The Condition of Postmodernity 13 - autonomous learning

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290 The experience of space and timesimultaneously upon the television screen, but even to transformthose images into material simulacra in the form of built environments,events and spectacles, and the like, which become in manyrespects indistinguishable from the originals. What happens to culturalforms when the imitations become real, and the real takes on manyof the qualities of an imitation, is a question to which we shallreturn.The organization and conditions of labour prevailing within whatwe might broadly refer to as the 'image production industry' are alsoquite special. An industry of this sort has to rely, after all, upon theinnovative powers of the direct producers. The latter have an insecureexistence, tempered by very high rewards for the successful and atleast a semblance of command over their own labour process andcreative powers. The growth of cultural output has in fact beenphenomenal. Taylor (1987, 77) contrasts the art market condition inNew York in 1945, when there were a handful of galleries and nomore than a score of artists regularly exhibitiflg, and the two thousandor so artists who practised in or around Paris in the mid-nineteenthcentury, with the 150,000 artists in the New York region who claimprofessional status, exhibiting at some 680 galleries, producing morethan 15 million art-works in a decade (compared to 200,000 in latenineteenth-century Paris). And this is only the tip of an iceberg ofcultural production that encompasses local entertainers and graphicdesigners, street and pub musicians, photographers, as well as themore established and recognized schools for teaching art, music,drama, and the like. Dwarfing all of this, however, is what DanielBell (1978, 20) calls 'the cultural mass' defined as:not the creators of culture but the transmitters: those workingin higher education, publishing, magazines, broadcast media,theater, and museums, who process and influence the receptionof serious cultural products. It is in itself large enough to be amarket for culture, purchase books, prints and serious musicrecordings. And it is also the group which, as writers, magazineeditors, movie-makers, musicians, and so forth, produce thepopular materials for the wider mass-culture audience.This whole industry specializes in the acceleration of turnovertime through the production and marketing of images. This is anindustry where reputations are made and lost overnight, where bigmoney talks in no uncertain terms, and where there is a ferment ofintense, often individualized, creativity poured into the vast vat ofserialized and recursive mass culture. It is the organizer of fads andThe postmodern condition 291fashions and, as such, it actively produces the very ephemerality thathas always been fundamental to the experience of modernity. Itbecomes a social means to produce that sense of collapsing timehorizons which it in turn so avidly feeds upon.The popularity of a work like Alvin Toffler's Future shock layprecisely in its prescient appreciation of the speed with which thefuture has COme to be discounted into the present. Out of that, also,comes a collapse of cultural distinctions between, say, 'science' and'regular' fiction (in the works of, for example, Thomas Pynchon andDoris Lessing), as well as a merging of the cinema of distraction withthe cinema of futuristic universes. We can link the schizophrenicdimension to postmodernity which Jameson emphasizes (above,pp. 53-5) with accelerations in turnover times in production,exchange, and consumption that produce, as it were, the loss of asense of the future except and insofar as the future can be discountedinto the present. Volatility and ephemerality similarly make it hardto maintain any firm sense of continuity. Past experience gets compressedinto some overwhelming present. Italo Calvino (1981, 8)reports the effect on his own craft of novel writing this way:long novels written today are perhaps a contradiction: the dimensionof time had been shattered, we cannot live or thinkexcept in fragments of time each of which goes off along itsown trajectory and immediately disappears. We can rediscoverthe continuity of time only in the novels of that period whentime no longer seemed stopped and did not yet seem to haveexploded, a period that lasted no more than a hundred years.Baudrillard (1986), never afraid to exaggerate, considers the UnitedStates as a society so given over to speed, motion, cinematic images,and technological fixes as to have created a crisis of explanatorylogic. It represents, he suggests, 'the triumph of effect over cause, ofinstantaneity over time as depth, the triumph of surface and of pureobjectivization over the depth of desire.' This, of course, is the kindof environment in which deconstruction ism can flourish. If it isimpossible to say anything of solidity and permanence in the midstof this ephemeral and fragmented world, then why not join in the[language] game? Everything, from novel writing and philosophizingto the experience of labouring or making a home, has to face thechallenge of accelerating turnover time and the rapid write-off oftraditional and historically acquired values. The temporary contractin everything, as Lyotard remarks (see above, p. 113), then becomesthe hallmark of post modern living.
292 The experience of space and timeBut, as so often happens, the plunge into the maelstrom of ephemeralityhas provoked an explosion of opposed sentiments andtendencies. To begin with, all sorts of technical means arise to guardagainst future shocks. Firms sub-contract or resort to flexible hiringpractices to discount the potential unemployment costs of futuremarket shifts. Futures markets in everything, from corn and porkbellies to currencies and government debt, coupled with the 'securitization'of all kinds of temporary and floating debts, illustratetechniques for discounting the future into the present. Insurancehedges of all kinds against future volatility become much morewidely available.Deeper questions of meaning and interpretation also arise. Thegreater the ephemerality, the more pressing the need to discover ormanufacture some kind of eternal truth that might lie therein. Thereligious revival that has become much stronger since the late sixties,and the search for authenticity and authority in politics (with all ofits accoutrements of nationalism and localism and of admiration forthose charismatic and 'protean' individuals with their Nietzschian'will to power') are cases in point. The revival of interest in basicinstitutions (such as the family and community), and the search forhistorical roots are all signs of a search for more secure moorings andlonger-lasting values in a shifting world. Rochberg-Halton (1986,173), in a sample study of North Chicago residents in 1977, finds,for example, that the objects actually valued in the home were notthe 'pecuniary trophies' of a materialist culture which acted as 'reliableindices of one's socio-economic class, age, gender and so on,'but the artefacts that embodied 'ties to loved ones and kin, valuedexperiences and activities, and memories of significant life events andpeople.' Photographs, particular objects (like a piano, a clock, achair), and events (the playing of a record of a piece of music, thesinging of a song) become the focus of a contemplative memory, andhence a generator of a sense of self that lies outside the sensoryoverloading of consumerist culture and fashion. The home becomesa private museum to guard against the ravages of time-space compression.At the very time, furthermore, that postmodernism proclaimsthe 'death of the author' and the rise of anti-auratic art in thepublic realm, the art market becomes ever more conscious of themonopoly power of the artist's signature and of questions of authenticityand forgery (no matter that the Rauschenberg is itself amere reproduction montage). It is, perhaps, appropriate that thepostmodernist developer building, as solid as the pink granite ofPhilip johnson's AT & T building, should be debt-financed, built onthe basis of fictitious capital, and architecturally conceived of, at leaston the outside, more in the spirit of fiction than of function.The postmodern condition 293The spatial adjustments have been no less traumatic. The satellitecommunications systems deployed since the early 1970s have renderedthe unit cost and time of communication invariant with respect todistance. It costs the same to communicate over 500 miles as it doesover 5,000 via satellite. Air freight rates on commodities have likewisecome down dramatically, while containerization has reducedthe cost of bulk sea and road transport. It is now possible for a largemultinational corporation like Texas Instruments to operate plantswith simultaneous decision-making with respect to financial, market,input costs, quality control, and labour process conditions in morethan fifty different locations across the globe (Dicken, 1986, 110-13). Mass television ownership coupled with satellite communicationmakes it possible to experience a rush of images from differentspaces almost simultaneously, collapsing the world's spaces into aseries of images on a television screen. The whole world can watchthe Olympic Games, the World Cup, the fall of a dictator, a politicalsummit, a deadly tragedy ... while mass tourism, films made inspectacular locations, make a wide range of simulated or vicariousexperiences of what the world contains available to many people.The image of places and spaces becomes as open to production andephemeral use as any other.We have, in short, witnessed another fierce round in that processof annihilation of space through time that has always lain at thecenter of capitalism's dynamic (see plate 3.2). Marshall McLuhandescribed how he thought the 'global village' had now become acommunications reality in the mid -1960s:After three thousand years of explosion, by means of fragmentaryand mechanical technologies, the Western World is imploding.During the mechanical ages we had extended our bodiesin space. Today, after more than a century of electronic technology,we have extended our central nervous system itself in aglobal embrace, abolishing both space and time as far as ourplanet is concerned.In recent years a whole spate of writing has taken this idea on boardand tried to explore, as for example Virilio (1980) does in hisEsthhique de La disparition, the cultural consequences of the supposeddisappearance of time and space as materialized and tangible dimensionsto social life.But the collapse of spatial barriers does not mean that the significanceof space is decreasing. Not for the first time in capitalism'shistory, we find the evidence pointing to the converse thesis. Heightenedcompetition under conditions of crisis has coerced capitalists
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The Conditionof PostmodernityAn Enq
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Page 105 and 106: 12IntroductionMarshall Berman (1982
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Page 183 and 184: 27Cracks in the mIrrors, fusions at
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Page 187 and 188: 364 ReferencesJacobs, J. (1961): Th
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Page 191 and 192: 372IndexSoja, E. 284Sorel, G. 34Spe
Page 193 and 194: 376IndexIndex 377jouissance 57-8, 9
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