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Environment and Planning D: Society and Space 1995, volume 13,
pages 529-555
The incredible shrinking world? Technology and the production of
space
Scott Ktrsch Department of Geography, University of Colorado,
Boulder, CO 8030-0260, USA Received 10 May 1994; in revised form 13
March 1995
Abstract. This paper is about the role of technology in the
transformation of .space, and the ways in which these changes are
represented, These processes are explored principally through
critical analysis of the work df Harvey and Lcfebvre; more
specifically, I contrast the place of technology as expressed
through their varied emphases on the annihilation of space, and the
production of space. The dramatic restructuring of space and time
in recent decades, associated with new high-speed geographies of
production, exchange, and consumption, has been theorized against
the backdrop of a 'shrinking world', The popular conception of the
world shrinking to a global village is generally seen as the
product of technological advances in telecommunications,
transportation, and 'information*. For Harvey, these innovations
arc seen as the means through which capital has freed itself from
spatial constraints. By placing the 'collapse of space* jargon
alongside Marx's phrase, the annihilation of space by time, these
spatial metaphors serve Harvey as shorthand for the complexities of
time-space compression; the shrinking world is seen as a midpoint
between a regime of accumulation and a mode of representation. I
argue that, although these metaphors help to theorize the
relativity of spaceas the global impinges on the localthey only do
so by obfuscating the relative space of everyday life, and the
increasingly technical means through which it is produced. Through
an interpretation of Lefcbvrc's discussion of technology in The
Production of Space, I suggest how the role of technology in the
transfor-mation of space is not limited to those globalizing
processes through which the world has been made increasingly
interconnected in space and time. So too, technology has been
critical to the domination of conceived space over lived space as
social relations are spatialized at the scale of experience. As a
foundation for these arguments, the social relations of technology
and tech-nological change are theorized through the incorporation
of ideas from the social studies of science and technology and from
critical human geography.
It is ironic that, as space has come to the forefront of social
theory, the space described by much influential geographical social
theory has shrunk, collapsed, and been annihilated. The dramatic
restructuring of space and time in recent decades, associated with
new high-speed geographies of production, exchange, and
consump-tion, has been theorized against the backdrop of a
'shrinking world'an increasingly interconnected space in which
distances can be transcended at supersonic speeds, or even at the
push of a button. Efforts to explain the social relations embedded
in this restructured space have spawned new metaphors, from the
global village to the global assembly line, and have led to the
revival of Marx's aphorism, the annihilation of space by time.
Indeed, in many ways these metaphors have contributed towards
broader geographical understandings of the dynamism of space and
time as they have been transformed through the workings of a highly
technological society. Inevitably, though, the effect of these
metaphors which cause us to rethink such taken-for-granted social
worlds is to raise questions: what happens to space after its
collapse, how do these spatiotemporal transformations impact our
everyday lives, and how does this notion of a shrinking world help
us to understand the social rela-tions which that world
embodies?
These questions are conceptualized and advanced in quite
different ways in the work of Harvey and Lefebvre. In The Condition
of Postmodernity, Harvey (1989) makes frequent references to the
"annihilation of space through time"; the axiom
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530 S Kirsch
serves Harvey as a shorthand for the complexities of time-space
compression (see also Harvey, 1990). Similarly, Harvey discusses
the shrinkage of space and the collapse of space in his analysis of
the contemporary experience of space and time which has resulted
from the transition from Fordism to an economy of flexible
accumulation. Harvey's argument pivots on two principles: on one
hand, that con-ceptions of space and time are relative to social
formations and, on the other hand,
Figure 1. The incredible shrinking world? "The shrinking map of
the world through innovations in transport", for Harvey (1989, page
241), "which 'annihilate space through time'." Reprinted by
permission of Peter Dicken and Paul Chapman Publishing Ltd (Dicken,
1992, page 104).
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The incredible shrinking world? 5.11
that these commonly accepted conceptions must change to
accommodate new material practices of social production and
reproduction (Harvey, 1989; 1990; see Smith, 1990). Among the
strengths of Harvey's position here is his ability to theorize the
dialectical linkages between regimes of accumulation and modes of
representation (Gregory, 1994). The concept of time-space
compression thus incorporates the material practices which
transform the objective qualities of time and space (as resources
for human action, as dimensions of social life), and also the
changes in how we represent the world to ourselves (Harvey, 1989;
see Gregory, 1994; Kellerman, 1989). For Harvey the most recent
wave of transformations in our modes of production and
representation have been of such a dizzying intensity that "... we
have to learn how to cope with an overwhelming sense of compression
of our spatial and temporal worlds" (1989, page 240, italics
original).
l b illustrate these important connections, Harvey employs
images of the Earth shrinking relative to innovations in transport
(figure 1), and throughout his analysis, he intersperses popular
notions of the shrinking world with references to the annihi-lation
of space through time. The popular conception of the world
shrinking to a global village is generally seen as the product of
technological advances in telecom-munications, information, and
transportation. Harvey turns this logic inside out. By
conceptualizing these innovations as the means through which
capital has freed itself from the constraints of space, the global
village is no longer an end product, but instead a midpoint between
a regime of accumulation and a mode of representation. Technology,
then, is a means through which underlying social forces are
expressed; its integration into society is necessarily a process of
social relations (Harvey 1982; see also Bijker and Law, 1992a;
Latour, 1992a; Winner, 1977). If Harvey's shrink-ing world is a
product of technological innovation, then it must be seen as an
expression of the capitalist imperative behind the process of
technological change.
Like Harvey, Lefebvrc seeks to understand the relations between
capital and space; more specificially, his work articulates the
necessity of the production of space to the reproduction of the
social relations of capitalism over time (see Lefebvre, 1976a;
1976b; 1991; Smith, 1990). Lcfebvre's orientation, though, often
differs markedly from Harvey's, principally in his attention to the
integration of the abstract, conceived spaces of modern capitalism
with the perceived and lived realms of everyday life. This
orientation, which seems to extend from the human body to the
global economy, and then back again, has led Lefebvre to
conceptualize space in unique and imaginative ways; building on
both Hegelian and Marxian notions of production, he sees space as
the product of social processes.(I) Although the trans-formation of
space is certainly at the center of Lefebvre's argument, his
conceptuali-zation of this perpetual process stands up without
reference to the shrinking world, or the annihilaton of space by
time.(2) Unlike the macroperspectives implicit in the 'collapse of
space' discourse, Lefebvrian space cannot be reduced to flows,
or
(1) Lefebvre's contributions to the explanation of society-space
relations have been assessed in a growing body of literature (for
example, see Goss, 1993; Gottdiener, 1985; Gregory, 1994;
Kellerman, 1989; Merrifield, 1993; Mitchell, 1993; Shields, 1989;
1992; Smith 1990; Swyngedouw 1992). W Smith (1990, page 189, note
46) observes that for Lefebvre "...the production of space leads
not to the 'annihilation of space by time' but to something akin to
the annihilation of time by space". The significance of this
distinction will be discussed below. Massey (1992) contrasts some
of these positions through a discussion of Lefebvre, Laclau, and
others, and argues for the reasonable, Einsteinian conception of
space-time.
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532 S Kirsch
networks of production and exchange.(3) Rather, we come to see
space as an amalgam of different kinds of space, material and
conceptualconceived, perceived, and lived.
Space is now experienced globally in ways previously
unimaginable in economics, politics, at home, and in the workplace,
but the social construction and experience of space is "[not]
simply a global event" (Smith, 1990, page 164; see Lefebvre, 1991).
As Smith (1990) asserts in his reading of Lefebvre, the production
of space is also a project in the production of scale. The
interaction of global, regional, and local scale process through
which space is produced is also experienced in the spaces and
practices of everyday life, in place (see Merrifield, 1993). If, as
Castells (1989) posits, space has dissolved into flows, then how do
we situate ourselves within the flow of the landscape, the network
of space? For Lefebvre (1991), the struggle (for meaning, for lived
experience) within the spaces of everyday life has not diminished
in importance with the advent of an abstract global scale space.
This problematic, located in the space of the body (as Lefebvre
asserts), as well as the conceived spaces of the city and the
suburb, the factory, farm, office park, or minimall, has clear
parallels to Harvey's concept of time-space compression. Both
theorists seek to understand how material practices and abstract
representations have altered our spatial and temporal worlds, and
both are concerned with our efforts to cope with these dramatic
changes. Still, through their varied orientations, metaphors, and
emphases, we are left with quite differentbut I believe
reconcili-ablevisions of how these processes work.
In this paper I will investigate the role of technology in the
broad set of processes through which space is transformed over
time. These processes, and the social relations through which they
are constructed, are simply unknowable without tech-nology, just as
they are unworkable without technical means. I will suggest that
these processes can be viewed without the artificial divide which
is commonly imposed on studies of technology and society. This
perspective will be used to bring a dialectical mode of analysis to
the technological workings of society and space. That is, just as
technology is constructed through social relations, society is
shaped by this socially produced technology as well, all the way to
the dimensions of space and time which serve to bracket human
experience. Specifically, I argue for a reconceptualization of the
relations between technology and space without the so-called
shrinking world as a backdrop; through a Lefebvrian interpretation,
tech-nology is seen here as a mediating force in the production of
space commensurate with the processes of production and social
reproduction. But it does not go far enough to say that
technological change is intimately linked to the production of new
spaces. We need also to ask what kinds of spaces, at what scales do
they operate, how are they produced, and for what purposes?
Technology plays an increasingly important role in how we create
and understand the material world around us. On one hand, there are
the technologies which facili-tate the ongoing globalization of
spacethe space of sovereignty and homogeneity (see Smith, 1990).
But on the other hand, the accumulation of technology and
techniques in society has also shaped space at the local scale, and
facilitated the processes through which space is not only
homogenized (and global), but always fragmented as well. The first
argument has been well articulated. Following Marx,
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The incredible shrinking world? 53.*
Harvey and others have examined the technology which continually
revolutionalizes the forces of production, transportation, and
exchange, and in doing so, allows firms to increase (or maintain)
surplus value production (see Harvey, 1982; Massey, 1984; Scott and
Storpcr, 1986; Storper and Walker, 1989). This view of the process
of technological change, situated principally in the economic
theater, has also illus-trated the dramatic social consequences
associated with 'technological progress' and how those social
consequences have been spatialized as components to the creation of
international divisions of labor and the processes of uneven
development (Harvey, 1982; Massey, 1979; Massey and Meegan, 1985;
Smith, 1990; Wallerstein, 1983). The role of technology in our
understanding and production of the space of everyday life is less
clear. Following Lefebvre, I suggest that in addition to its
signif-icance to production in space, technology also plays a
mediating role in the production of space. From the material
landscape to the financial landscape, and from the global village
to the global assembly line, our representations of space are
constituted in and through contingent social and technological
formations.
Harvey's shrinking world, situated historically between a regime
of accumulation and a mode of representation, goes a long way in
connecting the economic geogra-phy of technological change to our
representations of a changing world. It is not despite Harvey's
theoretical advances in this area, but because of thcrn that I move
to reconceptualize the relations between technology and space
without the spatial metaphors which tend to cloud the picture. That
is, through a theoretical analysis of the role of technology in the
production of space, I seek to recover that space which has not
collapsed through technological innovation, but rather has
seemingly been lost in the process of representation. As I will
argue, one side effect of Harvey's utilitarian application of what
might be called a paradigm of 'the incredible shinking world' may
be to obscure the significance of the material practices so
criti-cal to his project. Atlhough these metaphors function
effectively as hyperbolic devices, they also draw attention away
from some of the complex social processes through which space has
not simply shrunk, but has (more importantly) been trans-formed at
a variety of scales. If we are interested in the changing
experience of space in a world of rapid technological change, then
we must also consider the processes through which technology is
spatialized at the scale of experience.
The significance of technology in the production of space is an
aspect of Lefebvre's theory which has been largely neglected in the
emerging Lefebvrian dis-course (for example, Gottdiener, 1985;
Merrifield, 1993; Mitchell, 1993; Shields, 1989; 1991; Swyngedouw,
1992.(4) For Lefebvre (1991), technology has been increasingly
influential in society, not simply in the rapid increase of our
productive capacities and the acceleration of the turnover time of
capital investments, but also in the production of a space which
must always be recast to accommodate the dynamic geographies of
production, exchange, and consumption. Just as these processes
reflect an accumulation of technology and techniques, and thus an
exten-sion of human control over (a socially externalized) nature,
the production of space can similarly be seen as an increasingly
technical process. The articulation of this aspect of Lefebvre's
theory, which I will call the technics of spatialization, can
illus-trate how the production of space has increasingly been
mediated by technical
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534 ' ' ' ' S Kirsch
processes, and more importantly, how this process is critical to
understanding the domination of conceived space over lived
spacearguably at the center of Lefebvre's project. The so-called
shrinking world has been a popular and at times effective metaphor
for representing the 'changes wrought by technology', but it
remains rather opaque in terms of the explanation of these
processes. The analysis of technology in the production of space
offers an important analytical window onto the relations of society
and space. If we are careful not to obscure the collapse of spatial
barriers with the collapse of space, it can be an extremely useful
means of interpreting the geography of political, economic and
social relations in an increas-ingly technological society.
To continue with this argument will require, as a preliminary, a
more detailed definition and interpretation of technology as a
social process, which I will construct through the incorporation of
ideas borrowed from the social studies of science (for example,
Bijker et al, 1987a; Bijker and Law, 1992b; Haraway, 1991; Latour,
1987; Winner, 1977). Although participants in the discourse of
time-space compression are undoubtedly aware that recent
transformations of our time - space relations are simply the
current phase of an ongoing historical-geographic process, the
adherence to metaphors such as the collapse of space implies that
we have somehow reached the zenith of time-space compression: the
annihilation of space by time. In this respect, I need to show that
technology, for better or worse, must be recognized as an ongoing,
cumulative process, and it is in this manner that its seamless
integration into society and space must be understood. Next, I will
evaluate the role of technology in the 'annihilation of space'; the
work of Harvey and others must be more explicitly situated in its
Marxian context to express accu-rately the significance of
technology to the annihilation of space, and further, how the
annihilation of space can be seen as constituent to the production
of space. Although, as I have suggested, some associations with
this line of argument are unsatisfactory, there are a number of
salient points which cannot be dismissed. Ulti-mately, these
deliberations will lead to an exploration of Lefebvre's discussion
of technology (and techniques) in The Production of Space (1991),
in order to explain how technological change in society is linked
to our changing spaces, from the local to the global, and back
again to our geographical imaginations.
'Unfolding' technological society Any study which stresses the
importance of technology, it seems, must be carefully worded to
avoid the appearance of technological determinism. Fair enough; the
dangers of representing technology as the engine of social change,
rather than the other way around, warrant a cautious approach to
this topic. But there are also dangers in wraferemphasizing the
role of technology, in reducing technology to a neutral, tool-like
application of scientific knowledge. As Harvey (1982) remarks,
among the more bizarre criticisms of Marx are those that challenged
his (supposed) technological determinism. Contra such claims, when
Marx wrote that "[technology discloses man's [sic] mode of dealing
with Nature", his aim was to accentuate the importance of
technology, shaped by historical and social processes, to the
forma-tion of social relations in capitalist society (1967, volume
I, page 372; cited in Harvey, 1982, page 98).(5) For Marx,
technology is a means of dominating, appro-priating, or reproducing
nature to meet the needs of capital (Lefebvre, 1991).
(5) In his chapter "Technological change, the labour process and
the value composition of capital", Harvey (1982, pages 98-136)
deals more explicitly with the question of technologi-cal
determinism and other misreadings of Marx.
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The incredible shrinking world? i PERSONAL S U B S C R I P T S I
5 3 5 i row PttrvA re us om.Y a
Though the production of science and technology is clearly more
nuaneed than to be limited directly to the service of capital (see
Latour, 1987; Smith, 1990), this sense of technology as
meansthrough which social agencies are channelled, con-tested and
mediated-"clearly situates technology as a nonautonomous social
process, without undermining the significance of the effects of
this process on social life. Technology, then, is a process between
society and (a socially externalized) nature, even as material
technological practices serve to alter the very relations of space
and time to human experiencethe boundaries of 'nature' within which
meaning is constructed. We need only to think of the new
geographies created by rail systems, electricity, and the telegraph
in the late 19th and early 20th centuries to recognize that
technology becomes at once a means of dominating nature, and a
means of defining it (see Kern, 1983; Wilson, 1992). The point is
that, whereas technology is thoroughly a social construction,
society is a technological construction as well. This dialectic is
at the hub of my analysis of technology; this is why technology
matters.
The meanings and popular usage of technology have been somewhat
dynamic over time (Pinch ct al, 1992). As late as the early 20th
century, technology was essentially confined to the realm of
industrial sciences and manufacturingthe 'mechanical arts".(6) More
recently, technology is defined as "the totality of means employed
to provide objects necessary for human comfort'*, or "a technical
method of achieving a practical purpose".(7) As Winner (1977)
suggests, the definition of technology has become so broad that it
risks meaning both everything and nothing. Yet although it may be
difficult to pin technology down to a strict definition, it seems
quite easy to identify technology in practice: fax machines,
televisions, auto-mobiles. But machines, as Ellul (1964) points
out, are merely the most obvious examples of technology; technology
(as a complex of stanclarizcd means of achiev-ing a predetermined
result) is perhaps most impressive or sublime when it is highly
mechanized. It is through these commonsense associations of
technology with machines that we tend to lose sight of the
invariably human aspects of technology.
Technology, as meansor more simplistically, technology as
machineis always shaped and negotiated by society, while still
serving (quite practically) to influence our behavior (see Bijker
et al, 1987). Such behavior-shaping technologies can be as mundane
as a door hinge (see Latour, 1988), socially and mechanically
complex such as a computerized system of clinical budgeting (see
Pinch et al, 1992), or highly spatializedfor example, a
commercially efficient method of producing suburban tract housing,
shopping malls, or urban redevelopment projects (see Crilley, 1993;
Goss, 1993; Shields, 1989). In each case, people must adapt to the
integration of these technologies into society, or else they must
reject or alter the technology in some fashion. Whether a new
technology is driven by economic, military-strategic, or even
'purely scientific' motives, it is subject to a variety of
influences during its innovation, diffusion, regulation, and
'stabilization' in society (Bijker and Law, 1992a; Latour, 1987).
Technologies are not implanted with a momentum all their own which
propels them through a neutral social medium (Bijker and Law,
1992a; Winner, 1977)(8) Instead, the forms and functions of a
technology are transformed by its innovators, market strategists,
government regulators, and through social use.
(6) As defined by Webster's Dictionary (1909), cited in Winner
(1977). (7) The definitions are from Webster's New Collegiate
Dictionary (1980), and The New Merriam Webster Dictionary (1989),
respectively. (8) From a geographical standpoint, Blaut (1987)
provides a critique of the 'myth of emptiness' in diffusionist
analyses of innovation.
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536 S Kirsch
As Bijker and Law (1992a, page 8) explain, technologies: "are
subject to contingency as they are passed from figurative hand to
hand, and so are shaped and reshaped. Sometimes they disappear
altogether: no one felt moved or was obliged to pass them on. At
other times they take novel forms, or are subverted by users to be
employed in ways quite different from those for which they were
originally intended." The telephone, for example, was initially
marketed by the Bell company primarily
as a communications tool for business, and to a lesser extent
for business and emergency use in upper class homes (Martin, 1991).
The unexpected popularity of the telephone for social uses led to
increased installations of telephones in homes, diffused along
particular social geographic axes, and contributed (along with the
threat of corporate espionage) to the need for Bell to convert
their phone lines from open party lines to private lines (Martin,
1991). In this case, the meaning of the technology was adapted
through usage, and served to feed back on the reconstruc-tion of
the actual technological system. Similarly, video conferencing
services (the 'vid-phones' which have been appearing in pulp
science fictions novels for decades) are currently being marketed
primarily for business uses. As this technology passes from
"figurative hand to hand", as firms (and technologies) merge,
patents dissolve, and market conditions change, will the
video-telephone become a common commu-nications link between our
'electronic cottages'?(9) They may indeed, but this development
would be of little consequence for those who cannot afford the rent
in the 'global village' in the first place. As with all forms of
social change, the conse-quences of technological change are always
felt unevenly.
The economic logic of technological change can have dramatic
social consequences when the production process is 'reinvented' as
a result of decisions to adopt a new technology, often causing
firms to scrap less efficient methodswhich may require changes in
location and labor force (Massey, 1984; Massey and Meegan, 1985).
As Haraway (1991, page 153) points out, trends toward
miniaturization and portability in technology have been "a matter
of intense human pain in Detroit and Singapore". Yet the power
relations which underpin the integration of any technology into
society (and thus of society into technology) tend to be clouded in
some of the social studies of science and technology, often
obscured or undertheorized because of an overreliance on microscale
relations.(10) As Latour (1992a, page 273) admits,
microsociological studies such as his tend to lose track "of what
holds society together"; they fail to theorize the links between
the scales of society and of human experience which Lefebvre and
others have sought to illuminate. Yet Latour's "radi-cally
localist" set of assumptions, in which social agency begins with
social actors who in turn formulate larger social structures, can
help to open up the politics of the production of science and
technology to wider scales of interpretation simply by bringing
local, social contexts into the picture. Latour's archaeologies of
technical artifactswhich range from a door hinge (or 'butler') to a
proposed highly auto-mated system of public transport in France
(the Aramis rail system)illustrate how what we know as stabilized
technical artifacts are born of negotiation and struggle
(9) Robins and Hepworth (1988) elaborate on the myth of
electronic cottages in futurist Utopian writings. (10) Here I must
point out that I am not referring to the work of either Massey or
Haraway, who both have put theory into the study of technological
change. See, for example, studies in the sociology of technology
(Bijker et al, 1987a; Ellul, 1964; Latour, 1987).
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The incredible shrinking world? 537
between social actors (sec Latour, 1988; L992b).(,l> In the
Anunis case, for example, Lntour shows how the very design of the
system was shaped as an expres-sion of the competing interests of
politicians, engineers, transit technocrats, a trade union
concerned about job loss, manufacturers bent on profits, and
commuters who might use the system (Latour, 1992b; see Mitchell,
1996). But if the innovation, integration, and stabilization of a
technology in society are processes molded by the actions of
scientists, workers, capitalists, commuters, and mayors, and thus a
wide range of social contingencies, then where does society end and
technology begin, or vice versa?
For Latour and other proponents of the 'seamless web* of
technological society, it becomes necessary to treat technology,
society, and the course of history as "messy contingencies" (Bijker
and Law, 1992a, page 8). Theoretical analyses have constructed a
divide which places humans on one side and their technics on the
other, thus representing an artiftcally folded society (Latour,
1988), Conversely, Latour (following Law, 1987) offers a
process-oriented definition of high-technology as a complex and
dialectical association of humans and 'nonhuman actors'. In
Latour's words, high technology is:
"A shifting network of actions redistributing competencies and
performances either to humans or non-humans in order to assemble in
a more durable whole an association of humans and things and to
resist the multiple interpretations of other actors that tend to
dissolve away the set up" (1992b, page 5).
Technology, in this light, is a means of eliciting specific
ends, but one which is always open to interpretation, resistance,
and change. It is indeed through resistance and negotiation that
technologies take form, and it is through the accumulation of these
sociotechnological processes in technological formations that the
boundaries of 'nature', space, and time are redefined. To these
ends, Latour's reference to nonhuman actors within a larger
technological system is more serious than the images it might evoke
of mechanical robots serving cocktails. Rather, his aim is to
remove the artificial divide which has been imposed on our
understandings of the workings of highly technological societies.
As societies become increasingly technological, an historical
necessity which will be discussed subsequently, human activity is
increasingly mediated by technologyand Latour's actor networks thus
become more complex.
Haraway (1991) has similarly explored the shifting boundaries
between technology and society. Like Latour, Haraway is interested
in the relations between people, machines, and nature in, borrowing
Latour's words, the assemblage of more durable wholes. But for
Haraway, the upshots of these relations transcend the production of
any one technological system or artifact; Haraway draws out these
relations to show how they reflect reciprocally on larger social
structures. Situating her ontology of technological society in
relation to a history of patriarchal capitalism and
Western-scientific (technologically based) notions of progress,
Haraway (1991, page 150) argues that, "the relation between
organism and machine has been a border war. The stakes in the
border war have been the territories of production, reproduction,
and imagination". For Haraway, then, the boundaries between human
and non-human actors matter, the experiential "border war" between
the organic and inorganic cuts to the heart of the social
construction of technology, as well as the technological
construction of society. But these borders are fluid. That is, the
boundaries between the social and the technological are under
perpetual revision,
Mitchell (1994; 1996) has explored Latour's development of the
idea of social struggle in the production of a scientific object as
a metaphor for understanding the production of material landscapes.
Central to this argument is the notion that morphology guides
conflict, and conflict reforms morphology.
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538 S Kirsch
and increasingly, these boundaries are blurred: Haraway's
cyborgs operate at the intersection of these realms.
Whether we are discussing an 'artificial intelligence' system
with military applica-tions, any of the recent wave of technics
associated with the transition to 'flexible accumulation', or the
buildup of communications links to the household, human activity
and technological processes are intensively interfaced. These
technics con-tinuously serve to reinvent the processes of
production and reproduction, and revise the boundaries of what we
know as nature. Technologies, these networks of inter-connected
human and nonhuman actions, have thus become increasingly complex.
At the same time, technology remains a door hinge, a means to an
end. By unfolding society to reveal the social construction of
technology, we gain greater insights into the technological aspects
of society. In this respect, Latour 's work is quite useful so far
as it goesas a theoretical tool for analyzing the increasingly
technological facets of social, political, and economic processes.
But if we are to further illumi-nate what Haraway calls the stakes
of the border war between organism and machinethe territories of
production, reproduction, and the imaginationwe must also look to
structural factors for explanation beneath the surface of
technological change.
The technology of accumulation and the accumulation of
technology Ellul (1964, page 436) concludes his polemical sociology
of the technique with the observation that "[t]he attitude of the
scientists, at any rate, is clear. Technique exists because it is
technique .... Any other answer is superfluous".(12) This may well
be an accurate assessment of a common social perception: not
limited to the scientists, but also engineers, technocrats,
politicians, and a wide spectrum of social actors may not seek to
theorize why techniques and technologies exist, nor why
technological change is perpetual and imperative. But these latter
concernsthe why of technological innovationare at the center of
Marxian analyses of technology, and are intrinsic to some of the
major contradictions which have been identified with the historical
geography of capitalism (see Harvey, 1982; 1989; 1990; Smith, 1990;
Swyngedouw, 1992).
It is clear that the history and geography of capitalism have
been associated with unparalleled technological dynamism (Feenberg,
1990; Haraway, 1991 ; Harvey, 1982; Marcuse, 1964; Smith, 1990).
For Harvey (1982, page 133), "[technological change exists ... as
the prime lever for furthering the accumulation of capital through
perpetual increases in the value productivity of labor". Harvey
(1982) thus attri-butes the imperative for technological change,
and the consequent spiralling, multiplier effects of 'technological
progress', to the interrelations of three primary sets of
relations: competition between capitalists, the class struggle
between capital and labour, and the interdependency of capital.(13)
That capitalist competition
(12) Technique, for Ellul (1964), refers to standardized methods
(mechanical or otherwise) of achieving predetermined results. The
aim of his work was thus to explore the human and social
consequences of the accumulation of techniques in society. Ellul,
writing three decades ago, could reasonably be accused of a type of
technological determinism, yet his perspective, which demands
attention for the expanding role of technics in society, succeeds
in challenging taken-for-granted assumptions against an autonomous
technology. (13) Harvey (1982) explicitly deals with the relations
of capital and the labor process to technological and
organizational change. My discussion of these relations is in part
an abbre-viation of that argument, a necessary shorthand for
placing the annihilation of space in its theoretical context.
Harvey's reading of Marx is of course far more nuanced than this
reduction. The role of the military state as a subsidizer of these
processes is of course crucial, but is beyond the scope of this
discussion.
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The incredible shrinking world? 539
should spur technological innovation seems self-evident; the
adoption of new technologies is one of several options, including
changes in labor organization, location and marketing strategies,
which are induced by the competition over rela-tive surplus value.
But so too has technological innovation been a means of reducing
the power of organized labor. This is true of those deskilling unci
reskilling technologies which give form to the production process*
as well as those technol-ogies in transportation, communications,
information, and finance through which capital has been freed from
Iocational labor constraints.
If the transition to 'flexible accumulation' offers but a single
lesson about tech-nology, it could be that technological innovation
in one sector is unlikely to stop there. The 'global option' which
has been so vigorously pursued by core capital in recent decades is
simply inconceivable without the integrated circuitry of
telecom-munications and information technology, the infrastructure
for the "technically disarticulated" world economy (Henderson,
1989). Interdependence in capital accumulation inevitably leads to
multiplier effects in technological innovation as firms attempt to
keep pace with the reinvented, accelerating rhythms of the economy.
Increasing productiveness in one sector, for Smith:
"creates both the possibility and the necessity for increased
productivity in others. The possibility arises that an innovation
in one sphere is likely to find an applicability in another. The
necessity arises because an advance in one sector may require
advances in those sectors to which it is closely related" (1990,
page 115).
Marx identifies the multiplier effects of interdepcndency
through the example of technological spillover in integrated
industries; spinning by machinery made weaving by machinery a
necessity, and both combined to make imperative the mechanical and
chemical revolutions in bleaching, printing, and dyeing (Marx,
1967; see Harvey, 1982; Smith, 1990). Also linked to these
technological dynamicsand implicated in the same logic of
accumulationwere the innovation of new modes of transportation and
communication: railroads, steamships, telegraphy (Marx, 1967). The
drive to accelerate the turnover time of capital investments in
production, exchange, and consumption has been expressed
historically and geographically through material technologies which
have continually overcome existing spatial and temporal barriers.
Technological change, then, is constituent to social formations
(Harvey, 1990). Yet, just as all technological change must occur
within that social formation, so too must the existing social
forces of production adapt to, alter, or transform the constituent
technological formations in transportation, communications, and now
in information technologies. With each new chapter of innovation,
from trains to jet planes and from telegraphy to telephones,
television, the internet and other globalized computer networks,
societal space-time relations and conceptions are periodically
transformed in ways that profoundly influence the reproduction of
social life. Much of the force of Harvey's recent arguments (1989;
1990) thus comes from his ability to illuminate the connections
between modes of production and the changing human experience of
space and time as reflected in political, social, and cultural
practices and representations. Technology is deeply implicated in
these processes; enquiry into the social origins of technological
change can, as Marx says, expose the formation of social relations
as well as the "mental concep-tions that flow from them" (1967,
cited in Harvey, 1982, page 88).
Historical geographical materialist perspectives thus contribute
a great deal to our understandings of technology by looking through
the lens of accumulation. What appears on the surface as a snowball
effect of autonomous technological momentum is more clearly
understood in relation to the engines of society itself.
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540
The point of this discussion is not to undermine those
microscale studies which have examined how science and technology
are produced through relations between social actors and groups,
but rather to hold these complex technological actor net-works
(which shape particular technologies) up to relevant structural
considerations. To understand the 'seamless web' of technological
society, we need to understand the process of technological
change.
But the technics of accumulation are not simply changing, they
are accumulating as well. As Lefebvre (1991, page 262) points
out:
"The accumulation of money for investment, and productive
investment itself, are hard to conceive without a parallel
accumulation of techniques and knowledge. Indeed these are all
really indivisible aspects of the accumulation process." What makes
scientific and technological progress so lucidand at times
sublime-
is that, unlike so many forms of knowledge, technical knowledge
tends to be cumulative (Wallerstein, 1983).(14) There is no need to
reinvent the wheel, turbine, or microcomputer, but there remains
both the possibility and the necessity to expand on these
technologies. Marx, working with (and widening) a 19th-century
definition of technology as the mechanical arts, recognized this
accumulation of technics in the production process when he wrote of
the technical foundations established when machines were capable of
being used to produce other machines (Marx, 1967; 1973). But the
accumulation of technology in society is clearly not limited to
economic processes. The expansion of technological means has been
integrated (differentially) into all spheres of social life,
including, as we shall see, into the production of space
itself.
Just as technological means have continually served to
revolutionize the processes of production and exchange, so too have
households been remade, both materially and conceptually, to
accommodate changing social and technological formations; as Harvey
(1982, page 122) avers, "...the technology of final consumption
must keep pace with the requirement to absorb the increasing
quantities of commodities pro-duced". Yet if we wish to consider
the scale of experience, obligation to this 'requirement' tells
only part of the story. The electrification of American homes in
the city and countryside during the late 19th and early 20th
centuries, for example, brought far more than the bills for
electric light and power; the social meanings of the
electrification process became synonymous with modernity, progress,
and social well-being (Nye, 1990a; see also Nye, 1990b).
Electricity, in conjunction with such similarly revolutionary
technologies as rail transport and the global standardization of
time, formed a crucial link in the modernization of 'progressive'
society (Kern, 1983; Nye, 1990a). Still, the underlying political
economic logic of electrification in the USA was never far from the
surface; electrification provided a material link between producers
and consumers for the first time (Nye, 1990a). Following the
initial electrification of homes, facilitated through state
legislation and regulation, electric light and power companies
began to produce home electrical appliances which they marketed on
a door-to-door basis (at bargain rates) as a means of increasing
electrical usage (Nye, 1990a; see Miller, 1983). The wiring of
homes to power supplies, the distant ancestor of the 'information
superhighway', produced profound effects on the spaces of our homes
as well as the relations between pro-duction and social
reproduction. The power lines would be followed by gas lines,
(14) For Wallerstein (1983), the inherently cumulative aspects
of science and technology may serve to obscure the question of
human progress under capitalism. The relations between conceptions
of technological and human progress are also explored (in quite
different ways) in Ellul (1964), Matless (1992), Postman (1992),
and Wilson (1992).
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The incredible shrinking world? 54 t
telephone lines, cable television, and so on, an increasingly
complex technological formation which links global, national, and
local scale politics, entertainment and (perhaps most importantly)
commodtfication to the 'American living room'.
The point is that, on the one hand, technology can be understood
as a set of structural relations, but on the other, that we also
need to return to the surface of experience to understand how the
geographies of everyday life arc increasingly mediated by
technology. As Wilson puts it:
"If the land is wired, so are we. Technology has become an
organizational prin-ciple of our everyday lives. It provides the
framework for scientific thought and public discussionin short, the
whole range of social relations" (1992, pages 258-259).
But it is precisely became the land is wiredwith ever-expanding
superhighways for transportation, communications, and
information*that technology can become an 'organizational
principle* to everyday life. There are perhaps no greater modes of
organization than space and time. Yet social organization within
space and time is tliaicctically related to the social organization
of space and time; these taken-for-grantcd 'natural' boundaries
exist in flux, an expression of the evcr-accclcrating geographies
of production, exchange, and consumption. By means of technology,
these boundaries have been revised again and again. Here, then, is
the setting for Harvey's time-space compression: conceptions of a
world in which space has collapsed (and a more abstract, global
space has emerged) flow from the very spatial practices through
which the land has been 'wired'linked together by (often wire-less)
networks of human and nonhuman actors.(,5)
How can these processes be most usefully represented? In what
follows, I will examine some of these representations of the
changing dimension of time and space (or lack thereof), with an eye
towards what is gained and lost through these inter-pretations.
The incredible shrinking world redux The annihilation of space
by time To this point, we have seen that the social construction of
technology and the tech-nological construction of society are
essentially different windows onto the same process. Yet aside from
the general certainties of this processthat the imperative for
technological change leads to an increasingly technological society
(or socie-ties)the logic which impels these workings is reflected
quite differently through these separate vistas. Innovation in
communications and transportation can be seen as the product of the
structural logic of technological change as well as the product of
conflicting strategies amongst the makers of science and
technology. But many of the effects of these technologies,
including the changing social conceptions of space and time which
develop alongside the adoption of these innovations, are not the
intended consequences for which the technics were produced; they
are by-products which appear to follow a trajectory all their own.
Nevertheless, as Harvey says, new social definitions of space and
time "... operate with the full force of objective facts to which
all individuals and institutions necessarily respond" (1990, page
418). At this reflexive interstice of technology, space, and social
relations, our separate views
(15) Of course, these networks of spatial practice are not
limited to the land. Satellites orbiting the planet have
contributed as well to our changing definitions of space and time,
and the changing objective operation of these conceptions. So too,
as Cosgrove (1994) has shown, have images of the earth from space
been integrated into our conceptions of the global space in which
we live.
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542 S Kirsch
onto this process coalesce. That is, the effects of
technological change on social life feed back to the spatial
practices through which technology (and social space) is produced.
Space is a medium for these processes, bridging the gaps between
material practices and representations, between lived social
relations and history.
As the experience of space and time is fundamentally altered, we
need to create new modes of representing these shifting sands
beneath our feet, new maps to give order to a world in flux. The
'annihilation of space and time' was just such an expression in
popular jargon. This phrase achieved widespread appeal in
19th-century America in response to the dramatic changes at hand in
time - space relations as the railroad began to criss-cross the
continent, steamships similarly changed the nature of aquatic
transport, and telegraph cables created the first 'real-time'
linkages between distant locales (see Harvey, 1989; Kern, 1983;
Nye, 1990a; Postman, 1985). The sublime quality of this phraseone
part hyperbole and one part poetrywas achieved in response to the
material spatial practices which were impacting on the experience
of everyday life: an earlier phase of 'time-space compression'.(16)
But as much as the railroad annihilated space (read: friction of
distance), so too did it create spaces, making heretofore isolated
lands accessible to more rapid and expan-sive networks of exchange.
So while 'the annihilation of space and time' reflects a keen
awareness of the elasticity of these dimensions, it also served to
mystify these changes by shrouding them in an ontology of
scientific and technological triumphalism (LMarx, 1964; Smith,
1990).
With a simple turn of phrase, Marx turned the "annihilation of
space by time" into a critical tool which evoked a new set of
meanings (Smith, 1990). The acceler-ating rhythms of production and
exchange do not take place in a vacuum but in the material space of
the landscape. Marx thus recognized distance as a spatial barrier
to the circulation of value, and he saw time'objective' time
related mathematically to the accumulation of capitalas
perceptually annihilating these barriers through technological
means. In Grundrisse, Marx writes:
"The more production comes to rest on exchange value, hence on
exchange, the more important do the physical conditions of
exchangethe means of communi-cation and transportbecome for the
costs of circulation. Capital by its nature drives beyond every
spatial barrier. Thus the creation of the physical conditions of
exchangeof the means of communication and transport the
annihilation of space by rimebecome an extraordinary necessity for
it" (1973, page 524, italics added).
Marx's turn of phrase, prefiguring its revival by Harvey by
roughly a century and a half and countless innovations, similarly
is situated as a midpoint between a regime of accumulation and a
mode of representation, the popular annihilation of space jargon.
What is gained from Marx's wordplay, then, is the demystification
of the processes through which previous conceptions of space had
been shattered. Rather, we come to see these changes as the outcome
of concrete spatial practices.
Smith agrees, holding the logic of Marx's critique up to more
recent chapters in the popular discourse of relative space:
"We recognize essentially the same reality in the popular
impressionist observation that we occupy 'a shrinking world'. What
Marx offers is an historically specific explanation of the
necessity of this geographical shrinkage. Spatial development
(16) LMarx (1964) and Smith (1990) trace the etymology of "the
annihilation of space and time" to the poet Alexander Pope. For
more on relations between the railroad and time-space relations,
see Kern (1983) and for observations of a more contextual nature,
read Norris (1901).
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The incredible shrinking world? 543
is treated as an integral moment of overall societal development
rather than simply as an independent effect. The so-called
shrinking world is not merely an effect of generalized progress of
modernization but the specific necessity of the mode of production
based on the relation between labour and capita!** (1990, page
94).
Whereas Smith points to shrinkage in a "so-called shrinking
world**, Harvey attempts to bring us closer to the experience of
that world when he speaks of the compres-sion of our spatial and
temporal worlds (see Harvey, 1.989; 1990). Like Marx, Harvey
relates the changing experience of space and time (as understood
through cultural representations) to materialist processeswhich is
to say, to capital. But where Marx leaves off here at capitals
imperative to modify the conditions of exchange, to "drive beyond
every spatial barrier'*, Harvey extends his analysis into far more
difficult terrain: the connections between material spatial
practices and the experience of social life. As Harvey (1989) walks
us through the collapse, shrink-age, and annihilation of space
through time, from the 'Enlightenment project*, to 'modernism-, and
finally to the 'postmodern condition', we are made aware of how, in
each of these periods, the experience of space and time has been
transformed. To make these connections, the icon of the shrinking
world becomes an important vehicle for Harvey's discussion, serving
as the backdrop for a wide range of compelling issues dealing with
the rise of global space, the acceleration of social life, and the
processes of 'creative destruction*. Without undermining the
importance of these issues, I suggest that the shrinking world must
be examined more critically. There comes a point when we must raise
our heads from Harvey's book, look around, and reconsider whether
space has realty shrunk, and whether the world is, in fact,
collapsing inwards upon us.
A critique of Harvey's shrinking world "Metaphor", argues
Buttimer (1982, page 90), "...points to the process of learning and
discoveryto those analogical leaps from the familiar to the
unfamiliar which rally imagination and emotion as well as
intellect". Indeed, metaphors are not only useful, but often quite
necessary to make the connections between abstract ideas and social
experience which are of such importance to critical theory. But a
meta-phor can take us only so far until it falls apart (Gregory,
1994). For example, McLuhan's global village (1964), still deeply
entrenched in popular jargon, helped to create an image of the
emerging interconnectedness and 'simultaneity* of places in global
economy and culture which, in many respects, has been verified both
in our material practices and in our conceptions of space. At the
same time though, the global village metaphor is linked to
simplistic futurist-utopian notions of democrat-ized electronic
cottages (see Robins and Hepworth, 1988), which serve to mask the
social problems which are linked to the same information and
communications technologies which make the global village possible.
The expansion of core capital to the South over the past
twenty-five years, for instance, has been immeasurably facilitated
by technological advancements which have made production highly
portable, allowing firms to seek out particular labor pools or
other favorable local conditions, while at the same time
maintaining a high degree of control from a distant 'global village
headquarters'. The creation of new forms of regional and
inter-national divisions of labor and other patterns of uneven
development, epitomized, perhaps, by concurrently widening income
gaps between North and South, as well as by the polarization of
incomes within US cities, are thus as much a part of the
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544 S Kirsch
global village as telecommuting and the information
superhighway.(17) Yet references to the global villagewhether in
the popular media or in the classroomtend not to make these
connections. Instead, we are left with a spirit of technological
trium-phalism which suggests that we have (technically) solved the
problem of distance, thus screening the fact that for some
divisions of society, the barriers of social and physical distance
have not been diminished, but by contrast, strengthened.
In a similar and even related manner, although the notion of the
collapse or annihilation of space helps to promote an understanding
of the changing experiences of space and time, the metaphor also
serves to obfuscate or preclude questions about how that space,
more accurately, has been transformed. The effect of this recurring
metaphor is to remystify the relations between technology and
space. Of course, this is not Harvey's aim; rather, he employs the
shrinking world to illustrate the changing relations between
capital and space:
"The free flow of capital across the surface of the globe ...
places strong emphasis upon the particular qualities of the spaces
to which capital might be attracted. The shrinkage of space that
brings diverse communities across the globe into competition with
each other implies localized competitive strategies and a
heightened sense of awareness of what makes a place special and
gives it a competitive advantage. This kind of reaction looks much
more strongly to the identification of place, the building and
signalling of its unique qualities in an increasingly homogeneous
but fragmented world" (Harvey, 1989, page 271, italics added).
The so-called shrinkage of space is obviously not Harvey's
central point here, but is instead a vehicle to explaining the
changing space relations through which localities must compete,
through image building and other strategies, to attract global
capital. I have no argument with these findings, which Harvey
elaborates with great care, but rather I contest his vehicle for
reaching them. By resorting to the rather cartoonish shrinking
world metaphor, we lose sight of the complex relations (which Marx
sought to demystify) between capital, technology, and space,
through which space is not 'shrinking', but rather must be
perpetually recast. That the technologies of accomulation are
inexorably linked to an accumulation of technology necessitates
these shifts in the boundaries of 'nature'felt characteristically
by the advent of global scale space impinging on what we know as
localis too nuanced a process, and too important, to be summed up
through the recycled metaphors of 'the incred-ible shrinking
world'.
For Harvey (1989, page 293), "... the collapse of spatial
barriers does not mean that the significance of space is
decreasing". This is true in (at least) two important ways: there
are the local qualities of social formations and environment which
attract the footloose capital of 'flexible accumulation', and there
is also the significance of space as the interactive setting where
everyday life is experienced. Among the strengths of Harvey's
project is his ability to illuminate the connections between the
space of capital and the space of social experience, and it is to
these ends that his history of time-space compression operates.
"[T]he history of capitalism", Harvey (1989, page 240) writes, "has
been characterized by speed-up in the pace of life, while so
overcoming spatial barriers that the world sometimes seems to
collapse inwards upon us". Conceptions of a shrinking world, for
Harvey, thus become cultural evidence for time-space compression,
flowing from the material spatial practices which have accelerated
the economy and hence the pace of all social life.
(17) The polarization of global income distribution has been
well documented (for example, see United Nations Development
Programme, 1992).
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The incredible shrinking world? 545
But in making these arguments, Harvey's (1989; 1990) reliance on
the so-called collapse of space as a seemingly universal element of
human consciousness through time undermines some of his more useful
explanations for how these processes actually work. More
specifically, the emphasis on how space "appears lo shrink to a
'global village' of telecommunications" (Harvey, 1989, page 240)
reflects an histori-cal and macroseate bias in the interpretation
of the social relations of technology. Enthralled by the history of
the shrinking worldthe annihilation of space through timewe tend to
lose sight of its geography.
The same technologies which annihilate space, reducing frictions
of distance and eliminating spatial barriers, are also implicated
in the production of social space at the scale of experience. If we
accept that, although clearly technology is socially constructed,
society is in part technologically contructcd (to recognize this,
we need only think of life without the networks of human and
nonhuman actors which Latour describes), then we must try to
understand technology's role in the produc-tion of space, not
merely in its annihilation. The social relations which, as we have
seen, impel technology continually to overcome spatial barriers,
also facilitate the increasingly technological production of new
kinds of space. In relating the familiar narrative of the
transition from waterfall to steam power, Swyngedouw asserts
that:
"the drive of capital to liberate itself from space,
simultaneously and inevitably implies the necessity to take root
again in another place. In the process, how-ever, the previous
spatial pattern is overhauled and a new one constructed. The
overhaul undermines the monopoly position of the waterfall owner,
but simulta-neously creates a new monopoly position through the
production of a more productive, but monopolized, space/technology
nexus" (1992, page 422).
Swyngedouw's "space/technology nexus", it should be noted,
stands up without reference to the shrinking world. In fact, this
process whereby new spatial patterns are constructed as technology
continually serves to revolutionalize the conditions of production,
exchange, and consumption, stands in direct opposition to the
collapse of space; it is what happens to space after the collapse
that best illustrates the wider set of historical-geographical
processes involved. These are the processes of the production and
reproduction of space rather than those of a perpetual shrinkage:
where space is annihilated, it is not only annihilated, for it is
recast into a new space/technology nexus as well (see Swyngedouw,
1992).
My point is not that these processes are lost on Harvey; indeed,
for many of us both inside and outside the discipline of geography,
it is through Harvey that so many of these processes have been
articulated. Harvey's discussion of creative destruction is, in
some respects, quite similar to the production of space
argument.
"[I]t takes the production of a specific set of space relations
(like a rail network) in order to annihilate space by time. A
revolution in temporal and spatial rela-tions often entails,
therefore, not only the destruction of ways of life and social
practices built around preceding time-space systems, but the
'creative destruc-tion' of a wide range of physical assets embedded
in the landscape" (Harvey, 1990, page 425). Here, then, we can see
how spatial practices must take form in the landscape
itself in order to annihilate space by time. But if we are
interested in how "ways of life and social practices" correspond to
revolutions in spatiotemporal relations, then we must question
whether the shrinking world metaphors help to illustrate these
connections, or if, as I have suggested, they tend to obscure them.
The railroad, a principle factor in the standardization of time
across vast distances in the early 20th century, compelled society
towards a new set of space-time relations (Kern, 1983). Just as the
rail system itself was designed to keep the networks of exchange on
pace
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546 S Kirsch
with those of production, so too were new forms of urban and
rural space engendered to meet the demands of this more rapid means
for the circulation of commodities, capital, and population. And
here we might again consider our modification to Wilson's
observation presented above, that it is because the land is wired
that tech-nology can become an organizational principle to everyday
life. That is, to understand the connections between technological
spatial practices and our changing concep-tions of space and time,
we must look to the space of experience where geographical scales
coalesce, and from which these conceptions flow. To describe these
relations as a process of geographical shrinkage is akin to taking
the material space out of the geography (an abstract fetishism of
space), when in fact, spatial practices can only he connected to
social life as they operate through these material spaces. In this
sense, the world has not shrunk through technological innovation,
but rather, only through the process of representation.
Technology and the production of space The technics of
production Like the 'creative destruction' embodied by the
production of a rail system, the expansion of the interstate and
suburban highway systems in the USA after World War 2 was part of a
radical reconstruction of spatial and temporal relations.
Simi-larly, jet airplanes and computer networks have, in their own
fashions, facilitated the dramatic restructuring of political,
economic, and social processes, and the produc-tion of new
high-speed geographies of production, exchange, and consumption.
Yet for all of these revolutionary innovations which have so
accelerated the pace of social life, we are no closer to the
collapse of space than were those 19th-century celebrators of the
annihilation of space and time. In describing essentially the same
processes of creative destruction which Harvey touches on above,
Lefebvre comments:
"each epoch produces its own space. There was a space produced
from the 1960s on; it was at a world scale, based on aeroplanes,
motorways, suburbs, peripher-ies, the disintegration of historic
centres and conurbations (Lefebvre, 1987, page 31 , italics
added).
Lefebvre's (1976a; 1991) discussion of the process through which
social relations are spatialized reflects a different emphasis from
that of Harveyon production rather than annihilation. That the
production of a new space might necessarily annihilate (or in
Lefebvre's more common phrasing, shatter) a previous space is not
lost in this formulation, but nor is it fetishized. Though Lefebvre
is always con-cerned with the experience of space, his is an
experience too complex to be reduced to (or captured by) metaphors
of a world collapsing inwards upon us. These meta-phors, while
accentuating the relativity of space, work abstractly by obscuring
the relative space of everyday life: the local scale is presented
as 'dead space' onto which the global is collapsing.(18) But space,
for Lefebvre, is actively produced through social relations on a
day-to-day basis, and its scales are endlessly negotiated and
reconfigured (see Lefebvre, 1991; Smith, 1990). Unlike the
metaphorical space of the shrinking world, Lefebvre's spacewhich he
calls a concrete abstraction cannot be divorced from its
materiality.
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The incredible shrinking world? 547
In his analysts of commodities, Marx, as Lefebvre (1991, page
115) describes, "worked his way back front the results of
productive activity to productive activity itself*. Of course, this
is exactly the method which Lefcbvre applies to his science of
space, To understand space as the product of social processes, and
hence of politics, economics, and ideology, we need to examine the
process of its production. The technological aspects of this
process are explicit in Lefebvre's (1991) theory, though never
fully articulated.{m Lefebvre's analysis hinges on making careful
dis-tinctions between a work and a product, and thus between
creation and production. As Lefcbvre (1991, page 70) points out,
"...whereas a work has something irre-placeable and unique about
it, a product can be reproduced exactly, and is in fact the result
of repetitive acts and gestures" (italics original). Production,
then, is a process through which these repetitive activities are
organized. Lefebvre (1991, page 71) thus defines the inherent
rationality of production as organizing:
"a sequence of actions with a certain 'objective* (i.e. the
object to be produced) in view. It imposes a temporal and spatial
order upon related operations whose results are coextensive."
Certainly, production implies the operation of particular
techniques or technologies as defined by EIlul (1964) as a complex
of standardized means of achieving a predetermined result. Of
course, for Lcfebvrc these processes are more complex, pivoting on
the Marxian discourse on relations between use and exchange values
and the organization of labor. Yet still, Lefebvre, like Ellul,
recognizes the accumu-lation of technics in the production process,
and thus their increasing significance.
"Producing an object invariably involves the modification of a
raw material by the application to it of an appropriate knowledge,
a technical procedure, an effort and a repeated gesture
(labour).... Over the centuries, more and more sophisti-catedand
hence less 'natural'materials have replaced substances obtained
directly from nature. The importance of technical and scientific
mediation has increased constantly" (Lefebvre, 1991, page 113).
But if the importance of this mediation has increased in the
production of objects, then how does this fact relate to the
production of space?
The production of space, of course, is never the same as the
production of an object (Lefebvre, 1991). Whereas the production of
an object can be completed (and repeated ...), this can never be
fully true of the production of a space, which is always, to borrow
Pred's (1984) phrase, in the process of becoming over time.(20)
(19) Although technology and techniques constitute a recurring
(and crucial) element in Lefebvre (1991), the social relations of
technology are never really explained. Lefebvre (1976a; 1991) is
also prone to phrases such as "freewheeling technology" and
"uncontrolled technology" which might suggest the conception of an
autonomous technology. For example, Lefebvre (1976a, page 105)
states, "Pollution and the crisis of the environment are simply the
surface of deeper phenomena, one of which is the uncontrolled
technology that has been unleashed; the danger warned of ... was
that resources would be exhausted as a result of uncontrolled
technology and galloping population growth". But Lefebvfre's views
here, it seems, should not be taken for an assertion of a
self-propelling technology, but rather of a technology in which the
practices of extant social (and environmental) relations are
projected onto. This argument would be consistent with that of
Marcuse (1964), which avers that tech-nology bears the mark of its
origin in a particular mode of production, including capitalism and
its communist imitators. By the same logic, Marcuse also saw the
potential for an eman-cipatory technology which would reflect the
new relations with nature of a new social mode of organization. For
a discussion of Frankfurt School views on technology, see Feenberg
(1990). (20) Pred (1984) specifically refers to place as
historically contingent process (rather than space), but given the
dramatic transformations of space (and space relations) as
discussed above, it seems that his argument lends itself to
geographies of any scale.
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548 S Kirsch
The space of, say, a public park can be conceived (or designed)
and produced through labor, technology, and institutional factors.
But the meaning of that space, and indeed the space itself, is
adapted or transformed as it is perceived (Lefebvre's "moment of
communication") and lived by social actors or groups. Whether that
park becomes a campground for the homeless or the more ordered
space for which it was designed depends on how those who produced
(or reproduced) the park and attempt to control it are able, in
Latour's (1992b, page 5) words, to "resist the mul-tiple
interpretations of other actors that tend to dissolve away the set
up" (see Mitchell, 1995; Smith, 1989). In this sense, the
production of space is akin to the actor networks defined by
Latour: like 'high technology', space is a product of negotiation
and contest. Lefebvre is adamant on this issue:
"the production of a new space commensurate with the capacities
of the produc-tive forces (technology and knowledge) can never be
brought about by any particular social group; it must of necessity
result from relationships between groupsbetween classes or
fractions of classeson a world scale" (1991, page 380). Technology,
here, is inextricably linked to the production of a space which
is
commensurate with the rhythms and territories of production,
exchange, and con-sumption, the boundaries of 'nature'. One
important aspect of this relationship between technology and space
is the dialectic between space (or more specifically, geography) as
a barrier to capital accumulation which, through technology,
capital strives to overcome, and space as an organizational
resource or force of production (see Harvey, 1982; 1989; 1990;
Kellerman, 1989; Lefebvre, 1991; Swyngedouw, 1992). Through his
concept of time-space compression, Harvey connects these processes
to the changing social experience of space and time. But technology
is more than just the crowbar of time-space compression, and its
effects on our social space are not only experienced (passively) as
the world collapses upon us. Lefebvre's is thus a more active
space, cogently reflecting the impacts of social rela-tions 'on a
world scale' through the endless transformation of space, and the
rapid acceleration of social lifebut without the shrinking world.
To articulate more fully the role of technology in these complex
processes, we need also to pursue the con-nections between the
production of space and the production of objects, which is to say,
the technics through which social actors or groups strive to
produce space like an object: engineered, reproducible, and
controllable.
The production of space can never match the technical precision
achieved in the production and exact reproduction of objects, for
space is not only a product of technical design, but is also an
ongoing relationship between social groups. Still, we must wonder,
how closely can technical methods be approximated in the production
of space, and what are the consequences? The expansion of seemingly
'placeless' strip development and suburban 'edge cities' across the
North American landscape certainly lends credence to the
possibilities that space, like an object or commodity, can be mass
produced. What ideologies are embedded in this production process?
We might look at the built environments of shopping centers,
designed to give the appearance of public space when they are
actually commercial spaces scientifically engineered to increased
profits (Goss, 1993; see Shields, 1989; Wilson, 1992), improvements
in worker housing camps to facilitate the labor relations of
agribusi-ness (Mitchell, 1993), or the production of 'signature
skyscrapers' and downtown redevelopment schemes. Working backwards
to examine the ideas and activities which produce these spaces
(which Lefebvre would call "representations of space"), it is
useful to examine how relations of power are operationalized
through technical methods in the production of space. Certainly,
these technologies can be used for
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The incredible shrinking world? 549
the creation of new and liberating spaces (schools and
universities, for example, or a well-situated health center), but
as Lefebvre (1991, page 392) reminds us, technolo-gy and
"tcchnicity" tend "to reinforce domination far more than they do
appropria-tion, the quantitative far more than the qualitative".
The capacity for space to guide and channel social practices of
production and social reproduction has thus led to an accumulation
of technics in the production of space (see Mitchell, 1993); this
is true out of the same possibilities and necessities through which
technologies are produced to annihilate spatial barriers*
The notion that space is produced, to some extent, like an
object, should not imply a static conception of space any more than
the life' of an object is static; each exists within particular
social contexts in relation to people. Indeed, Lcfcbvrc's use of
the term "production" as the central motif of his theory is no
accident; like the production of an object, the production of space
involves an organizing process, the imposition of "a temporal and
spatial order upon related operations whose results arc
coextensive" (Lcfcbvrc, 1991, page 71), and also similarly, it
involves relations of power. And as with any process of production,
the production of space is achieved through the operation of
technology and techniques, the technics of spatialization. In
earlier sections of this paper, I have tried to elaborate on how
technology and technical means have accumulated in nearly every
aspect of social life, including the dimensions of space and time
which bound social experience. So too, the production of space has
increasingly been mediated by technology; the spatialization of
social relations has become, for much of the world, an increasingly
technical process. And the techniques designed to produce space as
if it were an objectthough only ever a tendencyhave become more
sophisticated.
The technics of spatialization In a general sense, of course,
the technics of spatialization are nothing new. Historical systems
of irrigation, town planning, canal and road building, all reflect
a significant technical component to the production of space (for
example, see Cosgrove, 1990; Harvey, 1989; Heffernan, 1990;
Matless, 1992). But together with a broad set of
historical-geographical developments from which technology is
inseparable,(2,) the accumulation of technical means in society has
been reflected in the production of space through the increasing
domination of conceived space over lived space. Benjamin (1986),
for example, made the historical observation that in late 19th
century Paris, the idea of the engineer began to assert itself in
the city's arcades, buildings, and streets. In fact, the practice
of engineering geography through the application of a new science
and technology of space was elevated to a greater scale of
operation at this time. Between 1880 and 1920, for example, the
emergence of new technical division of labor was characterized in
the USA by an increase from 8000 to roughly 200000 engineers (Nye,
1990a). And it is no coincidence that the production of such
massive geographic engineering projects as the Suez and Panama
canals (completed in 1869 and 1913, respectively) occurred at this
historic juncture. In this age of the railroad, telegraph,
steamship, and telephone, which is to say in an accelerating, truly
global political economy in which nearly every place was wired to
everywhere else, the conceived spaces of technology took form like
never before. The 'idea of the engineer' was operationalized from
the scale of the city to that of the world economy, and back again
to the geographical imagination.
(21> Here I am referring to the commodification of land, the
rise of the urban system, imperial-ism, industrial and agrarian
capitalism, and so forth: that is, the major processes which define
the past, present, and future geographies of capitalism and of
human experience. Rather than to trivialize these concepts through
crude brush strokes, my aim here is simply to point to these
processes which are the foundations for Lefebvre's argument.
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550 S Kirsch
For Lefebvre, the rise of 'abstract space' in the epoches of
modernity and late modernitythe domination of the conceived,
designed (and technological) space of the idea over lived
representational spaceis thus seen as a historical-materialist (and
not merely philosophical) development. This process of domination
has a long list of historical antecedents, most pertinent among
them the commodification of land and the assertion of state
control, but as with many theorists of modernity, Lefebvre quite
specifically dates the production of this abstract space to the
period prior to World War 1. These processes, again, were not lost
on Harvey (1989), whose discussion of these transformations is
certainly forceful. Yet Harvey's emphasis on these dazzling
transformationsthe metaphorical space of the shrink-ing worldtends
to obscure the fact that the increasingly technological aspects of
society are also spatialized through material practices at the
scale of experience. Through Lefebvre, on the other hand, these
multiscale relations between technology and space can be read as
two sides of the same coin. Without either side, the whole story
(of the social construction of technology, and the technological
construction of society) cannot be told.
Lefebvre asks: how has the production of space contributed to
the survival of capitalism, how is this space produced, and how can
we become less alienated through material practices?(22) In
Lefebvrian language, these questions converge on the tension
between representations of space and representational space. And
tech-nology, for Lefebvre, is critical to the domination of the
conceived over the lived.
"Now let us consider dominated (and dominant) space, which is to
say a space transformedand mediatedby technology, by practice. In
the modern world, instances of such spaces are legion, and
immediately intelligible as such: one only has to think of a slab
of concrete or a motorway. Thanks to technology, the domination of
space is becoming, as it were, completely dominant. The
'domi-nance' ... has very deep roots in history and in the
historical sphere, for its origins coincide with those of political
power itself (Lefebvre, 1991, page 164, italics original).
The role of technology, as the production of space is channeled
through increasingly technical procedures, is thus central to the
operation of political power (and to understanding Lefebvre's
work).
Curiously through, Lefebvre's attention to technology as a
mediating force in the production of space is conspicuously absent
in Gottdiener's (1985) interpretation of Lefebvre, The Social
Production of Urban Space. Although Gottdiener does identify
technology as a source of social change, he subordinates technology
with the blanket statement that institutional factors, "... are
more important [than technology] as explanations of urban
morphological transformation" (1985, page 44). Gottdiener goes on
implicitly to subject technology to the realm of 'mainstream'
social scien-tists. For Gottdiener, technology is a black box: a
mode of transportation or com-munications which enters society as a
stable, uncontested (and unexplained) factor in the production of
space. The danger of this approach is not only a misreading of
Lefebvre, but also that it naturalizes the social relations of
technology. That is, if we are interested in how space can serve to
channel social relations and behavior, the domination of the
conceived over the lived, then the increasingly technological
processes through which space is mass produced cannot be dismissed
so easily. Rather than representing technology and institutional
factors (that is, state and local state agencies, the real estate
sector, development capital) as competing factors, Gottdiener would
do well to investigate the interaction between these social forces.
(22) The first in this triad of questions stems from Smith's (1990)
reading of Lefebvre, and the latter from Shields (1994, personal
communication).
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The incredible shrinking work!? 551
The planned communities of entrepreneurs such as Levitt and Sons
are funda-mental to Gotuiicncr's analysis of the production of new
settlement space. In this context* government subsidies such as the
Gl home loan guarantees, tax subsidies, and other political
economic measures designed to promote an economy of mass production
and mass consumption played an integral rote in the production of
post-World War 2 suburban tract housing such as the Levittowns of
New York, New Jersey, and Pennsylvania. But to look critically at
these communities through a Lefebvrian methodologyto work backwards
from Levittown to the processes of its production and (ongoing)
reproductionwe also need to understand the technical means through
which these 'towns* were designed and engineered into the
land-scapes of the northeastern USA. In regards to places such as
Levittown, Lefebvrc asks: "Can a place of this kind really still be
called a 'work'? There is an over-whelming case for saying that it
is a product striata sensa: it is reproducible and it is the result
of repetitive actions" (Lcfebvre, 1991, page 75). In fact, the
production of Levittown(s) utilized a technology of cheap, mass
produced housing which was adapted from the wartime construction of
temporary housing for munitions and armory factor workers (Kelly,
1993; Wilson, 1992). Even the appearance of Levittown was a product
of highly specific codes and regulations for the mainte-nance of
homes as well as their construction. Designed and financed under
appropriate political and economic conditions, Levittown and
similar 'developments' could be bought, sold, and engineered
(through technology and labor) like objects, commodities. The point
is that, on one hand, the production of Levittown is incon-ceivable
without the institutional factors associated with the rise of the
Fordist economy. But on the other hand, the means through which
these places are pro-duced reflects a technical (or technocratic)
ideology, despite (or perhaps because of) the appearance of
technical 'objectivity'.
On the subject of town planning in France, Lefebvre thus
uncovers much the same technocratic ideology: "planned space was
objective and "pure"; it was a scientific object and hence had such
a neutral character. Space, in this sense, passes as being innocent
or, in other words, apolitical" (Lefebvre, 1976b, page 30). Whether
innocently or not, this ideology works against the guiding premise
of Lefebvre's work: that space is political. Of course, Levittown
and the larger geographical processes of suburbanization, which
allowed homeownership for previously impossi-ble portions of the US
population, must also be seen in the context of the space politics
of gender relations, the erosion of city tax bases, and more
broadly, in the formation of Fordist social relations. In this
vein, Lefebvre continues:
"There is an ideology of space. Why? Because space, which seems
homogeneous, which seems to be completely objective in its pure
form, such as we ascertain it, is a social product. The production
of space can be likened to the production of any given particular
type of merchandise. Nonetheless, there are interrela-tionshps
between the production of goods and that of space. The latter
accrues to private groups who appropriated the space in order to
manage and exploit it" (Lefebvre, 1976b, page 31). If we accept
Lefebvre's explanation of space as a social product, then the
increas-
ingly technological mediation in its production cannot be seen
merely as a neutral conduit. Whether we examine the technologies
through which everywhere is wired to everywhere else, or those
technics through which space is produced like an object,
technologyand the operation of the idea of the engineermatters (and
has always mattered) in the domination of space. If space can
indeed serve to channel social relations (even as it is produced
through these very relations), then the links between the
engineering of space and the engineering of society need to be
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552 S Kirsch
examined more critically. And these important connections
between technology and space are more active and complex, and
indeed more geographical, than those expressed through the less
credible paradigm of the shrinking world.
Conclusions "DEVOURER OF TIME AND SPACE". So claimed the
19th-century inscription on the Union Depot in Washington, DC (Nye,
1990a). In some respects, the statement is quite reasonable; the
time and space of a trip from, New York to Washington, would seem
to be swallowed up by the railroad, at least for the rider
accustomed to coach travel. But the space between these cities, of
course, had not collapsed, and the time 'saved' through rail travel
was not devouredit was reinvested in the more rapid circulation of
commodities, capital, people, and ideas. Still, in very real ways,
space and time had been transformed: they were experienced in
radical new forms as the pace of social life was accelerated, and
places became increasingly intercon-nected (in both time and space)
as they were linked together via the railroad. The inscription on
Union Depot was an expressionby those with the power to represent
of how these changes could be understood through metaphor.
As the accelerating rhythms of production, exchange, and
consumption have been spatialized, the ongoing accumulation of
technology has been inscribed across the earth's surface, and new
forms of time-space relations have been engende