Lesbók Morgunblaðsins - 12.05.2005, Blaðsíða 102

102 | Lesbók Morgunblaðsins ˜ 12. maí 2005
But this time you are not just travelling through space or across it
(from one place – London – to another Milton Keynes). Since space
is the product of social relations you are also helping, although in
this case in a fairly minor way, to alter space, to participate in its
continuing production. You are part of the constant process of the
making and breaking of links which is an element in the consti-
tution of you yourself, of London (which will not have the pleasure
of your company for the day), of Milton Keynes (which will; and
whose existence as an independent node of commuting is reinforced
as a result), and thus of space itself. You are not just travelling
through space or across it, you are altering it a little. Space and
place emerge through active material practices. Moreover, this
movement of yours is not just spatial, it is also temporal. The
London you left just a half an hour ago (as you speed through
Cheddington) is not the London of now. It has already moved on.
Lives have pushed ahead, investments and disinvestments have
been made in the City, it has begun to rain quite heavily (they said
it would); a crucial meeting has broken up acrimoniously; someone
has caught a fish in the Grand Union canal. And you are on your
way to meet up with a Milton Keynes which is also moving on.
Arriving in a new place means joining up with, somehow linking
into, the collection of interwoven stories of which that place is
made. Arriving at the office, collecting the post, picking up the
thread of discussions, remembering to ask how that meeting went
last night, noticing gratefully that your room’s been cleaned.
Picking up the threads and weaving them into a more or less
coherent feeling of being ’here’, ’now’. Linking up again with
trajectories you encountered the last time you were in the office.
Movement, and the making of relations, take/make time.
At either end of your journey, then, a town or city (a place) which
itself consists of a bundle of trajectories. And likewise with the
places in between. You are, on that train, travelling not across
space-as-a-surface (this would be the landscape – and anyway what
to humans may be a surface is not so to the rain and may not be so
either to a million micro-bugs which weave their way through it –
this ’surface’ is a specific relational production), you are travelling
across trajectories. That tree which blows now in the wind out there
beyond the train window was once an acorn on another tree, will
one day hence be gone. That field of yellow oil-seed flower, product
of fertiliser and European subsidy, is a moment – significant but
passing – in a chain of industrialised agricultural production.
There is a famous passage, I think from Raymond Williams… He
too is on a train and he catches a picture, a woman in her pinny
bending over to clear the back drain with a stick. For the passenger
on the train she will forever be doing this. She is held in that
instant, almost immobilised. Perhaps she’s doing it (’I really must
clear out that drain before I go away’) just as she locks up the house
to leave to visit her sister, half the world away, and whom she hasn’t
seen for years. From the train she is going nowhere; she is trapped
in the timeless instant.
Thinking space as the sphere of a multiplicity of trajectories,
imagining a train journey (for example) as a speeding across
on-going stories, means bringing the woman in the pinny to life,
acknowledging her as another on-going life. Likewise with
Berkhamsted Castle. The train does not, as some argue, speed
across different time-zones, from Norman times to twentieth
century. That would be to work with a form of theatre of memory
which understands space as a kind of composite of instants of
different times, an angle of the imagination which is a-historical,
working in opposition to a sense of temporal development. Space as
a collage of the static. Yet both the castle and the station continue
their histories as I pass through (I may contribute to those
histories). From Norman strong hold, the castle became a palace,
was passed between kings and other royalty, served as a prison and
was subsequently cannibalised for the building of a mansion. Today
its story continues as a significant tourist attraction. (However
much the heritage industries might wish on occasions to preserve
things in aspic they cannot actually ever hold them still. The
depthless commodified present which Jameson so effectively points
What is it to travel? How can we best think it in terms of time and
space? Hernán Cortés trudging across the neck of (what was to
become) Mexico. The ’voyagers of discovery’ setting out across the
oceans. My own, regular, journey to work: sitting in the train from
London to Milton Keynes looking out of the window at the land-
scape we are crossing – out of the London basin, through the sharp
gash carved in the chalk hills, emerging finally into the expanse of
the clay of the East Midlands. Travelling across space? Is it?
Thought of this way the very surface, of land or ocean, becomes
equated with space itself.
Unlike time, it seems, you can see space spread out around you.
Time is either past or to come or so minutely instantaneously now
that it is impossible to grasp. Space, on the other hand, is there.
One immediate and evident effect of this is that space comes to
seem so very much more material than time. Temporality seems
easy to imagine in the abstract, as a dimension, as the dimension of
change. Space, in contrast, has been equated with ’extension’, and
through that with the material. It is a distinction that resonates too
(as was seen in Chapter 5) with that understanding of time as in-
terior, as a product of (human) experience, in contrast to space as
material in opposition to time’s incorporeality: it is the landscape
outside the window, the surface of the earth, a given.
There are many who have tried to puncture that smooth surface.
The art events of Clive van den Berg (1997) aim to disrupt the
complacent surface of white South Africa with reminders of the
history on which it is based. Iain Sinclair’s (1997) dérives through
eastern London evoke, through the surface, pasts (and presents)
not usually noticed. Anne McClintock’s provocative notion of
’anachronistic’ space – a permanently anterior time within the
space of the modern – is catching at something similar (McClintock,
1995). On the way between London and Milton Keynes we go
through Berkhamsted. Right by the station stand the remains of a
Norman castle: the motte and bailey and the moats around them
still clearly defined, the grey stone walls now fallen and dis-
continuous, with the air of old grey teeth. We know then that the
’presentness’ of the horizontality of space is a product of a multi-
tude of histories whose resonances are still there, if we would but
see them, and which sometimes catch us with full force unawares.
However, it is not just buried histories at issue here, but
histories still being made, now. Something more mobile than is
implied by an archaeological dig down through the surfaces of the
space of today. Something more temporal than the notion of space
as a collage of historical periods (eleventh-century castle abutting
nineteenth-century railway station).
So take the train, again, from London to Milton Keynes.1
to precisely denies all this. But it does so not only, as is usually
argued, by commodifying ’the past’, but also by refusing to
recognise the histories which are ongoing through the present.)
’The only adequate image is one that includes a sense of motion in
itself ’ (Rodowick, 1997, p. 88). The train transects the castle’s
on-going history.
As Jameson argued (Chapter 7), recognising all this is impossi-
ble. Every train journey (and that would be the least of it) would
become a nightmare of guilty admission of all the stories the
fullness of whose coeval existence you did not manage to
recognise… as the train sped on. What is at issue is not this but the
change in perspective… the imaginative opening up of space. It is
to refuse that flipping of the imaginative eye from modernist
singular temporality to postmodern depthlessness; to retain at
least some sense of contemporaneous multiple becomings.
When Hernán Cortés heaved to the top of the pass between the
snow covered volcanoes and looked down upon the incredible island
city of pyramids and causeways, the immense central valley
between the mountain ranges stretching away into the heat, he
wasn’t just ’crossing space’. What was about to happen, as he and
his army, and the discontented locals they had recruited along the
way, marched down upon Tenochtitlán, was the meeting-up of two
stories, each already with its own spaces and geographies, two
imperial histories: the Aztec and the Spanish. We read so often of
the conquest of space, but what was/is at issue is also the meeting
up with others who are also journeying, also making histories. And
also making geographies and imagining space: for the coeval look
back, ignore you, stand in a different relation to your ’here and
now’. Conquest, exploration, voyages of discovery are about the
meeting-up of histories, not merely a pushing-out ’across space’.
The shift in naming, from la conquista to el encuentro, speaks also
of a more active imagination of the engagement between space and
time. As Eric Wolf (1982) has so well reminded us, to think
otherwise is to imagine ’a people without history’. It is to
immobilise – suspended awaiting our arrival – the place at the other
end of the journey; and it is to conceive of the journey itself as a
movement simply across so me imagined static surface.
Wolf’s arguments, and the writings of others in a similar vein,
are now well recognised and widely cited. Yet their implications are
rarely taken on board; and this failure has political effects. José
Rabasa’s appreciative but critical engagement with the work of
Michel de Certeau provides a lovely illustration both of how a
contrary way of thinking (that ’others’ ’out there’ have no history) is
still deeply embedded in the way we imagine the world and of why
this matters. Rabasa (1993) analyses in particular de Certeau’s
treatment of Jeande Léry’s Histoire of his journey in Brazil (de
Certeau, 1988; de Léry, 1578), and draws out the opposition which
de Certeau establishes in de Léry between two ’planes’. He quotes:
On the first is written the chronicle of facts and deeds…
These events are narrated in a tense: a history is composed
with a chronology – very detailed – of actions undertaken or
lived by a subject. On the second plane objects are set out in
a space ruled not by localization or geographic routes –
these indications are very rare and always vague – but by a
taxonomy of living beings, a systematic inventory of
philosophical questions, etc.; in sum, the catalogue raisonné
of a knowledge. (de Certeau, 1988, pp. 2256; cited in Rabasa,
1993, pp. 467; emphasis in the original)
de Certeau is here establishing a set of oppositions: between an
active historical Europe and a passivity-to-be-named; between an
agency/subject and an object of the gaze/knowledge; and (though
Rabasa does not comment on this) between time and space.
Rabasa’s first point mirrors the arguments already made (Chapter
3) which are critical of de Certeau’s ’insistence on binarism’
(Rabasa, 1993, p. 46), and relates this to de Certeau’s roots within
structuralism and ’the danger of repeating the categories of the
method under criticism’(p. 43) – the difficulty, even in critique, of
fully escaping its terms.
Travelling
imaginations
Doreen Massey is professor of geography at the Open University
in London. She has for some time done research on the way in
which people connect to places and sense space. Her hypotheses
often center on the fusion of these two realms and their relation
to the contemporary environment in which we live for example
from the perspective of globalisation, urban development, social
and governmental issues and so forth. The following passage
from the book For Space, published in Britain several weeks ago,
is presented with the generous permission of Sage Publications.
In this work Massey focuses in an interesting way on the need to
re-evaluate our mode of thinking about space and the manner we
visualize it.
By Doreen Massey
]