Everything, All the Time, Everywhere cover art

Everything, All the Time, Everywhere

How We Became Postmodern

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About this listen

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 continues to today.

He tells this history through a riotous gallery that includes David Bowie, the iPod, Fredric Jameson, the demolition of Pruitt-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 other than suffer from buyer's remorse?

©2021 Stuart Jeffries (P)2022 Tantor Political Science Politics & Government Social Sciences Socialism Capitalism
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I couldn't finish this - the narrator's voice is too irritating. Upspeak is the order of the day, and his pronunciation of some names is bizarre. For example, who the hell are "Jill" Scott-Heron or John "Liddon"? Did nobody listen to this before it was published? Poor quality control on Audible's part.

Irritating narrator

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