Chapter 3 - Her Dark Past

Summary

INTRODUCTION

In 1978, on a brisk, bright Friday morning in early spring, the dozen or so of us taking Jacquie Burgess’s third-year philosophy of geography course at University College, London, trooped down Tottenham Court Road, took a right on Goodge Street, and walked the mile or so to the architecturally brutal modernist Polytechnic of Central London. We were there to participate in a day-long conference on ideology and geography. Sir Peter Hall (although then still a commoner), Ron Johnston (not yet a recipient of the Order of the British Empire, or OBE) and Doreen Massey (not yet having refused an OBE) were speakers. From my perspective, the event was perfectly timed. My course paper was on ideology and geography, pretentiously called, “Never mind the truth, here’s the ideologues”. The title was a riff on the Sex Pistols’ album, Never Mind the Bollocks, Here’s the Sex Pistols, released a few months before. Because of the record title’s profanity, you had to buy the album in a plain brown paper bag. Ratcheting up the pretension, I handed in my paper to Jacquie Burgess in a plain brown paper bag. Like the Queen’s reaction to the Pistols’ version of “God Save the Queen”, Jacquie Burgess was not amused. “Bollocks”, she said. That is, Jacquie Burgess, not the Queen.

For my course paper, I read everything in Volume 5, issue 3, of Antipode, “Ideology in Geography”, including Doreen Massey’s (1973) contribution, “Towards a Critique of Industrial Location Theory”. It was brilliant, the first piece I’d read in economic geography that took on the neoclassical economic underpinnings of spatial science. It showed how each of the presumed universal assumptions of neoclassicism were not so universal, their deployment producing only inconsistency and contradiction. Massey argued that the end of neoclassical theory, as well as industrial location theory, was not to explain the world but only to justify and legitimate ideologically what it studied, industrial capitalism.