Time-Space Compression

In his book The Condition of Postmodernity, David Harvey makes the argument that postmodernism is in fact a cultural construct of the flexible accumulation of the economy, or what others have called globalization. To make his argument Harvey discusses the phenomena of what he calls "time-space compression." Harvey claims that ever since the increased mobility and internationalization of capital in the early 1970's, society has undergone another round of "time-space compression" which is the likely root of the postmodern condition. What exactly this means and how it relates to the our place/space discussion will hopefully make itself clear in what follows here.

According to Harvey, "the general effect is for capitalist modernization to be very much about speed-up and acceleration in the pace of economic processes and, hence, social life" (Harvey, 230). The goal of this speed-up is to accelerate "the turnover time of capital" which is composed of the "time of production together with the time of circulation of exchange" (Harvey, 229). In this process, the rapidity of time annihilates the barriers of space. As Harvey puts it, "innovations dedicated to the removal of spatial barriers...have been of immense significance in the history of capitalism, turning that history into a very geographical affair--the railroad and the telegraph, the automobile, radio and telephone, the jet aircraft and television, and the recent telecommunications revolution are cases in point" (Harvey, 232). All these modernizations have served to make the world a smaller place, and have in the last quarter of the twentieth century connected disparate markets together in the creation of a world market with global producers and global consumers. For example, the world from 1500 to 1960 got 70 times smaller as the average speed in 1500 of horse-drawn carriages or boats was 10mph versus planes in 1960 which could fly 700 mph. The Fordist economy, however, with its spatial "rigidities" in which capital was held to be loyal to a place, to a nation, ended up becoming a bottleneck, a spatial barrier to be overcome. Coupled with the advent of new global communications technology, like telephones, satelites, tv, and the fax, it has become increasingly feasible for corporations to become transnational, to transcend spatial bottlenecks like the nation. It was thus the dismantling of the Fordist economy, which became too "rigid" and constraining to capital in the early 1970's with the emergent onset of a flexible regime of accumulation, which marked a "new round" of time space compression.

This one world, works increasingly faster, leading to the common understanding in Wall Street that 24 hours is a very long time in the world of international finance (Harvey). This is especially true considering that in one second, a bank computer can switch millions of dollars from one national currency to another in response to a slight fluctuation in exchange, and in the process gain millions of dollars out of nothing. This serves as a prime example, and almost the culmination, of the capitalist dream of ever-shortening turnover time. For the production process can be bypassed and spatial barriers skipped altogether via electronic banking systems which profit off of speculation.

But the global financial system, which though ever important in helping to shape the development of our world, is more of an abstracted system which we tend not to associate with our daily lives. Thus it by itself (which is an oxymoron) does not serve as the stimulus for the rise of the postmodern condition. Harvey, however, does mention other aspects of the global modern world which better correlate. Thanks to the global production and circulation brought about by the globalization of the economy, localities are now accustomed to the influx of images and goods from around the world. TV news gives us in one half-hour, images, coupled with sound bites of processed information, of Palestinians throwing rocks down sun bleached streets in the middle-east, of Hutus and Tutsis swinging axes in the green southern valleys of Africa, of a face of a tupac amaru guerilla in Peru, of a Parisian drinking wine in an outdoor dinery, and of a mid-western town drowned by a flood; while the Disovery channel takes us to the Himalayas on our couch; and grocery stores are filled with "Kenyan haricot beans, Californian celery and avocados, Noth African potatoes, Canadian apples, and Chilean grapes" (Harvey, 300). In under twelve hours we can go from a small town in Ohio to the streets of Nairobi via a plane, a scientist in the Anarctic can e-mail their friend back in Australia, and musicians can blend African drum rhythms with Indian sitars, with slow jazz, backed with a techno beat beating through the night. The world has thus become a virtual grab bag; a world which breeds the pastiche, simulacrum, and juxtapositions which are the predominant mediums of postmodern art.

Furthermore, time space compression which marks the erosion of place into space, creates a disconnection to place and a subsequent "universal placenessless" which creates the feel of the postmodern condition, or what Geoffrey Hartman calls the "release from gravity" (Poe). This "release from gravity" is epitomized in the video clip shown above from Wim Wender's movie Unitil the End of the World. In the video, Claire, rotating gravity-less in a ship floating over the earth which she watches through a computer, talks to her old boyfriend through the TV who is in New York, and who is then joined by other friends of Claire from around the world on a conference call to sing to her, in multiple languages, her birthday. In the annihilation of place, Claire is literally in boundaryless "space." One doesn't have to wonder what Heidegger would think about such a state. For without a boundary to begin "presencing," Heidegger believes there can be no being. Heidegger's view is backed by Celeste Olalquiaga, who claims that when a human, or any organism for that matter, is engulfed in space, a condition of pyschasthenia occurs, in which one's identity is lost. Pyschasthenis occurs when someone is "incapable of demarcating the limits of its own body," and when one in turn becomes "lost in the immense area that circumscribes it" (Olalquiaga, 1). When this occurs, "the psychasthenic organism proceeds to abandon its own identity to embrace the space beyond" (Olalquiaga, 1).

Although the clip from Wender's film serves as a good example of the loss of gravity that can come from the placenessless caused by time-space compression, it is not exactly what you'd call an everyday experience. When Geoffrey Hartman talks of a loss of gravity and when Olalquiaga talks of pyschathenis, they are not talking about astranauts. Rather they are most specifically addressing the spatial phenomema of the megalopolis, which are those "urban sites that are no longer able to maintain a defined form" (Poe). Also known as urban sprawl, this type of development is in an "endless processal flux" (Frampton) as capital comes to the strip, opens and closes, always leaking further outwards creating a "liquidation of all referentials" in whose absence it can become quite difficult to orientate oneself (Baudrillard).

This megalopolis is a product of time-space compression in that as Paul Ricoeur says, it is a product of the "phenomenon of universalization." According to Ricoeur, this phenomenon "while being an advancement...at the same time constitutes a sort of subtle destruction...[of] the creative nucleus of great cultures, that nucleus on the basis of which we interpret life....This threat is expressed...by the spreading before our eyes of a mediocre civilization...Everywhere throughout the world, one finds the same machines, the same plastic or aluminum atrocities..." (Ricoeur). If we view the time space compression of universalization or of globalization as being a blender which steadily mixes more and more different ingredients from around the world into the same mush, then megalopolis are those places of mush, or what we call space, and what James Kunstler calls the "geography of nowhere." In this mush, in this space, in this geography of nowhere, the lack of referentiality to coordinate oneself causes disorientation, identity-loss, and senselessness. For the self, as Olalquiaga states, begins to acquire some of the traits of the surrounding landscapes. Thus if the landscapes are marked by an absence of boundaries, of reference points, while possessing a leaking decentering "endless processal flux," then clear boundaries of one's identity will also become decentered as well. What does this mean? Well, in the movie Repo Man, which took place in the warehouse wastelands of L.A.'s sprawls, the main character, Otto, remarks that "not many people got a code to live by anymore." Such codes, be them moral, intellectual, or cultural, are sure absent in postmodernism which, in its relativistic anti-foundationalism, can't get itself to say whether something is right or something is wrong. In the boundaryless world left by time-space compression, it is indeed hard to draw a boundary oneself, hard to draw a line in the sand.

By not being able to draw a line in the sand postmodernists will by their nature not be able to support Ken Gould's Deweyan call for extra-local mobilization to help strengthen and stabilize the quickly liquidating local community. This is a shame because the balance between local monitoring and global mobilizing (a strategy of place and space tactics) which Ken Gould emphasizes is pragmatic and adheres well, albeit in a political way, with Yi-Fu Tuan's definition of place/space. According to Tuan, "human lives are a dialectical movement between shelter and venture, attachment and freedom...A healthy being welcomes constraint and freedom, the boundedness of place and the exposure of space" (Space & Place, 54). In postmodernism's unabashed call for freedom--freedom from structure, freedom from hierarchy, freedom from metanarrative, freedom from organization, freedom from ethics, and freedom from politics, in its exciting and inspiring anarchic impulse, it loses the balance between "constraint and freedom," for by not accepting constraint (i.e. rejecting rationality, relativising values, scorning organization) it not only fails to help the local, but in turn fuels the global, helping to expand the mush of megalopolis space which in turn erodes place. For if space represents freedom, then postmodernity's freedom, its foundation-less, rootless, value-less extropy, flows ever so well with the loose and liquid, rootless, capital which is eroding place all over this globalizing world. By failing to take a stand, to draw a line in the sand, postmodernism thus only adds grease to the global capitalist wheel which is spinning out of control. This is the "trouble" with postmodernism, claims Marshall Bermnan, it "never developed a critical perspective which might have clarified the point where openness to the modern world has got to stop, and the point where the modern artist needs to see and say that some of the powers of this world got to go" (Berman, 32).

It is no wonder therefore, with the popular ideology of our present time so relativistic, so value-less, so non-committed, that the ideology of the free-market is such a catch-all phrase, that wild-boundaryless capitalism goes unquestioned and unchallenged, and hence, why the autonomy of place is being eroded and with it the nation-state and with it democracy. All state intervention, as was prevalent in the post-fordist economy, is now looked upon as too statist, as too controlling, and thus "governments, intimidated by market ideology, are actually pulling back at the very moment they ought to be aggressively intervening. [For] what was once understood as protecting the public interest is now excoriated as heavy-handed regulatory browbeating. [And thus] justice yields to markets, even though, as Felix Rohatyn has bluntly confessed, 'there is a brutal Darwinian logic to these markets'" (Barber, 7). Such a mimetic relationship between free market capitalism, which observes no boundaries, no borders, no customs, no traditions, no regulations, no loyalities, no committments, and postmodernism, leaves one with the chicken and egg question of which came first. Is postmodernism a culture which has adapted itself and formulated itself to the changing landscapes and ideologies of the free market flexible accumulation of wild capitalism? Or is it vice versa? Or is it both?

In appreciating and incorporating the presence of time-space compression into this discussion, with its erosion of all spatial boundaries, I think it is accurate to not say one is the chicken or one is the egg. If the medium is the message here, then it would be safe to say, that postmodernism, globalization, and time-space compression are so interwoven, so de-differentiated that trying to seperate them is like asking a Hindu if he/she's religious. Religion? they'd say in confusion. What's that? For before the west introduced the term, religion was never differentiated from the hustle and bustle of everyday life.

However, as both Historical geographers, Edward Soja and David Harvey, point out, the increasing homogenization of the world is reciprocated by increased differentation as well. This works on many levels--in particular on a cultural level, where there is an increase in pluralism, heterogenity, and a hyper-differentation of interests/fetishes/obsessions, and on an economic level where there is still, more then ever, core/periphery, developed/underdeveloped places within the spaces. Harvey continues off of this point saying, "spaces of very different worlds seem to collapse upon each other, much as the world's commodities are assembled in the supermarket and all manner of sub-cultures get juxtaposed in the contemporary city. Disruptive spatiality triumphs over the coherence of perspective and narrative in postmodern fiction, in exactly the same way that imported beers coexist with local brews, local employment collapses under the weight of foreign competition, and all the divergent spaces of the world are assembled nightly as a collage of images upon the television screen" (Harvey, 302). Such "disruptive spatiality" is perhaps most visible and volatile in the wake of footloose multinational capital, in its scramble across the globe, as it deposits striking juxtapositions of first world wealth with third world poverty, whether it be South Central by Bell Aire, or the shanty towns of Bogota beyond the razor edged walls of Banker Ave. And just like postmodern art, these juxtapositions do challenge our ontological stability, they do make us question, "what world am I in? which role do I play? Am I in the first world or the third world? Am I the colonizer or the colonized?" And yes, it is hard to find a balance here, to have a foundation in a world where the middle-class stability of the post-war fordist economy has fallen asunder by capital flight and the world is accelerating, restructuring, and shrinking. It's also not hard to have a decentered self in a decentered world, and it isn't hard to imagine why the increased anti-foundationalism of postmodernism is reciprocated by increased fundamentalism which seeks a return to the basics, to tradition, to stability, to order. And in sum, it isn't hard to see the Christian Right and Postmodernity as dialectical responses to similar social/political/economic changes. For, thanks to the increased circulation of globalization, people from Katmandu are in Kansas and people from Kansas are in Katmandu. Worlds are colliding with worlds. Do you respond with pluralism or intolerance? Are you Jihad or McWorld? Are you, you?

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