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).