Amongst scholars who have dwelt on colonial urbanisation, there is a dominant vein that agrees that the phenomenon of the ‘colonial city’ constituted a ‘heterogeneous but distinct urban type’.1 The explanations for this distinctiveness, however, have varied considerably. While Immanuel Wallerstein emphasised the colonies’ specific ‘peripheral’ place within the expanding global frame of industrialisation, Ronald Horvath and Terence McGee countered that this uniqueness was not reducible to such conventional classifications of urban development as ‘pre-industrial’, ‘transitional’ or ‘industrialised’.3 Instead, they understood the distinctiveness of the urban environment as the ‘spatial expressions of the imposition of an alien culture on an existing one’.3
Yet, as Brenda Yeoh argues, such approaches tend to treat the urban landscape as a reflection of colonial rule without attending to how the colonial city was physically ‘made’. In doing so, no matter what cultural, economic or political factors are invoked, these scholars ‘implicitly or explicitly’ assume that ‘the colonial town or city is either wholly or largely a creation of its colonial masters’.3 Although colonial administrators undeniably possessed vastly greater political and economic power than the populations they governed, to understand the colonial city simply as a product of imperial power obscures the ways that indigenous populations inhabited, negotiated and shaped these spaces. The challenge, then, is to account for the power of colonial rule without reducing those subject to it to passive, insignificant actors.
This is a familiar problem in the social sciences: how can we recognise the force of oppressive ‘structural’ power without negating the agency of individuals? Michel de Certeau’s The Practice of Everyday Life offers one influential approach. Its central proposition, that ‘space is a practiced place’, sought to reinstate the agency of the ‘ordinary people’, who are ‘commonly presumed to be passive and guided by established rules’.4 Published in 1980, de Certeau described his work as both ‘analogous and contrary’ to Michel Foucault’s Discipline and Punish (1975), which emphasised how ‘proliferating technocratic structures’ of domination trapped the individual with an ever-intensifying ‘grid of discipline’.6
Yet, de Certeau’s account does indeed remain more ‘analogous’ to Foucault than this opposition suggests. In his example of walking in the city, de Certeau explains how authorities exercise conscious ‘strategies’, while individuals on the street must resort to ‘tactics’, that:
Lack [their] own place, lack a view of the whole, [and are] limited by the blindness resulting from combat at close quarters 7
Although walkers possess ‘agency’, they operate in the ‘absence of power’, within, or beneath, the ‘god-view’ of the authority.8 De Certeau therefore risks reproducing the binary he seeks to challenge: the omnipotence of power and the helplessness of the individual before it. As Doreen Massey argues, such a binary obscures the complex social relations through which power is produced and negotiated.9 This is particularly problematic in analyses of colonial cities, where it reinforces the image of an all-powerful empire acting on a passive population. While de Certeau’s effort to restore agency to ‘the weak’ is valiant, characterising their ‘tactics’ as unconscious and fragmented ultimately implies that they are still insignificant, incapable of driving change. Thus, the question is only intensified: how can we account simultaneously for the power of structures and the capacity of individuals to reproduce, negotiate and transform them?
Slavoj Žižek’s invocation of the ‘big Other’, elaborating on Jacques Lacan’s original conception, provides a way to approach the problem. The big Other does not refer to an individual or an institution but to the seemingly autonomous authority of the social order: the structures, rules and expectations that appear to exist independently above those that enact them.10 Yet, when Žižek claims, ‘the big Other doesn’t exist’ he does not deny the reality of power but rather challenges the idea that power exists as a natural or autonomous structure.11 The big Other has no existence independent of the people and institutions that reproduce it, yet it cannot be reduced to any one of them.
This can be illustrated through the all-too-familiar frustration of bureaucracy: after waiting two hours on hold, the customer service representative informs you that, while they sympathise with your situation, their ‘hands are tied’.12 By invoking regulations or higher-ups and referring only ‘to decisions which have always already been made’, they embody the authority of the ‘system’ they seem only to administer.13
This distinction is particularly useful for understanding colonial power. As Yeoh shows in her analysis of the Singapore Municipal Council, conflicts between government officials, councillors, ratepayers and professionals reveal how colonial power was actually practised: how legitimacy was claimed, negotiated for and given material effect.14 Colonial authority was not simply an autonomous structure imposed from the ‘god-view’ above but was produced and reproduced through individuals who embodied and enacted institutional power.
The methodological task, then, is not simply to replace the study of elites with the study of subalterns, but to examine the ‘interface’ through which power was enacted. It is through the ‘daily encounter’ that power can be studied:
in its external visage, at the point where it is in direct and immediate relationship […] it installs itself and produces its real effects 15
Following Massey, this offers a way beyond the structure-agency binary by locating power in the relations between people, institutions and spaces. As Yeoh argues, while we must recognise the ‘specific structural inequalities within colonial society’ that constrained different groups’ capacity to shape the built environment, these individuals (and groups) were also capable of intentional ‘strategies’: both those that were ‘motivated and intended’ and ‘those habitually carried out in practical consciousness.’16
Oriented in this way, de Certeau’s insight that space is practised remains valuable, provided that ‘practice’ is understood not simply as the resistance of ‘atomistic individuals’ but the way that social relations construct ‘the spatial’, ‘an ever-shifting social geometry of power and signification.’17 The colonial city should therefore be approached through the encounters in which authority became tangible: municipal meetings, planning disputes, petitions, regulations, professional networks, streets and buildings. The question is not simply who possessed power, but how actors mobilised, negotiated, subverted or reproduced its manifestations, practices enacted in space.
[1] Brenda Yeoh, Contesting Space in Colonial Singapore (Singapore, 2013), p.1.
[2] Ibid, pp.5-8.
[3] Ibid, p.5
[4] Ibid., pp.3-4.
[5] Michel de Certeau, The Practice of Everyday Life () p.35-6
[6] Ibid., p.xiv.
[7] De Certeau, Practice, pp.35-6, 38.
[8] Ibid., p.38.
[9] Doreen Massey, For Space (London, 2005), pp.45-6.
[10] Slavoj Žižek, How to Read Lacan (New York, 2006), p.8-10
[11] Section 3 from Slavoj Žižek, ‘The Big Other Doesn’t Exist’, Journal of European Psychoanalysis, 5, (1997)
[12] Mark Fisher, Capitalist Realism (Washington DC, 2009), p.25.
[13] Ibid.
[14] See Yeoh, Contesting Space, pp.28-59.
[15] Michel Foucault, Power/Knowledge, p.97.
[16] Yeoh, Contesting Space, p.17.
[17] Doreen Massey, Space, Place and Gender (Cambridge, 2007), p.3.