Lesbók Morgunblaðsins - 12.05.2005, Blaðsíða 103

Lesbók Morgunblaðsins ˜ 12. maí 2005 | 103
But Rabasa then goes further. The ’passivity’ was in fact not
simply passive, he argues; Brazil was not simply an object of
knowledge. As in Latin America more widely there was a sub-
stantial input to the colonial interpretation of this ’new world’ from
active indigenous knowledges. This was not ’Western desire’
striding into the ’blank page’ of the to-be-conquered/colonialised:
rather, andhowever unequal were the terms, it was an encounter.
(In the language of the argument of this book, there was more than
one history here.) Moreover, arguesRabasa, it is not only in terms of
an interpretation of the past that such binary readings have effects:
more generally they construct a tautological closure which ignores a
potential openendedness; it is a ’will to closure’ which must be prised
open precisely to enable a way out from present-day Eurocentrism.
Now, what Rabasa does not do (it was not his concern) is to pull
out what is going on here in terms of time and space. This, too, is an
opposition embedded in the quotation from de Certeau (although it
should be recognised that the possibility is also suggested that
space can be traced through ’routes’ – that it can be more active,
mobile?). In this formulation history/time is the active term,
voyaging across passive geography/space. It is thus that the
’others’ are rendered static, without history.
It is thus, too, that they can be rendered as ’a blank page’. This is
a significant phrase: one deployed by de Certeau and analysed by
Rabasa, and it links us back to other themes. Rabasa’s argument is
that the construction and interpretation of these active/passive
discourses of colonialism (and, in my terms,these discourses of time
and space) are bound up with wider historical shifts. In the first
place, they are bound up with a more generally emerging
distinction between a ’subject’ and an ’object’ of knowledge (and, in
Rabasa’s view, with ’the emergence of Western subjectivity as
universal’) (p. 47). Secondly, they are bound up with the emergence
of ’the scriptural economy of the Renaissance’ and the strict
distinguishing of writing from orality, with the latter designated as
the primitive form: ’it is only in the Renaissance that writing
defined itself as labor, in opposition to non-productive orality. This
scriptural economy reduced Amerindians to “savages“ without
culture, hence to apprentices of Western culture’ (pp. 512). Orality
is banished to the spatiality of the object; one writes on it. (Just as
one, supposedly, travels across space.)
Now, both the term ’the scriptural economy of the Renaissance’
and Rabasa’s link between orality and spatiality are drawn from de
Certeau (de Certeau, 1984, ch. 10; and 1988, ch. 5, respectively). 2
De Certeau writes, ’The “difference“ implied by orality… delimits an
expanse of space, an object of scientific activity. In order to be
spoken, oral language waits for a writing to circumscribe it and to
recognise what it is expressing’ (de Certeau, 1988, p. 210; emphasis
in the original). Two uses thus come together: the blank page of what
will become, in this case, the Americas ’on which Western desire will
be written’ (1988, p. xxv) and the blank page as ’the proper place of
“writing“’ (Rabasa,1993, p. 42). For de Certeau, ’writing’ is the
concrete activity that consists in constructing, on its own blank space
(un espace propre) – the page a – text that has power over the
exteriority from which it has first been isolated’ (de Certeau, 1984, p.
134). The notion of a blank page relates both to the conceptualisation
sof ’the “Other“ as absence of culture’ (Rabasa, 1993, p. 42) – or in
my terms and more generally as absence of history/trajectory – and
to the connection between writing-as-representation and space. And,
as will be remembered from Chapter 3, for de Certeau ’The „proper“
is a victory of space over time’ (1984, p. xix). Moreover, as Rabasa
goes on to argue, in relation to the development of the printing press
in contrast to ’the scribes of the Middle Ages’, books and maps… not
only made information more accessible but also laid out the world on
surfaces ready to be “explored“’ (1993, p. 52; my emphasis).3
Two things are working together here then, and they
powerfully reinforce each other. On the one hand the represen-
tation of space as a surface, and on the other hand the imagination
of representation (here, again, in the specific form of writing, as
scientific representation) in terms of spatialisation. Together what
they lead to is the stabilisation of others, their deprivation of a
history. It is a political cosmology which enables us in our mind’s
eye to rob others of their histories; we hold them still for our own
purposes, while we do the moving. Crucial to this operation is the
taming of space.
And here this argument can link up with others. For we perform
such magic with our usual notions of space. Not only do we imagine
it as a surface, we do infact often conceive of our journeys ’across’ it
as temporal too. But not the way I mean it, where our trajectory will
meet up with another’s. As has been argued, ’the West’, in its
voyages and in its anthropology, and in its current imaginings of the
geography of globalisation, has so often imagined itself going out
and finding, not contemporary stories, but the past. (Do travellers to
California imagine themselves as accelerating through history?) Or,
again, there is the way the story of cities is so often told, as a tale of
singular change from Athens toLos Angeles. (Where in this line of
development do we put Samarkand or SãoPaulo? Does it mean
Calcutta will one day be like LA? And what of Bangalore?)Space as
a surface, then, but one which slopes in time.
We do it in our daily lives. Migrants imagine ’home’, the place
they used to be, as it used to be. ’The Angry Young Men’ of the
British 1950s and 1960s have become iconic in this; coming south to
make their names, both ridiculing and, so often in the figure of
’Mother’, sometimes revering, the northern places they had left.
But what they so often also tried to do was hold those places in
aspic; they stopped these places’ histories at the point at which the
migrants left. The spatial surface, from London to the north, sloped
backwards in time.
I too am a northerner who presently lives ’down south’ and I
have often thought about this in the context of ’going home’. When
the train passes Cloud Hill beyond Congleton we’re nearly there. I
put away my books (this is aritual), the hills get higher, the people
get smaller, and I know that when I get off the train I will meet
again the constant cheery back-chat which is south Lancashire. Im
’home’, and I love it, and part of what I love is my richer set of
connections here, precisely its familiarity.
And what is wrong with that? This kind of longing, for instance of
the migrant, for a ’home’ they used to know? Wendy Wheeler (1994)
has addressed this question in her thoughtful work about the losses
we have suffered as a price of our incorporation in the project of
modernity (see alsoWheeler, 1999). As do many others, she points
to the prominence within the postmodern of feelings and
expressions of nostalgia, including nostalgias for place and home
(one section is entitled: ’postmodernity as longing to come home’).
While agreeing that the fixing of the identity of places is a matter
always of power and contestation rather than of actually existing
authenticity, and agreeing too that ’the past was no more static
than the present’ (she is citing, and responding at this point to,
Massey, 1992b, p. 13), she continues, ’it is nevertheless still the
case, as Angelika Bammer argues (Bammer, 1992, p. xi), that these
nostalgic gestures of postmodernism are ’the recuperative gestures
of our affective needs’. One of the questions which postmodernism
poses to politics is that of a response to ’affective needs’ (Wheeler,
1994, p. 99). Her argument is that Enlightenment modernity has
been bought at the cost of the radical exclusion of everything that
might threaten rational consciousness. Moreover,
This radical exclusion of Reason’s ’other’ forms the basis
both of the major distinctions upon which modernity is
founded (reason/unreason; maturity/ childishness;
masculinity/feminity; science/art; high culture/mass
culture;critique/affect; politics/aesthetics etc.) and of
modern subjectivity itself. (p. 96)
This is an important argument, and one which in a number of
ways links up with the theses in this book.4 Postmodern nostalgia,
on this reading, is at least partly explicable as a kind of return of
the repressed of modernity. Moreover, it can take a number of
forms, and one potential political project is precisely to articulate a
politically progressive form. The title of Wendy Wheeler’s article is
’Nostalgia isn’t nasty’.
Now, nostalgia constitutively plays with notions of space and
time. Andwhat I would like to argue, I think in sympathy with
Wheeler’s thesis at its broadest level, is that when nostalgia
articulates space and time in such a way that it robs others of their
histories (their stories), then indeed we need to rework nostalgia.
Maybe in those cases it is indeed ’nasty’.
My point is that the imagination of going home (and I am by no
means sure that, as Wheeler implies, this is only a postmodern
phenomenon) so frequently means going ’back’ in both space and
time. Back to the old familiar things, to the way things used to be.
(Indeed as I look out the window after Congleton the things I pick
out are so often the things I remember from before. Signs of
Mancunian specificity, which so often too get entangled (given
modernity’s and postmodernity’s tendencies to sameness) with
signs inherited from the past one thinks wryly of Borges’ (1970)
’The Argentine writer and tradition’.)
One moment haunts me in this regard. My sister and I had gone
’back home’ and were sitting with our parents in the front room
having tea. The treat on such occasions was the chocolate cake. It
was a speciality: heavy and with some kind of mixture of butter,
syrup and cocoa powder in the middle. A wartime recipe I think,
invented out of necessity, and a triumph. I loved it. On this
occasion, though, Mum went out to the kitchen and came back
holding a chocolate cake that was altogether different. All
light-textured and fluffy, and a paler brown. Not the good old
stodgy sweetness we loved so well. She was so pleased; a new
recipe she’d found. But with one voice my sister and I sent up a wail
of complaint - ’Oh Mum… but we like the old chocolate cake’.
I’ve often re-lived and regretted that moment, though I think she
understood. For me, without thinking then of its implications, part
of the point of going home was to do things as we’d always done
them. Going home, in the way I was carrying it at that moment, did
not mean joining up with ongoing Mancunian lives. Certainly it was
time travel as well as space travel, but I lived it in that moment as a
journey to the past. But places change; they go on without you.
Mother invents new recipes. A nostalgia which denies that, is
certainly in need of re-working.
For the truth is that you can never simply ’go back’, to home or to
anywhere else. When you get ’there’ the place will have moved on just
as you yourself will have changed. And this of course is the point. For
to open up ’space’ to this kind of imagination means thinking time and
space as mutually imbricated and thinking both of them as the
product of interrelations. You can’t go back in space-time. To think
that you can is to deprive others of their ongoing independent stories.
It may be ’going back home’, or imagining regions and countries as
backward, as needing to catch up, or just taking that holiday in some
’unspoilt, timeless’ spot. The point is the same. You can’t go back. (De
Certeau’s trajectories are not, in fact, reversible. That you can trace
backwards on a page/map does not mean you can in space-time. The
indigenous Mexicans might re-trace their footsteps, but their place of
origin will no longer be the same.) You can’t hold places still. What
you can do is meet up with others, catch up with where another’s
history has got to ’now’, but where that ’now’ (more rigorously, that
’here and now’, that hic et nunc) is itself constituted by nothing more
than – precisely that – meeting-up (again).
For a fuller rumination on the space-time of this journey see Massey, 2000c.
As Rabasa points out (1993, p. 44), de Certeau is conscious that his approach is
one with a particular history, and that it has effects (de Certeau, 1988, pp. 211-12).
This quotation continues: ’This objectification enabled appropriation of the ter-
ritories’ (p. 52). Here I would part company with him. Appropriation also required
cannons and horses and other material supports. Rabasa’s analysis seems to
remain within the discursive (see 1993, pp. 224-5, footnote 6).
It is also an argument which very constructively challenges the simplistic for-
mulation which would have it that current tendencies towards a return to a place,
and towards a defensiveness of the local, are a product only of a reaction to the
invasive and disorienting processes of globalisation.
© Doreen Massey, 2005, www.sagepub.co.uk
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