"The difference between the present and the past is that the
conscious present is an awareness of the past in a way and to an
extent which the past's awareness of itself cannot know."
T. S. Eliot
In his eminently readable The Condition of Postmodernity, geographer David Harvey presents a concise and coherent depiction of the postmodern period, making the argument that postmodern culture is demonstrably different from modern culture, although such changes may be only superficial in the end. The uncertainty one feels with Harvey's definitions--at one point, his concision takes the form of a list of simple dichotomies, albeit qualified, quoted from Hassan (1985; appears on Harvey 43) reminiscent of the 'what's in/ what's out' compendiums of teenage fashion magazines--I think points to the speciousness of cross-cultural projects such as his own, and the ironic fact that such interpretations of modernity and post-modernity tend to be reductive: so reductive, in fact, that they do not stand up to historical fact (or, to satisfy a postmodernist, the text of history). What I hope to present here are my own reactions to Harvey's analysis of postmodernity, particularly with respect to its overgeneralizations between the fields of architecture, literature, and economics (I believe that to include Harvey's political analysis would vault this paper well beyond its intended length), and some of the contradictions I find in Harvey's own postmodern project of interpretation.
It is not my intention to describe in detail what that
interpretation is, particularly because Harvey's analysis is quite
readily understood on its own. If Harvey's presentation errs on
the side of reductivism, it at least presents a clear description
of his ideas. Let us suffice with Terry Eagleton's assessment of
the post-modern artefact, which Harvey quotes and with which he
agrees: it is "playful, self-ironizing and even schizoid;... reacts
to the austere autonomy of high modernism by impudently embracing
the language of commerce & commodity... pastiche, contrived
depthlessness undermines metaphysical solemnities, sometimes by a
brutal aesthetics of squalor & shock." (Harvey ) Together with
the Hassan list, which rather than quote I have simply appended to
this essay, and Huyssens's 1984 statement, which I quote in part
below, I believe this remark to be the essence of Harvey's opinion,
insofar as he is willing to appeal to other thinkers in making it.
That extent is limited, however, because Harvey voices a skepticism
of the depth of postmodernism. He asserts quite rightly (at least
based on the facts he presents) that the economic changes that have
accompanied--or perhaps caused--postmodernism are changes within
the modern capitalist framework, not from it to something else.
And with regard to culture and aesthetics, he writes that
postmodernism
sees itself... as a willful and rather chaotic movement to overcome
all the supposed ills of modernism. But in this regard I think
postmodernists exaggerate when they depict the modern as grossly as
they do... There were, after all, many cross-currents within
modernism, and postmodernists echo some of them quite explicitly."
(Harvey 115)
The combination of Harvey's cautiousness and his acknowledgement
that some change has taken place seems to be best expressed in the
aforementioned 1984 Huyssens quote, with which Harvey says "Most,
I think, would now agree:"
The nature and depth of that [postmodern] transformation are
debatable, but transformation it is. I don't want to be
misunderstood as claiming that there is a wholesale paradigm shift
of the cultural, social, and economic orders... but in an important
sector of our culture there is a noticeable shift in sensibility,
practices, and discourse formations which distinguishes a
post-modern set of assumptions, experiences, and propositions from
that of a preceding period.
(Harvey 39)
Let this brief presentation suffice for Harvey's ideas about the nature and extent of postmodernism; it seems to be quite careful and without the rhetoric of Lambropoulous or impenetrability of Cascardi. With Harvey's ideas as background, however, I wish to question his methodology, which is typical of postmodern interpretations of modernity. Harvey himself, it seems, falls into the same trap of overgeneralizing which he claims has snared most postmodernists, not in his evaluation of modernity within any one discipline, but in his assumption that it could be carried out in the same way between disciplines. Even self-conscious high modernist artists had widely different views of what their work was to accomplish. Pound's vorticist remarks notwithstanding (he denied them six months later, anyway), I think it is very difficult to see modernist writers such as Virginia Woolf and James Joyce as embodying the same machinist ethic as the architect Le Corbusier. The latter's homes were built to resemble factories, to function as "machines for modern living." Harvey writes that Le Corbusier was "following Jeffersonian principles of land partition" in his desire to create "a highly ordered and rationalized space... a kind of unity in which a socially conscious notion of individual difference could be explored." (Harvey 271)
This is not what most poetry contemporary with Le Corbusier was concerned with. At the time, Woolf and Joyce were destroying the (as they saw it) over-mechanized language which prohibited them from adequate expression. I very much doubt that Woolf's Room of her Own was intended to be a machine for modern living. Kern's Culture of Time and Space, quoted by Harvey, reveals the opposite intention from Le Corbusier's, saying that the stage of modern literature had been "transformed... from a stage of fixed settings in homogenous space into a multitude of qualitatively different spaces that varied with the shifting moods and perceptions of human consciousness." (Kern 149, in Harvey 267) Yet despite the proximity of the Kern quote and the Harvey statement on Le Corbusier, Harvey wants to link them together. His compromise of "two currents of sensibility that flowed along side by side," which does not directly mention Joyce or Le Corbusier, seems to have its own problems. (Harvey 275) Not the least of these is Harvey's linkage of particularism in aesthetics with Nazism, despite Nazi architect Speer's 'heroic' and Corbusiesque designs (both terms are supposed to be hallmarks of the universalist aesthetic stream), and that Le Corbusier himself "flirted with Mussolini." (Harvey 279) I have no idea where Joyce fits in, because literature and architecture simply do not follow the same pattern in the early part of the 20th century,
Still less tenable is the linkage between modernist or postmodernist culture and economics. First, if Harvey as a Marxist posits a one-way causal connection between world economics and works of art, he is bound to history. If postmodernist culture cannot begin until "flexible accumulation" becomes possible in the 1970's, how do we explain James Joyce's explicitly post-modern (using Eagleton's definition) chapters in Ulysses? One of these is the literary equivalent of postmodern pastiche architecture: it progresses stylistically from early English through Elizabethan and Romantic Styles (as well as over ten I have omitted) to Joyce's own stream-of-consciousess, and while some have suggested that this has theoretical implications which are integral part of Ulysses as a whole, I think a careful Burgessian reading of Joyce (let alone a Derridian one) would more likely arrive at the answer of "play." Perhaps Lukacs might argue that Joyce as an intellectual perceives the coming fluidity of international monetary markets, but Joyce's more explicit politico-economic concerns seem to focus on Britain's domination of Ireland, and the microeconomic travails of his characters. Lukacs' apologetic seems ludicrous anyway: of course Joyce did not know about the end of the at-his-time-nonexistent Bretton Woods agreement, nor is Ulysses even isomorphically related to the monopolization process going on in the 1910s. Harvey himself makes only the claim that Joyce is about "the quest to capture the sense of simultaneity in space and time during thir period, insisting upon the present as the only real location of experience." (Harvey 267) While this is a nice point, it does not draw the causal linkage Harvey wants. And, of course, even if a theory can show that the economic climate at the time of a work of literature's production influences its character--whether because of market forces or artistic intention--the relationship is by no means one of resemblance. Setting Joyce aside, if the monopolization of printing presses in the 1920s gave large-size publishing houses a larger market share, and thus increased the output of mass-appeal pseudo-gothic novels, very well. But gothic novels do not resemble monopolistic corporations.
Moreover, because Harvey maintains that cultural changes are related to economic changes, he is married to dates, which problematizes his own cautiousness regarding the variance within modernism. Even with Harvey's qualifications, what do we do with Joyce's and Woolf's project of presenting "other voices"... in the 1910s? Joyce's famous Molly Bloom soliloquy and the majority of Woolf's work are not merely women's-suffrage or even women's-equality tracts; both authors explicitly claim that the woman's voice is irreducibly different from the man's. The Marxist thesis becomes even more absurd when one looks at earlier Modern works such as Lawrence Sterne's 18th Century postmodernist novel, Tristram Shandy. With its wild humor (the black page comes to mind; the text as object?), its parody of style and substance, and its obsession with the impossibility of defining origins (Shandy isn't born for several hundred pages because he wants to give "the full story"), Sterne's work is to my mind quintessentially postmodern. What I believe the incoherence of holistic theories of culture points to is a contradiction embedded in postmodernism: it must totalize modernity in order to make its own claim for detotalization.
As noted, Harvey agrees that we've seen postmodernism before: he can explain Sterne and Joyce by saying that they emphasized the "uncertainty" which was always present in modernity. Yet if postmodern's metacultural claims are in any sense true, why do postmodernists pretend that they are not when they analyze modernity? Specifically, if the postmodernists are right about there not being any totality in the world, only fragments, why do they expect that there is anything they can call modernity? I have tried to show that such a term is of very limited use across disciplines: Clearly, there is a high modernist trend in literature, but it is different from the high modernist trend in architecture, and both are different from their predecessors, which still fall into the 'Modern' period as Harvey defines it. Postmodernism itself seems to begin at many different times; it's been a recurrent joke that postmodern writers each set the Axial Moment at important turning-points in their own fields of specialty. The reason I think such questions border on the absurd is because what is for me the defining quality of postmodernity is its self-reflexivity, the fact that it is so self-conscious about not being modernity that it has little else to it: the name is, as Harvey states, quite appropriate. That and the noticeable rapidity with which ideas come and go within the contracting hyperspace, lead me to believe that Harvey may have a point about the economic causes of postmodernity, but I believe those causes to be more familiar: postmodernity is only possible when people are paid to think about what modernity is and whether it was a good idea. It arrived at a time when university's began paying academics to analyze modernity, itself a decision which might be attributable to a variety of economic factors (the saleability of such a field in the post-1968 academic world, the demand for non-European studies created by the presence of only-recently-admitted black and female students, etc.). The paradox is that posmodernity is a movement which refutes elitism, yet is born out of--and remains in--the intellectual elite. Most people, after all, think that post-modernism is an oxymoron. These people's opinions count only because the postmodern program of anti-high-art-ness makes them relevant, yet postmodernity is exclusively the movement of the elite. Harvey's descriptions of cityscapes make it appear bottom-up, but Harbor Place and the AT&T Building were designed--like the Robie House and Pruitt-Igoe--by members of the architectural elite, even the avant-garde. The styles spread in various disciplines because the elite is manning the gates to them: at "the best places," one cannot get a job teaching literature or designing buildings or showing one's art if one is not a postmodernist, just as postmodernists are banned from certain conservative establishments, like Cambridge University, which was scandalized by the decision to award Jacques Derrida an honorary degree. Postmodernists may say that their shrines are the Dairy Queens and Wal-Marts of the world, but they're saying so within the hallowed halls of academe.
Further despite the bottom-up claim, postmodernism has its conditions, historical, aesthetic, and economic, for who is and is not postmodern--Harvey analyzes David Lynch and Wim Wenders, for example, but Spielberg sold more tickets. Everyone has a program, and standards; even Harvey indicates a certain unease with the "give the people what they want" credo that might result in whole suburbs of neo-Colonial mini-mansions. Surely, there is a difference from the paternalism of Le Corbusier, but postmodernism is a movement just like any other: its proponents must have time on their hands to call themselves a movement. Lyotard and Foucault are no more everymen than were Descartes and Kant.
I believe, in conclusion, that Harvey's work presents an excellent example of these internal contradictions within postmodernity, largely because Harvey himself refuses to take the postmodernists too seriously--which should be what the postmodernist would want anyway. Harvey cannot resist bundling together several unlike discourses, which have almost always worked from different premises and with radically different terms. Almost always, ironically, until postmodernity, when they all have to realize their irreducible heterogeneity and fragmentation, impenetrable surface-ness, and arationality--together, introspectively, and methodically.
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