David Harvey: The Condition Of Postmodernity

Harvey, D. (1990) The Condition Of Postmodernity: An Enquiry into the Origins of Cultural Change. Cambridge MA and Oxford UK: Blackwell Publishing.

p. 7 Introduction

"No one exactly agrees as to what is meant by the term, except, perhaps,  that 'postmodernism' represents some kind of reaction to, or departure from, 'modernism'. Since the meaning of modernism is also very confused, the reaction or departure known as 'postmodernism' is doubly so."

p. 11

"To begin with, modernity can have no respect even for it's own past, let alone that of any pre-modern social order."

"The transitoriness of things makes it difficult to preserve any sense of historical continuity."

p. 44

"I begin with what appears to be the startling fact about postmodernism: it's total acceptance of the ephemerality, fragmentation, discontinuity, and the chaotic."

"It does not try to transcend it, counteract it, or even to define the 'eternal and immutable' elements that might lie within it. Postmodernism swims, even wallows, in the fragmentary and the chaotic currents of change as if that is all there is."

p. 46,47

"Lyotard (like Foucault) accepts that 'knowledge is the principle force of production' these days, so the problem is to define the locus of that power when it is evidently 'dispersed in clouds of narrative elements' within a heterogeneity of language games. Lyotard (again like Foucault) accepts the potential open qualities of ordinary conversations in which rules can bend and shift so as 'to encourage the greatest flexibility of utterance.'"

p. 49

"Most postmodernist thinkers are fascinated by the new possibilities for information and knowledge production, analysis, and transfer."

"Lyotard (1984), for example, firmly locates his arguments in the context of new technologies of communication and , drawing upon Bell's and Touraine's thesis of the passage to a 'postindustrial' information based society, situates the rise of postmodern thought in the heart of what he sees as a dramatic social and political transition in the languages of communication in advanced capitalist societies."

"There is more than a hint in Lyotard's work, therefore, that modernism has changed because the technical and social conditions of communication have changed."

"Postmodernists tend to accept, also, a rather different theory as to what language and communication are all about. Whereas modernists had presupposed that there was a tight and identifiable relation between what was being said (the signified or 'message' ) and how it was being said (the signifier or 'medium' ), poststructuralist thinking sees these as 'continually breaking apart and re-attatching in new combinations.'"

p. 346

"'In principle a work of art has always been reproducible,' wrote Walter Benjamin, but mechanical reproduction 'represents something new.'"

"The consequences that Benjamin foresaw have been emphasized many times over by the advances in electronic reproduction and the capacity to store images, torn out of their actual contexts in space and time, for instantaneous use and retrieval on a mass basis."

"The increased role of the masses in cultural life has had both positive and negative consequences. Benjamin feared their desire to bring things closer spatially and humanly, because it inevitably led to transitoriness and reproducibility as hallmarks of a cultural production system that had hitherto explored uniqueness and permanence."