Urban Desolation and Symbolic Denigration in the Hyperghetto

Author(s): LOÏC WACQUANT

Source: Social Psychology Quarterly, Vol. 73, No. 3 (September 2010), pp. 215-219
Published by: American Sociological Association
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Urban Desolation and Symbolic Denigration in the Hyperghetto
The scene of urban desolation and social
despair captured by the cover picture
of 63rd Street, one of the ghostly thor
oughfares transsecting Chicago's collapsing
black ghetto at century's close, invites us to
reflect on the link between the built environ
ment, social structure,and collective psychol
ogy. More precisely, it points to the need to
elaborate theoretically and empirically the
connections between urban desolation and
symbolic denigration inAmerica's racialized
urban core and assorted territoriesof relega
tion in the dualizing metropolis of the
advanced societies (Wacquant 2008): how
the daily experience of material dilapidation,
ethnoracial seclusion, and socioeconomic
marginality translates into the corrosion of
the self, the rasping of interpersonal ties,
and the skewing of public policy through
themediation of sulfurous cognition fastened
onto a defamed place.
The link between ecology, morphology,
and representations was a theme central to
the Durkheimian school of sociology, as at
tested by such tomes as Emile Durkheim's
([1912] 1993) celebrated analysis of "collec
tive effervescence" in The Elementary Forms
ofReligious Life,Marcel Mauss's bold investi
gation of Seasonal Variations of theEskimo
(Mauss and Beuchat [1906] 1979), andMaurice
Halbwachs's ([1942]1958) probing Psychology
of Social Class. But it has rarely been ad
dressed frontally by students of urban inequal
ityand poverty. From Robert Park and Ernest
Burgess toLouis Wirth on down to his postwar
students, theChicago school did posit a corre
spondence between metropolitan morphology
and psychology, with distinct "moral regions"
corresponding roughly to the evolving ethnic
and class quartering of space in theAmerican
city (Hannerz 1983). But its exponents were
so intent on fighting the deep anti-urbanism
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Social Psychology Quarterly
Vol. 73, No. 3, 215-219
? American Sociological Association 2010
. DOI: 10.1177/0190272510377880
^
V^P&niHQS http://spq.sagepub.com
LO?C
Wf?CQUf?NT
University of California, Berkeley
of America's national culture and on elabo
rating the notion of (sub)cultural diversity
that they devoted little attention to the nega
tive synergy between material deterioration,
institutional devolution, and the mental
atmosphere of neighborhoods, in spite of
the explosive racial tensions and conflictive
class transformation roiling the metropolis
under their eyes. More problematic still, they
were oblivious to the role of the state as
a stratifying and classifying agency that
wields a dominant influence on the social
and symbolic order of the city.
Likewise, the classic studies of the crisis of
the dark ghetto during and after the upheavals
of the 1960s addressed collective deprecation
and depression, but they linked them primarily
to pervasive unemployment and continued
racial discrimination inflicted upon lower
class blacks (Clark 1965; Liebow 2003; Glas
gow 1980; Wilson 1987), rather than to then
proximate sociospatial milieu and its distinc
tive ambiance and image. In this regard, they
converged with the resurgent Marxist and
political-economic approaches to urban dispar
ity,which typically treatedcollective represen
tations as secondary efflorescences or reflexes
of material forces rooted in the realm of pro
duction and its disjunctive from theworld of
"community" (Katznelson 1982; Harvey
1989). By the 1990s, the academic tale of
the "underclass" took it as axiomatic that
the inner-city poor were both destitute and
dispirited?indeed, in thehegemonic accounts,
themoral degradation of this segment of the
urban proletariat was not a consequence but
the cause of their predicament. But it neither
documented nor related this state of mind to
the physical and social state of the crumbling
ghetto and their structuraldeterminants.With
few partial and oblique exceptions (e.g., Bour
dieu [1993]1999, Bourgois 1995,Young 2004,
 21 ? SOCIALPSVCHOLOGV
QUf?f?T6RLV
Jamoulle 2008), then, observers of landscapes
of urban dereliction have paid littleattention to
the symbolic valence and psychological tenor
of entrapment at the bottom of the hierarchy
of places thatmake up the city. This essay is
an invitation to fill this gap.
The barren and brutal scenery featured on
this issue's cover is located inWoodlawn,
barely two hundred yards ?rom theUniversity
of Chicago Law School, butworlds away from
it as itwere, and a few blocks east of the box
ing gym that served as hub for the ethno
graphic component of two nested studies, the
one a carnal anthropology of prizefighting as
plebeian bodily craft carried out in 1988?
1991, and the other a comparative sociology
of the dynamics and experience of urban mar
ginality in the black American ghetto and the
urban periphery ofWestern Europe stretched
over the ensuing decade (Wacquant 2004,
2008). It gives a glimpse of thephysical dilap
idation, social decay and stunning depopula
tion thatwere the first palpable features of
everyday life in theAmerican hyperghetto at
century's close. Between 1950 and 1990, the
ranks ofWoodlawnites sank from 81,300 to
a mere 27,500 as their ethnic composition
swung from 62 percent white to 98 percent
black. The number of housing units plummeted
apace, from 29,616 to 13,109, with fully one
fifth of the remaining structures left vacant,
due towaves of building abandonment, arson,
and demolition. As the wage labor market
and thewelfare state both retrenchedfrom the
area in thewake of the rageful riots of 1968 re
sponding to the assassination ofMartin Luther
King, economic involution and organizational
desertification set in. The decline and death
of hundreds of commercial, social, and cultural
establishments,frommachine shops and barber
shops, to hotels and brothels, theaters and res
taurants, churches and banks, clothing outlets
and day-care centers, turned a vibrant neigh
borhood intoan urban wasteland doubly segre
gated by race and class. The bustling
commercial arteryof 63rd Streetmutated into
a lugubrious stripdottedwith theburnt-outcar
casses of stores, boarded-up buildings (scav
enged for metal, fixtures, and bricks), and
vacant lots strewnwith weeds, broken glass,
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and garbage.1 Extending the thrust of the
"New Federalism" dictated by Washington
after 1980, city policy shifted away from sup
porting lower-class residents and districts
toward attracting corporations and beefing up
middle-class amenities. The ensuing break
down of public services in the metropolitan
core undermined the local institutionscentral
to the strategies of preservation of the urban
poor (S?nchez-Jankowski 2008), leaving them
mired in rampant joblessness, crushing pov
erty, and escalating crime, as the predatory
commerce of the streetgrew to fill thevacuum
leftby the ebbing of the formal economy.
How did the racially skewed economic,
demographic, and political forces that com
bined to gut out the erstwhile proud "Black
Metropolis" of Chicago (Drake and Cayton
[1945] 1962), leaving it in a state of infrastruc
tural and institutional abandonment unknown
and unthinkable inWestern European cities
(see Kazepov 2005 for comparison), impress
the consciousness of its residents? Urban des
olation translates into collective demoraliza
tion, registered in feelings of dejection, dread,
and anger, as well as in the inordinatelyhigh
rates of malnutrition and obesity (attested by
the advertisement for "The Big Fish"), alco
holism and drug abuse, depression and assorted
mental afflictions detected in the hyperghetto.
The material crumbling of the neighborhood
is but thephysical manifestation of the sudden
closure of the opportunity structure,incarnated
by the social phantoms roving the street for
whom existence is reduced to sheer subsis
tence. The amputation of objective life chan
ces, in turn, collapses the social horizon of
subjective expectations, leaving little room
between utter despair and oneirism, repre
sented, on the legal side, bymassive participa
tion in the Illinois state lottery and, on the
illegal side, by narcotics distribution and
consumption.
1
This is not a Chicago particularity, as documented
by Vergara's (2003) stunning photographic collage on
the ghostly ruins of the inner cities of New York City,
Newark and Camden (New Jersey), Philadelphia, Balti
more, Gary (Indiana), Detroit and Los Angeles.
 URBAN
D SOlf?TION
ANDSVM60LICD6NIGRATION
217
Anthropologists of place have taughtus that
public space is pregnant with civic meaning
(Low and Smith 2005). In this regard, the
physical disrepair and institutionaldilapidation
of the neighborhood cannot but generate
an abiding sense of social inferiorityby com
municating to itsresidents that theyare second
or third-class citizens undeserving of the atten
tion of city officials and of the care of its agen
cies. This message of social worthlessness is
conveyed not only by the crumbling bridges,
broken sidewalks, leaking sewers, and by the
corrugated hulk of the elevated train line that
would get dismantled a few years later,but also
by the gradual replacement of the social wel
fare treatment of marginality by its punitive
management through the aggressive rolling
out of the police, the courts, and the prison in
and around the hyperghetto, leading to astro
nomical rates of incarceration for lower-class
blacks (Wacquant 2009). It is reinforced by
thedistinctive advertising imagery thatvisually
dominates the streets.Billboards invitepassers
by to seek succor in the embrace of hard liquor
("Vampin' with theBrothers: Colt 45," "Mis
behavin': Canadian Mist," "Be Cool: Smirnoff
Vodka"); they remind them of their present
economic quandary and of the dreary fate
-
awaiting their children ("Get A Job Call
-
Now 19 dollars"; "No School, No Future");
and they invite them to resolve on their own
festeringproblems that should be the responsi
bility of government ("Stop Black on Black
Crime") or yet to collaborate with its repres
sive arm ("Save A Life: Tell On Your Neigh
borhood Drug Dealer").
The ominous placard blaring "Addiction is
Slavery" over a black hand clutching drug
pills reactivates the historic dishonor of servi
tude and links it syntagmatically with urban
to suggest that today's
dispossession?except
derelicts are to blame for their
inner-city
own predicament, insofar as theirbondage is
portrayed as the product, not of subordination
to a (white) master abetted by an indifferent
political machinery, but of a relation of self
to self, in keeping with the neoliberal trope
of individual responsibility thathas percolated
down to the rock bottom of the social order.
Indeed, both whites and the state are the absent
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presence thathaunts the picture by their joint
empirical invisibility and causal liability.
The decrepit physical setting, the un
checked institutionaldysfunction, the grinding
demoralization, and the pervasive aura of col
lective indignity suffusing the hyperghetto
combine to tag its residentswith an "undesired
differentness" whose "discrediting effect is
very extensive" (Goffman 1963:5, 3), that is,
a stigma attached to territory which becomes
superimposed onto and redoubles the stigmata
of race and poverty. People trapped in districts
of social perdition widely perceived as urban
warts, nests of vice and violence where only
the discards of society would brook living,
respond to the taint associated with dwelling
in the regio non grata of theirmetropolis by
deploying four strategies of symbolic self
protection (Wacquant 2007).2 The first is
mutual distancing and the elaboration of
micro-differences:They disavow knowing peo
ple around them and stresswhatever minor per
sonal property can establish separation from
a population and a place theyknow tobe defiled
and defiling. The second strategyis lateral den
igration,which consists in adopting thevituper
ative representations held by outsiders and in
applying these to one's neighbors, effectively
relaying and reverberating the scornful gaze
society trains onto its urban outcasts. A third
reaction to spatial vilification is to retreat into
the private sphere and seek refuge in the
restricted social and moral economy of the
household, while a fourthis to exit theneighbor
hood as soon as one garners the resources
needed todepart (as attestedby theoutmigration
thatcut thepopulation ofWoodlawn by 30 per
cent in the 1980s alone).3
2
See Wacquant (2007) for a discussion of the specif
icities of territorial stigma?by contraposition to what
Erving Goffman characterizes as physical, moral, and
tribal stigmata?and of the thorny dilemmas it creates
for collective claims-making and group formation among
the urban precariat.
3
This is only a temporary or apparent solution: Sub
proletarian families who leave their run-down districts in
theAmerican city do not go very far in social and physical
space. They typically relocate in an adjacent area or in
another tract sporting similar ecological, economic, and
demographic properties (Sharkey 2008).
 218 SOCIf?lPSYCHOLOGY
QUARTERLY
Territorial degradation and defamation a false spatial solution to the real economic
exercise a deleterious influence on the social and political problems destabilizing lower
structure of urban marginality through two class districts.
routes. First, internally, stigmatization feeds This essay has proposed that the social psy
back into demoralization, and the two con chology of place operates in the manner of
verge to encourage residents of districts of der a symbolic cog latchingthemacro-determinants
eliction to disassociate themselves from their of urban political economy to the life options
neighbors, shrinking their networks and re and strategies of the poor at ground level
strictingtheirjoint activities. This social with through themediation of the negative collec
drawal and symbolic disidentification, in turn, tive representations of dispossessed districts
undermine local cohesion, hamper collective that come to be shared by their inhabitants,
mobilization, and help generate thevery atom by city dwellers around them, and by the
ism that the dominant discourse on zones of political and administrative elites which
urban dispossession claims is one of their design and run the range of public policies
inherent features. Second, on the external and services aimed at deprived populations.
front, spatial stigma alters the perception and This points to the need for detailed field
skews the judgements and actions of the studies tracking how the stigma fastened on
surrounding citizenry, commercial operators, neighborhoods of relegation across advanced
and government officials.4Outsiders fear com Western societies?the hyperghetto in the
ing into the neighborhood and commonly United States, the degraded working-class
impute a wide range of nefarious traitsto its in banlieues in France, the "sink estates" in
habitants. Businesses are reticent to open facil the United Kingdom, the krottenwijk in the
ities or to provide services for customers in Netherlands, etc.? twists the nexus of urban
"no-go areas." Employers hesitate to hire job ecology, morphology, and psychology and
applicants who, coming from them, are unre thereby skews the functioning of the institu
flectively suspected of having a laxwork ethic tions that shape the destiny of urban outcasts
and lower moral standards, leading to perva in the era of rising social insecurity.
sive "address discrimination." Most deci
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Loie Wacquant is a professor of sociology at theUniversity ofCalifornia, Berkeley, and researcher

at theCentre de sociologie europ?enne, Paris. AMacArthur Foundation Fellow and recipient of the
2008 Lewis Coser Award of theAmerican Sociological Association, his interestsspan incarnation,
ethnoracial domination, urban inequality, penalization, and social theory. He is a cofounder and past
editor of the interdisciplinaryjournal Ethnography.His books have been translated in some dozen
languages and include Body and Soul: Notebooks ofAn Apprentice Boxer (2004), Urban Outcasts:
A Comparative Sociology ofAdvanced Marginality (2008), Punishing thePoor: The Neoliberal Gov
ernmentof Social Insecurity (2009), and Deadly Symbiosis: Race and theRise of the Penal State
(2010).

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