Theorizing time-space compression - Time-Space Compression: Historical Geographies - page 32

boundaries of the tangible and the intangible, incorporating sets of mean-
ings, or as Hartwick (1998:424) elegantly puts it, they “conjoin the repre-
sentational with the geomaterial.” Moreover, they are temporally situated,
constantly fluctuating in location and length over time.

However, like time-space compression itself, commodity chains have a
history longer than that of modernity. While the temptation is to equate
commodity chains with postmodern, globalized forms of production, the
historical record (like that of time-space compression) indicates that they are
not new. As numerous scholars have demonstrated (Abu-Lughod 1989;
Frank 1998), long-distance trade pre-existed the capitalist world economy,
and spatial divisions of labor that extend deep into history tied together
diverse communities, however loosely. With the rise of mercantile capitalism,
commodity chains became increasingly larger in scope and length, linking
widespread places through an increasingly complex division of labor in which
distant strangers became ever more reliant upon one another. Thus, while
commodity chains are certainly longer, more complex, and change more rap-
idly than ever before, as a means of producing relative space their novelty is
debatable.
Conceptually, commodity chains helped to change many theorists' view of
space from the absolute, Cartesian notion—static,

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fixed, and lying outside of
society, or space as a container—to relative and relational space, space as
socially produced by people, not simply given, and thus

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fluid, folded, twisted
by chains, pleated, and unstable. The rise of the poststructural view of space
owed much to the work of Latour (1993), who sought to move beyond the
Enlightenment focus on pure essences that created dualities such as indi-
vidual and society, people and nature, human and nonhuman, Western and
non-Western, urban and rural, micro and macro, local and global. Rather,
this view takes as its point of departure the linkages and connections (rather
than di

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erent ontological categories as actors draw upon
and combine them in various forms of hybridity. Latour (1993:25), for
example, notes “Space and time are not, contrary to Kant's demonstrations,
the a priori categories of our sensibility.... On the contrary, spaces and
times are traced by reversible or irreversible displacements of many types of
mobiles.” This view entailed a shift in the conception of space as a surface
to one centered on networks (Murdoch 2006): unlike surfaces, which have
traditionally been portrayed as containers “outside” of society and thus
“holding” it, networks explicitly admit to their human construction. As
Mann (1986) insists, societies are never unitary, bounded states, but multi-
ple, overlapping, intersecting, and contingent networks of power stretched
unevenly across time and space. No social formation is thus a totally uni

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ed
entity, but rather forms an open-ended lattice of relations; societies do not
just occupy space, they manufacture networks. Such a notion is disconcerting
to those accustomed to thinking of geography in Cartesian terms, i.e., as the
smooth surface of a globe. As Latour (1993:77) maintains, “How are we to
gain access to networks, those beings whose topology is so odd and whose

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