The Condition of Postmodernity 13 - autonomous learning

322 The experience of space and timeIt is both intriguing and interesting that two films otherwise sodisparate should depict such similar conditions. I do not believe thesimilarity is accidental or contingent. It supports the idea that theexperience of time-space compression in recent years, under thepressures of the turn to more flexible modes of accumulation, hasgenerated a crisis of representation in cultural forms, and that this isa subject of intense aesthetic concern, either in toto (as I think is thecase in Wings of Desire) or in part (as would be true of everythingfrom Blade Runner to Cindy Sherman's photographs and the novelsof Italo Calvino or Pynchon). Such cultural practices are important.If there is a crisis of representation of space and time, then new waysof thinking and feeling have to be created. Part of any trajectory outof the condition of postmodernity has to embrace exactly such aprocess.The distressing side of both films, in spite of the overt optimism ofWenders's ending, is the inability to go much further than romanticism(individualized and strongly aestheticized) as a solution to the conditionsthat both film makers so brilliantly portray. It seems as if thefilm makers are unable to break free from the power of the imagesthey themselves create. Marion and Damiel seek an image to replaceimages, and seem to see that as an adequate conception of how tochange the world. The turn in both cases to romanticism is, fromthis standpoint, dangerous precisely because it presages the continuationof a condition in which aesthetics predominates over ethics.The qualities of the romanticism on offer vary of course. The tiredmachismo of Deckard and the submission of Rachel are entirelydifferent from the meeting of minds and of souls in the case ofMarion and Damiel (both of whom are set to learn from each other).Yet even here there is a sense that Blade Runner speaks with a rathermore authentic (though not necessarily praiseworthy) voice, becauseit is at least concerned with what nature of symbolic order we mightbe in (a question that Wenders evades). Wenders likewise evades thequestion of class relations and consciousness entirely by casting thesocial problem as the unmediated relationship between individualsand collectivity (the state). While signs of objective class relationsabound in Blade Runner, the participants in the action evidently seeno purpose in relating to them even if they are, like Deckard,vaguely aware of their existence. Brilliant portrayals though bothfilms are of the conditions of postmodernity, and in particular ofthe conflictual and confusing experience of space and time, neitherhas the power to overturn established ways of seeing or transcendthe conflictual conditions of the moment. This must, in part, beattributed to the contradictions inherent in the cinematic form itself.Time and space in the postmodern cinema 323Cinema is, after all, the supreme maker and manipulator of imagesfor commercial purposes, and the very act of using it well alwaysentails reducing the complex stories of daily life to a sequence ofimages upon a depthless screen. The idea of a revolutionary cinemahas always run aground on the rocks of exactly this difficulty.Nevertheless, the malaise lies rather deeper than that. Postmodernart forms and cultural artefacts by their very nature must selfconsciouslyembrace the problem of image creation, and necessarilyturn inwards upon themselves as a result. It then becomes difficult toescape being what is being imaged within the art form itself. Wenders,I think, really struggles with that problem and the fact that he doesnot, in the end, succeed, is perhaps most clearly signalled in the finalcaption that Cmore is to follow.' Within these limits, however, themimetic qualities of cinema of this sort are extraordinarily revealing.Both Wings of Desire and Blade Runner hold up to us, as in amirror, many of the essential features of the condition of postmodernity.