ABSTRACT
David Harvey’s The Condition of Postmodernity is a very important book, one that offers a way of grasping and imaginatively organizing the condition of postmodernity, in all its pullulating indefiniteness. His work begins to supply that ‘conceptual map’ of postmodernism, for which Fredric Jameson has wistfully yearned, but been unable to supply. Hitherto, Jameson has been able to offer only a map in the future tense, which can cling as a centring principle only to centrelessness itself. Interestingly, the issue of conceptual mapping is bound up for Jameson with the question of a postmodern political art:
The new political art—if it is indeed possible at all—will have to hold to the truth of postmodernism, that is to say, to its fundamental object—the world space of multinational capital—at the same time at which it achieves a breakthrough to some as yet unimaginable new mode of representing this last, in which we may again begin to grasp our positioning as individual and collective subjects and regain a capacity to act and struggle which is at present neutralized by our spatial as well as our social confusion. 1
