The Condition of Postmodernity 13 - autonomous learning

98 The passage from modernity to postmodernityunified whole but as 'disparate "texts" and parts that remain distinctand unaligned, without achieving a sense of unity,' and which are,therefore, susceptible to 'several asymmetrical and irreconcilable'readings. What deconstructivism has in common with much of postmodernism,however, is its attempt to mirror 'an unruly worldsubject to carooming moral, political and economic system.' But itdoes so in such a way as to be 'disorienting, even confusing' and sobreak down 'our habitual ways of perceiving form and space.' Fragmentation,chaos, disorder, even within seeming order, remain centralthemes (Goldberger, 1988; Giovannini, 1988).Fiction, fragmentation, collage, and eclecticism, all suffused with asense of ephemerality and chaos, are, perhaps, the themes that dominatein today's practices of architecture and urban design. Andthere is, evidently, much in common here with practices and thinkingin many other realms such as art, literature, social theory, psychology,and philosophy. How is it, then, that the prevailing moodtakes the form it does? To answer that question with any powerrequires that we first take stock of the mundane realities of capitalistmodernity and postmodernity, and see what clues might lie there asto the possible functions of such fictions and fragmentations in thereproduction of social life.5ModernizationModernism is a troubled and fluctuating aesthetic response toconditions of modernity produced by a particular process of modernization.A proper interpretation of the rise of postmodernism, therefore,ought to grapple with the nature of modernization. Only inthat way will we be able to judge whether postmodernism is a differentreaction to an unchanging modernization process, or whetherit reflects or presages a radical shift in the nature of modernizationitself, towards, for example, some kind of 'postindustrial' or even'postcapitalist' society.Marx provides one of the earliest and most complete accounts ofcapitalist modernization. I think it useful to begin with that not onlybecause Marx was, as Berman argues, one of the great early modernistwriters, combining all the breadth and vigour of Enlightenmentthought with a nuanced sense of the paradoxes and contradictionsto which capitalism is prone, but also because the theory of capitalistmodernization that he offers makes for particularly compellingreading when set against the cultural theses of postmodernity.In The communist manifesto Marx and Engels argue that thebourgeoisie has created a new internationalism via the world market,together with 'subjection of nature's forces to man, machinery,application of chemistry to agriculture and industry, steam navigation,railways, electric telegraphs, clearing of whole continents for cultivation,canalization of rivers, whole populations conjured out of theground.' It has done this at great cost: violence, destruction oftraditions, oppression, reduction of the valuation of all activity to thecold calculus of money and profit. Furthermore:Constant revolutionizing of production, uninterrupted disturbanceof all social relations, everlasting uncertainty and agitation,distinguish the bourgeois epoch from all earlier times. All fixed,