The Condition of Postmodernity
David Harvey (Blackwell, 1989)
Part I - The Passage from Modernity to Postmodernity in Contemporary Culture
The first part of the book examines major thematics in the transition from the modernist period (which Harvey locates in 1848) to the postmodern period (which for him begins in 1973). Harvey sees both of these periods as continuous with the basic goals of the Enlightenment project. These basic goals began to break down about 1848, says Harvey, under the strain of the European depression that spread out of Britain in 1846-7. This produced a crisis of representation that led to new modes of both aesthetic expression (which he traces in examples from Baudelaire, Marcel Proust, Le Corbusier, Manet, etc.) and capitalist accumulation.
The depression of 1846-7 was the first truly economic depression: It was attributable not to natural disaster, but to a failure of capitalist accumulation. "Modernism" encountered another crisis of representation during the period 1910-15, which also saw the production of numerous basic literary and musical productions of "high modernism": Dubliners, Swann's Way, Death in Venice, The Rite of Spring, etc., and the numerous new developments in painting and sculpture by Klee, Kandinsky, Braque, Picasso, Duchamp, Matisse, among others. There were also numerous theoretical shifts in areas as diverse as physics and linguistics during this time.
For Harvey, these basic shifts are related to underlying shifts in the means of production, which generate crises of representation that require new aesthetic responses from cultural producers. He sees the transformation from modernity to postmodernity in the same terms, and provides a table comparing the major characteristics of each as they are generally understood. He takes the basic characteristics of postmodernism to be totalising rejection of meta-narrative, a transition from a unified view of the personality to a fragmented view of the personality, and "depthless", "reproductive" aesthetics. For Harvey, deconstruction is the exemplary theoretical approach, although he recognizes that it is not isomorphic with postmodern theory in general.
Harvey also provides an account of Marxist commodity fetishism, tracing the origin of profit back to the division and alienation of labour, linking the basic aspects of urban life - urban organization, the fluidity and ephemerality of corporate locations, the constant drive to increasingly rationalize production - to these fundamental parts of Marxist theory. He critiques the postmodern thematic concern with "the impenetrability of the other" as simply "overt complicity with the fact of fetishism and of indifference towards underlying social meanings."
Part II - The Political-Economic Transformation of Late Twentieth-Century Capitalism
Harvey's argument about the transition from Fordism to flexible accumulation is, in essence, an argument that the superstructural elements of the culture depend on the base. He attributes the transitions from Enlightenment to postmodernist thought to crises within the capitalist regime of accumulation, as noted above. The Fordist regime of production, produced by the crisis of accumulation that also led to World War I, was characterised not only by assembly-line production but also by the capitalists' control of the workers' private lives. This change was instrumental in producing a regime of consumption to accompany the regime of production. The Fordist regime of production required altering the basic qualities of the relationship between capital, government, and organised labour, and resulted in the broad adoption of Keynesian economic policies by governments in Fordising countries.
This system of production managed to contain the contradictions of capitalism successfully until approximately the end of World War II, when new contradictions manifested themselves. These were based in the problems of the successful export of the Fordist system in the earlier parts of the century and the resulting increase in competition as the Fordist-Keynesian system expanded led to a crisis of consumption.
This crisis in demand as production increased put pressure on organised labour, which increasingly saw itself as negotiating for the special interests of its own membership rather than broader class interests. Rates of profit and wage increase dropped, and labour was increasingly fragmented into small groups, some of which were able to take advantage of access to higher-paying jobs and others of which were left out. Often, this group fragmentation intersected with existing ethnic, race, and gender inequalities. The new crisis in capital accumulation produced a transition to a more flexible mode of accumulation (which Harvey calls "flexible accumulation") at the same time that postmodern cultural forms are emerging. "Flexible accumulation" involves a number of characteristic changes in business practices: corporate mergers, diversification, outsourcing, and self-employment. Fictitious capital is generated on an increasingly large scale, and turnover times for capital have decreased.
All of this contributes to the postmodern sense of life as "new ... fleeting ... ephemeral". For Harvey, there is nothing inherently surprising about the recurrent crises in capitalism, as Marx's analysis shows that three of its basic characteristics (capitalism is growth-oriented; this growth rests on exploitation of labor; capitalism is inherently dynamic, reorganising itself in search of greater profits) are fundamentally incompatible, resulting in accumulations of capital that cannot be usefully brought together with accumulations of labor. The change to the flexible mode of accumulation is simply another metamorphosis that capitalism has undergone as it attempts to contain its own contradictions.
Part III - The Experience of Space and Time
Part three solidifies Harvey's argument about the connection between base and superstructure - that is, the argument that changes along the Enlightenment-modernist-postmodernist arch are responses to crises of capital accumulation. Surveying numerous theoretical arguments about how space and time are normally seen across cultures, Harvey argues that the "naturalised" positivist views of space and time, skimming through de Certeau, Bourdier, Lefebvre, and Foucault on the subject of space, and drawing on Gurvitch's 1964 outline of conceptualisation of time across cultures.
For Harvey, there is no "natural" way to conceptualise space or time; both are produced in the context of social action. He maps out a variety of ways that space is actually treated in practice, drawing largely on Lefebvre to produce another grid that summarizes methods of relating to space materially, in representation and in the imagination. All of this is intended to demonstrate not only that space and time are connected to social practice, but also that they are connected to money: as an abstraction, money represents labour time; space is explored temporally, and time is represented spatially; and money allows capitalists to exercise control over both time and space. Harvey traces several examples of capitalists exercising control over production of space and time as tools in the class struggle. As money becomes an increasing measure of value, too, it alters the way that people experience both space and time. Several chapters are devoted to changing representations of both space and time from the Enlightenment through the postmodern period.
The modern and postmodern periods are dominated by a phenomenon that Harvey refers to as "space-time compression" indicating not just a continually shrinking globe but also a speedup in the rate at which capital is expected to turn over and the degree to which up-to-the-minute information is required to make profitable business decisions (especially as money becomes more abstract, i.e. as capital becomes more fictious and currency is decreasingly tied to real labour). The postmodern era is especially characterised by the way in which images have partially displaced commodities as the objects of the system of production, in part because the turnover time of images is nearly instantaneous.
In an increasingly small world with increasingly minute time frames, very small labour-quality differences between areas can make big differences in the attractiveness of one area over another to big capital; space is thus displaced by a sense of "place." For Harvey, it is the collapse of spatial distances for people and commodities, the omnipresence of information, and the flattening of history produced by technological changes that produce the ephemerality and schizoid character of the "postmodern condition”.
Part IV - The Condition of Postmodernity
Harvey sketches several implications of this schizoid, fast-paced, shrinking-world situation produced by crises of capitalist accumulation. One is the rise of image-based, aestheticised, neoconservative politicians who pursue specific class goals. He revises his earlier schema showing modern/postmodern differences, updating it to focus on economic conditions and suggesting that these oppositions constitute "a structural description of the totality of political-economic and cultural-ideological relations within capitalism" (339). This, he suggests, provides a more complete descriptions of capitalism's working than simple adherence to one idea or the other, and notes that viewing the table this way lets us see "the categories of both modernism and postmodernism as static reifications imposed upon the fluid inter-penetration of dynamic oppositions" (339).
Part four also includes a critique of the Reagan presidency, perhaps most notably explaining the administration's popularity by invoking the previous explanations of aestheticised politics to explain the administration's popularity despite the numerous scandals in which it was involved, and explaining the Reagan administration's vast increase in debt as generating fictitious capital to help contain increasing tensions in the regime of flexible accumulation.
The end of part four analyses the difficulties that the orthodox left has encountered since the 1960s. For Harvey, the shift away from "orthodox" Marxism through the positive aspects of postmodernity has resulted in several fundamental changes to Marxist thought: a shift towards concepts of "otherness" besides those most directly associated with class.
· A theoretical recognition of the changing nature of capitalist production, especially the focus on the shift toward production of images.
· A theoretical focus on changes in the perception of space and time.
· The addition of geography to history in materialist thought. (Harvey dubs this "historical-geographical materialism.") (353-5)
Ultimately, for Harvey, the crises in capitalism open up possibilities for meaningful change not only by leading to crises of representation, but thereby loosening the grip of ideology. Several changes in the representation of both capitalist and Marxist thought open up potentials for genuine social change in the coming future.
