TIME-SPACE COMPRESSION AND THE GEOMETRIES OF POWER

Much of what is written about space, place and postmodern times emphasizes a new phase in what Marx once called ‘the annihilation of space by time’. The process is argued, or more usually asserted, to have gained a new momentum, to have reached a new stage. It is a phenomenon which Harvey (1989) has termed ‘time-space compression’. And the general acceptance that something of the sort is going on is marked by the almost obligatory use in the literature of terms and phrases such as speed-up, global village, overcoming spatial barriers, the disruption of horizons and so forth.

Yet the concept of time-space compression remains curiously unexamined. In particular, it is a concept which often remains without much social content, or with only a very restricted, one-sided, social content. There are many aspects to this. One is, of course, the question of to what extent its current characterization represents very much a Western, colonizer’s view. The sense of dislocation which so many writers on the subject apparently feel at the sight of a once well-known local street now lined with a succession of cultural imports – the pizzeria, the kebab house, the branch of the middle-eastern bank – must have been felt for centuries, though from a very different point of view, by colonized peoples all over the world as they watched the importation of, maybe even used, the products of, first, European colonization, maybe British (from new forms of transport to liver salts and custard powder); later US products, as they learned to eat wheat instead of rice or corn, to drink Coca-Cola, just as today we try out enchiladas.

But there are just two points which it seems particularly important to raise in the current context. The first concerns causality. Time-space compression is a term which refers to movement and communication across space. It is a phenomenon which implies the geographical stretching-out of social relations (referred to by Giddens (1984) as time-space distanciation), and to our experience of all this. However, those who argue that we are currently undergoing a new phase of accelerated time-space compression usually do so from a very particular view of its determination.