The Condition of Postmodernity 13 - autonomous learning

252 The experience of space and timeresulted. The environmentalist explanations of difference put forwardby Montesquieu and Rousseau hardly appear enlightened, while thesordid facts of the slave trade and the subjugation of women passedEnlightenment thinkers by with hardly a murmur of protest. Nevertheless,I do want to insist that the problem with Enlightenmentthought was not that it had no conception of 'the other' but that itperceived 'the other' as necessarily having (and sometimes 'keepingto') a specific place in a spatial order that was ethnocentricallyconceived to have homogeneous and absolute qualities., The recording of time by the chronometer was no less totalizing in\ its implication for thought and action. Increasingly seen as a mech­, anical division fixed by the swing of the pendulum, time's arrow wasconceived to be linear both forwards and backwards. The conceptionof past and future as linearly connected by the ticking away of theclock allowed all manner of scientific and historical conceptions toflourish. On such a temporal schema it was possible to see retrodictionand prediction as symmetrical propositions, and to formulatea strong sense of potentiality to control the future. And even thoughit took many years for geological and evolutionary time scales to beaccepted, there is a sense in which such time scales were alreadyimplicit in the very acceptance of the chronometer as the way oftelling time. Even more important, perhaps, was the significance ofsuch a conception of homogeneous and universal time to conceptionsof the rate of profit (return on stock of capital over time, said AdamSmith), the rate of interest, the hourly wage, and other magnitudesfundamental to capitalist decision-making. What all this adds up to isthe by now well accepted fact that Enlightenment thought operatedwithin the confines of a rather mechanical 'Newtonian' vision of theuniverse, in which the presumed absolutes of homogeneous time andspace formed limiting containers to thought and action. The breakdownin these absolute conceptions under the stress of time-spacecompression was the central story of the birth of nineteenth- andearly twentieth-century forms of modernism.I think it useful, however, to pave the path to understanding thebreak into modernist ways of seeing after 1848 with a considerationof the tensions that lay within Enlightenment conceptions of space.The theoretical, representational, and practical dilemmas are alsoinstructive in interpreting the subsequent move towards postmodernism.Consider, as a starting point, de Certeau's contemporary critiqueof the map as a 'totalizing device.' The application of mathematicalprinciples produces 'a formal ensemble of abstract places' and 'collateson the same plane heterogeneous places, some received fromTime and space of the Enlightenment project 253tradition and others produced by observation.' The map is, in effect,a homogenization and reification of the rich diversity of spatialitineraries and spatial stories. It 'eliminates little by little' all traces of'the practices that produce it.' While the tactile qualities of themediaeval map preserved such traces, the mathematically rigorousmaps of the Enlightenment were of quite different qualities. Bourdieu'sarguments also apply. Since any system of representation is itself afixed spatial construct, it automatically converts the fluid, confused,but nonetheless objective spaces and time of work and social reproductioninto a fixed schema. 'Just as the map replaces the discontinuouspatchy space of practical paths by the homogeneous, continuousspace of geometry, so the calendar substitutes a linear, homogeneous,continuous time for practical time, which is made up ofincommensurable islands of duration each with its own rhythm.' Theanalyst, Bourdieu continues, may win 'the privilege of totalization'and secure 'the means for apprehending the logic of the systemwhich a partial or discrete view would miss,' but there is also'every likelihood that he will overlook the change in status to whichhe is subjecting practice and its product,' and consequently 'insist ontrying to answer questions which are not and cannot be questionsfor practice.' By treating certain idealized conceptions of space andtime as real, Enlightenment thinkers ran the danger of confining thefree flow of human experience and practice to rationalized configurations.It is in these terms that Foucault detects the repressiveturn in Enlightenment practices towards surveillance and controLThis provides a useful insight into 'postmodernist' criticism of the'totalizing qualities' of Enlightenment thought and the 'tyranny' ofperspectivism. It also highlights a recurring problem. If social life isto be rationally planned and controlled so as to promote socialequality and the welfare of all, then how can production, consumption,and social interaction be planned and efficiently organized exceptthrough the incorporation of the ideal abstractions of space and timeas given in the map, the chronometer, and the calendar? Beyond thisthere lies another problem. If perspectivism, for all its mathematicalrig our, constructs the world from a given individual viewpoint, thenfrom whose perspective is the physical landscape to be shaped? Thearchitect, designer, planner could not preserve the tactile sense ofmediaeval representations. Even when not directly dominated byclass interests, the producer of space could only produce 'alien art'from the standpoint of its inhabitants. Insofar as the social planningof high modernism reincorporated these elements into its practicalapplications, it likewise stood to be accused of the 'totalizing vision'of space and time to which Enlightenment thinking was heir. The