The Condition of Postmodernity 13 - autonomous learning

108 The passage from modernity to postmodernityas a sane device for regulating the incoherent tendencies of capitalistproduction, ends up becoming 'the main lever for overproductionand over-speculation.' The fact that postmodernist architecture regardsitself as being about fiction rather than function appears, in thelight of the reputations of the financiers, property developers, andspeculators that organize construction, more than a little apt.The state, constituted as a coercive system of authority that has amonopoly over institutionalized violence, forms a second organizingprinciple through which a ruling class can seek to impose its will notonly upon its opponents but upon the anarchical flux, change, anduncertainty to which capitalist modernity is always prone. The toolsvary from regulation of money and legal guarantees of fair marketcontracts, through fiscal interventions, credit creation, and tax redistributions,to provision of social and physical infrastructures, directcontrol over capital and labour allocations as well as over wages andprices, the nationalization of key sectors, restrictions on workingclasspower, police surveillance, and military repression and the like.Yet the state is a territorial entity struggling to impose its will upon afluid and spatially open process of capital circulation. It has tocontest within its borders the factional forces and fragmenting effectsof widespread individualism, rapid social change, and all theephemerality that typically attaches to capital circulation. It alsodepends on taxation and credit markets, so that states can be disciplinedby the circulation process at the same time as they can seekto promote particular strategies of capital accumulation.To do so effectively the state must construct an alternative sense ofcommunity to that based on money, as well as a definition of publicinterests over and above the class and secretarian interests and strugglesthat are contained within its borders. It must, in short, legitimizeitself. It is, therefore, bound to engage to some degree in the aestheticizationof politics. This issue is addressed in Marx's classic study ofThe eighteenth brumaire of Louis Bonaparte. How is it, he thereasks, that even at the height of revolutionary ferment, the revolutionariesthemselves 'anxiously conjure up the spirits of the past totheir service and borrow from them names, battle cries and costumesin order to present the new scene of world history in this timehonoureddisguise and borrowed language'? The 'awakening of thedead in [bourgeois J revolutions served the purpose of glorifying thenew struggles, not of parodying the old; of magnifying the giventask in imagination, not fleeing from its solution in reality; of findingonce more the spirit of revolution, not of making its ghost walkabout again.' The invocation of myth may have played a key role inpast revolutions, but here Marx strives to deny what Sorel was laterM oderniz at ion 109to affirm. 'The social revolution of the nineteenth century cannotdraw .its poetry from the past,' Marx argues, 'but only from thefuture.' It must strip off 'all superstition in regard to the past,' else'the tradition of all the dead generations weighs like a nightmare onthe brain of the living' and converts the cathartic tragedy of revolutioninto the ritual of farce. In pitting himself so mercilessly against thepower of myth and the aestheticization of politics, Marx in effectaffirms their remarkable powers to stifle progressive working-classrevolutions. Bonapartism was, for Marx, a form of 'caesarism' (withall its classical allusions) that could, in the person of Louis Bonaparteassuming the mantle of his uncle, block the revolutionary aspirationsof the progressive bourgeoisie and the working class alike. Thus didMarx come to terms with the aesthetization of politics that fascismlater achieved in far more virulent form.The tension between the fixity (and hence stability) that stateregulation imposes, and the fluid motion of capital flow, remains acrucial problem for the social and political organization of capitalism.This difficulty (to which we shall return in Part II) is modified bythe way in which the state stands itself to be disciplined by internalforces (upon which it relies for its power) and external conditions -competition in the world economy, exchange rates, and capital movements,migration, or, on occasion, direct political interventions onthe part of superior powers. The relation between capitalist developmentand the state has to be seen, therefore, as mutually determiningrather then unidirectional. State power can, in the end, be neithermore nor less stable than the political economy of capitalist modernitywill allow.There are, however, many positive aspects to capitalist modernity.The potential command over nature that arises as capitalism 'rendsthe veil' over the mysteries of production holds a tremendous potentialfor reducing the powers of nature-imposed necessities over ourlives. The creation of new wants and needs can alert us to newcultural possibilities (of the sort that avant-garde artists were later toexplore). Even the 'variation of labour, fluency of function, universalmobility of the labourer' demanded by modern industry, holds thepotential to replace the fragmented worker 'by the fully developedindividual, fit for a variety of labours, ready to face any change ofproduction, and to whom the different functions he performs, arebut so many modes of giving free scope to his own natural andacquired powers' (Capital, 1 :458). The reduction of spatial barriersand the formation of the world market not only allows a generalizedaccess to the diversified products of different regions and climes, butalso puts us into direct contact with all the peoples of the earth.