NIGHT AS FRONTIER

THE SPATIAL REVOLUTION GOES NOCTURNAL

We ended last post with a tantalizing quotation from James Carey’s essay on the spatial revolutionary significance of the telegraph to the effect: “When the ecological niche of space was filled, filled as an arena of commerce and control, attention was shifted to filling time, now defined as an aspect of space, a continuation of space in another dimension.” Another passage from the same 1983 essay by Carey also foreshadows today’s post: “There were no 24-hour radio stations in Boston, for example, from 1918 through 1954; now half of the stations in Boston operate all night. Television has slowly expanded into the night at one end and at the other initiated operations earlier and earlier. Now, indeed, there are 24-hour television stations in major markets.”

Approximately four decades since Carey published that essay, it seems quaint to observe that “now half” Boston radio stations broadcast all night. How many people even listen to radio stations these days? And the more likely current source for what radio was providing in the 1980s comes from the infinite space of the timeless Internet. But the groundbreaking character of what he’s emphasizing here shouldn’t be underappreciated for how dated it may sound. Younger readers for instance may not appreciate that Saturday Night Live, now as standard an expression of institutional spatialism as one might find, began in 1975 as a rogue pioneer colonizing the night frontier, at a time when it was still conventional for TV stations to sign off at or even before midnight with the national anthem and post a test screen until morning.

It is indeed “night as frontier” that I want to explore in this post. Toward that end, we’ll examine Murray Melbin’s 1987 book with just that name – and the exotic subtitle: Colonizing the World After Dark.¹ The story he tells is one of the spatial revolution, indeed as Carey described it, turning time into a form of space. This, as we’ll see, is time as conceived geometrically, or mathematically, as Schmitt would have it. As Melbin describes it, this is a story of resource pursuit bending to meet the path of low hanging fruits of unused capacity, gradually enabled through technological development and expansion. As obvious as it may seem to think of the spatial revolution as a geographic-technological development, in fact possibly nothing could be more emblematic of the power of the spatial revolution than its capacity and propensity to convert even time into space: rendering it a form of frontier.

Melbin begins his book though with reflections upon the very gradual colonization of the “world after dark” dating back to prehistoric humans.

...at the time our planet was born, the sun's rays washed against half its surface and left the other side in shadow. We call the shadow night.

Our body's physiology is attuned to sunlight's comings and goings, and we have established separate phases of labor, leisure, and rest in our daily round. Family life, work, mental alertness, sexual interest, and the conduct of business all fill a timetable synchronized with the turns of the globe.

Long in the past...we began to use fire to illuminate the evening. We began staying up after dusk, chatting in the fading warmth of dying embers. Here and there we continued to work after sundown. We began dabbling cleverly to keep fires going, to make them enduring, brighter, more portable. From those early events until the present we have advanced in our power to summon light.

This extraordinarily long human history of tiny advances across the frontier threshold of night with the use of fire began to give way to more effective and aggressive means of penetrating that frontier by the 19th century:

...at the beginning of the nineteenth century, the invention of gas lighting enabled the pace to accelerate. People stepped up the scope and amount of their after-dark activity.

In a lyrical passage, Melbin captures and contextualizes the colonization of night metaphor as in keeping with the expansive, border/barrier defying ethos of the spatial revolution, which would immediately resonate with Schmitt.

We are good at inventing ways to enlarge our realm. Repeatedly we find methods of spreading farther. If an element is forbidding we devise a means to master it. Reaching the continental shores, we developed shipbuilding and navigational skills in order to cross oceans. Shivering at arctic weather, we designed fur clothing and snug shelters in order to edge northward. And, having first occupied much of the usable space in the world, we are now filling its usable times. Although being wakeful at night flouted our natural rhythms, we developed artificial lighting that let us be active after dark. Both the sea and the night must have been feared by human beings. We are a terrestrial and a diurnal species. We have no personal equipment to breathe underwater or to see in the dark. Both were strange realms. Both were mastered by our resourcefulness and endeavor. It is a stunning record of enterprising expansions.

He then illustrates his claim with an appeal to then well known examples which strike the present-day reader of Melbin's 1987 description of the colonization of the night as almost quaint. It's hard to imagine anyone today taking a paragraph to presume to itemize all the then obscure activities perhaps surprisingly occurring during the night.

There is widespread factory shift work, transportation, police coverage, and use of the telephone at all hours. Airports, gasoline stations, hotels, restaurants, and broadcasters operate incessantly. Data-processing departments of insurance companies and banks are astir all night. So are platoons of maintenance personnel. Emergency services such as oil burner repair, locksmiths, bail bondsmen, and drug, poison, suicide, and gambling hot lines are constantly available. Meanwhile isolated individuals bend over books and papers on desks in their homes, watch television after midnight, or walk in the streets and listen to the night breathe.

With this set of examples in hand, Melbin returns to his reflections upon the comparative assessment of frontier crossing, not only again invoking Schmitt’s “free sea,” but also Innis’ space bias as the manifestation of dimensional expansion:

This extension across all hours of the day resembles our spreading across the face of the earth.

Both forms of expansion are frontiers. A closer look will discover more similarity between them and will confirm that both types of advance are urged by the same forces, carried out by the same types of people, and expressed in the same modes of social life.

A frontier is a new source of supply for resources that people want for subsistence or for more profit. It is also a safety valve for people who feel confined. They disperse in response to pressures at home and to appealing opportunities elsewhere. Always there is a combination of dissatisfaction with current circumstances pushing them and the hope of fulfillment pulling them. We resort to the strategy whenever we come up against scarcity in our environment, and those conditions in the past caused us to expand across the face of the earth.

The aforementioned allure of the low hanging fruits of unused capacity then enters his discussion:

The chance to exploit facilities that are left idle also arouses our initiative to use more of the night.

To interpret wholesale human wakefulness in this way rests on recognizing that night is essentially a span of time, and that we occupy time as we occupy space. Time is less tangible, but the two are inseparable. Together they form the physical container of existence. As we fill one with an activity we also fill the other. Nothing can occupy space for no time.

The way we use parking meters, rent apartments, plan itineraries, buy resort condominiums, and schedule appointments shows that we fill time along with space.

It’s worth reiterating here the propensity with Melbin, as we saw with Carey (see here), for time reference to get a bit conceptually muddy. In this passage he describes time as akin to Schmitt's characterization of open space as a geometric, mathematical domain to be occupied. Innis' application of the time reference, though, more resembles Schmitt's concept of occupied space (see here). In juxtaposition, Innis' “time” is occupied by an orientation to time's (or the timekeepers') own self-awareness, life practices, and identity. Just as Schmitt's occupied space is already cultural and political, so too is Innis' time (and of course his space).

From there Melbin goes into a short history of the growth of the technological means for colonizing the night.

A half-million years ago people used fire domestically and left remains of wood ash, singed animal bones, and charcoal as archeological evidence. By 7000 B.C. they had developed reliable fire-making techniques.

Since the end of the Middle Ages every century was marked by distinct growth in wakeful practices and improvements in lighting. Medieval and Renaissance cities had no regular public illumination. Assaults by ruffians and thieves were common after dark, and often a curfew was imposed at night.

Parisian police in the eighteenth century sought to deter crime by hanging lamps along the city streets. A considerable part of the police budget was used for buying tallow, and hundreds of lamplighters were employed to set the lanterns burning once the sun went down. Londoners introduced a series of Lighting Acts for similar reasons.

The evening social life of urban areas came to depend on public lighting.

Scientists sought to intensify the meager rays sent out by the lamps. They introduced better wicks, finer fuels, and more radiant incandescent materials.

[William Murdock] improved the methods for making, purifying, and storing coal gas, and in 1803 Boulton and Watt allowed him to illuminate the interior of their main foundry in Birmingham, England. He sent coal gas from a central pumping station through pipes to burner jets mounted in several locations. When other mill operators nearby saw how feasible it was, they quickly adopted the method.

...others soon used the method to distribute gas to all buildings and streetlamps in an area. Pall Mall in London became one of the first avenues to be illuminated in this fashion.

Thomas Edison perfected the design and produced a successful lamp in 1879. Edison went on to develop a practical generator that supplied electric power steadily to keep the filament glowing. Now it was possible to distribute electricity from a central source and place the lamps wherever they were wanted. In tandem Murdock and Edison had solved the puzzle of consistent delivery of the energy needed for illumination.

This long development of the technological means for crossing the night frontier – comparable to that long history of developed navigational techniques for freeing the seas which I’ve discussed in relation to Schmitt – did indeed make the increasingly large scale penetration and occupation of the night possible. However, as I also emphasized in relation to Schmitt, Melbin reminds us that the technology was not what determined or drove the expansion.²

...lighting inventions, indispensable as they were, were not the causes of more wakefulness. Light is an enabler. Enablers are useful rather than forceful. The oceans, for example, were not crossed until shipbuilding, navigation, and food preservation had been mastered, but those arts, while they made it possible, were not the driving powers behind sailing the seas.

Instead, as mentioned earlier, Melbin points to the under-utilized capacity of the night and the associated markets that became increasingly available to be tapped:

The great surge in to the night began in manufacturing plants. Recognizing the idle capacity in their factories, entrepreneurs inaugurated the industrial expansion once gas lighting was developed and recruited large numbers of people to be active them.

The use of the dark hours escalated. Twenty-four-hour activity had been a fraction of all human endeavor until the nineteenth century, but then it started to spread vigorously. Whole factories and cities could be lit at night. Artificial illumination permitted multiple-shift mill operations on a broad scale. Gas lighting was developed in the context of the Industrial Revolution, and the invention itself cast a spell over the Revolution's engineering and laboring forms. Even if prolonged processes were known beforehand, their use had been restricted by daylight ending. Now the continual mode of production became possible.

Gas lighting made people believe the day was longer. All daytime activities could be extended. If day was the time for work, then work could be extended. So manufacturing mills began to call for two shifts—each twelve hours long—in order to run continuously. Artificial lighting also assisted the nighttime entertainment industry. Just as the gas lamp served the gin mills of London in Charles Dickens's time, the electric light helped public nightlife bloom on Broadway in New York in the1890s.

Nighttimers want amenities and pull in complementary businesses. Incessant organizations call for other helping units. They want maintenance and repair services and special products, and they hire other firms to mend equipment, deliver materials, cart away goods, feed their employees, remove trash, and guard the premises.

As merchants notice untapped markets in the people up and about, they begin to offer late-hour shopping. After night work was introduced in the mills of New England, horse-drawn night lunch wagons began to appear on the streets.

Eating places now stay open near stadiums, cinemas, factories, and college dormitories. Breakfast parlors open earlier near wholesale food and flower markets. Grocers, fast food restaurants, and other retailers lengthen their hours once they discover the size of the wakeful group.

Twenty-four-hour radio broadcasting in the United States illustrates this later stage of expansion, for its growth was stimulated by the perception of the Federal Communications Commission (FCC), in the early 1960s, that there were many people up at night who were not receiving broadcasting services. Seeing a role for radio then, the FCC encouraged FM broadcasting by resisting licensing new AM channels if an FM channel was available that could bring the same service to an area. That rule was based on FM's technical qualities. At night AM signals generate a great deal of skywave interference, while FM intrudes much less and also transmits music better. By rejecting AM applications for a while and favoring FM because of its lesser interference, the FCC spawned many more radio stations and enabled more after-dark broadcasting.

Readers of a certain age will likely have fond memories of late night FM radio and its propensity for musical style exploration that was far rarer during the day. Some of my fellow Canadians may share my nostalgia for David Wisdom's CBC FM weekend show Nightlines. I expect many older readers will have their own such fond memories. Perhaps recalling such cult legends as The Nightbird, Wolfman Jack, or Dr. Demento. Melbin though illustrated that that magical period of esoteric music curation was initially inspired less by aesthetic considerations, than motives associated to the colonization of the nighttime world.

In a most Innisian twist, Melbin concludes that while the colonization of night was largely driven by unused capacity and emergence of associated markets, in a very real sense, the night itself was commodified, as a resource, in fact reminding us of Polanyi’s observations on the spatial revolution’s relentless capacity and disposition to universal commodification (see here).

[Nighttime] is not a material, but it is a natural resource nevertheless, with attributes like that of space. In its basic form it has a uniform quality, for every hour is like every other. It is valuable, finite, and often scarce, and yet time's supply is reliable, for it comes steadily night after night. It is easy to employ, neither hard to reach nor requiring further preparation before putting it to use. In use it is also versatile, for filling it multiplies the capacity of people and equipment, lowers costs, and accelerates accomplishments. It is like an additive to the engine of production. As entrepreneurs were earlier drawn to newly accessible wealth in the land, they were now attracted to the promise of fortunes in the night.

The new world taking shape across a previously forbidding frontier unpacked by Melbin sounds increasing obvious and even mundane to the present-day reader.

Some undertakings need the critical density of a metropolis to be tried at all, so nighttime endeavors are more common in large cities. But always-open restaurants, food stores, turnpike toll booths, and auto service stations gleam along the highways between towns.

According to a tally for the United States during a week in May 1980, just after midnight there were 29 million people active.

Yet, I’d suggest, the fact that Melbin’s descriptions may seem as quaint as the events described are clearly pioneering only points to just how thoroughly today we find ourselves utterly immersed in the spatial revolution. Like the fish in water, we simply take our surroundings and context for granted. Reading Melbin’s book though, however dated it might seem compared to our 24/7 world, provides the service of reminding us just how radically novel the night life of the city really is. And most of the world’s population do now live in cities. And if not all cities yet are all-night affairs, as Melbin indicates, that is the directional logic of their economic development: the expansion into unused capacity will always be alluring as the technical means become economically feasible.

Drawing correlations between conceptions of time and Schmitt’s distinctions between his different concepts of space – i.e., between open space, defined by geometric dimensions, vacant for penetration and occupation; and ordered space, already occupied and enmeshed in existing identities and institutions (see here) – we find with Melbin an evocative discussion of the spatial revolution’s occupation of open time: the resource of resources waiting to be optimally utilized.

At the same time, given what we know of the spatial revolution from Schmitt (see here), it probably won’t be surprising to observe that that spatial revolution hardly stopped at open time, but in fact is maybe most consequential for its colonization of ordered time – Innis’ time as durable tradition. This colonization of ordered, Innisian time, or what I’ve also referred to as endogenous expansion, will be the main focus of this lengthy exploration of the spatial revolution going forward.

So, if you want to keep abreast of these exciting new posts, but haven’t yet, please…

And, if you know of someone else who might enjoy joining this intellectual journey, please…

Meanwhile: Be seeing you!

1. Murray Melbin, Night as Frontier: Colonizing the World After Dark, First Edition (New York, NY: Free Press, 1987).

2. Though, of course, long time readers of this Substack and my books will know that I’d point to an even more fundamental cause of the urge to expand than does Melbin, rooted in the phenotypic selection processes driven by the model I’ve identified as the phenotype wars.