A few notes from David Harvey’s excellent work The Condition of Postmodernity. In the following, I am mostly interested in his concept of time-space compression and the cultural and aesthetic responses to it.
But if, as the postmodernists insist, we cannot aspire to any unified representation of the world, or picture it as a totality full of connections and differentiations rather than as perpetually shifting fragments, then how can we possibly aspire to act coherently with respect to the world? The simple postmodernist answer is that siince coherent representation and action are either repressive or illusionary (and therefore doomed to be self-dissolving and self-defeating), we should not even try to engage in some global project. (Harvey, 1990: 52)
Postmodernism also ought to be looked at as mimetic of the social, economic, and political practices in society. But since it is mimetic of different facets of those practices it appears in very different guises. The superimposition of different worlds in many a postmodern novel, worlds between which an uncommunicative ‘otherness’ prevails in a space of coexistence, bears an uncanny relationship to the increasing ghettoization, disempowerment, and isolation of poverty and minority populations in the inner cities of both Britain and the United States. It is not hard to read a postmodern novel as a metaphorical transect across the fragmenting social landscape, the sub-cultures and local modes of communication, in London, Chicago, New York, or Los Angeles. (Harvey, 1990: 113-114)
Changes in the way we imagine, think, plan, and rationalize are bound to have material consequences. Only in these very broad terms of the conjoining of mimesis and aesthetic intervention can the broad range of postmodernism make sense. (Harvey, 1990: 115)
I think it important to challenge the idea of a single and objective sense of time and space, against which we can measure the diversity of human conceptions and perceptions. I shall not argue for a total dissolution of the objective-subjective distinction, but insist, rather, that we recognize the multiplicity of the objective qualities which space and time can express, and the role of human practices in their construction. Neither time nor space, the physicists now broadly propose, had existence (let alone meaning) before matter; the objective qualities of physical time-space cannot be understood, therefore, independently of the qualities of material processes. (Harvey, 1990: 203)
In what follows I shall make frequent reference to the concept of ‘time-space compression.’ I mean to signal by that term processes that so revolutionize the objective qualities of space and time that we are forced to alter, sometimes in quite radical ways, how we represent the world to ourselves. I use the word ‘compression’ because a strong case can be made that the history of capitalism has been characterized by speed-up in the pace of life, while so overcoming spatial barriers that the world sometimes seems to collapse inwards upon us. (Harvey, 1990: 240)
I want to suggest that we have been experiencing, these last two decades, an intense phase of time-space compression that has had a disorienting and disruptive impact upon political-economic practices, the balance of class power, as well as upon cultural and social life. (Harvey, 1990: 284)
The popularity of a work like Alvin Toffler’s Future Shock lay precisely in its prescient appreciation of the speed with which the future has come to be discounted into the present. (Harvey, 1990: 291)
Aesthetic and cultural practices are peculiarly susceptible to the changing experience of space and time precisely because they entail the construction of spatial representations and artefacts out of the flow of human experience. They always broker between Being and Becoming. (Harvey, 1990: 327)
Since crises of overaccumulation typically spark the search for spatial and temporal resolutions, which in turn create an overwhelming sense of time-space compression, we can also expect crises of overaccumulation to be followed by strong aesthetic movements. (Harvey, 1990: 327)
The fourth response [to the travails of time-space compression] has been to try and ride the tiger of time-space compression through construction of a language and an imagery that can mirror and hopefully command it. (Harvey, 1990: 351)
