Subversive Property: Reshaping Malleable Spaces of Belonging
| DOI | 10.1177/0964663910372175 |
| Published date | 01 December 2010 |
| Date | 01 December 2010 |
| Author | Sarah Keenan |
| Subject Matter | Articles |
Subversive Property:
Reshaping Malleable
Spaces of Belonging
Sarah Keenan
University of Kent, UK
Abstract
Despite a wide field of scholarship critiquing the idea and workings of property, most
understandings still centre on the propertied subject. This article spatializes property in
order to shift the focus away from the propertied subject and onto the broader
networks of relations that interact to form property. It draws on critical geography,
phenomenology and empirical socio-legal work to argue that property can be understood
as a relationship of belonging that is held up by the surrounding space – a relationship that is
not fixed or essential but temporally and spatially contingent. Building on Davina Cooper’s
analysis of ‘property practices’, I argue that when analysed spatially, the two types of
belonging she discusses – belonging between a subject and an object and between a part
and a whole – become indistinguishable. As such, characteristics generally associated with
identity politics can be understood as property in the same way that owning an object can –
in terms of belonging in space. This spatialized understanding shows the breadth of prop-
erty’s political potential. Although property tends to be (re)productive of the status quo, it
can also be subversive. Property can unsettle spaces too.
Keywords
belonging, place, property, space, subversion, unsettling, whiteness
This article spatializes property in order to put forward an alternative political agenda for
it. The article shifts away from the focus on the ‘proper(tied) subject’ and her right to
exclude and instead constructs a theory of property that focuses on belonging in space.
Space is understood as something constantly unfolding and open to change; not the dead
inert matter over which time happens or an already completed story to which an essential
meaning can be attached, but rather, as Doreen Massey puts it, the simultaneity of stories
so far (Massey, 2006). Drawing on this perspective, I argue that property is a relationship
of belonging that is held up by the surrounding space – a relationship that is not fixed or
essential but temporally and spatially contingent. Property happens when a space holds
Social & Legal Studies
19(4) 423–439
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DOI: 10.1177/0964663910372175
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up a relationship of belonging, whether that relationship is between a subject and an
object or between a part and a whole. This spatialized understanding of property means
that being white, hetero/homosexual or other such social characteristic generally associ-
ated with identity politics can be understood as having property in the same way as own-
ing a mobile phone can. This understanding of property fits with anti-essentialist
understandings of identity and with a critical geography understanding of place as a pro-
cess and space as dynamic and heterogeneous. But most significantly, it suggests the
possibility of an alternative political agenda for property. For as property is spatially and
temporally contingent, it is also malleable – so while property tends to be (re)productive
of the status quo, it can also be subversive. Property can unsettle spaces too. Rather than
questioning whether subversive property falls within law’s parameters, this article exam-
ines both legal and extra-legal property on the same basis because both have real effects.
It invites a rethinking of what property can do.
The Propertied Subject and the Right to Exclude
The theorization of property as an essential part or extension of the subject has a long
history in Western philosophy, most prominently in the work of Locke and Hegel. Locke
famously argued that ‘every Man has a Property in his own Person’ which he could
expand by mixing his labour with uncultivated or ‘state of nature’ land (Locke, 1978).
Because this appropriation through labour was understood as a kind of natural, god-
given right, no permission from others was required, so long as the appropriator left
‘enough, and as good’ for others (Locke, 1978). According to Locke’s definition then,
property is both an inherent, essential part of the subject (the body’s labour) and a con-
structed extension of it (the land that is cultivated). That property, however, only exists in
and for subjects who are able-bodied, Anglo-European, men of a particular class (Arneil,
2001) – Locke’s ‘every man’ is embedded in class, gender, race and ability
1
assumptions
about who can be a proper subject and the most famous legacy of his theory is as a sig-
nificant justification for colonial expansion (Davies, 2007). As well as excluding certain
socially and legally constructed categories of people, Locke’s subject is also assumed to
pre-exist any such categories – the Lockean subject always already has property in him-
self, he does not need to acquire it through any social or legal processes.
In contrast, Hegel’s proper subject only achieves subjectivity through the process of
appropriation – he is not born with property but must acquire it in the process of becom-
ing fully human (Davies, 1994). Hegel argued that the subject begins as an abstract free
will, which is purely individual and thus not yet in a relation with the external world
(Hegel, 1991). The subject ‘must translate his freedom into an external sphere’ by put-
ting his will into external objects and making them his own. His externalized will is then
taken back into himself in the form of property – the subject recognizes that ‘I, as free
will, am an object to myself in what I possess’ (Hegel, 1991). Property for Hegel is thus
an essential part of the process of becoming a proper subject. Whereas Locke’s proper
subject enters the world already fully formed complete with property in his own labour,
Hegel’s subject only reaches a state of subjectivity by acquiring property and in turn hav-
ing his property recognized by another subject. And whereas Locke sees the world as a
place which began in the state of nature and was slowly cultivated into property by ‘the
424 Social & Legal Studies 19(4)
424
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