Book Review: Subversive Property: Law and the Production of Spaces of Belonging
| Published date | 01 August 2016 |
| Author | Nicholas Blomley |
| Date | 01 August 2016 |
| DOI | 10.1177/0964663916647530 |
| Subject Matter | Book Reviews |
Book Reviews
Book Reviews
SARAH KEENAN, Subversive Property: Law and the Production of Spaces of Belonging. New York:
Routledge, 2014, pp. 192, ISBN 978-1-138-78589-2, (pbk).
Property, we’re told, entails relations, not just things. Yet ‘we more often pay lip service
to this idea rather than think through its full implications’ (Singer, 2009: 1048). The
crucial question for me concerns how these relations are to be understood, and what is to
be brought within their reach. Property lawyers grapple over the direction of such
relations (exclusion or inclusion?) and their scope (property as a series of individualized
incentives or as a means for the organization of democracy and virtue?)
Sarah Keenan invites us to go further. First, she asks us not to think of property
according to a dominant logic of exclusion, but rather as a relationship of belonging,
organized both in terms of the relationship between subject and object (e.g. the owner
and that which is owned), and in terms of th e relationship between part and whole
(membership within a broader category). My house can be thought of both as an object
that ‘belongs’ to me and as a set of resources for thinking about part/whole relationships,
such as the manner in which I include family members who ‘belong’, from those who do
not. Belonging, in this sense, entails both mastery and membership.
In so doing, secondly, the focus should be on the networks in which a property subject
is embedded, rather than the subject herself, she argues. My belonging, in both senses of
the term, is not a matter of my prowess as an individual owner, carving off a space of
dominion from the world, but rather must be thought of in terms of the manner in which
wider networks are aligned in such a manner so as to constitute my position as subject.
For Keenan, the work of such networks directs us, thirdly, to space. Thinking spatially
is a way to think beyond the subject, she argues. Legal geography has devoted consid-
erable attention to the relationships between space and law. Whilst valuable, she argues
that legal geographers have not gone far enough. They have neither sufficiently engaged
with the relationship between space and the legal subject, nor with the spatiality of
property more generally (and here I would lodge a small demurral). She draws from
the work of geographer Doreen Massey in order to make such connections. Whilst it can
be organized as fixed and finite, and can operate in disciplinary ways, space is also
malleable, and thus capable of different meanings. Space, understood as dynamic, het-
erogeneous and simultaneous, is not ‘the inert backdrop to action undertaken by subjects.
Rather, space is part of the action’ (p. 7).
And this brings us back, finally, to property and belonging, and her concept of
‘holding up’. Relations of belonging, she argues, are ‘held up’ when a set of processes,
Social & Legal Studies
2016, Vol. 25(4) 509–522
ªThe Author(s) 2016
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DOI: 10.1177/0964663916647530
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