The Condition Of Postmodernity

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modern ideas and the key structural features of modernity. Harvey's basic approach to postmodernism is sound. Rather than rejecting postmodern developments as superficial and merely transitory, he believes they represent a new paradigm of thought and cultural practice that requires serious attention. At the same time, he avoids exaggerating the novelty of postmodern developments and sees both continuities and discontinuies with modern practices. Postmodernism represents not a complete rupture from modernism, but a new "cultural dominant" where elements that could be found in modernism appear in postmodernism with added emphasis and intensity. As he puts it, where a modernist like Baudelaire tried to combine in a modern aesthetic both the eternal and the transitory, the whole and the fragmentary, postmodernism rejects all attempts to represent the immutable or ordered patterns and totalities, in order to revel in flux, fragments, difference, and chaos.
Harvey is neither overly ...

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does not see postmodernism as some radically new postindustrial or even postcapitalist development. Rather, postmodernism results from new organization and technological forms developed by capitalism in the second half of this century. Specifically, Harvey directly relates postmodern developments to the shift from Fordism to a "more flexible mode of accumulation" (he deliberately avoids the term "post-Fordism" to avoid suggesting there are not some fundamental continuities in the two modes of capitalist organization).
Fordism emerged with the attempts by Henry Ford to provide workers with sufficient income and leisure time to consume the products they produce. "Fordism" refers to a ...

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