The Possibilities of A Politics of Place Beyond Place A Conversation With Doreen Massey (Bond and Featherstone, 2009)

Scottish Geographical Journal
ISSN: 1470-2541 (Print) 1751-665X (Online) Journal homepage: http://www.tandfonline.com/loi/rsgj20
The Possibilities of a Politics of Place Beyond

Place? A Conversation with Doreen Massey
Doreen Massey , Human Geography Research Group , Sophie Bond & David
Featherstone
To cite this article: Doreen Massey , Human Geography Research Group , Sophie Bond
& David Featherstone (2009) The Possibilities of a Politics of Place Beyond Place? A
Conversation with Doreen Massey, Scottish Geographical Journal, 125:3-4, 401-420, DOI:
10.1080/14702540903364443
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Published online: 07 Dec 2009.
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Scottish Geographical Journal
Vol. 125, Nos. 34, 401420, SeptemberDecember 2009
The Possibilities of a Politics of Place

Beyond Place? A Conversation with
Doreen Massey
Downloaded by [UVA Universiteitsbibliotheek SZ] at 14:40 01 June 2016
DOREEN MASSEY with the HUMAN GEOGRAPHY RESEARCH GROUP,

edited by SOPHIE BOND & DAVID FEATHERSTONE
Department of Geographical and Earth Sciences, University of Glasgow, Glasgow, UK
ABSTRACT What follows is the edited and footnoted transcript of a conversation between
Doreen Massey, recipient of an Honorary Doctorate from University of Glasgow in July 2009,
and the Human Geography Research Group in the Department of Geographical and Earth
Sciences, University of Glasgow, to mark this occasion. Themes explored include Doreen
Masseys early work and inuences ranging from geology to Marxism and feminism; recent
political engagements in Venezuela; the politics of place beyond place; climate change and
transnational solidarities; and being political and an academic in the current conjuncture.
KEY WORDS: Doreen Massey, geography, place, political, Venezuela
Introduction
On 2 July 2009, as part of the celebrations of the Centenary of Geography in
Glasgow, Professor Doreen Massey was presented with an Honorary Degree of
Doctor of Letters from the University of Glasgow (Figure 1). Doreen Massey has
been at the forefront of innovative geographical scholarship for over three decades.
Her work has re-dened the common-sense understandings in the discipline of key
concepts such as space and place. She has creatively engaged with and reworked
dierent theoretical traditions such as Marxism, feminism and post structuralism.
Doreen Masseys work has always been driven by a strong political engagement
which has dovetailed with her theoretical and geographical interventions. Her
reconguring of dominant ways of understanding space and place has allowed
dierent ways of envisaging the world and politics and has opened up possibilities
for rethinking political activity. Her intellectual work has been formed in relation to
active participation in political activity, such as the womens movement in the 1970s
and the Greater London Council in the early 1980s. In the 1990s she co-founded
Soundings: a Journal of Politics and Culture with Stuart Hall and Michael Rustin.
Correspondence Address: David Featherstone, Department of Geographical and Earth Sciences, East
Quadrangle, University of Glasgow, Glasgow G12 8QQ, UK. Email: David.Featherstone@ges.gla.ac.uk.
Sophie Bond. Email: sophie.bond@vuw.ac.nz
ISSN 1470-2541 Print/1751-665X Online 2009 Royal Scottish Geographical Society

DOI: 10.1080/14702540903364443
402 A Conversation with Doreen Massey
Figure 1. Doreen Massey, on the occasion of receiving an Honorary Degree at the University
of Glasgow, 2nd July, 2009
Most recently her concept of power geometries has been taken up as one of the ve
motors of the Bolivarian revolution in Venezuela.
While Doreen was in Glasgow she kindly agreed to have a conversation with the
Human Geography Research Group about her life and work. This wide ranging
conversation forms the basis of this interview. The interview develops a strong sense
of how important inuences beyond the academy have been to Doreens political
identity and to her theoretical engagements. She insists, contrary to restrictive
government prescriptions of policy relevance, that it is important to see political
struggles not as outside or beyond our work as geographers. Rather, she avers that
they should also be our struggles and part of our activity. She argues for the
importance of developing theoretical engagements in a grounded, but radical and
critical way. A commitment to critically understanding and engaging with
conjunctures and political moments in space and time is also a key concern of the
interview. The interview concludes with some important remarks about the necessity
of politicizing the current economic crisis.
Early Work and Inuences

Leah Gibbs:
I wonder if you could start by just telling us a little bit about the sorts of things that
rst inspired and excited you to be involved in geography?
Doreen Massey:
I am very wary of any kind of stories of origin; biographies too often search for the
ultimate root. I am very wary of that and I couldnt do it. But if you are meaning things
A Conversation with Doreen Massey 403
that went back quite a long way, I know, but I cannot explain why, that as a child I was
incredibly curious about other places. I was lucky enough to live in a household where
there was a globe and there was an atlas and I used to spend hours gripped by playing
with these things and reading them. I couldnt tell you why that happened but it is a
kind of curiosity which has remained with me. I know that this department is absolutely
not of this kind, but there are certain parts of geography these days that I think have
almost forgotten that there is a global world. I mean, we talk about globalisation but
not that vast, dierentiated international global that we live within. There is so much
concentration on places that we know already. So there was that side of it.
But the other thing, which one cant live up to, but I think is a geographical
potential, is the way geography crosses, or has the potential to cross, the human
sciences and the natural sciences. And before I had to specialise, that was one of the
things that I really, really liked about geography. The reason I am wearing the
heaviest clothes Ive got, including hiking boots, is because I am just o to
Sutherland (I was there last year as well) and Ill spend three days remembering all
the stu about the Moine Thrust and be utterly gripped by geology. So it still has
that potential absolutely to engage me, that holistic perspective of geography.
Jo Sharp:
This feels a bit like one of those questions in the Guardian but what have been your
key inspirations and inuences that doesnt need to be intellectual?
Doreen Massey: Well they arent intellectual, and that is what is so interesting. I have
never quite worked like that. I have been asked this question before and I couldnt say
that there have been particular people or authors that have been guiding lights in that
sense. It has been more, and this may be in part a product of the particular generation I
have been part of, that the stimulus to stu, the reason for asking questions and the
ways in which debates got framed, have come out of being part of political movements.
Whether that has been in the late 60s and the 70s with the emergence of Marxism,
feminism, sexual liberation or the kind of stu that has happened more recently, and
more generally an engagement with politics. So a lot of my key reference points have
been urgent debates provoked by things like that. If there is one person that really
inuenced me early on, and this is a very strange person to cite, it is Louis Althusser.
The most unpopular person you can possibly mention.
In the late 1960s and early 1970s Marxism was very much on the agenda and the
left was organised not only into the Labour party and the Communist Party but also
a lot of groups, the Trotskyists and Maoists and so forth. And I read a lot of Marx
and Engels and took part in a lot of those discussions and found it very, very dicult
to count myself as a Marxist. Even though at a gut level in terms of wanting to think
class politics I knew I was on that side, reading Marx was not convincing me and I
think years later I realised a lot of that doubt had been about the fact that we were,
at that point, concentrating a lot on early Marx and stu around human nature, the
German Ideology and so forth, and as a feminist I couldnt buy it. So much of it was
so very, very essentialist about the sexual divisions of labour, natural divisions of
labour, all this kind of stu kept coming up. The heterosexual family was treated
completely unproblematically and even at that stage I had no intention of being part
of one of those. And so I found it very, very dicult to buy into Marxism.
And then along came Althusser. I actually learned Althusser in the strangest of
places, which was the University of Pennsylvania in Philadelphia where I went to do
an MA in mathematical economics and regional science. (I did that as a kind of you
ought to know your enemy kind of thing. And I think one ought to as well.) So I
went and did maths and microeconomics but you can always do elective courses in
US universities so I did this course in French philosophy which was mainly on
Althusser. There were two things about Althusser which utterly changed my view of
life and of Marxism. The rst was that, you know before all your Derrida, before all
of this stu that we all know now so well, Althusser insisted that everything was
always a product of what came before it. And if that is true then nothing is given. So
anything can be changed: his famous line which I have repeated in a number of my
works is there is no point of departure. And that absolutely, as a young woman
who was trying to escape the norms, who didnt conform to any of the given
descriptions of woman, and who wanted a way of challenging them, that rst entry
into anti-essentialism, although I didnt know that term, none of us knew that term
at that point, was utterly important.
The second thing: Althusser was in the French Communist Party (PCF) and was
wrestling with the standard critique of Stalinism at that time which put it all at the
door of a person Stalin and Althusser was trying to say no, it is bigger than that,
it is more structural than that, the critique has to go deeper. And part of the way in
which he constructed a deeper critique of the PCFs long term political history, and
therefore of the Moscow communist party, was to engage very critically with
economic determinism. And so he began to put onto the agenda questions of
ideology, questions of structures of society and ideological state apparatuses which
immediately appealed to feminists. And in the womens movement in the early 1970s,
I was in two reading groups and we used to do readings, night after night we used to
be sitting there, cold towels on our heads, reading Marx on one set of nights and
Althusser and Balibar and people like that on other sets of nights, in each of them
doing a critique of the other. And of course Althusser brought onto the agenda the
later Marx. So I became a Marxist at that point through that rather odd trajectory.
So, that is how I think about inuences.
Chris Philo:
I was having a look at the 1973 paper Towards a Critique of Industrial Location
Theory (Massey, 1973) and I was intrigued because although it appears to have a
Marxist horizon, Marx is hardly mentioned in that particular piece. That was one of
the things that got me thinking about your relationship to Marxism at the time. To
what extent was Spatial Divisions of Labour (Massey, 1984) an attempt to spatialise
Marxism, given also that you were then often branded as one of those heretics, you
know a spatial fetishist?
Doreen Massey:
Its brilliant that you mention the 1973 critique because I was in Philadelphia 19712
[doing the MA in Maths and Economics] precisely to think those issues through.
I came back and wrote that critique. We were just starting Antipode. And so
precisely as a result of having done neoclassical economics, I came back and felt
able nally now to write the critique. And of course in my elective I had been
reading Marx so your question absolutely catches the moment; that was the
moment. And Spatial Divisions of Labour is an expression of one of the things I
have most taken from Marxism over the years, which is thinking relationally. One
of the jobs that book was trying to do was to spatialise those relations of capitalist
production. That is what it was about. And the other thing it was about, and
maybe this is another inuence, was being a northerner. In English terms, Im from
the North West and have lived with, through and kind of in combat with regional
inequality throughout my childhood and so a lot of what I wanted to address was
the terms in which regional inequality, uneven development as we called it then,

was thought about. Looking back now, it seems so obvious, one has to put oneself
right back 30 years to note that it was quite a new thought at the time, some of the
things we were saying. But to argue that you shouldnt just think about regions in
terms of them being successes and failures through their own behaviour so that
they are to be blamed or congratulated on their economic failure or success, was
then quite new. And to argue that regions were locked into systems of the spatial
organisation of capitalist relations of production and that it was through that that
uneven development got produced, was at the time quite radical. And it is still
something I go on about all the time. The World City book (Massey, 2007a), which
is provoked by London, is precisely an argument about relationality and regional
inequality.
One of the reasons Spatial Divisions of Labour is less explicitly Marxist is that
there was a lot of stu going on at the time where Marxist geography and uneven
development spoke very much in terms of value. So people were envisaging ows
of value between regions and around the place, surplus value. I was at the time on
the editorial board of Capital and Class and in the middle of the most erce
argument between dierent interpretations of value. There was Sue Himmelweit
and Simon Mohan on the one hand and John Harrison and Andrew Glyn and
people on the other hand, with their Sraan-type notions of value.1 And I could
not, knowing that argument so well, I couldnt buy what some people were arguing
in geography that value was measurable and simply identiable as a quantiable
ow between places. And so I didnt talk in those terms. And so I got criticised for
not being a proper Marxist because I hadnt used the terminology. But the way in
which I was thinking was denitely inuenced, utterly inuenced, by Marx. And in
fact an earlier book, the second book I think I did, Capital and Land (Massey and
Catalano, 1978), was an explicitly Marxist analysis about the structure of land
ownership in the UK.
Geraldine Perriam:
You point out in your essay Flexible Sexism,2 that the potential contributions of
feminism to politics and academe have routinely been ignored. As a feminist
geographer, how do you see the gender politics of academe evolving, where women
are still a minority in senior positions and their visibility is often limited and even, in
some cases, excluded, either through omission or commission? So I wanted to see
how you saw gender politics in academe.
Doreen Massey:
The reason I did Flexible Sexism was partly just pure, visceral anger. I dont know
whether people know, but this was an article I published a long, long time ago, but
the typesetters were so incapable of taking on board the articles title, that the
running head was set as Flexible Systems or something like that. There are dierent
ways of doing feminist geography and absolutely valued ways of being a feminist
academic and my preferred tack, which isnt that I think everybody ought to do this,
has been not to study gender as such. Feminism was about more than gender.
Feminism in the 1970s was about a new society, a new way of being, a new way of
organising things; it is a bigger political struggle. I want to have feminists

everywhere, in nuclear physics, in geomorphology, in human geography etc.
Studying everything as a feminist, not just studying women or gender. So I was quite
resistant to doing gender. That doesnt mean other people shouldnt. One of the
things that reects one of the points you were making is the number of times I get
invited to places and theyve heard of you, and they invite you, but they dont really
know what you do. But because you are of the female persuasion they assume you do
gender. I accepted a major prize in a major European country, and they said we
always ask our recipients to do a seminar and we thought Professor Massey you
could do one on gender. And I said why? And it was like well, you are a woman.
Extraordinary! And I said well, I will do it if, next time you award this prize to a
man, you ask him to do a seminar on gender. And so there was a complete backing
o, I did it on something else. So one thing is that I think feminists ought to be
everywhere and doing feminist geography is about a lot more than studying gender
specically. It is an outlook on life and a way of doing things which is a lot more
subversive than that. And the other reason for Flexible Sexism was related to that
and that is I think we ought to attack the citadels. These were the two big books,
everybody thought they were wonderful, and in many ways they both were.3 But
they also seemed to me to be utterly, unconsciously, deeply, sexist. And I just wanted
to attack where the sources of power were in terms of the voices within geography; so
I did.4
As to what we address now I mean yes, all the things I think are true that you said.
I have been lucky in that the Open University is pretty progressive. But in
universities and academic institutions more generally there remains a pervasive
oblivion to issues of sexism. The discounting of women, simply not seeing or hearing
us, still goes on. And more contradictorily, to join them on important (self-
important) committees, to play the game, you still (after all this time) so often have
to play in a way (pompous, overly serious, self-congratulatory, competitive though
in a very civilised way!) that is counter to everything feminism should stand for.
There is also one issue that has been troubling me just recently. And that is how we
as and this would include men as well anti-sexist, feminist geographers,
academics, should be addressing issues outside of the academy also. It hit me most
ercely when thinking about what is going on in Afghanistan, and what is going on
in the Swat valley, young girls getting acid thrown over them when they try to go to
school, and what our commitment should be. How do feminist academics, feminists
in education, take this seriously, and how do we act upon our address to young
women being denied education. I think that poses a lot of tricky issues for us in
relation to a cross-cutting of our own values, political positions, with multicultural

sensitivity, or intercultural sensitivity. And I think in some senses we have to address
that crosscutting a lot more. We do the cultural sensitivity bit really well these days,
we have got it o to a T in many ways. But standing up for other things in those
contexts can be extremely tricky. Id like to have a context in which to think about
something like that. So I think there are issues beyond the academy also, but within
education if you like, that we might be thinking about.
Hester Parr:
I was just wondering if you could comment in a general way about how we might use
dierent means and ways of engaging beyond the university. And whether you have
general advice about how to make research matter?
Doreen Massey:
I think that way of putting it is really interesting. There is possibly a generational
issue here, or a kind of conjunctural issue which isnt about people being given
ages but political moments. I dont think there are any rules or right ways of
doing it; there are loads and loads of dierent ways. All the dierent things that I
have done outside the UK, in Nicaragua in the 1980s, in Venezuela, in South
Africa, have all come from invitations. So I havent made the eort, it has come
from them. But I have never thought about it quite in the way that you put it at
the start of your question and I am very aware that I may be alone in this. Ive
never thought Im an academic, so how can I relate to the outside world? And I
think this is because, maybe it is generational but I suspect there are quite a few
people in this department like this being an academic and being involved in stu
outside are all part of the same thing. Its not a question of from the inside to the
outside.
That earlier period I was talking about in response to Jos question about
inspirations some of the most intense theoretical and empirical debates we had
were motivated by politics outside. How were we to think about what a woman
was? How are we to think about sexuality etc.? Racism, the whole question of
whether there was such a thing as ethnicity or not, race or not, came from real
struggles that we were engaged in and that we didnt know how to address. And I
said at the beginning of For Space (Massey, 2005) all that stu about why I have
been so obsessed with trying to think how we should think about space. So often I
have come back from meetings and I have known that it has been wrong, the terms
on which we have been arguing, and I have needed to come away and wrestle with it
intellectually and take it back in. And sometimes that never becomes academic.
You know all that thinking we did about identity and essentialism in the feminist
movement in the 1970s I never wrote a single article about it, many of us didnt, we
just needed to know. And then some people took it up as their thing and they wrote
about it and it became a stream of academic work. So I have reservations about the
formulation: rst you do your research or you think of your research project, and
then you think about how it might be disseminated. Instead I prefer this real coming
of a motivation, out of something you desperately want to know the answer to.
And you need to know the answer because you are engaged in a political argument
about it. I think some of the theoretical work that goes on in geography at the
moment is in a circularity of academic published articles rather than bringing in
questions that we really need to answer. So I think your question is really important
and maybe we ought to rephrase it and place the academy more organically back in
the society that we are asking questions from. In our heads, in our implicit
imaginations. I think its really important.
Merle Patchett:
In the past, you have made the argument that human geographers should be
having a conversation with physical geographers rather than physicists about
emerging ways of conceptualizing space, time and space-time. Yet new quantum
theories, like quantum animism, are positing space-time as the causation of life.
These developments have had major ramications for the study of life at the
molecular level (Olsen, 2006). Taking into account your argument that classical
physics and physics envy has led us astray in our inherited conceptualizations of
both time and space, is there not a conversation still to be had with physicists,
biologists, chemists and geoscientists, especially as these developments around
space-time as the causation of life are not really touched upon in physical
geography and have strong commonalities with emerging theories of biopolitics
and aect in human geography?
Doreen Massey:
Yes we should be having conversations, and it is the nature of the conversation, or
the need for it to be a conversation, that I want to insist upon. First of all there is the
physics envy thing where we assume that the natural sciences, and specically
physics, is true, in a way which we dont accord to any social science or any other
discipline. And that actually happens across natural sciences as well, there is the
famous Frodeman article from geology (Frodeman, 1995) and so forth. Biologists as
well. Physics envy is not uncommon and we should abandon it. Physics isnt simply
true in that kind of way. But to come to your particular point about theories of
biopolitics and aect. My other critique was that people have already got an
ontological position, they already know what they want to argue, and then they nd
that there is a bit in physics which looks just like it and wouldnt it be nice if that
were absolutely true and therefore we can say physicists these days say that the world
is all verbs and not nouns. I dont think it is intellectually honest just to pick up on
the bit of physics that happens to accord with an ontological predisposition that you
already have and then cite it in justication of that already taken position. I am just
asking that we dont do that. That doesnt mean we cant say but blimey, this is
really provocative, its really stimulated me to think in a dierent way about x, y and
z. I mean I am absolutely not saying dont read physics. But I want to have a voice
in these conversations and I dont want to pick just on the bits that are useful. And I
do think that there is quite a bit of fashionable geography that does do that
sometimes. But conversation which assumes both sciences have a right to speak
absolutely totally agree.
Political Engagement - Venezuela

Mo Hume5:
Could you tell us a bit about your recent work in Venezuela and specically how the
concept of power geometries has been taken up by Chavez and the Bolivarian
revolution?
Doreen Massey:
There was a time about three or four years ago when I was thinking I was going to
retire early, that there was no point in being an academic because it never changes
anything. You know you get those years when you just dont know if there is any
worth to it at all. And then World City came out and that caused a bit of a political
urry. And then I got this letter from the political people in Venezuela, saying we
are doing this project, its on Metropolis and Revolution, would you like to come?
I said yes.
When Chavez came to power [in 1998] he was not a socialist and it was only after
all the various attempts at intervention, the coup (which is a total mirror of the coup
that just happened in Honduras a few days ago), it was after all of that that Chavez
came out as a socialist and put forward a set of proposals to change the Constitution
and to change the direction of the revolution towards more explicitly socialist goals.6
As part of that, they were trying to think through alternative forms of democracy.
The formal state apparatus of representative democracy was totally de-legitimised. It
had no standing in the country at all; there was no trust in it. So various ways were
adopted to try and build almost dual systems. Bolivarian Circles7 were one
experiment to do that in the early days. What this new era oered, what Chavez was
trying to argue for, was a dierent kind of system with representative democracy on
the one hand and participatory democracy on the other. Ill explain a bit more in a
minute.
The idea of power geometries was picked up by Chavez through some sociologists
and geographers.8 He reads enormously, he is quite astonishing. He will sit there on
Alo Presidente which is a television programme which goes on for endless hours on
Sundays, like watching a test match, you can come in and out of it, it goes on and on.
Each one is held in a dierent place a cooperative or a new project, for instance.
And Chavez will be sitting there talking and he will pick up a book and he will read a
paragraph and it could be Hardt and Negri, it could be whoever, Ernesto Laclau.
And he will read it and he will put it down and he will say what I think that is trying
to tell us is . . . There is a real popular pedagogy going on there that I nd extremely
interesting and there is no doubt that he reads, and thinks, extremely widely and
openly. And somebody had told him about power geometries and given him, I guess,
edited versions of some of the stu that Id written. And he picked up on the work
and it became, of the ve motors of the revolution which were inaugurated in 2007,
number 4 which is we have to build a new power geometry. I was completely gob
smacked when I got there. There were huge anuncios, posters, hanging down the side
of buildings saying vamos con una nueva geometra del poder [towards a new
geometry of power] Can you imagine? Can you imagine New Labour doing this?
Anyway, the way it is being used in Venezuela, is to try and extend democracy.
This is partly by an equalisation of voice between the southern regions and the
coastal regions. So there is a huge emphasis on trying to get democratic structures
going in the more rural and southern parts of the country, to give them more voice.
That I think is a long and dicult process. There is absolutely no doubt that the
coastal regions dominate. But at least now there is something on the agenda which
makes it a question. More interestingly for me it is being used to set up a structure of
participatory, direct democracy parallel to the state. So every 400 households has the
right to set up a communal council, Consejo Comunal, and that communal council
has to conform to certain things, put forward plans, all the rest of it. But then it has
rights and resources to self government. The long term idea is that within the local
area there can be self government and it can be a voice to put pressure on the parallel
structures of the elected state which as I say had fallen into such disarray. And those
communal councils are then aggregated parallel to the structures of the
representative state.
Remember also, this is not brand new in Latin America. In Chile under Allende
there were locally based councils as well; it does have quite a long history. But I do
think it is very interesting and I have spent a bit of time talking to the people who are
trying to form and organise these Consejos Comunales. They are often women, often
older women and there is one conversation that really, really struck me very much. A
woman who was organising a council in Petare which is an area outside Caracas but
adjacent to it a vast area of informal housing we would call it. And she said to me
how wonderful the idea of communal councils was; it was brilliant. She talked about
all the problems within the area. There is an assumption in this initiative, that there is
some kind of coherence to place and that people will agree and of course what has
happened is that there are battles happening within these household groupings. On
the one hand that is quite destructive, but on the other hand it is a process of political
education. But the thing she said to me which really made me think was que voy a
hacer con todo este poder? What am I going to do with all this power? And it was
like the opposite of what we always say in geography, you know, give them the
power and all the rest of it, and she said antes de darnos, before you give it to us,
hay que ensenarnos, you have to teach us. In other words the very process of
setting up these things is a process of learning and it is going to be very dicult and it
is going to take a lot of time.
What Ive done there is participate in this process. I have given talks at
universities, public meetings. I have done stu on television, I can speak Spanish
enough. And Ive done writings and Ive just done a popular pamphlet of which
there will be 10,000 copies, just doled out. And Chavez, as part of the celebration of
200 years of Venezuelan independence, has said ok now weve got a basic literacy
programme o the ground, which they have, it has been quite successful, but there is
no point in just being able to do basic literacy, you then need to use it. So the next
thing is to set up reading circles (a Revolutionary Reading Programme) and so they
have sent round a bundle of stu, a library of stu has been put on the list. And I
have been told that this pamphlet is included in this popular, free, collection of
books and readings. Which I must say, in terms of pure excitement and pleasure, I
think is one of the most important things Ive done. And then you look at a form
that comes from the RAE and it asks about impact! There is no way you can express
that kind of thing in an impact statement.
Place Beyond Place

Ulrich Oslender:
My question relates to a book by Arturo Escobar Territories of Dierence (Escobar,
2008). He proposes in this book a radical, political ecology which he bases on
notions of dierence where he wants to move towards the recognition of the
epistemologies that are being constructed within social movements. In particular he
talks about the possibilities of a politics of place that are enacted and articulated by
social movements. The question for me is how to narrate place when at the same time
our narration of place is not just made up of what we say, but also made up of these
silences of things that we choose not to talk about? For one reason or another, it
may not be convenient to do so. What does that mean though, in terms of our ability
to narrate place both in terms of our academic and political selves?
Doreen Massey:
I havent yet read the book, to be honest, but I know Arturo Escobars work. I have
read Culture Sits in Places (Escobar, 2001) which became kind of emblematic of his
work. And I have never been able to work out my attitude to it. In fact a few weeks
ago I wrote something as part of a book I am now writing which is very sympathetic
to him. And I think that comes partly because he is a good guy, I mean he is on the
right side of the barricades, and partly because he is standing in a very dierent part
of the world than I was standing when I was rst engaging with place. And I wanted
to make sure I paid due respect to that. What Ulrich didnt mention, but its
important and is in the written question here9 Arturo Escobar has a very strong
argument that social sciences have got so obsessed with globalisation that in one way
or another place has been erased from our explicit agenda, or it has been put into
some romanticised margins. I have great sympathy with that and in fact I think that
all those big N theories of neoliberalism, the kind of neoliberal-tsunami version of
globalisation which totally erases place, or, and Ill probably tread on a few more
toes here, Hardt and Negri and Holloway, and their insistence on never dividing up
the world, that we mustnt have loyalties to place, has also meant it is very dicult to
think place in a progressive way. So I have sympathy with Escobar; in fact I would
extend his critique in some ways about that.
But, I agree with you it could be essentialist and evade dicult questions. It is
back to the Swat valley question in a sense, what I was saying about Pakistan and
Afghanistan [and girls right to education]. There has been a long debate just recently
on our home turf as it were, about London Citizens which is the grassroots, working
class organisation in [East] London which is brilliant. And because it is brilliant it is
everybodys touchstone for something good is going on. But within London
Citizens there are problems about things which cant be addressed, for instance gay
rights, particularly issues around gender, because it is so structured around faith
groups. I was talking to people within UNISON, there are union people in there as
well, and they cant raise those issues. We have to be able to address that kind of
stu, I absolutely agree with you. For me, to make a politics of place possible is
about explicitly questioning the construction of that place. A central question is
what does this place stand for? and thats why in the book on London [World City],
the argument is we were revelling in its multiculturalism, quite legitimately, but then
turning a complete blind eye to the fact that a few miles down the road is one of the
heartlands of neoliberal capitalism. Its an argument Ive had with Ken Livingstone
over the years that his economic policy was actually to support the nancial city of
London as a necessary basis for the economy of London. My argument was if we
are going to have a progressive place, there has got to be an explicit debate about the
nature of that place (see Massey, 2007b).
And also another thing that goes along with that slight romanticisation and
essentialisation, is a removal of the local from any implication in wider processes. So
the local becomes the innocent and always the victim. Yet very few places arent in
any way at all implicated in wider processes that you may or may not wish to contest.
And that relates to, you didnt mention, but your humdinger last line in your written
question is how can we resolve the binary between place and space? Well one way is
precisely by integrating them relationally. But if you do that then it means you have
to accept the implication of the local in the construction of the global. The global
doesnt just exist up there. It is made in places and there is hardly a place on the
planet that in some ways isnt party to that making. That is what Transition Towns
are about; trying to think about ones locally-based responsibility. That is what
Fairtrade regions are about, and dierent places are in one way or another trying to,
I guess, address that.
Climate Change and Transnational Solidarities

Aaron Franks:
How do you see climate change aecting the relationship between peoples ethical or
mental constructs of place, and place as a material or biophysical reality? Is it
possible to bring our emotional or imagined geographies of place, into some sort of
more immediate and eective alignment with the material properties of places,
considering how the material properties of places are creating and being aected by
climate change?
Doreen Massey:
I nd this question very dicult, because I havent done sucient thinking about
climate change. What struck me in reading the question and this is all I can do is
that one of the things it has the potential of doing, is to push at an anti-
foundationalism. A lot of thinking about place has nature as the stable backdrop, as
the eternal. Some of the romanticisms of place would do that too. And in fact quite a
lot of social science stu on globalisation ironically xes the natural world as stable.
Nigel Clark in our department at the Open University has written quite a lot against
that kind of counterposition and its really nice (see for example Clark, 2002). So to
the extent that this is nature changing, that it isnt given, it has the potential to
unseat in the same way that say, migration raised the question of who is local? And
we replied everybody is a migrant. So in this sense we might say it isnt as though
the local character of a place grew out of the soil and Nigel would reply well even
the soil aint local. Because everything, including nature, is moving. Absolutely
right. And so maybe there is a potential there for arguing about the changeability of
place even down to the very nature of it (see Massey, 2006). And the second thing
that it raises is the thing about interdependence and the inevitable openness of
places. And once again then, that reinforces that kind of notion of place, not just as
open, and not just as process, but also as unbounded. This is a very provocative
question and that is as far as I got, but those thoughts already make me want to go
and think about it some more.
Ive been doing a little bit of work on the Inuit Circumpolar Council who have
been trying to stand up against climate change and to talk about the eects on their
place of climate change but who also want to make alliances with other places. So
they are not passive victims. They have made an alliance with some threatened
Pacic Islands, called it Many Strong Voices,10 and talked about their relationships
within these global processes of climate change that relates to the last question as
well. And it seems to me that that is an example of a sense of place or a construction
of place which is evolving precisely in the context of climate change. That would be
one of my key ways into that. I found it very, very interesting.
Paul Routledge:
I am struck [by] many of the things you have said today the motivation by what is
going on beyond the walls of the university, the inspiration and how we are driven by
real struggles, peoples lives, that are taking place, [ . . . ] and the current conjuncture.
How might we think about fashioning transnational solidarities given critiques
coming from movements in the global south or parts of the global south anyway
about the need for people in the global north for governments and citizens to
seriously be considering their carbon footprints. I mean the amount of carbon
emissions per capita that we in the global north produce. How might we think about
a progressive politics of place beyond place, given the need to become, as I would
argue, more carbon sensitive?
Doreen Massey:
I think its a great question. In some ways that very challenge that is coming from the
global south is the beginnings of constructing the grounds for such a politics. And
things like Transition Towns and Fairtrade Regions are attempts to do something
that responds to that. And one of the things that one can say about the last GLA
Livingstones London was that it had a massive climate change programme, it was
brilliant, actually. And it was constructed in explicit recognition of Londons wider
impact. It was place beyond place that was going on there.
Can I just say one little tiny thing. I use the term global south, we all use the term,
being progressive and politically sensitive, we dont like calling it the third world.
So we have come to call it the global south. But I have just being doing all this work
on the high north and the high Arctic and of course the Inuit and the Evenki and the
Eveni are absolutely not in the south, at all. But they are not of what we mean by the
North. So even our attempt to be progressive and not say the third world, we say
the global south, and we are obliterating some other people. Weve got to think
about another word, some other phrase.
In some ways I think the current conjuncture, and Ill come back to that term, may
be a moment of opportunity in a sense. I mean the Washington Consensus has been
formally dropped, and is now derided in large parts of the planet. And I think it is
also true that economically, and to some extent ideologically, this is a Copernican
moment. The west is being decentred, not because we are writing about it being
decentred, but because it is happening. Russia and China are doing something quite
radically dierent. Their societies are not just neoliberalisms latest spatial x. It is
quite dierent. The challenge that is coming from Latin America is quite dierent
too. A lot of them are struggling free of the IMF. The Banco del Sur is being set up.
Telesur challenges CNN. There is in Latin America an explicit, common
conversation that, no, we tried neoliberalism and look what happened. So there
is a fracturing going on and an ability for multiplicity to be given a voice that there
wasnt say ten years ago, I feel.
On climate, interestingly because I have been working in Venezuela, a lot of its
radical external politics is to do with oil. They give oil to the tribal communities in
Alaska in the heart of the United States of America: Petroleo Subversivo. There is also
the work of Platform11 in London and they are doing a very strong kind of interplace
politics against oil companies. Whether it is the big Asian pipeline, or BP or the Ken
Saro Wiwa and Niger Delta stu, and the thing that I have just been looking at is in
Sakhalin Island o Eastern Russia. Platform is an arts and social activism group. They
challenged, not the oil companies that were doing the extraction o Sakhalin Island,
which is the biggest integrated oil and gas project on the planet, they challenged the
nancial institutions for nancing it. The nancial institutions a few years ago now,
because of challenges from NGOs, drew up a set of guidelines for their own behaviour
called the Equator Principles. You know we will always talk to indigenous people we
will respect the environment we will do this, that and the other. And so what Platform
did in the Sakhalin case was to take them seriously. And to evaluate the project and get
experts to evaluate the project on the basis of these nancial institutions own criteria
and show that in all three one of them being indigenous, one of them environment,
one of them democratic participation there were failings. And some changes were
produced. So there is stu going on, there are things happening.
Politicising the Current Conjuncture

Will Hasty:
I nd your notion of a politics of place beyond place really positive and it is a really
good way of thinking about how we as individuals or communities work at the local
level and have an impact on the global. But one thing that worries me is that a lot of
people dont think that through very carefully. Its not that they dont care, but its
not part of their everyday life. Is that a barrier for a successful politics of place
beyond place?
Doreen Massey:
There was a wonderful phrase in the written question which was that a signicant
section of our society is militantly apathetic. I could not but agree. I wanted to
answer that question, well, answer it I cant, but I wanted to say a couple of things in
relation to it. There is an important point that Id like to mention. Politics of place
beyond place is not necessarily progressive. I think as progressives we need a politics
of place beyond place. But Bushs war in Iraq, Blairs war in Iraq, the whole we
must extend western notions of democracy around the planet that is a politics of
place beyond place. So the forms that it will take will be politically contested. What I
was trying to do by using that term was to say we on the left, a) dont have to
abandon place as an arena for the construction of a politics and, b) part of making a
politics of place progressive is to have a politics which is not only introspectively
about the local, but is about the locals relation beyond.
I agree that there is mass apathy. I think some of it is that people are obsessed with
their own lives. I think some of it is also about powerlessness. The feeling that you
cant alter things, you know, that whatever you do, nothing will change. And that is
partly to do with democratic structures, lack of democratic structures, and that is
one of the ways we could learn from some of the things that are going on in other
parts of the world. It is also to do with ideas. The way in which over the last 30 years
we have absolutely come to take it as read that the market is a natural process. And
economics have been, in a sense, taken out of the political. Not individual economic
policies, but the fact of markets and economics. And if part of apathy is to do with
peoples feeling of powerlessness it is also partly addressable because we can
intervene in those debates. You know, there are ways in which those things can be
challenged. I would also say that political change has never been a majority
occupation. It has nearly always been minorities of one size or another which have
been leading political change. Obviously in revolutionary moments you get mass
participation, but that is rarely something that lasts for years and years and years.
What I think one needs is a provocation to debate. And I am thinking particularly
about place. I wrote a lot about the politics of place beyond place in relation to
London at rst. And one of the things I wrote about was an agreement between
London and Caracas where London gave expertise to Caracas and Caracas gave
cheap oil to London which was used on buses for people on benet. It was brilliant
and it caused outrage and thats why it was brilliant because it caused political
debate. It changed how people understood Venezuela. It absolutely disrupted some
peoples geographical imaginations some Tories criticised it as being socialism.
Yes! One speaker from another party, I wont mention the name, they are probably
very embarrassed now, said it made us feel like a third world country, this is barter.
Because precisely what it was about was equal exchange, negotiated equal exchange
in which the two cities saw themselves as equal, sitting down to work out how they
could exchange as equals. And so because of that precisely, it dislodged us from
being a big world city dealing with the capital of an export-oriented oil producer
somewhere down in Latin America. It dislodged a lot of things, and the reason that I
thought it was so good was that it had the potential to provoke debate. It didnt,
suciently, partly because it never really got o the ground enough, it could have
been made into a better debate than it was. But also because when Boris Johnson
won in the election last year on May the 1st, there was this period of eerie calm after
he had won. I think he was as stunned as we were, and Ken and Boris were being
terribly nice to each other. And then the rst thing that Johnson did to break the
truce was to cancel the agreement with Caracas, the very rst thing. He knew its
potential perhaps. But it did play a role in constituting a debate about what London
was, just a little bit.
And on Saturday 11 July I am speaking at the second conference of a thing called
Progressive London,12 which is a new organisation trying to think about what could
be a progressive voice for this city to have. Even Johnson has said even though he
won the election this doesnt mean that London is suddenly a conservative city. So
we are trying to work out what this progressive voice might be. At the rst
conference I spoke on a panel which had Jean Lambert, Green Party MEP, George
Galloway, Kate Hudson who is head of CND, Ken Livingstone, and Samuel
Moncada who is the Ambassador from Venezuela.13 So it is a real attempt to get an
alliance of voices; home-based, national, European and beyond to talk about what
might London be as a progressive city. It was massive. They expected about 500
people, it was more. The one on 11 July is going to be small, it is supposed to be
small. It is a discussion about green new deal type stu, alternative economics for
London and its got Vince Cable, Jenny Jones, trade unionists, Ken. Its got a
website.14 So there are attempts to do this and although there is mass apathy it
doesnt seem that nobody is interested. Some reasons to be cheerful.
Danny MacKinnon:
I wondered if you thought there was any danger of relational theories of space,
which you have obviously done so much to develop, being seen too starkly against
traditional use of space and notions of space as xed. And that there possibly might
be a danger of over-emphasising openness and uidity and the possibilities of the
ease of change and perhaps glossing over existing forms of relative xity or closure.
Is there possibly a middle ground between relational and more traditional xed views
of space?
Doreen Massey:
I really wanted to answer this question because I totally agree with you. A million
years ago I wrote an article called A Global Sense of Place (Massey, 1991b) and it
was all about that places open, unbounded meeting place, all of this stu. But I
didnt mean that place does not exist, I meant that it has to be re-thought, re-
imagined, reconceptualised. And I found myself in total disagreement with a certain
strand of geography, amongst whom there are some very close friends of mine, who
talk about everything is now ow. I dont think that is the case. And also with
certain strands of political theory, particularly John Holloway and Hardt and Negri,
with whom Ive had this now explicit kind of continuing exchange (see Hardt and
Negri, 2000; Holloway, 2002; and Massey, 2005; and forthcoming). Hardt and Negri
say that you cant have a concept of place which doesnt have boundaries. Therefore
it is one of those old, modernist containments that we must abandon, because it
divides global humanity, it divides the global multitude. I think that is a classic
counter-position like striated space and smooth space and I would say that there is
no such thing as either, there never was place that was a container. Only people who
werent feminists would ever think of home as having been that place of wonderful
security that they always set it up as having been.
On the other hand neither is there a non-striated smooth space. What we have to
do is take responsibility for the striations that do exist. Take responsibility for the
boundaries, the denitions, the categorisations. We cannot not. Every time we dene
something we are in our conceptual lives drawing a line. Even though I wrote this
article saying we cant understand Kilburn15 without understanding half the British
Empire, you know, a hundred years of history and all the rest of it, so place is
unbounded, I have said. Now my friend Chantal Moue would come at that and say
yes but, in order to specify something called Kilburn there has to be conceptually
something that is not Kilburn. In a sense any denition has to posit something that
isnt what it is you are dening (see Laclau and Moue, 2001). So that in your head
any denition is a drawing of a line. We could not live without denitions. We could
not communicate. I think one of the things that then happened was that that
argument about denition got played in political theory and particularly within
geography almost entirely through a Lacanian or through a Carl Schmittian type
perspective. Which meant that the only way of looking at a line and an inside and an
outside, was to say that they are antagonistic relations. That the inside could only be
constructed in opposition to the outside, and that nationalism was necessarily
negative towards the beyond and so forth. Dave [Featherstone] and I have both
written things about this.16 Although conceptually I believe denitions are necessary,
and that sometimes we have to draw boundaries in space, the job is to take
responsibility for the drawing of those lines on the one hand, but also to recognise
that the social relations which cross those boundaries arent only ones of
antagonism. As soon as you start thinking really geographically, really materially,
that is clear. And so we ended up with a language and an imagination of othering
that came to dominate everything. But while it is an important insight, it isnt the
only relation that we can ever have across a boundary and it isnt everywhere. I really
do want to stress that. So I have now got myself into a position where I am wanting
to say a global sense of place absolutely yes, but that doesnt mean abandon place.
So the book I am writing at the moment is called Voices of Places and it is asking a
question to which I think the answer is going to be fairly positive. It is to what extent
can a self identication around place still provide a basis for progressive
organisation, counter hegemonic organisation, political organisation. Sometimes I
feel I am cited as one of the people who says the end of place. Part of the reason
takes us right back to Hesters question. I wrote that piece in Marxism Today in
response to stu that was going on that was saying any localism was necessarily
reactionary. I wrote it at a moment when it looked like that: we had ethnic cleansing
in Serbia, the collapse of the Soviet Union and of Yugoslavia had left us with the
most violent and mutually-antagonistic nationalisms and it did look like local place
was reactionary. And so I was trying to say no it doesnt have to be. That argument
came out of the political moment and then it gets transposed into other moments
and you think, well, that is not what it means here. So yes, I would want to hang on
very much to place, but to an utterly reconceptualised notion of place.
Danny MacKinnon:
What are the possibilities for radical political change in the UK in the context of the
current crisis? Is there evidence of emerging alternatives or is the window closing?
Doreen Massey:
I do think it is a moment of uncertainty and fracture. I do think in that sense it is a
conjuncture. Conjuncture is a term that takes me back to that same period of the 1970s
when another thing that Althusser gave us was conjunctural analysis. This is massively
an economic crisis. The nub of it, the sharp end of it, is the banks failing. But it is also a
crisis with lots of other dimensions. Some of the way in which the radical movements of
the 1960s got taken up and transformed by Clinton and Blair left us with an
individualism which in the end we dont like. There is a crisis of whole sets of what
Althusser would have called dierent instances of society and they are knotted together
at this moment in quite a complicated set of ways. In the 1970s and 1980s when the turn
towards neoliberalism happened, we had really good people trying to do conjunctural
analysis. That is where the arguments of Stuart Hall about Thatcherism (see Hall, 1979,
1988) came from, really nuanced readings of Gramsci, really thought-through readings
of Althusser in order to look at the specicities of this political moment in terms of the
semi-autonomous instances that were knotted together in a ruptural moment. Of
course we didnt win then but it gave us a handle on the situation. And I think we need
that now. And that might enable us to recongure this not only as an economic crisis,
but also as a political crisis. That is what we need to do because at the moment it is being
addressed in dierent and somewhat isolated ways. (Which doesnt mean I think the
economic is not important, it massively is, that is what this conference is about
[Progressive London, see above].) But it is also up to us. You know. To be saying things
and intervening in things to make that happen. I am sure it has been the same in
Glasgow, but this summer in London has been absolutely full. Every weekend there
have been political conferences of various sorts. There is stu happening and not just
among intellectuals. Political meetings of some kind of positivity I think.
And just one nal, completely daft and utterly serious point which is, actually, two
points. Somebody said real struggles in peoples lives linking up to them. And I
absolutely agree. But one of the dierences from the 1970s is that then we were the
struggle. We didnt have to go out and link up with the struggle. We were the struggle.
And that is what we should be. You know it is not like we nd the nice people to help.
We were the womens movement or whatever. But that also has little tiny, perhaps
rather silly but quite important implications for how we are now. Not just as
commentators on society, say analysing Big Brother or Radio Five Live or whatever it
happens to be. But intervening in their debates. We do that too little. You know, phone
in when you think the radio programme is biased. Take part in debates in newspapers.
We have to be in those debates and not just writing articles about them in some refereed
journal. It takes time and sometimes you wish youd never spoken. But I do think we
ought to do it. You know, we are sh in the sea; we are not just in an ivory tower. And
sometimes it can be quite fun. And the media is a huge thing in all of these problems and
possibilities. Intervening in those debates is massively important. So ring up sometimes!
Acknowledgement
Thanks to Doreen Massey for her enthusiasm for the project and her careful reading
of a draft of the edited interview, to Geraldine McDonald for transcribing the whole
Conversation and to Doreen Cowling for her help with the process.
Notes
1
For these debates on value see Steedman (1981). Sraan accounts of value refer to the economist
Priero Sraa whose most inuential work was Production of Commodities by Means of Commodities
(1960).
2
Massey (1991a); reprinted in Massey (1994).
3
See Soja (1989) and Harvey (1989).
4
See also Deutsche (1991), Morris (1992), and Harveys (1992) reply.
5
Department of Politics, University of Glasgow.
6
This refers to the US sponsored/ recognized coup in 2002 which was unsuccessful primarily due to the
popular support for Chavez. For useful overviews and debates on the Chavez project in Venezuela see
Margarita Lopez Maya and Marta Harnecker in Socialist Register, 2008. See also Gott (2005).
7
The term Bolivarian refers to Chavezs project of Bolivarian revolution after the liberator Simon
Bol var. See Raby (2006) pages 132196.
8
See Massey (1993, 1999). Specically in relation to Venezuela see Massey (2009a, 2009b) and three
lectures by Doreen entitled Geometr as del poder y la conceptualizacion del espacio; Geometr as
internacionales del poder y la pol tica de una cuidad global: pensamientos desde Londres; and Las
Geometr as del poder en el contexto de la Reforma Constitucional. All three lectures will be
published as chapters in Contreras forthcoming collection Territorios Insurgentes.
9
Prior to the conversation taking place, Doreen was provided with a list of written questions to
consider. In the course of the conversation as participants asked their questions, sometimes the
phrasing altered slightly from that sent to Doreen.
10
See www.manystrongvoices.org/
11
See www.platformlondon.org/
12
www.progressivelondon.org.uk
13
www.progressivelondon.org.uk/conference/progressive-london-conference.html
14
www.progressivelondon.org.uk/conference/london-a-the-global-economic-crisis.html
15
The neighbourhood of North London where Doreen lives referred to in A Global Sense of Place.
16
See Featherstone (2008) especially chapter 2, and Massey (1995, 2005).
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Scottish Geographical Journal

ISSN: 1470-2541 (Print) 1751-665X (Online) Journal homepage: http://www.tandfonline.com/loi/rsgj20

The Possibilities of a Politics of Place Beyond

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The Possibilities of a Politics of Place

DOREEN MASSEY with the HUMAN GEOGRAPHY RESEARCH GROUP,

KEY WORDS: Doreen Massey, geography, place, political, Venezuela

ISSN 1470-2541 Print/1751-665X Online 2009 Royal Scottish Geographical Society

Early Work and Inuences

the terms in which regional inequality, uneven development as we called it then,

organising things; it is a bigger political struggle. I want to have feminists

relation to a cross-cutting of our own values, political positions, with multicultural

Political Engagement - Venezuela

Place Beyond Place

Climate Change and Transnational Solidarities

Politicising the Current Conjuncture

Geography, University of Heidelberg).

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