![]() I use ’empty’ as both a criticism and a description of how the blank spaces around the routes in GPS maps illuminate the frontier-mentality of the technologies themselves. One only has to travel in a vehicle using (visual) GPS navigation to see how this ’empty’ conceptualising of space has totally saturated our lives. The former advocated a mathematically independent absolute space… while the latter argued for a relational space dependent on the connection between objects…’ (Rainey, 2012).Ĭlearly the idea of space as an empty container to be filled and organised emerges from the enlightenment and has not yet left us. ‘Globalist visions of flat space, of a smooth, utterly deterritorialized global level playing field thereby frequently do service as the unexamined imaginative geography on which the player-managers of the free market seek to build their putatively non-hierarchical version of a “free world”‘.Īgain, I want to return to Mark’s comments on Lefebvre and Hegel below: ‘There is a ring of the old debate between Newton and Leibniz in the priority given to empty space. Matthew Sparke, in his commentary on For Space (2007) explains how, for Massey: She explains very simply how Lefebvre told us that space is thinly understood in both academic and popular discourses. In her landmark work, For Space, Massey mentions Henri Lefebvre only once (2005: 17). Massey clearly came through the Marxist traditions, although her non-dogmatic, post-structuralist revisions are wide-ranging, without ever losing sight of the doing of practical politics. ![]() I want to hopefully open-up and extend this discussion of space by dropping some notes from my reading of Doreen Massey on here. that therefore the production of the immediate material means of subsistence and consequently the degree of economic development attained by a given people or during a given epoch form the foundation upon which the state institutions, the legal conceptions, art, and even the ideas on religion, of the people concerned have been evolved, and in the light of which they must, therefore, be explained, instead of vice versa, as had hitherto been the case.’Įarly on, Marx and Engels criticised Feurbach’s revisions for leaving his conception of man essentially a-social, a-historical and abstract. ‘Just as Darwin discovered the law of development of organic nature, so Marx discovered the law of development of human history: the simple fact, hitherto concealed by an overgrowth of ideology, that mankind must first of all eat, drink, have shelter and clothing, before it can pursue politics, science, art, religion, etc. This morning I read the speech Engels made at Marx’s graveside, which skims the surface of this larger debate about moving the origin of the ‘production of space’ from the Hegelian absolute to the social spaces of work: ![]() ![]() He ended by saying that there is much more to be said, and that we have to return to Marx and Engels for that. Mark’s notes on Lefebvre and Hegel here were revelatory for me. ![]()
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