Space rules developmentalist thinking. Analyses of economic development and underdevelopment in the social sciences presuppose the category of space. In fact, they seem to invariably take the rule and measurement of space, employing spatial scales and geographical tropes in order to grasp and to explain the processes of economic change and development. Neil Smith’s study on uneven development is exemplary on this regard, positing global capital as something ultimately reducible to what he calls a “space-economy,” in which “uneven development” is defined as nothing more than the “geographical expression of the contradictions of capital.”[1] In world-system’s theory—from Samir Amin, Giovanni Arrighi, Andre Gunder Frank to Immanuel Wallerstein—center and periphery models are presented as heuristic spatial frameworks by which to understand the dynamic infrastructural relations undergirding the production of inequality and underdevelopment on a global scale.[2] Simply put, space rules social science inquiry insofar as spatial units and scales become the primary ruler of measurement. Theories of uneven development in the social sciences therefore tend to think about the problem of development in terms of geography and its effects on lived space and natural and built environments. Arguably, their thoroughgoing analyses of space produce what I wish to call a kind of geographical, spatial realism in understanding social and economic processes. The point is obviously not to discount the important work and insights of spatial analysis, but to critically account for the privileging of space, that is, to ask: Why space, and consequently, not (also) time? We can outline at least three overlapping arguments—phenomenological, materialist, and historical interpretations—that give primacy to the rule of space over time.
Phenomenological arguments about the rule of space imbue space with an empirical, objective value. Because of the bare fact that all material things appear in space, an entity that is present has spatial form, whose magnitude or extendedness is measurable and calculable. Unlike time, space enables, prima facie, the tactility of objects. By virtue of being in space, objects are given a place, a location, and thereby become perceptible as tangible, sensuous things. An object’s form in space acquires a certain physicality, whose physics conform to the mechanical laws of natural causality, and therefore amenable to the method of scientific experimentation and verification. The measurement of an object’s dimensions and movements in space can then be drawn along Euclidean geometrical grid, and assessed by the laws of Newtonian physics. The explanatory power accorded to space thus lies in its ostensible capacity to provide “real-world” observations of natural phenomena that can then be submitted to verification and elevated to the status of scientific facticity. This is why forms of knowledge and methods of research that intend towards concrete, empirical objectivity prioritize space.
Yet, in the demand for empirical facticity, they risk assuming an unquestioned positivist notion of what Henri Lefevbre calls “abstract space,” a logico-mathematical construction understood as that which is something already “there,” an empty container ready to be filled with physical matter.[3] The methodological positivism of economic geography filled this plane of abstract space with “geographical space,” even as it tried to account for the social dimension of space. Neil Smith explains it the following way: “geographical space is manifestly physical; it is the physical space of cities, fields, roads hurricanes, and factories. Natural space, in the sense of inherited absolute space, is no longer synonymous with physical space in that physical space can be social in definition. This distinction emerges in the discussion of geographical space because geographers have to deal with physical space in general and not just natural space of first nature. With their objects of study located squarely within social space, most social sciences could abstract from physical space, incorporating it into analysis only as an occasional external given.”[4] The crucial point here is that while distinctions were being made in the early analytical treatments of economic geography between natural, physical, and social spaces, the “concreteness” or “objectivity” of space (either in nature or social space) was nonetheless presupposed in the geographical imaginary as the necessary and fundamental point of departure for any work of theoretical abstraction or generalization. One always started with the “givenness” of space in order to abstract from it. This kind of methodological positivism in the study of economic geography as it pertained to uneven development in the Third World had the consequence of viewing these spaces as sites “lacking” and therefore in need of development. This lack was generally registered as the lack of heavy industry, adequate food production, and technology in agriculture, etc. Underdevelopment became a spatial sign, which indexed a (negative) lack requiring (positive) development. Under this narrow phenomenological, positivist understanding of space, the world, as Timothy Mitchell suggests, was conceptualized as “a limited totality, something that form[ed] a bounded structure or system.”[5] With the idea of the global space as a bounded entity possessing limited natural resources, poverty on a world scale was seen as a brute fact of nature. It is important to note that development studies became a distinct field in the social sciences during the period of decolonization, when economists from the First World saw political independence as an opportunity for rapid economic development and industrialization. The problem of economic underdevelopment, then, became a problem of preparing and transforming regions in this bounded totality of global space for capitalist development and industrialization.
Materialist arguments about space view it as necessarily tied to the processes by which space is produced as social space. On this view, the natural world of objects forms a necessary component to the sphere of human activity. In Marx, as we know, this was understood as the fundamental metabolic relationship between man and nature, in which the latter was the means of life, the raw materials for the activity of human labor. “Man,” therefore, “is a natural being…[who] with natural powers…is an active natural being…[T]he objects of his instincts exist outside him, as objects independent of him; yet these objects are objects that he needs – essential objects, indispensable to the manifestation and confirmation of his essential powers. To say that man is a corporeal, living, real, sensuous, objective being full of natural vigour is to say that he has real, sensuous objects as the object of his being or of his life, or that he can only express his life in real, sensuous objects.”[6] This materialist understanding of natural space as objective ground of human livability and sensuous activity, i.e. labor, acknowledges that all that is external to man has its own independent objectivity, but which becomes reintegrated and metabolized in the self-objectifying activity of human labor. Objectivity is thus the confirmation, on the one hand, of man’s irreducible finitude as a heteronomous, corporeal being and, on the other, of man’s active power over and against this determinate, objective sphere of nature by altering the external world of objects for its own ends through purposive activity. The coextensity between human activity and the world of natural objects defines the boundaries of social space as such.[7] In other words, space is a necessary and active component of social reproduction; or, as Lefebvre puts it, “(Social) space is a (social) product.”[8] One can therefore say that the development of man (Entwicklung), in the sense of the cultivation, enlargement, and actualization of human potential and capacities, requires the appropriation of nature and, more generally, space, which is enabled by the causal powers of labor as purposive activity.[9] Harvey follows this Marxian materialist understanding of space as fundamentally social in order to account for the ways in which capitalist accumulation creates not only spaces, but also different forms of spatiality. What Harvey emphasizes is that uneven development reflects “the different ways in which different social groups have materially embedded their modes of sociality into the web of life, understood as an evolving socio-ecological system.”[10] In Harvey’s account, uneven development is fundamentally a spatial complex, rooted in the differential integration and material embedding of individuals and social groups into what he calls the “web of life.” Viewed as “the product of processes whereby we make ourselves and our world through transformative activities,”[11] uneven geographical development and the contradictions of capital accumulation, circulation, and surplus value extraction which are its objective expressions, are explained with reference to the processes of social reproduction and the social organization of space.
There are historical arguments that explain the supremacy of space over time, which complement the materialist understanding of space and the positivist affirmation of its empirical and objective value. Lefebvre, for instance, argues that with “the advent of modernity time has vanished from social space. It is recorded solely on measuring-instruments, on clocks, that are as isolated and functionally specialized as this time itself. Lived time loses its form and its social interest — with the exception, that is, of time spent working. Economic space subordinates time to itself; political space expels it as threatening and dangerous (to power). The primacy of the economic and above all of the political implies the supremacy of space over time.”[12] In Lefebvre’s account, modernity has vanquished time, made temporality intelligible only through its instruments of measurements and calculations. We can therefore say that modernity masters time insofar as it is able to measure and visualize time’s passing as an infinite succession. Simply put, modernity masters time insofar as it is able to spatialize it. This spatialization of time under modernity has the consequence of subsuming time into capital, in which the social interests of lived time, as Lefebvre notes, become exclusively codified in terms of the hours spent working—time in and for capital. The instrumentalization of time under capitalist modernization, then, means the losing-form of time. The historical progression and development of modernity seems therefore to be the story of time’s gradual recession into space, or, what is the same thing, the thoroughgoing spatialization of time and temporality. The experience colonization points to the violence of this spatialization of time. Time was spatialized under coloniality to the extent that it furnished an image of universal historical progress that hierarchically organized the world into modern and pre-modern forms of worldhood. Colonialism was viewed as bringing civilizational progress on to these so-called pre-modern regions of the world. Contemporary practices of capitalist development and modernization inherit and extend this colonialist logic of universal progress.
Taken together, the phenomenological (positivist), materialist (Marxian), and historical (historicist) arguments about the rule of space over time have exclusively defined development and underdevelopment as primarily a spatial phenomena, graspable only through an analysis of space and spatiality. What remains an important task for us is to think about what happens to time under all of this, and how a temporal framework may provide new ways of comprehending the problem of development.
— P.N.
Image: Fx Harsono, Pagar Tripleks Dan Hutan Kita (Plywood Fence and Our Forest), installation at Parang Tritis Beach, Yogyakarta, 1982.
[1] See Neil Smith, Uneven Development: Nature, Capital, and the Production of Space. (Athens: The University of Georgia Press, 2008 [1984]), p. 202.
[2] See Samir Amin “Unequal Development: An Essay on the Social Formations of Peripheral Capitalism” (New York: Monthly Review Press, 1976), et al.
[3] See Henri Lefebvere, The Production of Space. (Malden and Oxford: Blackwell Publishing, 1991), pp. 49-50. Hence he begins as follows, “Not so many years ago, the word ‘space’ had a strictly geometrical meaning: the idea it evoked was simply that of an empty area. In scholarly use it was generally accompanied by some such epithet as ‘Euclidean’, ‘isotropic’, or ‘infinite’, and the general feeling was that the concept of space was ultimately a mathematical one. To speak of ‘social space’, therefore, would have sounded strange” (p. 1).
[4] Smith, Uneven Development, p. 104.
[5] For a critique of this conceptual determination of the world as a bounded totality, in which the political territorialization of space became a precondition for colonization and, later, development, see Timothy Mitchell, Colonising Egypt (Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California, 1988, 1991), p. 22.
[6] Karl Marx, ” Economic and Philosophical Manuscripts,” in Early Writings, trans. Gregor Benton Rodney Livingstone (London, New York: Penguin Books, 1975, 1992), p. 389, emphasis mine.
[7] This is how the “production of life,” as Marx writes, “now appears as a double relationship: on the one hand as a natural, on the other as a social relationship,” in which sociality means “the co-operation of several individuals, no matter under what conditions, in what manner and to what end.” See Marx, The German Ideology (New York: International Publishers Co., 1947, 1996), p. 50, my emphasis.
[8] Lefebvre, The Production of Space, p. 26.
[9] Human labor is a causality fundamentally different from the causal laws of nature in the sense that it is purposive, which contrasts to the immutable and mechanical causality of nature.
[10] Harvey, Spaces of Global Capitalism: Towards a Theory of Uneven Geographical Development (London and New York: Verso, 2006), p. 77.
[11] Ibid., p. 86.
[12] Lefebvre, The Production of Space, 95.
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