Space–timeandthepoliticsoflocation说明.docVIP

Chapter 4 Space–time and the politics of location Doreen Massey The social spaces through which we live do not only consist of physical things: of bricks and mortar, streets and bridges, mountains and sea-shore, and of what we make of these things. They consist also of those less tangible spaces we construct out of social interaction. The intimate social relations of the kitchen and the interac- tions from there to the backyard and the living room. The relations with neighbours: talking across the back wall, the more formal hello in the street, the annoyance when they come home noisily and very late, yet again, on a Saturday night. These local spaces are set within, and actively link into, the wider networks of social rela- tions which make up the neighbourhood, the borough, the city. Social space is not an empty arena within which we conduct our lives; rather it is something we con- struct and which others construct about us. It is this incredible complexity of social interactions and meanings which we constantly build, tear down and negotiate. And it is always mobile, always changing, always open to revision and potentially fragile. We are always creating, in other words, not just a space, a geography of our lives, but a time–space for our lives. 1 Sitting there so solidly, so silently, so implacably, in Grove Road, so physi- cally in just the place it always was, and yet so clearly out of place, Rachel Whiteread’s sculpture House worked as a disruption of such social time–spaces. It jumped into and threw awry the “normal” time–spaces, and the ideas of time–spaces, which we construct in order to live our lives. It worked this disruption, ?rst and most obviously, in a predominantly temporal sense. It set a familiar past in the space–time of today; it made present something which was absent; it was the space of a house no longer there. Secondly, however, it worked spatially: it turned the space inside out. The private was opened to public view. The little intimacies