Академический Документы
Профессиональный Документы
Культура Документы
There, where thepower-bome 0fall time andspaee call it brain or heart ofcreation
activate: everymetion; who i: the arrest who would not dwell there?
Paul Klee
1. Social constructions ofspace and time are not wrought out of thin air, but
shaped out of the various forms of space and time which human beings 5:51;
encounter in their struggle for material Survival. For example, night and "jg-1
7776 Social Construction ofSpace and Time 211
day, the seasons, lifecycles in the animal and plant world, and the biological
processes which regulate human reproduction and the body, are typical
encounters with various kinds of temporality. But each of these standsto
be modied or even transcended as we harness sources of energy to turn
night into day, as we use an international division of labor to put fresh
produce into our shops at all times of the year, as we speed up the lifecycles
of chickens and pigs through genetic engineering and as human life
expectancy rises with improved living standards and medical knowledge.
The discovery of the varying properties of time and space in the material
world (through the study of physics, ecology, biology, geology, etc.) is
therefore fundamental. Such knowledge permits a social choice as to which
particular process or processes shall be used to construct space and time.
The swing of the pendulum or the pace ofradioactive decay are now used,
whereas in other eras it may have been the cyclical motions of the planets
and the stars or the migrations of animal populations. To say that time and
space are social constructs does not deny their ultimate embeddedness in
the materiality of the world:
Time is "in the universe; the universe is not in time. Without the universe,
there is no time; no before, no after. Likewise, space is in the universe; the
universe is nor in a region ofspace. There is no space outside the universe.
(Hewitt, 1974: 515)
Time and space may be facts of nature but, as with values in nature
A
see chapter 5) we cannot know what those facts are outside of our own
cultural embeddedness in language, belief systems, and the like.
Social constructions of space and time operate with the full force of
objective facts to which all individuals and institutions necessarily respond.
To say that something is socially constructed is not to say it is personally
212 Space, Time, and Place
In what follows I use two studies, by Gurevich and Munn, to tease out some.
fundamental underlying questions and principles on the social construction
of space and time. _ '-
The Social Construction ofSpace and Time 213
II. Gurevich and The Categories ofMedieval Culture
This had profound implications for how the self and the body (primary
constituents of identity) were thought to relate to the world:
dwelling in the land that comes very close to that which Heidegger (see
chap'ter 9) was later to articulate with great force. Says Gurevich of the pre
Christian medieval period:
The site of the dwelling has grown together with its owners so intimately that
neither is conceivable without the other. Just as the man possessed the Farmstead,
so it in turn possessed him and put its own stamp on his personality.
Scandinavian topography is not based on purely geographical coordinates: it is
saturated in emotional and religious signicance, and geographical space
represents at the same time religiousmythological space. The one passes
ellortlessly into the other. (pp. 48-9)
The medieval way of looking at space and time was relationaland dialectical
rather than absolute. Space and time did not exist outside and before
experience; they were given only in experience itself, ofwhich they formed an
indissoluble part, which could not be detached from the living Fabric (p. 102).
This defined a particular sense of situatedness and of positionallty of human
beings in relation to the world. But:
Nancy Munns study, The Fame of Gawa (1986), deals with value formation
through spatio-ternporal practices found on a small atoll (population not many
more than 500) within the chain of islands that constitute the Massim 03 the
northeast of Papua New Guinea. Munn (1986: 121) places the three concepts
of space, time, and value at the heart of a relational nexus that acts as a
template or a generative schema for constructing intersubjective relations in
which value is both created and sigmea'. She introduces her study with the
assertion that sociocultural practices do not simply go on in or through time
and space, but they also constitute (create) the spacetime in which they
go on. Actors are, therefore concretely producing their own spacetime.
Munn tracks the formation of symbolic systems of meanings - of values
through the sociocultural practices which socially construct space and time.
g Different forms ofspacetime derive from diferent social practices. This means
i that spacetime in Gawan society is multidimensional and hierarchical depend
;1 -'ing upon the sorts of social practices being looked at. The effect is to generate
_i a complex interplay of the incommensurable spacctimes of different trans-
actions, rather than any homogeneous spacetime dened by determinate
Calendric frames. But incommensurable does not mean unconnected. A lot
of Gawan activity is precisely about linking one domain of spacetime and
value formation to another.
Munn looks at a variety of practices in this light. The house and garden
forms one sphere ofsociocultural practices and spacetime construction which
Is highly gendered as the domain of women, and holds its own distinctive
template for the construction of symbolic meanings and values. Relations
between household units, primarily dened by marriage and exchanges
between groups (in which the exchange not only of produce and cooked food
but also the highly signicant gifts of canoes), forms another level and both
E these together form the basis for the construction of a much broader sphere
valuation Structured around the offering of hospitality to males from other
lands and the reciprocal male search for hospitality from other islands. This
ter extends the range of individual spacetime relations - giving food away
overseas visitors for their own consumption is perceived as initiating a
ratiotemporally extending process which allows food to be converted into
e. Conversely, consumption of food in the domestic sphere by oneself is
eeived as negative value because of the contraction of spacetime implied.
216 Space, Time, and Place
This poses the problem of how translations are made from one domain
of spatiotemporal practices (as well as associated discourses and symbols)
to another, for we are not dealing with completely separate worlds, but
with interlocking constructions that take us from the gardens and houses
to the expanded spacetime of kula shell exchanges. The exchange of
canoes for armshells, she argues, effects a transformation amm these different
value levels of spacetime (p. 150). As one moves from garden produce
to canoes and kula shell exchanges, canoes appear as crucial spatiotemporal
intermediates between the internal spacetime of Gawan exchanges and
the maximal circulation of kula armshells and necklaces in the inter-
island world. The canoes, constructed by households and internally trans-
mitted from one marriage group to another, not only enable travel from
island to island, but as gifts they allow someone to break into the kula circle
itself.
Once they are set up, however, these intersecting abstractions and discourses
affect and regulate social practices (this conclusion is common also to Bourdieu
i-ifimd HughJones). The body, the house, gender relations of reproduction as
iii/ell as gender roles, Munn shows, all become caught up in a wider Symbolism
: onstructed around space, time and value. For example, bodily spacetime
erves in the Gawan case as a condensed sign of the wider space'time ofwhich
tais a part (p. 17), While the expansions of intersubjective spacetime created
through hospitality and kula exchanges affect the dialectic of hierarchy and
quality within the community as a whole (p. 20).
If the expansion of spacetime lies at the heart of value construction, then
e- contraction of spacetime (or simply failure to expand it) amounts to a
_s-' of value or negative value When Gawans eat their own ,fciod instead of
Zing hospitality to others they in effect destroy values. But the most
portant negating mechanism is Witchcra, constituted as a hidden world
I dissolves and disorders the overt, visible spatiotemporal order,
listallizing a latent, negative signicance, and even subverting the apparent
hs'itive value potentials of transmissive acts into negative, destructive value
pg; 1314). It is through witchcraft that fame gets subverted, communities
come defamed, while individuals suffer from heaviness, illness, death.
aluation and devaluation consequently form a binary and dialectically
tituted coupler within the Gawan world ofspatio-temporal practices. The
"five moment has important social consequences. Witchcraft, by attack
those Who individually deviate or accumulate, serves on the one hand to
orce the fundamental egalitarian premises ofthe society, especially as these
ses are embeddedin acts of giving as opposed to keeping or consuming
f. On the other hand, the witch also attacks the polity as a whole to
it nonviable, thus provoking forms of collective action. This evaluative
tic the formulation, in effect, of positive and negative discourses about
__ awan self Munn (1986: 271) concludes:
218 Space, Time, and Place
is intrinsic to the transformational process ofvalue production. Indeed, without
these evaluative discourses Gawa cannot produce value for itself, inasmuch as
it is through their operation that Gawans define and bring into consciousness
their own value state or the general state ofviability of the community. (p. 271)
persons are the obj ectied form of relationships, and it is not survival of the self
that is at issue but the survival or termination of relations. Eating daes not
necessarily imply nurture; it is not an intrinsically beneciary act, as it is taken
" be in the Western commodity view that regards the self as thereby
petuating its own existence. Rather, eating exposes the Melanesian person
all the hazards of the relationships ofwhich he/she is composed. Growth
n'social terms is not a reex ofnourishment, rather, in being a proper receptacle
n_ ourishment, the nourished person bears witness to the effectiveness of a
that thing coming from the person is not only morally, but physically and
spiritually, that essence, that food, those goods, whether movable or
immovable, those women or those descendents, those rituals or those acts of
communion n all exert a magical or religious hold over you. Finally, the thing
given is not inactive. 'Invested with life, often possessing individuality, it seeks
to return to its place of origin, or to produce an equivalent to replace it.
The effect is to create a mixture of spiritual ties between things that to sdm
degree appertain to the soul, and individuals, and groups that to some extent =
The Social Construction ofSpace and Time 221
treat one another as things. The parallel here to Marxs celebrated fetishism
thesis in which commodity market exchange transforms relations between
people into relations between things while similarly investing things with social
values is obvious. But there is something lacking in Mausss explanation ofhow
objects become active in relation to people.
Munns (1986: 109) answer is in part to insist on the spatio-temporality of
the valuing process that requires things (food, canoes, kula shells) as mediators
that can, as it were, bear the message of ones fame across space and time. But
she also shows that this development depends on language:
When a young man who wishes to advance in lcula is starting out, he must not
only develop his own kula speech skills, but also listen to the discussions ofmore
senior men, learning the path histories, metaphors, names, and so on, pertinent
to kula.
The discourse about the thing, or evaluative discourses more generally, are
fundamental to the spatiotemporal practices ofvaluing both the thing and the
person. Without naming, memory, discourses, and the like, the whole process
of constituting a mediated world ofspacetime relations would fall apart. The
oral circulation of the names of men, shells, and islands is an exponential
aspect of the emergent spacetirne of kula:
Societies change and grow, they are transformed from within and adapt to
pressures and inuences from without. Objective but socially given
conceptions of space and time must change to accommodate new material
practices of social reproduction, new ways of assigning value. _
How are such shifts accomplished? In certain instances the answer is simply
given. New concepts of space-time and value have been imposed by main force "3
through conquest, imperial expansion or neocolonial domination. The-
European settlement of North America imposed quite alien conceptions of i i
time and space upon indigenous populations, for example, and1n so doing
altered forever the social framework within which the reproduction of these
peoples could, 1f atall take place (see, for example, Hallowell, 1955). Cronons ,
The Social Communion ofSpace and Time 223
(1983: 50) account of the impact of colonial settlement on the New England
Indians is again relevant. A conict arose over the different ways in which
spatiotemporality and value were constructed:
.; . And while each Indian village held sovereign rights that dened a villages
i political and ecological territory, the rights were never individual rights not were
. - they forever. People owned what they made with their own hands, but there
i' ' ' was little sense either of accumulation or of exclusive use precisely because
1' .the need for diversity and mobility led them to avoid acquiring much surplus
property. Mobility meant that they had no permanent rights to the land. They
possessed rights of use only which did not include many of the privileges
_ Europeans commonly associated with landownership: a user could not (and saw
no need to) prevent other village members from trespassing or gathering
nonagricultural food on such lands and had no conception ofderiving rent from
them. Nor did Indians own any other kind ofland clam banks, shing ponds,
berrypicking areas ..and here too the concept of usufructury right was crucial,
since different groups of people could have di'erent claims on the same tract
ofland depending on how they used1t.Property rights,in other words, shifted
th ecological use(Cronon, 1983: 63). The sale of land by Indians to the
lonizers was conceived on the Indian side as a compact to share the land and
use rather than alienatingit. As the English understood these transactions,
t was sold was not a bundle of usufruct rights, applying to a range of
__e_rent territories,but the land itself, an abstract area whose boundsin theory
mained xed no matter what the use to which it was put and such lands were,
Oreover, alienated forever. To the abstraction of legal boundaries alienated
[-1 perpetuity was added the abstraction of price (and land rent), a measure
" t of propertys value assessed on a unitary scale. More than anything else,
was the treatment of land and property as commodities traded at market that
uished English conceptions of ownership from Indian ones. The value
. _ of the colonizers was set in a matrix of socially constructed spacetime
ch was radically at odds with that of the Indian community
he. urban order has been equally subject to superimposed change. The
"sition of a mathematically rational spatial order in the house, the
room, the village, the barracks and even across the city of Cairo itselfwere,
temple, centerpieces of a late nineteenth-century project to bring Egypt
224 Spare, Time, 1272dech
The public sense of time and space is frequently contested from within the
social order. This in part arises out of individual and subjective resistance to- "35
the absolute authority of the clock and the tyranny of the cadastral map};
Modernist and postmodernist literature and painting are full of signs of revolt-i;
against simple mathematical and material measures of space and time, whil'
psychologists and sociologists have revealed, through their explorations; g}
highly complicated and often confused world of personal and social repre-
sentations which depart signicantly from public practices. Personal space-antl
The Social Construction ofSpace and Time 225
time do not automatically accord, then, with the dominant public sense of
either and, as Hareven (1982) shows, there are intricate ways in which family
time can'be integrated with and used to offset the pressing power'of the
industrial time of deskilling and reskilling of labor forces and the cyclical
patterns of employment. More signicantly, the class, gender, cultural,
religious, and political differentiation in conceptions of time and space
frequently become arenas of social conict. New denitions of what is the
correct time and place for everything as well as of the proper objective qualities
of space and time can arise out of such struggles. A few examples of such
conict or negotiation are perhaps in order.
the poor, Where they are to be plentiilly fed, warmly and decently clothed and
where they do little work. In this House of Terror, this ideal workhouse,
the poor shall work 14 hours a day, allowing proper time for meals, in such a
manner that there shall remain 12 hours of neat-labour. The House of
Terror for paupers of which the capitalistic soul of 1770 only dreamed, was
realized a few years later in the shape ofa gigantic tWlorlthouse for the industrial
worker himself. It is called the Factory. And the ideal this time fades before the
reality. (Marx, 1967: 2623)
The struggle over spatiovtemporality in the labor process is erce and carried
into every niche and corner of production:
these minutiae, which, with military uniformity regulate by stroke of the clock
the times, limits, pauses of the work, were not at all the products of
Parliamentary fancy. They developed gradually out of the circumstances as
natural laws of the modern mode of production. Their formulation, ofcial
recognition, and proclamation by the State were the result of a long struggle of
classes. (Marx, 1967: 268)
: ithin the house, under the males protection, the woman learns her natural
aCe by learning the place of things and commanding the spaces of the
o'usehold, thus internalizing the very spatial order that connes her. This
patial order, Xenophon proposed, is itself a thing of beauty more beautiful
an any of the possessions it orders.-
There are two important points here. First, the womans otherwise fluid social
in dentity is constrained by her insertion into a bounded space the house.
i condly, the ordering of space m considered as beauty is more important than
t it orders, creating an esthetic mask for a highly gendered social relation.
berti extends Xenophons argument in two ways. First, the closeting off
21. control of all bodily functions helps secure a boundary of the isolated body,
ablishing spaces of purity and individuality that are protected from the
'sity that characterized, for example, Gurevichs account of the medieval
Secondly, the privatization of sexuality within the household (the interior
ace of bedrooms) becomes important:
228 Spare, Time, and Place
The intricacy ofsocial control by spatial ordering (and, conversely, the complex
ways in which social orders get challenged by "the transgression of spatial
boundaries) requires sophisticated analysis. Symbolic spaces and the semiotics
of spatial orderings, for example, create texts that have to be read in social
terms. The internal spadetemporal organization of the household, of
workplaces, of cities, is the outcome of struggles to stabilize or disrupt social
meanings by opposed social forces. The xing of spatiality through material
building creates solidly constructed spaces that instanciate negotiated or
imposed social values (as in the case with all forms of environmental
transformation, cf. chapter 8). The spatialized Control of unwanted groups
the homeless, gypsies, New Age travelers, the elderly - and spatial stigmatiza
tion is as widespread a phenomenon in contemporary society as it was in the
medieval world (Sibley, 1995). But by the same token, the search for
emancipation from social control instills the desire,=:,the longing and in some
instances even the practices of searching for a space outside of hegemonic
social relations and valuations. Spaces on the margin become valued spaces
for those who seek to establish differences (see chapter 5). That metaphorical
longing has often been translated into action through the formation ofUtopian
communities, communes in faraway lands, migration. The search for What
Foucault calls heterotopia a space of liberty Outside of social control
becomes a living proof of how vital spatial ordering is to the actual practices
and institutions of a power-laden social process.
Sitins, street demonstrations, the storming of the Bastille or the gates of
the US embassy in Teheran, the striking down ofthe Berlin Wall, the occupa
tion of a factory or a college administration building are all signs of attack
against an established social order. The initiation of some new social order
requires a radical change in spatio-temporality. To separate themselves offfrom
the past, the victors of the French revolution not only devised an entirely new
calendar (see Zerubavel, 1985): they also broke open all the old spaces of
privilege and constructed a new set of ceremonial spaces consistent with their
revolutionary aims (Ozouf, 1988: 12637). The Parisian communards, to take
another example, readily put aside their pressing tasks of organizing for- the..f_j_.;
defense of revolutionary Paris in 1871, to tear down the Vendome column-
The column was a hated symbol of an alien power that had long ruled overii
them; it was a symbol of that spatial organization of the city that had put so
many segments of the population in their place, by the building of Hans? 5 .
manns boulevards and the expulsion ofthe working class from the central citYQ
The Social Construction ofSpace and Time 231
Haussmann imposed an entirely new conception of space into the fabric of
the city, a conception appropriate to a new social order based on capitalistic
(particularly nancial) values and state surveillance. The trmsformation of
social relations and daily life envisaged in the 1871 revolution entailed, or so
the communards felt, the reconstruction of the interior spaces of Paris in a
different nonhierarchical image. 80 powerful was that urge that the public
spectacle of toppling the Vendrne column became a catalytic moment in the
assertion of communard power over the citys spaces (Ross, 1988). The com
munards tried to build an alternative social order not only by reoccupying the
space from which they had been so unceremoniously expelled but by trying
to reshape the objective social qualities of urban space itselfin a nonhierarchiml
and communitarian image. The subsequent rebuilding of the column was as
much a signal of reaction as was the building of the Basilica of Sacr Coeur
on the heights of Montmartre in expiation for the communes supposed sins.
The latter (as I have shown elsewhere see Harvey, 1989c) was an attempt on
the part of the forces of reaction to shape memory through the construction
of a certain place and, thereby, to put revolutionary Paris in its place.
The point of these examples is to illustrate how social space, when it is
contested within the orbit of a given social formation, can begin to take on
new denitions and meanings. This occurs because the social constitution of
_'spatio-temporality cannot be divorced from value creation or, for that matter,
"from discourses, power relations, memory, institutions, and the tangible forms
iof' material practices through which human societies perpetuate themselves.
The interlinkages are there, always to be observed.
If space and time are both social and objective, then it follows that social pro
oesses (often conictual) dene their objectication. How, then, can these
processes be studied? In the rst instance, objectications ofspace and time must
be understood, not by appeal to the world ofthoughts, ideas and beliefs (though
study of these is always rewarding) but from the study of material processes of
iial-reproduction. Let me illustrate. I often ask beginning geography students
consider where their last meal came from. Tracing back all the items used in
'iepioduction ofthat meal reveals a relation ofdependence upon awhole world
cial labor conducted in many different places under very different social
goons and ecologiad conditions ofproduction. That dependency expands even
er when we consider the materials and goods used indirectly in the produo
ofthe goods we directly consume. Yetwe can in practice consume our meal
,ut' the slightest knowledge of the intricate geography of production and
3yriad social relationships embedded in the spatioremporal system that
232 Spare, Time, and Place
puts it upon our table. The spatiotemporality of my experience when I go to
work, stop off at the bank, shop in the supermarket, cook, eat, and sleep at
home, is very different from that embodied in the production and exchange of
the commodities I buy. Decisions that seem reasonable from the former stand
point are not necessarily appropriate from the latter. Which set of experiences
best captures the spatiovtemporality of capitalism? The answer is both because
both are equally material and equally historically constructed. And it is here that
the unity (that Munn, for example, advocates) between phenomenological and
political_economic perspectives comes into play, signaling the continuing
dialogue (rather than rupture) between the young and the mature Marx.
But there is also another way to look at the unity: it is through the mediation
of a thing called money that the two spheres relate. Cronon (1991: 37884)
puts it this way:
Living in the city means consuming goods and services in a market place with
ties to people and places in every corner of the planet, people and places that
remain invisible, unknown and unimagined as we consume the products oftheir
lives. The market fosters exchange relationships of almost unimaginable
complexity, and then hides them from us at the very instant they are created,
in that last moment when cash and commodity exchange hands and we nally
consume the things we have purchased.
was that the same market that brought city and country ever closer together,
giving them a common culture and fostering ever more intimate communication
between them also concealed the very [in/eager it was creating. The geography of
capitdlproduced a landscape ofobscured connections. The more concentrated the
city markets became and the more extensive its hinterland, the easier it was to
forget the ultimate origins ofthe things it bought and sold. (Cronon, 1991: 340)
[My italics].
This was the condition that Marx (1967: 7183) picked upon in developing
one of his most telling concepts ~ thefetir/yirm ofcommodities. He sought to
capture by that term the way in which markets conceal social (and, we should;
add, geographical) information and relations. We cannot tell from lookingdtiii
the commodity whether it has been produced by happy laborers working in?
cooperative in Italy, grossly exploited child laborers working under conditions.
of slave labor in Pakistan, or wage laborers protected by-adequate labor legislaf-
tion and wage agreements in Sweden. The grapes that sit upon the supermarki.
shelves are mute, we cannot see the ngerprints of exploitation upon them Of
Tbe Social Construction ofSpace and Time 233
tell immediately what part of the world they are from. By further enquiry, the
veil can be lifted on this geographical and social ignorance and we can become
aware on these issues, as happens with consumer boycotts of Commodities
produced under particularly inhumane conditions. But in so doing it is
necessary to go beyond what the market reveals. This was Marxs agenda: to
get behind the veil, the fetishism of the market, in order to tell the hill story
of social reproduction through commodity production and exchange.
For Cronon (1991: 3845), remaining ignorant of these nearly innite
interrelations is to miss our moral responsibility for the ways they shape each
others landscapes and alter the lives of people and organisms within their
bounds. If the others who put breakfast on our table are judged, as they
surely must be, signicant, then What kinds of intersubjective spacetime and
what kind ofvaluation schema is being constructed thereby and how does this
affect our sense of self, of moral and political identity? If, for example, we
consider it right and proper to show moral concern for those who help put
dinner on the table, then this implies an extension of moral responsibility (and
values) throughout the Whole intricate geography and sociality of intersecting
markets. We cannot reasonably go to church on Sunday, donate copiously to
a fund to help the poor in the parish, and then walk obliviously into the market
to buy grapes grown under conditions of appalling exploitation. We cannot
reasonably argue for high environmental quality in the neighborhood while
still insisting on living at a level which necessarily implies polluting the air
somewhere else. We need to know how space and time get dened by the quite
different material processes which give us our daily sustenance.
_ But that idea deserves deeper scrutiny. Munn showed how different spatio-
Ttemporalities are dened by different social practices in different domains and
that spacetime in Gawan society is multidimensional and hierarchical
j;-_.tdepending upon the sorts of social practices being looked at. But she also shows
igjizithecomplex interplay of seemingly incommensurable spacetimes and that all
EifiisOrts of social mechanisms exist that translate and transform from one
{_'___i-.':__s'patio-temporality to another. Those social mechanisms rest on social relations
iii-intediated by things (food, canoes, kula shells). Munns account is complicated
' n its details, even for a relatively homogeneous population of no more than
500 people living on one small island. The possibility exists that a similar or,
perhaps, far greater complexity and heterogeneity of spatiotemporalities might
be found within contemporary capitalism. If so, we need to identify the modes
of. translation and transformation from one spatiotemporality to another,
paying particular attention to the mediating role of things.
"But spatio-temporality within capitalism is usually characterized as a binary
ucture, contrasting the various intricately interwoven spatiotemporalities to
found in the lifeworld of individuals (such as the gendered spatio-
__poralities encountered within the household) and the abstract rationalized
_ _ tio-ternporalities attributed to modernity or capitalism (such as those that
234 Space, Time, and Place
emerge from a discussion of market exchange). This is how Mitchell (see the
citation above) depicts it. Such a duality also seems to be implied in Marxs analy-
sis of the fetishism of commodities, and it is a general feature to be found in
writers as diverse as Lefebvre, Heidegger, and Habermas. Is this dualism appro
priate? The answer to that can be found through consideration of that thing
money which has the greatest power to mediate across these different domains.
The three roles of money that Marx identies do not replace each other.
They all remain copresent (gold is still meaning-ll as an embodiment ofwealth
for example) But the use ofmoney as an individualized and exclusionary form
of social power is a central feature of capitalism. Marx then focuses on that
particular use by capitalists of the social power of money to control laborers
in order to make more money. This analysis rests on a sharp distinction
between wealth (the physical command over use values of whatever sort) and
value (the expression of generalized social labor through exchange, itself a
historical product). As an expression of labor values, money operates as both
measure and as medium of circulation of those Values. The (abstract) exchange
value differs from but internalizes the (concrete) we value aspects of money.
Only a portion of the total money is used directly as capital (though most
money at some time or another is brought within its orbit). But the story does
not stop there. Merchants, bankers, landlords and rentiers of all kinds can each
use their money power visd-vz'r each other as well as with respect to the direct
producers to procure some share of the surplus value produced by laborers [see
Harvey (1982: chapters 911) for an exegesis of Marxs argument]. Affluent
workers control poorer, men control women, parents control children, the state
controls society, and political parties or corporations control the state apparatus
(to cite just a few examples). Money stands to be used in all manner ofdifferent
ways to control all manner of social relations.
The diverse uses of money have not been well analyzed. In practice, Zelizer
(1994: 202) observes, individuals have invented an extensive array of
currencies, ranging from housekeeping allowances, pin money, and spending
money to money gifts, gift certicates, remittances, tips, Penny Provident
savings, mothers pensions, and food stamps." They have differentiated and
segregated their monies, setting food money apart from rent money, school
money, or charity money as well as funds for burial, weddings, Christmas, or
recreation.How they do thisIS often the focus of struggle and1s strongly
affected by family structures, cultural predilections, habits, gender, and class
position. The creation ofWearmarked moneys illustrates the complex web of
social and spacewtime relations out of which moneys arise and within which
money uses are embedded. When, for example, money is earmarked within a
household unit for burials, weddings, vacations, remittances, old age, college
education, or whatever, it is set aside for a certain purpose each of which has
a certain spatioatemporality attached to it.
Zelizer unfortunately ignores the spatiotemporalities created by these
different uses while Hareven, in analyzing the different forms of family time,
similarly ignores the diverse uses of money. Conjoining the two analyses
provides a rather more complex but unied picture of how different elds of
social action connect. While some currencies (such as promises exchanged
among family members) may never escape restricted spatio-temporal domains,
by far the most interesting circumstance is when a promissory note verbalized
The Social Construction ofSpace and Time 237
A number of people who live locally and who want to work and trade together
get together, agree to the LETSystem rules, and give themselves account
numbers. Each person then makes our two lists, one of wants and one of
offers," with prices attached (following normal market prices). A joint list is
made up and circulated to everyone. Then the members look down the list and
phone whoever has what they want, and start trading. The limits of one to
one barter are eliminated, as you can now trade with the people in the system
as a whole: barter is now a collective proposition.
system. It simply says that if a local economy becomes too dependent on such
trading, it becomes very vulnerable to the vagaries ofinternational trade winds,
and that too much global trading undermines community stability and
sustainability. (p. 63)
social progress. One of the rst actions of the French revolutionary assembly
was to ordain the systematic mapping of FranCe as a means to ensure equality
ofpolitical representation [though once more I note with interest that historical
sociologists, like Zerubavel (1985: 82100) prefer to concentrate their
attention on the republican calendar as a key symbol rather than cadastral
mapping]. This is such a familiar constitutional issue in the democracies of
the world (given the whole history of gerrymandering) that the intimate (and
often contested) connection between democracy and mapping is now taken
for granted. But imagine attempting to draw up an egalitarian system of
representation armed only with the Mappa Mundi! On the other hand, the
Cartesian grid also has its defects. The peculiar-looking (and now hotly
contested) shapes of constituencies that have to be drawn up for the US
congress in order to ensure adequate political representation of minority
interests is a contemporary case in point. The Jeffersonian land system, with
its repetitive mathematical grid that still dominates the landscape ofthe United
States, sought the rational partitioning ofspace so as to promote the formation
of an agrarian individualistic democracy. In practice this proved admirable for
capitalist appropriation ofand speculation in space, subverting Jetrsons aims,
but it also demonstrates how a particular denition of objective social space
facilitated the rise of a new kind of social order.
Accounts of the sort which he Goff and Landes provide illustrate how
concepts of space and time connect to capitalistic practices. Helgetson (1986)
points out, for example, the intimate connection between the ght with
dynastic privilege and the Renaissance mapping ofEngland (by Speed, Norden,
Caxton, and the others) in which the political relation between individual and
nation became hegemonic. The new means of cartographic representation
allowed individuals to see themselves in terms that were more in accord with
these new denitions of social and political relations. In the colonial period,
to take a much later example, the maps of colonial administrations had very
distinctive qualities that reected their social purposes (Stone, 1988).
Capitalism is, however, a revolutionary mode ofproduction, always restlessly
searching out new organizational forms, new technologies, new lifestyles, new
modalities of production and exploitation and, therefore, new objective social
denitions oftime and space. Periodical reorganizations of space relations and
of spatial representations have had an extraordinarily powerful effect. The
turnpikes and canals, the railways, steamships and telegraph, the radio and the
automobile, containerization, jet cargo transport, television and telecommtmi
cations, have altered space and time relations and forced new material practices
as well as new modes of representation of space. The capacity to measure and
divide time has been revolutionized, rst through the production and diffusion
of increasingly accurate time pieces and subsequently through close attention.
to the speed and coordinating mechanisms of production (automation,
robotization) and the speed of movement of goods, people, information,
The Social Construction ofSpace and Time 241
messages, and the like. The material bases of objective space and time have
become rapidly moving rather than xed datum points in human affairs.
Why this movement? Since I have explored its roots in greater detail elsewhere
(Harvey, 1982, 1989a) I simply summarize the principal argument. Time is a
vital magnitude under capitalism because social labor is the measure of value
and surplus social labor time lies at the origin of prot. Furthermore, the
turnover time of capital is signicant because speed-up (in production, in
marketing, in capital turnover) is a powerful competitive means for individual
capitalists to augment prots. In times of economic crisis and of particularly
intense competition, capitalists with a faster turnover time survive better than
their rivals, with the result that social time horizons typically shorten, intensity
of working and living tends to pick up and the pace of change accelerates. The
same occurs with the experience ofspace. The elimination ofspatial barriers and
the struggle to annihilate space by time is essential to the whole dynamic of
capital accumulation and becomes particularly acute in crises of capital
overaccumulation. The absorption ofsurpluses ofcapital (and sometimes labor)
through geographical expansion into new territories and through the construc-
tion of a completely new set of space relations has been nothing short of
remarkable. The construction and reconstruction of space relations and of the
global space economy, as Henri Lefebvre (1974) acutely observes, has been one
of the main means to permit the survival ofcapimlism into the twentieth century.
The general characteristics (as opposed to the detailed where, when and how)
of the historical geography of space and time which results are not accidental
or arbitrary, but implicit in the very laws of motion of capitalist development.
The general trend is towards an acceleration in turnover time (the worlds of
' production, exchange, consumption all tend to change faster) and a shrinking
of space horizons In popular terms, we might say that Toqers (1970) world
of future shock encounters, as it were, Marshall McLuhans (1966) global
village. Such periodic revolutions1n the objective social qualities of time and
{space are not without their contradictions. It takes, for example, long-term and
often highcost xed capital investments of slow turnover time (like computer
hardware) to speed up the turnover time of the rest, and it takes the production
fi-a specic set of space relations (like a rail network) in order to annihilate
"spjaCe by time. A revolution in temporal and spatial relations often entails,
"erefore, not only the destruction of ways of life and social practices built
bund preceding timespace systems, but the creative destruction of a wide
nge of physical assets embedded1n the landscape. The recent history of
cindustrialization1s amply illustrative of the sort of process I have1n mind.
he multiple spatiotempOtalities at work within western capitalism do not
ways cohere. If, as is the case, the temporal and spatial world of contemporary
all Street is so very different from that of the nineteenthecentury stock
hange and if both depart from that of rural France (then and now) or of
cortish crofters (then and now), then this must be understood as a particular
242 Spare, Time, and Place
X. TimeSpace Compression
Rapid changes in the objective qualities of social space and time are both
confusing and disturbing. The nervous wonderment at it all is excellently
captured in the Quarterly Review for 1839:
Supposing that our railroads, even at our present simmering rate of travelling,
were to he suddenly established all over England, the whole population of the
country would, speaking metaphorically, at once advance en matte, and place
their chairs nearer to the reside of their metropolis. As distances were thus
annihilated, the surface of our country would, as it were, shrivel in size until it
became not much bigger than one immense city. (Cited in Schivelbusch, 1978:
32).
The poet Heine likewise recorded his tremendous foreboding on the opening
of the rail link from Paris to Rouen:
What changes must now occur, in our way oflooking at things, in our notions!
Even the elementary concepts of time and space have begun to vacillate.
Space is killed by the railways. I feel as if the mountains and forests of all
countries were advancing on Paris. Even now, I can smell the German linden
trees; the North Seas breakers are rolling against my door. (Cited in
Schivelbusch, 1978: 34).
George Eliot-was so taken with such sentiments that she chose to introduce
her complex tale of shifting social relations in Britain in Felix Holt, The Radical
with an extraordinary description of changing spacetime conditions that
included the following observations:
Posterity may be shot, like a bullet through a tube, by atmospheric pressure from
Winchester to Newcastle; that is a ne result to have among our hopes; but the
slow old-fashioned way of getting from one end of the country to the other is
the better thing to have in the memory. The tubejourney can never lend much
to picture and narrative; it is as barren as an exclamatory 0! Whereas the happy
outside passenger seated on the box from the dawn to the gleaming gathered
enough stories of English life, enough of English labours in town and country,
enough aspects of earth and sky, to make episodes for a modern Odyssey.
The Social Construction ofSpace and Time 243
The German theaterdirector Johannes Birringer (1989: 12038) records a
similar sense of shock (though with a good deal more hyperbole) in a
contemporary setting. On arrival in Dallas and Houston he felt an unforseen
collapse of space, where the dispersion and decompositions of the urban body
(the physical and cultural representation of community) have reached a
hallucinatory stage. He remarks on the unavoidable fusion and confusion of
geographical realities, or the interchangeability of all places, or the disappear-
ance of visible (static) points of reference into a constant commutation of
surface images. The riddle of Houston, he concludes, is one of community:
fragmented and exploded in all direction the city impersonates a specula
tive disorder, a kind of positive unspecicity on the verge of a paradoxical
hyperbole (global power/local chaos)
_ I have called this sense of overwhelming change in spacetime dimension
' i . ality timespace compression in order to capture something of Heines sense
of foreboding and Birringers sense of collapse. The experience of it forces all
'2; V" = of us to adjust our notions of space and time and to rethink the prospects for
'Social action. This rethinking is embedded in all manner of political
, economic struggles. Failure to rethink can be the prelude to disaster. Cronon
iI-( 1991: 1058, 3187) provides us with the telling example ofJohn Burrows,
.._--a successil merchant operating out of Davenport, Iowa in the 1840s who
perfected business methods to deal with the uncertainties of trading in
{.fagricultural products, battling seasonal transportation uncertainties across the
(gs-badly organized space that stretched between St Louis to New Orleans.
7 urrows had to have the xed capital to warehouse large and often
npredictable surges of commodities as well as the cash reserves and credit
apacity to handle large surges of income and expenses. But by 1857 he is
ankrupt, a victim of the new economic regime, cast aside and left to die a
(nely and bitter old man. What drove him under was the coming of the
ailroad from the hitherto inaccessible Chicago and the new orderings ofspace
. d time thatit imposed.The opening of the Chicago 8t: Rock Island Railroad
ather bewildered me,he Wrote. The coming of the railroad changed all the
es. The differences between seasons, between night and day as well as
_' erability to the weather were radically transformed and regularity of
nection coupled with reasonably accurate timetables placed merchants in
ery different operating milieu. Merchants with very little capital or credit
uld operate out of Chicago opportunistically on low prot margins but rapid
"ital turnover. Burrows, who had much of his capital tied up in xed
estments that had stood him in good stead in the 18405 simply could not
, pete nor nd an adequate response. The timespace compression wrought
the coming of the railroad squeezed him out, but it did so in part because,
_'e new structural conditions created by the railroad and by Chicagos
CttOpolitan market were simply too alien to his familiar way of doing busi-
5" his identity as a man of affairs was so wrapped up with a certain form
244 Space, Time, and Place
the major step being taken here, technologically, is the transition, wherever
advantageous, from information transported physically, and thus against inertia
_ and friction, to information transported electrically along wires, and thus
1 effectively without resistance or delay. Add to this the ability to store information
'electromagnetically and we see yet another signicant and evolutionary step
'n- dematerializing the medium and conquering as they say space and time.
(Benedikt, 1991: 9)
"loser look at the contradictions built into these cultural and political
vements illustrates how deeply they are embedded in capitalist political
n'omy. Consider the cultural response to the recent speedup and accelerae
Ii of capital turnover time. The latter presupposes a more rapid turnover in
246 Space, Time, and Place