The Condition of Postmodernity 13 - autonomous learning

304 The experience of space and timeimage, allows the construction of some limited and limiting sense ofidentity in the midst of a collage of imploding spatialities.The tension in these oppositions is clear enough but it is hard toappreciate their intellectual and political ramifications. Here, forexample, is Foucault (1984, 253) addressing the issue from his ownperspective:Space is fundamental in any form of communal life; space isfundamental in any exercise of power . .. . I recall having beeninvited in 1966, by a group of architects, to do a study of space,of something that I called at the time 'heterotopias,' thosesingular spaces to be found in some given social spaces whosefunctions are different or even the opposite of others. Thearchitects worked on this, and at the end of the study someonespoke up - a Sartrean psychologist - who firebombed me,saying that space is reactionary and capitalist but history andbecoming are revolutionary. This absurd discourse was not atall unusual at the time. Today everyone would be convulsedwith laughter at such a pronouncement, but not then.The proposition the Sartrean critic offers is, though crude andoppositional, nowhere near as laughable as Foucault avers. Onthe other hand, postm01ernist sentiment definitely leans towardsFoucault's position. Whereas modernism looked upon the spaces ofthe city, for example, as 'an epiphenomenon of social functions,'post modernism 'tends to disengage urban space from its dependenceon functions, and to see it as an autonomous formal system' incorporating'rhetorical and artistic strategies, which are independent ofany simple historical determinism' (Colquhoun, 1985). It is preciselythis disengagement that permits Foucault to deploy spatial metaphorsso extensively in his studies of power. Spatial imagery, liberatedfrom its roots in any social determination, becomes a means todepict the forces of social determination. It is a short step, however,from Foucault's metaphors to reinforcement of a political ideologythat sees place and Being with all its associated aesthetic qualities as aproper basis for social action. Geopolitics and the Heideggerian trapcome not too far behind. Jameson (1988, 351), for his part, views thespatial peculiarities of post-modernism as symptoms and expressionsof a new and historically original dilemma, one thatinvolves our insertion as individual subjects into a multidimensionalset of radically discontinuous realities, whose framesrange from the still surviving spaces of bourgeois private life allThe postmodern condition 305the way to the unimaginable dec entering of global capitalismitself. Not even Einsteinian relativity, or the multiple subjectiveworlds of the older modernists, is capable of giving any adequatefiguration to this process, which in lived experience makes itselffelt by the so-called death of the subject, or, more exactly, thefragmented and schizophrenic decetltering and dispersion ofthis last . ... And although you may not have realized it, I amtalking about practical politics here: since the crisis of socialistinternationalism, and the enormous strategic and tactical difficultiesof coordinating local and grassroots or neighborhoodpolitical actions with national or international ones, such urgentpolitical dilemmas are all immediately functions of the enormouslycomplex new international space I have in mind.Jameson exaggerates somewhat with respect to the uniqueness andnewness of this experience. Stressful though the current conditionundoubtedly is, it is qualitatively similar to that which led to Renaissanceand various modernist reconceptualizations of space andtime. Nevertheless, the dilemmas which Jameson depicts are exactand capture the drift of postmodern sensibility as to the meaning ofspace in contemporary political and cultural as well as economiclife. If, however, we have lost the modernist faith in becoming, asFoucault's Sartrean critic argued, is there any way out except via thereactionary politics of an aestheticized spatiality? Are we sadly destinedto end up on the track that Sitte began with, in his turn toWagnerian mythology as support for his assertion of the primacy ofplace and community in a world of changing spaces? Worse still, ifaesthetic production has now been so thoroughly commodified andthereby become really subsumed within a political economy of culturalproduction, how can we possibly stop that circle closing onto aproduced, and hence all too easily manipulated, aestheticization of aglobally mediatized politics?This should alert us to the acute geopolitical dangers that attach tothe rapidity of time-space compression in recent years. The transitionfrom Fordism to flexible accumulation, such as it has been, ought toimply a transition in our mental maps, political attitudes, and politicalinstitutions. But political thinking does not necessarily undergo sucheasy transformations, and is in any case subject to the contradictorypressures that derive from spatial integration and differentiation.There is an omni-present danger that our mental maps will notmatch current realities. The serious diminution of the power ofindividual nation states over fiscal and monetary policies, for example,has not been matched by any parallel shift towards an international-