Constitutive outsides or hidden abodes?: Spatial dialectics and the problem of totality in critical urban theory

Keywords: critical urban theory, totality, dialectics, Marxism, feminism, postcolonial urbanism
Abstract Type: Paper Abstract

Abstract

In the context of hotly contested debates within urban studies, many scholars have recently attempted to develop the claim that there is a constitutive outside to urban theory, which renders any usage of the Marxist lexicon of totality effectively obsolete. With this broad problematic in view, this paper seeks to (1) develop an immanent critique of the ways in which the concept of the constitutive outside is deployed in these debates (particularly in relation to work on extended and planetary urbanization); and (2) to sketch another path forward – one that understands capitalist urbanization as a distinctive moment in the evolution of a world-encompassing socio-spatial totality, while also attending to well-founded concerns among theorists of the constitutive outside regarding the question of difference and ascriptive hierarchization. More precisely, this paper will pursue a close reading of work on the constitutive outside, suggesting that it ultimately reproduces some of the core tenets of Cartesian binarism and atomistic thought, which have long been a target of feminist critique. And it will conclude with a revised conceptualization of totality for urban studies, which extends the claims of Marxist critical urban theory through an engagement with Nancy Fraser’s recent work on capitalism’s hidden abodes.