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Richard Sennett:
< The Disorder of Anarchy as A Beautiful Pattern
by Robert
W. Lancaster
Often the best plan is to have no
plan at all, or so the urban radical Richard Sennett tends to
argue in his 1970's book The Uses of Disorder. The war in Viet
Nam and the civil rights movements were the vanguard of social
conscience by the adolescent in the 1960's.
Sennett, in recognizing the disruptive control anarchy attained
over the adolescent, didactically explains that the more we allow
for orderly and planned interaction that serves to instill a
strict definition of humanism within the realm of the community,
while the very infrastructure of our social potpourri is then
segregated and the individual is propelled to a higher level
individualism without the need of the community.
Affluence is the creature that forces the adult society to seek
comfort in the form of rigid and planned interaction, and it
is only through the new eyes of the adolescent that we can see
affluence for the social wedge that it is, and the thread to
repair society that it could be.
The counter-culture of the 1960's
had a revolutionary effect on Sennett who would conclude that
the chaos of true social disorder would offer the course of least
resistance as a means to return individuals back to viable areas
of social interaction, where the immediate emancipation of a
modern society of formerly adolescent individuals would depend
upon attaining "the freedom to accept and to live in disorder
represents the goal which this generation has aimed for, vaguely
and inchoately, in its search for 'community.'" (Sennett,
p.xviii)
Sennett, an opponent to the rigid structuring and order that
the 'planned' city offers society, is a proponent of a high level
of disorder that a society slovenly awashed in a high level of
anarchy. Planned order is argued as the negative force creates
the one dimensionality of the Marcusian 'I' and is behind the
current selfishness of the individual in society.
The 'We' of the whole, that constitutes the positive force that
recreates communities, is lost to a comfortable and complacent
society of individuals. Sennett thus challenges the individual
to seek out the "'otherness' of the people around them,"
to regain the 'we' lost through actual community participation,
taken by "the repression of deviants" that concocted
the 'them' in society; silently expunging the 'I' from society
and casting them out those "communities whose people fee
related to each other by virtue of their sameness...." (Sennett,
p.38; p.44)
But why search for a community of otherness when we have a society
where the individual appears to have so much?
 Anarchy, revolution against a legitimate government,
is not an option; or at least that is what we are told 'by the
powers that be.' However, as early as the 1920's, the pragmatist
John Dewey who, when asked how democracy could be pursued without
institutional change, would logically point out that in the 18th
century, "The American revolution was a rebellion against
an established government" and everyone seemed to logically
agree with that outcome. (Dewey, p.87)
But those revolutionary Colonials were a hungry bunch, rich in
interaction but poor in the affluence that material abundance
allowed. High levels of affluence in our contemporary society
have brought so many individual comforts to so many, until the
individualistic society is no longer hungry. The adolescent craves
this hunger of interaction. Yet, this hunger is suppressed by
the conventions of an adult individualistic society, forcing
the adolescent to become first insulated, then complacent, to
the needs of the growing community that surrounds. It is then
that the metamorphosis is complete.
Affluence, revered as a holy grail
and sought by earlier generations, is now, by the 1960's, "becoming
an intolerable weight to those who supposedly enjoy it,"
as it creates a false comfort of independence within the various
individuals that has since evolved into a lack of socially interacted
co-dependence, and thus is the source of the force that has led
to this voluntary social degradation (Sennett, p. 188).
Sennett argues that "abundance in urban community life has
only made it possible for this deep-down passion for slavery
to express itself....What the past decades have taught us is
not how rotten abundance as such is, but how rotten are the uses
to which it is put." (Sennett, p.107)
Affluence has disenfranchised the individual, and borne a new
type of poverty in our society, though "This is an emotional
poverty rather than material poverty, and it is voluntary."
(Sennett, p.107) The adolescent, by rejecting affluence and complacency,
its companion, as the culprits that twain the community, volunteers
to enhance social values over individualism. Yet, the adolescent
who seeks out the social confrontation lost to the adult is too
often forced to face reality alone.
 Romanticizing the past brings to the forefront
the crisis that has led to the ordering of simple sameness in
society, that of the urban crisis, though the crisis is not the
dying of the city nor attributive of a rush to the suburbs, but
the death of the "multiplicity of 'contact points'"
found on everyone's "Halstead Street" (Sennett, p.56).
The local markets and the social clubs, even the brothels and
pool rooms, all set along side the churches, the schools, and
residential dwellings, were the sub-cultures, the very adolescent-to-adult
growth matrixes, that allowed for social intercourse within the
community and the positive growth of adolescent to adult, where
"Each piece of the city mosaic had a distinct character,
but the pieces were 'open,' and this was what made life urban."
(Sennett, p.57) Yet, it was the selfish individual, whose voluntary
exodus to the suburbs would leave what was once open on Halstead
Street closed for business.
Dull should never be a word applicable
to the city. The powers that be within the cities must be made
to recognize that centralization of planning policy must be taken
away from the omnipresent planner who "can steel himself
against the unknown outside world," and be returned to those
social groups of individuals that live in it. (Sennett, p.8)
Too often, the adolescents of modern society are forced to gather
on street corners to complain that 'there's nothing to do,' yet
these adolescents are unwittingly compiling the results of the
only uncoerced social interaction remaining, namely that of making
and relaying a collective decision, though the conclusion, in
relation to the multitude of choices available, may not be the
popular nor the desired choice, but a collective decision none
the less. (Sennett, p.8)
The city planners in fact shun spatial conglomeration, and soon,
everyone's Halstead Street is razed by adult reasoning. With
futures adolescents planned, they are then injected with high
levels of social individualistic indoctrination inherent to previous
adult generations, social detachment seeps in and supplants the
inquisitive nature of the adolescent, thus continuing this closed
social cycle. Over and over again, until boredom sets in. Societies
of sameness know from experience that such massing forces individuals
to realize the differences that exist, though such individual
differences, if avoided, become social voids.
 Disorder, onset by anarchy in its purest form,
would surely offset the pure boredom of order. With revolutionary
disorder, Sennett envisions survival communities as the new social
norm. "I believe diverse communities do not arise spontaneously,
nor are spontaneously maintained, but instead have to be created
and urged into being." (Sennett, p.157)
And with that, Sennett offers this simple plan: revert from the
extreme strict ordering of the bureaucratic city to the extreme
chaos demanded by anarchy. Under the disorder of the new revolution,
Sennett would severely mute the policing powers of the city,
both the power inferred through its bureaucracy and then physically
through the cop once on the beat. Violence, in this new anti-utopian
community, would be addressed as an individual social issue,
"where men must confront differences around them,"
where the arguments and violence of "disorder is better
than dead, predetermined planning..." (Sennett, p.139, p.142)
To hell with those pseudo-professionals of the real estate industry
who falsely argue for "homogeneity...because people feel
uncomfortable unless they know that their neighbors are mostly
like themselves." (Sennett, p. 160) Such argument is simply
a thinly disguised ploy to sell housing in most conforming economy
of scale example available as homogeneity is the plan of the
city planners to neatly segregate individuals into individual
groups for the ease of maintaining urban control.
The disordered city would indeed
be chaotic to the blinded adults in the urban bureaucracy, though
in such a "complex city, the new eyes of the adolescent
would find nothing out of place. Complexity brought on by disorder
would offer an inchoate society where "a young person must
become an active being, a man, and not an abstract thinker discoursing
on the evils of society at large." (Sennett, p.145)
And these adolescents in the new disordered city would miss the
decentralization indoctrination of the old ordered city, thus
allowed to grow and become new, now-aware adults. The new city
of disorder is where "Men would find in the places where
they worked community problems and community experiences, as
well as community conflicts...," where everyone's Halstead
Street would return and again provide the necessary "Multiple
points of contact with different elements in a city diffuse hostility...."
(Sennett, p.156, p.155)
Sennett targets the "omniscient"
city planners, who ironically with "the projection of a
rigid group self-image similar in its motivation to the rigid
individual self-images seen in the young revolutionary,"
have, over the course of the 20th century, groped but for one
purpose for life. (Sennett, p.100, p.7-8)
These paternalistic planners, then with slide-rules in their
hands, and now with computers on their laps, have retained but
one goal for the future projective needs of all components of
any society, be it the development of roads, issues of zoning,
or urban renewal: simply to simplify social life to its purest;
to make it easier for the "ideal person" to get from
point A to point B. (Sennett, p.23)
Diversity, to the city planners,
is the enemy, but shoot before you see the whites of its eyes.
But getting from point A to point B should always be more than
just a couple of dots on a comprehensive plan. In fact, point
A for Sennett is symbolic of the positive force of adolescence
that "is commonly thought to be a period of wandering and
exploration" and is a time of the individual's life that
knows no boundaries; the whole world but an oyster. (Sennett,
p.13)
Yet, when the plate of the planned city is filled with the omnipresent
comprehensive structuring of city planners who continually bombard
society with high level grafts of the sterility inherent in individuality
as a positive, such a course "unavoidably" overwhelms
the adolescent who is then transformed into just another underwhelmed
adult who "has learned how to exclude disorder and painful
disruption for the conscious consideration." (Sennett, p.20-1)
Sennett's point B is the negative force of the adult, who not
only has been absolved from his adolescent uniqueness, but is
now, thanks to our righteous city planners, no longer expected
to interact with any other individuals in a social capacity,
restricting the choice of social intercourse and/or discourse
available to the individual, rendering the individual to raise
his own adolescent without the benefit of interdependence of
unstructured social interaction.
Growth from the inquisitive adolescent to the continually-informed
adult is planned out the fabric of the city. If the question
is how long will the individuals of society be able to suppress
the Freudian inner-child that was once native within us all,
the answer, according to the latest statistics just in from Planning
& Zoning, is perpetuity. If a society of individuals is to
return to the status of a community, Sennett argues that we must
devolve. Indeed, we must ask how to reverse the process.
For Sennett, the city planners simply
must fail at a policy that is bound in the simplicity of structured
order. "Instead of planning for some abstract urban whole,
planners are going to have to work for the concrete parts of
the city, the different classes, ethnic groups, and races it
contains." (Sennett, p.102)
The plan of the planners must be changed, returned the wants
and needs of a people who once "actively involved in shaping
their social lives" and not held hostage by, and for, the
individual (Sennett, p.100)
Sennett agrees with Lewis Mumford who said "that it is necessary
to learn to use tools in humane ways, not abandon them in order
to be humane." (Sennett, p.86-7) Sennett thus envisions
revolution as the tool, and anarchy as the desired humane result.
It will take a great deal of work
to return that individual society back in a community, often
more work than the community is willing to put forth, though
the affluence of society is in place. Sennett agrees that decentralization
will cause great fragmentation in the pollical forum, but "when
people become active, they begin evaluating political power in
terms of effective networks, because they have defined for themselves
their needs or their desires in terms of action... The more powerful
the process of rejecting, the more complete, the more purging
an event it would be." (Sennett, p.168; p.173)
Bureaucracies can be altered, and
those in the positions of city power should learn the two new
terms that have been worn out in the modern public sector: down-sizing
and out-sourcing. To the city powers, we should be inspired by
Peter Finches' most stunning, and oft quoted, soliloquy from
the movie Network, "I'm mad as hell, and I'm not going to
take it anymore!" and take back the cities that, before
the negative onset of affluence and individuality of the 20th
century, belonged to us.
In American society today, the battle
against the boredom of affluence must take the forefront as the
preeminent issue facing the people as a whole, for we live in
a society of such affluence that even the poor have well defined
levels. Oliver Goldsmith, in The Deserted Village, proffers a
most powerful forecast, to Sennett's disordered vision with
Ye friends to truth, ye statesmen
who survey
The rich mans's joys encrease, the poor's decay
'Tis yours to judge, how wide the limits stand
Between a splendid and an happy land.
And without decentralization, without
at least a measure of disorder, without an end to a planned urban
boredom that is supported by rampant, planned affluence, without
ending the vicious social cycle that robs our adolescent and
adult, then there will be no one socially correct individual
left with the sufficient social insight that is befitting an
'affluent' adolescent "to judge."
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