The Condition of Postmodernity 13 - autonomous learning

238 The experience of space and timethe accumulation of capital is perpetually de constructing that socialpower by re-shaping its geographical bases. Put the other way round,any struggle to reconstitute power relations is a struggle to reorganizetheir spatial bases. It is in this light that we can betterunderstand 'why capitalism is continually reterritorializing with onehand what it was deterritorializing with the other' (Deleuze andGuattari, 1984).Movements of opposition to the disruptions of home, community,territory, and nation by the restless flow of capital are legion. Butthen so too are movements against the tight constraints of a purelymonetary expression of value and the systematized organization ofspace and time. What is more, such movements spread far beyondthe realms of class struggle in any narrowly defined sense. The rigiddiscipline of time schedules, of tightly organized property rights andother forms of spatial determination, generate widespread resistanceson the part of individuals who seek to put themselves outside thesehegemonic constraints in exactly the same way that others refuse thediscipline of money. And from time to time these individual resistancescan coalesce into social movements with the aim of liberatingspace and time from their current materializations and constructingan alternative kind of society in which value, time, and money areunderstood in new and quite different ways. Movements of all sorts- religious, mystical, social, communitarian, humanitarian, etc. -define themselves directly in terms of an antagonism to the power ofmoney and of rationalized conceptions of space and time over dailylife. The history of such utopian, religious, and communitarian movementstestifies to the vigour of exactly this antagonism. Indeed,much of the colour and ferment of social movements, of street lifeand culture, as well as of artistic and other cultural practices, derivesprecisely from the infinitely varied texture of oppositions to thematerializations of money, space, and time under conditions of capitalisthegemony.Yet all such social movements, no matter how well articulatedtheir aims, run up against a seemingly immovable paradox. For notonly does the community of money, coupled with a rationalizedspace and time, define them in an oppositional sense, but the movementshave to confront the question of value and its expression aswell as the necessary organization of space and time appropriate totheir own reproduction. In so doing, they necessarily open themselvesto the dissolving power of money as well as to the shiftingdefinitions of space and time arrived at through the dynamics ofcapital circulation. Capital, in short, continues to dominate, and itdoes so in part through superior command over space and time, evenTime and space as sources of social powerwhen opposition movements gain control over a particular place fora ti e. The 'oth .ernesses' and 'regional resistances' that postmodernistpolItics emph sIze can flourish in a particular place. But they are alltoo often subject to the power of capital over the co-ordination of ive sal ragmente space .and the march of capitalism's globalhistoncal time that lIes outsIde of the purview of any particular oneof them.A number of .general conclusions can now be ventured. dpractl es-aJ;e-ne.veJ;_ .. neutr:a.Lin-social ... af£air.s._._The¥._.al:w:Jiexpress some !m.. .2.L