1989: David Harvey’s Postmodernity: The Space Economy of Late Capitalism

This chapter sets the scene by contextualising Harvey’s The Condition of Postmodernity in the year 1989. The year was turbulent and dramatic, and its shockwaves reverberate still. For some, such as Nikolai and Elena Ceausescu, dictators of Romania, it was the end of the line. For millions of ordinary people in China and India and elsewhere it was the beginnings of economic opportunity. At this juncture globalisation and the transformed experience of time and space were what awaited much of humanity in the post-Cold War/neoliberal era. Postmodernity seemed to explain much of this change and give hope for the future and a ‘renewal of historical-geographical materialism [to] promote adherence to a new version of the Enlightenment project’. Yet the Harvey’s book overlooks digital technology and fails to anticipate its status as a new category of technology creating a whole new realm for virtual space for capitalism to exploit and thus the advent of the condition of ‘digitality’.