The Condition of Postmodernity 13 - autonomous learning

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254 The experience of space and timemathematical unities given by Renaissance perspectivism could, fromthis standpoint, be regarded as just as totalizing and repressive as themaps.Let me follow this line of argument a bit further in order tocapture the central dilemma of defining a proper spatial frame forsocial action.The conquest and control of space, for example, first requires thatit be conceived of as something usable, malleable, and thereforecapable of domination through human acti8n. Perspectivism andmathematical mapping did this by conceiving of space as abstract,homogeneous, and universal in its qualities, a framework of thoughtand action which was stable and knowable. Euclidean geometryprovided the basic language of discourse. Builders, engineers, architects,and land managers for their part showed how Euclideanrepresentations of objective space could be converted into a spatiallyordered physically landscape. Merchants and landowners used suchpractices for their own class purposes, while the absolutist state(with its concern for taxation of land and the definition of its owndomain of domination and social control) likewise relished the capacityto define and produce spaces with fixed spatial co-ordinates. Butthese were islands of practice within a sea of social activities in whichall manner of other conceptions of space and place - sacred andprofane, symbolic, personal, animistic - could continue to functionundisturbed. It took something more to consolidate the actual use ofspace as universal, homogeneous, objective, and abstract in socialpractice. In spite of the plethora of utopian plans, the 'somethingmore' that came to dominate was private property in land, and thebuying and selling of space as a commodity.This brings us to the heart of the dilemmas of the politics of spacein any kind of project to transform society. Lefebvre (1974, 385)observes, for example, that one of the ways in which the homogeneityof space can be achieved is through its total 'pulverization' andfragmentation into freely alienable parcels of private property, to bebought and traded at will upon the market. This was, of course,exactly the strategy that so forcefully transformed the British landscapethrough the enclosure movements of the eighteenth and earlynineteenth centuries, and which demanded systematic mapping asone of its accoutrements. There is, Lefebvre suggests, a permanenttension between the free appropriation of space for individual andsocial purposes, and the domination of space through private property,the state, and other forms of class and social power. Out ofLefebvre's proposition we can extract five explicit dilemmas:Time and space of the Enlightenment project 2551 If it is true that the only way that space can be controlled andorganized is through its 'pulverization' and fragmentation, then itbehoves us to establish the principles of that fragmentation. If space,as Foucault would have it, is always a container of social power, thenthe reorganization of space is always a reorganization of the frameworkthrough which social power is expressed. Political economistsof the Enlightenment period debated this problem quite explicitlyunder the opposed doctrines of mercantilism (in which the state wasthe relevant geographical unit around which spatial policy should beformulated) and liberalism (in which itwas the rights of individualizedprivate property that were paramount). Turgot, French minister ofstate and an eminent economist with physiocratic and liberal leanings,commissioned the accurate cadastral mapping of much of Franceprecisely because he sought to support private property relations, thedispersal of economic and political power, and to facilitate the freecirculation of commodities both within and without France. Colbert,on the other hand, had earlier tried to organize the French space toconcentrate on Paris, the capital, because of his interest in supportingthe absolute state and monarchical power. Both were concerned toenhance the fiscal basis of state power, but saw quite different spatialpolicies as necessary to meet that goal, because they envisaged quitedifferent relations of power between private property and the state(Dockes, 1969).2 What Enlightenment thinkers began to grapple with was thewhole problem of 'the production of space' as a political and economicphenomenon. The production of turnpikes, canals, systems ofcommunication and administration, cleared lands, and the like putthe question of the production of a space of transport and communicationsclearly on the agenda. Any change in space relationswrought by such investments, after all, affected the profitability ofeconomic activity unevenly, and therefore led to a redistribution ofwealth and power. Any attempt to democratize and disperse politicalpower likewise entailed some kind of spatial strategy. One of thefirst initiatives of the French Revolution was to devise a rationalsystem of administration through a highly rational and egalitariandivision of the French national space into 'departments' (see plate3.8). Perhaps the clearest example of this politics in action is thedesign of the homesteading system and the spatial grid for landsettlement in the United States (a product of Jeffersonian democraticand Enlightenment thinking). The pulverization and fragmentationof the space of the United States along such rationalistic lines was
Time and space of the Enlightenment project 257thought to (and in some respects indeed did) imply maximum individualliberty to move and settle in a reasonably egalitarian wayin the spirit of a property-owning and agrarian democracy. TheJeffersonian vision was ultimately subverted, but at least up until theCivil War there was enough truth in its practical meaning to givesome credence to the idea that the United States, precisely because ofits open spatial organization, was the land where the utopian visionsof the Enlightenment might be realized.3 There can be no politics of space independent of social relations.The latter give the former their social content and meaning.This was the rock upon which the innumerable utopian plans ofthe Enlightenment foundered. The pulverization of space, whichJeffersonian land politics presumed would open the way to an egalitariandemocracy, ended up being a means that facilitated the proliferationof capitalist social relations. It provided a remarkably openframework within which money power could operate with few ofthe constraints encountered in Europe. In the European context itwas the ideas of Saint-Simon, with his associated capitals conqueringand subduing space in the name of human welfare, that similarly gotsubverted. After 1848, credit bankers such as the Pereire brothers inSecond Empire France, promoted a highly profitable even if speculative'spatial fix' to the dilemmas of overaccumulation and capitalistcrisis, through a vast wave of investments in railways, canals, andurban infrastructures.Plate 3.8 The French Revolution emphasized Enlightenment concerns forboth the rational mapping of space and its rational division for purposes ofadministration: (above) a 1780 prospectus fo r a 'Nouvelle Topographie' ofFrance and (below) a 1789 map drawn up by the National Assembly to• 1 . •4 The homogenization of space poses serious difficulties for theconception of place. If the latter is the site of Being (as manytheorists were later to suppose), then Becoming entails a spatialpolitics that renders place subservient to transformations of space.Absolute space yields, as it were, to relative space. It is precisely atthis point that the incipient tension between place and space can gettransformed into an absolute antagonism. The reorganization of spaceto democratic ends challenged dynastic power embedded in place.'The beating down of gates, the crossing of castle moats, walking atone's ease in places where one was once forbidden to enter: theappropriation of a certain space, which had to be opened and brokeninto, was the first delight of the [French] Revolution.' Moreover, as'good sons of the Enlightenment,' Ozouf (1988, 126-37) goes on toreport, . the revolutionaries 'saw space and time as an occasion' toconstruct a ceremonial space that was the equivalent of 'the time ofthe Revolution'. But the subversion of that democratizing project bymoney power and capital led to the commodification of space and
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The Conditionof PostmodernityAn Enq
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PrefaceI cannot remember exactly wh
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Introduction 5theatre, a series of
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8 The passage from modernity to pos
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Postmodernism in the city 85Here we
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7IntroductionIf there has been some
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124 Political-economic capitalist t
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From Fordism to flexible accumulati
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Page 105 and 106: 12IntroductionMarshall Berman (1982
Page 107 and 108: 204 The experience of space and tim
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Page 115 and 116: Table 3.1 A 'grid' of spatial pract
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27Cracks in the mIrrors, fusions at
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ReferencesAglietta, M. (1979): A th
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364 ReferencesJacobs, J. (1961): Th
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Index 369Adorno, T. 13Aglietta, M.
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372IndexSoja, E. 284Sorel, G. 34Spe
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376IndexIndex 377jouissance 57-8, 9
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