ABSTRACT
In a speech given in 1967, the French philosopher Michel Foucault made the following observation, and, in the decades that have followed, more and more critics have come to agree that our own historical moment is somehow the “epoch of space.” As Foucault announced,
[t]he great obsession of the nineteenth century was, as we know, history: with its themes of development and of suspension, of crisis, and cycle, themes of the ever-accumulating past, with its great preponderance of dead men and the menacing glaciation of the world. [ ... ] The present epoch will perhaps be above all the epoch of space. We are in the epoch of simultaneity: we are in the epoch of juxtaposition, the epoch of the near and far, of the side-by-side, of the dispersed. We are at a moment, I believe, 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: 22)