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

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

Stuart Jeffries
$29.95
Publication Date: October 26th, 2021
Publisher:
Verso
ISBN:
9781788738224
Pages:
384

Description

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?

About the Author

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 Slocombe's Pussy: Growing Up in Front of the Telly and Grand Hotel Abyss: The Lives of the Frankfurt School.

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

“Erudite and entertaining … Everything, All the Time, Everywhere is a detailed and convincing horror story of the amalgamation of the two most dominant intellectual paradigms of the past half century.”
—Ryne Clos, Spectrum Culture

“Jeffries is a rarity: a journalist with a serious interest in cultural theory … who writes about it in a way that is both scholarly and welcoming to non-theorists … entertaining and astute.”
—Joe Moran, Times Literary Supplement

“In holding a mirror to a familiar world, Everything looks to reveal hidden complexities … eminently readable, without eliding the difficulties that are so key to its intrigue.”
—Daniel Baksi, The Arts Desk

“Splendidly readable … Jeffries packs a remarkable knowledge of postmodern culture into these pages.”
—Terry Eagleton, Guardian

“Intriguing.”
—William Davies, New Statesman

“Everything, All the Time, Everywhere finds Stuart Jeffries examining simply and engagingly how a loss of values and critical thought has led to our ‘post-truth’, irrational world.”
—Choice Magazine

“A lively, sparky book.”
—Michael Rosen, BBC Front Row

“Not only instructive; [Everything, All the Time, Everywhere] is a pleasurable read … brilliant and entertaining.”
—Lisa Downing, Financial Times

“Engaging and richly detailed.”
—Christopher McMichael, New Frame

“Astute.”
—D.L. Dusenbury, Spectator

“Everything, All the Time, Everywhere is a book replete with philosophical, social, and political references and its range of material is truly impressive.”
—Sean Sheehan, popmatters

“Pertinent … on class, and capital, [Jeffries] is good.”
—Stuart Kelly, Scotsman

“Stuart Jeffries’ animated and witty approach in Everything, All the Time, Everywhere is an exhilarating and even intoxicating look at the shambles the relationship between postmodernism and neoliberal capitalism has created.”
—Ron Jacobs, Counterpunch