No Center, Only Circulation

Why globalization didn’t connect the world but emptied it

Photo by Doug Bagg on Unsplash

“Globalization” is frequently presented, especially in liberal discourse, as an almost self-evident good: it is said to signify a world that is more “connected”, more fluid, more open, and therefore more advanced.

Yet this narrative rests on a highly selective reading of what globalization actually entails at the economic level. Far from simply connecting previously isolated spaces, globalization reflects the expansion and intensification of capitalist relations across the globe.

As Karl Marx already suggested in the Communist Manifesto, capitalism has an intrinsic tendency to dissolve local particularities in order to create a unified world market. What appears as “connection” is thus inseparable from processes of standardization, commodification, and the subordination of space to the logic of capital accumulation. Later thinkers such as Immanuel Wallerstein, with his world-systems theory, further clarified that globalization does not produce a flat, harmonious world, but rather a hierarchical system structured by core, semi-peripheral, and peripheral zones, each integrated into a single economic order under unequal conditions.

In this sense, any narrative about globalization is necessarily a narrative about space itself. Modernity has not only “accelerated time”, as is often remarked, but has profoundly transformed the very structure and meaning of space.

This transformation was already theorized before the contemporary discourse on globalization, notably by Henri Lefebvre. In The Production of Space, Lefebvre rejects the idea of space as a neutral container within which social processes unfold. Instead, he argues that space is actively produced through social relations. What appears as a given environment is in fact shaped by economic forces, political power, and cultural practices. He distinguishes between spatial practices that organize everyday life, the conceptual representations of space formulated by planners and technocrats, and the lived, symbolic dimensions through which individuals experience and inhabit their surroundings. Modernity, in this framework, is characterized by the growing dominance of abstract, “conceived” space, imposed by institutions and aligned with the requirements of capitalist production.

A similar line of argument is developed by David Harvey, who places particular emphasis on the relationship between capitalism and spatial transformation. Drawing explicitly on Marxist categories, Harvey argues that capitalism is driven by the need to overcome spatial barriers in order to accelerate the circulation of capital. From the expansion of railway networks to the development of digital infrastructures, each technological advance reduces the friction of distance. The result is what he famously describes as a “time–space compression”, whereby space appears to shrink as the speed of economic exchange increases. This process produces a world that is not simply more connected, but also more volatile, less rooted, and increasingly subordinated to the imperatives of rapid turnover and global competition.

The fact that both Lefebvre and Harvey operate within a broadly Marxist framework is not incidental: Marxism, from its origins, has emphasized the material conditions of social life and the structuring role of economic relations. For Marx, space is not an abstract backdrop but is continuously reshaped by the dynamics of production, circulation, and class relations. The expansion of capitalism entails not only the transformation of labor and markets, but also the reorganization of geographical space itself. Later Marxist thinkers extended this insight by showing how urbanization, infrastructure, and global trade networks are all expressions of the same underlying logic: the imperative to maximize accumulation by reorganizing space in ever more efficient and controllable ways.

Yet the consequences of this transformation are not only economic but also existential. This is particularly evident in the work of Marc Augé. In Non-Places, Augé argues that contemporary modernity produces spaces that are devoid of identity, history, and relational depth. Airports, highways, shopping malls, and hotel chains are not places in the traditional sense, but transient zones designed for circulation rather than habitation. They are interchangeable, standardized, and detached from any local context. In this sense, modernity does not merely connect places; it increasingly replaces them with networks of transit. The world becomes easier to traverse, but harder to inhabit.

At a deeper level, this economic and social reconfiguration of space presupposes a prior transformation that is rarely made explicit: the mathematical redefinition of space itself. What modernity treats as self-evident (a homogeneous, measurable expanse) is in fact the result of a conceptual rupture. With Descartes and the rise of analytic geometry, space is no longer understood in terms of orientation, hierarchy, or lived significance, but as a system of coordinates. Every point becomes definable through numerical relations, and position is detached from meaning. Space is no longer something inhabited, but something mapped.

This abstraction is consolidated in the physics of Newton, where space is conceived as absolute, infinite, and uniform. In such a framework, space functions as a neutral container, identical in all its parts and independent of the beings within it. There is no longer a privileged center, no qualitative distinction between here and there. This is precisely the kind of space that can later be reorganized, standardized, and integrated into a global economic system. The mathematical uniformity of space becomes the silent condition for its economic exploitation.

Subsequent developments in mathematics and physics only radicalize this abstraction. With Bernhard Riemann, space is reconceived as a manifold defined purely by internal relations rather than intuitive geometry; and with Einstein, space is fused with time into a single formal structure, spacetime, whose properties are described through highly abstract equations. While these theories complicate the Newtonian picture, they do not restore any qualitative or lived dimension to space. On the contrary, they further distance it from ordinary experience, placing its true nature increasingly beyond perception and within mathematical formalism.

What matters here is not the technical content of these theories, but their broader implication: the more space is defined mathematically, the more it becomes homogeneous, divisible, and ultimately interchangeable. This is exactly the form of space presupposed by modern capitalism, as analyzed by Lefebvre and Harvey. Lefebvre’s notion of “abstract space” can be read, in part, as the social extension of this mathematical homogenization: a space conceived, planned, and imposed according to the requirements of production and control. Harvey’s analysis of time–space compression likewise depends on a space that has already been rendered measurable and reducible, such that distance can be overcome through speed and infrastructure.

In this light, globalization appears not as a spontaneous increase in “connection,” but as the culmination of a long process of abstraction. The mathematical redefinition of space makes possible its economic reorganization; the latter, in turn, produces the world described by Marc Augé, in which places are increasingly replaced by standardized zones of transit. What emerges is a continuous, quantifiable field, optimized for circulation but stripped of qualitative depth.

All of this must be understood as part of a broader movement characteristic of modernity itself: the progressive secularization and homogenization of reality. The modern world is defined by the substitution of quantity for quality, of measurable extension for symbolic depth; space, once experienced as a structured and meaningful order, oriented around centers, hierarchies, and sacred directions, is reduced to a neutral expanse devoid of intrinsic significance.

In premodern cosmologies, space was not merely “there” to be occupied. It was differentiated, charged with meaning, and inseparable from a higher order. The notion of a center, whether expressed through sacred geography or ritual orientation, anchored human existence within a cosmos. With secularization, this structure dissolves. Space is no longer a reflection of a transcendent order but a domain of immanence, flattened and indefinite.

Globalization, in this sense, represents not only the extension of economic networks but the final stage of this desacralization. The world is unified, but only as a homogeneous field of circulation. Distinctions are erased, places become interchangeable, and spatial experience is reduced to movement between equivalent points.

Modern man moves through space with unprecedented ease, yet does so in a world that no longer speaks to him, because the very conditions that once made space meaningful have been systematically effaced.