The Condition of Postmodernity 13 - autonomous learning

298 The experience of space and timeMoney consequently became useless as a means of storing value forany length of time (the real rate of interest, measured as the moneyrate of interest minus the rate of inflation, was negative for severalyears during the 1970s, so dispossessing savers of the value they wereseeking to store). Alternative means had to be found to store valueeffectively. And so began the vast inflation in certain kinds of assetprices - collectibles, art objects, antiques, houses, and the like.Buying a Degas or Van Gogh in 1973 would surely outstrip almostany other kind of investment in terms of capital gain. Indeed it canbe argued that the growth of the art market (with its concern forauthorial signature) and the strong commercialization of culturalproduction since around 1970 have had a lot to do with the search tofind alternative means to store value under conditions where theusual money forms were deficient. Commodity and general priceinflation, though to some degree brought under control in the advancedcapitalist countries during the 1980s, has by no means diminishedas a problem. It is rampant in countries like Mexico,Argentina, Brazil, and Israel (all with recent rates in hundreds of percent), and the prospect of generalized inflation looms in the advancedcapitalist countries, where it is in any case arguable that the inflationof asset prices (housing, works of art, antiques, etc.) has taken overwhere commodity and labour market inflation left off in the early1980s.The breakdown of money as a secure means of representing valuehas itself created a crisis of representation in advanced capitalism. Ithas also been reinforced by, and added its very considerable weightto, the problems of time-space compression which we earlieridentified. The rapidity with which currency markets fluctuate acrossthe world's spaces, the extraordinary power of money capital flow inwhat is now a global stock and financial market, and the volatility ofwhat the purchasing power of money might represent, define, as itwere, a high point of that highly problematic intersection of money,time, and space as interlocking elements of social power in thepolitical economy of postmodernity.It is, furthermore, not hard to see how all of this might create amore general crisis of representation. The central value system, towhich capitalism has always appealed to validate and gauge its actions,is dematerialized and shifting, time horizons are collapsing, and it ishard to tell exactly what space we are in when it comes to assessingcauses and effects, meanings or values. The intriguing exhibition atthe Pompidou Centre in 1985 on 'The Immaterial' (an exhibition forwhich none other than Lyotard acted as one of the consultants) wasperhaps a mirror image of the dissolution of the material repre-The postmodern condition 299sentations of value under conditions of more flexible accumulation,and of the confusions as to what it might mean to say, with PaulVirilio, that time and space have disappeared as meaningful dimensionsto human thought and action.There are, I would submit, more tangible and material ways thanthis to go about assessing the significance of space and time for thecondition of.postmodernity. It should be possible to consider how,for example, the changing experience of space, time, and money hasformed a distinctive material basis for the rise of distinctive systemsof interpretation and representation, as well as opening a path throughwhich the aestheticization of politics might once more reassert itself.If we view culture as that complex of signs and significations (includinglanguage) that mesh into codes of transmission of socialvalues and meanings, then we can at least begin upon the task ofunravelling its complexities under present-day conditions by recognizingthat money and commodities are themselves the primarybearers of cultural codes. Since money and commodities are entirelybound up with the circulation of capital, it follows that culturalforms are firmly rooted in the daily circulation process of capital. Itis, therefore, with the daily experience of money and the commoditythat we should begin, no matter if special commodities or evenwhole sign systems may be extracted from the common herd andmade the basis of 'high' culture or that specialized 'imaging' whichwe have already had cause to comment upon.The annihilation of space through time has radically changed the IIcommodity mix that enters into daily reproduction. Innumerable local food systems have been reorganized through their incorporationinto global commodity exchange. French cheeses, for example, virtuallyunavailable except in a few gourmet stores in large cities in1970, are now widely sold across the United States. And if this isthought a somewhat elite example, the case of beer consumptionsuggests that the internationalization of a product, that traditionallocation theory always taught should be highly market-oriented, isnow complete. Baltimore was essentially a one-beer town (locallybrewed) in 1970, but first the regional beers from places like Milwaukeeand Denver, and then Canadian and Mexican beers followed byEuropean, Australian, Chinese, Polish, etc. beers became cheaper.Formerly exotic foods became commonplace while popular localdelicacies (in the Baltimore case, blue crabs and oysters) that wereonce relatively inexpensive jumped in price as they too becameintegrated into long-distance trading.The market place has always been an 'emporium of styles' (toquote Raban's phrase) but the food market, just to take one example,