Geography Reference
In-Depth Information
changes at multiple scales are telescoped into the unique contexts of local
areas. Moreover, scales are never frozen, but are constantly in
flux: continual
scaling and rescaling are thus constitutive dimensions of the capitalist spa-
tial dynamic (Paasi 2004). Dodgshon (1998) cautions against exaggerating
the rapidity of the process of landscape devaluation, and calls attention to
the enormous role of inertia in shaping social and spatial change, that is, the
stubborn persistence of the past (in the form of the built environment and
social institutions) in the present in a manner that may retard or de
fl
ect
transformation. Moreover, he posits (1998:192) that the geographies that sta-
bilize commodity production serve more than one purpose: “the idea of a
'spatial
fl
fix' needs to be seen as a potential solution to a much wider range of
inner con
fi
icts than those associated with modern crises of capital accumula-
tion.” The spatial
fl
fix is not simply an outcome of the economic logic of
commodity production, but entails widespread political dimensions as well.
This notion is particularly helpful in exploring premodern time-space com-
pressions, in which political logics were often more important that putatively
economic ones. Jessop (2006) criticizes the notion of the spatial
fi
fi
x as mech-
anistic, and of
fixes in which
local class alliances, including the state, stabilize the conditions of produc-
tion (at least momentarily) and control the class antagonisms that capitalist
production inevitably generates.
ff
ers a more nuanced notion of spatio-temporal
fi
Structuration and time-space distanciation
The understanding of time-space compression as a social and cultural pro-
cess, rather than one simply reducible to the dynamics of the spatial division
of labor, was greatly advanced by structuration theory (Giddens 1981, 1984,
1987), which became widely popular in the late twentieth century. Anthony
Giddens freed time-space compression from its con
nes within the sphere of
production, embedding it within everyday life and social reproduction. In this
view, time and space, and thus their transformations, both produce and are
produced by people in their normal daily routines. Structuration theory dif-
fers from the rather rigid, top-down perspective initiated by Harvey in that it
allows actors room to take advantage of the di
fi
erential advantages, con-
straints, and opportunities that time-space compression always generates.
This maneuver rescued this topic from the abyss of teleological naturalism by
explicitly a
ff
rming that folding time and space are always and everywhere
only human products, and are thus changeable, malleable, contingent, and
never pre-determined; as Thrift (1996: 46) puts it, “The socio-technical net-
works that have produced time-space compression are themselves made up of
practices which have been sedimented over many, many years.”
Structuration theory begins with the recognition that only human beings
are sentient (i.e., as actors they have consciousness about themselves and their
world), and draws upon the rich phenomenological and psychological tradi-
tions concerning perception, cognition, ideology, and language, all of which
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