David Harveys Theory of Postmodernity

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Added to Your Shopping Cart. Description In this new book, David Harvey seeks to determine what is meant by the term in its different contexts and to identify how accurate and useful it is as a description of contemporary experience. Permissions Request permission to reuse content from this site. Table of contents Reviews The argument.

Postmodernism in the City: Architecture and Urban Design. From Fordism to Flexible Accumulation.

Article(s)

The Experience of Space and Time: Individual Spaces and Times in Social Life. Time and Space as Sources of Social Power.

Selected quotations

The Time and Space of the Enlightenment Project. Time-Space Compression and the Postmodern Condition. Time and Space in the Postmodern Cinema.

Neoliberalism, Flexibility, and Postmodernism: Reflections on the work of David Harvey

Lyotard understood modernity as a cultural condition characterized by constant change in the pursuit of progress. Postmodernity then represents the culmination of this process where constant change has become the status quo and the notion of progress obsolete. Following Ludwig Wittgenstein 's critique of the possibility of absolute and total knowledge, Lyotard further argued that the various metanarratives of progress such as positivist science , Marxism , and structuralism were defunct as methods of achieving progress.

The literary critic Fredric Jameson and the geographer David Harvey have identified postmodernity with " late capitalism " or "flexible accumulation", a stage of capitalism following finance capitalism , characterised by highly mobile labor and capital and what Harvey called "time and space compression". They suggest that this coincides with the breakdown of the Bretton Woods system which, they believe, defined the economic order following the Second World War.

See also consumerism , critical theory. Those who generally view modernity as obsolete or an outright failure, a flaw in humanity's evolution leading to disasters like Auschwitz and Hiroshima , see postmodernity as a positive development. Other philosophers, particularly those seeing themselves as within the modern project, see the state of postmodernity as a negative consequence of holding postmodernist ideas.

Description

Postmodernity, the consequence of holding postmodern ideas, is generally a negative term in this context. Postmodernity is a condition or a state of being associated with changes to institutions and creations Giddens , and with social and political results and innovations, globally but especially in the West since the s, whereas postmodernism is an aesthetic, literary, political or social philosophy, the "cultural and intellectual phenomenon", especially since the s' new movements in the arts.

Both of these terms are used by philosophers, social scientists and social critics to refer to aspects of contemporary culture, economics and society that are the result of features of late 20th century and early 21st century life, including the fragmentation of authority and the commoditization of knowledge see " Modernity ".

The relationship between postmodernity and critical theory, sociology and philosophy is fiercely contested. The terms "postmodernity" and "postmodernism" are often hard to distinguish, the former being often the result of the latter.

David Harvey's The Condition of Postmodernity

The period has had diverse political ramifications: Though none of these institutions entirely embraces all aspects of the postmodern movement in its most concentrated definition they all reflect, or borrow from, some of its core ideas. Some authors, such as Lyotard and Baudrillard , believe that modernity ended in the late 20th century and thus have defined a period subsequent to modernity, namely postmodernity, while others, such as Bauman and Giddens , would extend modernity to cover the developments denoted by postmodernity.

Others still contend that modernity ended with the Victorian Age in the s. Postmodernity has been said [ by whom? The first phase of postmodernity overlaps the end of modernity and is regarded by many [ by whom? Television became the primary news source, manufacturing decreased in importance in the economies of Western Europe and the United States but trade volumes increased within the developed core.

In — a crucial cultural explosion took place within the developed world as the baby boom generation, which had grown up with postmodernity as its fundamental experience of society, demanded entrance into the political, cultural and educational power structure. A series of demonstrations and acts of rebellion — ranging from nonviolent and cultural, through violent acts of terrorism — represented the opposition of the young to the policies and perspectives of the previous age.

Opposition to the Algerian War and the Vietnam War , to laws allowing or encouraging racial segregation and to laws which overtly discriminated against women and restricted access to divorce , increased use of marijuana and psychedelics , the emergence of pop cultural styles of music and drama, including rock music and the ubiquity of stereo , television and radio helped make these changes visible in the broader cultural context.

This period is associated with the work of Marshall McLuhan , a philosopher who focused on the results of living in a media culture and argued that participation in a mass media culture both overshadows actual content disseminated and is liberating because it loosens the authority of local social normative standards. The second phase of postmodernity is defined [ by whom?

This has brought producers into conflict with consumers over intellectual capital and intellectual property and led to the creation of a new economy whose supporters argue that the dramatic fall in information costs will alter society fundamentally. It began to be argued [ by whom?

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Those holding this position argued that the ability to manipulate items of popular culture, the World Wide Web, the use of search engines to index knowledge, and telecommunications were producing a "convergence" which would be marked by the rise of " participatory culture " in the words of Henry Jenkins and the use of media devices , such as Apple's iPod. The simplest, but not necessarily most correct demarcation point of this era is [ according to whom? He predicted that the question of political philosophy had been answered, that large scale wars over fundamental values would no longer arise since "all prior contradictions are resolved and all human needs satisfied.

The debate on postmodernity has two distinct elements that are often confused; 1 the nature of contemporary society and 2 the nature of the critique of contemporary society. The first of these elements is concerned with the nature of changes that took place during the late 20th century. There are three principal analyses.

The Condition of Postmodernity: An Enquiry into the Origins of Cultural Change

Theorists such as Callinicos and Calhoun offer a conservative position on the nature of contemporary society, downplaying the significance and extent of socio-economic changes and emphasizing a continuity with the past. Second a range of theorists have tried to analyze the present as a development of the "modern" project into a second, distinct phase that is nevertheless still "modernity": Third are those who argue that contemporary society has moved into a literally post-modern phase distinct from modernity.

The most prominent proponents of this position are Lyotard and Baudrillard. Another set of issues concerns the nature of critique, often replaying debates over what can be crudely termed universalism and relativism , where modernism is seen to represent the former and postmodernity the latter.

Seyla Benhabib and Judith Butler pursue this debate in relation to feminist politics, Benhabib arguing that postmodern critique comprises three main elements; an anti-foundationalist concept of the subject and identity, the death of history and of notions of teleology and progress, and the death of metaphysics defined as the search for objective truth. The denial of normative ideals removes the possibility for utopia, central for ethical thinking and democratic action.

Butler responds to Benhabib by arguing that her use of postmodernism is an expression of a wider paranoia over anti-foundationalist philosophy, in particular, poststructuralism. In reality, these movements are opposed: Lacanian psychoanalysis in France positions itself officially against poststructuralism, that Foucauldian rarely relate to Derridideans Lyotard champions the term, but he cannot be made into the example of what all the rest of the purported postmodernists are doing. Butler uses the debate over the nature of the post-modernist critique to demonstrate how philosophy is implicated in power relationships and defends poststructuralist critique by arguing that the critique of the subject itself is the beginning of analysis, not the end, because the first task of enquiry is the questioning of accepted "universal" and "objective" norms.

The Benhabib-Butler debate demonstrates that there is no simple definition of a postmodern theorist as the very definition of postmodernity itself is contested. Michel Foucault rejected the label of postmodernism explicitly in interviews yet is seen by many, such as Benhabib, as advocating a form of critique that is "postmodern" in that it breaks with utopian and transcendental "modern" critiques by calling universal norms of the Enlightenment into question. Giddens rejects this characterisation of "modern critique", pointing out that a critique of Enlightenment universals was central to philosophers of the modern period, most notably Nietzsche.

Jameson views a number of phenomena as distinguishing postmodernity from modernity. He speaks of "a new kind of superficiality " or "depthlessness" in which models that once explained people and things in terms of an "inside" and an "outside" such as hermeneutics , the dialectic , Freudian repression , the existentialist distinction between authenticity and inauthenticity, and the semiotic distinction of signifier and signified have been rejected.

Second is a rejection of the modernist " Utopian gesture", evident in Van Gogh, of the transformation through art of misery into beauty whereas in the postmodernism movement the object world has undergone a "fundamental mutation" so that it has "now become a set of texts or simulacra " Jameson Graff sees the origins of this transformative mission of art in an attempted substitution of art for religion in giving meaning to the world that the rise of science and Enlightenment rationality had removed — but in the postmodern period this is seen as futile.

The third feature of the postmodern age that Jameson identifies is the "waning of affect" — not that all emotion has disappeared from the postmodern age but that it lacks a particular kind of emotion such as that found in " Rimbaud 's magical flowers 'that look back at you'".

He notes that " pastiche eclipses parody " as "the increasing unavailability of the personal style" leads to pastiche becoming a universal practice. Jameson argues that distance "has been abolished" in postmodernity, that we "are submerged in its henceforth filled and suffused volumes to the point where our now postmodern bodies are bereft of spatial co-ordinates".

This "new global space" constitutes postmodernity's "moment of truth".

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