Skip to main content Accessibility help
×
Hostname: page-component-586b7cd67f-t7czq Total loading time: 0 Render date: 2024-11-29T17:42:27.067Z Has data issue: false hasContentIssue false

6 - Postmodernism and space

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  28 May 2006

Steven Connor
Affiliation:
Birkbeck College, University of London
Get access

Summary

The temporal line in the sand drawn between us and modernism by postmodernism's prefix is generally associated with a “crisis of historicity.” The withering away of the authority and certainty of our historical sense has another side, however: namely, the reaffirmation of our spatial imagination. This “spatial turn” has been variously avowed by many of our epoch's most illustrious intellectuals. Michel Foucault, for one example, insisted that “the anxiety of our era has to do fundamentally with space, no doubt a great deal more than with time. Time probably appears to us only as one of the various distributive operations that are possible for the elements that are spread out in space.” On the face of it, this statement looks willed and arbitrary, a mere inversion of Kantian categories for the purposes of polemic. We may do well to attend to John Frow's salutary suspicion that postmodernism designates “nothing more and nothing less than a genre of theoretical writing” in which the elaboration of strong oppositions is always the foundational gesture. Yet it is at least conceivable that we postmoderns live “more spatially” than the moderns, who somehow had it in them to live “more temporally” than we. The insistence of contemporary theory on this score is, arguably, not fanciful, but a response at the level of the concept to shifts in the structure of our world. This chapter explores that possibility by way of an historical presentation of reemergence of spatial consciousness in an escalating scale of magnitude, from the body, through the textures of everyday life, our cities, and ultimately to the planetary stage we are calling “globalization”; all of which are in fact inextricable - “postmodern space” being, precisely, their compression into a single, complex plane of immanence, whose contours and elevations we are still in the process of mapping.

Type
Chapter
Information
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
Print publication year: 2004

Access options

Get access to the full version of this content by using one of the access options below. (Log in options will check for institutional or personal access. Content may require purchase if you do not have access.)

Save book to Kindle

To save this book to your Kindle, first ensure [email protected] is added to your Approved Personal Document E-mail List under your Personal Document Settings on the Manage Your Content and Devices page of your Amazon account. Then enter the ‘name’ part of your Kindle email address below. Find out more about saving to your Kindle.

Note you can select to save to either the @free.kindle.com or @kindle.com variations. ‘@free.kindle.com’ emails are free but can only be saved to your device when it is connected to wi-fi. ‘@kindle.com’ emails can be delivered even when you are not connected to wi-fi, but note that service fees apply.

Find out more about the Kindle Personal Document Service.

Available formats
×

Save book to Dropbox

To save content items to your account, please confirm that you agree to abide by our usage policies. If this is the first time you use this feature, you will be asked to authorise Cambridge Core to connect with your account. Find out more about saving content to Dropbox.

Available formats
×

Save book to Google Drive

To save content items to your account, please confirm that you agree to abide by our usage policies. If this is the first time you use this feature, you will be asked to authorise Cambridge Core to connect with your account. Find out more about saving content to Google Drive.

Available formats
×