The Condition of Postmodernity 13 - autonomous learning

290 The experience of space and timesimultaneously upon the television screen, but even to transformthose images into material simulacra in the form of built environments,events and spectacles, and the like, which become in manyrespects indistinguishable from the originals. What happens to culturalforms when the imitations become real, and the real takes on manyof the qualities of an imitation, is a question to which we shallreturn.The organization and conditions of labour prevailing within whatwe might broadly refer to as the 'image production industry' are alsoquite special. An industry of this sort has to rely, after all, upon theinnovative powers of the direct producers. The latter have an insecureexistence, tempered by very high rewards for the successful and atleast a semblance of command over their own labour process andcreative powers. The growth of cultural output has in fact beenphenomenal. Taylor (1987, 77) contrasts the art market condition inNew York in 1945, when there were a handful of galleries and nomore than a score of artists regularly exhibitiflg, and the two thousandor so artists who practised in or around Paris in the mid-nineteenthcentury, with the 150,000 artists in the New York region who claimprofessional status, exhibiting at some 680 galleries, producing morethan 15 million art-works in a decade (compared to 200,000 in latenineteenth-century Paris). And this is only the tip of an iceberg ofcultural production that encompasses local entertainers and graphicdesigners, street and pub musicians, photographers, as well as themore established and recognized schools for teaching art, music,drama, and the like. Dwarfing all of this, however, is what DanielBell (1978, 20) calls 'the cultural mass' defined as:not the creators of culture but the transmitters: those workingin higher education, publishing, magazines, broadcast media,theater, and museums, who process and influence the receptionof serious cultural products. It is in itself large enough to be amarket for culture, purchase books, prints and serious musicrecordings. And it is also the group which, as writers, magazineeditors, movie-makers, musicians, and so forth, produce thepopular materials for the wider mass-culture audience.This whole industry specializes in the acceleration of turnovertime through the production and marketing of images. This is anindustry where reputations are made and lost overnight, where bigmoney talks in no uncertain terms, and where there is a ferment ofintense, often individualized, creativity poured into the vast vat ofserialized and recursive mass culture. It is the organizer of fads andThe postmodern condition 291fashions and, as such, it actively produces the very ephemerality thathas always been fundamental to the experience of modernity. Itbecomes a social means to produce that sense of collapsing timehorizons which it in turn so avidly feeds upon.The popularity of a work like Alvin Toffler's Future shock layprecisely in its prescient appreciation of the speed with which thefuture has COme to be discounted into the present. Out of that, also,comes a collapse of cultural distinctions between, say, 'science' and'regular' fiction (in the works of, for example, Thomas Pynchon andDoris Lessing), as well as a merging of the cinema of distraction withthe cinema of futuristic universes. We can link the schizophrenicdimension to postmodernity which Jameson emphasizes (above,pp. 53-5) with accelerations in turnover times in production,exchange, and consumption that produce, as it were, the loss of asense of the future except and insofar as the future can be discountedinto the present. Volatility and ephemerality similarly make it hardto maintain any firm sense of continuity. Past experience gets compressedinto some overwhelming present. Italo Calvino (1981, 8)reports the effect on his own craft of novel writing this way:long novels written today are perhaps a contradiction: the dimensionof time had been shattered, we cannot live or thinkexcept in fragments of time each of which goes off along itsown trajectory and immediately disappears. We can rediscoverthe continuity of time only in the novels of that period whentime no longer seemed stopped and did not yet seem to haveexploded, a period that lasted no more than a hundred years.Baudrillard (1986), never afraid to exaggerate, considers the UnitedStates as a society so given over to speed, motion, cinematic images,and technological fixes as to have created a crisis of explanatorylogic. It represents, he suggests, 'the triumph of effect over cause, ofinstantaneity over time as depth, the triumph of surface and of pureobjectivization over the depth of desire.' This, of course, is the kindof environment in which deconstruction ism can flourish. If it isimpossible to say anything of solidity and permanence in the midstof this ephemeral and fragmented world, then why not join in the[language] game? Everything, from novel writing and philosophizingto the experience of labouring or making a home, has to face thechallenge of accelerating turnover time and the rapid write-off oftraditional and historically acquired values. The temporary contractin everything, as Lyotard remarks (see above, p. 113), then becomesthe hallmark of post modern living.