The fictionalization of space

a hypothesis about the mobilization of capital in contemporary Brazilian agroindustry

Abstract

Taking into account the global crisis of capitalism that redefines the ways in which social reproduction takes place in the contemporary world, this text aims to understand the atuality of the category of space – and the production of space – with regard to the territorialization of capital on the fronts of expansion of agroindustry in Brazil. If this process today is based on strategies that aim at accumulation through the inflation of property titles – a logic particular to the reproduction of fictitious capital –, we argue that such fictionalization implies a fictionalization of the production of space. Along this path, we resort to the History of Geographical Thought with a view to, on the one hand, demonstrating the historicity of the production of space in close association with the process of capitalist modernization and, on the other, demonstrating how a certain theoretical fetishism is tributary to the positivist roots of geographic science limits the possibilities of understanding the contradictions (im)posed by capital. Movement that will provide us with the basis for understanding how, if in the ascending phase of modernization there was an overcoming of the production of piecemeal goods in space for a production of space as such, in the current historical moment a new overcoming may be underway: that of the production of space for the fictionalization of this, a process that can be understood in a privileged way based on the territorialization of agro-industrial capital in Brazil.