Theorizing time-space compression - Time-Space Compression: Historical Geographies - page 22

spatialities, is thus the Marxist motor of time-space compression. Time-space
compression occurs when one spatial fix displaces another, typically at a larger

spatial scale of interaction. Harvey (1989a:240) de

fi

fi nes the phenomenon as:

Processes that so revolutionise the objective qualities of space and time
that we are forced to alter, sometimes in quite radical ways, how we
represent the world to ourselves. I use the word “compression” because a
strong case can be made that the history of capitalism has been charac-
terized by speed-up in the pace of life, while so overcoming spatial
barriers that the world sometimes seems to collapse inwards upon us.

The result is periodic economic, social, political, and cultural upheaval as new
forms of time and space replace older ones. Harvey's (1989a) most famous
explication of time-space compression, The Condition of Postmodernity (the
single most important work on this topic) closely anticipated and inspired
many of the topics addressed in this volume, including, inter alia , the impacts
of capitalism and the Enlightenment on modern notions of time and space,
the role of perspective in art, Renaissance mapping and cadastral science,
chronometry, and, of course, the world of post-Fordist fi financial capital (what

he unfortunately labels “ “fictitious capital”), which, traveling through tele-

communications networks, has ushered in a profound and as yet un

fi

fi nished

round of postmodern time-space compression (see also Harvey 1990).
In the context of contemporary postmodern capitalism and globalization,
industrial capital has been largely supplanted by financial capital, with

unprecedented spatial mobility. This transformation is more than simply a
scalar change, but represents signi

fi

cantly enhanced levels of leverage of cap-
ital over labor. Essentially, Harvey maintains, “capital commands space,
whereas workers struggle to control place” (Sheppard 2006:129). Financial
capital's ability to

fi

ortless across the globe—time-space compression
on a global level—gives it enormous abilities to pit places against one another
by o

fl ow e ff

ering, for example, an optimal “business environment.” As explored in
Chapter 5, this process has signi

ff

cant implications for structures of local and
national governance. The very nature of

fi

fi finance capital, with its tenuous ties

to the landscape, rede nes local dependence, revealing it as one, contingent

way in which capital relates to places, not a universal necessity.
Harvey's view is not without its critics, who often point to its economic
reductionism, and have supplemented his ideas in several ways. Brenner
(1998) extended the spatial

fi

fi fix into a “scalar fi fix,” a multiscalar con fi guration

of territorial organization that mediates capital flows, linking hierarchies of

places in a process of constantly changing uneven development. He argues
(1998:460), for example, that “Spatial scales can no longer be conceived as
pre-given or natural arenas of social interaction, but are increasingly viewed
as historical products—at once spatially constructed and politically con-
tested.” Each geographical scale constitutes an arena in which the oppos-
ing forces of

fl

fi fixity and motion collide, and the concatenated e ff ects of