Constitutive outsides or hidden abodes? Totality and ideology in critical urban theory

Abstract

In the context of hotly contested debates within critical urban theory, many scholars have recently attempted (both implicitly and explicitly) to move beyond the relational-dialectical concept of ‘totality’, taking up the notion of ‘the constitutive outside’ in its place. With this in view, this article seeks to (1) develop a critique of the ways in which the concept of the constitutive outside is deployed in these debates; and (2) to sketch another path forward – one that understands capitalist urbanisation as a distinctive moment in the evolution of a world-encompassing and internally related socio-spatial totality, while also attending to well-founded concerns among theorists of the constitutive outside regarding the question of difference and ascriptive hierarchisation. More precisely, this article will pursue a close reading of work on the constitutive outside in critical urban theory, suggesting that it effectively re-articulates longstanding and entrenched tenets of capitalist ideology, positing the image of a ‘space-time of the other’. And it will conclude with a revised conceptualisation of totality for critical urban theory, building on Nancy Fraser’s recent work on capitalism’s racialised, gendered, and ecological ‘hidden abodes’.