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{"id":17754,"date":"2015-12-07T00:00:00","date_gmt":"2015-12-07T00:00:00","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/leithart.level2d.com\/?p=2580"},"modified":"2015-12-07T00:00:00","modified_gmt":"2015-12-07T00:00:00","slug":"parochial-postmodernism-2","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.patheos.com\/blogs\/leithart\/2015\/12\/parochial-postmodernism-2\/","title":{"rendered":"Parochial Postmodernism"},"content":{"rendered":"\n\n<\/head>

David Harvey (Ways of the World<\/a>) describes our cultural moment in terms of \u201cspace-time compression,\u201d and finds an analogy with the speed-up of life that was widely noted at the beginning of the twentieth century: \u201cWhile historical analogies are always dangerous, I think it no accident that postmodern sensibility evidences strong sympathies for certain of the confused political, cultural and philosophical movements that occurred at the beginning of the twentieth century (in vienna, for example) when the sense of time\u2013space compression was also peculiarly strong. I also note the revival of interest in geopolitical theory since around 1970, the aesthetics of place, and a revived willingness (even in social theory) to open the problem of spatiality to a general reconsideration.\u201d<\/p>\n

The evidence of acceleration is pervasive: It\u2019s evident in the \u201cvolatility and ephemerality of fashions, products, production techniques, labour processes, ideas and ideologies, values and established practices.\u201d It spills over into our high valuation of \u201cinstantaneity.\u201d It creates a culture of disposability, as everyone is \u201cable to throw away values, lifestyles, stable relationships and attachments to things, buildings, places, people and received ways of doing and being. These were the immediate and tangible ways in which the \u2018accelerative thrust in the larger society\u2019 crashed up against \u2018the ordinary daily experience of the individual.\u2019\u201d It has psychological effects, already identified in Georg Simmel\u2019s analyses of urban life: \u201cthe blocking out of sensory stimuli, denial and cultivation of the blas\u00e9 attitude, myopic specialisation, reversion to images of a lost past (hence the importance of mementoes, museums, ruins) and excessive simplification (either in the presentation of self or in the interpretation of events).\u201d<\/p>\n

The acceleration puts pressure on businesses to be\u00a0highly adaptable and fast-moving in response to market shifts, or masterminding the volatility. The first strategy points mainly towards short-term rather than long-term planning, and cultivating the art of taking short-term gains wherever they are to be had. This has been a notorious feature of US management in recent times. The average tenure of company executive officers has come down to five years, and companies nominally involved in production frequently seek short-term gains through mergers, acquisitions or operations in financial and currency markets.\u201d<\/p>\n

Harvey goes on for some pages further illustrating this process, extrapolating the implications for contemporary economics and politics. And this, he points out, is the setting within which postmodern theory develops. And it develops as a theoretization of contemporary culture. His sketch helps to explain both the persuasiveness of postmodern theory, and its limitation. It\u2019s persuasive because it explains the experience of late or liquid modernity. Yet it\u2019s radically limited: Postmodern theory doesn\u2019t really break through to new insight into the nature of things as such. It is much more modern than that. Like modern sociology, it is a theory that mirrors its own social conditions.<\/p>\n<\/body><\/html>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"