Towards the Great Transformation: (5) Materialisms, old and new: theory, sources, and praxis (an introduction)

Abstract

One of the major critical claims of this series is that the social and socio-spatial sciences, in their currently dominant form, cannot, for lack of a de-familiarising agenda, one that leads to an appropriate and continually tested strategy (praxis), effectively counter the normalized and naturalized forms and processes of late capitalist urbanization, normalized by mainstream theory in the service of established power, and their extrapolation into a ‘planetary future’. Critical urban theory presents/presented a step forward but it is losing some critical momentum and thus purchase on present and future realities in its neglect of aspects of its own intellectual heritage, of ‘extra-scientific’ resources including the cognitive aspect of the arts/humanities and ordinary experience (‘the university of the streets’), and in its too restrictive theoretical, spatial and temporal foundations.1 It thus, to a significant extent, fails to give an adequate account, a representational and ethical/normative accounting, of ‘the great transformation’ of marketisation/capitalism as told and analysed notably by Polanyi and Marx, and to the possibilities of and its relationship to praxis for a post-marketised/capitalist great transformation. We need a purposeful reading of the full range of the lived materialities of the planet (not just abstracted away into a distinctly immaterial usage of the notion of the ‘planetary’ and, indeed, of ‘urbanization’). We need in fact a sensuous materialism, an old but still unrealized project. This, the first of two futher episodes, is a brief retrospective and prospective survey, drawing on earlier work in this series and sketching in future directions, of such a materialism (materialisms, old and new): theory, sources and praxis.