MASCULINITY, DUALISMS AND HIGH TECHNOLOGY

spaces One way of beginning to conceptualize the difference between these two kinds of spaces is through the work of Henri Lefebvre. In his account of The production of space (1991), he characterizes the space of current western society as 'abstract space' and discusses (and criticizes), as one of its defining features, its fragmentation, its division into subspaces devoted to the performance of specialized activities. His historical analysis explains this process as the result of aspects both of modernity and capitalism on the one hand and of currently dominant forms of masculinity on the other. Although Lefebvre's historical account and the supposed newness of abstract spaces may be questioned, his examples of such specialized and fragmented spaces/ space-times resemble very strongly the specialized space-times constructed in high-tech workplaces. They seem to have many of the characteristics of abstract space: they are demarcated against an outside, they are specialized, they are masculine. Yet, in the story we are telling here, they are not coexisting with other similarly specialized and sealed-off time-spaces but with a time-space that This content downloaded from 157.55. 39.244 on Fri, 17 Jun 2016 05:27:31 UTC All use subject to http://about.jstor. org/terms Masculinity, dualisms and high technology 495 of the domestic sphere which is porous, which allows entry from other spheres, which is perhaps, in Lefebvre's terms, characteristic of an older and yet, possibly at the same time, a more potentially progressive kind of time-space. Lloyd (1984, 50), it might be recalled, contrasted the wholly rational sphere of reason/transcendence (i.e. evacuated of other things) with 'woman's task' of preserving 'the sphere of the intermingling of mind and body' (my emphasis). Further, Lefebvre (1991, 191) pointedly asks Is not social space always, and simultaneously, both a field of action (offering its extension to the deployment of projects and practical intentions) and a basis of action (a set of places whence energies derive and whither energies are directed). In other words, social space is both an arena of action and potentially enabling/productive of further effects. Just so the places of work in these high-tech parts of the economy: they are not merely spaces where things may happen but spaces which, in the nature of their construction (as specialized, as closed-off from intrusion, and in the nature of the things in which they are specialized), have effects in the structuring of the daily lives and the identities of the scientists who work within them. Most particularly, in their boundedness and in their dedication to abstract thought to the exclusion of other things, these workplaces both reflect and provide a material basis for the particular form of masculinity which hegemonizes this form of employment. Not only the nature of the work and the culture of the workplace but also the construction of the space of work itself, therefore, contributes to the moulding and reinforcement of this masculinity. As Lefebvre (1991, 89) writes: The dominant tendency fragments space and cuts it up into pieces . Specializations divide space among them and act upon its truncated parts, setting up mental barriers and practico-social frontiers. Lefebvre would argue that the currently dominant tendency towards the homogenization/ fragmentation and specialization of space is something which should be opposed. This relates to the second stage in the argument here about what is happening to the work/home boundary among the scientists of the Cambridge phenomenon. For what has been discussed so far is an alteration in the boundary between home and work which consists of nothing more than the spatio-temporal transgression by one sphere (one side of the dualism) into the other. As has been noted, this transgression is all one way but the second stage of the argument is that in whatever manner one interprets this 'blurring' of boundaries, it does not overcome the dualism itself. Yet it is the fact of the dichotomies (reason/non-reason; transcendence/immanence) which has been criticized as being part of that same mode of thinking which also polarizes genders and the characteristics so frequently ascribed to them. And it is the parallel fragmentation/specialization which came in for criticism from Lefebvre. What, then, can be learned about the possibility of unification from this study of Cambridge scientists?