Place and the Politics of Identity

Michael Keith, Steve Pile

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2004
• eBook ISBN: 9781134877416
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Physical Sciences
• Subtopic: Geography
• Index: Geography

In the last two decades, new political subjects have been created through the actions of the new social movements; often by asserting the unfixed and `overdetermined' character of identity. Further, in attempting to avoid essentialism, people have frequently looked to their territorial roots to establish their constituency. A cultural politics of resistance, as exemplified by Black politics, feminism, and gay liberation, has developed struggles to turn sites of oppression and discrimintion into spaces of resistance.This book collects together perspectives which challenge received notions of geography; which are in danger of becoming anachronisms, without a language to articulate the new space of resistance, the new politics of identity.

1
INTRODUCTION PART 1
The politics of place…

Michael Keith and Steve Pile

WHY THINK ABOUT PLACE, POLITICS AND IDENTITY?

Writing in the wake of yet another Conservative party victory in the 1992 British general election and more urban conflict in Los Angeles and various British cities, it would appear that politics has changed very little—no matter where you look— whether at the level of the nation-state or on the streets.

On the other hand, many social commentators have detected some kind of a sea change—not only in the nature of Western societies but also in global economic relations. This transformation is usually referred to as the transition from modernity to postmodernity. Unfortunately, debates on the nature of the modern and the postmodern have become internal and arcane (Pile and Rose 1992). There is no broad agreement on what modernity was, on what post-modernity is, or on how we got from there to here, or on where we are going next.

Much of this debate revolves around three related issues: the relationship between time and space; the potential of politics; and the construction of identity. This book is, however, not about the debate over modernism and postmodernism, instead the question is this: can concrete geographical and historical circumstances —whether the British general election or civil disturbances on the streets of Los Angeles—be understood as expressions of abstract social relations? Many theorists allege that the contemporary (whether it be modernity or postmodernity) is now much more complex than hitherto and that it is no longer good enough to theorize power as the expression of a singular dimension of oppression, such as class or gender or race. We may question how far this is true, but the effort now and here is to specify the relations between the many dimensions of oppression— including class, gender and race—and then to suggest strategies of resistance. In order to articulate an understanding of the multiplicity and flexibility of relations of domination, a whole range of spatial metaphors are commonly being used: position, location, situation, mapping; geometries of domination, centre-margin, open-closed, inside-out side, global-local; liminal space, third space, not-space, impossible space; the city. Such terms are used to imply a complexity which is never directly explored or confronted (to use two more spatial metaphors)—partly because it is rarely clear whether the space invoked is ‘real’, ‘imaginary’, ‘symbolic’, a ‘metaphor-concept’ or some relationship between them or something else entirely. For example, the metaphor-concepts of exploration (which has deep roots in imperialism) and confrontation (which implies a face-to-face, potentially violent opposition) may evoke social relationships between authors, texts and readers which are not intended or are inappropriate.

In this introduction, we wish to achieve two things: first, in Part 1, we want to explore the politics of place, and, second, in Part 2, we want to confront the place of politics. In Part 1, we introduce the notion of spatiality by drawing on the writings of Fredric Jameson and Ed Soja. This review suggests that space cannot be dealt with as if it were merely a passive, abstract arena on which things happen. The spatialities of urban regeneration and the politics of diaspora illustrate precisely these themes. For the purposes of our argument, the first may be understood as an identity politics of place and the second as the spatialized politics of identity. In Part 2, we ground this discussion in debates surrounding the sense of space evoked by political theorists. At the end of Part 2, we describe how the essays collected here are both embedded in this tradition, and confront it, in analyses of the relationship between place, politics and identity.

THE SPATIAL VOGUE

One of the most prominent commentators on the condition of the contemporary, Fredric Jameson (1984; 1991), has suggested that these new patterns are distinguishable from old ones by the domination of social and cultural life by the logic of spatial organization, rather than time.

I think that it is at least empirically arguable that our daily life, our psychic experience, our cultural languages, are today dominated by categories of space rather than categories of time, as in the preceding period of high modernism.

(Jameson 1991:16)

Jameson suggests that there are three basic phases in the development of the spatial logic of society under capitalism. In the first stage, he argues that market capitalism was dominated by the spatial logic of the grid. Capitalism organized, and was organized by, a geometrical view of space. This view was subsequently replaced by the growing contradiction between lived experience and structure. In the second stage, monopoly capitalism, figurative space stands in the place of absent causes. Space represents, and is represented by, distorted images of the real determinations of social relations. Currently, the spatial logic of multinational (postmodern) capitalism is simultaneously homogeneous and fragmented—a kind of ‘schizo-space’.

Indeed, for Jameson, schizophrenia seems to have become the mark of the age: old loyalties of class or gender or race fragment, dislocate, rupture, disperse; new loyalties of class and gender and race interrupt, disrupt, recombine, fuse. No one is quite sure of the ground on which they stand, which direction they are facing, or where they are going. Under these circumstances, the subject is proclaimed dead; the agent of history no more.

In order to counteract the political paralysis of today, Jameson develops an alternative view of space and political action, provisionally naming it as the aesthetic of cognitive mapping. Jameson is not calling for the mapping of old notions of space, instead this is the name of a new form of radical political culture; its fundamental object is the ‘world space of multinational capital’ (Jameson 1991:54). Cognitive mapping is in some senses recognized to be both unimaginable and impossible; it attempts to steer between Scylla and Charybdis, between an awareness of global processes and the inability to grasp totality. Nevertheless, it is also meant to allow people to become aware of their own position in the world, and to give people the resources to resist and make their own history. It is the logic of capital itself which produces an uneven development of space. These spaces need to be ‘mapped’, so that they can be used by oppositional cultures and new social movements against the interests of capital as sites of resistance.

The problem for oppositional politics is that ‘everyone “represents” several groups all at once’ (Jameson 1991:322). This means that the identity of the subject position and of the political movement need to be understood simultaneously. This brings us back to what political pundits in Britain have described as ‘Basildon man’ and ‘Essex girl’. These are geographically specific, gendered stereotypes of working-class people who vote against their class interest by voting for the Conservative party—the party of capital. We should not forget, in the nostalgia for the simplicity of class war, that its rhetoric is increasingly useless—because, however fleetingly, it does not work. Identities supplant others —no matter how important an ‘objective’ circumstance or central an identity is argued to be by politicians, academics and pundits. Following Lefebvre, Jameson argues that what is needed, in order to help recover the sites of resistance, is

But what is involved here is in reality practical politics: since the crisis of socialist internationalism and the enormous strategic and tactical difficulties of coordinating local and grassroots of neighborhood political actions with national or international ones, such urgent political dilemmas are all immediately functions of the enormously complex new international space in question.

(Jameson 1991:413)

a new kind of spatial imagination capable of confronting the past in a new way and reading its less tangible secrets off the template of its spatial structures—body, cosmos, city, as all those marked the more intangible organization of cultural and libidinal economies and linguistic forms.

(Jameson 1991:364–5)

This contention suggests, at least, that space may be the template from which the secrets of reality are to be read. Later, Jameson notes—on the last page of his book —that work in this vein may best be exemplified by the writings of Ed Soja (Jameson 1991:418).

However, Soja, similarly drawing on Lefebvre but also more on Foucault, does not see space as so passive, undialectical. Both Soja and Jameson share a common concern for spatiality, partly because this term is designed to reinstate space at the heart of a dynamic conception of time-space relations. But Soja wants to locate his argument on different terrain from Jameson; while Jameson sees space as a process of distance, Soja would rather treat distance as a dialectic between separation and the desire to be close. This leaves the question of the individual’s occupation of subject positions in a different conceptual place. For Jameson, the individual is to be mapped by the spatial specificity of their subject positions, in order to uncover the hidden human geography of power, but Soja’s schema suggests that even this dynamic understanding of the situation is too solid: space is not an innocent backdrop to position, it is itself filled with politics and ideology.

We must be insistently aware of how space can be made to hide consequences from us, how relations of power and discipline are inscribed into the apparently innocent spatiality of social life, how human geographies become filled with politics and ideology.

(Soja 1989:6)

Soja (1989:7, 122–6) argues that space has been misrecognized by contem porary social theory. It has suffered from a dual illusion: either space has been seen as opaque or as transparent. The illusion of opaqueness has led to a concentration on concrete forms, where space is fixed, dead and undialectical (following Foucault). What is lost from view are ‘the deeper social origins of spatiality, its problematic production and reproduction, its contextualization of politics, power and ideology’ (Soja 1989:124). The illusion of transparency dematerializes space, it becomes an abstraction, a supposedly real representation of concrete forms: ‘spatiality is reduced to a mental construct alone… Social space folds into mental space…[and] away from materialized social realities’ (Soja 1989:125). This version echoes Jameson’s identification of geometrical space, but connects the representation of space to actual space. Having made this connection, Soja is able to argue that the contemporary situation is marked by the convergence of three different kinds of spatialization: posthistoricism, post-Fordism and postmodernism. These, Soja continues, may now be reconnected—in a mutually reinforcing hermeneuticarc—to Jameson’s radical cultural politics: i.e. cognitive mapping. It is themapping of these features of space which will allow ‘a new way of seeingthrough the gratuitous veils of both reactionary postmodernism and latemodern historicism to encourage the creation of a politicised spatial consciousness and a radical spatial praxis’ (Soja 1989:75).

If, as Soja argues, ‘the geography and history of capitalism intersect in a complex social process which creates a constantly evolving historical sequence of spatialities’ (Soja 1989:127), then certain questions are invoked—and these relate to the way in which place, politics and identity are to be understood through an already spatialized array of concepts, such as mapping and spatiality. These issues may be introduced by turning to bell hooks, who is fast becoming a shibboleth for white academic men—including us—who want to prove beyond any shadow of a doubt their radical credentials.

QUESTIONS FOR MAPPING THE POLITICS OF IDENTITY

Our living depends on our ability to conceptualize alternatives, often impoverished. Theorizing about this experience aesthetically, critically is an agenda for radical cultural practice. For me this space of radical openness is a margin—a profound edge. Locating oneself there is difficult yet necessary. It is not a ‘safe’ place. One is always at risk. One needs a community of resistance.

(hooks 1991:149)

Distinct, irreconcilable understandings of space underscore the cultural mappings of the contemporary. For Jameson, space is a template, while for Soja, such a geometrical conception of space is passive, fixed, undialectical and no longer appropriate. For hooks, both these perspectives involve risks and dangers which are directly political; for those who have no place that can be safely called home, there must be a struggle for a place to be. Her evocation of the margins is simultaneously real and metaphorical—it defines an alternative spatiality: radical openness. A different sense of place is being theorized, no longer passive, no longer fixed, no longer undialectical—because disruptive features interrupt any tendency to see once more open space as the passive receptacle for any social process that cares to fill it—but, still, in a very real sense about location and locatedness.

In this collection, the authors develop their own lines of disruption; new spaces of politics are identified, new politics of identity are located. Unwisely, perhaps, we would like to suggest that there are three key areas that distinguish these new projects:

1. locations of struggle;
2. communities of resistance;
3. political spaces.

These surfaces of articulation permit alternative agendas for geography and for those interested in space and place for other reasons. Key strategic moves are being made by the authors in this book, ones which transgress and displace traditional notions of space and place, of time and history. New spaces of resistance are being opened up, where our ‘place’ (in all its meanings) is considered fundamentally important to our perspective, our location in the world, and our right and ability to challenge dominant discourses of power.

As a radical standpoint, perspective, position, ‘the politics of location’ necessarily calls those of us who would participate in the formation of counter-hegemonic cultural practice to identify the spaces where we begin the process of re-vision.

(hooks 1991:145)

It is in this spirit of re-visioning that this volume charts attempts to de-limit positions which avoid two equally unacceptable arguments: a myth of spatial immanence and a fallacy of spatial relativism. The first is the notion, self-evidently bizarre on close inspection, alarmingly common in much social description, that there is a singular, true reading of any specific landscape involved in the mediation of identity. On the other hand, it is invidious and disingenuous to suggest that each and every reading of a specific landscape is either of equal value or of equal validity; such notions lead to an entirely relativist notion of spatiality.

Instead, it may be argued that simultaneously present in any landscape are multiple enunciations of distinct forms of space—and these may be reconnected to the process of re-visioning and remembering the spatialities of counter-hegemonic cultural practices. We may now use the term ‘spatiality’ to capture the ways in which the social and spatial are inextricably realized one in the other; to conjure up the circumstances in which society and space are simultaneously realized by thinking, feeling, doing individuals and also to conjure up the many different conditions in which such realizations are experienced by thinking, feeling, doing subjects.

The spatialities in which we are interested in this volume are the source of both the complexity of our understandings of the spatial and the confusion in the contemporary vogue for a spatialized vocabulary. Most readily seen in the unproblematic use of metaphors of, and allusions to, the spatial, there is a sense in which the geographical is being used to provide a secure grounding in the increasingly uncertain world of social and cultural theory. As some of the age-old core terms of sociology begin to lose themselves in a world of free-floating signification, there is a seductive desire to return to some vestige of certainty via an aestheticized vocabulary of tying down elusive concepts, mapping our uncertainties, and looking for common ground.

Transparent landscapes: the myth of spatial immanence

At times, the resort to spatialized vocabulary deploys limited and misleadingly unproblematic evocations of spatiality. Typically, in an acknowledgement of the increased salience of notions of the spatial to contemporary social theory, Scott Lash and Jonathan Friedman (1992) have contrasted the fixity of pre-modern identities (founded in, for example, religion) with the manner in which ‘social space opens up the way for the autonomous definition of identity’ in modernity (Lash and Friedman 1992:5). They also draw attention to the importance of spatial...

Table of contents

• COVER PAGE
• TITLE PAGE
• COPYRIGHT PAGE
• CONTRIBUTORS
• 1. INTRODUCTION PART 1: THE POLITICS OF PLACE…
• 2. INTRODUCTION PART 2: THE PLACE OF POLITICS
• 3. CLASS RELATIONS, SOCIAL JUSTICE AND THE POLITICS OF DIFFERENCE
• 4. GROUNDING METAPHOR: TOWARDS A SPATIALIZED POLITICS
• 5. LOCATING IDENTITY POLITICS
• 6. WOMEN’S PLACE/EL LUGAR DE MUJERES: LATIN AMERICA AND THE POLITICS OF GENDER IDENTITY
• 7. READING ROSEHILL: COMMUNITY, IDENTITY AND INNER-CITY DERBY
• 8. POLITICS AND SPACE/TIME
• 9. BLACK TO FRONT AND BLACK AGAIN: RACIALIZATION THROUGH CONTESTED TIMES AND SPACES
• 10. THE SPACES THAT DIFFERENCE MAKES: SOME NOTES ON THE GEOGRAPHICAL MARGINS OF THE NEW CULTURAL POLITICS
• 11. QUANTUM PHILOSOPHY, IMPOSSIBLE GEOGRAPHIES AND: A FEW SMALL POINTS ABOUT LIFE, LIBERTY AND THE PURSUIT OF SEX (ALL IN THE NAME OF DEMOCRACY)
• 12. CONCLUSION: TOWARDS NEW RADICAL GEOGRAPHIES