Everything, All the Time, Everywhere: How We Became Postmodern

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A radical new history of a dangerous idea 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 20th 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 continue 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, Las Vegas, Margaret Thatcher, Grand Master Flash, I Love Dick, the RAND Corporation, the Sex Pistols, Princess Diana, the Musee D'Orsay, Grand Theft Auto, Perry Anderson, Netflix, 9/11 We are today scarcely capable of conceiving politics as a communal activity because we have become habituated to being consumers rather than citizens. Politicians treat us as consumers to whom they must deliver. Can we do anything else than suffer from buyer's remorse? Stuart Jeffries is a Journalist and Author. He was for many years on the staff of the Guardian, working as subeditor, TV critic, Friday Review editor and Paris correspondent. He now works as a freelance writer, mostly for the Guardian, Spectator, Financial Times and the London Review of Books. He has written two books Mrs Slocombes Pussy and Grand Hotel Abyss. Cover Title Page Copyright Page Contents Introduction: Creative Destruction 1. Shock Doctrines, 1972: Nixon Shock | Martha Rosler | Anti-Oedipus 2. Disappearing Acts, 1975: The Passenger | David Bowie | Cindy Sherman 3. No Future, 1979: Sex Pistols | Margaret Thatcher | Jean-François Lyotard 4. Living for the City, 1981: New York | London | Poundbury 5. We Are Living in a Material World, 1983: Sophie Calle | Apple Macintosh | Madonna 6. The Great Acceptance, 1986: Rabbit | Quentin Tarantino | Musée d’Orsay 7. Breaking Binaries, 1989: ‘The End of History?’ | Queer Theory | The Rushdie Fatwa 8. Deserts of the Real, 1992: Gulf War | Vegas Revisited | Silicon Valley 9. That’s Entertainment, 1997: I Love Dick | Netflix | Grand Theft Auto 10. All That Is Solid Melts into Air, 2001: 9/11 | iPods | Debt Afterword: Ghost Modernism Acknowledgements Notes Index