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

194 published claims from this book.

• A simulacrum is near-perfect replication erasing the original-copy distinction.
• A vast cultural-mass labor force far exceeds cultural producers in size.
• Abandoning modernist becoming leaves only aestheticized spatial politics
• Accelerated turnover transforms modernist aesthetics into postmodernist flux
• Aesthetic practices broker between Being and Becoming.
• All capitalist growth rests on a gap between wages and value created
• All systems of representation spatialize and thereby distort lived experience
• American pragmatism and French poststructuralism merged to attack Enlightenment rationalism.
• Annihilation of space through time has always driven capitalism
• Architectural populism cannot protect diverse groups from each other.
• Baudelaire defined modernity as half transient and half eternal
• Beauty is the temporal synthesis of past, present, and future that we desire.
• Beauty-making functions as a defense against temporality and death
• Bell explains postmodernism as modernism exhausted by institutionalized cultural workers.
• Capitalism condemns the poor’s present-orientation while itself running on debt-financed gratification
• Capitalism has repeatedly embraced flexibility in prior historical episodes.
• Capitalist accumulation obeys law-like principles yet produces only illusory novelty
• Celebration of transience conceals a longing for stability.
• Cinema’s image-reduction for commercial purposes blocks genuinely revolutionary film
• Class position shaped rival explanations of the 1847-8 crisis.
• Collage and montage serve as the primary form of postmodern discourse.
• Collage fragments force a double reading against origin and new totality.
• Commodification of land, not utopian design, universalized abstract space
• Commodified ethnic quarters veil rather than reveal real urban geography
• Communication-speed limits among decision-makers caused the July 1914 crisis to escalate into global war.
• Compressed decision time makes financial markets prone to cascading collapse
• Conservative cost-cutting produced Britain’s worst postwar housing failures, not leftist ideology
• Contemporary literature mirrors a pervasive cultural sense of helplessness
• Credit money and commodity-backed money stand in structural antagonism
• Crossing into human time transforms fragmented space into coherent place.
• Cubism fragmented spatial perspective in parallel with Fordist industrial practice
• Cultural forms are causally rooted in the daily circulation of capital.
• Cultural output has exploded enormously since the mid-twentieth century.
• Cultural shift and economic transition align but causal direction stays unclear
• Daily routines treat time as objective despite its contested meaning
• Debt-encumbered homeowners are geographically more vulnerable than capital
• Deconstructivism reacted against populist postmodernism by fusing literary theory with avant-garde architecture.
• Deindustrialization forced major cities to compete as financial and entertainment centers.
• Difference and otherness must be integral, not added on, to Marxist analysis
• Early geopoliticians rationalized imperial expansion through national destiny ideologies
• Economic globalization undermined realist narrative structure by introducing spatial simultaneity.
• Electronic reproduction stores images detached from context for instant mass retrieval
• Enlightenment spatial schemes were ultimately realized by capitalist modernization
• Enlightenment thought was grounded in the practical rationalization of space and time.
• Entering human life means being subordinated to money.
• Established orders reproduce themselves by naturalizing their own arbitrariness
• Event-spectacle media culture causes the postmodern collapse of time horizons
• Every text inevitably conveys meanings its author neither intended nor controlled.
• Everyday metropolitan culture anticipated postmodernism before its intellectual articulation
• Everyday walking replaces totalizing spatial order with fragmentary, allusive pedestrian rhetoric.
• Factory division of labor reduces workers to fragments of persons
• Fixed spatial representations inevitably distort the fluid practical spaces they depict
• Fixed-capital intensity forced the state to stabilize demand.
• Flagging growth forced all capitalist states to curb labor power
• Flexible accumulation coexists with entrenched Fordist production rather than replacing it.
• Flexible capital’s ephemerality atomizes workers and enables individualism
• Flexible postmodernism couples economic ephemerality with cultural commitments to place and being
• Flexible production bypassed Fordist rigidity to serve quick-changing markets
• Ford’s core innovation was flowing work to a stationary worker, not new technology
• Fordism reorganized society and culture, not just production.
• Fordism required active nation-state economic management.
• Fordist modernity stabilized its economy to enable change while flexible postmodernism reverses this
• Fordist-Keynesian capitalism expanded globally to absorb de-colonized nations
• Fragmented identity makes classical Marxist alienation obsolete.
• Freedom from contingency requires a deliberate common project of becoming.
• Futurism’s celebration of speed and destruction aligned with fascism
• Global finance has escaped the collective control of advanced capitalist states.
• Greeks treated mythology as national while Christians ascribed it to universals
• Habermas grounds universalizing reason in the dialogical structure of communication.
• Harvey endorses a becoming-oriented rather than being-oriented historical stance
• Heidegger framed national destiny as existential response to modernity’s crisis
• Heidegger’s Nazi involvement remained a recurring French intellectual scandal
• Heightened competition redistributed income upward despite energizing growth
• Heterogeneous language games yield only patchy, local institutional determinism.
• Historical materialism has begun to treat space and geography as causal forces in capitalism
• History changes only through historical means, not eternal truths
• Hollywood depicts flexible labour paired with deindustrial urban decay
• Human improvisation is regulated by historically situated conditions
• Ideologically varied states converged on Keynesian welfare management.
• Image and style can override corruption and policy failure in public esteem
• Imagination and aesthetic practice have direct material consequences.
• In 1960s French thought, spatial analysis was dismissed as reactionary while history was revolutionary
• In postmodern fragmentation, the library becomes a contested space for forging historical identity.
• Industrial society reduces individuals to interchangeable species beings through conformist working conditions
• Institutionalized space appropriation produces territorially bounded social solidarity
• Intensified ephemerality drives a reactive craving for eternal truths and secure moorings.
• International money homogenizes social life into an undifferentiated present
• Interstate competition drove the rationalization of space and time during the Enlightenment.
• Keynesian deficit spending continued to drive 1980s global growth
• Lacking a mother indicates lacking real history to interrogators
• Le Corbusier’s ordered space drew on Jeffersonian land partition
• Left-originated syndicalism became a powerful organizing tool of the fascist right
• Local class reception shapes how Western capital implants in new spaces.
• Loose monetary policy plus oil shocks triggered the 1973 economic crisis
• Map names are the primary instrument of imperial spatial power.
• Marxist meta-theory functions as fallible open-ended inquiry, not total truth
• Masking and disguise in postmodern art mirror spatial fragmentation and anonymity.
• Mediatised collage aesthetics can immunize provocation against censure
• Modern advertising manipulates desires through images largely unconnected to the product.
• Modern capital markets only emerged systematically after 1850
• Modernism defined itself as the subjugation of space to human purposes
• Modernism’s universalist claims grew out of negotiation with localism and nationalism
• Modernist architecture necessarily fixed space within a dynamic historical process
• Modernist writers and artists modeled creative work on machine rationality.
• Modernist writers reacted to standardized public time with pluralized private time
• Money as arbitrary fiction can only represent real social labour
• Money’s instability created postmodernity’s crisis of representation
• Monopoly pricing and planning emerged from US capital centralization since 1900
• Nation states can now default on international debts
• Negative real interest rates drove capital into collectibles and artworks
• Neo-conservatism’s rise reflects a shift to competitive individualism, not economic success
• Non-interventionist governments were forced into greater intervention
• Nostalgia is an adjustment mechanism during crises
• Oppositional subcultures get absorbed into a weak sense of plural others.
• Overseas investment absorbed US surplus capacity by creating global mass markets
• Photographs function as proof of history even when fabricated
• Photographs make personal history collapsible and rebuilable at will
• Place aesthetics now serve as lures for mobile capital
• Place-based identity politics replace class politics and revive geopolitics.
• Pluralist fragmentation triggers a compensatory search for secure identity.
• Post-1850 capitalist globalization proceeded through imperial conquest that reterritorialized world space.
• Post-1960s time-space compression makes postmodernity historically distinctive
• Postmodern architecture of spectacle displaced austere modernism for urban redevelopment.
• Postmodern architecture’s celebration of spectator freedom masks shared social meaning
• Postmodern architecture’s surface fascination masks underlying conflicts between place-rootedness and cosmopolitan style.
• Postmodern fragmentation prevents picturing a radically different future at all
• Postmodern spatial disruption mirrors flexible accumulation’s global marketplace.
• Postmodern urban imagery erases class relations and production from its aestheticized surface
• Postmodernism can only be defined relative to the equally confused term modernism
• Postmodernism is best treated as a historical condition, not an ideas set.
• Postmodernism is inseparable from everyday capitalist life, not autonomous art.
• Postmodernism’s rejection of unified representation leads logically to pragmatic localism.
• Postmodernist thought arises from the new technologies of knowledge communication in advanced capitalism.
• Postmodernity may be evolving toward its own dissolution
• Poststructuralism rejects the modernist bond between signified and signifier.
• Postwar boom industries concentrated in a few grand production regions
• Postwar Fordist affluence made pure image production a basis for capital accumulation.
• Postwar modernist building choices were driven by cost and technology, not style ideology
• Powerful groups dominate space through legal and illegal means
• Pre-WWI Vienna’s stylistic diversity grew from crisis over shifting space and time
• Preserving the past functions as a form of identity preservation
• Property values shift dramatically with political control of territory
• Purchasing sign systems like designer clothes has become a labour market survival strategy.
• Raban reframed the city as producing signs and images, not goods
• Raban’s Soft City marks the moment postmodern urban discourse begins
• Rational social planning necessarily requires fixed abstract space-time representations
• Regulation theory explains how unstable capitalism achieves temporary coherence.
• Regulation-school analysis examines the full package of stabilizing arrangements in each period.
• Regulatory-system innovation is needed to sustain capitalism’s profit logic
• Revisionist socialist theorists of peaceful transition later collaborated with fascist occupiers.
• Revolutionary syndicalists could convert into fascist state functionaries.
• Rival spatial strategies serve different relations between property and state power
• Schizophrenic temporality makes present experience overwhelmingly vivid and material
• Science’s class-imposed limits yield only to altered historical praxis.
• Shared oppression under corporate power fails to produce solidarity in postmodern imagination
• Shared spatial and temporal rhythms constitute group identity itself, not just its symbols
• Shifts in spatial and temporal representation drive shifts in social relations
• Sloganeering reaction to complexity tends to confirm existing prejudices
• Social transactions require intersecting time-space paths at stations
• Space homogenization clashes with place-based identity, fueling political antagonism
• Spatial practices cannot be read apart from social context
• Stateless Eurodollar money grew explosively outside any government’s control.
• Technology’s cultural effects are mediated by late capitalism not deterministically
• The 1846-7 depression was the first pure crisis of capitalist overaccumulation.
• The 1847-8 crisis produced a cultural crisis of representation.
• The 1847-8 crisis proved capitalism generates crises from its own internal workings.
• The 1848 crisis birthed modernist art in Paris across Manet, Baudelaire, and Flaubert
• The 1848 financial crisis revealed an antagonism between credit and specie money
• The 1848 revolutions forced workers to reconcile local place with international space
• The 1973 recession undermined Fordism and birthed a new accumulation regime
• The collapse of Enlightenment certainty politicized struggles between modernist currents.
• The Fordist regime collapsed with the 1973 recession
• The labor periphery splits into career-stalled full-timers and precariously casual workers
• The New Left’s cultural-political self-conception drove postmodernism’s turn to aesthetics.
• The same map technology can serve either subversive or centralizing political ends
• The state’s crisis-management role grew in the post-Fordist era rather than shrinking
• The turn against space in economics preceded and enabled realist fiction’s crisis.
• The US budget deficit has been stabilizing global capitalism
• Theorists locate the postmodern shift in a crisis of spatial-temporal experience
• Time-space compression from flexible accumulation generates a crisis of representation in cultural forms
• Universalist and particularist sensibilities coexisted within the same thinkers
• Urban plasticity liberates identity yet invites totalitarian control
• Urban spectacle historically serves both social pacification and revolutionary mobilization.
• Urban spectacle serves as a political weapon for both control and revolt.
• Urban spectacle shifted from oppositional movements to different forces around 1972.
• US financial-military hegemony structured the postwar Fordist world economy
• US society’s speed and image-saturation have displaced causal depth by surface effects.
• US unions traded bargaining power for collaboration with Fordist production
• When aesthetic judgment favors space over time, spatial practices dominate social action.
• Williams read postmodernism as a mask for deeper capitalist cultural transformations
• Wings of Desire frames postmodern fragmentation through clashing time scales between angels and humans
• Worker accommodation to Fordist labor remained a surface adaptation, not internalized consent
• Workers establish their own norms that blunt management speed-up tactics
• World War I destroyed faith in progress, evolution, and continuity with history.