43 novel (194). These terms will be particularly useful when exploring Auster’s spaces of pure imagination in Chapter 7.
Harvey’s observations on the novel are also of interest because of Williams earlier assertion that community can be knowable through fiction (a community of characters becoming known to the reader) and Harvey’s own sense of the role of the imaginary in the construction of communities.
Doreen Massey, in her article ‘A Global Sense of Place’ (1991, reprinted 1993) and in subsequent clarifications and reassertions, also uses community as a way of apprehending the relationship between the quotidian and local experience of contemporary metropolitan living with the global processes in which those experiences are embedded. In short, she considers the ‘composite nature’ of the local and the global in the contemporary metropolis (‘Cities in the World’ [1999] 102), or more succinctly, ‘the outside as part of the inside’ (‘A Place Called Home’ [1992, reprinted 1994] 5). Along with Williams, Jameson and Harvey, Massey describes the way in which the social relations experienced by individuals extend far beyond a bounded sense of place or locality, while at the same time exploring how a specific sense of place emerges in the face of capitalism’s homogenising processes. To illustrate her point, Massey describes how a walk down a suburban London street can reveal the intersection of the global in the local such that it becomes impossible to think of that place ‘without bringing into play half the world and...imperialist history’ (238). The experience of this street provokes ‘a really global sense of place’ for her (ibid). This thinking requires a new ‘sense of place’, she writes, which should be ‘progressive; not self-enclosing and defensive, but outward looking’, and is ‘adequate to’ both ‘this era of time-space-compression’ (‘Global Sense’ 233) and ‘the current global-local times’ (236-7). ‘Place’ and ‘community’ are now rarely coterminous
for Massey (232) - community often existing without place in instances of networks such as friends, religion, and political solidarities (238).
The new round of time-space-compression recognised by Harvey provokes one of two possible responses - one reactionary, the other progressive - both of which Massey considers to be misguided. She describes a nostalgic and backward looking notion of place as ‘a response to [a] desire for fixity and for security of identity in the middle of all the movement and change’ which can lead to ‘romanticized escapism’ (236). However, the alternative progressive view also has limitations. For one, it is by no means clear to Massey why a new round of time-space-compression should initiate feelings of insecurity. For another, progressive senses of place tend to deny ‘people’s need for attachment’ to a specific locale (236).
The ‘geography of social relations is ... increasingly spread out over space’, for Massey. ‘Economic, political and cultural social relations ... [are] stretched out over the planet at every different level, from the household to the local area to the international’, she insists (239). Under these conditions it is again reasonable to expect ‘place’ to be subsumed by the homogenising processes of international capital. However, like Harvey, Massey describes how differentiated senses of place endure. But for her, this is in part a consequence of the social relations that develop beyond the compass of money relations (238). As well as the social relations shaped by the mode of production, and in a significant addition to the previous debate, Massey recognises gender as an example of the non-economic; where men make women feel ‘out of place’ in certain spaces (the street, particularly after dark, is a powerful example). For Massey then, ‘there is a lot more determining how we experience space than what “capital” gets up to’ (233). To illustrate this point, she describes a ‘power-geometry’ (234) which is able to plot metropolitan inhabitants differential positions in relation to the flows of power (Harvey
calls this ‘situatedness’ or ‘positionality’ [Spaces 236]). It is our relative ‘power- geometry’, Massey insists, that ‘determines our degrees of mobility, that influences the sense we have of space and place’ (233). The concept of ‘power-geometry’ is instructive in considering how much control individuals have over their immediate environment, and how they comprehend and respond to rapid shifts in social and spatial formations (235).
To understand the extended context in which these experiences are embedded, Massey calls for ‘a geographical imagination which can look both within and beyond the city and hold the two things in tension’ (‘On Space and the City’ 161). The reader is asked to imagine all the invisible communications, and ‘all the social relations, all the links between people’ as though viewed from a satellite orbiting the earth (‘Global Sense’ 239). We are then instructed to picture a particular location on the globe, such as her suburban London street, while at the same time ‘holding all those networks of social relations and movements and communications in one’s head’ (239). Through this mobile perspective the observer is then able to imagine ‘place’ as a particular set of unique intersections. As a consequence, she insists that:
Local, regional and national are increasingly drawn into, and constituted by, a logic which exists at international level, the different geographical scales become less easy to separate - rather they constitute each other: the global the local, and vice versa.
(‘Home’161)
The specificity that produces a ‘sense of place’, then, can be imagined as a locus of ‘articulated movements in networks of social relations and understandings’ ( ‘Global Sense’ 239). But the reach of these networks extends far beyond the geographical
experience of any individual caught in them. As a result, Massey is able to argue that ‘those relations, experiences and understandings are constructed on a far larger scale than that we happen to define ... as the place itself, whether that be a street, a region or even a continent’ (ibid). A contemporary sense of community, it then follows, is less a population in a defined place, than a connection between individuals whose social interconnections coincide across space and between places. Thus Massey is able to identify the material conditions which give rise to ‘the uniqueness of place’ in the face of homogenising international capital, resulting from ‘the accumulated history of a place’ and its location at the intersection of a particular set of wider social relations (240).
Having established the manner in which we can think progressively about a place- bound urban existence, Massey goes on to consider the development of a politically transformative sense of place. This is able to incorporate material social conditions, and differentiate places one from the other through the slight nuances in historical and geographical constructions. Massey’s progressive ‘sense of place’ is seen here as a matrix of material and immaterial social conditions, of the physical fabric and the history of that location. Thus, Massey is able to describe ‘a sense of place which is extroverted, which includes a consciousness of its links with the wider world, which integrates in a positive way the global and the local’ (239). Clearly Massey encourages us to think ‘a global sense of the local, a global sense of place’, (240) which will be an invaluable strategy in the consideration of the forces at work in the construction of literary city- scapes and fictional communities in the chapters which follow.
Finally, exemplifying the emerging correspondences between theories of the metropolis and metropolitan fiction, Harvey’s Spaces o f Hope is embellished with an appendix which (unwittingly?) uncovers some of the contradictions between utopian discourse and
47 utopian practice (257-281). Harvey describes a possible vision of future social relations constructed from the ashes of our present society (the concrete realities of material social practice). Through the frame of a dream, he describes an anarcho-syndicalist world able to use technology and industry in the pursuit of an egalitarian society and universal human rights. The dream format indicates the problematics of representations of utopias that remain exclusively vested in the imaginary. It also demonstrates the way in which the empirical social sciences (such as cultural geography) are beginning to incorporate imaginary and mythical elements of metropolitan life into their rational discourses. Thus, there emerges a compelling dialogue between the discourses of art and science that is helping to shape a debate on contemporary forms of metropolitan living. As the following chapters demonstrate, Auster’s writing begins with the debilitating effects of the ‘systemic’ metropolitan order. He moves on, as cultural geography has done, to represent a limited and ‘localised’ knowledge that provides a fragile and temporary stability. His work develops, again in a reflection of the work of cultural geographers, to encompass both the ‘local’ and ‘global’ in the form of a wider social world. This last position gives the individual a degree of flexibility which allows them to locate themselves in the metropolitan world (in a situated and relational way) while adapting to the transformations in physical and social formations. The subsequent chapters trace the correspondences between the perspectives of cultural geography, the phases of identity in Auster’s work, and his ‘ways of telling’ - from poetry, through fiction, to film. As we shall see, Auster comes to argue persuasively for the power of fable, magic, imagination and storytelling as one way of locating the self and creating a coherent and stable sense of identity in the complex contemporary metropolis. Thus he proposes a compelling corrective to the rational theories of space, that is a ‘poetics of place’, a poetics of New York.