The Condition of Postmodernity 13 - autonomous learning

258 The experience of space and timethe production of new but equally oppressive geographical systemsfor the containerization of power (as in the United States).5 This leads us back to the most serious dilemma of all: the factthat space can be conquered only through the production of space.The specific spaces of transport and communications, of humansettlement and occupancy, all legitimized under some legal system ofrights to spaces (of the body, of land, of home, etc.) which guaranteessecurity of place and access to the members of society, form a fixedframe within which the dynamics of a social process must unfold.When placed in the context of capital accumulation this fixity ofspatial organization becomes heightened into an absolute contradiction.The effect is to unleash capitalism's powers of 'creativedestruction' upon the geographical landscape, sparking violent movementsof opposition from all kinds of quarters.This last point is sufficiently important to warrant generalization.Not only does it take the production of a specific, fixed, and immovablespace to pursue the 'annihilation of space through time,' but italso takes long-term investments of slow turnover time (automatedplants, robots, etc.) in order to accelerate the turnover time of themass of capitals. How capitalism confronts and periodically succumbsto this nexus of contradictions is one of the major untold stories inthe historical geography of capitalism. Time-space compression is asign of the intensity of forces at work at this exus of contraicti nand it may well be that crises of overaccumulauon as well as cnses Incultural and political forms are powerfully connected to such forces.Enlightenment thinkers sought a better society. In so doing theyhad to pay attention to the rational ordering of space and time as. prerequisites to the construction of a society that would guaranteeindividual liberties and human welfare. The project meant the reconstructionof the spaces of power in radically new terms, but it provedimpossible to specify exactly what those terms might be. State,communitarian, and individualistic ideas were associated with differentspatial landscapes, just as differential command over time posedcrucial problems of class relations, of the rights to the fruits of one'slabour, and of capital accumulation. Yet all Enlightenment projectshad in common a relatively unified common-sense of what space andtime were about and why their rational ordering was important. Thiscommon basis in part depended on the popular availability of watchesand clocks, and on the capacity to diffuse cartographic knowledge bycheaper and more efficient printing techniques. But it also restedupon the link between Renaissance perspectivism and a conceptionTime and space of the Enlightenment project 259of the individual as the ultimate source and container of socialpower, albeit assimilated within the nation state as a collective ystemof authority. The economic conditions of the European EnlIghtenmentcontributed in no uncertain measure to the sense of commonobjectives. Increased competition between states and other economicunits created pressure to rationalize and co-ordinate the space andtime of economic activity, be it within a national space of transportand communications, of administration and military organization, orthe more localized spaces of private estates and municipalities. Alleconomic units were caught up in a world of increasing competitionin which the stakes were ultimately economic success (measured inthe bullion so dear to the mercantilists, or by the accumulation ofindividualized money, wealth, and power as lauded by the liberals).The practical rationalization of space and time throughout the eighteenthcentury - a progress marked by the rise of the OrdnanceSurvey or of systematic cadastral mapping in France at the end of theeighteenth century - formed the context in which Enlightenmentthinkers formulated their projects. And it was against this conceptionthat the second great turn of modernism after 1848 revolted.