Monday, May 30, 2005

Space, time and interconnection bits:

the indivisibility of cause and effect

interpenetration of opposites

dynamic simultaneity

synchronicity

the compression of time and space, time dilation

"Capital by its nature drives beyond every spatial barrier. Thus the creation of the physical conditions of exchange -- of the means of communication and transport -- the annihilation of space by time -- becomes an extraordinary necessity for it." (Marx, Grundrisse)

'For Massey, "space-time" is a "configuration of social relations within which the specifically spatial may be conceived of as an inherently dynamic simultaneity."'
(Drew Whitelegg, "The Big Squeeze: The Time and Space of Flight Attendants Since 9/11", citing Doreen Massey's 1994 Space, Place and Gender.

Network as an expression of juxtaposition and simultaneity, as counterposed to linear and temporal. Found on the Internet: "We are at a moment ... when our experience of the world is less that of a long life developing through time than that of a network that connects points and intersects with its own skein" (Foucault, 1986; found in "How Space got its groove back: Geography and poststructuralism", lecture notes by Deborah Thien, University of Edinburgh).

Social relations as the interconnections within the social network. Some asymmetrical ones, in terms of social power: Property-propertyless, boss-worker, man-woman, white-black, urban-rural, etc. (Links have a direction property)

"This 'perceptual revolution' was the result of the fracturing of perspective into multiple viewing points in the early years of the 20th century. It creates a "new perceptual field" that is "'multiperspectival and environmental'" (Lowe 14) and where linear perspective comes to be replaced by the disorientation of navigation in simulated and multidimensional space. It creates a new way of looking appropriate to the speed, shape and space of the network as it exists in the instantaneousness of now time. By uniting space and time within the framework of vision, it also takes the onus off the 'female' as the guilty chaotic element within a binary, devalued (by the patriarchy) spatial system. And, in fact, rather than privileging the temporal aspects of the system, Doreen Massey argues that time is an emergent property of a network's spatial dimensions (268)." (from Quantum Feminist Mnemotechnics: The Archival Text, Digital Narrative and the Limits of Memory by Carolyn G. Guertin, University of Toronto; emphases mine)

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