The Dictionary of Human Geography

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and human/non-human connectivity reson-

ates with new ontologies with a naturalist

twist, such asactor-network theoryand

non-representational theory. ks

Suggested reading

Dyck (1990); Ha ̈gerstrand (1985).

time^space compression An increase in the

speed of social life and a diminution in the

constraining effects of distance on human ac-

tivities. Processes of this kind have a long and

varied history, but when David Harvey

(1989b) first proposed the term, his primary

purpose was to designate the product of what

Marx saw as the compulsion to ‘annihilate

space by time’ undercapitalism. Marx fam-

ously described capitalist modernity as a

world in which ‘all that is solid melts into

air’, but Harvey showed how this extraordin-

ary volatility – the accelerating rhythm of so-

cial change – is connected through the restless

expansion of capitalaccumulation to far-

reaching transformations in the structures of

an increasingly global space-economy.

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’. These are ‘processes that so revolu-

tionize 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 thus intended the con-

cept to have anexperientialdimension that is

missing from related concepts such astime-

space convergenceandtime-space distan-

ciation. He paid particular attention to the

ways in which time–space compression dis-

locates the modernhabitusthat gives social

life its precarious coherence: implicated in a

crisis of representation (‘how we represent the

world to ourselves’), the consequences of

time–space compression are supposed to be

disturbing, even threatening; time–space com-

pression is a ‘maelstrom’ and a ‘tiger’ that

induces ‘foreboding’, ‘shock’, a ‘sense of col-

lapse’ and even ‘terror’ that, at the limit, trans-

lates into a ‘crisis of identity’ (Harvey,

1989b, 1990, 1996).

Harvey was radicalizing an argument pro-

posed by the conservative critic Daniel Bell in

The cultural contradictions of capitalism(1978).

In Bell’s view, ‘physical distance’ was ‘com-

pressed’ by new systems of transportation and

communication at the turn of the nineteenth

and twentieth centuries, and what he called ‘aes-

thetic distance’ was in its turn compressed by a

corresponding stress on ‘immediacy, impact,

sensation and simultaneity’ that was characteris-

tic of the cultural formations ofmodernism.

Harvey took this account further by:

 wiring cultural crises ofrepresentationto

basal crises of capitalaccumulation(see

crisis); and

 reading the cultural formations ofpost-

modernismas symptoms of the heightened

intensity of a new round of time–space

compression produced by a regime of

flexible accumulationat the close of

the twentieth century (see Gregory, 1994,

pp. 406–14).

Harvey’s theses have been subjected to both

critique and development:

(1) Somefeministgeographers have been

sceptical of Harvey’s view of time–space

compression as threatening, and seen his

‘cartographic anxiety’ as symptomatic of a

challenge to the confidentmasculinismof

mainstream theorizing (Deutsche, 1996a)

(cf.cartographic reason).Thishasfedin

to a recognition of the multiple registers

through which time–space compression is

socially differentiated, and Massey (1993)

proposed a comprehensive grid of agency

andaffect, position and power that she

called the ‘power-geometry of time–

spacecompression’(cf.Bridge,1997).

(2) These objections intersected with alter-

native theorizations of place. Some

critics complained that the containing

metaphor of time–space compression

represented place as a bounded site

whose ‘essential identity’ is hollowed

out by the powerful forces of capitalist

globalization. To Gibson-Graham

(2006a [1996]), this scenario enacts a

‘rape- script’ that ‘normalizes an act of

non-reciprocal penetration’: all non-

capitalist forms are construed as ‘sites of

potential invasion, envelopment, accumu-

lation’,victimsawaitingtheirviolation.This

evidently militates against the very politics

that Harvey is concerned to advance

(but cf. Harvey, 1996, pp. 291–326).

Others argued that the original meta-

phor distracted attention from the pro-

duction of more open, so-called ‘global’

conceptions of place in which the intim-

ate and the impersonal, the virtual and

the corporeal, the near and the far are

Gregory / The Dictionary of Human Geography 9781405132879_4_T Final Proof page 757 31.3.2009 9:40pm Compositor Name: ARaju

TIME–SPACE COMPRESSIONTIME–SPACE COMPRESSION