Geography Reference
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tyranny of constant speed leads to alienated, stressed-out, exhausted citizens
who populate the virtual geographies of the space of
flows, it distorts human
perception, sterilizes communications, forces a colonialism of daily life by
machines, and generates a mindless automation that robs people of their
humanity in a hypermotorized, digitized world. Virilio asserts that time-space
compression has become su
fl
ciently complete that the struggle for space—
geopolitics—has been displaced by chronopolitics, the struggle for time.
“Virilio's dystopian vision replaces politics based around public and private
spaces, local and global, with a series of intermingling and con
icting tem-
poral modalities—a chronopolitics created by instantaneous transmission
bringing formerly discrete space-times into contact” (Crang 2000:303). In
short, complete time-space compression means that “distinctions of here and
there no longer mean anything” (Virilio 1991:13). Despite the hyperbole,
Virilio's insights are useful in understanding that speed and velocity are not
simply technical issues, but as profoundly cultural and political ones as well.
fl
Theorizing poststructural relational space
The enormous economic, technological, social, and spatial changes that
accompanied, underpinned, and gave shape to the late twentieth-century
transition into postmodern capitalism were addressed from numerous theor-
etical perspectives (including Virilio). Many views within this genre point to
the greatly enhanced degree of globalization evident under contemporary
capitalism and the ostensible annihilation of distance announced by techno-
crats (e.g., Cairncross 1997) and the concomitant alleged “end of history”
announced by neoliberal intellectuals (e.g., Fukuyama 2006). Dodgshon
(1999) rightly challenges notions that postmodern time-space compression
has resulted in the “end of history” as ahistorical and simplistic. Rather, the
“end of history” meant the end of the cold war, and the beginning of a new
epoch, one
filled with new historical and geographical issues, predicaments,
and questions.
The shape of postmodern society, including its temporal and spatial
dimensions, has been the topic of considerable discussion. Foucault (1986:22)
concisely summarized the postmodern condition as follows: “We are in the
epoch of simultaneity: we are in the epoch of juxtaposition, the epoch of the
near and far, of the side-by-side, of the dispersed. We are at a moment, I
believe, when our experience of the world is less that of a long life developing
through time than that of a network that connects points and intersects with
its own skein.” Such changes unfold at multiple scales ranging from the
global to the individual person. At the global scale, rather than connections
that rely on traditional notions of distance and proximity, postmodern capit-
alism has substituted virtual
fi
flows of information. At the scale of the indi-
vidual body, Jameson (1984) maintained that the bewildering complexity of
postmodern hyperspace exceeds the individual's capacity for cognitive repre-
sentation of the world; thus he holds that under the disorienting round of
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