Global Spaces, Forgotten Places

In the months I spent in the Bay Area, I became intimately aware of its status as a Global Space. Activism focuses on issues a hemisphere away, the research at Berkeley is bent towards uniquely global problems, and economic production is geared towards producing and facilitating the production of global commodities. In the age of globalization, capitalism and modernity articulate as tightly as ever and work to produce the phenomena called globality. The markers of globality are the dominance of linear (as opposed to cyclical) time, identities produced and sustained through the values of capital, and the spatial resonance and destruction of distance between geographically distant global spaces, found mostly in the cities of the world. One can think of so-called global banks, the practices of Washington Mutual in Berkeley, CA are the same as the practices of Washington Mutual in Birmingham, AL in spite of the starkly different socionatural contexts. Both are global spaces, and fit together in the phenomena of globality, spaces sterilized from the particularities of place and conforming to a set of global practices which seemingly float, rootless in the global milieu.

In contrast to global spaces are forgotten places. Forgotten places, while still subjected to the linear time of capital, are primarily defined by cyclical time. The difference between cyclical time and linear time is that linear time seeks ever increasing production - to add to an ever increasing bottom line, while cyclical time merely seeks reproduction - to survive in a global world in which it is forgotten. Forgotten places still have culture, religion, and cultural/racial prejudice, in a phrase, forgotten places have true difference, sometimes manifest in a repressive way. However, these other than capital value practices are more pronounced if merely as a result of being forgotten. Quite simply, forgotten places, which are often poor, are rooted in the socionatural and sociohistorical context, but struggle to maintain or develop identities which can be recognized and validated by capital and its nation-state/global-facilitators. Forgotten places can be found in urban areas (sections of Oakland, CA) or rural areas (The Black Belt; Appalachia), and generally are spaces of marginalization, poverty, drug abuse, crime, and generally malaise.

In my next post, I will explore more deeply the types of subjectivities produced in global spaces and forgotten places and explore why certain identities are incompatible with the subjectivities produced by each.