Book Review: Spaces of modernity: London’s geographies 1680-1780

Abstract

the Palais Royal is understood as the site of ‘an alternate ordering of society to that which existed in France at the time’. More generally, each heterotopia ‘stands in contrast to the taken-for-granted mundane idea of social order that exists within society’, or is seen ‘as juxtaposing another way of acting against that which prevails and dominates’. The difficulty here is not with the notion of heterotopia, but with the social and spatial homogeneity which this understanding of space forces onto non-heterotopic places, as ‘prevailing’ social orders become singular, identifiable and hegemonic. This social theory is unsatisfying both theoretically and empirically. The position is particularly problematic when it comes to discussing modernity, as Hetherington wants to do. He understands modernity through and against Zygmunt Bauman’s work, and thus as a mode of ordering which combines and opposes total freedom and total control. Here heterotopias are those spaces which produce a utopics of freedom and/or discipline, and become the points of passage through which social relations can be remade in modern form: the Palais Royal and the French Revolution, the Masonic lodge and the public sphere, and the factory and capitalist production. However, in setting these transformative spaces against the undefined background of the Ancien Régime Hetherington replays a commonplace history of modernity: a break from one state, a period of transformation, and the establishment of another state. Instead of letting the complexities of the historical geographies of modernity weave an alternative story of partial, fragmented and interlocking states and transformations, this sociology seems to be defined by the compulsions of a conventional temporal ordering of social change. This is also emphasized by what the examples have in common. It is not simply that, as Hetherington argues, all of them are associated with the new bourgeois class, although that may lead to emphasizing some stories and occluding others. It is more that they all share the same spatial scale: the architectural. Because of this they share a tale of the willed transformation of space towards utopic goals (although, admittedly, the Palais Royal is more a place of unintended consequences than either the Masonic lodge or the factory). It also means that there is no place for the landscapes, networks and frontiers that offer different geographies of modernity at other scales: regional, national and global. Instead of a heterogeneous panoply of modernities whose strands and surfaces interweave and crosscut through a variety of spatialities, we are only offered a few walled-off heterotopias which, in the way the examples are researched and presented, are not pursued in enough depth to reveal their detailed histories, ambiguities and connections. The badlands have a much more complex geography than this one.