Andrew's Wiki
Condition Postmodernity

Gambit

• Postmodernity: around 1972-3
  • Modernity, ie Keynsian-Fordism from 1945-73 is domination of modernist ideas developed before WWI
  • Transition from modernity to postmodernity more a shift of “surface appearance”
• Mutual relationships among economic organization, cultural forms, and time-space representation
• Time-space compression
  • Space and time are the “mediating link” between changes in economic organization
• How should I use it?
  • Outsider’s look on modernism
    • Modernism for him begins post 1848
  • As a current work of Marxism
  • 121-2: how to define subeconomy
    • Must have system of reproduction, must imply relations of product that are stable, must have stable balance between consumption and accumulation, must have money system, “norms, habits, laws;” some “semblance of order” for a certain period of time
  • Great definitions of capitalism
• Neat Example
  • Uses examples of inspiration (pastiche) to contrast modernism and postmodernism
    • Modernism: Manet’s Olympia as adaptation of Titian’s _Venus D’Urbino, 1863
      • People said it was vulgar
      • Showed dirt; she was prostitute; revealed race relations
      • Zola defended it as Manet’s decision not to lie
      • Author still produces even if alludes to and critiques former work
      • Still creates an organic work of art that could be understood without comparison to the inspiring work
    • Rauschenberg’s Persimmon as adaptation of Rubens’ Venus at Her Toilet, 1964
      • Artist just reproduces
      • Allusion and combination IS seen as art itself: the theme is collage

My Ideas, Which It Prompted

• Modernists: Where’s their capitalism?
  • As members of the leisure class, many authors had nothing to be alienated from, no screws or watches they were making. As Veblen points out, academic work is a type of leisure work: meticulously unproductive. So that doesn’t count.
  • So, they do not enter (economic) modernity on the ground floor.
  • How do they enter it?
    • Through commodity culture: suggesting why shopping is such a fascinating topic for m’ist scholars
    • Through positioning themselves as professional artists who make money off their work OR as people who are marketing their work
      • That story begins with Dickens: the society he formed

Modernist (Keynesian-Fordist) Capitalism

• 174-9
  • Centralization of capital in the form of banking and creation of national markets, as well as in centralization of certain industries and regions, as well as in urbanizations/city centers
  • Emergence of manager class apart from industrial class
  • Growth of bureaucracy
  • Collective bargaining
  • State collaborates with capitalistic business; heading to welfare state
  • Spatial expansion: overseas markets and investment
  • Scientific rationality
  • Extraction and manufacturing operations
  • Cultural modernism
  • Mass production
  • Homogeneous goods (uniformity and standardization
  • Buffer inventory
  • Lots of lost time (inefficient)
  • Changing wages to control costs
  • Single task
  • Pay per piece
  • Specialization
  • Unskilled
  • Workers not responsible for themselves but controlled
  • Lack of job security
  • Spatial division of labor (both by task within a single business and by regional specialty)
  • State regulation, welfare, direct intervention
  • Mass consumption
• 180-3
  • Three Qualities of Capitalism, accg to Harvey
    • Indispensable Growth: you absolutely must grow to succeed (more output required for success)
    • Intensifying Exploitation: for more growth, you will essentially rob the worker of more and more of his productivity
    • Dynamism: continual organizational and technological reorganization
  • What do these three qualities lead to?
    • Propensity for crises: if you don’t grow, you’ve got a crisis; if your labor gets made about increasing exploitation, you’ve got a crisis; if you don’t innovate, you’ve got a crisis
    • The contradictions of capitalism that Marx referred to
    • In Particular, They Lead to Overaccumulation
  • Overaccumulation: “a condition in which idle capital and idle labour supply could exist side by side with no apparent way to bring these idle resources together to accomplish socially useful tasks” (180)
    • Your workers are idle and you have commodities hanging around in warehouses
    • Marxism: overaccumulation is inevitable in capitalism: will always be a problem
      • This explains why I am allowed to refer to a contemporary theory of antiproduction: because it was always a feature of capitalism
    • Solving Overaccumulation: Three Options
      • 1) Devaluation (destroying or devaluing commodities or labor) (commodities: sales/low prices or destroying them; labor: sick underpayed underemployed labor, unemployment, or even death) Often Too Brutal
      • 2) Macro-economic Control (Fordist-Keynesian regime 1945-73): systems of regulation are institutionalized, requiring coordination of economic system and state activity (only could occur after the crises of the 1930s convinced people to overcome their initial resistance to gov intervention and widespread Fordism)
      • 3) Absorption (through “temporal and spatial displacement,” that is investment for future uses, speeding up turnover time (like obsolescence), or foreign investment or “production of new spaces within which capitalist production can proceed” (ex: infrastructural investments): a better long-term solution, Harvey argues
• 340-1

Annotated Bib

While Harvey�s book deals in general with discussing the nature of postmodernity (in order to defend the term as a fruitful and meaningful appellation for changes in culture since the early 1970s), part III of the book (chapters 12-18) deals specifically with how conceptions and representations of space and time have changed during the past five hundred years. His broadly Marxist (rather, Jamesonian) framework assumes changes in economic structure (the transition from modernist Fordism to postmodernist flexible capital) as the primary force between such changes, making the history of space a history of the mediation by economy of the relations between the person and the space s/he inhabits. In particular, he uses the term �time-space� compression to document the evolution of conceptions of lived space from the tactility of medieval times to the rigid, individualist scientism of the Renaissance, to the compact urbanity of modernism and finally to the volatility and instantaneousness of postmodern spatial relations which end in the �annihilation� (293) of space through temporal means. All the while, though, spatial relations always reflect power structures, and therefore changes in space become the necessary precursor for any major political, social, economic, or aesthetic change. During this five-century process, modernism itself assumes an important position, as his Joycean epigraph indicates (�I hear the ruin of all space, shattered glass and toppling masonry, and time one livid final flame,� [199]), and aesthetic judgments matter in particular because their prioritizations affect the possibilities for social change. In particular, modernist explorations into epistemology underwrite his core argument of multiple objectivities. In this argument, he denies the simplistic dichotomy between the subjective and objective, explaining how because �the material practices and processes of social reproduction are always changing, it follows that the objective qualities as well as the meanings of space and time also change� (204). While he admits that subjective accounts of time-space certainly exist, he wants to stress changes over time of objective relations with space due to material and economic changes. More specifically, these economic changes�the globalization of markets and the increasing rapidity of economic exchanges over wide distances�allow disparate spaces to interact with each other intimately, therefore �shrinking� the globe.
Documenting these changes are maps, paintings, and books, whose common emphasis on positionality and perspectivism reflect changing conceptions of the individual�s epistemological relation to space, as well as of the �knowability� of the world at large (that is, the degree to which scientific assurances underwrite one�s sense of the objective reality of one�s perceptions). The importance of these historical signs to understanding political and social relations through presentations of space convinces me of the importance of literature in the process of understanding these relations. Furthermore, modernism as a literary movement is crucial to understanding the economic shifts from modernity to postmodernity because modernism�s foregrounding of the processes of individual consciousnesses during this time of �time-space compression� make it an admirable candidate for retracing the changes in people�s relations to space, as well as in identifying the particular qualities of this change. For Harvey, though, the most important modernist concerns that illuminate this time-space compression include the following: Nietzsche and his legacy, the tension between Being and Becoming, debates of nationalism versus internationalism versus universalism, abstractionism and expressionism, reactions to political revolutions and wars, and the serial or simultaneous display of multiple spaces.