The Condition of Postmodernity 13 - autonomous learning

302 The experience of space and timesub-cultures get juxtaposed in the contemporary city. Disruptivespatiality triumphs over the coherence of perspective and narrative inpostmodern fiction, in exactly the same way that imported beerscoexist with local brews, local employment collapses under the weightof foreign competition, and all the divergent spaces of the world areassembled nightly as a collage of images upon the television screen.There seem to be two divergent sociological effects of all of this indaily thought and action. The first suggests taking advantage of all ofthe divergent possibilities, much as Jencks recommends, and cultivatinga whole series of simulacra as milieux of escape, fantasy, anddistraction:All around us - on advertisement hoardings, bookshelves,record covers, television screens - these miniature escape fantasiespresent themselves. This, it seems, is how we are destinedto live, as split personalities in which the private life is disturbedby the promise of escape routes to another reality. (Cohen andTaylor, 1978, quoted in McHale, 1987, 38)From this standpoint I think we have to accept McHale's argumentthat postmodern fiction is mimetic of something, much as I haveargued that the emphasis upon ephemerality, collage, fragmentation,and dispersal in philosophical and social thought mimics the conditionsof flexible accumulation. And it should not be surprisingeither to see how all of this fits in with the emergence since 1970 of afragmented politics of divergent special and regional interest groups.But it is exactly at this point that we encounter the oppositereaction that can best be summed up as the search for personal orcollective identity, the search for secure moorings in a shifting world.Place-identity, in this collage of superimposed spatial images thatimplode in upon us, becomes an important issue, because everyoneoccupies a space of individuation (a body, a room, a home, a shapingcommunity, a nation), and how we individuate ourselves shapesidentity. Furthermore, if no one 'knows their place' in this shiftingcollage world, then how can a secure social order be fashioned orsustained?There are two elements within this problem that deserve closeconsideration. First, the capacity of most social movements to commandplace better than space puts a strong emphasis upon the potentialconnection between place and social identity. This is manifestin political action. The defensiveness of municipal socialism, theinsistence on working-class community, the localization of the fightagainst capital, become central features of working-class struggleThe postmodern condition 303within an overall patterning of uneven geographical development.The consequent dilemmas of socialist or working-class movements inthe face of a universalizing capitalism are shared by other oppositionalgroups - racial minorities, colonized peoples, women, etc. - whoare relatively empowered to organize in place but dis empoweredwhen it comes to organizing over space. In clinging, often of necessity,to a place-bound identity, however, such oppositional movementsbecome a part of the very fragmentation which a mobilecapitalism and flexible accumulation can feed upon. 'Regional resistances,'the struggle for local autonomy, place-bound organization,may be excellent bases for political action, but they cannot bear theburden of radical historical change alone. 'Think globally and actlocally' was the revolutionary slogan of the 1960s. It bears repeating.The assertion of any place-bound identity has to rest at somepoint on the motivational power of tradition. It is difficult, however,to maintain any sense of historical continuity in the face of all theflux and ephemerality of flexible accumulation. The irony is thattradition is now often preserved by being commodified and marketedas such. The search for roots ends up at worst being produced andmarketed as an image, as a simulacrum or pastiche (imitation communitiesconstructed to evoke images of some folksy past, the fabricof traditional working-class communities being taken over by anurban gentry). The photograph, the document, the view, and thereproduction become history precisely because they are so overwhelminglypresent. The problem, of course, is that none of theseare immune from tampering or downright faking for present purposes.At best, historical tradition is reorganized as a museum culture, notnecessarily of high modernist art, but of local history, of localproduction, of how things once upon a time were made, sold, consumed,and integrated into a long-lost and often romanticized dailylife (one from which all trace of oppressive social relations may beexpunged). Through the presentation of a partially illusory past itbecomes possible to signify something of local identity and perhapsto do it profitably.The second reaction to the internationalism of modernism lies inthe search to construct place and its meanings qualitatively. Capitalisthegemony over space puts the aesthetics of place very much back onthe agenda. But this, as we have seen, meshes only too well with theidea of spatial differentiations as lures for a peripatetic capital thatvalues the option of mobility very highly. Isn't this place better thanthat place, not only for the operations of capital but also for livingin, consuming well, and feeling secure in a shifting world? Theconstruction of such places, the fashioning of some localized aesthetic