Summary of David

Harvey's The Condition of

Postmodernity
Notes by PATRICK MOONEY

N.B. This chapter-by-chapter summary necessarily distorts Harvey's

argument by de-nuancing it and stripping out most of Harvey's examples.
(Excerpted quotes are provided in partial amelioration of this fault.) It is
presented in the hope that it will be useful, but is not a substitute for a
careful reading of Harvey's text, which is (in any case) highly enjoyable.

N.B. This summary is very rough and may even contain typos.
A PRETTIER version, with frames to allow for parallel readings, is also
available; so are bibliographic entries in ZOTERO RDF and BIBTEX
FORMAT, which also contain these reading notes.

N.B. Thoughtful suggestions for improvement are more than welcome.

Summary

Part one: "The passage from modernity to postmodernity

in contemporary culture"
Ch. 1 ("Introduction," pp. 3-9) examines major thematics considered to be "postmodern"
and poses the basic question of the Enquiry: Is "postmodernism" simply another trendy
fad from the art world, or does it indicate a real change in the mode of life experienced by
real people? Major examples are Jonathan Raban's Soft City and the photographs of Cindy
Sherman.

Ch. 2 ("Modernity and modernism," pp. 10-38) traces the "modernist" project back to its
Enlightenment roots, bracketing the question of whether the worst excesses of 20th-
century modernity were inevitable. Harvey's relation to modernity is apparently
ambivalent: while one can appreciate the goals of the Enlightenment project in their
historical context, the underside of the project of rationality, universality, and
technologism has always had its critics, from Rousseau to Weber and Nietzsche. Harvey
says that the Enlightenment project began to break down about 1848, producing cultural
trends that are grouped together under the rubric "Modernism." 1910-1915 are a critical
period in this development. This is partly due to the increasing class tensions in capitalist
Europe in the mid-19th century, but also has to do with a specific change in the
experience of space and time. Modernism's increasing tendency to mythologize found its
outlets in the fascist movements and American consumerism no less than in T.S. Eliot or
James Joyce.

Ch. 3 ("Postmodernism," pp. 39-65) describes the term as a reaction to those parts of the
Enlightenment project still present in modernity; "postmodernism" rejects totalizing
meta-language, meta-narrative, and meta-theory in favor of constructs such as Lyotard's
"language games" or Foucault's "power-discourse" formations. This rejection of totalizing
narratives leads to an emphasis on the analysis of a plurality of resistances to power in
radical though in place of Marx's meta-narrative of a revolution of the proletariat. Harvey
also picks up on Lyotard's (somewhat implicit) argument that "postmodernism" as
cultural phenomenon is grounded in a change in the social and technical conditions of
life. Partly, this postmodern resistance to the meta-narrative of the proletarian revolution
takes the form of doubt that Marx's "alienation" applies adequately to workers: if identity
is fragmented ("schizoid," as postmodern concerns with identity frequently assert), than it
is doubtful that "alienation" can characterize them sufficiently to motivate class identity
and revolutionary fervor (e.g., pp 53-4) Harvey goes on to analyze postmodern aesthetics
as characterized by "depthlessness" and "reproduction" rather than "depth" and "original
production." Finally, differences in communicative forms (i.e. television) are analyzed as
being both typical products of and shaping forces in the postmodern consciousness. Tied
in with the inability to make overarching aesthetic or value judgments, the postmodern
aesthetic has become more directly and explicitly tied to corporate interests as explicit
investment -- both economically and as a way of legitimating the operations of big
capital.

Ch. 4 ("Postmodernism in the city: architecture and urban design," pp. 66-98) traces the
effects of postmodernism on the conceptualization of space. For modernists, space is to
be subordinated to larger social plans; for postmodernists, space is independent and
autonomous. Postmodern criticisms of modernist urban planning center on the "anti-
ecological," rationalist, symbolically impoverished spaces constructed according to the
demands of overarching demands for urban rationalization under the impetus of big
capital. Harvey traces the origin of high modernist urban restructuring plans to the crisis
after World War II. In Europe, the war had directly resulted in the destruction of large
parts of many major cities; in the United States, newly affluent returning GIs were able to
take advantage of a restructuring of urban space to accommodate the demands of
corporations that had enriched themselves during the war. Capital's tendency is to
reproduce itself, and the profits generated in World War II allowed for re-investment in
infrastructures so that urban spaces could be rationalized. Harvey is here critical of
postmodernist architecture/urban design and the discourse that surrounds it on several
grounds: (1) Postmodern architecture fails to deliver on its promise of near-infinite
variety, degenerating very quickly into "gentrification and … monotony" (77); (2)
Postmodern urban planning is itself increasingly rationalized, and marginalizes the poor
in new and increasingly oppressive ways; (3) the construction of "spectacular" spaces
such as Baltimore's City Fair and San Francisco's Fisherman's Wharf, masks the real
conditions of urban life by presenting a sanitized version of civic identity; (4) Postmodern
conceptions of space simply pander to the consumer demands created by other forms of
discourse; this ultimately leads to representing "heritage sites" as history and "historical
forms" in architecture as a series of meaningful "distinctions" that construct identity
through consumer choice.

Ch. 5 ("Modernization," pp. 99-112) traces the Marxian account of capitalist

modernization. After a summary of Marx's commodity fetishism, he critiques
postmodernism's thematic of "the impenetrability of the other" as simply "overt
complicity with the fact of fetishism and of indifference towards underlying social
meanings" (101). Harvey recapitulates much of Marx's argument about capital, tracing the
possibility of profit back to the division and alienation of labor. Harvey here traces many
contemporary features of capitalist production -- urban organization, the fluidity and
ephemerality of corporate locations, the constant drive to increasingly rationalize
production -- to these basic aspects of the capitalist mode of production. Harvey here also
locates Marx within the tradition of modernity and the Enlightenment project (e.g., p.
111)

Ch. 6 ("POSTmodernISM or postMODERNism?," pp. 113-118) provides a preliminary

assessment of the postmodern condition: positive in its "concern for difference for the
difficulties of communication, for the complexity and nuances of interests, cultures,
places, and the like" (113), and useful as "mimetic of the social, economic, and political
practices in society," provided that it is accompanied by careful analysis (113-4).
However, it overstates its own importance and difference from previous cultural forms
(114), and often critiques a straw-man version of modernity (115). Moreover,
"postmodernism, with its emphasis upon the ephemerality of jouissance, its insistence
upon the impenetrability of the other, its concentration on the text rather than the work, its
penchant for deconstruction bordering on nihilism, its preference for aesthetics over
ethics, takes matters … beyond the point where any coherent politics are left, while that
wing of it that seeks a shameless accommodation with the market puts it firmly in the
tracks of an entrepreneurial culture that is the hallmark of reactionary neoconservatism"
(116).

Part two: "The political-economic transformation of late

twentieth-century capitalism"
Ch. 7 ("Introduction," pp. 121-124) broadly outlines the question of how fundamental the
changes in the capitalist mode of production have been during the postmodern period.
Despite fundamental changes in the form of social life, "we still live, in the West, in a
society where production for profit remains the basic organizing principle of economic
life" (121). Harvey nods at the general concerns in Althusser's "Ideology and the
Ideological State Apparatus," but looks at them more briefly and from an economic,
rather than socio-psychological, viewpoint.

Ch. 8 ("Fordism," pp. 125-140) initially defines "Fordism" in terms of two primary
characteristics: not only the de-skilled, repetitive, rationalized industrial production
associated with Taylor's methodologies, but also control over the "private" aspects of
workers' lives that tends to produce the appropriate ideological stances conducive to the
expansion of the then-current mode of capitalist production. Harvey traces the expansion
of Fordist production processes from 1913 to 1973, noting that a variety of
accommodations had to be made in the regime of accumulation for Fordism to spread
outside of the United States as a common regime of accumulation. Two major problems
were generally encountered in the spread of Fordism: (1) Fordism accelerates the
alienation of labor already present under the capitalist mode of production; and (2) the
relations between organized labor, corporate production, and state regulation had to be
altered so as to work productively in a Keynesian regime. This relation was only achieved
after 1945, resulting in an economic expansion that depended on (1) expanding industrial
production; (2) increasing consumer demand by those producers who were able to occupy
privileged labor positions; (3) financial systems being interlinked across markets; and (4)
neoimperial (in Lenin's sense) appropriation of raw materials from underdeveloped
countries. As Fordism was successfully exported, however, other countries increasingly
became competing centers of Fordist production, rather than sources of raw materials and
markets for products produced in the (previously) nearly unique countries that had fully
integrated Fordist systems of production. The requirement of keeping demand for the
output of industrial production processes high under these circumstances led to
decreasing union power, lower rates of profit and wage increase, and increasing fracturing
of labor relations as "privileged labor" was increasingly able to take advantage of the joys
of mass consumption (especially when combined with existing inequalities based on
gender, race, and ethnicity), leaving . (134-8) Centralized administration of benefits
tended to produce cultural blandness, and third-world countries found themselves
exploited and impoverished even as they were being promised the benefits of Fordism for
participating in the global market.

Chapter 9 ("From Fordism to flexible accumulation," pp. 141-172) describes the

reorganization of the capitalist mode of production under a new regime of accumulation,
"flexible accumulation." Harvey traces the impetus for this change to accelerating
tensions under the Fordist regime of accumulation, citing increased international
competition for the major Fordist countries; rigidified relations between capital,
government, and organized labor; decreasing production and profits, increasing inflation;
and heightened social tension between those inside and outside privileged production
jobs. Overall, the transition to flexible accumulation has several effects: the restructuring
of the labor market into more flexible forms, cutting away at traditionally well-
compensated "core" jobs in favor of a "periphery" and "second periphery." This has
numerous advantages for capitalists: it becomes simpler to reduce employment during
economically slack times (150-2) and allows for alternate arrangements of production,
which reduce the possibility for labor to organize (153). Those production systems that
remain Fordist in character have been increasingly transfered to markets where labor
costs less and is less regulated. At the same time, a shift in employment from
manufacturing to service has accelerated. Harvey, in summary, identifies four major
increases in corporate business trends during the postmodern era: (1) mergers; (2)
corporate diversification; (3) self-employment; and (4) outsourcing (158). The most
important results of these multiple shifts in the mode of production are (1) increased
access on up-to-the-minute information for making business decisions (159); and (2) the
complete reorganization of the global system of finances, especially insofar as it is
increasingly integrated (160-1). Major effects of the decreasing barriers in the global
financial system have been the increasing tendency for fictitious capital to be created
("paper entrepreneurialism," etc.) (163-4) and the decreasing power of nation-states
(notably the U.S.) to regulate capital flows and processes (165-6). The net effect of these
changes has been a rise in neoconservative political power (168-170) as governments
struggle with yet another manifestation of capitalism's tendency to produce internal
contradictions. Harvey suggests at the end of the chapter that the sense of life as "new …
fleeting … ephemeral" underlying postmodernity maps onto the characteristics of capital
flows during the postmodern period.

Chapter 10 ("Theorizing the transition," pp. 173-188) begins with Harvey remarking on
the confusion of economic theorists under the regime of flexible accumulation. Most
economic theorists (including Marxists) seem to throw up their hands under the burden of
attempting to deal with this mode of accumulation theoretically. Harvey surveys several
overviews of "postmodern" economics and proposes an analysis based on terms from
classical Marxism. Since flexible accumulation is still a form of capitalism, he argues,
basic Marxian forms of analysis should provide a way of looking at the post-Fordist
economy. Citing three elements of basic Marxist economic theory ("Capitalism is growth-
oriented," "Growth in real values rests on the exploitation of living labour in production,"
and "Capitalism is necessarily technologically and organizationally dynamic"), he skims
over Marx's argument that these basic conditions are contradictory, i.e. that capitalism is
necessarily crisis-prone (180-1). Capitalist crises take the form of periodic
overaccumulation, "a condition in which idle capital and idle labour supply … exist side
by side with no apparent way to bring these idle resources together to accomplish socially
useful tasks" (180). The classical Marxian responses to capitalistic crises (devaluation of
commodities, productive capacity, or labor value; macro-economic control; absorption of
overaccumulation through infrastructural re-investment -- "temporal or spatial
displacement") are examined, along with their negative consequences -- inevitably, to
precipitate a new crisis of overaccumulation. In this context, Harvey argues that post-
World War II Fordism was a response to the capitalistic crisis of the worldwide
depression of the 1930s and 40s, and that this regime of accumulation successfully
contained the inherent contradictions of the capitalist mode of production until
approximately 1973, when the previously mentioned conditions precipitated a new crisis.

Chapter 11 ("Flexible accumulation - solid transformation or temporary fix?," pp. 189-

197) sketches the outlines of an evaluation of the stability of the new regime of flexible
accumulation. Rejecting the extreme views that (1) the new regime is so radically
different that current theoretical perspectives are completely unable to deal with it (189-
90); and (2) discourse about the change to a flexible mode of accumulation is mere hype
about surface changes that obscures the real solidarity of the working-class movements
(190-1), Harvey argues that the technology of flexible accumulation is an increasingly
hegemonic form of production that leads to real changes in the relations of capitalist
production (191-4), including changes in the underlying possibilities of working-class
consciousness (192). Pointing out similarities to past crises of capitalist accumulation,
Harvey expresses doubts that the new regime of accumulation will be able to support
itself under the increasing fluidity of forms of investment, creation of new forms of
fictitious capital, and burgeoning debt levels. He argues that if the flexible system of
accumulation is to continue to contain the inherent contradictions of capitalism, it will
likely be through the continuing expansion of credit and the continuing displacement of
profits across spaces and into the future.

Part three: "The experience of space and time"

Ch. 12 ("Introduction," pp. 201-210) presents an overview of the argument that the
experience of modernity is bound up with a specific experience of space and time. Harvey
argues that space and time are commonly "naturalized," treated by people as if they were
self-evident or obvious (201-3). Of course, this is an aspect of ideology, and masks the
real social and psychological factors producing specific concepts of space and time. Time
and space are produced through material processes and practices, Harvey argues, and
because capitalism is a continuously revolutionary mode of production, it follows that it
should revolutionize the production of space and time as well as material production
(204-5). However, Harvey argues that time has typically been privileged over space in
theory, and he proposes as reconceptualization of their relationship. Space becomes
predominant in theory under certain social conditions, however, such as conditions of
nationalistic feeling and/or war, particularly when space is mythologized. (208-9)

Ch. 13 ("Individual spaces and times in social life," pp. 211-225) continues the argument
by presenting an overview of twentieth-century theoretical approaches to these topics.
Harvey synthesizes de Certeau's, Bourdieu's, Lefebvre's, and Foucault's concepts of space
(among others), finding commonalities in the production of space through social practices
and outlining a set of arguments about how spatial production occurs, largely after
Lefebvre's three dimensions of space ("material and spatial practices," "representations of
space," "spaces of representation"). This schematic emphasizes the mutually
determinative character of Lefebvre's spatial dimensionality. Drawing on Georges
Gurvitch's 1964 outline of the variety of ways that time is experienced socially, Harvey
argues that neither space nor time can be understood outside the context of social action.

Ch. 14 ("Time and space as sources of social power," pp. 226-239) traces some examples
of this theoretical position by posing two basic questions: (1) How are the social
processes that produce the "objective" qualities of space and time to be understood? and
(2) How are spatial and temporal practices used and modified by these social practices?
Harvey traces a connection between time, space, and money, arguing that money (as a
measure of value) is based on time spent by a worker in production, and that the concept
of time as value was discovered in the medieval period through the exploration of space.
Thus, increasing reliance upon money as determinant of value alters concepts of space
and time (226-8). Contrapositively, alterations in the production of space and time are
advantageous to capitalists. (229) Harvey then traces examples of changes in production
of time (230-2) and space (232-4) as capitalist strategies to increase profit by devaluing
labor, and traces examples of capital-labor struggles in which control over space and/or
time have been dominant issues (235-9).

Chapter 15 ("Time and space of the Enlightenment project," pp. 240-259) traces the
changes in the production of time and space from the medieval period through the
Enlightenment. For medievals under feudalism, space was sensuous and direct, and
individual locations were situated in an unknown, "weakly grasped" cosmology; medieval
maps emphasize the sensory qualities of space rather than the rational and objective
qualities (240-2). The Renaissance instituted a number of changes that affected the
production of space -- artistic perspectivism; mathematical developments; rationalized,
"objective" and "functional" mapping according to a Ptolemaic system; Newtonian optics.
Rationalization and abstractification of time also occurred during this period due to the
increased availability of mechanical timekeeping devices. (242-7) These changes in the
production of time and space opened up theoretical possibilities for the domination of
space (via rationally planned social theories) and time (via an increased temporal sense
regarding the possibilities of the future), especially for the nascent bourgeoisie. Because
space and time encode and provide for the reproduction of social relations, changes in
their representation imply changes in the sociopolitical order as well. (247-52) It is on this
basis that modernist critiques of space and time become relevant. Harvey takes de
Certeau's arguments as generally representative of the problems of Enlightenment space
and time: insofar as the map is a "totalizing device," it homogenizes and reifies the
diverse forms of spatiality that are actually produced in the area that it represents.
Moreover, it converts the real fluidity of experience in the represented area into a fixed
representation, thereby doing violence to it, causing the alienation of the occupants of the
space from the representation of it (252-3). Following Lefebvre, Harvey notes several
problems with the strategy of conquering space through abstractification
(cartographically) and fragmentation (by dividing it up into alienable land parcels): (1)
principles of pulverization need to be established; (2) "production of space" is made into
an explicit political-economic problem; (3) "abstraction" of space obscures the social
relations that produced the concept of space in the first place; (4) "homogenized" space
undercuts conceptions of "place"-as-meaningful location. Finally, and most importantly,
(5) space can only be conquered by producing space-as-concept -- but there are inherent
contradictions in this proposition. (255-9) The production of mechanisms to dominate
space necessarily result in the production of new conceptions of space. Harvey argues that
the experience of space and time throughout the post-medieval period is dominated by a
phenomenon that he calls "time-space compression," a fundamental tendency to
revolutionize the production of time and space to the point that the representation of the
world that we make to ourselves is fundamentally altered (240).

Chapter 16 ("Time-space compression and the rise of modernism as a cultural force," pp.
260-283) traces the development of the modernist period to the mid-nineteenth century
and the revolutions of 1848. Harvey argues that these revolutions were responses to the
British depression of 1846-7, the first unequivocal crisis that can be assigned to capitalist
overaccumulation. This crisis precipitated a new round of time-space compression,
initially developing as a crisis in aesthetic representation of time (Baudelaire, Flaubert,
and Zola, e.g.) that was itself a response to the respatialization accompanying
technological advances (railway, telegraph, enhanced steamship travel) and the
burgeoning age of imperialism that remapped the globe in terms of the spaces of
domination of the advanced capitalist countries. (260-5) These new representations of
time (and space) encountered another crisis of representation at the time of World War I,
when increasing fragmentation (Fordist rationalization of production, simultaneous
worldwide radio transmission, increasing market interdependence) produced new
aesthetic responses constituting "high modernism" (Joyce, Proust, Stein, Picasso and
other cubists) (266-70). Harvey argues that this set of new aesthetic responses
encapsulated these changes in the mode of production (of goods and of culture), but
resulted in tensions between interpretations based on nationalism/space/Being and
interpretations based on internationalism/time/Becoming. One method of resolving these
contradictions was the aestheticizing of politics, particularly through mythologicization.
Ultimately, this culminated in the aetheticized, mythologizing politics of fascism, which
represents modernism's inability to contain the contradictions (270-83) Postmodernism,
for Harvey, is a response to these new rounds of contradictions.

Chapter 17 ("Time-space compression and the postmodern condition," pp. 284-307)

argues that the cultural phenomenon "postmodernity" is a response to the round of time-
space compression associated with the transition from Fordist capitalism to the regime of
flexible accumulation. Postmodern compression of time is associated with an acceleration
in the turnover of capital (via credit, electronic and plastic money, etc.) and an
acceleration in consumption. (285) The turnover of capital has largely been accelerated
by increased volatility of fashion (in the broad sense of the word) and increased
production of disposable products. The increase in disposability also affects basic social
relationships (producing a "throwaway society"). (286) The increase in volatility
produces a business climate in which long-range planning is increasingly difficult;
methods of capitalist response to this phenomenon involve seeking very short-range
capital turnover or attempting to intervene actively in the production of volatility.
Notably, the acceleration in consumption is also associated with the rise of image as a
commodity produced by the capitalist, especially (but not exclusively) in the role that
advertising plays in production and consumption. (287-8) This increased ability to
produce images more or less at will is exemplified in the rise of personal image
consultants and the production of class & other group identity on the basis of images.
(288-9) The image, as commodity, entails special systems of production, including
specialists producing it, and has a very rapid turnover time. One result of all of this
increased volatility and turnover speed in the system has been to cause capitalists to
attempt to buffer themselves against these factors through a variety of economic means
(futures markets, government debt securitization, insurance schemes, etc.). All of this
leads to deeper questions of identity for individuals living under this regime of
accumulation, which explains the aesthetic concern with the search for identity and the
revival of "basic institutions" (family, community, etc.) and emphasis on historical roots.
(290-2) Spatial adjustments to this new regime of accumulation have also fundamentally
altered the production of space. It costs substantially less to ship commodities widely, and
some forms of communication, such as satellite telephone, not only collapse space
entirely by making everyone equally distant but have no cost increase based on distance.
Media presents all events as of equal ontological status regardless of their actual
provenance. Ironically, the effect of the collapse of space has been an increased attention
to the specific qualities of various places, especially as capital becomes increasingly
mobile. Differences in labour markets, especially, are relevant as space collapses. (293-6)
These changes in time and space are linked to changes in the representation of value via
money, which is increasingly immaterial -- linked neither actual production nor to any
material base -- and, since the collapse of the Bretton Woods system of international
exchange, highly volatile. As money has become more volatile, so has inflation. (296-7)
The increased rates of inflation have rendered money useless as a store of value for the
future and led to more speculative forms of investment -- art, stock speculation, etc.
Money's breakdown as symbol of value both reflects and reinforces the postmodern
phenomenon of time-space compression, and this crisis in representation is affected by
the rise of the image as commodity in the postmodern system of production. (299) This is
exemplified by the changes in the distribution of commodities, which present post-1970
consumers with a vastly increased selection of commodities from across the globe, which
Harvey analyzes by looking at food availability in markets and restaurants. This increased
eclecticism in commodities feeds the postmodern sense of eclecticism in general, in
which all options become equivalent consumer choices. (299-301) One implication of this
change is an increase in the sense of place in the production of group identity, especially
in the increase in 'identity politics,' as the sense of history collapses under the barrage of
representations of 'history as commodity.' (303) This points toward one indication that our
"mental maps" are lagging behind the material changes in the system of production: the
collapse of history and emphasis on place provides a useful interpretive scheme for
geopolitical events since the transition to flexible accumulation. (305-6)

Chapter 18 ("Time and space in the postmodern cinema," pp.308-323) analyzes two films
-- Ridley Scott's Blade Runner and Wim Wenders's Himmel über Berlin (called Wings of
Desire in English translation), finding traces of postmodern time-space compression and
its resulting changes in consciousness in the production of these films as cultural artifacts.
Although Harvey provides a fascinating close reading of both films, I feel that the chapter
does not advance his argument, but merely instantiates it. For this reason, no summary of
this chapter is provided.

Part four: "The condition of postmodernity"

Ch. 19 ("Postmodernity as a historical condition," pp. 326-327) recapitulates Harvey's
argument so far: "postmodernity" as an aesthetic-cultural phenomenon is continuous with,
not a radical break from, the conditions of Enlightenment and modernist thought.
Moreover, it is explicable as the result of the changes in the capitalist system of
production. Harvey proposes to survey some of the aspects of the postmodern condition
in the short chapters of part IV.

Ch. 20 ("Economics with mirrors," pp. 328-335) cites examples of Reagan's "trickle-
down" theory, claiming that the discontinuity between Reagan's moral bankruptcy and his
high approval rating show that postmodern politics are based on aesthetics, not ethics.
Though the late modernist period showed that television savvy could influence election
outcomes. Harvey traces the deployment of Reagan's image as a strategy to pursue a
specific neoconservative political agenda (330-2), especially as a way of widening the
class gap.
Ch. 21 ("Postmodernism as the mirror of mirrors," pp. 336-337) ties the polemic against
Reagan-era image-based politics in to the thematic concerns of postmodernism as a
whole, arguing that postmodernism's reflexive rejection of any meta-narrative effectively
precludes the possibility of addressing the underlying mechanisms of domination in
"flexible accumulation" capitalism.

Ch. 22 ("Fordist modernism versus flexible postmodernism, or the interpenetration of

opposed tendencies in capitalism as a whole," pp. 338-342) revises table 1.1, based on
Hassan's work, to show the differences between modernity and postmodernity in the
context of the change from Fordist to flexible accumulation. Harvey suggests that the
opposition between "modernism" and "postmodernism" expressed in the table
"constitutes a structural description of the totality of political-economic and cultural-
ideological relations within capitalism" (339). This, he suggests, provides a more
complete descriptions of capitalism's working than simple adherence to one idea or the
other, and notes that viewing the table this way lets us see "the categories of both
modernism and postmodernism as static reifications imposed upon the fluid
interpenetration of dynamic oppositions" (339). This, he says, is why
Marx's Capital provide such a useful analysis of current economic-social conditions.

Ch. 23 ("The transformative and speculative logic of capital," pp. 343-345) opens with a
reminder that "capital is a process and not a thing" (343), reminding us that capital's goal
is to reproduce itself and that this necessarily involves a reproduction (but also a constant
transformation) of the social processes that are required to maintain it as the dominant
mode of production. These social processes are what underlie and constitute cultural life.
For Harvey, it is in the crises of accumulation that interventions are possible, because
these crises of accumulation, by generating new ways of producing time and space,
loosen the grip of the extant ideology and open up opportunities for new forms of cultural
life to be produced.

Ch. 24 ("The work of art in an age of electronic reproduction and image banks," 346-349)
provides brief notes on the ability to archive and store contextless images, then retrieve
them for mass dispersal. Harvey argues that, despite their democratizing appearance, the
logic of capital still controls what can and cannot be done with these image stores. The
mobilization of capital is evident, for instance, in the way that cultural producers are
mobilized by capital to produce (market, circulate, package, transform) a continuing
stream of spectacles for public consumption. Of course, this is precisely what opened up
the possibility for German fascism to become such a powerful political force. (346-7) The
expansion of the "middle class" to include cultural producers integrates artists and
aesthetes into the dominative logic of capital by seducing them with visions of individual
freedom within the capitalist regime, and therefore fractures possibilities for class
consciousness. As postmodern capitalism is increasingly a regime of accumulation that
produces images and symbols, and thereby produces space and time, this is a particularly
canny move for capital to make.

Ch. 25 ("Responses to time-space compression," pp. 350-352) examines various

theoretical responses to that phenomenon. Deconstructionism, Harvey argues, has value
insofar as it promotes analysis of hidden presuppositions and simplifications, but the
reflexive rejection of all narratives and metatheories into language games or "a rubble of
signifiers" "produced a condition of nihilism that prepared the ground for the re-
emergence of a charismatic politics and even more simplistic propositions than those
which were deconstructed." (350) A second response is a simplification of the
"complexity of the world" to "highly simplified rhetorical propositions," including
slogans and "depthless images." Harvey also acknowledges a middle-of-the-road
postmodernism "which spurns grand narrative but which does cultivate the possibility of
limited action." Dubbing this "progressive postmodernism," he acknowledges its positive
contributions (visions of other possible worlds and grounds for acting on them," but says
that "it is hard to stop the slide into parochialism, myopia, and self-referentiality in the
face of the universalizing force of capital circulation." Harvey does praise the attempts to
find new forms of representation that adequately address these new conditions of time,
space, and money, mentioning Baudrillard and Virilio in this context but claiming that
this branch of postmodern thought, too, sometimes tends to degenerate into "the most
alarming irresponsibility" (351).

Ch. 26 ("The crisis of historical materialism," pp. 353-355) analyzes the cultural
phenomenon of the left's theoretical difficulties with postmodernism. For Harvey, the
New Left of the 1960s, which provided a political basis for the cultural shift towards
postmodernism, was more closely aligned with libertarianism and anarchism than with
traditional "orthodox" Marxism. Though the New Left was, in his opinion, justified in its
concern with "race and gender issues, of difference, and of the problems of colonized
peoples and repressed minorities, of ecological and aesthetic issues," it "tended to
abandon its faith both in the proletariat as an instrument of progressive change and in
historical materialism as a mode of analysis" (354), which left it without a coherent
theoretical framework. Harvey argues that the rejection of "orthodox" Marxism was "both
necessary and positive" because new theoretical groundings were needed for dialectical
materialism. Harvey lists several basic and fundamental shifts that were necessary in
Marxist thought, including a recognition of "otherness" as a fundamental category (and
not something to be grafted onto class as a subsidiary consideration), a broader
recognition of the cultural significance of images and discourses, and the reformulation of
Marxism as "historical-geographical materialism," which is to be understood as open-
ended and dialectical rather than a canonical set of fixed theory. (355)

Ch. 27 ("Cracks in the mirrors, fusions at the edges," pp. 356-359) points toward signs
that postmodernist thought as a dominant interpretive regime is (as of 1990, the time of its
writing) becoming passé. Harvey argues that further crises of capitalist accumulation are
immanent and that, at the same time, deconstructivist thought is revealing its own set of
contractions, particularly in its response to accusations of anti-Semitism and neo-fascism.
(357)

Selected quotations
Part one: "The passage from modernity to postmodernity
in contemporary culture"
"To the degree that it does try to legitimate itself by reference to the past, therefore,
postmodernism typically harks back to that wing of thought, Nietzsche in particular, that
emphasizes the deep chaos of modern life and its intractability before rational thought.
This does not imply, however, that postmodernism is simply a version of modernism; real
revolutions in sensibility can occur when latent and dominated ideas in one period
become explicit and dominant in another." (44)

"Whereas the modernists see space as something to be shaped for social purposes and
therefore always subservient to the construction of a social project, the postmodernists see
space as something independent and autonomous, to be shaped according to aesthetic
aims and principles which have nothing necessary to do with any overarching social
objective, save, perhaps, the achievement of timeless and 'disinterested' beauty as an
objective in itself." (66)

"How a city looks and how its spaces are organized forms a material base upon which a
range of possible sensations and social practices can be thought about, evaluated, and
achieved." (66-7)

"It has, unfortunately, proved impossible to separate postmodernism's penchant for

historical quotation and populism from the simple task of catering, if not pandering, to
nostalgic impulses." (87)

"Postmodern concerns for the signifier rather than the signified, the medium (money)
rather than the message (social labour), the emphasis on fiction rather than function, on
signs rather than things, on aesthetics rather than ethics, suggest a reinforcement rather
than a transformation of the role of money as Marx depicts it." (102)

"Capitalism did not invent 'the other' but it certainly made use of and promoted it in
highly structured ways." (104)

"Capitalism, in short, is a social system internalizing rules that ensure it will remain a
permanently revolutionary and disruptive force in its own world history. If, therefore, 'the
only secure thing about modernity is insecurity,' then it is not hard to see from where that
insecurity derives." (107)

"What Marx depicts, therefore, are social processes at work under capitalism 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 as a
crisis-ridden dynamic of social change. If these conditions of capitalist modernization
form the material context out of which both modernist and postmodernist thinkers and
cultural producers forge their aesthetic sensibilities, principles, and practices, it seems
reasonable to conclude that the turn to postmodernism does not reflect any
fundamental change of social condition. The rise of postmodernism either represents a
departure (if such there is) in ways of thinking about what could or should be done about
that social condition, or else (and this is the proposition we explore in considerable depth
in Part II) it reflects a shift in the way in which capitalism is working these days. In either
case, Marx's account of capitalism, if correct, provides us with a very solid basis for
thinking about the general relations between modernization, modernity, and the aesthetic
movements that draw their energies from such conditions." (111-2; emphasis in original)

"It is equally wrong to write off the material achievements of modernist practices so
easily. Modernists found a way to control and contain an explosive capitalist condition.
They were effective for example, in the organization of urban life and the capacity to
build space in such a way as to contain the intersecting processes that have made for a
rapid urban change in twentieth-century capitalism. If there is a crisis implicit in all of
that, it is by no means clear that it is the modernists, rather than the capitalists, who are to
blame." (115)

"But postmodernism, with its emphasis upon the ephemerality of jouissance, its insistence
upon the impenetrability of the other, its concentration on the text rather than the work, its
penchant for deconstruction bordering on nihilism, its preference for aesthetics over
ethics, takes matters too far. It takes them beyond the point where any coherent politics
are left, while that wing of it that seeks a shameless accommodation with the market puts
it firmly in the tracks of an entrepreneurial culture that is the hallmark of reactionary
neoconservatism. Postmodernist philosophers tell us not only to accept but even to revel
in the fragmentations and the cacophony of voices through which the dilemmas of the
modern world are understood. Obsessed with deconstructing and delegitimating every
form of argument they encounter, they can end only in condemning their own validity
claims to the point where nothing remains of any basis for reasoned action.
Postmodernism has us accepting the reifications and partitionings, actually celebrating the
activity of masking and cover-up, all the fetishisms of locality, place, or social grouping,
which denying that kind of meta-theory which can grasp the political-economic processes
(money flows, international divisions of labour, financial markets, and the like) that are
becoming ever more universalizing in their depth, intensity, reach and power over daily
life." (116-7)

"If both modernity and postmodernity derive their aesthetic from some kind of struggle
with the fact of fragmentation, ephemerality, and chaotic flux, it is, I would suggest, very
important to establish why such a fact should have been so pervasive an aspect of modern
experience for so long a period of time, and why the intensity of that experience seems to
have picked up so powerfully since 1970." (117-8)

Part two: "The political-economic transformation of late

twentieth-century capitalism"
"Signs and tokens of radical changes in labour processes, in consumer habits, in
geographical and geopolitical configurations, in state powers and practices, and the like,
abound. Yet we still live, in the West, in a society where production for profit remains the
basic organizing principle of economic life. We need some way, therefore, to represent all
the shifting and churning that has gone on since the first major post-war recession of
1973, which does not lose sight of the fact that the basic rules of a capitalist mode of
production continue to operate as invariant shaping forces in historical-geographical
development." (121)

"What was special about Ford (and what ultimately separates Fordism from Taylorism),
was his vision, his explicit recognition that mass production meant mass consumption, a
new system of the reproduction of labour power, a new politics of labour control and
management, a new aesthetics and psychology, in short, a new kind of rationalized,
modernist, and populist democratic society." (125-6)

"In the United States, for example, the unions won considerable power in the sphere of
collective bargaining in the mass-production industries of the Midwest and North East,
preserved some shop-floor control over job specifications, security and promotions, and
wielded an important (though never determinant) political power over such matters as
social security benefits, the minimum wage, and other facets of social policy. But they
acquired and maintained these rights in return for adopting a collaborative stance with
respect to Fordist production techniques and cognate corporate strategies to increase
productivity." (133)

"The perpetual problem of habituating the worker to such routinized, de-skilled and
degraded systems of work, as Braverman (1974) forcefully argues, can never be
completely overcome. Nevertheless, bureaucratized trade union organizations were
increasingly corralled (sometimes through the exercise of repressive state power) into the
corner of swapping real wage gains for co-operation in disciplining workers to the Fordist
production system." (134)

"The unions also found themselves increasingly under attack from the outside, from
excluded minorities, women and the underprivileged. To the degree they served their
members' narrow interests and dropped more radical socialist concerns, they were in
danger of being reduced in the public eye to fragmented special-interest groups pursuing
self-serving rather than general aims." (138)

"At the very minimum the state had to try and guarantee some kind of adequate social
wage for all, or to engage in redistributive policies or relative impoverishment and lack of
inclusion of minorities. Increasingly, the legitimation of state power depended on the
ability to spread the benefits of Fordism over all and to find ways to deliver adequate
health care, housing and educational services on a massive scale but in a humane and
caring way." (139)

"In spite of all the discontents and all the manifest tensions, the centrepieces of the
Fordist regime held firm at least until 1973, and in the process did indeed manage to keep
a postwar boom intact that favoured unionized labour, and to some degree spread that
'benefits' of mass production and consumption even further afield. Material living
standards rose for the mass of the population in the advanced capitalist countries, and a
relatively stable environment for corporate profits prevailed." (140)

"In retrospect, it seems there were signs of serious problems within Fordism as early as
the mid-1960s. By then, the West European and Japanese recoveries were complete, their
internal market saturated, and the drive to create export markets for their surplus output
had to begin (figure 2.3). And this occurred at the very moment when the success of
Fordist rationalization meant the relative displacement of more and more workers from
manufacturing. The consequent slackening of effective demand was offset in the United
States by the war on poverty and the war in Vietnam." (141)

"More generally, the period from 1965 to 1973 was one in which the inability of Fordism
and Keynesianism to contain the inherent contradictions of capitalism became more and
more apparent." (142)

"The only tool of flexible response lay in monetary policy, in the capacity to print money
at whatever rate appeared necessary to keep the economy stable. And so began the
inflationary wave that was eventually to sink the postwar boom." (142)

"These enhanced powers of flexibility and mobility have allowed employers to exert
stronger pressures of labour control on a workforce in any case weakened by two savage
bouts of deflation, that saw unemployment rise to unprecedented postwar levels in
advanced capitalist countries (save, perhaps, Japan)." (147)

"Such flexible employment arrangements do not by themselves engender strong worker

dissatisfaction, since flexibility can sometimes be mutually beneficial. But the aggregate
effects, when looked at from the standpoint of insurance coverage and pension rights, as
well as wage levels and job security, by no means appear positive from the standpoint of
the working population as a whole." (151)

"While it is true that the declining significance of union power has reduced the singular
power of white male workers in monopoly sector markets, it does not follow that those
excluded from those labour markets, such as blacks, women, ethnic minorities of all kids,
have achieved sudden parity (except in the sense that many traditionally privileged white
male workers have been marginalized alongside them." (152)

"Working-class forms of organization (such as the trade unions), for example, depended
heavily upon the massing of workers within the factory for their viability, and find it
peculiarly difficult to gain any purchase within family and domestic labour systems."
(153)

"What is most interesting about the current situation is the way in which capitalism is
becoming ever more tightly organized through dispersal, geographical mobility, and
flexible responses in labour markets, labour processes, and consumer markets, all
accompanied by hefty doses of institutional, product, and technological innovation."
(159)

"The 'merger and takeover mania' of the 1980s was part and parcel of this emphasis upon
paper entrepreneurialism, for although there were some instances where such activities
could indeed be justified in terms of rationalization or diversification of corporate
interests, the thrust was more often than not to gain paper profits without troubling with
actual production." (163)

"The electoral victories of Thatcher (1979) and Reagan (1980) are often viewed as a
distinctive rupture in the politics of the postwar period. I understand them more as
consolidations of what was already under way throughout much of the 1970s. The crisis
of 1973-5 was in part born out of a confrontation with the accumulated rigidities of
government policies and practices built up during the Fordist-Keynesian period.
Keynesian policies had appeared inflationary as entitlements grew and fiscal capacities
stagnated. Since it had always been part of the Fordist political consensus that
redistributions should be funded out of growth, slackening growth inevitably meant
trouble for the welfare state and the social wage." (166-7)

"If the language of the regulation school has survived better than most, it is, I suspect,
because of its rather more pragmatic orientation. There is, within the regulation school,
little or no attempt to provide any detailed understanding of the mechanisms and logic of
transitions. This, it seems to me, is a serious lack." (177-9)

"The Marxist argument is, then, that the tendency towards overaccumulation can never be
eliminated under capitalism. It is a neverending and eternal problem for any capitalist
mode of production." (181)

"The revival of the sweatshops in New York and Los Angeles, of home work and
'telecommuting', as well as the burgeoning growth of informal sector labour practices
throughout the advanced capitalist world, does indeed represent a rather sobering vision
of capitalism's supposedly progressive history." (187)

"Eclecticism in labour practices seem [sic] almost as marked in these times as the
eclecticism of postmodern philosophies and tastes." (187)

"I do not, therefore, see the neo-conservative monetarism that attaches to flexible modes
of accumulation and the overall devaluation of labour power through enhanced labour
control as offering even a short-term solution to the crisis-tendencies of capitalism. The
budget deficit of the United States has, I think, been very important to the stabilization of
capitalism these last few years, and if that proves unsustainable, then the path of capitalist
accumulation world-wide will be rocky indeed." (192)

Part three: "The experience of space and time"

"Space and time are basic categories of human existence. Yet we rarely debate their
meanings; we tend to take them for granted, and give them common-sense or self-evident
attributions." (201)

"I think it important to challenge the idea of a single and objective sense of time or space,
against which we can measure the diversity of human conceptions and perceptions. […] It
is, however, by no means necessary to subordinate all objective conceptions of time and
space to this particular physical conception, since it, also, is a construct that rests upon a
particular version of the constitution of matter and the origin of the universe." (203)

"The objectivity of time and space is given in each case by the material practices of social
reproduction, and to the degree that these latter vary geographically and historically, so
we find that social time and social space are differentially constructed. […] Since
capitalism has been (and continues to be3) a revolutionary mode of production in which
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. On the
other hand, if advance of knowledge (scientific, technical, administrative, bureaucratic,
and rational) is vital to the progress of capitalist production and consumption, then
changes in our conceptual apparatus (including representations of space and time) can
have material consequences for the ordering of daily life." (204)

"How adequate are such modes of thought and such conceptions in the face of the flow of
human experience and strong processes of social change? On the other side of the coin,
how can spatializations in general, and aesthetic practices in particular, represent flux and
change, particularly if these latter are held essential truths to be conveyed?" (206)

"The combination of film and music provides a powerful antidote to the spatial passivity
of art and architecture. yet the very confinement of the film to a depthless screen and a
theatre is a reminder that it, too, is space-bound in some curious ways." (207)

"The common-sense notion that 'there is a time and a place for everything' gets carried
into a set of prescriptions which replicate the social order by assigning social meanings to
spaces and times." (214)

"The organized spatio-temporal rhythms of capitalism provide abundant opportunities for

socialization of individuals to distinctive roles." (216)

"Being, suffused with immemorial spatial memory, transcends Becoming. It founds all
those nostalgic memories of a lost childhood world. Is this the foundation for collective
memory, for all those manifestations of place-bound nostalgias that infect our images of
the country and the city, of region, milieu, and locality, of neighbourhood and
community? And if it is true that time is always memorialized not as flow, but as
memories of experienced places and spaces, then history must indeed give way to poetry,
time to space, as the fundamental material of social expression. The spatial image
(particularly the evidence of the photograph) then asserts an important power over
history." (218)
"The grid of spatial practices can tell us nothing important by itself. To suppose so would
be to accept the idea that there is some universal spatial language independent of social
practices. Spatial practices derive their efficacy in social life only through the structure of
social relations within which they come into play. Under the social relations of
capitalism, for example, the spatial practices portrayed in the grid become imbued with
class meanings. To put it this way is not, however, to argue that spatial practices are
derivative of capitalism. They take on their meanings under specific social relations of
class, gender, community, ethnicity, or race and get 'used up' or 'worked over' the course
of social action." (223)

"[Gurvitch's schematic of the ways in which people experience time] inverts the
proposition that there is a time for everything and proposes that we think, instead, of
every social relation containing its own sense of time." (223)

"It is a fundamental axiom of my enquiry that time and space (or language, for that
matter) cannot be understood independently of social action." (223-5)

"Money measures value, but if we ask what constitutes value in the first instance, we find
it impossible to define value without saying something about how the time of social
labour is allocated." (227)

"Ironically, the explorations of the calendar and time measurement that had been
promoted by the monastic orders in order to impose religious discipline were appropriated
by the nascent bourgeoisie as a means to organize and discipline the populations of
mediaeval towns to a new-found and very secular labour discipline." (228)

"The general effect, then, is for capitalist modernization to be very much about speed-up
and acceleration in the pace of economic processes and, hence, in social life. But that
trend is discontinuous, punctuated by periodic crises, because fixed investments in plant
and machinery, as well as in organizational forms and labour skills, cannot easily be
changed." (230)

"The Renaissance separated scientific and supposedly factual sense of time and space
from the more fluid conceptions that might arise experientially." (244)

"The extraordinary strength of spatial and temporal imagery in the English literature of
the Renaissance likewise testifies to the impact of this new sense of space and time on
literary modes of representation. The language of Shakespeare, or of poets like John
Donne and Andrew Marvell, is rife with such imagery." (247)

"If spatial and temporal experiences are primary vehicles for the coding and reproduction
of social relations (as Bourdieu suggests), then a change in the way the former get
represented will almost certainly generate some kind of shift in the latter." (247)

"Enlightenment thinkers similarly looked to command over the future through powers of
scientific prediction, through social engineering and rational planning, and the
institutionalization of rational systems of social regulation and control. They in effect
appropriated and pushed Renaissance conceptions of space and time to their limit in the
search to construct a new, more democratic, healthier, and more affluent society. […]
Maps, stripped of all elements of fantasy and religious belief, as well as of any sign of the
experiences involved in their production, had become abstract and strictly functional
systems for the factual ordering of phenomena in space. […] They also allowed the whole
population of the earth, for the first time in human history, to be located within a single
spatial frame." (249-50)

"By treating certain idealized conceptions of space and time as real, Enlightenment
thinkers ran the danger of confining the free flow of human experience and practice to
rationalized configurations." (253)

"The conquest and control of space, for example, first requires that it be conceived of as
something usable, malleable, and therefore capable of domination through human action.
Perspectivism and mathematical mapping did this by conceiving of space as abstract,
homogeneous,and universal in its qualities, a framework of thought and action which was
stable and knowable." (254)

"Time-space compression is a sign of the intensity of forces at work at this nexus of

contradiction and it may ell be that crises of overaccumulation as well as crises in cultural
and political forms are powerfully connected to such forces." (258)

"All Enlightenment projects had in common a relatively unified common-sense of what

space and time were about and why their rational ordering was important. This common
basis in part depended on the popular availability of watches and clocks, and on the
capacity to diffuse cartographic knowledge by cheaper and more efficient printing
techniques. But it also rested upon the link between Renaissance perspectivism and a
conception of the individual as the ultimate source and container of social power, albeit
assimilated within the nation state as a collective system of authority." (258-9)

"The thesis I want to explore here, however, is that the crisis of 1847-8 created a crisis of
representation, and that this latter crisis itself derived from a radical readjustment in the
sense of time and space in economic, political, and cultural life. Before 1848, progressive
elements within the bourgeoisie could reasonably hold to the Enlightenment sense of time
('time pressing forward', as Gurvitch would put it), recognizing that they were fighting a
battle against the 'enduring' and ecological time of traditional societies and the 'retarded
time' of recalcitrant forms of social organization. But after 1848, that progressive sense of
time was called into question in many important respects." (260-1)

"Events proved that Europe had achieved a level of spatial integration in its economic and
financial life that was to make the whole continent vulnerable to simultaneous crisis
formation. The political revolutions that erupted at once across the continent emphasized
the synchronic as well as the diachronic dimensions to capitalist development." (261)
"Nationalist workers could exhibit xenophobia in Paris yet sympathize with Polish or
Viennese workers struggling, like them, for political and economic emancipation in their
particular spaces." (262)

"It was only after 1850, after all, that stock and capital markets (markets for 'fictitious
capital') were systematically organized and opened to general participation under legal
rules of incorporation and market contract." (262)

"Even though, for example, excessive speculation in railroad construction triggered the
first European-wide crisis of overaccumulation, the resolution to that crisis after 1850
rested heavily upon further exploration of temporal and spatial displacement." (264)

"The map of domination of the world's spaces changed out of all recognition between
1850 and 1914. Yet it was possible, given the flow of information and new techniques of
representation, to sample a wide range of simultaneous imperial adventures and conflicts
with a mere glance at the morning newspaper." (264)

"Ford, we recall, set up his assembly line in 1913. He fragmented tasks and distributed
them in space so as to maximize efficiency and minimize the friction of flow in
production. In effect, he used a certain form of spatial organization to accelerate the
turnover time of capital in production. Time could then be accelerated (speed-up) by
virtue of the control established through organizing and fragmenting the spatial order of
production. In that very same year, however, the first radio signal was beamed around the
world from the Eiffel tower, thus emphasizing the capacity to collapse space into the
simultaneity of an instant in universal public time." (266)

"Public time was becoming ever more homogeneous and universal across space." (266-7)

"By enhancing links between place and the social sense of personal and communal
identity, this facet of modernism was bound, to some degree, to entail the aestheticization
of local, regional, or nation politics. Loyalties to place then take precedence over loyalties
to class, spatializing political action." (273)

"It is, therefore, a readily understandable paradox that in an age when the annihilation of
space through time was proceeding at a furious pace, geopolitics and the aestheticization
of politics underwent a strong revival." (273)

"While modernism always ostensibly asserted the values of internationalism and

universalism, it could never properly settle its account with parochialism and nationalism.
It either defined itself in opposition to these all too familiar forces (strongly identified,
though by no means exclusively so, with the so-called middle classes') or else it took the
elitist and ethnocentric road by presuming that Paris, Berlin, New York, London, or
wherever, was indeed the intellectual fount of all representational and aesthetic wisdom."
(276)
"This deployment of art in the shaping of space to create a real sense of community was,
to Sitte, the only possible response to modernity. […] needing a new ideal 'beside and
above the real world,' Sitte 'exalted Richard Wagner as the genius who recognized this
redemptive, future-oriented work as the special task of the artist. The world that the
rootless seeker of science and trade destroyed, leaving the suffering Volk without a vital
myth to live by, the artist must create anew." (276) [quoting Schorske's Fin-de-
siècle Vienna: Politics and culture]

"The dramatic spectacles of the sort the Nazis organized certainly brought space alive and
managed to appeal to a deep mythology of place, symbolizing 'community,' but
community of a most reactionary sort. under conditions of mass unemployment, the
collapse of spatial barriers, and the subsequent vulnerability of place and community to
space and capital, it was all too easy to play upon sentiments of the most fanatical
localism and nationalism. I am not even indirectly blaming Sitte or his ideas for this
history. But I do think it important to recognize the potential connection between projects
to shape space and encourage spatial practices of the sort that Sitte advocated, and
political projects that can be at best conserving and at worst downright reactionary in their
implications." (277)

"Newspapers fed popular anger, swift military mobilizations were set in motion, thus
contributing to the frenzy of diplomatic activity that broke down simply because enough
decisions could not be made fast enough in enough locations to bring the warlike stresses
under collective control. Global war was the result. It seemed, to both Gertrude Stein and
Picasso, a cubist war and was fought on so many fronts and in so many spaces that the
denotation appears reasonable even on a global scale." (278)

"The heroic modernists sought to show how the accelerations, fragmentations, and
imploding centralization (particularly in urban life) could be represented and thereby
contained within a singlular image." (279-80)

"If modernism meant, among other things, the subjugation of space to human purposes,
then the rational ordering and control of space as part and parcel of a modern culture
founded on rationality and technique, the suppression of spatial barriers and difference,
had to be merged with some kind of historical project." (280)

"As spatializations, the artefacts produced by the moderns (with exceptions, of course,
such as the Dadaists) conveyed some permanent if not monumental sense of supposedly
universal human values. But even Le Corbusier recognized that such an act had to invoke
the power of myth. And here the real tragedy of modernism begins. Because it was not
the myths favoured by le Corbusier or Otto Wagner or Walter Gropius that in the end
dominated matters. It was either the worship of Mammon or, worse still, the myths stirred
up by an aestheticized politics that called the tune. Le Corbusier flirted with Mussolini
and compromised with Pétain's France, Oscar Niemeyer planned Brasilia for a popular
president but built it for ruthless generals, the insights of the Bauhaus were mobilized into
the design of the death camps, and the rule that form follows profit as well as function
dominated everywhere. […] Its insights, tragically, were absorbed for purposes that were
not, by and large, its own" (281-2)
"The opposition between Being and Becoming has been central to modernism's history.
That opposition has to be seen in political terms as a tension between the sense of time
and the focus of space. […] Even under conditions of widespread class revolt, the
dialectic of Being and Becoming has posed seemingly intractable problems. Above all,
the changing meaning of space and time which capitalism has itself wrought, as forced
perpetual re-evaluations in representations of the world in cultural life. It was only in an
era of speculation on the future and fictitious capital formation that the concept of an
avant-garde (both artistic and political) could make any sense." (283)

"Indeed, learning to play the volatility right is now just as important as accelerating
turnover time. This means either being highly adaptable and fast-moving in response to
market shifts, or masterminding the volatility. The first strategy points mainly towards
short-term rather than long-term planning, and cultivating the art of taking short-term
gains wherever they are to be had. This has been a notorious feature of US management
in recent times. […] Mastering or intervening actively in the production of volatility, on
the other hand, entails manipulation of taste and opinion, either through being a fashion
leader or by so saturating the market with images as to shape the volatility to particular
ends." (287)

"Advertising and media images (as we saw in Part I) have come to play a very much more
integrative role in cultural practices and now assume a much greater importance in the
growth dynamics of capitalism. Advertising, moreover, is no longer built around the idea
of informing or promoting in the ordinary sense, but is increasingly geared to
manipulating desires and tastes through images that may or may not have anything to do
with the product to be sold." (287)

"Images have in a sense, themselves become commodities. This phenomenon has led
Baudrillard (1981) to argue that Marx's analysis of commodity production is outdated
because capitalism is now predominantly concerned with the production of signs, images,
and sign systems rather than with commodities themselves. The transition he points to is
important, though there are in fact no serious difficulties in extending Marx's theory of
commodity production to cope with it." (287)

"The acquisition of an image) by the purchase of a sign system such as designer clothes
and the right car) becomes a singularly important element in the presentation of self in
labour markets and, by extension, becomes integral to the quest for individual identity,
self-realization, and meaning." (288)

"Insofar as identity is increasingly dependent upon images, this means that the serial and
recursive replications of identities (individual, corporate, institutional, and political)
becomes a very real possibility and problem." (289)

"The home becomes a private museum to guard against the ravages of time-space
compression. At the very time, furthermore, that postmodernism proclaims the 'death of
the author' and the rise of anti-auratic art in the public realm, the art market becomes ever
more conscious of the monopoly power of the artist's signature and of questions of
authenticity and forgery (no matter that the Rauschenberg is itself a mere reproduction
montage). It is, perhaps, appropriate that the postmodernist developer building, as solid as
the pink granite of Philip Johnson's AT&T building, should be debt-financed, built on the
basis of fictitious capital, and architecturally conceived of, at least on the outside, more in
the spirit of fiction than of function." (292)

"Heightened competition under conditions of crisis has coerced capitalists into paying
much closer attention to relative locational advantages, precisely because diminishing
spatial barriers give capitalists the power to exploit minute spatial differentiations to good
effect. Small differences in what the space contains in the way of labour supplies,
resources, infrastructures, and the like become of increased significance. Superior
command over space becomes an even more important weapon in class struggle." (293-4)

"If capitalists become increasingly sensitive to the spatially differentiated qualities of

which the world's geography is composed, then it is possible for the peoples and powers
that command those spaces to alter them in such a way as to be more rather than less
attractive to highly mobile capital." (295)

"The question of which currency I hold is directly linked to which place I put my faith in.
That may have something to do with the competitive economic position and power of
different national systems. That power, given the flexibility of accumulation over space,
is itself a rapidly shifting magnitude. The effect is to render the spaces that underpin the
determination of value as unstable as value itself. This problem is compounded by the
way that speculative shits bypass actual economic power and performance, and then
trigger self-fulfilling expectations. The de-linking of the financial system from active
production and from any material monetary base calls into question the reliability of the
basic mechanism whereby value is supposed to be represented." (297)

"A strong sense of 'the Other' is replaced, he [I. Chambers] suggests, by a weak sense of
'the others.'" (301)

"Disruptive spatiality triumphs over the coherence of perspective and narrative in

postmodern fiction, in exactly the same way that imported beers coexist with local brews,
local employment collapses under the weight of foreign competition, and all the divergent
spaces of the world are assembled nightly as a collage of images upon the television
screen." (302)

"Whereas modernism looked upon the spaces of the city, for example, as 'an
epiphenomenon of social functions,' postmodernism 'tends to disengage urban space from
its dependence on functions, and to see it as an autonomous formal system' incorporating
'rhetorical and artistic strategies', which are independent of any simple historical
determinism (Calquhoun, 1985)." (304)

"This should alert us to the acute geopolitical dangers that attach to the rapidity of time-
space compression in recent years. The transition from Fordism to flexible accumulation,
such as it has been, ought to imply a transition in our mental maps, political attitudes, and
political institutions. But political thinking does not necessarily undergo such easy
transformations, and is in any case subject to the contradictory pressures that derive from
spatial integration and differentiation. There is an omni-present danger that our mental
maps will not match current realities. The serious diminution of the power of individual
nation states over fiscal and monetary policies, for example, has not been matched by any
parallel shift towards an internationalization of politics. Indeed, there are abundant signs
that localism and nationalism have become stronger precisely because of the quest for the
security that place always offers in the midst of all the shifting that flexible accumulation
implies. The resurgence of geopolitics and of faith in charismatic politics (Thatcher's
Falklands War, Reagan's invasion of Grenada) fits only too well with a world that is
increasingly nourished intellectually and politically by a vast flux of ephemeral images."
(305-6)

"The problems are not confined to the realms of political and military decision-making,
for the world's financial markets are on the boil in ways that make a snap judgement here,
an unconsidered word there, and a gut reaction somewhere else the slip that can unravel
the whole skein of fictitious capital formation and of interdependency." (306)

"By putting this condition into its historical context, as part of a history of successive
waves of time-space compression generated out of the pressures of capital accumulation
with its perpetual search to annihilate space through time and reduce turnover time, we
can at least pull the condition of postmodernity into the range of a condition accessible to
historical materialist analysis and interpretation." (306-7)

"She [Rachel] escapes the schizoid world of replicant time and intensity to enter the
symbolic world of Freud." (312)

"The depressing side of the film is precisely that, in the end, the difference between the
replicant and the human becomes so unrecognizable that they can indeed fall in love
(once both get on the same time scale). The power of the simulacrum is everywhere. […]
While Tyrell's eyes are indeed torn out during his killing, this is an individual rather than
a class act of rage. The finale of the film is a scene of sheer escapism (tolerated, it should
be noted, by the authorities) that leaves unchanged the plight of replicants as well as the
dismal conditions of the seething mass of humanity that inhabits the derelict streets of a
decrepit, deindustrialized, and decaying postmodernist world." (313-4)

"Brilliant portrayals though both films are of the conditions of postmodernity, and in
particular of the conflictual and confusing experience of space and time, neither has the
power to overturn established ways of seeing or transcend the conflictual conditions of
the moment." (322)

"Cinema is, after all, the supreme maker and manipulator of images, for commercial
purposes, and the very act of using it well always entails reducing the complex stories of
daily life to a sequence of images upon a depthless screen. The idea of a revolutionary
cinema has always run aground on the rocks of exactly this difficulty." (323)

Part four: "The condition of postmodernity"

"Aesthetic and cultural practices are peculiarly susceptible to the changing experience of
space and time precisely because they entail the construction of spatial representations
and artefacts out of the flow of human experience. They always broker between Being
and Becoming." (326)

"It is possible to write the historical geography of the experience of space and time in
social life, and to understand the transformations that both have undergone, by reference
to material and social conditions. Part III proposed an historical sketch of how that might
be done with respect to the post-Renaissance Western world. The dimensions of space
and time have there been subject to the persistent pressure of capital circulation and
accumulation, culminating (particularly during the periodic crises of overaccumulation
that have arisen since the mid-nineteenth century) in disconcerting and disruptive bouts of
time-space compression." (326)

"Since phases of time-space compression are disruptive, we can expect the turn to
aesthetics and to the forces of culture as both explanations and loci of active struggle to
be particularly acute at such moments. Since crises of overaccumulation typically spark
the search for spatial and temporal resolutions, which in turn create an overwhelming
sense of time-space compression, we can also expect crises of overaccumulation to be
followed by strong aesthetic movements." (326)

"The election of an ex-movie actor, Ronald Reagan, to one of the most powerful positions
in the world but a new gloss on the possibilities of a mediatized politics shaped by images
alone. his image, cultivated over many years of political practice, and then carefully
mounted, crafted, and orchestrated with all the artifice that contemporary image
production could command, as a tough but warm, avuncular, and well-meaning person
who had an abiding faith in the greatness and goodness of America, built an aura of
charismatic politics." (330)

"The biggest physical export from New York City is now waste paper. The city's
economy in fact rests on the production of fictitious capital to lend to the real estate
agents who cut deals for the highly paid professions who manufacture fictitious capital."
(331-2)

"The obverse side of this affluence was the plague of homelessness, disempowerment,
and impoverishment that engulfed many of the central cities. 'Otherness' was produced
with a vengeance and a vengefulness unparalleled in the post-war era." (332)

"One of the prime conditions of postmodernity is that no one can or should discuss it as a
historical-geographical condition. […] It is conventional these days, for example, to
dismiss out of hand any suggestion that the 'economy' (however that vague word is
understood) might be determinant of cultural life even in (as Engels and later Althusser
suggested) 'the last instance.' The odd thing about postmodern cultural production is how
much sheer profit-seeking is determinant in the first instance." (336)

"The street scenes of impoverishment, disempowerment, graffiti and decay become grist
for the cultural producers' mill, not, as Deutsche and Ryan (1984) point out, in the
muckraking reformist style of the late nineteenth century, but as a quaint and swirly
backdrop (as in Blade Runner) upon which no social commentary is to be made. 'Once
the poor become aestheticized, poverty itself moves out of our field of social vision',
except as a passive depiction of otherness, alienation and contingency within the human
condition." (336-7)

"It seems as if postmodernist flexibility merely reverses the dominant order to be found in
Fordist modernity. The latter achieved relative stability in its political-economic
apparatus in order to produce strong social and material change, whereas the former has
been dogged by disruptive instability in its political-economic apparatus, but sought
compensation in stable places of being and in charismatic geopolitics." (339)

"One side-effect has been to rekindle a lot of theoretical interest in the nature of money
(as opposed to class) power and the asymmetries that can arise therefrom (cf. Simmel's
extraordinary treatise on The philosophy of money). Media stars, for example, can be
highly paid yet grossly exploited by their agents, the record companies, the media
tycoons, and the like. Such a system of asymmetrical money relations relates to the need
to mobilize cultural creativity and aesthetic ingenuity, not only in the production of a
cultural artefact but also in its promotion, packaging, and transformation into some kind
of successful spectacle." (347)

"The imaging of politics by the public relations agencies matched the politics of imaging
in powerful ways." (348)

"In the hands of its more responsible practitioners, the whole baggage of ideas associated
with postmodernism could be deployed to radical ends, and thereby be seen as part of a
fundamental drive towards a more liberatory politics, in exactly the same way that the
turn to more flexible labour processes could be seen as an opening to a new era of
democratic and highly decentralized labour relations and co-operative endeavours." (353)

"Jesse Jackson employs charismatic politics in a political campaign which nevertheless

begins to fuse some of the social movements in the United States that have long been
apathetic to each other. The very possibility of a genuine rainbow coalition defines a
unified politics which inevitably speaks the tacit language of class, because this is
precisely what defines the common experience within the differences. US trade union
leaders finally begin to worry that their support for foreign dictatorships in the name of
anti-communism since 1950, has promoted the unfair labour practices and low wages in
many countries which now compete for jobs and investment. And when British Ford car
workers struck and stopped car production in Belgium and West Germany, they suddenly
realized that spatial dispersal in the division of labour is not entirely to the capitalists'
advantage and international strategies are feasible as well as desirable." (358)

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