The Dictionary of Human Geography

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social, economic and political understandings

about the how the world is materialized

and experienced (Jones, Natter and Schatzki,

1995).

Intellectually, postmodernity is generally

considered to be a period initiated by a thor-

ough rupture in the history of Western

thought, with its confident allegiances to what

Jean-Franc ̧ois Lyotard (1984) called ‘meta-

narratives’ – grand theories ofsocietyand

human progress. These were thoroughly cri-

tiqued and often rejected by postmodernity’s

more philosophical wing,post-structuralism,

which was a concurrent response tostructur-

alismand its endless proliferation of binarized

power relations. Post-structuralism quickly

extended its critical scope to the hegemonic

conceptual cornerstones of Western modernity,

sometimes even back to their foundational the-

orizations in Greekphilosophy.Morebroadly,

postmodernity’s historical break might be

loosely described in terms of an avoidance of

theoretical absolutism, an investment in epi-

stemological constructivism (sometimes bas-

tardized and mischaracterized under the

slogan ‘everything is relative’: cf.relativism),

a celebration ofdifference, a fascination with

open systems and a devotion to complex rela-

tions ofpower(for a review of key thinkers, see

Best and Kellner, 1991). Its rise alongside the

information age inflects it away from moder-

nity’s faith in our ability to accurately and

adequately represent the world, and for some,

such as Jean Baudrillard (1993), postmoder-

nity’s products are not simply bad reproduc-

tions but ‘simulacra’, copies taken as more real

than the reality that they represent (seerepre-

sentation; simulacrum).

The uptake of these notions was in great

part a response to the horrors that attended

the rise offascismand theholocaust. Often

read by members of the postwar Frankfurt

School (seecritical theory) and later by

post-structuralist thinkers as the logical cul-

mination of the worst parts of modernity and

asthepolitical crisis to which all future ethico-

political thought must respond, these events

effectively signalled the end of an era. As post-

modernity has progressed, its central ideas

have been adopted and adapted for both pro-

gressive and quite cynical, reactionary ends.

By the late 1980s, it appeared that postmod-

ernity and postmodernism were co-extensive,

and indeed the intellectual fashions of the for-

mer fed the cultural currents of the latter. The

geographer David Harvey sought to explain

these connections in his 1989 book,The con-

dition of postmodernity(see also Jameson, 1991;

Soja, 1989). A testament to the broader

importance of both ‘posts’ across the intellec-

tual and popular landscape, the book was

wildly successful inside and outsidehuman

geography, making Harvey one of the most

well known Anglophone theorists of the

twentieth century. The argument draws

primarily from Harvey’s reformulation ofpol-

itical economy as an explicitly historico-

geographical materialism, and situates both

postmodernity and postmodernism within the

transformations ofspaceandtime(or, rather,

time–space) brought about by the latest stage

ofcapitalism, which began to take on a new

shape in the 1970s. As Harvey explained, the

age of postmodernity was characterized by a

series of growing crisesin capitalism, the

results of which heralded a shift from a rela-

tively stable set of production relations,ford-

ism, exemplified by the capital–state–labour

contract sealed by the New Deal in the USA,

to the contemporary era ofpost-fordism.

Whenthatcontractexpired under the weight

of international competition for low wages,

Western capitalists responded withjust-in-

time production, a credit-based economy,

and the spatial fixes of capital relocation and

fresh market penetration. The new economy’s

spatial, technological and labour processes

had become, under the regime offlexible

accumulation, more nimble and quicker to

change. Harvey’s argument was not, however,

to draw a direct line of causality from these

disruptions in the economic sphere to postmo-

dernity’s seemingly similar loss of moorings in

the intellectual domain. It was, rather, to

couple these transformations through shifts

in the ‘experience of space–time’; as he put

it, economic change led totime__space com-

pression, which dramatically redrew our cog-

nitive maps of the social order. Into this

confusion arose postmodernity, the result of a

profound disenchantment with modernity’s

long-held matrix of certainty and order. For

its turn, postmodernism was simply a cultural

blip, an ephemeral reaction inartand archi-

tecture to the deeper anxieties brought forth

by postmodernity (for an extended discussion,

see Gregory, 1994, Part III, esp. pp. 406–14).

From Harvey, it follows that we should not

welcome postmodernity as a new, emancipa-

tory era that moves us beyond a confining,

stodgy and conservative modernity, but see it

rather as a description of forces that are deep,

complex and surprising. And since 1989,

arguably, things have intensified: the collapse

ofcommunism, massive consumption and

even larger looming crises fuelled by

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POSTMODERNITY