Geography Reference
In-Depth Information
technologies only enable or encourage options among a suite of opportunities
rather than determine which trajectory will unfold. For example, communica-
tions systems, as Deibert (1997) makes clear, greatly a
ect (but do not, by
themselves, simply determine) the epistemological and ontological founda-
tions of di
ff
erent symbolic orders. That said, many social constructivist
accounts, which successfully portray how technologies come into being, are
not as successful in understanding the impacts of technologies on social
relations and the changing construction of time and space, and run the
risk of denying any independent e
ff
ff
ect of new technologies, intended or
otherwise.
Likewise, from Marxism, the analysis gains a critical appreciation of the
politics of time and space, of the constitutive role of class and inequality, and
role that particular production systems play in the reproduction of uneven
development over time. Just as Marxism o
ered a rich
social
and historical
analysis of social systems, i.e., as more than the sum of their individual parts,
so too has it powerfully informed our understandings of how time and space
are never abstract, value-neutral categories with lives of their own, but only
exist by virtue of how people organize them within hierarchical systems
of power. World systems theory allows this understanding to unfold at a
global scale, pointing insistently to the uneven relational geographies that
have existed, in one form or another, for most or all of human existence.
Structuration theory extends the understanding of time-space compression
to the sphere of social reproduction and the scale of everyday life, i.e., as the
unintentional product of human beings in their daily routines. Like all
approaches that take the human subject seriously, structuration theory forces
the understanding of time-space compression to plunge into the phenomeno-
logical world of meanings and everyday experience, calling attention to the
need to delve into its discursive and representational dimensions. From
Virilio, we learn that speed is not simply a technological phenomenon, but a
cultural and symbolic one, often with military origins, and that the present
historical moment is unique in its ability to conquer space with unparalleled
ease. Finally, the analysis draws on various poststructural accounts of space
by rejecting the easy Cartesian equation of geography with surfaces, noting
that relational spaces are produced by actors in networks that extend across
multiple spatial scales in ways that defy simply measurements such as “near”
or “far.” Time and space never, therefore, exist “outside” of a society, but are
always and everywhere produced by a society, changed by it, and in turn
change it. In many respects, this position, ironically, marks a return to the
position advanced by Leibniz in his confrontation with Newton. Relative
space, it seems, has come full circle.
Attributing causality is always a di
ff
cult enterprise, particularly today,
given the widespread suspicion of metanarratives and essentialist reduction-
ism. Monocausal explanations are invariably simplistic, tend to lack historical
depth, and ignore the contingency inherent in human a
airs. Time-space com-
pression does not simply result from some innate human drive, technological
ff
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