North of Empire: Essays on the Cultural Technologies of Space

Abstract

It is in space, on a worldwide scale, that each idea of "value" acqu ires or loses its distinctiveness through confrontation with the other valu es and ideas that it encounters there. Moreover-and more importantly-groups, classes, or frac-tions of classes cannot constitute themselves, or recognize one another, as "sub-jects" unless they generate (or produce) a space. Ideas, representations or values which do not succeed in maki ng their marlk o n space, and thus generating (or producing) an appropriate morphology, wil l lose all pith and become mere signs, resolve themselves into abstract descriptions, or mutate into fantas ies.-HENRI LEFEBVRE, The Production of Space Branch plants of American industries were built in Canada in order to take advantage of the Canadian -Euro pean system and British imperialism. As part of her east-west program, Canada had bu ilt up a series of imperial preferential anrangements in which Great Britain had felt compel led to acquiesce and which p~oved enormously advantageous to American branch plants. Paradoxically, t he stoutest defenders of the Canadian tariff against the United States were the rep-resentatives of American capital investors. Canadian nationalism was systemati-cally encouraged and exploited by American capital. Canada moved from colony to nation to colony.-HAROLD INNIS , "Great Britain, the United States, and Canada" The 1994 centenary of the bir.!h of Harold Innis stimulated scholars from various regions and disciplines to enter into dialogue with his work and with one another. The work of this economic historian and communica-tion theorist has been revisited by a number of Canadian cultural studies scholars interested in how Innis's work can inform newer issues and debates in cultural studies. 1 Innis's centenary assumed particular significance in rela-tion to the "spatial turn" in cultural studies, which encouraged a shift away from .the analysis of representation in texts toward an analysis of communi-cation as a technological and spatial process with its own meanings in spe-cific locales. I took this event as an opportunity to explore Innis's research on technology, space, and empire in relation to this later literature in terms