Ping Pong 18: The Twisting of Space and Time
In last week’s Rant I considered exactly what it was in the ideas of Adam Smith that was so effective. In this week’s Rant I will develop a slightly different angle, and look at how two of his ideas, namely the Division of Labour and the Free Market have created endless complexities and complications for modernity. While in next week’s Rant I will look at one last aspect of Adam Smith’s work, namely the trauma and hypocrisy that allowed ‘free markets’ to be at all.
Adam’s Smith’s starting point was a very simple one. It was that human labour is at its most productive when it is broken down into a large number of different tasks. His example is how in a pin workshop the number of pins produced greatly increased when this happened. Each individual will then become the expert in one specific task, and the overall production process is greatly enhanced. From this single example Adam Smith infers two things. Firstly that specialization increases productivity; and secondly that it allows each human to have their own specific skill. A successful factory, and beyond that a wealthy society, is one where each citizen has their own job, which they learn to perfect, and so help the overall community.
This model for a workshop is then the one that Smith wishes to pull out and apply to society. Society must be similarly flexible he suggests, and similarly allow each human the ability to specialize in whatever they are good at. In the process each human will cease to be self sufficient, and will thereby be bound to a community whose overall function it was to provide material wealth for all its participants. Smith thereby conjoined collectivity with material interdependency. A society was only collective because it had to be; that is because each individual element in it relied on all the other elements for their survival. This reliance would be enough in itself, Smith suggests, to keep everyone interested in cooperating together, and to keep the overall society functioning.
However, from the perspective of modernity, it is clear that there is something very wrong about Smith’s account of production. Smith assumes that dividing production into numerous small tasks created a high degree of skill within the workforce, and without that ‘skilling’, his theory falls flat. However this is of course not what happened. This is was because, to divide a task into numerous small separate tasks, was less the founding stone of society, and more a stepping stone towards the mechanisation of the entire process. It was these small tasks which individual machines could be built to perform. The bite sized skills that Smith thought would allow each human their dignity, was in fact the very element that would de-skill the entire workforce, and destroy the collectivity that Smith was trying so hard to be a harbinger of.
This failure to predict the effects of machination is of course perfectly acceptable in Smith (he died long before the idea of the industrial revolution was born). However it is less excusable for us. We (I mean elements in the West) simply ignore the effect that machines have in disrupting the account of the free market, and argue that one can apply Smithian doctrines willy nilly across the world, and then wonder why they do not work or do not work quite as we had hoped. Here no doubt we exploit something odd in Smith’s idea of the division of labour. The Idea clearly creates human society as a shadow of a machine. The Machine is defined on the global level, rather than the individual. If one is therefore asking the question ‘how should we run a society according to mechanical principles?’ Smith appears to be the answer. The problem of course was whether one could ask this question in the first place. This is a problem, I will return to in other Rants. For the rest of this one, I will leave this problem of machines suspended, and look at the effects that the ‘mechanization of society’ has produced.
The Effect of the Division of Labour is to splice time into space. If one goes back to Adam Smith’s original formulation, the space of a workshop, was to be ordered according to the principles that minimised the amount of time needed in the production of pins. Space was therefore organized to maximise what could be done in a certain time. Space (by which one means distance) to this degree ceased then to matter for itself. Once this argument is applied to the world, once the world becomes a massive workshop, then it is clear that, all other things being equal, geography ceases to be about distance, and becomes rather about efficiency. Strawberries might be grown in Cornwall, and eaten in Devon, and yet travel to India to be wrapped, as that is where ‘wrapping is done’. The geography of the workshop-world is at once complex and free flowing. From the outside one can never be sure where the paths (space) are to be weaved, in the name of efficiency (time). On the inside, each path though space is of itself temporary, as other paths will open, and create new more efficient temporal paths. The world-workshop is then ever active, and ever shifting exactly what it will do.
Even more interestingly, the image of the workshop percolates everywhere. One’s ‘leisure’ time becomes, from another angle, a mere aspect in the production process. One needs to understand this point in two different senses. Firstly, it is clear that all the invasive processes of the world-workshop inform the organization of leisure. Not only will that time off come to resemble the workshop itself. That is, one has a limited time, in which one must choose what to do, what products to endorse (or to do nothing). Leisure thereby becomes of itself ‘busy’. But also leading on from the last point, one is endlessly reminded of the workshop in this time, as products are placed before one’s notice. One’s ability to discriminate and ‘choose’, is thereby folded back into the production process.
Secondly and building on the last point, one’s production becomes as it were, the raw material or fuel for the workshop itself. It is the point that space, curved by time is folded back into itself as one consumes one’s reallocated wealth, and allows the entire process to not only to continue, but also to change. That is, exactly how and what one spends one’s own money on defines which processes, and which temporalizations of space are efficient and which are not. To consume is therefore also to have a part in the workshop world.
The workshop thereby radiates out across the world, binding every occupation into its ever-evolving system of interdependencies. And yet this system by itself Adam Smith argues, would not produce a lasting and effective system, for the Workshop-world is merely another name for Utopia. What makes the system both realisable and desirable is the free market. The aim of the free market is of course to allow different processes and different ways to produce the same or similar products to initially stand together, and thereby to allow one to select the best (by which is meant the most efficient) of these products. It is then the free-market that will allow the workshop to move beyond its utopian origins, and gives to it its own history. Once again however there are clearly problems with this doctrine. On the one hand there is something somewhat cloud-compelling in the very notion of the free market. Not only are interest groups and wealth likely to disrupt any particular formation of the market place; but also it is very unlikely that consumers in this market place will ever have the patience or time to ever fully assess each product, and without this effort on the behalf of the consumer, the entire process remains somewhat random! On the other hand there is no evidence that the free market will be able to act in anything but the shortest of short terms. I will react then to immediate situations, and be utterly unaware of long term implications, for ill or for good. Both of these two points will be the subject of next week’s Rant. I will therefore in this week’s Rant once again take Smith at his word, and consider what the world would be like if one could take him at face value.
If the Workshop-world bended space into time, is clear that the free-market reversed the procedure. Time itself becomes caught up in space, both in an abstract but also concrete manner. Of these two dimensions, the abstract is, all other things being equal, the one which we habitually think of as most critical. Put in a nutshell, it is the function of this bending of time into space, to problematise the nature of the production process and with it the very notion of wealth. In terms of the production process every process is (theoretically) kicked into a neutral space, where its various temporal savings and efficiencies can be assessed, and played off one against the other. The geography of the free market (and the very notion of the market is of course geographical), is then the setting out of stores whose products are little temporal loops (production processes) whose relative merits can thereby be assessed.
However at the same time as the abstract geometry of the market place is applied to all the little loops of time produced in the workshop, space also invades one’s very notion of wealth, and therefore one’s right to insure oneself against the future. That is, wealth is nothing if it is not temporal. To be wealthy is to have the ability to do things in the future. It is therefore to reserve in the present the rights (or at least the partial right) to act, and to own in a time to come. To hoard wealth is therefore to hoard possibility. And yet the free market kicks open the value of this hoarding of the future. One’s ability to have wealth suddenly depends upon everyone else’s behaviour. If then, they do not value the wealth that one has or if they act in such a way as to undermine it, it becomes utterly valueless. One’s ability therefore to reserve neat little futures for oneself becomes hidden in a silent geography of chance. Space therefore catches up one’s ability to give oneself a time.
Initially at least it appears that the abstract dismembering of the loops of time workshop, by the space of the free market is the critical move that the free market imposes upon us. And yet this is only so as long as the costs of travel are either ignored or assumed to be static. That is, the particular abstract space of the market is founded on a certain set of travel costs. As those travel costs vary, what will then be in the market will vary. Markets grow or shrink as the costs of travel defines different abstract space for them to occur within. And beyond the market all is horror or at least colonialism, or perhaps another free market, working according to its own abstract space. Historically therefore we have been caught up in a process whereby the abstract has expanded from Britain to the West to the world; and we have of course been rather smug about the fact. Our problem now, arguably is not that this space has simply stopped expanding (travel costs again), so much as that the rules which govern that expansion have been shattered. We are faced with a situation where some forms of travelling are becoming cheaper (computers) whilst others are becoming once again more expensive (flying). Abstract spaces therefore are forced to angle between different forms of communication.
In some senses this has of course, always been the case. Abstract spaces grow and change as technology changes. And yet it is clear that there is something weird in the current fluctuations as not only are they are rapid but also extreme. Thence how long it takes one to get between two points of the globe, and how much it costs, is radically changing. Two points which might have seemed close last week, now feel miles apart (as the price of fuel goes up) while in another sense (and according to rather a different rhythm of travelling) America has never been closer to anyone in Europe with a computer…Abstract spaces have lost any sense of proportion.
At the same time of course there is a suspicion that behind these fluctuations in another ghost, that of climate change. That is, that maybe the wider world itself, as a sealed up globe has either a finite capacity to support our globalization; or at least (and more likely) only a certain series of possible (if flexible) trajectories for that globalization to occur within. It might simply be impossible to form any old abstract space. It is not just that forming the wrong one might lead to extinction, but also, and more probable, the ‘wrong ones’ will be impermanent and self defeating. An Abstract Space defined only by oil is therefore a limited affair, unless it can spawn spaces defined by other ways. Pollution becomes therefore the concept in which we assess this effect.
That Smith is fundamentally wrong in his laying down of the groundwork for modernity, should of course come as no surprise. He was after all, writing over two hundred years ago, in a society before the industrial revolution. The mystery is rather, why his ideas can appear to be still so useful, or at least used. And the problem, is what then follows on from this, for us, given the fact that these ideas almost inevitably fail. In this essay I have attempted to grasp the first of these questions, and to assess some of the aspects of the second. Adam Smith is important because he gives us a neat way to bend space into time and time into space. He therefore allows us to grasp what a ‘global community’ (which is nothing more than this mutual bending) might look like, or at least the position which it might start from (abstract and concrete spaces and work-shop-worlds). Understanding how this model would develop would be hard enough (that is, what happens to fractured abstract spaces and what happens when concrete spaces call the tune), and yet it is further complicated by another problem. The Free Market could not be simply assumed. It was imposed. And we live in the history of that violent imposition, - a fact which I will examine next week.
