The Condition of Postmodernity 13 - autonomous learning

12IntroductionMarshall Berman (1982) equates modernity (among other things) witha certain mode of experience of space and time. Daniel Bell (1978,107 -11) argues that the various movements that brought modernismto its apogee had to work out a new logic in the conception of spaceand motion. He suggests, furthermore, that the organization of spacehas 'become the primary aesthetic problem of mid-twentieth centuryculture as the problem of time (in Bergson, Proust, and Joyce) wasthe primary aesthetic problem of the first decades of this century.'Frederic Jameson (1984b) attributes the postmodern shift to a crisisin our experience of space and time, a crisis in which spatial categoriescome to dominate those of time, while themselves undergoing such amutation that we cannot keep pace. 'We do not yet possess theperceptual equipment to match this new kind of hyperspace,' hewrites, 'in part because our perceptual habits were formed in thatolder kind of space I have called the space of high modernism.'In what follows, I shall accept these statements at their face value.But since few trouble to explain exactly what they mean by them, Ishall give an account of space and time in social life so as to highlightmaterial links between political-economic and cultural processes.This will allow me to explore the link between postmodernism andthe transition from Fordism to more flexible modes of capital accumulationvia the mediations of spatial and temporal experiences.Space and time are basic categories of human existence. Yet werarely debate their meanIngs; we tend to take them for granted, andgive them common-sense or selI::Cevident attributions. We record thepassage of time in seconds, minutes, hours, days, months, years,decades, centuries, and eras, as if everything has its place upon asingle objective time scale. Even though time in physics is a difficultand contentious concept, we do not usually let that interfere with thecommon-sense of time around which we organize daily routines. We