Geography Reference
In-Depth Information
such as United Nations, the World Bank, and the International Monetary
Fund, which have e
ectively assumed some governance functions.
This collection of events may be viewed as moments in the transition into
postmodern “
ff
“flexible” and “disorganized” capitalism (Lash and Urry 1987).
Similarly, Bauman (2000) di
fl
erentiates “heavy” modernity, a period lasting
from the Renaissance to the late twentieth century, from the “light modern-
ity” of contemporary capitalism, one centered on mobile rather than
ff
xed
capital, lightness and speed rather than power, instantaneity rather than
duration, software rather than hardware, individual rather than collective
struggle, consumption rather production. The origins of postmodern capital-
ism lay
fi
firmly within the post-war boom—in the networks of multinational
corporations that succeeded in uniting much of the globe in dense webs of
capital, in the terror of instantaneous death through nuclear war, in the rapid
globalization of culture and the resistance it inspired—and postmodern cap-
italism assuredly incorporated and was pre
fi
gured by many aspects of its late
modern predecessor. Indeed, this point may be taken as a caveat that new
forms of production and consumption, new representations of time and
space, never emerge
de novo
, but always arise from and are shaped by earlier
ones. The simple dichotomy between “modern” and “postmodern,” there-
fore, fails to do justice to the complexity of both categories and the extent to
which they are commingled.
Numerous observers sought to describe contemporary time-space com-
pression. Alvin To
fi
uential topic
Future Shock
painted a world in which time passed too quickly, in which the speed of
cultural and technological change were overwhelming, and one in which
geographies melted away before the hot
er's (1970) famously in
fl
fires of advanced modernity: “Never
in history has distance meant less.... Figuratively, we 'use up' places and
dispose of them in much the same way that we dispose of Kleenex or beer
cans” (p. 75). In the same vein, David Harvey (1989a:240), perhaps the most
famous theorist of this issue, argues in
The Condition of Postmodernity
that
an enormous round of time-space compression is underway:
fi
As space appears to shrink to a “global village” of telecommunications
and a “spaceship earth” of economic and ecological interdependencies—
to use just two familiar and everyday images—and as time horizons
shorten to the point where the present is all there is (the world of the
schizophrenic), so we have to learn how to cope with an overwhelming
sense of compression of our spatial and temporal worlds.
He (1989:240) suggests that in the face of massive contemporary changes,
contemporary inhabitants of the world have “learned to cope with an over-
whelming sense of compression of our spatial and temporal worlds.” Similarly,
Jameson (1984) holds that in the postmodern era, space has abolished time,
but simultaneously, space has become so warped and distorted as to defy con-
ventional interpretation. Thus, his famous essay concerning the disorienting
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