From the 1980s onwards, sociologists could with reason look enviously across at their colleagues in the field of geography, and ask themselves what had happened to bring about such a reversal of their respective intellectual and academic fortunes.
In the 1960s and 1970s, the discipline of sociology seemed to provide the most effective language with which to think about social change and conflict. Indeed it was probably because its own internal arguments and rifts were so focused at the time on the theoretical and political necessity to think about change and conflict that this became so. This was the period, after all, of the breakdown of the Keynesian, New Deal or Welfare State settlement in the United States and Britain, as the clamorous voices of class, race, gender and generation demanded a voice which each said were denied to them.
But then an intellectual revolution took place. For some reason, the sociologists, who had succeeded in becoming the leading force in charting and even giving political expression to the growing antagonisms of the era of industrial conflict, galloping inflation and ‘ungovernability’, seemed less able to function effectively as the theorists and catalysts of the era that followed. Neoliberalism after all reinstated the individual as the focus of moral value, and as the prime mover of change, through the roles of entrepreneur and consumer in which ‘individuality’ was held to be most fully expressed. It was at this time, in the early 1980s, that geography as a discipline revolutionised itself, and seized its opportunity to become the most effective critical analyst of what was fast becoming ‘the new world order’. ‘Space’ suddenly became a focal concept, as it had not previously been. Changes in the meaning and experience of space, and transformations in human relationships to it, became one of the most powerful metaphors for explaining what was going on.
Doreen Massey’s work was, of course, central to this reinvigorated and transformed geography. She has been concerned to chart the impact of these larger spatio-temporal processes on the embodied human societies she knows and cares about. One cannot exactly say ‘local’ societies, since although she has retained strong attachments to certain specific places (her Manchester working-class origins, for example), she has also made and kept many other ‘local’ attachments in the course of her working life; for example, she has worked with people in several parts of Latin America, including Nicaragua, Mexico and Venezuela. She has also retained keen links to the Open University, with its distinctively democratic educational mission, and to London itself (and the particular neighbourhood within it where she lives1), where one of her most active political and indeed governmental commitments was her work with the Greater London Council and with the London Mayor’s Office of Ken Livingstone. Her work has shown that it is possible to be both a severe critic of the consequences of a nexus of financial and governmental power – for example in bringing about inequalities between North and South in Britain, and at the larger but also interconnected level of neo-imperial relations – yet also enjoy and value the more benign side of the cosmopolitan diversity of a great metropolis. After interrogating Massey’s account of space and time, this chapter explores possible affinities between her approach and the relational turn in variants of psychoanalysis.
Massey in her work has given attention to many substantive forms of spatially located inequalities, such as those of North and South both within Britain and on a global plane, and in regard to inequalities of gender. But she has also extensively explored the abstract categories of space and time themselves, especially in her later work (Massey 1995a, 2005). While her work has been distinguished in its consideration of these issues (it has also increased in its complexity and sophistication over time), it has not been wholly untypical of work in the ‘new geography’. This discipline seems to have found it necessary to interrogate its subject matter at this ‘meta’ level, in order to find ways of making sense of its substantive objects of interest. The surprising thing for me in this project is that the categories of space and time appear to constitute the philosophical presuppositions of a geographical form of study, but not to be conventional empirical or theoretical objects of study in their own right. Sociologists can study social groups, or forms of social action, or social networks, or social structures (as the sedimented forms of these), and still remain quite close to the observed particulars which constitute their empirical field. Something similar can be said of economists and their observable particulars of interest-maximising individuals or the competitive markets within which they interact; or of anthropologists and the normatively or culturally shaped patterns of behaviour which they study. The ontology of these fields moves between observed particulars and typified generalities and causal or other relations between both, without moving that far away from the tangible empirical objects which might be thought to constitute the usual objects of most kinds of scientific study.
But the concepts of space and time seem to function at a rather higher level of abstraction than this, that is to say philosophically as much as scientifically. Entities need to exist in both space and time in order to exist, but to say an entity does have these two dimensions seems to ascribe no attribute except existence itself to the entity in question. It is interesting therefore that a field of study should have decided to define itself, in recent decades, in part because of its distinctive preoccupation with these categories. What has been at stake in this choice, and in particular what has been at stake in it for Doreen Massey?
It seems to me that the insistence that, as a favourite maxim would have it, ‘space matters’, can only be understood in the context of its implied contrary. And if the implied contrary might seem literally to be that space was of no significance (hardly a conceivable idea at all), its real force was to refute an opposite and erroneous focus upon the dimension of time, to the exclusion of space. To whom was this opposite emphasis imputed? One might say to two different but related forms of historicism (‘historicism’ meaning the construction of deterministic narratives of history to which all and every societal particular was presumed to conform). One of these historicisms was the once-orthodox version of historical materialism, the idea that the succession of modes of production and of the hegemonic social classes emergent from them would and should determine the shape of the future. The other historicism was that of liberal capitalism and its associate forms of ‘modernisation theory’, embodied in recent years in the ‘Washington Consensus’ and for example in the premature declaration, after the fall of European communism, of ‘the end of history’ by Francis Fukuyama (1992). Doreen Massey is implacably hostile to the neoliberal project of development, especially in its effects upon the regions and countries of the developing world, Latin America in particular. And she also has little time for the theory of the inexorable rise of the working class, not least because of her and others’ feminist understandings that the working class in this political reckoning was all too liable to trample over women during its forward march.
The absolute priority which had been accorded to the category of time in this reading was held to flatten out and homogenise all differences between social subjects, other than those relevant to their position in the imputed line of linear historical advance. The contrary – or in fact complementary – emphasis on the category of space signified a commitment to the recognition of differences, not only or mainly in regard to the imputed line of historical march (whether that be bourgeois or proletarian) but in regard to differences and particularities as such. Entities cannot occupy the identical space at the same time, and therefore in principle the insistence on the recognition of the innate multiplicity of spaces and places means an insistence on a principle of difference, and of differences as a source of value.
The argument, however, is not for an explanatory emphasis on space alone – Massey has been at great pains to insist on this point. Emphasis on the dimension of space, to the exclusion of that of time, is as crushing of complexity and variety as the reverse choice. If there is only space, and no dimension of time, there can be no change and no development. Just as if there is only time and no space, there is change only within a uniform and homogeneous social substance. In practice, predominantly spatialised representations of social reality take various forms. One of these is a fundamental conservative insistence that nothing of moment within ‘our’ spatially located community (whatever that may be) must at all costs change. Our way of life must be protected from the threat of the new, from wherever that may come. Another gentler version is in the cosmology of aboriginal peoples, whose sacralised concept of their home territory saw it as the location of a cycle of generational renewal and rebirth, which excluded the idea of development in any unprecedented and unwarranted directions.
Massey has expressed some sympathy for forms of resistance to the overpowering pressures from global market forces which find expression in spatially defined identities – ‘our place’, its community, its heritage, its natural environment – though it is to be noted that such imaginative constructions usually embody a temporal history too. The idealised object is ‘our place and its distinctive past’. But she does not in the end believe that such largely spatialised responses to the forces of imposed one-dimensional change can suffice in sustaining productive conceptions of political agency. Resistances of place are not enough to hold off the power of global markets.
Doreen Massey’s fundamental argument is therefore neither exclusively for space (despite the crucial categorical importance of space to the field of geography) nor for time. It is rather for space and time conceived essentially as related to one another, with each neither excluded nor diminished by the other. Social and historical analysis, she eloquently argues, should be constructed in terms of space-time relations. Massey is arguing that both wholly spatial and wholly temporal modes of analysis entail what in another terminology could be called reification. That is to say, they treat social entities or processes as thing-like and one-dimensional, whereas they need to be understood to be both in actuality and potentiality as processual, and multidimensional. Massey’s argument is for the recognition of contingency and openness in social and political processes, as the essential root of ethical and political progress.
Her theoretical and political positions in this respect draw substantially on the arguments of Ernesto Laclau and Chantal Mouffe (1985), who have theorised the democratic political sphere – in opposition to the essentialism and determinism of the Marxist tradition – as a properly deliberative and agonistic one, ‘without guarantees’, as others have put it. Laclau and Mouffe argued that Marxism, even in both of its most sophisticated Althusserian and Gramscian forms, remained dogmatic in its assumptions, ascribing unity to social formations, and necessary goals and intentions to class actors, which have no empirical basis. Instead, they urge the primacy of the political and the contingent, proposing that the distinctive contribution of both Lenin’s and Gramsci’s conceptions of agency was that they did acknowledge the necessary role of political action in situations whose outcomes could never be fully determined.2 They argue that classes and other political subjects are not the pre-existing ground for political action, but in part have to be constituted through it.
Mouffe (2000) went on to argue for a conception of ‘agonistic democracy’, urging the importance of the prosecution of conflicts of fundamental value (against the silencing contemporary ideas of political consensus), though nevertheless framed within a commitment to the democratic process itself (‘adversaries, but not enemies’ is her formulation of this). Massey has been influenced by this conception of political action, and the necessity to create alliances and movements through establishing ‘equivalences’ between claims by different collective subjects, and she argues for a spirited conception of political action and mobilisation, in varieties of situation. She has brought together her idea of spatially constituted differences between subject positions with a commitment, which draws on Mouffe and Laclau’s work, to an anti-essentialist democratic politics (Massey 1995a, 2005). Her underlying commitment is to spatial and human connectedness in relation to these various struggles. The description by Ehrenreich and Hochschild (2003) of the exploitative global pattern of arrangements for childcare which compels Filipino mothers to care for the children of affluent Californian mothers, while their own children have to be left in the care of grandparents and aunts, is an example of the kind of spatial patterning of social relations which can be recognised through this critical framework. In some instances, the specific political causes which Massey embraces can seem somewhat disparate and insubstantial, yet many flourishing initiatives – such as some of those she describes in part three of World City (2007) – indicate that this politics has real roots.
There is a ‘postmodern’ cast to Massey’s positions, following from her hostility to what she sees as the authoritarian transformative ambitions of different versions of modernism. Her ontology is somewhat constructivist, in her view that subjects are constituted through discourse and action, and her conception of agency is somewhat pragmatist. Notwithstanding this, her substantive political and ethical commitments have remained unyielding.3
The attention given in Doreen Massey’s work – especially her For Space (2005) – to the categories within which geographical and political thought takes place follows from the necessity at certain times to interrogate philosophical categories themselves. This is notably when dominant conceptualisations cease to be able to capture phenomena that call for description and explanation. Massey’s argument has been with what she believes to be misleading frames of thought, which produce false ways of accounting for and imagining human experiences. She has been engaged in an argument against what can best be described as ideologies, as framing preconceptions whose consequences both for thought and politics she regards as harmful.
Both of the extreme poles of the antinomy between spatial and temporal modes are imaginable modes of thinking, and indeed each has some contemporary sway. To the mainly temporal mode belongs an active, teleological, transformative politics of modernisation. To the largely spatialised mode belong various kinds of conservative defence of what is, in this spatially located ‘here and now’. Like other ideologies, each of these has been and remains capable of ensuring its own condition of reproduction. Ideologies which deny the existence of relevant differences within spaces may well be linked with instruments which diminish or remove them from political consideration in practice. For example, the Soviet project of modernisation attempted to impose uniform models of economic and political organisation wherever its power allowed.4 The ‘Washington consensus’ was similarly intolerant of societal differences from its own neoliberal perspective. Conversely, ideologies which deny the existence of teleologies, or indeed possibilities of change, can be associated with political practices which repress these. Authoritarian theocracies, whether dominated by Catholicism or Islam, have had this character. Ideologies – even systems of abstract presuppositions like those of space and time – are thus engines which drive both substantive ways of thinking and political practices. Even the most abstract categories of thought are supported by material powers, and in their turn give them legitimacy. It is thus valuable that Massey has given so much attention to the meanings and implications of such categories.
What is being advanced through Doreen Massey’s categories of space-time relations is in effect a conception of how she would like social relations and politics to be. What connect places and spaces to one another in her view are the social actions of those individuals and collectives who inhabit and move between them in time. ‘Time-space compression’ is the consequence of a vast expansion of human and technological powers of many kinds. Massey has sought to map the consequences of this situation, in terms of those differentially affected by these powers. She has explored how access to these powers is distributed, for example by class and by gender, and how these distributions can be contested. She develops a view of interconnectedness which she sees as giving rise to potentials for liberation and democracy, but locates these in the contexts of the social forces and structures – the ‘power geometries’, as she puts it – which oppose these. Her own view of ‘time-space compression’ is in fact a fairly positive one, since processes of globalisation, which to some are mainly sources of disorientation and dissolution, seem to her to contain new possibilities for the construction of improved ways of life. The connections between places, and also their temporalities (the historically produced ways of life in which communities live), though often exploitative or oppressive, can also bring the possibility of change.
I suggested earlier that the discipline of geography had been able to understand the new world dominated by global market forces better than most sociologists had been able to do. One reason was that geographers took to the globalised world as their natural (if new) intellectual habitat, while most sociologists were still caught up in nation-specific fields of study. The apparently abstract focus on changing relations of space and time made it possible to recognise the significance of many more phenomena – the growth of mega-cities, the functions of shanty towns as zones of transition within them, the development of ‘virtual’ circuits of financial exchange, ‘mobilities’ of many kinds – than was possible in the conventional lexicon of much sociology and political science. Changing relations of time and space are constitutive features of this emerging social order, and it is for this reason that the focus on them by geographers and others has been so productive of understanding.
But it emerges that in Massey’s work the primary object of study has all along been essentially social, and indeed political. Reflection on the categories of space and time has made possible new understandings of the actions of the human beings5 located within them, as a consequence of the changing relations of time and space. Massey’s contention is that connectedness and relatedness between places and spaces, and between societies and cultures with their specific histories or ‘times’, has increased, one would say as a consequence of expanded human and technological powers.
A link can be made between the relational theory that was being developed in the context of the discipline of geography, and the ‘object-relations theory’ which in this period has become the most influential framework in psychoanalysis in Britain. Certainly the idea of relations and the relational is very central to both ways of thinking. Doreen and I have been close colleagues on the journal Soundings for more than 15 years, and agree politically about far more than we disagree, yet we have previously found few ways of bringing together the two fields of geography and psychoanalysis which are respectively central to our interests. So it seems worth exploring these possible affinities a little further.
One notes to begin with that psychoanalysis and associated forms of thinking have also become more ‘relational’ in recent decades than they previously were. Freud’s original framing of psychoanalysis was somewhat individualist, with the self and its desires placed in primordial conflict and competition with the desires of others. But later developments in psychoanalysis, for example in the writings of Klein and Winnicott, gave a greater emphasis to the idea that infants were related to parental figures (often referred to technically as ‘objects’ because of their unconscious internal representations) from birth. The narcissism that had been declared to be a primordial condition by Freud came to be seen as a response to a failure in a primary relationship, not its natural precursor (Rustin and Rustin, 2010). Another earlier split, between a predominantly ‘internalist’ view of personality development which tended to ignore actual relationships in families and beyond, and perspectives which emphasised the effects of the ‘real’ environment, has diminished, as many psychotherapeutic practitioners have come to recognise that ‘internal’ personality formations, and the actual relationships within which persons are located from birth, need to be thought about together. Furthermore, in different psychoanalytic traditions, such as relational psychoanalysis in the United States (Mitchell and Aron, 1999) and the post-Kleinian tendency in the United Kingdom, much attention is now given to interactions between analyst and client in a therapeutic relationship in which the analyst is no longer imagined to be an unmoved observer and interpreter of what is happening. As our wider society (in Britain and the USA at any rate) has become more individualist in the last three decades, the psychoanalytic and psychotherapeutic fields have become more attentive to social connectedness and dependency.
One question is whether any particular vision of society and social relationship follows from a psychoanalytic perspective whose primary spatial location is the clinical consulting room, and whose primary focus of interest is on the inner world of individuals, usually within a context in which intimate ‘family’ relationships, past and present, are of most concern. One can ask if any specific politics follows from this perspective, and if so, whether it is anywhere specified what this might be. But even if the answer to this question is a qualified negative, one can ask if conceptions of the social good may nevertheless be implicit in this work, potentially capable of translation into a wider-than-clinical sphere.
The ‘relational’ dimension of this perspective emerges in its presence in various spheres of public policy, often as a minority voice. For example, in devising forms of care for the old, including those suffering from dementia, it is being argued that the quality of human attention accorded to subjects with diminishing capacities is essential to their well-being, since it sustains their sense of being through relation to another (Davenhill, 2007; Dartington, 2010). Or, in responding to the extreme difficulties in parenting of babies which sometimes occur (perhaps as an ultimate consequence of wider social injuries and deprivations, and attempted escape from these through drug or alcohol abuse), it is argued that it is the parents’ capacity to tolerate the needs of their babies, and the emotions aroused by them, which is the crucial issue. The question is whether, if the parents themselves can arrive at a sense of being held-in-mind, they may recover the capacity to hold-in-mind their infants.
Or, in considering the difficulties that sometimes occur in situations of adoption, it has been argued that it is helpful to realise that accompanying a troubled relationship between adoptive parents and child there is likely to be another ‘internal’ relationship-in-the-mind between adopted child and birth parent, or adoptive parent and wished-for birth child. There may be a multitude of ‘subjects’ in the situation, some of them denied or unrecognised (Rustin, 1999).
Or, in encountering many situations of difficulty in families, at any age, it has been found that past relationships – even going back a generation or two – may have a continuing shaping hold on the present, sometimes providing an unconscious template by which current relationships are unknowingly shaped.
Or, in considering the stresses on workers and professionals in many areas of the education, health and welfare systems, it is noted that their primary relationships of choice, with their students, pupils, patients or clients, and with their field of practice – their teaching research, their professional interest and expertise – may both feel under attack. Such attacks come from demands to follow bureaucratic procedures, to achieve ‘outputs’, to succeed in competitions (e.g., positions in league tables), which may be quite insensitive to the primary needs of the work in question (Rustin and Rustin, 2010).
Or, in thinking about how members of organisations can work productively together, and how managements can facilitate this, attention is given to whether the anxieties inherent in an organisation’s work can be recognised, thought about, ‘contained’ in the mind of those who hold responsib, so that attention can be given to the tasks of an organisation. Different organisational ‘missions’ are liable to carry their own specific anxieties. Those working in psychiatric settings will be preoccupied, consciously and unconsciously, with the perils of mental illness for all who come into contact with it; those in schools with the difficulties of learning, with the risks of failure, and with the problems of maintaining commitment to the work of learning when the risk and fear of failure is always present. Those in prisons have to cope with a fear of the potential resistance or violence of those whom they are imprisoning, and perhaps also with a despairing knowledge of their inability to do much to help many of those in their charge. All these are relational states of mind, of one kind or another.
The underlying ontology of a relational psychoanalysis approach includes the following elements. One is the idea that individuals are always located within a context, in which relation to others, both in actuality and in unconscious fantasy, is central to their being. Donald Winnicott memorably wrote, ‘there is no such thing as a baby, only a mother and baby’ (1966), but one can broaden this assertion to say that all individuals depend on others to constitute their being. Thus there is no teacher unless there are also pupils, no actor unless there is an audience to watch them perform, no doctor or nurse unless there are patients. The reason why retirement from work can be a crisis is because it may take from the self both a real and an imagined context of interaction, of shared being, which may not be capable of being adequately replaced.
A second element is the idea that individuals are multiple subjects, both in their actual present, and in their remembering and self-imagining (what will also, be in psychoanalytic terms, their unconscious.) One psychoanalytic discourse thinks of this in terms of ‘parts of the self’. Joyce McDougall, in her Theatres of the Mind (1986), writes about conscious and unconscious ‘scripts’, the problem for human actors being to avoid being overwhelmed by the power that unconscious scripts may have to take over the conscious self. Although in psychoanalytic clinical practice, the issue may often be to clarify the relation between ‘infantile’ and more grown-up parts of the self, this idea of multiple selves is not simply a developmental or ‘temporal’ idea, but also refers to coinciding – we might say ‘spatial’ – differences between different latent subjects within the self.
A third idea is that the capacity to reflect, to hold in mind the different and contradictory aspects of those ‘objects’ which the self is related to, is critical for mental integration and development. Under emotional stress, these different aspects become split off from one another, and ‘binary’ ways of thinking ensue. A world of the good ‘inside’ and the bad ‘outside’, or the good ‘us’ and the bad ‘them’, is constructed. We are all familiar with endless versions of such binary oppositions and antagonisms, of racial, religious, ideological, territorial and many other kinds. These are termed ‘paranoid-schizoid’ modes of mental functioning in the Kleinian psychoanalytic context, in contrast to ‘depressive’ ones which take account of the complexity and capacity to suffer of the other. The idea that the attainment of a capacity for reflection, especially in emotionally charged situations, is the crucial index of maturity has become crucial to contemporary psychoanalysis, largely through the contribution of Wilfred Bion, influencing many of its component theoretical tendencies.
A great deal could be said theoretically about the importance of the toleration of differences as an attribute of mind, within the contemporary psychoanalytic theory of the personality. Freud argued that the unconscious knows boundaries of neither time nor space. A more philosophically developed formulation of this idea is to be found in the writings of the Argentine psychoanalyst Jorge Ahumada, who has made use of Russell’s theory of logical types to explain the modes of unconscious mental functioning.6 Ahumada (1991) argues that the unconscious thinks, so to speak, in classes, from whose universal qualities and attributions the particulars of experience are not able to be differentiated. In healthy mental life, symbols are used to name and discriminate different attributes of reality, and to identify connections between them, whether by analogy or as cause and effect. Where the mind is unduly dominated by states of unconscious fantasy, internally generated symbolic representations become fused with perceptual reality, and distort and restrict its apprehension.
Doreen Massey has not generally been concerned with extreme situations in her consideration of the consequences of the denial of difference. But they do occur. Entire societies have at times been invaded by states of mind in which it was claimed that all differences from an absolute norm must be eradicated. The persecution of heresy, or the cause of racial purification, are examples of the expunging of differences which are ‘spatial’ in nature – that is to say, their intolerance is of different modes of being in the present. Struggles to destroy a class enemy (one remembers that ‘liquidate’ was a term in common use), whether bourgeois under Stalinism or aristocratic under the Jacobin Terror, defined their intolerable field of difference in historicist terms, as obstructions to the march of progress. These states of mind at certain times acquired a virtually psychotic character, in which it became impossible to differentiate between fantasy and reality. However, these theoretical arguments regarding the reality principle in psychoanalysis, essential for the apprehension and toleration of differences, cannot be further pursued here.
More can be said about the significance of the dimensions of space and time in psychoanalysis. One starting point is Roger Money-Kyrle’s (1971) idea that the fundamental challenge in psychological development is to come to terms with the ‘fact of life’ – that is to say, the realities of generation and gender, of the human capacities that arrive but are then lost with time, and of the different capacities that are given and denied by gender. This generalises Freud’s theory of the Oedipus complex, and the disappointments of infantile desires which this makes inevitable. Generation is a temporal concept and gender is spatial, in a metaphorical sense.
The psychoanalytic process aims to make possible, within a chosen temporal and spatial boundary (the set time and space allotted to analytic sessions), an exploration of psychic space and time, with the purpose of making possible a fuller engagement with and acceptance of differences of many kinds. One can say this is an exploration in both time and space: time in so far as the experiences of the past – in fantasy and in actuality – are made accessible to reflection and transformation in the ‘here and now’ of the transference relationship; and space in so far as differences and indeed conflicts can be negotiated, both internally and externally in this setting. The analytic process is intended to make possible a widening and deepening of emotional and mental life, a freeing of thought and feeling from closures of various kinds. The boundaries set by the frame are themselves usually the focus of much analytic work, since resentment and denial of them may reveal the structure of unconscious desires and anxieties. This is true for Lacan’s technique of deliberately ‘breaking the frame’ by unexpectedly ending an analytic session, as well as for the ‘English style’ in which these boundaries are firmly adhered to.
A zero degree of psychological closure to the experience of space-time relations is found in autistic states in children. Such children often cannot bear any separation from their objects of attachment (which would imply difference), nor change of any kind other than the most repetitious or mechanical. I once heard an account of psychotherapeutic work with such an autistic boy patient, who partially recovered. This boy had chosen to live in a completely frozen world, in which continuities neither of space nor time were recognised. He had no effective memory or sense of anticipation, nor was there any preparedness to connect things happening in one place with things happening in another. When the boy started to recover, the means by which he came to recognise the properties of time and space was by discovering his own powers of causal agency – by realising that he could make a difference. He found, for example, that blowing out the candle was what made it go dark. It was the development of a sense of self, of being an active agent in the world, that made differences of time and space begin to be tolerable rather than experienced as threats of annihilation. Here was a little boy learning the lessons of Heraclitus and Parmenides about the way things both change and persist in time. There are, no doubt, more parallels to be explored between the space-time relations of Doreen Massey’s geography and space-time relations as they are conceived in psychoanalysis.
What, if anything, does a psychoanalytically informed ‘relational’ perspective have in common with the relational dimensions of Doreen Massey’s writing? Both perspectives give great emphasis to relations with others, in effect to desirable engagements with difference. In the psychoanalytic sphere, this relation is mainly conceived in reparative and inclusionary terms. How can all these aspects of experience (in an internal world, in a family, in an institution, even in a larger society) be given their due recognition, be accepted for what they are, be made objects of thought rather than expelled from consciousness and turned into objects of hatred? ‘How can the sense of reality be defended from internal attack?’ is a continuing question, since it is recognised that individuals and groups are liable to defend themselves through rejection of reality itself, through various forms of denial and unthinking.
In Massey’s thinking, the relational focus is often more combative and conflictual. Differences need to be recognised and accepted, but the unequal and unjust geometries of power need to be addressed through political and social action. I don’t think this contradicts the imperatives of a psychoanalytic way of understanding differences and relationships, but it is distinct from it. The explanation of this difference is itself situational, a matter of spatial location, one might say. The psychotherapists find themselves primarily engaged in the work of emotional repair. Even when they are working with institutions, they are usually set the task of making them work better, more inclusively, more thoughtfully and kindly, not of attacking them for their deficiencies, still less attempting to sweep them out of the way. Doreen Massey often writes as a political citizen and activist, offering descriptions and explanations of injustices, showing how they are connected to larger systems of power relations. In this role she nevertheless proposes a mode of political action which is reflective, committed to understanding, respectful of differences, responsible, while still being prepared to identify opponents and seek to defeat them.
Both conceptions are essentially relational, in their different ways. One could say that each carries with it its innate risk. For the reparative psychoanalytic approach, the risk is of excessive compliance with existing institutions and powers. Therapists and consultants can usually only work within the social spaces which the dominant order accords to them – although because this order (in most places) is not a monolith, and because it may harbour various potentialities for development, these spaces can sometimes be significant. For the pursuit of an agonistic politics, the contrary risk is that in the heat of conflict, ‘differences’ may once again become collapsed into binary antagonisms, equivalences become flattened into identities, and tolerance of complexity and the capacity for free thought greatly diminished.
What none of us knows is what the emergence of relational perspectives like these, of different but perhaps nevertheless compatible kinds, may now socially signify. An earlier ‘reparative’ moment in psychoanalysis in Britain was connected historically to the broader movement for social reconstruction which followed the experience of the Great Depression and the Second World War, and made its small contribution to the development of the welfare state. Might these developments in theory and practice in geography and in psychoanalysis perhaps now indicate the scope for a broader development of relational social thinking, at the end of a period in which neoliberal individualism has been so much the dominant way of thinking?
Acknowledgements
I am grateful to Ash Amin, Margaret Rustin, Joe Painter and David Featherstone for their valuable advice during the preparation of this paper.
Notes
1 It was only in a semi-jocular spirit that Doreen Massey and the other founding editors of Soundings contemplated calling it The Kilburn Times, before we realised that while Kilburn might signify a rather unfashionable neighbourhood to us its residents, to readers elsewhere the metropolitan designation of London might signify more.
2 Rustin (1988) set out a critique of Laclau and Mouffe’s Hegemony and Socialist Strategy.
3 Richard Rorty sustained in his writing a similar conjunction of a constructivist philosophy and an outspokenly socialist ethics and politics (Rorty, 1999).
4 Tony Judt’s (2007) [2005] Postwar: A History of Europe since 1945, pp. 165–196, describes the effects of Soviet rule over most of Eastern Europe after 1945 in these terms.
5 Bruno Latour (2004), and perhaps Massey too, would say not only human beings, but other kinds of actant too, such as the elements of the environment itself.
6 Among the sources for these ideas are the Chilean psychoanalyst Matte Blanco (1975) and the anthropologist, psychiatrist and systems theorist Gregory Bateson (1973).