Hetherington Kevin. The Badlands of Modernity

Published in the Taylor & Francis e-Library. 2003. ISBN : 0-203-42887-0 (Master e-book ISBN). (175 pages). Series : International Library of Sociology. Founded by Karl Mannheim. Editor: John Urry.
Subjects : Utopias. Dystopias. Space (Architecture). Spatial behaviour. Human territoriality. Human geography. Social psychology.
The Palais Royal as modernity - Margins, orderings and the laboratories of society - Two castles. Heterotopia as sites of alternate ordering - The utopics of modernity - Secret virtues, Euclidean spaces. Freemasonry, Solomon’s Temple and the lodge - The factory for itself - The space of the horizon.This book is about space and modern society. Social space has become a major focus for social theory over the past decade. Where once it was argued that space had not been taken seriously enough by sociologists, or had not been adequately theorized by human geographers, it is no longer necessary to make such a claim. Cultural geography and to a lesser extent the sociology of space can now be said to have become central to understanding key issues within
social science: social change, modernism and postmodernism, consumption, power, inequality and political and cultural resistance to name just some of them. This book draws on much of this work and hopes to make some small contribution to it. There are, however, one or two things that make this book somewhat different to the ‘new cultural geography’. First, the author's interest here has been more historical than contemporary. The spaces that the author looks at and discuss in relation to questions about modernity are all drawn from the eighteenth century rather than from the present. Second, the book is about modernity rather than postmodernity; indeed one of the things I am trying to say here is that we should still be concerned with modernity because it remains all around us despite very obvious recent cultural changes. Third, whereas the majority of this new theorizing of space has tended to focus on marginality and acts of resistance to the social order, this book is very much about social order. That, however, is not because the author wants to offer a critique of those whose work has tended to focus on marginality, resistance and transgressions of the social order—although there has perhaps been a little too much romanticism involved here at times—but because the author wants to offer a critique of static views of social order that do not take account of the processes, ambiguities and differences involved in trying to think about the social ordering that we have come to call modernity.
The book is organized into seven chapters, and should be seen not specifically as a work of social history but as a work of social theory that is historical in context; a theory of the spatial dynamics of modernity. To say that it is a work of social theory is not, however, to say that the argument is offered in the abstract. The author has tried to use as many cases as possible, not only to illustrate the arguments but also to allow me to develop the theory through them. To that end there are three main examples in this book of the space of modernity: The Palais Royal, a royal palace significant during the French Revolution in 1789; masonic lodges; and early eighteenth-century factories in Britain. This is by no means a comprehensive set of examples and is not intended to be representative either—rather it should be seen as illustrative. The author's interest is in the processes expressed through these sites more than in the sites themselves.