Progressive planning,biased discourse,and critique: An agentic perspective

Introduction

John Friedmann once defined the agenda of radical planning as “the emancipation of humanity from social oppression” (Friedmann, 1987: 303). The framing of progressive practice as a process of emancipation has received similar endorsements over the years. Pløger (2001), for example, has described planners as social seekers of emancipation. In their own right, Goonewardena and Rankin (2004) cite the ideal of emancipation in their defense of strong state action on social inequality. Although planning so construed can address a wide array of actors, these statements are particularly pertinent in describing the progressive planner’s role in guiding citizens engaged in the planning process. Irazabal (2009), for example, frames emancipation as an essential “aim” of planning, an aim achieved when agents are made self-conscious of their roles in the reproduction of social practices and are empowered to transform the relations of domination that underpin them. So conceived, the practical interpretation of the progressive planner’s effort to reconcile divergent views in the planning process often implies the emancipatory task of challenging citizens to recognize and transcend the assumptions that inform their positions.

In planning scholarship, a critically informed progressive planning practice along these lines is often articulated as having the end goal of achieving the emancipation of participants in the planning process from biased planning discourses (March, 2010). This view derives from the recognition of the role of reigning discourses in informing the positions of citizens as planning agents. The interest in the perspective of discursive articulation has increased considerably in recent years, if only partially due to the impact that Habermas’ writings has had on the field. As a leading figure of the Frankfurt School, Habermas was fully invested in the emancipatory ideal, but his attention to the communicative aspects of rationality has thrown the role of discourse into sharp relief. The proponents of a discursive perspective have, in addition to turning to Habermas, also leaned on the genealogy of Michel Foucault, the political economy of Douglas Fairclough, and the discourse coalition perspective of Martin Hajer in search for theoretical grounding (Kumar and Pallathucheril, 2004). The heightened interest in discourse analysis signals a growing appreciation of the fact that discursive conflicts shape policy debates as stakeholders take positions vis-a-vis prevalent discourses. This scholarship has explored how problem definitions and argumentative stances are often shaped by discursive articulation, how conflict is informed by discursive regimes, and how domination is often discursively construed through hegemonic narratives. In this interrogation of the prevalence of certain discourses over others, the question of power naturally imposes itself. While writings inspired by the work of Habermas and Hajer have often been criticized for not addressing the question of power explicitly, the writings of Foucault and Fairclough have found appeal among those inclined to subject dominant discourses to a radical critique (Hastings, 1998; Jacobs, 2006; Pløger, 2004).

In studies of the planning process that take a discursive angle, the question of the personal investment of agents in dominant discourses and the implications of this investment for a radical politics of emancipation is however not given adequate treatment. The concern of how domination by elites is justified and maintained through the “active consent” of other social groups voiced by Gramsci (1971) many years ago remains pertinent to this discussion. When considered from a discourse-analytic perspective, it can be asked if this active consent also implies a role for dominant discourses in how agents manage their subjectivity. Thus, although the emancipatory ideal of planning as articulated by Friedmann and others remains a pillar of progressive practice, recognizing the personal investment in biased discourses implies that the agent cannot be merely exhorted to repudiate biased discourse but must be made to come to terms with his unacknowledged motives and confronted with a presentation of biased discourse in essential dimensions that lay exposed the weaknesses of this investment. The writings of Jon Elster, I argue, form a fruitful basis for understanding how this personal investment can be further explored.

In the following section, various discourse-analytic approaches prevalent in the scholarship on planning are briefly outlined, as is the notion that prevailing discourses fundamentally inform a subject’s worldview and value system. In the third section, I turn to the writings of Jon Elster on the question of cognitive and psychological motivations behind the investment in biased beliefs. I suggest that this approach can inform a theoretical position on the analysis of the subjective investment in biased discourse. In this respect, I also discuss Elster’s idea that these motivations are expressed in discursive forms featuring identifiable argumentative rationalizations or habitual modes of reasoning. My endorsement of what I describe as Elster’s “agentic” approach to the investment in biased beliefs is, however, qualified. Adapting from the work of John Thompson, I suggest an “interpretive” dimension to the analysis of the investment in biased discourse. This dimension is centered on the idea that the association of biased discourse with narratives of saliency also contributes to satisfying the motivations in question.

In section four, I use these insights to reconsider the nature of the popular investment in the neoliberal discourse on urban development. Through a number of examples from the literature, I propose that neoliberal discourse has found currency because it addresses anxieties about arrested social mobility and the erosion of community power. I describe how arguments about inevitable processes of global economic restructuring and local downtown redevelopment, in addition to the association of neoliberal discourse with discourses on welfarism, multiculturalism, and community choice, offer clues as to how the aforementioned motivations found satisfaction in these discourses. Finally, and leaning on the work of Raymond Geuss, I sketch the outline of how conceiving of subjective investment in these dimensions constitutes a practical approach to critique. I conclude by reasserting that the attention to motivations and their expression in prevalent narratives offers a practical roadmap for progressive planners to challenge and demystify biased planning discourses.

Discourse and subjectivity reexamined

Essays that have addressed the employment of discourse analysis techniques in planning and urban studies include those by Jacobs (2006), Lees (2004), and Richardson (1996). Of the many theoretical frameworks that these essays consider, the perspective offered by Hajer (1995) is perhaps the least invested in the question of insidious power. Hajer, in an articulation of the nexus between discourse, social rationality, and political organization, emphasizes how discursively inspired positions lead various groups to coalesce and create political boundaries. Hajer’s work has been of interest to those scholars seeking to examine the pragmatics of political coalition building as a reflection of discursive struggles (e.g. Lejano and Wessells, 2006; Lundqvist, 2004). In other frameworks, the question of hegemonic power looms larger. Habermas’ (1971, 1981) discourse analysis, grounded in his larger thesis of communicative action, is concerned with an interrogation of validity claims in the furthering of social rationality. One draw of the perspective offered by Habermas, I believe, is that it has offered a sense of how this discursive diagnosis of domination can imply a politics of resistance. The interpretation of Habermas’ position on ideology as distorted communication, a distortion that is “reproduced” in contingent discursive settings, has been especially appealing since it implied a strategy of disruption that is both practical and tenable (e.g. Forester, 1989). This formulation is echoed in later contributions, including Sarkissian’s (2005) call for the reform collaborative planning by mobilizing grassroots discourses to confront and “remove” distortions of power.

Scholars have alternatively leaned on Fairclough (1995) and Foucault (1982) for conceptual categories that have more directly addressed the question of how discourse perpetuates relations of domination. In a framework that itself is inspired by Foucault’s writings, Fairclough proposes the study of discursive rationalization, the role of the institutional setting in furthering certain discourses, and discourse’s role in the propagation of power structures as fundamental analytical categories. Studies that employ Fairclough’s framework have relied on this tripartite schema for the analysis of the nexus of power and discourse (e.g. Martson, 2004; Taylor, 1999). Foucault’s insights, and his treatment of strategies of domination such as discursive “prohibition” and “canonization” as tools in the service of an all pervasive normalizing force, have in their own right found special interest among scholars examining cases of extreme discursive hegemony (e.g. Jacobs, 2004; Stenson and Watt, 1999). The uses of biased discourse in the misrepresentation of reality, the obfuscation of alternatives, and the justification of inequality are some of the pathologies of planning practice that have been explored using these perspectives (e.g. Fischler, 2000).

The question of the emancipation from biased discourse naturally imposes itself on this discussion. Habermas has proposed that the evolution of intersubjective rationality in communicative processes results in an increasing level of emancipation. In Habermas, the idea of the extrication of distortion, however, implies a “pejorative” notion of ideology with roots in Marx’s ideas on false consciousness and developed in the Frankfurt School notion of ideology as objectification through instrumental reason (Habermas, 1981; Joseph, 1988; Luckas, 1967 [1923]). In an interpretation of Foucault’s position, the discursive articulation of power also presents opportunity for resistance. In his notion of a “critical polyvalence of discourses,” Foucault submits that discourse not only “transmits” but also “exposes” power relations, pointing in the direction of their transcendence. The literature building on these views has in this light paid scant attention to the question of the consequences of an aggressive critical interrogation of received wisdom. Merely identifying certain beliefs as being biased, Raymond Geuss (1981: 41) once argued, has rarely proven sufficient enticement for their renunciation. A thorough treatment of the question of emancipation thus requires a consideration of how ideological discourses play a foundational role in how agents negotiate their own subjectivity.

It is in the spirit of this argument that Nietzsche describes (ideological) oversimplification as a precondition for purposeful action and that Gramsci describes how the social consciousness of oppressed groups borrows from official dogma. Habermas himself has at points spoken of ideology as a vital “substitute formation” that compensates for frustrations borne of the fruitless pursuit of untenable wants (Habermas, 1971: 277). Fraser (1997), in an elegant remark, had also once opined that while an argument can, for example, be made for the suppression of forms of collectivity such as gender and race for their contributions to social differentiation, another equally persuasive argument can be made for the celebration of these same constructs for their role in cultural affirmation. Biased discourses in the context of planning should also be described to be of an ambivalent nature in a fashion not dissimilar to the social constructs studied by Fraser. This sentiment finds expression in Warren’s (1990) statement that

ideologies could never be imposed on individuals as meanings, because of the nature of meaning itself. Rather, ideologies must be seen as conceptual structures that—if they are to have an impact—must become meaningful for individuals by being reproduced by them. (p. 7)

Biased beliefs, once understood through this notion of ambivalence, should be thought of as assuming the qualities of both meaning and force (Eagleton, 1994).

Planning scholars have occasionally alluded to this more positive, constitutive role that biased beliefs play. Building on Habermas’ writing, Forester (1989), for example, discusses how the planning process not only produces agreements but also reproduces the social identities of those party to any such agreement. In other remarks, Forester also speaks of how legitimations of injustice, even as they serve to reinforce professional power, also reproduce received notions of common sense. These comments hint of a role for ideological distortion in value-formation. Healey (1997) explores similar ideas when she concedes that social interaction reproduced both power and agency. Channeling themes from the writings of Zizek, Gunder (2010) describes a fundamental role for ideologies in the subjective processing of an incoherent and unordered social reality. Building on the works of Lukes, Shin (2010) has written on how discourse shapes preferences in a way where the dominated acquiesce in their own domination. However, if this qualification is to be of any consequence, it should be in the recognition that progressive planners can thus only be truly effective in the quest to empower agents if the latter are successfully made to recognize the nature and extent of their own personal investment in biased beliefs. In the next section, I further explore how such an effective demystification of received wisdom can proceed by building on Elster’s thesis of motivations and rationalizations.

Motives, rationalizations, and interpretation: building on Elster’s contributions

In an argument along classical Marxist lines, the bourgeois ideology of freedom is often said to have been readily espoused by the capitalist elite because it afforded them a nonviolent means to manipulate the working class into exploitative industrial relations. Functional explanations of this sort attribute the persistence of certain beliefs to their consequences for some supra-individual entity. This approach to explanation has been the subject of a sustained critique by Jon Elster (1979, 1981, 1982), who has considered it to be fundamentally inadequate. In taking this stance, Elster has abided by a belief that the persistence of societal features must be reducible to the concerns of individuals (Van Parijs, 1982). It is still perfectly appropriate, in Elster’s view, for norms to play a fundamental role in explaining the persistence of social features, however, only if they can be shown to influence individual decision making.

The inadequate attention to this question, Elster continues, has been a basic liability in Marx’s theory of ideologies. Elster, however, reconstructs from Marx’s writings what he considers to be a promising cognitive and psychological basis for appreciating the nature of the investment in biased beliefs. In Sour Grapes (1981), Making Sense of Marx (1989), and Political Psychology (1993), Elster seeks to develop these insights into a theoretical framework that reestablishes an “agentic” approach to theoretical explanation. This project of “methodological individualism” features a theory of motives as its fundamental pillar. Here, Elster turns to the field of cognitive psychology, and borrows from Leon Festinger and Amos Tversky to argue for motives attributable to the “positions” or “interests” of agents. So conceived, cognitive “positional” motives are said to derive from man’s innate interest in making sense of the world around him. This motive underscores a propensity to comprehend the totality of worldly events as instances of recognizable laws rather than random unrelated occurrences. The worldview that emerges in fulfillment of this motive is naturally determined by the agent’s social positioning, whether in society, the workplace, educational attainment, occupation, and so on. Elster refers to this propensity to conflate the relations that govern the world at large with the world one knows as the “availability heuristic.”

Perhaps more interestingly, Elster proposes that the formation of beliefs can be catalyzed by certain psychological, interest-driven motives. One motivational interest, wishful thinking, describes the desire to justify a preferred state of affairs or future outcome. Elster gives an example of Shumpeter’s “hiding hand,” described as the capitalist entrepreneur’s biased overestimation of the probabilities that their enterprise might be successful. Following from this argument of psychological interests, it is posited that another fundamental reason social agents invest in biased beliefs is to satisfy an interest in self-consistency. This is alternatively defined as the interest in resolving “cognitive dissonance” (Elster, 1983). Cognitive dissonance, for example, might result from a social agent’s inability to achieve desired personal goals in the context of prevailing structural constraints. Beliefs that justify these failures act to reconcile the agent’s limitations with his or her values. For an illustration from the field of urban development, communities often embrace the discourse on the environmental and socioeconomic potential benefits of large scale and often on disruptive “mega-projects” (Lehrer and Maidley, 2008) as a reaction of a defeatist assessment of their inability to successfully engage the growth coalitions spearheading these projects. Motives, especially those of the psychological variety described here, contribute to an understanding of the context in which agents identify with biased discourse by illuminating how they come to manage limits to their agency. Espousing beliefs shaped by one’s position or interests is, however, not necessarily “in” one’s interest, a precondition for the characterization of belief as being “ideological.”

Elster, however, expands on this thesis and contends that these motivations find expression in constructs that feature “habitual modalities” of sense making. Synthesizing from Elster’s work, it can be proposed that two general rationalizations, “generalization” and “inversion,” undergird the formation of cognitive and interest-shaped beliefs. Generalization, as the term implies, is the identification of the particular with the general. Inversion, as contrasted to generalization, represents a misallocation of agency. In the context of beliefs compelled by cognitive motives, generalization can be described as a mechanism through which an agent mistakenly believes that certain causal relations that adequately describe their observations in her immediate context are valid in a wider context. In the context of psychological motives, wishful thinking might, for example, lead agents to conflate their special interests with the general interest by projecting societal benefits to actions borne of narrowly construed interests. Elster is quick to point out that this blurring of boundaries is a prerequisite to the moral justification of a social agent’s political project.

Inversion often takes the form of what Elster calls “abstraction.” This is when particular occurrences and objects are made to be instances of abstract entities originally formulated by reflection on the real objects themselves (Elster, 1989: 478). This is essentialist thought in its purest, one where particular social relations are, for example, made to derive from immutable structural laws of social organization. Continuing with the thread of mega-projects, biased discourses may, for example, become especially useful to particular development interests when they naturalize the process of intraurban competition and legitimize the resultant relaxation of planning processes (Essex and Chalkley, 2004). The concept of “reification” perhaps best exemplifies this sense of the notion of inversion. Alternatively, Elster approaches inversion through the notion of “projection.” This a misallocation of agency where subjects, by projecting certain desires and qualifications unto social constructs, manage their inability to achieve these desires themselves. Attributing agency to supra-individual entities such as “the community,” these constructs resolve the dissonance that is the result of the inability to fashion one’s life to one’s desires. These constructs, however, invariably risk becoming the objectifications that “come to dominate their makers” (Elster, 1989: 481). Construed as such, Elster’s thesis, especially that of the psychological motivation of resolving cognitive dissonance and its expression in argumentative rationalizations, offers an insightful perspective on the understanding the pervasiveness of biased beliefs.

The pervasiveness of neoliberal discourse reexamined

The framework described above is helpful in shedding light on how agents in the planning process come to be invested in neoliberal planning discourses. The valorization of absolute autonomy, the vilification of state interventionism, and the general negative attitude toward regulation are some hallmarks of the neoliberal agenda. By forcefully influencing the parameters of “sensible” discussion across policy contexts and geographic regions, the allied discourses constituting the neoliberal worldview have achieved what Peet (2002) refers to as “hegemonic depth” (see also Hackworth and Moriah, 2006). For Purcell (2009) and other planning scholars, this has galvanized a call for a “counterhegemonic” agenda that challenges a defeatist planning practice in the service of neoliberal politics. Such remarks only underscore the continued salience of the critique of neoliberalism in the planning debate.

Brenner and Theodore’s (2002) call for a research agenda probing the “contextual embeddedness” of neoliberal restructuring has marked a pivotal turn in the debate, one that promises to identify loci where such counterhegemonic interventions can be applied. In this perspective, neoliberalism is conceptualized as locally differentiated projects that share certain general features rather than as a set of universal principals or global force. Elwood’s (2004) illustration of how neoliberalism is embedded within local governance traditions is an early response to this call. This embedding is, however, also enabled by the discursive layer of neoliberal rhetorical practices. In remarks that speak to how a “contingent” neoliberalism is discursively legitimated, Wilson (2004), for example, proposes that it embeds itself in what he calls sense of world and sense of individual, “absorbing” common understandings of social and economic processes, while “exhorting” agents to submit to an atomistic view of society.

Although these remarks are interesting in their own right, I propose that the saliency of neoliberal discourses can be more clearly appreciated when reconsidered from the perspective of motives, rationalizations, and interpretation articulated above. As mentioned earlier, the willingness of agents to subscribe to biased discourse is often motivated by psychological prerogatives. Appreciating the influence of neoliberal discourse in this sense requires that progressive planners become more sensitive to the anxieties and aspirations for which these discourses compensate. Naturally, these imperatives will vary with much variety in context and circumstance. Nevertheless, much of the discussion can be reframed as one reflecting on the desire to resolve cognitive dissonance, although this may take either economic or social characteristics. With the issue restated in these terms, the literature suggests that neoliberal discourse addresses key anxieties among citizens participating in the planning process that pertain to the stalling of social mobility and the loss of community power.

Cognitive dissonance of the economic variety may here result from the failures in reconciling one’s station and the desire for upward social mobility. In a study of neoliberal urban development in Indianapolis, Wilson (2004) describes how the local political discourse on public education, policing, crime, and urban renewal had the effect of instilling a “cultivated fear” of government, effectively framing government intervention as promoting a “culture of dependency.” The rhetoric was straightforward: “previous government programs promoted poverty and welfare dependency” (Wilson, 2004: 777). These sorts of claims naturally reverberate with those perhaps struggling to secure their position in the middle class, where fears of stalled mobility abound. This fear of economic stagnation, for example, has also been cited as a driving force behind the identification with a managerialist (neoliberal) discourse on housing provision (Marston, 2004). Neoliberal discourse of this sort addresses the cognitive dissonance resulting from the failures in reconciling one’s station in life and the desire for upward social mobility.

Cognitive dissonance also expresses anxieties about the diffusion of power in a time when community organizing faces immense challenges. Carolyn Thompson’s (2011) study of local community groups’ involvement in redevelopment of Brooklyn’s Atlantic Yards here also illustrates the value of retracing the local acceptance of neoliberal discourse in the language of motives. In her account, Thompson describes the willingness of local groups to work through a community benefits agreement with the developers and the city. In this particular context, the discourse championed by the development coalition highlighted a narrative of a community threatened by gentrification, where locals would be pressed to cope with and to adjust to the loss of jobs and possibly even displacement. In the context of this discourse, the proposed community benefits agreement is framed as offering terms that could not be declined. The fact that disadvantaged groups are likely to identify with neoliberal practices might in this sense seem quite perplexing at first consideration. “The signatory groups’ willingness to participate in the project again signals how embedded neoliberal sensibilities are—their conceptions of what is possible in terms of community organizing is linked into the entrepreneurial logic of neoliberal development,” writes Thompson (2011: 1201). From a perspective of cognitive dissonance, it, however, becomes understandable how entrepreneurial approaches to redress would manage the rift between the desire for truly progressive measures and the clear inability to achieve these desires within seemingly insurmountable constraints on effective community mobilization.

Neoliberal discourses speak to these motives by way of typical argumentative rationalizations, notable among which is the rhetoric on inevitability. In remarks that substantiate this judgment, the portrait painted by cases from the literature is of a discourse that has been especially noted for its successful self-presentation as the" “common sense” of the time (Peck and Tickell, 2002). In most cases, this “common sense” is expressed as a “there-is-no-alternative” rationalization (Peck, 2004: 294). Arguably, narratives of this sort are structured around the argumentative mechanism of inversion. An examination of the literature yields two flavors of this rationalization: neoliberalism as a global process, currently still unfolding, and at the other end of the spectrum, neoliberalism as a byproduct of an ongoing and intensifying process of developer-led downtown redevelopment. The thesis on the inevitability of global neoliberal dominance is often couched in terms of the transition to a postindustrial economy. An early report on the role of discourse in the interpretation of economic distress from a case study of Adelaide presents how neoliberal restructuring was rendered discursively inevitable through the presentation of a transition to a knowledge economy as a necessary resolution to pervasive economic malaise (Metcalfe and Berne, 1994). Through this inversion, local economic transition is presented as an instance of an inevitable global process, and ceases to be judged a political choice. Wilson, in another insight that clearly speaks to the concept of inversion, describes neoliberalism as marshaling a “theatre of the logical,” where a “politics that is in reality a complex human accomplishment … is offered as natural and imminent” (Wilson, 2004: 776). Neoliberalism, a complex human political undertaking, is here also cast as a natural step in a process of intensifying globalization and economic competition.

Neoliberalism has, however, also been narratively constructed in terms of an inevitable process of developer-led urban reinvestment. This is an “irreversible” cycle that clears out the old to make room for the new (Wilson and Grammenos, 2005). In another insightful take on the uses of inversion, Zimmerman’s (2008) study of the reengineering of Milwaukee’s urban policy in the spirit of Richard Florida’s theory of the creative class offers a portrait of how selective investment in “strategic” neighborhoods, while motivated by the desire to gentrify specific areas, is made popularly palatable through the promotion of law-like processes of redevelopment. Zimmerman (2008) writes,

As these discursive moves demonstrate, the assimilation of Florida’s ideas into Milwaukee’s growth coalition had the effect of concentrating the focus of local opinion-makers into a crisp and singular pro-gentrification narrative; one that was powerful and difficult to challenge as it naturalized as inevitable a prescribed set of urban transformations. (p. 544)

In the context of downtown redevelopment, these discourses may alternatively invoke social dynamics. This is where the process of urban change is infused with a hint of social succession, as in the claims that minority residents of the inner city and suburbs naturally and gradually gain more secure economic standing and disperse to more affluent neighborhoods (Wilson et al., 2004). Little is said to be compromised since the process of urban change also benefits local residents in the reduction of crime and the promotion of civic responsiveness.

However, as I have argued earlier, advancing a compelling argument about the investment in neoliberal discourse also requires a presentation of the various ways these discourses align, through interpretive associations, with more salient discourses in any particular context. Neoliberal discourses on the city are most typically associated with entrepreneurial narratives celebrating individual risk taking, multiculturalism and ethnic diversity, and self-help. First, neoliberalism is often associated with entrepreneurial discourses celebrating individual risk taking and the economic orthodoxy of “competitive advantage.” Here, the neoliberal tenets of deregulation and flexibility are framed, in a narrative of win–win and benign competition, as a prerequisite of unleashing corporate ingenuity (Brenner and Theodore, 2002; Hall, 2006). In this narrative, the legitimacy of government is derived from its successful fashioning of the regulatory environment, tax incentives, and labor regulations to the desires of real estate interests. This is the discourse that real estate entrepreneurs advance when they fashion their efforts to transform the city as an unleashing of the spirits of capitalism. For these laisser fair values to gain further legitimacy, policy makers attempt a seemingly contradictory conflation of neoliberal with welfarist discourse (Dean, 1999). For example, welfarist and philanthropic discourses have sometimes also been deployed to justify market approaches to the delivery of services to the homeless (Arapoglou, 2004), or to provide legitimacy for proposals to decrease government regulation in spatial area plans (Stenson and Watt, 1999).

As an illustration of the association of neoliberal discourse with themes of multiculturalism, Kipfer and Kiel’s (2002) analysis of the “reinvention” of the city of Toronto speaks to a creative reinterpretation of neoliberalism in the context of a discourse that promotes planning for a “city of difference.” Urban design, historic preservation, and public art here serve to offer an aestheticized and commodified “difference” as manifestations of the new tolerant city. By furthering a discourse on local culture, neoliberalism also promises to enhance a city’s local cultural base (Wilson et al., 2004). The promotion of “authentic” ethnic neighborhoods through urban design is one such attempt to promote the city’s cultural richness (Wilson, 2004). The association of neoliberal discourse with another on art, creativity, and diversity has also been strategically cultivated as it serves to align the interests of local, community-oriented organizations with the interests of developers (Rankin and Delaney, 2011).

The association of neoliberal discourse with social discourses serves similar purposes. This is particularly true of the conservative “antistatist” rhetoric on “self-help” that has in some respects come to undermine the legitimacy of a liberal discourse on the city. Some variants of neoliberal rhetoric have successfully cultivated the conflation of the state with the “establishment.” The insinuation to minority communities here is that breaking away from the state constitutes a triumph of independence (Kelley, 1997), and a positive step in the struggle for self-determination. In practical terms, neoliberal development often rests on a locality’s success in clearing a potential site from its current users, which often involves programs to “deconcentrate” low-income housing projects. The rhetoric on emancipation from the state (and the slums) thus similarly serves to represent neoliberal development as “freeing” residents from the crushing conditions of the urban core through initiative and self-help (Addie, 2008). The local acceptance of new urban governance frameworks is, for example, also sometimes made possible through the reinterpretation of the neoliberal discourse on devolved governance as a discourse on neighborhood empowerment and local participation in planning, as Ward’s (2006) study of Business Improvement Districts (BIDs) in the United Kingdom attests.

Progressive planning and discursive critique

Of the scholars to whom discursive planning theorists have turned for theoretical guidance, Habermas is perhaps most sensitive to the question of personal investment in biased discourse. Habermas has, however, refrained from considering thoroughly the ramifications of what is being asked of an agent exhorted to renounce biased discourses. It is well known that Habermas leans considerably on Freud in his elaboration on the notion of theory as critical self-reflection. As Madison (2005) has more recently argued, Freud has, however, clearly conceived of self-reflection as a contentious, dramatic affair characterized by denial and resistance. One implication of Freud’s observation in the context of this discussion is the recognition of the subjective investment in biased discourse, and the primacy of a powerful critique that has the capacity to challenge this investment. The preceding has illustrated how the attention to motivational, argumentative, and interpretive dimensions can speak to the question of the pervasiveness of neoliberal discourse with some conceptual parsimony. The representation of biased discourse in these dimensions presents a powerful argument as to why biased discourses must be renounced.

For further clarity on how such a framework can make for a powerful critique, and building on conceptual categories developed by Geuss (1981), a critique of biased discourse in its motivational, argumentative, and interpretive dimensions can in this sense be said to proceed on “genetic,” “epistemic,” and “functional” grounds, respectively. The critique of argumentative rationalizations can be construed as the revelation that a biased discourse misconstrues value judgments as statements of fact. In this sense, it is particularly suited to be construed as a critique on “epistemic” grounds. The liability that lies at the heart of this fallacy typically involves confusing descriptive and normative statements, as when, for example, social phenomena are presented as natural or inevitable phenomena. Narratives arguing for an inevitable process of global deregulation and an irreversible momentum behind downtown redevelopment are particularly prone to a critique on epistemic grounds. The dimension of investment in biased discourse predicated on interpretive associations can alternatively be critiqued on “functional” grounds. A functional critique can proceed by illustrating how particular discursive associations can support certain (unjust) institutions or practices. The association of neoliberal narratives with narratives on welfarism and multiculturalism, for example, not only obscures the real ramifications of certain practices but also hijacks the language with which agents strategize to argue against these narratives.

What is, however, most critical in this discussion is how the argumentative rationalizations and interpretive associations speak to motivations that I have argued must be considered in any treatment of the investment in biased discourses. As illustrated, the investment in narratives designed around rationalizations of inevitable global deregulation may speak to anxieties about social mobility, while those of developer-dominated downtown redevelopment schemes in turn may betray anxieties pertaining to the loss of community power. Naturally, such determinations are contingent on particular planning settings. Here, Geuss’ discussion of the “genetic” critique of biased beliefs provides a fruitful articulation of how Elster’s thesis on psychological motivations can form the basis of a practical critique. As Geuss puts it, such a belief requires “ignorance on part of agents as for their true motives for accepting it.” If a critique purely on the account of motives is to have any value, the conceptual problem in exposing such beliefs as forms of illusion herein can only lie in the assertion that they are held for the wrong motives.

In the language adapted from Elster, it must be argued here that the motivations of resolving cognitive dissonance or legitimizing wishful thinking are unacceptable. For the progressive planner, becoming attuned to motivations that, for example, address issues of cognitive dissonance naturally imply an interrogation of the unacknowledged origins of such beliefs. Motivations such as those discussed here are of the sort that, when identified, can be shown to contradict with the stated values of the beliefs in question. This is the example of agents who subscribe to the neoliberal discourse on personal enterprise and risk taking “because” they are primarily interested in achieving economic stability, or one on privatized approaches to bargaining for community benefits “because” they are interested in community power. Alternatively, the theme of manipulation is a resource that the progressive planner can also employ to critique the formation of motives. A state of cognitive dissonance can, with the right arguments, for example, be shown to be born of excessive and unjustifiable manipulation of the sense of what is achievable. Historically, the discourses on urban renewal that sought to portray the costs incurred in dislocation as the “best possible” outcome are but an example of such subtle manipulation of expectations.

Conclusion

Planning scholars have become increasingly attuned to the role of discourse in enabling consensus, but also to its role in perpetuating relations of domination and furthering disempowerment. Discourse-analytic approaches to the discussion of the planning process, whether borrowing from the work of Hajer, Habermas, Fairclough, or Foucault, have, however, not adequately addressed the question of the personal investment in biased discourse. Adapting and building on Jon Elster’s theory of the motivations behind the investment in biased beliefs, this article has argued that progressive planners seeking the emancipation of agents from biased discourse must be able to reconstruct to the agent his investment in these discourses in essential dimensions that lay exposed the liabilities of said investment. The articulation of the nature of this investment in the language of psychological motivations is a promising step in that direction. Addressing these motivations is, however, a formidable challenge, and requires that the progressive planner be equipped with the conceptual tools to interrogate the beliefs that satisfy these motivations.

I have argued that argumentative rationalizations and interpretive associations are dimensions of biased discourse that must be addressed to understand how particular discourses satisfy these motivations. These are important dimensions of investment in biased discourse because they lend themselves naturally to critique on epistemic and functional grounds. The value of this perspective was probed in consideration of some of the recent writings on the local embeddedness of neoliberal discourse. It was illustrated that neoliberal discourses on the city take specific forms often describing an inevitable process of global deregulation and developer-led downtown redevelopment, in a context where these discourses are often associated with others on entrepreneurialism, cultural diversity, and self-help. These discourses, it was suggested, are motivated by pervasive popular anxieties pertaining to social mobility and community power.

There is no denying that the task before the progressive practitioner is challenging. The important point, however, is that while the investment in the biased discourse may satisfy an agent’s interest in subjective consistency, this is invariably achieved at the expense of his more fundamental interest in autonomy (Warren, 1990). The progressive planner cannot relinquish the hope that agents are less likely to unquestionably remain invested in beliefs whose continued espousal they learn would undermine their claim to rational autonomy.