David Harvey's The Condition of Postmodernity

Patrick Mooney
English 236
24 February 2010

Background

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.
—David Harvey, The Condition of Postmodernity, p. 326

David Harvey is a social theorist who was instrumental in constituting the field of Marxist geography. Born in 1935, he did his graduate and undergraduate work at Cambridge. He is currently the most-cited academic geographer and one of the twenty most-cited authors in the humanities, and is the Distinguished Professor of Anthropology in the Graduate Center at the City University of New York.

Harvey was instrumental in the constitution of Marxist geography as a specific mode of analysis in the period after 1970, perhaps most notably in relation to his 1973 work Social Justice and the City. Harvey argues that the concept of geography as objective has a specific quality of logical positivism and thus masks and reinforces the dominant spatial logic of big capital.

Harvey's work emphasizes the potentially transformative aspects of an application of basic Marxist economics to social theory, but steers clear of adherence to dogmatic orthodox Marxism, of which he is occasionally critical. Still, his analyses repeatedly turn to basic elements of Marxist economics to explain sociocultural and historical phenomena, and The Condition of Postmodernity provides a standard example of this particular mode of analysis.

Harvey's course on reading Marx's Capital, which he has taught for nearly forty years, is available online.

The Condition of Postmodernity

Introduction

The Condition of Postmodernity analyzes the cultural phenomenon of postmodernism from a historical-economic viewpoint. Drawing on numerous other works (including nearly everything else on our syllabus this quarter), it consitutes a meta-analysis of the phenomenon of postmodernity. Primary theses argued in the work are:

1. Postmodernity is not a radical rupture from the modernist period, but rather is continuous with the modernist period (and the Enlightenment) in important ways.
2. The phenomenon of postmodernity is a cultural response to specific transformative events in the underlying logic of capitalism.
3. These transformative economic events are the result of crises in the capitalist regime of economic accumulation that reveal underlying contradictions in the capitalist mode of production.

This handout provides a brief summary of Harvey's argument. A more detailed summary is available as a Zotero RDF citation, a BibTEX citation (which can be imported into EndNote with third-party tools, such as those available here), or marked up as HTML.

Part One: The Passage from Modernity to Postmodernity in Contemporary Culture

The first part of the book examines major thematics in the transition from the modernist period (the beginning of which Harvey locates in 1848) to the postmodern period (which begins for Harvey in 1973). Harvey sees both of these periods as continuous with the basic goals of the Enlightenment project. These basic goals began to break down about 1848, says Harvey, under the strain of the European depression that spread out of Britain in 1846-7. This produced a crisis of representation that led to new modes of both aesthetic expression (which he traces in examples from Baudelaire, Marcel Proust, Le Corbusier, Manet, etc.) and capitalist accumulation. The depression of 1846-7 was the first truly economic depression: It was attributable not to natural disaster, but to a failure of capitalist accumulation. Modernism encountered another crisis of representation during the period 1910-15, which also saw the production of numerous basic literary and musical productions of high modernism: Dubliners, Swann's Way, Death in Venice, The Rite of Spring, etc., and the numerous new developments in painting and sculpture by Klee, Kandinsky, Braque, Picasso, Duchamp, Matisse, among others. There were also numerous theoretical shifts in areas as diverse as physics and linguistics during this time.

For Harvey, these basic shifts are related to underlying shifts in the means of production, which generate crises of representation that require new aesthetic responses from cultural producers. He sees the transformation from modernity to postmodernity, about 1973, in the same terms, and provides a table comparing the major characteristics of each as they are generally understood. He takes the basic characteristics of postmodernism to be totalizing rejection of meta-narrative, a transition from a unified view of the personality to a fragmented view of the personality, and depthless, reproductive aesthetics. For Harvey, deconstruction is the exemplary theoretical approach, although he recognizes that it is not isomorphic with postmodern theory in general.

Harvey also provides an account of Marxist commodity fetishism, tracing the origin of profit back to the division and alienation of labor, linking the basic aspects of urban life -- urban organization, the fluidity and ephemerality of corporate locations, the constant drive to increasingly rationalize production -- to these fundamental parts of Marxist theory. He critiques the postmodern thematic concern with the impenetrability of the other as simply overt complicity with the fact of fetishism and of indifference towards underlying social meanings.

Part Two: The Political-Economic Transformation of Late Twentieth-Century Capitalism

Harvey's argument about the transition from Fordism to flexible accumulation is, in essence, an argument that the superstructural elements of the culture depend on the base. He attributes the transitions from Enlightenment to postmodernist thought to crises within the capitalist regime of accumulation, as noted above. The Fordist regime of production, produced by the crisis of accumulation that also led to World War I, was characterized not only by assembly-line production but also by the capitalists' control of the workers' private lives. This change was instrumental in producing a regime of consumption to accompany the regime of production. The Fordist regime of production required altering the basic qualities of the relationship between capital, government, and organized labor, and resulted in the broad adoption of Keynesian economic policies by governments in Fordizing countries. This system of production managed to contain the contradictions of capitalism successfully until approximately the end of World War II, when new contradictions manifested themselves. These were based in the problems of the successful export of the Fordist system in the earlier parts of the century and the resulting increase in competition as the Fordist-Keynesian system expanded led to a crisis of consumption.

This crisis in demand as production increased put pressure on organized labor, which increasingly saw itself as negotiating for the special interests of its own membership rather than broader class interests. Rates of profit and wage increase dropped, and labor was increasingly fragmented into small groups, some of which were able to take advantage of access to higher-paying jobs and others of which were left out. Often, this group fragmentation intersected with existing ethnic, race, and gender inequalities. The new crisis in capital accumulation produced a transition to a more flexible mode of accumulation (which Harvey calls flexible accumulation) at the same time that postmodern cultural forms are emerging. Flexible accumulation involves a number of characteristic changes in business practices: corporate mergers, diversification, outsourcing, and self-employment. Fictitious capital is generated on an increasingly large scale, and turnover times for capital have decreased.

All of this contributes to the postmodern sense of life as new … fleeting … emphemeral. For Harvey, there is nothing inherently surprising about the recurrent crises in capitalism, as Marx's analysis shows that three of its basic characteristics (capitalism is growth-oriented; this growth rests on exploitation of labor; capitalism is inherently dynamic, reorganizing itself in search of greater profits) are fundamentally incompatible, resulting in accumulations of capital that cannot be usefully brought together with accumulations of labor. The change to the flexible mode of accumulation is simply another metamorphosis that capitalism has undergone as it attempts to contain its own contradictions.

Part Three: The Experience of Space and Time

Part three solidifies Harvey's argument about the connection between base and superstructure - that is, the argument that changes along the Enlightenment-modernist-postmodernist arc are responses to crises of capital accumulation. Surveying numerous theoretical arguments about how space and time are normally seen across cultures, Harvey argues that the naturalized positivist views of space and time, skimming through de Certeau, Bourdie, Lefebvre, and Foucault on the subject of space, and drawing on Gurvitch's 1964 outline of conceptualization of time across cultures.

For Harvey, there is no natural way to conceptualize space or time; both are produced in the context of social action. He maps out a variety of ways that space is actually treated in practice, drawing largely on Lefebvre to produce another grid that summarizes methods of relating to space materially, representationally, and in the imagination. All of this is intended to demonstrate not only that space and time are connected to social practice, but also that they are connected to money: as an abstraction, money represents labor time; space is explored temporally, and time is represented spatially; and money allows capitalists to exercise control over both time and space. Harvey traces several examples of capitalists exercising control over production of space and time as tools in the class struggle. As money becomes an increasing measure of value, too, it alters the way that people experience both space and time. Several chapters are devoted to changing representations of both space and time from the Enlightenment through the postmodern period.

The modern and postmodern periods are dominated by a phenomenon that Harvey refers to as space-time compression indicating not just a continually shrinking globe but also a speedup in the rate at which capital is expected to turn over and the degree to which up-to-the-minute information is required to make profitable business decisions (especially as money becomes more abstract, i.e. as capital becomes more fictious and currency is decreasingly tied to real labor). The postmodern era is especially characterized by the way in which images have partially displaced commodities as the objects of the system of production, in part because the turnover time of images is nearly instantaneous. In an increasingly small world with increasingly minute time frames, very small labor-quality differences between areas can make big differences in the attractiveness of one area over another to big capital; space is thus displaced by a sense of place. For Harvey, it is the collapse of spatial distances for people and commodities, the omnipresence of information, and the flattening of history produced by technological changes that produce the ephemerality and schizoid character of the postmodern condition.

Part Four: The Condition of Postmodernity

Harvey sketches several implications of this schizoid, fast-paced, shrinking-world situation produced by crises of capitalist accumulation. One is the rise of image-based, aestheticized, neoconservative politicians who pursue specific class goals. He revises his earlier schema showing modern/postmodern differences, updating it to focus on economic conditions and suggesting that these oppositions [constitute] a structual description of the totality of political-economic and cultural-idelogical 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 interpentration of dynamic oppositions (339).

Part four also includes a critique of the Reagan presidency, perhaps most notably explaining the administration's popularity by invoking the previous explanations of aestheticized politics to explain the administration's popularity despite the numerous scandals in which it was involved, and explaining the Reagan administration's vast increase in debt as generating fictitious capital to help contain increasing tensions in the regime of flexible accumulation.

The end of part four analyzes the difficulties that the orthodox left has encountered since the 1960s. For Harvey, the shift away from orthodox Marxism through the positive aspects of postmodernity has resulted in several fundamental changes to Marxist thought:

1. A shift towards concepts of otherness besides those most directly associated with class.
2. A theoretical recognition of the changing nature of capitalist production, especially the focus on the shift toward production of images.
3. A theoretical focus on changes in the perception of space and time.
4. The addition of geography to history in materialist thought. (Harvey dubs this historical-geographical materialism.) (353-5)

Ultimately, for Harvey, the crises in capitalism open up possibilities for meaningful change not only by leading to crises of representation, but thereby loosening the grip of ideology. Several changes in the representation of both capitalist and Marxist thought open up potentials for genuine social change in the coming future.

Reference

Harvey, David. The Condition of Postmodernity. Cambridge: Blackwell, 2000. Print.