Research On The Theory Of ’Space-time Compression’ Of David Harvey

The progress and innovation of human civilization are interwoven in the dimension of space and time.With the development of transportation and communication technology,people generally have a very different experience about social time and space than before,and more and more scholars are keen to explore space-time problems.As one of the important representatives of new Marxism in contemporary western geography,Harvey discusses the root of the transformation of western capitalist culture from modern to post-modern from the transformation of capitalist accumulation system in the late 20th century,and points out that the cultural expression caused by this change is that people experience the change of space and time mode,that is,the new round of‘space-time compression’.In the course of the analysis of the‘space-time compression’,Harvey not only starts from the economic,political,cultural and social situation of the late capitalism,but also draws on the Social space-time view of Marxism and the Production theory of space of Lefebvre.First,Harvey analyzes the‘creative destruction’ and the revolutionary quality of time and space embodied in the capitalist production.Secondly,He points out that the transformation of capitalist mode of production has fundamentally led to the transformation of capitalist culture from modern to post-modern.Then he criticizes postmodernism from the cultural dimension,and analyzes the realistic performance of postmodernism,which leads to a substitution of aesthetics to ethics,a domination of fleeting images on narration,and the self-loss in the process of homogenization because of the need for material desire.In essence,the change of experience mode is a new round of ’space-time compression’.Finally,based on the criticism of the New left on the ’various Social processes of Transformation under the rapids of Postmodernism’,he constructs History and Geographical Materialism from the dimension of time and space,and advocates the Dialectical view of time and space,that is,through the exploration the existence and generation of space,the dialectical combination of time utopia and space utopia to realize the desired space.The ’space-time compression’ theory of Harvey not only studies the theory of Marx’s capital and the spatial dimension of the post-modernism culture,but also creates a new way of reading the History-Geographic materialism.But he neglects that historical materialism itself has a certain spatial connotation,and the analysis of the realistic response to ’space-time compression’ is not comprehensive so that it is difficult to put forward a practical alternative to capitalist society.It is of great significance for us to correctly grasp the analysis of ’space-time compression’ of Harvey to fully understand the capitalist logic in the Wave of Globalization and the realistic problems of the in modern society.