Everything, All the Time, Everywhere

How We Became Postmodern

By: Stuart Jeffries

Narrated by: Jonathan Cowley

Length: 14 hrs and 8 mins

Publisher's summary

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

Interesting book with the worst possible narration

I thought this was an interesting and a engaging book, thought provoking, though the initial sections quickly devolve into just a tour of the last 50 years of culture.

The narration here is… abysmal. I will strenuously avoid anything else read by this narrator - plodding, devoid of any kind of emphasis, read in a robotic monotone that is simultaneously ignorable and grating.

assumptions and no structure

do not buy this book.
this book reminded me of a monologue by a drunk in a new York bar. it just rabbles on.