Uneven Development: Nature, Capital, and the Production of Space

Afterword to the Second Edition

213 Afterword to the Second Edition The Beginning of Geography I. Deep Space and Satanic Geographies In his history of the “discovery” of geological time, Stephen Jay Gould refers to James Hutton’s famous conclusion—“no vestige of a beginning , no prospect of an end”—as the most significant single announcement of what he calls, in John McPhee’s ponderous phrase, “deep time.” Whereas, in the seventeenth century, discovered time stretched a mere six thousand years into the past, by the beginning of the nineteenth century a scientific consciousness of time stretched millions of years. “Deep time is so alien,” Gould tells us, “that we can really only comprehend it as a metaphor.” He recounts the metaphor of the “geographical mile” in which human history occupies only the last few inches; a Swedish portrayal of geological time as the trace of a pet snail set down at the South 214 Afterword to the Second Edition Pole during the Cambrian and permitted to proceed toward Malmö; and McPhee’s own metaphor whereby the earth’s history can be measured as the old English yard, namely the distance from the king’s nose to the tip of his outstretched hand, and where all of human history can be erased by a single stroke of a nail file across the end of the royal middle finger.1 By “visualizing time as geography,” space becomes the metaphorical bearer of time’s meaning. It is likewise with the most abstract depiction of time, the clock; time is rendered measurable and given meaning via the spatial arrangement of the clock’s hands. The twentieth century has ushered in the discovery of deep space, or at least its social construction, and yet it is only as the century draws to a close that this fundamental discovery is becoming apparent. By deep space I do not mean simply the sheer immensity of absolute space, the physical extent of the near-infinite universe as measured (appropriately) in light years. That conception of space is owed most clearly to Newton , and is explored, defined, and refined by physics and astronomy, space science and cosmology. Rather I refer to the relativity of terrestrial space, the space of everyday life in all its scales from the global to the local and the architectural in which, to use Doreen Massey’s metaphor, different layers of life and social landscape are sedimented onto and into each other.2 Deep space is quintessentially social space; it is physical extent fused through with social intent, Henri Lefevbre’s “production of space” in its richest sense. In the emerging spatial language of social theory, geographical time is more aptly a metaphor expressing the fluid meanings of space than vice versa. Deep space and its production are crushingly real. As a means to ground a later conceptual discussion, I would like to discuss two events from the 1980s that give some sense of the meaning and immediacy of “deep space.” First, the question of economic crisis. Speaking a year prior to the October 1987 stock market crash, even as the Reagan administration continued to hail the economic boom of the mid-1980s, one banker portrayed the potentially profound consequences of the looming financial crash as a kind of geographical holocaust. With banks Afterword to the Second Edition 215 “overexposed,” everyone holding excessive volumes of bad debt, and the gap between real and paper value growing ever more cavernous, Thomas S. Johnson, President of New York’s Chemical Bank, anticipated an imminent maelstrom: “There is the possibility of a nightmarish domino effect,” he predicted gravely, “as every creditor ransacks the globe attempting to locate his collateral.”3 That such a global rampage did not unfold a year later, and that the financial system effectively held as a containment vessel for the “financial meltdown” (as it was called by John Phelan, President of the New York Stock Exchange) does not mean that such a scenario is impossible or even unlikely. More than his recognition of the crisis at the economic core of global capitalism, our banker’s haunting nightmare recognizes the fundamentally spatial construction of global capital and the geographical destruction that will be wrought in efforts to “solve” the crisis, at least under the present economic rules of private property. The globe is to be ransacked by inexorable economic forces just because the books on Wall Street cease to add up; the...