Cultural Geography

from those happenstance juxtapositions, those accidental

separations, the often paradoxical character of

geographical configurations in which – precisely – a

number of distinct trajectories interweave and, some-

times, intersect. Space, then, as well as having loose

ends, is also inherently disrupted. (1999: 284)

The emphasis on the looseness and the potential

for disruption is for Massey central in rethinking

the politics of space, or rather the role of spatial

thinking in renewing how we think about politics.

The goal is to instil in our conception of politics

recognition of ‘the openness of the future, the

interrelatedness of identities, and the nature of

our relations with different others’ (Massey,

1999: 292).

As in many accounts, the idea of relations,

interrelations and proximities to others is key.

As Gillian Rose writes, the question is how to

imagine a space of relation (1999: 252). She

asks: ‘How are bodies positioned in relation to

each other? What kinds of connection do these

positions make possible, thinkable, visible, tangi-

ble?.. .what kinds of space articulate what kinds

of corporealized relation?’ (1999: 252). While I

agree with Massey that it is important to focus

on the ‘happenstance arrangement-in-relation-

to-each-other’ (1999: 282), we also need to bear

in mind that we are produced in distinct ways

because of how we are positioned, how we are

interpellated.

To go back to an example I used in discussing

Althusser’s ideas, a young black man will be

interpellated on the street in overdetermined

ways. To extend that point, I may be walking

along the street where I live and have a ‘happen-

stance’ encounter with a young Aboriginal

woman. To contextualize this encounter, let me

add that I live in an inner city area of Sydney that

has the highest urban population of Aboriginal

Australians. It also has one of the highest un-

employment rates, the highest crime, the highest

poverty levels, and is renowned for drug selling

and use (mainly heroin). It is heavily policed by

white cops, and because the university where I

teach is down the road there is a constant parade

of relatively affluent, mainly white students who

seem to proceed en masse through the Aborigi-

nal section, oblivious to the ‘difference’ that sur-

rounds them. Their behaviour may be motivated

by many reasons, including a protective bodily

comportment in order to deter muggers. As I

walk along in much the same manner, I come

across the young Aboriginal woman who is cry-

ing. ‘Are you OK?,’ I ask. ‘Ah sister, you wouldn’t

believe what happened.’ She then details the

death of an aunty and how she has come to

Redfern to try to find her cousins. I try to offer

consoling words, and wish her well as she

continues on the street and I turn off to go home.

Now in terms of the questions raised above

about the positions of bodies to bodies, what can

we say of this brief encounter? Well in a fairly

brutal manner, we’d have to say that the only

way that such an encounter could occur would be

in a happenstance way. We are relationally posi-

tioned as inhabiting different universes. In fact

we could be seen as standing in binary opposi-

tion to each other: me white, she black; me afflu-

ent, she poor; me educated, she probably not;

me the invader of her country, she the dispos-

sessed. The list could go on and on. That our

paths cross is also determined by the fact that

Redfern is becoming gentrified, something that

will not help her one jot and increases the pres-

sures to remove all trace of the Aboriginal housing

from this area. Further, our small encounter

surely left her indifferent: she had more impor-

tant things on her mind. For me, it registers

because part of my evolving subjective processes

involve the question of how to conduct myself as

a white non-Australian within a geography of

appalling racialized relations, and a history of

violence. Bluntly put, I need her more than she

needs me (Probyn, 2001).

This scenario captures for me some of the

sheer difficulty of how to live in an interrelational

framework. It also compels questions of how to

think and conceptualize subjectivities in relation

to others. In an early book, I posed the following

question as one way to think connection:

In trying to speak within the tensions of ‘who is she?

and who am I?’ I want to disrupt any certainty that we

know the answers in advance, or that either a good or

bad politics can be guaranteed by such a question. To

engage our imaginations precisely opens us into a space

where possibilities can be envisioned; a space where I

may no longer recognise myself. (Probyn, 1993: 163)

Nice words, but I now think that this formulation

relies too heavily on the optimism of openness.

Quite simply, I’m not sure where that space

would be in which I would no longer recognize

myself. Nor do I see now why this is of necessity

a ‘good thing’. Even the guiding questions no

longer satisfy. At the time, it allowed me a way

to think through how we might put experience

or, in the context of this chapter, our subjectivi-

ties to work. I envisioned a productive tension

set up by the question of ‘Who is she and who

am I?’ Equally I wanted to get away from a

navel-gazing perspective on the question of sub-

jectivity, which seemed to endlessly spiral

around ‘me’. In part, this may have been pro-

duced by an overly zealous insistence within

some forms of feminism that white women

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