The Condition of Postmodernity 13 - autonomous learning

222 The experience of space and timedefence against, human interaction. It imposes transactio"n costs uponany system of production and reproduction (particularly those basedon any elaborate social division of labour, trade, and social differentiationof reproductive functions). Distanciation (cf. Giddens, 1984,258-9) is simply a measure of the degree to which the friction ofspace has been overcome to accommodate social interaction.2 The appropriation of space examines the way in which space isoccupied by objects (house, factories, streets, etc.), activities (landuses), individuals, classes, or other social groupings. Systematizedand institutionalized appropriation may entail the production ofterritorially bounded forms of social solidarity.3 The domination of space reflects how individuals or powerfulgroups dominate the organization and production of space throughlegal or extra-legal means so as to exercise a greater degree of controleither over the friction of distance or over the manner in which spaceis appropriated by themselves or others.4 The production of space examines how new systems (actual orimagined) of land use, transport and communications, territorialorganization, etc. are produced, and how new modes of representation(e.g. information technology, computerized mapping, or design) arise.These four dimensions to spatial practice are not independent of eachother. The friction of distance is implicit in any understanding of thedomination and appropriation of space, while the persistent appropriationof a space by a particular group (say the gang that hangs outon the street corner) amounts to a de facto domination of that space.The production of space, insofar as it reduces the friction of distance(capitalism's 'annihilation of space through time,' for example) altersdistanciation and the conditions of appropriation and domination.My purpose in setting up such a grid is not to attempt anysystematic exploration of the positions within it, though such anexamination would be of considerable interest (I have penned in afew controversial positionings within the grid for purposes of illustration,and would like to suggest that the different authors we haveso far examined concentrate on different facets of it). My purpose isto find some point of entry that will allow a deeper discussion ofthe shifting experience of space in the history of modernism andpostmodernism.The grid of spatial practices can tell us nothing important by itself.To suppose so would be to accept the idea that there is someuniversal spatial language independent of social practices. Spatiall"'"tIndividual spaces and times in social life 223practices derive their efficacy in social life only through the structureof social relations within which they come into play. Under thesocial relations of capitalism, for example, the spatial practices portryed-intlie gri(lJecome .. imbued with class meanings To put it thisway is-iiot;-however, to argue that spatial practices are derivative ofcapitalism. They take on their meanings under specific social relationsof class, gender, community, ethnicity, or race and get 'used up' or'worked over' in the course of social action. When placed in thecontext of capitalist social relations and imperatives (see chapter 14below), the grid helps unravel some of the complexity that prevailsin understanding the transformation of spatial experience associatedwith the shift from modernist to postmodernist ways of thinking.Gurvitch (1964) suggests an analogous framework for thinkingabout the meaning of time in social life. He addresses the issue of thesocial content of temporal practices directly, however, while avoidingissues of materiality, representation, and imagination of the sort thatLefebvre insists upon. His primary thesis is that particular socialformations (listed in the right-hand column of table 3.2) associatewith a specific sense of time. Out of that study comes an eightfoldclassification of the types of social time that have existed historically.This typology proves rather interesting in its implications.To begin with, it inverts the proposition that there is a time foreverything and proposes that we think, instead, of every social relationcontaining its own sense of time. It is tempting, for example, tothink of 1968 as an 'explosive' time (in which quite different behaviourswere suddenly deemed acceptable) emerging out of the'deceptive' time of Fordism - Keynesianism and giving way in thelate 1970s to the world of 'time in advance of itself' populated byspeculators, entrepreneurs, and debt-peddling finance capitalists. It isalso possible to use the typology to look at different senses of time atwork contemporaneously, with academics and other professionalsperpetually condemned (it seems) to 'retarded time,' perhaps with amission to avert 'explosive' and 'erratic' times, and so restore to ussome sense of 'enduring' time (a world also populated by ecologistsand theologians). The potential mixes are intriguing, and I shall comeback to them later, since they shed light, I think, on the confusedtransition in the sense of time implied in the shift from modernist topostmodernist cultural practices.If there were an independent language (or semiotic) of time orspace (or time-space) we could at this point reasonably abandonsocial concerns and enquire more directly into the properties ofspace-time languages as means of communication in their own right.But since it is a fundamental axiom of my enquiry that time and