The Condition of Postmodernity 13 - autonomous learning

282 The experience of space and timePlate 3.12 After the trauma of World War I, Kandinsky shifts to a muchmore controlled and rationalized imagery of spatial organization, as in LesDeux of 1924 which bears more than a casual resemblance to a stylizedurban map.The rise of modernism as a cultural force 283aesthetic interventions always seem to imply nationalist, and henceunavoidably reactionary, politics.The opposition between Being and Becoming has been central tomodernism's history. That opposition has to be seen in politicalterms as a tension between the sense of time and the focus of space.After 1848, modernism as a cultural movement struggled with thatopposition, often in creative ways. The struggle was warped in allsorts of respects by the overwhelming power of money, profit,capital accumulation, and state power as frames of reference withinwhich all forms of cultural practice had to unfold. Even underconditions of widespread class revolt, the dialectic of Being andBecoming has posed seemingly intractable problems. Above all, thechanging meaning of space and time which capitalism has itselfwrought, has forced perpetual re-evaluations in representations ofthe world in cultural life. It was only in an era of speculation on thefuture and fictitious capital formation that the concept of an avantgarde(both artistic and political) could make any sense. The changingexperience of space and time had much to do with. the birth ofmodernism and its confused wanderings from this to that side of thespatial-temporal relation. If this is indeed the case, then the propositionthat postmodernism is some kind of response to a new setof experiences of space and time, a new round of 'time-space compression,'is well worth exploring.act had to invoke the power of myth. And here the real tragedy ofmodernism begins. Because it was not the myths favoured by LeCor busier or Otto Wagner or Walter Gropius that in the end dominatedmatters. It was either the worship of Mammon or, worsestill, the myths stirred up by an aestheticized politics that called thetune. Le Corbusier flirted with Mussolini and compromised withPetain's France, Oscar Niemeyer planned Brasilia for a populistpresident but built it for ruthless generals, the insights of the Bauhauswere mobilized into the design of the death camps, and the rule thatform follows profit as well as function dominated everywhere. Itwas, in the end, the aestheticizations of politics and the power ofmoney capital that triumphed over an aesthetic movement that hadshown how time-space compression could be controlled and respondedto rationally. Its insights, tragically, were absorbed for purposesthat were not, by and large, its own. The trauma of WorldWar II showed, if further proof were needed of such a proposition,that it was all too easy for Hegel's spatializations to subvert theEnlightenment's (and Marx's) historical project. Geopolitical and