Introduction: Spatializing Power: Doreen Massey on Space as Domination and Potential

In the 1980s and 1990s, academics increasingly turned to space as an explanatory concept. In cultural studies and political philosophy, space was mobilized primarily as a metaphor to aid in conceptualizing the “posts” of poststructuralism and postmodernism, while the social sciences repurposed space to make globalization tractable. As Henri Lefebvre observed, space was at once conspicuously absent and on every page of much social theory. But for Massey, the crux of the problem was not that the idea of space being circulated was vague. Rather, the problem was that the term was utilized to indicate a sphere of closure, of stasis, and, fundamentally, an absence of politics. Over numerous publications, Massey detailed the stakes involved in perpetuating this theoretical blind spot and offered a positive and dynamic theory of space instead. She argued that space was the product of relations and multiplicity; space was thus the condition for imagining a future not already foretold by the dominant temporal frames of modernism (i.e., progress, development, ‘the West’). Central to Massey’s theory of space was the problematic of hierarchical dualisms. Space and time were framed in Western thought in ways not only analogical to other central dualisms (man/woman, culture/nature, reason/emotion, etc), but also in combination with them; it was these combinations, of economic inequality with racial oppression, for example, that produced spatial relations of domination and subordination. Massey thus insisted upon an understanding of space that was shot through with the symbolic and material conditions of exclusion and oppression, on the one hand, and the potential of forging “relations otherwise,” on the other. The essays in this section offer the reader a view of the arc of Massey’s thought on space as a relationship of power. Her approach to space developed first and foremost in the wake of the radical turn in geography of the 1970s. During that decade, the discipline was upended by a rejection of the quantitative revolution and an embrace of social constructivist approaches to spatial forms. The implications of this epistemic shift were profound: rather than search for spatial causes of observed spatial patterns, radical geographers, influenced by the work of Marx, instead identified generalizable spatial dynamics of capitalist restructuring.

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