For anyone who didn't see this, just posted on Open Democracy...

Jon Cloke
Newcastle University

Is the world getting larger or smaller?

Doreen Massey

15 - 2 - 2007
"The world is not getting so small that there is room for only one story." 
The changing spatial dimensions of human life and thinking are creating the 
need for a new imagination and politics of space, says Doreen Massey.
------------------------------------------



It is hard to escape the grand statements: the world is getting smaller; we 
live in a global village; speed-up has conquered distance; time, finally, 
has annihilated space. We read of the death of distance, and that geography 
too is dead. (But then we are subjected, also, to assertions of the "end of 
history").

Olympian claims about "eras", shifts between great periods of history, are 
always a bit dubious, not least in their universalising pretensions. But 
recent changes do raise new questions.

One of the more thoughtful formulations about this supposedly shrinking 
world has been put forward by Zygmunt Bauman (see "Time and space reunited", 
Time and Society, 9/2-3, 2000). He has argued that there has been a shift 
from what he calls "heavy modernity" to "light modernity". Heavy modernity 
is territorialising and preoccupied with size. Light modernity is all about 
flow and movement; it is fleet of foot. "It all changed", he argues "with 
the advent of software capitalism and light modernity". And, he continues: 
"The change in question is the new irrelevance of space ... space counts 
little, or does not count at all".

But what does it mean to "count"? For Bauman here, things count if they are 
valued, in proportion to the cost of their acquisition. Since it is so easy 
now to travel, space does not count for much at all. "If you know that you 
can visit a place at any time you wish ... since all parts of space can be 
reached in the same time-span (that is, 'no-time'), no part of space is 
privileged, none has a special value". Bauman here is capturing something 
important: that dismal flattening of the planet into places to visit ("where 
shall we go this year?" "I've heard Mongolia is nice").





Doreen Massey is professor of geography at the Open University. She is 
co-founder & co-editor of Soundings: a journal of politics and culture. 
Among her books are For Space (Sage, 2005) and World City (Polity Press 
[forthcoming, 2007])

This essay is adapted from the first Open University radio lecture delivered 
at "Free Thinking: a festival of ideas for the future" in Liverpool, on 9 
November 2006

The talk was broadcast on BBC Radio 3; a transcript is here



Bauman's argument, of course, is not entirely right - though not in ways 
that immediately bring much cheer. It is not true that all places are 
reachable in the same time-span ("no-time"). There's been a kind of 
crumpling, a topological scrumpling, of space. New York has been brought 
closer to London than has Alma Ata, though in miles they are equally far 
away (or near). Cyberspace, and the instantaneous spaces of finance, each 
has its internal, unequal, geographies. The centralisation of fast travel 
through hubs has rendered some places in-between all the harder to get at.

As Dea Birkett wrote of the Pacific (the ocean assumed to be taking over 
from the Atlantic as the centre of this shrinking world):

    "The borders of the world's greatest ocean have been joined as never 
before. And Boeing has brought these people together. But what about those 
they fly over, on their islands five miles below? ... Air travel might 
enable businessmen to buzz across the ocean, but the concurrent decline in 
shipping has only increased the isolation of many island communities ... 
Pitcairn, like many other Pacific islands, has never felt so far from its 
neighbours".

It can feel much the same when the local railway service is cut back. The 
mobility of some is countered by, and can reinforce, the relative immobility 
of others - those who are visited but do not visit, those held up at 
frontiers, those immobilised in place.

The encounter with difference

But it is also more than this. Space does in fact continue to "count", and 
it does so because space is more than distance, certainly more than the 
physical distance of miles or kilometres.

If time is the dimension of change and succession, then space is the 
dimension of simultaneity. It is the dimension of contemporaneous 
co-existence. It is the dimension of the fact that, as I write this one 
morning in Kilburn, north London, there is right now fighting in the 
southern Philippines (I will learn about it later), right now in southern 
Africa women's daily struggle for water and life is underway, right now in 
the squatter settlements of the great cities of Latin America poor children 
are gearing themselves up for another day.

Space is a simultaneity of stories-so-far; it has the dimension of 
multiplicity. While air travel, and emails, and cyberspace, may certainly - 
though differentially - reduce the costs and effects of physical distance, 
these do not in any way abolish multiplicity. A telephone call may be 
instantaneous, the distance between us may be for a while reduced, but we 
are not merged into one entity.

Space, then, is the dimension of the social: it presents us with the 
existence of others (see Doreen Massey, For Space, 2005). "Visiting" a 
place, as in Bauman's scenario, is more than just getting there. Visiting is 
a practice of engagement, an encounter with others. It is in that process of 
establishing a relation that the "cost" (and the value) can be measured.

Susan Sontag offered the tangential but tantalising reflection at the end of 
her resonant essay Trip to Hanoi (1968) that the world seemed larger to her 
than when she had arrived.

This is social distance, cultural distance. It connotes those gulfs that can 
exist in the understanding and the experience of the world. This is the 
discontinuity, the disruptedness, of space. It happens at all scales. You 
never know quite what even the person next to you, whom you know so well, is 
thinking, feeling (a penny for them?). Maurice Blanchot has written of this: 
that in the very moment of the meeting, a gap, a rupture, remains. How much 
more this was and is so in the Sontag situation ....

What does it mean to say you can "get to" the southern Philippines, southern 
Africa or Latin America in five, ten or fifteen hours? What is it to be 
"there"? What distances must be crossed? How long might that take? And at 
what "cost"?

In the thesis of the shrinking world, because "we all" have mobile phones, 
drink Starbucks coffee, these differences are underplayed. The George W 
Bush-Tony Blair global project fails to understand (or refuses to respect) 
the depth of variation (cultural, economic, political) between the multiple 
stories whose contemporaneous coexistence makes up our spatially 
differentiated "now"'.

As inequalities that this project creates deepen around the world, what is 
it for Bill Gates, or a middle-class metropolitan from the rich world, to 
"visit" Mike Davis's planet of slums? If space is about the simultaneity of 
difference, then it cannot be annihilated by time. Quite the opposite - it 
poses a challenge: the full recognition of the contemporaneous existence of 
others. In that, there is still much work to be done.

Indeed, there are many who argue that this is in fact a spatial era. Bruno 
Latour, in a proposal for "a philosophical platform for a left European 
party" (1998), writes: "I have the feeling that we are slowly shifting from 
an obsession with time to an obsession with space".

This is the curious irony of the "death of geography" thesis. For in fact it 
is time (travel time, communication time) that is being reduced, not space. 
On the contrary, there is more "space" in our lives; the reach of our 
connectivities and interactions, the geographies of the dependencies and 
effects even of the most quotidian aspects of our lives (so that no longer 
can we equate the everyday with the scale of the local), have expanded 
dramatically. The really serious questions that are raised by speed-up, by 
"the communications revolution" and by cyberspace are not whether space will 
be annihilated (it won't) but what kinds of new spatial configurations are 
being constructed and whether we can face up to the real challenge of space: 
the encounter with difference.

Evasive imaginations

The truth is that we persistently evade the challenge of space. We adopt, 
often even without meaning to, alternative imaginations that deflect the 
reality of multiplicity. Little imaginative manoeuvres that make it easier 
to live in the world.

The notion of a shrinking world is precisely such a manoeuvre, projected 
above all in aid of the project of "Davos man": that new global elite of 
neo-liberal wealth and its cheerleaders, represented by Bill Gates's and 
Nicholas Negroponte's digital future, and Thomas Friedman's "the world is 
flat". Their world (of business, of virtual communication, of touchdowns in 
selected technological hotspots in the global south) is presented as the 
world.

In their world distance is always a burden (already, in Being Digital 
[1995], Negroponte was writing of the "limitations" of geography); there is 
no question of the pleasures of movement or travel. And the aim is to 
"unearth" us, from any form of embeddedness, indeed from the planet itself. 
The associated rhetoric of "level playing-fields" and flat earth (yes, the 
earth is now flat as well as shrinking - soon it will eat itself up into a 
black hole) eradicates the historical depth of any cultures or histories 
that are not theirs.

Another such evasive imaginative manoeuvre, with similar effects, is to turn 
space into time, geography into history. For instance, when faced with 
questions about the poverty and inequality that exist within today's 
neo-liberal globalisation (for evidence, see the annual United Nations 
Development Programme reports), the reply so often comes: do not worry, they 
are just behind, they will catch up.

The assumption of this form of globalisation is that the whole world is 
headed along the same path. In such a framing imagination the whole uneven 
geography of the world is reorganised into a historical queue. Geography (a 
spatial simultaneity of differences) is turned into history (seen as a 
single succession). Both space and time suffer here: on the one hand the 
contemporaneity of space is obliterated, on the other hand temporality is 
reduced to the singular. There is one historical queue (one model of 
development, say), and it is defined by those "in the lead" (there is one 
voice).

An evident result of this manoeuvre is that those supposedly "behind" in 
this queue have no possibility (no space, precisely) to define a path of 
their own. Their future is foretold. Maybe they would not wish to follow 
where the "developed" west has led. It is this framing evasive imagination 
that underpins the assertion that there is no alternative.

Another result is the obscuring of the evident fact that the inequality and 
poverty in the world are being produced now, in part as a structural fact of 
this form of globalisation (thus making it less likely that a majority of 
others can "catch up"). And in the same manoeuvre this evasive imagination 
cunningly ignores our own implication within the production of that 
inequality now.

However, and most relevant to the argument here, this turning of geography 
into history also reduces - makes more bland and less pressing - the way in 
which the differences between us are framed (the differences between, say, 
Davos man and those in the planet of slums, between Susan Sontag and the 
citizens of Hanoi). That unfathomable difference is reduced to place in the 
historical queue. The role of culture is reduced to decorative local colour, 
recruited as part of the inter-place competitive package.

This is an utter denial of the depth and reality of other stories, other 
trajectories. It is, indeed, a way of imagining that the world is smaller 
than it is. Moreover, the positioning of the different as somehow in the 
past denies equal standing; it is a form of belittlement, a denial of what 
Johannes Fabian (in Time and the Other: How Anthropology Makes Its Object 
[1983] called "coevalness").

Just to be clear: the argument here is not against any notion of "progress" 
or "development" tout court. All the obvious points are real: clean water is 
better than dirty water, shelter than exposure, education than ignorance. 
(The problems lie with the singularity of their assumed form, and with who 
it is that gets to define that form.) The aim here is, rather, to point to 
the apparent scariness of a real recognition of the spatially differentiated 
now, and our implication in it, and to point to those little manoeuvres we 
will adopt, the "political cosmologies" (Johannes Fabian, again) that we 
will conjure to avoid looking at it full in the face.

How exclusion works

A public argument about the "Bushmen" of the central Kalahari desert, modern 
Botswana, illustrates something of this. In a debate about development in 
Botswana in March 2006, the British politician Jenny Tonge (a Liberal 
Democrat, and member of the upper chamber of parliament, the House of Lords) 
characterised the Gana and Gwi people as living "in the stone age" (see "We 
need a proper debate about indigenous people", Guardian, 24 March 2006). 
Although this description was mobilised, as it so often is, in defence of a 
particular mode of development, it is not that that concerns me here. Rather 
it is the characterisation itself.

"Lady Tonge", reports George Monbiot, "later explained that she used the 
word primitive to mean belonging to 'another age'." (see George Monbiot, 
"Who really belongs to another age - bushmen or the House of Lords?", 
Guardian, 21 March 2006). But this is precisely the point. The Gana and the 
Gwi are - as Tonge later admitted - organising their way of life today, 
right now as you read this piece.

In the subsequent flurry of correspondence, a letter from Jumanda Gakelebone 
and Roy Sesane, of the First People of the Kalahari, captured some of the 
issues:

    "We, as the organisation of Bushmen of the Central Kalahari in Botswana, 
are very offended by comments made by Jenny Tonge ... that we are 
'mesolithic', or middle stone age. She says it is not an insult. But if you 
call someone stone age or primitive, it sounds like you think they are 
inferior to you. As a matter of fact, we use radios and some of us have 
mobile phones. But that is not the point. We just want the opportunity to be 
allowed to choose our lifestyles. We want to go back to our land to be with 
our ancestors and we want to be allowed to live there in peace by hunting 
and gathering - not as 'exhibits in a museum', but because it is a very 
clever way to survive in the desert. Tonge obviously does not respect us 
enough to think we know how to choose what is best for ourselves." 
(Guardian, letters, 25 March 2006).

Regardless of which "side" you take on the more appropriate form of 
development (and I am not competent to judge) this mode of denigration by 
relegation to the past, as opposed to the respect demanded by the 
recognition of contemporaneous, though different, existence, is a failure to 
recognise fully the spatiality of the planet.

It happens all the time, and in a multitude of ways. Tony Blair's constant 
mobilisation of the term "modernisation" in the singular, as if there were 
no other way of going forward than the one he proposes, and his 
characterisation of anyone who opposes him as stuck in the past, is another 
example. It is an assertion that there is only one story to be told, only 
one history to be made; and it is a refusal to engage in debate with the - 
evidently existing - alternatives. The world is not getting so small that 
there is room for only one story.

A final example of this powerful mentality and discourse struck me forcibly 
at the time when George W Bush was re-elected in 2004, many commentators of 
a more liberal persuasion were negligent in their characterisation of that 
base of support that was church-going, family-orientated, anti-feminist, 
jingoistic, homophobic ...(one could go on). The tendency was to express 
astonishment, to consign these views to some archaic past (if only); how 
could they possibly be like that in the 21st century?

This is inadequate. First, it is to deny their actually-existing difference; 
it is in that sense to display a lack of respect. Second, the proper and 
potentially more fruitful disagreement with these positions is not on 
grounds of "'old-fashionedness" but on grounds that are political. Third, 
simply dismissing such views as passé ignores the forces that have 
contributed to their production, and thereby deprives us of any political 
purchase upon them.

A need to look outwards

It could be argued that there is today already much attention paid to 
difference - too much, in the opinion of some. There is a constant 
preoccupation with multiculturalism, with the inevitable hybridity of 
everywhere, and with the supposed dangers of universalisms of all sorts. The 
processes involved have both liberated and carried their own dangers (of 
fragmentation, of relativism, of parallel lives).

It is a different point that I want to make, however. For, I would argue, a 
lot of this attention to difference has been inward-looking - another 
effective way, as it turns out, of reducing the dimensions of the world. Too 
often the question of difference, of cultural diversity and of the 
coexistence of otherness, is approached in terms of the world coming to us.

I could cite a hundred such evocations, but here is just one:

    "Cultural diversity is not a phenomenon of exotic and incommensurable 
others in distant lands and at different stages of historical development, 
as the old concept of culture makes it appear. No. It is here and now in 
every society" (see James Tully, Strange Multiplicity: Constitutionalism in 
an Age of Diversity, Cambridge University Press, 1995).

Note the phrase "the different stages of historical development'". There is 
no doubt that cultural diversity, on a myriad of dimensions is, in part and 
increasingly, internal to individual societies. That is the principal 
experience of it for those who live in the metropolitan West. But it is 
implacably also, and still, a question of different others in distant lands. 
It is the same with that oft-used phrase about "the margins invading the 
centre" (to refer to migration from the majority world). There has of course 
been movement, but most of "the margins" still live "in distant lands" - the 
global south is indeed the majority world.

Debates over the politics of our cities are utterly imbued with this 
inward-lookingness. While attention is paid to the diversity within - and 
quite rightly so - there is a blithe obliviousness to the wider planet upon 
which our urban lives depend. The most glaring example in Britain is that of 
London. It is justly celebrated for its mixity, for its everyday ability to 
rub along together, for what Paul Gilroy calls its "convivial culture".

In the aftermath of the 7 July 2005 bombs in London, everyone - from Ken 
Livingstone to the Evening Standard (and that is quite a distance) to Ben 
Okri - both celebrated this and insisted that it would continue. It is, 
indeed, and in spite of the racisms and discriminations that nonetheless 
continue, a considerable achievement: a real negotiation of place in a 
globalised world. Ben Okri, in Trafalgar Square on the day of remembrance, 
reworked a poem which contained the lines: "Here lives the great music / of 
humanity". In this sense, truly, the world is getting smaller.

Yet London is also the place where neo-liberalism began to stir, and from 
where it is now, in part, organised and disseminated around the planet. It 
is, precisely, in its global citydom at one end of a host of practices and 
relations - of finance and investment, and disinvestment, of hedge funds 
(the big thing now), and of currency dealings which make or break countries 
and communities in those "distant lands". (At the same time, it is indeed 
home to many of those who talk to us of shrinking worlds and level 
playing-fields.)

In the most mundane of ways, London could not survive a day were its 
relations with those places to be cut off. And yet so many of us, and indeed 
the politics our cities, live in utter forgetfulness of this, those wider 
geographies of difference (for a consideration of a potential politics to 
address this, see Doreen Massey, "London inside-out", Soundings: a journal 
of politics and culture, 12 /2006.)

If the world seems to be getting smaller perhaps it is in part because we 
don't look, or listen, or (precisely) take enough time; or because we focus 
on the world coming to us at the expense of looking outwards. It is 
impossible to be aware of all those other stories going on "right now", as 
we struggle on with our lives. But that is not the point. Rather it is a 
question of the angle of vision, of a stance in relation to the world, an 
outward-lookingness of the imagination.



Copyright © Doreen Massey, Published by openDemocracy Ltd. You may download 
and print extracts from this article for your own personal and 
non-commercial use only. If you teach at a university we ask that your 
department make a donation. Contact us if you wish to discuss republication. 
Some articles on this site are published under different terms.