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Scottish Geographical Magazine

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Politicising space and place

Doreen Massey
a a

Department of Geography , Open University , Walton Hall, Milton Keyes, MK7 6AA, UK Published online: 30 Jan 2008.

To cite this article: Doreen Massey (1996) Politicising space and place, Scottish Geographical Magazine, 112:2, 117-123, DOI: 10.1080/14702549608554458 To link to this article: http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/14702549608554458

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Scottish Geographical Magazine voL 112, No, 2, pp 117-123, 1996

Politicising space and place

Doreen Massey
Department of Geography, Open University, Walton Hall, Milton Keyes MK7 6AA, UK
Based on the Annual Wreford Watson Lecture, delivered in Edinburgh in December 1995. With thanks to the Department of Geography at Edinburgh
INTRODUCTION I begin this paper with some stories which have been told elsewhere (Massey, 1995c). I do this because these stories highlight very precisely the problems and conundra which are at issue in any attempt systematically to think through an approach to how we might, both as geographers and as members of society, highlight the intrinsically political nature of the construction of space and place. The first story concerns a Native American chief in the middle of the last century. His ancient society now survived, just about, in the middle of what had by now been transformed into the United States of America. One day this chief was asked by a member of his group what had been the biggest mistake ever made by the past generations' leaders. After thinking for a while, and gazing around him, the chief replied 'We failed to control immigration'. His reply returns to me sometimes when I read reports of t o d a y ' s debates in E u r o p e a b o u t immigration, and especially when I listen to Jean Marie Le Pen, or to xenophobic members of the far right in the United Kingdom. Bringing that story up against today's debates makes clear that, whatever one's view on international migration, it is difficult to base it on any simple notion of universal spatial rights. And, indeed, the opening argument of this paper is that there are few m if any - - abstract, generalisable, 'rules' in what might be called the politics of space and place. I clearly feel sympathy with the Native American chief, but I have no hesitation in my opposition to Le Pen. The point, of course, is that two attitudes are set within very different powergeometries, very different geographies of power. Then there is another pair o f stories. The first is o f coastal Honduras where there are protests against large-scale commercial development, of logging, coffee production, and oil extraction. The 'local people', indigenous people, argue that such developments will destroy the forests of the region, will create pollution, and through monocultural practices will threaten the small-scale variability of the natural-resource base on which their own economy depends. It will, they argue, destroy the place as they know it, and their way of life. The other story in this pair is similar, but it takes place on another continent in a First World city. Here, too, a group of 'local people' is defending its patch. This time, however, these are middle-class people in an expensive suburb (of the kind precisely labelled as 'exclusive'), and what they are resisting is the building
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University for its invitation and hospitality. I shouM also like to thank Allan Findlay, an anonymous referee, Steve Pile and John Allen, for their comments.

of cheaper housing for rent, and a community hostel. Their area is quiet and leafy, and everyone agrees how to behave in it. That is why they are here: the place, and the kind of life these people have constructed over the years, go together. (Just as in Honduras). An invasion of this place by something so different would, these local people argue, 'destroy their way of life'. Once again, it seems, there are no universal spatial rules in politics. Once again what are at issue are very different power-geometries. Would we evaluate the rights of these different 'local people' in the same way? (Both groups want to exclude people they think o f as different.) And what does it mean, anyway, to be 'local'? The wealthy suburbanites lay claim to this status simply on the basis that they are already there. They are certainly not 'indigenous', nor are they the first inhabitants of this place: even in the recent past, the building of their leafy roads has eradicated a place o f farms and farm workers. So is being 'a local' simply a matter of current occupancy? The situation in Honduras is not uncomplicated either. Certainly, these local people were the first to arrive in the place, though even they have not been here for ever, having crossed over the Bering Strait perhaps 15,000 years ago. Moreover, the term 'indigenous' covers a multitude of socio-cultural importations and influences: there has been extensive contact with English pirates, and with Spanish colonisers, and one of the groups is descended from African slaves. In other words, just as with migration so with the definition and the rights of local people: there are no 'rules' which can be elevated into an abstract, generalisable, principle. We are all, somewhere in the past, migrants. None of us is simply 'local'. And all local places and 'local cultures' are, actually, hybrid processes interweaving many influences. Moreover - and this is the real point here m if all this is true then the boundaries which we draw in space, the 'places' we define (indeed all spatial definitions), the decisions about which mobilities to allow and which not, and about how open, or how closed, our places are to be ... all these things, rather than being based on some eternal principles, are in fact expressions of, and exercises in, social power. And that means that we have responsibility for them, for the spaces and places through which we live our lives. In a way, much of this is very obvious. And yet we seem to think about it so little, or we think about it in thoughtless ways. In the rest of this paper I want to

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SCOTTISH GEOGRAPHICAL MAGAZINE explore two, very different, spheres of life for the constructions of space and place which they involve and the power-relations, and thus in the widest sense the politics, which lie behind them. GLOBALISATION AND ITS O T H E R One of the most powerful geographical imaginaries certainly in First World societies - - at the present time, is that of globalisation. There is now a ritual recourse to words and phrases which can be relied on to conjure up the nature of it all: instantaneous communication, global financial trading, the annihilation of space by time, the Internet, the margins invading the centre. It is a mantra which is, perhaps, becoming overused. It is certainly a view o f the world today which through constant repetition is widely regarded - - by western publics, by academics the world over, by national governments looking for an explanation of inaction or an excuse for failure - - as an 'accepted fact'. In this usage, the term 'globalisation' calls up a geographical imagination o f total, unfettered, mobility; it is an imagination of free space, of unbounded space. It is also important to point out immediately that this is a geographical imagination which can be challenged within its own terms. This view of unfettered globalisation is one which ignores gross inequalities of mobility and connection, lines of inequality between both social groups and parts of the world, and it is - - relatedly - - predominantly a view from the vantage point of a relative elite in First World countries. Hirst and Thompson (1996) question even the degree to which the current rhetoric of economic globalisation is backed up by what we know of the global economy. On a number of key indicators they find that rhetoric grossly overdrawn. Moreover, this discourse of globalisation, this imaginative geography, has effects. As Hirst and Thompson point out it has been effective as a reason - - or excuse - - for serious political demobilisation at the level of the nation state (and even above); it has produced a sensation o f political helplessness in relation to wide spheres of economic (and social) intervention. And Slater, too, has argued that the construction and strength of this discursive geography has powerful cultural and political effects, not least in helping to maintain relations of hierarchy between the First World and the poorer countries o f the South (Slater, 1995). In the last few years, the process of economic globalisation has been given a significant push forward by the decisions (not an inevitability) to ratify the Uruguay round of GATT, and to sign the North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA). Such agreements enable goods and investment in future to move more freely around the world. So, there is a powerful discourse of unfettered globalisation and a more halting, unequal and muddled globalisation of material connections, with the progress of the latter being not inconsiderably aided by the strength of the voice of the former. And yet, in play and in vogue at exactly the same time, there is also another imaginative geography of
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the world. It is equally powerful; yet it is in total contradiction to the first. This second is the imagination o f defensible places, of the rights o f local people to their own local places, of a world divided by difference and by boundaries. It is an imagination of nationalisms and localisms. Moreover m and this is at this stage the key point - - some people, perhaps many people, and certainly many powerful people, hold both these conflicting geographical imaginations at once. And so it is that in the UK people on the right of the political spectrum, for instance, argue for 'free trade' as though there were some self-evident right to global movement, the term 'free' immediately implying something good, something to be aimed at. They mobilise this geographical imagination of globalisation as a legitimising backcloth which enables them to have recourse to, to draw upon, an eternal truth of the right to mobility. Capital - - evidently - - must be free to roam. Yet many of those same people also want to prevent, or to minimise, international immigration; they would erect barriers to the free movement of international migrants. Lying behind this second position, of course, is that other imaginative geography - - of the world as home to different peoples, protected by their national borders, with inalienable rights to their 'own' places. It is a geographical imagination not called upon explicitly (for one thing that might raise tricky questions about imperial history and the presence of the British elsewhere), but which is nonetheless powerfully present and effective. Its very implicitness leaves it unquestioned. And so, in one breath such people assume that 'free trade' is akin to some moral virtue; and in the next they pour out venom against asylum-seekers (assumed to be bogus) or 'economic migrants'. 'Economics', it seems, is not a good-enough reason to want to migrate .... what was it they were arguing about capital's free trade? Two conflicting geographical imaginations are here held in play, to enable the mobilisation of two apparently self-evident truths, which can each be called upon when appropriate. No matter that they too - like the geographical imaginations on which they rely are unsustainable in pure form and contradict each other at every turn. The point is that the procedure works. And so, in the era of 'free trade' free migration is largely restricted to the rich and the skilled (Fielding, 1993; Hirst and Thompson, 1996; Sutcliffe, 1995) 1. In this era of 'globalisation' it has been announced in the British press that 'sniffer dogs' can be used with remarkable success to detect potential illegal immigrants from being smuggled in the holds of boats. The very fact of the doubleness o f these geographical imaginations - - their double and contradictory discursive construction - - of the freedom of space on the one hand and the right to one's own place on the other - - works in favour of the already-powerful. The relatively powerful - - we? - - can have it both ways. DOWN MEXICO WAY: A CASE IN P O I N T In 1994, I was in Chiapas, southern Mexico, making a film about contrasting geographical imaginations

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POLITICISlNG SPACE AND PLACE

of the eastern part of that country, from the Yucat~in to the southern border with Guatemala, deep in the Lacand6n jungle 2. In January of that year - - on the very day that N A F T A was signed - - there came into world view an armed uprising by hybrid-Mayan indians of Chiapas. The causes of this outburst of organised anger, after so many years of dulling poverty and repression, had much to do with NAFTA - - that is, with globalisation. As is the case with so many peoples and societies and as the history of 'maps of the world' illustrates so powerfully down the ages (Massey, 1995b) - - the Mayan understanding of the cosmos places them, their society and their region, at the centre of things. The earth is a thin layer between the heavens and the underworld, the connection with nature is close. The notion of the private ownership of land is alien - people belong to the land (la madre tierra) not vice versa. Corn is understood as the source of human life and the central symbol around which much of human life revolves. NAFTA is about free trade and investment between Mexico, the USA and Canada. It is part of that formation of economic blocs which is integral to globalisation at the present time. In the geographical imagination which lies behind NAFTA Chiapas could hardly be further from the centre of the world. The guiding structures of this imaginative geography are those of an evolving international division of labour within the hierarchised spaces of which Chiapas lies very much on the periphery. The clash of these visions in Chiapas in 1994, and the confrontation between the social groups which lay behind them, was acute. It is sufficient here, out of an immense complexity of issues, to pull out two threads as exemplars of the kind of thing which was at stake. The first thread concerns landownership. In its eagerness to see Mexico become part of the freetrading world, the Mexican government changed the country's constitution. Article 27 of that constitution had until that point enshrined the principle of communal landownership fought for by Emiliano Zapata and his forces in the Mexican revolution of 1910-17. By 1991, half of the land surface of the country was held under this form of ownership, and a quarter of the total population (20 million people out of 80 million) lived on such land, called ejidos (Harvey, 1995). It is, o f course, a form of landownership which coheres well with the inherited Mayan notion in these parts that land can not be privately owned. The ejido has become one of the central bases of social organisation in Chiapas. But in order to encourage private ownership and inward investment within Mexico as a whole - - as part of NAFTA - - protection for such land has now been abolished. That is one reason this uprising is called Zapatista. There is also the issue of corn. Corn (maize) is basic to the economy of these ejidos. And it is also more than that. Its centrality within the local cosmology means that it is much more than a crop, and certainly
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much more than a commodity. But under NAFTA, corn is to be traded freely. Over a period of 15 years all tariffs and quotas protecting Mexican production will be abolished. The neighbour immediately to the north - - the USA - - has a huge grain surplus. It is estimated that, over Mexico as a whole and as a result of opening the borders to trade, some 2 million small producers of corn will be unable to survive. In Chiapas the local economy, the local social and symbolic system this 'local place' and 'its way of life' look likely to be severely disrupted. The pushing forward of globalisation will undermine a previous coherence (itself never pure, always hybrid) of place. As a result of this disruption, people will leave the land. Over Mexico as a whole estimates of the number of such migrants range from 700,000 to several millions (Lang and Hines, 1993). They will go to the cities. Of course, they would really like to go to the USA, to 'el norte', to California. But NAFTA will not let them do that. For the North American Free Trade Agreement does not allow for the free movement o f Mexicans across the border. They could of course, and probably will, try to get across by other means. But in California at just this time the local people are passing 'Proposition 187', a law which would deny access to public services, except those of serious emergency, to all 'undocumented migrants'. The Californians, and the wider USA, will do their best to protect 'their place' and 'their way of life' - - just as the Zapatistas are fighting to protect theirs 3. But Californians and Zapatistas are in very different positions within the power-geometry which both holds them together and keeps them apart. And if the Zapatistas fail, the hybrid-Mayan corn-producers of Chiapas will, most likely, end up in unprepared, polluted, Mexico City. There are two final ironies in this story of the gross inequalities of space, place, mobility and territoriality in the current period. First, chief among the fomentors of the discourse o f unfettered globalisation are the IMF and the World Bank. These institutions have been major lenders to Mexico in recent years, given the country's parlous financial state. But their loans (especially those of the World Bank) increasingly demand preconditions, and these on occasions include a reduction of the spatial centralisation of the national economy on Mexico City. Yet it is their own policies which are producing one of the significant engines of such centralisation. That is a measure, in just one small example, of the complexity, and the utterly political nature, of 'globalisation' at the moment. The second irony is that of course 150 years ago California was part of Mexico. Before that it was part of the Spanish Empire (San Jos6, San Diego, San Francisco, Los Angeles). And before that - - the deepest irony of all - - it was settled by relations of the Mayan people of Chiapas, and of the Native American chief with whom we began.
-

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BRIEF T H O U G H T S It is not the intention of this paper to make a particular argument about the politics of free trade and
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migration. Indeed, the most general level of argument is precisely that we should not be trying to construct universal truths of space and place. On the contrary, all battles over space and place are in fact battles over spatialised socialpower. And it is in political positions which address directly questions of that (always already spatialised) social power that answers - - and they will therefore o f necessity be particular answers to (particular) questions of space and place must be sought. There are, however, three significant points which can be drawn out of the discussion so far; and they are three points which emerge out o f each other. First, what is happening in the current period is neither some undifferentiated, unfettered process of globalisation nor an acceptance of the universal rights of local people to their local (regional, national) places. It conforms to neither of the opposing imaginative geographies spelled out at the beginning of this section. What we are facing in this realm of the world economy is a global spatial reorganisation: a re-making of spaces and o f places. It is a r e s t r u c t u r i n g and reterritorialisation of social power. Moreover, it is a re-making in which different groups are very differently implicated. Different places (Chiapas, California, Europe), and different social groups occupy very different locations in this shifting global power-geometry. Just imagine what is happening: some barriers (to trade, for instance) are torn down while others are maintained; new spaces are created (of global trade, of new squatter settlements in Mexico City) while others (the spaces of small-scale agriculture perhaps) are destroyed; some 'identities' come under threat (the hybrid-Mayan cultures o f Chiapas) while those who already have more strength within this shifting power-geometry can wall themselves more tightly in (I think of Fortress Europe). Second, therefore, this is a highly unequal process. At its most extreme, put starkly in order to provoke but not in fact too far from a possible truth, is a vision of a future in which the poor and the relatively powerless are held in place and yet invaded while 'capital' and the already-advantaged - - including First World academics - - have the freedom both to roam the world and, at the same time, successfully to defend our fortress homes. Third, one way (only one way) o f guarding against such a future is to bring out into the open the imaginative geographies on which many current developments depend. For, as has been argued, imaginations of space and place play an important role in the constitution and legitimation of unequal material powers. Absolute imaginative geographies (of globalisation, of nationalism) may form the necessary landscape to which people have recourse in their mobilisation of claims to 'eternal truths' of space and place. Forms o f economic and political power, as was seen above, may be enabled and strengthened by duplicitously c o n t r a d i c t o r y imaginations each guaranteeing an impossible spatial truth. The constitutive intersection of material and imaginative constructions of space and place becomes a significant
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moment in the unequal politics of globalisation and place. SPACES AND PLACES OF H I G H T E C H N O L O G Y But such power-related constructions of space and place are not only found in the fields of international politics and the world economy. Processes by no means dissimilar in the general message that they convey can be found in any sphere of the social. That message concerns our responsibility - - individually and collectively - - for the construction of the places and spaces through which our lives are lived. As part o f a recent research project I have been studying high-tech scientists in British industry.., male scientists doing research and development in privatesector high-tech companies in and around Cambridge, England. These are, in many an excited narrative, the whiz-kids o f modern economic development. They have high status, high rewards, and long (flexible) w o r k i n g d a y s 4 . In the burgeoning literature (popular, journalistic, academic) which surrounds these men (95 per cent of them, in Great Britain, are men) two things stand out about the way in which they are configured spatially: that is, in the dominant imaginative geography of them and their lives. First that they work in a highly globalised part of the economy. And second that this is the kind of employment in which the boundary between home and work is breaking down. In general terms, the geographies of these parts of the economy are imagined as open, flexible, spaces. In the most general o f terms, it is an imaginative geography of mobility and borderlessness - - which locks into that wider vision of free trade and globalisation. And certainly, as we entered these workplaces in the course of our research, it was easy to pick up the signs of international connection. Every day, people here may be in touch with other continents, contracts are negotiated around the world, intellectual exchange leaps easily across national borders, trips abroad are commonplace. There is, of course, an immediate caveat that must be entered to all this. For this globalisation, like most globalisations, is highly specific and focused in the geography of its interconnections. The links to the USA, to Japan, to continental Europe are constantly alive and buzzing. But rare indeed is the contact with Chad, or Mali. Nonetheless, and given that we recognise (yet again) the deep inequality in this version of globalisation, these places are certainly 'globalised'. They are deeply internationally connected (indeed a case could be made that they are constructed out o f international connections). In that sense these high-technology workplaces are the epitome of openness. What is more, there seems to be a simple contrast here. For at night (usually quite late, and after a long day) these scientists go home. And a goodly number o f them go home to a quiet house, even a cottage, in an English country village: the English emblematic 'Home'. This contrast between the place of paid work and the place of the domestic thus mirrors the ability of the powerful both to be internationally connected

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and mobile and to maintain a secure place o f their own. The scientists return f r o m globalised days to local security. It seems, o n the face o f it, to be a clear story of openness versus closedness. A n d it is o f course a story redolent with implications o f gender - - a clear cartography o f gender - - about which m a n y have written (Lloyd, 1984; Morris, 1992; N e w Formations, 1992). It would be an easy and satisfyingly neat story to tell. A n d yet, in fact, the story is not so simple. For s o m e h o w these workplaces are, in another way, very closed spaces. They are, for instance, devoted to a highly specialised activity (thinking; 'Research and Development'). They are designed as celebrations o f that activity. W h e r e other activities have a presence within them (there m a y be a scullery for making snacks or tea or coffee, for instance; sometimes there is even a table-tennis table) those other activities are present precisely in order to increase the effectiveness o f this space in enabling the p e r f o r m a n c e o f its d o m i n a n t activity. There is, in general, quite little evidence o f what might be called 'the rest o f life' - - there are no supermarket bags lying a r o u n d full o f groceries, no non-work reading-matter, none o f the places we visited had a creche. In one place, where the employees had once been accustomed to bring in their offspring when working weekends, the security-guards were now under instruction to prevent the entry o f children 5. In fact, in other words, although these workplaces are globalised (if only very narrowly so) and in that sense ' o p e n ' , they are also specialised and excluding places, closed and defensive, quite tightly sealed against 'nonc o n f o r m i n g ' invasions f r o m the outside world. In contrast, the h o m e s to which these scientists returned seemed by c o m p a r i s o n muddled, multiple, even open and porous. These are not specialised places. Rather, they are a base for multiple people, interests and activities; and they are littered with evidence o f this multiplicity and variety. Specifically, however, and most importantly f r o m the point o f view o f the a r g u m e n t here, they are places invaded by 'his w o r k ' . There are work-related journals on the settee, or beside his chair. In m a n y cases he has an 'office' or a ' s t u d y ' within the house. (Moreover, these 'places within places' are constructed according to a different spatiality f r o m that o f the home. T h e y reflect a spatiality which resembles that of his paid work. While h o m e is in general open to the family, ' d a d d y ' s office' is often forbidden territory to people other t h a n its owner.) A n d there are other kinds o f invasion, too. There are the 'virtual invasions' o f thinking-in-thebath, worrying about w o r k while playing with the children, or on a day out. Interviews with partners gave a flavour o f what goes on: 'He is thinking about it most of the time. He might be digging the garden but he is thinking about it. If he gets back at two in the morning he can go to sleep and just wake up in the middle of the night.., and he has solveda problem in his sleep, or he will.., have to go and look at textbooks and things'. or again .... Partner: 'Well, wherever (we) go, long journeys in the car if we are going on holiday or down to see his mother in (south of England)... I drive; because I can't read or do anything in the car because I get travel sick. But he will have a pad of paper and be scribbling or reading photostatted articles,
or...'

D M: 'But not talking to you or the kids?' Partner: 'He would answer the children if they spoke to him. Oh yes, he is not totally wrapped up in it'. It is clear then, that what we have here, in h o m e and work, are indeed two very different kinds o f spaces. But their differentiation does not run along the clear lines o f openness versus closedness. Moreover, the point here is not to judge between the construction o f these spaces and certainly not to glorify one (perhaps the h o m e , the sphere o f the domestic) at the expense o f the other. The initial aim is simply to explicate the complicated nature o f their difference from each other. But the further aim is to point out that there is here no simple blurring o f the b o u n d a r y between (his) paid work and home. Rather what there is is a huge inequality; a one-way invasion o f ' h o m e ' by ' w o r k ' . His ' w o r k ' , on this account, has remained a fortress, but one which increasingly invades the space o f home. FORMS OF POWER The next question must be: why are things so? W h y is this just a one-way invasion? W h y is one space so m u c h stronger than the other? The kinds o f social power which construct these spaces are clearly different f r o m in the case o f the international arena o f economics and politics. But this is, nonetheless, an issue o f power: this b o u n d a r y - - between work and h o m e - - is one which was frequently fought over, be it t h r o u g h gentle and despairing reminders or o p e n confrontation. The first and most evident conduit o f power in this unequal relation between h o m e and work is the force o f the wage relation. The men have to perform in order to keep their jobs, and adequate p e r f o r m a n c e in this part o f the e c o n o m y is not achieved simply by being f r o m 9 until 5 in the office. As one partner o f a scientist reflected: 'I just had to accept it, it made me a little bit fed up ... But there is not a lot you can do about it... you have to put up with it... as they said to him 'If you are not interested there's plenty more people who are'. M a r k e t / c o m m e r c i a l relations, in other words, are here seen as overriding affective and n o n - m a r k e t relations. This is clearly a significant element in the explanation. Yet, it will be argued here, it is insufficient. The ' e c o n o m i c ' , or 'capitalist social relations', cannot provide a full a c c o u n t o f what is going on. A second element in any explanation must take account o f the character o f this employment. These are jobs devoted to thought, to R and D, to the production o f 'knowledge'. A n d in western society the production o f knowledge (science) has for long been associated with abstraction f r o m the material world: with the classic separation o f Mind f r o m B o d y 6. In m a n y ways, these spaces o f R and D within British industry reflect that deep-rooted philosophy. It is a structuring influence which registers at a n u m b e r o f distinct spatial scales. The workplaces themselves are

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temples to 'high-level' thought which might somehow be demeaned by the intrusion of the domestic. The inheritors of the specialised (and deeply gendered) spatiality of monasteries and of the early all-male universities, these are spaces for which the 'being setapart' for the production of knowledge is crucial. The same is true at the more intimate scale of the study or office within the space of the domestic. Wigley, in his history of the architecture of the western home, writes of such Spaces that 'the first truly private space was the m a n ' s study, a small locked r o o m o f f his bedroom which no-one else ever enters, an intellectual space beyond that o f sexuality' (Wigley, 1992:347 (my emphasis). This is the closed, defended, masculine space of immaterial knowledge. One female partner, indeed, referred to her scientist-husband's study as 'his m o n k ' s cell'. Finally, this spatial isolation of the activities of the mind can be seen also at a wider scale. Thus science parks - - where m a n y companies o f this kind are located - - in general only accommodate R and D. Their founding planning documents explicitly exclude physical, and especially manual, blue collar production. All these spaces, then, are designed to isolate the activities of the mind. Moreover they are designed to celebrate those activities. Conversely, they are elite spaces because they are spaces of the mind. This is the world of Hesse's Glass beadgame (1945/1972). In the dualism of mind and body, it is the mind that has status and priority. It is the mind which excludes the body, and not vice versa. 'Woman's task is to preserve the sphere of the intermingling of mind and body, to which the Man of Reason will repair for solace, warmth and relaxation. If he is to exercise the most exalted form of Reason, he must leave soft emotions and sensuousness behind; woman will keep them intact for him' (Lloyd, 1984: 50, my emphases). And so it is - - maybe - - that, while it is assumed that you can think about work while playing with the children, to be done properly work itself demands total concentration.., the children must be excluded. And yet the explanation, for the one-way-hess of the invasion of home by work, cannot rest there either. Not all places of intellectual work have to be like this. One or two of the female partners of scientists also worked in intellectual environments, but spoke differently about their workplaces: '(children) come in all over the place, and make a mess with my computer, and there are also (other) people with children around, and also colleagueswill invitechildren to see different things'. What seems to be different about the culture of high technology which is under investigation here is its masculinity. This is masculinity of a particular form, based a r o u n d abstraction, science, logic and rationality. This is further elaborated in Massey (1995a). The argument here is that this culture, strongly imbued with the dualisms discussed above, plays a significant role in structuring the spaces of high technology. Before going further it must be pointed out that, in fact of course, the high-tech workplace is not such a palace of pure reason as the commonly-accepted discourse (and my own earlier comments in this paper) would have us believe. For one thing, these men 'love' their work; they often have a quite passionate attachment to it. The workplace, therefore, m a y also be read as a physical embodiment of, and containing, a considerable emotional investment in rationality. Seidler (1994) takes this point further, arguing that m e n ' s emotional attachment to a particular f o r m of reason can itself subvert any easy identification between them and rationality. What can be added here to Seidler's argument is that it is therefore equally difficult to construct spaces of pure rationality. Try as they might to do so, their builders will always find erupting within such spaces precisely what they are trying to exclude. Indeed, in the sense that these places are celebrations of the love o f Reason, their very framing architecture is expressive of ' e m o t i o n ' . From another direction, Cockburn (1985) has commented on the importance of 'intuition' in this supposedly rational and logical labour process. (Although, of course, in the cause of preserving masculinity, the naming of insight as intuition was rejected: 'Intuition', I (Cockburn) asked, ' I s n ' t that supposed to he a woman's quality?' 'Ah, well', this engineer responded quickly ' P r o b a b l y it isn't intuition. It's probably just that we know the machine' ... (Cockburn, 1985:197). The point is that these places are simultaneously materially and imaginatively constructed, and the two processes intersect. We saw in the previous section that the ' n a t i o n ' , for instance, does not have the 'purity' which is often discursively attributed to it. But its material bounding, both based on and legitimised by that discourse, may be an attempt to construct it. In the same way, the hegemonic discursive construction of the high-tech workplace as a palace of pure rationality both consolidates the degree to which it materially is so, and forms the basis for the legitimation of the status of such places, and of their power in relation to other spaces. In other words, thinking of their work in that way (as that particular conjunction of knowledge/space/ power) may be important to these scientists in the construction of their identities as scientists, and thus as (a particular variant of) masculine. And, indeed, this exclusion of the other of 'science' was apparent in a number of ways. In interviews, for instance, other sides of life w such as doing domestic labour - - was sometimes treated briefly and dismissively, in contrast to the sometimes generous and elaborate descriptions of their scientific labours (Massey, 1995a). Such attitudes are important in indicating what is considered acceptable in the presentation o f a scientific identity. The response m a y not be 'true' - - the scientist might really go home and get tremendous fulfilment out o f doing the dusting - - but, in the presentation of his identity, not only is identification with scientific work strong and positive, but also it seems equally important for him to establish what is not part of his picture of himself. Moreover - - and this is the point here - - the construction o f the spaces o f his work, their specialisation and their closure, mirror, confirm,

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POLITICISING SPACE AND PLACE

celebrate a n d reinforce b o t h the separations a n d the b o u n d e d n e s s o f this identity a n d the status a n d power of this side of life in relation to others. T h e (materially a n d discursively constructed) n a t u r e o f the spaces o f high-tech work c o n f i r m s a n d protects the specialised (masculine) identity o f 'the scientist' just as m u c h as the closure o f frontiers to i n t e r n a t i o n a l m i g r a n t s is meant to protect the essential identity (when, o f course, there is n o such thing) o f n a t i o n a l cultures. F o u r t h l y , a n d finally, the disparity in strength between the spaces o f work a n d h o m e operates through the on-going, daily, u n e q u a l relations between already-established genders. A n d we heard in o u r interviews the r e s i g n a t i o n of... 'it's just not worth having a row about it. In the end, I put up with it'. The contrast, t h e n , in the ' s t r e n g t h ' of the spaces of work a n d o f h o m e derives f r o m their c o n s t r u c t i o n t h r o u g h f o u r (at least) c o n d u i t s o f power: that o f the wage relation, that asserted t h r o u g h the c o n s t i t u t i o n of knowledge, the power e m b e d d e d in the p r o d u c t i o n a n d m a i n t e n a n c e o f this f o r m o f m a s c u l i n i t y , a n d power relations between male a n d female genders. ' P o l i t i c i s i n g ' the o r g a n i s a t i o n of these spaces a n d places w o u l d entail addressing t h e i r e m b e d d e d n e s s in all these distinct, t h o u g h interlocking, m a p s of power. CONCLUSIONS So, the kinds o f power which construct these spaces of daily life - - of h o m e a n d work - - are m u l t i p l e a n d are different f r o m the sources o f power in the tale of g l o b a l i s a t i o n a n d the constructed identities o f place. Nonetheless, the p o i n t is the same: that we m a k e the spaces a n d places t h r o u g h which we live our lives; the m a k i n g o f such spaces a n d places is t h o r o u g h l y ' p o l i t i c a l ' , in the widest sense o f that word. A recognition of this, however, m e a n s that we have responsibility for the c o n s t r u c t i o n o f place a n d space. A n d this is a t o u g h assignment. For, as this article has attempted to d e m o n s t r a t e , there are few, if any, absolute, universal, spatial rules. ' T h e locals' are n o t always right; open spaces are n o t always feasible. T o argue always for the local against the m o b i l e / g l o b a l w o u l d n o t only be to defend the people o f H o n d u r a s or Chiapas but also to legitimise the closing of borders a r o u n d the First W o r l d . But, equally, to argue u n e q u i v o c a l l y for open spaces a n d open places m a y leave the less p o w e r f u l places (the space o f the domestic, the places of i n d i g e n o u s cultures) open to i n d i s c r i m i n a t e i n v a s i o n a n d d i s r u p t i o n . E v e n as I felt critical of the scientists' exclusive workplaces I r e m e m b e r e d Virginia W o o l f ' s call for a r o o m o f her own. As was said earlier, all battles over space a n d place are battles over spatialised social power, a n d it is the n a t u r e , sources a n d structured inequities o f that power which m u s t be central to analysis a n d to position-taking. Moreover, that power in and over the c o n s t r u c t i o n o f space a n d place is at the same time material a n d imaginative, the two not simply m a p p i n g o n to each other b u t intersecting a n d cross-cutting in complex ways. A n d in this complex process of c o n s t r u c t i o n , t h r o u g h our central c o n c e r n with place a n d space, geographers could play a n i m p o r t a n t role. NOTES 1 And, of course, the undocumented. An elaboration of this point would lead to a challenge to another of the keystones in the current discourse of globalisation - - that image of the margins invading the centre (Spivak, 1992). 2 This film Imagining new worlds was produced by Eleanor Morris for the Open University Production Centre. It is currently being shown twice a year on BBC2. 3 Proposition 187 looks likely to be turned out by the courts as unconstitutional, but the closure of the border to free Mexican migration under NAFTA remains. 4 This project was funded by the ESRC, grant no: R000233004 'High-status growth? Aspects of home and work around hightechnology sectors' and was carried out at the Open University, as part of the wider South East Programme, with Henry, now at the Department of Geography, University of Birmingham. Further details of the work can he found in Henry and Massey (1995) and Massey (1995a and 1995b). We interviewedmanagers or personnel officers of 29 companies, and 59 of their male scientificR and D employees. We also interviewedthe partners, in the 60 per cent of cases where these existed, of the scientists. 'Partner' was defined in terms of cohabitation; all of the partners identified were female. The quotations used in this paper are drawn from these interviews and are selected for citation here as illustrative of the more general point being argued. All the quotations are from different interviews. 5 The mention of security guards reminds us that others, apart from scientists,work in these spaces. These are, however, spaces defined by the scientistsand their activities.It is their spatialities, and their space-times, which are dominant. 6 The apparent influence of dualist ways of thinking in the structuring of these parts of the economy in countries such as the UK is explored in Massey, 1995a and forthcoming. REFERENCES Cockburn, C. (1985) Machinery o f dominance: women, men and technical know-how. London: Pluto Press. Fielding, A. (1993) 'Migrations, institutions and politics' in R. King (ed.) Mass migration in Europe. London: Belhaven, pp. 40-64. Harvey, N. (1995) Rebellion in Chiapas: rural reforms and popular struggle, Third World Quarterly 16(1):39-73. Henry, N. and Massey, D. (1995) Competitive times in high tech, Geoforurn 26(1): 49-64. Hesse, H. (1945) The glass bead game. London: Penguin. (1972 edition). Hirst, P. and Thompson, G. (1996) Globalization in question. Cambridge: Polity Press. Lang, T. and Hines, C. (1993) The new protectionism. London: Earthscan. Lloyd,G. (1984) The man o f Reason: "male' and "female" in western philosophy. London: Methuen. Massey,D. (1995a) Masculinity, dualisms and high technology, Transactions o f the Institute o f British Geographers 20: 487-99. Massey, D. (1995b) 'Imagining the world' in J. Allen and D. Masey (eds.) Geographical worlds. Oxford: Oxford University Press with the Open University, pp.5-51. Massey, D. (1995c)Making spaces, Soundings 1: 193-208. Morris, M. (1992) 'Great moments in social climbing: King Kong and the human fly' in B.Colomina (ed.) Sexuality and space. New York: Princeton Architectural Press, pp. 1-51. New Formations (1992) Special issue on 'Home', 17. Seidler, V. (1994) Unreasonable men: masculinity and social theory. London: Routledge. Slater, D. (1995) Challenging western visions of the global: the geopolitics of theory and North-South relations, European Journal o f Development Research 7(2): 366-388. Spivak, G.C. (1992) 'Poststructuralism, marginality, postcoloniality and value' in P. Collierand H. Geyer-Ryan,(eds.) Literary theory today. Cambridge, Polity. Sutcliffe, B. (1995) 'Un derecho a desplazarse?' in J.P. Alvite (ed.) Racismo, antiracismo e inmigraci6n. Tercera Prensa -Hirugarren Prentsa S.L.: Donstia, pp. 15-30. Wigley, M. (1992) 'Untitled: the housing of gender' in B. Colomina (ed.) Sexuality and space. New York: Princeton Architectural Press, pp. 327-89.

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