David Harvey. THE CONDITION OF POSTMODERNITY: AN ENQUIRY INTO THE ORIGINS OF CULTURAL CHANGE. Cambridge, MA: Blackwell, 1990.
Paperback. The book has 378 pages, includes an index. Seven plus pages of references include the usual theorists. Architecture, urban design, geographical topics are numerous, as are topics in capitalism, finance, and economics. No references are dated later than 1989.
David Harvey is Professor of Geography at The Johns Hopkins University. From 1987 to 1993 he held the Halford Mackinder Chair of Geography at Oxford University. His previous books include Social Justice and the City, the Limits to Capital, and The Urban Experience. (From the back cover.)
The argument
Part I The passage from modernity to postmodernity in contemporary culture. This contains six chapters, including Introduction, Modernity and modernism, Postmodernism, Postmodernism in the city: architecture and urban design, Modernization, POSTmodernISM or postMODERNism?
Part II The political-economic transformation of late twentieth-century capitalism. This contains five chapters, including Introduction, Fordism, From Fordism to flexible accumulation, Theorizing the transition, Flexible accumulation--solid transformation or temporary fix?
Part III The experience of space and time. This contains seven chapters, including Introduction, Individual spaces and times in social life, Time and space as sources of social power, The time and space of the Enlightenment project, Time-space compression and the rise of modernism as a cultural force, Time-space compression and the postmodern condition, Time and space in the postmodern cinema.
Part IV The condition of postmodernity. This contains nine chapters, including Postmodernity as a historical condition, Economics with mirrors, Postmodernism as the mirror of mirrors, Fordist modernism versus flexible postmodernism, or the interpenetration of opposed tendencies in capitalism as a whole, The tranformative and speculative logic of capital, The work of art in an age of electronic reproduction and image banks, Responses to time-space compression, The crisis of historical materialism, Cracks in the mirrors, fusions at the edges.
ECONOMIC/FINANCIAL BASIS OF THE POSTMODERN: In the most general terms, Harvey may be said to argue that the many manifestations of postmodernity flow from the basic operation of capital. He sees the operation of capital as a constant in the history of the past two centuries; its essential influence in postmodernity thus makes postmodernity less than unique but rather a special case of culture in a line of development that he traces back to the mid-nineteenth century in Europe and America.
Harvey gives a quite vivid description of the sensibility of postmodernism, with special insight drawn from his expertise in architecture and urban design.
His economic rationale for what he describes is set up as a theoretical model in his Part II. He adopts the hypothesis of the so-called "regulation school" in viewing "recent events as a transition in the regime of accumulation and its associated mode of social and political regulation." (p. 121)
He sees postmodernity rising from the transformation of a modern system of mass production with a relatively fixed system of capital accumulation. He depends heavily on Marx's theory of capital for his model. He sets up "Fordism" to describe the modernist emphasis on standardization, mass production, labor stability. He describes the instabilities inherent in Fordism and the transformation in the 1970s to "flexible accumulation" as a new way of operating capitalism and its financial markets.
SPACE-TIME COMPRESSION: For Harvey the most important cultural change in the transformation from Fordism to flexible accumulation--and from modernity to postmodernity--was the change in the human experience of space and time (Part III). His Plate 3.1 (p.241) gives a graphic rendering of his main point. It shows four maps of the world in descending order of size:
These increasing speeds of travel illustrate that in each phase the sense of global space changed; and with a change in the sense of space came a correlative change in the sense of time. Harvey carries this obvious point into a penetrating presentation of the change in sensibility, a change in the sense of reality itself, accompanying the changes in travel speeds.
[NOTE: Jean Baudrillard, Radical Thought about half way through the essay discusses the compression of space-time. He is eager to show how it reinforces his insight that simulacra ARE reality now.] Harvey argues that the change in the sense of space and time carried over to the financial arena. With faster and far-flung telecommunications, financial markets came to encompass the entire globe in very short time spans.
At the same time, production of real commodities ceased to be essential to the capitalist system. Through the space-time compression, the financial system came to be de-linked from active production of real commodities. The instabilities in capitalist production and a "radical shift in the manner in which value gets represented as money" (p.296) after 1973 further caused the change to a postmodern mode of capitalism. Harvey here links his argument with that of Baudrillard's concept of simulacra: "The interweaving of simulacra in daily life brings together different worlds (of commodities) in the same space and time. But it does so in such a way as to conceal almost perfectly any trace of origin, of the labour processes that produced them, or of the social relations implicated in their production./ The simulacra can in turn become the reality." (p.300)
Grounding the perceptual and social condition of postmodernity in the change in the way capital operates, as outlined above, Harvey then (pp. 300-307) discusses postmodern reality. He links to references to Baudrillard, McHale, and Foucault. He does this by keying off of the idea of the "simulacrum" as a commodity. From McHale he draws the idea of multiple and simultaneous onotologies ("a potential as well as an actual plurality of universes" p.301) at the heart of postmodernism. "Disruptive spatiality [resulting from multiple ontologies] triumphs over the coherence of perspective and narrative in postmodern fiction, in exactly the same way that imported beers coexist with local brews, local employment collapses under the wieght of foreign competition, and all the divergent spaces of the world are assembled nightly as a collage of images upon the television screen." (p. 302).
Harvey sees two contrasting sociological effects of this ubiquitous lack of coherence in daily life:
(1) People decide that they should (must?) take advantage "of all the divergent possibilities" and cultivate "a whole series of simulacra as milieux of escape, fantasy, and distraction." (p. 302) [NOTE: Our Charlie in The Table Talks tends to have this approach.] He calls on McHale to suggest that creative expression of postmodern sensibility is "mimetic of something"--the something being the fragmentation, ephemerality, and collage.
(2) But the second effect identified by Harvey is the opposite: faced with the fragmentation, ephemerality, and collage, people reach out for "personal or collective identity, the search for secure morrings in a shifting world." (p. 302) This strongly emphasizes the connection between place and social identity (the Bosnian syndrome); but that intensifies fragmentation as people grasp for their particular place. Second, this reaching out emphasizes "the aesthetics of space." (p. 303) This emphasis on specific spaces, as places, runs against the universal functionalism in space sought by modernism, especially in the city. Harvey relates this tendency to the dangers of a new totalitarianism, arising from the estheticization of space. (p. 305): "If aesthetic production has now been so thoroughly commodified and thereby commercially subsumed within a political economy of cultural production, how can we possibly stop that circle from closing onto a produced, and hence all too easily manipulated, aestheticization of a globablly mediatized politics?" (p.305). [NOTE: The convergence of politics and esthetics discussed by Harvey reminds us of the aims of John Kennedy, Jr., in his new magazine, George.]
Harvey sums up his economically grounded analysis of the sensibility of postmodernism as follows: "The intensity of time-space compression in Western capitalism since the 1960s, with all of its congruent features of excessive ephemerality and fragmentation in the political and private as well as in the social realm, does seem to indicate an experiential context that makes the condition of postmodernity somewhat special. But by putting this condition into its historical context, as part of a history of successive waves of time-space compression generated out of the pressures of capital accumulation with its perpetual search to annihilate space through time and reduce turnover time, we can at least pull the condition of postmodernity into the range of a condition accessible to historical materialist analysis and interpretation." (pp. 306-7)
Harvey draws on his expertise as a geographer to show the differing sensibilities that produced maps in the medieval period, in the Renaissance (with emphasis on the rules of perspective), in the Enlightenment (which carried the perspectivism of the Renaissance to its fulfillment), in the period starting in 1848, when time and space began to compress in ways that undid the assumptions of the Enlightenment, and in the further compression of time-space since the early 1970s, resulting in a postmodern condition.
In Part IV, Harvey evaluates postmodernity as a historical condition, still seeing historical development through the prism of an economic-financial analysis. He sees characteristics in the postmodern culture that are not unique although they are distinctive. They emerge in his view from the dynamics of capital overaccumulation (p. 327). He connects crises of overaccumulation with strong esthetic movements, including the estheticization of politics. An era turns to esthetics and away from scientific and moral reasoning under conditions of confusion and uncertainty, which we see in extreme compression of time-space as in the 1960s. He says that since 1973 "the experience of time and space has changed, the confidence in the association between scientific and moral judgements has collapsed, aesthetics has triumphed over ethics as a prime focus of social and intellectual concern, images dominate narratives, ephemerality and fragmentation take precedence over eternal truths and unified politics, and explanations have shifted from the realm of material and political-economic groundings towards a consideration of autonomous cultural and political practices." (p. 328) [NOTE, 22 August 2001: 1973 was the year the Bretton Woods accord on the control of international capital ended. Both Fredric Jameson and James Mittelman date the start of the postmodern period from 1973.]
He devotes the remainder of the book to supporting his argument that postmodernity is not a fundamental break in western culture but a shift in sensibility that can be explained by "historical materialist enquiry." He even thinks (heretically, from a postmodern viewpoint) that postmodernity is "capable of theorization by way of the meta-narrative of capitalist development that Marx proposed." (p.328)
Harvey presents a table (p. 340) designed to illustrate that the opposed tendencies of "Fordist modernism" and "flexible postmodernism" interpenetrate as characteristics of capitalist society as a whole. He thinks that this interpenetration "helps us dissolve the categories of both modernism and postmodernism into a complex of oppositions expressive of the cultural conditions of capitalism." (p. 339).
In the chapter on "Responses to time-space compression" (p. 350), Harvey criticizes the deconstructionists. He links them to one of the responses to time-space compression, that of a "shell-shocked, blasé, or exhausted silence, "a submission to the overwhelming sense of how vast, intractable, and outside any individual or even collective control everything is." (p. 350)
The second response to time-space compression that he identifies is "a free-wheeling denial of the complexity of the world, and a penchant for the representation of it in terms of highly simplified rhetorical propositions." (p. 351).
The third response is "an intermediate niche for political and intellectual life which spurns grand narrative but which does cultivate the possibility of limited action." (p. 351) [NOTE: Haber may fall into this category.] This leads to community, locality, but it slides "into parochialism, myopia, and self-referentiality in the face of the universalizing force of capital circulation." (p.351)
The fourth response is "to try and ride the tiger of the time-space compression through construction of a language and an imagery that can mirror and hopefully command it." (p.351) Baudrillard, Virilio, and Jameson are examples.
Finally, Harvey sees cracks in postmodernist thought that suggest a "subtle evolution, perhaps reaching a point of self-dissolution into something different." He hopes so.(p. 358-9).
The Argument Harvey presents "The Argument" of his work succinctly and it follows in full:
"There has been a sea-change in cultural as well as in political-economic practices since around 1972.
"This sea-change is bound up with the emergence of new dominant ways in which we experience space and time.
"While simultaneity in the shifting dimensions of time and space is no proof of necessary or causal connection, strong a priori grounds can be adduced for the proposition that there is some kind of necessary relation between the rise of postmodernist cultural forms, the emergence of more flexible modes of capital accumulation, and a new round of 'time-space compression' in the organization of capitalism.
"But these changes, when set against the basic rules of capitalistic accumulation, appear more as shifts in surface appearance rather than as signs of the emergence of some entirely new postcapitalist or even postindustrial society." (p. vii.)
Harvey is an extremely valuable study for the following reasons.
Harvey is a formulator of theories intended to explain the observable situation. As such he tends to become formulaic. The thinning out of modernist sensibility may have multiple explanations, not merely one of materialist capitalist process. But this is to quarrel with the very strength of what Harvey offers up, a coherent argument that attempts to tell us how we got into this situation. Like THE PROGRAMME, he even, at the end, wants to point to a way beyond it.
We think that the weakness in the corporate"agility" movement is that it will be unprepared to react profitably and responsibly when the society's intolerance of the "constant change and uncertainty" peaks at some point in the future. While corporations are busy accepting those conditions and working within them, other societal forces are already emerging to reduce the unacceptable levels of discomfort. These forces will emerge through political, artistic, religious, and other avenues of the society. Harvey senses this possibility better than the "agility" practitioners.
BERTENS ON HARVEY: Hans Bertens provides a lengthy explanation of this book (pp. 220-229). Evaluating, Bertens finds Harvey short in incorporating "difference" and "otherness" into his application of his modified materialist critique.
BEST ON HARVEY: Steve Best of the University of Texas reviewed Harvey's book. He found it a useful addition to Fredric Jameson's interpretation of postmodernity as a form of "late capitalism." He found it short on new theory to connect the cultural manifestations of postmodernism to the economic dynamics of capitalism. Best's review is in Illuminations at the Critical Theory page of the University of Texas. Click on Best on the Critical Theory homepage. Access to the article may be limited, depending on one's browser. (3 Jan 97)
25 December 1995; updated 3 January 1977.
Edited and links updated 22 August 2001.