An imaginary order
• Opposition, resistance, subversion, fatalism in housing practice
(Barnes and Prior, 2009; Casey, 2005; McKee, 2014)
• But also cynical ideology (Zizek, 1989)’ ‘they know perfectly well,
yet they are still doing it’
• ‘The mask is not simply hiding the real state of things, the
ideological distortion is written into its very essence’ (Zizek, 1989:
25)
Imaginary housing systems and
practice
• Priorities for allocation [in French social housing] could be
multiple, indecipherable and apparently covert, because of the
fiction of universal housing provision (Ball, 2012: 196).
• Stock transfers and ‘the banking of myths’ and ‘uncontested’
facts (McCormack, 2009).
• Homelessness practice in Scotland (Crawford, 2014)
• Contract sales in post-war Chicago, with practice continuing as if
causality never existed despite ‘everyone knowing’ the reality
(Satter, 2009).
• Practice embedded in an imaginary housing system that sustains
its fictional as well as rational elements
Omnipotent housing systems and
impotent housing governance?
• The world as an ahistorical, fixed entity, impervious to the
will of mankind and governed by the omnipotent, reified
forces of ‘destiny’, ‘fate’ and ‘market’ (McCormack, 2009:
396).
• David Cameron (2012) ‘growing phenomenon’ of lack of
access to affordable housing
• Bourdieu (2005): politics of housing as an articulation of the
aspiration of home ownership that denied the realities of
its possibility and sustainability
• Harvey (1975); housing as a form of fictitious capital based
on ‘imaginary costs’ and ‘stubborn illusions’ (Schwartz,
2002)
• Slater (2012): ‘manufactured ignorance’ of the state
Reconfiguring housing realities
• Public housing policy reconfigures the actual
spatial, architectural and demographic reality of
cities (Goetz, 2012): simultaneously a product of
preceding rationalisations of the way things are
(Hamblin, 1994) and a physical justification and
endorsement of the new reality
• Radical diminishing of the expectations that
certain population groups should have for their
housing provision
Conclusions
• A fantasy linked to imaginary housing systems that sustain a cynical
ideology masking social reality and which is essential to housing policy
rhetoric and embedded local practice
• The construction of the social reality of housing is equally a
construction of the imaginary of what government might achieve
• Gilroy (quoted in Slater, 2012): the imaginary of poverty in
contemporary governmentalities reveals the poverty of the
imagination
• US society and elite discourse pretended that it did not know about
slum tenements, exploitative merchants, loan sharks and
discriminatory real estates, acted as if this reality did not exist, or
constucted the fiction that society and government were incapable of
addressing these implacable problems (Carmichael and Hamilton,
1967; Helgeson, 2011)
• Painting our housing injustice in Cameron’s terms is very different to
Roosevelt’s painting out of injustice
• “The official plan was to have no plan at all” (Platt, 2010: 584)
References
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