The Condition of Postmodernity 13 - autonomous learning

272 The experience of space and timeWe can spot this 'other side' to modernism's explorations in anumber of contexts. Foucault's perceptive remark (quoted in Crimp,1983, 47) that 'Flaubert is to the library what Manet is to themuseum' underlines how the innovators of modernism in literatureand painting, while in one sense breaking with all past conventions,still had to situate themselves historically and geographically somewhere.Both the library and the museum have the effect of recordingthe past and depicting geography while breaking with it. The reductionof the past to a representation organized as a display ofartefacts (books, paintings, relics, etc.) is just as formalistic as thereduction of geography to a set of displays of things from far-offplaces. Modernist artists and writers painted for the museums orwrote for the libraries precisely because to work this way allowedthem to break with the constraints of their own place and time.Yet the museum, the library, and the exhibition usually aspire tosome kind of coherent ordering. The ideological labour of inventingtradition became of great significance in the late nineteenth centuryprecisely because this was an era when transformations in spatial andtemporal practices implied a loss of identity with place and repeatedradical breaks with any sense of historical continuity. Historicalpreservation and the museum culture experienced strong bursts oflife from the late nineteenth century on, while the internationalexpositions not only celebrated the world of international commodificationbut also exhibited the geography of the world as a series ofartefacts for all to see. It was out of such a climate that one of themost sensitive of modernist writers, Simmel, could write so persuasivelyon the significance of'ruins. Theywere, he said, places where'the past with its destinies and transformations has been gatheredinto this instant of an aesthetically perceptible present' (quotedin Kern, 1983, 40). Ruins helped ground our shaken identity in arapidly transforming world. This was also an age when the artefactsof the past or from afar began to trade as valued commodities. Theemergence of an active antique and foreign craft market (the lattersymbolized by the Japanese prints that Manet inserted into his portraitof Zola, and which to this day adorn Monet's house in Giverny)are indicative of a trend that was consistent, also, with the revival ofthe craft tradition pushed by William Morris in Britain, by thecraftwork movement of Vienna, and in the art noveau style thatswamped France in the early years of the century. Architects likeLouis Sullivan in Chicago and Gaudemar in Paris likewise searchedfor new and local vernacular styles that could satisfy the new functionalneeds but also celebrate the distinctive qualities of the places\ they occupied. The identity of place was reaffirmed in the midst of\ the growing abstractions of space.The rise of modernism as a cultural force 273This trend to privilege the spatialization of time (Being) over theannihilation of space by time (Becoming) is consistent with much ofwhat postmodernism now articulates; with Lyotard's 'local ,determinisms',Fish's 'interpretive communities', Frampton's 'regional resistances',and Foucault's 'heterotopias.' It evidently offers multiplepossibilities within which a spatialized 'otherness' can flourish. Modernism,seen as a whole, explored the dialectic of place versus space,of present versus past, in a variety of ways. While celebrating universalityand the collapse of spatial barriers, it also explored new meaningsfor space and place in ways that tacitly reinforced local identity.By enhancing links between place and the social sense of personaland communal identity, this facet of modernism was bound, to somedegree, to entail the aestheticization of local, regional, or nationalpolitics. Loyalties to place then take precedence over loyalties toclass, spatializing political action. At the end of the process lies therestoration of the Hegelian notion of the state and the resurrectionof geopolitics. Marx, of course, had restored historical time (andclass relations) to primacy of place in social theory, in part as areaction to Hegel's spatialized conception of the 'ethical state' as theend-point of a teleological history. The introduction of the state - aspatialization - poses intriguing questions for social theory for asLefebvre (1974) points out, 'the state crushes time by reducing differencesto repetitions of circularities (dubbed "equilibrium", "feedback","self-regulation", etc.).' If 'this modern state imposes itself asthe stable centre - definitively - of [national] societies and spaces,'then geopolitical argument has to resort, as has in fact always beenthe case, to aesthetic rather than to social values in its search forlegitimacy.It is, therefore, a readily understandable paradox that in an agewhen the annihilation of space through time was proceeding at afurious pace, geopolitics and the aestheticization of politics underwenta strong revival.Nietzsche captured the essential thrust philosophically in The willto power. Nihilism - a condition in which 'the highest values devaluatethemselves' - stands at our door as 'the un canniest of guests.'European culture, he asserts, 'has been moving as toward a catastrophe,with a tortured tension that is growing from decade todecade: restlessly, violently, headlong, like a river that wants toreach the end, that no longer reflects, that is afraid to reflect.' Thedissolution of 'unalienable landed property, honouring the old (originof the belief in gods and heroes as ancestors), in part arises, hesuggests (prefiguring Heidegger's arguments exactly, see above pp.207-9), with the collapse of space: 'newspapers (in place of dailyprayers), railway, telegraph.' The consequent 'centralization of a