Geographies of Exclusion

Society and Difference in the West

David Sibley

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2002
• ISBN:
  9781134813360
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Physical Sciences
• Subtopic: Geography
• Index: Geography

Images of exclusion characterised western cultures over long historical periods. In the developed society of racism, sexism and the marginalisation of minority groups, exclusion has become the dominant factor in the creation of social and spatial boundaries. Geographies of Exclusion seeks to identify the forms of social and spatial exclusion, and subsequently examine the fate of knowledge of space and society which has been produced by members of excluded groups. Evaluating writing on urban society by women and black writers the author asks why such work is neglected by the academic establishment, suggesting that both practices which result in the exclusion of minorities and those which result in the exclusion of knowledge have important implications for theory and method in human geography. Drawing on a wide range of ideas from social anthropology, feminist theory, sociology, human geography and psychoanalysis, the book presents a fresh approach to geographical theory, highlighting the tendency of powerful groups to purify' space and to view minorities as defiled and polluting, and exploring the nature of difference' and the production of knowledge.

Part I
GEOGRAPHIES OF EXCLUSION

1
FEELINGS ABOUT DIFFERENCE

The senior partner of a well-known professional firm around here put his home on the market with us and he said: ‘You sent me a Mr Shah and you sent me a Mr Patel and you sent me a Mr Whatever-it-was.’ He said: ‘I recognize that a lot of the big money comes from several thousand miles east of Dover nowadays, and I don’t want you to think that I’ve got any prejudice at all, but would you be able to send me an Englishman one day?’ (Suburban London estate agent)^1

There are several possible routes into the problem of social and spatial exclusion. I want to start by considering people’s feelings about others because of the importance of feelings in their effect on social interaction, particularly in instances of racism and related forms of oppression. If, for example, we consider the question of residential segregation, which is one of the most widely investigated issues in urban geography, it could be argued that the resistance to a different sort of person moving into a neighbourhood stems from feelings of anxiety, nervousness or fear. Who is felt to belong and not to belong contributes in an important way to the shaping of social space. It is often the case that this kind of hostility to others is articulated as a concern about property values but certain kinds of difference, as they are culturally constructed, trigger anxieties and a wish on the part of those who feel threatened to distance themselves from others. This may, of course, have economic consequences.

Feelings about others, people marked as different, may also be associated with places. Nervousness about walking down a street in a district which has been labelled as dangerous, nauseousness associated with particular smells or, conversely, excitement, exhilaration or a feeling of calm may be the kinds of sensations engendered by other environments. Repulsion and desire, fear and attraction, attach both to people and to places in complex ways. Central to this question is the construction of the self, the way in which individual identity relates to social, cultural and spatial contexts. In this chapter, I will suggest some of the connections between the self and material and social worlds, moving towards a conception of the ‘ecological self.²

ALTERNATIVE PERSPECTIVES ON THE SELF

Central to early visions of the self was the idea of human individuality.³ Rationalist philosophers recognized that only human beings were consciously aware of their own life, which gave them the capacity to act autonomously. Nineteenth-century romanticism similarly encouraged a view of the free spirit, and this notion of the self was reinforced by capitalist forms of social organization according to which people are highly individuated and assumed to have control of their own destinies. The subject was thus detached from his or her social milieu.

A shift in conceptions of the self was signalled by Freudian psychoanalysis. Freud situated the self in society and argued for connections between the developing self and the material world. Central to his thesis was the unconscious, that ‘aspect of psychoanalysis that directly challenges the emphasis in Western thought on the power of reason and rationality, of reflective and conscious control over the self. Although Freud suggested that on one level the unconscious was detached from reality, on another level ‘it is deeply entwined with the needs of the human body, the nature of external reality, and actual social relations’.⁴ The importance of external reality for the psyche was outlined in Civilization and its Discontents, published in 1929. In this book, Freud wrote about the repression of libidinal desires specifically in relation to the materialism of capitalist societies. He claimed that one form of repression was an excessive concern with cleanliness and order.⁵ Personal hygiene, for example, is widely accepted as desirable on medical and social grounds, but it removes bodily smell as a source of sexual stimulation. Washing and deodorizing the body has assumed a ritual quality and in some people can become obsessive and compulsive. This kind of observation raises issues about the role of dominant social and political structures in the sublimation of desire and the shaping of the self. What are the sanctions against a group or an individual represented as dirty or disorderly? In Civilization and its Discontents Freud brackets cleanliness and order, both distancing the subject from the uncertainties and fears of the urban-industrial environment. However, as Smith observes, ‘order is a part of the tragedy of modern urban culture: it brings frustration but it cannot be done without’.⁶

OBJECT RELATIONS THEORY

Freud’s psychoanalytical writing provides a starting point for an examination of relationships between the self and the social and material world. This is the field of object relations theory, which, for Freud, referred to the infant’s relationship to the humans in its world, but it is a theory which has been generalized to include non-human aspects of the object world, a wider environment of human and material objects, and extended beyond infancy. The latter is a particularly important contribution of Erik Erikson,⁷ who argued that ‘the personality is engaged with the hazards of existence continuously, even as the body’s metabolism copes with decay’. Erikson tried to model the changes in the self over the life course in the form of eight stages of ego development which he described as the ‘Eight Ages of Man’. The details of his schema are not as important as the idea of change throughout life, resulting from continuous engagement with the environment.

Object relations theory, as it has been reworked by psychoanalytical theorists since Freud, has an important role in my argument.

Object relations theory assumes that from birth, the infant engages in formative relations with ‘objects’—entities perceived as separate from the self, either whole persons or parts of the body, either existing in the external world or internalized as mental representations.⁸

It suggests ways in which boundaries emerge, separating the ‘good’ and the ‘bad’, the stereotypical representations of others which inform social practices of exclusion and inclusion but which, at the same time, define the self. In the following account I draw primarily on Melanie Klein’s work but I also refer to authors who put more emphasis on the social context of psychoanalytic theory, particularly Julia Kristeva and Constance Perin.⁹

Klein,¹⁰ like Freud, focuses on infancy but she provides a clear and quite convincing argument about the development of the social self. Her argument is that in the process of birth and immediately after birth the infant experiences anxieties associated with the initial discomforts of being—light, cold, noise, and so on, but comfort comes from being held by the mother and from breast-feeding, which make possible ‘the infant’s first loving relation to a person [object]’. The infant experiences a feeling of one-ness with the mother, who, ‘in the first few months…represents to the child the whole of the external world’. Necessarily, both good and bad emanate from the mother because she is the source of all of the earliest experience of social relationships. The mother is, therefore, both a good and a bad object. However, this initial, pre-Oedipal one-ness with the mother is lost as the child develops a sense of border, a sense of self-hood, and a sense of the social. This comes about through a combination of two processes. The first is introjection, whereby ‘the situations the infant lives through and the objects he or she encounters are taken into the self and become a part of inner life. Inner life cannot be evaluated…without these additions to the personality that come from continuous introjection.’ Klein identifies a simultaneous process of projection, ‘which implies that there is a capacity of the child to attribute to other people…feelings of various kinds, predominantly love and hate.’ However, objects are not necessarily either polarized or in balance. As she recognized, if projection is predominantly hostile, empathy with others is impaired. Conversely, if the child ‘loses itself entirely in others’, a condition of excessive introjection, it becomes incapable of independent, objective judgement. Seeing the world exclusively as ‘good’ or ‘bad’ is, in Klein’s terms, the paranoid-schizoid position. Most personalities exhibit finer gradations of goodness and badness, however, and do, in her view, achieve a kind of balance.

This concern with balance as a desirable personality characteristic is found in much psychotherapy and it represents a more optimistic view of the self than that of those social philosophers who see the psyche as buffeted by social forces.¹¹ However, t...

Table of contents

• CONTENTS
• PLATES
• FIGURES
• ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS
• INTRODUCTION
• Part I GEOGRAPHIES OF EXCLUSION
• Part II THE EXCLUSION OF GEOGRAPHIES
• CONCLUSION
• BIBLIOGRAPHY
• INDEX