Cuts, flows, and the geographies of property

Law, Culture and the Humanities

Volumn 7, Issue 2, 2011, Pages 203-216

  Blomley, Nicholas ^a  

^a SIMON FRASER UNIVERSITY   (Canada)

Author keywords

Cuts; Flows; Geography; Place; Property; Territory

Indexed keywords

EID: 79955106534     PISSN: 17438721     EISSN: 17439752     Source Type: Journal    
DOI: 10.1177/1743872109355583     Document Type: Article

References (75)

1. M. Jackson, At home in the world (Durham: Duke University Press, 1995), p. 85. I am thankful to David Delaney for pointing this reference out to me.
2. K. Grenville, The Secret River (Edinburgh: Canongate, 2005), pp 133-134, subsequently Grenville, The Secret River.
3. A. Gall, Taking/Taking Up: Recognition and the frontier in Grenville's The Secret River, Journal of the Association for the Study of Australian Literature, 8 (2008), pp 94-104.
4. I use property here as a shorthand to refer to modern, liberal conceptions of private property. Obviously, property is a much larger category than this. For my reading of property.
5. N. Blomley, Unsettling the city. (New York: Routledge, 2004), subsequently Blomley, Unsettling.
6. E. Soja, Postmodern geographies (London: Verso, 1989).
7. J. Murdoch, Post-structuralist geography: a guide to relational space (London: Sage, 2006).
8. D. Massey, A global sense of place, Marxism Today, June (1991), pp. 24-29, subsequently Massey, Global.
9. For example, Blomley, Unsettling.
10. E. Zerubavel, The fine line: making distinctions in everyday life (Free Press, 1991).
11. C. Donahue, The future of the concept of property predicted from its past in J. Roland Pennock and John W. Chapman eds., Nomos 22 (New York: New YorkUniversity Press, 1980), pp 28-68, 31.
12. M. Strathern, Cutting the network, The Journal of the Royal Anthropological Association, 2, 3, (1996), pp 525;
13. S. Whatmore, Hybrid Geographies: natures, cultures, spaces (London: Sage, 2002), subsequently Whatmore, Hybrid Geographies.
14. Although lawyers would point that property is technically to be understood as residing in relationships, rather than things, the fact that they are compelled to reiterate this point suggests the powerful purchase of the latter.
15. N. Blomley, Simplification is complicated: Property, nature, and the rivers of law, Environment and Planning, A, 40, (2008) 1825-1840,
16. Blomley, 'Simplification'; Pulverization is discussed in H. Lefebvre, The production of space (Oxford: Blackwell, 1991).
17. N. Blomley, Making private property: enclosure, common right and the work of hedges, Rural History. 18, 1, (2007), pp 1-21;
18. A. Pottage, The measure of land, The Modern Law Review, 57, (1994), pp 361-384.
19. J. Nedelsky, Law, boundaries, and the bounded self, Representations 30, (1990), pp 162-89.
20. C. Reich, The New Property, Yale Law Journal, 73, (1964), pp 733-787, p 771.
21. Star v Rookesby, 1 Salk 336, 91 Eng Rep 295,3 Bl Comm. 309 (1711)
22. D. M. Smith, How far should we care? On the spatial scope of beneficence, Progress in Human Geography, 22 (1998), 15-38.
23. J. Singer, Entitlement: The paradoxes of property (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2000), subsequently Singer, Entitlement.
24. K. Marx (1975) Early writings, Penguin, 1975), p 279;
25. N. Blomley Homelessness, rights and the delusions of property, Urban Geography (forthcoming).
26. D. Harvey, Justice, nature, and the production of difference (Blackwell, London, 1996) p. 261.
27. S Prudham 'The fictions of autonomous inventions: accumulation by dispossession, commodification and life patents in Canada' In Becky Mansfield, ed., Privatization. (Oxford: Blackwell, 2008), 14-37.
28. N. Castree, "Commodifying what nature? Progress in Human Geography, 27 3 (2003), 273-297, p 283.
29. Blomley, Simplification.
30. M. Robertson, Discovering price in all the wrong places: the work of commodity definition and price under neoliberal environmental policy, in Becky Mansfield, ed., Privatization. (Oxford: Blackwell, 2008) 106-132.
31. Cf. M. Callon, An essay on framing and overflowing: economic externalities revisited by sociology. in M. Callon, ed., The Laws of the Markets (Oxford: Blackwell, 1998), pp. 244-69.
32. Cf. D. Monterescu, To buy or not to be: trespassing the gated community, Public Culture, 21, 2 (forthcoming).
33. An interesting example of this is provided by the history of land surveying, in which the universalized rules of geometry and mathematics were deployed not only so as to convert relations into static spaces, but also to ensure that such spaces could become interchangeable, plugged into non-local market networks that required comparison and distanced evaluation.
34. R.D. Sack, Human territoriality: its theory and history (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1986), subsequently Sack, Territoriality.
35. B. Chatwin, The songlines (London: Picador, 1987), subsequently Chatwin, Songlines.
36. Massey, Global.
37. Whatmore, Hybrid Geographies, p 108.
38. In truth, the cuts of property are at work earlier on, in the descriptions of Thornhill's life in London. As a non-owner, in a realm almost of no-property (J.B. Baron, Homelessness as a property problem, Urban Lawyer, 36, 2, (2004) 273-88) he succumbs to the temptation to take other's property. The logic of the criminal law - with all its attendant categorical slices of reality - is mobilized, and he is sentenced to death (the most profound of property's cuts, perhaps). The revised sentence of transportation, of course, also entails his individualization and dislocation.
39. Op. cit, p. 93.
40. Grenville, The Secret River p. 80.
41. Op. cit, p 101.
42. Op. cit, p. 106.
43. Op. cit, p. 121.
44. Op. cit. p. 79.
45. Op. cit, p. 80.
46. Op. cit, p. 250.
47. Op. cit, pp. 160-161.
48. Op. cit, p. 161.
49. Op. cit, p. 250.
50. Op. cit, p. 171.
51. A comparable novel by David Malouf has an Australian settler complaining of a similar failure of spatialization, as well as signaling some of the challenges of networking the various spaces of property, when he reflects upon the tribes of wandering myalls who, in their traipsing this way and that over the map, were forever encroaching on boundaries that could be insisted on by daylight - a good shotgun saw to that -but in the dark hours, when you no longer stood there as a living marker with all the glow of the white man's authority about you, reverted to being a creek-bed or ridge of granite like any other, and gave no indication that six hundred miles away, in the Lands Office in Brisbane, this bit of country had a name set against it on a numbered document, and a line drawn that was empowered with all the authority of the Law (D. Malouf, Remembering Babylon (New York: Pantheon Books, 1993), p. 9.
52. Cf. Blomley, N., The borrowed view: privacy, propriety, and the entanglements of property, Law and Social Inquiry 30, 4 (2005), 617.
53. Op. cit, pp. 143-144.
54. Aboriginal voices and beliefs concerning the land are largely absent from the account, a deliberate choice, according to Grenville, the account being written from Thornhill's perspective: see K. Grenville, Searching for the Secret River (Melbourne:Text Publishing, 2006). While not without its limitations, this perspective also reminds us of the workings of colonial logics of effacement.
55. Op. cit, p. 144.
56. Op. cit. p. 270.
57. Op. cit, p. 193.
58. Op. cit, p. 197.
59. N. Blomley, Law, property, and the spaces of violence: the frontier, the survey, and the grid, Annals, Association of American Geographers 93, 1 (2003) 121-1.
60. Grenville, The Secret River, p 263.
61. Chatwin, Songlines.
62. N. Blomley, Law, space and the geographies of power (New York: Guilford, 1994), subsequently Blomley, Geographies of power.
63. Blomley, Geographies of power.
64. N. Blomley, "Mud for the land, Public Culture 14, 3, (2002) 557-82.
65. Paradoxically, the self and the object of property, imagined as bounded and discrete, are mutually entangled. The object itself has meaning only in relation to the subject, as expressed in the legal principle that all things must be assigned a determinate owner (or according to the Hegelian logic that things are not ends in themselves, but derive their destiny and soul from a person's will). Similarly, the subject is constituted in relation to the object. Either the object is an extension of the labour of the owner, in Lockean terms, or is actualized through a Hegelian extension of the subject's will into the external world and then reappropriated in the form of property. In Thornhill's case, the land takes on added meaning, becoming more than an alienable object, which he can cut from himself. Ultimately, indeed, his identity is caught up not only in the object of property, but also in the situation of his land in a broader web of localized meaning and association.
66. Op. cit, p. 4.
67. Op. cit. p. 130.
68. Op. cit., p. 123.
69. Op. cit,. p. 289.
70. Op. cit., p. 289.
71. Op. cit., p. 295.
72. The implication here is that, as the isolated liberal subject, Thornhill is somehow incomplete or inauthentic. Presumably, Grenville would prefer a more relational conception of property than one predicated on cuts alone. In this, she is not alone. Many Leftish treatments of property adopt a similar view of property, such as Singer's emphasis upon the obligations, as well as the entitlements of property owners (Singer, Entitlement) or Carol Rose's critique of the limitations of self-interest as an organizing principle for property (C.M. Rose, Property and persuasion (Boulder, CO: Westview Press, 1994). While I am sympathetic to such exhortations, I think they do not fully acknowledge the deeply entrenched, widely materialized and thus powerful logic of the cut, as it relates to property, the effect of which, as noted, is to transform the relationality of property into hostility. Property's cut is not simply a disposition but a socially constituted means by which we make sense of the world and, as such, is not easily cast off.
73. Blomley, Geographies of power.
74. D. Massey, For space (London: Sage, 2005).
75. D. Delaney, Territory: A short introduction (Malden, MA: Blackwell, 2005).