I wanted to look at the kinds of places we are living in today, and ask how they could be improved, without thinking only in terms of classical kinds of unity. So I was off to theme parks and New Urbanism, and wondering about how we could improve suburban dispersal. I found that much of the criticism was based on faulty dualities.
I also wanted to say something about how the modern sense of homelessness wasn't quite as some critics thought it to be.
I had some more general goals as well, since places make a wonderful study of the events of change and intersection of identities, and of changes in social grammars. I wanted to look at how sets of possibilities get established and changed, into new kinds of relevance and contrast and norms. I wasn't trying to offer algorithms for solutions, but rather some cautions and some attacks on constricted ways of thinking about our places and our identities today.
For instance, I wanted to fight against restricting the general debate to the two familiar options, namely that social grammars (social norms and forms) are either there from the beginning (factual, positive, original, natural, etc.) or else are wholly established by some act of subjectivity (individual or social, or divine).
This relates to the old fight against the fact/value dichotomy, and against a related but less famous dichotomy of passive data facing active forces, or passive content manipulated by active subjectivity.
In our situation today the problem is not so much particularity versus universality, as many think, but positivity versus process. We should not be forced to choose between particularity and universality; that is the wrong way to put questions about modernity and tradition. It is wrong to think in terms of some given particularity but also wrong to think in terms of some universality that is just given, either as passive or active.
Modernity does mean a new kind of self-awareness, but that is not so much of some universal position but of the process that generates positions. That process isn't itself a position we can take: it isn't pure, and our self-awareness of it isn't that of a self facing a direct object; yet that awareness does influence what social grammars we can accept or create now.
Places are a wonderful topic for broaching these issues, since places are emphatically factual yet also socially meaningful and historically changing. They show the way we are thrown into already operative dimensions of linked possibility within the process of self and social identity formation and change.
(c) David Kolb, 1 August 2001