Time Space Compression

time-space compression

\'Processes that so revolutionize the objective qualities of space and time that we are forced to alter, sometimes in quite radical ways, how we represent the world to ourselves\' (Harvey, 1989). Consistent with his vision of historico-geographical materialism, Harvey treats time-space compression primarily as the product of what Marx (and other nineteenth-century writers) identified as the compulsion to \'annihilate space by time\' under capitalism, shaped by the rules of commodity production and capital accumulation. Harvey explained that he deliberately used the word \'compression\' because \'a strong case can be made that the history of capitalism has been characterized by speed-up in the pace of life, while so overcoming barriers that the world sometimes seems to collapse in upon us\'. As this suggests, the concept of time-space compression is intended to have an experiential dimension that is missing from concepts of time-space convergence and time-space distanciation. Harvey pays particular attention to the ways in which time-space compression dislocates the habitus that gives social life its (precarious) coherence: implicated in a crisis of representation, its consequences are alarming, disturbing, threatening; a \'maelstrom\' and a \'tiger\', time-space compression under the sign of capitalist modernity induces \'foreboding\', \'shock\', a \'sense of collapse\' and, ultimately, \'terror\' that translates into a \'crisis of identity\' (Harvey, 1989, 1990, 1996, pp. 242-7).

Harvey\'s description of the experience of time-space compression in these terms conjures up the sublime. The sense of being overwhelmed by the scale and sheer power of the world was a persistent motif in modern Western aesthetics in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries: in the sublime \'we are forcibly reminded of the limits of our dwarfish imaginations and admonished that the world as infinite totality is not ours to know\' (Eagleton, 1990, p. 89). The sublime reappears in late twentieth-century postmodern thought, wherein the Marxist critic F. Jameson (1991) memorably despairs at \'the suppression of distance\' and the \'perceptual barrage of immediacy from which all sheltering layers and intervening mediations have been removed\'.

Source:GeoDZ Encyclopedia/2011