The Condition of Postmodernity 13 - autonomous learning

206 The experience of space and timea spatial form. Painters, sculptors, poets, and writers of all sorts dono less. Even the written word abstracts properties from the flux ofexperience and fixes them in spatial form. 'The invention of printingembedded the word in space,' it has been said, and writing - a 'set oftiny marks marching in neat line, like armies of insects, across pagesand pages of white paper' - is, therefore, a definite spatialization(quoted in McHale, 1987, 179-81). Any system of representation, infact, is a spatialization of sorts which automatically freezes the flowof experience and in so doing distorts what it strives to represent.'Writing,' says Bourdieu (1977, 156) 'tears practice and discourse outof the flow of time.' For this reason, Bergson, the great theorist ofbecoming, of time as flux, was incensed that it took the spatializationsof the clock to tell the time.The philosopher Karsten Harries (1982, 59-69) makes mch ofthis idea. Architecture, he maintains, is not only about domesticatingspace, wresting and shaping a liveable place from space. It is also adeep defence against 'the terror of time'. The 'language of beauty' is'the language of a timeless reality.' To create a beautiful object 'is tolink time and eternity' in such a way as to redeem us from time'styranny. The urge to 'devaluate time' reappears as the artist's will toredeem through the creation of a work 'strong enough to still time.'Much of the aesthetic thrust of modernism, we saw in Part I, is tostrive for this sense of eternity in the midst of flux. But in leaning tothe eternal side of Baudelaire's formulation, this emphasizes spacerather than time. The aim of spatial constructs is 'not to illuminatetemporal reality so that [we] might feel more at home in it, but to berelieved of it: to abolish time within time, if only for a time.' Harrieshere echoes those famous modernist formulations of Baudelaire, 'onecan only forget time by making use of it,' and T. S. Eliot, 'onlythrough time, time is conquered.'But here arises the paradox. We learn our ways of thinking andconceptualizing from active grappling with the spatializations of thewritten word, the study and production of maps, graphs, diagrams,photographs, models, paintings, mathematical symbols, and the like.How adequate are such modes of thought and such conceptions inthe face of the flow of human experience and strong processes ofsocial change? On the other side of the coin, how can spatializationsin general, and aesthetic practices in particular, represent flux andchange, particular!y if these latter are held essential truths to beconveyed? This was the dilemma that plagued Bergson. It became acentral problem for both futurist and Dada art. Eutur-ism- soughc tosh _ape space in ways that could represent speed and motion. padaistsIntroduction 207yiewed art as ephemeral and, renouncing any permanent spatialization,sought eternity by embedding their happenings in revolutionaryaction. It was perhaps in response to this conundrum that WalterPater argued that 'all art aspires to the condition of music' - music,after all, contains its aesthetic effect precisely through its temporalmovement. But the most obvious means of representation of timewaS the film. The young Sartre was particularly impressed by itspossibilities. 'It is an art which reflects civilization in our time,' hesaid; it 'will teach you about the beauty of the world you live in, thepoetry of speed, machines, and the inhuman splendid inevitability ofindustry' (Cohen-Solal, 1987). The combination of film and musicprovides a powerful antidote to the spatial passivity of art andarchitecture. Yet the very confinement of the film to a depthlessscren and a theatre is a reminder that it, too, is space-bound in somecunous way.There is much to be learned from aesthetic theory about howdifferent forms of spatialization inhibit or facilitate processes ofsocial change. Conversely, there is much to be learned from socialtheory concerning th flux and change with which aesthetic theoryhas to cope. By playmg these two currents of thought off against. each other, we can, perhaps, better understand the ways in whichpolitical- economic change informs cultural practices.But let me first illustrate where the political significance of such anarg ment might lie. In so doing, I shall revert to that conceptionwhlCh Kant advanced (see above, p. 19), of aesthetic judgement as apotential mediator between the worlds of objective science and ofsubjective moral judgement (without necessarily conceding either thetripartite division of knowledge that Kant proposed or the entirelydisinterested . satisfaction with which his concept of beauty is associated).Aesthetic judgements (as well as 'redemptive' artistic practices)have entered in as powerful criteria of political, and hence of socialand economic, action. If aesthetic judgement prioritizes space overtime, then it follows that spatial practices and concepts can, undercertain circumstances, become central to social action.In this regard, the German philosopher Heidegger is an intriguingfigure . .Rejecting the Kantian dichotomies of subject and object, heproclaImed the permanence of Being over the transitoriness of Becoming(Metaphysics, 202). His investigations of Being led him awayfrom the universals of modernism and of the Judaeo-Christian tradition,.and back to the intense and creative nationalism of pre­Socratlc Greek thought. All metaphysics and philosophy, he declared,are given their meaning only in relation to the destiny of the people