Concluding thoughts - Time-Space Compression: Historical Geographies - page 218

fl fluctuating surfaces of modernity and postmodernity, forming complex

topologies of wealth and power that expanded and contracted over the
earth's surface in mind-numbingly complicated chains of cause and e ect.

Selectively incorporating aspects of all of these perspectives—and refusing to
privilege one over another—is not theoretical opportunism, it is being real-
istic and

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fl flexible in the deployment of analytical tools to make sense of the

world.
This account of the historical geographies of time-space compression con-
stitutes but one short step in a much longer process by which various domains
of knowledge have been subject to the lens of social constructivism. What
are often perceived to be “natural” and thus outside of society—the body,
gender, poverty, even nature itself—have been systematically denaturalized by
exposing their social origins, historical roots, their mutability and plasticity,
their deeply political character. Time and space are no di erent in this regard.

When we accept that histories and geographies are in

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nitely variable in
their possibilities, that they have been repeatedly folded, distorted, remade,
reconstituted, and reinterpreted, that there is no one single “objective” form
in which spatio-temporal reality presents itself, and that there never will be,
our discovery of ourselves will have made a signi

fi

fi cant step forward.