Everything, All the Time, Everywhere

How We Became Postmodern

By: Stuart Jeffries

Narrated by: Jonathan Cowley

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.

Awesome book, meh narration

If you are interested in the cross-section between postmodernism and neoliberalism, this is the book for you. The narrator … however … is rushed and robotic, and kind of sounds to me like what an audiobook narrated by someone who is illiterate would sound like. It’s as though he doesn’t understand the words, he’s just plowing through them. Doesn’t pause in between chapter breaks, and doesn’t change his tone of voice at all, when he’s reading quotations just for starters. Really quite an uninspired and irritating narrator. Overall though this title is definitely worth a listen, it’s an amazing topic, expertly and creatively rendered.

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.