ABLE: Ford said the Model T came in any color you wanted as long as you wanted black--or something like that.
BAKER:Harvey sees a shift away from the state-supported stability of Fordism in the early 1970s.
CHARLIE: Don't forget that Harvey links Keynesianism with Fordism in his description of the arrangement. In our youth, this would have appeared to be a linking of opposites. Keynes was the bete noir of our economics teachers, who saturated themselves in the doctrine of laissez-faire. What ideologues! Harvey makes it evident that the state had to intervene to a degree in order to keep the so-called free enterprise post-war system from failing.
BAKER: The global political economy in the non-Soviet world, Harvey says, saw fundamental changes in the early 1970s. We probably don't fully appreciate the critical meaning of the breakdown of the Bretton Woods agreement on gold price and dollar convertibility. 1971.
ABLE: The year Nixon bombed Cambodia. The year Bennett Cerf, the publisher of the great moderns, died. The year of Stanley Kubrick's film, The Clockwork Orange. The US exploded a hydrogen bomb underground in Alaska. Look magazine folded, signifiying the end of something about the way we communicate. Tricia Nixon married Ed Cox.
CHARLIE: Louis Armstrong died!
BAKER: The point today in citing Harvey is simply that finance capital on a global scale took over the power to drive what he calls "accumulation" or as we might call it, the whole bloody system of economic process. That replaced the nation state, with its support of Fordism. We are discovering that this financial/economic shift was occurring at the same moment when people became disillusioned with the globalizing and rationalizing impulses of high modernism. That is, postmodernity in capital accumulation and postmodernity in critical theory and creative expression rise simultaneously.
CHARLIE: Robert Venturi and company celebrated the strip as a viable architecture for the postmodern temperament. Las Vegas on the Grand Canal. The building as a machine, the machine as a metaphor for international solutions, stripped of localized peculiarity--these went out the window. We see minds--and architects--go toward the parochial, particular, fragmented, tribal, national, rooted. This is a mardi gras of recovered values.
BAKER: Meanwhile, if we follow Harvey, we watch the space-time of global business compress further and further. Electronic information technologies carry exchange of all kinds--capital and cultural--toward greater connectivity, seamlessness, global linkage.
ABLE: The more powerful of these forces, we think, is the second, the continuing compression of space and time. This takes the flow toward convergence. It would be rash, though, to think this preordains Teilhard's magnificent vision of a completed noosphere. We look for a constant to emerge from the turbulence of contemporary change. But the turbulence itself, which is caused by convergent power and fragmenting power, may be the constant we are looking for. This would not be a pretty finding.
BAKER: But in that turbulence, we see that both powers--convergent and fragmenting--may be changed. The particularism in postmodern sensibility is, let us say, the gasping of the old as it becomes bracketed in quotation marks.
CHARLIE: ...As it is turned into the elements of a different culture than that from which it is spawned.
BAKER: Yes. Those brackets do not make it quaint or cute. In fact, as we see in "Yugoslavia," it can become more virulent than its original. But we still can see it as a last gasp before it is transformed..
CHARLIE: Metamorphosed.
ABLE: But if "turbulence" becomes the constant and it has the effect of transforming "fragmentation" (or particularism) into something else, it also has to have the power to transform the other factor, "convergence."
BAKER: This is too abstract to be helpful. We talk about this at all only because we care about the well-being of the people.
ABLE: If conditions in postmodernity lead to schizophrenia, as they say (and we want to quarrel with the word sometime), then our grasping for a dialectic in the turbulence is a grasping for social redress, not theoretical precision.
CHARLIE: That's the point. We cannot deny what we have made as a society. The sanity of the individual living in postmodernity has to be sought in the terms of what we have at hand. So we are justified in reaching into the fire, so to speak, and pulling out a burning stick that will somehow light the lamp for comfort.
ABLE: This is one justification for the creative expression of the postmodern.
CHARLIE: Therapy? To help us through it?
BAKER: Perhaps to help us see it.
ABLE: Does seeing it cure us?
BAKER: No, but it might lead us to change IT, the condition itself.
CHARLIE: If that means a move toward convergence at the expense of fragmentation, we still see huge obstacles.
BAKER: No, the move would not be toward convergence. It would be toward "convergence" and its complement, "fragmentation."
CHARLIE: Lunchtime.