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
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).
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.
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,

<3) Not limited to Harvey's work, the metaphor of collapsing space through technological
advances has been utilized by scholars of varying perspectives (for example, Brunn and
Leinbach, 1991; Castells, 1989; Dicken, 1992; McLuhan, 1964; Postman, 1985 and has been
used widely (if less critically) in the popular media.
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

<4) Swyngedouw (1992) describes a dialectically related space-technology nexus, and it must
be pointed out that he managers to conceptualize this relationship without invoking any
cliches about the shrinking globe. Although he attributes his notion of space itself as a pro-
ductive force to Lefebvre, the linkages he theorizes between space and technological change
are more closely related to Harvey's work (for example, 1982; 1989; 1990).
 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.
The incredible shrinking world? i PERSONAL S U B S C R I P T S I 535
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.
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).
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,
<u> 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.
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, h u m a n
activity and technological processes are intensively interfaced. T h e s e 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 b o r d e r 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, 1 9 9 1 ; 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.
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.
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).
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.
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).
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
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).
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
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. A n d 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 p r o d u c e s its own space. T h e r e 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 3 1 , 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. T h a t the production of a new space might necessarily
annihilate (or in Lefebvre's m o r e 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 u p o n us. T h e s e 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, 1 9 9 1 ; Smith, 1990). Unlike the metaphorical space
of the shrinking world, Lefebvre's spacewhich he calls a concrete abstraction
cannot be divorced from its materiality.

<18) In his "Afterword: the beginning of geography" in the second edition of Uneven Development
Smith (1990, pages 160-178) deals explicitly with the relations between material and meta-
phorical space. My use of the term 'dead space' is extrapolated from his discussion of spatial
metaphors. Ultimately, for Smith (page 169), "The question that confronts us ... is this: what
are the translation rules between the material and metaphorical meanings of space, and how can
we unearth them in such a way as to further the development of a spatialized politics?"
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.
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
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.
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).
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
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 engendered.
The conception of the world collapsing through technological innovation to a global
village (its urban problems notwithstanding) thus operates much like the depot's
inscription: as a metaphor which helps to create new understandings in what is, of
necessity, a changing world. The underlying irony that space can only 'collapse'
through the material spatial practices which create new spaces, is wound tightly
around such metaphors. Harvey's embrace of these terms is more critical, plugging
them into his notion of time-space compression to illustrate the impacts of global
capital on the space of everyday life. Yet here another layer of irony is added: the
icon of the shrinking world is employed to illustrate the relativity of space to the
material practices of given social formations, but it also serves to obfuscate the rela-
tive space of everyday lifeand the increasingly technical means through which
space is produced at the local scale.
The production of space has been characterized by the domination of abstract,
conceived, and technically designed spaces over those of lived experience. As
Lefebvre shows us, this process of domination works through space that is at once
homogeneous and fragmented, and ordered through relations of power. My discussion
of these spatial politics is intended to call attention to the increasingly technological
aspects of this production process, located principally in the conceived spaces of the
idea, but which can only take form as they are engineered into the space of
everyday life. The globalizing technologies through which the world has been wired
together, and those technologies through which space is produced, at the local scale,
as if it were an object, are thus essential processes which mediate the production of
space. There is little sense in a 'neo-Luddite' attack on technology, for such a
strategy wrongly implies that a break between society and technology is possible,
without fully examining the social relations which create our expanding technics.
Yet just as technologies are born of conflict and negotiation, space too can only be
produced through relations between social actors and groups. As we represent
these new worlds to ourselves, through popular metaphors, critical theory, or in the
classroom, we need to consider how technology shapes those worlds from the space
of everyday life to that of the imagination, and also, how the technics of spatializa-
tion might be shaped through more liberating geographical ideas.
The incredible shrinking world? 553

Acknowledgements. I am grateful for challenging and suggestive comments on earlier versions

of this paper from Don Mitchell, Neil Smith, Aharon Kellerman, Rob Shields, Lynn Staehelt,
and anonymous reviewers. Responsibility for the contents of the paper is mine,

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