A lot of us, I think, implicitly think of space as a kind of flat surface out there -we ‘cross space’ – and space is therefore devoid of temporality: it is without time, it is without dynamism, it is a kind of flat, inert given.
David Edmonds: Doreen Massey has made her reputation by
studying space, not outer space, space here on planet Earth. Professor Massey
is a geographer who wants us to rethink many of our assumptions about space,
including the assumption that it is simply something we pass through. She
believes that an analysis of spatial relations between, for example, people,
cities, jobs, is key to an understanding of politics and power.
Nigel Warburton: Doreen Massey welcome to Social Science Bites.
Doreen Massey: Hello. Thank you.
Nigel Warburton: The topic we are going to focus on is space. Now, some
people might think that that’s a topic for physicists or architects, why is it
a topic for geographers?
Doreen Massey: I think the
immediate way to respond is that if history is about time, geography is about
space. What I do in geography is not space meaning ‘outer space’, or space
meaning ‘atomic space’, or any of that; it is space as that dimension of the
world in which we live. Whereas historians concentrate on the temporal
dimension, how things change over time; what geographers concentrate on is the
way in which things are arranged- we would often say ‘geographically’, – I’m
here saying ‘over space.’
Nigel Warburton:So, in your own work about space what do you focus on?
Doreen Massey: Right, well one of
the things in the sense was anger: I got really annoyed with the rest of the
social sciences, and indeed with philosophers, paying so much attention to
time. And space became a kind of residual dimension: it’s always ‘time and
space’. So time is the dimension of change, and of dynamism, and of the life we
live, and all the rest of it; and space became the dimension that wasn’t all of
that. And a lot of us, I think, implicitly think of space as a kind of flat
surface out there -we ‘cross space’ – and space is therefore devoid
of temporality: it is without time, it is without dynamism, it is a kind of
flat, inert given. Foucault wrote in the later part of his life that, yes, he
thought we’d often been thinking of space like that and that was wrong, and I
agree with Foucault in that later moment.A lot of what I’ve been trying to do over the all too many years when I’ve
been writing about space is to bring space alive, to dynamize it and to make it
relevant, to emphasize how important space is in the lives in which we live,
and in the organization of the societies in which we live. Most obviously I
would say that space is not a flat surface across which we walk; Raymond
Williams talked about this: you’re taking a train across the landscape – you’re
not traveling across a dead flat surface that is space: you’re cutting across a
myriad of stories going on. So instead of space being this flat surface it’s
like a pincushion of a million stories: if you stop at any point in that walk
there will be a house with a story. Raymond Williams spoke about looking out of
a train window and there was this woman clearing the grate, and he speeds on
and forever in his mind she’s stuck in that moment. But actually, of course,
that woman is in the middle of doing something, it’s a story. Maybe she’s going
away tomorrow to see her sister, but really before she goes she really must
clean that grate out because she’s been meaning to do it for ages. So I want to
see space as a cut through the myriad stories in which we are all living at any
one moment. Space and time become intimately connected.
Nigel Warburton: If space isn’t just an empty stage, that is it’s
somehow inhabited, it’s imbued with all kinds of stories and memories and
events, how can you study it?
Doreen Massey: There’s a million
ways to answer that, but I think one way is to say that it raises some of the
most acute questions. If time is the dimension in which things happen one after
the other, it’s the dimension of succession, then space is the dimension of things
being, existing at the same time: of simultaneity. It’s the dimension of
multiplicity. We’re sitting here, and it’s somewhere around midday in London.
Well, at this moment it is already night in the Far East, my friends in Latin
America are probably just stirring and thinking about getting up, and space is
that cut across all of those dimensions. Now what that means is that space is
the dimension that presents us with the existence of the other; space is the
dimension of multiplicity. It presents me with the existence of those friends
in Latin America and that means it is space that presents us with the question
of the social. And it presents us with the most fundamental of political of
questions which is how are we going to live together.
Nigel Warburton:So would it be fair to summarize that as you are
saying that space isn’t about physical locality so much as relations between
human beings?
Doreen Massey: Exactly. I mean,
we don’t think of time as being material, time is ethereal and virtual and
without materiality. Whereas space is material: it is the land out there. But
there’s a dimension of space that is equally abstract and just a dimension, so
that’s the way in which I want to think about it. Space concerns our relations
with each other and in fact social space, I would say, is a product of our
relations with each other, our connections with each other. So globalization,
for instance, is a new geography constructed out of the relations we have with
each other across the globe. And the most important thing that that
raises if we are really thinking socially, is that all those relations are
going to be filled with power. So what we have is a geography which is in a
sense is the geography of power. The distribution of those relations mirrors
the power relations within the society we have.
Nigel Warburton:Could you give an example of that?
Doreen Massey: Well, look at the
city in which we’re sitting, London. The power relations that run out from here
around the world from that square mile and Canary Warf are extraordinary.
London is a key node, if you like, within the globalisation that has taken
place over the last thirty years, the financial globalisation – the dominance
of finance within the organisation of the global economy. And London has been
absolutely at the centre of that, not just that some of the most powerful
institutions are there, and they are, but also in the sense that it was there
that a lot of this neo-liberal economics within which we now which live was
imagined in the first place. And London has been part of the export, the
imagination in the first place and then the export, of that way of thinking
around the world. So its power is more than economic, it’s also political and
ideological.
Nigel Warburton:Now you’ve given a description of power relations in
the city, but how is that political?
Doreen Massey: Well there’s a
number of ways in which I think that way of looking at globalisation can lead
you into asking political questions which is more what I want to do. I mean,
one thing is that it enables you, if you like, to map power relations. I mean
I’m not against power – power is the ability to do things. What I do find that
we should be critical of in the social sciences is the unequal distribution of
power: power of some groups over others, power of some places over others. And
so one might want to be critical and indeed I am very critical of the role of
the city of London in its domination of economies and economic ideologies, if
you like, around the rest of the world. So, one way in is a kind of empirical
descriptive way of saying ‘look this power is in globalisation at the moment to
unequally distributed’. But there’s another way, which I think relates back to
the very way in which we think about space. The way in which we look at
globalisation at the moment: it turns space into time. For instance, we are
often using a terminology of we are ‘developed’ countries, the countries behind
us as it were, are ‘developing’ and then you’ve got ‘underdeveloped’ countries.
Now what that does is to convert contemporaneous difference between those
countries into a single linear history. It’s saying that that country over
there – lets say it’s Argentina a developing country, isn’t a country at the
same moment which is different, but it’s a country which is following our
historical path to become a ‘developed’ country like us. So in a sense we are
denying the simultaneity, the multiplicity of space that I want to insist on,
and turning all those differences into a single historical trajectory.
Now that has a lot of political effects, I mean the most important one is
that it says that there is only one future and that’s being a ‘developed’
country and so Argentina must follow the way we are going. Well, as it happens
Argentina right now does not want to follow the way we are going, there is a
lot of alternatives in Latin America that is saying ‘we don’t want to be
‘developed’ like you are developing. We want a different model which is more
egalitarian, more communitarian, and so forth’. But that way of turning space
into time, turning geography into history is a way of denying the possibility
of doing something different. If we take space seriously as the dimension of
multiplicity then it opens up politics to the possibility of alternatives.
Nigel Warburton: So what you’re saying is, is there is almost a
Gestalt shift that you’re trying to encourage by describing the world in a
particular way that reveals to your readers and to the people who hear you a
different way of understanding the same phenomena?
Doreen Massey: Absolutely. If we
took space seriously as a dimension that we create through our relations which
are all full of power and as a dimension which presents us with the
multiplicity of the world and refuse to align them all into one story of
developments, then we really re-imagine the world in a different way, it
presents us with different political questions, I think it opens up our minds.
Nigel Warburton:You’ve criticised this notion of ‘developing’
countries and ‘underdeveloped’ countries and the implication that this is all
in one trajectory towards ‘developed’ countries on the model that we in the
West have. What can you do to persuade those who believe in that story? I mean
how can you convince somebody who is in the grip of that ideology that they’re
wrong?
Doreen Massey: It’s a problem
that a lot of us have, isn’t it, that people get trapped in imaginations. It’s
a question of challenging common sense, and the hegemonic common sense at the
moment includes that notion that we are stuck with this. And my stuff about
space is one of the arguments that I hope will help to break us out of this
feeling that we can’t do anything about it. Now, the way you do that is you do
little things like this: I talk all over the place, I write, I go to and work
with countries that are trying to do something different.
Nigel Warburton:Is it just a case that each society wants to project
its version of reality onto the rest of the world?
Doreen Massey: Yes. I’m not
wanting to attribute a nefarious kind of intentions to people. I think I would
say two things: one is that that way of thinking ‘one road’ if you like, is
very classic to modernism and modernity generally on left and right of the
political spectrum. That there is a thing called ‘development’, there is a
thing, one thing called ‘progress’: it’s what we have called grand narratives,
it was true of some versions of Marxism too that from feudalism we would go to
capitalism, to socialism and to communism. But it’s also highly political and
very much a product of power relations – there is no doubt that the banks in
the City and the leaders of the Western world want the rest of the world
precisely to follow and to be dominated by our model of the world. I mean, the
USA and the UK are involved in absolutely trying to force other countries into what
they call democracy, which usually means market societies. So there’s both an
overall Zeitgeist which I think is a hundred years old, and which in the social
sciences we have criticised a lot, the whole critique of grand narratives. And
there is a particular political dimension in which the powerful do want to
dragoon the rest into following their path.
Nigel Warburton:Are there other ways in which space and politics link
together?
Doreen Massey: There’s loads of
ways. For instance Occupy, do you remember Occupy London, that group of tents?
I got a little bit involved, in fact I gave a couple of lectures in the
university tent, and what struck me very strongly was how spatial their
politics was. For one thing there was a huddle, a very unpretentious low huddle
of tents between vast stone edifices of God and Mammon on each side of it. And
almost the very unpretentiousness of those tents were an affront to the
pretentiousness of Saint Paul’s and the London Stock Exchange. The very
physicality of that raised an impertinent finger to the complacent spaces of
the Establishment and neo-liberalism. So there was something really symbolic I
thought about the very placing of the thing itself and its material form. And
even though it was so, so tiny, I think that’s the reason it had to go. Somehow
in it’s very presence it was asking questions that were too deep to ask.
Nigel Warburton:Occupy even by its name was about space as well, it’s
really interesting the way they chose the word, to occupy space.
Doreen Massey: That’s right. And
what I think they did was to create a new kind of space. One of the things that
neo-liberalism – if one can use that awful word – has done to our cities, is to
privatise a lot of what was public space, and that’s one of the things they occupied
people, and lots of other people have complained about. And, of course, they
tried to set up the camp outside the exchange and were told they couldn’t
because that square is in fact, although you would not know from looking at it,
private space. Now the place where they eventually set up their camps was in a
sense public space in the sense that it wasn’t private: people passed through
every day and all the rest of it. But that’s public space in a very loose sense
of the word. What I think Occupy did which fascinated me was to create public
space in a more meaningful sense because they created a space, and people
didn’t just pass by each other on the way to work or shops or whatever, they
talked, they conversed, they argued. There was argument going on in the tent,
there were people on the steps of Saint Paul’s arguing with each other. While I
was there people who had nothing to do with the occupation came up to me and
asked questions and talked and it seemed to me that what they managed briefly
to create there was a really public space, which means it was a place for the
creation of a public, of politically engaged subjects if you like, of people
who would talk to each other about the wider world. And it seemed to me that
that was a real creation of a space of the kind that we need a lot more of. A
space that brings us together to talk and to argue about the kind of future
world we want. So it seems to me that they were invented both in their location
and in the kind of space that they created.
Nigel Warburton:Do you think geography as a subject can be a catalyst
for this kind of activity?
Doreen Massey: I think it can, I
mean, the greater appreciation of geography and why it matters, and why in the
end space is utterly political, seems to me to be very, very important. I mean,
look at this country at the moment there’s a huge divide between the north and
the south of the country. OK, everybody knows that. What I would argue is that
that matters, it changes the society in which we live: there are different
cultures between north and south, there are different politics between north
and south. But even more, it makes the inequality between the different people
in this country even worse. So people in the south who happen to own houses are
making money hand over fist, far more than they are making from their jobs just
by the rise in the price of their houses. My friends in Liverpool and
Manchester aren’t making that money, and so the very division between north and
south is t increasing the inequality between us: geography matters. Or again,
if you think about gender in that whole history of the division between private
spaces and public places has been really crucial in the long history of gender
difference between men and women, and the confinement for centuries of women to
private space and men being the public figures in the public space.
Nigel Warburton:Geography is usually thought of as one of the social
sciences, I wonder if you think of yourself as a social scientist?
Doreen Massey: I do, because
that’s the way in which I have worked within geography, and in fact a lot of my
life has been spent trying to urge the social sciences to take geography more
seriously. Geography is a very multidisciplinary discipline in that sense: we
do engage a lot with sociologists and with economists. But one of the things
that I like most about geography is the fact that it also includes people who
are, if you like, natural scientists: people who study rivers and mountain
formation and the Antarctic, and and, and… And I think there is within
geography the possibility of bringing together the social and the natural
sciences more than we have historically done, and there are vast differences
between them, and the process is very hard, but we need to do that, I think. In
an age which is faced by environmental problems such as we have, with climate
change, with pollution questions, which are utterly social too, then I do think
that the natural and the social sciences need to talk to each other more. And
geography, maybe, is one of the places that could happen – one of the reasons
that I love the discipline.
Nigel Warburton: Doreen Massey, thank you very much.
Doreen Massey: Thank
you.
