Forum

The real city, the discursive city, the disappearing city:

Postmodernism and urban sociology
JANET WOLFF
University of Rochester

Poststructuralist and postmodern theories have already had a considerable impact in anthropology, and mainstream sociology is beginning to
consider the implications of these developments. A recent issue of a
sociology journal is devoted to a "symposium on postmodernism," in
which a radical rethinking of sociological theory is proposed (by Steven
Seidman) and debated. I Somewhat ironically, the sociology of culture
and the arts (my own field) has been slow to engage with critical work
in the humanities (literary studies, film theory, and cultural studies), a
reluctance that seems to perpetuate the disciplinary divide in the study
of culture and to block a more productive collaboration between those
interested in essentially the same project, namely a sociological analysis
of the artsf But urban sociologists and urban theorists have been
addressing these questions (notably David Harvey and Edward Soja,
but also contributors to the journal Society and Space), and Michael
Smith's article in this volume should be seen as part of the important
project of rethinking both the city and urban studies from the point of
view of postmodern theory.
One of the problems with discussions about postmodernism is that the
vocabulary of critical theory is often confusingly elided, and this is a
persistent difficulty with Smith's article. In the literature generally,
"postmodernism" is sometimes used generically to refer to a variety of
so-called poststructuralist theories (deconstructionism, semiotics,
Lacanian psychoanalytic theory, Foucauldian discourse theory, and
postmodern theory). I find it more useful to restrict the term "postmodern theory" to the critique of recta-narratives developed by Lyotard, and to the analysis of contemporary society in which the "totality"
is no longer visible (as argued by Fredric Jameson). Although varieties
of "post" theories do often overlap or get conjoined by some writers,
they are not identical, nor even necessarily compatible.
Theory and Society 21: 553-560, 1992.
1992 KluwerAcademic Publishers. Printed in the Netherlands.

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In the course of his essay, Michael Smith makes the following points3:
1. People are active participants in the construction of the social world.
They are not passive entities, entirely determined by macrostructural
factors.
2. Culture plays as important a role in social life and social change as do
economic and material factors.
3. The social world, with which w e are confronted, and in which w e act, is
discursively constructed. It is a product of linguistic and conceptual
formulation, and is not simply "out t h e r e '
4. Postmodern theory has convincingly demonstrated that "grand narratives" cannot be defended; this applies to Marxism and any metanarratives or "master discourses."
5. Urban studies must take account of developments in postmodern theory.
6. Studies of the city must take account of the global dimension.
7. Studies of the city must be focussed on the local.
8. There have been major changes nationally and internationally in the
social world, and urban studies must take account of these. (They include the restructuring of labor processes, mass communications, the
end of the Cold War, global geo-political restructuring, and transnational migration.)
9. Essentialist theories of identity have to be contested. Rather, identities
are provisional constructs, articulated in specific contexts.
10. It is important, in anthropological and sociological inquiry, to employ a
methodology that gives voice to the subject, and does not simply impose the researcher's meanings on those being studied.

These seem to me to be the main arguments of the article. I have extracted them from what is a complex (and, as I shall argue, often
unclear) text, and paraphrased them - though I hope accurately and
fairly. I agree with each of these ten points. Moreover, I think all of
them should be central to the reorientation of sociological theory in
general, and urban sociology in particular.
However, they are ten quite separate arguments. Not a single one of
them follows from any of the others. This means that each one has to be
argued and defended (something that I believe can be done). The problem with Smith's article is that a persistent elision of these topics weakens his case. A n illegitimate sliding from one argument to another - as
if they were the same, or as if one followed from the other - obviates
the need to analyze and justify. Among many examples of this elision
are the following: Arguments 4 (against metanarratives) and 9 (antiessentialism); Arguments 1 (people as active participants), 7 (focus on
the microlevel) and 3 (the discursive nature of reality); Arguments 4
(against Marxism as grand narrative) and 2 (centrality of culture - i.e.
here an anti-economistic argument); Arguments 6 (the global context

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of cities) and 8 (the substantive, historical argument that the global
context has changed); Arguments 1 (people are not passive) and 10
(dialogic methodology); Arguments 3 (no metanarratives) and 10 (dialogic methodology). Of course, there may be a connection between an
emphasis on the everyday practices and active participation of people
in the social on the one hand, and the centrality of culture in social life
on the other, but they are different points: it is possible to emphasize
culture in an entirely macrosociological perspective. Similarly, a noneconomistic account can still be a version of metanarrative - looking at
culture doesn't guarantee a postmodern perspective. Or, microsociologies, with their focus on actors and the local, need not be committed
to a view of the social as discursive. And the question of methodology
(letting the subject speak for him/herself) has nothing much to do with
any of this (though, again, in fact it is often raised in conjunction with
these questions of analysis).
In addition to confusions among the central arguments I have identified, there are other slippages. In one place (p. 501), Smith equates the
de-centered subject with the subject with "no roles" - a totally different
matter, and a totally different theoretical discourse. In the same discussion, he elides the critique of essentialism with the critique of the
notion of the rational actor, another case of the mixing of languages of
analysis. Elsewhere, he moves from the question of subjects (those
studied) to readers (of sociological accounts?) (p. 507); although there
are good poststructuralist arguments for democratic strategies in each
case, away from the authority of the researcher/author, again they are
separate issues. In another non sequitur (and, as elsewhere, making an
illegitimate link between two independently quite legitimate points),
Smith cites the postmodern practice of appropriation and quoting (in
the case of the film Brazil) as an example (which it is not) of the "constitutive structure of understanding" (p. 499). The example, moreover, is
misleading because the point about the constitutive role of language is
that it is always the case; to try to illustrate it with the secondary constitutive practices of particular texts weakens the argument. Lastly, in discussing the notion of the public sphere (p. 517), Smith again merges
two important, but distinct, critiques: the fact that the domestic sphere
has to be taken into account, and the fact that "the public" is cultural as
well as political.
I have documented these points of collapse of argument at some length,
not in an attempt to undermine Smith's whole project but, on the contrary, because I share his concerns. Because I think sociologists do have

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to work with developments in critical theory, including poststructuralist
and postmodern theories, I believe it is important to make the case for
this with great clarity. What I think this means is that we need a careful
exposition of each of the central arguments - most of which present a
real challenge to traditional approaches in the social sciences. Out of
this it will be possible to rethink urban studies in the light of postmodernism.
The unavoidable question for a poststructuralist sociology, posed more
critically than in the case of, say, poststructuralist literary criticism, is
"What is 'the real'?" Radical versions of discourse theory insist that
there is no real; that all we have are the discourses and articulations
that constitute the social and our lived experience of it. In cultural studies and feminist theory, such accounts continue to be contested, on
grounds that are theoretical (their ultimate idealism and relativism),
ontological (their fundamental agnosticism about the extra-discursive),
and political (their inability to provide a basis for critique or a social
identity for political organization). Whether or not we are prepared to
give up metanarratives such as Marxism, we may still want to argue that
class divisions are persistent and determinant, or that there are clearly
systematically structured gender inequalities in contemporary society.4
In Smith's account the real puts in tentative appearances, between arguments for its abolition. Having argued that the "global context of urban
life itself is not an objective structure existing 'out there,' but an intersubjective and contested set of understandings about material, cultural,
and historical permissions and constraints" (p. 503), he goes on in the
next paragraph to list the (very real) social conditions with which we
are confronted - economic, social, international, ethnic, and so on. On
the next page, his formulation seems very undiscursive. "By my reading
the complex global changes I have just enumerated have created new
material and cultural conditions conducive to the political production
of a multiplicity of local 'voices,' including potentially oppositional
voices to dominant modes of signification and power. Under these conditions, differences of race, gender, class, ethnicity, sexuality, locality,
and region and their complex interplay in discourses where personal
and group identities are formed, have become incipient social bases of
new discursive practices and hence of the emergence of new subjectpositions" (p. 504). But by the time we get to the final, substantive, discussion of ethnicity, the real evaporates again, and ethnic identity is a
matter of the articulation of discourses.
The question of the real and the discursive is a pressing problem for a

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postmodern sociology. Though there is not space to pursue this here,
my own view is that it is possible to recognize the centrality of representation in social life and (more importantly here) in social theory - in
the ways in which we conceptualize the social world - and at the same
time to argue for the persistence, power, and effectivity of certain structures (or, perhaps, "articulations"). 5
This means that we can still talk about class, capital, migration, ethnicity, and so on, and do so unapologetically; at the same time, we
know that these categories are mediated in representation and articulated (and experienced) in complex ways, and also that they are
grasped in specific theoretical and conceptual frameworks.
In addition, I think we can relatively unproblematically also "fix" identity without resorting to pre-theoretical essentialism. As some feminists
have recently argued, it is crucial not to employ poststructuralist theories in such a way as to evacuate the very terrain of gender. Although it
is true that "woman" is a discursive construct (or, as it has also been
put, a sign6), and although there is nothing essential about the category
or the identity, nevertheless women are not, as Denise Riley has put it,
just "fluctuating identities.''7 For at least three reasons, these identities
(in this case as "woman") are relatively stable. First, women are situated, and treated, as "women" in the social world. Secondly, experientially this identity may be central (at least, as Riley shows, for considerable portions of the time, since we don't inhabit particular identities
consistently). A n d thirdly, tactically and politically, women start from a
shared acceptance of the specific identity of "woman." For these reasons, 1 find Smith's discussion of Latino ethnic identity far too textual.
In his well-founded concern to avoid essentializing ethnic identity, he
resorts too enthusiastically to the discursive - polemical texts, music,
songs, etc. Identity (ethnic and otherwise) is not just a kind of freefloating intertextuality, however. So although it may be true that some
of these articulations and discourses do play an important role in the
formation and experience of identities, what is missing here is the
sociological account, of institutions, social relations, ideologies, and
practices.
In the general disappearance of the "real" in a postmodern account, the
major absence in this article is the urban itself. The last, lengthy, section
on ethnic identity does not deal with the city at all (though of course we
can assume that contestations of ethnic identity take place within urban
contexts). There isn't necessarily a problem with this - it could be that

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the article is intended to be primarily about ethnic identity, rather than
urban ethnography or urban studies more generally. However, in the
first part of the article, Smith appears to promise a contribution to
urban studies, and the evaporation of the city comes as something of a
surprise. Of course "the city" poses all the problems that any "real"
entity does, and it has been the import of certain recent work to
demonstrate that this too is a discursive construct. 8 There is a new
emphasis on the symbolic and representational aspects of space, including urban space, in urban sociology and urban geography, and in
such a context, the formerly solid city and urban spaces begin to dissolve. I want to conclude by putting the case, again, for the retention of
the real - in this case, the real city and the reality of physical, urban
spaces. In this, too, I take questions of gender as my focus.
Feminism and postmodernism have had a complicated relationship.
One point of view celebrates the potential alliance (first proposed by
Craig Owens) between a political and analytic project that has an interest in destabilizing the dominant culture, and a theoretical and aesthetic program that does just that. The opposite position rejects a radical
relativism that deconstructs "woman" as it challenges gender relations,
and leaves no possibility of a foundational ground for feminist critique
or feminist politics. Between the two, proposals have been made for a
more pragmatic association, taking advantage of the deconstructive
potential of postmodern theory and its challenge to those meta-narratives that have always marginalized women, but retaining the possibility
of smaller narratives, tactical identities, and structural critiques. Smith
refers briefly to a feminist critique (by Mascia-Lees, Sharpe, and
Cohen) of the "postmodernist turn" in anthropology that he employs as
a model (the work of Clifford and Marcus). This essay challenges the
new anthropology, first, on the grounds that feminists have been doing
this kind of dialogic work for some time, and secondly, on the grounds
that the anthropologists do not ground their work in the needs and
interests of their subjects. The authors conclude by reiterating the risk
of postmodernism, which can lead to "a denial of the continued existence of a hierarchy of discourses ... with all voices becoming equal "'9
As in the case of the discursive/the real, and the question of identity,
feminists have to be wary of claims for supposedly democratic methodologies that ignore realities of power and inequality.
It is interesting, therefore, that in the case of urban studies two feminists have recently taken the side of postmodernism against the "foundationalism" and androcentrism of David Harvey and Edward Soja. m

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Although I would endorse the project of challenging certain "totalizing
I want to stress the i m p o r t a n c e of resisting radical postmodernism, and asserting the effects of the real - the extra-discursive.
Feminist geographers and planners have pointed out the very specific
experiences and needs of w o m e n in u r b a n spacesJ I Although we can
now see (thanks to theories of representation, including p o s t m o d e r n
theory) that social relations, institutions, and practices are discursively
p r o d u c e d and mediated, this does not render them any less real. Just as
ethnicity cannot be u n d e r s t o o d (or racism challenged) at the level of
the text, so women's negotiation of the city is not just a question of
meanings and representations. In the case of late nineteenth-century
Paris, Griselda Pollock has illustrated the complex interplay of the real
and the discursive/textual in the ways in which w o m e n could inhabit
the m o d e r n city, showing that their real confinement to the private
sphere was b o t h p r o d u c e d and represented in visual and other discoursesJ 2 If we overemphasize the productive p o w e r of texts and discourses, we b o t h ignore the real constraints of extra-discursive factors,
and exaggerate the possibilities of political challenge and social change.
In the longer run, transformations in discourse might engender changes
in the social realm. In the short term, we should not m a k e the mistake
of taking one for the other.

visions," here

Notes
1. Steven Seidman, "The end of sociological theory: The postmodern hope," Sociological Theory 9/2 (Fall 1991).
2. Janet Wolff, Feminine Sentences, Essays on Women and Culture (Polity Press/University of California Press, 1990), especially "Prospects and problems for a postmodern feminism: An introduction" and "Texts and institutions: Problems of feminist criticism."
3. One of my criticisms of his article is of its promiscuous sliding across theoretical
and substantive issues. Because of this sliding, it is not always clear what point is
being made. This list is therefore a summary of my reading of the piece.
4. See, for example, Allen Hunter's critique of Laclau and Mouffe's radical scepticism: "Post-Marxism and the new social movements," Theory and Society 17
(1988): 885-900.
5. As Hunter says about Laclau and Mouffe, "their focus on the constitutive or constructive moment is important, undercutting essentialism, determinism, and holism;
but in itself.., this position argues neither against the existence of constituted totalities nor against the greater power, durability, and reproducibility of some forms of
social activity over others," ("Post-Marxism," p. 891).
6. Elizabeth Cowie, "Woman as sign," in Parveen Adams and Elizabeth Cowie, editors, The Woman in Question: m/f(Verso, 1990).
7. Denise Riley, "Am I that name?": Feminism and the category of 'women' in history
(University of Minnesota Press, 1988).

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8. I have used the term "the discursive city" myself, in a discussion of the ways in
which the nineteenth-century city was produced ideologically in visual and other
representations. See Caroline Arscott, Griselda Pollock, and Janet Wolff, "The partial view: The visual representation of the early nineteenth-century city," in Janet
Wolff and John Seed, editors, The Culture of Capital: Art, Power and the Nineteenth-Century Middle Class (Manchester University Press, 1988). See also John
Tagg, "The discontinuous city: Picturing and the discursive field," Strategies 3
(1990).
9. Frances E. Mascia-Lees, Patricia Sharpe, and Colleen Ballerino Cohen, "The postmodernist turn in anthropology: Cautions from a feminist perspective," Signs 18/1
(1989): 29.
10. R. Deutsche, "Boys town," and D. Massey, "Flexible sexism," in Environment and
Planning D; Society and Space 9 (1991).
11. For example, Linda McDowell, "Women, gender and the organisation of space," in
Derek Gregory and Rex Walford, editors, Horizons in Human Geography (Macmillan, 1989); Jos Boys, "Women and public space" in Matrix, Making Space:
Women and the Man Made Environment (Pluto, 1984).
12. Griselda Pollock, "Modernity and spaces of femininity," Vision and Difference:
Femininity and Histories of Art (Routledge, 1988).