This sea-change is bound up with the emergence of new dominant ways in which we experience space and time. There has been a sea-change in cultural as well as in political-economic practices since around 1972. Harvey prefaces the book with a pithy statement of his argument: Harvey, although an eminent Marxist geographer and anthropologist, is perhaps a less familiar figure than Fredric Jameson for the idea of postmodernism in what literary scholars loosely call "theory." The Condition of Postmodernity is a synthesis and summation of intense and high profile transdisciplinary debates in the academy over the 1980s. The Condition of Postmodernity: An Enquiry in the Origins of Cultural Change was a bestseller reprinted many times during the 90s and named by The Independent one of the fifty most important works of nonfiction published since 1945. Reflecting back on Harvey's book and on postmodernity more generally through the Janus-like prism of this forum has meant re-reading the text measured initially against the present of the MLA forum in January 2020, to which the previous sentence belongs but then revising those remarks in April and May of 2020 (the date of this phrase) in a present overshadowed by the proximate global crisis of the coronavirus pandemic and its massive, as yet unpredictable, and possibly epochal transformations, has altered the valence of the original remarks, prematurely historicized them, if you will, and cast a newly sharp, urgent and affective spotlight on the question of epochality itself. Not undead but disappeared: a former Zeitgeist, the ghost of another intellectual time, and perhaps of the strict historical demarcations underlying other times. And yet, in the last two decades, postmodernity seems to have dropped out of sight almost entirely in the US literary humanities, in marked contrast to other texts and topics from 1990 under consideration in this forum. Of all the academic 'isms,' postmodernism arguably had the furthest reach across disciplines and into the popular press, and became a kind of shorthand for and often a caricature of intellectual fashions or theoretical trends animating literary and cultural studies around 1990. Harvey himself remains ambivalent about the actual holding power of postmodernity, and especially about its status as epochal marker, to the end of this long, multifarious, and carefully argued book. What is a trend or a fashion? What is an epochal or, more modestly, a cultural change? The distinction between them, and debates about what it means for a cultural expression or mode of thought to correspond with a time, to be timely, were at stake in the term "postmodern" nearly from the start. Only when postmodernism began to appear "more and more as a powerful configuration of new sentiments and thoughts" - that is, as a genuine cultural change signaling an epochal transition or shift - did Harvey turn his concerted attention to it. David Harvey begins his preface to The Condition of Postmodernity: An Enquiry in the Origins of Cultural Change with the observation that his initial response to "postmodernism" was to try to wait it out, "hoping that it would disappear under the weight of its own incoherence or simply lose its allure as a fashionable set of 'new ideas.'" 1
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