should not attempt to speak for ‘the other’. By
now, hopefully, it is common sense that I cannot
speak for an amorphous group, be it the other, or
women, or whomsoever.
It also has to be said that I am no longer inter-
ested in the ins and outs of ‘Who am I?’ The
broad brush depiction will do fine: white, female,
relatively privileged, etc. I am, however, more
than ever committed to thinking about how sub-
jectivities can be thought of in terms of being
both structured and porous, spatially determined,
temporally heavy. This is why in this chapter I
have returned to the basics of Althusser’s struc-
tural theory of ideology. I suppose I could have
equally deployed theories such as Bourdieu’s
who develops a notion of how social structures
are incorporated. However there is something
about the immediacy of Althusser’s descriptions
that attract me. They point to the multidimen-
sional nature of how we produce ourselves, as
well as how we live with difference.
Subjectivity is a question of sameness and dif-
ference, the near and the far. My preferred way
of thinking about a wide range of issues is in
terms of ‘relations of proximity’. Dictionaries
define ‘proximity’ as closeness: ‘nearness in
space, time, etc.’ It is related to the Latin proxi-
mus, ‘nearest’. Personally ‘relations of proxim-
ity’ bring to mind the near and the far, what
cannot be rendered near, what is always pro-
duced as close. Furthermore, relations of prox-
imity highlight the facts of connection or
dis/connection. The term ‘connection’ has
become widely used, and belongs in much the
same frame as ‘interrelation’ or Massey’s
notion of ‘arrangements-in-relation-to-each
other’. Clearly her use of the hyphen emphasizes
the connection between each term, and refers to
possible connections amongst individuals. For
me, this remains an important point even if, as I
mentioned, I now want more ground upon which
to base ideas of the types of connection that are
possible. But logically, if we agree that we need
to think about possible connections, then we
must also address the conditions that will make
them impossible, or at least difficult to enact.
In adjoining connection and dis/connection, I
want to render central the facts that disable or
render connection hard. These are the hard ‘facts
of life’: conditions of inequality and non-
commensurability due to economic power, class,
social privilege, history, etc. They also return us
to the ways in which we are interpellated differ-
ently: that we are hailed by different ideologies
in different ways, and that the institutions that
maintain relations of how we are hailed pose
blocks to possible connections. In other words,
subjectivities are differentially informed.Emphasizing the absolute spatial nature of the
processes of subjectivity should also remind us
of where and how we are interpellated. Instead of
plastering over those differences, we need to stop
and address them. Sometimes that stopping will
result in silence. And that slash between dis/
connection should indicate a pause – a moment of
non-recognition that may be expressed as simply
as ‘wow, you really are different from me’.
The point is not to stay caught in that moment
of bewilderment or enchantment: that would
only reinscribe difference as an exotic, fetishized
or denied quality. In other words, this would be
to replay the not-same as ‘the other’, which is to
posit a relation of dubious connection. Nor is it to
legitimate turning away, closing down in the face
of non-connection. That would be to replay the
history of how racialized, classed and other rela-
tions have tended to produce hermetic subjects.
In Susan Willis’ description, this would be a
situation wherein ‘To some extent, all [whites]
are reified subjects, against whom it is impossi-
ble for blacks to mount passionate, self-affirming
resistance or retaliation’ (1989: 174). Con-
versely, it also renders it impossible for whites to
have any connection to blacks except those of
guilt, denial or retaliation. This is not the type of
dis/connection I am thinking of, and cannot be
because it is effectively no connection at all.
In terms of bringing together the different
points of this chapter, in returning to Althusserian
theory I have attempted to sketch out the
ways in which space always informs, limits and
produces subjectivity. Equally subjectivity con-
nects with space, and it rearticulates certain
historical definitions of space. In this sense, neither
space nor subjectivity is free-floating: they are
mutually interdependent and complexly struc-
tured entities. The interest in returning to the
ideological underpinnings of the very notion of
the subject is that it turns attention to the ways in
which subjectivities are produced under very
particular circumstances. This then can lead the
way to rethinking the questions that press upon
us: from the ways that globalization restructures
every aspect of our lives, and interconnects us in
visceral and symbolic ways with those ‘far off ’,
to the ‘spaces-off’ in which we perform new
modes of subjectivity and rearticulate the limits
of gender, sex, race and class.
We need to think of subjectivity as an
unwieldy, continually contestable and affirmable
basis for living in the world. Subjectivities are
then simply a changing ensemble of openings
and closings, points of contact and points which
repel contact. In space, we orient ourselves and
are oriented. That is the spatial imperative of
subjectivities.298 PLACING SUBJECTIVITIES3029-ch14.qxd 03-10-02 10:54 AM Page 298