My overriding concern in this address is with how we might (in this day and age, and in the context of the debates in which we are currently engaged and the challenges which we face) think about space/spatiality. ‘Space’ is one of those most obvious of things which is mobilised as a term in a thousand different contexts, but whose potential meanings are all too rarely explicated or addressed. As Grossberg has written:

My particular interest […] is to explore the connections between this question of how to conceptualise space on the one hand, and, on the other hand, first how social science theorising is conducted, and second how both these things are related to what appear to be significant current shifts in political philosophy and political thinking more generally. The connection to theorising in the social sciences (the challenge of spatialising social theory) is taken up in the paper: ‘Imagining globalisation: power-geometries of space-time’ (Massey 1999a). The relationship to shifts in approaches to politics is the central focus of this current paper.

THREE PROPOSITIONS

To initiate the argument, then, the following are three propositions about how space could be conceptualised:

• i. space is a product of interrelations. It is constituted through interactions, from the immensity of the global to the intimately tiny. This is a proposition which will come as no surprise at all to those who have been reading the recent Anglophone literature!;

• ii. space is the sphere of the possibility of the existence of multiplicity: it is the sphere in which distinct trajectories coexist; it is the sphere of the possibility of the existence of more than one voice. Without space, no multiplicity: without multiplicity, no space. If space is indeed the product of interrelations, then it must be predicated upon the existence of plurality. Multiplicity and space are co-constitutive;

• iii. finally, and precisely because space is the product of relation-between, relations which are necessarily embedded material practices which have to be carried out, it is always in a process of becoming; it is always being made. It is never finished; never closed.