Making Planning Theory Matter: A Lacanian Encounter with Phronesis

Abstract

Traditional social science often fails when deployed to explain complex human action. In each specific social field of human endeavour, including planning, experienced actors draw on a range of conscious and unconscious performative knowledges to act with effect: the experts simply ‘know’ what to do. Flyvbjerg suggests that to understand these complex human dispositions framing practice requires a detailed understanding of the particular, not the universal. Drawing on Aristotle's intellectual virtue of phronesis, Flyvbjerg refers to this as a phronetic social science model. This article suggests that Lacan's theoretical insights and conceptualizations pertaining to the split human subject, divided between symbolic consciousness and unconscious affect, can help to empower this phronetic model. The article argues that a Lacanian inspired phronetic model is particularly useful for understanding spatial planning and related urban policy discourses, for it provides insight as to how desire and resultant ideological fantasies shape our shared social reality and spaces of habitation in our globalized world.

Notes

Lacan identifies three registries: the symbolic (of words and representation), the imaginary (constituting images and imagination) and the Real. The Real is the registry that is outside of representation or imagination, so that ‘we can use’ the Real ‘to apply to the totality of things in the world prior to or apart from their structuralisation by language’ (McConnell & Gillett, 2005: 85). It is constituted in lack and the impossible (Lacan, 1994). It is constituted by affect and even agonism (after Laclau & Mouffe, 1985). It comprises human unconsciousness as well as what is simply not known or knowable. ‘For Lacan the Real, at its most radical, has to be totally de-substantialized. It is not an external thing that resists being caught in the symbolic network, but the fissure within the symbolic network itself … for Lacan the Real — the Thing — is not so much the inert presence that curves symbolic space (introduces gaps and inconsistencies in it), but, rather, an effect of these gaps and inconsistencies’ (Žižek 2006b:72–73).

‘Drawing from Jacques Lacan, Žižek views jouissance as an excessive, intense pleasure pain, as that “something extra” for the sake of which we do what otherwise seems irrational, counterproductive or even wrong… [it] is this excess beyond the useful and measurable that transforms something or someone into an object of our desire’ (Dean, 2008: 51).