Customer Reviews

The Condition of Postmodernity: An Enquiry into the Origins of Cultural Change

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Recent history, economics, architecture, business, sociology, marxist critique, and urban *design* are presented as a unified, interdisciplinary study of culture and the state of knowledge today. The density of the text is excused by his convincing overview of knowledge and appropriate references to other 19th and 20th century thinkers. Harvey maps our culture and how we think about ourselves and our world from the enlightenment to the 90's. He is careful and backs his arguments very well, which, I imagine, takes incredible discipline considering the mish-mash of post-modernity.

If you have some time, are looking for a challenge, and want a comprehensive and convincing crash course on the state of everything, read this book. It is essential for anyone who has studied several social disciplines and wants to understand them collectively. It will certainly affect any thinking person's perception of the late 20th century and the events that led to it.

This is a great overview of concepts that are, by definition, very fractured. Harvey clarifies and pulls together a number of seemingly disparate elements in a masterful manner. Though this book could work as a good introduction to these concepts, I think readers with some background in the major writers of modernism and postmodernism will get more out of it. Dogmatic postmodernists may be put off that Harvey has the "temerity" to suggest that postmodernism might be an extension of modernism or that he finds some good in modernism and some excesses in postmodern approaches but, they should get over themselves and realize that their insistence that "all meta-narratives are bad" is their own meta-narrative. Overall, Harvey manages to convincingly express his ideas while maintaining a remarkably evenhanded approach. I especially enjoy the fact that he avoids the postmodernist tendency to ignore the complexities of modernism and, thus create a postmodern meta-narrative about the modernist project.

Ask ten academics about what to call our present fin-de-siecle epoch and you'll get ten different labels, but "postmodernism" seems always the default term. Although it's twelve years old, Harvey's book is the best I've read about the pluralistic fabric we daily inhabit. It's edifyingly reader-friendly (especially compared to some of the Franco-drunk rhetoricians out there trying to get a handle on our current world). In precise prose Harvey outlines the shift to our information-as-capital paradigm since the mid-sixties, and the causes of the growth of the temp sector and "just-in-time" production capabilities. Harvey traces the arrival of "flexible accumulation" to the collapse of Fordist production practices in the 1966-73 waves of recession, but covers far more than just economic factors--architecture, art, literature, cinema--without any self-conscious Neo-Marxist whistling-in-the-dark. In his project to articulate a new (meta?)narrative, Harvey's book will probably give post-structuralists a new constellation of ideas to obfuscate with hip terminology and dense prose...
Manuel Castell's "The Rise of the Network Society" is another good book along these lines.

I am a graduate student and use this book in a course I teach on postmodernism. I think it is the most convincing analysis of postmodernism available. The book is involved and complex, ranging widely over many areas of culture, but Harvey is a clear writer and a lucid thinker. He defines his terms with precision and the work is relatively free of unnecessary jargon -- a rarity in debates over postmodernism.

But be forewarned: Harvey himself is no "postmodernist," and is often (though not always) critical of postmodern culture. The point of Harvey's book is to understand what postmodernism is and why it came about, and to answer these questions he relies heavily on economic and sociological models of social change. In this sense at least, Harvey's methodology is significantly removed from that of the thinkers he discusses.

The Condition of Postmodernity, although suffering from the author's modernist attitude, provides a vital and continually influential work on the percieved shift towards a postmodern cultural epoch. This shift is equated with the economic change from Fordist to Post-Fordist economies and the new regime of flexible accumulation. The book draws on theoretical examples as diverse as the work of Michel Foucault and Karl Marx and brings together empirical examples that are equally wide ranging. It has to be said that although Harvey provides a a substantial appraisal and critique of the postmodern condition the meta-narrative employed leaves the author as the outsider looking in rather than the insider looking out.

Chapters 8-11 of this book, on the rise of finance capital, increasing speculation, and credit, really illuminate the long-term origins of the current crisis. Harvey wrote on p. 357, in 1990 (commenting on the October 1987 crash and its aftermath) that "The mirrors of accelerating indebtedness...continue to work overtime....Fictitious capital is even more hegemonic than before in its influence....Debts get re-scheduled and rolled over at ever faster rates, with the aggregate effect of re-scheduling the crisis-tendencies of capitalism into the twenty-first century."

Harvey is able to make a very compelling case for the analytic power of Marx's Capital--understood as a starting point, not dogmatically -- and dialectical materialism more generally -- as a basis to understand economic and cultural transformation. Rereading the book eleven years after I first read it, I am still struck by his insights, and will no doubt read it again in decades to come.

David Harvey's "Condition of Post-Modernity" provides excellent representational cases to show the differences between modernity and post-modernity. Although sometimes difficult to follow (I had problems with the chapter pertaining to architecture), Harvey uses enough examples (i.e., economics, art, cinema, etc.) to make sure one understands the differences between post-modernism and modernism. The economic chapter, "Fordism and Flexible Accumulation" is particulary good and shows the gradual transformation from a modernist to a post-modernist economy and society. I was disappointed, however, that Harvey didn't have a complete section focused towards the differences between modernist and post-modernist lit.

David Harvey's "Condition of Post-Modernity" provides excellent representational cases to show the differences between modernity and post-modernity. Although sometimes difficult to follow (I had problems with the chapter pertaining to architecture), Harvey uses enough examples (i.e., economics, art, cinema, etc.) to make sure one understands the differences between post-modernism and modernism. The economic chapter, "Fordism and Flexible Accumulation" is particulary good and shows the gradual transformation from a moderninst to a post-modernist economy and society. I was disappointed, however, that Harvey didn't have a complete section focused towards the differences between modernist and post-modernist lit.

Harvey does an excellent job describing how time and space is measured within various perspectives thourgout time. I enjoyed every letter in it.

Deepest book you've ever read. I read Harvey's 'Enigma of Capital' and was astonished by the depth of knowledge he commands, so I knew this book couldn't be terrible, and wow, it was intense. So, onto the review.. having established that the man knows his Capital, he perhaps has more detail and logical/rational arguments to expound on the relation between economics and culture than his more literary counterparts-- like Jameson in 'Postmodernism, or the logic of late capitalism.' I've read some of Jameson's book on Postmodernism (I'm writing a paper on the topic as a Psychology/Philosophy student), which definitely makes a case for deepest book you've ever read, but I would contend that in it's often esoteric language, Harvey's more explicit rational (Modernist) language is a breathe of fresh air in these Postmodern times. Speaking of esoteric, this is precisely the thesis of this book, that the confusion of world markets, complex debt packages, inflation since the 70's etc. has been paralleled in cultural forms-architecture (modernist functionalism to Postmodern illusion), art (modernist representation to Post modern pastiche-imitation, death of history), philosophy (search for meaning to endlessly deconstructing meaning), and psychology, from Modern emphasis on what is signified, to the Postmodern emphasis on the ephemeral signifier. This last signifier vs. signified disparity is disturbing from an economic standpoint: what the Postmodern is prioritizing--money, for example as signifier--over the signifier, the value it represents or repression it necessitates, is merely echoing economic policies that began around the 70's, which have seen the rise of fictitious capital, the widening of the gap between paper money and any sense of being grounded in a real representative base. Harvey notes at one point the largest physical export out of New York City is paper, on which multifarious forms of imaginary capital are erected and distributed. As another reviewer noted, it is fascinating to read Harvey's detailed analysis of economics, and realize it was written in 1990! I double checked that as I was reading some sections, because he pretty much said 'there will be a crisis in the 21st century.' But to speak too much of economics in this review would be to overlook the truly fascinating elements of this book.It begins with a detailed account of Modernism in all it's complexities, and shows by the end that Postmodernism may not be it's own historical-geographical movement as it claims, but rather, a continuation of Modernism in some respects (in the end, it cannot reject meta-theories without appealing to it's own meta theory, in the self referential, circular logic it-- like Capital--employs). The final sections preceding the conclusion on Postmodernism itself, are much more philosophical. They focus on how our material relations with objects within economics, effects our perception of space and time throughout various modes of existence and cultural forms in Modernism, Enlightenment, and then Postmodernism. This space time tour makes you think a lot about how time and space perception are influenced and morphed throughout different time periods, debunking the common sense idea that time categories are universal. It makes you reflect on how ideologies are created and shaped through material practices, and implemented from the objective, to the subjective perspective, thus giving meaning to the stoner- like reaction to the present times-- 'duude, don't you feel like things move too fast heeere??' The answer is that they are, and that they HAVE to be because this is the new logic of the movement of capital. It flows instantaneously from border to border, shifting from Fordist-Keynesian logic of centralized mass consumption to what Harvey calls Flexible Accumulation and individualized consumption, aka. everyone is on their smartphones telling each other what they're buying via social (or more aptly named 'marketing') networks, so businesses can tailor to quick spurts of demand- patterns of consumption that have seen the dissolution of unions and other forms of stable work networks, comprising the shift from the vertical, hierarchical corporate formation, to a more ephemeral (Postmodern) horizontal formation. Read this book.