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Everything, All the Time, Everywhere Lib/E: How We Became Postmodern
Post-Modernity is the creative destruction that has shattered our present times into fragments. It dynamited modernism which had dominated the western world for most of the twentieth century. Post-modernism stood for everything modernism rejected: fun, exuberance, irresponsibility. But beneath its glitzy surface, post-modernism had a dirty secret: it was the fig leaf for a rapacious new kind of capitalism. It was also the forcing ground of the post truth, by means of which western values got turned upside down. But where do these ideas come from and how have they impacted on the world? In his brilliant history of a dangerous idea, Stuart Jeffries tells a narrative that starts in the early 1970s and continues to today. He tells this history through a riotous gallery that includes David Bowie, the iPod, Frederic Jameson, the demolition of Pruit-Igoe, Madonna, Post-Fordism, Jeff Koon's Rabbit, Deleuze and Guattari, the Nixon Shock, The Bowery series, Judith Butler, and more. We are today scarcely capable of conceiving politics as a communal activity because we have become habituated to being consumers rather than citizens. Can we do anything else than suffer from buyer's remorse?
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Published February 22, 2022
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Stuart Jeffries
5 books30 followersStuart Jeffries worked for the Guardian for twenty years and has written for many media outlets including the Financial Times and Psychologies. He is based in London.
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January 25, 2022
In the hopefully mock-egotistical spirit of David Foster Wallace reminding us (in A Supposedly Fun Thing I'll Never Do Again: Essays and Arguments), on more than one occasion, that he is "an exceptionally good ping-pong player," let me just remind you, dear reader, that I have forgotten more books on postmodernism than you're ever likely to read*.
And good for you, too, or mostly, I think. Except, for amateur students of intellectual thought and cultural histories, to know what it, PoMo, was (and, as Jeffries argues, possibly still is, in a "I ain't not afraid of no ghost" kinda way, and more on that later), you should probably read all of David Harvey's The Condition of Postmodernity: An Enquiry into the Origins of Cultural Change, the first chapter of Fred Jameson's Postmodernism or the Cultural Logic of Late Capitalism, and this book here—and (oh yeah, nearly forgot!), Marshall Berman's absolutely essential All That Is Solid Melts Into Air: The Experience of Modernity aside, that's probably sufficient for all of the cocktail party chitchat that you haven't been having anyway, due to the kind of agoraphobia induced by Covid, or the agora itself, or reading agoraphobic DFW, for that matter.
No, this book's not perfect (e.g. he dismisses entire, important works by two of my heroes, Terry Eagleton's and Christopher Norris's—The Illusions of Postmodernism and What's Wrong with Postmodernism?: Critical Theory and the Ends of Philosophy—in a single sentence each, pretty much), but it's otherwise perfect for me, in that it mostly eschews re-mapping what's been mapped before in favour of a deep dive into the cultural products thrown up over PoMo's** lifetime—from its infancy in the early 1970s through its heyday in the 1980s and early 1990s, to its sudden, abrupt, purported death on 9-11 in 2001 (or perhaps 2008), to its spectral presence in all our lives ever since, in the form of a persistent "late" capitalist economic regime, which the culture of post-modernism once paved the way for and then served (Jeffries agues, though I more than tend to agree).
So yes, this volume always has capitalism in its sights, whether directly or peripherally, when discussing each rhizomic phase and genetic mutation of PoMo, aka the power couple of Polly Valent and Neo Liberal. But it never makes the economic reductionist argument (one usually attributed by builders of straw men to what Marxist themselves call the "vulgar Marxist" belief in teleological economic "stages" in history, as well as in an economically determining "Base" and a cultural "Superstructure", which is but the mere, mostly passive by-product or ex-pression or epiphenomenon of said Base).
Rather, perhaps in the spirit of historian E.P. Thompson, capitalism and PoMo are seen here as dancing partners—not of the artificially yoked-together kind from the monstrosity which is Dancing With the Stars, but of the Dance With Them What Brung Ye variety, as in the economic and cultural "spheres" aren't independent of each other, or merely mutually-influencing, but are fully and completely "shot through" (in Thompson's words) with complexly determining traits of one another. Dance partners sporting complementary be-sequinned outfits, in other words, as gaudy and as seemingly ahistorical as the Vegas strip (in Thomas Pynchon's terms, "like a ritzy parable of the world" ), and sewn by the same outsourced, child seamstress, somewhere far off the consumer’s walled garden’s radar and way down deep in the Global South.
Enough ritzy parables: I came for the historical refresher course (Jeffies is light— appropriately, given the book's focus—on the economic history, and lighter still on the PoMo theory…this book is quite readable for the non-specialist, thank G-d), but I stayed for the "close readings" of the cultural products representative of the various periods under examination. From the photography of Martha Rosler, Cindy Sherman, and Sophie Calle, to the music of David Bowie and the architectural shenanigans of the UK's Poundbury and France's Musée D'Orsay, to the writers Kris Kraus and Salman Rushdie, my own understanding of specific PoMo artifacts was greatly improved by reading this book, and Stuart Jeffries is a superior interpreter/analyst of same (as well as a damned fine writer).
Some of the other analysands, though, have already been given a good going-over elsewhere, and thus perhaps seemed a wee bit perfunctory in these pages. These include: Margaret Thatcher, The Sex Pistols***, Apple, Madonna, Quentin Tarantino, Netflix, the Debt Industry. Still, what would a tapestry of post-modernism look like without such patches?
Jeffries is particularly good on post-modern irony, to which he returns time and again, and it is well worth quoting him here on that particular habit of mind (think of the cast of Seinfeld and their relations with and attitudes toward other human beings, and you'll get the drift):
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And good for you, too, or mostly, I think. Except, for amateur students of intellectual thought and cultural histories, to know what it, PoMo, was (and, as Jeffries argues, possibly still is, in a "I ain't not afraid of no ghost" kinda way, and more on that later), you should probably read all of David Harvey's The Condition of Postmodernity: An Enquiry into the Origins of Cultural Change, the first chapter of Fred Jameson's Postmodernism or the Cultural Logic of Late Capitalism, and this book here—and (oh yeah, nearly forgot!), Marshall Berman's absolutely essential All That Is Solid Melts Into Air: The Experience of Modernity aside, that's probably sufficient for all of the cocktail party chitchat that you haven't been having anyway, due to the kind of agoraphobia induced by Covid, or the agora itself, or reading agoraphobic DFW, for that matter.
No, this book's not perfect (e.g. he dismisses entire, important works by two of my heroes, Terry Eagleton's and Christopher Norris's—The Illusions of Postmodernism and What's Wrong with Postmodernism?: Critical Theory and the Ends of Philosophy—in a single sentence each, pretty much), but it's otherwise perfect for me, in that it mostly eschews re-mapping what's been mapped before in favour of a deep dive into the cultural products thrown up over PoMo's** lifetime—from its infancy in the early 1970s through its heyday in the 1980s and early 1990s, to its sudden, abrupt, purported death on 9-11 in 2001 (or perhaps 2008), to its spectral presence in all our lives ever since, in the form of a persistent "late" capitalist economic regime, which the culture of post-modernism once paved the way for and then served (Jeffries agues, though I more than tend to agree).
So yes, this volume always has capitalism in its sights, whether directly or peripherally, when discussing each rhizomic phase and genetic mutation of PoMo, aka the power couple of Polly Valent and Neo Liberal. But it never makes the economic reductionist argument (one usually attributed by builders of straw men to what Marxist themselves call the "vulgar Marxist" belief in teleological economic "stages" in history, as well as in an economically determining "Base" and a cultural "Superstructure", which is but the mere, mostly passive by-product or ex-pression or epiphenomenon of said Base).
Rather, perhaps in the spirit of historian E.P. Thompson, capitalism and PoMo are seen here as dancing partners—not of the artificially yoked-together kind from the monstrosity which is Dancing With the Stars, but of the Dance With Them What Brung Ye variety, as in the economic and cultural "spheres" aren't independent of each other, or merely mutually-influencing, but are fully and completely "shot through" (in Thompson's words) with complexly determining traits of one another. Dance partners sporting complementary be-sequinned outfits, in other words, as gaudy and as seemingly ahistorical as the Vegas strip (in Thomas Pynchon's terms, "like a ritzy parable of the world" ), and sewn by the same outsourced, child seamstress, somewhere far off the consumer’s walled garden’s radar and way down deep in the Global South.
Enough ritzy parables: I came for the historical refresher course (Jeffies is light— appropriately, given the book's focus—on the economic history, and lighter still on the PoMo theory…this book is quite readable for the non-specialist, thank G-d), but I stayed for the "close readings" of the cultural products representative of the various periods under examination. From the photography of Martha Rosler, Cindy Sherman, and Sophie Calle, to the music of David Bowie and the architectural shenanigans of the UK's Poundbury and France's Musée D'Orsay, to the writers Kris Kraus and Salman Rushdie, my own understanding of specific PoMo artifacts was greatly improved by reading this book, and Stuart Jeffries is a superior interpreter/analyst of same (as well as a damned fine writer).
Some of the other analysands, though, have already been given a good going-over elsewhere, and thus perhaps seemed a wee bit perfunctory in these pages. These include: Margaret Thatcher, The Sex Pistols***, Apple, Madonna, Quentin Tarantino, Netflix, the Debt Industry. Still, what would a tapestry of post-modernism look like without such patches?
Jeffries is particularly good on post-modern irony, to which he returns time and again, and it is well worth quoting him here on that particular habit of mind (think of the cast of Seinfeld and their relations with and attitudes toward other human beings, and you'll get the drift):
Irony is necessarily subversive because it means the opposite of what it says; but the risk of post-modern irony is that it subverts not what it sets out to critique, but the critical agency of the message itself. Just as sarcasm is the lowest form of wit, irony is the feeblest kind of indictment. And yet it has become the go-to rhetorical stance of the post-modernist. By maintaining a cool, affectless stance, irony colludes, unconsciously or otherwise, with what it overtly disdains.Part of the reason for that detachment, of course, was that the post-moderns lacked any faith in the "Grand Narratives" of history, that they were part of a movement or class which could affect change toward a freer, more just, and equitable world. To that extent, perhaps we Millennials-and-older are still post-modernists, than, looking toward the young, to the Greta Thurberg's of the world, to have the spiritual or ethical strength to do what we could not? We who are a little bit like Martha Rosler, perhaps:
Martha Rosler’s work is worth reflecting on as a challenge to those who see post-modernism as a giddy, irresponsible, consumerist free-for-all in cahoots with a neoliberal system that creates unparalleled inequality. While some fellow artists wallowed in the degrading exchange between commerce and art, Rosler critiqued the society she lived in and at the same time reflected critically on the power or otherwise of art to change that society. For the neo-Marxist thinkers of the Frankfurt School, steeped in the culture of mid-century modernism, the point of art was to exist as an Other that indicted, though could not change, society. In the post-modern age, that otherness of art was no longer possible. Artists, even radical, critical ones like Rosler, were enmeshed, often knowingly, in cultural, economic and language systems they could scarcely change: under post-modernism, there could be no avant-garde.To give you a sense of how PoMo culture is "shot through" with the economic, I will end with a long quotation from Jeffries on the book The New Spirit of Capitalism by Luc Boltanski and Eve Chiapello (1999, but which is new to me), its title an allusion to that seminal work on capitalism which so influenced the young Thomas Pynchon, Max Weber's The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism and Other Writings:
They suppose there have been three spirits of capitalism, each suited to the demands of sustaining it during different eras. The first spirit of capitalism is the one that Weber recognised in the nineteenth century, whose hero was the Promethean bourgeois entrepreneur, who risked, speculated and innovated at work, but at home was distinguished by his determination to save, personal parsimony, and austere attachment to the family. In The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism, Weber argued that the values of hard work and progress were seen as endowed with moral and spiritual significance, and the refusal to waste money meant that a large proportion of the proceeds of capitalism could be reinvested in nascent businesses.The third spirit is one in which capitalism addresses us directly as individuals and promises us authenticity, freedom, lots and lots and lots of consumer satisfaction—and the internet:
The second spirit of capitalism, Boltanski and Chiapello argue, existed from about 1930 to 1960. Instead of the nineteenth- century entrepreneurial hero, the second spirit’s hero was the director of the large, centralised, bureaucratic corporation. In France, in particular, the spirit that sustained capitalism during this time involved long-term planning and rational organisation, fixed career structures, self-realisation linked to security, and a common interest in satisfying consumers and overcoming scarcity.
The central organisational figure of the contemporary world had thus become the network, and the new hero of capitalism was the network extender. And the network extender was a soulmate of Zygmunt Bauman’s liquid modern – one who is always at work forging connections, a human rhizome sending out sprouts everywhere; uprooted and anxious, yes, but also light and mobile, tolerant of difference, informal and friendly.We haven't yet reached the end of post-modernism, in other words (though it is said to have peaked in the wider discourse in 1997), much less the end of its speed-fueled**** dancing partner, neoliberalism. The ghost of the one still haunts the not-so-glitzy internet ballrooms and bricks-and-mortar strip malls and Maquiladora sweatshops of the other. Whatever comes next, I do hope it comes soon enough to save the planet rather than raze it more completely. Who knows? Not me, though the kids might. The kids are all right, pretty much.
What became lost above all in the rise of this new justificatory spirit of capitalism, and the supposedly anti-hierarchical notion of the network, was social class. Marxism relied on this hierarchical, arboreal concept in accounting for social division and capitalistic exploitation. But, like Marxism, class was purportedly obsolete. Social exclusion became the preferred term to account for the oppressed or excluded. It was as if the problem were not how capitalism systematically exploited workers, but that there were some in society who remained outside the network. The corollary was obvious: what needed to be done was not the overthrow of capitalism, but the extension of its network so that all fell within its grasp.
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December 10, 2021
Listen, I'll admit right up front that I am a little confused by this book.
Not by what it says - Jeffries is a very clear writer - but more what it wants to do (and be).
I have some thoughts in mind but I will have to wait a bit to see if I can articulate them well...
Not by what it says - Jeffries is a very clear writer - but more what it wants to do (and be).
I have some thoughts in mind but I will have to wait a bit to see if I can articulate them well...
August 22, 2024
Stuart Jeffries - Tudo, a Toda a Hora em Todo o Lado
Enciclopédico, repleto de informação, assim é o livro de Stuat Jeffries, um ensaio sociológico onde tenta explicar como foi possível a transição de um mundo racional, orientado pela ciência para um outro onde esta surge como outra dentro de uma multiplicidades e probabilidades. É um mundo onde o racional clássico entrou em decaimento para um novo mundo, onde à semelhança do descrito por Aldous Huxley, o importante é o espetáculo, a imagem e as sensações. E neste admirável mudo novo, a nova “Soma” é o digital e as conexões interpessoais, que tendo surgido, e nas palavras de Steve Jobs, como elemento de libertação e superação da condição humana, mais não fez que nos tornar nos idiotas que contestam no verbo qualquer limitação de liberdade mas cujo comportamento nos coloca como crentes e devotos das corporações que abominamos. Como foi possível chegar aqui?
Para Jeffries, tudo começou na década de 70. Com as crises sociais que se vinham a arrastar e expressas nos movimentos raciais de findos anos 60, no movimento Hyppie e a oposição activa contra a guerra no Vietnam, e as revoltas estudantis de finais de 60 (Maio de 68), foram movimento sociais que marcaram o fim de período de crescimento glorioso ocorrido após a IIGM. O evento major de então foi a guerra do Yom-Kippur e o embargo de petróleo ao ocidente, mas outros houve como o fim do acordo de Brtton-Woods, o abrandamento do crescimento populacional e económico. O mundo entrou em crise económica e social. Rapidamente de um período de gloria entrou-se em estagflação, desemprego, insustentabilidade do estado-social, aumento da pobreza, agravamento do fosso entre ricos e pobres.
A resposta a esta crise veio de dois lados. De um movimento sociocultural que ecoava as ideias dos pós-modernistas, que resumidamente argumentavam contra uma dicotomia do mundo e a procura de uma resposta resultante de uma hierarquia de premissas. Para estes há sempre mais que uma resposta possível, sendo a articulação e dependência entre pessoas muito mais rizómica que expressa nas formas de dependência moderna e pré-moderna. Esta corrente filosófica encabeçada por Gilles Deleuze, Félix Guattari e Jaques Derrira, acompanhada pelo desempenho de muitos outros as artes performativas, da literatura, da arquitetura, etc, colocaram o mundo intelectual de então num patamar, hoje definido por pós-moderno que é caracterizado por fragmentação da identidade, simulacro e hiper-realidade, relativismo cultural, desconstrução com o desmantelar de estruturas e significados tradicionais, e a cultura do consumismo. Só que estes movimentos quando surgem são movimentos subversivos, restritos a uma elite e apresentados dentro desses círculos.
Mas o mundo não é só cultura, da resposta dada por estes intelectuais outra houve dependente de conceitos económicos que já vinham dos anos 30 e 40. O movimento neoliberal. Este apoiado numa série de teóricos da economia (escola de Chicago), mas também de vítimas do regime comunista soviético e das suas purgas (Ayn Rand), deram a receita da terapia de choque para um mundo em crise. Os anos 80 e 90 são assim caracterizados pelo desinvestimento do Estado no sector social, num aumento da pobreza, no aumento do fosso entre muito ricos e pobres. A classe média inicia aqui a sua extinção, o mundo desindustrializa-se, o sector financeiro cresce, sem controlo e supervisão, arrastando todos (Estados e particulares) para dívida, muitas vezes insustentável, causa de falência particulares, mas também de Estados e o acentuar de uma clivagem social entre os que se encontravam do lado bom do sistema e os que se poderiam apresentar como suas vítimas. Finais do milénio, com a queda do muro de Berlin e a derrocada da utopia/distopia soviética, o mundo globalizou-se, a economia mundial cresceu, mas não dentro das mesmas premissas do período pós IIGM. O neoliberalismo e as suas receitas de um bom estado é menos estado, estenderam-se pelo planeta e levaram alguns como Francis Fukuyama a propor o fim da história dos movimentos económicos e socias. Propunha-se a “Pax Neoliberal”. Só que esta nunca chegou, as assimetrias sociais tenderam a agravar-se e o capital, em particular o capital financeiro que se alimentava da dívida e do crescimento, não podia acolher todos, e logo à partida estava condenado pela insustentabilidade de que se revestia.
Este mundo de crise social e económica foi ainda agravado pelas formas de neocolonialismo que tentaram impor noutras latitudes e longitudes as mesmas receitas que já estavam a falhar no mundo ocidental.
Sem o apoio do Estado, sem o amparo ideológico fornecido por uma esquerda marxista que pós derrocada comunista se encontrava completamente desorientada, as pessoas, os deserdados do neoliberalismo estavam disponíveis para se tornarem os prosélitos de uma nova religião. Encontram-na no mundo digital e nos media.
Só que o neoliberalismo é como um câncer vorás, que tudo consome, mas também “ouroboro” uma vez que se consome a si mesmo e a todos quantos cria em oposição. Foi assim que neste mundo de consumo, neste mundo virtual, um mundo que surge como de libertação e estímulo para as liberdades individuais, rapidamente se volta contra os que pretende libertar e os captura num mundo virtual, onde o preformativo é o principal, onde o importante são os meios e não os objectivos, onde a verdade é subjectiva, onde tudo o que for possível com uma mentira passa a ser verdade. O mundo de Trump, o mundo da pós-verdade, o mundo que resultou de “Tudo, a Toda a Hora, em Todo o Lado” e que dá título a este livro
Enciclopédico, repleto de informação, assim é o livro de Stuat Jeffries, um ensaio sociológico onde tenta explicar como foi possível a transição de um mundo racional, orientado pela ciência para um outro onde esta surge como outra dentro de uma multiplicidades e probabilidades. É um mundo onde o racional clássico entrou em decaimento para um novo mundo, onde à semelhança do descrito por Aldous Huxley, o importante é o espetáculo, a imagem e as sensações. E neste admirável mudo novo, a nova “Soma” é o digital e as conexões interpessoais, que tendo surgido, e nas palavras de Steve Jobs, como elemento de libertação e superação da condição humana, mais não fez que nos tornar nos idiotas que contestam no verbo qualquer limitação de liberdade mas cujo comportamento nos coloca como crentes e devotos das corporações que abominamos. Como foi possível chegar aqui?
Para Jeffries, tudo começou na década de 70. Com as crises sociais que se vinham a arrastar e expressas nos movimentos raciais de findos anos 60, no movimento Hyppie e a oposição activa contra a guerra no Vietnam, e as revoltas estudantis de finais de 60 (Maio de 68), foram movimento sociais que marcaram o fim de período de crescimento glorioso ocorrido após a IIGM. O evento major de então foi a guerra do Yom-Kippur e o embargo de petróleo ao ocidente, mas outros houve como o fim do acordo de Brtton-Woods, o abrandamento do crescimento populacional e económico. O mundo entrou em crise económica e social. Rapidamente de um período de gloria entrou-se em estagflação, desemprego, insustentabilidade do estado-social, aumento da pobreza, agravamento do fosso entre ricos e pobres.
A resposta a esta crise veio de dois lados. De um movimento sociocultural que ecoava as ideias dos pós-modernistas, que resumidamente argumentavam contra uma dicotomia do mundo e a procura de uma resposta resultante de uma hierarquia de premissas. Para estes há sempre mais que uma resposta possível, sendo a articulação e dependência entre pessoas muito mais rizómica que expressa nas formas de dependência moderna e pré-moderna. Esta corrente filosófica encabeçada por Gilles Deleuze, Félix Guattari e Jaques Derrira, acompanhada pelo desempenho de muitos outros as artes performativas, da literatura, da arquitetura, etc, colocaram o mundo intelectual de então num patamar, hoje definido por pós-moderno que é caracterizado por fragmentação da identidade, simulacro e hiper-realidade, relativismo cultural, desconstrução com o desmantelar de estruturas e significados tradicionais, e a cultura do consumismo. Só que estes movimentos quando surgem são movimentos subversivos, restritos a uma elite e apresentados dentro desses círculos.
Mas o mundo não é só cultura, da resposta dada por estes intelectuais outra houve dependente de conceitos económicos que já vinham dos anos 30 e 40. O movimento neoliberal. Este apoiado numa série de teóricos da economia (escola de Chicago), mas também de vítimas do regime comunista soviético e das suas purgas (Ayn Rand), deram a receita da terapia de choque para um mundo em crise. Os anos 80 e 90 são assim caracterizados pelo desinvestimento do Estado no sector social, num aumento da pobreza, no aumento do fosso entre muito ricos e pobres. A classe média inicia aqui a sua extinção, o mundo desindustrializa-se, o sector financeiro cresce, sem controlo e supervisão, arrastando todos (Estados e particulares) para dívida, muitas vezes insustentável, causa de falência particulares, mas também de Estados e o acentuar de uma clivagem social entre os que se encontravam do lado bom do sistema e os que se poderiam apresentar como suas vítimas. Finais do milénio, com a queda do muro de Berlin e a derrocada da utopia/distopia soviética, o mundo globalizou-se, a economia mundial cresceu, mas não dentro das mesmas premissas do período pós IIGM. O neoliberalismo e as suas receitas de um bom estado é menos estado, estenderam-se pelo planeta e levaram alguns como Francis Fukuyama a propor o fim da história dos movimentos económicos e socias. Propunha-se a “Pax Neoliberal”. Só que esta nunca chegou, as assimetrias sociais tenderam a agravar-se e o capital, em particular o capital financeiro que se alimentava da dívida e do crescimento, não podia acolher todos, e logo à partida estava condenado pela insustentabilidade de que se revestia.
Este mundo de crise social e económica foi ainda agravado pelas formas de neocolonialismo que tentaram impor noutras latitudes e longitudes as mesmas receitas que já estavam a falhar no mundo ocidental.
Sem o apoio do Estado, sem o amparo ideológico fornecido por uma esquerda marxista que pós derrocada comunista se encontrava completamente desorientada, as pessoas, os deserdados do neoliberalismo estavam disponíveis para se tornarem os prosélitos de uma nova religião. Encontram-na no mundo digital e nos media.
Só que o neoliberalismo é como um câncer vorás, que tudo consome, mas também “ouroboro” uma vez que se consome a si mesmo e a todos quantos cria em oposição. Foi assim que neste mundo de consumo, neste mundo virtual, um mundo que surge como de libertação e estímulo para as liberdades individuais, rapidamente se volta contra os que pretende libertar e os captura num mundo virtual, onde o preformativo é o principal, onde o importante são os meios e não os objectivos, onde a verdade é subjectiva, onde tudo o que for possível com uma mentira passa a ser verdade. O mundo de Trump, o mundo da pós-verdade, o mundo que resultou de “Tudo, a Toda a Hora, em Todo o Lado” e que dá título a este livro
November 30, 2021
A carrousel? A varieté show? A kaleidoscope? Suitable metaphors for this book aren’t easy to find. Suffice it to say that its title – preposterously over-the-top, hinting at endless, formless blather – matches the book’s content in a suitably ironic postmodern way, since its content is anything but blather. It entertains, but also demands that you pay close attention. There's an abundance of topics, provocatively juxtaposed and often put in detailed terms. You're told, for example, that Sid Vicious of the Sex Pistols could in fact hardly play his guitar. So there's no risk of getting drowned in po-mo abstractions. Focused on the USA and Britain in the latter half of the past century, the author takes close looks at cultural personages, styles and tropes. These range from punk rockers to performance artists and from pop divas like Madonna and photographers like Cindy Sherman (each in her own way trying out masks and sexual identities) to writers, filmmakers, architects and philosophers who exemplify postmodernism or try to make sense of it. Among the last-noted, he deftly exposes the political vacuity of postmodern gurus such as the philosophers Judith Butler, Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari. Those are among the book’s strongest sections. Among the weaker bits is a sub-chapter on television and the now shopworn idea that we are ‘amusing ourselves to death’. The closing chapter gives a succinct and potent argument of how postmodernism, supposedly subversive of the prevailing order, has been confounded and co-opted as the “cultural handmaiden” of today’s neoliberal system in its highly successful strategies of titillation and domination.
So with some qualifications, my remarks (“a helluva good book”) posted on Goodreads when I was a halfway through, still hold.
So with some qualifications, my remarks (“a helluva good book”) posted on Goodreads when I was a halfway through, still hold.
January 21, 2023
Alright, Stuart. I went back through my notes and I think I have a handle on the problem. It's a defect in your definition of "postmodern." No, no, it doesn't run in the family, and it's not your fault, but it's a hazard for people in your line of work, and if we leave this unchecked it can cause significant problems in the long run.
The thesis of this book is that post-modernism originates under neoliberalism in the 1970s, when world governments under Nixon and Thatcher reigned in state intervention and attempted to encourage the free market. Postmodernism became the primary cultural movement of this era, encompassing music, visual arts, architecture, media, and more.
[Note that I am already tripping over this thesis because I come from an art historical background and we tend to trace postmodern art back to the early 1960s and the beginnings of pop art, but whatever, we will play this your way I guess.]
We run into problems right away. Jeffries says that "if neoliberalism was to succeed, it needed a cultural movement to support it: post-modernism was able to supply it." I am not convinced of this connection, which is a shame since his entire argument relies upon it. The political and economic forces of neoliberalism, I am thinking in particular of Thatcher and Nixon here, were not great lovers of postmodern art, culture, and media. They were frequently in direct opposition to it. How, then, can these artefacts of postmodern being in "support" of neoliberalism? Many of them are in direct opposition to neoliberal politics, but Jeffries' critique of these seems to just be that they weren't very good at being in opposition. Weak.
Another instance of this disconnect is when Jeffries discusses Poundbury, Prince Charles' planned cottagecore paradise. Jeffries states that Poundbury's combination of various architectural influences from the past makes it "impeccably post-modern." No, it does not. Reactionary conservative desires to return to pre-modern aesthetics is not "post-modern." Is Pugin "post-modern" now? To me, the distinction here is between an earnest desire to return to an imaginary prelapsarian era before industrialization ruined all our morals, and an ironic, playful "appropriation" of previous eras' aesthetics for new ends. I think Charles is the least ironic person on Earth, personally, and he is certainly not postmodern.
This is actually a reoccurring issue for Jeffries, that he thinks that something is postmodern when it's actually pretty common throughout history. One of his flashpoints for the beginnings of postmodernism in the 70s is artists' adopting different personas (he cites David Bowie and Cindy Sherman.) Artists adopting different personas is not new in the 70s, Stuart. Another instance is he says that under neoliberalism class was redefined to emphasize culture, but if you have read anything about history, you'll know that class has always been cultural, and that wealthy classes are always re-inventing cultural norms to distinguish between themselves and the nouveau-riche.
To add just a fun bit of sprinkling on top, Stuart Jeffries sprinkles in a healthy dose of idiotic nonsense about postmodern identity politics ruining progress. He argues that "queer theory" and "new feminism" are "dressing [themselves] in drag and beguiling itself at the results, while the struggle against patriarchal power is challenged." Christ on a cracker you are both ignorant and annoying. Shut up.
You do not have to read this, promise.
The thesis of this book is that post-modernism originates under neoliberalism in the 1970s, when world governments under Nixon and Thatcher reigned in state intervention and attempted to encourage the free market. Postmodernism became the primary cultural movement of this era, encompassing music, visual arts, architecture, media, and more.
[Note that I am already tripping over this thesis because I come from an art historical background and we tend to trace postmodern art back to the early 1960s and the beginnings of pop art, but whatever, we will play this your way I guess.]
We run into problems right away. Jeffries says that "if neoliberalism was to succeed, it needed a cultural movement to support it: post-modernism was able to supply it." I am not convinced of this connection, which is a shame since his entire argument relies upon it. The political and economic forces of neoliberalism, I am thinking in particular of Thatcher and Nixon here, were not great lovers of postmodern art, culture, and media. They were frequently in direct opposition to it. How, then, can these artefacts of postmodern being in "support" of neoliberalism? Many of them are in direct opposition to neoliberal politics, but Jeffries' critique of these seems to just be that they weren't very good at being in opposition. Weak.
Another instance of this disconnect is when Jeffries discusses Poundbury, Prince Charles' planned cottagecore paradise. Jeffries states that Poundbury's combination of various architectural influences from the past makes it "impeccably post-modern." No, it does not. Reactionary conservative desires to return to pre-modern aesthetics is not "post-modern." Is Pugin "post-modern" now? To me, the distinction here is between an earnest desire to return to an imaginary prelapsarian era before industrialization ruined all our morals, and an ironic, playful "appropriation" of previous eras' aesthetics for new ends. I think Charles is the least ironic person on Earth, personally, and he is certainly not postmodern.
This is actually a reoccurring issue for Jeffries, that he thinks that something is postmodern when it's actually pretty common throughout history. One of his flashpoints for the beginnings of postmodernism in the 70s is artists' adopting different personas (he cites David Bowie and Cindy Sherman.) Artists adopting different personas is not new in the 70s, Stuart. Another instance is he says that under neoliberalism class was redefined to emphasize culture, but if you have read anything about history, you'll know that class has always been cultural, and that wealthy classes are always re-inventing cultural norms to distinguish between themselves and the nouveau-riche.
To add just a fun bit of sprinkling on top, Stuart Jeffries sprinkles in a healthy dose of idiotic nonsense about postmodern identity politics ruining progress. He argues that "queer theory" and "new feminism" are "dressing [themselves] in drag and beguiling itself at the results, while the struggle against patriarchal power is challenged." Christ on a cracker you are both ignorant and annoying. Shut up.
You do not have to read this, promise.
April 4, 2022
What I loved about this book (and what was mostly new to me) were the sections that compared political and economic shifts with social movements and city planning - even architecture. For example, Jeffries' contrast of Fukuyama's "End of History", Rushdie's "The Satanic Verses" (and subsequent ordeal), artists' responses to 9/11, gender politics and "white flight" all together in context (Chapter 7, "Breaking Binaries") was exciting.
There were many highlights and great moments, but I never got a sense of what this book was meant to accomplish or what I should be taking away from the conclusion. It's all hindsight. Also there was an excess of cultural analysis - marching yet again through the well-trod territory from Bowie to Madonna, from Hitchcock to American Psycho. Younger readers will surely enjoy Jeffries' introduction to these landmarks, but I have been here before, and my appetite for more like this is limited:
"In life though, Diana was a virtuosa of the secular confessional like Chris Kraus, finding liberation in seizing control, wresting narrative and sexual power from the male/author/god, be it a prince called Charles or a professor called Dick. In so doing, they became outliers for the sprit of self-revelation and self-disclosure that would, in a few years, make social media, such as Facebook, Instagram and Twitter, not just spaces for self-performance and self-disclosure, but massively successful businesses."
There were many highlights and great moments, but I never got a sense of what this book was meant to accomplish or what I should be taking away from the conclusion. It's all hindsight. Also there was an excess of cultural analysis - marching yet again through the well-trod territory from Bowie to Madonna, from Hitchcock to American Psycho. Younger readers will surely enjoy Jeffries' introduction to these landmarks, but I have been here before, and my appetite for more like this is limited:
"In life though, Diana was a virtuosa of the secular confessional like Chris Kraus, finding liberation in seizing control, wresting narrative and sexual power from the male/author/god, be it a prince called Charles or a professor called Dick. In so doing, they became outliers for the sprit of self-revelation and self-disclosure that would, in a few years, make social media, such as Facebook, Instagram and Twitter, not just spaces for self-performance and self-disclosure, but massively successful businesses."
January 18, 2023
I can’t handle the pressure anymore, so I’m going to start using Goodreads, and hopefully it motivates more reading. Here’s the first book I’ve read this year.
“The ideology of freedom and choice is part of the misdirection industry: we suppose that we are freely choosing to buy particular brands of margarine, just as we suppose that Netflix offers us the freedom to choose. But, as the Frankfurt School thinkers Max Horkheimer and Theodor Adorno wrote in Dialectic of Enlightenment, we have only ‘the freedom to choose what was always the same’.”
If you know anything about me, it’s that I’m a student of philosophy most intrigued by the postmoderns. I was attracted by the thought of standing firmly against the values the West inherited from Plato and later the Enlightenment. I couldn’t put my finger on it, and I still can’t in the way I want to, but I felt that there must be a way to take the postmodern dissolution of the self or truth and do something with it. To make a politics out of it or some provocative but salient critique of modernity, something that hadn’t been said before.
This book, as a survey of postmodernism, and especially the cultural production that accompanied it, is a guide on how others have done exactly that. I learned about artists I hadn’t heard of, like Cindy Sherman and Sophie Calle, and I was met with some familiar faces, like Deleuze, Lyotard, Bowie, and Madonna. Jeffries arranged all these nodes into new intellectual syntheses that made me think of postmodernism in a whole new light. Its accesible language and mix of the popular with the avant-garde breaks postmodernism down into its many constituent parts, which the philosophers themselves would hardly give.
I did sometimes think the language was too simple or repetitive. I guess that did help with comprehension, but I would’ve loved to see Jeffries add more of his own stylistic flair. I also loved how it focused on cultural production, and while it did give an overview of some of PoMo’s most well-known thinkers, I could always do with some more philosophy. There were times that his jumps from one subject to another seemed abrasive and confusing, but I guess that’s the most postmodern aspect of the book.
Nonetheless, for anyone interested in the past few decades of philosophy and cultural production, I highly recommend this fun and informative review.
“The ideology of freedom and choice is part of the misdirection industry: we suppose that we are freely choosing to buy particular brands of margarine, just as we suppose that Netflix offers us the freedom to choose. But, as the Frankfurt School thinkers Max Horkheimer and Theodor Adorno wrote in Dialectic of Enlightenment, we have only ‘the freedom to choose what was always the same’.”
If you know anything about me, it’s that I’m a student of philosophy most intrigued by the postmoderns. I was attracted by the thought of standing firmly against the values the West inherited from Plato and later the Enlightenment. I couldn’t put my finger on it, and I still can’t in the way I want to, but I felt that there must be a way to take the postmodern dissolution of the self or truth and do something with it. To make a politics out of it or some provocative but salient critique of modernity, something that hadn’t been said before.
This book, as a survey of postmodernism, and especially the cultural production that accompanied it, is a guide on how others have done exactly that. I learned about artists I hadn’t heard of, like Cindy Sherman and Sophie Calle, and I was met with some familiar faces, like Deleuze, Lyotard, Bowie, and Madonna. Jeffries arranged all these nodes into new intellectual syntheses that made me think of postmodernism in a whole new light. Its accesible language and mix of the popular with the avant-garde breaks postmodernism down into its many constituent parts, which the philosophers themselves would hardly give.
I did sometimes think the language was too simple or repetitive. I guess that did help with comprehension, but I would’ve loved to see Jeffries add more of his own stylistic flair. I also loved how it focused on cultural production, and while it did give an overview of some of PoMo’s most well-known thinkers, I could always do with some more philosophy. There were times that his jumps from one subject to another seemed abrasive and confusing, but I guess that’s the most postmodern aspect of the book.
Nonetheless, for anyone interested in the past few decades of philosophy and cultural production, I highly recommend this fun and informative review.
September 13, 2022
Each chapter felt a little like Jeffries was shaking an old-man fist and yelling, “Those darn kids and their postmodernism!”
I had fun reading his curated history of postmodern art, theory, and culture and his argument that these are related to (responsible for?) the rise of neoliberalism and the collapse of society’s morals. But I’m not convinced. Here’s why.
Jeffries admits “postmodernism” is difficult to define. This makes it easy for him to define it himself as something sinister, vacuous, and immature. With this definition in place, he has an easy time arguing that postmodern art and theory are sinister, vacuous, and immature.
He writes, “Perhaps post-modernism is not dead; perhaps instead, we’re all post-modernist now.” But if we’re all postmodernists, postmodernism must have a positive side. Some of us are still creating substantive art, aren’t we? People are still fighting for positive social change. People are still genuinely searching for meaning. But they’re doing these things as postmodernists. They’re doing these things not in spite of, but through their postmodern lenses (which happen to be their most authentic lenses).
Postmodernism has definitely shifted values. Society is changing in many scary and detrimental ways. But not all of these changes are negative. Just because something scares you doesn’t mean it’s detrimental. Many of those darn postmodern kids are learning to stand up against tyrannical, traditional “truths.” In postmodern fashion, they’re revealing the multiplicity of perspectives—perspectives that have been traditionally sacrificed at the alter of supposed objectivity. Perhaps, in so doing, they’re making social progress.
Don’t worry Jeffries, the kids are gonna be alright.
I had fun reading his curated history of postmodern art, theory, and culture and his argument that these are related to (responsible for?) the rise of neoliberalism and the collapse of society’s morals. But I’m not convinced. Here’s why.
Jeffries admits “postmodernism” is difficult to define. This makes it easy for him to define it himself as something sinister, vacuous, and immature. With this definition in place, he has an easy time arguing that postmodern art and theory are sinister, vacuous, and immature.
He writes, “Perhaps post-modernism is not dead; perhaps instead, we’re all post-modernist now.” But if we’re all postmodernists, postmodernism must have a positive side. Some of us are still creating substantive art, aren’t we? People are still fighting for positive social change. People are still genuinely searching for meaning. But they’re doing these things as postmodernists. They’re doing these things not in spite of, but through their postmodern lenses (which happen to be their most authentic lenses).
Postmodernism has definitely shifted values. Society is changing in many scary and detrimental ways. But not all of these changes are negative. Just because something scares you doesn’t mean it’s detrimental. Many of those darn postmodern kids are learning to stand up against tyrannical, traditional “truths.” In postmodern fashion, they’re revealing the multiplicity of perspectives—perspectives that have been traditionally sacrificed at the alter of supposed objectivity. Perhaps, in so doing, they’re making social progress.
Don’t worry Jeffries, the kids are gonna be alright.
February 12, 2023
Jeffries analysis touches on a lot of interesting phenomena, but I think his thesis is fundamentally incorrect. The work is worth reading because it is very accessible for a work on postmodernism.
Jeffries central claim is that postmodernism has destroyed political consciousness and fragmented the body politic into hyper-individual consumerists. But postmodernism isn't an enabler of neoliberalism. The trends he's bemoaning have biological, technological, sociological, historical, and demographic causes that can't be unwound by doing away with bad ideas like postmodernism (side note - neoliberalism is overall a net positive for humanity).
Jeffries doesn't understand that market integration in a long-run, deep trend and that he's commenting on epiphenomenon that aren't causally relevant. It make all the political economy in this book look extremely amateurish. Once the market bonanza starts only cataclysm can reset things - hence why lefty social theorist love the post-war era so much. Jeffries would do well to acquaint himself with "capitalist realism" and to actually try and make a counterclaim against Fukuyama's End of History hypothesis (since he mistakingly thinks Fukuyama is wrong). Also, this book almost entirely ignores postmodernism as an aesthetic philosophy that emerged from linguistics and literary criticism.
Jeffries central claim is that postmodernism has destroyed political consciousness and fragmented the body politic into hyper-individual consumerists. But postmodernism isn't an enabler of neoliberalism. The trends he's bemoaning have biological, technological, sociological, historical, and demographic causes that can't be unwound by doing away with bad ideas like postmodernism (side note - neoliberalism is overall a net positive for humanity).
Jeffries doesn't understand that market integration in a long-run, deep trend and that he's commenting on epiphenomenon that aren't causally relevant. It make all the political economy in this book look extremely amateurish. Once the market bonanza starts only cataclysm can reset things - hence why lefty social theorist love the post-war era so much. Jeffries would do well to acquaint himself with "capitalist realism" and to actually try and make a counterclaim against Fukuyama's End of History hypothesis (since he mistakingly thinks Fukuyama is wrong). Also, this book almost entirely ignores postmodernism as an aesthetic philosophy that emerged from linguistics and literary criticism.
December 1, 2021
Allright, Jeffries work relies on a large amount of pop culture but I think serves as an excellent partial introduction to contemporary and recent past critical theory. Everything, All the Time, Everywhere makes some bold and at times overreaching claims - but the helpful framing of neoliberal experiments as more disruptive than purported punk or shock culture I think is a valuable way to move forward. Jeffries captures some of the Dark Deleuzian spirit of move fast and break things that has created our non-inevitable present.
April 23, 2022
Interessant boek over postmodernisme als culturele voorwaarde voor neoliberalisme. Aan de hand van heel veel korte essays laat Jeffries mooi de wisselwerking tussen beiden zien.
Toch wringt het af en toe. Heb het idee dat hij vaak het postmodernisme de schuld geeft voor uitwassen van het laat-kapitalisme/neoliberalisme, met name: waarom heeft iedereen het gevoel dat het systeem waarin we leven de enige manier is om onze samenleving in te richten? Jeffries wijst naar postmodernisme, ik zou zelf wijzen naar, zoals Mark Fisher het noemt: Capitalist Realism
Toch wringt het af en toe. Heb het idee dat hij vaak het postmodernisme de schuld geeft voor uitwassen van het laat-kapitalisme/neoliberalisme, met name: waarom heeft iedereen het gevoel dat het systeem waarin we leven de enige manier is om onze samenleving in te richten? Jeffries wijst naar postmodernisme, ik zou zelf wijzen naar, zoals Mark Fisher het noemt: Capitalist Realism
June 14, 2022
An incredibly insightful book. Look no further for insight into post-modernism.
However, I think the last chapter could have been more focused, and I would have liked an extended conclusion that ties all the chapters together and really argues for the link between post-modernism and neoliberialsm.
I'm sure this will be a book with multiple editions in the future.
However, I think the last chapter could have been more focused, and I would have liked an extended conclusion that ties all the chapters together and really argues for the link between post-modernism and neoliberialsm.
I'm sure this will be a book with multiple editions in the future.
February 27, 2022
Pretty okay as an introduction (or refresher course) on the relationship between postmodern aesthetics/philosophy and neoliberal economics – but also rather obvious in its analyses, repetitive in its use of theory, and often insufferable in the author’s attempt at a jokey “lightweight” tone.
April 3, 2023
I’m surprised I made it to the end. There’s so many surface level overviews about cliched subjects that the actual meat of the book is well hidden. To be fair the book is very readable and there’s probably good book here if you cut out loads of it.
February 4, 2025
It starts off well, and has a good concrete analysis of the economic origins of postmodernism. The book does a great job of connecting postmodernism to neoliberalism as the unwitting but enabling ideology of Thatcher and Regan’s Neoliberal onslaught. But then falls into the trap of endlessly naming off cultural artefacts that are “emblematic” and “symptomatic” of postmodernism, without returning to give us a concrete analysis of where postmodernism is changing, or how it can be challenged. That said, it’s an essential read for anyone hoping to get to grips with this seemingly mercurial topic, especially the first few chapters.
July 2, 2024
Más importante que muchas otras cosas. Librazo total.
January 20, 2022
Sigh. This was such a good book, I literally can’t put it down, but a few things confuse me. Another reviewer has expressed their confusion, which I share, about what Jeffries wants to do with this book, which is weird considering it’s published by Verso, whose other books are normally quite clear and unabashed in their agenda.
The second thing is his kumbaya narrative about the world having too much irony and wit and too little kindness and compassion. Why is he so overtly critical about irony and wit when it’s used to subvert power structures and point out absurdities in reality? I for one think irony and wit are indispensable to pointing out contradictions (both in the common meaning of the word and the Marxist sense) and hypocrisies in modern society. Look at leftist memes for e.g.
Third is that this stinks of white cis straight male Marxism. The reason why pomo was and is so important to my generation, and was and is still taught in classrooms as he so rightly observed, is that it freed people living on the margins (queer and trans people; non-whites; people from colonised countries; Indigenous and First Peoples) from the notion of “objective” truth, which is a concept constructed out of Western enlightenment. Davi Kopenawa’s writing is as important as, say, Levi-Strauss, or Li Bai, or etc… And freeing truth from its objectivity meant that it destabilises existing power structures and epistemic hegemonies.
I used to think phenomenology and ontology is bullshit, but I realised the terms themselves are bullshit, not the idea behind it. Walkabouts and vision quests represent knowledges embedded in the landscape that one “experiences” and not “know” — I think at this point I’m convinced that knowledge itself is a desperate act of ownership and control, stemming from an inherently imperial insecurity and fear.
Finally, and maybe tied back to my first point, is that, bro, you wrote a very postmodern book that called Thatcher postmodern, which is also like, huh? If postmodernism means all possible interpretations, my interpretation is that Thatcher was most definitely not postmodern. It is wholly possible to conceive of postmodernism separate from its entanglements and origins in neoliberalism and capitalism. What it is is merely a heuristic, a way of seeing that destabilises “conventional wisdom”, to use Galbraith’s term, and gain clarity.
You can be a postmodernist and a Marxist… although, I guess you have to close your eyes to many elements of both. But I guess that’s also postmodern in itself. I also don’t particularly enjoy how most of his references are Western, and he completely ignores emerging realms like VR, Harraway’s bionic feminism, and the PC music so very integral to our generation — and indubitably, overtly even, postmodern.
But ya, I believe that today the playful nature, the “wit and irony” in fact, of pomo is disappearing and being subsumed under a viciously capitalist agenda. Look at the rubbish that NFTs are. I also don’t know how to resolve the problem of extreme relativism. But don’t pin it all on postmodernism. Use it instead as a progressive heuristic.
- Also, isn’t it Wachowski Sisters?
The second thing is his kumbaya narrative about the world having too much irony and wit and too little kindness and compassion. Why is he so overtly critical about irony and wit when it’s used to subvert power structures and point out absurdities in reality? I for one think irony and wit are indispensable to pointing out contradictions (both in the common meaning of the word and the Marxist sense) and hypocrisies in modern society. Look at leftist memes for e.g.
Third is that this stinks of white cis straight male Marxism. The reason why pomo was and is so important to my generation, and was and is still taught in classrooms as he so rightly observed, is that it freed people living on the margins (queer and trans people; non-whites; people from colonised countries; Indigenous and First Peoples) from the notion of “objective” truth, which is a concept constructed out of Western enlightenment. Davi Kopenawa’s writing is as important as, say, Levi-Strauss, or Li Bai, or etc… And freeing truth from its objectivity meant that it destabilises existing power structures and epistemic hegemonies.
I used to think phenomenology and ontology is bullshit, but I realised the terms themselves are bullshit, not the idea behind it. Walkabouts and vision quests represent knowledges embedded in the landscape that one “experiences” and not “know” — I think at this point I’m convinced that knowledge itself is a desperate act of ownership and control, stemming from an inherently imperial insecurity and fear.
Finally, and maybe tied back to my first point, is that, bro, you wrote a very postmodern book that called Thatcher postmodern, which is also like, huh? If postmodernism means all possible interpretations, my interpretation is that Thatcher was most definitely not postmodern. It is wholly possible to conceive of postmodernism separate from its entanglements and origins in neoliberalism and capitalism. What it is is merely a heuristic, a way of seeing that destabilises “conventional wisdom”, to use Galbraith’s term, and gain clarity.
You can be a postmodernist and a Marxist… although, I guess you have to close your eyes to many elements of both. But I guess that’s also postmodern in itself. I also don’t particularly enjoy how most of his references are Western, and he completely ignores emerging realms like VR, Harraway’s bionic feminism, and the PC music so very integral to our generation — and indubitably, overtly even, postmodern.
But ya, I believe that today the playful nature, the “wit and irony” in fact, of pomo is disappearing and being subsumed under a viciously capitalist agenda. Look at the rubbish that NFTs are. I also don’t know how to resolve the problem of extreme relativism. But don’t pin it all on postmodernism. Use it instead as a progressive heuristic.
- Also, isn’t it Wachowski Sisters?
February 22, 2022
This thing is incredibly dopey, essentially long-form clickbait.
Jeffries begins by defining both neoliberalism and postmodernism as vaguely as possible (literally invoking Wittgenstein to justify a wildly open definition for postmodernism) and then proceeds through 10 chapters of three "things" each. In each chapter he is allegedly drawing connections between the three things, each of which is postmodern, or neoliberal, or maybe both, or whatever, it doesn't actually matter. It's like a terrible version of "Connections with James Burke."
In each chapter he fails to draw any meaningful connections, apparently hoping that writing about things next to one another will do.
He has no thesis, beyond "if you squint, maybe postmodernism and neoliberalism have some sort of relationship maybe something about consumerism?" and makes no argument. It's just an endless wall of superficial references. Jeffries notes that some people say postmodernism ended with 9/11 but that others disagree. Does Jeffries have an opinion? No. Indeed, his working definition of postmodernism is so vague and broad that, arguably, postmodernism began in Africa 20,000 years ago and will be with us until our race becomes extinct.
The game is clear: he's offering his readers a bunch of intellectualism-bait. A certain category of readers will get little doses of dopamine every paragraph or two "oo, I recognize the name Barthes" or "yes, I do think Koons is overrated, because I read that in The Guardian last week" and so on. That's all there is here.
It makes a certain class of kind of dopey kinda-sorta-well-read reader feel very clever, and as if they're really getting the inside story. In the end, if you're not paying attention, you'll definitely feel like you've learned the Ugly Truth about the Deep Connections between postmodernism and neoliberal capitalism. Pressed, you will find yourself unable to actually explain any of it, and will just tell people to read the book.
It will make some readers feel dumb, because they'll worry that they don't actually know anything about Wittgenstein, which is terribly unfair because you don't need to know anything about Wittgenstein to read this book.
And, if you're actually paying attention, and actually know stuff, you will want to throw the book across the room pretty much the entire time.
Just awful.
Jeffries begins by defining both neoliberalism and postmodernism as vaguely as possible (literally invoking Wittgenstein to justify a wildly open definition for postmodernism) and then proceeds through 10 chapters of three "things" each. In each chapter he is allegedly drawing connections between the three things, each of which is postmodern, or neoliberal, or maybe both, or whatever, it doesn't actually matter. It's like a terrible version of "Connections with James Burke."
In each chapter he fails to draw any meaningful connections, apparently hoping that writing about things next to one another will do.
He has no thesis, beyond "if you squint, maybe postmodernism and neoliberalism have some sort of relationship maybe something about consumerism?" and makes no argument. It's just an endless wall of superficial references. Jeffries notes that some people say postmodernism ended with 9/11 but that others disagree. Does Jeffries have an opinion? No. Indeed, his working definition of postmodernism is so vague and broad that, arguably, postmodernism began in Africa 20,000 years ago and will be with us until our race becomes extinct.
The game is clear: he's offering his readers a bunch of intellectualism-bait. A certain category of readers will get little doses of dopamine every paragraph or two "oo, I recognize the name Barthes" or "yes, I do think Koons is overrated, because I read that in The Guardian last week" and so on. That's all there is here.
It makes a certain class of kind of dopey kinda-sorta-well-read reader feel very clever, and as if they're really getting the inside story. In the end, if you're not paying attention, you'll definitely feel like you've learned the Ugly Truth about the Deep Connections between postmodernism and neoliberal capitalism. Pressed, you will find yourself unable to actually explain any of it, and will just tell people to read the book.
It will make some readers feel dumb, because they'll worry that they don't actually know anything about Wittgenstein, which is terribly unfair because you don't need to know anything about Wittgenstein to read this book.
And, if you're actually paying attention, and actually know stuff, you will want to throw the book across the room pretty much the entire time.
Just awful.
May 4, 2023
I enjoyed this book but when my partner asked me what it was about, I couldn't explain it if that says anything.
January 16, 2022
The first moment when “postmodernism” enters the philosophical lexicon was in 1979, with the publication of The Postmodern Condition: A Report on Knowledge by Jean-François Lyotard. In his book, he employs Ludwig Wittgenstein’s model of language games and concept from the speech act theory to analyse a transformation of the game rules for science, art, and literature since the nineteenth century, or in other words, since the modernist period. His text is some kind of combination between the languages of the expert and the philosopher which differs significantly in which the expert knows both what he knows and what he doesn’t know, whilst the philosopher knows neither yet poses his questions. Through this analogy, Lyotard attempts an experiment to understand the value of objectivity in knowledge in relation to reality. This is ever truer now with the rise of digital technology in which messages are coded differently from the previous age, and we also see reality with a new sensibility with a new coding process and the reshaping of information.
Lyotard’s view is only one of the postmodernist scholars that the author quotes in this book. Postmodernism is all about bringing more freedom, decreasing boundaries, and valuing individualism as opposed to collective identity, at least in my understanding of the term. One of the most interesting features of Stuart Jeffries’ analyses is the way he employs various examples from pop culture icons to explain what postmodernism is all about and how we arrived at this point. He starts with a striking example from the work of artist Jenny Holzer, with her LED installation at New York Times Square in 1982 which contains the text “Protect Me From What I Want”. Holzer experimented using texts, making narrative and commentary part of visual objects in public spaces. The texts are subversive, aim to provoke the viewers, and they led to multi interpretations with their simplicities. They’re at the same time political, while also non-political, but at the same moment portraying postmodern experience that’s relatable to the viewers. Stuart Jeffries doesn’t begin his discussion with various theories, yet it invites dialogues to the readers through various examples taken from something close to everyday’s life.
Another example offered by the author in this book is David Bowie’s performance, as he took up the stage as Ziggy Stardust, during the time he toured to promote the 1972 LP The Rise and Fall of Ziggy Stardust and the Spider from Mars. Ziggy Stardust is a notorious character that defies the previously popular icon in the entertainment industry. An alien, as opposed to a human. Androgynous, as opposed to the traditional male/female division. Theatrical, as opposed to the true face of the icon. Bowie through Ziggy Stardust invited his audience to transcend the existing boundaries and invent a new identity for themselves, which is not static as we know that Bowie was a musical chameleon. He changed a lot of time during his musical career, both in his costumes and genre, from Major Tom, Ziggy Stardust, Aladdin Sane, Diamond Dog, The Thin White Duke, his cool Berlin period, up until the day he staged his death as a tragic performance when Blackstar, his last album was released a few days before his death in 2016. Yet the numerous examples that Stuart Jeffries offers is also one of the weaknesses of this book, for lay readers will get confused with what constitutes postmodernism in itself.
But above all, this is a book of questions rather than an explanation in itself. What constitutes postmodernism, and how humanities transformed from the age of modernism to postmodernism are a few questions posed by this book. Postmodernism is very much present in our daily life, spanning from architecture, art, literature, science, even the way our consciousness functions with the advent of digital technology. The disruption is something that happened on a rapid scale, often with the previous generation, left dumbfounded with the disappearance of the previously-held values. It’s a subversive concept, destroying the previous structure of society, yet at the same time also liberating for many. And I think Stuart Jeffries has successfully presented postmodernism as a phenomenon, yet one question still remains: What to do after we understand postmodernism?
Lyotard’s view is only one of the postmodernist scholars that the author quotes in this book. Postmodernism is all about bringing more freedom, decreasing boundaries, and valuing individualism as opposed to collective identity, at least in my understanding of the term. One of the most interesting features of Stuart Jeffries’ analyses is the way he employs various examples from pop culture icons to explain what postmodernism is all about and how we arrived at this point. He starts with a striking example from the work of artist Jenny Holzer, with her LED installation at New York Times Square in 1982 which contains the text “Protect Me From What I Want”. Holzer experimented using texts, making narrative and commentary part of visual objects in public spaces. The texts are subversive, aim to provoke the viewers, and they led to multi interpretations with their simplicities. They’re at the same time political, while also non-political, but at the same moment portraying postmodern experience that’s relatable to the viewers. Stuart Jeffries doesn’t begin his discussion with various theories, yet it invites dialogues to the readers through various examples taken from something close to everyday’s life.
Another example offered by the author in this book is David Bowie’s performance, as he took up the stage as Ziggy Stardust, during the time he toured to promote the 1972 LP The Rise and Fall of Ziggy Stardust and the Spider from Mars. Ziggy Stardust is a notorious character that defies the previously popular icon in the entertainment industry. An alien, as opposed to a human. Androgynous, as opposed to the traditional male/female division. Theatrical, as opposed to the true face of the icon. Bowie through Ziggy Stardust invited his audience to transcend the existing boundaries and invent a new identity for themselves, which is not static as we know that Bowie was a musical chameleon. He changed a lot of time during his musical career, both in his costumes and genre, from Major Tom, Ziggy Stardust, Aladdin Sane, Diamond Dog, The Thin White Duke, his cool Berlin period, up until the day he staged his death as a tragic performance when Blackstar, his last album was released a few days before his death in 2016. Yet the numerous examples that Stuart Jeffries offers is also one of the weaknesses of this book, for lay readers will get confused with what constitutes postmodernism in itself.
But above all, this is a book of questions rather than an explanation in itself. What constitutes postmodernism, and how humanities transformed from the age of modernism to postmodernism are a few questions posed by this book. Postmodernism is very much present in our daily life, spanning from architecture, art, literature, science, even the way our consciousness functions with the advent of digital technology. The disruption is something that happened on a rapid scale, often with the previous generation, left dumbfounded with the disappearance of the previously-held values. It’s a subversive concept, destroying the previous structure of society, yet at the same time also liberating for many. And I think Stuart Jeffries has successfully presented postmodernism as a phenomenon, yet one question still remains: What to do after we understand postmodernism?
September 10, 2023
Es un libro interesante por conectar cosas y abrir perspectivas. Lo que parece la temática del libro -la postmodernidad- acaba siendo una excusa para hablar de neoliberalismo, posverdad y cómo un sistema social y económico que debería estar agonizando nos anestesia instando al consumismo, a no saber qué es verdad, al endeudamiento, a la asunción de sorprendentes totalitarismos y a la exposición voluntaria de todo lo que debería ser la esfera personal y privada de forma impúdica. Interesante porque conecta aspectos artísticos, sociales y económicos para reforzar las tendencias que expone.
January 27, 2022
As the name suggests ... a broad exploration of postmodernism characterised by a sense of both bricolage and juxtaposition, linked through chronological order to the type of grand narrative that PoMo refutes.
This probably wouldn't be everybody's cup of tea but I devoured it, enjoyed it, and recommend it.
This probably wouldn't be everybody's cup of tea but I devoured it, enjoyed it, and recommend it.
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September 24, 2022Lots of interesting ideas, with surprising connections drawn — but, for me, some chapters don’t seem to ever arrive to a convincing point-of-view, while others reach a convincing argument, only to abruptly abandon it for a new topic. Essentially, could’ve done without some chapters, and spent much longer with others?
August 1, 2023
Las únicas partes valiosas de este panfleto son aquellas en las que explica el pensamiento de otros, nada de cosecha propia es de provecho. Resulta irónico que en esta caza de brujas posmodernas el más posmoderno de todos sea el autor aunque él no lo sepa.
March 18, 2024
Un libro muy bien fundamentado y con una amplísima variedad de fuentes. Sin embargo (apreciación personal) se me ha hecho algo chapa terminarlo, y la tesis de vincular posmodernidad y neoliberalismo cada vez me convence menos.
June 24, 2024
Можно набрать себе много материалов на чтение. Но на вопрос «как мы стали постмодернистами» книга не отвечает
Подача автора очень спорная, как будто нет анализа и объективности, которой от такой книги хочется.
Подача автора очень спорная, как будто нет анализа и объективности, которой от такой книги хочется.
April 6, 2025
'Once irony was a rebel yell; now it is spiritually corrupting, the voice of the damned of neoliberalism. [.....] We need in our culture not more irony and wit, but more thoughtfulness and kindness.'
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January 31, 2022"Capitalism is a virus to which it would be absurd to ascribe moral qualities... Capitalism is and always has been fundamentally absurd and amoral."
January 18, 2025
A book with a nice, core, argument that is at times led astray by the author's own arguments. Very fitting given its title. Still, I am glad to have read it.
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