Postmodern mathesis, 2

Kumar argues that postmodernism is characterized by a contempt for the past, and by an embrace of the "depthless present." The result is an obsession with space: "The plane of the timeless present is the spatial. If things do not get their significance from their place in history, they can receive it only from their distribution in space. Post-modernity traffics in the contemporaneous and the simultaneous, in synchronic rather than diachronic time. Relations of nearness and distance in space, rather than in time, become the measure of significance."

Culturally, this is seen in the global information and communications network; in the "multinational networks of global capitalism"; in concerns with townscapes and landscapes. It has implications for the conception of the self, and Kumar sees a close linkage between the spatialization of culture and society and the notion of a "de-centered self":

"The 'decentred subject' of postmodern theory no longer thinks of his/her identity in historical or temporal terms. There is now no expectation of continuous life-long development, no story of personal growth over time. instead, the postmodern self considers itself as a discontinuous entity, as an identity (or identities) constantly made and remade in neutral time. No one identity or identity segment is privileged over the other; there is no development or maturation over time. This seems to require a metaphor of the self conceived in spatial terms - or, to put it in another way, in schizophrenic terms, 'the pure and unrelated presents in time' experienced by the schizophrenic, unable to unify past, present and future [quoting Jameson here]. Personal biography becomes a matter of discontinuous experiences and identities, rather than a story of a developing personality. The post-modern individual does not experience the 'sentimental education' and personal growth of Goethe's Wilhelm Meister or Dickens's David Copperfield. He or she is more likely to feel a resemblance to Luke Reinhart's dice-man, ceaselessly changing roles and identities in an eternal present."

Foucault saw it coming: "The great obsession of the nineteenth century was, as we know, history: with its themes of development and suspension, of crisis and cycle, themes of the ever-accumulating past, with its great preponderance of dead men and the menacing glaciation of the world. . . . The present epoch will perhaps be above all the epoch of space. We are in the epoch of simultaneity: we are in the epoch of juxtaposition, the epoch of the near and far, of the side-by-side, of the dispersed. We are at a moment, I believe, when our experience of the world is less that of a long life developing through time than that of a network of connecting points and intersects with its own skein."

posted by Peter J. Leithart on Saturday, February 25, 2006 at 12:40 PM

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