Globalisation, Space-Time Compression and Symbolic Exchange. Part One.

What a disorientating, exhilarating image that must have been the first time it was beamed back to Earth and then put out for general consumption, not just in the western world, but everywhere where there were television sets or newspapers.

Earthrise.

Even the word has a dislocating, uncanny quality to it. Sunrise is a word, an image and an idea, which takes its place seamlessly in the framework of words, images and ideas with which we are well familiar. Sunrise; signifying the dawn of a new day, signifying the romantic contemplation of our relation to nature, signifying a precise moment in the morning, it contains a potential potency, albeit one that requires the poet or the artist to retrieve it from the anesthetising familiarity of its habitual usage. Earthrise, however, did not require the poet or the artist to exhibit it in its strangeness and singularity. It didn’t fit into any prescribed contexts of usage or practice, save from the imaginings of science fiction. Earthrise did not simply show the Earth as it had never been seen before, it showed the Earth for the first time; a whole, unsupported, sphere situated in… what? Space? Nothingness? The Solar System? Our central nervous system did not evolve to make sense of perspectives such as this. Here was visual evidence that we didn’t only inhabit London or Delhi or Mexico or China, but that we also lived on a terribly fragile looking planet, what Carl Sagan was soon to liken to a mote of dust.

And I imagine the moment when people from all over the planet first saw that image and were, momentarily, wrenched from the familiarity of the many and various worlds that they inhabited, both individually and collectively, captivated by the image of what, within a hitherto unknown way of thinking, might be considered home. Was there, in that moment, an acknowledgement, however fleeting, of the reality of the planet, of Earth and of space? And would not such an acknowledgement inevitably impel a radical relativisation of the systems of meaning in which people found themselves, be they religious, familial or nationalistic. Did this not represent a reality upon which everyone was compelled to agree?

I don’t know. Perhaps it was nothing like that. I was one at the time and so probably had different priorities. What is clear is that any force that the image once had has long since been drained away as it has taken its place in the field of images that we consume and discard in the traffic of our everyday lives. In fact, it is striking how, in the intervening period, interest in space exploration seems to have evaporated and we seem to be more entrenched than ever in the networks of meaning that constitute our various worlds, as if we were intolerant of the absolute non-functionality of this extra-terrestrial perspective on terrestrial existence.

What I find interesting about this is that the image of the Earth from space seems to represent the culmination of a process of mapping, rationalising and objectifying space that was set in motion at the start of the renaissance. This was the proof, that was no longer even required, that all of those maps really did represent an objective reality. And yet now, 40-odd years on, that proof no longer seems quite so incontrovertible and the rationalisation of space which it vindicated no longer seems quite so secure. What was dislocating about Earthrise was that it referred to an ungraspable, inconceivable reality in the face of which we could only wonder. Now, however, thanks to Google Earth, the updated version of Earthrise, the manipulable globe that shimmers on our screens is fully incorporated into the networks of meaning and significance that constitute our everyday lives. From planning holidays to zooming in on familiar places in our home-town, the Earth has been truly domesticated and assimilated into our mundane routines.

All of which raises the question of Earth and of World and the relationship between them. Is the Earth an objective reality upon which we can agree? Does the Earth take its place within the play of signifiers that constitute our world? Is our world grounded upon the Earth or is the Earth dynamised by the place it holds within our world? Can a sense of the Earth resist such assimilation?

Heidegger addressed this question in his article, The Origin of the Work of Art (1). For Heidegger the work of art provided the locus for a struggle between the antagonistic, but mutually dependant phenomena of Earth and World. In Heidegger’s account, ‘World’ is the less problematic of the two terms. World is concerned with human goals and meanings and constitutes a totality of such meanings. Put simply, it corresponds to our everyday usage of the term when we speak of the “world of work”, the “art world” or the “Islamic world”. In this sense we obviously inhabit multiple worlds all of which interpenetrate each other at various points. Importantly, such a notion, while being well understood, is not grounded upon, or dependant upon, any geographical, or objectively quantifiable idea of space. World, in this sense, is a world of significance and significations. From this point of view, we can rightly assert that the Earth exists as an object in the world, in so far as it, or at least its representation, its idea or its image, is operable within the flow of significations that constitute our world (in the worlds of astronomy, geology and climate studies for example). For Heidegger, Earth is the problematic term. While the work of art seeks to uncover a world, Van Gogh’s “A Pair of Shoes” evoke the world of the peasant who wears them, Earth is that which both provides the possibility for such an uncovering, being the material with which the painting is created, and that which resists human attempts to make it intelligible, to draw it into the web of human signification.

It is not my intention to engage with Heidegger’s terminology or use it in a way that remains faithful to his vision. It is enough, for my purposes, to point out that he is obviously not employing the term “Earth” in any of its habitual uses here. He does not mean planet or soil or anything that is immediately familiar to us and operable within the flows of human meaning. If he is not employing the term in a metaphysical sense, then it is always right on the edge of metaphysics in so far as it is that which resists assimilation into the networks of human meaning. For ‘metaphysical’, one could read ‘religious’ or ‘mystical’.

So much for Heidegger. But what do we mean when we talk about the Earth? Is it an objective reality? Does it provide the ground upon which, within which, we construct our various worlds? Is it an ungraspable something which resists our attempts to represent it and incorporate it into our worlds of significance and meaning? Or is it a perfectly functional concept which operates seamlessly within the everyday exchange of meaning? Is it possible that the reality of Earth as a body in space is achingly vast and exterior to any ideas that we might have about it? Earthrise, or Google Earth?

I don’t think this amounts to semantic quibbling. ‘Globalisation’ is a term that is exchanged freely and unproblematically. It operates seamlessly within our discourse, albeit a discourse dominated by the semantic fields of economics and global politics. Yet with what model of the globe are we operating here and what theory of space does it presuppose? If globalisation defines the new horizon within which cultural, economic and political meaning is articulated, then surely it is only natural that we should subject that horizon to some interrogation.

What is clear is that for virtually all of the natural history of human beings, there was no recourse to this idea of Earth as an objective reality. What’s more, there was no recourse to space and time as objective constants, independent of the lived reality in which people were embedded. Pre-renaissance maps of the world, such as the O-T maps of Christendom, were symbolic in nature. They didn’t presume to map an objectively existing space, but the symbolic world within which people orientated themselves. Hence the O-T maps always placed Jerusalem at their centre. The question that this raises is whether the geographically accurate mapping of space corresponded to an objective reality, or whether it represented the triumph of a culturally specific way of conceptualising the world, which proved to be a highly effective tool in the service of colonial and capitalist domination.

In the following series of postings, I want to explore the concept and phenomenon of globalisation, taking as my point of departure the rupture with the symbolic world of the middle ages and the production, at the time of the renaissance and the voyages of discovery, of universal and objective conceptions of time and space. I will then go on to consider how such conceptions are bearing up in the media saturated world of instantaneous electronic communication.

What is Social Acceleration? Part Seven: Conclusion

Capitalism, like any term is loaded. It activates a series of narratives related to Marxism, economics and politics and establishes, for many people, a prescriptive evaluation regarding what is under discussion. Of course nowadays there are plenty of people who, following the likes of Freidman, will hear the term in a broadly favourable way, but for many the term contains an implicit condemnation. This duality is a problem- it introduces a form of oppositional thinking which disfigures that which is under discussion. That’s not to say the term can be circumvented or abandoned. I think that the term captures the central dynamic of the acceleration which is taking place in our societies and in our lives. Not perfectly and not exhaustively; the narrative could be and frequently is recast in quite different terms and is both revealing and compelling. Nonetheless, I don’t think there is anything that captures the dynamic of social acceleration quite as completely as does the designation of capitalism, for all the many reasons that I have discussed in previous postings.

However the problem of evaluation remains, and it is a serious one. After a discussion on some related issue in a class recently a student who quite understandably wanted to defend some facet of the modern world, added somewhat forlornly, “but I don’t want to be a capitalist”. Who would? It hardly secretes ideological glamour (if such a thing is possible). Self-interest, aggressiveness, a dour work ethic perhaps, but not any idealistic desire to right the wrongs of the world. It is not the case that there is, on the one hand, this avaricious capitalistic system driving an acceleration of social processes and on the other, human beings caught up in, but ontologically different from, such processes. We are, rather, its agents, propagators and medium. And what that means is that claims to being in favour of, or opposed to capitalism and the social acceleration that it implies are either superficial or disingenuous. When I attended classes for my Masters in Globalisation at the University of Barcelona, some of the more ideologically committed students would frown upon those of us that drank Coca Cola in class, as if abstinence from certain totemic symbols of capitalism could exempt one from complicity in its logic. This is an obvious example, but examples abound from NGOs and aid organisations to indie rock bands and student demos. All, to varying degrees, ostensibly oppose themselves to the logic of capitalism, whilst carving out niches within its overall architecture. All of which is to say that the logic of capitalism is totalising, leaving barely any corner of our lives or thought processes untouched. Which raises the question of whether, given this totalising characteristic, it really makes sense to designate the manifold processes which are transforming our lives and our world in terms of an economic system. And if we do, does it not, at least, become important that the term resonates slightly differently, so that it does not lend itself so easily to a rather un-nuanced form of oppositional thought.

We might wish to condemn capitalism, but in so doing we will often be implicitly reinforcing a form of traditionalism. Capitalism may have brought us alienating labour practices, massive social inequality and global warming, but it has also been instrumental in the development of rights and inclusiveness for all sorts of previously marginalised or persecuted groups, all the gadgets and technologies that have come to dynamise modern life (see the posting on David Harvey for a description of his views on time-space compression) and a sense of personal autonomy and freedom from the asphyxiating effects of traditional values.

On the first of these points, exclusion of certain groups from the social mainstream also excludes them from the market. This is an intolerable barrier to capitalism, which will then seek to re-insert them within the commercial field. Consider what a boom-market the gay scene has provided since the 1960’s. On the second, there are few among the relatively affluent of the planet who would be willing to dispense with the tools, the internet foremost among them, that have enabled us to so comprehensively overcome barriers of space and time. This can be seen in many different guises from the various dynamised production networks that enable us to buy cheap Chinese imports or provide novel Christmas present ideas on Amazon to the anti-globalisation activists who are able to communicate and organise globally thanks to the space-annihilating new technologies. These processes have been greatly facilitated and accelerated by the tendency of capitalism to creatively overcome barriers to capital accumulation. The third point mentioned above also relates to overcoming barriers, but this time the very intransigent barriers of social values and customs. Here the question of evaluation is particularly problematic and shifting. What seems like an unpardonable breach of a social value today can appear in a very different light with the passing of time. Sunday opening in the UK (the overcoming of an important temporal barrier to capital accumulation) seemed like a big deal when it was first introduced. Nowadays people would probably feel their rights had been violated if they were unable to shop on a Sunday. And how are we to judge the undermining of social institutions like marriage? It could be viewed negatively, in terms of the atomisation of society, or positively in terms personal liberation from confining social conventions. Either way, in the case of this example, people are being forced to re-evaluate and often re-negotiate the ground rules for their relationships. Even if a couple goes for a church wedding followed by a nuclear family, they are well aware that, these days, that this is but one option among many. Previously such an arrangement had not been option, or if it was, it was so to a much lesser degree, and so could not really be seen in terms of a choice. However, once it becomes optional, it also becomes a choice. This phenomenon of optionality is highly subversive of social institutions and identities (see T. de Zengotita, Mediated).

The key words and phrases here seem to be ‘overcoming barriers’ and ‘dynamism’. This seems to get to the heart of the acceleration of societal processes that is taking place. Over the course of the previous postings we have seen repeated examples of systems becoming increasingly dynamic, and how the rhythm of that dynamism is accelerating. This could be seen during the introduction of the factory system, which spelled the end of the craftsman, and the introduction of specialised, repeatable tasks controlled by the rhythm of the machinery. It is clear that technological innovation has been right at the heart of social acceleration as human beings are increasingly forced to adapt to the new technologies that are foisted upon them and which, increasingly, they greedily embrace. The paradigm example was the ‘just-in-time’ production method, where speed of turnover and the tight coupling of the system are of the essence. People have to adapt to the accelerated rhythm of such a production method as best they can. Stress in the work place is not an undesired consequence of imperfect institutional organisation, it is oftentimes a virtual condition of employment. We also saw a similar dynamic at work with airline scheduling, household chores, the working day and the timetable. As people adapt to these technologies and organisational forms, they become subtly reconfigured. In the same way as you can often spot an ex military man because of his mannerisms, way of walking and talking and values, so the curious, but rarely fully committed browsing and skimming of the internet subtly reconfigures our expectations, attention span and tolerance for mental effort (see Nicholas Carr).

It’s as if we have broken free from well established conceptions of time, space and historical development to occupy instead a timeless, spaceless universe in which anything of value from any time or space is decanted into the present in order to extract that value. Such a transformations could not be achieved without some violence to existing systems, conventions or values. Hence the breaking of barriers. Collectively the relatively wealthy of the world, which almost certainly includes everyone reading this blog, are acting like the loving middle class boy who becomes a junky and quickly fritters away all of the emotional and literal capital that he had accumulated over the course of a lifetime of good behaviour, all in service of the next fix. First he drains his trust fund (literal capital) and then starts using his parent’s credit card and stealing from them (emotional capital). The paradigm illustration of this is the stock market which operates both figuratively and literally.

Some embrace this whole transformation. There are a lot of people who simply see technology as the saviour. And the religious language is no accident. The highly influential Ray Kurzweil is convinced, and argues persuasively, that the accelerated rates of technological innovation form an unbroken continuum with the development of RNA and DNA, the evolution of species and the first use of tools by humans. He predicts that the current exponential rate of transformation will result in a paradigm shift sometime around the middle of this century at which point the rate of technological change will be too fast for human beings to cope with from within their existing conceptual paradigms. Technological enthusiasts and futurists of this sort would advocate riding the wave of technological change. It’s heady stuff, although I can’t help being struck by the strong parallel with Christianity and wonder whether it is not an unconscious attempt to redeem religion. Arguments of this sort tend also to be strikingly uncritical and fail to satisfactorily locate technology within a broader social context.

At the other end of the spectrum we find Baudrillard who would have no argument with the idea that society is undergoing a rapid acceleration, though he would see this in terms of the production and consumption of signs. Having replaced the physical commodity as the source of value in society, all manner of signs and symbols are manipulated towards the end of extracting value. This can be clearly seen with companies like Nike which produce nothing. The production of their sportswear is subcontracted to hidden-away sweat-shops in China where the workers can be exploited in 19^th century European factory conditions. The brand, however, is everything and that’s where the money goes and that’s where the value is generated. His vision is ultimately pessimistic in that he senses an extreme desperation in the extraction and utilisation of all types of value, wherever they might be found. For Baudrillard this is what explains palaeontology, archaeology and history. This is not exclusively capitalistic, but part of a social imperative for symbolic meaning which has been largely forgotten and obscured in the West, though it remains alive and well in the Muslim world.

Broadly speaking I am sympathetic towards Baudrillard’s approach, especially the direction in which he took Marxist thought, and in subsequent postings I would like to explore some of the areas that this blog is dedicated to, in the light of Baudrillard’s emphasis on symbolic value. However, with respect to evaluating the social acceleration that I set out to define with this series of postings, I think that before any sort of evaluation can be proffered the multi-faceted phenomena that I have tried to capture with this term must be recognised. That is difficult because we tend only to see what is in front of our noses. We don’t really see the historical processes which we are caught up in, we don’t recognise the degree to which the planet is interconnected and networked and we treat with an apathetic shrug the extraordinary transformations that are being wrought on the planet and on our species. Evaluation tends to be a way of fore-stalling further thought about any of these matters.

Introduction to Social Acceleration Blog

The purpose of this blog is to provide a forum in which to explore the phenomena of social acceleration, technological change, globalisation and effects of all these upon cultural and personal identity.

Given how slippery all of these terms are, I’m aware that such a bold introduction effectively says very little. So what am I interested in?

Firstly, following Marshall McLuhan, I’m interested in the way that human beings are shaped by the technologies that they use. That is to say that as well as fashioning the tools that they use, humans have, in equal measure, been fashioned by their tools and thus by technology generally. Of course, to some extent all this depends upon what you define as a technology. A convincing argument can be made that written language is a technology, and I’m interested in the development and use of writing and the transformative effects of literacy on oral cultures whether through its initial appearance within ancient Greek culture or its imposition as a consequence of colonialism. (Ong, W. 2002; McLuhan, M. 1997; Goody, J. and Watt, I. 1963).

While the issue of orality and literacy is one that remains alive and crucially important in understanding current technological changes, I think that it is the introduction and dissemination of print in the 15^th century which can show us most clearly the role that media plays generally in shaping our consciousness (McLuhan, M. 1997).

Whilst there is clearly an empirical distinction between the technologies we use and ourselves as bodies occupying space, the effect of these technologies is clearly to transform the social body and, in spite of what neo-liberal politicians would have us believe, the individual is an instance of the social body. For proof one need look no further than the social nature of language.

Consider some of the effects of the development of print technology in Europe.

Suddenly the ideas of the Romans and the Greeks, which had, hitherto, been contained within monasteries, became readily available to an increasingly literate population. People started to bemoan the relative backwardness of their society in comparison with that of the ancients, who were, to make matters worse, pagans. Ideas spread far and wide and became consolidated, now that they could be contained in an objective format (the book) and not simply in the body of the one who knows. A cannon of knowledge appeared and being learned meant internalising a proportion of this cannon, and synthesizing it into some sort of world-view, which then came to define who you were. In relation to this 'body of knowledge' (an interesting metaphor when you contrast it with the literal body of the knower which is the receptacle of knowledge in oral cultures) notions such as civilisation, and progress started to gain currency, defined principally in relation to one's literacy and learning. We are impressed by the capacity of the Internet to provide an external database of knowledge- but it was print that acculturated us to this externality. The rupture of authoritative canons of knowledge brought about by the Internet may actually put an end to the possibility of consensus as knowledge is disseminated via increasingly introspective and self-serving networks (Castells, M. 2004).

The development of print was, of course, just one of a plethora of synergistic transformations that were taking place during the Renaissance, laying the foundations for such modern phenomena as capitalism, colonialism, science and eventually electronic communications all of which have had a decisive role to play in shaping the particular form of globalisation that has subsequently emerged.

It is the latter, electronic communication, which has dominated the reconfiguration of the social body, and the shift in its metabolism over the last 100 years or so and I am interested in exploring the nature and ramifications of that reconfiguration. Authors who I have found particularly insightful in this include Manuel Castells, David Harvey, Thomas de Zengotita among many others. It is in order to try and capture that sense of a shift in social metabolism that I have borrowed Hartmut Rosa’s term ‘social acceleration’.

We have instantaneous access to an extraordinary quantity of information presented not only in text, but also in just about any medium imaginable from anywhere in the world. News, music, film, art, science, friendships, porn, clubs, the hotel situation in the town you're thinking of visiting in Florence at Easter, the price of second had garden gnomes on Ebay. You name it and it's instantaneously available as are all the people you know and, with Facebook, all the people you have ever known.

All of which is not a bad thing, but is it any wonder that people have difficulty finding the time- hence acceleration as our restless minds, grown accustomed to saturation, demand increasing stimulation. And this stimulation is increasingly external (to the extent that it does not form a part of what we consider to be an integrated part of ourselves- like our having read Dickens would be, for example). We are increasingly dependent upon external stimuli that can offer instant gratification and this is positively encouraged by an economic system which, in order to guarantee growth must either expand the market (through globalisation or innovation for example) or accelerate our rates of consumption (built in obsolescence, disposable everythings and channel surfing). Hence we enter an accelerating feedback loop in which an economic system which seeks to maximize turnover in order to guarantee growth offers us an ever increasing array of options designed to provide us with instantaneous (but definitely not permanent) gratification and we, like the fools we are, seize upon these passing goodies (be they the latest ipad, must-have trainers or reality TV show) as a temporary relief from a much more settled and deeply-rooted sense of dissatisfaction.

I found David Harvey’s The Condition of Postmodernity (Harvey, D. 1990) particularly useful in thinking about these issues and became interested in the Marxist analysis of capital through his online series of lectures (Harvey’s not Marx’s) Reading Marx’s Capital. Whilst I remain wary of economic reductionism, I do believe that neither social acceleration nor globalisation can be understood without reference to the unconstrained capital accumulation that was first theorised by Marx.

As a counterpoint to the reductive tendencies of Marxist analysis, I find Baudrillard consistently interesting and provocative and have been particularly influenced by his capacity to develop a analytical approach which is revealing of phenomenological aspects of our media saturated lives and managing to avoid getting bogged down in theory (Baudrillard, J. 2008).

As well as exploring the areas that I have outlined above, I would like to use this blog as a resource for articles and links as well as a forum for discussing these themes.

Baudrillard, J. 2008, Simulacra and Simulation, University of Michigan Press

Castells, M. 2004, The Power of Identity, Blackwell Publishing

Goody, J. Watt, I. 1963, The Consequences of Literacy, Comparative Studies in Society and History, Vol. 5, No. 3

Harvey, D. 1990, The Condition of Postmodernity, Blackwell Publishers Ltd

McLuhan, M. 1962, The Guttenberg Galaxy, University of Toronto Press

Ong, W. 2000, Orality and Literacy, New Accents