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)