The Condition of Postmodernity 13 - autonomous learning

19Postmodernity as a historicalconditionAesthetic and cultural practices are peculiarly susceptible to thechanging experience of space and time precisely because they entailthe construction of spatial representations and artefacts out of theflow of human experience. They always broker between Being andBecoming.It is possible to write the historical geography of the experience ofspace and time in social life, and to understand the transformationsthat both have undergone, by reference to material and social conditions.Part III proposed an historical sketch of how that might bedone with respect to the post-Renaissance Western world. The dimensionsof space and time have there been subject to the persistentpressure of capital circulation and accumulation, culminating (particularlyduring the periodic crises of overaccumulation that havearisen since the mid-nineteenth century) in disconcerting and disruptivebouts of time-space compression.The aesthetic responses to conitions of time-space compressionare important and have been so ever since the eighteenth-centuryseparation of scientific knowledge from moral judgement opened upa distinctive role for them. The confidence of an era can be assessedby the width of the gap between scientific and moral reasoning. Inperiods of confusion and uncertainty, the turn to aesthetics (ofwhatever form) becomes more pronounced. Since phases of timespacecompression are disruptive, we can expect the turn to aestheticsand to the forces of culture as both explanations and loci of activestruggle to be particularly acute at such moments. Since crises ofoveraccumulation typically spark the search for spatial and temporalresolutions, which in turn create an overwhelming sense of timespacecompression, we can also expect crises of overaccumulation tobe followed by strong aesthetic movements.The crisis of overaccumulation that began in the late 1960s and