The Condition of Postmodernity 13 - autonomous learning

110 The passage from modernity to postmodernityAbove all, revolutions in productive force, in technology and science,open up new vistas for human development and self-realization.It is particularly useful to look at these conceptions in relation to'heroic' modernism's jousting with mythology. The latter, Marxargues, 'controls and fashions the forces of nature in the imaginationand through the imagination; it disappears therefore when real controlover these forces is established.' Mythology is, in short, a humanlyconstructed, intermediate, and historically determined link, whichdisappears when human beings acquire the the capacity to make theirhistory according to conscious choice and design (Raphael, 1981,89). Revolutions in technology rendered possible by the division oflabour and the rise of the materialist sciences had the effect ofdemystifying the processes of production (aptly called 'mysteries'and 'arts' in the pre-modern period) and opening up the capacity toliberate society from scarcity and the more oppressive aspects ofnature-imposed necessity. This was the good side of capitalist modernization.The problem, however, was to liberate us from the fetishismsof market exchange and to demystify (and by extension demythologize)the social and historical world in exactly the same way.This was the scientific task that Marx set himself in Capital. But it isalways possible, particularly in the face of the uncertainties andfragmentations to which capitalism is prone (economic crises forexample), to re-mythologize, to seek once again to control andfashion the social forces in imagination and through imagination,under conditions where all semblance of control over these forcesseems to be lost. The struggle to create a 'de-mythologized' art andscience of history (both perfectly feasible projects in Marx's view)has to be seen as part and parcel of this broader social struggle. Butthat battle (for which Marx believed he had prepared a powerfulfoundation) could be won only through the transition to an allencompassingand powerful socialism, which would render appropriationof the natural and social world through myth redundant andirrelevant. Meanwhile, the tension between the mystifications, fetishisms,and mythological constructions of the older order, and thepenchant for revolutionizing our conceptions of the world has to beappreciated as central to intellectual, artistic, and scientific life.It is out of the tension between the negative and positive qualitiesof capitalism that new ways to define our species being can beconstructed:Thus capital creates the bourgeois society, and the universalappropriation of nature as well as of the social bond itself byM oderniz ation 111the members of society. Hence the great civilizing influence ofcapital; its production of a stage of society in comparison towhich all earlier ones appear as mere local developments ofhumanity and as nature-idolatry. For the first time nature becomespurely an object for humankind, purely a matter ofutility; ceases to be recognized as a power for itself; and thetheoretical. discovery of its autonomous laws appears merely asa ruse so as to subjugate it to human needs . . . , Capital drivesbeyond national barriers and prejudices as much as beyondnature worship, as well as [beyond] all traditional, confined,complacent, encrusted satisfactions of present needs, and reproductionof old ways of life. It is destructive towards all of this,and constantly revolutionizes it, tearing down all the barrierswhich hem in the development of the forces of production, theexpansion of needs, the all-sided development of production,and the exploitation and exchange of natural and mental forces.(Grundrisse, 410)There is more than a hint of the Enlightenment project in passages ofthis sort. And Marx gives us plenty of advice on how we might fuseall the sporadic though widespread resistances, discontents, and strugglesagainst the oppressive, destructive, fragmenting, and destabilizingaspects of life under capitalism so as to master the maelstrom andbecome collective creators of our own history according to consciousplan. 'The realm of freedom actually begins only where labour whichis determined by necessity and mundane considerations ceases . . ..Beyond it begins that development of human energy which is an endin itself, the true realm of freedom.'What Marx depicts, therefore, are social processes at work undercapitalism conducive to individualism, alienation, fragmentation,ephemerality, innovation, creative destruction, speculative development,unpredictable shifts in methods of production and consumption(wants and needs), a shifting experience of space and time, as well asa crisis-ridden dynamic of social change. If these conditions of capitalistmodernization form the material context out of which bothmodernist and postmodernist thinkers and cultural producers forgetheir aesthetic sensibilities, principles, and practices, it seems reasonableto conclude that the turn to postmodernism does not reflect anyfundamental change of social condition. The rise of postmodernismeither represents a departure (if such there is) in ways of thinkingabout what could or should be done about that social condition, orelse (and this is the proposition we explore in considerable depth in