Geography Reference
In-Depth Information
others (Basset 1999). Sheppard (2002) maintains that theorizations of net-
works tend to exaggerate their nonhierarchical nature and underplay the
role of power in the creation of centrality and peripherality. Thus, the
opportunities and constraints faced by local places are not simply dependent
on internal conditions, but re
ect how power relations play out across mul-
tiple spatial scales. This notion is particularly apropos to the geographies of
globalization, characterized as they are by “wormholes,” in which relational
proximity is unrelated to physical distance. Thus, “The presence and fre-
quency of wormholes is then a measure of the degree to which positionality
stretches selectively across geographic space.... Wormholes are a struc-
tural e
fl
ective of
how globalization processes reshape space/time” (p. 324). Regional develop-
ment—and the simultaneous lack of it—is a relational process in which local
places have few, if any,
ff
ect of the long historical geography of globalization, re
fl
fixed borders, and impulses of change travel dif-
ferentially through the complex, shifting manifolds of global capital (Coe
et al. 2004).
One consequence of this line of thought is to challenge the notion of
spatial scale itself, an idea so deeply embedded in most geographical thought
as to be taken for granted. Smith (1993) argued that scale is produced
through and constitutive of social relationships, and Thrift (1995: 33) went so
far as to claim “There is no such thing as scale.” Likewise, Massey (1999)
called attention to the intertwined scales of the global, national, and local,
refusing to see these as a simple hierarchy in which the global determines the
local; the distinctions among these scales are as misleading as they are
enlightening. Rather than viewing scale as some naturally occurring level at
which social relations unfold (e.g., the local, the national, the global), it may
be discursively repositioned in nonterritorial ways as a contested function of
the di
fi
erent locales (Marston 2000; Amin
2002; Howitt 2003). From the perspective of actor-network theory, scale does
not simply re
ff
erential powers exerted by di
ff
ect the shifting patterns of networks, it is
constituted
by them.
Hence, “Size and scale are nothing more than the end product of network
extension processes” (Murdoch 2006:71). Networks operate across many
scales simultaneously, creating as Latour (1993:121) puts it, “an Ariadne's
thread that allows us to pass with continuity from the local to the global,
from the human to the nonhuman. It is the thread of networks of practices
and instruments, of documents and translations.” By forcing us to rethink
how time and space are produced—that is, topologically rather than in terms
of conventional Cartesian and Kantian views of space that have dominated
geography—actor-network theory becomes “a machine for waging war on
Euclideanism” (Law, quoted in Murdoch 1998:357).
In this light, geography is not simply territorial, but something altogether
fl
di
erent, more complex, and more interesting. Postmodern, poststructural
theories such as commodity chains and actor-networks greatly accelerated
the rise of relational views of space. Harvey (2006:121-3) of
ff
ff
ers a useful
de
fi
nition of absolute, relative, and relational space:
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