The Condition of Postmodernity

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by David Harvey

Blackwell Publishers

Due/Published November 1991, 388 pages, paper

ISBN 0631162941

Harvey seeks to determine what is meant by the "postmodernity" in its different contexts and to identify how accurate and useful it is as a description of contemporary experience. But the book is much more than this: in the course of his investigation Harvey provides a social and semantic history--from the Enlightenment to the present--of modernism and its expression in political and social ideas and movements, as well as in art, literature and architecture. He considers in particular how the meaning and perception of time and space themselves vary over time and space, and shows that this variance affects individual values and social processes of the most fundamental kind.

Contents:

The argument.
Preface.
Acknowledgements.
Part I: The Passage from Modernity to Postmodernity in Contemporary Culture:
1. Introduction.
2. Modernity and Modernism.
3. Postmodernism.
4. Postmodernism in the City: Architecture and Urban Design.
5. Modernization.
6. POSTmodernISM or postMODERNism?
Part II: The Political-Economic Transformation of late Twentieth-Century Capitalism:
7. Introduction.
8. Fordism.
9. From Fordism to Flexible Accumulation.
10. Theorizing the Transition.
11. Flexible Accumulation - Solid Transformation or Temporary Fix?
Part III: The Experience of Space and Time:
12. Introduction.
13. Individual Spaces and Times in Social Life.
14. Time and Space as Sources of Social Power.
15. The Time and Space of the Enlightenment Project.
16. Time-space Compression and the Rise of Modernism as a Cultural Force.
17. Time-Space Compression and the Postmodern Condition.
18. Time and Space in the Postmodern Cinema.
Part IV: The Condition of Postmodernity:
19. Postmodernity as a Historical Condition.
20. Economics with Mirrors.
21. Postmodernism as the Mirror of Mirrors.
22. Fordist Modernism versus Flexible Postmodernism, or the Interpenetration of Opposed Tendencies in Capitalism as a Whole.
23. The Transformative and Speculative Logic of Capital.
24. The Work of Art in an Age of Electronic Reproduction and Image Banks.
25. Responses to Time-Space Compression.
26. The Crisis of Historical Materialism.
27. Cracks in the Mirrors, Fusions at the Edges.
References.
Index