The Condition of Postmodernity 13 - autonomous learning

More documents

Recommendations

Info

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
15The time and space of theEnlightenment proj ect?--'//'/c\ '.-:_ I·--" .:-.:. ,_,l'.? .':;;liIn what follows I shall make frequent reference to the concept of'tim-= l'__ c,".:tI? EesiQl1: . 1 ean to ṣi .gnal by that ter processesthat so revolutlOlllze the obJective qualmes of space and time that weare forced to alter, sometimes in quite radical ways, how we representthe world to ourselves. I use the word 'compression' because astrong case can be made that the history of ca p italism has b c: encharacterized by sped-up in the pace of life, whIle so ovecommgspatial barriers that'the world sometimes seems to collapse lllwardsupon us. The time taken to traverse space (plate 3.1) and the way wecommonly represent that fact to ourselves (pl te 3:2) are usefulindicators of the kind of phenomena I have m mmd. As spaceappears to shrink to a 'global village' of .tel communicatio s and a'spaceship earth' of economic and ecologIcal mterdepedencIes .- touse just two familiar and everyday i ages - an as time honzonsshorten to the point where the present IS all there IS (the .world of theschizophrenic), so we have to learn how to cope WIth an overwhelmingsense of compression of our spatial and temporal worlds.The experience of time-space compression is challenging, .exciting,stressful, and sometimes deeply troubling, cap le of sparkmg,therefore, a diversity of social, cultural, and pohtIcal respones.'Compression' should be understood as .relative to any .pre edmgstate of affairs. In what follows, I shall consIder the matter hIstoncally,using the European case (somewhat ethnocentrical ) as an example.In this chapter, I shall look briefly at the long transmon hat preparedthe way for Enlightenment thinking about space and time . .In the relatively isolated worlds (and I use ṭhe plural ad:I edly) ofEuropean feudalism, place assume a defilllte legal, p
Page 1:
The Conditionof PostmodernityAn Enq
Page 4:
PrefaceI cannot remember exactly wh
Page 7 and 8:
Introduction 5theatre, a series of
Page 9 and 10:
8 The passage from modernity to pos
Page 11 and 12:
12 The passage from modernity to po
Page 13 and 14:
Page 15 and 16:
Page 17 and 18:
24The passage from modernity to pos
Page 19 and 20:
Page 21 and 22:
Page 23 and 24:
Page 25 and 26:
Page 27 and 28:
Page 29 and 30:
Page 31 and 32:
Page 33 and 34:
Page 35 and 36:
Page 37 and 38:
Page 39 and 40:
Page 41 and 42:
Page 43 and 44:
Page 45 and 46:
Page 47 and 48:
Postmodernism in the city 85Here we
Page 49 and 50:
Page 51 and 52:
Page 53 and 54:
Page 55 and 56:
100 The passage from modernity to p
Page 57 and 58:
Page 59 and 60:
Page 61 and 62:
Page 63 and 64:
Page 65 and 66:
7IntroductionIf there has been some
Page 67 and 68:
124 Political-economic capitalist t
Page 69 and 70:
Page 71 and 72:
Page 73 and 74: 136 Political-economic capitalist t
Page 77 and 78: From Fordism to flexible accumulati
Page 79 and 80: 12 10Ql+-'l:'+-' 8CQlE>E 6Cl.EQlC4Q
Page 81 and 82: 152 political-economic capitalist t
Page 105 and 106: 12IntroductionMarshall Berman (1982
Page 107 and 108: 204 The experience of space and tim
Page 111 and 112: 212tThe experience of space and tim
Page 115 and 116: Table 3.1 A 'grid' of spatial pract
Page 117 and 118: TypeEnduringtimeDeceptivetimeErrati
Page 119 and 120: I228 The experience of space and ti
Page 123: 236 The experience of space and tim
Page 129 and 130: Plate 3 5 Dynasty versus the map: t
Page 133 and 134: Time and space of the Enlightenment
Page 135 and 136: The rise of modernism as a cultural
Page 147 and 148: 17Time-space compresson and thepost
Page 159 and 160: 18Time and space In the postmodernC
Page 167 and 168: Part IVThe condition of postmoderni
Page 169 and 170: 328 The condition of postmodernityw
Page 171 and 172: 332 The condition of postmodernityC
Page 173 and 174: 21Postmodernism as the mIrror ofmIr
Page 175 and 176:
Table 4.1 Fordist modernity versus
Page 177 and 178:
344 The condition of postmodernityN
Page 179 and 180:
348 The condition of postmodernityc
Page 181 and 182:
352 The condition 0/ postmodernityf
Page 183 and 184:
27Cracks in the mIrrors, fusions at
Page 185 and 186:
ReferencesAglietta, M. (1979): A th
Page 187 and 188:
364 ReferencesJacobs, J. (1961): Th
Page 189 and 190:
Index 369Adorno, T. 13Aglietta, M.
Page 191 and 192:
372IndexSoja, E. 284Sorel, G. 34Spe
Page 193 and 194:
376IndexIndex 377jouissance 57-8, 9
show all

The Condition of Postmodernity 13 - autonomous learning

You also want an ePaper? Increase the reach of your titles

Delete template?

Save as template?