Between Space and Time: Reflections on the Geographical Imagination¹

TLDR

Space and time are socially constructed yet function as objective facts that shape social reproduction, and their conceptions are contested within social change, whether imposed externally or generated internally. The study investigates how the mode of production and its social relations underlie the social construction of space and time concepts. By analyzing historical geography, the authors trace how capitalist revolutions accelerate time, annihilate space, and influence culture, politics, aesthetics, and geography. Capitalist revolutions, driven by technological change and rapid growth, have triggered powerful shifts in social conceptions of space and time.

Abstract

Abstract Although concepts of space and time are socially constructed, they operate with the full force of objective fact and play a key role in processes of social reproduction. Conceptions of space and time are inevitably, therefore, contested as part and parcel of processes of social change, no matter whether that change is superimposed from without (as in imperialist domination) or generated from within (as in the conflict between environmentalist and economic standards of decision making). A study of the historical geography of concepts of space and time suggests that the roots of the social construction of these concepts lie in the mode of production and its characteristic social relations. In particular, the revolutionary qualities of a capitalistic mode of production, marked by strong currents of technological change and rapid economic growth and development, have been associated with powerful revolutions in the social conceptions of space and time. The implications of these revolutions, implying as they do the “annihilation of space by time'’and the general speed-up and acceleration of turnover time of capital, are traced in the fields of culture and politics, aesthetic theory and, finally, brought home within the discipline of geography as both a problem and a stimulus for rethinking the role of the geographical imagination in contemporary social life.