[ Pobierz całość w formacie PDF ]
.77Part 3SPACE3.1Thinking globalisationAs we ve begun to see, since the nineties, globalisation, a word with multiple mean-ings, has replaced  postmodernism as a master term used to name, interpret anddirect the social and technological transformations of the contemporary era.Amongits various meanings, two stand out.It refers to the colonisation of more and moreareas of life with market forces in more and more places.As such, it overlaps with neo-liberalism, since neo-liberalism names the doctrine and policies that most consciouslypromote this colonisation.It overlaps with capitalism as well, since capitalism is themode of production by which contemporary markets are supported.Globalisation,then, names the global dissemination of capitalism, especially in its more market-orientated forms.Globalisation also refers to the process by which planetary distance is being over-come.As the theory has it: a new  borderless world is appearing, freed from thetyranny of distance.At the very least this transformation means that local acts increas-ingly have consequences or objectives across a distance  which is Anthony Giddensinfluential definition of globalisation (Giddens 1990, 64).These two meanings of  globalisation seem to point in slightly different directions:one social, the other spatial, although in fact, and as will become apparent, there aremany points at which they merge.The merging of the social and the spatial means that it iseasy to over-emphasise the degree to which market forces and capitalism are extendinginto all corners of the world.In particular, it is easy from the fastness of middle class lifein the world s  metropolitan regions to forget that,for instance,much production in sub-Saharan Africa is not capitalist at all.Or that about 2 billion of the world s population are81SPACEnot on the electricity grid while 4.5 billion have no access to telecommunications.And,finally, the notion of globalisation encourages the processes it describes: Paul du Gay, forinstance, argues that the discourse of globalisation allows various kinds of authorities tointervene  to shape, normalise and instrumentalise institutions  in the name of making globalisation more manageable (du Gay 2000a, 116).SpaceAt any rate,to think through the concept of the  global is  or seems to be  to think morein terms of space than of time.This in itself is a sign of a shift in our analytic habits.Over thepast thirty or years or so (not coincidentally the time frame of contemporary globalisa-tion), thinking about space has changed.It used to be that time was the dimension grantedprimary agency by social and cultural theory.Space had little or no agency.That is to say,history changed society while geography provided the ground upon which historyworked.This way of conceiving the time space relation was a heritage of that progressivetemporality developed during the West s modernising era in which history promisedmuch.Conversely, identities and societies that had not yet entered the processes ofmodernisation (and were thus placed outside history) were defined in spatial terms.Suchsocieties were, so to say, trapped in sheer locality.But today geography has been transformed.Its object is now what Doreen Masseyhas called  the stretching of social relations over space (Massey 1994, 23), or, other-wise put, the way that the geography orders and enables (particular forms of) societyand culture.In the academy, this means that, disciplines such as sociology and anthro-pology, geography jostles for space with cultural studies.More concretely, at theintersection of cultural geography and cultural studies, the older, modernist notion of space (an abstract grid detached from the human world) is replaced by notions of place (space broken down into localities and regions as experienced, valued andconceived of by individuals and groups).(See de Certeau 1984, 91 130, for the classicdefinition of the space/place opposition.) This leads to a problem for the category ofthe  global : it cannot be experienced in the ways that, say, a town or even a countrycan be.And yet it is not an abstract grid either: it has a real presence in everyday life.Furthermore, it soon becomes obvious that articulations of space (and time) differwithin and across cultures, and articulations of space (and time) are at stake in thestruggles around how to organise and plan for the future.Indeed it becomes apparentthat space and time are not easy to pull apart.For instance, at the moment there arefew hotter political issues than whether one is for or against globalisation  and theterms of that debate make it clear that globalisation is a temporal, social and politicalconcept as well as a spatial one.They address divisions about what future society shouldbe like in the same breath that they deal with questions about how we might manage todefeat the tyranny of distance.82T HI NKI NG GL OBAL I SAT I ONA brief history of globalisationGiven globalisation s complexity, it is useful to have a sense of its history, which in partduplicates the underlying conditions of  postmodernity discussed above.Popularunderstandings of globalisation seem to regard it as a more or less continuous (ifuneven) process leading to a contemporary borderless world as its more or lessinevitable endpoint [ Pobierz całość w formacie PDF ]