Spatial politics of dignity: De-universalizing and diversifying the concept

Introduction

The intention of our article was to examine how a focus on the concept of dignity illuminates a puzzling normative lacuna in both human geography and urban studies (Grossmann and Trubina, 2022), areas where the concept is often employed but rarely examined in detail. This lacuna has emerged because urban studies generally have maintained a focus on socio-economic inequalities and their inscription in urban space even as scholars have been arguing that people’s moral position in society may be just as important as their social-economic position (Fassin, 2017; Fukuyama, 2018; Honneth, 1994). Our article therefore explored ways in which using the concept of dignity in urban geographical work can generate productive new perspectives for normative orientation.

We have been gratified to see the rich set of responses to our article. There seems to be general agreement that existing deployments of the concept of dignity have failed to account for the spatial, relational, and affectual nature of the different dignities, or states of dignity, observable today. This is why we sketched in the article the contours of a decolonial, place-based, class-based, and racialized reading of spatially embedded differences of worth and the moral status of people in contemporary societies as it relates to their specific life-worlds. In light of the commentaries, this approach, together with the elaboration of core dimensions of the concept for both damage-focused but also desire-centered research (Tuck, 2009) seems the major achievements of the piece.

We focus here on four areas of discussion that have emerged through our engagement with the commentaries: first, further reflections on the relational and context-based conception of dignity; second, how to use the concept of dignity in practice; third, the question of scale; fourth and finally, our response to a concern raised about how the concept appears in activist rhetoric versus its formal use by scholars.

Positionality, regimes, and a difference-informed concept of dignity

Safransky (2022) highlights as a strength of our article the rejection of a universalist conception of dignity in favor of what she refers to as an ‘abolitionist’ understanding of dignities. She nails the problem with the universalist approach by recasting our explanations as a ‘central paradox: that ironically dignity discourses themselves often inhibit dignity. … Put simply, the ability to claim dignity has always been constrained by the intersection of regimes – racial, patriarchal, ableist – that order systems of worth and value’. This is a beautiful re-phrasing of our claim that both power and positionality are crucial for a difference-informed understanding of dignity. It captures our concern that dignity cannot be defined from a neutral, universal perspective. She endorses our link between the historical prevalence of the universalist take on dignity and its coexistence with spatial relations constructed under the conditions of racial, patriarchal, and colonial capitalism. We are persuaded by her call to examine further ‘how struggles for dignity have shaped alternative geographies and geographical imaginaries’. To become a useful inspiration for alternative geographies, the concept of dignity needs to be freed from associations with a guarantee of sorts, i.e., that one is supposed to have dignity simply by virtue of her or his humanity. Rather, we have drawn from scholarship on Black American experiences (Atuahene, 2016; Bromell, 2013; Fanon, 2004; Lloyd, 2018; Mbembe, 2017) that has helped us hone our arguments about the limits of the universalist liberal understanding of dignity.

We believe, however, that work remains to be done to ensure that less obvious spatial constellations receive the scholarly attention they deserve. These constellations include even places unlikely to produce resistance because the restraining effects of their regime-driven processes and structures have gone unnoticed, the roots of problems are individualized, and have thus been unchallenged. As an example, for citizens in shrinking cities and towns, dignity violations are less obvious. Disrespect can come indirectly, through ignorance rather than humiliation, as the indifference that marks inferiority, or as – seemingly – self-inflicted dependence on state support. While dignity violations may be harder to recognize in such places, they are nonetheless evidenced by emerging stigma, misrecognition, a sense of inferiority to central urban areas, and dependence on external decision making. Such harder-to-recognize spatial constellations are produced, again, by powerful regimes that profit from the spaces’ marginalization and peripheralization. Regions in decline seem more prone to having an upswing of nationalist, populist political actors and narratives. Fukuyama and others thus rightly raise the question of whether it is actually dignity violations that are endangering democracies (Fukuyama, 2018).

The connection between ambiguity and universality also warrants serious discussion (Balibar, 2002). In trying to establish dignity as something linked to specific contexts, we engaged with debates about what universality can mean in today's world, marked as it is by cultural relativism and decolonial thinking. Indeed, in the perception of many, the inclusion of dignity in the 1948 Universal Declaration of Human Rights serves as a guarantee for its global recognition. Yet one cannot adequately address questions regarding the universality of human rights without acknowledging the political and cultural dominance of Western modernity, together with its philosophical pillars. Given the growing disappointment today in the putatively universal, Enlightenment-inspired recognition of the value of every human being, we have tried to show that it is time for the universalist approach to be replaced by a difference-informed understanding that acknowledges struggles for respect and objections to humiliations stemming from one's class, gender, sexuality, race, religion, and ethnicity. It is regimes of power that turn these essential human categories into hierarchies of value and worth.

A matter of scale?

While in the article we emphasize connections between dignity and power, Lauermann (2022) in his response invites us to emphasize scale, asking whether ‘the big’ is always ‘bad’. After all, he argues, large-scale projects tend to be paternalistic and avoid citizen participation, so they might rightly be considered as a general impediment to dignified livelihoods. Taking large housing projects as an example, he writes, ‘overly-regulated landscapes where diverse and dynamic urban places were replaced by unlivable and unloved spaces, the sort of bleak uniformity that slowly robs a community of dignity like in the large housing estates Grossmann and Trubina describe’ (Lauermann, 2022). But he then further considers the possibility that these scalar transformations can be reconciled with a quest for dignity simply by having urban planners of large-scale projects take dignity into consideration during the development stage.

We see two issues here. The more important issue is how generalizations about scale can be seen in light of our critical take on universality. The generalization ‘any big is bad’ is itself a universal claim contradicting the relational, context-based perspective we try to promote. This also means that neither big- nor small-scale developments are per se good or bad, dignifying or demeaning. Related to this is the caution not to perpetuate stereotypes in academic writing. As we try to show in our article, the stigmatization of mass housing estates is widespread, not least in planning and largely urban literature. The worth or value of residents is sometimes ascribed to them on the basis of the physical structures they inhabit and the scale of those structures. So when such structures are deemed problematic, this in our view deprives both the structures and their inhabitants of dignity. When a general critique of any and all large housing estates (‘doomed to fail’) is further promulgated, it works against the dignity of people inhabiting these neighborhoods, sooner or later. We agree, however, with Lauermann's conclusion that ‘the story becomes more complicated’ when looking at different contexts globally. Dignity is indeed shaped relationally in human and societal contexts.

The second issue is a follow-the-money issue. We agree with those who say that the spatial politics of dignity operates through a vast range of scales. We unfortunately do not think that including a concern for dignity in a broader planning agenda, one that tries to keep citizen interests to the fore in the planning process, will prove to be the silver bullet through which dignity is achieved. Unfortunately, paternalism, humiliation, and violence result far less often from physical design than from power regimes seeking to exploit spaces qua spaces, with little if any egalitarian regard for those who happen to inhabit those spaces. As is well known, both planning and implementation of mega-projects are often based on ‘strategic misrepresentations’ (Raiffa, 1982). Planners and developers accustomed to paternalistic, top-down decision making have long been eager to use appealing or trending concepts to justify the ever-rising costs – and cost-adjusted declines in quality – of their projects. The risk in hoping for improvement through a ‘concern for dignity’ in planning is that, as so often, the concept may simply be evoked emblematically, as a distraction encouraging one to contemplate idealized possibilities rather than the devilish work of dusty details. As we have tried to point out, ‘all good things’ rhetoric also often embodies a generalized liberal universalist pretense of speaking on behalf of humanity as a whole while in practice actually giving voice only to the white, privileged, and Western part of humanity. Thus we still prefer to emphasize the effects of power over those of scale.

Putting research on dignity into practice

Lauermann further emphasizes that it is important not only to examine normative concepts that dignity exemplifies but also to ‘evaluate means for achieving it’ so that urban geographic research will not end with elaborate critique. After recognizing injustices, he stresses, ‘urban citizens [are subjects] with hopes, dreams, and some degree of agency’. We could not agree more. The question is, how to put this into practice? As just discussed, dignity is a concept easily used to distract people from attending to the processes and practices employed by particular, powerful interests. As mentioned earlier, Safransky frames this another way, asking how to avoid the paradox that dignity discourses can inhibit dignity?

It is our belief that the key to avoiding this paradox can be found through conceptual elaboration. In the original article, we identified three core dimensions of dignity, dimensions that help support analyses of violations of dignity, and recommendations for fostering dignity. Those three dimensions are respect (humiliation), self-respect (shame and inferiority), and self-determination (paternalism and dependence). Using the example of mega-projects, we showed how one might use these dimensions to reveal how a dignity rhetoric using the promise of respect can deprive locals of self-determination and instead cater to the vested interests of corporations and governments. We further suggested the utility of seeing affectivity as a constitutive part of putting dignity research into practice; after all, affective responses like anger, shame, or rage sometimes hint at dignity violations.

Keegan (2022) applies these dimensions to geographies of urban labour conditions and thus provides a convincing exploration, one that clearly sets a dignity-based approach to labour apart from justice- or equity-based approaches. The topics relevant to a dignity perspective seem endless. Safransky suggests investigating further topics such as housing, work, care, and even death in light of the pandemics that brought about undignified situations in which crisis management prevailed over the ethics of human dignity. Again, the related emotions may reveal experiences of dignity violation, just as Safransky describes for Atuahene's work on the emotional expression of dignity takings in the course of property confiscation and destruction in South Africa. On how this relation between emotions and dignity takings as well as dignity restoration works, much more investigation is needed. Not all anger, rage, or shame can point researchers to dignity violations: just think of nationalist, far-right violence, full of anger and rage yet itself an example of dignity takings from others.

Dignity as scholarly concept and political inspiration

As with any normative concept, scholars do not ‘own’ a superior understanding of dignity. They share it with social movements and ‘intuitive’ ordinary-language use in different everyday contexts. Keegan rightly challenges the way we frame existing uses of the term ‘dignity’ as ‘normative jargon’, asking us to ‘pause to ask what may be lost by formalizing an analytical framework of dignity’ and consider that we ‘risk glossing over the extent to which activists…strategically seize on its multiple meanings as an organizing tactic’. We agree that, politically, the concept of dignity, together with its more popular counterparts, justice and equality, needs to be sufficiently vague to serve as an emblem for a variety of aspirations and to unify socially and politically different citizens and interests. One is reminded of Laclau's (1996a) theorizing of empty signifiers as the condition of unity, and how empty signifiers have vital functions for the political – just because of their emptiness. Laclau argues that empty signifiers are linked to social demands that point to something outside existing hegemonic systems of signification, to something so far excluded; thus they challenge this existing, seemingly objective system of signification. The empty signifier is a vague gesture of signification with an open meaning that makes it attractive to different groups and their particular interests. For termini like ‘emancipation’ or ‘justice’, in Laclau's conception, this emptiness, the vague signifying gesture, is not a weakness that needs to be overcome but a precondition for political mobilization. The participants of a collective cause need to believe they have a shared understanding of the words on their banner. The vagueness of these words is the precondition for achieving unity while maintaining the heterogeneity of the collective. Empty signifiers provide a ‘constitutive distortion’ (Laclau, 1996b), serving different groups in their need to agree over common meaning.

Is ‘dignity’ such an empty signifier? Surely it is. Its use in social movements has exactly this characteristic of the empty signifier. That is why the employment of the term ‘dignity’ in different social movements comes with different connotations – and still works. We refer to this use of the term ‘dignity’ as a category of practice rather than as normative jargon. Particular interests of social movements are articulated in different slogans: ‘Stand with dignity’ by the New Orleans Workers’ Center for Racial Justice (Keegan, 2021), ‘marches for dignity’ in Spain (Narotsky, 2016), or the ‘Revolution of Dignity’ in Ukraine in 2014 (Wynnyckyj, 2019). The function of ‘dignity’ as an empty signifier used globally points to different ‘democratic demands’ locally. We acknowledge this and believe this is actually consistent with our conception. For non-academic discourse, it still proves the plurality, spatiality, and relationality of the concept of dignity. Thus also in its use as a category of practice, ‘dignity’ exists not as one universal dignity but as a multitude of dignities, varying in meaning with their respective contexts.

So if, to make it applicable in academic use, we suggest making the concept of dignity more explicit, providing dimensions and framings to it, does that fill the emptiness of and de-politicize the signifier? Does it so formalize ‘dignity’ that it becomes unsuitable for political discourse? Given the links between academic practice and social movements, and the political agency inherent in much academic work, this is anything but an easy question. As Brown (2016) argues, formalizing the concept of sustainable development pushed out the inherent antagonisms found within sustainability thinking, with the result that the formal version has been prone to neoliberal appropriation. While we appreciate this cautionary tale, given our emphasis on exposing the effects of power and oppressive regimes, we don’t see that our conceptualisation of dignity has the potential to exclude conflicts and their underlying antagonisms. Rather, we hope to pave the way to make their workings explicit. Further, as detailed above, a lack of conceptualization may leave paradoxical uses uncovered and gloss over vested interests while seemingly fostering the common good.

The main intention of our article has been to further the argument that dignity can be spatialized and to connect space and dignity interestingly and usefully. This has proven so far to be an ongoing struggle. Those responding to our article are inviting us to develop a more expansive theoretical perspective on dignity. This more expansive perspective should also, in our view, involve the practical engagement of scholars and urban activists representing different contexts outside Anglophone urban geography.