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Prologue

      The sociologist may find a special instrument of epistemological vigilance in the sociology of knowledge, as the means of enhancing and clarifying the knowledge of error and of the conditions that make error possible and sometimes inevitable.

      Pierre Bourdieu et al., Le Métier de sociologue (1968)

      The Invention of the “Underclass” is an ethnographically grounded case study in the sociology and politics of knowledge. It draws on the conceptual history of Reinhart Koselleck and on the theory of symbolic power and fields of cultural production of Pierre Bourdieu to chart the stunning rise, multi-sited flourishing, and sudden demise of the urban “folk devil” of the closing decades of the twentieth century known as the underclass.¹

Fusing the trope of disorganization with the drive to exoticism, cycling in and out of the social sciences, journalism, and the political-policy-philanthropic field, this woolly and inchoate notion dominated the academic and public debate on race and poverty in the American metropolis roughly from 1977 to 1997. Its advocates, conservatives and liberals alike, claimed that the novel term was needed to capture an unprecedented development: the insidious incubation and cancerous growth of a subpopulation of the black poor, distinct from the traditional lower class, characterized by self-destructive behaviors, social isolation, and cultural deviancy, and responsible for the ravaging of the inner city. During this same period, the category and its demonic imagery were exported to the United Kingdom and continental Europe to agitate the international study of exclusion in the postindustrial metropolis.

Concepts matter

      It turns out, upon close scrutiny, that this “terministic screen” was not a reflection of reality so much as a deflection from reality.² The “underclass” started out as a proto-concept à la Robert K. Merton, that is, “an early, rudimentary particularized, and largely unexplicated idea,”³ but quickly morphed into an instrument of public accusation and symbolic disciplining of the threatening black precariat in the hyperghetto – the novel sociospatial constellation that emerged from the rubble of the communal ghetto of the Fordist era.⁴ It follows that the notion enters into the sociology of urban marginality, not as tool, but as object of analysis, and an object whose study has much to teach us about the political epistemology of dispossession and dishonor in the city as well as about the craft of concept-making more generally.

Inspired by the Begriffsgeschichte of Reinhart Koselleck and the reflexive sociology of Pierre Bourdieu,⁵ the present book offers a kind of “microhistory” of the “underclass,” centered on the period of its hegemony. I pay close attention to the circumstances of the invention, the timing of the diffusion, and the variegated meanings of the term as well as to the institutional positions of those who pushed for and (more rarely) against its deployment. I draw up a genealogy of the notion by tracking its peregrinations across the boundaries of the scientific, journalistic and political fields from the heady days of the progressive 1960s to the somber years of the neoconservative 1980s and the late boom of the neoliberal 1990s.

      Turning to anatomy, I distinguish three faces of the “underclass”: the structural conception coined by the Swedish economist Gunnar Myrdal to forewarn about the dire consequences of postindustrialism for working-class formation; the behavioral view favored by policy researchers and think-tank experts, which quickly diffused to achieve hegemonic status; and the neo-ecological approach developed by the sociologist William Julius Wilson to highlight the role of the neighborhood as multiplier of marginality. Together, these form what I call the “Bermuda triangle of the underclass,” in which the historical nexus of caste, class and state in the metropolis effectively vanishes from sight.⁶

       Conceptual history meets reflexive sociology

      Two strands of social inquiry provide resources for probing the fabrication and fate of a concept: the Begriffsgeschichte of the German historian Reinhart Koselleck and the reflexive sociology of Pierre Bourdieu, grounded in the applied rationalism of Gaston Bachelard and Georges Canguilhem.

Drawing on historical philology and the hermeneutics of his teacher Hans-Georg Gadamer, Koselleck’s “conceptual history” is exegetical; it focuses meticulously on texts to trace the changing semantic charge of “fundamental concepts” (Grundbegriff) and “keywords” (Stichwort) as “indicators” of evolving historical constellations across conjunctures and epochs. It stipulates that language is not “an epiphenomenon of so-called reality” but “a methodologically irreducible guiding authority, without which experiences could not be had, and without which neither the natural nor the social sciences could exist.” It enjoins us to capture “historical arrangements of concepts” synchronically in their “concrete contexts” as well as diachronically as part of the “linguistic arsenal of the entire political and social space of experience” (1); to link them to the political conflicts of the period of their circulation; and to critically evaluate these concepts for their use in social analysis. A study of the “underclass” informed by Koselleck must thus excavate the layers of meaning of the term, check its sources, probe its dissemination, and establish its relation to current sociopolitical issues.

      Koselleck relies on the political theory of Carl Schmitt, for whom politics is fundamentally about the opposition between “friend and enemy,” to develop the notion of asymmetrical counter-concept, by which he designates pairs of opposite notions (hellenes/barbarians, Christians/heathens, Übermensch/Untermensch) that serve at once to build self-identity and to effect the exclusion of others by denying them mutual recognition and social reciprocity: “Asymmetrical counter-concepts have a lot to do with the art of silencing. They are means of attributing things to other people, to those who do not belong to our group, through a binary conceptualization that reduces them to a purely negative semantic field” (2). Koselleck then urges us to ask: who benefits from the use (and abuse) of such pairs? In the case of the “underclass,” what is the “we-group” that forms the tacit component of this asymmetrisch Gegenbegriff(3)?

Reflexivity in social science comes in three varieties (4). Egological reflexivity involves a sociological return onto the person of the researcher in an effort to control how her social position and trajectory (gender, class, ethnicity, age, etc.) affect her intellectual output. Textual reflexivity concerns itself with the ways in which the rhetorical forms employed by the researcher (voice, trope, metaphors, style, etc.) shape her object. Epistemic reflexivity, as advocated by Pierre Bourdieu, aims to control the “scholastic bias” introduced by the categories, techniques, and theories the sociologist uses as well as by the “scientific attitude” itself, which differs fundamentally from the “natural attitude” of everyday life dear to phenomenologists. Accordingly, Bourdieu deploys the “science of science” as vehicle for a reflexivity aiming to increase our collective capacity to design, engage and master properly scientific problematics (5).

      In this regard, the French sociologist extends to social science the principles of historical epistemology, the discontinuist philosophy of science developed by his teachers Bachelard and Canguilhem, according to which science advances through rupture and reconstruction, thanks to an endless work of “rectification of knowledge” already there, and by overcoming “epistemological obstacles,” among them the contamination of scientific thought by ordinary constructs and turns of thought (6). Canguilhem urges us to ground the history of science in the genealogy of “conceptual filiations” to detect how these shape and displace problems over time. The present book is an application, to the thematics of the “underclass,” of the tenets of historical epistemology – a practical exercise in epistemic reflexivity.

Bourdieu takes us beyond historical epistemology with his theory of symbolic power and fields of cultural production, which serves to map the nexus of institutional positions and symbolic position-takings adopted by cultural producers such as artists, journalists, knowledge experts, state officials, and

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