Massey 2005 For space. o el sabor del encuentro

Ok this was also a key text for my work. El cambio de diseño es puro credito de Rafa.

Chapters 11-14

Chapter 11
Space is not a map. As long as map presents the space form above it constructs it as a surface rather than depths, this is not inherently bad, but is partial. Maps try to establish determinacy into what is indeterminate, but because of chance space is not representable (quoting Letch). for which she proposes the metaphor of the palimpsest of multiple erasures and overwirtings This is not solved by presenting the hidden transcripts of sedimented mapping, which would be imaging space " as superimposed horizontal structures rather than full contemporaneous coexistence and becoming" (110), it fails to let us think the flow of juxtaposition of multiple trajectories shaping space. She takes the example of the flaneur as a trajectory that has no origin and no end, it has no identity but is rather and entity of contingency. To travel in between places is to move between collections of trajectories and to reinsert yourself in the ones to which you relate.

Some quotations form chapter 11:
p 118: " The presentness of the horizontality of space is a product of a multitude of histories whose resonances are still there, if we would see them, and which sometimes catch us with full force unawarness.... is not just buried histories but histories still being made now." "So take the train... You are not just travelling throgh space, you are altering it a little. space and place emerge form active material practices. Moreover this movement... is also temporal. The London you left is not the London of now. It has already moved on." (mmmm habia un griego que decia algo sobre el tiempo y que uno no se baña dos veces en el mismo rio... parmnides? ahora lo googleo)

p 119 "at the end of the journey, then a town or a city (a place) which itself consists of a bundle of trajectories.... You are, on that train, travelling not across space-as-a-surface you are travelling across trajectories.... Thisnking space as a multiplicity of trajectories , imagining a train journey as a speeding across on going stories, means brining the woman [you see through the window] to life, acknowledging her as another ongoing life."
p 120 Acknowledging all the different trajectories implied in space is impossible, yet we can still "retain some sense of contemporaneous multiple becomings."

p 124-5 "you can never simply go back to home or to anywhere else... the place will have moved on just as you yourself will have changed. And this is the point. For to open up space is to this kind of imagination means thinking time and space as mutually imbricated and thinking both of them as a the products of interrelations...
Finale p125 "You can't hold places still. What you can do is meet up with others, catch up with where another's history has got to now, but where that now is itself constituted by nothing more than -precisely- that meeting-up (again)."

Chapter 12 She has a very long analysis of how nature, that what we tend to see as a fixed and stable entity over which culture acts upon as a transforming force, has a deep history of transformation and change. She uses this image to point to a kind of always already unstable nature of spatiality. She is arguing against the fixity of place as a location in space. All essences are events, no fix “place” really exists but a flow of movement. Space is more a constellation of stories as a temporary point of encounter of multiple and conjunctural trajectories. The scope processes are in relation to the scales of spatial and temporal dynamics . (She takes a definition of the political form Laclau, Mouffe and a bit of Derrida.)
To overcome the distinction space and time, we can think of space as a series of encounters in an ever changing flow of spacio-temporal events. Space “If space is simultaneity of stories-so-far, then place are collections of those stories, articulations within the wider power-geometries of space.”(130) Force of narrative in shaping reality. But still materiality of forces, not just discourse. Non human forces, not rationality but are forces non the less.

Chapter 13 The political is the moment of when the tension between the different unspoken alternatives bought by the different trajectories encountering in space become antagonism. The resolution of this antagonism entails the visibility of power relations (I add in their reconfiguration).
Spatiality as a condition of the socio-political, what she call the through-togetherness, is two fold: it is inherently unstable, all spatial politics are attempts to put order into the chaotic, to control juxtapositions in space. "Place does change us, not through some visceral belonging but through the practising of space, the negotiation of intersecting trajectories, place as an arena where negotiation is forced upon us." (154) The spatialization of the social, has at least two dimensions, 1) it is in space time that the social and the political unfold and specifically is the sphere of multiplicity, and 2) much of the political practice is constituted through the negotiation of places, in which the imaginations of space are both means and "object" of this negotiation. She takes cities as particularly dense places in the respect of the political, she understands this because of the lack of rooted identities which makes them a site of negotiation of multiple constellations of identities, within hierarchies of spatial geographies. "negotiations of place are on the move between identities that are on the move. It also means that any politics catches trajectories at diferent points, is attempting to articulate rythms that which pulse at different beats. It is other aspect of the elusivness of space that render politics so difficult."

h 14
There are no rules for the spatiality, no valid statement ca be made as: openness is good vs closeness is bad. To mantain a generality is a way of maintaning an imagination of universality in relation to space , and a type of spatial fetishism ("spaces should always be open to new comers" says the left but then the newcomers are yuppie gentrifying a neighbourhood and thus they defend localism.) There is no good or bad politics in locality or openess, but socio-political relations of power and place in which each case is ntangled (this echoes in Lacalau and Mouffe there is no universal politics of topographic categories ie the state is not bad per se) . There is not an a priori on whether or not one should argue for or against openess but is a consecuence o regarding the power relations involved.
p 172-6 She make a critique to post modern theory in the dangers of being to enthusiastic about openness and nomadity. Nomadity and the notions of the periphery, escape (the desert as a space of pure intensities) can be linked to a modernist vision of space a bourgeoisie identity of the analyst, but ultimately an imperial imagination. She draws on citique by Kaplan Hansen and Pratt to Deleuze and Guatari. Lines of flight may be individualistic and be in sharp contrast to mass migration or escape. Also “Europeans in the name of mobility and unboundedness, casually and symptomatically invade half of the world of the desert.” (172). In that the “others” inhabiting the “deserts” would not have the same possibilities of fleeing o the desert as they are already there “the others are not allowed a life of their own” (173) (she points to Miller critique form an anthropological perspective). She argues that following a deconstructionist perspective does not necessarily avoid being he instability of meaning can also be part of forms of oppression. In this line she also replies to Hardt and Negri their critique thst if places are open then the concept is useless altogether. She points that this is based on binaries openness-enclosure as universal that further reproduces the problems of the romance of free flow.
“The closed geographical imagination of openness, just as much as that of closure, is itself irretrievably unstable. The real political necessities are an insistence on the recognition of their specific and an address to the particularity of the questions they pose.” (175) She ends up with Derrida, proposing that the only way to operate politically in the face o openness or enclosure is through experience and experimentation.