Geography Reference
In-Depth Information
feature of postmodern society, one in which a signi
cant share of the planet's
population spends a considerable proportion of its time. Cheap, instant-
aneous, and ubiquitous communications have increasingly made the notion
of place increasingly problematic, allowing many people to be in several
places simultaneously. So deeply have e-mail, the World Wide Web, and
e-commerce penetrated various domains of social life that the virtual and real
worlds are inescapably interpenetrated. Consumers, seduced by the magic of
the commodity, experience this process as the ever-deeper penetration of
commodity relations into everyday life, a process fueled at maximum speed
by television and related technologies. In this context, Baudrillard's (1994)
claim that the contemporary world has become a simulacrum, in which social
reality and commodi
fi
fi
ed image have become inseparably fused, deserves con-
siderable attention.
The prime economic manifestations of postmodern capitalism are intense
globalization and extreme rapidity of transactions: today, few commodity
chains are con
ned to national boundaries. The primary spatial expression of
this process include the centralization of skilled, high-value-added functions
in global cities—that is, in locales in which face-to-face contact allows for the
exchange of tacit, unstandardized information—and the decentralization of
unskilled, low-value-added functions such as back o
fi
ces and call centers,
which rely on standardized forms of information, to the global periphery. As
capital has become increasingly hypermobile, its ability to pit places against
one another has risen proportionately. Such events form the context in which
neoliberalism arose as the political face of postmodern capitalism, ushering
in widespread state withdrawals from the domain of reproduction and the
deregulation of various economic sectors, all of which have served global
elites well at the expense of the poor and disempowered. The globalization
of capital and information, as well as the transfer of various forms of gov-
ernance to supranational entities (e.g., the European Union, World Trade
Organization, World Bank, International Monetary Fund) are all gradually
undermining the viability of the nation-state system, the linchpin of the
global economic and political network since the Treaty of Westphalia in
1648. Postmodern capitalism, it would appear, is in the process of giving rise
to new, as yet poorly de
ned, forms of spatiality characterized by multiple
localities engaged in intense competition with one another.
If the surfaces that characterized the geographies of modernity have
slipped away, the spatial form that has taken their place may be likened to
rhizomic networks. Unlike the surfaces of modernity (e.g., the nation-state,
urban commuting
fi
“fibrous, thread-like,
wiry, stringy, ropy, capillary character that is never captured by the notions of
levels, layers, territories, spheres, categories, structures, or systems” (Paasi
2004:541). In Sheppard's (2002) view, these global power-geometries cut
across spatial scales to create “wormholes” that defy the traditional logic of
physical distance (i.e., transport costs have declined markedly in signi
fi
fields), postmodern society exhibits a “
fi
cance).
Temporally, the rise of networked capitalism has been accompanied by
fi
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