Emily Gettis
GEOG390: Professor Simpson
Response 2
9.9.20
For Schivelbusch, Railroad Space and Railroad Time describes a collapse of space and time initiated by the powerful, rapid, and—relative to prior transportation—industrial technologies of the railroad. This reduction both creates and destroys space; places once deemed 'far away' are now accessible, while the journey (and therefore landscape) is lost. I believe that Patel and Moore's perspective of cheapness could be applied here, as Schivelbusch associates the ease and quickness of arriving at a once distant place with a loss of local power (aura) associated with their market products. The manmade construct of time also shifts; the railroad holds so much power that entire nations alter time agreements to accommodate the railroad. This altering of time agreements impacts the passage of time as well. As previously stated, passengers who arrive at places with ease tend not to appreciate the journey (landscapes, and in this context, the countryside). In connection with our last class, the railroad deeply impacted cultural perspectives and engagement with the environment. As Marx points out, there is no escaping the ideologies created by a mode of production. In turn, society became removed from an environment's local product, which successively weakens the focus and the condition of workers who made that product. This scale manifests through capital, the emerging stratification between social groups, and those marginalized groups who are routinely exploited in the making of products.
In the Power-Geometry and a Progressive Sense of Place essay, Massey urges us to consider these globalized connections from a different scale: one that accounts for social stratification (opposed to sweeping generalizations) and is not ethnocentric. As I understand this essay, when we evaluate globalization's impacts from our own population's cultural standards, we engage in minimizing other people's experiences and, therefore, time and space. In learning about geography and the many histories of geography, interpreting the social relations that occur amid a landscape speaks the loudest and most accurately about the impacts on an environment. Clearly, those dominant forces reverberate structurally, physically, and historically in a feedback loop. I found Massey's essay to be a powerful example of our discussion last week on Gramsci's varying intellectuals while she critiqued the discipline and called to shift perspectives concerning space and sense of place. I wonder if her counsel and thoughtful examinations of time and space in this essay transported the discipline into a new school of thought.
Hi Emily, Massey's writing absolutely has had a huge impact on cultural geography/critical geography. And she continues to develop theories of space and spatial analysis. I highly recommend her book, For Space, if you are interested in the issues/questions she raises.
ReplyDeleteYou do a great job here connecting Shcivelbusch to Patel and Moore and Marx. It is precisely the "mode of production" by which one travels by train that now creates a different relationship to the environment. Riding in the train, the landscape becomes "Scenery"/objectified as beautiful and a resource for "recovery" from urban ills, rather than something that is experienced or known in a direct way. It is a great example of how we can understand how capital and production of space creates ideas and representations of that space.