Concluding thoughts - Time-Space Compression: Historical Geographies - page 213

6 Concluding thoughts

This volume has attempted to demonstrate the hugely variable and culturally
speci erent societies construct, mold, reshape, deform,

adjust, and annihilate space and time as they were reworked by global capital-
ism. If there is one theme that snakes its way through these pages, it is the
profound plasticity of these dimensions, their in

fi c ways in which di ff

nite forms and variations,
and the diverse ways in which people have created, folded, recalibrated,
distorted, and recon

fi

gured them.
The purpose of a conclusion is to summarize an argument at a higher level
of abstraction and to carry it forward to new horizons. Fundamentally, the
goal and purpose of this work have been to denaturalize time and space.
These dimensions acquire a deeply internalized sense of being “natural” in
every society, for they are intimately wrapped up with the rhythms of every-
day life. Yet as this project has shown, there is not and never has been a single,
“objective” time or space, no one “correct” way to organize or experience
them, only a vast array of very di

fi

erent ones. Hence, there are no stable
meanings that we can assign to time and space, only temporary and arbitrary
ones, because human life is itself so variegated spatially and temporally.
Geography and history, as the study of space and time, respectively, cannot
be conveniently reduced to broad generalizations, grandiose theories, over-
arching models, or facile explanations. Because all social processes unfold
contingently in di

ff

erent spatio-temporal contexts, time-
space compression itself cannot be easily understood in terms of convenient
abstractions, for as a process of social change, the ways in which time and
space have been folded and refolded have been unique to the societies, places,
and times in which it occurred. Su

ff erent ways in di ff

ce it to say that the analysis of time-space
compression forces us to consider how and why time and space are con-
structed in the ways they are, why they become “natural” in the lives and
minds of those who create them, and the politics of who gains and who
bene

gurations.
This project has approached the diverse ways in which time and space have
been constituted historically by lodging them within three broad (and admit-
tedly arti

fi ts from particular spatio-temporal con fi

cial) temporal eras, the early modern, late modern, and postmodern
worlds. There are, of course, large variations within each of these, temporally,

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