The Condition of Postmodernity 13 - autonomous learning

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258 The experience of space and timethe production of new but equally oppressive geographical systemsfor the containerization of power (as in the United States).5 This leads us back to the most serious dilemma of all: the factthat space can be conquered only through the production of space.The specific spaces of transport and communications, of humansettlement and occupancy, all legitimized under some legal system ofrights to spaces (of the body, of land, of home, etc.) which guaranteessecurity of place and access to the members of society, form a fixedframe within which the dynamics of a social process must unfold.When placed in the context of capital accumulation this fixity ofspatial organization becomes heightened into an absolute contradiction.The effect is to unleash capitalism's powers of 'creativedestruction' upon the geographical landscape, sparking violent movementsof opposition from all kinds of quarters.This last point is sufficiently important to warrant generalization.Not only does it take the production of a specific, fixed, and immovablespace to pursue the 'annihilation of space through time,' but italso takes long-term investments of slow turnover time (automatedplants, robots, etc.) in order to accelerate the turnover time of themass of capitals. How capitalism confronts and periodically succumbsto this nexus of contradictions is one of the major untold stories inthe historical geography of capitalism. Time-space compression is asign of the intensity of forces at work at this exus of contraicti nand it may well be that crises of overaccumulauon as well as cnses Incultural and political forms are powerfully connected to such forces.Enlightenment thinkers sought a better society. In so doing theyhad to pay attention to the rational ordering of space and time as. prerequisites to the construction of a society that would guaranteeindividual liberties and human welfare. The project meant the reconstructionof the spaces of power in radically new terms, but it provedimpossible to specify exactly what those terms might be. State,communitarian, and individualistic ideas were associated with differentspatial landscapes, just as differential command over time posedcrucial problems of class relations, of the rights to the fruits of one'slabour, and of capital accumulation. Yet all Enlightenment projectshad in common a relatively unified common-sense of what space andtime were about and why their rational ordering was important. Thiscommon basis in part depended on the popular availability of watchesand clocks, and on the capacity to diffuse cartographic knowledge bycheaper and more efficient printing techniques. But it also restedupon the link between Renaissance perspectivism and a conceptionTime and space of the Enlightenment project 259of the individual as the ultimate source and container of socialpower, albeit assimilated within the nation state as a collective ystemof authority. The economic conditions of the European EnlIghtenmentcontributed in no uncertain measure to the sense of commonobjectives. Increased competition between states and other economicunits created pressure to rationalize and co-ordinate the space andtime of economic activity, be it within a national space of transportand communications, of administration and military organization, orthe more localized spaces of private estates and municipalities. Alleconomic units were caught up in a world of increasing competitionin which the stakes were ultimately economic success (measured inthe bullion so dear to the mercantilists, or by the accumulation ofindividualized money, wealth, and power as lauded by the liberals).The practical rationalization of space and time throughout the eighteenthcentury - a progress marked by the rise of the OrdnanceSurvey or of systematic cadastral mapping in France at the end of theeighteenth century - formed the context in which Enlightenmentthinkers formulated their projects. And it was against this conceptionthat the second great turn of modernism after 1848 revolted.
The rise of modernism as a cultural force 26116Time-space compression and therise of modernism as acultural forceThe depression that swept out of Britain in 1846-7 and whichquickly engulfed the whole of what was then the capitalist world,can justly be regarded as the first unambiguous crisis of capitalistoveraccumulation. It shook the confidence of the bourgeoisie andchallenged its sense of history and geography in profound ways.There had been many economic and political crises before, but mostcould reasonably be attributed to natural calamities (such as harvestfailures) or wars and other geopolitical struggles. But this one wasdifferent. Though there were bad harvests here and there, this crisiscould not easily be attributed to God or nature. Capitalism hadmatured by 1847-8 to a sufficient degree, so that even the blindestbourgeois apologist could see that financial conditions, reckless speculation,and over-production had something to do with events. Theoutcome, in any case, was a sudden paralysis of the economy, inwhich surpluses of capital and labour lay side by side with apparentlyno way to reunite them in profitable and socially useful union.There were, of course, as many explanations of the crisis as therewere class positions (and a good few more besides). The craft workersfrom Paris to Vienna tended to view it as the inevitable outcome of arampant capitalist development process that was changing employmentconditions, raising the rate of exploitation, and destroyingtraditional skills, while progressive elements in the bourgeoisie couldview it as a product of the recalcitrant aristocratic and feudal orderswho refused the course of progress. The latter, for their part, couldattribute the whole affair to the undermining of traditional valuesand social hierarchies by the materialist values and practices of bothworkers and an aggressive class of capitalists and financiers.The thesis I want to explore here, however, is that the crisis of1847-8 created a crisis of representation, and that this latter crisisitself derived from a radical readjustment in the sense of time andspace in economic, political, and cultural life. Before 1848, progressiveelements within the bourgeoisie could reasonably hold to theEnlightenment sense of time ('time pressing forward' as Gurvitchwould put it), recognizing that they were fighting a battle against the'enduring' and ecological time of traditional societies and the 'retardedtime' of recalcitrant forms of social organization. But after 1848, thatprogressive sense of time was called into question in many importantrespects. Too many people in Europe had fought on the barricades,or been caught up in the maelstrom of hopes and fears, not toappreciate the stimulus that comes with participant action in 'explosivetime.' Baudelaire, for one, could never forget the experience, andcame back to it again and again in his explorations of a modernistlanguage. In retrospect, it became easier to invoke some cyclicalsense of time (hence the growing interest in the idea of businesscycles as necessary components to the capitalist growth process thatwould connect back to the economic troubles of 1837, 1826, and1817). Or, if people were mindful enough of class tensions, theymight invoke, as Marx did in The eighteenth brumaire of LouisBonaparte, a sense of 'alternating time' in which the outcome ofbitter struggles must always be seen as a precarious balance betweenclass forces. But I think it true to say that the question 'What timeare we in?' came in upon the philosophical agenda after 1848 in waysthat challenged the simple mathematical presuppositions of Enlightenmentthinking. The sense of physical and social time, sorecently brought together in Enlightenment thought, began oncemore to diverge. It then became possible for the artist and thethinker to explore the nature and meaning of time in new ways.The events of 1847-8 also challenged certainties as to the natureof space and the meaning of money. Events proved that Europe hadachieved a level of spatial integration in its economic and financiallife that was to make the whole continent vulnerable to simultaneouscrisis formation. The political revolutions that erupted at onceacross the continent emphasized the synchronic as well as the diachronicdimensions to capitalist development. The certainty of absolutespace and place gave way to the insecurities of a shiftingrelative space, in which events in one place could have immediateand ramifying effects in several other places. If, as Jameson (1988,349) suggests, 'the truth of experience no longer coincides with theplace in which it takes place,' but is spreadeagled across the world'sspaces, then a situation arises 'in which we can say that if individualexperience is authentic, then it cannot be true; and that if a scientificor cognitive mode of the same content is true, then it escapes individualexperience.' Since individual experience always forms the
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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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7IntroductionIf there has been some
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From Fordism to flexible accumulati
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Page 105 and 106: 12IntroductionMarshall Berman (1982
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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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