Minor theory and relational urbanism

Abstract

I first read Cindi Katz's (1996) Towards minor theory in preparation for a talk she gave in February of 2016. (1) And so when I was asked to contribute to this forum a few months later, asked to write about how I've used minor theory in my own work that examines the spatial strategies of urban social movements agitating for policy reform, I had to admit that my engagement with it was limited. Yet, in the few months that had passed between reading Katz's piece and beginning this commentary, I often returned to thinking about minor theory, in particular alongside the relational urban studies with which my work is concerned, and which I write about here. Towards minor theory is a provocative, and practical, roadmap that sets out a theory of praxis that transcends disciplinary boundaries. Further, the project, including its arguments and critiques, rings true two decades after the paper was first published. This brief commentary on Katz's intervention is intended to first highlight the timeliness and timelessness of her approach. I then comment on the potential that acknowledging theoretical and empirical work happening in alternate registers has for relational approaches to studying urban political economy, in particular how it can scholars to focus on the place of politics, in the process creating a richer sense of relational urbanism. Katz outlines several tenets of minor theory that make up the practice of working in a minor register and which, I argue, hold possibilities for a generative discussion between minor theory and several lines of debate in contemporary urban scholarship. First, the piece highlights the continual processes of 'becoming', or the constant assemblage processes that work towards knowledge creation; both becoming major theory and becoming minor theory. Second, Katz rejects the framing of minor theory as oppositional to major theory and in so doing disavows the tendency towards dualistic thinking within Marxist analyses in favour of pluralism and multiplicity. Third, she argues for the need to produce 'renegade cartographies', mapping a politics from within situated positions that are also able to be collectively read and taken up. This is based on the acknowledgement of a constitutive outside that exists within major theory. And fourth, there is a methodological emphasis on working within the interstitial spaces of major theory in order to investigate 'a different way of working with material' (Katz, 1996: 489). The paramount connection between these arguments for urban geographers (as well as other scholars interested in spatial politics) is the centrality of power and the political that flows through the intentionally spatialized conceptualization of minor theory. Of particular interest to me is the way in which a methodological emphasis grounds any minor theoretical intervention in empirical analysis. Recent debates in urban theory, for example, have called into question the methodological utility of using the urban as a unit of analysis (e.g. Brenner and Schmid, 2015). (2) This is perhaps one logical conclusion given the focus since the mid-1990s on globalization processes. Yet, as many scholars have noted, the city remains a distinct empirical as well as epistemological entity with delineated (though not uncontested) boundaries, specific histories, and uneven geographical and political relationships with places elsewhere (e.g. Bulkeley et al., 2016; Davidson and Iveson, 2015; Roy, 2011). A relational approach to urban studies takes seriously the notion that place is produced through a particular set of power-filled social relations (Massey, 1995). Furthermore, understanding power as both produced and productive of social relations can, in the words of John Allen (2004: 19): help us to avoid being caught in the all too familiar, yet shifting binary of power. This epistemic commitment to uncovering the ways in which the relational effects of power alter subsequent social relations and urban geographies leads researchers to empirically grounded examinations of the spatio-temporal relations of politics and the political. …