Abstract
Silos. Groupthink. Predictive algorithms. Confirmation bias. Filter bubbles. All familiar terms in our contemporary intellectual and public life. They have become symptoms of an age defined by an abundance of information. For sure, all this has been a long time coming. In the 18th century, Denis Diderot would work on his Encyclopédie while, at the same time, worrying about how impossible it was becoming to find truth amongst a flood of knowledge claims. Later Georg Simmel introduced us to the notion that modern life had dulled the senses, and that individuality had lost its struggle with socio-technological progress. Now we have populations addicted to smartphones, constantly being nudged into yet one more swipe, one more dopamine hit, one more email to open. Our mental lives are being corralled into a techno-mediated reality shaped by an intense competition for our attention (Moulier-Boutang, 2012).
Across various fields – brain sciences, psychology, sociology, computer science, business, economics – there is now a strong consensus that is accelerating shift has pushed us into discrete tribal groups. Quite what is meant by tribalism varies across contexts. In politics, tribalism commonly refers to the organisation of political conflicts by identity, not principles or interest (Fukuyama, 2018). In philosophy, Peter Sloterdijk (2016) has extended this line of thought to describe society as an agglomerative foam, made up of spheres and bubbles that constitute contained lifeworlds. When this translates into public debate, Fisher et al. (2018) describe there having been a shift from learning to winning. The central point is that having debates or dialogues in our current times is only about attaining victory, almost regardless of the costs. Tribalism therefore entails an unwillingness or inability to listen or learn from ‘others’ (Žižek, 2022).
For students of political theory, this is all reminiscent of Carl Schmitt's (2007) view on politics: that the bottom line of politics is a distinction between us and them. Schmitt's rejection of liberalism, and its insistence that societies can agree on the ‘rules of the game’, seems frightening relevant today. One needs only check in on Twitter/X to see that there are no agreed rules to political contests. Political enemies are now defined by their illegitimacy, commonly being deemed outside of undefined norms. This makes the idea of debate almost irrelevant to the most rabid participants in politics. What is the point of outlining a position or policy if the legitimacy of your opponent is already revoked?
Another way of putting this would be to say that intolerance defines our tribal politics (Žižek, 2022). This is a particular conundrum in societies with liberal institutions. In The Open Society and Its Enemies (2020), Karl Popper described a ‘paradox of intolerance’ in liberal societies. He observed that there is always a problem posed by groups or individuals with intolerant positions. Liberalism's commitment to open debate and free speech means that those who would like to end these practices can openly undermine liberal society. Popper then goes on to outline the limits to his liberalism, in that the intolerant cannot be granted unrestricted toleration. There are, he argued, necessary limits to tolerance.
Of course, deciding on what we can and cannot tolerate is a difficult task. Here Popper remained a liberal, but also conceded that debating even key liberal tenants remained indispensable. Popper was not naïve about the transformative potential of debate. He understood that debate rarely resulted in a revelatory change of position. Most participants in debates leave with the same basic position they arrived with. But, he argued, this position is usually not completely the same afterwards. Some parts of their position will have been shifted, altered or modified via the dialogue. Popper's commitment to debate was therefore founded upon the idea that debate enables all kinds of viewpoints and positions to incrementally shift and evolve.
The decreasing prevalence and importance of debate, substituted for the echo chambers of tribal politics and online algorithmic communities, is a defining feature of the information age. Of course, there is still ideological value associated with the idea of ‘debate’. It is not that ‘debate’ has been abandoned. Rather, debates are now largely performed for the tribal faithful. Search ‘debate’ in youtube.com and you will find countless hours of ‘debates’, most of which are described as involving your tribal representative ‘destroying’ another tribe's anointed spokesperson. This does nothing but steal from the ideological significance of ‘debate’. Liberalism's elevation of debate is regularly perverted by its loudest (ab)users. The entire intent of the exercise is usually to reinforce ideological and/or epistemic positions.
Quite what the relevance of this online mania is for academic debate is unclear. It may be the case that established intellectual protocols and institutions provide a barrier against such changes. If this is true, academic debate could be less sullied compared to how we find it in the virtual world. However, it is highly unlikely that the academy is immune to such shifts. As Edward Said (1996) wrote some time ago, intellectuals must be considered as a part of, not separate from, their time: Intellectuals are of their time, herded along by the mass politics of representations embodied by the information or media industry, capable of resisting those only by disrupting the images, officials narratives, justifications of power circulated by an increasingly powerful media – and not only media but whole trends of thought that maintain the status quo, keep things within an acceptable and sanctioned perspective on actuality – by providing what Mills calls unmaskings or alternative versions in which to the best of one's ability the intellectual ties to tell the truth. (22)
Said here describes the academic world as constantly buffeted by society's prevailing winds. But it must be added, there are many others who would add that the academic world has shaped many of these anti-liberal currents (Hamid, 2018). That is, academia is not always a passive recipient.
And so, part of this journal's mission has been to create a space where constructive forms of dialogue and debate are encouraged across a wide variety of urban scholars. For all those who have engaged with the journal over the past 3 years, the response to this has been overwhelmingly positive. Our editorial board, authors and reviewers have given praise, valuable feedback and encouragement. But, at the same time, creating a space for dialogues across the various urban fields has brought with it challenges, some expected and others unexpected.
On a day-to-day basis, the most obvious challenge has been recruiting authors and reviewers from across the broad array of urban studies literatures. Having a geographer read the work of a sociologist or planner does not readily make sense within the world of academic incentives and disciplinary reputations. It also involves a significant commitment on the part of reviewers and commentators to grapple with work outside of their immediate expertise. Reading work that employs unfamiliar ideas, concepts and literatures is simply more difficult and time-consuming. Saying ‘yes’ to our requests therefore relies heavily on the intellectual curiosity and generosity of others. Some people will write saying ‘saying your request makes no sense career-wise’ but that ‘they are intrigued’ or ‘supportive of the journal's mission’.
On occasion, scholars invited to write commentaries have responded by saying that working across epistemic communities is especially difficult. Usually, this involves someone writing ‘I’m not sure I know enough’ or ‘I don’t think I have enough to say’. Often these comments are related to being uncomfortable writing outside of familiar disciplinary or epistemic communities. But what is always striking, despite the hesitation, is how much value these commentators add. Reading work outside of your community makes you ask difficult questions; ones that are often hard to ask from the inside. Having to be read by the non-adjacent scholar also demands clarity from the authors of our forum papers. Here I would be mistaken to omit a reference to Orwell's (2011) indispensable guide on writing. We should, he argued, strive to write without the unnecessary jargon for which academic prose have become known. This is not simply about accessibility, but also clarity of argument. Poor writing, that which too easily evades evaluation or truth, would later become Winston Smith's world. On this Orwell writes: Now, it is clear that the decline of a language must ultimately have political and economic causes: it is not due simply to the bad influence of this or that individual writer. But an effect can become a cause, reinforcing the original cause and producing the same effect in an intensified form, and so on indefinitely. (Orwell, 2011)
This was a thread picked up by Edward Said in his Reith Lectures: Nothing in my view is more reprehensible than those habits of mind in the intellectual that induce avoidance, that characteristic turning away from a difficult and principled position which you know to be the right one, but which you decide not to take. […] If anything can denature, neutralize, and finally kill a passionate intellectual life it is the internalization of such habits. (1996: 100–101)
The line of connection here is clear. Writing to make your arguments comprehensible to those outside your field necessitates intellectual and political clarity. For Orwell, jargon was a refuge for those who made a living from obfuscation. For Said, it was a refuge for those lacking the first of all virtues, courage.
Set in this perspective, the value of dialogue becomes even more clear, as does the generosity of the journal's willing commentators. Dialogue between our silos serves an important intellectual and political purpose. It forces us to communicate and read in ways that are not often required within our small disciplinary communities. In doing so, it can make the politics and logical conclusions of our work more obvious. It also makes us aware of the bad habits Said was keen to point out.
For these reasons, I am thrilled to introduce the two forums in this issue. Our two forum papers, one written by Elvin Wyly and the other by Juval Portugali, are quite different. But, as forums, they serve a similar purpose. Wyly's forum is an example of a scholar stepping out of their silo. Wyly, a renown urbanist, has written a paper that extends this expertise to indigenous issues. The collected commentaries provide a varied assessment of the outcome: for some Wyly illuminates their own concerns and empirical projects, others find the paper misses the mark and repeats longstanding errors. This is, I think, what a dialogue is meant to generate. Genuine reflection, good faith critique, and the slow, incremental evolution of positions through intellectual exchange.
Juval's paper has quite different objectives. It draws on David Bohm's theory of orders to encourage urban scholars to reassess the possibility of a unified/unifying theory. Admittedly bold stuff, the paper again receives a mixed response from commentators. For some, Juval is charting an exciting theoretical course. Others suggest that these universalising projects have been abandoned, even if we might wish for a unified theory to be attainable. This forum is also notable for its varied perspectives. Some commentators work closely in Juval's intellectual community, others are distant urbanist relatives. Again, much of the value here is in the collective: in how Juval's ambitious programme started a conversation about how we do theory, and to what ends.
It would also be remiss to not mention the fabulous book forum on Loïc Wacquant's Bourdieu in the City: Challenging Urban Theory (2023). Like Juval, Loïc's book seeks to provide the urbanist with a guide to the ‘doing’ of urban research and theorisation. Our book reviewers offer a valuable set of reflections on the efficacy and insights of the Bourdieu-derived approach, with Loïc providing an eloquent set of reflections on the book forum comments. Again, this is dialogue at work.
So, as you read through the issue, please keep in mind where I started this editorial: in a world carved up into silos and echo chambers. The dialogues we foster and publish in this journal are meant to amount to more than the sum of their parts. By bringing people together, by debating and criticising in good faith, we can provide a small, but significant, push back to accelerating and socially corrosive trends.