Time–space compression: Difference between revisions

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[[Doreen Massey (geographer)|Doreen Massey]] critiqued the idea of time-space compression in her discussion of globalization and its effect on our society. She insisted that any ideas that our world is "speeding up" and "spreading out" should be placed within local social contexts. "Time-space compression", she argues, "needs differentiating socially": "how people are placed within 'time-space compression' are complicated and extremely varied". In effect, Massey is critical of the notion of "time-space compression" as it represents capital's attempts to erase the sense of the local and masks the dynamic social ways through which places remain "meeting places".<ref>{{cite book|last1=Massey|first1=Doreen |authorlink=Doreen Massey (geographer)|chapter=A Global Sense of Place|title=Space, Place, and Gender|date=1994 |isbn= 0816626162|publisher=[[the University of Minnesota Press]]}}</ref>
 
For [[Moishe Postone]],<ref>[[Postone, Moishe]]. "Theorizing the Contemporary World: Robert Brenner, Giovanni Arrighi, David Harvey" in ''Political Economy of the Present and Possible Global Future(s)'', Anthem Press, 2007.</ref> Harvey's treatment of space-time compression and postmodern diversity are merely reactions to [[capitalism]]. Hence Harvey's analysis remains "extrinsic to the [[social form]]s expressed" by the deep structure concepts of capital, value and the [[commodity]]. For Postone, the postmodern moment is not necessarily just a one-sided effect of the contemporary form of capitalism but can also be seen as having an emancipatory side if it happened to be part of post-capitalism. And because postmodernism usually neglects its own context of embeddedness it can legitimate capitalism as postmodern, whereas at the level of deep structure it may in fact be more concentrated, with large capitals that, accumulate rather than diverge, and with an expansion of commodification niches with fewer buyers.
 
Postone asserts that one cannot step outside capitalism and declare it a pure evil or as a one-dimensional badness, since the [[Emancipation|emancipatory]] content of such things as equal distribution or diversity are potentials of capitalism itself in its abundant and diverse productive powers. This initial perspective misfires however, when forms of society such as modernity and subsequently postmodernism take itself as the true whole of life for being oppositional to capitalism, when in fact they are grounded in the reproduction of the same capitalist relations that created them.