Locating the Social in Social Justice

Abstract

A concept of social justice in which the social names a subset of justice suggests that the social constitutes a distinct sphere within which a distinctively social justice is produced and experienced and within which a specifically social injustice can be addressed. Theorists from Dewey to Latour to Foucault, however, have questioned the conceptualization of the social as a separate substantive domain within which a distinctively social justice can be found. I seek to move from a substantive to a relational conceptualization of the social in social justice, drawing from Dewey's concept of the social as an associative rather than an aggregative relation. A relational approach situates the social not in a delimited substantive domain within which justice can be assessed but as a mode of collective association through which justice is performed and produced. Relocating the social from a substantive sphere to a relational practice transforms the problem of social justice. Rather than assessing the justice of outcomes within a specifically social sphere, the problem of social justice addresses the interactive practices of social actors engaged in the collective project within which justice is dialectically and simultaneously a process and an outcome, a means and an end. I illustrate the challenges of practicing a relational conception of social justice in an antidisplacement protest against a neighborhood redevelopment proposal in Camden, New Jersey. The case study suggests that furthering the goal of social justice focuses on everyday practices of associative interaction in which relations of democratic equality are undermined or encouraged.

社会作为正义的一个子集之 “社会正义”, 意味着社会构成了一个特殊的领域。在这个领域中, 社会正义进行生产与被经历, 且一种特定的社会不正义能够获得处置。但从杜威到拉图以至福柯等理论家, 质疑将社会视为分离的实质领域、且特定的社会正义可于其中寻得的概念化。我运用杜威将社会视为联合而非集合关系的概念, 寻求将社会正义中的社会, 从实质转为关系性的概念化。关系性取径, 并非将社会定位为可从中获得正义的限定实质领域, 而是将社会置于正义进行展演并生产的集体关联模式。将正义从实质领域再安置于关系性实践之中, 改变了社会正义的问题。与其评估一个特定社会领域中的正义结果, 社会正义的问题, 应对参与至集体计画的社会行动者的互动实践, 而正义于该计画中是辩证且自发的过程与结果、方法与目的。我描绘在新泽西坎顿一个针对邻里再开发计画的反迫迁抗议行动中, 实践关系性的社会正义概念之挑战。该案例研究主张, 推进社会正义的目标, 需聚焦关联性互动的每日生活实践, 其中民主平等的关系, 可能会受到侵蚀抑或鼓励。

Un concepto de justicia social en el que lo social califica un subconjunto de la justicia sugiere que lo social constituye una esfera distintiva dentro de la cual una justicia distintivamente social es producida y experimentada, y dentro de la cual puede abocarse una injusticia específicamente social. Sin embargo, teóricos desde Dewey a Foucault, pasando por Latour, han cuestionado la conceptualización de lo social como un dominio sustantivo separado dentro del cual pueda hallarse una justicia distintivamente social. Por mi parte, busco moverme de la conceptualización sustantiva de lo social hacia una relacional, apoyándome en el concepto de Dewey de lo social, más como una relación más asociativa que de agregación. Un enfoque relacional sitúa lo social no en un dominio sustantivo delimitado dentro del cual pueda evaluarse la justicia, sino como un modo de asociación colectiva a través de la cual la justicia es ejercida y producida. Relocalizar a lo social desde una esfera sustantiva a una práctica relacional transforma el problema de la justicia social. Más que evaluar la justicia de los resultados dentro de una específica esfera social, el problema de la justicia social aboca las prácticas interactivas de actores sociales comprometidos en un proyecto colectivo dentro del cual la justicia es dialéctica y simultáneamente un proceso y un resultado, un medio y un fin. Ilustro los retos de practicar una concepción relacional de la justicia social en una protesta anti-desplazamiento hecha contra una propuesta de redesarrollo vecinal de Camden, Nueva Jersey. El estudio de caso sugiere que fortaleciendo eso el fin de la justicia social se enfoca en las prácticas cotidianas de interacción asociativa en la cual las relaciones de igualdad democrática se socaban o promueven.

Key Words:

• democratic justice
• relational justice
• social justice

关键词：:

• 民主正义
• 关系性正义
• 社会正义。

Palabras clave:

• justicia democrática
• justicia relacional
• justicia social

Acknowledgments

I presented an earlier version of this article at the New York Pragmatist Forum at Fordham University and I have benefited greatly from that group's constructive engagement with pragmatist ideas. I am extremely grateful for helpful comments on previous drafts by Bob Beauregard, Nik Heynen, Kathe Newman, Stephanie Pincetl, and two anonymous reviewers for the journal. I am solely responsible for any shortcomings remaining in the article.

Notes

1. Camden's industrial history dates to the early nineteenth century, facilitated by the city's location at the confluence of the Cooper and Delaware rivers and its proximity to Philadelphia (Camden, NJ Department of Development and Planning n.d.; Gillette 2005). As described by Cowie (1999): “By the 1920s, the South Jersey city contained a variety of textile mills and leather processors, a huge ironworks, the Campbell's soup cannery, cigar factories, a pen manufacturer, paint and chemical processing plants, … the bustling docks, shipyards, and four thousand workers of the New York Shipbuilding Company [and] the Victor Talking Machine Company's [later Radio Corporation of America, and then RCA] sprawling complex of factories” (12).

2. See the Municipal Rehabilitation and Economic Recovery Act (MRERA) of 2002 (S428/A2054) at http://www.njleg.state.nj.us/bills/BillView.asp (accessed 28 January 2017). For a description of the legislation and subsequent amendments, see http://www.camconnect.org/resources/MRERALegislation.html.

3. Young (1990, 39–65) listed exploitation, marginalization, powerlessness, cultural imperialism, and violence as comprising the “five faces of oppression,” which, together with domination constitute her definition of injustice.

4. The conception of social justice as a distinct social sphere derives from Rawls (1971), for whom justice refers to “the way in which the major social institutions distribute fundamental rights and duties and determine the division of advantages from social co-operation” (7). A review of the vast literature that adopts Rawls's position is beyond the scope of this discussion but see, for example, Hayward and Swanston (2011).

5. Expressing his rejection of abstract foundational assumptions, Latour (2005) observed that “it's only the freshness of the results [i.e., the avoidance of foundational presuppositions] of social science that can guarantee its political relevance. And no one has made the point as forcefully as John Dewey did” (261). In Dewey's ([1929] 1984) words, “We are given to thinking of society in large and vague ways. We should forget ‘society.’ … There is no society at large, no business in general” (120).

6. Scott (1998, 91) considered “the discovery of society as a reified object that … could be scientifically described” as a legacy of the Enlightenment and a precondition for the ascendancy of authoritarian high modernism (see also Beauregard 2015).

7. A relational and processual approach to the social recognizes that power is unequally distributed across structural positions but it also insists that structural relations must be performed and enacted and that it is in the indeterminacy of such praxis that a politics of possibility is situated. See also Arendt's (1958, 2005) distinction between behavior and action, contrasting ritualized, habitual social behavior in accordance with norms with the agentic unpredictability of political action.

8. Dewey was unrelenting in his denigration of “the teleological character” of abstract theorizing: “Men looked at the work of their own minds and thought they were seeing realities in nature. They were worshipping under the name of science, the idols of their own making. … The social philosopher, dwelling in the region of his concepts, ‘solves’ problems by showing the relationship of ideas instead of helping men solve problems in the concrete. … Social theory … exists as an idle luxury rather than as a guiding method of inquiry and planning” (Dewey [1920] 2004, 20, 110–11).

9. “Natural rights and natural liberties,” Dewey asserted, “exist only in the kingdom of mythological social zoology” (Dewey [1935] 2000, 27). “The only thing which imports obscurity and mystery … is the effort to discover alleged, special, original, society-making causal forces, whether instincts, fiats of will, personal, or an immanent, universal, practical reason, or an indwelling, metaphysical, social essence and nature. These things do not explain, for they are more mysterious than are the facts they are evoked to account for” (Dewey [1927] 2012, 53). As Festenstein (1997) concluded, “It is an abstractionist error of old individualism to envisage individuals as prior to their social world” (69).

10. According to Young (1990), whereas “the aggregate model conceives the individual as prior to the collective,” in the association model “groups, on the other hand, constitute individuals” (44–45; see also Young 2011).

11. For a discussion of the similarities and differences between Dewey and Foucault on the relationality of subject formation, see Marshall (1995) and Rabinow (2011).

12. All meeting excerpts are from the author's contemporaneous field notes.

13. The Camden Planning Board approved the Lanning Square Redevelopment Plan by unanimous vote on 12 June 2008 and City Council approval followed shortly thereafter. The redevelopment plan called for construction of 400 single-family homes and declared the entire neighborhood eligible for public taking through eminent domain throughout the project's officially designated twenty-five-year life span.

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Robert W. Lake

ROBERT W. LAKE is Professor in the Edward J. Bloustein School of Planning and Public Policy and a member of the Graduate Faculties in Geography and Urban Planning at Rutgers University, New Brunswick, NJ 08901. E-mail: [email protected]. His research interests include the politics of urban land markets, collaborative and community-based planning, the financialization of public policy, and pragmatist approaches to the politics of knowledge production.