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An interview with Richard Sennett
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Rob Wilson spoke with the urbanist and sociologist Richard Sennett about whether the idea and ideals of the “commune” as a model are relevant in being revisited today – particularly against the background of the economic crisis. For Sennett it is clear that it is not communes we need to look at, but cooperation itself...
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In your book Together you explore aspects of bottom-up cooperation – including looking at past examples of self-sufficient communities founded on cooperative principles, like Robert Owen’s New Harmony in Indiana in the early 1800s – and relating this to current ideas. Do you see the communal or commune-type model as having a new relevance, in particular in cities today?
Well, the original commune, the Paris Commune of 1871, was a reaction to military invasion. The self-sustaining idea there came about because the Communards were surrounded by German troops. So it was not a voluntarily cooperative thing – which is one thing that gets forgotten – people needed to cooperate or they were going to starve to death, which they nearly did anyway. So in a way it’s not a really good example. And Robert Owen is not a good example either, because New Harmony was an anti-urban, idealised community where people could be self-sustaining by leaving the city.What interests me is, if you are in an urban situation where the threats are economic rather than violent, what kind of cooperation can you engage in?
We really have to understand where the State is likely to fail people in order to understand what kind of bottom-up cooperation is needed. David Cameron’s “Big Society” in the UK is really a very corrupt version of that, with the Tories saying: if I take everything away from you, if I cut everything and deprive you economically, then you are on your own – then see if you can still survive. And that’s not a situation that we want to be in. -
So cooperation is where we need to start?
We need to have cooperations and communities based on the idea that we can structure power bottom-up and create a state out of them. We have to look at cooperation as an activity that happens in civil society but that doesn’t do away with the State. That is what the right-wing wants to do: to do away with the State. And that to me is horrible politics.
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My book Together was about the question: how do people cooperate well? What kind of skills do you need to be able to cooperate with other people, particularly with people who are different from you? That’s an urban thing. If you are white and you have to work with black people, what kind of skills do you need to cross that racial boundary? Or gay and straight – you can spin it out any way you want.
The fact of cooperation is a starting point. And what I’ve argued is that we are not very skilled in ways of cooperation. We’re very assertive: the language we use is declarative rather than tentative, or subjective. There are a whole set of things we need to address about being able to communicate with other people that crosses barriers of difference.Going back to politics, I am interested that you’ve made the point that there have also been issues on the Left in regard to cooperation, particularly with how the socialist ideal ended up being top-down solidarity, not bottom-up cooperation. Do you see ways in which this can be avoided in the future?
“Solidarity” is a term of power. It is the idea that everybody is on the same page, that there is a repression of differences between them, a repression of debate. Solidarity is a repressive idea, so my big argument about it is that we need to relearn cooperation and unlearn solidarity.
When Socialism got going in the nineteenth century, the cooperative ideal was much stronger. It was only after the First World War that the idea of it as a revolutionary vanguard developed. And then in China under Mao Tse-tung there was this idea that solidarity means that there is no distinction: that there is no distinction of dress, of language, that people mature at the same rate, a tyrannical form of sameness. We don’t want that! -
So what do we want cooperation to be?
If we want alternatives, then we need to know how to deal with differences. Take labour organisation. Often when you need to work with very different groups of people, one of things that you have got to admit to yourself is that you don’t understand what the others want. But they want it and we’re comrades and we want to work together. Accepting the idea of “not getting it”, that there are limits to your own understanding – that is a way of cooperating with someone else by accepting that there are those limits. In a regime of solidarity, nothing is foreign to you; you understand everything.
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Richard Sennett (*1943, USA) is a sociologist and urbanist who writes on cities, labour and culture. His research entails ethnography, history, and social analysis and theory.
He studied at The Julliard School of Music, the University of Chicago and Harvard University and is University Professor of the Humanities at Harvard, Professor of Sociology at the London School of Economics and Director of Theatrum Mundi, a forum for cross-disciplinary discussion about cultural and public space in the city.
His books include The Fall of Public Man [1977], a study of the public realm of cities; Flesh and Stone [1992], a study of bodily experience and the evolution of cities; and The Culture of the New Capitalism [2006], looking at change in the work-world and its consequences for workers. Most recently, he has explored more positive aspects of labour in The Craftsman [2008] and Together: The Rituals, Pleasures and Politics of Cooperation [2012]. The third volume in this trilogy, The Open City, will appear in 2016.
richardsennett.com
In terms of urbanism, can you transfer ideas of bottom-up self-organisation effectively to the city, which seems to need by its very nature to have a top-down structure?
You can have both. You couldn’t get an electricity grid in the city by bottom-up cooperation – not yet at least – nor a sewer system. But schools can work bottom-up if they have the resources. If the State gives you the money, then you can self-organise. But particularly in poor communities you often don’t have the resources that allow you to cooperate.And what about architecture?
You mean could we produce cooperative architecture? Everybody believes in co-production, but it’s not that simple. If you have got 15 or 20 years of design experience under your belt you don’t want to say to people: forget experience, lets cooperate. You want to show what your knowledge is. And at that point, because you have knowledge and they don’t, it’s an asymmetrical relationship. This is a real issue in urbanism.
Architects’ offices don’t work as communes. I know architects who say they are very collaborative and all the rest of it, but in the end, there is someone who says yes or no. And maybe this is because you have this building, which is a fixed object. Maybe the object is the limit of cooperation. IPhoto: Thomas Struth
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