Idea Transcript
The Condition of Postmodernity An Enquiry into the Origins of Cultural Change
13
BLACKWELL
Cambridge MA &- Oxford UK
Copyright © David Harvey 1989 First published 1990 Reprinted 1990 (three times), 1991, 1992 (twice) Blackwell Publishers 238 Main Street
Contents
Cambridge, Massachusetts 02142, USA Blackwell Publishers 108 Cowley Road, Oxford OX4 1JF, UK
All rights reserved. Except for the quotation of short passages for the purposes of criticism and review, no part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise, without the prior permission of the publisher. Except in the United States of America, this book is sold subject to the condition that it shall not, by way of trade or otherwise, be lent, re-sold, hired out, or otherwise circulated without the publisher's prior consent in any form of binding or cover other than that in which it is published and without a similar condition including this condition being imposed on the subsequent purchaser.
British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data A CIP catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library
Library of Congress Cataloging in Publication Data Harvey, David, 1935-
The condition of postmodernity / David Harvey p. cm. Bibliography: p. Includes index. ISBN 0-631-16292-5-ISBN 0-'31-16294-1 (pbk.): 1. Civilization. Modern-1950-
2. Capitalism.
4. Postmodernism.
3. Space and time.
1. Title.
CB428.H38 1989 909.82.-dc19
88-39135
CIP
Typeset in lOY2 on 12pt Garamond by Setrite Printed in the USA This book is printed on acid-free paper
The argument Preface Acknowledgements
Part I 1 2 3 4 5 6
The passage from modernity to postmodernity in contemporary culture Introduction Modernity and modernism Postmodernism Postmodernism in the city: architecture and urban design Modernization posTmodernIsM or postMODERNism ?
"
Vll Vlll
x
3 10 39 66 99 1 13
Part II The political-economic transformation of late twentieth-century capitalism 7 Introduction 8 Fordism 9 From Fordism to flexible accumulation 1 0 Theorizing the transition 1 1 Flexible accumulation - solid transformation or ternporary fix?
121 125 141 1 73 1 89
Part III The experience of space and time
1 2 Introduction 1 3 Individual spaces and times in social life 1 4 Time and space as sources 0 f social power 1 5 The time and space of the Enlightenment project
201 211 226 240
VI
Contents Time- space compression and the rise o f modernism as a cultural force 17 Time-space compression and the postmodern condition 1 8 Time and space in the postmodern cinema
16
Part IV The condition of postmodernity
Postmodernity as a historical condition Economics with mirrors Postmodernism as the mirror of mirrors Fordist modernism versus flexible postmodernism, or the interpenetration of opposed tendencies in capitalism as a whole 23 The transformative and speculative logic of capital 24 The work of art in an age of electronic reproduction and image banks 25 Responses to time- space compression 26 The crisis of historical materialism 2 7 Cracks in the mirrors, fusions a t the edges
19 20 21 22
260 284 308
The argument 327 329 336 338 343 346 350 353 356
References
360
Index
368
There has been a sea-change in cultural as well as in pol itical economic practices since around 1 972 . This sea-change is bound up with the emergence of new dominant ways in which we experience space and time. While simultaneity in the shifting dimensions of time and space is no proof of necessary or causal connection, strong a priori grounds can be adduced for the proposition that there is some kind of necessary relation between the rise of postmodernist cultural forms, the emergence of more flexible modes of capital accumulation, and a new round of 'time- space compression' in the organization of capitalism. But these changes, when set against the basic rules of capitalistic accumulation, appear more as shifts in surface appearance rather than as signs of the emergence of some entirely new postcapitalist or even postindustrial society.
Preface
the wholly new discourses that have ansen m the Western world over the past few decades. There are signs, these days, that the cultural hegemony of post modern sm is .weakening in the West. When even the developers tell . an archItect h ke Moshe Safdie that they are tired of it, then can philosophical thinking be far behind? In a sense it does not matter whether postmodernism is or is not on the way out, since much can be learned from a historical enquiry into the roots of what has been a quite un�:ttling. phase in economic, political, and cultural development. In wn�mg thIS book I have had a lot of help and critical encourage . ment. Vicent� Navarro, Enca Schoenberger, Neil Smith, and Dick Walker pr� vIded a host of comments either on the manuscript or upon the Ideas I was developing. The Roland Park Collective provided a grand forum for intellectual discussion and debate. It was also my good fortune to work with an extremely talented group of graduate students at the Johns Hopkins University, and I would like to than Kevin Archer, Patrick Bond, Michael Johns, Phil Schmandt, and Enc Swyngedouw for the tremendous intellectual stimulation they provided during my last years there. Jan Bark initiated me into th.e joys of having some�::m e do the word-processing competently and WIth good humour whIle undertaking much of the burden of con structing : he index. Angela Newman drew the diagrams, Tony Lee h� lp �d WIth the photography, Sophie Hartley sought out the per . mIsslons, and Ahson DIckens and John Davey, of Basil Blackwell, . prOVIded many helpful editorial comments and suggestions. And Haydee was a wonderful source of inspiration.
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Preface
I cannot remember exactly when I first encountered the term post modernism. I probably reacted to it in much the same way as I did to the various other 'isms' that have come and gone over the past couple of decades, hoping that it would disappear under the weight of its own incoherence or simply lose its allure as a fashionable set of 'new ideas.' But it seemed as if the clamour of postmodernist arguments in creased rather than diminished with time. Once connected with poststructuralism, postindustrialism, and a whole arsenal of other 'new ideas,' postmodernism appeared more and more as a powerful configuration of new sentiments and thoughts. It seemed set fair to play a crucial role in defining the trajectory of social and political development simply by virtue of the way it defined standards of social critique and political practice. In recent years it has determined the standards of debate, defined the manner of 'discourse,' and set parameters on cultural, political, and intellectual criticism. It therefore seemed appropriate to enquire more closely into the nature of postmodernism, not so much as a set of ideas but as a historical condition that required elucidation. I had, however, to undertake a survey of the dominant ideas and, since postmodernism turns out to be a mine-field of conflicting notions, that project turned out to be by no means easy to undertake. The results of that enquiry, set out in Part I, have been boil ed down to the bare minimum, though I hope not unreasonably so. The rest of the work examines the political - economic background (again, in a somewhat simplified way) before looking much more closely at the experience of space and time as one singularly important mediating link between the dynamism of capital ism's historical- geographical development and complex processes of cultural production and ideological trans formation. In this way it proves possible to make sense of some of
IX
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Acknowledgements
The author and publisher are grateful to the following for their kind
Part I
The passage from modernity to postmodernity in contemporary culture
permission to reproduce plates: Alcatel 3.2; Archives Nationales de France 3.3, 3.8; The Art Institute of Chicago,Joseph Winterbotham Collection,
© The Art Institute of Chicago. All Rights Reserved. © DACS 1988 3.9;
Associated Press 1.21; A. Aubrey Bodine Collection, courtesy of the Peale Museum, Baltimore. 1.22; Jean-Fran�ois Batellier 1.4; Bildarchiv Photo
Marburg 1.20; British Architectural Library / RIBA 3.6; The British Library 3.4; Leo Castelli Gallery,New York, © Robert Rauschenberg, ©
DACS 1988 (photograph by Rudolph Burckhardt) 1.9; Deutsches
Architekturmusuem, Frankfurt am Main, 1.28; P. Dicken, Global Shift 3.1; Equitable Life Assurance Collection of the U.S. 1.5; Fondation Le
Corbusier, Paris, © DACS 1988 1.1a; Galerie Bruno Bischofberger,
Zurich, 1.6; Lintas Limited, London, 1.10; Lloyds Bank PIc, London, 4.1; Lloyd's of London (photograph by Janet Gill) 1.19; Los Angeles Times 1.18; Mansell Collection 1.7; Metro Pictures, New York, 1.2; Metropolitan Life Insurance Company Archives,New York,1.1b; Musee
National d'Art Moderne, Centre Georges Pompidou, Paris, © ADAGP, Paris, and DACS, London 1988 3.11, 3.12; Musee d'Orsay, Cliche des
Musees Nationaux, Paris, 1.8; The Museum of Modern Art, New York, Purchase Fund, © ADAGP, Paris, and DACS, London 1989 3.10;
National Portrait Gallery, London 3.5; Roger-Viollet 1.3. All other photographs were kindly provided by the author. The author and publisher would also like to thank the estate of T.S. Eliot, and the publishers of the
Four Quartets, Faber and Faber Ltd and
Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, for permission to reproduce the extract from
Burnt Norton, and Heinrich Klotz, Revision der Moderne: Postmoderne Architektur 1960-1980,Prestel VerlagMunchen,1984,for the catalogue description of Charles Moore's Piazza d'Italia.
The fate of an epoch that has eaten of the tree of knowledge is that it must . . . recognize that general views of life and the universe can never be the products of increasing empirical knowledge, and that the highest ideals, which move us most forcefully, are always formed only in the struggle with other ideals which are just as sacred to others as Max Weber ours are to us.
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Introduction
Jonathan Raban's Soft city, a highly personalized account of London life in the early 1 970s, was published in 1 974. It received a fair amount of favourable comment at the time. But its interest to me here is as a historical marker, because it was written at a moment when a certain shifting can be detected in the way in which problems of urban life were being talked about in both popular and academic circles. It presaged a new kind of discourse that would later generate terms like 'gentrification' and 'yuppie' as common descriptors of urban living. It was also written at that cusp in intellectual and cultural history when something called 'postmodernism' emerged from its chrysalis of the anti-modern to establish itself as a cultural aesthetic in its own right. Unlike most of the critical and oppositional writing about urban life in the 1 960s (and I here think primarily of Jane Jacobs, whose book on The death and life of great American cities came out in 196 1 , but also Theodore Roszak), Raban depicts as both vibrant and present what many earlier writers had felt as a chronic absence. To the thesis that the city was falling victim to a rationalized and automated system of mass production and mass consumption of material goods, Raban replied that it was in practice mainly about the production of signs and images. He rejected the thesis of a city tightly stratified by occupation and class, depicting instead a wide spread individualism and entrepreneurialism in which the marks of social distinction were broadly conferred by possessions and appear ances. To the supposed domination of rational planning (see plate 1 . 1 ) Raban opposed the image of the city as an 'encyclopaedia' or 'emporium of styles' in which all sense of hierarchy or even homo geneity of values was in the course of dissolution. The city dweller was not, he argued, someone necessarily given over to calculating rationality (as many sociologists presumed). The city was more like a
Introduction
5
theatre, a series of stages upon which individuals could work their own distinctive magic while performing a multiplicity of roles. To the ideology of the city as some lost but longed-for community, Raban responded with a picture of the city as labyrinth, honey combed with such diverse networks of social interaction oriented to such diverse goals that